Godfrey Reggio
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Stylistically, the film occasionally nods to Godfrey Reggio’s famed time-lapse documentary Koyaanisqatsi, which the film also name-checks, sometimes speeding up or slowing down the frame, suggesting the mutability of time.
He even imposes an occasional switch into Koyaanisqatsi mode to give the illusion of smeary LSD trails.
Lo and behold, then, that a closed-off home located in a very particular place at a very specific cultural moment — which Mills, time and again, will make the point of emphasizing through his Beginners-esque montages, too-on-the-nose Koyaanisqatsi clip and all — fosters particular ways of thinking and being.
Since Godfrey Reggio's time-lapse-intensive Koyaanisqatsi is another cultural artifact sampled by Mills, the post-production effect also manages to suggest punk as a logical extension of late postwar capitalism.
Writer/director Mike Mills—whose previous family drama Beginners (2010) was a lovable portrait of the relationship between a son and his elderly, newly declared gay dad—makes unusual use of fast-motion photography in many sequences, a choice perhaps inspired by the frenzied time-lapse of the 1982 modernist documentary Koyaanisqatsi (a movie explicitly referenced at one moment).
Bening and Gerwig are dynamite, their co-stars exceptional, and a late-game visual quote of Godfrey Reggio’s incredible 1982 documentary “ Koyaanisqatsi ” proves serendipitous in its synchronicity.
Like 2012’s similarly deluxe travelogue Samsara (directed by Reggio’s former DP Ron Fricke), Visitors is content to score broad points off modern life – a scene of fingers moving over an invisible tracking pad facilely paints us as slaves to technology – instead of seeking out genuinely surprising points of view.
Director-photographer Ron Fricke (Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka) seems to be making a spiritual statement about the unity of life (the title is a Sanskrit word meaning "cyclic existence"), but any sincerity inherent in the project is overwhelmed by the manufactured awe of its godawful New Age score.
“Samsara” is a sumptuous film by Ron Fricke, who directed “Baraka” and was cinematographer of “Koyaanisqatsi.”
The results, as in the previous films Fricke has photographed, including "Baraka," "Chronos" and "Koyaanisqatsi," can take your breath away.
Much like his films “Chronos,” or “Koyaanisqatsi”, Fricke’s “Samsara” (the word is Sanskrit for “continuous flow,” referring to the cycle of life) is a wordless documentary that is essentially a continuous flow of arresting images, sometimes sped up with time-lapse photography.
Thirty years ago, a popular film on the midnight-movie circuit was “Koyaanisqatsi.”
This is why half the movie plays out as a greatest-hits homage to the trick camera work of Danny Boyle, Godfrey Reggio, and Jonas Åkerlund (a useless shot of Ben falling onto a bed is a perfect example of how to squander an entire day of shooting; one ray-of-light shot accomplishes nothing but vertically flipping Koyaanisqatsi 's DVD cover art), while the rest occurs as tacky fits of juvenilia, the nadir of which is a bathroom-mirror montage of the story's motley characters getting ready for a party that ends with Ben's best bud whacking off to a nudie mag—his bottle of lotion opportunely evoking the man sploog exploding below the frame.
But where the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey had to fake his galactic vistas, Reggio – whose trilogy of Qatsi films rank among the most commercially successful avant-garde productions of all time – possesses the resources and the reputation to actually film in outer space (take that, Gravity!).
Is it wrong to think “2001: A Space Odyssey” when we cut from Triska to the moon, or to spend time pondering how the hell Reggio pulled off some of this?
And it's nowhere near as visionary as “2001: A Space Odyssey” whose imagery the movie evokes on multiple occasions.
This last notion is made explicit when the movie concludes on the sort of fourth-wall-breaking effect “presenter” Steven Soderbergh employed more successfully in Full Frontal .
It's also not the equal of a host of other related films that come to mind: the cinema portraits by James Benning (“Twenty Cigarettes” in particular) or by Andy Warhol, Nicolas Philibert's “Nenette” (where the title orangutan stares back at the viewer for the length of the documentary), or Abbas Kiarostami's “Shirin” (in which we watch women watching a movie we never see).
There are specks of promise hidden amidst the muck of "Fantastic Four"the music score co-composed by Marco Beltrami (2014's " The Giver ") and Philip Glass (2014's " Visitors "), for example, is far better than the images that accompany itbut what disturbingly permeates the surface is director Josh Trank's creative anguish over seeing his movie get viciously stripped of its soul.
Here’s what I got: Visitors sometimes comes off like a postmodern King Kong, as when a beautiful lowland gorilla stares at the lens head-on, almost accusingly.