8MM (1999) and The Conversation (1974)

Two films have been on my mind a lot lately: 8mm (1999), directed by Joel Schumacher, and The Conversation (1974), directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Both deal with a male who gets too cozy with his work and loses his marbles as a result. 8mm is more conventional as a film, but its story is more perverse and twisted. Nick Cage is best when he portrays mind-losers, and he really drives this one home for the victory lap: he plays a nervous, workaholic private eye hired by a very wealthy family who discover, after their daddy dies, there's an 8mm snuff film their safe. Dead daddy's confused, aging widow charges Cage's character with finding how the film got in the safe and to seek the identity of the girl killed in it by a leather-masked gimp. Already smoking cigarettes behind his wife's back (played by Catherine Keener) and on a long absence from her and the baby, Cage's private eye goes deeper into the mystery, milling about in L.A.'s EXXXtreme porno underworld. There, he gets help in finding the director of the snuff film from a young smut pusher cum-musician named Max California (played by Joaquin Phoenix). Upon the private eye's full immersion in the pervert void his determination to bring justice for an otherwise forgotten young girl has calcified into lunacy. He tricks the evil pornographer into outing himself to catastrophic effect for both, and by Cage's character identifying too much with the dead girl's fate, he ends up dredging up as much dirt within himself as he does for the family that hired him. 8mm's power is primarily driven by the spiraling narrative and its curated menagerie of sleazy characters, but there's an added benefit, which was no doubt added by the 10 years since its release: with everything going digital nowadays, obsolete analog technology—in this case the grainy physicality of the 8mm 'snuff film' —has rarely made violence more primal and creepy.
Another post on the more brilliant of the two, The Conversation, next time.....

Bye Polke

Sigmar Polke was a great artist and one of art's greatest smart-asses. This picture seems to encapsulate what he was all about. I will miss him.

DEATH

I've been thinking about death a lot lately. Not as a verb but a concept. Maybe it's because my life is in a major transitional stage (i.e. girlfriend moving abroad, moving apartments and studios, starting new jobs, growing a larger beard, et al), or maybe it's because I saw a dying bird yesterday which was later devoured half-alive by ants? Hmmm.. ..what do you think? "Life is strange" as philosopher/singer/poet James Douglas Morrison once wisely said. Everything is fleeting and change sometimes comes in bundles. Or in an onslaught of ants. You decide.


before


after

We originally perched the bird in a prefab nest so it could be 'comfortable' as it was dying. Chris, my mother's husband, pulled out his trusty pellet rifle and we all pleaded him to spare the coup de grace. He told us we were all retarded and that the bird would die a slow and painful death just so we could enjoy this communion with nature.
But still the idea of him aiming his huge rifle at the throat of this tiny bird seemed unbearable. Later that night, when I found the bird, being eaten alive by ants I felt retarded indeed. The lesson? Sometimes you have blow a little bird's head off so it can die quickly in peace instead of selfishly giving yourself a Kodak moment with a wild animal—which usually stays as far away as possible from humans—and for good reason. Either we want to eat them, cage them, or get a snapshot with them while they're writing in pain. Oh man.