Medfly Quarantine

The Morality of Noir: Femme Fatale

2011-02-21T20:00:00.004-05:00

This is my contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon, hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and Farran Nehme of Self-Styled Siren, in what I sincerely hope is becoming a yearly tradition. Be sure to click the button at the bottom of this post and donate what you can - every penny counts. For a poignant (if I do say so myself) reminder of the rich history lost with every destroyed film, read my contribution to last year's blogathon, on the sad fate of many of the films shot in my hometown of Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale can be viewed as the director's personal essay on film noir, a great movie artist taking what he responds to most about a genre and applying to it his perspective on morality, ethics, and politics. This is not to say De Palm'a film "elevates" the genre or should be viewed apart from noir in any way - the noir elements recontextualize De Palma, not the other way around. De Palma, so frequently trivialized as a mere Hitchcock plagiarist/imitator, can be thought of as an American Godard as well, in that a considerable element of his artistic identity is analyzing the morality of cinema.

Proper film noir could certainly be viewed as a moral movement in American film - more or less all film noirs deal with people who are rotten to some degree, and many are blatant morality plays - but I feel that can be reductive as it implies that there was some kind of unified aesthetic, which I don't think has ever been the case in mainstream American movies. These stories were told because they were popular for a time, reflecting a desire to be "bad" vicariously within the safe confines of a movie theater; to get a glimpse into a sleazy underworld of detectives, criminals, beautiful women, sex, and violence. With Femme Fatale, De Palma similarly gives us a glimpse into that world, but as is typical of the film maker he forces you to think about what it means to watch.

And the very act of seeing has always been vital to even the weakest of De Palma's films - his elaborate camera work, extensive use of split screens, propensity for depicting voyeurism, and grounding in movie history aren't merely stylistic flourishes, they are examinations of perception, and Femme Fatale contains his greatest ruminations on the subject. Consider the director's often imitated but never equaled use of split screen in an early sequence, where one half of the screen is taken up by the tabloid photographer Nicolas (Antonio Banderas) while he photographs Laure from his balcony, the other taken up by Laure's former accomplices as they watch her through a pair of binoculars from afar. One half of the screen depicts curiosity while the other half depicts resentment and rage; as with everything in life, it's all a matter or perspective.

Femme Fatale is undoubtedly a post-modern noir, a movie very much aware of film noir aesthetics and its place in cinema history. This is established masterfully in the film's opening shot, which shows the main character Laure (Rebecca Romijn, who was a Stamos at the time) watching Billy Wilder's seminal Double Indemnity on French television, and we see Laure's reflection superimposed over that of Barbara Stanwyck's standard setting femme fatale. Though you can't even begin to compare Romijn's acting abilities to that of Stanwyck's - who could literally do it all, and brilliantly - one thing they share is that neither woman is overwhelmingly beautiful, but each exudes sexuality. Watching them cast their feminine spells, one gets the impression that they're the ones in charge (perhaps no actress was ever better at being the sexual aggressor than Stanwyck) To put it bluntly, both chicks know how to work it, though naturally by virtue of working in post-code Hollywood De Palma is able to be much more frank about the film's sexual undercurrents.

Although Femme Fatale is ultimately a serious movie, it opens with De Palma at his most playful, though De Palma when he's playful is still as incisive as it gets. The picture opens with a heist, though the heist doesn't take place at a bank or a casino, but at the Cannes film festival. This sequence is both thrilling and satirical, and it plays as a "fuck you" to the film making establishment that De Palma has always remained on the outskirts of, in spite of his sporadic critical and financial success. The heist itself - of an outfit worn by a film director's date, made of gold that just barely covers her breasts, another hilarious gag that paints the film making establishment as decadently bourgeois - is a brilliant sequence, a visual symphony that showcases De Palma's incredible aesthetic sensibility and his inventive use of camera movement that establishes and explores cinematic space as radically as any director since Carl Dreyer.

What with Laure being cut from the classic femme fatale cloth, she fucks over the people in her gang of criminals and makes off with the loot herself. She disguises herself, is found anyway, and is thrown off a high railing by a pissed off ex-accomplice, and when she hits the ground a couple mistakes her for their troubled, suicidal daughter and takes her home with them. If all this sounds contrived it is, but here De Palma is taking the classic mistaken identity element of film noir and making it genuinely, profoundly existential. She walks around their home, sees pictures of the daughter she has been mistaken for, in effect getting a glimpse into a life. Again, it is the very act of seeing portrayed as a reflection of human experience.

And this is the point when the film dives down the rabbit hole, morphing from thriller to metaphysical examination of existence that invites comparison to David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. Laure falls asleep in the bathtub and dreams that the real daughter comes home to kill herself, and she observes her suicide and follows through on stealing her identity, in effect transforming herself into another human being. She takes the dead girl's plane ticket to the United States, and as it turns out the plane was overbooked so she moves to first class where she winds up seated next to a kind, wealthy American, who she proceeds to marry. This is where De Palma begins exploring the concept of fate, which will play a vital role in the remainder of the picture.

Flash forward seven years - the wealthy American that Laure (who now goes by Lily) married has become the American ambassador to France (in a touch typical of the politically charged De Palma, there are implications that he purchased the Ambassadorship), so she finds herself back in France and doing everything she can to hide her identity, lest her ex-accomplices find her ("Bad people read newspapers, too", she remarks late in the film). An interested party calls on Nicolas to find a way to take her photograph, and he manages to sneak a picture of her by pretending to have been hit by the Ambassador's car, which ignites a cat and mouse game between the two.

And naturally this interplay between the two becomes not just a battle of the sexes but a battle of sex itself, culminating in a sexually charged fever dream that allows De Palma to put on full display the themes of latent sexuality that true noir had to mask. After taking her picture Nicolas tracks Laure down in a hotel room and finds her with a pistol, and tries to stop her from committing suicide; he convinces himself that she's a damsel in distress and he's her savior, but really she's one step ahead of him and manipulating him every step of the way - in typical De Palma fashion, the woman is the one in charge and the man is powerless, in effect emasculated. Laure never planned to kill herself, she wanted him to take the gun away from her, and the moment he steps out onto the streets she calls the police, reports a bogus crime, and has him arrested. The hopelessly masculine desire to save the beautiful woman blows up in Nicolas' face.

While he was under arrest, Laure sends an e-mail from Nicolas' computer to her husband telling him that she's been kidnapped and demands a ten million dollar ransom for her return. He comes home and discovers this, and realizes that he's essentially fucked and has no choice but to go along with her plan. He meets her on a bridge overlooking the Parisian skyline, and she uses her sexuality in an attempt to lure him into going along with her plan. She takes him to a bar, and in this sequence De Palma fully explores the themes of emasculation and voyeurism, depicting sex itself as an expression of gender power dynamics, hostility, and attraction. Once again, Laure uses the masculine desire to protect against Nicolas, putting herself in a position where a man will be forceful with her so Nicolas can step in to save her. He beats up the would-be rapist, and then proceeds to have aggressive sex with Laure - she thinks he's fallen into her trap, and he thinks she's fallen into his, as he records her saying that the whole kidnapping plot was her idea.

On the bridge, with Nicolas in kidnapper attire, the Ambassador arrives with a briefcase full of cash, and Nicolas tries to explain the truth of what's happening. Laure shoots the Ambassador and turns around and shoots Nicolas, and as she walks over to Nicolas to shoot him one more time, her ex-accomplices grab her and, as they did in the beginning, throw her over the railing. As it did the first time, being thrown from a high distance begets a rebirth, as she lands in the river and is suddenly naked, and it's clear that she's not actually in the river but in the bathtub once again. This is a deeply, profoundly spiritual moment - a linking of life, death, and dreams that examines the infinite depth of a single instant.

Laure awakes in the bathtub suddenly, as every movie character in history does from a nightmare. Once again, the real Lily comes in to kill herself, but only this time Laure stops her and informs her that, in spite of how awful things may seem, a great life awaits her - all she has to do is get on that plane. Laure needed to see how awful things would get before she made the moral decision to change her life, to not indulge her desire to fuck over everyone, to cease being an archetypal femme fatale and to become a true human being. While the film acknowledges fate as a spiritual precept, De Palma also seems to be saying that we're ultimately the ones in control of our destiny - Laure writes Lily's future by telling her to get on the plane, and ultimately her commitment to changing her ways will bring her to her true love, Nicolas, who is the only character in the movie who has proved to be her intellectual (and sexual) equal.

Femme Fatale is simultaneously De Palma paying homage to film noir and expanding it by expressly highlighting the moral, political, sexual, and spiritual elements of it. De Palma has always been a director with an aesthetic deeply rooted in genre and film history, and Femme Fatale may contain his most pronounced analysis of each, as the genre is a perfect vehicle for his sensibilities. By looking to cinema's past, De Palma found an eminently beautiful way to relate out history to our present.

My 2010 Movies

2011-01-18T16:45:00.005-05:00

Well, looks like another year has passed us by. It was a good one for me in virtually every way imaginable, and that extends to the movie theater (or DVD player, as was the case more often than not) as well. It was a terrific year for movies, and anyone who tells you otherwise just isn't looking hard enough.

Anyway, here are my favorite movies of 2010, presented chronologically as always.

Shutter Island

Part mystery, part psychological portrait, part human tragedy, Martin Scorsese's best film in many years was the year's first great film, and an unexpected treasure. Review here.

The Ghost Writer

Sad that when a movie comes along that does the sort of thing Hollywood used to do well - that is, tell a cohesive story with style and craft - it is something we have to savor, as it's the exception as opposed to the rule. This is not to take anything away from The Ghost Writer, which is as good as genre film making gets - and there are some very pointed, non-preachy insights into the political process to boot. Review here.

Mother

Hye-ja Kim gives one of the year's great performances in Bong Joon-ho's unusual film, which was a real treat after his interesting though highly problematic previous effort The Host. Whereas the manner in which that film tried to balance the serious and the silly was borderline offensive, Bong has found a way to streamline his sensibility much more effectively in the years since The Host. A disturbing tale of the extents a mother will go to protect her child - right or wrong - Mother is a simultaneously twisted and hilarious document of parenthood, permeated by a cruel irony.

Vincere

Marco Bellocchio's Vincere is a deeply affecting film about a fascinating historical footnote - the plight of Benito Mussolini's first wife (portrayed by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, in a performance that is nothing short of stunning), the hell he put she and his first born child through after he went away to fight in the first World War and met another woman. As he ascended to power, he had their marital documents destroyed and had both her and his son committed to insane asylums, where they both died tragically young - she at the age of 56, their son at the age of 26. The remarkable thing about Vincere is that it puts you through this anguish without being exploitative in the slightest.

The Eclipse

Easily one of last year's most unique films, Connor McPherson's The Eclipse is at once a frightening horror film and intimate human drama; a fascinating exploration of both the horror genre and human loneliness. A lovely, scary, and deeply affecting film that showcases one of Ciaran Hinds' two great performances from the last year.

Wild Grass

Alain Resnais' latest film is a quixotic recapitulation of the French New Wave; an elegy about aging, a simultaneously comic and tragic examination of love and lust, and quite frankly the most inventive aesthetic work I've seen in a long time. In short, it is nothing short of a total fucking masterpiece, and hands down my favorite film of last year.

Life During Wartime

Todd Solondz is now so much more than a bitchy, though perceptive, observer of the faults of our culture, he is one of our great humanitarians - a director who challenges you to empathize with those society teaches us to hate. Considering the extent of the cruelty in our world, this is revolutionary. Review here.

Eccentricities of a Blond-haired Girl

Perhaps the only film you could ever call "delightfully antiquated", Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blond-haired Girl is just about the most sublime 60 minutes imaginable - a recontextualizing of an Eça de Queiros short story written in the 19th century to the modern world, a dramatic conceit that at once makes the past feel immediate and the present feel timeless.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

One of last year's most pleasant surprises, Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger isn't any less cynical than Allen has been for the last, oh, 30 years, but here he plays it in almost a gentle way, which is not to say he softens the punch of the material in any way. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is yet another of Allen's odysseys of infidelity, but what separates You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is he deals with the misery people inflict on one another in an emotionally honest way, acknowledging that your actions have consequences both on your own life and on the lives of those around you. Review here.

Secret Sunshine

Chang-dong Lee's Secret Sunshine is a radically structured melodrama, one that takes such unusual turns throughout its 2 and a half hour run time that you feel emotionally drained as you watch the tale of Shin-ae, a widow who moves to her husband's hometown Milyang in South Korea after his death. For the first 45 minutes, the film plays as a borderline quirky drama/comedy hybrid that you could almost see Indiewood doing (poorly). Then the film takes a sharp, sudden shift, one that would be literally criminal to discuss here as it's so dramatically potent. But suffice to say, it changes the film completely, and it transforms into something deeply tragic and, I think, pretty great. Jeon Do-yeon anchors the film with a sensational performance that is nothing short of haunting.

True Grit

What I would consider the Coen brothers greatest virtues as film makers - their idiosyncratic humor, their insights into the American south, their elevation of American folklore to almost mythic stature, their sense of morality, their reverence of film genre, their genuine considerations of spirituality and faith - are all on display in the brothers' adaptation (not remake) of True Grit. While the film is on one hand a scathing satire of Old West racism and sadism, both as it existed in history and on film - some of the Coens' sharpest gags in years highlight the casually cruel treatment of Native Americans - True Grit is, ultimately, a moving portrait of family, and the manner in which the film's three characters (Hailee Steinfeld's Mattie, Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon's Labeouf) transform into that family over the course of the film is incredibly powerful. By the end, True Grit becomes a meaningful testament to history and our place in it; the final line, which I dare not reveal here, is at once a simple profound truism. All the performances are great, but it is Hailee Steinfeld who is the true revelation here.

Another Year

You could label Mike Leigh's latest film as "The Abyss", as his latest is quite dark and extremely troubling, yet there is a palpable optimism as well. Of course, this is a Mike Leigh film, so the drama springs out of the narrative in the most unusual ways - as opposed to the central characters providing us with the drama and the supporting characters existing solely to be thoughtful listeners and advice-reciters, the central characters - a married couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen - are as stable as a rock; as in love with one another as the day they were married, happy as can be, and just all around good people. It's everyone around them who is fucked up. What is remarkable about Another Year is that it pays homage to the depth of suffering and unhappiness in the world, yet is in no way oppressively glum or downtrodden; like life itself, there is joy and misery and everything in between.

Favorite Male Performances:
Jeff Bridges - True Grit
Jim Broadbent - Another Year
George Clooney - The American
Leonardo DiCaprio - Shutter Island
André Dussollier - Wild Grass
Lars Eidinger - Everyone Else
Jesse Eisenberg - The Social Network
Ciaran Hinds - The Eclipse & Life During Wartime
Anthony Hopkins - You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Ben Kingsley - Shutter Island
Mark Ruffalo - Shutter Island
Jason Schwartzman - Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Ben Stiller - Greenberg
Justin Timberlake - The Social Network

Favorite Female Performances
Sabine Azéma - Wild Grass
Jeon Do-yeon - Secret Sunshine
Greta Gerwig - Greenberg
Shirley Henderson - Life During Wartime
Iben Hjejle - The Eclipse
Hye-ja Kim - Mother
Jennifer Lawrence - Winter's Bone
Lesley Manville - Another Year
Giovanna Mezzogiorno - Vincere
Birgit Minichmayr - Everyone Else
Natalie Portman - Black Swan
Ruth Sheen - Another Year
Hailee Steinfeld - True Grit
Olivia Williams - The Ghost Writer

Now, bring on 2011! I promise I'm going to be on top of my shit this year, as the paltry amount of output from me this year is literally depressing.

The Streets of New Haven

2010-12-21T20:30:00.002-05:00

In July of 2007, I found myself standing on Yale's campus dressed in a tweed jacket, a bow tie, knickerbockers and penny loafers, surrounded by probably 150 other similarly dressed individuals in the hot summer sun. No, this wasn't a costume party, and I hadn't fallen into a time warp, though it felt like I did - I was fortunate enough to be on the set for the what was the then unnamed fourth Indiana Jones picture, working as an extra, which still stands as amongst the most rewarding experiences of my life. Not just because it was about an exciting beginning to what I hope will be a long career in the making of motion pictures, but because I got to witness firsthand the directorial methods of a man I consider to be the greatest cinematic artist in the United States. Watching Steven Spielberg work his movie magic first hand was and is, quite frankly, the thrill of a lifetime - an experience that I'll never forget, and one I'll always be grateful for.

This saga began in May of 2007 when I noticed I had a missed call on my cell phone from a good friend of mine. Now, this guy is as close a friend as I have in this world, but he's not one to call you for anything, ever. You wanna see him, you have to do the initiating, but I like this individual so much that he's one of the few people for whom I'm actually willing to make that dreaded first phone call. But on this day, he called me, so I figured something must be up - maybe someone died, maybe he robbed a bank, who knew, but I knew it was something big if he was picking up the phone and calling me.

As it turned out, he did have big news, but not on the order that I could have possibly predicted - he told me that he'd just read that the next Indiana Jones movie was going to be shooting in New Haven, Connecticut, just an hour and a half away from where he and I live in New Jersey, and that there was an open casting call for extras. "Do you wanna go?", he asked me, clearly trying to contain his excitement - "Hell yes", I replied, not trying at all to contain my excitement. Here it was, one of the most anticipated and talked about movies of the decade, a film that had gone through endless stages of development hell, a movie that would reunite the legendary Lucas/Spielberg tandem, and we had a chance - however outside it may have been at the time - to be in it? There wasn't anything that could keep me away.

A few days later, he came by my house bright and early and we hit the road for New Haven. From where we live, it's about an hour and a half up Interstate 95, so it was an easy, relaxing trip. We parked somewhere on the street and headed for what I think was a Marriott and were shuffled into this room with lots of chairs where we filled out an application - which was, surprisingly enough, just like every other job application I'd filled out - and waited for it to be our turn to go talk to the casting directors. When our time came, I did what I usually do, got friendly with everyone and tried to endear myself to them in some way. They asked me if the distance would be an issue, I said absolutely not, that I had a car and was willing to make any and all arrangements necessary to work on the movie. My friend and I gave our headshots, and that was that. We headed back to Fort Lee, figuring we didn't have a shot, but happy that we tried at least.

Truthfully, over the course of the next few days it was the farthest thing from my mind. I'd more or less resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to get it - that there were people more qualified (i.e., better looking with more experience) and closer to New Haven than I. Then, while sitting at work one day, the phone rang and it was someone who worked for the casting agency, informing me that, yes, I had indeed been cast as an extra. I somehow managed to avoid screaming into the phone and deafening the poor fellow, and when I hung up the phone the first thing I did was call my friend to see if he'd received the same glorious phone call that I did. He did not. To this day, the fact that I was cast in the film and he was not is a source of heartbreak for me, a blemish on what is an otherwise perfect experience. I met more than a fair share of interesting people in my time working on the film, but ultimately, I did it alone. A few weeks later I made the drive up to New Haven, all by my myself this time, to get my hair cut and to get measured for my costume. I was given a date and time to come up in July, and until then, I waited for my day to come.

And when it did, I woke up before the sun was out and, once again, made the trip to New Haven, this time watching the sun rise as I drove. I arrived at the very same hotel that I had just a month prior, this time not as a hopeful but as an employed member of the cast of Indiana Jones IV. I went to get made up (an experience I was used to because of the little bit of acting I'd done in High School), then I went to get my costume. On my way out the door, I walked past the prop master who goes "Hey! You! You want a bike?". Now, I hadn't ridden a bike since mine got stolen in 8th grade (a truly traumatic experience), but there was no way I was saying no to a bike - especially a vintage one. For what it's worth, I discovered later on in the day that I was given a girl's bike.

So, after helping myself to the complimentary breakfast (man I loved working on a Hollywood movie - you make great bank and they feed you), I walked my bicycle over to the Yale campus where the other extras had gathered. I decided to ride my bike around and get a feel for it, because I hadn't ridden one in years and the last thing I needed to do was make a jackass of myself (or make more of a jackass of myself). I pedaled about the campus and stopped at a gate away from everyone else and just kind of looked around, taking in the surroundings, when I heard coming from behind me a voice I recognized instantly. I turned around and there was Steven Spielberg, and he walked past me and stopped in front of me to the side, where he stopped and waited for his assistant, whom he was a good 40 paces in front of. It somehow made perfect sense that Spielberg would be in such a rush to get to work that his assistant wouldn't be able to keep up, and though he stood near me for a solid few seconds, I didn't dare say anything to him, though I know I should have. Not "OMG I love your moviez!!!!", but something simple like "Good morning". But I couldn't. I was star struck, for the first and only time in my life, and though we made solid eye contact we exchanged no words. His assistant finally caught up to him, and one of the great American artists continued on his busy way.

The rest of the day seemed to go along smoothly. They were basically filming 2nd unit footage, though Spielberg was supervising it, for the motorcycle chase that occurs early in the film. The whole sequence is masterful, displaying Spielberg's near perfect sense of geography and his inspired use of camera choreography - my favorite bit of staging being when Indiana Jones hops off his motorcycle, goes through an open car window, and comes out the other side and gets back on - but what was filmed in the courtyard over the course of the two days I spent there is visually uninteresting in the film. My guess is Spielberg was there to shoot a crucial shot of the Marcus Brody statue being decapitated, but the short sequence - about a minute of the finished film - was by and large standard from a compositional standpoint.

My first day on the set was a Friday, and I'd presumed that would be my only day. I was surprised when, on the following Monday, they contacted me in the later part of the morning and asked if I could come to New Haven - like now - because apparently they had to do re-shoots in the courtyard and were scrambling to get extras. I told them of course, and as quickly as I could got in my car and drove (really, really fast) back to New Haven, donned my costume, and went back to the Yale Courtyard for another day of riding my bike around the campus.

My reward for coming so far on such short notice was being offered to join them the next day, which truthfully didn't thrill me at the time because that would mean I get home just in time go right to sleep, wake up at 5 AM and do it all again, but obviously there was no way I was going to refuse. And I'm glad I didn't, because my third and last day was by far the greatest I spent on the set, though also the longest and most exhausting (though getting paid time and a half was a consolation). I spent a 10-12 hour day inside the Yale Law Library, and it was here that I really got a sense of Spielberg's directorial methods, because the staging was more intensive and required a more active presence on his part. The man worked with an energy that was infectious - his enthusiasm for his work was truly inspiring. One of the more touching displays I saw in my three days occurred when a young man, who has a few quick lines in the finished script, thanked Spielberg when he was through shooting. It was clear he was very deeply touched by being given this opportunity, and as he was in the midst of thanking Spielberg it was obvious to me that he was on the brink of tears. Spielberg sensed this, and just gave the kid, whom he probably barely knew, a big hug. Spielberg is truly as warm a human being as his films would have you believe, and that kindness was on full display in my three days on the set. Which is not to say Spielberg is a pushover by any means - on my first day, he kicked a member of the crew off the set for dicking around. Though the set was a very pleasant place to be, you never forgot for a second that you were there to work and work hard.

He filmed the whole sequence that day, and I had a feeling it would be my last. It couldn't have ended more perfectly. As I walked to my car, up the streets of New Haven which were decorated with vintage store fronts and lined with pristine 1950's cars - which, combined with everyone being dressed in period costumes, was truly surreal - I suddenly realized I was walking through Steven Spielberg's memory, his vision of his childhood both as it existed to him and our culture's perception of it. This feeling was very much echoed when I saw the film when it was released in May of 2008, which opens with a shot of teenagers driving their car through the desert while Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" plays on the soundtrack, through its opening which ultimately finds Indiana Jones on a nuclear test site and nearly killed by a bomb, to the sequence's shot in New Haven which convey cold war era political tensions, and through the finale which conveys a genuine wide eyed appreciation of science fiction pulp. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is Spielberg at his most personally populist, a channeling of the popular conception of the '50s through his own personal memories and imagination. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is by no means a perfect film, but it's certainly a film that illuminates a lot about where Spielberg is coming from as an artist, and to be able to participate (however insignificantly) in its creation is an experience I'll always cherish.

Yours truly, decked out in 50s attire, caught completely off guard (though that's the expression I usually have on my face) by some dude with a camera while riding my prop bike around New Haven, July of 2007.

Spielberg's 9/11

2010-12-18T00:15:00.001-05:00

In 2005, Spielberg did what he had done in 1989, 1993, 1997 and 2002, that is make two films in the same year. This feat is pretty incredible in and of itself, especially in modern Hollywood, and though it seemed to follow in the standard formula of blockbuster in the summer and serious film in the winter, the two films are really more alike than they are different. War of the Worlds and Munich are both, essentially, reactions to September 11th - the former is a channeling of the imagery from the attack through science fiction aesthetics, the latter is a philosophical consideration of the aftermath via a combination of an early shared memory of Israel/Palestine relations and, fittingly, 70's spy movie tropes. Together they form a rich, fascinating tandem, and still stand as amongst the most thoughtful reactions to the September 11th attacks by an American artist.

When I saw War of the Worlds when it was released in the summer of 2005, my opinion was pretty much in line with that of many other people - that it was a failure with some effective moments, that Spielberg's sappiness ruined the ending, and so on. When I saw Munich later that year I was forced to reconsider a film I had dismissed, because Munich made me stop viewing War of the Worlds as a piece of summer entertainment and made me think of it as a serious consideration of 9/11, as Munich most certainly is. Now I think of War of the Worlds as the dream and Munich as the reality, like when you wake up after a nightmare and begin to comprehend the imagery and dream logic; that which seemed irrational or nonsensical while you slept suddenly makes perfect sense.

Spielberg subverts standard blockbuster formula with War of the Worlds, which is all too fitting as he allegedly invented the genre (which is another topic for another day). War of the Worlds is, essentially, the world's first avant-garde blockbuster. Upon its release in the summer of 2005, though the film did well at the box office, everyone I spoke to about War of the Worlds treated it with a kind of hostility, and I think that's because it does not aim to excite, it aims to capture an emotional frame of mind, and a painful one at that. There are moments in the film that are downright frightening. It is a masterful, if imperfect, symbiosis of 1950s martian mythology - itself symbolic of communism hysteria - and imagery directly inspired by the September 11th attacks and our subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Spielberg forces us to see ourselves on the wrong end of an invasion - which is truly radical in a time when the media barely documents the atrocities of the wars we wage - by reminding us what our home looked like as a warzone, and then expanding that nightmare to a full scale invasion. But rather than using the imagery as a gateway to cheap thrills by justifying our knee jerk desires for revenge and further brutality, Spielberg vividly dramatizes what an invasion looks and feels like, turning the American landscape into a desolate warzone. 9/11 was a nightmare, but it was only a glimpse into the true nature of living in a place where war is being waged, and Spielberg's film serves as a powerful visualization of invasion and occupation - something the United States has never been on the receiving end of. As Wells' novel, written at the height of the English empire, was a blatant allegory for the spread of imperialism and colonialism it's only fitting that Spielberg, King of Hollywood, shift the setting of the film to the modern day United States.

By recontextualizing Wells' text to modern America, Spielberg is able to express themes that have been vital to his work throughout his career while still remaining faithful to the source material. By making the film's central character the typical Spielberg absent father, Spielberg is able to examine the issues of family that have been so vital to his work. As in his first feature, The Sugarland Express, Spielberg paints a portrait of a parent who is really still a child, who has been unable (or unwilling) to grow up, and the casting of Tom Cruise as the perpetual adolescent is a stunning example of casting against type. I've always thought Cruise was a better actor than he was given credit for, and the way he portrays his characters transformation from an immature, incompetent man to a capable, mature father is truly remarkable. It probably didn't hurt that he was given a fully capable co-star, whom he shares many of the film's most deeply affecting moments with, Dakota Fanning, in one of the best performances Spielberg has ever received from his child performers (which is saying something).

Spielberg's affinity for familial drama is put brilliantly on display early on, when the tensions begin between Tom Cruise's Ray Ferrier and his teenage son, Robbie. What other film maker could use a simple game of catch between a father and son to express the emotional distance between them? Only Spielberg could elevate such iconographic American imagery as a father and son tossing a baseball in the backyard into something so intimately personal. Ray, who has been seen adorning a Yankee cap for the entire film, is miffed when his son comes for a weekend visit wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. This detail could have been merely juvenile bickering, but in Spielberg's hands this visual detail becomes truly heartbreaking, a metaphor for how Ray Ferrier has lost his children in the time since he divorced his wife. Spielberg, by shifting the focus from the children onto the neglectful father, challenges himself to sympathize with a character he has demonized in the past.

The examination of the dissolution of the nuclear family in the modern era gives Spielberg an emotional vessel to illustrate the manner in which extreme trauma is capable of at once uniting and dividing humans; Spielberg's martian invasion brings out the best and worst in humanity simultaneously. There is a harrowing sequence where the Ferrier family, who have one of the few working automobiles left, suddenly find themselves in a town surrounded by hungry, exhausted, desperate people who steal their car from them - one particularly unsettling image shows a man breaking the windshield glass with his bare hands. The person I saw the film with in 2005 criticized this moment as being unrealistic, whereas I felt the exact opposite, that the sequence is an all too accurate dramatization of exactly what would happen - it wouldn't even require a disaster on the magnitude of an alien invasion to unleash our barely restrained animal instincts. In Spielberg's 2002 film Minority Report, a character has a line that essentially serves as the precursor for this scene in War of the Worlds. "It's funny how all living organisms are alike. When the chips are down, when the pressure is on, every creature on the face of the Earth is interested in one thing, and one thing only: its own survival". Though this sounds like a cynical sentiment, it's really not, as we are animals and our latent desire to survive above all else is something that Spielberg has elevated to profound heights in films like Schindler's List, A.I., and here in War of the Worlds. All of Spielberg's films are, essentially, survivor's stories, which makes the ending of the film where Robbie inexplicably turns up alive - which is a very accurate approximation of the book's ending, for what it's worth - not as out of place or absurd as it has been accused of being. Yes, it's a bit contrived, but people have been shown to be capable of surviving against all odds - let's not forget that there were people on 9/11 who survived having 110 story buildings collapse onto them. To quote Dr. Ian Malcom from Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way".

Spielberg has said that they key image he took away from September 11th was people walking in large groups away from Ground Zero, and he channels that imagery of mass exodus beautifully in War of the Worlds, filtering an almost absurd science fiction concept through our collective memory of our home being attacked. Spielberg invokes the attack to give way to catharsis, challenging us to stop seeing 9/11 as something that happened to the United States and to instead view it as something that happened to the human race. I may not have responded to Spielberg's profoundly empathetic sentiments the first time I saw War of the Worlds, but little did I know at the time that Spielberg was in the process of making a film that would turn the very concept of national identity on its head.

War of the Worlds forces you to relive September 11th. Munich, on the other hand, forces you to think about it. Though War of the Worlds deals with the attack more directly, the fact that Munich fictionalizes a real life event - the massacre at the 1972 Olympics - allows Spielberg to draw a direct parallel between an event that introduced many in the United States to the realities of radical Islam and September 11th . Munich begins with the members of Black September hopping a chain link fence and breaking into the Israeli athlete's hotel room and ends with a shot of the World Trade Center, and Spielberg here is illustrating that the events at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the atrocity in September of 2001 are directly linked, and Munich can be viewed as serving as a straight line between the two events.

Spielberg always claimed that Raiders of the Lost Ark was the result of his desire to make a James Bond movie, but we could argue that Munich is actually his 007 movie - but it's a Bond movie as only he could do it, one that thoughtfully considers identity on both a personal and national level, that evaluates the morality of killing another human being, that analyzes the sacrifice a person must make to become an assassin. It's James Bond with a moral center, in other words (though obviously morality is not the reason we watch 007 movies). In Munich Spielberg transcends nationalism before the film properly begins, as the title sequence shows a collage of major world cities before ultimately highlighting the word "Munich" - rather than portraying this act of terrorism as something that happened to Jews or to Germany or to any one group of people, Spielberg is suggesting throughout Munich that this was a tragedy that happened to the human race, that the murder of human beings is something that should be treated as tragedy regardless of your religious, ethnic, or political affiliations.

Munich is, at its heart, the tragedy of a man - that man being Avner, in an unforgettable performance from Erica Bana. We are introduced to Avner at the end of a long montage showing people of various backgrounds - Israeli, Palestinian, families of both the athletes and the members of Black September - watching the events unfold on television; as with September 11th, this is a tragedy that television was an inseparable part of, where the news reports are a vital element of the popular conception of the event. Spielberg captures the feeling of being glued to your television by this real life drama beautifully in these opening sequences. The next day, Avner is contacted by no less than Golda Meir herself, who requests that he lead a mission of retaliation against the architects of the Munich massacre, essentially Government sponsored terrorism in the name of revenge. Out of a sense of duty to his people and his country, he accepts, not realizing that by agreeing to take part in this mission that he will lose his soul as well as his cultural and spiritual identity in the process.

In the hands of lesser artists, Avner could have been an empty symbol, but Tony Kushner (whose screenplay surely ranks amongst the very best of the last 10 years), Spielberg and Bana manage to make Avner work on both a symbolic level and as a flesh and blood human being. The same is true of the supporting players - Daniel Craig's Steve, a nationalist who has no moral qualms about the mission and makes this fact repeatedly known, Ciaran Hinds' Carl, who has nothing but moral qualms about the mission, Geoffrey Rush's Ephraim, the pencil pushing bureaucrat - who, between the quality of the writing and the excellence of the performers, manage to play Kushner's admittedly philosophy-heavy script as very real human drama. But it is Avner who is the heart of the film, and Bana plays his pathological dissent into guilt, paranoia, and borderline insanity masterfully.

The tragedy of Avner is that, at the outset of his mission, he truthfully believes that what he's doing is right, and as the mission presses on he gradually comes to the realization that killing is not only wrong but that it doesn't accomplish anything; that anyone you kill will only be replaced by someone who is even worse, that murdering your enemy will only escalate their desire to bring harm to you - essentially, Avner comes to understand the reciprocal nature of violence over the course of the film. More than violence being morally reprehensible, it doesn't solve a damn thing except our desire for bloodshed, which is only a temporary fix anyway. Yes, Avner loses the notion of Israel as a home over the course of his mission, but he gains a philosophical enlightenment by becoming a man without an ethnic identity; he stops seeing humans as a collection of countries and religions and sees us all as one. That Munich was accused of being anti-Israel by some and anti-Palestine by others (depending on your bias) illustrates the depth of the film's powerfully anti-nationalistic, humanistic sentiments.

Avner is clearly meant to represent a certain discontent that Spielberg and Kushner feel as pacifists with the militant actions of Israel. Late in the film, Avner's mother has a beautiful speech about how whatever he did - and she doesn't actually want to know - was worthwhile because it means the Jews "now have a place on Earth". Kushner and Spielberg certainly aren't arguing that the Jews don't deserve to have a home, they're just theorizing on what extents are acceptable to ensure that they don't lose that place on Earth. Avner - and by extension Kushner and Spielberg - draw the line at bloodshed, radically suggesting that the murder of another person is wrong regardless of if it's in the name of revenge, country, or religion. In a time when the United States launches invasions predicated on the concept of vengeance, this is a truly bold sentiment.

The film's brilliant final scene - which features some of the best screen acting you are ever likely to see - sends this message home in a powerful way. It details the final meeting between Ephraim and Avner, and in it Avner makes his stance clear that he firmly believes that the mission he undertook was wrong, while Ephraim argues that what he did was brutal but necessary; he reminds him that he did what he did he did for "the future, for Israel... for peace", to which Avner responds "There's no peace at the end of this". While Ephraim still believes in his responsibility to his country above all else, Avner has comes to the realization that his responsibility to humanity overrides his responsibility to his country. Avner invites Ephraim to break bread with him, and Ephraim refuses - it's a truly devastating moment, but their worldviews are ultimately irreconcilable. As Avner walks back to his Brooklyn apartment, alone, the camera pans to reveal the World Trade Center off in the distance simply waiting to be destroyed, another casualty in the war between Israel and Palestine. Here, Spielberg cuts through the nonsense we were fed by our Government after the attacks - that we were attacked because those stinking Arabs hate freedom, democracy, and capitalism - and acknowledges that 9/11 happened for political as well as religious reasons. September 11th was another act of retribution, and it has only yielded further murder and destruction in the name of revenge.

The Spielberg Blogathon

2010-12-18T00:00:00.017-05:00

The day is finally here! Be sure to check back throughout the blogathon for updates to this post, and read our friends' hard work and, most importantly, comment.

Day 1:

Over at Icebox Movies, my co-host Adam Zanzie takes a look at Spielberg's early short Amblin', featuring an interview with Caryle Camacho.

At Radiator Heaven, J.D. offers his observations on Catch Me if You Can.

At Little Worlds, Hokakey offers a take on Jaws.

At Not Just Movies, Jake Cole applies his considerable critical skills to an essay on Empire of the Sun.

At The Flickering Myth, Trevor Hogg begins his five part examination of Spielberg and his work.

At Seeti Maar, Ratnakar Sadasyula examines what it means to love and A.I.

At Cinema Viewfinder, Tony Dayoub defends Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

At 24 Frames, Jon Greco takes a look back at the summer of Jaws.

At Cinema Directives, Tom Hyland analyzes themes of identity in Catch Me if You Can.

At Invincible Defeat, Ilias Dimopoulos examines Munich.

Noel Tanti pays tribute to A.I. at noeltanti.com

At Taking Barack to the Movies, Tom Shone celebrates the 35th anniversary of Jaws.

At They Live By Night, Bilge Ebiri takes a look at "Spielberg's Fantasies of Reversal".

At The House Next Door, Keith Uhlich announces our blogathon and reprints a terrific series of reviews of the Indiana Jones quadrilogy, written by Odienator, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Keith Uhlich respectively.

Day 2:

At Not Just Movies, Jake Cole gives us a review of Hook.

At Diary of A Movie Lover, Ratnakar Sadasyula celebrates the power of Schindler's List.

At Icebox Movies, my co-host Adam Zanzie defends Jaws as a New Hollywood film.

At The Man from Porlock, Craig Simpson details his problems with Spielberg's "maturation" as a film maker.

At Things That Don't Suck, Bryce Wilson appreciates Catch Me if You Can.

At Invincible Defeat, Ilias Dimopoulos celebrates Jaws.

At four:48, Tom Elce waxes poetic about E.T.

Jaime Grijalba offers the blogathon its first non-English contribution, a celebration of the spiritual essence of the Indiana Jones films.

Day 3:

At Icebox Movies, my co-host Adam Zanzie considers Jurassic Park as Spielberg's "Howard Hawks film".

At Hell and Beyond, Lee Chase IV takes a closer look at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

At Diary of a Movie Lover, Ratnakar Sadasyula writes up E.T.

At Flickering Myth, Trevor Hogg gives us part 2 of his five part profile on Steven Spielberg.

At 30 Years at the Movies, Sean Stangland analyzes A.I.

Day 4:

At Not Just Movies, Jake Cole writes up Always.

At 30 Years at the Movies, Sean Stangland takes a look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

At Icebox Movies, my co-host Adam Zanzie writes a tome on Schindler's List.

Day 5:

At Only the Cinema, Ed Howard takes a look at Minority Report and what it means to see.

At Invincible Defeat, Ilias Dimopoulos examines family in the Spielberg canon.

At Edward Copeland on Film, Damian Arlyn discusses Schinlder's List, the greatest film he's ever seen.

At Venetian Blond, Machelle Allman looks at some of the best moments with Spielberg's kids.

At The Kind of Face You Hate, Bill Ryan examines the way Spielberg uses violence.

Day 6:

At Icebox Movies, Adam Zanzie asks "What is happening?" in Saving Private Ryan.

At A Fish in the Percolator, Elliot Gallion ~~loses his mind~~ puts Spielberg in a villainous context.

At Cinenoxi, Chris Zafeiriadis celebrates Duel.

At Not Just Movies, Jake Cole examines The Color Purple.

At The Flickering Myth, Trevor Hogg gives us Part 3 of his 5 Part profile on Spielberg.

At The Dancing Image, Joel Bocko asa visual tribute to Duel.

Day 7:

At Scanners, the great Jim Emerson ressurects a duel piece on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.

At Diary of a Movie Lover, Ratnakar Sadasyula takes a look at Raiders of the Lost Ark.

At Ferdy on Films, Roderick Heath defends Amistad as Spielberg's best history film.

Day 8:

At Things I Know About Movies, Adam Gentry tells us what he knows about A.I.

At The Flickering Myth, Trevor Hogg contributes Part 4 of his 5 part Spielberg profile.

At Wonders in the Dark, Allan Fish defends A.I.

Day 9:

At Cinema Styles, Greg Ferrara discusses how George Pal paved the way for Spielberg.

At Invincible Defeat, Ilias Dimopoulos takes a closer look at War of the Worlds.

Day 10:

At Pussy Goes Grr, Andreas takes E.T., "the sacred cow", to task.

At The Flickering Myth, Part 5 of Trevor Hogg's Spielberg profile.

At Flak Magazine, Sean Weitner looks at "the Spielberg ending".

At Invincible Defeat, Ilias Dimopoulos waxes poetic about A.I.

Day 11:

At the Indiewire Blog, Eric Kohn offers a piece on Duel and escapism as art.

Spielberg Blogathon Reminder

2010-12-11T16:45:00.005-05:00

Hello friends, just popping in real quick to remind you all that in one week's time the feverishly anticipated moment that will surely define a generation, The Spielberg Blogathon, will begin, commence, and so on. To participate, just host a piece on your own site, send Adam and myself the link, and we shall post it on our respective sites and also at the Blogathon's official site. And that's about it, really. If any of you could advertise it on your blog by hosting a banner or even just throwing up (no not like that) a quick post to get the word out, I'd appreciate it greatly. Click the above image for the Blogathon's official site, with announcements, banners, and more (actually there's only banners and announcements).

And once again:

Adam Zanzie's e-mail: adamzanzie@gmail.com

My e-mail: medflyquarantine@gmail.com

Hope to hear from you next week. Looking very forward to it.

Over and out.

2010 Capsules: Somewhere, Winter's Bone, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

2010-12-04T15:45:00.003-05:00

First things first: My apologies for the dearth of posting ~~for the entirety of this blog's existence~~ in the last month. But, you know, lack of will, appropriate subjects, and time has prevented me from partaking in the noble vocation of cinema blogging. My many thanks and most sincere apologies to my readers for putting up with my laziness ~~for the entirety of this blog's existence~~ the last month.

But I have a reward for all of you who have been anxiously awaiting my triumphant return to writing about the cinema of Two Thousand and Ten in the Year of our Lord: capsule reviews! Delicious, delicious capsules.

Sofia Coppola - for whom I've been a bit of a defender/apologist - attempts a minimalist (or more minimalist) aesthetic in Somewhere, and it's an experiment that, save for some truly touching moments, largely falls flat. Coppola, so often written off as a Princess who has been handed the keys to her indie kingdom, is undoubtedly a major talent, and I think her namesake prevents a more objective analysis of her work - yes, she is a rich girl, and she makes movies about rich people, but the honesty of her perspective is often overshadowed simply by her being who she is. For whatever reason, her particular method of depicting rich people seems to rub a great many people the wrong way.

Somewhere represents the first time I've understood where her detractors are coming from - while in the past I feel Coppola has humanized the rich in a meaningful way, offering us insights into a social world that many of us never have and never will know anything about, the manner in which she tries to extract sympathy for her disaffected wealthy protagonist in Somewhere is insensitive and borderline obnoxious. The film opens with a static shot of hot shot actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) driving his expensive muscle car very fast on a desolate road, and this opening image, which drags on for what feels like an eternity, pretty much sums up the problem with Coppola's film - she basically sits back and expects people who have trouble paying their God damn mortgage to feel bad for this poor, lonely, alienated little rich man. Look how boring it is to be rich! Look how dull it is to drive a really fast and expensive car, look how passe it is to sit by your swimming pool, look how "meh" it is to have an almost absurd amount of big breasted women throwing themselves at you every time you turn around. I weep for this man.

Perhaps the stripped down aesthetic is the problem - Coppola is not the most expressive of visual artists, and the use of minimalism basically necessitates that you be able to tell stories in a purely visual way. Coppola's images don't feel evocative, they feel literal, and that makes the endless static images, long passages of silence and sparse dialogue more dull than poetic. Also, Dorff is good enough, but he's not a strong or dynamic enough actor to be able to express the things that Coppola wants him to wordlessly, as Bill Murray did in Lost in Translation.

The best moments in the film depict the relationship between Marco and his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning) - essentially, this is a tale of a father reconnecting with his daughter, and the two of them have some moments together that are truly magical; especially affecting is a sequence when a tearful Cleo is leaving for camp, and Marco apologizes to her for not being more involved in her life, but his apology is drowned out by the sound of a helicopter. In spite of this, it still feels like Coppola is reaching to places she can't quite achieve through purely visual expression. Especially after the ambitious and extremely underrated Marie Antoinette, this feels like a retread to safer, more familiar territory.

An effective balance of social realist and mystery, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone is a sensitive class portrait and an engaging, suspenseful neo-noir. There is a real poetry to the film, espeically in its quieter moments; Granik and her cinematographer Michael McDonough capture the sparseness and stark beauty of their Missouri backwoods, expressing both the desolation of their setting and the literal and figurative loneliness of their main character, Ree Dolly, unforgettably brought to life by Jennifer Lawrence. Dolly, whose father has been in jail for dealing drugs and whose mother has had a mental breakdown, is forced to raise her two siblings in spite of being only 17 herself when an officer comes to her home and informs her that her father has skipped bail and, since he put the house up for collateral, their house will be claimed in one week unless he turns up. Ree then essentially takes on the role of a detective, searching for the truth of what happened to her father, and being delivered standard noir warnings by the townsfolk along the way; "stay out of it", "mind your own business", and so on.

The biggest problem with Winter's Bone is the dialogue, which tries too hard to approximate Southern dialect - it lays it on more than a little thick, and the performers with the exception of Lawrence frankly aren't talented enough to sell it. It tarnishes the illusion somewhat when you're constantly reminded that you're watching actors reciting lines; indeed, the films greatest flaw is that it feels the need to oversell all its point via the script, which isn't any great shakes. Still, Winter's Bone brings enough new ideas to its genre to make it worthwhile. But it could have been so much better.

Woody Allen, while not quite "returning to form", certainly rebounds from last year's despicable Whatever Works with the surprisingly pleasant You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Though still chock-full of token Allen cynicism - everyone cheats on everyone, every relationship is doomed to failure, and so on - there is a gentle feel to what is on the plot level standard Woody boilerplate. While Whatever Works essentially condoned immorality with its titular philosophy, Allen forces his characters in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger to confront their mistakes, and the result is a moving, if imperfect film. Anchored by terrific performances from a great ensemble cast, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is one of the year's most pleasant surprises.

We are introduced to Helena (Gemma Jones) as she tells a "clairvoyant" about her recent break up with her husband (Anthony Hopkins) , who is going through a life crisis and doing the things men apparently do when they go through said crises: break up from their boring old wife, get obsessive about physical appearance, and bag a bimbo half their age (and I.Q.) whose just sleeping with them for money (literally - his new girlfriend is an ex-hooker). While this is going on, their daughter (Naomi Watts) and her husband (Josh Brolin) are having - wait for it! - marital issues of their own; Brolin is a struggling writer whose novel he's sure will be rejected by his publishers, and Watts is resentful of being forced to be the breadwinner by working in an art gallery while her husband sits on his ass waiting for the phone to ring and stares out his apartment window at a young guitar player (Freida Pinto), who apparently only owns red clothing. Their fights lead them, naturally, to grow more fond of acquaintances than one another - Brolin begins making advances towards his neighbor while Watts finds herself falling for her boss (Antonio Banderas). You can imagine where things go from there, but Allen enriches this borderline soap opera by making his characters more alone by the end than they were in the beginning - acknowledging that the answer to your problems can't be found in the warm embrace of another person, but only within yourself.

While in his previous picture Allen just shrugged his shoulder at his characters' wrongdoing, here Allen grapples with his characters callous shortsightedness. This is typified by a scene where Pinto breaks off her engagement with the man she was to marry, and tearfully apologies to her fiance and his family for her wrongdoing. It's hard to remember the last time Allen didn't merely accept infidelity as a given - that is, didn't reductively characterize it as one of those things people do to each other - and acknowledged that it is profoundly hurtful to the person who was cheated on, and this in and of itself adds a dimension to Allen's work that has been long absent. In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Allen does what he does best - that is, finding comedy in sadness and tragedy in the humorous.

#106

2010-11-02T10:00:00.009-04:00

Giants baseball: torture.

Indian Giving

2010-10-20T20:15:00.004-04:00

Criterion's stunning Blu-ray release of Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited provides an opportunity to re-examine a movie that was received rather coldly when it was released in 2007 - or at least it should. Wes Anderson's film about three brothers on a "spiritual journey" through India may be his greatest work, one of his Salinger-esque tales of the disaffected wealthy, but here he puts his typically Anderson-ian characters into a global context, enriching our understanding both of his characters and of the world itself. Anchored by three great performances from Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman (who are completely believable as brothers in spite of looking nothing alike), this is Anderson at his best - gorgeous aesthetics, funny, poignant, sad, and incredibly moving.

Any discussion of The Darjeeling Limited must begin with the film's true beginning, the short Hotel Chevalier, a great film on its own that is even greater in the context of The Darjeeling Limited, as The Darjeeling Limited is greater, more powerful, and richer in the context of Hotel Chevalier. Hotel Chevalier focuses on the younger brother Jack, played by Jason Schwartzman, and as far as I know Anderson using the vessel of a short film as a prequel to the film that it precedes is unique. It's certainly an inspired an idea, at any rate, though a completely necessary one. Hotel Chevalier is, while an integral part of The Darjeeling Limited, very much its own film with a tone that differentiates it from the feature; there is an exuberance permeated by sadness in The Darjeeling Limited, whereas the tone of Hotel Chevalier is decidedly melancholic, though beautifully so. We are introduced to Jack as he sits alone in a hotel room in Paris when his one man party is crashed by his ex-girlfriend, who invites herself up to his room. Anderson, with his wide lenses and 'scope aspect ratio, makes the hotel room feel at once vast and confined, creating almost a feeling of claustrophobia in what is undoubtedly a 5 star hotel. The hotel room itself is eerie, like the zoo at the end of 2001, in that the room itself symbolizes a literal and figurative solitude. Jack prepares his iPod doc to play Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go To My Lovely?" upon her arrival, and this feels almost like Anderson criticizing his own methods, that is using music as a kind of emotional shorthand. The reunion with his girlfriend, played in a coolly detached manner by Natalie Portman, when it occurs is extremely painful - not the passionate embrace of reunited lovers, but isolated people fucking out of loneliness, boredom, and desperation. When in bed, with her naked on top of him, they don't even have the meaningless sex that was the whole purpose of her visit in the first place, and, in an exquisite moment, he throws a robe over her (in slo-mo, of course) while, yes, Peter Sardtedt's "Where Do You Go To My Lovely?" comes in on the soundtrack. The characters finally leave their room and step out into the world, ignoring their own problems and appreciating the beauty of their surroundings; this is the key theme of The Darjeeling Limited, literally stepping outside yourself and gaining a better understanding of the world around you, and in turn gaining a better understanding of yourself.

A large part of the condescension towards The Darjeeling Limited when it was released resulted simply from its subject matter - white people (rich white people, at that) traveling through a 3rd world nation and "finding themselves" in the process. What this line of criticism ignores is that Anderson himself is critical of this so-called "spiritual journey", and he puts their materialism on display throughout the film and is sharply critical of it himself. The first stop on the three brothers' journey is an outdoor mall - the spiritual journey begins, as it were, with shopping. The brothers carry luggage (exquisitely designed by Wes' brother, Eric) that was previously owned by their dead father throughout, and yes, this is a bit of rather heavy handed symbolism - but it symbolizes much more than their family's emotional baggage, it's a literal representation of the brothers' attachment to possessions. They bicker over items of clothing, over which of their father's possessions belongs to whom, over the most petty, insignificant of things - yet Anderson mangers to be critical of them while never looking down at them. He has too much affection for, and understanding of, his characters to gratify a desire to put the bourgeois on display so we can all gawk at the immorality of those decadent rich folks. Anderson is a humanist, above all else, and a large part of humanism is trying to understand people we don't necessarily have an immediate, emotional connection with - of empathizing with the other.

And this is the key theme of Anderson's more recent work - while his films from Bottle Rocket through The Royal Tenenbaums (all of which I like, in varying degrees) are relatively inclusive - if we were going to level the accusation of Anderson being a white film maker who makes white movies about white people doing white things, I could almost understand that if you were judging solely by his first three films, though that's still a gross oversimplification, and it's hard to imagine these accusations being leveled at film makers of other races. But Anderson's films since The Life Aquatic have all been about, either directly or indirectly, understanding the other as a natural part of the world - even if it's scary, unusual, or both. In The Life Aquatic this was symbolized, naturally, by the Jaguar Shark that starts out as the Moby Dick to Steve Zissou's Captain Ahab, but by the end, when Zissou has the opportunity to kill it, he can not - he is awestruck by the creature's beauty, even if that beauty is threatening to our own existence. In last year's Fantastic Mr. Fox, the other is symbolized by the wolf - the film makes Fox's phobia of wolves clear throughout the film, and when Fox meets the creature at the film's end, he too is blown away by the creature's majesty, and can no longer fear it. This sublime moment was accused of being racist by some, because the wolf is black - but, assuming Anderson meant for this moment to symbolize race relations (I don't think it's that specific), that would make it the opposite of racism. The key theme of his work has always been understanding - loving, even - that which we don't understand; his characters have generally been obnoxious and petulant, yet earnest and lovable - though he's expanded that theme in recent years beyond what was previously a relatively narrow worldview. In spite of the fact that Anderson's films are largely divorced from a political context, empathy as he portrays it is practically a revolutionary concept.

The other manifests itself in two ways in The Darjeeling Limited - first, and most in line with the two examples I cited above, is the tiger that's haunting the convent where the boys' mother, Sister Patricia Whitman (Anjelica Huston), lives. The second is the people and country of India itself, and once the brothers are kicked off their train at about the film's halfway point, the genuine spiritual journey begins. To this point, they have been typical American tourists - visiting the towns, admiring the people, wasting money on frivolous expenditures, but a tonal shift occurs after they get kicked off their train for fighting like a bunch of 5 year olds - one of the film's most hilarious scenes, yet it is a humor that illuminates a profound sadness in terms of the brothers' relationship with each other. The Whitman brothers naively hope that this beautiful country with its beautiful people holds the answer to their problems - that's the rather patronizing attitude Owen Wilson's Francis has been trying to imbue the trip with, as it's easy to think that a certain place holds the answer to your problems when you are ignorant to their problems. They were amused by the quaintness of the country and its people while traveling on the train, seeing the country in only the most superficial of ways - "These people are beautiful", Francis says on one of their stops, and that about sums up the complexity of the brothers' perceptions of their spiritual journey. They go through the motions of a spiritual awakening, but leave out the important part - they go to Indian churches but pick petty fights with each other instead of pray (their ignorance is hilariously crystallized when Adrien Brody's character Peter says, after getting fed up with the bickering, "I'm gonna go pray at a different thing"), they focus more on their personal problems than learning to appreciate each other and their own life. Francis is recovering from a motorcycle crash that he reveals later to his mother to have been a failed suicide attempt, Peter is apprehensive about the fact that his wife is having a child, and Jack is recovering from the failed relationship we glimpsed in Hotel Chevalier. They finally get removed from the train for being so childish and disruptive throughout their trip, and as they set up camp in the Indian desert they have reached rock bottom - "Maybe this is where the spiritual journey ends", Jack says, and it does seem that the three of them are incapable of relating no matter how hard they try because they all, not to put too fine a point on it, have their respective heads up their respective asses - so much so that, when Francis reveals to his brothers that the real reason for the trip is to meet up with their estranged mother, all they can do is use this as an excuse to become even more withdrawn from each other.

While traveling the next day they encounter three children making way across a tempestuous river on a raft, and the raft capsizes and each brother quickly jumps in the water to save one apiece. Francis and Jack each save a child, but the one Peter was trying to save was killed on the rocks, "I didn't save mine" is his heartbreaking confession as he holds the dead child in his arms, covered in blood that is not his own. In an instance of parallelism typical of the famously meticulous Anderson, it was three brothers they encountered, and as they're leaving the village the Whitmans are informed that they're invited to the funeral. It is in this passage of the film that the brothers get a true glimpse into India - into their way of living, their beliefs, their social customs, and it is at this point that their sojourn to India becomes a genuine spiritual journey, not just a hollow, cliched idea of what a spiritual journey should be. The death of the child naturally strikes a deep chord with Peter, and this tragedy helps put his own problems, indeed the problems of all the brothers, into context; as the Whitmans march off to the child's funeral, with The Kinks' "Strangers" coming in on the soundtrack in one of those patently poetic slo-mo shots of Anderson's, they have transcended their small mindedness and are finally truly brothers. At this point the film flashes back to the last time the three of them were together, their father's funeral, and this masterful sequence detailing their experience at Lutwaffe Automotive - alluded to throughout because it's the subject of a short story Jack is writing - is like another Hotel Chevalier, another movie within a movie that, instead of focusing on one of the brothers, illuminates who all three Whitman brothers are as people, their motivations, and their relationship with one another.

At this point the Whitmans go to follow through with their plan to leave India, and they get as far as the airport tarmac. There is a wonderful sequence set in the airport lounge, and it's clear that the brothers feel more comfortable with each other, as they look happy to be together for the first time in the movie. The incident with the three brothers has clearly impacted them significantly, awakening them to the beauty and preciousness of their relationship with one another, but Anderson coveys that not with grandiose emotional moments but subtly through the brothers' mannerisms. They have a brief conversation right outside the airplane, though we don't hear any of it as the plane's propeller drowns it out - obviously we don't know what they said, but Anderson clearly wants you to imagine it, and I've always imagined Francis turning to his brothers and saying something to the effect of "Look, we don't have it so bad. We came all the way to India to see our mother, and we should". Whatever he said he must have made a strong case as Peter, who has to this point been hostile to all of Francis' ideas, takes their tickets and tears them up right there on the tarmac. The spiritual journey hasn't ended.

The passage at their mother's convent is perhaps the most extraordinary one in the film, as it gives Anderson a venue with which to more directly address the themes of family, spirituality, class, and materialism that have to this point only lingered on the surface. The ghosts of the past are made apparent immediately upon their arrival when their mother asks Francis, whose face is covered in bandages, what happened, and it's at this point that he confesses that the crash - which to this point he'd claimed to be an accident - was a failed suicide attempt. "There's a lot we don't know about each other" is their mother's reply, and this simply and eloquently expresses how much they've changed and gone down separate paths since the death of the boys' father. And, as the Whitman boys tend to, the bickering begins almost immediately - they can only ask their mother, like a bunch of neglected 12 year olds "What are you doing here?", and she responds that these people need her in a way her grown sons can't and shouldn't. They may have learned to appreciate each other more, but they still fail to grasp that there are people in the world whose needs are far greater than their own - they still think of Patricia as their mommy. She suggests that they stop feeling sorry for themselves and stop with this incessant bickering; she suggests they simply look at each other. So they shut up for the first time in their life (for the first time in the movie, anyway) and try to really see each other, to look deep inside these people that you have wasted so much time hating and bickering with. In the film's most stunning sequence - indeed, perhaps the most stunning sequence of Anderson's filmography - these characters look at each other and see the world, and Anderson expresses this with the most natural of visual metaphors considering the film's title, a train. But the train isn't just a train - it's a hotel room, an airplane compartment, indeed the whole world; and every compartment contains all the film's minor characters - it is The Darjeeling Limited. The train is life itself, and the tiger, the other that is a threat to our own existence, is a God in Anderson's micro-cosmic universe. This is Anderson's most concise expression of his view of humanity as ultimately one despite the language, class, and social barriers that separate us, and the result is eminently beautiful.

There is still one hurdle that remains on the brothers' spiritual journey, though they are themselves unaware of it until the moment presents itself. They leave their mothers' convent the next day after she mysteriously disappears, which they are told she is known to do from time to time. They get to the train station just as their train is departing, and in one of the great liberating moments of modern cinema, they dispense with their luggage in order to make the train on time. Again, this may be somewhat obvious symbolism, but it's also extremely rich symbolism; not only are they dispensing with their father's baggage, but with their mother's, their own, dispensing of their pettiness and materialism and vindictiveness and simply living life. They are now truly family because they are now truly people. In The Darjeeling Limited, trains - collections of humans, where each person is interesting and beautiful and on their own unique path - are symbols of life, and after such a profound and metaphysical spiritual journey, Wes Anderson makes us all want to get on board. Great movie.

Bloggin' Spielberg

2010-10-14T21:30:00.010-04:00

My friend and partner in crime Adam Zanzie and I would like to take this opportunity to announce a little pet project of ours: we'll be hosting a Steven Spielberg blogathon come December. December 18th, to be exact. It will run a full ten days, so that means it ends the 28th, for the mathematically challenged among us (I used a calculator). Anyone and everyone can participate, just please send myself and Adam (or just one of us, if you're lazy) the links to your work when it's published, and I will link to them here as well as on a blog I created specifically for the blogathon (click picture for link).

Also on the blog you will find banners for the blogathon. If you could place them on your own site, I would greatly appreciate it.

Adam Zanzie's email: adamzanzie@gmail.com

My email: medflyquarantine@gmail.com

Thanks in advance, everybody.

Kids Today: The Social Network

2010-10-10T19:45:00.001-04:00

Two artistic styles that, separate from one another, I've found obnoxious in the past - David Fincher, who found profundity in the grotesque and banal before becoming an Oscar-baiting softy and Aaron Sorkin, best known as a smartass writer of trite melodramas on the big and small screen - form an effective synthesis in The Social Network, aka "The Facebook Movie" (even though "The Mark Zuckerberg Movie" is more accurate and less reductive, but anyway). It's not that their temperaments compliment each other so much as they cancel each other out - Fincher's ice cold detachment effectively counterbalances Sorkin's hacky, show off writing style, while Sorkin supplies Fincher's stoic seriousness with a sense of life and energy. In tandem they've created perhaps the best "Give me an Oscar!" movie in a while, though that's admittedly a bit of faint praise.

One thing that I think is important before continuing: The Social Network is not, ostensibly, a movie about "the Facebook" - that would be boring. I feared that it would be based on the trailer released earlier in the year, but it's a movie about the people who made Facebook. There is a distinction, and a fairly large one at that. Though it's an ingrained part of the world today - honestly, it's hard to imagine going to a party without being tagged in a photo album the next day, and it's hard to meet someone without asking them if they have a Facebook - analyzing Facebook as social phenomenon when it's been around less than a decade would be pretty much a futile effort, and thankfully Sorkin and Fincher avoid that line of thought, for the most part. Though the movie can't resist making a few sweeping generalizations about connection in the digital age, mercifully these examinations comes in the context of Zuckerberg as a human being as opposed to a sociological one. What I find disappointing is that The Social Network is ultimately a combination of two rather cliched stories: triumph of the underdog, of the nerd vs. the jock(s), and a tale of a person who gains everything and loses his soul in the process. And I don't think it brings enough new ideas to these older-than-dirt stories to be a really great movie.

If The Social Network is a great movie - and I don't think it is by any means - it's because of Jesse Eisenberg's performance as Mark Zuckerberg. He so perfectly balances arrogance and insecurity, loneliness and congeniality, bitterness and charisma, that he rises above the rather mediocre material. We're introduced to Zuckerbeg while he's having a typical Sorkin rapid fire conversation with his girlfriend in a bar, and he says something obnoxious about his being allowed into clubs and introducing his girlfriend to "people she wouldn't meet otherwise", which she (understandably) takes a large degree of offense to, and walks out on him, though not before saying to him "When you're alone, it won't be because you're a nerd, it'll be because you're an asshole". I have no issues with taking artistic license, but the real Zuckerbeg has claimed that he had no interest in joining college clubs, and I see no reason to not believe that. Why would he? It's clear he planned to make a ton of money working with computers, so why would he waste time with a bunch of spoiled little shits while they do body shots and play beer pong when he was a blatant careerist, even as an undergrad? But Fincher and Sorkin don't really see it that way, and early on the movie includes a rather hackneyed juxtaposition between Zuckerberg and his group of computer nerd friends working on a website and one of those illicit college parties - you know the kind, with blasting techno music in a darkened hall, where super skinny girls take off all their clothes (in slow motion to boot!), where the cool kids play strip poker while doing ecstasy and - wait for it! - smoke pot, and have sex with each other, and do all those super cool things that I'd imagine Fincher and Sorkin were never invited to do, because this rather unfortunate sequence is played with hostility. Basically, it's a cliched movie party that exhibits how out of touch the two of them are from any kind of modern reality - they're just basically saying "Look at these kids, with their Northfaces and their marijuana and their alcohol and their sexy parties and their internet" - not a particularly unique point to be making, and it honestly makes Sorkin and Fincher look like a pair of cranky fuddy duddys. I think this speaks more to their view of "the cool kids" than to Zuckerberg's, which is fine, but to take such extreme artistic license while projecting your own anti-social anxieties onto another human being is borderline character defamation.

Not to say Zuckerberg isn't worthy of some criticism - he's a ladder climber who stomped on people on his way to the top. He perhaps not un-coincidentally donated $100,000,000 to Newark public schools about a week before the film's release, and I don't think you need to have a PHD to deduce that he was probably trying to pre-emptively repair his image in light of a film that is, really, extremely critical of him - he's called an asshole or something to that effect no less than 20 times during the course of the movie. I don't know how serious a flaw in terms of storytelling that is, but I think this is fairly representative of A) the current hatred of the wealthy elites and B) the resentment of genuine innovators in this country, which admittedly isn't exactly a new development. Zuckerberg created - and he did create it - a tool that fulfilled such a primary function and spoke to such a profound need that it's hard to imagine a world without it. Coming up with something so simple is undoubtedly a form of genius, and if he's as much of a back-stabbing shit as Sorkin and Fincher make him out to be, well, welcome to America. That's how you make billions of dollars. Bill Gates "stole" an idea in the same way Zuckerberg did - and, like Gates, Zuckerberg improved the initial idea, made it simpler, more accessible. You don't become a billionaire by being nice and doing everything by the book. It just doesn't work that way.

What I've frequently found most bothersome about David Fincher's sensibility is his detached point of view, but that detachment helps diffuse some of the idiocies of Sorkin's script. Sorkin's script is just so conventional, and even the interwoven structure - which has invited comparisons to Citizen Kane - feels like it's there strictly to impress. The dialogue is the driving force of The Social Network, and I think it speaks to Sorkin's lack of ability that many of the film's best moments are wordless ones. An event so frequently cited as proof positive of Zuckerbeg's dickishness and cockery, the now famous "I'm CEO, bitch" incident, is played as such an expression of youthful arrogance that it's heartbreaking, with Zuckerberg looking over the cards with the aforementioned expression on it alone in the office of Facebook and wondering what the hell he was thinking - and Eisenberg absolutely nails this poignant moment. Fincher works Sorkin's script, somehow, as it's easy to imagine another director either playing the film as either too much of a celebration or condemnation of Zuckerberg, but Fincher's detachment gives way to a sense of objectivity. Though Sorkin does not deny Zuckerberg's humanity, I still feel like he's a little too harsh on him; yes, he's a bit of a jerk, but he was also a sophomore in college when he suddenly found himself in charge of a multi-million dollar - and, soon enough, multi-billion dollar - corporation. We can cut the guy a little slack I think, as I'm sure there are lots of people who, if they had their every move from their early 20s enshrined in the popular lexicon, wouldn't come out smelling like roses either.

The backbone of The Social Network is a great and truly amazing story, a real life account so littered with drama that it was almost tailor made for a movie. However, Fincher's directorial disconnect helps keep the film from becoming a soap opera, and it is this very disconnect that creates a feeling of isolation, which in turn helps align our sympathies with the lonely Zuckerberg. Though I feel Sorkin and Fincher are too hard on Zuckerberg throughout the picture, ultimately they understand that his know it all exterior is a facade concealing a much more complex person. "You're not an asshole, Mark, you're just trying so hard to be" , a lawyer tells him, echoing his ex-girlfriend's harsh words to him in the beginning of the picture, and though this line is more than a tad sappy - I was so embarrassed upon hearing it that I looked around for a place to hide - it still works, and it's still necessary to the duo's portrait of Zuckerberg. Most affecting is the film's final moment, (again, wordless) which shows Zuckerberg looking over his ex-girlfriend's Facebook profile and adding her as a friend, and hitting refresh on an endless loop. The implications of a man who brought so many people together being unable to forge a human connection himself elevates this insider account of the creation of a social networking site to a more general statement on the nature of loneliness, and is all the richer for it.

Cutting God: Saying Goodbye to Sally Menke

2010-09-29T10:15:00.010-04:00

Few things in life are fair, but some things are so unfair they make you stop and wonder what the fucking point of getting up in the morning and going through the daily grind is. That's the state that the news of the death of Sally Menke, Quentin Tarantino's career long editor, has left me in. As most of you have probably noticed, I tend to avoid obituaries on this blog, for several reasons, but the primary reasons are A) Whenever anyone dies many movie blogs all chime in with their remembrances, most of which are more eloquent than I am capable of and B) Obituaries of people who worked in the movie industry tend to favor the work over the person, which annoys me. I'm not sad that Sally Menke isn't ever going to edit another movie again - well, I am, but that seems almost beside the point now - I'm sad that she isn't walking amongst us anymore. I'm sad that a director I value very much has lost a collaborator and a friend. I'm sad that her dog, who was with her on her ill-fated hiking trip, has lost an owner and companion. I'm sad for her friends who spent all of Monday worrying about her only to find out in the early hours of Tuesday morning that she was dead. I'm sad for her husband, her two kids, for anyone who was lucky enough to meet her.

And, yes, I'm sad about all the footage that will be shot by Quentin Tarantino throughout the rest of his career that will be unedited by her. I recall in a documentary I saw, that I can't exactly place now, where he said he always felt that he needed a woman to edit his pictures (which I think illuminates part of why he puts women on pedestals in his films, but I digress), his reasoning being that while a man would try to imprint his own ideas for what the film should be in the editing process, a woman would be more nurturing towards his vision. The way I paraphrased it makes it come off a little sexist, but I think the sentiment illuminates a lot about Menke as an artist - that she would listen to Tarantino and do everything within her considerable power to help him make the film he wanted to make. It seems that the two of them were on the same wavelength, and his work to this point has relied on her considerable abilities (he has even flat out stated that he considers her work vital to his own). He also said in that same documentary that cinema is like music, and cutting at the right vs. wrong instant is the cinematic equivalent of a sweet note vs. a sour note; Sally Menke prevented him from playing sour notes. He had such fondness for her that he would always have his actors do a "Hi Sally" take where they would look directly into the camera and say hello to his dear editor. Watching these outtakes now, some of which are available as extra features on his DVDs and on YouTube, is literally heartbreaking.

The only Sally Menke I ever knew was the professional Sally Menke, which was admittedly a distinct pleasure in its own right. It's hard to pick a favorite moment, but there are many unforgettable moments in Tarantino's films that result from her spectacular sense of cinematic rhythm: the final sequence of Reservoir Dogs, as intense as any moment in any movie you can think of; the dance sequence in Pulp Fiction, masterfully cut in time to "You Never Can Tell"; the genius mall sequence at the end of Jackie Brown, which creates a flawless unity of time and place; the fight with the Crazy 88's in Kill Bill, which is lightning fast yet never disorienting; the car chase that serves as the climax of Death Proof, which is visceral yet never sacrifices spacial continuity for cheap thrills; the unforgettable opening of Inglorious Basterds, where the tension builds slowly, deliberately, and when the violence explodes you can almost feel the bullets penetrating your flesh. All these moments belong to Menke as much as they belong to Tarantino.

For all these unforgettable moments, and many others, I will forever be thankful to Sally Menke. I will miss her as much as you can possibly miss someone you've never met. Rest in peace.

The Business of Junk: Naked Lunch

2010-09-10T09:45:00.003-04:00

Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession. The addict stands by while his junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse. Junk is quantitative and accurately measurable. The more junk you use the less you have and the more you have the more you use. All the hallucinogen drugs are considered sacred by those who use them - there are Peyote Cults and Bannisteria Cults, Hashish Cults and Mushroom Cults -`the Scared Mushrooms of Mexico enable a man to see God'' - but no on ever suggested that junk is sacred. There are no opium cults. Opium is profane and quantitative like money. I have heard that there was once a beneficent non-habit-forming junk in India. It was called *soma* and is pictured as a beautiful blue tide. If *soma* ever existed the Pusher was there to bottle it and monopolize it and sell it and it turned into plain old time JUNK.

- William S. Burroughs,
"Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness"

David Cronenberg's adaptation of William S. Burroughs' junkie manifesto Naked Lunch surely ranks as one of the great film adaptations of all time - as much a biography of the novel's troubled author as an adaptation of his most well known work, which Cronenberg has cited as his favorite book of all time. Since the novel only barely has a plot, Cronenberg was forced to improvise much of the content of the picture, and the result is an often hilarious, occasionally tragic, perpetually surreal film - one that dramatizes Burroughs' psychological state at the time he wrote the famed novel. In spite of the numerous alterations to the text, this is a surprisingly faithful adaptation, as Cronenberg's film is a scathing satire that attacks Capitalism, drug culture, Corporate America, even the creative process - ultimately, it's as true to Burroughs' novel as any adaptation could possibly be, while also a new dimension to the text: an extremely moving portrait of its author.

I must confess that I did not care for Burroughs' novel, though I've had trouble deciding if I find it bad or simply disturbing, as Naked Lunch reflects a particularly tumultuous time in its authors life. Burroughs further wrote in "Deposition" that he had "no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch", which certainly explains the novel's lack of grammatical and narrative structure, as well as the often repulsive imagery that Burroughs employs (it's the only book I've ever read to make me physically ill). Cronenberg's aesthetic is a good match for Burroughs', creating similarly revolting depictions of flesh on the screen. By merging biography with fiction, Cronenberg dramatizes Burroughs' subjective reality; in spite of the numerous artistic liberties he takes with the book and Burroughs' life, Cronenberg beautifully dramatizes the state of mind of the author at the time of writing Naked Lunch, creating an extraordinarily rich and moving allegory for the creative process.

Peter Weller plays William Lee, an exterminator working in 1950s New York, and the film evokes the period before it properly begins with stunning opening credits in the style of the great Saul Bass. The film opens with Lee performing an extermination job and running out of bug spray in the middle of it, and he realizes that his wife has been lifting his bug powder for her personal use - the film uses bug spray as a representation of heroin - and the very beginning of the picture details her descent from user to all out junkie. Burroughs later states in "Deposition" that " [he] could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. I was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. If a friend came to visit - and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit - I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision - a grey screen always blanker and fainter - and not caring when he walked out of it. If he had died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn't you? Because I never had enough junk - no one ever does.", and we gradually see Lee's wife, Joan (Judy Davis), slipping into this barely cognizant state. When Lee walks in on one of his friends casually fucking his wife on his living room couch, she urges him not to be jealous - she assures him that his friend can't come, because of the spray, and she doesn't need to. Though the film never deals with Burroughs' actual drug use (the film only shows him drunk, in one scene), it nevertheless portrays the drug culture that Burroughs' art was a result of.

Naked Lunch also details the paranoid mind of a drug addict -though Lee is never depicted using drugs recreationally, he nevertheless confesses that he experiences "severe hallucinations", presumably a side effect of being in constant contact with the spray. After being apprehended by police for misappropriation of his insecticide, he has a vision of a large bug that speaks out of its asshole telling him that he must kill his wife because she works for "Interzone Inc.", and, moreover, isn't even human. He winds up inadvertently completing his 'mission' when he suggests that he and his wife do their William Tell routine, misses, and shoots her in the head. This is a key moment, both in Burroughs' life and in Cronenberg's film, an event that fueled Burroughs' writing. "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death", the author wrote, and the film examines the profound effect that him killing his wife had on his life and his work.

The inclusion of the death of Burroughs' wife is part of the genius of Cronenberg's film; Cronenberg sprinkles in details of Burroughs' personal life to at once make Naked Lunch a cohesive narrative and an expansion of the text upon which it is based. Rather than treating the man's work and his life like they are two separate entities, Cronenberg suggests that the two are intimately related - that understanding the man is key to understanding the art, and vice versa. After shooting his wife, Lee flees to Interzone to complete his mission, and it is here that that the picture details the writing of the novel, which it imagines as Lee's reports from Interzone.

Perhaps the most inspired detail in the picture is the way it transforms the character of Doctor Benway - a crazy, corrupt surgeon in the book - to a pharmaceutical doctor, a daring connection of illegal drugs to legal drugs. Lee visits him early in the film to receive a substance that will get his wife off the spray, called The Black Meat, though in fact it's a more dangerous drug than the drug spray; Benway is the most successful pusher of them all. Lee finds Benway's factory in Interzone at the end of the film and witnesses a few barely conscious human beings feasting on the insides of Centipedes, high out of their minds, highlighting that pharmaceuticals - abused as frequently, if not more frequently, than illegal substances - can produce the most strung out junkies of them all.

This discovery prompts Lee to leave Interzone for Annexia, accompanied by Joan Frost - also played by Judy Davis - and when he arrives at the border he is ordered to "prove" that he is the writer he claims be. He turns around to see his wife in the back of his car, and suggests that they do their William Tell routine. Once again, Lee shoots Joan dead, and this is the point when Cronenberg's approach towards translating the novel to the screen takes on truly tragic ramifications. As Burroughs wrote, he would not have become a writer were it not for the death of his wife, and the film pays homage to the fact that this event is part of Burroughs' artistic identity - there is no getting around it, he did a terrible thing, but it was an event that formulated his art (though it's worth noting that, while Burroughs expressed profound guilt over shooting his wife, he didn't feel bad enough to serve any kind of punishment for it). Cronenberg takes a senseless tragedy and ingrains in into the fabric of William Lee's very existence, and the implications of a never ending cycle of guilt and regret - yet Burroughs' necessity for it - are truly heartbreaking.

[This has been an entry in The Cronenberg Blogathon, hosted by Cinema Viewfinder, where this piece is cross-published. The blogathon runs from September 6-12]

Growing Pains

2010-08-19T19:30:00.006-04:00

With seemingly endless visual invention and wit, Edgar Wright brings comic books and video games to vibrant life in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, an enjoyable if standard romantic comedy from a director who has proven in three features that he is amongst the great visual artists of his generation. Many, if not all, of Scott Pilgrim's finest moments are a result of Wright's spectacular use of audio/visual technique, as this strikes me as Wright's weakest feature yet - though Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were marketed as spoofs in the Brooks or Zucker mold, they were both piercing satires of class and British society, as well as explorations of genre worthy of De Palma. Conversely, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a fairly rigid satire of superhero movies - another in what feels like an endless line of post-modern comic book adaptations - that relies on the audience's knowledge of the genre for its ultimate effect.

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera, doing what Michael Cera does - which, no, I don't think is necessarily a bad thing) is the 22 year old bass player in a rock band "Sex Bob-omb" (a cute reference to the Mario games) that he freely admits sucks, still suffering from post traumatic stress disorder after a particularly painful breakup with Envy Adams, now a famous rock star, which has resulted in his dating a 17 year old by the name of Knives Chau - a move that causes his bandmates and friends to question his sanity. "It's just... simple, I guess", he explains to his sister early in the film, highlighting Pilgrim's refusal to grow up at the crossroads of young adulthood and adulthood - and the film's many attempts to connect with this kind of youth-in-extremis vibe struck me as pandering. When he meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who is quickly becoming a favorite of mine, both physically and as an actor), his desire for a more adult relationship - one with things like physical contact - causes him to pursue Ramona while he's supposed to be dating Knives, and the film plays his infidelities as another part of the refusal to grow up schtick that's supposed to be endearing, which I instead found obnoxious. The film's take on romance- even taking into account that it's young romance played in a comic book context - leaves much to be desired.

The film is never once critical of what a selfish asshole Pilgrim is, celebrating his confused, aimless, mixed up life as a symbol of counter-culture hipness. The films are wildly different, but I kept going back to Wes Anderson's Rushmore in my head when watching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - imagine if Anderson's film treated Jason Schwartzman's Max Fischer know-it-all exterior not as the facade of a confused adolescent, but as a genuine persona, and you basically have the cinematic Scott Pilgrim (I have not read Brian O'Malley's series of comics, so I can not comment on whether or not this element is true to the source material) - he doesn't just think he's hot shit, the film treats him as such, and to my mind this is Scott Pilgrim vs. the World's critical flaw, celebrating the main character's vanity.

And it is not just Pilgrim's vanity that the film celebrates, the film exalts Ramona Flowers' narcissism as well - every relationship you enter has baggage, but Flowers has caused so much pain in her past relationships (she "dabbled in being a bitch", she tells Scott) that her former significant others have created the league of "Seven Evil Exes", whom Pilgrim must battle to the death if he wishes to date Ramona. It's an inventive, humorous device, but one that I feel wears out its welcome by the film's end - especially tiresome is the second to last battle with the Katayanagi twins, the dispensing of which would have made for a much leaner picture. What I find dubious is the way the film plays Ramona's 'troubled past' as a tragedy - events that happened to the characters in middle school and 9th grade are depicted in an almost mythic manner (and in the style of O'Malley's art for the comics), and I'm not so sure it's played in a way that's supposed to be ironic; Wright is deeply invested in his characters and their emotions, even if to a fault, in a film that's supposed be a goofy post-modern mash up. But the film offers no commentary on the way young people's lack of perspective causes them to make mountains out of molehills with respect to failed relationships, instead playing the juvenile high school crush phase as a kind of true love that some characters never get over.

It is Wright's considerable visual panache that saves the film from failure, and the inventive use of technique is too numerous to even mention here, but some things that really stuck out: the opening 16 bit version of the famous Universal logo, complete with MIDI soundtrack; the inventive use of cinematic space, established in the opening shot which transforms a basement used for Sex Bob-omb's rehearsal into the widest of valleys; the opening credits (which my pal Jake Cole astutely notes as Brakhage-esque in his great review), a pure expression of Wright's sense of music and its relation to image, as well as his considerable sense of color and cinematic rhythm; the De Palma esque use of split screens; the somehow not campy integration of comic book aesthetics into a motion picture - perhaps no film ever has better captured the feeling of reading panel-to-panel; the integration of video game image and sound that, again, is never campy or cutesy - particularly memorable is the use of The Legend of Zelda's theme music, which Wright called "the lullaby of a generation"; the visual humor (there is a moment where the film spoofs super hero film's traditional "suiting up" sequence, which I thought was the film's most inspired moment); Jacon Schwartzman's character Gideon, a clear channeling of Paul Williams' performance as Swan from De Palma's masterpiece Phantom of the Paradise (a film whose influence is all over Scott Pilgrim). Wright's aesthetics combine every element of pop culture - there are references to work in virtually every medium - into a phantasmagoria of image and sound that, if hollow, is never boring for a second, and Wright balances the film's hyperactivity so expertly that it's never overwhelming. Still, in spite of the wildly inventive aesthetics, I feel that the film's attitudes toward romance and entering adulthood are every bit as shallow as its main character.

A Time to Forgive: Life During Wartime

2010-08-16T10:30:00.015-04:00

Todd Solondz poignantly sums up the emotional state of a war torn nation in his latest film Life During Wartime, a sequel to the director's Happiness which revisits the same cast of characters, played here by different actors - a brilliant device that aptly sumps up the degree to which the world has changed since 1998. Life During Wartime is the most observant and relevant American movie of the year, a film that dares to suggest that you forgive and attempt to understand those who have wronged you - a notion that, in the years following 9/11, is even more foreign to popular consensus than the Middle Eastern nations that our media spends so much time demonizing. Empathy is dying, and Life During Wartime is a moving, challenging attempt to resuscitate it.

Seeing my home as a warzone on September 11, 2001 was a key moment in my life that awakened me to a world beyond my day to day existence as an adolescent in New Jersey. One image that sticks out in my mind is seeing people in the Middle East celebrating the attacks on the news, realizing that there are people out there in the world who hate us very much, and then came the more unsettling notion that perhaps they have good reason to. It was a true revelation, and it's a moment in time that I keep going back to as the true formation of my political worldview. I bring this up because I feel a similar shift has occurred within the films of Todd Solondz since September 11th; his first few features (all of which I at least admire) are more or less a portrait of New Jersey as Hell on Earth (The Garden State is, for whatever reason, indie cinema's favorite go-to hellhole), analyzing the manner in which a largely upper-middle class society is, in its own way, as bourgeois as the upper class elites. He criticizes, at times brutally, middle class entitlement, while also attempting to reveal the darker side of humanity, which he argues is not as sequestered as we would like to believe. However, in his last two features, instead of bitterly highlighting America's dark side he has challenged his audience to sympathize with characters society says we should hate - and though I don't think this shift is entirely due to 9/11, the attack has left a clear mark on his subsequent work.

I was not a fan of Happiness, perhaps Todd Solondz's most well known film, which I found to be cruel and condescending towards virtually all of its main characters for the purpose of making a pedophile and rapist (here played by Ciaran Hinds, giving what may be the best performance of the year thus far) the most sympathetic character in the film's warped ensemble. Happiness is centered around a trio of sisters, and his portrait of them - Joy, a free spirit whose work is reforming criminals; Trish, whose highest aspiration is being a middle class wife and mom; Helen, who is a prototypical suffering writer - is harsh and critical to the point that it comes off as resentment. He is contemptuous of Joy's desire to heal the world, even playing the fact that she is drawn to a pervert (who she winds up marrying, the beginning of Life During Wartime reveals) toward the end of the film as a cruel joke; he is contemptuous of Trish's desire for normalcy, and he punishes her for this desire for complacency by making her seemingly normal husband a pedophile; and he is contemptuous of Helen's sanctimonious bohemian suffering, painting her as ultimately shallow in spite of her lofty artistic aspirations.

However, this resentment has given way to a profound understanding in Life During Wartime - what was cruelly ironic in Happiness is cast in a tragic light here, and the opening scene, which depicts Joy and her husband Allen out to dinner to celebrate their anniversary, establishes this. It is an echoing of the opening scene of Happiness (which featured Jon Lovitz in one of the most memorable cameo roles I've ever seen, playing Joy's boyfriend Andy), right down to the detail of Allen giving Joy an ashtray identical to the one that Andy gave her in the opening of Happiness. This sets the stage for the theme of history repeating itself - as Joy sings in the titular song later in the film, "We made a mistake/It's just like Vietnam". The players change, but the game stays the same.

And though he has a different face all these years later, Allen is the same as he was in Happiness (when he was played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) - still a pervert, still using drugs, still making elicit phone calls to strangers - and this revelation (if it can even be classified as such) is what prompts Joy to spend some time apart from her husband, and she travels to Florida to be with her divorced mother and her sister Trish. The film makes constant visual parallels between Israel and Florida, depicting The Sunshine State as a haven for spirituality, specifically Judaism. In spite of attempting to escape her problems, Joy is still haunted by the past - she walks out of her bed one night and goes to a restaurant where she is haunted by a vision of Andy (here played by Paul Ruebens, in a stunning and unforgettable channeling of Lovitz's performance in Happiness), whose suicide she blames herself for. Though the fact that she can't heal these broken spirits is a cause of endless distress for her, she should have realized long ago that people never change, no matter how much we want for them to and no matter how hard we try. She brings this anguish on herself.

When we catch up with Trish, she is in the midst of finding romance (with Welcome to the Dollhouse's Harvey Weiner, making Solondz's filmic world a true universe of its own) for the first time since her marriage to Bill the pedophile, and when we first see her she is in the ecstasy of newfound love - and this may be the first time Solondz has allowed his characters true happiness, however fleeting it may be. As Trish sits at lunch with Harvey, she exclaims "You're just so... normal!" with a beaming smile on her face, and it's this same characteristic that Solondz painted as a damning flaw in Happiness. Yet viewing this statement in context with the ordeal she suffered through in the previous film, who can blame her for this desire for normalcy, the only thing in life she has ever aspired to? These first two sequences with Trish and Joy rhyme one another, showing them both in restaurants attempting to bury the scars of the past and, at the very least, appear normal.

Shortly after this we are introduced to (or reacquainted with) Trish's son Timmy, who is on the verge of his Bar Mitzvah and, in his mind at least, becoming a man. Solondz's richest portrayals are often of children, as he perfectly captures feeling as though your future is a void, and living in a time when the future of the world is equally uncertain only serves to compound that anxiety. Timmy Maplewood may be Solondz's greatest achievement yet, because as he is living a relatively carefree, privileged existence in his Florida home, a classmate discovers the truth about his father (whom he thought was dead most of his life) on the internet - and this discovery, naturally, creates an identity crisis in this young man. He runs home, tears streaming down his face, confronting his mother with what he's learned at school - was dad really a pedophile? If so, what am I? He desperately cries out "I don't want to be a faggot!" - a perceptive if unsubtle observation on the way youth, and our culture in general, demonizes homosexuality - as though being gay and wanting to fuck children of any gender are even remotely comparable, and his mother 'reassures' him that he is not a faggot, though she's probably trying to convince herself as much as she is trying to convince Timmy.

As this is happening, Bill is being released from prison, and Ciaran Hinds beautifully captures the essence of a broken man attempting to re-enter society in a largely wordless performance. He expresses this profound sadness through body language: through his eyes, through facial expressions, through the most subtle of gestures. We are immediately reminded of Bill's heinous crime (if we could ever forget it), when he makes eye contact with a child on the street, and forces himself to walk right passed him, attempting to fight desires that he knows are wrong. He checks into a hotel and looks over his wallet that he last saw over a decade ago, and this detail helps reinforce the theme of living in a world that has changed so radically - the last time he saw his driver's license the World Trade Center was still standing. There were still levees in New Orleans. A black man had never been President. We were not engaged in any large scale wars. The economy was good. It was, if not a simpler time, certainly a time when the United States was more dissociated from the problems of the world - and it was this idyllic bubble that Solondz's early films were such scathing critiques of. Though he has his freedom back, Bill is thrust into a world he no longer understands, if he ever understood it at all; a world that he has no place in.

Bill tracks down his family and breaks into their Florida home when no one is there, observing details of the life that has passed him by while he was rotting away in a jail cell. He looks at the pictures on the walls of the Maplewood's Florida home not as though they are family, but as though they are strangers, which they may as well be (and, again, the recasting reinforces this sentiment). This life that could have been literally haunts Bill - he has a recurring dream in which Timmy is the central figure, a simultaneously beautiful and troubling visualization of Bill's tormented psyche. He walks up the stairs to his son Billy's room - Billy was an adolescent during the events of Happiness - and he walks into the bedroom of your typical college man: messy, hemp and music posters on the wall and, most importantly, a college calendar on the wall - Bill's next destination.

Next, we catch up with Joy, who got sick of her mother and decided instead to fly out to Los Angeles to visit her estranged sister, Helen. Though the portrait of all the other characters from Happiness is considerably more nuanced and sympathetic in this picture, Solondz still has little use for Helen, who is now living an unhappy life as a Hollywood screenwriter. Though she lives in a mansion littered with awards, she is still a brooding negativist, and in a brilliantly ironic image, she laments what a terrible, war torn world we live in while sitting beside her swimming pool and while her personal chef prepares her dinner behind her. This is certainly an attack on the Hollywood establishment that Solondz remains on the outskirts of (he is a true independent), criticizing the fact that they pander to leftist sentiments while living an insulated and privileged existence - and Solondz hammers this point home when he frames Helen against a portrait of an Israeli war tank in her living room. While Helen is moralistically screaming about how "We are still a country at war!", as though we could forget, Joy is writing a song that attempts to sum up what it really means to be a country at war: a time to forgive, a time to forget - a time to understand those that have been labeled our enemies.

Solondz challenges the notion of forgiveness and empathy by asking us to understand perhaps the most warped of human beings: a pedophile. During a dinner when Timmy and Trish's other children finally meet Harvey, they see Timmy standing outside, looking contemplative and distressed. Trish urges Harvey to talk to him, as Timmy is clearly bothered by something - he's writing his Bar Mitzvah speech on the concept of forgiveness, and this has caused him to seriously consider what it means to forgive and how far you take it. Do you forgive someone who punched you in the face? Does it depend on the reason? How about a pedophile? What if a terrorist bombs your office building - do you forgive him? This line of questioning causes Harvey and Trish to toss out a plethora of Bush-era cliches: terrorists aren't people. They hate our freedom. They hate democracy. They aren't like you and me, and other such insanity that we've been expected to swallow as justification for the nonsensical and heinous wars that the United States is currently involved in. With this challenging, bold sentiment, Solondz connects his portraits of suburbia as hell to a larger political context, thoughtfully contemplating the essence of forgiveness - not just as a buzz word, but the spiritual essence of moving passed the wrongs that you have suffered at the hands of others.

This is the point in the film where Trish's overzealousness with respect to pedophilia takes on a tragic ramification - it manages to ruin a relationship of hers for a second time. Timmy requests a few words with Harvey in private, like he is the over protective father making sure this would-be suitor is good enough for his daughter. Since his father hasn't been around and his brother has been off at college, Timmy has viewed himself as the "man of the house" and acts accordingly. Timmy asks Havey, point blank, if he's ever had sex with a boy - and Harvey realizes that this is just a wounded, confused boy who has lacked a father figure most of his life, and goes to give him a simple hug. He remembers his mothers oft-repeated warning - that if a man ever touches him, you scream - and screams at the top of his lungs. When Trish barges into her son's room, the fate of Harvey and Trish is implicit - it's simply not meant to be. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in, where we're so afraid that someone is a child molester or rapist that even the most innocuous of contact between adult and child is expressly forbidden. Sometimes all a child needs is a hug.

The film brings us to Billy's college, where he and a group of friends are having a contest: who has the most fucked up family? Billy refuses to participate, for obvious reasons, and goes to his dorm room to be by himself, when he hears a knock at the door. He is understandably shocked when he opens the door to find his father, who inhales some scattered candy that Billy has littered on his bedside table and chugs a bottle of water that Billy offers to him. He came for one reason, and one reason only: to make sure that Billy didn't turn out like him, as he can't live with even the vaguest suspicion that his son may have also become a pedophile. Bill hates himself for who he is, has tried to cure himself, has tried taking medication, "Nothing works", he dejectedly tells his son, and this sequence - a tragic family reunion that reopens the deep wounds of the past in a direct, straightforward manner - is likely amongst the most heartbreaking moments you are going to see in a movie this year. Solondz captures this moment in all its awkwardness and sadness without resorting to sentimentality or cliche. As he walks out the door, he tells his son to "Keep pretending, like before", and Billy pleads with him to stay - in this instance, Billy has ceased to see him as the pedophile who fucked up his family and his life and sees him as only his father. As quickly as he came, he is gone - like a ghost (the past haunting the characters - literally and figuratively - is a recurring motif).

Timmy's Bar Mitzvah serves as the film's climax, which brings all the central characters together. Though this is nothing more than a party for all the other people attending (Solondz hilariously sums this up with a brilliant use of a techno remix of "Hava Nagila"), Timmy views the Bar Mitzvah as a spiritual experience, a genuine morphing of child into adult, and he leaves his own reception to go find Harvey and apologize for his terrible mistake. Instead he finds his son Mark (who, in Welcome to the Dollhouse and Palindromes, essentially serves as the mouthpiece for Solondz's worldview), begins to sob, and apologizes profusely for his terrible mistake - he was, after all, still a child; he didn't know. Even if Harvey is a pedophile (which Mark assures him he's not), Timmy reasons, that doesn't mean he shouldn't be allowed to get married and live a happy life. However, the accusations of pedophilia have deeply wounded Harvey, and he is moving to Israel - a Jew escaping persecution. In this sequence, Timmy is simultaneously more an adult and more a child than he has been in the entire film to this point, at once a human being who has come to truly grasp the concept of forgiveness (coming to understand it through the spiritual experience of his Bar Mitzvah), and a child simply yearning for his father, who he fears is now dead, "for real this time". As Timmy declares "I just want my father", the ghost of Bill Maplewood walks in the background behind him, disappearing into eternity - a moment that, I must confess, devastated me as few moments in any movie have. Solondz simultaneously makes you hate and love Bill Maplewood, making him an impenetrable yet entirely sympathetic character. The evil other - the type of person that the media so often oversimplifies as a 'monster' - has been so powerfully humanized that his death is truly tragic, and only Solondz could create these complicated, almost contradictory feelings. Solondz makes you understand (if not forgive) a person who has committed amongst the most unfathomable atrocities imaginable, and Solondz seems to be suggesting that if we can understand him, then we can understand anyone.

In the two features he has made since 9/11, Solondz has evolved from a perceptive (if somewhat snarky), sharply critical observer of American society to one of the most sensitive artists currently working in the United States. His notions of forgiveness in a time of terrorism, war, and recession are truly daring, especially when most American entertainments pander to our biases and hatred of one another - I struggle to name another American film where a pedophile is anything other than a villain, a purely evil character whose purpose to reinforce a black and white view of the world (even at its worst, Solondz's worldview is certainly never black and white). Life During Wartime is the most beautiful prayer for peace since Spielberg's Munich, and Solondz, like Spielberg, challenges us to rethink, reflect, and forgive - and it's a challenge I'm not sure we're up to.

In Nolan's Dreams

2010-07-19T22:30:00.000-04:00

That Christopher Nolan chose dreams as the concept for his latest portentous and pretentious blockbuster Inception is all too fitting, because it perfectly highlights the severe limits of the director's imagination. These are surely the most workmanlike, banal dream sequences in the history of the medium, with Nolan managing to make even the most unreal (not surreal) of imagery come off as completely commonplace - what other film maker could do virtually nothing with imagery such as an entire city folding in on itself, a train riding down the middle of a street, or an entire cityscape crumbling? Nolan never uses his storytelling device as anything other than a device, rather, it's merely an attempt to convince the audience that there's something profound going on beneath a mechanical heist movie.

Inception tells the story of Dom Cobb (an ultra serious Leonardo DiCaprio), an 'extractor' who, via a concept the film continuously refers to as "shared consciousness" (something Nolan never fleshes out and just expects us to swallow), infiltrates people's dreams to steal their secrets. Alas, not the good kind of secrets - surely the subconscious isn't quite as timid as Nolan depicts - the heist movie kind of secrets, in this case, the code for a safe that houses a document that will help Saito (Ken Watanabe) bring down a business rival. While Nolan uses copious amounts of CGI to flesh out what he constantly tries to remind us is supposed to be a psychological landscape (the words "projection" and "subconscious" make frequent appearances in the film's script), it never looks like anything but the world we inhabit, even when he introduces things that are supposed to clash with our perception of reality. All I could wonder during sequences that I felt were intended to blow my mind is if Nolan's dreams are actually this boring, or if he doesn't have the directorial capacities to visualize dreamscapes in an effective manner - is it a failure of vision or a failure of execution?

Nolan makes it clear from the outset that he's in way over his head - he is a film maker fascinated with process and details, so perhaps dreams weren't the best thematic vehicle for his particular sensibilities. Rather than expressing himself via imagery (and, really, how else do you make a movie about dreams?), Nolan feels the need to explain via contrived dialogue the significance of every solitary event in the story, to the point where his characters feel less like flesh and blood human beings and more like mouthpieces with which to explain the film's themes, which makes his rather trite attempts at melodrama come off as disingenuous. It's like Nolan feels the constant need to prove - either to himself or to his audience - that what we're watching really is meaningful, yet he rigidly confines himself to genre and cliche to express ideas that are at once cosmic, intimately personal, and intensely psychological - Nolan even turns Cobb's visions of his dead wife (Marion Cotillard) into a cheap plot device by having her play what amounts to the film's villain. The approach he takes in Inception doesn't do his chosen topic justice.

Even if you were to judge the picture on strictly action movie terms, it's still a mess. As my darling girlfriend remarked as we exited the movie theater, watching Inception is like going to a restaurant and ordering a cheeseburger, but being given a whole cow instead. Truthfully, I can't remember the last time I was so profoundly bored in a movie theater, as Nolan's film feels aimless and structureless, lacking even the shallow pleasures offered in the similarly problematic The Dark Knight. The action sequences display Nolan's propensity for chaos over continuity and, as with his previous feature, it's an impossible task to deduce where one object within his frame is in relation to another. While he uses quick cutting and disorientation in an attempt to create excitement, I've always found action movies that seek to disorient to be the dullest kind, and that's become a defining feature of Nolan's blockbusters, unfortunately.

Since his debut film Following, Nolan has essentially been a trickster at heart - the "Gotcha!" endings of Memento and The Prestige pretty much sum his artistic M.O. - yet it is this very desire to confuse, impress, and mystify that makes his films ultimately hollow. Christopher Nolan is literal minded to a fault, and the logical approach he takes to dreams is inherently contradictory, as dreams are by their very nature illogical - and it is this paradox that Nolan fails to reconcile in any meaningful way, instead inventing a lot of arbitrary rules for his imagined world that he can obey or not as he pleases. What Nolan fails to realize is that he's the only one who has stolen our dreams.

My Blu Heaven

2010-07-17T14:45:00.007-04:00

Screenshot unceremoniously ripped from the indispensable DVD Beaver.

So, about a week ago I decided it was high time for me to join 21st Century - or at least the late 00s - and get myself a Blu-ray player. Now that I finally bought the damn thing, I can't believe it took me so long to get one, but hey, times are hard, and the almighty dollar can sometimes prevent us from indulging in the things we would like to. But, while surfing a certain internet based wholesale retailer, I found one for a reasonable price and threw caution to the wind. The time has come!

It's not everyday that the complexion of your movie watching experience is so radically upgraded, so I, being a sad sap and all, had to make a big production out of what my first purchase would be. I eventually decided on Kiarostami's transcendent masterpiece Close Up, and my reasoning was, believe it or not, two-fold. First, I'd never even seen Criterion's standard edition of it, nor the print that was recently exhibited at Manhattan's Film Forum, in spite of Close Up being a favorite of mine. The only edition I'd seen of it before my most recent viewing of it on Blu-ray was the old Facets DVD of it which, if you've never seen it, consider yourself lucky; the colors are washed out and faded, the image is blurry, and the trial footage is a notch above unwatchable (if that). A film as great as Close Up deserves the immaculate treatment, and seeing this stunning BD of it amounted to essentially seeing it for the first time (seriously, what the folks at Criterion do is art unto itself).

What made my selection all the more fitting is that Close Up is a film that attempts to show us what it means to see and hear - it's perhaps Kiarostami's most fully realized investigation into the nature of form, a rumination on narrative that tears down the barrier separating fiction from nonficiton. Close Up tells the story of a man, Hossain Sabzian, who convinces a family that he is Iranian film maker Mohsen Mahkmalbaf and will make a movie with them. He gets in their good graces, stays in their home, and even takes them to see Mahkmalbaf's The Cyclist, which he tells Kiarostami early in the film (which takes place after he's been arrested) is a part of him - a simultaneously beautiful and disturbing confession. What is upsetting about Sabzian (who died of asthma not long after the events of Close Up, according to Kiarostami) is that he escapes into images, that he sees more beauty in cinema than he does in his own life, and that his love of cinema manifests itself in the most desperate of cries for help. And the auteurs he so revered responded, because Kiarostami understood that Sabzian is Mahkmalbaf. And he's Kiarostami, too.

Though all the individuals involved in the real life case play themselves, calling Close Up expressly a documentary oversimplifies the film a great deal. While Close Up contains footage from Sabzian's trial, it also features reenactments of Sabzian's alleged crime (which surely must have been awkward - how Kiarostami and Mahkmalbaf talked them into it is anyone's guess), which complicates the issue even further. This as well as Kiarostami's next feature Life, And Nothing More integrate fact and fiction in supremely inventive ways, and though both these films are extremely formal, they are also extraordinarily moving depictions of the plight of the poor in Iran. To view Kiarostami expressly as a formalist is to ignore his uniquely sensitive perspective towards class differences, and Hossain Sabzian may be the most fitting vehicle for this radically humanist sentiment, because Sabzian sees more beauty in art and cinema than he does in real life (he's a personification of Trufaut's famous quote, "I have always preferred the reflection of life to life itself") - and Kiarotami realizes that, perhaps if things have gone a little differently in his life, he could have turned out just like Sabzian.

However, Kiarostami's portrait of Sabzian does not reinforce Sabzian's view but rather transcends it in the film's climax, which depicts Sabzian being released from prison and being met by Mahkmalbaf, who sobs when he makes eye contact with him (this meeting was allegedly staged by Kiarostami, though Sabzian's tears are apparently authentic). Kiarostami's camera rests in a van in the distance, observing this unique meeting from afar, though this directorial choice makes the scene feel more intimate, oddly enough. What makes this moment powerful and unforgettable, however, is because the camera crew's microphone that they wired on Sabzian isn't functioning properly (a dramatic contrivance cooked up by Kiarostami after the fact), and though this seems like a bit of a smartass tactic at first, it makes the scene nothing short of heartbreaking, as Kiarostami reminds us that, no matter how powerful something in a movie may be, it's still just image and sound. The sequence of these two men - the real Mahkmalbaf and the bogus Mahkmalbaf - riding through the streets of Tehran on Mahkmalbaf's motorcycle is the perfect expression of the bridge between the imagined and the real that has been a defining element of Kiarostami's career. Kiarostami understands that cinema can offer an escape, but movies are as powerful an art form as they are because they reflect the human experience, not because they distract from it.

Seeing the Criterion Blu-ray was a true revelation, among the most exhilarating cinematic experiences I've had in quite some time. The colors so vibrantly fleshed out - especially stunning are the fading leaves of the trees, the roses purchased in the film's profoundly moving climax, and the green aerosol can that figures into the film's opening (which is the punchline for a great jab at Kiarostami's famously minimalist style - in one moment he imbues the weight of the world in this rolling can, and in another, a character kicks it aside without a second thought) - that it really is like seeing the film for the first time. Though Kiarostami's style is minimalist, he also tells very complex stories visually and that makes every element of his compositions especially vital. None of Kiarostami's films so clearly illustrate this fact, and none of them needed this stunning facelift more (though please, please, please release his masterful Koker Trilogy).

So, yeah, I kinda like this whole Blu-ray thing.

A Child's Plaything

2010-06-23T01:30:00.005-04:00

Evaluating the films of Pixar poses a unique dilemma, as the pictures have praise so readily heaped at their feet that any critic using superlatives must preface the review with something on the order of "Sorry, but I really do think it's that great". In addition to this, since the film's target audience is allegedly children (I would argue that the 'target audience' is really said children's parents, who must take their kids to the latest family fare as surely as they must buy into the latest fad, but I digress), this forces some to attempt to render any effort of examining the film critically in the positive or negative sense moot with the reminder that "It's just a kid's movie". Third, any dissenting opinion generally incites one, if not all, of the following comments: "99% of people like it, therefore the 1% who don't are wrong", "It's just for kids" or "You have no soul/hate children/just want attention/are insane" and so on. Pixar Studio's unique place in modern culture - at once regarded as high art by critics and loved by audiences - creates this flaw in the evaluation of their movies.

All Pixar is wrought with compromise, and the latest installment in the Toy Story franchise is no different. What I find so frustrating about Pixar is that all their films contain hints of what they are capable of if they weren't forced to create art with hundreds of millions of people's expectations in mind, and if ever a film illustrated the folly of giving the people what they want (or what men in suits think they want), Toy Story 3 is it. It begins with a stroking of the audience's nostalgia by providing a literal recreation of the first film's opening sequence, but making it a large scale action set piece invalidates the original's point, which is that imagination is the most exciting thing of all, but that's not even the real problem: the sequence is just mindless, unimaginative spectacle. This proved to be the tipping point that, instead of treading new ground, Pixar is content to simply rehash what has come before.

It's a shame that the plot never becomes anything more than hodgepodge of the first two, because the concept is inspired: Andy, now leaving for college, winds up donating the toys to a local daycare, and the toys band together and believe in each other and work with one another to escape from it (of course, it was a misunderstanding that led to the toys being donated - it would be too harsh for Disney to admit that a young man has no use for hunks of plastic anymore). This would seem to open the door for ruminations on the nature of love and mortality, but as usual with Pixar there is a wide gap between the kind of movie the film's makers wanted to make and what is actually presented on the screen. I respect that they try to lend weight to the characters that have become so iconic, but the fact is that by not exploring the toys' existential crisis more in depth Pixar actually trivializes the suffering they're attempting to depict (and, in some cases, Pixar even plays said suffering for laughs - such as when Barbie™ is abandoned by Andy's sister). It feels as though Toy Story 3 wants to be a much more serious movie than it can possibly be, more serious than it's allowed to be, and this makes much of the largely low brow humor seem disingenuous, as though it wandered in from a different movie. While the first two films had clever writing, Toy Story 3 relies on toilet humor (literally, in one instance) and lowest common denominator pop culture references to provide cheap laughs.

Never has the need for compromise in the work of Pixar been more evident than in the picture's climax, which has already become a famous sequence in its own right. The toys, through a convoluted series of misadventures (no, really) find themselves on a conveyor belt that leads to an incinerator, and this sequence is some of the most effective imagery Pixar has ever created; the flames are animated so vividly that you can almost feel the heat (and I saw it in 2D). This sequence culminates in the most fully realized individual moment in any Pixar film, as the toys fall in to the incinerator and interlock hands with one another, and Woody, always the hero thinking up clever ways of escape, realizes he is powerless and accepts his implicit fate. Only it's not implicit, as a literal Deus Ex Machina comes in to save the day, morphing the sequence from an examination of mortality and family into just another cheap thrill in literally the blink of an eye. Coming from someone who grew up with these films (I was 7 when the first came out), it's impossible to deny this sequence's effect, but it's devoid of any real consequence because it's not even a remote possibility that Pixar will kill the toys, even though that's probably the most fitting ending imaginable. After this, we're given an embarrassingly saccharine ending where Andy gives the toys to a neighbor's child, playing with them one last time before moving into adulthood. It's one of those moments like Pauline Kael described in her review of The Sound of Music, where you can hear all the noses blowing in the theater at once. This is yet another of Pixar's manufactured sentiments, a cheap and borderline insulting attempt to package the depth of human experience in a nice little bow.

All of Pixar's films contain brilliant, fully realized moments, but for every moment they force you to step back and marvel at their artistry there are many more moments that are compromised, mechanical, and banal; context is everything. While Pixar attempts to create art in an environment that exists only to stifle it, they - unwittingly or not - take part in the great lie that we have always told, and will continue to tell, children: that things will always turn out alright in the end if you just have faith, stick together, and believe in each other. The bad guy will get his comeuppance and all will learn a valuable lesson. It's the Disney way.

Writing Politics: The Ghost Writer

2010-03-28T20:00:00.000-04:00

Roman Polanski's new thriller The Ghost Writer is about the way political images are manufactured. The film is a multi-faceted take on the political thriller, a picture full of pointed insights into the political process. While functioning as a tightly crafted genre effort, what intrigues me most about The Ghost Writer is the way it engages with a time when the media sets the tone for political discourse, and how the narrative that the mainstream media forges is as carefully honed and crafted as fiction, perhaps even more so. In an era where the media is omnipresent, The Ghost Writer tackles the power - and danger - of political myth making.

Ewan McGregor stars as an unnamed ghost writer (credited only as "The Ghost" in the credits) assigned to edit the incoherent memoirs of an ex British Prime Minister ("All the words are there, they're just not in the right order", he remarks after reading the manuscript) after the original ghost writer dies. The Ghost quickly finds himself in the midst of a political firestorm as the International Criminal Court announces that the Prime Minister is going to be arraigned on charges of war crimes, specifically sanctioning torture against terrorists. So pronounced are the parallels between the film's fictional Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), and Tony Blair that the character may as well be named after him: he left office by resigning, and is accused of being in the tank for America (specifically for helping to sanction the Iraqi Occupation and global War on Terror). Olivia Williams plays Lang's wife, and the film makes it very clear from the get-go that she was, and remains, the power behind the throne (an accusation leveled at many famous political wives).

As the scandal surrounding Lang gets more and more intense, the Prime Minister's office forces The Ghost to move in with them, so as to avoid the press finding out who he is. He is hesitant to do this, as he thinks moving in with clients makes it difficult to maintain a strictly professional decorum, and he is quickly proven correct, as almost immediately he gets intimately involved in the personal and political dealings of the Prime Minister's office. And when The Ghost helps draft a political speech, one designed to save face in the midst of this scandal, Polanski and screenwriter Robert Harris make one of the most sophisticated political barbs in modern movies, brilliantly equating political speech writing with fiction. Especially considering that many of our current leaders would more than likely be unable to speak without their teleprompters spewing words at them that are more heavily scripted than most television, this sequence has a particular bite to it.

Roman Polanski's direction expertly toes the line between restraint and expressionistic, allowing the tension to build slowly and deliberately before it explodes. Even sequences of dialogue have an underpinning of unease to them, and that's because Polanski instills many moments with a dark sense of foreboding, as though you don't know what's around the next corner. His direction is tight and economical, and Alexandre Desplat's score perfectly underlines the drama and tension.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the parallels between the exiled Prime Minister and Polanski himself, who edited this movie from a Swiss jail cell. I'm sure many things intrigued him about Robert Harris' novel, but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that this element of the story was probably the hook for Polanski. He poignantly dramatizes what exile does to the human psyche, while never telling us exactly how to feel about the Prime Minister's predicament - rather, he just wants us to understand it. Polanski paints the portrait of the Prime Minister as a man with very serious flaws - that he was in over his head, too ideologically compromised, subservient to the agenda of others, and more about image than substance - but a man, nevertheless, mercifully avoiding mean spirited vilification or idol worship.

The Ghost Writer also stands as an extremely perceptive deconstruction of the political machine; as The Ghost sinks further and further into the mystery of his deceased predecessor, it becomes more and more apparent that Lang is a puppet, serving the interests of a global military industrial complex as opposed to the people of his country. The Ghost happens upon a file left by his predecessor that leads him to Professor Paul Emmet, a shady character who clearly has some sort of connection to Lang's past, though he emphatically denies this until confronted with photographic evidence. As The Ghost digs deeper, he realizes that this man is a C.I.A. agent and was Lang's American handler - and this, obviously, is the reason for all the pro-American decisions he made while in office. It's revealed that Lang was an actor while in college, and this is undoubtedly why he was chosen: he could play the role of Prime Minister and allow others to make the decisions for him. Like many of the world's current leaders, Lang was just playing the role of a leader and making appearances, while others behind closed doors pulled the strings.

Like Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, this is the sort of story that Hollywood used to tell well; an ingeniously scripted, tightly directed genre effort. The story isn't merely told, but rather it unfolds, and we feel like we're uncovering the clues - and therefore the truth about modern politics - right along with The Ghost. It culminates in an ending that is both surprising and foregone, and a final shot (reminiscent of the famous final shot from Stanley Kubrick's The Killing) that is both comic and tragic, a brilliant evocation of the hopelessness of trying to tell the truth in a world that knows only lies. It's hard to tell whether Polanski wants us to laugh or cry.

Now I Want One More Than Ever!

2010-03-07T18:00:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year, people. No matter how hard one tries, it's virtually impossible to avoid discussion of the Oscars - love 'em or hate 'em, they're the movies' equivalent of the Olympics, World Series, or Super Bowl, a cinematic decathlon. Some love them, some hate them, some are indifferent, but I think just about every movie lover goes through the five stages of Oscar, and it ends with acceptance - for better or worse (mostly worse), the inclusive, pretentious, self congratulatory circle jerk is what it is. Truthfully, depending on the host, I enjoy the show more often than not. I accepted long ago that it's not about art and it never will be, so I try to focus on the positive in that, if a good movie is at least nominated, then I'm a happy person.

And the Academy has implemented a major face lift this year that I think makes the awards more interesting than usual (not saying much): in something of an homage to the Oscar's past, they opened up the Best Picture nominees to ten films. Some have objected to this, saying that this and the new weighted voting process (where the films are ranked 1-10 and every movie gets something from every ballot) will open the door to film's not worthy, to which I can only reply: "So the eff what?" Undeserving films winning the biggest prize in Hollywood isn't exactly a new development. The major plus side of the 10 nominees is that it opens the door to more populist films being nominated, and to dark horse candidates winning; especially after the stiflingly self important garbage that was nominated last year, this is especially refreshing. If the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences is going to validate crap, they should at least validate popular taste as well.

Anyway, not to make too much of a production out of this post, I just want to share my thoughts on the 10 nominees, toss down some (probably way off) predictions, and call it a day.

James Cameron's long awaited and highly-touted Avatar has almost everything the Oscars could want: large-scale spectacle, melodramatic romance, and heavy handed social import (bonus points for anti-American social import), plus everyone out in Hollywood seems to like James Cameron and his wavy, silver hair. Reviewed here.

Though it occupies a Hallmark card universe, there is an earnestness and depth of feeling in The Blind Side that I find it a difficult film to dismiss. Sandra Bullock does just fine with her role, but almost anyone would be nominated for this performance, full of snappy one-liners and sassy attitude. Most remarkable, to my eyes, is the performance Quinton Aaron as first round draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens (23rd overall) Michael Oher; he does not have too much to work with in the dialogue sense, and has to be expressive with his eyes and face. Because of this, he naturally was not nominated.

Still, it is not a bad film at all, certainly not a racist one as some have suggested. The Blind Side strikes me as more accentuating the class differences between Oher and the Tuohy family than the racial ones.

Though it feigns a socially driven subtext, District 9 is a big screen video game that doesn't have much to say about anything. Unlike The Hurt Locker, which used fast editing and hand held camera work to make a statement on the existential nature of the rush of combat, District 9 wants you to feel that rush instead of ponder it.

An Education mercifully avoids typical coming-of-age cliches for the most part, with the exception of a few speeches designed to sum up any point that you were supposed to take away from it. But Nick Hornsby's screenplay is well written and the leading performances by Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard are excellent, and Alfred Molina is memorable in a supporting role as Mulligan's father.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is a visceral, gripping war film - one that grabs a hold from the opening frames and doesn't let go for its entire 2 hour duration. Using handheld 16mm cameras, The Hurt Locker brings us directly into the action unfolding onscreen, without trying to approximate a documentary style (the film is above such gimmicks). Rather, the movie's quick cutting and hand-held camera work allows us to enter the subjective mind frame of the characters, who work as part of an E.O.D. (explosive ordinance disposal) squad and could easily be killed at any moment. However, this technique is never used gratuitously; The Hurt Locker is exciting without being exploitative and political without being partisan. While this is among the most exciting films to come out in 2009, it's also among the most contemplative, and this is because the film is more interested in portraying the way men relate to one another than it is in polemics. The result is among the first movies to approach the Iraqi Occupation in the manner it needs to be approached, which would be on the same level it's waged: with the men who fight it. The Hurt Locker shows that Kathryn Bigelow has unique insight and understanding into the kind of mentality that would travel half-way across the globe to fight in this conflict, which actually makes it more politically relevant than the cheap partisan movies on the subject.

Tarantino's gleeful, anarchic take on World War II and its cinematic representations has just enough pristine polish to be accepted by the Academy. I'm thrilled it was even nominated. Review here.

A grotesque freak show that masquerades itself as a valuable social commentary, Precious is an exercise in sheer cinematic torture. The critics throwing claims of racism are only doing themselves a major disservice; the film does not trivialize racial relations, but rather it misrepresents the plight of the lower class in the most cliched, obvious of ways, confusing dark subject matter and gritty filming from depth and meaning. Surely if Precious were about white people (which it could have been), no critic would claim that it was racist or supposed to be representative of all white people everywhere. It's a fairly typical white liberal trap to fall into: any artistic representation of a black person must represent an entire race. And what makes it especially dubious in the case of Precious is that there are many black characters from various backgrounds depicted.

Oh boy. This movie. This fucking movie. I remember the day that I saw A Serious Man at Manhattan's Sunshine quite vividly, though the film hangs over that day like a storm cloud. Not to say that I think it's a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, but the worldview that it seems to be endorsing is not one that I empathize with, let alone understand. What bothers me most about A Serious Man is that the Coens not only suggest that existence is meaningless, but that they mock the very idea of the search for meaning (a Rabbi's condescending and patronizing speech about the beauty and wonder of a parking lot being the most offensive). I don't wish to take anything away from the Coens, film makers I have felt a strong personal connection with in the past, but A Serious Man helped kick start a season's long depression that I am only recently starting to pull myself out of.

Pixar, under the watchful eye of The Walt Disney Company, continues with the same old formula instead of expanding perceptions of our world. Reviewed here.

What I find most repulsive about Up in the Air is the way it capitalizes on the economic hardships our country currently faces yet doesn't say anything meaningful about them. It simply patronizes the people who are currently suffering and calls it a day. Did the film makers honestly think this would make anyone feel better?

And, as promised, my annual way off predictions:

Best Picture: Avatar (potential Hurt Locker upset, probably not)
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Best Actor: Jeff Bridges
Best Actress: Sandra Bullock
Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Waltz
Best Supporting Actress: Mo'Nique
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino
Best Adapted Screenplay: Nick Hornsby, An Education
Best Animated Feature: Up
Best Art Direction: Avatar
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds
Best Documentary: Food, Inc.
Film Editing: The Hurt Locker
Best Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon
Best Makeup: Star Trek
Best Original Score: James Horner, Avatar
Best Visual Effects: Avatar
Best Sound Editing: Avatar
Best Sound Mixing: Avatar

Damn, writing Avatar over and over got really boring. It's just one of those years.

Oh, and some live blogging to follow during the ceremony from great writers will make the proceeds that much more enjoyable, be sure to check out Roger Ebert, Glenn Kenny at Some Came Running, and Ali Arikan at Cerebral Mastication. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

America's Ghosts

2010-02-27T16:45:00.007-05:00

Major Spoilers Herein

Who but Martin Scorsese could take a text that, on the surface, reeks of genre tropes and turn it into an intensely personal work of art? Scorsese has given the ghost story a radical face lift - Shutter Island is less about things that go bump in the night than it is about the ghosts in our soul, the ones that don't ever go away, the ones that haunt us individually and as a society. No doubt some will look at the picture and see nothing but the labyrinth plot, myriad twists (including a third act revelation that most will probably see coming a mile away), and the period details and think that's all there is to it, but like the best of Scorsese's work this is a film with a dark, tortured soul. Though on the surface this is a radical departure from what we've come to expect from Martin Scorsese, it's perfectly consistent with themes the director has been presenting his entire career.

The film's protagonist, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio, in another great performance under Scorsese) is a veteran of World War II and a Federal Marshal assigned to investigate a missing patient at the titular island, the home of a mental institution for the criminally insane, the kind of people that other hospitals won't take. We're introduced to Daniels in a claustrophobic close up as he battles a bout of seasickness en route to Shutter Island, and this unsettling image highlights immediately that this is going to be one of the Scorsese pictures that plunges us square within the psychological state of mind of its main character. Scorsese, who has at his heart always been an expressionist, is often at his best when dramatizing a wounded psyche and a tormented soul, and DiCaprio's Teddy Daniels is certainly not without his share of personal tragedy: in addition to fighting in World War II and being present at the liberation of Dachau, we learn that his wife (an ethereal Michelle Williams) died young.

While the use of World War II and Holocaust imagery could have easily been nothing more than dramatic placating, Scorsese so intimately relates that horrific imagery to his character's personal tragedy that it's not just a cheap narrative device. From his early short The Big Shave (initially titled Viet '67, which gives you a clearer idea of what Scorsese was going for) and Taxi Driver, Scorsese is an artist who has been able to dramatize what war does to the human condition, and the massive guilt and psychological transgression that results from witnessing and participating in such extreme violence. The Big Shave stands as a testament to the frame of mind of a nation dealing with war as well as the trauma of the individuals who fight it, as the main character shaves himself in front of a mirror, first shaving away all his facial hair and then eventually cutting himself; though he lays on the political sentiment a little thick, the film is nevertheless incredibly effective. In Taxi Driver Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle is also a veteran of Vietnam, and this is a key element of understanding Bickle's behavior throughout the film, as he sees the streets of New York as a jungle that only he can tame. I bring up these two early works because I feel they are both important to understanding the drama at the heart of Shutter Island, though instead of post-Vietnam anxiety Scorsese here is summing up post-World War II and Cold War dread.

Which is not to say that the film doesn't work on the level of film-noir mystery/thriller. The film is extraordinarily well constructed, and with the exception of a few short sequences that feel like tired exposition to throw the audience off balance with respect to the central mystery, nary a moment passes that doesn't fit into the tapestry of the film. Scorsese's intimate knowledge of film history helps bring the genre and period details alive; the film has an atmosphere that feels like big budget Val Lewton filmed by Hitchcock. The script is tightly constructed and captures the '50s without having to resort to hackneyed and cliched period shorthand. The plot feels fairly by the numbers - Daniels and his partner, a pitch perfect Mark Ruffalo (who captures the unique spoken tempo seen in film noirs of the 50s), are sent to the island to investigate an escaped prisoner who's crime was that she drowned her three children in a lake behind her house - or so we're told. As Daniels digs deeper and deeper into the investigation , he begins to suspect something is afoul at the mental institution, and attempts to uncover a massive conspiracy involving fun activities such as Nazi-esque experiments on the mind, funded by no less than the House of Un-American Activities.

Much has been made of the aforementioned third act revelation, some stating that they find the twist to be a cheap parlor trick beneath a master like Martin Scorsese. But I find it impossible to engage with how the picture is distinctly Scorsese, far more so than his other collaborations with DiCaprio, without acknowledging the way this twist plays into themes the director has been dealing with throughout his career. After DiCaprio's Teddy Daniels spends the duration of the film chasing lead after lead, it's revealed that Daniels, real name Andrew Laeddis, is actually a patient at the mental hospital and what we've been watching is a radical role-playing experiment, designed to help Laeddis come to terms with the heartbreaking tragedy of his past. Not merely the passing of his wife and the devastating sights he'd witnessed while fighting in World War II, though that is certainly no small part of it, but that it was his wife who was mentally unbalanced and drowned their three children in a lake, and he'd forged the Daniels identity and created the conspiracy in his own mind to avoid acknowledging his personal tragedy.

This revelation, in addition to providing an ending that "keeps you guessing" (as the ads proudly proclaim, as though that's even much of an accomplishment), is an absolute kick in the gut from a dramatic standpoint. There is a reason that conspiracy theories - from Pearl Harbor to JFK to the moon landing to 9/11 - take on a life of their own. Though they imply a much darker, more sinister reality, they also imply an order to the world that simply does not exist - in their own, bizarre way, conspiracy theories are actually more comforting than the chaotic, anarchic world we inhabit (take this from a former tin-foil hat wearer): a world where bad things happen to good people, where the depth of tragedy knows no bounds, where the one good thing you have in the world can be suddenly and violently ripped away from you. The sequence that illustrates DiCaprio's character breaking through and acknowledging his own past - a vivid, haunting nightmare of a sequence where Laeddis comes home from work to find his wife soaking wet and his three children dead in the lake, pulls them out and lays them to rest in the yard, and then shoots his wife dead after he asks her to "set [her] free" - is so fully realized in the dramatic sense that it breaks your heart. Of all the tragic, horrible, fucked up things Martin Scorsese has put in front of a camera in his career as a director, this may stand as the most tragic, horrible, and fucked up yet. Considering the magnitude of Laeddis' personal tragedy, it's difficult to blame him for living in a fictional reality - in spite of his alternate reality's dark implications, it's still far easier to cope with than his personal tragedy. A large part of this sequence's effectiveness stems from DiCaprio's remarkably nuanced portrayal - though some will never be able to look past his heartthrob phase, he has shown much depth as an actor, and he has evolved considerably under the watchful eye of Martin Scorsese.

This is the point where the key Scorsese theme comes in to the film - penance. From that early short The Big Shave through Mean Streets and his great Paul Schrader collaborations Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Bringing out the Dead has been atoning for one's sins - some would say that this is merely Catholic guilt manifested cinematically, but Scorsese relates the concept of shame to human experience richly enough that it's not expressly theological. After his breakthrough, Laeddis is informed that if he doesn't accept reality - that if he regresses back to thinking he's Teddy Daniels investigating the big-bad mental hospital - then they will be forced to lobotomize him so that he can no longer harm other patients or hospital workers (he is, after all, trained as a solider and Federal Marshal). Immediately after the sequence when Laeddis acknowledges the truth of who he is and what he's done, there is a short sequence of him talking to his 'partner' (who is revealed to be his psychiatrist), and he seems to have regressed back to the Daniels persona - he talks to his doctor like he's his partner, asking him what their next move is, and Laeddis' doctor makes a gesture to the medical staff that, tragically, their experiment did not work and a portion of his brain must be removed. But Scorsese throws in a line that complicates things that, from what I understand, is not in the novel - he says to his partner/doctor "This place makes me wonder which would be worse: to live as a monster, or to die as a good man", and he marches off, and his fate is implicit. The question, though, is whether he honestly regressed or if he knowingly baited them into thinking that he had regressed, so he no longer had to live within himself. It adds an incredibly moving element of complexity and ambiguity to the film, though either way the implications are both tragic and deeply disturbing.

While the film is viewed by some amongst the critical community as a slight genre effort from a renowned master after a string of Oscar-bait (though I don't feel either of these criticisms are accurate), this is the most distinctly Scorsese of all of his DiCaprio collaborations - Gangs of New York was a long gestating passion project, Aviator was more a DiCaprio project that Scorsese finessed, and The Departed was the slight genre effort Shutter Island is being written off as that retroactively became Ocar-bait by virtue of the fact that it won an Oscar. Though Shutter Island can indeed be appreciated as the thrill-a-minute-keep-you-guessing mystery film that it's being advertised as, Scorsese has managed to manifest his personal vision in a work that seems fairly atypical of its genre, and what may be the year's first truly great film is the result.

Fort Hollywood, My Home Town

2010-02-20T17:30:00.005-05:00

This is my contribution to For The Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand and Farran Nehme, a.k.a. The Siren. The Blogathon runs from February 14-21.

An interesting footnote of American film history is that before there was Hollywood, California there was Fort Lee, New Jersey. It doesn't have quite the same ring to it (perhaps not where a young mechanic can be a panic), but for all intents and purposes it's the location of the birth of a large-scale motion picture industry, one of the first the world had ever seen. The fact that the industry was born here is fitting really, as Thomas Edison and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson invented the 'Kinetograph' (history has suggested that Dickson was the more instrumental of the two), a crude early version of the movie camera which was designed to shoot films for Edison's Kinetoscope (essentially an early version of the Nickelodeon) when located at Edison's lab in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison also built his famous "Black Maria" soundstage in Fort Lee, thought of as the first proper film studio. But Fort Lee was the artistic home of many legends of the early medium: D.W. Griffith (as actor and director), Douglas Fairbanks, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Theda Bara, Oscar Micheaux, Mary Pickford, W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, Raoul Walsh, Lionel, John and Ethel Barrymore are among the noteworthy artists and performers to have worked in the town. In addition to this, Fort Lee housed many early manifestations of some of the medium's most noteworthy studios: Metro Pictures Corporations, Fox, Biograph, Keystone, The Champion Film Company (a precursor of Universal Studios) and Selznick Picture Corporations are examples of some of the studios that operated directly across the river from New York City.

The proximity of Fort Lee and the New Jersey Palisades (the term 'cliffhanger' is said to refer to the area's distinctive cliffs) to New York was what initially attracted film makers to the area, as the large amount of undeveloped land created an ideal situation for location shooting as well as land to build studios on. One of the earliest films shot in Fort Lee was Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (pictured below), directed by Thomas Edison and staring a young actor named David Wark Griffith, who would later achieve some notoriety as a director. Griffith got his proverbial foot in the door on these hallowed grounds, and soon after his appearance in Edison's film he would begin a prosperous relationship with Biograph as actor and later as a director (probably most noteworthy is the fact that Griffith shot some exteriors for his seminal The Musketeers of Pig Alley in Fort Lee).

As more and more studios began to set up shop in Fort Lee, the area became more and more prosperous. Between businesses designed to help the movie companies and businesses catering to the tourism of the area, Fort Lee became the first great movie town in America.

Alas, as with all great American institutions - from the Colonies to Baseball - a Westward pilgrimage was imminent, taking the movies away from the East Coast and relocating them to sunny California. Nestor Studios, which operated out of Bayonne, New Jersey, was the pioneer of West Coast based film making, as they were looking to make use of California's vast open spaces and year round warm weather (Nestor Studios would eventually be swallowed by mega-conglomerate Universal). Other studios quickly followed suit. Some studios kept their labs located on the East Coast but by the early 1920s the movie industry had more or less completely relocated to Hollywoodland.

The tragic element of this story is that very few of the films shot in Fort Lee have survived to this day. Studio fires were fairly common, between ultra-flammable nitrate film stock and the fact that the studios were built with large windows that trapped heat in the studios like a greenhouse (example below), and one studio after another burned to the ground. For instance, The Marx Brothers first film Humor Risk was screened once in New York and is thought to be lost forever. The incredibly rich cinematic history of Fort Lee has been almost completely destroyed, which is a hole in my heart, as I would love to see what my hometown looked like a century ago. Who knows what early masterpieces will remain unseen for all time?

And this is, as they say, the hook. So many films - as valuable a cultural indicator as we have - run the risk of suffering the fate the films of Fort Lee did. But we know so much more about the art and science of preserving films now, the only thing that's missing (and it's a big thing) is monetary support. That's why two of the most wonderful writers on the internet joined forces for this blogathon: to raise awareness and money for this most noble cause. As film bloggers, we do something very valuable by sharing our views with the world and engaging with works of art, but this cause is extremely important. This is bigger than all of us. It's estimated that 75% of all silent films are lost forever, though this is impossible to accurately gauge as accurate records were not kept at that time. I'm sure that 75% contains more than a few duds, but isn't it possible that we've lost films on the level of Metropolis, The Passion of Joan of Arc, or The Last Laugh? Though the quality of the films saved is virtually irrelevant, at any rate - as Henry Langlois said, "One must save everything and buy everything. Never assume you know what's of value. " We need to preserve these films for future generations, and let them decide what's great and what is not. And that starts with us. Donate anything you can spare to The National Film Preservation Foundation. Let's give something back to the medium that has given us so much.

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Big Blue

2010-02-18T21:00:00.005-05:00

Avatar stands as a wildly uneven summation of director James Cameron's career, embodying every good, bad, awe-inspiring, and downright silly and embarrassing thing about the self proclaimed King of the World. While being touted as the next revolution in movie making, what's most striking about Avatar is how derivative just about every single thing in it is: second hand memories of every science fiction, fantasy, and colonialist tale ever told in every medium abound, and the lack of good storytelling makes the presence of these cliches pretty much inexcusable. The world that James Cameron's film inhabits may be fully realized, but the gateway into that world - actual thematic substance - is virtually nonexistent.

In Jean Luc Godard's In Praise of Love, two characters discuss the massive success of the ex-biggest movie of all time Titanic in a restaurant, and one character states "Why bother saying or writing that Titanic is a global success? Talk about its contents. Talk about things, but don't talk around things. Let's talk on the basis of things." Substitute the word Avatar and Godard's observation is relevant all these years later. It has become virtually impossible to discuss the movie on its own terms, as almost any criticism of the movie can quickly be met with "2 Billion dollars worldwide doesn't lie" or "The numbers speak for themselves" and, yes, both of these observations are correct, but they don't necessarily speak to the actual quality of the movie, merely to the power of the media in creating an 'event'. Anything becomes an event if you say so for long enough, and Cameron was touting that he was looking to redefine movies before a single camera had begun rolling. All the controversy and speculation surrounding Avatar has only assisted in advertising it even more.

But the so-called revolutionary elements have been done before, and done better. The main selling point of Avatar is that it creates its own unique world and submerges the viewer into it via 3D technology, and even people critical of Avatar have cited that the world is immersive; I have seen very few criticisms of the creature and ecological design of the film's setting, Pandora. This is what really makes-or-breaks the film, subjectively speaking - if the viewer finds the cinematic world convincing and enjoys being in it, then it naturally follows that they will enjoy the movie (I have read reports that some people actually "experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora", a notion that, if true, makes me depressed and suicidal). Speaking for myself, I never forgot that I was looking at a computerized forest populated by computerized creatures. Though one can't help but marvel at the scope of Avatar's planet, it reflects a stunning lack of imagination on Cameron's part, as it's ultimately nothing more than a cartoon forest. The creature design leaves much to be desired, as well, because all of the animals look like their earthly counterpart with a skewed color palette and odd flailing limbs.

The obtrusive 3D doesn't help matters much; Cameron filmed the live-action portions with two 3D cameras in an attempt to mimic peripheral vision and, while this idea sounds intriguing on paper, it simply does not work. It makes characters look like cardboard cut outs (which is fitting, really), any implication of depth of field flies out the metaphorical window, and it can occasionally be disorienting, as Cameron will occasionally use a rack focus and the foreground, the pane that is popping out from the screen, will go out of focus. The animated portions don't fare much better, though they're at least watchable, as I don't recall any bone-headed directorial decisions on the level of the rack focus catastrophe. Cameron actually managed to make me physically uncomfortable while watching a movie, and at certain intervals I had to take off the 3D glasses in order rest my eyes. I've seen Avatar twice, once in skullfucking IMAX 3D, the other in my decidedly non-skullfucking home in 2D, and I must say it played much better in traditional 2D; though the inherent silliness is still present, it goes down much smoother, even though it's plain as day that Cameron composed many shots strictly for the purpose of throwing stuff at you, cheapening many of the moments designed for emotional impact. It's always about the spectacle in Avatar.

And as I noted earlier, the spectacle isn't even particularly well done. The action sequences are loud and incoherent - visual noise that, in many instances, isn't even context appropriate. Cameron's big finale is one of the most hypocritical and ideologically confused sequences of the last few years, one that includes the gleeful and wanton slaughter of the SFWM (stupid fucking white man) in his third act epic battle extravaganza. Cameron falls into the trap that Terrence Malick so wonderfully avoided in his masterpiece The New World: Cameron demonizes the SFWM imperialists in cartoonish broad strokes and fetishizes the natives in a manner that is simplistic, disturbing, and kinda perverted - Cameron stated in a Playboy interview that he told his special effects crew that the female Na'vi "got to have tits, even though that makes no sense because [their] race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals". In Cameron's world, the natives are pure, wise and uncorrupted - so much so that an early scene details the female Na'vi, Neytiri, in mourning over some wolf-like creatures that she killed to save the life of the protagonist, Jake Sully, who is foolish enough to thank her for saving his life. "Don't thank! You don't thank for this. This is sad. Very sad only", says Neytiri, proving her love of the planet and respect for all forms of life, though as far as I could tell not a single tear was shed nor a single moment of silence observed for all the SFWM that are killed in Cameron's big finale. In spite of Cameron's blatant anti-American baiting (no small part of its worldwide success, I would wager), he is little more than a cinematic equivalent of George W. Bush, using an act of terrorism - the raping and pillaging of Pandora, including the destruction of a sacred tree, which is a blatant hijacking of 9/11 imagery - to justify further acts of terrorism, slaughter, and destruction.

Cameron has never been known as a wordsmith - even his previous works, many of which I like very much, are sorely lacking in this department - but Avatar's spoken word is about as poorly written as anything I've ever heard in a Hollywood blockbuster; the script is stuffed to the brim with movie trailer style one-liners and scene punctuations. I wouldn't mind such awful writing if I could find other things to admire but the story, visuals, and acting don't exactly pick up the slack. Many have excused the banal writing because they find the visuals so dazzling, but I was never particularly dazzled; when on Pandora, Cameron's camera is constantly moving (so as to impress us with things flying out of the screen), and we never get a particularly good look at the planet because Cameron doesn't believe in static shots anymore, I guess (so 20th Century). What we're left with is a poorly written and badly acted cinematic light show - flashing fluorescents and whooshing sound effects, but no technique or substance behind them.

Avatar is an ingeniously marketed but ultimately empty piece of exhibitionist technology. It is expressly designed to be seen and disposed; the film doesn't linger on a single image, emotion, or idea long enough for anything to register. Like the 3D process Cameron employs, Avatar is just about throwing things out at you, attempting to delight and wow you with its sights and sounds, but its effect is ultimately numbing. James Cameron has shown himself to be in roughly the same film making class as George Lucas: a man who has always been on the forefront of pushing cinematic technology further, but in the CGI-era when anything that can be imagined can be put on a screen, they have allowed technology to override the human interest in their movies. In spite of the fact that Cameron waited 10 years for technology to catch up with his grandiose vision, he was probably better off when a lack of technology forced him to imaginatively make a movie.

The Human Touch: Fantastic Mr. Fox

2010-02-07T20:00:00.015-05:00

Wes Anderson has always had something of a storybook aesthetic and with his latest, the consistently delightful Fantastic Mr. Fox, the Prince of the American Eccentrics has succeeded in doing something far greater - and much more meaningful - than merely adapting a story to the screen; he has brought a picture book, the kind we all grew up, to vibrant, spirited life. Adapting Roald Dahl's picture book to the screen (the first book he ever owned), Anderson has clearly made a deeply personal work, one you can sense he's wanted to make since he was a child. But Anderson is much too sophisticated an artist to make a film for the child inside him - he fleshes out Roald Dahl's story with a distinctly mature and adult sensibility, and that makes the film more rewarding than the typical family fare that pollutes multiplexes year after year. In a time when movies, especially animated movies, merely cater to their target audience to distract them for a few hours in exchange for a 10 dollar ticket, Wes Anderson has dared to bring a personal vision to the family movie.

Wes Anderson is a film maker who finds beauty in flaws, and in Fantastic Mr. Fox Anderson manifests human foibles - quirks, if you will - in the form of animals: examinations of masculinity, femininity, family, adolescence, and class are all put at the forefront of the movie, and that in itself elevates it above the diversionary family entertainment that the form of animation is unfortunately confined to. Anderson paints the portrait of an animal society where every creature has a well defined role in the animal community; be it a real estate agent, a super, a chef, a lawyer, a musician, a painter, or the author of newspaper editorials - and this is an extremely meaningful linking of a capitalistic society to that of the natural order of the animal kingdom. This examination of a civilization where each person (animal) has a different but equally meaningful place in it is perhaps Anderson's most well pronounced rumination on the true meaning of a community, a theme that has always permeated his work.

But this film is also an examination on the manner in which a civilized society neuters our animal instincts. When we're first introduced to Mr. Fox, he is a wise cracking, arrogant, and untamed wild beast; sneaking onto farms and stealing himself some dinner. Needless to say, this is a dangerous line of work, what with angry farmers who don't like having their property raided by a hungry fox. In the opening scene, Mr. Fox and his wife get caught in a fox trap on a squab farm, and his wife drops the bombshell: she's pregnant, and should they escape the farmer's clutches, she demands that he find another, less dangerous, line of work. Flash forward to 2 years (12 fox years) later, and Mr. Fox is distinctly middle class; a domesticated father, husband, and working man, writing newspaper editorials for the local rag newspaper. He wants to move out of their little hole in the ground (literally) because it 'makes [him] feel poor', and he brazenly ignores the advice of his wife and lawyer (Bill Murray, here manifested in badger form, of the law firm Badger, Beaver & Beaver) and buys himself a house a stone's throw away from the farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean: "three of the nastiest, meanest, ugliest farmers in the history of this valley". He does this despite the fact that, as his voice of reason wife points out, foxes live in holes for a reason.

The three neighboring farms light Fox's instincts afire. Fox hatches a Master Plan with the help of his loyal opossum super and friend Kylie to raid each of the local farms over the course of three nights. As he and Kylie sneak onto the farms and steal the farmer's squabs, apples, and alcoholic cider, Fox's Master Plan quickly reveals itself to be more about territoriality than survival, more about hubris than instincts. Fox is simply getting a kick out of 'cussing with their heads'. With this, Anderson reduces masculinity to its animalistic essence, as the back and forth between the animals and the farmers becomes a literal pissing contest. The farmers first attempt to simply shoot the fox, so he runs into his house. The farmers tear the tree down, the foxes dig underground. The farmers rent tractors, the foxes dig further underground. Survival, not social status, becomes the priority of Fox and his family.

However, Fox's antics create something of a crisis in the film's animal society. The farmers' attempts to dig out the Fox family displaces the other animals within his community, and this leads to the typical Andersonian third act where the lovable scamp patriarch convinces everyone to give him another chance and join up with him in an attempt to correct his wrongs. In spite of the fact that this is typical thematic material for Anderson, it feels fresh, mostly because the cast of animal puppets recontextualizes motifs that have come to define Anderson as an artist.

And yet this film is more than an animated Life Aquatic - it is a technical marvel, the most incredible technical achievement of 2009, in spite of the crock of shit James Cameron and his partisans are trying to sell. Every frame is packed with detail; I've seen the film several times and still haven't even come close to absorbing all the nuances that adorn each and every one of Anderson's delicate compositions. And the plethora of detail isn't superfluous eye candy - art design has always been a vital element of his films, saying as much as about his characters and the world they inhabit as their words and actions do. The level of detail both in the puppets and the sets are simply eye popping, and the use of animal fur is one of the many little touches that makes the world feel organic. The animals look so real that you want to reach out and touch them.

The voice acting is also some of the best I have ever heard in an animated movie. Generally in American animated films, the 'name' casting feels utterly tacked on; take the animated films of Dreamworks, for instance, where the character and the voice that emanates from it don't seem to match at all. For Fantastic Mr. Fox Anderson abandoned the usual process of recording in a studio and instead did location recording; in attics, cellars, and in the woods, and that brings a certain ease and spontaneity to the voice performances. There is such a relaxed, almost naturalistic delivery by the voice actors here that you almost completely forget that you're watching puppets synced up to a recorded soundtrack. George Clooney's smooth baritone is a perfect fit for the titular sly fox, Meryl Streep drops the theatrics and is instead soothing as Mrs. Fox, and Jason Schwartzman captures adolescence in all its awkward glory as poignantly as he did in Rushmore over 10 years ago. The supporting players are Anderson's usual cast of characters, merely manifested as animal puppets, so that lends a tone of familiarity to those of us who are familiar with his previous work.

Anderson acolytes and detractors alike will notice how perfectly he has transposed his aesthetic - perhaps the most singular vision in modern American movies - to animation, and some writers have used the fact that he seems to work more comfortably within the realm of animated movies to backhandedly diss his earlier work, specifically his last two, wildly misunderstood movies; as though making idiosyncratic pictures is the worst thing a person could do (perhaps these people live in a fantasy world where too many people are making movies on their own terms). Yes, animation affords Anderson the opportunity to fashion an even more distinct world then he usually does, but Anderson's cinematic universe is and always has been intimately connected to the world we live in, and this connection has never been more evident than in the stop motion puppetry of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Anniversary

2010-01-31T22:30:00.005-05:00

So, as I sit here at my kitchen counter on this bitter cold Sunday evening, there is a feeling gnawing away at me that this --- this --- is an important day. A monumental day. A historic day. Shit, it's an historic day, because we all know when something really important happens, in the historic sense, you use an instead of a, even though it's not grammatically pertinent. But whatever, gramaturgical (I made that word up) exceptions must be made for important, monumental, historic days like this one.

Yes, you guessed right, on this day 49 years ago, Ham the Chimp became the first almost-human to go into outer space. Here's the cute little guy preparing for his intergalactic adventure:

Also, one year ago today, your humble host was bored on a Saturday night at work and said to himself "Oh, what the hell, I'll throw my hat into the film criticism blogsophere". Three book deals, millions of fans, and 165,203 posts later (approximately), here we are.

I would just like to take this opportunity to extend a hearty thanks to all my readers and fellow film bloggers who have been nothing but kind and welcoming to me over the course of the last year. Even during my long hiatuses (which I most sincerely apologize for, and hope to put a stop to) I've come back to writing and felt like no time has passed at all. That people have responded to my writing and felt compelled to share their thoughts here means more to me than I can express, at least without getting all lame and mushy, and maybe even crying a little, so I'm not even going to try. Just understand that it means a great deal of me, and I hope to be a little more prolific moving in to my second year of blogging.

So, from the bottom of my cold, black heart™: thanks, everybody. You've made blogging fun and rewarding all at once.

Posts of substance forthcoming. I promise.

CooCoo for CoCo

2010-01-20T22:00:00.005-05:00

The internet firestorm that Lenogate has created is noteworthy to me insofar as it's the first thing that has fired up youth culture since that Obama guy decided he was gonna run for President. O'Brien doesn't merely have supporters, he has partisans, and Leno doesn't have detractors, he has mortal enemies who hate his fucking guts. It's the McCain/Obama dichotomy all over again; the hip, youth centric voice of tomorrow versus the older, decidedly un-hip codger who seems to be out of a different era. And they're both going head-to-head in a battle to claim the highest office in the Television land; the house that Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson built. Only there's no election, as TV Land is a totalitarian state.

But just look at this "I'm with CoCo" picture, which I find frankly disturbing, and which (not incidentally, I'm sure) resembles the iconic Obama image:

Now, I happen to like O'Brien much more than I like Leno (or Obama, for that matter), but I simply can't get too fired up about this little Late Night fiasco. Frankly, I don't think the time slot suited O'Brien too well. I watched his very first Tonight Show way back in the summer and couldn't help but feel like it wasn't the same O'Brien that I'd been watching all the years prior. Maybe I'd just grown fond of having him in New York, but there was also a kind of anarchy to The Late Show show where, even though obviously everything was scripted, the proceeds felt loose and relaxed. You felt like anything could happen because O'Brien himself was such a burst of spontaneous energy. His Tonight Show, by comparison, felt neutered and safe. The wild, unpredictable energy that I'd always loved about O'Brien was simply absent. And if I had to take a wild stab as to why his show failed, it would be because Conan wasn't Conan enough for the Late Show fans, and the people who'd grown attached to Jay Leno for the 20 or so years that he'd been doing The Tonight Show were put off by the nerdy, quirky, Harvard educated host that had replaced him. For example, O'Brien's mantra when he began preparing his version of The Tonight Show was "What Would Tati Do?" --- Jacques muthafuckin' Tati. Do you think the people who tuned in to watch Leno's middlebrow (to be diplomatic) humor over the years have even the faintest idea who in the hell Jacques Tati is? I suggest that his show is being canned not because NBC is ignoring the will of the people (and they are a private company who has no obligation to the will of the people, anyway), I suggest that it's being canceled because it wasn't very good and failed to find an audience. No great conspiracy.

But I can't help but be amused by this internet campaign and the passionate defense of O'Brien this has brought about. I just want to suggest to all the people signing internet petitions, threatening to picket outside NBC studios, and boycotting NBC networks that this whole ugly situation could have been easily avoided if you'd only watched the show in the first place. If Conan was pulling in the kind of ratings he is now this wouldn't be an issue. Most all of these Conan partisans are people who never bothered to watch his Tonight Show before this week. Yes, kicking O'Brien off the show before it even had a chance to find an audience is Busch League, and putting Leno on in front of him didn't exactly help, but wasn't it also Busch League to kick Leno off his show when it was in first place, strictly to hold on to Conan? NBC took a gamble that simply did not work. O'Brien will be just fine; he will find another show with another network, and perhaps he will be allowed to be himself instead of having to live up to the standard of a (largely imagined) television legacy. And everything will be fine and dandy.

Now, may I suggest we get fired up about something worth getting fired up about, like FILM PRESERVATION?!?!?! Coming soon.

The Decade That Was

2009-12-31T17:00:00.016-05:00

It's that time of year, with another year over and a new one about to begin, when we all embrace the opportunity to be all reflective and contemplative about what's come before. This is doubly true with a new decade upon us, when we can reflect on the last ten years and what they meant to us --- or didn't, as the case may be.

Myself, I'm not quite so sentimental, but it's certainly as appropriate a time as any to reflect on the cinematic times that have come to pass. I quite resent the notion that the 00s have represented some kind of nadir of cinema --- as with every other era in movie history, there is the good and the bad. I don't think it's fair to judge the decade from the B to Z movies; we should evaluate the decade based on the quality of the best films, not the worst. And this decade was ripe with works that confirmed the cinema as a powerful art form. Don't listen to the people who tell you the form is on the decline; they're just not looking hard enough.

I will admit some bias in this area. The 00s represent my first full fledged decade of cinephilia, and thus I am partial to it. I was but 11 years old when the decade began, so naturally most of the truly memorable cinematic experiences I've had in my life (be it in a theater or at home) have come in the last ten years. It's important to have a respect for and understanding of what came before, of course, but appreciating what's fresh and new is equally as important an aspect of loving movies.

So, here's the movies that mattered most to me these last ten years, arranged chronologically. To make my life easy, I'm going by initial release dates, not necessarily American ones, so don't bother pointing that out to me. If the movie never had a proper theatrical release, I'll go by initial festival debut. Blind spots are too numerous to mention, so think of this not as an authoritative list, but as an ever expanding work in progress, one that I will probably post an addendum to on a yearly basis. Take a walk through the movies with me, won't you?

Mission to Mars (Brian De Palma, 2000): For me, the first great movie of the decade, and also among its most reviled, though why I'm not exactly sure. But it's a wild, bold, and beautiful take on our place in the Universe, and the miracle and wonder of existence --- simultaneously sophisticated and pulpy. You may read my humble thoughts on the picture here.

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000): I may not be the most objective critic of Wong Kar Wai, whose imagery I find so intoxicating, whose world-view I find so earnest, and whose sense of romance I find so passionate that I'm generally even taken with lesser works. In the Mood for Love, however, is no lesser work --- it may be Wong's most fully realized film. This tale of the unconsummated love affair between Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) still manages to be as sensual and romantic as any of Bertolucci's sex dramas.

George Washington (David Gordon Green 2000): A poetic rumination on childhood and the South --- like a cosmic, earthy Killer of Sheep.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (The Coen brothers, 2000): The Coens' take on American folklore elevates modern American history to a unique blending of myth, fairy tale, and folk legend. Stunning cinematography by Roger Deakins, and a brilliant soundtrack to boot.

In Praise of Love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001): Godard best sums up the great aesthetic divide of the 21st century with In Praise of Love, half of which shot on black & white 35mm celluloid, the other half shot with video. As always with Godard, he tells us a story but also introduces a serious discourse on film, culture, and politics.

Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001): Miyazaki brings his unique stamp to an Alice in Wonderland type story, but he doesn't just give us eye candy, he's careful to dramatize the coming of age of his heroine.

A.I. (Steven Spielberg, 2001): I'm gonna have to side with Jonathan Rosenbaum and pick this as my favorite movie of the decade. A brilliant pairing of perhaps cinema's greatest mind, Stanley Kubrick, and cinema's greatest eye, Steven Spielberg, is much more than a mish-mashing of sensibilities; it's filled to the brim with ideas and insight into humanity, art, and existence in general. It's also packed with some of the most dazzling imagery in modern cinema, like a 21st Century silent movie. Those who interpret the ending as sentimental need to watch it again as, like Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, it uses the so-called 'sentimentality' as a mask for much more disturbing subtext.

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001): David Lynch's sad, strange tale of romance is also a bold critiquing of Hollywood convention and formula, deconstructing the very notion of Hollywood as a kind of earthly Oz. What started off as a Hollywood version of Twin Peaks became one of the most tragic love stories ever committed to film.

ABC Africa (Abbas Kiarostami, 2001): Kiarostami's first foray into digital is a startlingly humanist insight into the economic and political strife that still plagues the continent of Africa. Whereas many documentaries of this ilk are opportunistic and patronizing, Kiarostami's film is full of life and energy. Pure digital poetry.

The Man Who Wasn't There (The Coen Brothers, 2001): The Coens take on film-noir is one of their finest existentialist comedies. Like most of their best work, it has a unique grounding in, and understanding of, film history and genre.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001): A brilliantly conceived adaptation of Tolkien's seminal work. I'm only including the first one, because I feel that as the series went on they just got sillier and sillier, with Jackson trying to cram as many details from the novels as possible instead of fleshing out his own cinematic world. They don't play well outside of a multiplex. But as a self contained unit, Fellowship of the Ring holds up rather well.

Punch Drunk Love (P.T. Anderson, 2002): P.T. Anderson's unique love story about two outsiders is a wonderful reflection of alienation and disenfranchisement in the modern world. Every frame is absolutely stunning, and Adam Sandler turns in a performance that is nothing short of a revelation.

Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002): The ultimate De Palma movie. I really can't think of much else to say about it in blurb form.

25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002): Spike Lee's tale of machismo and loss is also a startling reflection of New York in the weeks and months following 9/11, to the point where you can almost smell the burning rubble. In addition to being a moving drama, with a career performance from Edward Norton, it stands as a filmic record of one of the darkest hours in American history.

Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002): Scorsese's sprawling epic is also a brilliant microcosm of racial and political tensions in 1860s America. Unlike most of the other epic films of the 00s, this one is mostly absent of CGI, and that lends the film an aura of intimacy and authenticity.

Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002): Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives home from school one day to find a lawyer in his apartment. The lawyer gives him a Sophie's choice of sorts --- his parents are getting a divorce, and he has to pick which parent he wants to live with. Instead of choosing, he runs away --- and in this one single image, Spielberg captures youth as the blending of anarchy and confusion that it is. While many of Spielberg's films deal in fantasy, this film is about a youth that attempts to live in a fantasy world, like an adolescent James Bond. He instead has to come to a harsh understanding of reality.

The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003): Bertolucci simultaneously criticizes and romanticizes youth in his brilliant The Dreamers, perhaps his best film since the 70s (Bertolucci is another director I find intoxicating so, again, I may not be the most objective of critics). Like an intimate, sexy version of Godard's La Chinoise.

Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003): I'm counting Tarantino's fractured epic as one movie, in spite of the fact that it was released in two installments. To truly appreciate the scope of Tarantino's vision, you pretty much have to treat it as one movie, in spite of the fact that the Weinstein's chose to milk every last penny out of it by releasing his 4 hour vision in two parts. Volume 1 may be balls to the wall action, and in that it's fairly unique amongst his movies, but in the second volume he gives the characters meaning, depth, and gravity, transforming what were comic book archetypes in the first volume into flesh and blood. Taken as a whole it's a rather stunning achievement.

Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003): I do not think Elephant is a great film by any means; truth be told, I'm not even sure it's a very good one. It's ideologically confused, and towards the end attempts to pin school shootings on just a couple of bad eggs, almost refusing to engage with the manner in which High School culture makes youth feel isolated, alone, and confused. But, whether Van Sant means to or not, this is an important film that deals with an issue that has defined a generation (including mine), that is the issue of schools becoming warzones. Van Sant, instead of trying to find one exact reason why Columbine-type school shootings happen, takes an almost cosmic perspective towards a school shooting.

The Company (Robert Altman, 2003): Robert Altman's first foray into digital stunningly captures the majesty of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, like a painting in motion. Worthy of consideration with Altman's other great ensemble dramas.

Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar, 2004): Almodovar's tale of sexual abuse in Franco-era Spain is so personal as to make one uncomfortable during the viewing of it. Almodovar claims to have worked on the script for 10 years, and it shows --- the film is masterfully interwoven, coming together for an almost Hitchockian finale. That the film came out during the biggest child abuse scandal in the history of the Catholic church only adds to its impact.

Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, 2004): A moving and insightful film that beautifully illustrates that classicism is as much a part of why abortion was illegal as sexism --- and the manner in which the two are intimately interrelated. Though made in the heat of an ongoing and ever present abortion debate, Vera Drake never feels cheaply political.

Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004): Miyazaki's follow up to his great Spirited Away suffered from a bit of a backlash effect --- how is this movie anything less than stunning from first frame to last? In addition to being another of Miyazaki’s aesthetically rich works, it has a beautifully articulated antiwar sentiment.

Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004): Perhaps the decades funniest movie – in addition to having a brilliantly funny script and great comedic actors (most of whom worked together on the sitcom Spaced), it has great visual humor that relies on composition, camera movement, and the use of space for its ultimate effect. Oh, and the picture’s insights into the zombified nature of modern culture are more apt. than in the George A. Romero film from which it apes its title. Just sayin’.

The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004): I think it speaks to the scope of Steven Spielberg that his most modestly scaled film of the last ten years includes a full scale recreation of JFK Airport on a sound stage, a rather incredible feat. Though he tried to find a real airport that would allow him to film there before deciding to film on a set, this is very much to the film's benefit --- who would want to spend two hours trapped in a real airport? Instead, Spielberg's airport is as fantastic as anything he's ever filmed. The film's sensibility lies somewhere between Capra and Tati; simultaneously a sentimental fairy tale and a detached look at modern society. The Terminal also has one of the most nuanced looks into post 9/11 America, particularly the way the Patriot Act created something of a Police State.

Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004): I have mixed feelings about Solondz --- I admire Welcome to the Dollhouse very much, loathed Happiness, and appreciated Storytelling somewhat, so going into Palindromes I wasn’t quite sure how I’d react to it. It’s certainly typical Solondz subject matter; a 13 year old girl named Aviva (the cousin of Welcome to the Dollhouse’s Dawn Weiner, whose funeral opens this film) wants someone to love her, so she seeks to become pregnant by any means necessary, what’s different --- and revelatory – is the execution. Solondz has Aviva played by 13 different actresses; some children, some adults, some black, some white, but each revealing a new layer of meaning, and lending the film an almost fairy tale nature.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004): Epic film making never felt so personal. In terms of ambition and scope, The Life Aquatic stands virtually alone in the pantheon of American cinema in the 00s. A beautiful, moving film about family and the majesty of Planet Earth. If The Life Aquatic is a failure, what's a success?

War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005): Who but Steven Spielberg would give the world the first avant-garde blockbuster? Spielberg tackles his usual theme of family (specifically fatherhood), but he focuses it through the prism of post-9/11 dread. The film is a channeling of 9/11 imagery into the annals of science fiction. A haunting, beautiful nightmare.

Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005): The second part of Spielberg's incredible one-two punch of 2005, and to be truly appreciated it must be seen through the prism of War of the Worlds. I had mixed feelings about War of the Worlds when I first saw it in the summer of 2005, but when I saw Munich at the end of that year, I began to understand exactly what it was Spielberg was going for. If War of the Worlds is the dream, then Munich is the reality. You wake up and begin to comprehend the dream logic; what seemed illogical, even nonsensical, suddenly makes perfect sense. So much more than a timely film about what is perhaps the most important (and complex) issue facing the world today --- the split between Israel and Palestine --- Munich is ultimately about the manner in which violence perpetuates itself. It's the most intellectual case for pacifism ever made in an American movie. The final image, which shows the World Trade Center off in the distance simply waiting to be destroyed --- yet another casualty of the Israel/Palestine conflict --- sends the message home in a powerful way.

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005): Terrence Malick makes an old story (one of the oldest) feel completely fresh and new in The New World; the film is about the magic, and horror, of discovery. When the Native Americans and the Colonialists go to battle for the first time, it doesn't feel like a foregone conclusion --- in Malick's hands, it really does feel like the first time.

Planet Earth (Alastair Fothergill, 2006): I know it's cheating including this on my list, as the mini-series Planet Earth --- which debuted on the BBC and had its American broadcast on the Discovery channel --- really isn't a feature film. But it's certainly cinema; an awe-inspiring, humbling filmic record of the beauty and mysteries of the rock we all call home. Using some of the most advanced digital cameras in the world, Planet Earth captures the planet and the life that populates it in a way that's never been seen before. The camera's had up to 40X magnification which allowed the documentarians to observe the animals from a distance, and they also had a special infra-red lens that made filming in pitch darkness as easy as filming in broad daylight, thus allowing the documentarians to record animals without the obstruction of heavy lighting equipment. The 40x zoom also allowed them to film from high in the sky, following predators as they capture their prey (one particularly striking sequence captures a Cheetah running at full speed through an open space to capture dinner). All in all, perhaps the most incredible nature documentary ever made.

Volver (Pedro Almodovar, 2006): Picture Hitchcock and Cukor collaborating on a Spanish version of The Women and you begin to understand the unique vibrations of this Almodovar masterpiece.

A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, 2006): What would become Altman's last film really is one of his best; the sometimes mean-spirited tone of some of his later work is completely stripped away in this buoyantly humanist tale of the last broadcast of an old-time radio show, one of a dying breed. More than just cinematic nostalgia, this film is about building a bridge from the old to the new, from youth to old age, from life to death. A truly beautiful, moving picture, and a fitting end to one of the greatest careers in American cinema.

Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006): Mann's film adaptation of his own television show is one of the most intimate, romantic, stripped down blockbusters ever made; reducing action movie cliches to their existential essence. A bold, exciting use of digital film making tools that could never have been done with traditional celluloid.

Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006): Like a pop music equivalent of Fantasia, Miller's animated masterpiece finds the perfect piece of music --- be it The Beach Boys or The Beatles or Prince --- to accompany its visual rhythms. The most inventive computer animated movie since Toy Story, and to my eyes better than anything Pixar has done since that debut film.

Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006): David Lynch's first digital video excursion is perhaps his purest work since his seminal debut Eraserhead. Full of dream logic, loose connectives, and haunting imagery, Inland Empire is one hell of a trip.

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007): Tarantino's contribution to the Grindhouse double feature is a brilliant summation and transcending of screen misogyny, specifically as perpetuated by the horror genre.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (Matt Maiellaro & David Willis, 2007): The only real example of surreal animation out of America that I can think of, the film version of Adult Swim's Aqua Teen Hunger Force is a brutal, gleeful slaughtering of Hollywood convention and formula. Not to mention it's fucking hilarious.

Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2007): Werner Hezog's English language debut is a beautiful tale of humanity and brotherhood in a POW camp during the Vietnam War. Like most of Herzog's work, more about the war between man and nature than between man and man.

The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007): Wes Anderson's masterpiece was accused of racism by a great many people --- because it dare be about white people (eww!) who go to a Third World country and learn the meaning of family, brotherhood, and love. Of course, it's not as lame as I make it sound, because Anderson's film is as much about the fact that rich white people seem to have a thing for going to India to 'find themselves'.

No Country for Old Men (The Coen Brothers, 2007): The Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel brilliantly sums up the emotional anxiety of living in post 9/11, post Iraq War America. Though described as apolitical by some detractors, I think this label is inaccurate --- just because it's not polemical doesn't mean it isn't political. It's more about an emotional state of mind than a specific sociological event.

My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wai, 2007): Wong Kar Wai's wildly romantic tale of human connection is like a compact Short Cuts. It's about the way human beings, in spite of needing isolation, really thrive on one another. Another stunner from Master Wong.

Youth Without Youth (Francis Ford Coppola, 2007): Francis Ford Coppola's startling cinematic comeback is perhaps the most incredible use of the form of digital thus far. The story, about an elderly man who is struck by lightning and begins to age backwards, is a perfect metaphor for an aged film maker rejuvenated by new film making tools. Coppola is back in a big way.

Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2008): Truthfully, outside of the original Night of the Living Dead, Romero's zombie films always left me a bit cold. The much lauded Dawn of the Dead struck me as sanctimonious and obvious ("Oh, I get it, putting the zombies in a mall is really a commentary on consumerist culture! Oh George, you ol' sly boots.), and that may be doubly true of Day of the Dead. I found Land of the Dead's themes of class distinction to be far more subtle and thematically appropriate than the social import in his earlier pictures, and I think the small scale Diary of the Dead is probably the best of the Dead films since the first. Diary of the Dead, while channeling post 9/11 and Iraq War dread, is also about the manner in which the digital age has radically changed the way in which information is shared --- themes Brian De Palma fumbled in his cheap anti-war diatribe Redacted. Unlike other horror films which use the first person technique strictly for cheap scares, Romero uses this perspective to approach the horror genre --- and politics --- from a new, incredibly revealing angle.

Chop Shop (Raman Bahrani, 2008): A lyrical look into the poverty and destitution in Flushing, New York is never oppressively glum. Bahrani instead offers us a poetic insight into the daily existence of his characters, mercifully avoiding the patronizing liberal guilt trip that plagues so many films about the poor.

Happy Go Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008): A thoroughly wonderful film featuring perhaps the performance of the decade (Sally Hawkins), Leigh's Happy Go Lucky is a beautiful insight into human nature and the way our behavior affects everyone we come into contact with, whether we realize it or not.

Speed Racer (The Wachowski Brothers, 2008): The computer effects that George Lucas used as a toy the Wachowski's use as a tool in the unfairly maligned Speed Racer --- a case in which the form, groundbreaking and unique though it is, was all most who watched it could see. A brilliant anti-corporate fable, painted on the screen with a stunning palette of bright colors.

RocknRolla (Guy Ritchie, 2008): I never, ever thought I'd love a Guy Ritchie movie. My first exposure to him was Snatch, which I thought (and still do think) was just stupid. I didn't much care for his debut Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels either. He just struck me as another in a long line of Tarantino wannabes, only without the sense of movie history that makes Tarantino unique. I decided to give Revolver a chance when several people whose opinions I trust used superlatives when describing it, and that was certainly the film of his that won me over. However, I find RocknRolla to be a much more complete film; full of the same exciting style of Revolver, but it has far more charm, wit, and grace.

Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008): Kiarostami's adaptation of the legend of "Khosrow and Shirin" is a completely radical reinvention of traditional cinematic storytelling. Instead of watching the film unfold in a traditional manner, we watch an audience as they watch the film, and we only hear a very carefully (and expertly) arranged soundtrack --- all we see for 90 minutes are the enraptured faces of the spectators of the film. It's like two films in one; in addition to being told the story of "Khosrow and Shirin", Kiarostami's film is a brilliant investigation into how cinema --- and art in general --- affects us.

Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008): Approximately a half hour into Demme's brilliant Rachel Getting Married, tears began flowing from my eyes; not tears of sadness, but tears of joy, for the depth and breadth of human experience is so beautifully and poignantly rendered in Demme's collage that I found it impossible not to be moved by it. In most films the images simply unfold, but in Rachel Getting Married, they dance.

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009): A truly inventive animated film that attempts to move the form past the trivializing notion of 'family entertainment'. Fuck Avatar and Up, Coraline is still the only inventive use of 3D I've ever seen. My review here.

The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009): I'd been lukewarm on Jarmusch up to this point; always admiring his beautiful compositions but generally being left cold by the actual content of his films. This was definitely *the* Jarmusch picture for me, and has helped me look at his filmography in a completely different light. Maybe my favorite of 2009 at this point.

Tetro (Fracis Ford Coppola, 2009): Another Coppola revelation, formally speaking it's the complete opposite of Youth Without Youth, but they both indicate an artist moving into perhaps his richest phase yet. My take here.

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009): Tarantino's final film of the decade proved he was the maker of the most idiosyncratic epic films of the last ten years. Review here.

This Is It (Kenny Ortega, 2009): I initially planned to avoid This Is It entirely, as I didn't want to contribute any of my money to the "Michael Jackson Death Fund", but I'm glad I caved, as This Is It is worthy of consideration with any of the other great concert films you can think of. It's also different from any other concert film; as opposed to providing a filmic record of a concert, This Is It is about the concert we never got to see. And, from the looks of it, the world missed a hell of a show. Though MJ is saving his energy for the actual show through most of the film, every once in a while he feels the music and simply can't help but get into his performance, and seeing inspiration flow through his body --- especially during a beautiful rendition of "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" --- is one of the great moments at the movies in 2009.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009): The last great movie I saw this decade is also perhaps the best American animated film of the last ten years; Anderson's compositions perfectly fleshes out a storybook aesthetic, but this is much more than kids stuff --- though his cast is furry, Anderson's film is ultimately about humanity, as all of his pictures are.

A Happy New Year to all of you, and a Happy New Decade as well. Thanks to all of you for making my first year of blogging memorable. I feel like many of you have become my friends over the course of the last few months, and I'm looking forward to my first full year of blogging.

Nitpickers may feel free to point out that the next decade doesn't actually begin until 2011 in the comment section.
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A special thanks to my pal Rob Humanick, who grabbed that there Aqua Teen Hunger Force screencap for me at virtually a moment's notice.

Growing Up with the Movies

2009-12-03T21:00:00.006-05:00

The blogger known by the handle The Kid in the Front Row has instigated a blogathon, which states that the participants recount an experience at the movies that's particularly memorable. Now, I'm much too indecisive to pick just one solitary night at the movies; so many incredible experiences are so ingrained into my psyche that I'd feel bad leaving so many out. So, in chronological order, here are some experiences at the movies that have helped define the person I am today (take that as you will).

We probably all had a time when we started to appreciate movies differently, more substantially, when our understanding of movies become more enriched. If I could draw it to a point, I'd say at the start of High School is when I began to expand my cinematic horizons. I began to watch older movies, foreign movies, or generally anything that was canonized in any way. Due to this, as I got older and older I could feel that my taste was out of sync with those of my peers. Some of them didn't like going on to movies because I would dare be critical of them. Also, when I hit High School, I began to take myself to movies and didn't rely on my parents to drop off and pick up, so going to the movies became less of a special, once in a while thing, and more an ingrained part of my day to day existence. Due to this, from 2002 and onward there are plenty of movies I saw that left a great imprint on me, but this list will only cover pre 2002, thereby reflecting the time in my life when my going to see a movie was a rare occurence --- and the true great experiences were few and far between.

Beauty and the Beast
Circa Christmas 1991

This is the first movie I have clear memories of seeing, and thus it warrants an inclusion on this list regardless of quality. That it happens to be the last watchable, let alone good movie that Disney's hand drawn animation studio made is beside the point, but it certainly doesn't hurt. I was like 3 years old at the time, so my memory is hazy to say the least, but I remember getting very, very upset when Gaston plummets to his death from atop the Beast's castle. I mean, that had to hurt really bad.

Jurassic Park
Circa Summer 1993

Again, I was 4-going-on-5 when I saw this movie, so my memories of it are hazy, but they're more clearly defined than my memories of Beauty and the Beast. This was the first non-Disney, non-animated, non G-rate movie I saw in a movie theater, and I remember being very excited to be seeing something that wasn't expressly 'kiddy'. I remember being scared shitless during the film's claustrophobic, expressionistic opening sequence, being in awe when we got our first glimpse of dinosaur's (the Brontosaurus sequence is quintessential Spielberg --- human beings eclipsed by technology), and then spending the rest of the movie scared shitless when all hell (not to mention carnivores) breaks loose. Most people find the T-Rex sequence to be the scariest and most memorable, but it was the Raptors that had me watching the movie between my fingers --- I had nightmares about being chased by Raptors for years and years afterward. Besides, the T-Rex is basically the hero of the movie, saving our protagonists from certain, painful death (one of the most glorious Deus Ex Machina's in modern movies). Those Raptors, on the other hand, were real bastards.

Every movie lover has that movie: the movie they saw at just the right time in their childhood that will always stick out as being the one that showed them the real power of movies. For me, Jurassic Park is that movie, in that it's the first movie I remember having a visceral, intense reaction to, and for that it will always have a place in my heart.

Toy Story
Circa December 1995

Not many movies have the distinction of being the first of a kind, but Toy Story certainly is that; and a thoroughly charming, clever, and incredibly economic one at that. I remember before we left for the movies, my parents gave me the choice between seeing this and Jumanji, for whatever reason. I chose wisely. Little did I know at the time that I'd seen Disney's swan song, their last truly great contribution to the moving image, nor did I have any conception that Pixar would some day become my mortal enemy. I just loved the movie to death, and still do.

Star Wars (none of this A New Hope shit)
Circa early 1997

I was late to the whole Star Wars party, about 20 years late, to be exact. I hadn't even heard of the movie before I started to see advertisements about the re-release of the so-called special edition of the movie, just in time for its 20th anniversary, and to help build anticipation for the upcoming series of prequels. The experience is memorable for me for many reasons; it's one of the few movies I saw in a theater as a child that actually tapped into a childlike sense of awe, and I went into the theater with virtually no expectations, because I had no idea what this movie was. I loved the movie's sense of adventure, the action, the characters, and it's sense of fun. But this is not the only reason it was memorable; I wanted to sit in the front, because I knew this was going to be a big movie, but my parents opted to sit in the middle/close to the back, so I got to sit by myself. Now, I know this seems relatively inconsequential, but to a 9 year old, this is a big deal. I felt so independent, and I remember sitting between a guy who was probably about 20 and some kid who was like 7, and chatting it up with them before and after the movie. Man, I felt so cool.

Titanic
Circa Christmas 1997

I know, I know, James Cameron's epic blockbuster is everything that's wrong with Hollywood film making: bloated, reliant on special effects, and hijacks history to tell a trite love story. Or at least, that's what I've been told, but it's hard (nay, impossible) to erase the impact that this movie had on my 9 year old self. I was always something of a history buff, so I was fascinated by the Titanic since I was about 6 years old. I remember the first movie I saw on the subject was the Clifton Webb version from the '50s, which is everything that Cameron's film is so often accused of being: overblown, tawdry melodrama that uses the ship as a backdrop for a trite familial drama. One thing that I don't think can be argued about Cameron's film is that the ship itself is the star of the show, and it's the humans that serve as the backdrop to the grandeur and tragedy of the ship, instead of the other way around. I also saw A Night to Remember a few years before, and though I enjoyed it for its factual recounting of the events of April 14, 1912, there was no dramatic grab to the movie, at least for me (the book is truly great, though, for precisely that reason).

And then, I remember hearing whispers of this huge Hollywood movie that was going to be about the Titanic. I remember hearing that this was going to be the most expensive movie ever made, and that painstaking attention was paid to every last detail of the ship. The recreation was going to be simply unprecedented. I remember it was due to come out in July of 1997, and then it being abruptly pushed back because the movie wasn't ready. I just had to see this movie, come hell or high water.

So, when December of 1997 finally rolled around (and it felt like a long wait --- this is the first movie I remember looking forward to for more than a year before it came out), and the movie became a phenomenon, my anticipation grew. I'd heard stories of people going to see the movie and being forced to stand in the back, I'd heard stories of people going to see it and then getting on line for the next showing, of people (especially teenage girls) walking out of the picture sobbing. This was the first time I remember living through a movie that captured the popular zeitgeist. Like it or not, this was a movie everyone just had to go see.

When I finally did see the movie, it was everything I could have hoped for. I would have been more than happy if the movie just provided a recreation of the ship that had captured my imagination, but I found the love story that is the film's dramatic center to be extremely involving and moving as well, and an apt representation of the tragedy of the ship. I also remember crying like a baby from the time the ship sank to the final shot, and all the way home. But I was always a giant sap. It's also the first movie I ever saw twice, once with each of my parents.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Circa December 2001

Being a 13 years old sucks enough, but the period after 9/11 was especially rough, what with my living in the Metropolitan area, and some good escapism was sorely needed. I couldn't get too terribly into Harry Potter, but I was intrigued by the upcoming Lord of the Rings movie, the first of a trilogy. I remember checking its IMDb page a day or two after it had come out, and was floored to see it had been voted to number 1 on the top 250! (when I cared about such things) Now, I was definitely curious. I hadn't read the books, and wasn't particularly familiar with the story, so I walked into the theater more or less cold, having no clue what was about to unfold before me. I was taken in by Jackson's film in the same way I was taken in by Star Wars just a few years earlier; I was seeing a complete, self contained, spectacularly detailed cinematic world. This was also something of the end of an era for me, as even by the time Jackson's incredibly inferior sequels rolled out, I found myself mostly bored by the movies (I tried watching The Two Towers the other night, and was struck by how incredibly silly and insubstantial it is --- what you see is what you get, if that much), but the first one, due to good timing as much as anything else, will always be a night at the movies that I treasure. Plus, The Fellowship of the Ring is full of promise, except I don't feel that Jackson's vision for the saga ever realized that promise.

If I was going to stretch this list into my adolescence/early adulthood, there would be dozens and dozens more movies listen, but I figure I've rambled enough for today, so I'll leave it at that for now.

#105

2009-11-05T10:45:00.006-05:00

George: Do you wanna talk about hotels, or do you wanna win some ball games?

Jeter: We won the World Series.

George: ... in 6 games.

Cinematic Paradise

2009-10-17T21:30:00.003-04:00

Today, the good folks who bring us the glorious Big Screen Classics series of revival film treated myself and my lovely girlfriend (among others) to a screening of the incomparable Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo. I've been to this theater exactly thrice in my life; my first time, I saw another Hitchock classic, North by Northwest, and I saw the original King Kong not long after that. Unfortunately, my work schedule has kept me from going to the screenings consistently, but if there's something really special I'll do my best to weasel my way out of it. I bring this up because what particularly strikes me about the Lafayette is the way the theater itself is as large a part of the movie watching experience as is the film itself (in the case of King Kong, an enjoyable if throw-away adventure, maybe even more so), and the way in which the theater dominates my memory of seeing those movies. Growing up in the age of the multiplex, where one theater is more or less indistinguishable from another, this is something more or less foreign to my cinephilia --- don't ask me where I saw Beauty and the Beast, Jurassic Park or Toy Story as a child, because I wouldn't be able to tell you. I could tell you that I saw them, and that those movies are as ingrained into my childhood experience as my first day of Kindergarten. I saw them at some multiplex here or there, where they shuffle you in and out like cattle. There are good multiplexes and bad multiplexes, but there's no such thing as a special one.

I remember the first time I set foot in Manhattan's Ziegfeld: I was blown away by its grandeur and majesty, and how much presentation mattered to the theater's proprietors. I'd only been in one single screen theater in my life up to that point, which was the shabby-if-charming (and now defunct) Rialto theater in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. Needless to say, it didn't have nuttin' on the Ziegfeld (but, come on, what theater does?), which I still consider an ideal place to watch a movie. Not just because they realize presentation matters (how many times have you been to a multiplex, only to have the projectionist mess it up --- assuming there's even one at all), but because going to the Ziegfeld feels more like going to live theater than it feels like going to some multiplex attached to a mall. This theater was my first glimpse into a bygone era of cinema, one where movies were the dominant form of popular entertainment and they mattered. Not when they were just product being exhibited for a brief window before being dumped on home video, but when films were more special and less disposable. When going to the movies was more than a time-waster for apathetic teenagers on the weekend (and I went to enough movies with enough apathetic teenagers in my life to be able to testify to this --- they don't care what they see, or even if it's any good).

If the Ziegfeld was my glimpse into this era, then the Lafayette allows me to dive head first into the Golden Age, almost like a time machine. With the exception of some minor renovations, the theater more or less appears now as it appeared in 1924, when it first opened. As you walk in (for the Big Screen Classics series, the door opens at 11 A.M. sharp) the distinctive sound of their Wurlitzer organ fills the air and serves as fantastic and unique pre-screening entertainment. Instead of inundating you with advertising for the latest terrible television show, the latest diabetic-breeding-soft-drink, or further crap you don't really need, the sonorous music of the Wurlitzer invites you to relax before the movie, and makes the experience that much more enjoyable. So much popcorn has been sold at the Lafayette theater in its 80+ year history that the smell is part of the very fabric of the building; it's in the walls and carpet, in the curtains and the seats. It's that intoxicating movie theater smell, and damn, it makes you want some popcorn something awful. And the prices at the concession stand are reasonable, not highway robbery like they are at even the best multiplex. This is what going to the movies should be; a reasonably priced experience that exists because of a love of and respect for movies, not to further the interests of advertisers and CEOs who don't even like movies, let alone understand or respect them.

And as for the movie itself, what more can be said of it that hasn't already been said? An aesthetically rich masterpiece with a tortured soul at its center, Vertigo is certainly one of Hitchcock's finest hours. Seeing it projected was like seeing it for the first time, and it's a film that never fails to devastate me. What starts out as a routine Hitchcock psychodrama quickly develops into one of the most tragic love stories ever committed to film, and it's the nuanced portrait of the two leads that keeps the drama grounded and believable, in spite of the fact that the movie makes you swallow its fair share of contrivances. But these contrivances seem incidental when you take into account the depth of feeling in the movie.

I will say that I've always found it interesting that Vertigo tends to be the go-to Hitchcock masterpiece (not interesting in the "that's way off base" kind of way, interesting in the "I'm surprised there isn't more debate on the subject" kind of way), because it's far from a crowd pleaser, to say the least. The first 70 minutes is a lot of exposition along with the most schmaltzy thing Hitchcock ever filmed in his career (the scene where Stewart and Novak kiss as waves crash into rocks behind them is a load of melodramatic hooey, unusually sentimental for Hitchock), and the final hour is just soul crushing devastation. If I had to take a guess as to why Vertigo is so highly regarded, I'd say it's because the film was unavailable for many years and, after a tepid initial reaction to the film (many critics complained that it was too much of a departure from the Hitchcock formula), the film feels like ours in a different way than the other Hitchcock greats do. No matter which way you cut it, this 'aint your daddy's Hitchcock, and I think Vertigo has struck a unique chord with younger movie lovers precisely because it was so misunderstood at the time of its release, and fell out of circulation for a decade.

Seeing Vertigo projected has always been something of a dream of mine, and it's thanks to all the wonderful, dedicated folks behind the Big Screen Classics series that my dream of seeing this landmark of 20th century cinema became a reality on this cold Saturday in October. Considering I live a stones throw away from New York, which is allegedly a hub for the arts, there is shockingly little respect for film history displayed in the Big Apple, and it's refreshing to know that there are people out there who care enough about the medium to put together a series of meaningful revival films for the good of the community; and they've proved that such a program can indeed be a success. They've been rewarded for having faith in their customers as opposed to giving them no credit at all, though the Big Screen Classics series strikes me as ultimately a labor of love, and should you ever be privileged enough to see a classic film at the great Lafayette Theater of Suffern, New York, you too will feel the love. It shines through in everything they do.

So, to Nelson Paige, Pete Apruzzese, and anyone else who brings us this indispensable series of classic cinema, I extend a most hearty thanks. Though I may not be able to go as often as I would like due to my work schedule, just knowing there are people who care enough to bring classic movies to our cinemas year after year gives me faith.

To my East Coast readers, the Lafayette Theater's schedule of classic films is available here, and Teaneck's Cedar Lane schedule is available here. If you have the time, be sure to check it out. You won't be disappointed.

Let My People Go

2009-10-06T15:30:00.009-04:00

I wasn't planning to stick my nose into this whole Roman Polanski fiasco, as it seems to be bringing out heated emotions from everyone in all corners of the internet. This is all a little surprising to me, because I don't seem to remember anyone really caring about Polanski on September 25, when he was still a 'fugitive from justice' --- presumably when people would be most outraged about his crime, while he was still living free and in the lap of luxury. Coming to this situation as something of an outsider, as Polanski has always been the fugitive rapist director in my lifetime, I can't help but be a little puzzled by the moralizing it's bringing out for those against him, and the righteous indignation and bleeding-heart sympathy it's bringing out for those in support of him. As usual, I'm just kind of sitting on the sidelines wondering exactly what the problem is; he committed a crime, plead guilty to said crime, skipped out of the country, moved to a country that wouldn't extradite him to the United States (smart), then traveled to a country that does extradite criminals to the United States (not smart), and then the United States had their request for extradition granted, and thus he was arrested. What exactly is the problem?

But with the arrest comes petitions, and this is what has floored me the most about Polanski's arrest. Not that there are those who can't help but feel bad for the guy --- he's had a life filled with tragedy that would probably seriously mess anyone up, and dare I say it would be almost inhuman to not feel at least a little sorry for a man who lost ~~his parents~~ his mother in the Holocaust, and had his pregnant wife murdered by cultists who took The White Album as some kind of Apocalyptic manifesto. It doesn't excuse his criminal act, but surely it casts this dastardly predator into a different light.

Now, I'm in no way part of the Polanski lynch-mob, but these Hollywood petitions are down-right crazy. Some real house-of-cards shit. Ignoring the fact that they really have no legal or moral standing to speak of, they're filled with shaky arguments and logical fallacies that wouldn't fly on a High School debate team. This petition, drafted by writer-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Neil Jordan, Sam Mendes, Taylor Hackdord, and Mike Nichols, makes some rather incredible claims:

"Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison."

Oh, the humanity! It's of course un-clear exactly what Lévy means by 'apprehended like a common terrorist' (as opposed to, what, an uncommon terrorist?) --- does Mssr. Lévy mean he was subject to waterboarding and other 'enhanced interrogation' methods? Is he implying that he was arrested without formal charges (a blatant distortion)? It's un-clear exactly what Mssr. Lévy means by this phrase, except for the fact that he means to guilt you into sympathizing with a rapist by using non-sequiturs (what one may call a 'strawman' argument). If an officer of the law can take a citizen of this country away in hand-cuffs just because the individual game them lip (doesn't that count as being treated like a terrorist, too?), then I don't really find the handling of Polanski's case to be un-just in any way. Surely this country is filled to the brim with un-just arrests every year, from simple drug possession to, um, being black in the vicinity of a police officer, so getting worked up over the arresting of an admitted child rapist strikes me as a bit... odd.

Moving on:

"He risks extradition to the United States for an episode that happened years ago and whose principal plaintiff repeatedly and emphatically declares she has put it behind her and abandoned any wish for legal proceedings."

Right, 'cept if we acquiesced to the victims wishes in every case, we would have a revenge system as opposed to a justice system. I suppose if Ms. Geimer were crying for Polanski to be put in front of the firing squad, Mssr. Lévy wouldn't take her opinion into consideration while attempting to exonerate Polanski.

"Seventy-six years old, a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland, Roman Polanski risks spending the rest of his life in jail for deeds which would be beyond the statute-of-limitations in Europe."

Then he should have raped the girl in Europe. What a putz!

"We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it."

At this point, Lévy is just trying to confuse you with a load of gibberish. Don't ask me what the phrase "martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio" means, and certainly don't ask Lévy. And I'm not sure how arresting a fugitive is somehow "unworthy" of the United States, or any other sovereign nation. But such concerns are trifle, no?

But that other petition, this one drafted by France’s Société des Auteurs, is so full of holes it makes Lévy's case seem air-tight. This petition has been graced with the presence of such signatories as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar, Wes Anderson, Wong Kar Wai, among many more, and while it's not as outwardly batshit crazy as the Lévy petition it's just as fundamentally illogical.

"We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski’s arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon arrival in Zurich (Switzerland) while on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award for his career in filmmaking.
His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.
Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him."

The astonishing news of Polanski's arrest. Yes, I too was astonished that Polanski, who more or less was going to get off scott-free for a very serious crime (one you or I would have no doubt been locked up without a moment's hesitation for), was dumb/arrogant/drunk enough to travel to a country that has extradition to the United States, because he just had to receive yet another award (remember when he didn't come to the Academy Awards for fear of being arrested? Going to Switzerland was every bit as dangerous). Many people use the fact that he fled the country as proof-positive of Polanski's scumbaggery, but I honestly have a hard time blaming him for his instincts of self-preservation. But, still, the dude was dumb enough to go to Switzerland, which has an extradition agreement with the United States, and expect to not be arrested (doesn't he ask his travel agent about these things?). Now, I understand that he had indeed gone back and forth over the years, but talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Hey now, wait a minute! Switzerland is a netural terriroty, man! That means they don't take sides:

"By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance, undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no-one [sic] can know the effects."

So film festivals and their patrons are granted diplomatic immunity? News to me. And I love how the the Société des Auteurs makes it out like the United States government is in opposition to the film festival itself, instead of just arresting a criminal that they have been trying to arrest for 30 odd years.

But the real kicker is that the Société des Auteurs is using the fact that Switzerland is a neutral country as a defense of Polanski. Perhaps they don't realize that neutrality is a term that refers strictly to warfare, which really doesn't have anything to do with extradition, now does it?

"Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renown [sic] and international artist now facing extradition. This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom."

File this one under "DUH".

"Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians everyone involved in international filmmaking want him to know that he has their support and friendship.

On September 16th, 2009, Mr. Charles Rivkin, the US Ambassador to France, received French artists and intellectuals at the embassy. He presented to them the new Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the embassy, Ms Judith Baroody. In perfect French she lauded the Franco-American friendship and recommended the development of cultural relations between our two countries.

If only in the name of this friendship between our two countries, we demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski."

Read: Let Polanski go or it's war, muthafuckaz!

OK, maybe it's not quite that extreme --- but surely that last sentence is going for intimidation, which is just plain ridiculous. All I can say is that, if the Frenchies wants to make a mountain of this mole-hill, I say: have fun.

But more upsetting to me than these idiotic petitions is the artists, many of whom I have nothing but respect for (and some of whom taught me how to love movies in the first place), condoning such idiocy. I know, this is the part where I'm supposed to say, "And I'll never see another so-and-so movie as long as I live" and, no, that's not what I'm trying to say at all. Just as Polanski's hideous act doesn't prevent me from enjoying his work, neither does Scorsese, Anderson, Wong, Almodóvar, or Allen condoning said hideous act going to prevent me from enjoying their work (and, make no mistake, signing these petitions is nothing short of condoning). But I can only imagine what on earth compelled them to sign these petitions, and what exactly it is about rape that they don't have a problem with.

Playing Catch-Up

2009-10-01T10:30:00.001-04:00

I haven't been as productive 'round these parts as I would have liked these last two months. I was on a bit of a roll in the early parts of summer but just kind of fizzled out through August and September. Lots of my fellow bloggers have spoken of feeling this kind of burn-out, so perhaps it's a communal thing, but for me it stops today.

So I am hereby declaring October catch-up month here at Medfly. I'm gonna do something I've never done here before, review movies from DVDs, and try to write-up some of the 2009 releases that I haven't seen yet, in addition to staying on top of the new releases this month. It's a new dawn , it's a new day, it's a new life for me... and I'm feelin' good.

Goodnight, Moon

2009-09-25T21:00:00.004-04:00

Autobiography time: in my High School days, I dabbled in acting. I enjoyed it, and think I was reasonably good at it, considering I was an amateur in every sense of the word. My High School did two plays a year; in the Fall, a 'straight' play, and in the Spring a musical. My stage debut was a female version of The Odd Couple the fall of my Sophomore year, with all the genders of the characters being switched (transsexual Odd Couple may have been more accurate), so the bit roles of two British sisters were changed to two Hispanic brothers (I know, me in that role isn't a stretch of the imagination at all). I ran amuck with the role --- what else could one do with a part so patently ridiculous, that I so clearly didn't fit? I knew no one would buy me as a 'real' Hispanic, or even a cartoon Hispanic ala Al Pacino in Scarface, so I had fun with the role. My second play, also my Sophomore year, was a production of the musical The Pajama Game. Most of the cast didn't like the play because of how dated it was, but I loved the anachronistic quality of it all --- doing the play was almost stepping into a time machine. Plus, the film version is one of Stanley Donen's best musicals (Godard called it the 'first socialist operetta' in his review of it). The Pajama Game is the kind of good, cheap fun that Broadway was known for before it became a bourgeois Disneyland; catchy numbers, memorable dances (the original had choreography by Bob Fosse), and light-hearted comedy and romance. I played the nasty capitalist head of the Pajama factory that refused to give the workers a 7 and a half cent raise, prompting a labor strike. It's probably the best play I was in during High School.

Rolling around to Fall of my Junior year, I was one of the handful of reasonably talented males left auditioning for shows. I was thrilled to have nabbed my first lead in a play, Moon Over Buffalo --- until I actually read the script, that is. My God, it was awful --- a farce without the comedy. The first act is full of one-liners that fall flat more often than not, and the second act is pretty generic farce material; slamming doors, people screaming, mistaken identity, and so on. My theater director was a big Neil Simon fan, and this play, by Ken Ludwig (Lend me a Tenor, Crazy for You) was poor man's Neil Simon; smug, elitist, and not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. The play, in Ludwig's words, is about "A couple --- a theatrical couple --- in the early 1950s. They're sort of the second-rate Luntz's of the American stage who, after learning that Frank Capra is coming to their play to maybe cast them in his new movie, goes crazy with their own greed and ambition"; that's not quite the synopsis I would have given, but hey, it's his play.

So, due to the fact that I had performed in Moon Over Buffalo, D.A. Pennebaker's film Moon Over Broadway has always been on my radar. Pennebaker is one of the great documentarians on the planet; he uses brilliant fly-on-the-wall camerawork to give us a kind of insider's look at his subjects (which range from legendary musicians, political campaigns, and Broadway shows) , and the way he forges narrative from documentary footage is fascinating --- he creates complete dramatic arks in his films, but the difference of course is that in his films they're carved out of real life. I've never seen Pennebaker use interviews in his documentaries; rather he uses documentary footage to tell a complete story, without interviewees explaining the significance of the events to us. Also, the way he gets his subjects comfortable with having a camera following them around constantly is remarkable; it allows us an all-access, insider's look at the events he captures. And Pennebaker has been given intimate access to some of the more noteworthy events and figures of the 20th Century --- from Bob Dylan to David Bowie to Bill Clinton's campaign staff.

Here, he and his wife and partner Chris Hegedus turn their perceptive eye on the backstage escapades of a Broadway show, from casting announcements to opening night. While it is specifically about the production of Moon Over Buffalo, I'm sure the backstage goings-on --- the trash talking, the drama, the politics, the fact that anything that can go wrong does go wrong --- isn't exactly unique to the production of Moon Over Buffalo. This play was noteworthy, though, for being Carol Burnett's highly-touted return to Broadway after a 30 year excursion with television and movies, which was probably the hook for Pennebaker and Hegedus. I don't think either of them could have guessed that the playwright, Ken Ludwig, would ultimately steal the show. You can think of him almost as a Salieri-type, forever confined to banality while living in the shadow of people more talented than he, and resenting it deeply.

The problems begin early on at a table reading. The play's stars, Carol Burnett and Philip Bosco, request that they be allowed to improvise, and the director Tom Moore and Ken Ludwig both shoot down that notion. This sequence is remarkable, because the two of them sum up my problems with the play perfectly --- the comedic rhythm of the play is simply off. The word selection is awkward, the punch line's have no punch to them; the jokes simply do not work. "Don't you not want our experience, our sense of comedy?", Phillip Bosco asks the director, not in a Primadonna manner but in a completely straightforward, reasonable tone. "I am not taking about improvisation, I'm talking about the actors' input in the creative process. If you consider that improvisaiton, I'll just do what is written and not contribute anything at all." The director and writer foolishly opt for that, suffocating the actors' comedic instincts because they take the mediocre text as a kind of gospel (the director of the play honest to God calls Ludwig a "modern day Faydeau"). Ludwig, behind Burnett's back, insults Burnett's background in television --- as though this mere TV actress is beneath his mighty play (and as though all the Broadway work she did before her television show somehow doesn't count). "This is the pact you make with the devil in the modern theater: you need a star to sell tickets", he whines after a preview of the play in Boston "it'll never be the play I wrote", he continues, as though that's such a tragedy.

In spite of his somewhat prickly nature, it's difficult not to feel bad for Ludwig. This is a man who, day by day, feels his work slipping away from him. He's forced to constantly re-write his play to appease his producers, and still his jokes fall-flat. He dismisses himself from a cast and crew meeting in one scene to "go home and write", "Are you writing a new play?", Carol Burnett quips, "Apparently" is his reply. In one sequence, the producers discuss "the joke problem" and note that Ludwig has had this sort of issue before, to the point that he actually had to hire an outside joke writer. Then, to add insult to injury, it's revealed that this joke writer is a dentist from Long Island! One particularly uncomfortable sequence shows him going around the theater the night of the premiere, meekishly introducing himself to the celebrities in attendance, trying desperately to appear calm, cool, and collected and falling short of the mark. He knows his ass is on the line with a 2 million dollar Broadway production that, in spite of its star power, hinges on the success or failure of his script. "Everyone else will rebound and go on to other things if the play fails," one crew member remarks "but Ken's life is really on the line".

Most of the issues he seems to be having throughout the film arise from the fact that he deeply resents being upstaged by anyone. This is hammered home during one of the play's previews when the winch that controls the curtain breaks, stranding Carol Burnett on the stage (I've been in a similar situation, though not because of a broken winch --- because the person controlling the curtain queues wasn't paying attention). Burnett, being the cool-headed professional she is, does all anyone can do in that situation --- she has fun with the audience. She knows they all paid to see her anyway, so she answers their questions and tells jokes until the winch is fixed and the play can continue. Let's just say that Burnett, doing shtick completely off the cuff, gets more laughs --- genuine, uproarious laughs --- than anything in the play. The lack of audience response is part of what prompts Ludwig to further re-write the play, causing more frustration amongst the actors and leading to greater discord between he and the cast.

But, at the end of the day, the play was a success; perhaps not a smash hit, but it was one of very few non-musicals to finish its season on Broadway that year. It received mixed reviews from critics ("The bad reviews aren't good, but they're not mean-bad", a crew member remarks), but virtually no one faulted Bosco or Burnett --- simply the play itself. "Burnett and Bosco are impeccable performers, and do their best with this stuff... Act two is a little like beating a dead horse, the jokes are worn out before we ever get to them. Surprisingly enough, Act one is much better, holding as it were the promise of things never to come." Granted, this is slightly mean spirited criticism, but surely this is the result of the director and playwright stifling the actors' comedic instincts and forcing them to do material that they knew in their hearts simply did not work. It's worth noting, however, that the film ends with a long list of revival productions of Moon Over Buffalo, performed all over the country and all over the world; after all is said and done, Ken Ludwig is the only one still making money from the play. He who laughs last laughs longest.

Yours truly at the age of 16, chewing the scenery in the aforementioned High School production of Moon Over Buffalo.

Visions of Life: Mission to Mars

2009-09-10T19:00:00.004-04:00

This piece is being cross-published at Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder as part of The Brian De Palma Blogathon. The blogathon runs from September 7-16.

One of the most inexplicably hated movies of this past decade, Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars is not only "not that bad", it might even be great. The film presently rests with a score of 34 on Metacritic (which translates to "generally unfavorable reviews", to those who don't speak the language), and a confounding, outrageous, wholly unjustifiable 24% on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course, much of this hatred arises from the fact that the movie was marketed one way (a space adventure from the man who made Mission: Impossible just a few years earlier), while actually being a thoughtful, humanist, post-modern take on science fiction lore. And I feel it's the film's unique encapsulation of the science-fiction genre on film that may have jarred some at first; it has the grand, cosmic mystery of Kubrick, the humanistic benevolence of Spielberg, and the spirit of science fiction pulp and B-movies. Tim Robbins' character Woody Blake wears a Flash Gordon rocketship around his neck, and like the Robbins character, Mission to Mars keeps the adventurous spirit of b-movies close to its heart; but it's more than a celebration of trash, it's a transcending of it. So many action spectacles are given a free pass in spite of more often than not being nothing more than B-movies with high production values, but Mission to Mars understands the child-like sense of wonder these films would tap in to --- De Palma has never been an artist who denied cinema's more base pleasures --- but De Palma does much more here than dress-up empty material with CGI.

The movie begins with one of De Palma's patented long takes (complete with some Buckwheat Zydeco on the soundtrack), but it's so much more than showing off technique --- he introduces us to all the film's principle characters here, the two teams of astronauts that will be the first human beings to set foot on Mars. They each consist of three men, one woman ("same handicap", one character quips at the beginning of the film, but women being equal to men is one of the key elements of Mission to Mars), and this is fitting, as gender dynamics have always been a key element of De Palma's work --- and in Mission to Mars, gender dynamics define space exploration, as husband and wife couples are chosen to give support and strength to one another during the long duration of the voyage. It's at this point that the movie introduces us to Jim McConell (Gary Sinise); an astronaut who, along with his wife, was slated to be on the first manned mission to Mars. However, it is revealed that Sinise's wife got sick and passed away, and he had to unfortunately give up his and his wife's life-long dream of going to Mars in order to be at his side while she died (apparently, playing characters who almost-but-not-quite go to space is Sinise's specialty). For a movie that so many reviewers wrote off as 'poorly written', the dramatic elements of Mission to Mars are poignant and extremely well played by the film's performers. Yes, it's a film that wears it's heart on its sleeve --- but is that really such a bad thing? It's one of the most earnest movies of the decade, so enamored with its central concept and characters that I personally find it difficult not to love it as well.

Mission to Mars, with its large-scale subject and budget, also gives De Palma great material with which to flex his directorial muscle; the incredible special effects and set design make it one of the few movies, outside of 2001, that have actually taken me to space. There is one sequence in a spaceship where the characters dance to Van Halen's "Dance the Night Away", and the camera is as weightless as the characters. Even if you don't like the movie I defy you (seriously) to tell me that this sequence, at once romantic and bittersweet (romantic in that it shows how in love the Robbins character is with his wife, bittersweet in that it highlights the loss felt by the Sinise character), doesn't at least bring a smile to your face. The sequence that shows the Mars Rover exploring the Mars Terrain (one that recalls R2-D2's arrival on Tattoine from Star Wars), with Ennio Morricone's soothing, beautiful music on the soundtrack, uncannily recreates the surface of Mars in gorgeous widescreen. Brian De Palma has always been a film maker who operated within the Hollywood system, all the while subverting it within his films, and it speaks to what an idiosyncratic artist he is that he managed to bring his unique moral stamp to a large-scale Hollywood spectacle.

The film strips away the usual xenophobia of space action/adventure movies by portraying aliens as benevolent givers of life, as opposed to relegating them to a generic monster role; "Life reaches out for life" is the film's simple, eloquent, and profound mantra --- and it's the exact notion that so many film's on this subject fail to grasp. It's so easy for films to give us empty spectacle that offer nothing in terms of ideas or subtext, but for a film to challenge our ideas about life, the universe, and everything (to borrow from Douglas Adams) is a rare thing that deserves praise. Of course, this is Brian De Palma we're talking about, so these ideas come from within the firm boundaries of genre; but the subtext is still there, and it's still powerful. Mission to Mars expands on popular folk-lore by making the so-called "Stone Face of Mars" (something that allegedly 'proved' there was life on Mars that was proved to be an optical illusion right around the time of the film's release) a central plot point; one character says "In all our myths, in every human culture, Mars has always held a special attraction. I mean, what if that means something?" Mission to Mars assumes that the fact that Mars has tapped into the popular imagination in the manner it has does mean something, and so expands on that pop-mythology by making Martians the creators of life on Earth; it is revealed at the end of the movie (set inside the 'Stone Face') that upon the destruction of Mars by an asteroid that Martians 'seeded' life on Earth. An inspired CGI sequence gives a brief history of Earth, with the first single celled organisms evolving into fish, then reptiles, then mammals, then humans --- this causes Sinise to realize that we are one with not only one another, but with the Martians as well "We're them, they're us" is the film's ultimate realization --- all life coming full circle and being intimately related to one another. Then Gary Sinsise's Jim McConnell, like Richard Drefyfuss' Roy Neary from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is given a choice between remaining with his human compatriots or hopping in the Martian spaceship into the great unknown, and Sinise makes the decision to go on the quest of eternal enlightenment; the decision many of us would probably like to make, if we weren't too scared of what we might find.

Mission to Mars is, ultimately, a supremely good-natured, highly entertaining adventure film --- but one that understands the essence of science ficition, which is ideas about existence and humanity. De Palma gives us all this in the guise of a Hollywood action movie (one released by Disney with a PG rating, no less), but when you take De Palma's career as a whole and realize that he's always been as much defined by popular modalities of storytelling as by his own, highly idiosyncratic style, Mission to Mars feels less like an anomaly and more like a flawless distillation of themes he had previously tackled; at once paying homage to genre and expanding on it. The cosmic perspective of Mission to Mars would pave the way for his next film, Femme Fatale, which instilled his preferred genre (the thriller) with similar cosmological and existential queries presented in Mission to Mars. It has marked the beginning of a bold new phase of De Palma's career, one that would challenge the popular notions about the kind of director he is ('plagiarist', 'stylist', and so on) and enrich his art with bold, dazzlingly self-assured technique.

2, 3, Kick, Turn, Turn, Turn, Kick, Turn

2009-09-08T19:30:00.010-04:00

I may lose some street cred (net-cred?) for this sentiment, but I love memes. Really, I do. Especially the last few months, writing here has been stressful. I know it comes easy to some, but writing is generally a struggle for me; a worthy and rewarding one, but a struggle nonetheless. I tried to step up my game this summer in giving this site substantive content that would generate good discussion, and I feel that, for the most part, I succeeded. I certainly generated good discussion (and a hearty thanks to all those who have helped in that department), but I still feel that my writing doesn't quite reflect my personality in the way I would like. It reflects my ideas about movies and personal sensibility, but I'm still not completely satisfied with the tone. That's why I enjoy Greg Ferrara, Bill R., and Glenn Kenny so; they manage to be eloquent, perceptive, and humorous all at once. And their love of movies shines through in everything they do.

So a meme gives me a chance to both wax poetic about movies, and lighten up the mood around here. This one comes courtesy of the wonderful Marilyn Ferdinand from Ferdy on Films. It states that the participants pick their 15 favorite film dancers; but, I must be quite honest, I'm not so sure I could pick 10, let alone 15. Admittedly, this just proves Marilyn initial point, that dancers aren't given enough credit for their craft, but she has kindly allowed me to break the rules a bit, so I'm going to pick my favorite dance sequences in film. And I think this is interesting because this opens the doors to non-musicals as well.

As with all memes, any other day and I may have picked completely different set. Here are ten dance sequences that have always stuck with me (when the information is available, I'll list the choreographer as well):

Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding (1951)
Choreography by Nick Castle

There are actually two sequences from Royal Wedding that I was considering, ironic because outside of two exemplary dance sequences with Astaire, the movie really is quite lousy (one of Donen's lesser musicals, for sure). Both speak to what an incredible dancer Astaire was, as well as how innovative and imaginative he was with dance sequences. One involves Astaire dancing with a coat-rack and Astaire, with his incredible grace, makes the inanimate coat-rack feel like a living, breathing partner. The other, more memorable sequence, involves Astaire dancing alone in a room, and he starts dancing on the walls and ceiling, defying gravity. It's a breathtaking, incredibly innovative sequence; as was typical of Astaire's dance sequences, this is all done in one unbroken take, and this makes the sequence all the more phenomenal. They used a rotating set to capture this incredible illusion, and it's a technique that was borrowed for films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fly.

Donald O'Connor in Singin' in the Rain (1952)

Choreography by Gene Kelly

In the case of Singin' in the Rain, it's tempting to be obvious. Of course, the titular dance sequence is among the most memorable sequences in all of film, dance or otherwise. But a musical number in the film that impresses me every bit as much is the "Make 'Em Laugh" number with Donald O'Connor doing a kind of slapstick tap dance, and O'Connor is really given a chance to show his stuff in this solo dance sequence. Throughout the film, he manages to keep up with the incredible athleticism of Gene Kelly, proving to be his equal in that respect. Too bad he decided to do Francis the Talking Mule pictures for most of his career, because he shows an incredible amount of talent throughout Singin' in the Rain.

James Cagney & Bob Hope in The Seven Little Foys (1955)
Choreography by Nick Castle

13 years after James Cagney won an Academy Award for playing George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, he reprised the role in the film about Cohan's 'rival', Eddie Foy (it's worth noting that Eddie Foy Jr. played his father in Yankee Doodle Dandy, but here he is played by Bob Hope). I could have picked a number of sequences from Yankee Doodle Dandy, but I actually prefer this cameo appearance in The Seven Little Foys; it's an extremely energetic, inventively choreographed sequence. Again, the movie isn't exactly great (or good, even), but this sequence is a real treasure, in no small part because Cagney, over a decade after he first played the role, (and a few years older than Bob Hope) completely upstages the film's star (though I've always found Hope somewhat insufferable). But watch the sequence closely, and you'll see Cagney is far lighter on his feet than Hope is.

Ann Reinking & Erzsebet Foldi in All that Jazz (1979)

Choreography by Bob Fosse

My favorite of all of Fosse's memorably choreographed sequences (both in films he and others directed), because in addition to being a spectacular dance sequence (set to Peter Allen's "Everything Old is New Again") in its own right, showcasing the talents of the beautiful Ann Reinking and the 12 year old Erszebet Foldi, it's also an extremely dramatically affecting one as well. As Joe Gideon watches his girlfriend and daughter put on a show for him to cheer him up after the poor reception of his latest film (paralleling Fosse's own experience with making Lenny), you see in his eyes that he recognizes that this is the closest thing he'll ever have to a real family. And, considering how intensely personal this film was to Fosse, that revelation is damn near heartbreaking.

Rosie Perez in Do the Right Thing (1989)

This might seem like an unusual pick, but I love the way this title sequence combines a music video aesthetic with the film's uniquely counter-cultural, broadly comic sensibility. Set to Public Enemy's "Fight the Power", Rosie Perez does a dance that I can only describe as "interpretive boxing"; imagery that is simultaneously rhythmic, aggressive, and empowering. It gets me excited for the movie to follow it in a way that few other title sequences do.

John Travolta & Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction (1994)

There are many memorable dance sequences involving Travolta (he has an entire movie dedicated to these abilities), but I'd have to go with this one because it's cheeky, almost self-conscious about the fact that John Travolta simply must dance in movies he appears in. He's dragged into a dance contest, unwillingly, by Uma Thurman's Mia Wallace. She not only exerts her power of him by reminding him that it is he who must do what she says (she is the boss' wife, after all), but she challenges his ego by saying that she not only wants to dance, but she wants to win. Well, dance he does, and win they do, and Tarantino wonderfully uses this sequence to illustrate the powerful sexual connection these two characters feel towards each other, complete with some Chuck Berry on the soundtrack.

Woody Allen & Goldie Hawn in Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
Choreography by Graciela Daniela

A wonderful sequence that caps a wonderful film, Woody Allen uses special effects for one of the few times in his career to create an enchanting, otherworldly dance sequence set to "I'm Through With Love". As Allen and Hawn dance on the Parisian riverside, Hawn literally defies gravity as she spins and leaps through the air. Magical.

Tim Robbins & Connie Nielsen in Mission to Mars (2000)
Choreography by Adam Shankman

Adam Shankman is the credited choreographer on Mission to Mars, but surely Brian De Palma deserves as much credit for choreography as Shankman, because his camera is as much a dancer as his characters in this sequence, set to Van Halen's "Dance the Night Away". De Palma's camera here floats weightlessly as he captures this intimate zero-gravity dance.

The Company (2004)

I'm cheating a bit here: I found it impossible to choose one image from Robert Altman's penultimate film The Company, let alone one dance sequence, all of which are extremely visually striking and memorable in their own right. Altman, using high definition cameras (his only use of the format), beautifully captures the art of dancing as the kinetic combination of theater, painting, and athleticism that it is, all the while giving an intimate behind the scenes portrait of the members of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. It's a wonderful film that pays much respect to the art of dancing, and those who dedicate their life to that craft.

CGI Penguins in Happy Feet (2006)
Choreography by Kelley Abbey

For a movie that goes to such painstaking lengths to portray accurate, organic dancing (through a brilliant use of motion capture technology), Happy Feet bizarrely doesn't actually credit the live-action company of dancers that brought life to the film's animated penguins (though I remember reading a New York Times article that discussed the dancer whose movements were used to render the main character Mumbles, Savior Glover). As with The Company, I'm not choosing a specific dance sequence here, as any time Mumbles or any of the other penguins dance, I'm positively enchanted.

So, those are my ten. This is the part where you're supposed to tag people to do it, but everytime I tag someone, no one does it. So I'm tagging everyone. And don't be like "Oh, I'm not gonna do it and he'll never know." I will know. Trust me.