To start with one of those names: Walter Benjamin famously described involuntary memory using the example of Proust's madeleine: with one bite of a pastry, the narrator's remembered youth, associated in his mind with the taste of a delicacy, enlarges (a lot). In The House is Burning, involuntary memory occurs as a kid going to war watches his girlfriend rolling Lucky Strike cigarettes, reminding him of his mother's habit.
house is burningElegant concepts are otherwise embodied in a white trash setting throughout the movie, Holger Ernst's first feature. Produced by Wim Wenders, Ernst's very accurate representation of American culture is, like Wenders', honest, yet ultimately sympathetic and tender. A good lover (smile).
Its selling points are low brow: sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll, teenage coming of age à la Dazed and Confused, with every star on the constellation of romantically self-destructive behavior visible in a very dark plot. Its narrative structure verges on made-for-tv melodrama. I can believe Ernst purposefully embraces the aesthetic of his subject and audience. The major theme revolves around kids trying to survive (in) the System. Their options include going to war, selling drugs, and giving really good head to get a position as a secretary at an insurance firm. One kid's Freudian desire to kill his father flounders when even the abusive Father is a victim of the bureaucratic, uncaring System.
Hope appears tentatively, through women, who, previously estranged, comfort each other through the trauma that a night of violence exposes (rather than creating). One mother recognizes her neglect of her daughter, whose silence causes everyone to ignore her or believe she is stupid. The daughter's anesthetized hospital stay - unclogging her ears (presumably filled with the verbal junk surrounding her) – corresponds to the film's night of intensifying violence, as if the night/film was her dream, following its own logic of justice.
If, as the Protestant Pentecostal preacher repeatedly proclaims, God is the alpha and omega, this silent child and her dream vision is outside of His alphabetic (and legal) realm.
Sara Malaria
The House Is Burning
house is burningThis film is a piece of shit. The cover of the DVD says it all, we have a condom, some girls pants, a mixed assortment of pills, a bag of weed, a bottle top and a bullet...is there anything they missed. In fact the whole project seem to have been arranged by some industry fucks who have systemically tried to check all the requisite boxes for making an 'edgy' film. Every cliché has been covered here; the little innocent girl who looks on naively, another girl's refrain of "what's happening, what's happening?", the sickeningly sentimental melancholy music from the outset, the super slow-motion shot of someone falling in despair onto his knees in the rain (think Platoon without context) and of course the inevitable round up when we get to see a close up of everyone's miserable faces at the end (yes, they actually do it...again).
There is no message here. The characters have no depth and are completely unbelievable. None of the individual stories are sufficiently developed for us to sympathize with those involved - all in all it is a fucking joke.
I remember thinking Requiem For A Dream was getting into this territory when i saw it, but at least it hooked you in enough to actually make you feel really shit by the end. If you want to see a movie that deals with all the same stuff but is actually good (i.e. what they were trying to rip off) go watch Kids or Gummo by Harmony Korine. Iain 'the cruncher' Ross
www.goodmovies.de
