Posts Tagged ‘Hyper-Real’

Beneath the Veneer of a Murder (2010)

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"You know, you should really think about getting a flatscreen; prices are lower than ever."

Reviewed from a screener. Oh, and the review contains spoilers.

What we have here is basically a standard film noir, only told in about 8 minutes, with the on-screen action boiled down to one scene: a man named Judd (Eric Schneier) kills a woman called Lolita (Christy Scott-Cashman). This scene is bookended by two telephone conversations that are played over the opening and closing credits. The conversations both involve Buchanan (Mark Grant), talking first with Judd and then with his wife, Daisy (Jennifer McCartney), who had been having an affair with Lolita. Apparently, Judd is after the money Lolita scammed off Daisy, but runs into trouble in the form of Buchanan’s head of security, Bartlesby (Angel Connell). This leads to Judd killing Lolita (the only on-screen action), followed by the police gunning down Judd.

Persona (1966)

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Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullman) and the doctor (Margareta Krook)

“At the same time, the chasm between what you are to others and what you are to yourself — the feeling of vertigo and the constant desire to finally be exposed, to be seen through, cut down, perhaps even annihilated.”

A projector lamp. Film running through spools. A penis. A nail driven through a hand. A spider. Footage from a silent film. Bodies in the morgue. A boy watches Bibi Anderson’s and Liv Ullman’s faces on a screen. No, that isn’t an excerpt from a Coleman Francis film’s narration, but a list of some of the images which open Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.

Inland Empire (2006)

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This is a story that happened yesterday. But I know it’s tomorrow.

Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) relaxes at home.

Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) relaxes at home.

Shot on the cheap on digital video, Inland Empire was filmed without a complete script, and Lynch instead mostly made it up as they went along. Amazingly, this somehow works — fragmented, but still with a general, thematic cohesion. It stars Laura Dern as Nikki Grace, an actress who has just gotten the role of her life. The film they’re shooting, On High In Blue Tomorrows, starts bleeding into reality, and the nature of reality and fiction become even more confused when it turns out the On High is a remake of an old Polish play, 47, rumoured to be cursed.