Tarnation - WORST. FILM. EVER.

Cameras are dangerous things. They can convince even the most talentless hack of a true calling. All you gotta do is press that little red button and before you know it the world starts appearing on the viewfinder - stored, waiting for later manipulation. In the simplest but most essential way, you're a filmmaker.

Tarnation is a bad film in spite of its material. The problem is with all that stuff stored on tape is that you eventually have to edit it, mould it, structure it - make it tell a good story.

There are ways around this irreducible fact. Music has its own narrative momentum - it keeps familiar time, hushed voice to strident chorus, acoustic intro to rock outro. And thus in Tarnation we see stunning and powerful material made to fit the MTV mind. Made by the MTV mind, it's important to add. Accompanying the endless barrage of cuts and cuts and cuts is the aural wallpaper of an impatient mind, terrified of his audience being for a second, a mere second, left with the haunting loneliness of an image considered in pictoral isolation.

One comes to the end of Tarnation suspecting that Caouette is less of a camerakind than he wants us to believe, that there isn't a Friedman-like stockpile of 16mm lying around in the attic to excavate. And, more than that, Caouette's lens seems to keep missing the best parts of the story. Why are we spending so much time under the single bulb in the bathroom when Renee's visiting or Rosemary's dying? Captions haven't had to do so much work since The Duelling Cavalier.

Plus the kid's a snot. Honestly, this boy has been through some genuinely traumatic stuff, but by film's end he has exhausted every ounce of audience sympathy with his narcissism. It's quite an achievement, to be unmoved by such material. But like talk show guests turning real pain into synthetic wares, the effect is that of a magical reversal of empathy - too demanding of our attention, like a straining witness playing up to a jury, the film never lets its tragedy speak unaccompanied. Oh look, there's Jonathan again. And again. The point where the audience enters into the story's innate pathos is cancelled out with melodrama. Just sit there and be moved dammit!

If this film was made by anyone other than Caouette, Caouette would not be on the movie posters, camera-gun pointed like a poser to his head. The only Russian roulette going on in this film, really, is with the life of his mother. Caouette knows it, and does everything he can to shift her left of centre. The scene where Renee sings and jigs her impromptu song about pumpkins seems to go on forever only, it seems, so we the audience can be wrung once and once more for an obvious point - this woman is at her end. And with no taste left in the tank, he just keeps the camera rolling - grotesquerie being the highest truth in this world. The "she's crazy" music used towards the end of scene doesn't help either. The way is paved for Caouette to take centre stage, and he happily, triumphantly does so - the pentient, understanding, loving son, at his mother's feet.

As so the film ends, in a final act of emotional fakery and helpless overstatement. Some things should remain home movies.
And how the hell does Gus Van Sant find the time to become attached to so many crappy films between his own recent monstrosities?

Elvis! That's The Way It Is!

[To start, a little something that's been sitting on my hard-drive for a few years...]

I’ve just been to see Elvis at Vegas. Yes, he’s still there - he’s been there all the time. You looked? Well, perhaps the skyscraper collar is to blame, or all that kaleidoscopic confusion of card machines and carpet, because he never left the building. You can’t afford to go? Well, just take the 380 bus like I did, give the good man in the bow-tie a tenner, and sit back and enjoy the show.

But before that, a sneaky-peak at the rehearsals. Yes, even Elvis has to have them. Not that that means he actually needs to be there. Can there be a better demonstration of divine celebrity than having your musicians rehearsing to your rehearsal tape?

Watching Elvis on stage is in every way as innocuously but deliciously promiscuous as an Edinburgh New Year’s. The King kisses rather than croons his way through ‘Love Me Tender.’ And who can blame him, really - he’s so obviously past the pearly pleasantries of the love lullaby. Caught in the cusp between rockabilly and cheeseburger, this is an Elvis buffed but not yet blistered by drugs and debauchery, somewhere between man and icon.

Watching these women unhitch themselves, trance-like, from husbands and boyfriends, wend forward, kiss the King, and fall back obeisantly into line and their old selves got me thinking about desire and lust and the body and the role fame plays among these giant emotions of the everyday. The more I think about it, fidelity is what we do when no-one’s knocking on the back door. Yes, I’ve felt the baseball bat of humiliation swung by another’s overactive imagination but now - happy, laughing, glowing, in love - if a bookish boy with pornos in his bottom drawer looked at me the right way and made movie-dialogue conversation, I’d have a lot of trouble saying no. The fact is we all want to kiss Elvis. It’d be special, amazing, different, intense, realer than real life - yes, even for a second, because that second would feel like eternity.

That’s the thing about icons and other objects of desire from the vault of the personal or collective imaginary - they live in the eternal present. But the truth is, Elvis doesn’t give a shit about you. You’re one in a million - in a bad way. Kisses are fuel and, besides, he wants a break from the gyrating. You can see it in his snicker. He doesn’t believe a word he’s singing. Sometimes he can hardly keep it together, it’s all so god-damned hilarious. But it’s a private joke and you get the feeling that no-one but the great man in white is in on it. He seems to like it that way, though you know he’s got no real choice: the time’s past for meeting on anything like equal terms. You’ve got to feel that when you’re capable of ruffling even Cary Grant’s feathers - after all, Hitchcock - despite the cropdusters and scolding mothers - couldn’t even do that. But who says sincerity and intimacy make great performance? Don’t go telling that to the wannabes. Yes, my man, that’s the wonder, the wonder of you.

First Post

This is culs-de-sac. Opening Soon...