Monday, January 22, 2007

Elegant and eerily lyrical sickness

Via Jessica McBride, one of the featured films at Sundance is a documentary about guys who love animals. I mean really love them.

It's not surprising that a chunk of the people who frequent Sundance regard this as "an elegant, eerily lyrical film." The stereotype of the intellectual who thinks transgressive is synonymous with profound is old, but resilient.

The movie is, they say, not graphic and the director claims to have "aestheticized the sleaze right out of it." I'm skeptical, but maybe he did. Leni Riefenstahl managed to make a Nazi Party gathering in Nuremburg look pretty neat, too. It is art, I suppose, but what do you make of art that distorts reality and your own moral compass?

This movie, Zoo apparently consists of "elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations." These "situations" apparently involve the "marriage of the completely strange mind-set and the beauty of the natural world ...." How deliciously outre. Sundance is just so out there.

To paraphrase Stan Marsh, "Dude, they're horses."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just off the top of my head.

Isn’t hoss a cowboy name? They spend a great deal of time alone on the range.
My friends name is Horst. I wonder what the origin of his name is.
Speaking of outré does my not shaving for several days at a time apply.

Rick Esenberg said...

I do not know the origin of the name, but, in German, "Horst" means "nest" or "refuge" and there is no where good to go with that.