Film types, explain NORTHFORK to me

God, this is why I'm moving to London, I keep missing all the good shit. I think they're a good piece on this film in Vertigo magazine, dunno. Is it like set in some area that's about to be flooded for a dam or something? And it looks all post-apocalyptic and shit? Grrr. Fuck pronvincial life.

Yeah, there's a guy with two wives who lives in a gigantic dry-docked ark and refuses to leave until he's got a sign from god, despite the fact that they're about to flood the place and he's going to drown.

And a weird dog's head on stilts thing that make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER to me.

And a sick orphan conversing with camp angels.

The thing is the whole tone of the thing is so po-faced and austere, and then half way through one of the black-suited grim characters will say to his mate "what you talking about, Willis?" and suddenly it seems like the funniest film ever.

But it makes no sense.

The first half an hour is fucking boring though.

And it's all set in Cromer...

It appears to be set in the worst town ever. The fucker deserved to be flooded. There's bugger all there apart from houses and dirt and the church was missing two walls despite it being in, like, Minnesota or somewhere.

I remember the newsagents in Cromer having really spectacular amounts of porn for sale.

The "What you talking about Willis" line was so out of the blue it was hilarious. I really liked it, despite terrible premenitions in the first half hour. It is po-faced, it is obscure but in all its artsy stylings it has at its core a real purty vision.

ANd the story of the death of the child worked as an actually story, not just as a ropey old allegory. I am not sure what there is to understand about it though.

Oh, and Matt, you did notice what was on the kids bedside table.

Ah, of course, the copy of Hercules and the toy plane, right?

Everything from the boy's dream was elements from real life I suppose - the dog's head was on top of the priest's walking stick and it was on four walking sticks... I'd forgotten that bit when I started the thread.

I laughed out loud when it got shot with the hallucinogenic dart.

The plane bit at the end was way Top Gun as well... I liked the way Anthony Edwards went "goose!" when examining the feathers as well. There were probably fifty film references in there I failed to get altogether.

Cup Of Tea on the table was what gave that away. But like I say, there's loads in there that fits togeether as a nice collage, rather than there being clear explainations for what actually happens. (If it is just a dream, how does James Woods stumble into it....)

That's a point, why was there a 5ft gap in the middle of that house anyway?

Because there was I think is the only acceptible answer to that.

this looks like the worst movie ever

What's to explain? It's terrible. Really, really boring.

did you see their other movie? i didn't but i judged it solely on the basis of the trailer and it was awful.

I saw Twin Falls Idaho but don't remember very much of it. I don't remember disliking it, but nothing stuck whatsoever. I saw it on video.

Re: Northfork, as I said on ILF, paraphrasing a friend, it's sub-Lynch but without anything intense like sex or malevolence to make it the slightest bit compelling. (It makes you realize how good Lynch is at making the smallest moment feel fraught with anticipation and significance.)

Like, if Lynch directed this, we'd see the weird dog on stilts and think WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? OH MY GOD, THAT'S THE MOST DISTURBING THING EVER. Here, it's like, "Oh, that's quaintly absurd. Huh. I don't get it."

isn't there an angel in it?

I think Lynch is a red herring here. The actually effect is a collage of minor weirdness, the dislocation of a pre-death state almost (death of the town/child). That the Polish brothers obsession aren't kinky sex does not make those ideas any less interesting to me, since the film was shot in such a compelling manner.

The angels as wild animals of the plain, being lassoed like buffalo was alovely touch.

This film isn't on at enough cinemas! I want to see it, coz I thought Twin Falls Idaho was great!

I think we all agreed on ILF that this movie was dire and overrated; interesting to see some dissenting opinions here.

dire and overrated? northfork enchance. i think.

i be off now.

worse than winged migration.

cozen did you like winged migration?

northfork was so unbelievably boring and just bad. and the comedy was so misplaced and awkward, like it was trying too hard to be clever.

most over-rated piece of garbage released last year (in the states at least)

Since you asked....here's a review I wrote of it last year:

Whatever happened to “art” films?
You know what I’m talking about – those slow, cryptic, elliptical things with sad-eyed European women and brooding symbolism and the occasional bare breast so some reviewer can call it “erotic,” guaranteeing a date-night audience of philosophy majors.
These days, an “art” film is more likely to be an insane Hong Kong bloodbath or an ironic French porno than some expressionistic contemplation of death and love. Even philosophy majors want some bang for their buck. I’m not saying this by way of bereavement -- I’m fine with the bloodbaths and pornos. I suppose that’s why David Lynch is my favorite working director -- he makes expressionistic contemplations of death and love with bloodbaths and pornography included.
I’m guessing that Mark and Michael Polish like David Lynch too. The twin filmmakers from Idaho have a visual style that owes a lot to Lynch’s American surrealism, Edward Hopper by way of Luis Bunuel. It’s also natural and fair up to a point to compare the Polishes to the Coen Brothers, another pair of Midwestern siblings. Like the Coens, the Polishes (Mark does most of the writing, Michael directs) are probably doomed to live with the word “quirky” in a lot of reviews and profiles.
But as their third film Northfork makes clear, the Polishes have their own sensibility and perspective, and it really doesn’t have more than a surface resemblance to either Lynch or the Coens. The Polishes are more earnest and more obvious and more self-consciously serious. They are, in fact, old-fashioned “art film” guys. They want to say important things. The only problem is that I’m not sure they’ve figured out which important things they want to say.
Northfork is the third in a triology of films about the modern American West. The first (and best) was Twin Falls, Idaho, in which the Polishes starred as Siamese twins who fall in love with the same woman. The second was Jackpot, named after and partly set in a gambling town on the Idaho/Nevada border; it’s about a deluded karoke singer aiming for the big time, and his equally deluded manager. Northfork is named after a Montana town that, in the movie at least, is scheduled to be drowned by a new dam in 1955.
The movie takes place over the two days before the waters are due to start rising. There are two primary storylines: A frontier preacher (Nick Nolte, doing a Kris Kristofferson imitation) watches over a dying orphan in a church that has been abandoned as the congregants seek higher ground; and a father and son (James Woods and Mark Polish) working on behalf of the federal government visit local houses to make sure all the residents have evacuated.
There’s a third strand too, which eventually brings the other two together, and it represents both the movie’s ambitions and its follies. A mysterious quartet is holed up in a house in the flood zone, and they’re also looking for someone to evacuate: an “unknown angel.” It turns out that the Montana plains used to be home to flocks of wild angels, who were hunted to near extinction. The oddball foursome -- a tea-guzzling dandy in a turban (Robin Sachs), a maternal Goth chick with a wig safety-pinned to her scalp (Daryl Hannah), a mute cowboy with a music box (Ben Foster), and a mad scientist with amputated arms (a post-doc Anthony Edwards, still searching for life after e.r) – is clearly not of this mortal coil. And if you’re thinking that a dying orphan in an abandoned church is a good bet for a lost angel, then you have some idea of the sentimentalism at work.
The central subject here is death (I told you it was an art film). The opening scene shows a coffin bobbing on the waves of a lake, and the gray looming dam is referred to as a tombstone no less than twice. But it’s never really clear what the Polishes are getting at, beyond a general sense that it’s sad when things die. If the extinct angels are supposed to represent the lost innocence of the American prairie, then it’s the most hamhanded metaphor of the year.
What’s good about the movie is its sense of place, especially its magnificent widescreen Montana landscapes. The Polishes love the sweep and light and unfinished cragginess of the Plains and Rockies, and you can feel in their movies how much those places shaped them. The region deserves its own brand of lyricism, and it’s commendable for the Polishes to try to fit the bill. If they ever manage to join their landscapes to a story that can comfortably inhabit them (the way, say, Terrence Malick did for the Great Plains in Badlands), they’ll make a great film.
As it is, Northfork falls into that tiresome category of movies too interesting to dismiss but too flawed to actually enjoy. It doesn’t help that the Polishes don’t have much of a sense of humor. The film is so po-faced that the occasional gags would feel out of place even if they were funny, which they mostly are not. And philosophy majors should note -- there’s not a bare breast in sight.