Up All Night

Wednesday, 1:30 A.M.
Zzzzzz.

Wednesday, Noonish
I only made it through five more. Humans are not meant for this kind of prolonged passivity. I've been doing a lot of running in place while watching, but that only goes so far, and at one point, just after Ruby's Town, a long documentary about a turkey race, I lit out in a huff on a bike ride. Ruby's Town is a celebration of small-town life and the definitive history of the annual two-part race between the avian representatives of Cuero, Texas, and Worthington, Minnesota. This is the sort of stuff for which the final 30 seconds of local news broadcasts exist. Perhaps it would've worked better in that format.

Writer-director Claudia Llosa brings us Madeinusa, the title being both a pun and the heroine's name. In the film's early going, Madeinusa (Magaly Solier) is crowned the most beautiful young virgin of a strange village in the Peruvian Andes. The honor won't cure her head lice or keep at bay her wicked father (Ubaldo Huaman). It does, though, attract the attention of a stranger in town (Carlos J. de la Torre), a light-eyed itinerant miner from Lima who has been waylaid by a flooded road. Most of the action in this delicate, folkloric debut goes down during Holy Week, which the town treats as a bacchanal on the grounds that from Good Friday through Easter Sunday, God is dead and therefore can't see sin.

Dutch director Heddy Honigmann's Forever is an affecting doc about art and death built around interviews with folks visiting and tending to the graves at Paris's Père-Lachaise. One interviewee says that when, as a teen, he awakened to great art, he knew that he would never again be bored. Never bored. I'd like to see that liar argue a parking violation at the downtown DMV.

Wednesday, 'Round Midnight
I've been thinking a lot about boredom this week. Boredom is an inevitable product of watching five movies more or less in a row. One must then try to figure out whether or not the boredom is meaningful.

Many boredom scholars maintain that boredom is always accompanied by some degree of hostility. When it isn't, we call it something else, such as tranquility. Sometimes the hostility is directed outward, e.g., This movie is tedious, and I resent it for stealing my time. And sometimes the hostility is directed inward, e.g., I, raised on Hollywood and rock 'n' roll, am too stupid for this slow but reportedly brilliant novel, and I will die in embarrassed ignorance of its subtle pleasures. I sometimes try to use these differently aimed hostilities to sort all art into two camps: art that is too boring for me, and art for which I am too boring.

I was bored during parts of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, from the makers of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, but I was able to relax and go with its creeping flow. Rasmussen is set in arctic Canada in 1922, and draws on the accounts of the titular Danish explorer. The vantage, though, is that of the shaman Awa and his similarly gifted daughter, Apak. Several of the high-def video shots are in slow motion, and the directors make a virtue of laconic lethargy. Foregoing story arc for an old-fashioned yet grave yarn, Rasmussen eventually finds its principal drama in the battle between waning traditional Inuit spirituality and waxing Christianity. Philosophically rich and even richer visually, the movie is a poem to white, gray, and light brown that ought to shame the designers of California Closet brochures.