Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Sheldrake and the rest of the NY gang are weighing in with their Tribeca reports, and here’s one for a film called SATELLITE.
Satellite
Gigantic pictures
directed/written by/edited by Jeff Winner
100 of the longest minutes
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL
April 4 2005
Sheldrake here, live from New York City, reporting from the Triangle Below Canal Street, Tribeca, land of the lofts and of the most desolate and empty urban spaces in the city, including a huge empty dirt triangle – yup - below Canal Street. It’s also the home ground of the Tribeca Film Festival and for the next two weeks I’m going to be doing very little else than seeing movies in preview for the festival and writing about them. I'm working on this, as is MiraJeff and EliCross, so by the time we're done you should have reviews of some 3/4 of the movies that will be at the festival. So let’s get started with SATELLITE. If it hadn't been daylight savings time, we would have been starting with THE LAST Mitterrand. Oh, how much happier I would be today if that had come to pass.
Let’s get right to it: you don’t need to see this movie. Sometimes movies are like parties filled with people you can’t stand. I’ve spent all my life trying to avoid people like the couple in this film: pretty faces who think “deep” thoughts and share them with each other, while the rest of us are gaping in embarrassed horror as the clueless romantic duo leave no callow thought unexpressed. These are the sort of people that you wonder manage to summon the gray matter to dress themselves in the morning. Early in their lives people found them attractive and pretended to listen to them, so that they could absorb some of the glamor, and the pretty never really recover from having developed a taste for this luxury. They began to take themselves seriously, even as consequences developed and multiplied. They see characters in movies who have existential crises and and so they think they're supposed to have them.
In SATELLITE, a movie that never achieves orbit (channeling Gene Shalit today!), one of these pretty faces picks up the other pretty face in a bar, and soon they’re coupling, in all senses of the word. Pretty boy quits his job so they can spend more time together. Pretty girl talks about how she feels insignificant in the universe. They run out of money. They steal things and they feel bad. They steal something at the end of the movie that makes them feel good. And that’s about it.
Being a couple can be a great thing: it can give you succor against loneliness; it can give you a second useful income; it can give you physical satisfaction; it can give you a lover and friend. It can also be a poisonous thing: it can multiply your grandiose self-delusions, or denial; it can lead you to justify heinous acts against those not in your family circle; and it can lead to self-destructive one-upsmanship and subscriptions to dime-store philosophy; it can reinforce a penchant for self-pity and melodrama. It’s perhaps a truism that stupid people do not need other stupid people in their lives, but intelligent and learned ones, for direction and useful criticism. It is also true that you would need to be intelligent in order to be able to recognize such a need, and so that rarely happens, and instead our lives are a circus of the predatory attracting the naive, the manipulative drawing in the pure-hearted and hopeful, and the imbecile lamb mesmerized by the practical and hungry lion; and what's left over when the action finishes.
I never got over the movie’s form/content problem: as a movie about a boring subject cannot BE boring, so a movie about the callow, imitative and dumb cannot be etc. I spent most of the two hours twitching in my seat and dealing with my own existential crisis: there are no good coffee shops to run to, none close to the Tribeca Screening Room, and so all you can do is sit there and take it—just like a REAL relationship! I spent most of the movie’s long runtime cursing like a crazy man into my voice recorder and bitterly mocking the characters on screen. I walked out of the movie deeply resentful that I’d been forced to spend two hours with such a couple of narcissistic creeps. The film’s notes talk about how the movie’s characters were influenced by French New Wave cinema. If Truffaut had lived to hear that, it would have killed him.
Give this movie a miss.
Mr. Sheldrake
NY,NY
Thanks, man. Keep it up.
"Moriarty" out.
