Rick’s Reel Recommendations | 3 Films on Craft

FILM COLUMN | ISSUE SIX | MAHI Ā-RINGA / CRAFT

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Columnist

1. A Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959)

Whether you’re burdened by imposter syndrome or choked by a creative block, if you’re an artist in a rut, seek the protagonist of A Bucket of Blood for reassurance that you’re not fucking up this badly. In this dark comedy, Dick Miller plays the nebbish Walter, a busboy at a beatnik café who doesn’t fit in with the sophisticated clientele. This crowd of pseudo-intellectuals pat themselves on the back for their refined taste (papaya cheesecake and Yugoslavian white wine, to be exact), and not for a lack of huffing tobacco are they constantly blowing smoke up their own arses. But who doesn’t crave a community, however many poseurs? In the hopes that some artistic genius has rubbed off on him, Walter returns to his apartment after work one night and begins punching dimples and creases into a hunk of clay. He is trying to sculpt a life-like bust of Carla, a pearly-grinned regular at the café whom he quietly fancies. Now in the Book of Genesis, God moulds dust and clay into the shape of a body and begins humankind. Compare that to A Bucket of Blood, where Walter bullies a lump of mud on his dining table, throws a hissy-fit, and accidentally stabs his landlord’s cat. Jesus wept. Walter’s unwitting felicide actually leads to an artistic triumph – he covers the cat’s carcass with clay (keeping the knife in the cat, mind you) and brings it to work the next day as an art decor piece, astutely titled ‘Dead Cat’. Sounds like bullshit, right? Lo and behold, the room of beatniks eat it up. They readily champion his newfound place in the local talent pool. I won’t spoil the rest; I implore you to watch the movie and see exactly how this hysteria poisons his brain.

2. Oxhide II (Liu Jiayin, 2009)

Two hours and a little bit more of a Chinese family making and eating dumplings together in (almost) real-time. What appears to be a documentary on the surface is actually a staged family drama in the style of Yasujirō Ozu – just with a lot of pauses. For those unacquainted with Ozu, his films (e.g. Late Spring, Tokyo Story) were spacious reflections of their socio-economic setting, showing how a household and its people change (or don’t). Liu Jiayin’s films, set in modern Beijing, burn slow enough that by the time Mum and Dad are finally plopping jiǎozi into a wok of boiling water, it thrills my blood as much as the Hall of Mirrors shootout in John Wick Chapter Two. Oxhide I was about Jiayin’s father’s leather-crafting business, but I chose to highlight its sequel, mainly because I enjoy eating dumplings more than wearing leather. There is always something happening in this movie. The father is an optimistic businessman, particular in his craft. He kindly scrutinises his daughter’s inexpert dough-folding technique, at least when she’s not off staring out of the window. Occasionally, the family conversation circles back on their artisanal leather shop, which only profits on days when they mark the prices down. It’s worth thinking about this in tandem with the family’s generational divide and their obligation to keep an ancestral dumpling-crimp technique alive and kicking. Should you fill in the blanks, you may too lament what the free market has brought on as a blatantly clear decline in consumer standards. But then this conversation will stop in its tracks, subsumed by graceful actions on the prep table: scraping wet flour from the edges of the bowl, measuring of chives by counting the knife chops, and listening for the correct tearing sound when stretching the dough.

3. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2019)

Forgive my urges to just throw half of Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful filmography on the column. First Cow is simply the one that I think you might like. And yes – I mean you specifically. So much of her hushed realism, tinted into rustic paintings by her DOP Chris Blauvelt, also evokes the blood, sweat and tears of honest graft. Often, her unwavering patience with the most arbitrary processes can repel an audience (though I utterly adore that and think it is an antidote to today’s benchmark of instant-gratification). Last year’s The Mastermind had a particularly polarising scene in a barn at night where Josh O’Connor painstakingly disassembles a crate of paintings, carries them up a ladder piece by piece, then reassembles them on the second floor. In Night Moves (2013), a heist thriller about a trio of radical environmentalists plotting to blow up a dam, we watch Dakota Fanning nervously barter with the clerk of a garden centre for a totally inconspicuous 500lb of ammonium nitrate fertiliser. In the anthology Certain Women (my absolute favourite), two of the three stories sympathise with women striving to be taken seriously by their male peers. In Showing Up, Michelle Williams plays a grumpy clay sculptor tangled in the stresses of arranging her exhibition, reminding her landlord to fix the hot water, and nursing an injured pigeon back to health. And in First Cow – Reichardt’s most visually astonishing film – American history is told on the margins, through two men who both keep one eye on a dream and the other on the first cow in San Francisco. If only they could meet her by sneaking onto the yard of a wealthy English trader; ol’ Bessie may be their ticket to a brand new life. Their dream? Baking buttermilk biscuits!