Eden Log (2007)

It is Christmas time in Puerto Rico. Improbably. Halloween has been packed in and Thanksgiving skipped right over. Apparently.

Someone should inform the Occupy San Juan crowd who are chanting something or other in the courtyard below, as Frank and Coqui Esperanza idle in the old city, waiting for a stack of photocopies to be made at Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. It was too hot and tiring to watch a balding civil servant shuffle papers around the office in a red and green sweater while alternatingly finding his favorite carols on a Perry Como CD and gasping for air in front of an ancient electric fan. The old metal kind with the wide finger accepting holes. The law suit attracting kind you don’t dare see in the CONUS anymore. Silver tinsel taped to the top fluttered before it. Papers littering the man’s desk were held down with what were no doubt pre-Columbian potsherds. An Elenoid appliqué bat head appeared to be keeping some excavation permits from littering the room.

Frank and Coqui were in town doing some background research on a commercial lot in the Cañabón Ward for which the contractor would require a wetlands permit before erecting a Mofongo Express. The food at an ME wasn’t the best or healthiest but the little Styrofoam mortars the shit came in were ingenious. Besides when you are trying to dine in the Caribbean on 27-dollar a day, you couldn’t go wrong. Especially not when you blew most of your walking around money on strip clubs down by the Luis Muñoz Marín Airport strip.

In any case, when he’s shoved a flyer about Troy Davis, Frank decides its time to head back to the government offices to see if his Xeroxes are ready. They are. With empty pockets they head back to the Rio Arriba motor lodge on the outskirts of the city to pack it in for a quiet night. Expense accounts and progress reports done for the evening, Frank tucks down for a movie and several tall glasses of Don Q and mango juice. Coqui meanwhile chats up the prostitutes working a Medalla beer commercial production on the street outside.Frank chose a little number called Eden Log (2007) to watch from the pile of loose DVDs the front desk clerk keep in a shoe box under the foosball table. He’d been trying to download it at least since it was released in May 2009 by Magnolia Home Entertainment. Yes, in the economic turndown, Frank was a slave to the whims of the torrents. Oh what vicious seas they could be.

Downloading Eden Log resulted in a lot of files that were in truth rather barbaric and amusing pornos. A few times he also got Frontier(s) (Gens 2007) another French horror film. This one about a group of crazed neo-Nazis who prey on traveling youngsters. But that’s a topic for another blog. Anyway, he’d have to watch Eden Log dubbed Spanish with English subs that didn’t quite sync. But whatever, it was free. The film didn’t appear to have much dialogue anyway.

Eden Log is the 2007 freshman feature of Franck Vestiel. It came to Frank’s attention when it got slapped into a bunch of film house scenesters’ top ten lists. It wasn’t as bad as all that though. Just not too fresh. It has some redeeming qualities, though, Frank would have just assumed skipping the last five minutes.

He admits the first five minutes intrigued him. A man, Clovis Cornillac (Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles [Jeunet 2004]), regains consciousness at the in the mud at the bottom of a cave, with a dead man at his side. He doesn’t’remember anything. He has to piece together along the way, avoid some monsters, meet a chick. Blah blah. It takes him 98 minutes to find out. (Cool story, bro.). There’s some twists and turns you might understand if you cared to pay attention. But you don’t much. Frank managed to hang on until the first appearance of mutants. Ugh.

At the outset, Frank had hoped the film might do for Caves what Don’t Look Now (Roeg 1973) did for Canals. [Sic; from FT’s notes. No idea what that means-ed.]. The faux black and white filming and detailed sets are excellent but not unique. But it’s all sufficiently cramped and surreal.

And it ends with some half-baked green nonsense involving a CGI tree.

Fuck. Read the IGN Review. They hit this dead on. It’s fair and Frank couldn’t say it better. It has the feel of a video game (ala Doom [Bartkowiak 2005]) and presents a cluttered view of the future has been done to death. Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1996) leaps to mind out of numerous others. The photography has Gaspar Noé (Irreversible 2002), all over it. Add a dash of Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973) and ta-dah, you’ve got Eden Log.

The morning found them a middling pleasant hike into the Cañabón mountains where the lot in question stood. Frank had decided their rental vehicle need not risk getting bogged down in the wet, unpaved clay roads. To his dismay, there were occupiers there as well. Squatters at least, living in an abandoned community park. They had taken up residences in the pool houses and cabanas and all peered suspiciously out at them as they scoured the surface for artifacts or hacked away the jungle foliage to inspect possible evidence of old sugar cane harvesting equipment from the last two centuries.

They were cheered however by the Christmas decorations, amazed by the good Catholics hauling out boxes of garland and lights from their hovels to sting across the falling fences and crumbling changing rooms. They scratch their heads and wonder if the folks at ME knew they were going to have to boot these people out of the property. Happy early holidays.