#138 - the limits of my patience.

a little over a decade back, i was a plucky, naive & young boston university film student without a care in the world. growing up in NH, the pinnacle of film for me was a few good men, but soon after i arrived at school, i discovered that there were a million films out there, independent & otherwise, that were much better than a few good men. i'd thought that i loved film, but it was during that time that really fell in love with film. it was also during this time that i came across the films of the man who became my favorite director, jim jarmusch. he has this style of storytelling where it's about the characters & not the story, where he doesn't beat you into submission with the plot. often, there isn't even a plot to speak of in his films. instead, there are beautifully shot scenes where characters who always seem to be on the move drive the film forward through dialogue. i eat that shizz up & to me, his films are a perfect example of film as art.

about a week back, i finally checked out his latest film, the limits of control, which came out on DVD back in mid-november. it stars isaach de bankolé as "lone man," a criminal on an undefined mission in spain. a lot of critics hated it. it's definitely the most minimalist of all his films & i have no doubt that it's a difficult film for the average movie goer to handle. i even had to go back a few times this week & watch it again to fully understand what he was going for. still, it's definitely SLOW going. you can count the lone man's lines of dialogue on your two hands & throughout the entire film, we're not even clear as to what his objectives are. all we know is that he's in spain & he keeps meeting people (none of who have names) at cafes, where they exchange matchboxes with pieces of paper in them that appear to give him the next steps in his vague mission.

jarmusch has always enjoyed meditating on repeated imagery & scenarios in his films (see 2003's coffee & cigarettes) & in this film, he meditates on this cafe matchbox-swapping scenario, pairing a dead-silent de bankolé with a host of characters played by such folks as john hurt, tilda swinton & gael garcía bernal. each character he meets has their own personality & through comparing these personalities & the lone man's reactions to them, we get some idea of who the lone man is. that's the central device jarmusch uses in the film. since he's paired the lone man up in one-on-ones with a cast of characters, the lone man doesn't even have to speak for us to get a sense of his character. in addition to the cafe scenes, there are appearances by paz de la huerta (who plays "nude" & is totally true to her name in EVERY scene she's in) & bill murray (who appears late in the film).

every shot in the film is artfully constructed, which, along with the fact that you never quite know what's going on, helps to give the film a dreamlike feel. jarmusch was definitely going for a dreamlike feel. in the dvd extras, there's a "making of the film" documentary that opens with jarmusch walking the streets of spain, talking about what is essentially his motivation behind the film. he says that he likes music, so he knows a lot about music. he also knows a lot about the history of movies. although he knows about & enjoys those things, he is more fascinated by all the things that he doesn't yet know about. in the limits of control, there are a lot of things that you don't know, but if you're okay with that, you'll enjoy it for what it is...a film that's not his best but is still a work of art.

#138 - the limits of my patience.
snack: r.w. garcia organic veggie tortilla chips
drink: maine root root beer



to keep myself busy the first time i watched the limits of control, i snacked from a bag of r.w. garcia organic veggie tortilla chips. r.w. garcia's a san jose-based company who's been making "premium tortilla chips since 1982." they're relatively primo, i suppose. the veggie ones are tall-natural & organic & gluten free, so they've got the healthy snack thing going for them. with the veggie ones, you get three flavors--spinach & garlic, red beet & onion and carrot, tomato & sesame. out of the three, i preferred the red beet & onion ones, but the flavor in the chips is baked in & subtle, so i didn't notice a huge amount of difference between the three.

according to the bag, they're "for more than just salsa" & although they are pretty good just on their own, i ended up eating them with a number of different salsas over the past week. it's mostly because i've been growingly increasingly obsessed with fruity salsas recently, ones made with peaches & raspberries & such, so i had to indulge that obsession. the veggie chips made a nice complement, especially since they're a firm, crunchy chip that you can scoop a good amount of salsa on to. like i said though, you don't need salsa. maybe you're a communist & you hate salsa. you can still enjoy these chips & i'll try to avoid questioning your twisted motives.

for my beverage, i went with a bottle of one of my favorite beverages of late, maine root root beer. it's brewed out of scarborough, maine by two brothers who formed the company four years ago. they started it after one of the brothers, who worked at a portland restaurant & was sick of the sub-par root beer selection there, began brewing his own root beer. four years later, they're brewing a ginger brew, a sarsparilla & blueberry, lemon-lime & mandarin orange sodas in addition to the root beer. they even have a pumpkin pie soda that they brewed a batch of for the fall, which i can say from experience is pretty damn good but also pretty damn sweet. they're available all around the country & if you've got a whole foods near you, you'll find their stuff there.

as for the root beer, it's one of the best root beers that i've tried to date. it doesn't have an overly carbonated makeup like you find in commercial root beers like a&w and barq's, so when you pour it, it settles nicely in the glass, with a head & everything, just like a draft beer would. when you drink it, it also has the same smoothness as a draft beer. if you're used to drinking commercial root beers, the flavor of the maine root root beer's very similar, but with less carbonation & syrup mucking up the flavor, making for a much more enjoyable beverage. it's made up of all-natural ingredients like extracts of wintergreen, clove and anise & overall, it's just a cleaner, better drinking experience. as far as root beers go, it's a work of art.