This would be the ideal movie to pair with The Devil and Daniel Johnston as a double-feature.

Superb photography in this one. The black and white film and terrific lighting call attention to the shots themselves, which is sometimes a sign of “over-production”. Here, the cinematography feels like it’s daring you scene after scene to think of this bleak, sometimes comedic movie as anything but beautiful.

When my friend went up and ordered a round of Miller Chills last night, the bartender responded, most appropriately, “Are you serious?” It’s cool that a bar with no intention of selling it accepts kickbacks from their distributor to advertise the stuff. Free money for Al’s Tavern. Little did they know that some of us cannot resist a marketing onslaught – not because we think we’ll discover a tasty and refreshing summer sipper, but because we are daring beverage adventurers. We drink things like Miller Chill because they are there. We understand the risks. As we gulped down our first and last round, we tried to figure out how best to describe the stuff, and what we came up with is this. Imagine if Sprite was susceptible to “skunking”, that process whereby beer gets chilled and then unchilled and then driven around in your trunk for a few months during the summer and then rechilled in your basement refrigerator from the fifties and then somehow it doesn’t taste so good, but you drink it anyway. If that happened to Sprite – if you could skunk it – then that’s how you would make Miller Chill at home. I think it’s better left to the professionals though. Personally, I wouldn’t touch the stuff.

It’s strange that a movie can be about someone famous and about nobody in particular at the same time, but this movie manages to pull it off, partly by having virtually no plot. I can understand why many people are turned off by it, as it defies almost any cinematic trickery. The film is an art piece that slowly and methodically evokes the mood surrounding a few days leading up to a rock star suicide, obviously referencing Kurt Cobain and a cast of anonymous hangers-on. I thought it was an engaging, distinctly successful attempt at going nowhere by design.

If the evolutionary processes of cellular death and the relative lifespan of organisms weren’t utterly charming topics to you already, then these documentaries would make them so. These are the kinds of films that aim for entertainment without sacrificing the depth and accuracy of the science. Brilliant!

I guess Goldsworthy’s work is interesting in that it’s visually appealing, and I guess his process is interesting because it’s so labor-intensive and ephemeral. It’s often clever in its application of available material and color. The documentary is beautifully shot and well edited, so as a film object it stands up and is worth watching. But I found Goldsworthy a rather bland character whose art wasn’t really inspired or inspiring, it was merely pretty. Meanwhile, he gets interviewed throughout the feature length flick, expounding on rather inane and redundant theories about his connection to the land and so forth. If you can stomach someone saying “I don’t think that the Earth needs me at all, but I do need it” as if it’s a profundity, you might like Goldsworthy, because that’s the kind of thing he always says. At one point he explains that he finds people draining, but I can imagine that it really works the other way around, at least with regard to ironical city folk like myself. But, hell, you might adore unwavering earnestness. If you do, or you find more inspiration in his work than I did, I promise you that this film is a well-made must-see.

With the qualifier that I’m a sucker for slow movies that leave plenty of space for the audience to fill in, I have to say that this was a strange and wonderful movie to watch. Enigmatic and self-contradictory, it gives only enough dialogue to suggest a narrative thread, and relies on pure cinematography and indistinct dream sequences to imply much of the drama. It’d be easy to criticize the movie for having virtually no story at all. Yet I found myself reluctant to take a bathroom break for the entire two hours and ten minutes, fearing that I’d miss even one of the brief, suggestive scenes that all seemed to be integral pieces of a large and magical puzzle. While that greater whole never came together coherently, I didn’t much care, I was riveted. Meanwhile, half the audience was sleeping. To each their own.

Many criticize this documentary for omitting the biographical details of Cartier-Bresson’s life. True, it doesn’t follow a standard documentary structure. There’s really no narrative to it at all, in fact. You pick up hints of biographical details, but it’s mostly comprised of famous people – an actress, three photographers, a publisher, a playwright, and HCB himself – looking at photographs and talking about them. Sometimes even that “action” subsides. There are long shots where HCB listens to classical music pieces or observes museum paintings, and the camera simply observes his act of observing. In the end, the film sets an emotional/aesthetic mood more than it purveys information. Sort of like a fine art photograph. The film is chock full of photographs – many among the best ever taken, and it is interesting to hear insightful folks comment on particular ones that strike them. Interviewed not long before his death, Cartier-Bresson reveals himself as a warm, jocular, reflective and contented man. True: this movie is not what I expected. Also true: I watched it three times.

I’m about a third of the way through, and at this point I’m pretty sure that 101 Reykjavik is going to quench my recently developed desire to find the Catcher in the Rye for mid-thirties urban slacker bachelors. Not that it’s destined to be a classic novel taught in schools and suchlike. It is not. But the narrator’s hypercritical take on the people and situations in his life and the tangential threads of thought coloring all experiences resonates with me, despite my life having few of the downsides of his. Just like with Salinger’s novel back in high school, I both identify with the narrator and feel relieved that he’s so much worse off. I’m also amazed that a book so dependent on wordplay can work this well in translation. Brian Fitzgibbons, you are my current favorite translator, and I raise a glass to you tonight from 206 Seattle.