Growing Pains

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

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

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

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

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.