Ask the Dust (2006)

A MOVIE AS WARM AND SLEEPLESS AS THE SANTA ANAS

All the reviews told the plot, technical analysis, but I hold onto the movie's non-refundable quiver that remains after it is over; I read forbiddingly, without permission, between the lines. That's what I remember in helpless dreams doing Freudian battle with that stupid persistent sunrise; during sleep-walking curious sublinimal marathons that keep me from recognizing the "Do Not Walk" signal at the fatal intersection, or flailing for thoughts from the warm security of my tomb as I try to connect the dots between art and reality, wondering if my paid fare of admission and effort were just wasted on what could have been good video game quality time. I watched this movie release from my belly like the The Hungry Alien, still giving thanks that it was not judgement, but lesson.
I asked the heated Santa Ana Random Dust for definition, like a pest, asking what He could not randomly give. His stern, frowning rebuking silence, for Him I give up my anonimity.
I, a sullied worker with raw bloodied hands working the fields demanding submission from a Saint?
Art demands the dangerous: every viewer, every reader, every listener finds his person individual....and then, mostly for worse, We Sing The Body Electric upon our discovery, impiously disfiguring the drawing, the poem, the song in silent reconscruction. But for Some, a soiled naughty halo appears in place of the coda.
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa from...... "The Warm Velvet Box."
That's a long ride.... my personal connection.
.... that was my Warning Label.
Arturo Bandini, not a name of Grande Poets, but of fertilizer, a writer, an observer who finally figured out, during on the job training, that you just need to write what you ....observe.... and that which interests you in honest acceptance. He writes his publisher back East that he doesn't have anything to write about, not realising that he already is!! The rest begins to follow, like his "Legions of Ghosts crawling in from the seas through the fog at night"
I've seen a thousand foggy Southern California ocean nights. I wasn't ready for that line; I was ready for Camilla and the skin on surf scene EVERYONE knew was coming!!! Steinbeck can wait...
And I am still a weak man, refereeing my mind and body...Which of the three of us will finally tire of this race? Camilla wins this one as my heart breaks for just one more time for a beautiful woman just out of my reach.
Arturo, you Goof. Are you me, or am I you?? What's wrong with us?
And it's the little things in a big city viewed afresh that Arturo Bandini, eyes wide open still, from an undefined stunted childhood suddenly realizes is before him, like an unpainted canvas waiting for the splash of an outsider's definition. No drugs, no alcohol needed when so much of the technicolor eveything is new and assaults the unrubbed virgin velvet of his imagination. And what isn't there to observe in the sub-desert Urban Genesis Assault of 1930's LA??
Women most of all: mysterious, coppered and bedroom athletic; women, probably there a starlett on loan from the New Jewish Hollywood Empire just down the street; women, confident, as young and fashioned as the city they watch being built; women, with blond curls dripping from spectacular hats with spidery veils that flirt intruders' wishing the taste of Cabernet Lips; women, proud women clicking their high heels on freshly swathed walkways their men just left for them; women, wading through the Sainted Santa Ana's warmth, that air hot like opium on skin, embarrassed at their fragrant sweat.
....and a woman, an illegal alien who works the scullery: Camilla, the most beautiful of all. Camilla, as a defrocked nun, banished from finery, reduced to peasant shoes, who serves five cent coffee as communion wine, treating it as a fine rustic protected vintage hijacked from next Sunday's Bishop's Altar Mass, secretly hoping, sharing, pushing it's redemption, not in a church, but in a coffee shop.
Camilla: with deadly eyes that flash at you to pull over, like police warning lights in the dead of night, waiting for you to plead your innocence. You know that one look into those eyes and you will drink the night's rum. You stagger, insanely innocent, indefensibly guilty.
Camilla: Once her humble servant, once her defeatism, once her dangerous insolence, once her challenging, once her unwavering eyes and daring sarcastic smile with folded arms, once her insecurity, once her 1930's female vulnerablity, impossibly unhidden even by her latitude complexion.
East Coast boyish cold Winter's adolescence meets the anxious heat of a Southern California precocious Summer's sexuality.
East Coast snobism meets West Coast racism.
He rows, fearing sharks. She swims, defying them.
It's all a learning experience for both, stalled by pride, accelerated by an obvious finite. Camilla is a tragic figure, bruised outside, an injured fabric outline for her inner organic consumption only Arturo Bandini, in all his kinetic writings seemed unaware of. Maybe his canvas was so full. Their were only so many colours on his board. Maybe his mix was off. The Moment, impossibly lingered, was missed.
Been there, done that, Arturo...
I guess it's a Guy Thing.
No wonder you hate us, Ladies!
But just give....me....a moment so that I can figure this out....
Let me go back and look at my Superheroes:
Cisco Kid and Diablo, Roy Rogers and Trigger, Superman and Krypto.
Can you, My Loves, be as clean; can you accept such images as uncomplicated and silently dedicated as my childhood heroes? And why do you always ask more from us?
Cisco is not a matador.
Roy drives a jeep.
Superman wears glasses, as I....
Lois Lane falls in love with Superman, not Clark Kent
OK, enough, you're right; Arturo Bandini is selfish and infantile, and a most unpleasurable irritant, not the stuff of Superheroes. For him, words meant more than pictures, hope more than acheivement, the Past more precious than the Now. The future, Oh My God, the Future!!! A giddy anticipated moment of finding ridiculous, useless unknown presents at Christmas time or a birthday....The Chocolate Feast of Forever Innocent Youth. When he did do something right, it wasn't quite good enough. His life's novel always had time for a rewrite, even if his characters didn't. Time was what he needed. Time: His mother probably gave him time. Give Arturo Bandini another 50 years and he would have finally been ready for Our Camilla. Camilla, a Lover, not a Mother couldn't wait, the pages of her life yellowing fast in the dry Southern California heat. Camilla, our Superheroine in her own right, shut her mouth, folded up Her tawdry cape, and died not fighting the good fight, waiting for Arturo to let go of his childhood to become a man, and to save his woman.
We like to think things were less complictaed ...back then..but we didn't have the learning curve to figure out those....less complicated things....back then.
We always seem to be behind.
But, thank God, not as behind as Arturo, who notices those new breezy California palm trees outside his window more than Camilla's absence of underwear one uninvited evening. A Beautiful Woman's rejected seducing is perhaps the greatest Tradegy poetic.
Angel's Flight lives! I saw it....and not as a movie prop.
I love LA
I love Period Pieces.
I love this movie and all the little molecules of memory it excited.
And I love Mexican Women flirting naked in moonlit surf indecently asking to be liked before they were loved...

I would have been there then, Camilla, writing your poetry all these years later, as I am now. And I would have breathed all the badness possible from your lungs into mine.
I am a strong man, but I run from people as I run my marathons, following mountains, chasing clouds...and, unlike the small people below, I can run forever.
They are content, oily, flacid and lazy, thinking they have won something worthy. I am not. I am skinny and hungry and uncommonly without thirst.
They burrow from your garlic's rose. Every morning I am outraged, having to wash away your lover's perfume. For them the day runs dry. For us the night runs moist and chaotic, unpredictable as a monsoon. In our unifying dreams we blink each other our morning's confidence.
How arrogant are we? Does Saturday's Secret Confession await?
Does Sunday's Public Host run through us, unnourished?
Why? After all, we both clocked in on time all week. We paid the bills on time.
Our Mothers....Our final forgivness. They slip us their smirking genuflect past warring priests.
Love Her without concern, they whisper.
Love Her as your heartbeat.... and don't the both of you dare look back......

I run for perfection, trying to outrun God. I run from failure, chasing the Devil, knowing that as my entrance into heaven, I must look back, showing The Insignificant Beast my taunting angered lifetime victory snarl.
I run mountains, not tracks.
And for that, I refuse to stop searching.
But for you, Camilla, I would have stopped, lauging with easy breath as I waited for you to catch up;
Because I know, even at your laboured risk, why you follow me!!
Why you risk the Seed...
And even if the clouds obscured your jog, like a predator, I would have heard you long before your melting human footsteps.
Like a predator, I could have closed my eyes smelling the arrival of your.... fragrent sweat....waiting confident, unhidden from your trusted seeking. For you, I left my unhidden trail.
You and your flesh would have not escaped me, the clouds hiding our union from all the little people on time clocks below.
And all those bored silent gods that were sifting through clouds with nothing to do would have been our Bridesmaids, Honor Guards, far beyond the unsettled dust of the Santa Anas.
This they would have done without asking.
August 18, 2008

UK DVD BETTER ASPECT RATIO

For those of you who can play REGION 2 50hz PAL DVD issues I strongly urge you to go to Amazon UK and get the UK DVD issue. This movie was shot spherical that means full frame. In the USA there is a very stupid policy of insisting on presenting spherical films in 1.85:1 which is too tightly framed. In Europe these films are released on DVD in 1.78:1 which is a perfect native fit for a 16:9 widescreen TV/panel/projector screen. This gives more height with the same width as 1.85:1. You get a better pure and uncompromised native resolution for your 16:9 TV and more photographic content.

August 8, 2008

Does the Dust Have an Answer?

I must admit that I have not read John Fante's novel on which this movie is based. The big question is, did I need to? Ask the Dust as a movie is a delightful little self-contained drama, almost a melodrama if it had not been changed for ever from being that by its ending. It was a film never destined to be a blockbuster or win a Oscar (if that means much anyway). Nevertheless, it is a work of art and while it may lag in places for those of short attention span, if you stay with it, the film is most entertaining. Colin Farrell is more impressive as Arturo Bandini the would-be novelist than in his flat lead role in Alexander, and Salma Hayek, as beautiful as ever, playing the role of the earthy and highly sexual Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez, whether buck naked in the moonlit ocean, making soft porn love in a seaside cottage or fully clothed shod in native espadrilles serving coffee in a bar, is an excellent actress, something that was not revealed in thinner roles she has played before such as with Antonio Banderas in the mindless but entertaining Desperado romp. To her credit it is hard to realise that Miss Hayek is ten years older than Farrell.

One does not need to be a geographer to learn that the film story based in Southern California in the early 1930s was actually shot in South Africa near Cape Town. This fact is revealed in the ending credits if you care to read them. Maybe it was cheaper to shoot there but more likely it was easier to capture an image of what Los Angeles may have looked like back then than any attempt to produce the film in modern day California. The desert scenes are very convincing even though a pendant might say the vegetation is not quite right, where are the Joshua trees? But that is nit picking.

There are several themes in the film which are not hard to discern. Indeed, this movie is empty of mysteries or surprises. There is much awkwardness in the relationship between two young people who are inevitably attracted to each other and deeply in love, although they don't realise this truth until near the end. They are always at each other's throats almost as if they are struggling to resist the deep feelings they have for one another. The meaning of the "battle of the sexes" becomes very clear. Their relationship is not only complicated by their almost virginal youth and inexperience (inevitably more in the young man than the woman) but by the fact that they both belong to "coloured" minorities; she a Mexican probably with some Indian blood, he of Southern Italian parentage, both with black hair, dark eyes and swarthy complexions. she is a Lopez he a Bandini, therefore both are liable to the open discrimination considered acceptable in the pre-holocaust era.

The youth is an aspiring but not yet successful writer of short stories, with one published in a magazine,who has yet to produce a novel (he can only type 2000 words a day or that's his excuse). He meets the beautiful Mexican girl serving at a slightly down at heel café bar near the gloomy entrance to a highway tunnel in one of the less salubrious parts of Los Angeles. Their first encounter is not encouraging, which leads the girl to say much later in the movie "Why do you have to be so mean when you first meet somebody?"

The theme of race also interferes in their relationship where they sling insults at each other. Camilla, an immigrant, is hoping to become a US citizen, Arturo is already one by birth. They both desperately want to believe in the myth of American equality and in the US constitution which he teaches her for her citizenship exam. She is illiterate, at least in English (hardly the ideal companion of a writer,)so he also helps her in reading English via a children's illustrated book about a dog.

The young man had arrived in LA with several hundred dollars in his pocket, almost a small fortune in those days, but with virtually no income and rather wasteful habits at first so he is down to less than a single nickel (the price of a cup of coffee)when the story begins. He rents a room in a cheap boarding house,whose grimy back abuts on a hillside. His view is of the scaly trunk of an uncared for scraggy date palm dying slowly from the already evident LA pollution. However, the rear window of his room provides him with an escape route from the middle-aged landlady always at the front hall desk who is after him for seriously past due rent. When he arrives in LA- in a flashback- and asks for a room the landlady assumes by his colour that he is Mexican and bluntly informs him that she doesn't rent rooms to Jews or Mexicans but seem reassured when he tells her he is Italian (she probably doesn't know what an Italian is).The old fellow (played by Donald Sutherland) across the way is a down and out who like most of the neighbourhood came to LA seeking success and failed. He owes Arturo some small change but arranges to seduce the milkman so the author can pinch a couple of bottles from the cart while the Milko is occupied. The implication, when the dilapidated alcoholic neighbour appears (though never spoken) is "look at me and what I am now-thus you in time will also become". It is on the day when the old neighbour pays back a nickel debt in coin that the story is launched as Arturo rushes off to the nearby café bar for his long-awaited luxury - a cup of coffee- where he is destined to meet Camilla.

The girl is in a somewhat better position as she has a regular though obviously low-paid job. She runs a 1927 convertible and is apparently supported by the young blond barman Harold. It is unclear what Harold's sexual preferences are and they probably don't sleep together. He is a kind of protector. Camilla reveals to Arturo that Harold suffers from tuberculosis and won't live very long. Unfortunately once this fortuitous piece of information was given I guessed where the film was going and how it would end.

There is one diversion which doesn't seem vitally necessary to the story line when a good looking thirty-something New York City exile pursues the writer. She is a disfigured one-time wealthy Jewess who has been evicted by her husband who could not bring himself to accept her scarred body. She is another LA misfit whose passion serves the young man as a test for his real love for the Mexican girl. The woman is conveniently evicted again, this time from the story itself by her sudden death in an Long Beach earthquake. The scenario of the film is not very complex beyond the battle of the sexes and the need for people- who did not quite fit the contemporary image of the ideal Americana, as fair skinned, blue eyed and blond- to establish an identity as they had wrongly been induced to believe that they were somehow inferior.

Unlike King of the Hill, (itself a movie perhaps too glossy to describe the reality of that era despite the "Hoovervilles" in it), Ask the Dirt is not a tale of the 1930s economic depression. While late for the rent at the beginning neither Arturo or Camilla are ranked with the homeless who briefly appear in the movie. True Arturo is often skint, but he is saved from destitution by an unexpected cheque from his magazine publisher. At the very end of the film he is apparently wealthy and successful but that is an add-on which has little or nothing to do with the story.

The cinematography is superb and the low key jazzy guitar music on the background soundtrack is haunting and appropriate to the setting. If you don't believe me just Ask the Dust! Altogether a good, though not a great movie.




June 17, 2008

Original but not great

Set during the depression, Ask the Dust examines what happens when two immigrants expectations of what they want to get out of life changes drastically when they meet each other.

Arutro Bandito (Colin Ferrell) is an Italian American, first generation who moves to LA to write a great novel, a love story. But his experience in life is limited and he finds himself stumped on what he should write about. Flat broke and desperate, he spends his last nickel on a cup of coffee at a diner. There he meets Camilla (Selma Hayek), a beautiful and feisty Mexican woman who is trying to get her citizenship. The two of them spark immediately. They have chemistry, but not always in a good way. Arturo is infatuated with her but wants to meet a blue eyed California girl that are so abundant in LA. Camilla is enamored as well but she is looking for a rich man to marry and bring her up to high society.

As Arturo starts to have success in his writing, Camilla warms up to him and the possibility of loving him. Arturo finds, with the help of a woman who is physically disfigured, that his anger toward Camilla is based on the fact that he has great passion for her but can't imagine diverting from his dream.

The movie is unsympathetic in it's display of racism and character differences. Things are rough, and the life of these two young people is not envied on many levels. Farrell and Hayek give spectacular performances for what they have. Hayek is especially striking and powerful, embracing the role with no fear, especially with the nude scenes. If the movie were better I would say she should get an Oscar.

But alas, the movie is not great. It is good. It's character study is original and the love story is not like anything we have seen on screen before. The ending is not neat and tidy. Director Robert Towne seemed to want it that way. He didn't want a polished version of the novel this movie is based on, he wanted something that spoke in the same manner, which is not always welcomed with wide audiences. So you'll have to make your own opinion, watch it and decide for yourself. August 6, 2007

IT'S THE STORY OF A YOUNG WRITER WHO WRITES ABOUT A YOUNG WRITER WHO...

Writer-director Robert Towne is responsible for a few first-class screenplays of the last thirty years. For example, he wrote or co-wrote Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza and Jack Nicholson's The Two Jakes. Not bad, isn't it ?

I had read the novels of John Fante a few years ago and liked them a lot. Arturo Bandini, John Fante's literary double, is a character one doesn't forget easily and the description of the post WWI Los Angeles was particularly shabby. Now, in my opinion, Robert Towne's movie perfectly describes the mood of that period and the difficulties met by the Americans of the first generation to obtain the right and the opportunity to enjoy the American dream. ASK THE DUST is not a masterpiece but provides for the movie buff a kind of pleasure that starts to become more and more uncommon nowadays: the feeling to have been considered as an adult by the director.

A DVD it would be a shame to look down upon. June 8, 2007

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