Film Review: Next

Needing a final movie to review, I went to go see the new Nicholas Cage action film Next, this afternoon, as it was the only film playing in the area that dealt with the measure of time. The film follows Cris Johnson (Cage), and his special powers to see two minutes into the future. Through a ludicrous plot, Federal Agent Ferris, played by Julianne Moore, chases Johnson in order to use his power to stop a nuclear bomb from going off in southern California. The only interesting aspect of the film is the notion of fate and causality that arise from Johnson’s power. In seeing the future he is able to play out different possibilities, and then choose the optimal one changing the course of the future, whether that is hitting on Jessica Biel, or avoiding trains in car chases. Johnson’s visions of the future are depicted just as the “reality-based” scenes are. So, it becomes difficult for the viewer to discern which actions are really taking place in the present and which are merely in the future, and about to shift back. However, this notion of the duality of temporality and image is shattered by the twist at the end, from which we realize the last hour has been one long vision of the future…

Film/Event review: Frame by Frame

On April 24th I attended Frame by Frame, the Academy Film Archive’s presentation of recently restored avant-garde short films. Former UC Berkeley student Mark Toscano, who worked on restoring the 8 films shown, introduced the night. He didn’t go in to much detail about the films, or the processes of film restoration, but rather, he talked about the company he works for. The Academy Film Archive is a division of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science, the organization responsible for the Oscars. Toscano mentioned that as the Oscars was the sole means of procuring money for the Academy, so the film restoration division was only possible because of the award show. All of the films shown were relatively short, running from 5 minutes to 18 minutes. Two of the pieces I found particularly interesting were Film Exercise #5 by John and James Whitney, and Documentary Footage by LA avant-garde filmmaker Morgan Fisher.

Film Exercise #5 was a 5-minute film consisting only of different colored shapes morphing, growing, shrinking, and eventually disappearing to give way to the next morphing colors. This was all done to music, very beautifully. It reminded me a great deal of one of the vignettes in the Disney film fantasia, in which animated, colored strings vibrated and changed shape in a choreographed manner along with an accompanying piece of classical music.

Fisher’s 1970 film Documentary Footage was a single 11-minute shot in which a young woman sat naked on a stool and recorded a series of interview-type questions. Every question was asking the interviewee to describe a specific body part. She sat and read each question from a clipboard in a very serious manner, pausing for several seconds in between each. After she read all of the questions, she stopped the recorder, rewound it, and pressed play. She then stood up next to the stool facing the camera. As the recording of her questions began playing, she would answer each of them. The long pauses she gave between questions in her recording provided her with time to give detailed answers. It was very interesting to see the polar opposite emotional states of her as the interviewer, and her as the interviewee. As the interviewee she was extremely animated, and naturalistic as she shyly answered each question as if it were the first time she had heard it.

Jim Cambell Talk

Jim Campbell talk:

The Jim Campbell talk was… interesting. A small detail that I thought to be funny was he said, “I don’t really want to be here but, here it goes…”, priceless. He spoke about his shadow piece that was off to the left of his presentation. It was a box that had a Budda figurine in the center with some type of scripture that cannot be seen. He built a mechanism that has a sensor, when you approach the object the glass fogs up so nobody can see it. He began his slide show which showed pixels of different ranges that showed blurs of images such as a boxing match that you cannot make out but if you look at it for awhile you begin to see the image in motion. He also did the same thing with a man stumbling while walking down the street that was along the same idea but it was the pixels turning off and on making the outline and filling the image of the man. He seemed brilliant but not very enthusiastic.

film screening: Am I making art?

“Am I Making Art?”


At the PFA the film, “Am I Making Art” were four featured extremely awkward pieces of art. The film that first appeared was Thresa Cha’s “Mouth to Mouth”, which began with lots of fuzz or snow like in the old days when you would not get reception to your television. A mouth appears and it looks as if water is mixed in with the fuzz as the mouth opens and closes. The mouth makes “O” shapes and fades out as water continues to trickle about but with a blowing wind sound. As the film goes on the man and the mouth appears and re-appears displaying with loud sounds and disappearing with silence. At the end of the first film it looked like there were bats flying out of the “O” shape mouth, like a bat cave. The second film was by John Boldesary called “I Am Making Art,” it was the single most boring film I have ever scene. He starts in a standing position with his arms at his side and moves one part of his body at a time in one single motion and when he completes the movement says the words, “I am making art.” He looks as if he is doing the “Hokey Pokey” in slow motion, although he never does the same move twice in a row. I feel his movement could be related to Virilio’s character Trajectory because he begins in one place and through a series of robot like movements he ends up all over the screen as if he is painting something. The trajectory is with himself and the path he makes around the room along with the motions he makes. The third film was by Acconchi, called "Theme Song" and was as extremely odd like the others. The same guy made the film where he pointed at the screen for thirty minutes I noticed. He is laying on the ground and lights up a cigarette, throughout the film he smokes one after the other, and sings songs about a girl and that he is ready for her to come to him. What he would do for her by changing the music in the music box next to him and singing about her. The final film by Nancy Holt, “East Side West Side” takes place in a kitchen or dinning room. Two artists, Nancy Holt from New York and Robert Smithson from California converse about random topics and argue peacefully like we know they are acting. The two differ in many ways, the audience that was there laughed because of the drastic character difference. They each talk about different topics and have very obvious disagreements with one another. Holt has very easy going ideas while Robert thinks about what he is saying and says it in an intellectual manner.

Film Screening Response: Next (2007)

Next is a film directed by Lee Tamahori, and adapted from Philip K. Dick’s short story, “The Golden Man.” Overall I found the film a bit disappointing. I felt the movie was thirty minutes too short as it lacks an apparent satisfactory ending. It left me wondering if anything actually happened in the film as the end credits was rolling in reverse. The entire film was layered in different realities that could be the future or the present. In the beginning of the film the distinctions were clear as the color tone served as a marker; however, towards the end of the movie, viewers were informed that what we had actually seen thus far didn’t happen yet, and the plot abruptly ended when a closure was definitely expected. One phrase by Chris Johnson (Nicholas Cage) was particularly interesting, “here’s the thing about the future. Every time you look at it, it changes, and that changes everything else.” This reminded me of several authors we read so far this semester. Bergon’s Creative Evolution suggests that, “time is invention or it is nothing at all,” and in the case of Next the nature of form becomes questionable: is it still an instantaneous juxtaposition in space, or is it something that’s been predetermined? It seems that both arguments can be justified using Bergson’s time as an invention. If latter scenario is the case, then Virilio’s objective, subjective, and trajective frame work seems to be a useful tool in analyzing the relationships among past, future, and present. If form is predetermined then the trajective element would be permanently missing; however, in Virilio’s Open Sky, the trajective seems to refer to state of the present, as dromology pollutes the space, and time by bringing the future and the past instantaneously closer than ever. In Next, this trajectivity is no longer depicting the present; it is bringing future closer to a future that’s even further away.

Next

The movie Next, directed by Lee Tamahori and released this year, is about a man who can constantly see two minutes into the future. This man, played by Nicholas Cage, tries to live a normal life until a nuclear bomb goes missing and the FBI tries chasing him down in order to get his help for finding the bomb. He does not want to help because his ability will be exploited and the government will run experiments on him. The government knows he can see two minutes into the future but what they don’t know is that he can see even further into the future when it deals with the girl played by Jessica Biel.
There is one scene in the movie when Cage’s character first meets Biel’s character in a diner and he walks up to her and she tells him to go away. The same shot is then shown again and he tries a different approach but is again rejected. These shots are him seeing what would happen in the next two minutes if he takes these certain approaches. Finally he sees one that works out and he takes it, but had he been unable to see the future, things may not have worked out.
Another aspect of the movie that was like a huge twist was the end when the nuclear bomb explodes and the movie goes back to about the middle and we realize all that had happened was what Cage’s character was seeing in the future. Essentially, he was seeing the future within the future. The main way this relates to the class is that it shows how someone can change the future if they know what is going to happen. This is the whole point to the movie and Cage is constantly using his ability to see the future to change the future.

-Danny Ponticello

Pine Flat

Pine Flat consisted of twelve ten-minute sequences, with an intermission half-way through. It started out with a still shot from above a grove of trees during the winter. It is hard to tell if there is any visible motion during this shot because no significant motion occurs, if any. In this scene, there is just the occasional yelling by children who apparently are playing in the grove. The film continues with more still shots, each of which consist of a little motion here and there. There is another shot of a child sitting on a grassy hill reading a book. She reads for a minute or two and then turns the page and continues with this for the whole ten minutes. The technique of using a still shot for all the sequences is a way to highlight the motion of the action that does occur on screen. Just like in La Jetée when the woman blinks in one shot, it is like that with the minimal motion that occurs in Pine Flat for some of the sequences. This lack of motion can become boring at times because it is the same scenery for ten minutes straight, making us rely on the motion of the children on screen. We are lucky that the film was filmed over multiple years, giving us scenery from all the seasons of the year.

-Danny Ponticello

Commissioned Works

A Tight Thirteen Minutes- A Commissioned Works consists of thirteen one-minute sequences and then fifteen four-minute sequences. One of the one-minute sequences was a film of the director talking to the audience for the whole minute, trying to get in as many words as he possibly can. I found that interesting because it made the minute seem like the shortest minute, even though the most seemed to happen in that one compared to all the other one minute videos. One of the four-minute sequences that I enjoyed was the dog and ball one where the maker of the film tries to get his dog to drop the ball in the bucket. It is really funny because the dog doesn’t know the goal, yet, in the end, the dog is able to accomplish it. These four minutes seemed so much shorter than the four minutes of the screen saying “Stand By” and the sequence with the guy tuning the two glasses by pouring water constantly from one to the other. I feel like the main point of this film, where each director gets four minutes to do anything on screen, is to show the difference in time from one sequence to the next. There is a clear difference in the sense of time in each sequence because when something is interesting, it seems to be shorter than if it is really boring.

-Danny Ponticello

Pine Flat

Pine Flat is a movie directed by Sharon Lockhart with a series of various long shots depicting scenes of youth interacting with nature. Each long shot was ten minutes long and filmed with a camera that did not move. Personally, I was very disappointed with the this film, thought it was a waste of my money, and left after the scene featuring the kids playing cops and robbers. As these scenes are all long shots, each scene represents real time and perhaps attempt to capture the experience which the children felt when they were filmed. However, while this may have been the intent (to capture the details of nature and the experience through long intense shots), the technique she chose was very inappropriate for a movie theatre audience. While Lockhart's use of the long shots does help to bring out the little details in nature which one might not usually pay attention to, I often found myself not noticing these things because I was so annoyed with the monotonousness of the film. This film is a perfect example of where the director has gone too far in terms of capturing and portraying real time. Much like how an artist who draws overly photorealistic ends up with a stiff and lifeless drawing, the same has happened here. By showing a perfect reflection of what she experienced, she has tainted the experience through the medium. Just a little creative license--perhaps some editing or even just a bit of music--would have given the experience more energy and vibrancy. Instead, however, Lockhart has created a film which some might appreciate, but most would deem as a waste of time.

Film Screening - Emma's Bliss

On Tuesday, May 1, I attended the screening of the film Emma's Bliss at the Pacific Film Archive. This film was about a man named Max who was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the pancreas. With not much time to live, he decides to steal a car and money from the car dealership where he works. While fleeing, he drives off the road, ending up the frontyard of a woman who lives by herself on a farm. We learn that this woman, named Emma, lives by herself. One peculiarity about her is that she has a habit of slaughtering pigs in a very loving manner. Emma takes care of Max, and as the story progresses, the two develop a relationship. However, their relationship is short lived, as Max's condition becomes worse and worse. At the end of the film, Emma chooses to end Max's life in the same loving way that she slaughters her pigs.

I found the movie to be very entertaining, especially after my first experience at the PFA. I found myself empathizing with the situation that Max and Emma were in. One thing I found particularly interesting was the movie's portrayal of assiting someone with dying. Having recently gone on interviews at medical schools, I realize that euthanasia is big issue in the medical community. This movie portrays euthanasia in a positive light. The ending with this movie will impact me as I am asked to evaluate whether euthanasia should be accepted or not in the U.S.

Philip Schmidt

Am I Making Art

The PFA screening, “Am I Making Art”, showed four films, each one famous in it’s own right. The first film was Thresa Cha’s “Mouth to Mouth”. This film showed a screen filled with television static but it took shapes, such as that of a river, or a mouth. There were accompanying static sounds. The symbols and sounds faded in and out of focus leaving the viewer stuck trying to make sense of the compilation of the blurred pictures and distorted sound. One of the other films was, “I Am Making Art by John Boldesary. This film is possibly the most famous but also possibly the most boring and monotonous of all of the films. It consists of a fifteen minute long shot of Boldesary making different poses saying “I am making art” with each new pose. He progresses through motions and angles and eventually ends up on the floor and out of the view of the camera. The continual movement could be related to film, or Bergson’s cinematographic view because it is a series of stopped motions that come together to make motions. He represents the interval by moving from pose to pose and place to place but the stopped poses and places represent the frames. As a result, his film can be interpreted as a representation of the “art” he is supposedly making. The third film that was shown was Acconchi's "Theme Song". In this film he tries to seduce the camera, and thus the audience while playing music of the time. This seems to be a blatant criticism of the seductive medias of film and music. He acts as an embodiment of the media’s through his words and mimicking of the media’s themselves. For instance, he often refers to the lines of the song that is playing in order to seduce the audience. By doing this he not only displays the seductive quality of media but also breaks down the barier between the viewer and the viewed. By speaking directly to the audience he transforms the audience from spectator to interactive participants of his work. The last film was, “East Side, West Side” by Nancy Holt. The film portrays two artists, Nancy Holt from New York and Robert Smithson from California interacting. The difference in character between the two is almost comical at many points. Each person is trying to discus different topics and in different ways. Smithson is talking about intellectual ideas and Holt is acting in a hippie manner. There is a distinct conflict between the two throughout the film.

Next

Next is a movie about a man (Nicholas Cage) with the ability to see two minutes into the future. However, the movie makes clear that his ability to see the future changes what happens in the future itself. The way that the movie presents this effect, however, is very interesting. For example, there is a scene in a casino where he predicts the future--someone will rob the cashier. However, the movie is directed in such a way that his vision is portrayed as if it is actually happening Then when this alternative reality (the future) has been shown, the movie snaps back in time to the present. From here, he makes the decision of what to do next and "reality" plays out accordingly. By portraying his visions like this, the viewer becomes unsure of what might actually be reality and what is the future, the vision. Some could argue that even though this movie could be played out in a rational order, this movie is a very good representation of a time-image. The rational order could be argued because it is showing the vision which he is seeing spliced between the two moments of reality. Yet paradoxically, the fact that these visions are those of the future and are indistinguishable from actual reality (until the scene snaps back to reality and plays over again in a different way) begs for the film to be deemed a time-image. When this first happened, I was actually quite surprised and caught off guard because I thought the future vision was the reality. In this temporal sense, this movie manipulates the viewer really well, adding to the overall excitement of the experience.

doug aikten

Doug Aitken is an artist from the LA area who focuses on visual mediums. He uses still framed pictures as an art form with several interesting shots. During his presentation he showed a shot of a diamond sea from an aerial view. This generated a sense of immensity, showing the vast span of the desert area. I also liked his picture of the ghost town in Africa. There seemed to be an intangible emptiness of the town. It showed a long street, with dirt roads, and boarded windows. Almost every aspect in the frame seemed to state the emptiness of the town. Aitken also used film in his art. He combined several different and somewhat disorienting scenes throughout the film. Several sequences had frames within the frame with different actions going on in each frame. Each frame had a different person in it. This system made it seem like each person was equated with a different frame. Overall though, I was incredibly confused by the film. I had trouble figuring out what it’s point was. Obviously, it was supposed to be an art form but I felt like nothing inside the film had any real point or message. As the viewer I was frustrated by the lack of a real story or point but it is possible that that was the intended point: to conflict with the standard system of film.

Premonition

Premonition, which came out this year, combines the basic elements of a sci-fi film with those of a melodrama and action film. Sandra Bullock's character Linda is living out the seemingly perfect life with an attractive husband, two beautiful daughters and a big American home, when suddenly her life is turned upside down. She comes to learn that her husband has died in a fluke car accident. After Linda suffers from shock and disbelief, the following morning she is surprised to find her husband laying next to her in bed.
This non-linear film jumbles the days of the week, and inserts Linda's premonitions into her reality to make for a very confusing, yet somewhat suspenseful film. While the film overtly deals with time, the underlying theme is the question of predetermination or destiny. Without trying, Linda acts out the events that lead to the climax that she has already witnessed in her premonition. It becomes obvious that, even though she is aware of the situation, she cannot control what is destined to be.
I'm not sure that i can really decide if this movie fits into the 'good' or 'bad' category. I have heard so many negative reviews about the film (since it has been out in theaters for quite some time) that i was expecting it to be absolutely terrible. i have seen some terrible films, and i don't think this should be in the same category. I think i am biased because i like Sandra Bullock, and we are also talking so much about time that i found it interesting. I appreciated the film's originality and creativity with the manipulation of time, however, i would recommend to wait and rent it on DVD because $9.50 is expensive for a film that is just okay.
-chloe kloezeman

Premonition, 2007

Premonition is basically about a woman who knows her husband will die on a certain day before it happens. This movie is much like the recent movie Deja Vu or even Donnie Darko, where the character sees what's going to happen and then does it without realizing it. For example, Sandra Bullock puts pills down a drain just as she saw it in her vision, but realizes that she's just setting up fate. It's not until she puts the newspaper in the garbage that she realizes what she's doing. What's different about this movie is that there is no sequence to how the week is played out. In Donnie Darko, the audience sees a linear sequence of events, where it's Mon, then Tues, then Thurs, etc. In Premonition, it starts with Thursday, then jumps to Monday, then Saturday, Tuesday, Friday, Sunday, and finally Wednesday. There are a few errors in the film's sequences, such as the stickers on the glass door and when they show the cuts on the girl's face. The girl gets the cuts on Tuesday but when they show Thursday early on in the film, she doesn't have them, but has them later on Saturday.
A good idea that the film brought up was whether or not you can change events; you may try to change it but how do you know whether or not you trying to change it is actually what's needed to make the original event happen in the first place?

pine flat

Pine flat by Sharon Lockhart was composed of roughly ten minute long fixed frame scenes. These scenes were split into several two parts with an intermission in between. The first series of scenes was composed of children by themselves while the second focused on group interaction. At first each scene seemed painfully long but as the viewer becomes accustomed to the drawn out, monotonous style they start to view the little things in the scene. For example, in a scene in the first half of the film, there is ten minutes of a girl sitting and reading. The viewer quickly looses interest in the girl reading because there is not much to interact with. However after several minutes of boredom the viewer begins to notice the sounds of birds, the waving of grass, the wind in the trees and other minor details. The viewers consciousness is drawn away from what its typically the center of the frame, or what would typically be considered the focal point of the action. This style forces the audience to notice the details that they would otherwise not notice. This is also illustrated in the scene that has a child sleeping in the center of the screen for its entirety. Because this scene is several scenes into the film the viewer already knows not to focus on the child for too long. As the viewer, I began to focus on the grass moving, the twitches of the child and its affects on his environment. The sounds of animals, wind and so on. The fixed frame style of pine flats brings out the details of a shot while conflicting with the typical perception of a film because there is no dominant action, theme or crisis.
The later portion of the film is more like a typical film because it has more action and conflict. Due to the interaction between people this portion of the film has more to entertain the viewers. In several scenes there are children running around, playing games and basically acting like kids. The viewer sees conflict with kids playing with airsoft guns, and sees extensive movement on the hike up through the screen or around the screen. However, the details are still a huge part of every scene. There are still prolonged moments with little to no action. The viewer has already become accustomed to these pauses and will focus on the minor details in the absence of more significant action. While the style of the film is not increadibly entertaining it forces the viewer to focus on things they otherwise would not have noticed.

Next - Anthony Castanos

The movie Next is about Chris Johnson's ability to see the future, how the government is trying to use his power to stop terrorists, and his attempts to save his girlfriend, played by Jessica Biel, from a preconceived death. The idea of the film calls into question the concept of fate and whether or not what Johnson sees could actually be considered "the future." Technically he still has to the ability to change his decisions and affect the now rather than following a preconception that would lead to his death or some sort of trouble. It seems instead, he sees what could potentially happen rather than a definite fate. The movie suggests that there is a difference between seeing the future and seeing your fate because while you can change your present situation to adjust the future, seeing fate would have to be impossible if it's meant to be a fixed, inevitable future that can never go unchanged and seeing it ahead of time would already change what you were meant to do. This film contrasts from Minority Report in that Tom Cruise sought to follow his preconceived future to find out if it was true while Johnson makes his own future by adjusting his decisions in the now to form a preapproved future. The film takes the liberty of making Johnson's powers into physical images such as when he divides into several figures to find a prefered future.

Next

A line from the film that really stood out to me was "Every time you look at the future it changes, because you looked at it. And that changes everything else." This seems to support the idea that time is changing, that everything is constantly changing. And it invokes another idea that each change has its succeeding change and that there is some kind of chain reaction mechanism. But what interests me is the fact that simply looking at it changes the future. Why does simply looking at it change it? What if you were to look at it but do nothing to alter the change? This seems to imply that the simple act of looking, which can arguably equate to the simple fact of knowing the future or the succeeding change is enough to change the future. So does knowledge, even if left alone and not used, have the power to change a future? Or might it mean that once we have knowledge, it is impossible to separate it from our actions which effect change? This reminds me of Bergson when he says that having an end state in mind drives the action to arrive at that end state. But in the case of this film, the major storyline is that he has two end states in mind: the one he sees occurring in the future, and the one he desires to occur in the future. And knowledge of both these end states drives his actions.

Film Screening: Next

The film Next is about a man, Nicholas Cage, who can see two minutes into the immediate future. Because of his talent, he is tracked down by the government to locate an atomic bomb about to be deployed by terrorists. An interesting scene in this film is when him and the police are in a hostile situation and he proceeds to divided his vision up into a multitude of selfs and explore the area in which there are possible bad guys or sensor bombs. What it shows us on the screen is him standing in one position and images of himself departing from his body in all different directions. What he intends to do by pulling this stunt is test all the possible options of what would happen next if they went in this or that direction. Therefore, if one of his images sets of a sensor bomb and dies, he know not to choose that option and instead picks another route. In this scene theya re in an engine room with many levels and platforms and the camera pans all around the room showing us replicas of Nicholas Cage testing all the different next options. He finally clears the entire area and they proceed to kick ass. It is stated in the film that when one sees the possible options of what comes next, that changes the future. I think by saying this , he means that nothing can be predetermined even if he can see in the future because doing that changes what comes Next.

JoeyP