foggy eyes wrote:Anyway, JC, I always value your posts & opinions, but just can't get my head around your point of view here.
the unrestrained hyperkinetic quality of these films allow them to transcend the banality of adhering to any kind of "real".
So, in order to make vindicate
Torque (and others), any kind of "real" must, by comparison, be relegated to the "banal"?
Any kind? What does that even mean?
Yeah, I admit that was perhaps poorly worded or phrased or something. At the very least knotty and in need of a little elucidation. My problem isn't with the "real" per se (though I do think the notion itself is a dubious one), but rather with the idea that there is a necessary component of every picture which needs to either adhere to or somehow formally acknowledge an immediately recognizable, and therefore usually banal, presumed psychological reality. This is the banality of the "real" I was talking about; the kind that turned Jackson's Tolkien pictures into such a monumental bore and chore. The kind that reduces myth and blatant archetype to the comforts of a relatable psychological specificity (that isn't real either as it allows in no meaningful complicating contradictions).
I looked this up on YouTube, and you might have to expand on what is "wonderful" or "nuanced", rather than ham-fisted and downright ugly, about the sequence. Imaginative potential?
Well, I'll give it a shot but I'm not sure I can articulate it any better than I did above. Also, I do worry a bit in discussions like this that the emotional effect, which to me is the core purpose of this kind of art, can get lost along the way or in thickets of too much analysis. The direct, sensational and cumulative effect, an almost intuitive response, seems crucial to its success. On the other hand, perhaps an appreciation of its mechanics can enhance that and you did already watch the sequence so...
In all truth, I'm not sure how well isolated scenes from a movie like this really work because, regardless of how they're generally conceived (i.e. as music video fragments, Youtube fodder, etc.) there is often an elegance to the structure of the whole unified thing, to the way it all holds together or an emphasis on when it doesn't. With this film, the climactic bike chase is overpowering specifically and perhaps only because it is established as an idea early and Kahn builds up aesthetic momentum in terms of tempo and structural dynamics to eventually accommodate its emergence. Viewed by itself I would imagine it would just appear as any old cartoon action moment, but it's the hysterical pitch, the exuberant release that is truly awesome here. In other words, Kahn appreciates the need to vary or fluctuate tone and rhythm, to include a built in sense of aesthetic development through gradation or scale, something which already puts him well ahead of many.
As far as the whole Pepsi/Mountain Dew thing, what I was trying to get at there is the fact that any movie of this sort would have the expected product placement but this one revels in the absurdity of that placement while at the same time reveling in the moment itself, the exaggerated sense of self identification, even through something otherwise numbingly trivial, which can be made to be vital without any condescension. In this way the trivial can be almost transmogrified (sorry, I know, that's a bit much but it really is about calling those kinds of flip determinations or casual dismissals about what should constitute character into question).What I especially like about that moment is that there is no critique going on, it's just pure acknowledgment of not only a cinematic reality but a truth of contemporary identity assembly. The fact that Pepsi produces both drinks is important because it further restricts or refines the insularity of this world without being able to shut it down. The sound barrier bike chase and the girls jousting on the bikes function as cathartic eruptions, volatile disruptions in the presumed limits of the surface real (there's another wonderful scene introducing a bike rally which plays like the greatest possible Michael Bay parody but also unabashedly indulges in the exact same sentiment--it's this unwillingness to deny basic ecstatic allure that seems to be the big problem for some, though Kahn never tries to convince you it
should be alluring to you, just that you can share his own unbridled enthusiasm if it is and that generosity inspires even if it doesn't ultimately persuade). The fact that Kahn can manage all this in a film in which most of the early action is already patently ridiculous is no small feat.
Also, on a side note, I wish Armond wasn't so patronising towards "pop culture" - the models he uses as exemplars of "pop" art are, from what I can tell, invariably simplistic, lurid, brash, abrasive, overly sentimental, etc. I have no idea why he so often confuses barrel-scraping with "essence".
But see I don't think he does confuse them; at least what he does has more to do with a very willful conflation. And, once again, it's a desire to salvage these things to the extent that he can, to distinguish qualitative differences between their usages and to see some potential worth in all the common pop detritus--a longing or joy of some kind. Often this takes the form of a jubilation that can only come in total immersion or surrender to the form, without argument and without a distanced removal from experience. Whether that surrender is worth while is, obviously, an individual decision.
Oh, Armond. I suppose he has some interesting opinions on those musical geniuses, though.
