August 2006

Anna Wood comes face to face with two of life’s crux occasions – death and Beastie Boys concerts

Awesome: I Fuckin Shot That!
Dir: Nathanial Hörnblowér
Cert 15
(Cinema and DVD)

In October 2004, the Beastie Boys handed out 50 digital and hi-8 cameras to fans who’d bought tickets for their hometown gig at New York’s Madison Square Gardens, plus another 11 to friends and crew. They were told to keep shooting through the entire show, and their footage has been deftly cut and pasted together by Beastie Boy Adam Yauch (directing under his favoured pseudonym Nathanial Hörnblowér) and a team of four editors. The result is a film that is a little bit more than post-pub background noise for men of a certain age, with a hoard of Fat Lace magazines and a skateboard in the loft – although it would serve that purpose very well.

The image quality is terrible most of the time, and wildly changeable. The less light there is, the grainier the image. The whole thing teeters on the brink of boring; sometimes there’s a hint that the filmmakers themselves got bored during post-production – they start playing with solarisation, making the image black and white, or negative, making it look like animation. There’s also a point where I realise that however talented Mixmaster Mike (the fourth Beastie, kind of) is on the decks, scratching is pretty boring, too.

But I also realise that the songs are still great songs (the sound quality certainly wasn’t recorded by amateurs). And I hadn’t thought before about the worldwide goodwill and fondness that drenches the Beastie Boys. Everyone likes them, or everyone of a certain generation. Adrock was one of the first men I found sexy, when I was 13 (yep, always had great taste). Now that I’m 32, Adrock is about to turn 40 and he’s still hot. Phewee. There’s a touch of gimmickry about them, a bit of novelty band (even if they have been going 25 years), and something a bit startling about three middle-aged men still in their tracksuits, still acting with that childish and childlike way, all excited and silly and playful. But the politics of the Beastie Boys, this open and energetic approach, and the handing out of cameras so that the audience can capture the band: these three things sit well together, come from the same place. The Beastie Boys have become an institution, and this ramshackle, honest film proves it without pomp and with plenty of chutzpah.

The Death of Mr Lazarescu
Dir: Cristi Puiu
Cert 15

We all die, and if we’re lucky we get old first. Is our life of making friends and families just a way of buffering ourselves against death, investing in people who might stick by us as we get old and helpless and lonely? Is our death and our fear of death the impetus for everything we do? ‘The Death Of Mr Lazarescu’ does exactly what it says on the tin. An old, but not that old, man lives alone in Bucharest, drinks the local moonshine (“double-strength alcohol, burnt sugar and a vanilla pod, but no chemicals”) and wakes up one day vomiting, with a headache. That evening he calls an ambulance, and then asks his neighbours for help. There is talk of a sister in Targu Mures. His daughter is in Canada. The first we know of her is when we notice the Kim Wilde posters in one of Mr Lazarescu’s rooms: the signs of an absent child. Lazarescu is alone, he is perhaps not that likeable, he may be an alcoholic. Like ‘United 93’, ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’ documents details and behaviour without spin or judgement. The film is occupied by different people who show strange combinations of caring and unkindness. The ambulancewoman who is Lazarescu’s most constant companion as he dies sticks with him, takes him from hospital to hospital to find him help, but is oddly detached, too. The neighbours show some kind of gruff, affable concern and offer advice and medication as well as moussaka, but can’t be bothered to go with him to the hospital. Other characters are part of other, livelier stories that we don’t see: another neighbour who borrowed a drill; a romance in the first hospital; a local bus crash. Mr Lazarescu is the blank, dying centre of the film and they all distance themselves from him, as if death can be avoided, like loneliness, if you just manage not to get too close to people who have it. Lazarescu is chided for drinking because people around him assume that is what is killing him, and as if being teetotal would make you immortal. There is morbid talk of ulcers and colon and liver before doctors settle on a subdural hematoma and neoplasm as the causes of this impending death: his brain is bleeding and he has liver cancer. By this time, we’re so aware of how much can go wrong with our bodies, like cinema-bred hypochondriacs, that it’s no surprise that our protagonist has not one but two deadly conditions. In hospital, doctors seem to take Lazarescu’s body from him, just as illness and death do. They question him without explaining their questions, they tap him with a little hammer, get him to look up, down, left, right. He is washed and shaved ready for an operation, and his body seems to have less and less to do with him. With each new encounter, with each new doctor, nurse or surgeon, he has to repeat his name: Lazarescu Dante Remus. It’s a beautiful name. As he dies, the name fades, he becomes more and more distant from it, it no longer seems relevant. He begins to mumble, about his family, and the doctors don’t understand him. He is making no sense to others: a supreme form of loneliness, and a detachment, a step towards death. His final thoughts, about family, unexplained names, are a little bit like the ‘Rosebud’ in Citizen Kane: family is what matters in the end, apparently, or at least what you’re thinking about. (I am more convinced, I think, by another image from Citizen Kane: the young woman with the white parasol, glimpsed once and never forgotten). Death is not a moment, it’s a long time. This film takes a long time too, but it’s not so much boring as honest. Illness, loneliness, dying can be dull. It’s shot with handheld digital cameras, and the lighting is ugly; it looks as cold and unadorned as it is. In the end, Lazarescu, Dante Remus Lazarescu, would have been better staying at home and dying alone on his stinky sofa, in front of a good film. Not this film though: what would you want your last film to be? Not this, something with a little more beauty, just a bit.

Filed under: Culture, Reviews - Film/DVD/Blu-Ray by Flexmaster Nylon
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2 Responses to “Reviews – Film”

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