No Time For Love, Dr. Jones!

Incident at Loch Ness

2011-07-15T00:57:00.000-07:00

The idea of a mockumentary about a film crew trying to capture the crazies who believe in the Loch Ness Monster is a good one, but taking it to its mockumentary logical-extreme and casting Werner Herzog as the documentarian in question elevates this from a good idea to a great one. Standing on the shoulders of Herzog's mystique and living-legend status and skewering himself as a baldly (if incompetently) narcissistic "Hollywood producer" is pretty brilliant. He exploits everyone: he willfully sabotages and undermines the legitimacy of Herzog's art, repeatedly risks the lives of his entire crew, and even in life-and-death situations has no capacity for honest confession or anything but a self-serving, paranoid and cynical nature. But instead of making that character a villainous one-dimensional scoundrel, Penn turns it into a buffoon, a moron incapable of distinguishing between real and fake (the film repeatedly mentions the difference between truth and fact).

Sidenote: By coincidence, I first saw this film a week before I saw Grizzly Man in theaters. I therefore had a very, very hard time taking the story of Timothy Treadway at all seriously, and in that light much of Herzog's self-aware-but-un-self-conscious narrative style and editorial choices struck me as hammy, melodramatic, even a little vaudevillian. But back then I hadn't seen many Herzog films, so I just assumed his thing was to skirt the line between fabrication and fact, looking for realer truths than a straight documentary might uncover. (Which, by the way, I was completely fine with. Not to get pedantic, but facts reveal nothing, and fiction often reveals many truths.) Now I know better, and while Incident is still a beautiful turn-it-on-its-head story of real and fake, I know that Herzog himself is generally far more intensely earnest than the tone of this film. Which really, is why it works in the first place.

Taxi Driver

2011-07-09T22:27:00.000-07:00

Again, another film I wish I'd had more time when I saw it to talk about, because there's so much to say. I guess there's nothing I might say about Taxi Driver that six million college kids haven't already said before, but still.

This is a film I have only seen a handful of times, actually. All the major plot-points and sequences stuck with me pretty well, but I'd forgotten the permeating sense of melancholy the film has. I remember it makes you a little uneasy, and you never quite know if you should like/side with Travis Bickle or loathe/suspect him, but I don't remember feeling this sorry for him last time I watched it. More than anything, Taxi Driver strikes me as one of the saddest films I've seen in a long time -- and it actually reminds me even more of Observe and Report than I expected it to -- a film that, when I saw it, I tried to convince people wasn't a farcical comedy, but a disturbing black-comedy/character-driven absurdist tragedy in the vein of Big Fan or Taxi Driver).

Not scary (I mean, it has its moments). Not thrilling (again, same). Not funny (I could go on). This film is sad. Bickle was so broken from before this starts, there was nowhere to go but down, and we have no choice but to watch him lose it.

Dead Man

2011-07-09T22:21:00.000-07:00

It's tragic that life got so busy I couldn't blog about two amazing and blog-worthy films I saw recently. So it will have to suffice to say I watched them, a couple of days ago.

Dead Man is almost certainly my favorite Jarmusch film, and one of my favorite films in general. It is everything about a western upside-down. It is the transcendent poetry of Blake turned pensive and existential. It is one of the best examples of true Absurdism in film that I can think of. And it's dark and poetic and funny as hell.

Godfather, Part II

2011-06-27T01:18:00.000-07:00

Of course I want to talk about this one for hours, but I can't and won't. I've only seen Par II once or twice ever, and the most recent was more than five years ago, so I got to come at it with reasonably fresh eyes. And I'm sorry, hardcore fans, but The Godfather (Part I) is an undeniably better film. It's a matter of bias (though what do you expect?), but the first film has a sharp focus, a single journey for an entire family, a sense of larger-than-life tragedy as many lose their lives and others lose their souls to grander causes.

Part II seems in every way the best-case scenario "smart sequel." It expands the world by showing us what happens next (and what came before), and it deepens the existing themes and crises as it goes. But apart from some really strong drama and really smart filmmaking, I'm not sure it says a whole lot more about the themes or crises than the first film said. Kay's crisis (which really represents Michael's sacrifice of his humanity and compassion) is more forefront, and the drama of what she goes through is darker throughout, but it never felt surprising or revealing in any way beyond the expected. Michael's relationships with Tom Hagen and Fredo are similar: they expand in scope and develop as plot points, but they are built from the same basic building blocks that shaped the relationships of the first movie. Tom is more at ease with his position, though he shows several times an emotional sensitivity to being shut out or misused; Fredo is less at ease with his, having now been more formally overstepped by his little brother, but he is basically the same well-meaning, weak-willed, marginally incompetent tragic character he was in the first story. There he never betrays the family directly, but he seems to insult them by betraying their philosophies and way of life (when he gets in with Moe Green); here he betrays them more directly (in scenes we are tragically never witness to, but then again it's not Fredo's story) but only because his wounded pride and desperate need for respect (mostly self-respect, but also the respect of his brothers and peers) are manipulated. It all works, and it tells a really good story that deserves the kind of respect it got, but it's a more fragmented continuation of Part I.

Actually, to put that another way and give it a little more credit: it's the kind of rich, robust, true-to-the-original-themes storytelling that we see more now, in serialized television than we saw then, in feature films. I'm sure it was no coincidence that this film doesn't bear any title other than the original's, it is merely Part II, not Part II: Michael's Mafioso Adventures or whatever. This is simply a continuation. It could be viewed best (and perhaps only) as the same story, not a new one.

One last thought I'll keep brief: I thought the Vito backstory was beautiful, and well-performed, and pretty well-written, but it always felt a little like Vito telling his own story. He was always just a little too noble, a little too beyond reproach in his actions. I'm not sure he shows a single weakness in any scene, and he never makes a misstep or mistake, never loses a thing in his journey. It was nice to see the rise of the man (and Empire), but it almost seemed a little too Yin and Yang, with Michael's consistently tragic (and surprisingly messy) story.

I want to go on, but other matters demand my attention tonight.

Buck *

2011-06-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

(Time barely allows me the luxury of movie watching, let alone long writing blathery blog entries about what I watched. That may be for the better. It means the thoughts will get a lot briefer. Case in point...)

Buck is a pretty ideal character study documentary, in that it takes a character with a really concise and distinct hook, is clear about who he is and what he does and where he's come from -- and illustrates an insider's world with total clarity, such that a total outsider like myself is brought in. It's light on dramatic arc or sense of "journey," but it captures the character in a complete-feeling way, and it even allows us to see him fail (he was unable to tame the oxygen-deprived "predator" horse Cal), though I wouldn't have minded seeing more reaction to that failure -- nothing shows character like how one deals with a crisis, and outside of life-and-death scenarios, few crises are as big as the inability to do the one thing you're best at.

Mostly, though, Buck feels like it's a story about emotions, and how we channel what we're given or who we are into those around us. It's a story about paying it forward, and being aware of that cycle. Buck's dad abused him terribly, but Buck transforms the feeling of being a victim into compassion for another creature. Buck's clients are told repeatedly that how they treat their horses mirrors who they are as people. I've held that theory about household pets for years as well -- that the "personalities" of your cats and dogs are echoes back to you of who you are. Whatever aspect of you you show them that resonates with whoever they already are, that is what amplifies and reflects back from them. So much more so with more intelligent creatures like horses.

Seen at Cinema 21.

Female

2011-06-21T02:38:00.000-07:00

Holy shit.

Look, I know a movie is a product of its times and all, but this seems like the kind of thing you show to a bunch of Reed-graduate women's studies majors to see if you can give one an embolism. The plot basically boils down to: hard-nosed extremely successful career-minded lady is CEO of an automobile company and the only one with the cajones to keep the company afloat through hard times. She blatantly abuses her power as head of the company to invite salesmen and execs and engineers over to her palatial home for dinner and "private business meetings," in order to aggressively seduce them, only to snub them brutally (and in some cases, transfer them to Montreal for not being quick enough to get the signal that they'd been blatantly used by their boss) the next morning at the office.

Before you start thinking this is a pretty awesome role-reversal with a sexually empowered and voraciously predatory woman who knows what she wants and takes it, hear out the rest of the story. All she's looking for is a man who can love her for herself, and when she finds one she not only leaps into his arms, literally transforming her entire personality three times in short order to be what he wants, but she makes repeated attempts to quit her successful job to be his wife. In fact, the story wraps up (very quickly, in about an hour actually) with her having tracked down Mr. Dreamboat Industrial Engineer and promising that she'll never set foot inside the automobile company again; she wants him to run her business now because she's "no good at it," and she's adamant about staying home and raising the nine children she promises to bear him. This is presented unambiguously as a bow-on-the-package ending to the romance movie.

Woman is dominating and kind of a bitch, only successful at the job because she pretends to be something she's not; woman finds the right man for her; woman gives up the powerful, lucrative job (to the man) and declares herself a homemaker, lickety-split. All she wanted was to be a docile wife. She finally got what she wanted. Happy ending! Look, I'm not touching that. I'll just leave it as it lay.

I will say, though, that though there was nothing outright bad about the direction or filmmaking, the performances were all a little hokey and forced in a way that -- if I'm really honest with myself -- makes me re-evaluate some of the characters and performances in Casablanca. But mostly, Female had none of the inspired or inspirational dynamic-energy, shadows-and-light (literally in the camera work; figuratively in the elements the story brings together) that makes Casablanca such magical cinema. This was a weirdly misogynistic treatise posing only barely as a light-hearted not-quite-screwball romantic comedy. The truth is, I think this film might offend more people than Lars von Trier or Gaspar Noé films. It's a weird one.

Dick Tracy

2011-06-20T02:02:00.000-07:00

Time got away from me so I don't have as much to say about this as I might like to. The world-building and unreal comic-like artificiality is beautiful. The characters, especially the villains, are so entertainingly strange and so like the Dick Tracy comic strip that it's almost distracting. (To borrow a thought from Ebert's four-star review of the film, this is a world where everyone's personality flaws are written plainly on their unusual faces.) My friend says he vaguely recalls Beatty having to really convince Pacino to take the part, and while that may be true, so much of the character of "Big Boy" Caprice reminds me of Richard III and specifically, Pacino's own pet-project documentary Looking For Richard, that I can't help but wonder if the hunchbacked body-suit and the weird desperate-for-love vulnerability and misunderstood nature of the villain wasn't a contribution of Pacino's own, or at least teased out and exaggerated to suit his proclivities toward that Shakespearean character. On the other hand, much of the sexless earnestness of Dick Tracy himself reminded me almost too much of Beatty in Bonnie & Clyde, and made me wonder what the significance of such a flipside-of-the-same-coin parallel might mean.

Even all these years later, it's pretty much impossible not to see this film as living in the shadow of Tim Burton's first Batman (it came out the summer after; it uses a similar-but-less-hooky Danny Elfman score).

This isn't a flawless film -- in fact it's pretty sloppy in a lot of ways -- but what works about it really works. The characters are so flat and weirdly arbitrary that it can't be a mistake (someone find me a reason why Breathless Mahoney is so madly in love with Tracy?). It's a strange and flashy passion project that maybe wanted to be an early franchise builder, and while I keep reading rumors that Warren Beatty still intends to make a sequel (and if he does I'll go see it, no question), I'm kind of glad this didn't become a franchise after all. The thoughtful(-seeming) cardboardness of it all is amusing and entertaining once. I don't think it could have sustained a series. This story didn't have any room to grow. (Especially with "The Kid," who was just a hair shy of irritating, and any more with him -- as "Dick Tracy, Jr" and mysteriously as a certified police detective [??] -- would have proven absolutely unbearable.)

Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope)

2011-06-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

For as long as I've been alive, in every format of recorded video I've ever had access to, this has been my go-to movie. I know it so well I can fall asleep to it, sometimes before the droids get to Tattooine (~0:08:50), and if not then, then almost always before we meet Luke Skywalker (~0:16:30). It's also been my go-to for discussing story structure, as it hits all the right beats clearly and concisely, and is one of the most written-about screenplays in the history of cinema. (It's also my go-to cautionary example, how the constraints George Lucas had to face brought out the kind of ingenious problem-solving that made this film everything it is; versus the obstruction-free environment of the prequel trilogies [and even as early as Return of the Jedi] which led to a squandering of talent and resources and hard-won goodwill in an uninspired sloppy cash-grab.)

But it's that second thing that made me sit through the movie tonight. Like Magnolia and Dr. Strangelove before it, I went through and did a beat analysis breakdown of the whole story, noting even roughly when each scene-cut took place. Just to get my head back into thinking about big-picture stuff so I can give a good hard push on my script this weekend. That's the only reason I could tell you how many minutes in certain scenes happen. Act Two begins after Luke tells Ben, "There's nothing for me here. I want to go with you to Alderaan and learn the ways of the Force." The next scene (~0:42:45) has Ben and the gang standing on a cliff face, describing the first gauntlet they must beat: Mos Eisley Spaceport. ("You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy," after all.)

The Midpoint (or call it Act Three, if you prefer thinking of a film as four equal-length acts; screw Syd Field, man) comes when their mission changes, from waiting for Ben to deactivate the tractor beam so they can all get away (their first mission of delivering R2-D2 to Alderaan having already been rendered null when their destination evaporated) into trying to rescue the captured princess from the black knight deep inside the well-protected castle (~1:08:18). The turn into Act Four (or Act Three, you Fieldians) is even easier to pinpoint: after having won a minor dogfight and escaped the castle/Death-Star, they deliver R2's plans (and the princess) to the Rebel Fortress (which is where they were headed all along, before the battle over Tattooine that sets everything in motion. From there they plan the attack (~1:41:00) to bring the whole thing down, and the majority of the final act is the big Death Star Trench sequence.

There's nothing I can't say about this film that hasn't been written before, probably. But I could say enough to fill ten blogs. I've seen this movie too many times. I admit it. I'm not a fanboy, exactly, but I'm not exactly not one either, if I'm being honest. Anyway, I grew up on it, with the toys, the t-shirts, the Pizza Hut drinking glasses, the bedsheets and bedroom curtains. The truth is, yesterday I was wearing some weirdo vintage Star Wars t-shirt my parents bought me for Christmas. So whatever. Anyway I'm mostly excited by it at this point as an exercise in combining and "modernizing" (if you will) Joseph Campbell myths and universal story elements. Even the ways it diverges from the screenplay formula are perfect examples of how to do so. And returning to it is often, at this point, a way of meditating on the relationships between scenes and sequences, sequences and acts, acts and story.

That's what I did. That's what I'll keep doing. The truth is, I've seen it too many times to look at it and just see another movie. This is a thing in my blood, a story embedded in my DNA when I was still learning how to view movies and stories and heroes. I can tear it apart and dismantle it and I can see all the parts and how they work and why, and I can marvel that they do, and occasionally I'll see through the rose-colored lenses and suddenly catch on a flaw (especially when fine-toothing like tonight) but throughout it all, there's something more than sum-of-the-parts in this bastard, and it's both magical and comfortable. It's childhood adventure, escapist fantasy, and clockwork perfection. No amount of looking under the hood is going to undo that. Seems like that's about as good a testament to its power as anything I can think of.

The Tree of Life *

2011-06-13T00:59:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot to say about this one. Malick isn't a guy whose films you watch once and walk out with concrete, fully-formed opinions readymade for a blathering first-response movie blog. They have to sit with you a while and you have to give them some space to breathe. It sounds all lofty and hoity-toity, but I tried to give Jen a sense of what she was getting into (having not seen a Terrence Malick film before), and I said they were something like cinematic transcendental poetry.

It was beautiful and evocative and forced patience and open-mindedness while watching. The complicated emotions were never lost on me -- and I found a surprising amount of my own childhood echoed in the story of Jack and his father -- but some of the nitty-gritty plot details escaped me. (SPOILERS) For one, I was unclear for a while which son Sean Penn was portraying the adult-version of (he was Jack; by the end it felt obvious) and which son died (the musician boy, whose name I'm not sure they said). And mostly I had trouble linking the story of Adult Jack, in his world of glass of steel, to the idyllic/anti-idyllic past of Young Jack -- specifically, I couldn't find any specific impetus for him to be having such a rough time of it, and thinking back to his dead 19 year old brother (who we only meet as a child, incidentally; implying his death was not Jack's fault or perceived as such). Jen and I gathered it was an anniversary, but still. Adult Jack could barely keep his shit together, and the strength of his emotions felt disproportionate to the time and distance that separated him from the events. But this isn't a movie about its plot, and I didn't actually find those questions very pressing or important to the story. This is about the feelings, and the relationships, and the world, and the abstract impressions there aren't words for that come from the long sequences of nature and grace colliding.

The beautiful montage of images of the universe forming -- nebulas, planets, asteroids, early life, dinosaurs -- may have no literal use in this story, but it wouldn't have been The Tree of Life without it. But whether or not Adult Jack has a reason to suddenly miss his brother so much, that's not really the kind of thing that trips up the watching of this. I only linger on it here because, what else can I say? The rest of it needs a lot more time to digest.

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

Super 8*

2011-06-10T03:01:00.000-07:00

I saw the teaser once, then I went into ostrich-mode on this one. J.J. Abrams has a good track record so far (even Cloverfield is kind of a gem in that over-done genre), and teaming up with Spielberg for an homage/return to '80s-Spielberg -- that was enough for me. It already had my money. The less I knew about it the better.

Basically, it doesn't disappoint. It's got some DNA from E.T. and Close Encounters, and a lot of The Goonies, and although if you stop and think about it I'm not sure the story makes very much sense, it smartly sticks to the kids, and their story makes sense. It's fun, it's emotionally rewarding, it's smart, it's exciting, and it's legitimately scary. It's a little hamfisted more than once, but it's an 80s movie -- it really is more of a "return" than an "homage," because almost never does it tip its hat or modernize sensibilities; it feels like someone uncovered a film from about 1985 that has impossibly good effects for the time (and passingly good for now, though a little heavy on the CG) -- so hamfisted goes with the territory, and anyway the not-quite-subtle moments at least feel earned. Overall I enjoyed the hell out of this.

My biggest criticism of Abrams films is that he doesn't have the eye for iconic images and design that Spielberg has. I'm thinking of the Abrams-produced Cloverfield (which I have read Super 8 is supposedly not a prequel to, but I remain skeptical and unconvinced) and Star Trek, mostly, and now this. Compare those to any Spielberg film -- then or now, but especially then. Spielberg embeds his films with characters, costumes, ships, framing of shots that stick with you decades later. The look of E.T., the red hoodie, the fly-past-the-moon, the dinosaur in the rearview, virtually every frame of Raiders of the Lost Ark (the perfect storm of Lucas and Spielberg). Abrams doesn't really have those moments. [SPOILERISH] His characters are great -- nuanced takes on the archetypes of their genre -- and his stories move along at just the right pace, and are full of exciting, brilliant scenes, but his sense of iconic imagery feels lacking. The alien in Cloverfield, Big Red from Star Trek, and the monster here, all vaguely Lovecraftian tentacle-things, but almost the opposite of iconic or memorable. Messy, alien things. In a sense it's neat, and definitely consistent, but it's also a tiny bit disappointing. It lacks the "cinematicness" of Spielberg's design without adding any level of "realism" or "verisimilitude" in its place. And sometimes it comes off as functional without formal beauty. The same is true with his ship designs and character looks, I think. Nothing stands out, begs to be remembered. Very few shots leap off the screen and scream "this could be your poster, but even if it's not, you'll remember me forever."

I only even think of this because of the odd consistency in the alien design (also reminiscent of The Mist and Monsters... clearly a trend), and because this is "Abrams doing Spielberg," which begs that sort of comparison. Still, a lack of iconicness (iconicism?) doesn't detract from the film's enjoyment. And this one was fun.

If you're reading this and you haven't seen it yet, stay for the credits. It's not a spoiler/twist kind of thing. It's just fun.

Seen at Regal Lloyd Center Cinema.

十三人の刺客 (13 Assassins) *

2011-06-09T23:08:00.000-07:00

Jen (the girlfriend) put it best when halfway through the movie she leaned over and whispered, "Now these are real Tough Guys." The Japanese are not, in modern times, thought of as a particularly tough people, but boy, what a history. They weren't fooling around. The stakes don't get higher than a hero (or band of heroes) who have willingly committed to giving their lives to a cause, to a leader. In movies the hero says that kind of thing all the time -- I would die for you, for that belief, for her, for my country -- but it's all talk. The hero is in no real danger of dying, and he might as well know that when he makes these oaths, because we know it when he makes them. Sure, it sounds so cool, but the men and women who swear by it don't mean it -- or if they do, they don't mean it with the kind of brutal "I will cut my guts out with my own knife on a matter of principle" way the samurai meant it in Feudal Japan.

It seems to me like Miike is making a real case here for just what that kind of oath means. He's exploring the reality and the gravity of swearing an allegiance so powerful you would die for your boss unflinchingly. He pits two old comrades against each other, and though they remain bitter adversaries to the very end, their rivalry isn't borne out of some ethical or philosophical difference -- in fact both men repeatedly imply that, but for the twists of fate that make up their lives, they could easily have ended up on the other's side in all this. The chase- and battle-to-the-death that Shinzaemon and Hanbei see to the end (and arguably beyond) is borne out of literalizing the samurai's oath, notoriously in a time of peace. A sadistic evil lord (Miike also takes the usually-all-talk ivory-tower cruelty that goes along with that notion to new extremes) is Hanbei's master. Therefore, it doesn't even matter that Hanbei opposes him philosophically, is disgusted by him personally and morally, or that he literally fears for the future of Japan if his lord succeeds; he will fight to his dying breath savagely and furiously to protect him and to help him succeed. That's what a good samurai does.

13 Assassins doesn't flinch or hold back in the morality of this -- or the mortality. It's Takashi Miike, after all. And actually, if anything, apart from some early-on imagery that was hard to take, I found most of the action and drama remarkably subdued, character- and plot-driven and never shock for its own sake, or envelope-pushing because he can. There was very little zany or madcap in the story (though the amusing Kikuchiyo-homaging 13th assassin certainly has elements, as does the villain himself). It was more about the idea of honor and nobility and sacrifice than about visceral pleasures. In other words, it felt "mature." (I feel like I'm painting Miike as some looney-tunes shuckster rather than a seasoned director. It's somewhere in-between, and I mean that with respect.)

Also, I don't know my Japanese history or political climate nearly well enough, but I got half the sense that there's some commentary here about good men blindly following lunatics to their deaths, eyes wide open. But don't ask me to translate that metaphor.

Seen at Cinema 21.

Snake Eyes

2011-06-08T23:33:00.000-07:00

I keep trying to find a nice way to say this. Structurally, this film is tightly-wound clockwork. But no character in it has a single moment that feels motivated or like something a real person would ever say or do. Gary Sinise and Nicolas Cage have so little chemistry as "best friends" that twice in the story I started looking for tell-tale signs that the two were shot in different locations and cut so it seemed they were across a table from each other, or whatever. The ending is so complicatedly pat for no reason that I don't even know what to say about it... after everything seems to have come to some sort of head -- a purely by-the-books and soulless dovetailing of androids lurching from scene to scene and saying the kind of thing needed to get to the next scene, whether or not it made any sense to say -- suddenly about six random events happen all at once -- the Daily Planet-style giant metal globe rolling down the street, the hurricane, the gunshot triggering (?) the electronic doorlock, the news man running with his camera for shelter, the police van hydroplaning into the opened garage just as our heroes are about to be shot point-blank by Kevin Dunne (that is, Gary Sinise's character, who inexplicably shares a name with Kevin Dunn, who stars in this same film as a different character, who is sadly not named Gary Sineese) -- anyway it's all too much.

To its credit, the first twenty minutes, even though they're completely artificial feeling, are incredibly fun and gripping. The camera work and visual motif/theme of What the Eye Sees vs. What the Camera Sees (also playing out in the story as What the Memory Sees vs. What the Camera Saw) is innovative and provocative. But none of it ever makes up for how soulless and hollow the film remains. De Palma has always been an affectionate Hitchcock impersonator, and he and Zemeckis seem to occupy the artificial, cinema-fetishizing end of that New Hollywood spectrum, and I thought Blow Out kind of felt like "pinnacle De Palma," but if that's an example of all the fun parts of his movies-for-their-own-sake repeating-the-masters'-steps-precisely style, Snake Eyes stands as counterpoint. Here the artificiality and navel-gazing doesn't help. The Hitchcockian clockwork-thriller/tragedy-of-errors just feels like it exists to exist. The story doesn't mean anything or do anything, the characters never seem to feel things (anybody anywhere, watch this movie and tell me you really believe Nic Cage's character being heartbroken, hurt or shocked at any of the nineteen times he is surprised or betrayed by Sinise; or that the curtain-close romance between Gugino and Cage feels genuine or motivated by any previous scene in the entire story).

As someone who generally (but skeptically) enjoys and respects and deeply admires Brian De Palma, this is the film that makes me see what his detractors see when they look at his best works. This is a De Palma film, not "warts and all," but maybe just warts.

Noises Off

2011-05-24T04:45:00.000-07:00

I put this on specifically because I remembered it being harmless and funny, and I thought it would be light enough and silly enough that I'd likely fall asleep to it. Unfortunately, it's well enough paced with enough charming nostalgia-inducing faces (Reeve! Ritter! Mark Linn-Baker and Julie Hagerty! Carol Burnett and Marilu Henner! even Denholm Elliott!) that I never quite drifted off. It was a foolish idea -- something as clockwork choreographed as a stage farce was never going to let up long enough for me to turn away. It's not hilarious, but it's funny enough to work. And it's not brilliant, but it's clever enough to stay with.

Ultimately it's too stagey. For one, it's obviously a 4th-wall-challenging stage play trapped in the 4th-wall-less world of cinema, so it loses a lot of its punkish energy. But for another, it never quite feels like the actors want to be any more involved than they would be if this were the goofy, breezy play-within-the-play. I know it's a light-hearted comedy and about as far from character-driven material as you can get, but there's a lack of investment or nuance to any of the characters or performances here that feels a little... winking. The physical parts are brilliant -- and the timing is impeccable -- but the actors are maybe acting a little too much like actors playing actors actings, if that follows.

Anyway, it's a fun cast. It's a silly play. It's an amusing movie. It means almost nothing, goes almost nowhere, and wraps up in the most horrid "oh shit it's over, well here's a happily-ever-after capper because why not" way. But apart from that last bit, the cleverness and physical comedy and the joy of seeing some underrated comedy actors from my childhood era made it all a more pleasant than unpleasant experience. Is it a great movie? nah. A good one? maybe, just. But I liked it. It wouldn't let me sleep when I wanted to. That's something.

Sweet Smell of Success

2011-05-22T23:58:00.000-07:00

I'd heard a lot about this film for its dialogue, for being a famously left-wing script that didn't pull its punches. I knew it was a noir about newspapermen. I knew it got compared to Network. I hadn't really thought about that, though, in the terms this presents them: anti-heroes that are newspapermen, as basically slick-talking amoral schucksters and underworld power barons. Actually, I've been reading about other stories that do this, like two Fritz Lang films, While The City Sleeps and Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, so it's not like there's not precedent here -- and in fact, those films were 1956 and 1957 respectively; since Sweet Smell is 1957, clearly something was in the air.

But this isn't really a noir at all. For one thing, the story pointedly lacks femme fatales, and the only woman I can remember in the entire film who wasn't a cowed victim or means to an end (which, in this world, is worse than merely being a "cowed victim") was an older woman long since accustomed to her dubious husband's wandering penis. For another, the anti-hero of the noir is almost always someone able to step through the muck of the underworld and come out clean -- a man whose principles and convictions allow any number of questionable deeds because he knows the ends justify those means. Here the ends are the dirtiest part, the protagonist has to have a last-minute "change of heart" because he hasn't had a straight and true noble purpose from the beginning. This is a story of moral awakening, with innocent people (noir stories generally don't even have innocent people) hurt by terrible people, and that's all good. I'm not disappointed that this isn't a noir -- I don't think it should be -- but it seems to have been miscategorized, if you ask me.

So, sharp-as- and fun-as-hell dialogue, check. The city at night, seething with corruption, check. Fascinating anti-heroes and an alluring world of ugliness, check. Noir trappings -- well, no, but that's okay. But what isn't covered in all of that, that I hadn't expected, was the nuanced and exciting kind of antagonist/villain that this film has. Burt Lancaster's J.J. Hunsecker is wonderful. His introduction is beautifully orchestrated, giving him a practically mythical element (coupled by his story of loving-his-sister-just-a-little-too-much). He's intimidating and every bit believable as a powerful man with the power of will and the ivory-tower separation from the common man that makes him both a pitiable king and an amoral monster.

[SPOILERY NOTE: There was a point very late in the film after Susie had attempted to throw herself off a balcony and Sidney had managed to wrestle her back in. J.J. attacks Sidney, seeming to misconstrue the situation, in fact perhaps knowingly choosing his beloved sister's obvious lie over his dirty-handed minion's more feasible story. (Sidebar: Lancaster is intimidatingly huge; it worked so well for the character in general but it was also great to see that physical threat made manifest, especially on such a deserving scoundrel as Sidney but for all the wrong reasons, fittingly.) In his defense, shouting anything he can to stop the attack, Sidney blurts out that J.J. is behind the framing of Susie's lover. There is an eerie moment -- Susie stands with J.J., no longer sure which side to take here. J.J. turns to her and says, "It's a lie, Susie. Just as I know he lied to me about your suicide attempt, you know he's lying to you about my involvement." Susie obviously knows her suicide attempt was genuine, and for just a moment this invitation to exchange willful ignorances hangs there, and part of me really wanted Susie to agree to it, to sink into the quicksand and say, "Yes, of course Brother," and together they would destroy Sidney, put it all behind them, and rewrite their history fully. That end -- Sidney dying (or being run out, or locked up, or whatever) and Susie selling her soul to stay at her brother's side -- would have been so dark I think it would have been unsatisfying, ultimately, but there was a moment there where I wanted to see how it would play out, how dark could this dark story get, and would it dare?]

I don't think of the 50s as an era with layered characters exploring moral gray areas (or at least making your audience sympathize with characters firmly entrenched in the black, say). I guess audiences didn't either, from what I read about the initial audience response to this. Critics loved it, though, for all of its sharp-tongued intelligence and emotional messiness, and, not surprisingly, so did I.

Blow Out

2011-05-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

The A.V. Club repeatedly cites Blow Out as the unofficial king of De Palma films, and I may have let this one get a little too built up in my excitement to see it. (It didn't help that they were writing about it in such celebratory terms a full six weeks or so before the film was finally re-released by Criterion, or that it took me almost a full month after that to finally find the time to sit and watch it.) It's definitely engaging, and it's fun, and it's smart, but I'm not sure off-hand where I'd place it between good and best. But there's no denying that it's a very good film -- and man, it's surprisingly tense at parts, in both a good and bad way. On a personal note, I'm starting to feel some stressed-out anxiety about deadlines and projects and time budgeting, and this movie was probably a poor choice for the ninety-minute Relaxation Session I was sort of hoping for.

But enough with the audience's apologies and outside influences. I don't have a lot of time and I should really be at least mentioning the film's influences that struck me if I'm going to blather about anything. You can't really talk about De Palma without talking about what films influence him, can you? No wonder certain kinds of critics are in love with him and others are... less-than-in-love with him. I haven't seen Blow-Up in too long to compare the two, but I did pretty recently watch The Conversation, and it's pretty much impossible NOT to compare those films. (Note: I distinctly remember watching The Conversation about two months ago, but checking previous posts I realize I never wrote anything on it, because I think circumstances got in the way and I never finished it. Alas.) Blow Out is such a visceral ride and The Conversation is so cerebral. Both are uncomfortable in their paranoia. Harry Caul has a much more developed and three-dimensional paranoia than Jack Terry's, but both stem from being too good at their jobs and hiding from a past that involved getting someone killed. And in my memory, both films star Dennis Franz, but a little research proves that The Conversation starred Allen Garfield as Bernie the slick competitor. So let's say both films star Dennis Franz-types.

There's a lot of really striking shots here that I couldn't quite put my finger on the intent behind -- other than being striking. Similarly, there is a lot of really overt symbolism here, like driving your jeep willy-nilly through the parade of firefighters, policemen, and Uncle-Sam dressed paraders, and crashing through a storefront window into a mannequin-reenactment of a revolutionary-war era hanging. Sally screaming for help and being murdered in front of a massive American flag. The number of times telephones appear when someone is being betrayed or killed. The repeated motif of the bell icon, providing a crossover between Liberty, Telecommunications, and the city of Philadelphia. But I don't know what, specifically, to make of any of these, to be honest. I do know I haven't given them enough thought yet, and so maybe with more time or repeated viewings a connection will come to me; but with Brian De Palma, whose scenes sometimes feel like they come with neon signs reading CLEVER SET PIECE, it's also possible that the repeated motifs are there so that a motif can repeat, because that's what films do. It's entirely possible that he's built all the thematic structure he can into a piece without any of the thematic content. I kind of think there's some of that in Body Double at least, and possibly Carrie. I think that's part of why his films work so well for some and so poorly for others. The man tells interesting, excessively self-conscious stories set in excessively self-conscious movie-centric worlds, but he doesn't really say much. It's not like he says nothing, or that his films are meaningless -- far from it -- but he definitely doesn't make films whose primary intent is to say much of anything, or explore an idea very deeply. He makes films to echo smartly, and add layers and voices to pre-existing text.

Maybe Brian De Palma is the starkest, most obvious example of that phenomenon I just babbled about recently, the man who touched-up millennia-old cave art in Aboriginal Australia and said he wasn't painting, that the spirits were painting. Maybe De Palma is repainting those lines, continuing an artistic process that's still in its infancy. Remaking a film could certainly be called an example of this, but maybe a more interesting and almost as obvious example is what De Palma does -- which, for the record, isn't so novel: off the top of my head Tarantino, Scorsese, Haynes, Jarmusch all do variations of the same. "Homages," right?

It's possible there's some interesting thought there. Or it's possible I just rattled off a stream-of-consciousness game of free association through ideas and said almost nothing at all about the film Blow Out itself. Then again, it's possible that in doing so I've done exactly what De Palma would want me to: I've used this film to springboard into a talk about Film. There's an hour-long interview between De Palma and Noah Baumbach on this disc that's supposed to be pretty great. One of these nights I'll watch it, and maybe I'll have a better idea then what De Palma intended with non-specific filmic homages like this.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams *

2011-05-12T22:57:00.000-07:00

It took me longer than usual to get around to blogging this one, so my reactions aren't as fresh or as sharp as I like, but sometimes that's how it goes. There's a lot to recommend about this film, but most of it you can almost guess before going in. It's a gorgeous and unusual (and totally beautifully appropriate) use of 3D. It's narrated by a madman poet who is singularly able to remain completely unironic and earnest when asking scientists if numbers in a phone directory have souls, or if we are all mutant albino alligators staring at our own doppelgangers through glass. It's profoundly moving and, honestly, a little existentially shaking to be in the presence of 32,000-year-old art and religion. And I think Herzog is completely right to ask bold and awkward questions about the soul: art and religion are inarguably the arenas of the soul, they are our expression of the soul today and their birthplace, whenever that happened exactly, would be the soul's birthplace as well. At least in any meaningful way, as far as this atheist/secular humanist is concerned.

But all of that feels like what almost anyone would say after seeing this film. Some more personal thoughts/reactions I had are to two of the little Herzog tangential thoughts, the notes and anecdotes on the fringe of the cave story. One: I'm surprised, somehow, to find that musical scales haven't changed in 32,000 years -- that the flutes found in other caves use the very same notes and scales we use today. I don't know, I'm not a trained musician but I've taken a class or two, and I know that Eastern musical scales for example are (or were, historically) very different from Western (which I believe is "pentatonic," but rather than look it up I'll just expose my ignorance and half-education here -- I'm just that lazy). I think a lot of people just thought it was a very silly moment when the archaeologist played "The Star-Spangled Banner" on the caveman flute, but the very fact that you can kind of impressed and amazed me.

And two: the story of the aboriginal cave-wall painters touching up thousand-year-old art, and the European anthropologist who asked him why he was painting. The man's answer was that he wasn't painting, that a spirit was painting. It was difficult to determine (or maybe: it is difficult for me to remember) if he literally meant the spirit of the original painter or not, but I took it more as the spirit of the art, or the spirit that inspired the first art, or "the spirit" in a more holistic, non-individualistic sense of spirits -- and that idea I found kind of profoundly moving. In a weird way, that's all (we) artists do with art today, with paintings and narrative and mythology and religion. We see a piece of The Same Old Legends in disarray -- atrophying from lack of attention, from cultural entropy or whatever -- and something moves us to revive it, and paint new lines to fill in the old. Sure, there's more to it, there's that western individualism kicking in, and we feel the vital imperative to season the stew just a little bit, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that adding my voice to the grand story isn't an appealing part of why (we) artists make art. In fact, the ego-centric drive to create art is so strong that I think (we) artists need moments like the aborigine story in Caves to reminded of something grander and far simpler -- that all human art could be viewed as a single tapestry being continually touched up by new hands channeling old spirits.

What struck me strongest in the film was simply the presence of the walls, the caves, the freshness of the art, the profoundness of a window into ancient human history, Herzog's mad-poet voiceover with his matter-of-fact exposition sprinkled with stark humanistic philosophy, and the exciting and justifiable-beyond-merely-dazzle use of 3D, but that all seems like everybody's reaction. Commonalities with our ancestors in music and a connectedness in our storytelling and art that makes me go all Jungian -- those reactions were smaller, more compartmental, but they felt more specific and more fun to rant about.

Seen (in 3D!) at Cinema 21.

In The Loop

2011-05-10T21:22:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to seeing this, and I knew I would like it. I have vague memories of critics comparing it to Dr. Strangelove, probably for its depiction of government and war policy as being dictated by petty tension and paranoia between allies. I can see a reason to compare the two (satire of the government which is both outlandish and frighteningly plausible? Overt sexual tension, frustration, and gay panic channeled inappropriately into policymaking? No line between personality quirk and philosophical stance?), but it actually felt more like The Office meets Traffic, or something, to me. It's funniest when it's meanest, which is a lot like being funniest when it's angriest.

I expected, considering the first six minutes or so and Simon's continual similar fuckups throughout, that this was going to quickly turn into a comedy of errors and misunderstandings like some geopolitical Shakespeare farce, and although I was ready to laugh and enjoy just that I'm relieved it didn't go there. Too many coincidental blunders and conveniently misheard mutterings creates a story so tightly wound and artificial that it's hard to sustain itself, a dramatic Rube Goldberg machine. Instead -- apart from main characters Simon and Toby -- In The Loop hinges primarily on petty, small-minded characters lashing out in bitterness or undermining each other through paranoia and the assumption of corruption, deceit, and self-centeredness. It's almost like an answer to Ayn Rand's philosophies in that most of the people here, even the loathsome ones, aren't terrible or evil, but they assume that everyone else is, and that causes them to act terribly or evilly. But mainly it's just satisfying when the characters are driving the story instead of being driven by clever contrivances for ninety minutes.

I know I rant about this very same thing pretty much all the time, but a story driven by its characters means they are making the decisions, means the story matters to them and to us, and means the characters matter and who they are and how they are constructed matters. Otherwise it's just a series of plotpoints, a connect-the-dots, a clever piece of architecture -- or as I just mentioned, a Rube Goldberg machine. A story where the characters matter and the decisions matter that also manages amusing and clever twists and turns and surprises is always going to be more satisfying.

Network

2011-05-09T03:37:00.000-07:00

Poor Howard Beale. The guy never really had a chance. From the first minute of the story we're told he is a once-great now-faltering anchor who has devoted his life to television news. He snaps, and then they encourage him to spiral downward, and he does. And then they encourage him to spiral further downward, and he does. And then when the execs and the President no longer agree about his usefulness, they exploit him for one final ratings explosion, and that's that.

There's so much written about Lumet lately, his style of directing and the kinds of stories he told. And plenty has been written about Network over the years -- its prescience, its clever raving dialogue, its heart-in-the-right-spot heavy-handedness. I don't have much to add to either debate right now. Here are some disconnected reactions: I love Ned Beatty's scene. I'm consistently impressed with the whole case -- Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway especially -- for making such mealy-mouthed writerly speeches feel natural, or at least real, in an emotional sense. But of course the dialogue is great, and I want to watch or read more Paddy Chayefsky scripts. William Holden re-telling his bridge-report story reminds me of Brad retelling the Shania Twain/tuna story from I Heart Huckabees. Duvall is fun to watch get pissed off. Faye Dunaway is one of the most beautiful portrayers of damaged goods cinema has ever had.

The Mikado

2011-05-09T00:52:00.000-07:00

I surprised myself by procuring and watching this fairly unusual-for-me musical based entirely on a review of Topsy-Turvy that off-handedly suggested Gilbert and Sullivan used The Mikado and the new-to-the-west Japanese culture/world as a screen to openly deride the bureaucratic buffoonery of the government at the time, and since one of the more difficult aspects of my script is governmental buffoonery I gave it a try. It was helpful, I think, mostly because the dialogue and plot is so brilliantly off-kilter absurdist that it's like a proto-Catch-22 in its genius recursive nonsense.

The music is bizarre and operatic and catchy as hell (not a big surprise) and the lyrics seem like they were written by the man who wrote the Thesaurus (also not a big surprise), and both seemed, like I said, outside my typical wheelhouse but fun. But the world of the story... the Japan presented here... what a strange cultural artifact! White people in colorful foam costumes and practically clownish makeup portraying a world as consistent and fantastical as Brazil, only this world was ostensibly "Japan." It's a little like watching anime movies "borrow" from elements of western storytelling or legend and repurpose them into some unidentifiable hodge-podge. Taken as representational of contemporary view of eastern culture, it looks pretty racist at first -- but it doesn't take long before you realize it isn't trying to be representational. It really is setting up a strange and bureaucratically obsessed world. It really is a spiritual ancestor to Brazil. With Gilbert and Sullivan songs. And a convoluted operatic plot.

Really bizarre. Very silly. But a lot of fun.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2011-05-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, we couldn't have picked a better Mother's Day movie if we'd tried. Rewatching A.I. got me ranting about the intersection of Spielberg's sentimentalist exploration of the nature of family and Kubrick's analytical exploration of the nature of humanity (though not in those exact words), and about just how emotionally complicated the end is. (I mostly just read this article by Todd Alcott to Jen and then blathered for a while in the same vein.)

When I first watched this I kind of hated it, mostly for the seemingly endless parade of "final moments," which at the time I attributed to Spielberg trying to stitch a happy ending onto a crushing tale of Pinocchio learning that not only can he never be human, but that humanity's pretty rotten anyway. I now know the "2000 years later" ending was more or less exactly how Kubrick intended it, and when I watched the movie again later I started to see more and more how it had to be there.

A.I. is the story of the first robot who can love. It addresses the moral stickiness of making an immortal child, an immortal dependent who can never stop loving you, and it doesn't shy away from how hubristic, and uncompassionate humans can be, and how even our sentimentality is actually cruel, ruthless narcissism. It address the relationship between man and God, between art and artist, between parent and child, and it even boldly (and rightly) reverses those roles as we go.

But one of my favorite things is simply that it takes three interesting characters who are hard-wired into extremely specific functionalities (David the boy who loves Monica; Teddy the discreet conscience of his owner; and Gigolo Joe the sex-bot) and it takes them away from their worlds and forces them to adapt. Joe becomes ward of a child, and David grows in a strange sense from monomanic lover to obsessive dreamer. The end shows us that after humanity's extinction, robots will continue to evolve and adapt without us. In the slice of time we see within the rest of the story, with those three characters, we see it beginning to happen. The humanity displayed by the inhuman and the inhumanity displayed by the human makes an interested and sort of cynical-optimstic story.

The beginning works so well. The end, even, works so well. But David's journey through the World of Violence (the Flesh Fair) and the World of Sex (Rouge City) are too toothless and cartoony; both sequences begin disturbingly but soon collapse. Spielberg goes to some unusual and uncomfortable places here, but he isn't the right guy to go far enough with the sex and violence of an ugly world to really give it the kind of impact it should have had. Joe's sexbot-ness is well-portrayed but no more racy or sexual than a Hayes Code film, and apart from some lewdly shaped buildings, Rouge City comes off more like a polished-up Blade Runner Los Angeles with more neon and less ethnic diversity. And the Flesh Fair -- the visceral desperation and torment of the broken bots scavenging and being hunted by a madman in a giant Moon is wonderful, but the "violence and savagery" of the actual fair feels more like a Monster Truck Rally with suspiciously un-entertaining-looking robot-torture than it should have.

There's also a lot of really beautiful visually poetic moments and repeated imagery throughout. In fact I suspect every element, plot-point, and dramatic metaphor encountered along the way (including the crazy future-robot-architects) can be seen visually foreshadowed around Monica and Henry's house in the first hour of the story. It almost gives it that Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass feel, one of those stories where the hero crafts a twisted universe out of the elements around him. I want to say more about this, but as I said, it's Mother's Day, and now I'm running late to go spend time with mine.

Exit Through The Gift Shop

2011-05-06T02:51:00.000-07:00

Boy, 2010 really was the high-water mark for the documentary/mockumentary/hoax ambiguity, wasn't it? Between Catfish and I'm Still Here and this, it seems like the best way to make a doc was to make it meta and question not just itself but the viability of the medium. The documentary genre has seemed muddied up by a confusion of facts versus truth (or worse, factoids and opinions and soundbytes versus truth), and if we've hit a point where we can bust that journo-evangelistic style wide open, I'm all for it. But whether or not it's the genuine article, that's not what Exit Through The Gift Shop is aimed at.

Exit busts wide open a different pet issue of mine: the disparity between art, artists, and the art scene. It posits that there are those who make art, that there are those who call themselves artists, and that there are those who land on the art scene, and is shows us really clearly that we are wrong to assume a natural crossover between any of the categories. At first the film was gripping and engaging, but when Banksy turned everything upside down -- when he disappeared behind the camera and Thierry took the role of underground sensation -- the film suddenly felt like some kind of personal-artistic-integrity agitprop, and I found myself more and more aggravated by the bland, voiceless shit "Mr. Brainwash" was selling the world.

Someone (Shephard Fairey, maybe? or actually I think it was Banksy himself) pointed out rightly that Mr. Brainwash is the 21st Century Andy Warhol. He has a team of artists mass-producing his half-baked ideas, which are basically just juxtapositions of recycled pop-cultural iconography. The difference then is that the 20th Century Andy Warhol was semi-knowingly making a statement about the nature of scenes, fame, celebrity, and popularity, and he was selling the idea that he could sell art as much as the art itself; and the 21st Century equivalent, the post-postmodern, the post-information-age, post-meta Mr. Brainwash, seems to be exploiting the now-commonplace abusably tenuous nature of scenes, fame, celebrity, and popularity.

All art scenes are full of half-assed, idea-less recyclers in love with themselves or just desperate for a scene. And whether or not the film has been scripted for our benefit or caught and cleverly cut to tell the story it does, it still does a wonderful job of not just exposing that, and deriding it, but steering (mostly) clear of a holier-than-thou attitude about it. The line between what Mr. Brainwash did on the streets and what Shephard Fairey did is largely a matter of who got there first and who made the bigger splash doing so. Fairey seems infinitely more aware of his position and of his statement-of-purpose, but there's some fuzzy area in there, and it's hard to know for sure if Thierry Guetta is being edited to make a point or if he's truly a moron. The line between MBW's art show and Banksy's LA art show again seems to come down to a matter of awareness and who got there first with regards to controlling and riding one's own hype. Again, it's hard to say for sure editing doesn't play a part here, as we linger on the selling-a-hollow-man aspects of Brainwash's promotion but emphasize the successful celebration that was Banksy's show. (The two shows are demonstrably very different; but how different is difficult to know.)

Mr. Brainwash is every bad artist, aping what he's seen and skipping from art fan to would-be art giant without taking the time to hone and develop, and the film does seem to vilify that attitude (which I happen to agree with). What it doesn't touch on, probably smartly, is the nature of artistic voice, intent, or talent. Fairey and Banksy seem to have things to say, and (lesser artists?) Invader and Swoop and Borf and most the others have at least the distinction and singularity of style. The film doesn't try to tell you why what works works. It just shows you that the fact that it works doesn't necessarily mean shit. Art scenes and art critics are capricious mobs, racing each other to the next big thing. That kind of desperate fickleness leads to a throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks mentality, the opposite of a steady, discerning eye. In other words, it's not very surprising that someone like Bush or Linkin Park might become huge rock stars, and it's not very surprising that someone like Mr. Brainwash might sell a million dollars worth of street-art knockoffs. At least a couple of other, "more real" artists like Shephard Fairey and Banksy can help us laugh at it while they exploit it, right?

Meek's Cutoff *

2011-05-04T22:38:00.000-07:00

This is seems at first to be a movie just about being there. We've romanticized the old west, and pioneering/exploring/colonizing -- it's the core of American mythology -- and here is a film that makes us live it, in a reasonably straightforward, no-frills, struggle-and-suffer kind of way. We barely know our characters, and what we do know we learn from the outside: any clues to where they came from or where they are headed specifically, or what they hope for when they get there, or why they left behind whatever it is they left behind must be inferred through observing closely a bunch of stoic travelers. In a lot of ways it feels like the film adaptation of the old Oregon Trail game (it opens with three wagons ever so slowly fording a river, after all; though SPOILER nobody dies of dysentery, and nobody shoots more buffalo than they can carry), and that seems appropriate and maybe deliberate. In the game, there is only the bare details of the journey, the facts and figures. Apart from buying supplies and naming your wagon-mates after your classmates, there's no history or character arc to the game, or to the idea of the Oregon Trail.

But as we go, I found that the anonymity and obtuseness, the patience and meticulousness of the story, became meditative. The story's minimalist approach may be perfectly suited to the emptiness of the terrain; the paucity of passion in our bible-quoting, hard-working white european pilgrims; and even the sparseness of their belongings, but I think there's more to it than that. At first there was the opaqueness of the pioneers. Then there was the opaqueness of their hired guide Mr. Meek's motivation and expertise. And then the opaqueness of their captive The Indian. Somehow I felt led down a path without a single line of dialogue directly pointing me there, and I spent most of the movie contemplating how alien the Indian seemed to them, his ways, his beliefs, his language, his motives. Was he helping? Was he leading them in circles, or into a trap? There was a point where I honestly wondered, could be be suffering dementia? What would happen if you met a single Indian, assumed he was representative of the whole, an expert of his land, a survivor, a wise man in touch with a larger world, but everything he said and did was confounding and beyond translation to you -- how would you ever know that you weren't being led by a madman, or a senile fool?

But of course the Indian wasn't the alien here, and I think that's part of the story's point: the pioneers were the aliens, who didn't speak the language, who took for granted that their elaborately developed paradigm was the right and only one to filter the world through. They weren't bad people, not even Meek with his hardness and bluster, or Millie with her paranoid hysteria, or Millie's husband (Paul Dano; I missed his name) with his milquetoast dependence on conflict resolution and capital exchange. But they were intruders. Like the Indian who may or may not have represented his tribe, or all native peoples, the pioneers were just individual well-meaning soles that may or may not have represented America, or all European colonialists.

None of that's very deep, really -- just a list of comparisons and contrasts, I admit -- but it's what I sat and mulled over as the film moved. The ideas of the film weren't complex, but the simplicity of the story and the pace and tone and style all allowed me to relax and experience two worlds simultaneously, to pull the rose-colored glass away from our mythologized history without getting nasty or ugly or liberal-guilty about it, and to wonder what it must have felt like for both sides in such a strange and naive time.

Meek's Cutoff is in my mind kindred spirits with Dead Man and The Proposition, but after emptying out all the commonly held myths and assumptions, Jarmusch fills the void with poetry and gallows humor, and Hillcoat fills it with starkly contrasting beauty and violence. Reichardt keeps the needle steadier; she doesn't indulge in playful extremes or exaggerated experience. Instead she fills it with fly-on-the-wall "realism" and a smartly tight-lipped narrative that trusts the audience to do most of the heavy-lifting. Actually, I'd say each film's hero is a perfect illustration of that film's merit. So it's not as darkly fun as William Blake in Dead Man, or as movingly intense as Charlie Burns in The Proposition, but Meek's Cutoff goes down similar roads, with the same understated elegance and hard-edged grace as Emily Tetherow.

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

Time Bandits

2011-04-30T03:30:00.000-07:00

There's something imperfect and fun about this. It's hard to look at it not as a really, great, amazing film, exactly, but as someone with really amazing potential stretching and trying something new -- it feels a little like looking in a master's sketchbook and seeing the seeds planted, ideas that would blossom in later works. It's not a bad film as a standalone, but it's messy, and it's tough to pin down. It feels like it waffles between frivolous madcap Monty Python-light and something deeper, darker, more philosophically and morally rich, but I can't decide if the vacillations feel like the filmmaker is unsure himself, or if he's daring me to believe both simultaneously. It's both extremely thoughtful (Evil insisting he wasn't created; recurring themes of parenting from a child's perspective) and extremely thoughtless (Palin and Duvall's recurring characters; Evil's topsy-turvy pain-is-pleasure idiot thugs). I mean, it's episodic, sure but the tone shifts so wildly that in retrospect it's hard to place Sean Connery's scenes, John Cleese's scenes, Michael Palin's scenes, David Warner's scenes, and Ian Holm's scenes are all inside one film.

I will say this, though. Something that has stuck with me from the very first time I saw this as a child, and continues to haunt me and my own work today, is the very end, after the (let's face it) extremely easy, peril-free literal deus ex machina of God (the Supreme Being, anyway) stepping in and cleaning it all up. Yes, there's a weird/nice little exchange where He is indifferent to the dying and suffering caused just because he wanted to test his new creation (Evil) and that works on so many different levels (a child's disillusionment of his parents' infallibility; modern society's exuberant lust for gadgets and knickknacks at the expense of a great many things; philosophical and theological debates about the nature and being of both God and Goodness), and even if it's a cheap-shot scene it's a good one. But what really sticks with me isn't any of that; it's when he goes home and finds his house on fire. His parents and him barely escape, and then Mom and Dad, negligent and borderline loathsome as they were, brazenly touch the last scrap of Evil and explode. Kevin is left standing alone calling out for a Mom and Dad that aren't going to return -- and the credits roll. Aside from an odd scene of Agamemnon (Kevin's would-be adoptive father) winking at him as a modern-day fireman, there's not even a trace of hope in this ending. I mean, it's not like the fireman hangs around and says, "What's the matter, little boy?" He winks and drives away, and Kevin is alone in the world, eleven years old, standing outside his house, two dead parents and nothing else. That haunted me as a kid -- partially because in my kid brain I was trying to work out if somehow Kevin deserved this (I think instinctively we all expect characters, especially in kids films and comedies, to get only what they deserve at the end of the story), but partially because I couldn't think of many things more terrifying than the tetherlessness that we leave this story with. He didn't ask for any of it (in fact, my gut wonders if this even works as a traditional narrative; I'd have to watch it again to even determine what Kevin wants as a main goal throughout the story... he's a very reactive character, around for the ride and sometimes trying to help/sometimes trying to stop/sometimes trying to flee our title gang) and what he gets for all the trouble he goes through -- I suppose much like the theological knowledge that God allows Evil and suffering to exist only as a way of exercising something we call freewill -- is nothing but the helplessness of spiraling in a void.

I'm somewhat aquaphobic; I can't swim and my body freezes up beyond my control if I'm floating in a body of water without touching a wall or the floor. This film, when I stop and take it seriously (which I did very much as a child; and which I have a harder time doing as an adult, without caveats), leaves me with the same kind of free-floating existential panic. So I guess I'll concede that for all of its flaws, the parts of it that hit at all, hit very hard. And that's definitely something.

Forbidden Planet

2011-04-29T02:42:00.000-07:00

I am going to go old-school on my comments tonight, keep it very short, because I expected to fall asleep to this and didn't. The story is really talky, and the science is really hokey, but the plot is pretty interesting, the acting better than typical B-movie, and most of the effects really are pretty astounding. It's a very cerebral story and, admittedly, you can see the end coming a mile away, but for the most part they make getting there entertaining and the reveal satisfying.

And oh, young serious Leslie Nielsen, and your proto-Kirkian love affair with the first lady living on another planet that you meet. How earnest you are, and yet how dashing!

Rushmore

2011-04-26T02:25:00.000-07:00

I don't have as much to say as usual. I put this on to end another long night of writing. Mostly I put it on to see one scene very early -- Max Fischer seeing Miss Cross for the first time, since so much of the movie is carried by his ridiculous, unrealistic, unrequited love for her. Rushmore is about a precocious dreamer who really doesn't understand how real people act in a real society, but whose tenacity is an unstoppable force. His inability to grasp that he can't get his way is the main ingredient of his success. There's something similar in the hearts of Max Fischer and my script's main character, though I'm not sure which is the more exaggerated version.

As Wes Anderson films go, this one feels more emotional than the rest, and in a weird way probably his most personal -- there's something honest and self-deprecatingly two-sided in the depiction of Max's insularity and the limitation of being so sure of your own dreams that might speak to the filmmaker himself and the nature of his output.

I also noticed a lot of odd cuts in this film, sloppy cuts on action to too-similar framings that on the one hand smacked slightly of a filmmaker still finding himself and not quite mastering his craft, but on the other hand came off as refreshingly uncontrolled and raw compared to the too-tight artificiality of his later projects, which added a right kind of plucky Max Fischerness to the film.

Last quick, disconnected comment: I do believe we get to watch Bill Murray actually act here, something I know the man can do but I tend to think he doesn't like to unless he has to -- he seems perfectly comfortable to coast through a film "being Bill Murray" (something he's very good at doing) when he can get away with it. But Rushmore was one of the first out of a slump, wasn't it? And as such, he maybe had less leeway to ride the wave of his own cool factor.

Brazil

2011-04-20T03:27:00.000-07:00

The world of Brazil is complex and rich, but for all its über-Gilliamesque intricacies that fold in on themselves, it never feels arbitrary, or odd just for oddness's sake. Maybe the best thing about the world of Brazil (and probably what makes it such a lasting and resonant film) is that for all the deep weirdness -- weirdness that goes far beyond just the surface of this world -- it's ideologically consistent. It's a study in bureaucracy that takes itself seriously enough to build up a layered world and it applies the skewed philosophy to every layer. It's populated with characters just as "ideologically consistent" as the world: petty and small-minded, people who can only see their corner of the puzzle, but who sympathetic and layered enough to be more than just props or fill-ins for necessary roles.

Actually, the characters here remind me of what I've been saying about science fictions films I've seen lately: it seems to me an easy (read: lazy) mistake to create the perfect character for the role you need him or her to fill just so your story can move along the beats you want it to. Seems like it would always be better storytelling if you put the wrong person for the job and then find a way to make them the right person, though their choices and actions. Instead of a washed-out astronaut hero with nothing to lose, why not make him a guilt-ridden alcoholic who can barely keep his shit together and has three kids back home he's ashamed of himself for neglecting? Now, when the Martian Almond Aliens ask him to join them on a crazy adventure to the center of the galaxy, you have your hero faced with an extremely difficult decision rather than a no-bainer.

In Brazil, Sam Lowry is a pointedly unambitious, keep-your-head-down man who not only believes in the bureaucracy of the system, but is perfectly happy to be nothing but another cog. His old friend Jack Lint is one of the main antagonists in the story (the true antagonist here is The System, with Jack as a common stand-in) not to mention a torturer and murderer, and yet Jack is the nicest, warmest man in the Ministry, an ambitious ladder-climber but also a capable husband and father (in a detached, working-dad/yuppie sort of way). Sam's old boss Mr. Kurtzmann, head of the Department of Records, isn't the right man for the job, traditionally speaking: he's a sniveling coward who can't control his work force, doesn't understand half the equipment in his office, and is so absolutely terrified of the culpability that comes along with committing any kind of action whatsoever that he fakes an injury to get out of signing his name to a document (arguably, in the world of Brazil these things add up to make him the exactly right person for the job of Head of Department of Records). Harry Tuttle, Jill Layton, Ida Lowry, and even the two mean-spirited bunglers from Central Services are just as good examples of the not-perfect person for the role they play. In each case, it's not as simple as choosing the polar opposite of what the role ought to require -- it's messier than that, and that's the point. But each character either struggles with himself or contradicts himself and his nature and that keeps the story dynamic, entertaining, and somewhat more nuanced.

I also went through the first act and did a beat analysis, studying how we move into the story and get the necessary exposition out there. Not shockingly, Brazil fares somewhat better than the other films I've watched this month. First, the exposition delivery systems (the method by which they dump all that info on us) are original and dynamic; second, they're entertaining and humorous; third, each moment and shot manages to work on a minimum of two levels (e.g., backstory and world-building; theme and characterization). It's just -- it's a classic. A tight, beautiful script, completely madcap but firmly controlled, directed by the right guy.

I didn't get into the visuals or the dream sequence or the art/effects/framing, but all of those are just as inspired and multi-layered as the stuff I did rave about. And the visuals! the flying-through-the-clouds dreams, the bizarre ducts-and-wires Rube Goldberg-meets-Orwell nightmare world, the miniatures throughout -- they're all so fucking pretty! Like I said, a classic. Hardly news to anybody: it deserves its reputation.

Red Planet

2011-04-19T17:59:00.000-07:00

Red Planet came out to ride the coattails of (or "compete with," if you want to be generous) Mission To Mars, and I remember both being fairly sloppy, disappointing, with pretty hokey dialogue and hokier plots, but this is by far the lazier of the two movies -- the story seems lazy, the science seems really lazy, and the themes feel more like they were added to the dialogue the day of the shoot. Clunky editing doesn't help either (like flashing back to deleted or extended scenes to let a couple of characters have superfluous character moments).

Plus, as a study in the Act One world-building exposition-delivery stuff, this was lazier and stiffer than The Angry Red Planet, which at least gave me characters talking for a reason. Here we get a big (mostly unnecessary, as it turns out) infodump from Captain Bowman, who is neither our main character nor our most important. Something interesting could have maybe been done with her as their eye-in-the-sky (kind of an inverse man-in-the-hole), an overseer to the heroes' adventures and struggles -- almost as if she was the Computer Voice in all those space operas and starship adventures, but of course Bowman has her own computer voice here, which sort of muddies up that analogy -- but they never really do. Instead, she's (I guess) more like Penelope to Gallagher's Odysseus, except a) the closest thing they have to a romance is he sees her naked and later we see a flashback to an earlier scene where they almost kiss (which apparently wasn't important enough to leave in the movie except as a flashback), and b) Gallagher is a far cry from Odysseus going on a voyage (again, that's a direction they might have taken things, were this a very different story).

Part of the problem with the story is that no time is spent building up the urgency or need of the characters. We're told Earth is overpopulated, running out of clean air and water, a dying crowded mess of a planet, and that all the international organizations have banded together to send five white Americans (well, one vaguely Latino guy and an old Brit among them, to be fair... plus isn't Val Kilmer Native American or something? I'm kidding) to find out why the long-distance terraforming efforts like algae-bombs and habitat-landers seem to be missing.

Along for the ride, the old Brit mentioned above, is a tragically, preposterously wasted Terence Stamp as a "former scientist" (?) named Ch'something, not worth looking up, whose clever little exposition-tag our narrator-captain offers us is "the soul of the mission." He hasn't found God, exactly, but apparently he's given up science because he is looking for God, and so he turned to... philosophy? It's all a little sloppy and confusing, but from a dramatic standpoint I guess he's there to suggest that some things can't be explained by your precious science. The movie then goes out of its way to make sure you see that, yes, everything can be explained by my precious science (even if that means all of the mysteries of the planet can be explained by secret Martian bugs ["nematodes," a fun word] that eat algae, and also metal, and also love human blood the most, and are extremely combustible, but when they aren't termiting you they produce breathable oxygen and are slowly terraforming Mars all on their very own).

Once they've explained to you in detail how it all makes perfectly logical scientific sense, within the confines of the fantastical story anyhow, Captain Bowman wraps things up with another bit of voiceover (or maybe it was a mission debrief to Houston? I forget, to be honest) in which she says "Ch'whatever always said there was more to the universe than science could account for, and I'm just the captain here who doesn't know what happened down below, but that sure seems to sum things up for me." Okay, it's a lousy and snarky paraphrase, but basically she suggests that hey, maybe it was all God's will after all, because of all the miracles we saw or something. The only miracle I can think of that we witnessed on Mars was the random upcropping of Martian life (about which we are assured "where there's air and water, there's life"); or maybe she meant the sudden self-awareness of the combat robot AMEE they decided to bring along (about which we are assured "her processor's been damaged"); or maybe it's the fact that no telemetry or telescope from Earth or Martian orbit could locate the glowing green or orange algae fields, or identify an oxygen-rich atmosphere (they couldn't even identify the oxygen-rich atmosphere when they were standing in it, until they almost died -- a fine moment for Gallagher to take a "leap of faith," but instead it was played as the grasping-at-straws backwards-thinking flailings of a desperate and dying man).

Anyway, it's silly and it's not very well thought out, nor very well executed, but it's a Martian Astronaut movie, so it's kind of fun. Actually, I wanted more astronautness here, more like Mission To Mars. Once they got there it played out more like a crashland-in-the-mountains kind of story than an astronauts-on-Mars kind of story. There's air, there's gravity, there's some kind of (robot) cougar stalking you, there's a horde of (alien) insects, and there's the same kind of mysteries and puzzles, obstacles and solutions that could have been told in some remote Antarctican or Andes Mountain story, with only a couple of tweaks.

Still, spacemen, am I right? And lessons in what not to do. Don't breeze over too much world-building set-up in verbal exposition. And don't bring Terence Stamp onboard to read a couple of embarrassingly hippie-ish lines and then give up and die without an ounce of gravity (heh) or punch. Lessons, noted and learned!

Star Trek: Insurrection

2011-04-16T03:14:00.000-07:00

I've been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation lately, just cycling through from season 3 all the way to season 7 in my downtime or vegging-out nights at home. It's spotty but generally very good, and I guess I just felt recently like continuing that trend by revisiting one of the more generic Next Generation movies over the last few nights as a fall-asleep-to choice. I remember it being pretty bland, a little too new-agey for its own good, and more about the actors and writers having fun with the characters than it was about developing them in a meaningful story. (Unequivocally, this falls into that recurring theme of late, plot-driven science fiction stories that don't give enough attention to characterization [for my tastes], just like this and this and this.) It's also an odd-numbered Star Trek film, the ninth, and we all know what that means.

But for all of that, it's actually surprisingly watchable. Especially when stacked up against the last few episodes of the TV series and not the other, admittedly better Star Trek feature films (it follows the mostly very good First Contact, for example -- though it's worth noting that it's succeded by Nemesis, which is basically the X-Men 3 of the Next Generation movies/universe). To geek out for a moment, Insurrection is basically a recap of several decent episodes, off the top of my head it steals major plot-points from "Who Watches The Watchers?", "Brothers", and "Homeward" -- and to be honest, aside from combining elements to keep the story moving, it doesn't even offer a very original take on these ideas. It also insists on making Picard a Kirk-style action hero -- though I suppose both Generations and First Contact had already started pushing us down that road, it's still weird when comparing him to the stoic diplomatic Picard of the TV series (and frankly, hard to believe as a natural development of the same character). But it's not bad. It's reasonably smart, and the fan service paid is neither pandering (exactly) nor totally out of character -- Data's awfully smarmy-human in most scenes but I guess by now he's experienced emotions so many times I can't even keep track, so why not; and Riker's gotten awfully soft and well-fed for a dashing new ship captain, hasn't he?

The only other comment I have is, it's always been my opinion that the difference between an okay Star Trek movie (which I'll generously lump this one into) and a great Star Trek movie is the villain. Star Trek II had Khan; Star Trek VI had General Chang (plus, insidious conspiracy); First Contact had the Borg Queen. Even The Motion Picture and Star Trek IV had interesting non-human/truly-alien adversaries. Hell, Christopher Lloyd cut a decent Klingon villain in Star Trek III, for that matter. But F. Murray Abraham falls into an unfortunate pile with Malcolm McDowell, Tom Hardy, and Eric Bana: fine actors who just can't salvage uninteresting, kind of cheesy villains. Like Batman, like James Bond, like any number of action movies or thrillers: without a good villain, it doesn't matter how cool your heroes are.

In my mind, this was more like a ridiculously expensive reunion episode more than a feature film. I'd say that's how III and IV and Generations feel, too. (Star Trek V wants to feel that way, and the not-unbearable parts of it definitely do, to a fault; but it's easier to just pretend there never was a Star Trek V.) So in a way it almost feels silly to blog (rant) about it here, where I generally don't write-up every TV series I watch (I've made exceptions when I felt I had something I wanted to say). But it's a movie, so I gave it the full service. And I more or less enjoyed it, even the weak parts (oh, and a side-note: now that I've seen all of TNG's successor and this film's contemporary, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I do want to say I found it satisfying that there were references to the galactic-political situation of that show, giving a sense of consistency to the continually expanding world). And since I enjoyed it, I figured it deserved a little bit of blather. And so there you go.

Source Code *

2011-04-15T01:46:00.000-07:00

I feel mixed about this film, but more positive than negative. It leaves you a little dissatisfied, doesn't it? (Everything else I say is blatant SPOILER territory, so don't blame me if you keep reading!) It comes on so goddamn strong and fast, an on-the-train thriller where you have eight minutes to explore alternate histories before the moment collapses on itself. Every eight minutes a brutal explosion; then you flash back to a mysterious chamber and get a new piece of the puzzle; then you have another eight minutes to abuse the consequence-free nature of your impending death while you hunt for the bomber, and then another brutal explosion. The first half moves so fast and smart -- Captain Stevens even begins bucking the rules about as fast as we can infer them -- and the the midpoint (when the hero's quest traditionally evolves and changes directions) is such a sharp and unorthodox shift, veering away from "catch the bad guy in a contained space (and time, no less!)" thriller into a much vaguer, existential dilemma of causality and possibility. It's an interesting direction, and comes naturally (almost inevitably, really) out of Stevens's character and situation, but the stakes and pacing and emotional weight of it shift so drastically, it's easy to feel like the story veered away and left you cruising on an untaken path. (Confession: I struggled to work that weak-ass metaphor around not making any kind of a train pun/analogy.)

I think the reason this feels odd -- apart from some slippery metaphysical and existential questions the end brings up, but one thing at a time -- is because the whodunit chase that starts the story off with a bang gets wrapped up tight somewhat easily and sooner than you expect, and the second half of the story (Stevens hoping to get back onto the train one last time, to set everything right; and Goodwin deciding to honor Stevens's last wish and euthanize him) feels a little like an extended denouement. Once the authorities have Derek Frost in their hands, it feels like there's a missed beat, a moment where the stakes and the urgency drop too steeply, and even though it's still Stevens's life at risk and even though there's still the chance of saving everyone who died in the first, "unstoppable" train explosion, it just feels kind of arbitrary -- I guess I just didn't buy that Stevens wanted it enough? I buy that he insisted he could change the past, and I certainly buy that one more eight-minute try, in a more real-feeling body and world, would be preferable to chilling in that weird chamber and knowing you weren't really there, or waiting to cease existing altogether. But I don't buy that he had any chemistry with Christina (for all the natural chemistry Michelle Monaghan shared with Robert Downey Jr in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, there was none of that here... none at all) and I don't think he made a compelling enough case for Captain Goodwin to go against protocol so boldly in his favor.

Which I guess brings me to my last real "beef" with the story, which is that, aside from Colter Stevens, nobody in the story seems to react like real people at any point, especially Christina. I kept waiting for the explanation to be that Stevens wasn't visiting actual pasts but some distortion based on the teacher Sean's recollections or perspective, or something. I kept waiting for it to be deliberate, another clue to the truth of his situation, that she kept reacting so oddly and passively, that others kept allowing him to dominate with only a passing gesture toward resistance -- the way it feels when you suddenly realize you're dreaming and you begin acting accordingly, and "people" resist a little, and then go with it, whatever "it" is. So the further in we went, as we learned that it was all real, more or less, the more that kind of "disconnect" felt off-putting. And outside the Source Code, Goodwin and Dr. Rutledge didn't feel much more "real" in their development, either. They both had subtle character moments, tells that were nicely understated but still filled in some story, but they just never felt fully dimensional or real to me, which hurt the story a little.

Mostly, that all boils down to a story that's plot-driven, where the characters were designed to suit the needs of the story and to keep the story moving where it wanted to go, rather than the story going where the characters wanted it to go. The arbitrariness of the last half which should have felt natural and organically unpredictable; the disconnect and detached passiveness of everyone except our hero throughout; these people were who they needed to be and made the choices they needed to make so that we could tell this specific story in this specific way. (It's the exact same thing I've been seeing in other half-dissatisfying science fiction films I've watched lately, both newer films and older ones.)

But despite all of this, I did kind of like this movie, and I'd definitely consider seeing it again. It's smart in its selection of detail and paucity of exposition (and what exposition the story does have boils down to unnecessary and unscientific silliness, like a scientist talking to a child rather than a lot of distracting technojargon and arbitrary rulemaking), and it doesn't waste time going through the motions just so the audience can get comfortable in the world: it assumes you're smart enough to keep up, and it knows you'll be one step ahead of the confused character, because this isn't your first rodeo. You've seen virtual worlds, time travel, train-thrillers, ticking time bombs, and Quantum Leap; just because Stevens doesn't know what's going on doesn't mean you don't, and that's smart of the story to acknowledge. By comparison, I think I like Source Code a good deal more than Inception -- though both films feel a lot more engaging in their first half and a lot more dry or sparse in their second (Source Code loses the lit-fuse urgency and strays into "what's it all mean?" territory; Inception strays from the surreal and unpredictable into the too literal and unimaginative, which runs counterintuitive to what you expect a "dream within a dream" to be like).

That was a lot more than I expected to say. I didn't even get the loose existential ends the story leaves us with. So, briefly: If Stevens gets to keep going in Sean's body just because he changed the timeline, what happens to Sean's consciousness? Where is Sean? Further, if Stevens's consciousness is being transmitted into the past from several hours in the future, and he creates a parallel timeline where the body he's transmitted into doesn't die, and he can continue in perpetuity in this new body, is his consciousness still dependent on his crippled, barely-living body in the Beleaguered Castle labs? The film seems to imply yes, but does that mean his mind is technically living perpetually x hours behind his body -- that, effectively, his body is in the future? More complicated: is "his" body, his version of his body, in the unaltered timeline, still continuing? Is Stevens's mind tethered to a different reality, at a different temporal point, and both are moving along their permanently-distinct paths until one or the other dies? Will Sean return to his body if they shut off Stevens's body, or will Sean's body drop dead -- or will that parallel dimension collapse upon itself? (Is it "stable?" or is it dependent on a perceptual agent and a stable tether? Do infinite universes coexist or is there a single universe capable of creating other quantum universes but only when they are being perceived by someone from the "real" universe?) I could go on and on.

The end -- the train not exploding, Stevens continuing as Sean, Goodwin receiving the email and choosing not to initiate the program in the first place -- all circles back on itself in a way that's interesting and a little mindbending, and it asks a lot more questions than it answers. And I do think it's smart to leave those things unaddressed, but it's hard to say whether I should be generous and praise it for a wildly open-ended conclusion, or be critical and call the ending inconsistent and messy. I guess, as a fan of open-endedness and ambiguity in storytelling, I fall into the former camp, but skeptically so.

Moon was a balls-out unimpeachable example of thoughtful, character-driven "hard" science fiction, a tight package and a closed-circuit of a story that implied a much richer world beyond every edge of the frame. In a similar vein, Source Code is more of a tricky, slippery idea-driven/plot-driven piece of entertaining science fiction that splits the difference between "soft" and "hard." It's nowhere near as simplistic and over-literal as Avatar or Inception, but on the other hand it's not as elegant and sharp as Moon or District 9, for example. Basically, it's a story that seems fun to think about, but you get the idea that, unlike Stevens, if you stray too far outside the frame, the whole thing actually will collapse very easily.

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

The Angry Red Planet

2011-04-12T04:24:00.000-07:00

Hard to know what to say about this. Such attention to technical detail, but the detail's all fabricated technobabble. In a lot of ways I'd say this is the prototype for Mission to Mars, the way it has more excitement for its faux-verisimilitude than for its characterization or drama; the way it clumsily dumps an endless barrage of exposition and hokey sentiment into the mouths of every character; and the way the whole film treats Mars like a mysterious threat but in the end the Martian "message" is surprisingly humane and civilized -- though in Mission to Mars that message is an invitation to explore the cosmos, and here in The Angry Red Planet the message is a weirdly parental one, akin to "We've been watching you, and do as you like, but stay out of Mom and Dad's bedroom or you'll be in big trouble, mister."

Also like Mission to Mars, this was a story about a series of events, and the cast was basically filled out in a way that gave us what we needed to make the story work -- including what I have to say is the least realistic crew selection I've ever seen in an astronaut/space movie, like trying to split the difference between the useful archetype diversity of Gilligan's Island and the mutli-discipline scientific-family of Lost in Space. The characters here are too perfectly what is needed to tell this story, and never come off as interesting or believable. In fact, with his rugged kind-of-good looks and brutish masculinity, I gather Colonel O'Bannion is supposed to be a kind of knock-off Bogart, but he comes off more like a heavy. The "dark alley" flirtation between him and "Irish" is less sparky and more rapey. Professor Gettell and good-ol' working class Sam come off more like cartoonish caricatures than genuine people. But the film is 1959, and a b-movie sci-fi thriller, so I'm fully aware that I'm gauging it on unfair criteria.

There's something interesting to the story, definitely, but more in a proto-Star Trek way than anything useful. The exposition moves pleasantly fast, which is worth noting, but it's so stiff and forced all I can take from it is a list of cautionary examples -- how not to inform your audience of the crucial details. The characterization starts to take hold in rudimentary ways, painting with a broad brush but at least painting some characters, but it never really amounts to anything more than "Irish and O'Bannion (supposedly) have chemistry, the Professor is old and smart, and Sam is dumb but good-hearted." The adventure of the story wraps up like a Star Trek episode, with some arbitrary technojargon about electrocuting giant amoebas which have swallowed their ship. Though to be fair: no doubt this seemed a lot more novel and original before so many Star Trek episodes, particularly one where they have to electrocute a giant amoeba which has swallowed the ship (heh). And the end, for all its scares in the middle, seemed particularly toothless, with an easily found and listened-to message from the Martian superbeings; a surprisingly easy-to-cure infection on the Colonel; and no real threat remaining to either our characters or our planet, beyond a vague "you guys are awfully violent, so steer clear" kind of thing. I imagine the message of being watched from space and judged "technological adults, but moral and spiritual children" probably rang pretty true during the Cold War -- but it doesn't really do any dramatic favors to wrapping up an eighty-minute adventure to Mars and back.

Mission to Mars

2011-04-06T22:15:00.000-07:00

This is probably my third time seeing this film, including way back when (all the way back at the dawn of time, in the year 2000) when it played in theaters. I guess I'd basically describe it as equal parts entertaining and underwhelming -- not quite disappointing, and not quite exciting. The script is a bit hokey, with by-the-books dramatics and characterization, clunky exposition and backstories, all that. But the technical details, though simplistic-feeling, also have a real sense of verisimilitude to them. It feels very much like someone excitedly did a lot of really good research into realistic advances in space exploration technology and culture, but maybe hasn't spent a lot of time around real humans. In fact, for all the detail put into space suits and orbital velocities, there is no sense that life continues for any of these characters when the camera's not actively on them. They exist only as elements in this particular story, the perfect combination needed to get from Point A (a disaster involving the first astronauts on Mars, in a curiously but conveniently un-televised event) to Point B (Jim staying behind to accept the Close Encounters-style invitation to explore the cosmos in an alien ship). There is no life beyond the edges of the frame, but within the frame some reasonably exciting stuff does happen.

So -- seriously -- who is a better director for this kind of material than Brian De Palma? Apart from vague similarities to 2001, it's not full of homages to classic cinema (probably somewhere there's a wink or a nod to Hitchcock somewhere in there... right?), but the self-conscious style and the use of movie expectations to keep the story rolling along fits De Palma just fine. There's something exuberantly unambiguous and hamfisted in the storytelling, the emotions, and especially the strange, mildly unearned sentimental montage at the end, and watching this now it's hard to fault it for its obviousness or patness: it's hardly accidental or unconscious. As a story about a man solving a hundred-million-year-old puzzle and earning a chance to join the proto-human Martians somewhere out in the galaxy, it does everything you'd expect it to do, and it does an all right job of it.

For the most part the space- and Mars- and astronaut-related visual effects all look surprisingly good (I'll overlook the wrongness of the zero-G liquids), which makes the weird cartooniness inside the Martian Face structure all the more unusual, and I remember thinking before that this was just another case of You-Never-Should-Have-Put-The-Camera-Inside-The-Ship (to reference Close Encounters of the Third Kind for a second time), but I'm willing to give a tiny bit more leeway here, since it's pretty clearly meant to be some kind of a holographic representation, a CGI simulation in other words, and not a photorealistic depiction of the ancient Martian, or of the Solar System History lesson. Again, with so much of the movieness of this feeling slightly self-conscious, I'm inclined to at least wonder if it wasn't a deliberate choice, letting the alien look less than realistic (it being a film from 2000, when CGI was still coming out of its infancy, doesn't really help support this theory). What it doesn't forgive is the awkward, goofy design of the alien itself. But, whatcha gonna do.

From the perspective of writing reference, though, it was interesting to note how sharply delineated the first act info-dump is, leaping ahead in time (necessarily) and cramming as much conveniently on-the-nose dialogue into each sequence as possible. Again, it's hard to ignore the artificiality of the whole enterprise, the convenience of almost every scene (this unfortunately diminishes an otherwise memorable and dramatically exciting death scene halfway through the film -- you all know which one I mean). Again, the pieces are just too well-suited to the needs of the story, and so at no point do you really get a sense of tough choices being made even when the choices being made would ostensibly be very high-stakes, very difficult decisions.

It's a case of the cart before the horse: they had a story they needed to tell, these guys -- humans get to Mars; on Mars they find a mystery that kills three and strands one; the rescue mission gets to Mars and finds their stranded friend, from whom they learn some key pieces of the story; a challenge is posed, accepted, and met; a deep secret of the universe is revealed; and someone from the party has to be perfectly suited to make a leap of faith. To tell that story, you look at the pieces you need and you fill them out accordingly. That's plot-driven writing. In character-driven writing, you'd set up the mystery and the puzzle, and then put the wrong sorts of people in these situations, and see what they do instead. Maybe the Martian Cyclone-Worm/Spaceship-Invitation Doohickey goes unsolved for fifty more years. I don't know. The point is, this isn't character-driven. And it's okay, but... well, I guess it's clear where my preferences fall.

(Further, the story demands that when the hero leaps off a cliff we don't give too much thought to the logistics or ramifications of that: a single human alone, in some strange alien spaceship, chasing after a very alien race with completely unknown cultural and ideological -- let alone biological -- expectations, needs, or desires... do the proto-human Martian Almond Men want to eat him? study him in a zoo? is he the final step in a hundred-million-year-long experiment in evolution and xenobiology? It seems pretty weird if they just want a single human friend, doesn't it? Compound all that with the fact that this race left Mars before single-cell life on Earth had developed -- I mean, that's a pretty big head start; in the time it took amoebas to become spacefaring hominids, what changes do you think these highly advanced, genetics-mastered spaceworthy Almond Giants have undergone? What exactly is waiting out there for him, best case scenario? It's not like they're going to remember sending out a party invite when they were forced to abandon their home to an asteroid crash. Also, if I'm going to fill this long parenthetical with hole-punching, I can't walk away and not ask: when their lush green Mars was turned into a lifeless husk, why was soaring through space toward a new galaxy a better option than hopping one planet closer to the Sun and populating Earth themselves? It was worthy of their raw genetic material but it wasn't worthy of their cities and culture?)

Anyway, like I said: this story desperately doesn't want to exist beyond the edges of the frame. The characters, the technology, the mystery, and the secret origins of life on Earth. It's like the façades built for those old 1950s westerns: entire towns that were nothing but storefronts and boardwalks, held together on the backside by plywood crossbeams. If you look at it head-on, it's a beautiful, sprawling, detailed frontier town. But if you cock your head to either side and peer around the edges, beneath the surface or into the shadows, you realize how poorly supported and precarious the whole thing is.

Several cautionary tales in all those colorful metaphors, as I return now to working on my script.

Metropolis

2011-04-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

I knew I'd never seen Metropolis all the way through, but I thought I'd seen more of it than it turns out I had, so sitting and watching the "Complete" version with all the restored "lost" footage was a real treat. The number of films I could catch reference to here, feeling the impact backwards as it were, was pretty incredible. Several Spielberg films (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Lucas (THX-1138, Star Wars: A New Hope), Gilliam (Brazil most notably) and even more offbeat fare (The Hudsucker Proxy, Joe vs. the Volcano) all come to mind.

The metaphor and visual poetry throughout was pretty great. For one the (explicitly repeated) theme that "The Heart Must Be The Mediator Between The Head And The Hands" played out in pretty interesting ways, although the very end with Freder literally mediating between Head (his father, Joh Fredersen, the Master of Metropolis) and the Hands (the foreman Grot, the Master of the Heart Machine and the ad-hoc leader of the city's workers) was a bit too direct to resonate as much more than an easy way to resolve the characters' stories. Taking the "God" out of the Tower of Babel story and turning it into a stone-cold ideological metaphor of class was pretty cool, especially in the economical way it was handled with so few lines or scenes (the leaders and thinkers who come up with Babel think of the word as an exultation of their own and God's greatness; the workers hired to slave away and die for its construction see the same word not as cry of praise but as a curse of despair; therefore it is as though the men all spoke a different language and could not communicate with each other, and so the Tower of Babel was cursed to remain unfinished).

Actually -- and not surprisingly considering my obsessive focus of late (the reason I haven't been blogging is that I haven't been watching films; the main reason I haven't been watching films is that I've been pushing myself for eight to ten hours a night, writing) -- the way the film most impacted me is the way it threw some elements of my "end of the world romantic black comedy epic" script into sharp relief. The theme of Heart vs Hand vs Head is actually no small part of the story I'm working on, and the way the future is depicted here too is actually kind of relieving (that I could "reference Metropolis" in my depiction of rulers, thinkers, and workers somehow makes that seem at least a tiny bit less daunting -- especially the "rulers," which have been giving me a little trouble). Even the technology of throwing a lever and transferring the identity of Maria into the Machine-Man robot has a pretty clear parallel in the story I'm working on (though, at least right now, I have no intention of making the post-mad-scientist woman turn evil and maniacal).

I already know I'm going to be revisiting this soon for a beat-analysis and writing exercise, because I have a feeling considering the themes and approaches this film takes with its story may have an impact on the telling of my own. Maybe I'll have more insight then, beyond "It does things well, and the story feels similar to my own in unexpected ways." I will say this, though: even by today's standards most of the visual effects and sets look pretty amazing; by 1927 standards they must have blown people's socks off. And the use of film as a medium to tell a story that couldn't be told any other way -- the non-literal, the visual poetry and metaphor, the operatic drama combined with heady modern themes and huge, lush setpieces -- make me wonder about all the later, American films by Fritz Lang I've seen over the years. Did I miss something? They struck me as gorgeous, and well-told, and well-acted and directed, but I don't remember any of the kind of boldness of storytelling that you find here in Scarlet Street or The Big Heat or The Woman in the Window.

Wonderful film, deserving of every bit of its reputation.

Magnolia

2011-03-22T03:58:00.000-07:00

Much like I did to Dr. Strangelove the other night, I actually combed through this film with my thumb on the pause button and wrote down each story beat as I went so I could better analyze the structure of a multi-plotline ensemble film. Of course, Dr. Strangelove is a 90-minute high-concept story with very few scenes, locations, and characters. It has virtually no subplots, just a handful of threads that all tell their part of a single story. By contrast, Magnolia is a 3-hour tapestry of nothing but low-concept subplots (and one big Event), so it actually took a lot more out of me to write it all down.

Two dying fathers suffering the regrets of their earlier dalliances -- both of whom cheated repeatedly and flagrantly on their wives; one who may have/probably did abuse his daughter and the other who abandoned his dying wife and teenage son when the scene got a little too "real" for him. The daughter has become a coked-out wreck who takes home strange men and lives like an angry child, unwilling and unable to let go of her past. The son has become a self-styled exaggeration of the aggressive macho bullshit he saw in his father, a stunted man-boy unwilling and unable to acknowledge the existence of his past. The first father is the host of a popular game show produced by the second father's company. The daughter has a chance encounter with a loser cop on a particularly bad day and the two awkwardly agree to fall in love and help support each other (in a dynamic later explored under different-but-similar circumstances in P.T. Anderson's next film), and although she never reconciles with her father, she at least manages to reconnect with her mother. The son doesn't quite reconcile with his father, but he at least acknowledges through catharsis his father's role in his life and admits to needing him not to die.

On the other side of the spectrum, two damaged boys. One, a former "quiz kid" from the 60s (living in the shadow of his past), now an adult with more neuroses and problems than can easily be counted, who loses his job, drunkenly embarrasses himself in front of the big-dumb-pretty bartender he's in love with, and robs his former employers in order to pay for braces he doesn't need to be somehow closer to the bartender. The other, a current "quiz kid" with no friends other than books (living the past that will overshadow his future?), and already well on his way to his own highly complicated set of neurotic tics and phobic anxieties. In the middle, bridging these distant poles: a shy but compassionate male nurse; a manic and/or bipolar golddigger who's grown a conscience; and the adorable, affable loser cop mentioned before.

The pacing is pretty intense throughout, I realized, and one of the ways it manages to keep so much story going at once is with a surprising number of rapidfire montages, often set to music. That none of it's boring or just feels like spinning plates is testament to a lot of strong characters and stories. That the dialogue could be this stylized and the tension this high for so long (and the emotions and tones so varied from story to story) without ever collapsing or tearing itself apart is again testament to the strength of the story.

At the time this was released, I considered this one of the greatest films I'd seen in the last ten years or so. Now, especially if I compare it to Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, the film comes off a lot more poppy and overpolished than I remembered. It's amazing to return to a massive, unmarketable three-hour film like this -- one that Anderson was only able to make because Boogie Nights was such a huge success, and he struck while the iron was hot -- can come off so commercial feeling, but there it is. As good as Tom Cruise's breakdown scene is (and it's still good), it comes off as the "big Oscar moment" for the "big bankable actor," even if he's playing against type (and yet, playing so perfectly into his own public image). The quirkiness and originality of it (structure, tone, the climactic self-conscious deus ex machina) are all a lot less refined and confident, almost too bombastic and bold -- not refined enough, maybe -- when you look at his next two works.

But Magnolia holds up well. It makes me nostalgic for Aimee Mann songs, makes me love intense/vulnerable Melora Walters, makes me miss dramatic actor John C. Reilly, makes me look back in wonder to an era where nobody's heard of Patton Oswalt, or Philip Seymour Hoffman, or where small cameos by Luis Guzman, Clark Gregg, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Felicity Huffman, and even William Mapother (Ethan from Lost! ...also Tom Cruise's cousin) might go almost unnoticed. And now I have an intricately charted beat-sheet to go through sometime, and see what kind of wisdom I can glean from it, how ensembles can be put together, and how you keep so many engines running all at once without a story falling apart. (Something to look forward to, when it's not four in the morning!)

The Social Network

2011-03-21T00:56:00.000-07:00

I recently had a conversation with a friend about the subtler messages in The Social Network, like the ways it shows how interactions change, and fail to change, in the wake of the Facebook explosion (of course Facebook is just the biggest peak in a pre-existing and still-continuing wave of social network trends, neither the first nor the last, but this isn't some technological history paper, it's a blog post about a specific dramatic movie, and I think that movie chose the right representative of the ongoing sociological phenomenon). The film intercuts the drunk debauchery of the Final Clubs parties that Mark wants into with Mark (drunkenly) building Facemash, paralleling the social world he wants to be a part of (self-conscious and somewhat artificial "raucous party" behavior; entitlement buoyed by exclusivity) with the prototype of the social world he's creating to replace it -- small groups or individuals, anyone anywhere really (stairwells, coffee shops, dorm rooms), sharing the same sense of self-conscious, artificial entitlement and exclusivity: both groups objectifying women and lording a kind of judgmental, pseudo-discriminatory power over those outside the group.

This parallel continues as Eduardo goes through the stages of entering these self-same clubs, while Mark (not invited to join) goes through the stages of tearing down the powerbase and redefining the market value for the only commodities the Final Clubs have: selective entry and "coolness." It's oversimplistic to say the entire movie hinges on jealousy of Eduardo (just as it's oversimplistic, despite the ending, to say the whole thing hinges on his bruised feelings over Erica's rejection of him), but to the extent that the movie does play with the motivation of jealousy, these scenes almost play out like a race: Eduardo jumping through hoops to get into the castle while Mark jumps through hoops to tear down the castle walls.

Aside from these parallels, and after last night's beat-by-beat analysis of Dr. Strangelove, I really would like to see a diagram of the intersecting storylines here. The way the present-past (or future-present, if you prefer; once we get deep into depositions vs action, it doesn't matter which is more "present") interact and the way the various strands come together makes for a beautiful and complicated story.

Mark lashes out, angry at Clubs and Erica (girls) and looking to rile people up, eager to bring down Harvard's servers. This gets him on the radar of the Winklevosses, which directly inspires him to create Thefacebook.com (historical accuracy bores me; the fictional movie's story is clear enough in its order of events and that's all I care about). Once we enter act two and (The)facebook.com becomes the main objective, Mark manages to make it Mark vs. Winklevosses and Mark vs. Eduardo -- he turns both (sets of) allies into not just antagonists, and just as the story's main line of Mark vs. Exclusivity is dually represented by both Girls(/Erica) and Final Clubs, now the dual obstacles are the two lawsuits. I don't think Mark set out to make enemies out of friends; I think he set out to change the world in his image and this kind of act of megalomania often involve casualties.

But I digress. The point I was aiming for is, there are so many layers to how the two depositions and their corresponding "flashback" scenes interweave, everything is locked together like the tightest dramatic and thematic jigsaw puzzle I think I've ever seen. It's not just that a scene from one will bleed smoothly into the other, or that the results of one scene will inform or expand the relationship depicted in the next; they also propagate each other causally, act as counterpoints to each other philosophically, and seem to run circles around each other. I want to cite examples, but the scenes are too intertwined for me to pick them apart from memory. Maybe I'll go look for a beat sheet one day, or write one up, and be in a better position to defend this point. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of levels at play here, and none of them seems accidental, out of place, or (worse) shoe-horned into the story. It's all smooth and organic.

This is the third time I've seen this film now, and so the third time I've blogged about it (see here and here), and each time my respect for it grows enormously. I always feel like I want to say more, to pick apart deeper themes and hidden signals -- I still believe this is the film about how humans interact in the early 21st century -- but it's just so dense that I only get so far. I recently read a critique that said the only films it's fair to compare The Social Network to are Citizen Kane and There Will Be Blood. Even while reading that I thought it was slightly outlandish, but I also think there's something to it at least. Stories about larger-than-life men who have the power to shape the world in their image but who lack the power to overcome even the simplest and most basic of human weaknesses -- and truly great pieces of capital-c Cinema, that the world would be a worse place without.

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

2011-03-20T01:12:00.000-07:00

Tonight I watched this film and kept copious notes of pretty much every beat and scene for the entire film, as research for a project I'm working on. I wanted to pay close attention to the structure of it, and since I can't find a copy of the screenplay anywhere (and honestly, a "beat sheet" is more useful anyhow), I just went ahead and did the legwork myself. Looking at it as closely as that, it's interesting to note who's "crazy" and who's "sane. To twist an old writing adage, I think one of the best ways to make absurdity work in a comedy (or in any story, I imagine) is to have sane ("ordinary") people treat insane ("extraordinary") circumstances in totally reasonable ways, or have insane ("extraordinary") people react to sane ("ordinary") circumstances in insane or unreasonable ways.

Here, General Jack T. Ripper sets the whole thing off by reacting to, ostensibly, the real-life situation of an increasingly tense arms race and cold war (whether you call that "ordinary" or "extraordinary" circumstances probably depends on your political and philosophical views). He is insane -- the only one in the film depicted as actually, dangerously nutso, and not just goofy or quirky or hilariously ill-equipped for their position. Mandrake, by contrast, though a bit of a passive coward, is decidedly sane, perhaps (in that British-prim-and-proper way) too sane for his job, and he reacts to the insane situation sanely -- that is, he acknowledges that the situation is insane.

President Muffley, General Turgidson, and the absent Premier Kissoff, are all quirky and out of sorts with your expectations for their roles; all are sane but in their own ways seem to be handling the situation before them unreasonably, the way insane people might. Muffley and Kissoff are nervous nellies, concerned with oversensitive telephone etiquette (to be fair, we are told Kissoff is drunk; Muffley has no excuse and comes off more like a nervous chief accountant than a Head of State). Turgidson is an exaggeration on military men: practically a little boy with too many wonderful toys to play with, beamingly proud of them all and quick to forget the gravity of their intent. The titular Dr. Strangelove... well, he might be legitimately insane as well, it's difficult to say. At the very least he's a mad scientist a little too in touch with his god complex, and he definitely reacts to the situations with what I would have to call unreasonable reactions: like Buck Turgidson, he's proud of his evil toys; but like Jack Ripper his answers are cut-and-dry, brutal, beautifully extreme and megalomaniacal. And he is the end-all/be-all voice of reason for the President and his staff here; all questions filter through Strangelove, and nobody questions his wisdom (except when asking for more juicy details). In short, nobody in the War Room are technically "sane" in their reactions; although the broad strokes remain reasonable, the details from each of the key players are decidedly less so.

By contrast, nobody aboard the bomber in flight is shown as anything but perfectly rational: bold, brave, direct men of action who've been trained to do a task and carry it out right down to the letter. In fact, aside from some color commentary from Major "King" Kong, nobody aboard the bomber has any agency at any point in the story. Every choice and (meaningful) line of dialogue is a script laid out for them, a program running. They hit conditionals, conditions are met, the proper response is given, and so on. Even (especially) when things go wrong, all there is to do is go down the checklist and act accordingly. Primary and secondary targets are out of reach, there is no choice but to look up in the books what the closest potential target is and to move in that direction. Right down to Kong personally climbing into the bomb bay to get those doors open, and riding down one of the two hydrogen bombs -- Kong is the Major after all, and it's his duty above all else to protect his men and ensure the success of his mission. Wearing a cowboy hat and yahoo'ing like a, well, like a total yahoo -- that's all Kong, I admit; but the choice to do so was written before the Plan R order went out. Just look at Colonel Guano who shows up to arrest Mandrake, and how difficult it was for him to sidestep the strict and preordained sequence of commands, to allow a "prevert" like Mandrake to try to call the President. Soldiers here are cogs; this is shown with full respect of the job they do (at least for the bombardiers, who do their job well, bravely, and keep their spirits up), bur they're cogs all the same.

The danger isn't soldiers gone astray. The danger is soldiers too good at doing the tasks laid out for them, cogs too efficient in a program too automated. Of course it's well-known lore that Dr. Strangelove started life as a non-humorous, deadly serious thriller novel, and that Kubrick tried for a long time to adapt it in that tone before realizing it only worked when it was played for laughs -- it's too gruesome not to laugh at -- and that's why the film works. The events are all feasible, even when the characters and their beliefs, reactions, dialogue, and personalities are thoroughly and wonderfully less so. But the villain here isn't Ripper -- he's just the macguffin that sets things rolling. The villain here is a system set up to make a chilling, world-ending series of events deliberately and pointedly unstoppable. In fact, it's Ripper's madness, his obsession with with his Purity of Essence, that saves them all -- a sane general would not have picked a three-letter code that his XO could so easily figure out, nor would he doodle it all over the papers on his desk. And lest we think the film claims the U.S. were crazy and the Russians mere victims, remember that it's the Russians who'd devised the actual Doomsday Machine which upped the stakes from merely one messy nuclear war to the devastation of all life on the surface of the Earth. And then, oh, that end!

What keeps me coming back to this film, I think, are three things. First, the dialogue and humor: so deadpan, so outlandish, so wonderfully theatre of the absurd. Second, the audacity of the thing, a black comedy about the end of humanity not through some kind of hubris but just through paranoia and automation -- that the film ends with all those nuclear detonations, the end of civilization everywhere, and the song "We'll Meet Again" has obviously had an enormous impact on me (and this particular script). And third, the delicate balance of tone, where we watch those unreasonable and implausible characters react semi-reasonably and semi-plausibly to a situation so frighteningly plausible (despite a warning at the front assuring us this could never actually happen)... it's exciting to watch a filmmaker daring you to laugh at the things that terrify him (and all of us, especially then) the most, and also daring you to take serious a story that on the surface is a comical farce full of sex-puns and a kind of pent-up energy, like at any point the tension could snap and the whole thing will devolve into slapstick (true story: there was a filmed deleted scene in which the entire War Room gets into a massive pie fight). There's nothing more serious than good comedy, and I think Kubrick knows it. Off the top of my head, I believe this was his only comedy film? Unless you count A Clockwork Orange?

So yeah, this was writing research more explicitly than anything else I've watched lately, but it's still not very surprising I keep coming back to this film again and again.

A Boy Named Charlie Brown

2011-03-17T00:52:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the Complete Peanuts books lately and in a strange way have fallen in love with them, an impulse I had because so many respected writers and artists I know speak so lovingly of them, and because I'd remembered from a couple years back discovering that the Charlie Brown cartoons aren't funny but painfully, unsparingly melancholy. The comics, even more so. By the '60s it feels almost like Charles Schultz is no longer trying to be funny. I think he knew that nostalgia for a certain kind of childhood anxiety and emotional despair was plenty charming on its own. And I think he is right. There is something weirdly beautiful about Charlie Brown's endless, year-to-year cycles of the same kinds of pain, and Linus's neuroses, and Lucy's fussiness, and Snoopy's fantasies, and Schroeder's borderline-autistic love of music.

Halfway through rewatching it, I described A Boy Named Charlie Brown as "the unrelenting psychic dismantling of an over-anxious all-around failure, played as bittersweet nostalgia." Scene after scene we watch Charlie fall apart. He can't fly a kite. He can't manage a baseball team (or pitch). Lucy shows him a slideshow, categorizing and illustrating in painful, traumatic detail every single fault within him. Even when trying to cheer him up, Linus can't help but beat Charlie Brown at tic-tac-toe. Charlie Brown says he is a "born loser." Linus convinces him to join a spelling bee, and a couple of lucky words gets him past the local and state tournaments and into a national competition, where he agonizes over spelling rules, loses sleep and becomes a delirious wreck. When finally excelling at something, he finds he is more miserable than before.

Then of course, all that minimal success and popularity (even the other kids tune in to see, and after his own mini-crisis with a misplaced loaned blanket is resolved, Linus sits in the front row with Snoopy, eager to support his friend) is just a build-up for an even bigger failure than he's ever experienced before, as Charlie makes it to the last two spellers and blows it on the easiest word, the breed of his dog. He spells "Beagle" as "Beagel" and loses, in front of everyone he knows, when he was right there and could have had the trophy.

The spelling bee itself lasts about sixty seconds. The drive home after losing lasts something like five minutes, followed by Charlie walking the empty streets, Charlie going into his empty house, Charlie undressing and crawling into bed -- where he remains through the whole next school day and after. There is no question that this is being milked for all its poignancy and pain, basking in the miserable afterglow of failure. Linus comes to try once again to cheer up his friend ("We played a baseball game without you today; it was the first time we won all season,") and finally all he can say is, "Well, I can understand how you feel. You worked hard, studying for the spelling bee, and I suppose you feel you let everyone down. You made a fool out of yourself and everything, but did you notice something, Charlie Brown? The world didn't come to an end." It's the best he can offer, and it's enough to convince Charlie to get out of bed, get dressed, and go out.

Wandering by friends at play (mostly ignored) he goes to the baseball mound and kicks up dust. And from there he sees Lucy, her back turned, goofing with the football. He creeps up on her, momentarily confident all over again -- hope springs eternal -- and rushes her for a kick. But -- yank! -- Lucy was ready for him, and he goes flailing and crying out in true Charlie Brown fashion ("Auuughh!"), and lands unceremoniously on his ass. Lucy comes up to him and says, sort of sweetly, "Welcome home, Charlie Brown."

You fail at everything, Charlie Brown, but look on the bright side: your friends are still there to tease you, and there are always more opportunities to fail ahead. (In one strip, Charlie Brown tells Linus, "I've come up with a new philosophy: now I only dread one day at a time.") Children's humor doesn't get much blacker than Peanuts, and this film is a perfect, unapologetic example of that. The closest thing to a happy ending in Charlie Brown's world is the recognition that nothing has changed, even when he fails so spectacularly as this.

The thing is, I don't find any of it depressing, and I don't revel in the depression of it. I find it all enlightening, and even a little energizing. Not to get all hippie-deep on you, but: That's life, man, you know? Not to get all existential-nihilist on you, but: Life will continue to be absurd, cruel, and kick you when you're down, and your only choices are to get up or lie still, and neither will drastically change what happens next (life will continue to be absurd, cruel, and kick you when you're down), and so you might as well get up. Reading Peanuts and watching this (and, if memory serves, its successor, Snoopy, Come Home), I am reminded of one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes: from the underrated Timequake. When Vonnegut wonders to himself "Why bother?" he comes with this response: "Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"

Again, not to get all touchy-feely about a late '60s cartoon based on a popular newspaper strip about a bald little boy who sucks at everything, but: What can I say? There's something thoroughly grand and humanistic in this, a certain emotional and dramatic territory and language that gets almost no attention in the funny-pages or in children's cartoons. How could I not love it?

Stripes

2011-03-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

It's odd watching this movie as an adult, especially as an adult with (to be perfectly honest) a lot lower tolerance for silly comedies than I had when I was a kid. So much of the movie exists just to build to weird gags and setpieces that barely work (Ramis as an ESL teacher getting his class to sing "Da Doo Ron Ron?"). The movie ends up being more charming than funny, which isn't so bad.

I once read that Bill Murray contacted Johnny Depp and warned him not to sign on to Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, because after playing Hunter S. Thompson himself, Murray felt he couldn't get the man back out of him. Rewatching Stripes, which came out the year after Where the Buffalo Roam, it's hard not to notice Murray's character Winger go into (probably ad-libbed) energetic, sharp-barbed diatribes that sound more than a little like Thompson, and he even calls people "weird mutants" twice. Make of it what you will, but I found that an interesting thought. On the subject of performance: Harold Ramis is about as good an actor here as Jerry Seinfeld on Seinfeld -- he tries from time to time, but he's always smirking a "hey look, I'm acting like I'm acting" kind of smirk.

Don't get me wrong. The movie is fun. I watched it, believe it or not, as part of character reference for a project I'm writing (one of the characters I have described as "Peter Venkman-like"), and I'm home sick and half out of it, so I wasn't looking for anything too challenging here. It feels a little (actually, a lot) like a smarter-than-average Police Academy movie, and even knowing it's Warren Oates in the G.W. Bailey role, I still can't see that as the hard-faced anti-hero of some of the best Pekinpah movies. (I realize Police Academy came several years later and it's very obvious that Academy was in fact pretty clearly a cheap, silly knock-off of Stripes and not the other way around, but I guess I grew up watching those fairly horrible movies more often, and between that franchise and playing basically the same character in Mannequin, G.W. Bailey really owned the role of Capt. Harris for me, I guess, even as he made it more cartoonish and one-dimensional than Oates's Sgt. Hulka.)

Anyway, a silly movie. Fun. Fairly pointless. And I still rambled endlessly about it. (Hardly shocking.)

Colossus: The Forbin Project

2011-03-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

I haven't done any research into when this came out in relation to other stories of this kind, but it feels like Colossus: The Forbin Project suffers from a case of undercooked ideas, like maybe it was the first time a computer-taking-over-humanity story had ever been made as a film. Certainly it suffers a little because there's not much more to the story than that simple premise. It's so procedural and direct about its "What would happen if a master computer was put in charge of our nuclear weapons and took its job as Overseer too seriously?" storyline that it lacks any good give-and-take (or even a decent subplot, apart from some chemistry between Forbin and Markham). We see our protagonists, Dr. Forbin and the other pesky humans, reacting to the situation as hostages react to a bank robber with a machine gun, or as any victim of terrorism reacts when capitulating. They stall for time, they adhere to the barest minimum requirements of each demand, and they look for clever ways out of their situation. The implication at the end is a kind of Twilight Zone realization that there's no way out, but to me it seemed like it was only just getting good when the credits rolled.

I know they're remaking this (and I think with Will Smith? oh well) and for my money I'd like to see the entirety of this film compressed into act one, or at the very least make the "You will now comply with me and one day learn to love me" seemingly-dead-end-for-humanity's-agency speech be the act two midpoint. There's a lot more story after this, even if the humans fail to regain control of the planet. Hell, I know this movie doesn't have the following required for such a gambit, but I'd be much more interested in a sequel akin to TRON: Legacy than a straight remake. A modern-day retelling of this would lose almost all of its punch instantly, since there's hardly anything shocking about networked computers, panopticon-esque surveillance, or complicated intertwined technological systems doing most of the decision making for mankind. Plus, we don't have a Cold War, and Cold War stories redesigned as U.S.-versus-Middle East stories always feel cheap and silly to me. But if they left the original as a relic, then leapt ahead 32 years or whatever and showed us an alternate future where Colossus/Guardian was running every little thing and humanity's own interests were being "served" by a sort of mechanized übermensch -- I could get behind that. In fact, you could be really sneaky and show us an alternate future where a giant machine took over the planet in 1969 and now humanity is now a slave to this higher power, and you could show us how this alternate world was almost totally indistinguishable from our own in meaningful and poignant ways, suggesting maybe our real world isn't as much humanity's domain as we think. What with mega-corporate superstructures and media-based cultural and ideological control and decisions being made way over our head and all.

But I digress. The film is decent, fairly tense, does a nice job of showing the fear of losing global and political control (though everyone gave in a little too readily for my taste), but too much of it was talking, and too much of the talking was one-sided (for most of the story Forbin advocated immediate capitulation; those advocating resistance never put up a reasonable fight). I don't want action, but I'd like more visual storytelling and less verbal story telling. Still, not bad. Interesting. Dated. Interesting precursor to a lot of films and stories I enjoy, most notably stuff like WarGames and even TRON.

The Godfather

2011-03-09T04:22:00.000-08:00

Now here's a nice continuation of tonight's theme of crime melodramas. Shockproof was (ostensibly) about a morally upright man driven to the dark side by love of a woman; As Tears Go By was about an amoral man tempted toward the light side by love of a woman, but ultimately brought down by brotherly love for a fellow gangster; and here, The Godfather is about a shrewd, smart man born into amorality who tries (twice) to let the love of a woman keep him from slipping, but ultimately his responsibility to and love of his family draws him back down.

In a way it's always been odd to me that Brando is all over the posters and movie boxes for this. I mean, literally speaking he's the title character, but the story is really about Michael Corleone's transition from golden boy/war hero into the next Don/Godfather. It's the story about the position or role of "Godfather" and its power, and the gradual but inevitable transition from too-smart-to-get-involved Michael into cold, shrewd, too-smart-to-do-anything-else Michael. Of course, it's also about the family and the role of family and about the transition from one generation's way of thinking into the next and how the departing seat's values ought to be respected but considered skeptically by those coming into power, and about the nature of (and right time and place for, and right time and place to avoid) violence, and the value of firm action over mere words (this at least is something I could easily argue is echoed throughout As Tears Go By and is perversely, poignantly missing from Shockproof). But I always look to drama and character first, and the story isn't Vito's, it's Michael's. Part II splits its focus between the two, to both the benefit and detriment of the film if you ask me, but Part I here is strictly Michael's story.

I'm not actually making a case against Brando being on the posters, of course. Brando is the big-deal actor, and the iconic figure of the story. It's Michael who's the classic hero here, who resists and then answers the call to action, who faces demons in a cave, sets sail for distant lands, usurps his father's throne and returns home a changed man, but it's Vito Corleone casting the looming shadow over everything: Vito is at various points nemesis, trickster, attractor and mentor. He's the key to everything. Of course he's on the poster.

But the story belongs solely to Michael Corleone, is all I'm saying.

旺角卡門 (As Tears Go By)

2011-03-09T01:53:00.000-08:00

It seems kind of perverse to me that Wong Kar-wai's first film, his only fully scripted film, is his highest grossing and most successful film in his native Hong Kong. I'd seen this once before about five years ago, and it's a lot stronger than I remember it being, but it's just not the caliber of his subsequent, more loosely structured stories. It's easy to see how this led smoothly into what followed, though, and by the standards of what I've seen of Hong Kong crime-melodramas of the era (seems like crime melodrama is the theme of the night, doesn't it?), this is still a little more free-floating, with a handful of subplots circling each other -- or maybe circling our hero.

This doesn't quite have the slippery-slope-descent to it that Shockproof, the other film I finished tonight, had though; here it's more like a morally fallen man sees a glimmer of hope, reaches for it, but is unwilling to let go of the further-fallen friends (particularly Fly) that he's keeping propped up. The tragedy here is that Wah's fate is already decided for him; he's already committed to protecting Fly and keeping him from getting himself killed, and when Ngor (Maggie Cheung, looking so young!) arrives in his life with the open promise of redemption, he is damned if he follows her (and leaves Fly to his inevitable fall -- as the names are Chinese I'm not going to make much of that particular wordplay) and damned if he stays inside the gang world to protect Fly (linking his own fate to Fly's). The protagonist here loves his foil -- who by dramatic definition is unable to change within the story -- and so his fate is all but decided. It's almost Greek, when you look at it like that.

Still, for all its dramatic value and beautiful scenes and nice performances, the story slags a little through the second half, as so many of the confrontations-with-bad-ass-bosses seem the same, becoming variations on a theme rather than new and escalating obstacles. I don't know if that's the limit of the genre (Hong Kong films all tend to have the kinds of scenes we have here, fights in late-night cafés or pissing matches over mahjongg) or if it's a conscious comment on that limit. It doesn't ruin the story, either way, but it does wear the viewer down a lot. All you have to do is compare this to his next film, Days of Being Wild (made only two years later), to see what Wong Kar-wai can do with a little more freedom and a lot more confidence.

Shockproof

2011-03-09T00:55:00.000-08:00

Seems like every other film I put on at random speaks to my shelved "crime road movie" idea about the well-meaning couple who commit a crime and flee from Washington state to Mexico and lose their soul along the way. Shockproof is definitely a film in this category. Or at least, it wants to be. Somewhere in there is the story of a man who falls for the wrong girl and does crazy things for her, sacrificing incrementally more and more of his principles and reputation (in other words, his identity) to be with her; and somewhere in there is the story of a girl pushed back and forth by two love-mad men, one a smalltime bad-guy and the other a smalltime good-guy, only each shove pushes her further away from any reasonable moral center. Somewhere in there is a story that asks is love bigger than the troubles of real life, or are the troubles of real life bigger than love? And the answers are almost interesting.

It's hard to say if what holds it back is the romance backbone of the story, the Douglas Sirk melodramatic tone, or the populist expectations of the era. A little research suggests that the original ending of Samuel Fuller's screenplay had Griff "violently rebelling against the system that tried to keep him and Jenny apart." Instead, here, we have Jenny realize how far through the muck she's dragged this poor guy and turn herself in, only to be rewarded by a weird and abrupt one-eighty by her antagonistic former love interest, when he decides to drop all charges, apparently rendering the apathetic cops unable to convict them of anything. (Note: Jenny didn't "drag" Griff through any muck, actually; in fact he dragged her practically kicking and screaming into virtually every mess they find themselves in. Griff Marat has got to be the most cracked, poor-judgment parole officer in the history of criminal law, but I guess love'll make you do crazy things, right?)

The story undermines itself completely before the end, and to make matters worse it seems to only have two modes: heavy-handed symbolism and overwrought, too-thematically-spot-on dialogue. My instinct is that the former is Sirk's touch and the latter Fuller's, and neither helps the story work. Basically, this isn't the very best movie ever made, but it hits on some pretty interesting themes and has, until the (anti-)climax at least, a pretty decent structure. Something just got overcooked along the way, and the result is a somewhat toothless, stale romantic fantasy.

But it's really so close to something... it really is. Oh well.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

2011-03-04T02:05:00.000-08:00

I just mentioned this recently, actually, but one of many unrealized projects I have floating around waiting for me to get back to is a crime/road-movie about a trio of people with a too-good-to-be-true shot at millions of dollars if they just do one quick criminal act and then drive quietly down to the Mexican border. Katalin Varga has vague overtones of that kind of a story in its DNA, I admit, but almost no story is as big an influence on this idea as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The idea of well-intentioned desperate people, facing the challenges of character most people don't have to actually face, and learning what kind of a human you really are, has no greater forebear I know than this (though I have always wanted to see Erich von Stroheim's Greed).

Casting Bogart in what might be one of my favorite Bogart roles, a sort-of-against-type/sort-of-perfectly-to-type ruffian who slips a little too comfortably into the role of paranoid murderer as the story goes -- even his fairly brutal (though off-screen) death -- I always wonder if there's a bit of stunt casting in that. I mean, he'd been a box-office star for seven or eight years at that point, had already done Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and so on. Here he starts out down on his luck (even begging from an eerily dapper-looking John Huston cameo) but charming enough, and there's no reason going in to assume that this is going to end with him a raving, dirty, bearded lunatic, a killer and a thief, hacked to death by bandits while trying to flee like a coward. It's perverse, and it gives a little extra oomph to the idea that greed can turn even the best of men into monsters.

The whole cast is brilliant. The story is unexpected and beautifully told. It's also unblinkingly intense without feeling unusual for its time or place -- that's a hard concept to articulate right now (it's pretty late as I write this, to be honest), but it's something John Huston has always seemed a little better at than most of his contemporaries.

I have seen the first half of this movie a dozen times now, and the second half about twice. That's not a judgment on the film but on the bad timing of when, over the years, I've chosen to put it on. It's a weird kind of brutal-comfort film for me, somehow, possibly because of my own story that was borne spiritually out of combining elements from this and Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. But regardless, there's very little negative to say here; I love this movie. One of my favorite classic films.

Cold Weather *

2011-02-26T22:49:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that the goal (conscious or otherwise) of Cold Weather is to make a "mumblecore mystery" film, playing with the mumblecore toolbox and telling a sort of sideways crime story, another in-over-our-heads watched-too-many-movies amateur-detective story (which, to be fair, I generally enjoy quite a bit, at least in theory). I didn't stick around for the director's Q&A because it was obvious it would be an endless round of silver-hairs asking what street such-and-such a scene was shot on, or how they got permission to use the Montage, or whatever. (Sadly, random-audience Q&As are rarely any good, full of silly production questions and local-filmmaker-makes-good stories are even less likely to be.) So I can't say for sure that the intent was to go down that road, but at best I'd say that's what he accidentally did, if he didn't do it knowingly.

Anyway, you can more or less get away with writing a low-key pseudo-observational "real" (messy/sluggish/quirky/unstructured) interpersonal drama or relationship comedy, but when you inject an overly-familiar high-concept plotline into that same story, the amorphous storytelling gets in the way because there really is action to follow, stuff really is happening, and your characters are going to have to act or react as needed to keep the story moving. My hope was that the filmmakers would play with the expectations of the genre in some clever and perhaps unexpected ways, as they told their mumblecore-y story of listless middle class dudes taking jobs beneath them and put off growing up for as long as possible. Instead it just kind of lurched awkwardly in and out of some familiar scenes with no sense for action or thriller pacing. Moments dragged on without being humorous or exciting (I admit there's something "real" about the boredom of a stakeout, but if you can't develop your characters or advance your story with this scene, why are you showing it to me at all?) and key elements to drive the story just kept plopping into our heroes' laps (the missing girl just up and calls them on the phone; the briefcase was a breeze to steal; all peril seemed entirely imaginary in this story).

Further, too much of the story was driven by the side characters, which totally undermine any idea that our hero Doug is anything but a lazy slacker who's all talk. He insists he loves Sherlock Holmes and "wants to be a detective" (of the non-CSI/Sherlock Holmes variety no less) but refuses to take action and is the wet blanket when they begin their adventures. And on a side note, as a guy who's probably even geekier than he lets on (and I hardly hide it), I was irked by the idea that some Conan Doyle fanboy wouldn't be at least amenable to Star Trek fandom, and would have heard the names of the characters (Counselor Troi, anyway; maybe not Gul Dukat). His bro-ish resistance to acknowledge that it might be fun, even for the fans, struck me as the weirdest beat for that character, and only served to help me like him less. Basically, in the end, Doug is a wiener who wanted to be Sherlock Holmes but gave it up because the schooling was too hard, still talks about the big dreams, doesn't even understand nerd culture or how to talk to nerds of a different color, and won't even step up to be the story's protagonist without the constant propping up of his sister and his cool DJ/Star Trek geek/ice worker friend.

Everything's too easy, moves too slow (the missing girl mystery doesn't happen until about forty-five minutes in; that means half of this movie is act one), and we begin and end the movie with Doug and his sister in roughly the exact same place: more or less happily cohabitating, getting along, passing the time without actually doing anything. Honestly, the film is almost a clever portrait of spinning plates instead of actually living, and except for the anxiety-inducing glacialness of the story's midsection and a story with no stakes (or momentum, really), I could almost say it works as such. Only that renders all of the characters unlikeable, unsympathetic, and uninteresting.

It's not like I hated this or anything. I just felt like it was a disappointment, a misstep. But the audience ate it up, and I clearly wanted something from Cold Weather that the director didn't feel it was necessary to deliver. So chalk it up to difference of taste.

Oh, but I did hate the pointlessly shaky handheld camera work. Made it feel a lot cheaper than it probably was.

Seen at Cinema 21 as part of the Portland International Film Festival.

Katalin Varga *

2011-02-22T23:24:00.000-08:00

I once tried to write a sort of crime-tinted road movie drama with a tone similar to this (though a story that was drastically different), and at the time it seemed like such a simple structure, something I could just belt out quickly and easily. Of course writing is never that simple, and the project gathers dust on the proverbial shelf and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but Katalin Varga makes writing a good dark-drama road-movie script look so effortless I almost feel ashamed that I couldn't complete my own. That's just an artifact of good, clean writing, however, because the truth is this is a very complicated story with some very complicated morals behind it. The characters are fairly one-track minded but never one-dimensional, and although the scenes are often efficient to the point of sparsity, the story doesn't lack for layers because of it.

There's a lot I could say for the moral world of the story here, but it really speaks for itself and anything I might say would really just be summarizing the drama for those who haven't seen it, and really they should see it. I'd say this falls in the Recommended If You Like category for fans of Kelly Reichert who crossover with fans of dark existentialism, but this film has also got a fair amount of Lynch's Inland Empire DNA just beneath the surface. The sound design is stellar throughout (turns out they won some awards for it, and rightly so), and the composition finds this great unexplored space between provincial realism and lucid-dream surrealism.

As to the story, the sequence of events is somewhat deceptively straightforward. In that, it reminded me of other Romanian films I've seen, like last year's Police, Adjective (though admittedly, this film is a Hungarian language film shot in Romanian Transylvania by a British filmmaker, and didn't quite feel like the "Romanian New Wave"), because both films seem more about the conversations that come after watching than the conversations or events that occur onscreen.

Anyway it's good. You should definitely check this out if you get a chance. It's dark and depressing, and yet kind of enervating all at the same time. But for a movie that I can call both realistic and surreal, that seems only appropriate.

Seen at the Broadway Metroplex as part of the Portland International Film Festival.

Rubber *

2011-02-19T02:50:00.000-08:00

The first thirty or forty minutes of Rubber are exciting and energizing. Rarely has something been so pointedly unpredictable and self-aware without feeling overcooked or pretentious. Forgive me for taking the high-minded (read: totally pretentious) road here, but: on the one hand it was a skillful characterization of an inert, characterless object that said a lot about the nature of narratives and protagonists; and on the other hand it was a self-conscious anti-story deconstruction of everything the genre movie (and especially the exploitationy slasher film) means to be. For all of act one and the beginning of act two, this was something I'd never seen before, and it was fun, and funny, and exciting, and meta, and thoughtful, and strongly deconstructionist. It hit my high-brow and low-brow sides just right. But only for the first thirty or forty minutes.

Not that after that it's a disaster. I'm still glad I saw it. It's just that, once we've got the many conceits that get us into act two rolling, we don't really get any more flashes of brilliance. Instead we just ride the waves caused by those initial ripples for another forty or so minutes. It's still fun in bursts, and clever at times, but it loses its newness and its oddness. It may be strange to call the story of a psychokinetic murderous living tire rampaging through a slightly self-aware movie world monotonous, but there you have it. Once things get up to speed we never really change gears, and for that reason we kind of lose steam before the end (mixaphorically speaking). The end itself, of course, is the same unexpected and untelegraphed anti-end that you'd expect from something trying so deliberately to be an anti-story. It lacks resolution and satisfaction, pointedly, and I can live with that. But getting there should have had more of the original twists and turns that carried every minute of the first act forward.

I knew going in that Mr. Oizo had done the music for this, but I did not know, to be honest, that writer/director Quentin Dupieux was Mr. Oizo. In retrospect, that should have been obvious. On the one hand it seems very Spike Jonze (and Jack Plotnik, who plays the "Accountant," even looks like Spike Jonze in character) but more than that the way the personification of the tire is handled -- deadpan, casual, tragicomic -- reminds me somehow of the Mr. Oizo music videos, which were of course also directed by Dupieux himself.

Definitely glad I saw this, but it starts with a premise so bold and strong and unusual and novel that it's almost impossible to follow through, so it's not one I'm going to rush out to see again or rave to my friends about.

Seen at the Hollywood Theater as part of the Portland International Film Festival.

ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) *

2011-02-18T23:50:00.000-08:00

It's frustrating to watch a film that's basically all symbolism and recognize that you're only getting about 20% of the symbols, but that's how it felt for me as I watched this. Totally dreamlike, a sad fantasy world based on a very eastern approach to mythology and philosophy, and full of historical, cultural, political references that I have only the slightest ideas about. Still, as Jen points out, it's a testament to how fundamentally good a movie is when you still get and enjoy it on a core level despite all the missed layers and references.

The same "monkey spirits" in this -- or similar enough for me, an outsider -- appear as vaguely hostile forces in Princess Mononoke: dark, shaggy shapes lacking distinction or detail, with impossibly glowing red eyes. But seeing them here, in live action, was so much more beautiful and surreal than seeing animated creatures. The moments between Boonmee and his wife, Huay, were consistently touching in how underplayed and vulnerable they were, and the general tone of casual, deadpan acceptance of the bizarre and the impossible lends a soft dignity to some of the stranger moments that I don't think a western film could pull off. The cave, the letting of his fluids, the talk between dying husband and dead wife about how and where they will meet in the afterlife, the monk and Aunt Jen becoming literally detached from their own bodies and going to get dinner in a karaoke bar while they also stayed behind to watch boring television -- all of it was beautiful and wonderful and rich. Not to mention the midstory vignette of the ugly princess and the catfish.

I really liked this film, and the world it shows me, and the mood and atmosphere of the whole thing, and I will definitely watch this again one day, but I still can't help but feel like most of it went over my head. It's too Thai to be meant for me, in a certain sense; but in another, it's perfectly universal and all the more powerful for being so obviously coded about much of its meaning.

Seen at CineMagic, as part of the Portland International Film Festival.

Goethe! (Young Goethe in Love) *

2011-02-16T23:38:00.000-08:00

I have always wished I knew more about Goethe and The Sorrows of Young Werther. It's always been a bit of a blind spot. All I knew, really, about Young Werther was that it's about how being young and heartbroken sucks and is supposedly responsible for more suicides than any other single work in the history of western literature. All I knew about Goethe was that Germany considered him their own personal Shakespeare and he was kind of a big deal. (Full disclosure: I completely forgot he was responsible for Faust, though halfway through this film I had my hunches.) So I was not in the ideal position to watch a film overflowing with nods to his most famous work -- though I seemed to be in a better position than the vocal minority of housewives and silver hairs who surrounded us in the theater.

For the most part, I liked it. Bits of it clung too easily to the hoariest of romance film formulas, but Wikipedia suggests that those things were true to the texts, which suggests to me that some of those hoary formulas may owe a debt to this, or at least to literature from this era. Reading how Young Werther is an amalgamation of Goethe's life, his friend Jerusalem's, and his fantasy version of events with Charlotte Buff, it's fitting to find a different configuration of these elements come alive in the film. In fact, reading just the summary on Wikipedia gives me already a newfound respect for both the film and its drama.

My one nagging thought, then, concerns the end. Young Werther did reportedly turn Goethe into an overnight sensation and celebrity, as was dramatized in the film, and that in itself felt sudden but didn't bother me. I enjoy that he leaves the work to Lotte and demands she burn it, but her final gift to him ("We cannot be together in truth, but we will always be together in poetry," she tells him) is the publication of his longing for her and the pain he's endured. It's a beautiful love letter outside the confines of actuality, wherein Lotte remains with the stable, mostly decent Albert. Even the reversal of Goethe's father from frustration to pride is perfectly fine with me (because even though he disdains all that "scribbling," he really only wants what's best for the boy, which in his mind is success -- not necessarily law).

What sticks out like a sore thumb about the end is Goethe's own reaction to all this. He seems overjoyed, bubbling with glee, without a care in the world. I wanted this ending, where his lost love is both literally and figuratively what gives him the recognition for the only other thing he's ever loved, to be bittersweet. He got what he wanted by losing what he wanted, and his heart suffered terribly for what he gained. Showing him let go of all that with such ease, shrugging off the inconvenient weight of all that "Sorrow" so readily, devalues the journey he's gone through and the loss he's borne. It twists the rest of the story, for me, in an awkward direction, where love and longing and loss become palatable experiences if artistic success can be gleaned from them. And while I may even, on some level, agree with that sentiment, to deny the sacrifice for the goal seems to happily render the sacrifice null, or close to.

So yeah, that ending (and his reaction to the story's conclusion) feels a little too 80s comedy for me. I half-expected Goethe to leap upward and freeze-frame in mid-air, knees bent, arms out, laughing hysterically with his buddies. But everything up until that point was really nicely handled, and much richer once I've done even the barest research into the story behind the story. Call it one more book I'd like one day to read, but who knows. As I've said, it's a depressingly long list.

Seen at the Broadway Metroplex, as part of the Portland International Festival.

Up

2011-02-16T01:31:00.000-08:00

Up is such a hard film to parse for me. I'm reasonably certain it's the most thematically and dramatically complex story Pixar has done yet. It's also the most symbolically rich film I think they've done, and as such I suspect it's the most unpackable Pixar film to date. More than any of the others -- even ones I personally have more fondness for (not that I'm short in the fondness department when it comes to this one) -- Up is a slippery riddle that seems to run off in all directions at once and still manages to feel like a single cohesive story.

Last time I watched this I dismissed it somewhat glibly as one of those stories (like Wall-E, like Juno) that starts in one direction and seems to veer off in another, broader direction once the story gets going, and I don't think that's a wrong assessment. It's just that Up seems like it does that a little differently, a little more aware. On first glance, it seems like the story is Carl's need to fulfill his dead wife's wish, to keep a crossed-heart promise to the young girl he fell so deeply in love with. In fact Carl achieves that, actually, about an hour in, and what's left is the discovery that his wife's final wish was not for him to live in their past but to "have new adventures," to never give up the ghost, and to live in his own present and future. Up isn't about a man trying to float a house down to a South American jungle to make real the silly dreams of his youth; it's about a man coping with loss and finding a way to honor that loss without losing himself as well.

To that end we also have other characters dealing with loss: Russell has lost his father (presumably to divorce); Charles Muntz has lost the respect of the nation, and maybe you could argue he's lost his soul to the bitterness of spending a lifetime hunting for Kevin, the giant bird -- who in turn has lost her family and the way home. There's even Dug, who's never really had a loving master as far as we know in the story. Dug's maybe an outlier, in that he wants the same kinds of things our heroes want (family, father/son relationship and love, dignity and self-respect) but we don't get the sense that these are things he has ever had. Still, for the most part Up feels like a bunch of lost and wounded souls with colliding trajectories. Or that's my passing theory on the subject.

The truth is, this new perspective still figures oddly into the final act, which pits Fredricksen against Muntz. I guess the key to all this is Kevin, the macguffin-in-bird-form, who is trying to get back to her home. Muntz wants to use her to absolve the shame of his career and prove that he was not a fraud and a fake (which, it should be pointed out, he was not, making his villainy almost problematically tragic), and Carl wants to rescue Kevin and deliver her to her babies -- which is actually not Carl's quest at all, but Russell's -- and even that is Russell's secondary quest since we begin the story with Russell's mission definitively set as "assisting the elderly" and helping Carl on Carl's journey -- and even that is just a means to an end, because what Russell is really after is reunion with his lost father (which is similar to how Carl's quest to relocate his house is actually a means to reconnecting with the ghost of his wife).

You can see how it's a puzzle to decode here. Halfway through the story -- when Carl looks through Ellie's Adventure Book and realizes she's lived her full life and only wants her husband to do the same -- Carl completely changes his goals. At this point in the narrative, Russell has already made up his mind, and abandons his main quest (assist Carl, win back his father) and pursues this secondary quest as well. This actually prompts a focus in Carl's objective from saving Kevin to saving Russell. I suppose what happens here is our two heroes learn to look past their own selfish needs and desires and to connect with a larger world, to both be a family unit and to help bring together other family units as well. Coping with loss means acknowledging the pain (and Up doesn't skimp, especially in the first forty minutes, on scenes that hurt) and embracing what follows, the new, the different, the unexpected. It's hard to say if I'm making excuses for a film's convoluted second act or digging into the heart of the matter and finding the true reason for it, but it does feel like a theme here is to find the next adventure and to connect with likeminded souls and to be a family, in the looser-and-so-much-more-meaningful Vonnegutian sense of the word "family."

On a stylistic note, Up walks the finest line of any modern fantasy I know of between gritty realism (the sets and action, the photography, the existence of death and despair and the gravity with which they're treated, the peril throughout, the even the use of mundane-sounding names like "Muntz" and "Russell" and "Carl Fredrickson") and broadly comic cartoonishness (the character design, the balloon-house premise, the simplicity of their mission and ease of getting to South America, the Disney's Alice in Wonderland tone of Kevin, and of course talking dogs who pilot aircraft and fear the cone of shame). Sometimes the story dips too far into one side or the other, and for my money the overly broad strokes are the trouble spots, but for the most part it manages to keep this balance surprisingly well. It's satisfying to watch and it's satisfying to think about.

Up isn't my favorite Pixar film. In some ways, it feels like one of the messiest, structurally. But in other ways, it really does feel like one of the most mature, and the messiness smacks of deliberate intent. (Compare to Wall-E, a film I personally felt had more potential in its simplicity but slipped too far into broadly-painted cartoon elements and never really came back -- the messiness there doesn't feel as deliberate.) Up feels worth closer and closer inspections, because so much is happening on so many layers. I didn't even talk about the visual symbolism -- I could write twice as much on that subject and still not crack the surface.

Pixar is famous for being the undisputed kings of western animation, and without question this is rightly so. But for all of the prettiness of their computer-generated art, character design, photography and effects, their greatest strength has always been in the writing. Nobody writes an animated script like Pixar, with tough-to-explain (let alone sell) premises and layers of meaning and emotional resonance. The screenplays are the golden secret weapon that keeps Pixar ahead of everyone else in the game, and Up is a perfect example.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

2011-02-14T23:39:00.000-08:00

This film led to a long discussion about what holding auditions for actors is like, watching monologue after monologue, each one well-written, clever, and slightly overacted in that certain way: the actor wants you to know he or she gets it, that it's more than just words to them. Most monologues involve one character telling a single story to a captive, silent audience -- theater and film have concocted an endless number of excuses for this simple setup -- and basically, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men plays out as an endless stream of these. Part of that is inherent to the idea of interviews, naturally, and I suppose writer-director-actor John Krasinski had to choose between downplaying that and embracing it, and he clearly went with his theater and acting roots and embraced it. At times it becomes exhausting, but I wonder how much of that is just my own personal reaction after so many times sitting in an empty room behind a table and watching dude after dude after dude of roughly the same type and look deliver variations on the same two or three monologues directly to me. Not everybody's held auditions, so for some people this experience would be novel, or at least not flashback-inducing.

As to the content of the film, I haven't read this DFW ~~novel~~ collection of short stories so I can't say how much of it comes from that versus how much of it is the filmmaker's choice, but there is an episodic quality to the events in Sarah's life (the speechmaking guy, the neighbor at the closed door, the student obsessed with the positive-transformative side of rape, and so on), and I couldn't help but wish they were a little more connected somehow, or interwoven more than episodic. Mostly I wanted to see this applied to the subplot involving Daniel, the rape-obsessed thesis student, whose circular back-and-forth with Sarah was believable and interesting and aggravating (all at once), but in the end I felt that the beats of his story lost a lot of their impact by being piled on top of each other like they were.

Like the climactic speech of a good play, Krasinski's monologue at the end leaves a lot to mull over, specifically in the choices of the writers/director, and while it was a little offputting it wasn't displeasing, and it tied in nicely to the themes building throughout. If I follow the nonlinear storytelling properly, it was Sarah's breakup with Krasinski (sorry, I didn't catch the character's name) that directly led her to go to Professor Timothy Hutton and change the direction of her research into (briefly) interviewing (hideous) men. Withholding until this point what she was researching (feminism, and specifically what impact its advent has had on male culture) worked for me, in the way that a narrative shouldn't spell out its thesis until after it's already made it, if at all -- unlike a term paper or dissertation.

What didn't work for me in this reading, however, is something that speaks to what Professor Hutton said early on in the film, with regards to Nanook of the North: (I'm paraphrasing, but) "I know, it's kind of dry and uninteresting, but try and pay attention to the documenter, not the documented, and always remember to ask the big question: why?" At its heart, this isn't a story about the many ways many men react to a newly feminist world; this is the story of one woman and why she is pursuing this line of reasoning in the first place. And as Brief Interviews lays out for us, Sarah is pursuing this as a direct reaction to an awkwardly soul-baring speech by an ex-love confounded by his own fear of connection and suspicious of his role in the power dynamic of seduction.

Krasinski's confession that he never loved Sarah because he'd never known love hurts her, but her academic training kicks in like a (probably very common, judging from Krasinski's comments) defense mechanism, and instead of fighting back or taking a stand, she listens, she absorbs, and she quietly judges. She remains deadpan and stoic even after he's gone, furious and pitying that she cannot speak up or reach out (or even lash out). Her only reaction that we see -- again, if I've got the chronology right, and I think I do -- is to go to her professor and say, "You know, I'm tired of reading about feminism and women; that's been well-documented. I just realized men are a wreck because of this whole 'movement' thing, and there's a lot of rich, unmined territory there. I'd like to investigate that instead." It is hard to fault Krasinski for wandering astray, hooking up with what he thought was a pathetic floozy. It's just as hard to fault him for chasing an ephemeral moment of intensity upon hearing a story that embarrassed him out of his safety zones. (It's easy to fault him for having this pseudo-epiphany about connections with other humans so late in life, but there seems to be a recurring theme of just how emotionally stunted all these academics and intellectuals are anyway.)

Another thought: Daniel's speech about the empowerment and enlightenment that can only come after the most grievous acts of degradation and trauma has a clever reverse-parallel* in the point of her thesis. The opposite of degradation and trauma -- I guess you could make a case, the "opposite" of rape -- is liberation and equalization -- specifically in this case, the feminist movement. As such, the thesis that "empowerment and enlightenment can come from rape" can be reversed as "disempowerment and ignorance can come from feminism." Don't get me wrong, I'm not endorsing anything so glib in the slightest, but as a dramatic theme for a story, it's strong enough to string a lot of scenes on, and the clever head-to-tails contrast of these ideas is nice, though again that just reinforces my desire to see more done with the Daniel character and his incendiary philosophy.

Overall, the movie's interesting, and it's fun to watch a lot of these actors try overhard in a way that works (i.e., is neither hammy nor corny, nor any other food-based adjective I can think of), wrestling with a lot of quasi-provocative speeches and breathing life into a lot of wooden scenes. The ideas are strong and the film isn't a wreck, but it's not quite a success either, obviously for those same reasons. (It makes me wish I'd read the book, but who are we kidding? My to-read list is wildly disproportionate to my pace of books-per-year these days.) Glad I saw it. Not in love.

* Is that a thing, "reverse-parallel?" It should be. (I had to ask. Anyway, it wouldn't do to blog about a film based on David Foster Wallace without at least one footnote.)

Five Easy Pieces

2011-02-14T01:17:00.000-08:00

I can see why this is an American classic, because it's got so much to say about class warfare, ivory-tower intellectuals, the nature of roots and the allure of rootlessness (and what is more American than denying one's roots and stomping boldly across untrodden soil?), and it has scenes devoted to workaday traffic jams, senseless inhuman bureaucracy, environmentalism, smug liberalism, art vs. work, the fear of death, the fear of new life, and every kind of existential angst a human adult was capable of feeling in 1970. Bobby is a seething, raging hypocrite, but like all good anti-heroes, he's someone who's darkness comes across as a defense mechanism against a time and place when things seem too crazy for anything else.

But for my money, the movie is a little too meandery and episodic, and the characters that populate the world drawn a little too broadly and simplistically. I like a little more ambiguity in my moral soapboxing, and a little more dimension to my characters and their relationships. Though the story does a good job of showing the good and the bad sides of almost every one of its main characters, the people themselves are still cartoonishly one-sided, more spokesmen for various perspectives and ideologies than rounded-out human beings. To be fair, I am almost positive this was deliberately done, and the number of ideologies that parade in front of Bobby's crosshairs is impressive and wide ranging. Still, I like characters over symbols, so I was left a little wanting in that regard.

On the other hand, I enjoy the end a lot. It's messy and it's preposterous (I mean, it's a perfectly fine ending; it's a preposterous choice Bobby makes) and it's obvious without being telegraphed.

So I didn't love it, but I admire and respect it. Years ago I'd started it once and gave up before the bowling alley sequence was over, and I'm glad I finally returned and gave it more due this time (I should thank Jen, who needed to watch this for class... and because it was late when we started it, still needs to). It's a solid piece of Americana, and many different angles and collisions are explored properly. A lot of different worthwhile papers could be crafted out of this film... or so it seems to me, on a single viewing.

世界グッドモーニング!! (Good Morning to the World!) *

2011-02-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

Before I get into this, I need to say: unfortunately, the version that the Portland International Film Festival is showing of this has some egregious, prohibitively distracting problems with its interlacing. Maybe every copy that went out looks like this, I don't know -- but it's definitely a fixable error. Specifically, I'm pretty sure it's a shift-field issue, and the truth is it tainted the experience of watching what was already an extreme-low-budget Japanese film that appears to have been shot on a ten-year-old DV camera. And so:

It depends on how you want to view this. Is it a deconstructionist anti-narrative, with one part coming-of-age road movie and one-part inside-out detective story? Or is it an amateur's meandering story with no center and no linear direction? Either way, along the way are some interesting parts and some clearly padded-out-for-no-reason parts, but it's difficult for me to say if the intent here is artsy and high-brow or simplistic and low-brow.

The film starts strong, with a kind of high-schooler version of Mersault accidentally causing (or having nothing to do with) a homeless man's death and getting his classmate in trouble with a strict teacher, resulting in enough social pressure to practically force him to skip class. All that's interesting, as pieces start to crumble and pressures start to build all around this stoic, sheltered, lonely boy. And as he begins a journey to return the bag he's stolen, or at least do some right by the man who died and inform his loved ones, the story should have become more engaging as his focus sharpened and the trail of chaos broadened, but those things don't happen. Instead we get a lifeless series of vignettes, what looks like an episodic trek through the rural outskirts of Japan in a film that might have cost as little as $200 to shoot (depending on how much hot air balloon rentals run).

So basically, it starts with dull promise and collapses quickly. But I have read this is a first (?) film by a 23-year-old student, and while it doesn't save the film to know this, I'd say this shows promise both in understated storytelling and economical filmmaking. I'd be interested to see future works by Satoru Hirohara, but I don't think there's enough in Good Morning to the World to revisit it, or to recommend it to others.

And Jen absolutely hated it.

Seen at the Broadway Metroplex as part of the Portland International Film Festival.

The Informer

2011-02-12T01:36:00.000-08:00

I can't decide if I really like this one as much as the last John Ford film I watched. Both spend a lot of act two in weird narrative dead-ends, and although it didn't bother me as much here as in Shark Island I wasn't as in love with this story as with the last. It felt a little too much like a cheap, drunk, Irish Crime & Punishment with lesser stakes -- though more politicized: rather than committing murder our anti-hero merely betrays a compatriot instead. Plus, instead of being motivated by an existentialist ideal taken to absurd extremes, our drunk buffoon is motivated by an idiot's dream of coming to America. I'm sure there are layers and ramifications to this, but in the end it all comes down to everybody (his girlfriend, the leader of their group, and even the victim's mother) forgiving him in the face of the repeated chorus "[he] didn't know what [he] was doing."

What I did like about it is the seedy nightlife of a mean Irish city and the out of control binge Gypo goes on, careening like a pinball from one dangerous situation to another and leaving a wake of chaos and greed and suspicion. The more untethered he becomes in his wanderings, the more pleasurable I found the story actually, but the tailing operatives tallying up his cashflow felt a little easy -- like a conspiracy of invisible accountants. The big tribunal sequence was nice, though, and it was interesting to watch our hero so willfully and brazenly throw an innocent man under the bus. Gypo was kicked out of the organization some time earlier and only reinstated on the stipulation he find and eliminate the informer (for a moment I was hoping for a 1930s John Ford Gangs of New York meets A Scanner Darkly thriller, but alas). My thought is, maybe someone with the poor judgment and low impulse control that Gypo Nolan has shouldn't be a) let into your little club, b) trusted with any kind of secrets at all.

Anyway, it was an all right film, but not my favorite John Ford. It held together well and set up a great and wonderful messy little world... just didn't grip me or keep me as engaged as The Prisoner of Shark Island managed to.

The Prisoner of Shark Island

2011-02-11T23:50:00.000-08:00

I didn't know until just now that this was based on the true story of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, but of course it is. It's too grand and bizarre and interesting a story to be otherwise. I was about to suggest that it might also explain some of the stranger directions the story goes in, most notably the attempted-but-thwarted escape sequence, but according to Wikipedia, that's all made up, it turns out. Still, this is a pretty exciting film, and damn impressive for 1936 in terms of action and drama.

I made a point to watch this when reading Samuel Fuller talk about Shock Corridor and being visited by Ford and calling him "the man who made the great Prisoner of Shark Island," and I can definitely see how the claustrophobia and madness inherent to the fort made an impression on Fuller's film years later.

The structure is a little odd, taking forty-plus minutes to get the prisoner onto shark island and all, and then spending the next thirty or so with his wife's scheme to storm the castle and bring her man back to Key Largo for a new trial -- which works until their ship is boarded (and her father murdered, no less). Considering this was Dr. Mudd's story primarily, I'm surprised this whole sequence occurs. I mean, I'm glad Mrs. Mudd wasn't portrayed as sitting at home wringing her hands and waiting for a miracle, but other than showing how hard it is to escape, it seemed to be a massive, needlessly complicated dead-end that had nothing to do with the final act's action. Then again, I guess you can't really put an innocent dude in a prison called Shark Island and not have a long daring escape sequence.

But aside from the dead-ends and long side-stories, I was pretty impressed. Dr. Mudd looks haunting with his skinny body, wild hair, and shaggy beard, but commanding with his half-buttoned dress shirt and funny little mustache. A lot of scene-stealingly great character actors (including John Carradine among them) populate the sidelines throughout, which helps the world feel lived-in and interesting.

My only comment left is the music. The "score" was primarily made up of variations on two songs. "Dixie" I understand, though it didn't always work. On the other hand, the love-theme and tragic/sad song of choice throughout was "O Tannenbaum" (or "Oh Christmas Tree," if you prefer), and frankly, that never worked. Why does Christmas music play as he is escorted to prison? Why does Christmas music play as his wife mourns her broken home? Am I wrong and maybe "O Tannenbaum" has non-Christmas connotations as well? (Wikipedia doesn't mention any.) It's just distracting and confusing. But other than that, and some gee-golly-yes-massa overacting by the "Negroes" (which was at least era-appropriate, I admit, but still felt overperformed to me), I was really impressed. Definitely lives up to the legend Samuel Fuller bestowed on it for me.

Lolita

2011-02-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

It'd been a long time since I'd seen this, and it's an interesting study in what works and what doesn't. (If I have only a little to say, it's largely due to having just read an excellent piece by Nathan Rabin comparing the two Lolitas, from his book My Year of Flops.)

The film version is unsurprisingly light when it comes to the characters' sexuality and sexual adventures -- no long sequences devoted to Lo's spindly limbs coated in sweat or anything of the sort -- and of course Dolores Haze here is a good deal older than twelve, but the general detached-lust and totally askew protagonist remain, as does the flippant ambivalence of the girl in question. The film isn't shy about the tension between them and even has room for some humorously suggestive bisexual voraciousness from Sellers's Claire Quilty, so you can't accuse the film of being sexless, or even toothless -- just reserved.

What's more interesting are some of the other omissions Kubrick makes as he goes. The most obvious seems to be that Humbert isn't allowed a single moment of genuine joy here (this thought originated in Rabin's book, I confess). The two sequences of Humbert actually having Lolita, both the one first time and the subsequent six months together, are over and done with in a crossfade and some stilted voiceover (for a novel that relies on the beauty of first-person prose, it's odd that the voiceover feels so stiff and formal here -- I can't tell if that's a deliberate choice or the result of it being a post-meddler fix on Kubrick's part). The life of Humbert Humbert is rendered even more pathetic here than in the book, where at least he is his own hero and suffering victim, rather than a petulant, obsessed paranoid-neurotic.

Overall, I like the story all right. It's clearly not the gem later Kubrick movies would be (this one was famously meddled with, as I just alluded to, and I believe Kubrick once said, "If I'd have known how much trouble I'd go through to make it I never would have started the project in the first place."), but it's got a lot of great moments. Peter Sellers plays almost too broad but he's never less than entertaining... though I wonder. It's been a long time since I've read the novel; are we supposed to know that all those "chance encounters" were just Claire Quilty fucking with Humbert the whole time? As it plays in the film, it's so obviously Sellers in those roles that we roll our eyes and wait for our buffoon protagonist to catch up to what is obvious to us every step of the way. James Mason and Susan Lyon and Shelley Winters (here playing a character similar to her role in The Night of the Hunter) are all wonderful. But it doesn't quite escape the shadow of its source material...

Lolita still feels mostly unfilmable, a book about language and perspective and the ability of words to both underline and undermine (see what I did there?), not to mention a study in getting your audience to sympathize with one of the least sympathetic main characters in the history of storytelling. Here I never quite like Mason, though I suppose I do side with him more or less. It's a good go at it, and I'm glad to've seen it again, but it's not a classic, to be sure.

Beat the Devil

2011-02-05T03:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I do myself a favor by remembering that I very much want to see a film and allowing myself to forget the reasons why. It gives me the impetus to pay attention and adds the fun of trying to figure out what piece of long lost lore or trivia led me here in the first place. I remembered that Beat the Devil was a less popular (non-blockbuster) Huston film with Bogart, and that at one point I was very excited to watch it, but by the time I sat down to do so I'd forgotten why, and watched it with a blank slate.

Immediately it was obvious that Bogart was playing a kind of posh John Huston. Aged as he was, with his skin starting to sag and his teeth looking more and more like old-man teeth, he even looked like Huston. The mannerisms were good too -- a little affected, a little entitled, but also gruff and no-bullshit.

Billy Dannreuther (it sounds distractingly like everybody calls him "Dan Rather," and Humphrey is no Billy) is cynical and manipulative and knows when to put survival before dignity. He plays everyone against each other and like his Spade or Marlowe he tries to stay out in front of the various conniving bad guys so he can score the loot and get the girl. I found it impossible to watch this movie and not keep comparing it to The Maltese Falcon, right down to the appearance of an always-fun Peter Lorre and a languidly verbose, sweaty fat man who seems sometimes like the leader of the ragtag gang of ambitious crooks -- it isn't Sydney Greenstreet, but Robert Morley plays it with the same kind of fondness for his own blather. The main difference, though, is that here everything seems to go wrong, and often comically. The car going down the hill and off the cliff; the boat sinking; Billy fleeing the Arabs, getting caught, weaseling his way out of danger by throwing his companion under the bus in his place. It was almost like Huston was turning his own film on its head and shaking out all the hard-edged bravado, leaving only the nonsense and schemes and shifting loyalties and ever-changing backstories.

And so, when I finished the film I peeked online to see if I could figure out what had drawn me here in the first place. Sure enough, plain as day, Wikipedia says, "It was intended by Huston as a tongue-in-cheek spoof of his earlier masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon, and of films of its genre." Written (apparently on the fly, day to day) by Huston and Truman Capote, it was the director taking the piss out of a genre he helped make huge. It apparently tanked and Bogart disowned it to some degree ("Only phonies like it") and Wikipedia goes on to call it "the first camp movie," but I admire it beyond all of that. It has undeniably fun characters, and isn't boring for a moment. (The romance is just as rushed as its forebear, but there's vastly more chemistry between Bogart and Jennifer Jones than he ever had with Mary Astor.) The plot is insane, leaping (fairly seamlessly) from manic slapstick to shifty-eyed noir to weapy romance to high-stakes thriller, and it never slacks in any of these.

Beat the Devil comes off clearly as the work of an old-hat at genre film who's bold enough to challenge the expectations of an audience, but it's also got the punk attitude of a great director rewriting old formulas. If artists didn't so willfully color outside the boxes every now and then, we'd never move forward artistically. In that sense, it's easy to see this film as a predecessor to anything from Romancing the Stone to The Big Lebowski to Shaun of the Dead. Anything with a gleefully deconstructionist bent, really.

Personally, while I can see why it wasn't a huge success and isn't as fondly remembered as The Maltese Falcon or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Asphalt Jungle, I still really enjoyed this and am very glad to have seen it. It feels in its way like an important film, because it's bold enough to spit in the face of something both I and the filmmakers clearly hold dear. Dismantling a thing you love is a hard thing to do but it's so rewarding when it's done well. And here it's done well.

L'Illusionniste (The Illusionist) *

2011-02-04T22:28:00.000-08:00

It's funny to have so little to say about a movie that I liked so much, but the truth is, I don't have any words to do it justice. It's not that I'm speechless (exactly), it's just that the film is an experience, a collection of tiny poignant moments and bittersweet humor. It's not that surprising, maybe -- the story doesn't need words to speak; words are pointedly missing, especially from the main character (basically Tati himself, practically M. Hulot). This isn't a story about words.

Just last night I advised a friend to tell his students to try and envision (and write) their stories as silent films first, and tell the story through visual cues rather than exposition and info-dump (a particular student wants to tell his complicated story solely through voiceover), and this is the perfect example of that done right. It also feels like a suitable testament to the body of work Tati left, but although I quite like him and his films I'm not an avid fan, so maybe that's not for me to say.

That's about all I have to say. I liked everything about this. I would like to see it again (on DVD or Blu-ray, perhaps, or at a cheap theater). I would even love to see this win Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, but of course who am I kidding? Well, at least it got a nomination.

If I do have anything critical to say, I have to mention that towards the end a couple of egregious 3D tracking-through-landscape shots ruined some otherwise magical moments for me, but they were quick and the rest of the film's poetry eclipses the flaws for me.

Anyway, I have nothing deep to say about this. You should really just go see it, right away. It speaks for itself.

Seen at Cinema 21.

Κυνόδοντας (Kynodontas / Dogtooth)

2011-02-01T02:26:00.000-08:00

Wow.

Ever since one of the A.V. Club writers (Mike D'Angelo, I think?) wrote about this film at last year's Cannes, I've been looking forward to seeing it. All I knew about it was it involved some sheltered sisters and was sufficiently "weird." Beyond that, I blocked it all out and waited until I could finally watch it for myself. It took a while, since it never played in theaters (that I was aware of) and only just came out on DVD, but it was worth it.

I don't even know what to say about it. Maybe one of my favorite things, because it relates to where I'm at with my own story is, no matter how unusual the premise, it manages to remain crystal clear without a single line of exposition or any scenes that merely "establish." The photography is similarly obtuse, often arbitrary feeling in an unsettling, oddly-framed way that harmonizes nicely with the tone of the story. The performances are great, just intimate enough that we squeamishly sympathize and just detached enough that we recognize the monstrousess of the children, regardless of their blamelessness. The movie never moralizes, in fact it never even offers counterpoint to its slanted philosophy. We just watch scenes unfold in a strange world. Some scenes have odd details that make sense later on. Other scenes take a little mental footwork and keep the audience figuring out the puzzle as they go. Right to the last frame we have to do the work ourselves to understand the story, but it's never unclear.

There is of course a couple of squirmy scenes in this. [SPOILERS] I don't mind the weird sexuality and incest in the story, or even the crazy brainwashing and mental, emotional, and physical abuse (although abuse through misinformation does touch a nerve with me, it's hardly something I have to turn away from) but I almost lost it when the older daughter decided to lose her dogtooth. The mirror, the mini-barbell, the look in the mirror... as soon as the scene began I muttered out loud, "Oh no," and then when she did it (repeatedly) I could barely keep watching or sit still. Maybe it's the dental thing (I've had a lot of dental work done and grew up with an average-or-higher fear of losing my teeth), or maybe it's the prolonged, deliberate, unflinching pace of it, but I found this harder even than The Scene in Caché.

This is Yorgos Lanthimos's second feature, supposedly, and I'm going to see now if I can't find a copy of Kinetta, his first. He's definitely someone to watch. And although tonight was supposed to be devoted to writing and that's exactly the one thing I failed to accomplish, this film feels like exactly the kind of thing I need to see, to give me a little kick-in-the-pants courage about how I approach some scenes and character beats.

This was an enervating and inspiring film to see, and it makes me hungry for more like it. The Portland International Film Festival begins in a little over a week. Hopefully this experience can be repeated with some of the films they're showing there.

Make-out with Violence

2011-01-30T01:57:00.000-08:00

I don't really know what's the best way to judge this film. On the one hand, if I look at it as the first feature film by a collective of artist friends who've never done this before -- if, that is to say, I view this as a bunch of aspiring students putting together their first major endeavor -- I can admire the very fact of its existence, overlook its many shortcomings, and respect the fact that a cohesive whole with some decent ideas even exists somewhere in there. I can admire the boldness of the idea and the willingness to leave so much out of the story (like how Wendy died, why and/or how she came back, who tied her to a tree and why), both in order to focus on the details that matter and also to leave a surreal mystery at the fringes of the story (the thing is lousy with Twin Peaks homages). If I consider this the way I'd consider a locally made film by friends or peers of mine, I can get a little excited that it comes as close to working as it does.

On the other hand, this film has an awfully big crew, and touts an awfully showy soundtrack (though no big names jump out at me), and has won an awful lot of accolades & audience-choice awards at festivals, and all of that encourages me to treat this film like a grown-up movie, not an aspiring kid making good. But if I view this with the critical eye I use on other films, it's hard to be nearly so kind. The acting is bad -- but bad acting is one thing. Here, the acting just doesn't make sense, which means the directing is what's bad. Tiny moments feel forced and come off with the weirdest energy, casual gestures feel as artificial as if they'd programmed very stoic robots to perform them. Motivations barely exist, and many actions in the story seem taken so the characters can quietly make visual puns or poetic imagery for an unseeing audience (i.e., the camera). Key dramatic (especially tragic) moments and emotional beats are skipped over, and would-be contemplative moments are lingered on lovingly -- which frankly means that the writing is also bad, here. If I were to believe in these people as they are presented in the film, I would assume this community is six people large, all of them are heavily sedated, and suffer from Asperger's sydrome.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't a hatefest for Make-out With Violence -- nothing of the sort. It's just that, all good-intentions and young-punk energy aside, this film stands as everything I'd be terrified my first feature film might be. It's like a parade of wrong choices: from casting to performance to direction to script to photography to camera and lighting choice to tone to jokes to pacing to theme to perspective. Nothing is an unmitigated disaster, but not a single one of those things ever hits spot-on like it wants to (or should, at least). Every single choice looks wrong, in the end, and most of it smacks of a) limitations due to budget concerns, b) a lack of bravery or tenacity with the story/emotional world, and possibly c) the result of direction by committee -- as "the Deagol Brothers" is a self-professed collective and no one member has stepped up to claim the title of writer or director.

So, yeah. I guess Make-out With Violence doesn't work for me, pretty much at all. And it was frustrating to watch (and emotionally unsettling, as I can imagine myself falling into a lot of these traps). But it wasn't miserable, and I don't regret the time I or the filmmakers spent on it. In other words, it's amateur and messy, but it's not the The Green Hornet.

The Green Hornet *

2011-01-29T23:14:00.000-08:00

This is a lousy movie. There's just nothing else to say about it. Seth Rogan wrote a lousy movie. Michel Gondry directed a lousy movie. I am shocked at how bad it was, and I would have walked out of the theater had I been seeing it alone (and I never do that -- in fact I've never done it). Rogan's Britt Reid is an unrepentant dickhole who lives in a world of bro-tastic bro-ness, complete with debilitatingly intense gay panic and that weird, acerbic camaraderie entrenched in an ugly loathing for oneself and everyone else in roughly equal measure. It is styleless, toothless, and feckless. Rogan and Jay Chou have zero chemistry. Diaz, Waltz, Wilkinson, and EJO all play thankless, meaningless roles -- more like props than characters, in fact. And I haven't seen this many nutshots in a single movie... ever.

Funny enough I didn't hate it, but almost. I went in expecting it to be bad and it was at least as bad as I'd expected. I have nothing invested in the idea of a good Green Hornet story, though I'm aware enough of the original to see how shoehorning in a frat-boy trustafarian douchebag and a lot of "dude don't be so gay" jokes is egregiously off-key. There were almost no spots that worked, and even less that made the remotest bit of sense. Most of the Gondryisms were half-assed and felt like afterthoughts to a story that didn't call for any -- the only one I even enjoyed was the screen-splitting montage of word-of-mouth, but it was pretty unmotivated and too deaden to be whimsical -- and honestly? That's just an expansion on an effect he'd pretty much already mastered 13 years ago.

The editing, too, deserves a special note for how pointedly lazy it is with the story: a newsroom scene has a bunch of reporters rattle off a list of offenses the Green Hornet has been seen doing over the past few days, which is followed by (not preceded by) a rock-n-roll montage of them doing all those things -- most obviously, shooting out a stoplight-camera. I imagine they decided the scenes worked better in the opposite order, but anyone actually paying the tiniest bit of attention to dialogue would find it a little suspicious that the Hornet seems surprised by the ability to shoot out a stoplight-camera if they'd just done so last night as well. I'm not convinced anyone cared.

I hate to say this -- then again, it's also not the first time I've said it -- Michel Gondry is not a brilliant director without a brilliant script to interpret, and one that calls for his particular skills. This film is neither of those things, even a little bit. Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind both play as sloppy messes as films, but as passable entertainment as delivery systems for Gondryesque moments. Human Nature is decent, and of course Eternal Sunshine is a truly gorgeous perfect-storm of talent and style, but The Green Hornet should have been a McG project that nobody paid any attention to or something. At best it might have been doctored and worked into a good movie by David Gordon Green or Jody Hill, maybe. But there's nothing for Gondry here. And Seth Rogan is at least as unlikable here as he is anywhere. This film is... yuck. It's just lousy.

Seen at the Regal Cinemas at Lancaster Mall.

Monkey Business

2011-01-28T00:55:00.000-08:00

Marx Brothers films are always so hard to write anything about. They only work because they're funny, with a kind of savage anarchic wit and seeming utter contempt for convention. The four just make such a well-rounded team, and for all of their seeming randomness their films are always intricately planned, choreographed, and put together. The truth is, as a story it barely makes any sense but as a series of gags (some sight, some puns, some slapstick, some romantic or musical) each segues into the next with a surprisingly natural fluidity. Maybe it's because the overarching story is so haphazard here (a ship ride and castaways somehow leads to getting mixed up with gangsters, making almost a two-part story with some crossover), but here the connecting elements really stood out to me as more worried over and planned out than later films like Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera, where (as I remember it) the seams between each setpiece were more invisible. But that's not all bad: it really makes me realize what consummate professionals these guys were, carefully orchestrating their chaos.

And just like Harpo's harp solo in Opera, Chico gets a piano bit here that's simply a joy to watch. The way his fingers move is like a funny dance. (Harpo also hits the harp again here, for the record.)

I don't have much else to add. Some of the bits were funny, but Duck Soup remains my favorite Marx Brothers film so far. An interesting palate-cleanser after Blue Valentine (though I'm not sure I needed one).

Blue Valentine *

2011-01-27T23:45:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I watched a film with this kind of emotional rawness or verisimilitude of character. The stuff I've watched lately has been classics, (good) Hollywood stuff, and silly adventures about wizard children. So in an odd way, although this was a little rough, it was also incredibly refreshing.

There was a point fairly early on where, even though I already liked both characters, I couldn't help but see all the clichéd plot points they were hitting, and was a little worried about where the story was going to go. The script takes some awfully familiar turns, like the use of extensive flashback counterpoints or Cindy missing her daughter's recital. I wasn't faulting it really, but I couldn't pretend not to notice. By the end, though, I think it actually did this cleverly, and in a way I was glad for it.

The characters are much more lived in than most movies (literally, it turns out, if you read any behind-the-scenes trivia about the filmmakers) and much more dimensional. Dean and Cindy act like real people, and they are both lovable and wonderful to each other, and deplorable and terrible to each other. For the writers to hang all this on a chain of familiar tropes is actually very clever, for a couple of reasons. First, it does have the effect of keeping your general audience a little more anchored and properly oriented -- that is, it keeps the tougher-to-take emotions more palatable -- but moreover I think it highlights the difference between this film and your typical romantic comedy (or drama).

At first glance, to this viewer, it seemed they were establishing Dean as the loving family man, capable of dealing with traumatic situations and keeping his cool, devoted to nothing so much as his wife and daughter; and Cindy as the more serious-minded, job-oriented marmish mother, concerned with propriety and a little neglectful emotionally of both Dean and their daughter Frankie. By the midway point however, these two traits had been magnified and on closer inspection, it became clear that Dean was oppressively affectionate, so intent on giving love that he was unable to see the recipient of it as a genuine person; and that Cindy had grown into who she was in part as a reaction to this, that her tongue-clucking and scatterbrainedness both stemmed from the difficulty of having a man-child love her too intensely. And by the end we see everything in such stark, unapologetic detail, that it's impossible not to blame both of them for their collapse, and yet it's equally impossible not to sympathize with both as well. Like Closer, a much more stylized story with equally flawed characters falling in and out of love messily, you sympathize because you've been that guy or girl.

Much of the film hits close to home, and of the people I saw it with, I think I had the least obviously relatable recent past. Even so, it hits hard to see the way you are, or more often the way you have been, up there on the screen, and see the good and the bad of it. Not enough films are willing to show that, to show love as messy and damaging and to show relationships as genuinely broken and unfixable and still the thing you want to cling to desperately (because at the end of Blue Valentine, against all odds and against all logic, I wanted them to work it out anyway).

This really was a hard-hitting story emotionally, and I'm not sure that comes through all this analysis of story and style. Only from the safe distance of home can I look back and see what I've seen. In the moment, I was Dean and I was Cindy and everything that hurt them hurt me, and all the tiny things that thrilled them thrilled me. It's rare to be swept into a movie, especially one that's sort of tonally bleak, but it's also a beautiful thing. Enough corniness now, though. It's a great movie, and I hope everyone sees it.

(And on a side note: that this almost got an NC-17 rating, I find atrocious and frankly, morally reprehensible. There is no excuse for shuttering a story like this and encouraging youth to see torture porn and movies with rape. Honestly, if protecting the children is the motivation of the MPAA, then a film like this where sex has seriously messy consequences and love and sex do not solve everything should be mandatory and films like Van Wilder and whatever Katherine Heigl is in right now should be reserved only for viewers 21+, who know better. End rant.)

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

Pickup on South Street

2011-01-26T21:24:00.000-08:00

I have really mixed feelings on this one, to be honest. I like the tone of the story and the world that's set up, and I enjoy the performances of the pickpocket Skip and Moe the snitch, but the cops and feds and commies -- and the "muffin," Candy -- barely register. It's hard to determine who the real protagonist is, which might be interesting in an espionage-laden crime noir about some accidentally stolen government microfilm, but it would necessitate all players to be as much fun to watch as only some of them are. Whenever the story cuts back to Joe and his Red conspirators, or to Captain Tiger and the authorities, the story loses all its steam instantly. Candy is interesting, but her part is undercooked -- she has no real reason to get so deeply involved in the first place, and too much of her motivation in the second half is dependent on that old movieland fall-back, Love At First Sight. Since it never feels quite logical, it never carries the weight it's meant to in the story. In fact, that Skip and Candy get each other in the end doesn't even seem to matter. On that note, I'm not sure I would've been very disappointed if Skip had been caught, or Candy killed, or hell, if the Reds had gotten away scot-free. Realizing how little I've invested in any of the players, even my favorites (though I suppose it's a shame Moe had to die), doesn't help me build a case for liking this film much.

But I have to admit, I do kind of like it. It's got that raw Fuller energy that nobody else had back then, like an indie filmmaker fifty years before the term was invented. It's not that he's making b-movies, though he obviously uses some b-movie actors and techniques, it's just that he's making movies cheaper and looser than the era was used to, and getting away with more. I do like the world set up here, and I have a feeling there's some straight lines to be drawn between the cops-and-robbers seediness of Pickup and the French New Wave films of someone like Melville or maybe Truffaut.

The film presents us with a world that's concise and sharp, with fun (probably made-up) slang like "cannon" and "muffin," where every single pickpocket working has a "signature move" and if you want to know who robbed you, you just buy a tie from the crazy lady (and the hoods don't begrudge her her snitching, seeing it rather as all part of the cops-and-robbers game). It's just that the players in this particular game aren't very exciting. And the stakes of the game (I know, I know, national security and the red scare and all that) aren't really used to any emotional end. In Shock Corridor all the American History stuff stood for deeper psychic pains in both the inmates and the world as a whole; but here the same kinds of elements feel like they exist just as an excuse for one team to distrust the other, almost as a cheapening of the politics, as if to say: reds vs yanks, it's no different than the cops and crooks in our silly action movies. I guess I see (and totally agree) with the point, but it's not a very strong one, and I'm not even positive it's intentional.

Anyway, I can't hate it, but I don't love it. Which made it an ideal choice to rewatch while I work (though the movie got a lot more attention than my work did).

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

2011-01-26T02:35:00.000-08:00

I have a real fascination with madness, with the way madness sets in and changes a man, the way it paradoxically heightens his senses both perceptual and psychic, the way it burns a man out if left hot too long, and the way madness is one of the most contagious diseases man can fall victim to. It's easy to see all that on display here, in both titular characters. Jesse is a folk hero and an old west rock god, not to mention a stonecold killer when the need arises, and the weight of all that is too much for anyone to bear. Bob Ford, on the other hand, is none of these things, except perhaps the last one, and the unbearable lightness of barely being (if I may borrow and abuse a phrase) is too much for him to bear in much the same way.

The kind of humanity on display throughout The Assassination is pretty universal. As it unfolds, Jesse descends from detached celebrity to cult status to paranoid to ivory-tower madness (partially affected, but isn't it always). Correspondingly, Bob goes from hero-worship to cult member to conspirator to broken-hearted assassin. He had to kill Jesse James, not just because he was slowly groomed and coerced into doing so by an exhausted, soul-weary Jesse himself (though there's something to that) but also for the same reason anybody assassinates a celebrity: that same cocktail of love and hate, fear and loathing, fascination and morbidity, and the need to simultaneously prove and defy the truth -- that our gods are in every way mortal. Once the deed is done, Bob gets what every tragic hero gets: everything he wished for, and just as Jesse dragged those around him to misfortune or madness, Bob continues the game. But where Jesse's understanding of people was part of what made him almost superhuman, his ability to know the world and those in it in almost spooky ways, Bob's understanding was too hard-won and came far too late for him to take control of his own destiny. So although they met similar ends, what follows each end is dramatically different: Jesse remains a the legend he was in life, and Bob's hollow celebrity collapses on itself, deflates, and he is forgotten, returning to his status as a footnote in the greater man's life.

This film is poetry, in its dialogue, in its far-reaching themes and its psychoanalysis of epic characters, and in its astounding photography -- that makes two films in a row for me set in the Gothic Old West that explore the dark places in a man's soul and do so with magnificent expressionistic photography. (Sidebar: somehow I either did not know or completely forgot that this was shot by Roger Deakins. Hardly surprising. Talk about superhuman.) The performances here are subtle and powerful, with beautifully lived-in and filled-out secondary characters and some of my favorite work from Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck and Sam Rockwell -- all three of whom have long lists of great work.

I know the Oscars are a famously bad measure of quality cinema, but lately (I guess it's the time of year and all) every time I watch a movie this undeniably cinematically great I feel the need to peek at how it was rewarded when it came out. Of course Assassination was overlooked, but it reminded me that 2007 was the year of this, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Eastern Promises, Zodiac, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I'm Not There... I keep lamenting how ambitionless 2010 seemed -- well, the truth is I realize now I'm comparing it to 2007. 2007 is the bar. Not to harp on the case, but it was also the year of Ratatouille, Gone Baby Gone, Michael Clayton, The Lookout, the Grindhouse double feature, Sunshine, hell even The Darjeeling Limited and my favorite Harry Potter movie. Put it all together and 2007 looked like a year where film could do anything. Looking over this list, even a lot of the bad movies seemed eager to try something new or break with tradition.

I'm just saying, if The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford came out in 2010, I would have called it the best movie of the year. But the truth is, it's sadly hard to imagine that happening. Maybe 2011 will be better.

The Night of the Hunter

2011-01-25T01:47:00.000-08:00

I don't have much to say about this. It's quickly become one of my favorite "classic" movies. Everything about it is so artificial, so contrived, so stagy, but it's also so incredibly beautiful and dreamlike. Having dissected the story the first time I saw this, I watched it more now for mood and cinematography. The number of iconic shots throughout are really exciting. (If you click the composite image above, you can see a larger version of it: this is an image I found online, and I think it predates the Criterion blu-ray release, which makes those images even more stunning.)

Mitchum's performance is so over the top that at times he becomes a cartoon character, and Shelly Winters, here as in Lolita, plays such a tragic, fucked-up woman... she's fascinating to watch for how un-starletty she plays her leading ladies. It's fun to watch someone from this era play a victim with such depth: she really seems emotionally scarred and vulnerable -- not just vulnerable but so malleable as to seem brainwashed, even before meeting the Rev. Harry Powell. The kids' performances aren't quite "real" but they match well with the style of performance from the adults.

All the shadows, the setpieces, the icons. It's a film that exists to be explored visually more than dramatically. It's a world of stark German-expressionist-era paintings of light and dark. It's freaky and dark and cool. And for all of its overt staginess, it's got a real scary core and some great human characters and ideas. I can't help but wonder what Laughton would have done if this had been even remotely successful, and he'd gone on to make a second film.

Shock Corridor

2011-01-23T03:15:00.000-08:00

When I saw Hitchcock's Spellbound, I was so frustrated with the silly, ignorant depiction of psychoanalysis and dream-analysis that I couldn't enjoy the film. Everything about Spellbound hinges on psychoanalysis working a way that is so obviously unrealistic, an unresearched explanation of an at-the-time new school of thought, and if I couldn't accept the basic premise then I couldn't accept the story built on it. I had the same trouble with Inception, which depends entirely on an artificially constructed series of rules about dreaming, only I have to admit that on second watching I was able to accept the in-story rules and enjoy the film. Perhaps I owe Spellbound another try. Salvador Dalí directed the dream sequences, after all.

The same sort of phenomenon is at work in Shock Corridor, although to be honest it doesn't so much ruin my enjoyment of the film as it does color it. Like Inception, I can say, okay, inside this story the rules work this way, and within those rules as long as we stay consistent I can enjoy the story. Like Inception and like Spellbound, the main drama and the concepts and themes that drive the story are just as valid, whether or not psychoanalysis, or dream states, or clinical insanity work in real life the way they do in the stories.

This feels like "exploitation cinema" with a conscience and a soapbox, which works better than maybe it should. (It's not my first time seeing it, but it's been a while and I only half-remembered it.) Each of the three witnesses Barrett has to interview have convenient lapses into sanity for him, but in each case the lapses teach us that their breaks from reality were the direct and singular result of primary political movements of the last ten or twenty years: the communist scare and shame of succumbing to a different ideology drove the first witness mad; racial segregation and hatred in the south did in the second; and the construction and deployment of the hydrogen bomb was the burden of the third.

It struck me as interesting that while these large-scale American problems were being exposed as ugly and messy and soul-destroying, our hero was monomaniacally obsessed with such a petty thing: the murder of another patient. But it's not that one single murder in an insane asylum outweighs the impact of all American history for Johnny Barrett: it's that his Pulitzer Prize-winning story, his own fame and glory, outweighs all the carnage and wounded souls of recent American history. Not a very flattering approach to a hero, I've got to say.

A lot could also be said (and no doubt has been said) about the particulars here. His girlfriend -- who is pretending against her will to be his sister -- is a stripper. The soldier-turned-communist-turned-pariah has reverted back to a general on the losing side of an older, equally hate-filled conflict: the U.S. Civil War -- a position which would make him a pariah by modern eyes but a hero in his own. The first black student in a desegregated college has taken on the role of his own oppressor, chasing black men and "founding" the Ku Klux Klan as a way to keep other blacks from "marrying his daughter." And the "most brilliant mind the United States," the doctor responsible for the H-bomb (this story's Oppenheimer, or Dr. Felix Hoenikker) has become an innocent child who only wants to play games. Meanwhile, of course, the reporter hellbent on solving a case and writing an award-winning story is driven insane by the conditions and environmental pressures within the asylum -- of course one of the primary themes here is that asylums do not make people better, but simply foster and incubate more madness (the doctors even say as much, plain as day, at the end).

You can smell the tragedy of the end a mile off, but Samuel Fuller and his cast make it a lot of fun getting there. This film comes after the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (though an excerpt of his autobiography suggests that the idea for this story dates back for Fuller to at least the late 40s, when he wrote for Fritz Lang and Douglas Sirk), but it's hard to imagine that a lot of asylum-centric films like Cuckoo's Nest and 12 Monkeys weren't greatly influenced by the world and tone presented here.

Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid

2011-01-23T01:08:00.000-08:00

It's amazing, actually, how little really happens in this film. We meet them over a card game, they ride back to their gang, deal with a would-be usurper, follow through with the usurper's ambitious plan to rob the same bank train twice, get busted the second time, an extended chase across the Old West, flight to Bolivia, a little bit of bank robbin' until their pursuers track them down, attempts at going straight that end in a bloodbath, a little bit more robbin', then a final showdown. That may sound like a lot, but it's almost literally every moment in the story. A side story involving Sundance's girl Etta and a couple of short-lived celebrations in a brothel are all I left out. Most of the story is made of extended sequences of Butch and Sundance arguing and running, or montage sequences that push us along through time as things go well for them. In fact, the better things are going the more likely the script is to fastforward through their lives -- to such a degree that the most hopeful, safe and joyous time they spend is reduced to a montage of sepia-toned stills like some Old West music video. (And don't get me started on the soundtrack; aside from the eerie main title theme I pretty much think all the music here is as absurd and tonally counterproductive as the font in the title sequence, seen above.)

And this is famously and rightfully a film known for its screenplay. It's The Film known for its screenplay to some people, since it's William Goldman. The script, though, I must admit -- it's pretty brilliant. The dialogue is so easy and so telling, the characters so distinct and likable and unshowy, and the action so tight and well-paced, there is nothing to complain about at all in here. I've seen it a dozen times and still, each time, the dialogue (and Newman's and Redford's easy delivery) just sparks.

I think there's something to the fact that most of the big moments in this are outside our heroes' control, that this is a story of two people who've been in charge of their lives for a long time and are gradually losing that control. They never give up, and they keep trying their old tricks with less and less success, to the very end -- because what are you going to do? First their gang tries to turn on them, then the train companies are smarter than them (and meaner than them), then the hunters are smarter than them (and meaner than them), and eventually they are simply out of options. Etta sees it, and duly leaves them. Their friend the old sheriff sees it, and refuses to help them. Even Sweetface "the lying son of a bitch" is forced to see it and turns on them as quick as he can. It's not a world for good-old bank robbers anymore, with the organization of civilization moving in on them from all sides. And to the end, Butch and Sundance refuse to recognize this, dreaming of escaping to Australia -- of repeating the very same pipedream leap of faith that brought them to Bolivia in the first place. Every step of the story, they are backed to the edge of a cliff, and charming Butch and stalwart Sundance, they just keep jumping off. Right to the very last. Whether or not they can swim, or shoot, or speak Spanish.

I'm pretty sure there's a bold political read to this, and an easy existentialist one. But I'm not writing thesis papers; I'm just digging shallowly into great films while I rearrange and trim words out of scripts so I can make my own.

The Maltese Falcon

2011-01-22T22:52:00.000-08:00

It's really hard for me not to compare The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. They're two of the most famous detective novels from the golden age of detective novels -- the former by Dashiell Hammett and the latter by Raymond Chandler. (Much has been written comparing these two, though if memory serves they both loved and respected each other immensely: Hammett wrote sharp action in the third person; Chandler wrote quippy dialogue with a first-person narration... beyond that I forget the details of the debate.) They're both also classic detective movies, obviously both starring Humphrey Bogart, directed by two of the greatest (and both somewhat notorious, right?) filmmakers from the golden age of Hollywood filmmaking: Falcon by John Huston and Sleep by Howard Hawks. And they both take really different approaches to the mystery formula.

In each, the hero (Sam Spade here, Philip Marlow in Sleep) is a tough-as-nails, quick-witted detective who improvises boldly as a way of staying one step ahead of the chaos long enough to put together all the pieces of the puzzle. But where Marlowe comes off as fearless and sarcastic, Sam Spade actually comes off a bit like an asshole. It's hard to imagine Marlowe sleeping around with his partner's wife, both of whom he seems to practically loathe, or feeling so apathetic about a friend's death that the only reason he avenges it is because letting people kill detectives isn't good for business. But the hero's relative morality isn't the difference that stands out to me. What stands out to me is the story, and how linear and rational Huston wants to be, and how loose and abstract Hawk is willing to be.

The Maltese Falcon is at every turn concerned with keeping all the details straight as it goes through its labyrinth of twists and turns. The players are all full of useful exposition and the majority of the story is listening to each character lie or change sides back and forth, as everyone vies for the titular macguffin. In The Big Sleep, the details are so fuzzy that even Hawks, Bogart (and Chandler himself, reportedly) weren't sure why each murder took place or who was ultimately responsible. For sheer story and colorful crooks, The Maltese Falcon seems to win out, because each beat in the story makes rational sense and because Greenstreet, Lorre, and Cook are wonderful character actors used brilliantly. For mood and dialogue, though, The Big Sleep weighs out better.

But the final deciding factor for me between these two is the romantic chemistry and the performance of the story's femme fatale. Falcon comes up pretty weak, if you ask me, and although Mary Astor doesn't do the film any favors (she and Bogart are supposed to fall almost instantly in love, but they have no chemistry), it should be pointed out that her character is written pretty sloppily. Still, it's possible a great actress could sell us on the untrustworthy, self-serving backstabber who becomes a damsel-in-distress at the drop of a hat (and a lot of proverbial hats get dropped throughout), but Astor never manages to tie all the lies and pleas and plasticity into a single, satisfying character. On the other hand, The Big Sleep pits Bogart against Lauren friggin' Bacall, who holds her own against Bogey's sardonic wit and always reads as a character with depth and personality and feeling. So, it's not fair.

I still like The Maltese Falcon a lot. Seriously, any time Bogart, Greenstreet, Lorre or Cook have scenes together it's classic stuff; and it's fun to watch Sam Spade make shit up to everyone he talks to and struggle to outpace all the conniving and backstabbing (it's easy to see how George Lucas and Steven Spielberg drew a straight line from the kinds of characters Humphrey Bogart played into the kinds of characters Harrison Ford would play thirty years later, with Han Solo and Indiana Jones both acting very much as Bogart does here). But even though its story makes so much more linear sense than The Big Sleep, there's really no question which of the two I hold more fondness for.

There Will Be Blood

2011-01-18T04:47:00.000-08:00

The hardest films to talk about are always the ones I love and admire so thoroughly, and there have been precious few films in the last decade I hold in as high a regard as There Will Be Blood. Just like the poster says, it's ambition versus faith, and each side is painted in such savage, unforgiving colors and with so much raw charisma that it's just hypnotic.

Daniel Day Lewis is an actor who relies on external impersonative acting more than internalized character building, but for someone as outsized and showman-like as Daniel Plainview it becomes spot-on casting -- recalling Christian Bale (another excellent impersonator) and his Patrick Bateman, Plainview seems unsure what lies beneath his own surface. But where Bateman had a hollow center surrounded by various affectations, I think Daniel Plainview is truly the same on the surface as he is throughout. We are ten or fifteen minutes into the story before anyone speaks, and during that time we watch Plainview, alone in the desert, every bit the man he claims to be. He gets his hands dirty, so to speak, without hesitation, and if he exploits the existence of an adopted son and denies his loathing toward the humans he strives to outdo and outpace (which is all of them), these are still traits he carries to the very core of his being. "To thine own self be true," right? -- well say what you will about him, Plainview is at least true to himself. Sunday, on the other hand... well... the jury's out on that.

So many subtle foreshadowings I caught this time, as when Eli (mud-coated and furious, having just been physically beaten and humiliated by Daniel) takes his rage out on his elderly father, wailing on him and crying out how Paul the brother is the cause of all their troubles -- just before "Henry Plainview" appears and, acting as Daniel's brother, causes new troubles. Just little moments like that stand out and impress, mostly in the order of scenes or the way the context of one scene is inverted to become the subtext of the next.

When Daniel and his deaf son sit to eat in the local restaurant, but Daniel's business competitors get served first, the shot is framed such that one of the competitors' shoulder and arm crowd the frame, that we have to look over and around him to see Daniel and H.W., but even more telling than that is the man's menu, a diagonal slash through the frame separating Daniel from his son. From the moment the newcomers sit down, Daniel cannot relax and be a father to his boy, and soon raises up, drunk, and causes a bit of a scene, even threatens to become violent. If his boy represents his best hope and strongest connection to humanity, then the outrage of comparing himself unfavorably to some uppity businessmen from the big city drives a wedge in there. He says it himself, "I have a competition in me." But it's the way tiny moments like this are put to us that illustrate the point stronger than any magnetic, hyper-charged words. I mean, when H.W. is struck deaf and the oil derrick at Little Boston erupts with an endless flame that tells them what a treasure they're sitting on, it's hardly coincidence that the sky deepens within a single minute from clear day to blackest night, that they seem to be peering excitedly into the gates of hell, and that Daniel's face is coated in a black slime. These things say more than the words around them.

I mean, I could go on, but it's just a laundry list of minutiae done well. Every detail from the smallest to the largest is in aid of a strong story here, one of the best, and a hard one for me to argue with. You know it's a good year when you are not just rooting against the Coens, but a little offended when No Country For Old Men (hardly a bad film, by any means) steals all the Oscars, but in ten years, or twenty, or fifty, I think There Will Be Blood will be dancing circles around that particular Coen Brothers film. Compare it to A Serious Man, however, and I'm less positive which will be considered more of a classic.

I'm not sure if this makes sense or not, but in my mind I consider There Will Be Blood as the contemporary benchmark for the line between what people call cinema and what people call movies.

影武者 (Kagemusha) *

2011-01-18T00:22:00.000-08:00

I took Japanese in high school, because it was offered and Spanish, French and German all sounded boring by comparison. Within the first week, my freshman year, they made us choose Japanese names that we would keep for as long as stayed in that program (I and my friends did all four years). Off a list of names I chose Shingen before I could even read it, because it looked easy to write in hiragana. Later our Sensei explained to me that Shingen was the name of a famous Japanese general. When we had to pick fake last names and play-act various language lessons with full names, she practically insisted I choose Takeda, because that was Shingen's name. So for four years, I actually answered to "Shingen-kun" or "Takeda-kun." All I knew was, this was something like the equivalent of an ESL student deciding to call themselves George Washington.

Kagemusha is the story of the last days of the famous Japanese warlord Shingen of the Takeda Clan, and now it's 15 years later but I still think of "Shingen" in the back of my mind as some kind of name associated with me. This has no bearing on anything, other than novelty and coincidence, but I wanted to share anyway, since it was in the back of my mind as I watched Kurosawa's epic. (Also, she did a pretty terrible job explaining to me Furinkazan, but perhaps she should get props for even trying, considering she wasn't a history teacher and was barely a language teacher. I was surprised and excited by how clear Kagemusha makes the concept, and also how central it is to the philosophy of the story.)

The story is an epic war movie, with larger-than-life characters and events, massive battles and hundreds of armor-toting, horse-riding extras, but it's surprisingly philosophical (surprising for a war epic; not surprising for a Kurosawa film). It's also, appropriately, the dramatic story of tragic characters in tragic times -- including Takeda himself, his brother/double, the rescued thief who becomes his Kagemusha ("Shadow Warrior," or professional impersonator), many of his generals, and even his young grandson. Each of them suffers in one form or another for the "greater good" of maintaining the Takedas' strategic foothold in an unending three-way war.

I'm pretty sure you can chalk this up to the drastically alien time and place, but it was interesting to watch a film literally about war and not feel turned off by the war-porn nature of it. In fact, I found the notions of honor as depicted in the film to be attractive, and admired the men in many cases. Takeda's enemies, for one, refused to feel joy at the loss of their most dangerous adversary out of respect for the man, and the loyalty felt by Takeda's generals led them to kowtow to an impersonator for three full years after his death. Then again, even the Kagemusha himself was so moved by the power of the man's shadow that he found himself willingly playing the role and continuing the legacy.

That's, I think, what Kagemusha is really all about: the "shadow of the king," the way a great man's reputation can outlive him and as if by sheer inertia continue propelling people down paths he's willed for them. Their enemy's "bravest general" turned back willingly and unhesitatingly at the very sight of "Takeda" sitting atop the hill, as immovable as a mountain, and his personal guard gave their lives just as willingly and unhesitatingly to the very idea of the man, standing in the way of incoming arrows to protect a common thief who stood only as symbol of the once-great, beloved and feared Lord Shingen.

But on the other hand, we see all too clearly (and anticipate for over half the film, which adds some great tension) how easily that same legacy can crumble the moment your followers lose their faith in your legacy, as in the end (the ruse is exposed by such a fleeting accident, when the lord's horse bucks the well-meaning impostor) Takeda's son Katsuyori seals the fate of the entire clan simply by "moving the mountain." His impetuous need to prove himself more than just an unloved son standing in the shadow of a great man unraveled the quaking fear and grudging respect their enemies had for them, after which each aspect of Furinkazan fell one by one, systematically: the speed of the wind wasn't enough, nor the silence of the forest, nor the ferocity of the fire -- not without the undefeatable mountain behind them. The moment Katsuyori moved the mountain, everyone knew, the magic was gone. There was no shadow to stand within, and that was all that held the Takeda Clan together.

An interesting and somewhat conservative message which I can accept as beautiful and noble within the confines of the story, even without knowing if there was anything the warlords fought for beyond power and borders (that is, ideology doesn't matter here; war is simply the thing you do if you're a warrior). But if you transport this message into twenty-first century terms, it's actually kind of appalling. Honor and pride and military might are things that can be moving when the world feels like a fantasy -- knights and dragons, samurai and musketmen, even the Klingon warriors from Star Trek (who to be honest I found myself reminded of more than once, since I've been watching a lot of Star Trek lately). So really, I'm glad for stories like this, because honor and nobility are such daring and bold subjects, and you would never be able to get me to sympathize with a modern-day story of war and great generals -- at least not in the same way.

This is a great film that runs three hours long and splits its time between massive battle sequences and conferring generals and warlords (real and faux) gnashing their teeth, but it's never boring for a second. Plus it's beautiful, both in its photography and its characterizations. It makes me eager to seek out Ran and Throne of Blood, two Kurosawa samurai "classics" I've yet to see.

Soon, maybe.

Seen at Cinema 21.

Persona

2011-01-17T10:38:00.000-08:00

Usually I manage to blog immediately after seeing a movie, but this time I had to wait until the morning, so this will be short. You're welcome!

It'd been so long since I've seen Persona that I forgot a lot of it, including the "avant-garde" film breaks and such. I didn't immediately remember the beginning with the film starting up, the rapid onslaught of images (including a single frame of a cock) and the thin boy whose sheet won't cover his head and his toes, grasping at the projection of the young woman's face. (I watched this with Jen, who nailed it: I think that was the boy from Alma's story who became "massively" infatuated with his mother.)

Bergman films are so plain-faced in their symbolism and emotional rawness that they can be a little uncomfortable to sit through, like a best friend looking you directly in the eyes and telling you how sad he feels when he's alone. I don't think that's a bad thing, to be confronted by a film's emotional intent so boldly, just as it's not a bad thing to have your friend tell you point-blank how he feels, even if it's squirm-inducing. But I'm glad not every film does that. As to the symbolism, I confess that I was not in a mindspace (specifically, I was almost falling asleep, alas) to delve too deeply. The obvious parallels in them being parts of a single person, confusing one for the other despite looking reasonably different, are strong. The major emotional shift that happens halfway through when Alma reads Elisabet's letter is a great move, and possible saves the story for me -- if it didn't have that shift in the balance of power between them it would be exhausting.

I'm going to go read an analysis of the film by Susan Sontag now, but it would be cheating to post after reading that. (Ha, I watch a movie rich enough to finally warrant all the dismantling and exploration of symbols I like to do, and all I can say is, hey I watched it, and this beat of drama was good. Oops. Sometimes life gets in the way of a good blogpost, you know?)

Body Double

2011-01-16T13:55:00.000-08:00

Brian De Palma films are funny creatures. A lot of his output is only made for cinephiles, with inside references and layered homages to all the classics that shaped him and shaped film. Like Hitchcock, his favorite go-to, De Palma worries over complicated camera moves and the iconography of details more than he worries over actual cinematography (which ranges wildly from gorgeous to naturalistic to flat) or performance (which ranges wildly from comedic to dramatic to hammy). His sense of pacing within a sequence is very good, but like Hitch, his sense of pacing for the story as a whole is often awkward, with fits and starts and time devoted to minor beats because they are tense at the expense of major beats that, though less tense, are actually the more important moments.

The plot itself is a pretty Hitchesque mindfuck, and that's fun, but it's a little too easy to piece together for Jake. Maybe it's that I just came off a couple of mystery films that devote time to connecting all the pieces and Body Double isn't a mystery at all, but a thriller, but when the hero makes the leap of logic and gets it right on the first try, it always smacks of a writer who doesn't care about his story so much as he cares about the scenes that make it up. Which is, like I just said, exactly what I think Hitchcock and De Palma are both guilty of. They are master scene-craftsmen who didn't always make the best actual films. Anyway, I do like the scheme, it's a nice way to update a Hitchcock-styled conspiracy and mistaken-identity story into 1970s Hollywood and add lots and lots of boobs. It's not a bad film, though, if you just roll with a couple of strange details -- like that the police don't detain Jake, or the exact method with which the "Indian" murders the woman.

A couple of funny things stick out to me, though, as clearly deliberate choices that I haven't made peace with just yet. For one, Sam's death (the dog leaps into him and they both fall off a cliff into the reservoir) is just so sudden and ludicrous and unexplained -- wasn't that his dog? who protected him no matter what? ...plus it's basically a deus ex machina no different than an elf getting you out of a dungeon, since the villain's death and the hero's salvation aren't even at the hands of the hero. For another, Holly's entire performance (and especially her comedic wake-up-shouting routine immediately after the villain has died/disappeared) -- she seems a little too dense for no reason, which makes her seem less like a character and more like a plot-contrivance; she just switches motivations on a dime to match whatever is needed of her in the moment.

The thing is, though, that both seem almost Brechtian in their design, here, as De Palma goes to great pains several times to remind you this is just a movie, after all, just a cheap, tit-filled thriller. Even Jake's claustrophobia is about as real as Scottie's acrophobia in Vertigo, with a lot of fairly preposterous nail-biting and tooth-gnashing and paralysis. But this is De Palma, doing That Hitchcock Thing, and I'm torn between the idea that he just let these things be contrived because that's how Hitchcock handles them and movies make no promises about being real, or whether he is deliberately inserting unnatural elements because this is a movie about the joy of watching movies. Either way, they stick out like a sore thumb and I haven't decided if that's okay or not, but on a single viewing I'm left wondering as to the filmmaker's motivations with them.

On the subject of Brechtian beats however, I actually did enjoy the mid-climax break from reality back into the opening scene's film shoot, the chat with the director and the hero taking charge of his own paralyzing fear. It wasn't real but it was nice, and for being such a break from reality, it was smoothly integrated and never disorienting. It was one of many nice moments in here.

Also, a final thought: in addition to all the Hitchcock stuff, this movie kept calling Chinatown to mind. It has a woman posing as someone else to frame our hero, a hero named Jake who follows people around on their day-to-day lives, a showdown at the reservoir, and even makes references to Chinatown at one point. Or maybe I've just got Chinatown on the brain.

L.A. Confidential

2011-01-16T03:36:00.000-08:00

Truth is, this was picked for unrelated reasons, but it makes such a great counterpoint to The Thin Man, at least in terms of how messy and chaotic a mystery story can get and how differently you can deal with that phenomenon. Like any good Chandler or Hammett story, the deeper a detective looks the more mess he uncovers, and it takes a staggering genius to take all those loose threads and craft a single tapestry. One way to deal with it, the way most common for '40s PIs like Philip Marlowe and Nick & Nora Charles, is to just dive into the chaos and come out the other side with a story, and let the middle just be a mess of shadowy characters and uncovered conspiracies, murder stacked on murder until the detective(s) point the finger and solve the case. The joy here is watching the hero walk through the muck and get in and out of pickles and interact with boldness and tenacity. But the contemporary mystery often takes a sharper and smarter route, and L.A. Confidential may be the best example of that style: the detective(s) don't walk through quite so much muck, and they don't get into and out of quite as many pickles, and they don't interact with as many thugs and villains with the same kind of near-nihilistic daring -- instead they actually go through the procedure of solving a case, and all those loose threads and uncovered conspiracies are more than just excuses for more thugs and exciting traps and sexy dames. In the old films, I think the color was the story, but now the clues are the story. And like I said, L.A. Confidential does a great job of juggling an amazing number of disparate clues and crimes and cover-ups and bringing them all together to a single story without ever feeling clunky or confusing or obnoxiously detail-oriented. It's a full two hours long but it zooms by and although your head swims a little in subplots, you never feel like you're drowning. It keeps its eye on the goal and it keeps moving forward. It's a brilliant story and a brilliant script.

Plus, I'm always a big fan of any solid trio of heroes. Luke, Leia and Han; Kirk, Spock, and McCoy; Peter, Egon and Ray; The Dude, Walter and Donnie; Groucho, Chico and Harpo; even, yes, Harry, Hermione and Ron. The dynamic of trios is always the most fun, and each can represent a different personality trait or philosophical perspective. The unspoken rule is that, really, it takes all three to be a complete person, and that's why they always work. Heart, Brain and Body; Id, Ego and Superego; Words, Actions and Feelings. Break it down however you like, but I'm always much much more excited by trinaries than binaries. Pull out a single element, explore what the new dynamic is and what's missing. An endless wealth of drama is built into every good trio. And here, with Bud White, Jack Vincennes and Ed Exley, you get a character driven toward thoughtless instinctive action (loosely, the id), one driven toward self-aggrandizement and narcissism (the ego), and one driven toward a moral universe with an unbreakable conscience (the superego). But of course we also undermine each, by having Bud need to protect women and want to be smarter than he is; by having Jack's conscience creep in and drive him to do the right thing; and by having Exley constantly and deliberately maneuvering himself toward positions of political power. So each is sufficiently self-contradictory that we want to spend more time with them and explore their inner conflicts, but they play off each other and the world around them in beautifully archetypal ways that serve the story well. No two of them alone ever would have solved the case of the Nite Owl Massacre, let alone uncovered the corruption behind it all, and it's naturally and appropriately the perfect storm of bringing these three men together than allows the house of cards Dudley Smith and his co-conspirators have built to collapse. You need the fighter, the thinker, and the charmer to gather the pieces. That they all mistrust or outright hate each other until the very last possible moment that they can reconcile and align... well, that's good drama. Like I said: this is an amazing script. I don't normally check this kind of thing, but I had to here -- and yes, L.A. Confidential won best adapted screenplay for 1997.

Good damn thing.

The Thin Man

2011-01-15T23:34:00.000-08:00

Of all genres, I think detective stories and murder mysteries may have the most freedom to run all over the map and continually introduce new characters and subplots willy-nilly until the very last possible second. (On second thought, that's almost certainly not true: musicals or anything under the umbrella of "comedy" surely have more license for freeform plotting, but nevermind that.) Anyway, so long as they can still bring everything together with a result that doesn't feel like a cheat, the murder mystery gets a lot of leeway in terms of how chaotic and haphazard it can feel. This is why it's hard to pin down the actual plot of films like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or The Big Lebowski, or anything by Raymond Chandler or Agatha Christie. Trying to pay painstaking-close attention to the machinations of a good mystery plot is aggravating, and actually not all that rewarding. I think in a strong novel you can follow along with all the clues and just maybe try to outguess the detective (though even then I never try; what's the fun in that? I'm much more happy to follow the story for its own sake and then on second viewing identify the clues and red herrings), but in a film the pace usually makes that hard: you can't slow down and take stock, and you're not supposed to. You're Dr. Watson at best, following along with the action, keeping up as best you can and if you can't, getting clued in by the master detective either along the way or, more likely, at the end. The fun isn't the answer, anyway: the fun is all the mystery. A mystery is about, in a way, having fun with a story, and there's no denying that Nick and Nora Charles are fun.

In fact, Nick and Nora remind me of a roarin' 20s style boozy and funner version of George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The large, complicated cast of characters and the intersection of uppity highbrows with dour lowbrows reminded me of The Rules of the Game or Gosford Park. It's easy to see the light-hearted approach to such a dark caper as a sign of the times (the film was made in 1934, after all) and the audience's need to escape, and I think that very same madcap almost comic-pitched tone has helped it age well. At first it's a little off-putting, because the jokes aren't very subtle (though they're often very witty, especially the back-and-forths between the Charleses) and the reaction shots feel particularly hammy -- plus the story is confusing from scene one until nearly the end. But at a certain point you realize that they're playing it against type, consciously. Nick won't take the case no matter what, but everyone around him from crooks to cops keep treating him as the authority on the subject. Suspects sneak into his house in the middle of the night to try and clear their name at gunpoint, and he's not even involved in the case! In a single dinner-party scene, every member of the suspect's family shows up individually and is secreted off to different rooms of the apartment for private info-dumps on the couple who aren't even in on the case. After a point, the backwardsness of it becomes hilarious.

It's the complete inverse of a classic Agatha Christie formula. Usually you begin with a bunch of suspects in a single place and a stalwart mastermind determined to solve a murder. Here Nick and Nora have thugs and cops bully every suspect into a single dinner scene at the end of the film, where he rattles off what he admits privately is only one possible version of the mystery's solution and waits for someone among the bunch to blunderingly tip their hand. His speech seems to call out one or two obvious ones, but these are decoys, and he even interjects a name or two of his own in a sharp accusatory way, only to ask them casually if the oysters are to their liking. It's all a parody of murder mysteries, and throughout it Nora keeps saying to him she'd really like to see him be a detective one of these days. In fact, after spending over an hour trying to find and either accuse or absolve Dr. Wynant, Nick does his only bit of actual sleuthing and determines that the man's been dead for three months now -- the entire case itself is turned upside down in a single moment that brilliantly brings us into the act three dinner sequence I just mentioned. Although it never quite tips its hat to the audience (which is nice), this is a murder mystery standing on its head every step of the way. And it's a lot of fun.

De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped)

2011-01-14T03:33:00.000-08:00

It's nice to have something more character-driven and naturalistic to watch. There's not nearly so much I have to say about this as, say, the Harry Potter series. Because this isn't a story about what happens next so much as it is about who it happens to and what their choices (or lack of choices) are, I feel like I'm watching with a different part of my brain turned on.

I really liked the tone of this. 90% of the story's tension is between Tom Seyr's dreams to be a pianist and the pressure in his world to be a crooked real estate man and petty thug for his father, but neither of those storylines felt like they depended on any shorthand or easy formulas from the hundreds of films that came before it. The way the piano playing was depicted was concise and clear, even to a non-musician, and having a coach who didn't speak his language kept the scenes from ever relying on easy exposition or colorful language to carry the action, instead showing us that he cannot relax, that he plays too quickly and stiffly, that his concentration is off or his anger issues are getting in the way, strictly through the playing or the non-verbal interactions between him and Miao Lin. Likewise, the real estate "thug" half of the story -- seemingly so disparate from the world of concert pianists (I have not seen Fingers, which I now recall this is a remake of; that's okay with me, though I may someday seek it out) -- never feels like a crime-story cliché. Instead, it feels awkward and desperate and messy and emotional and brutal. It feels like what you'd expect real crime feels like: quick, dirty, and often improvised.

The only other thing I have to say is, the last ten minutes -- the "two years later" coda, makes the story for me. Up until that point it was just another character-driven drama with a lot of expertly-done tight handheld camerawork and some gritty performances. Something about the epilogue transported it for me to a different kind of movie, I guess in the way it was all so painful and full of consequence but ambiguous. From the moment [SPOILER] Tom came home and found his father dead to the moment, two years later, that he sits in the audience, shaking and covered in the blood of his father's killer (or so we assume, and so does he) and shares a look with Miao Lin, everything moves so quickly and so definitively that you almost can't keep up. It's like Tom's playing: he doesn't slow down or take breaths, he just rolls through, excited and anxious about each next note, and then over in a flash. That kind of performance may hurt a delicate piano piece, but here that pacing strengthens the end of an already pulled-taut drama film.

Cutting to black on that look is just the right way to end it: all judgments and reactions have to exist outside the film. Room to breathe would have only made room for sentiment and consideration, and for better or worse, Tom's world hasn't had a lot of those things in it.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 *

2011-01-13T23:30:00.000-08:00

Well, for obvious reasons this is a tough one to get too into until I've seen both halves. It quite literally cuts off without the slightest semblance of resolution or anything. In fact it felt a lot like when I was a kid and we had movies on laserdisc, and I would watch Star Wars, and Grand Moff Tarkin, fed up with the princess's lies, would bark the order, "Terminate her! Immediately!" -- and at that exact moment, the disc would cut to black and wait to be flipped over. The end of this, with Voldemort snatching the Elder Wand from Dumbledore's dead hands, just after we bury Dobby (more on that in a moment), hasn't resolved anything. I mean, that's okay, at least in theory, because the book is vast, and apparently uncompressable, and you can make a lot more money if you release two 150-minute films rather than one five hour film, and that's what's done here. I refused to go see Kill Bill in theaters for this reason; I wasn't willing to fork over money twice for a single film, and I wasn't willing to try and understand a single story with a six-month gap between parts or whatever. Here I've gone ahead and done so, but I still can't judge this story until I see how any of these things pan out. Subsequently, all I can do are discuss scenes or elements, but not the overall narrative, which is frustrating. As such, this may come off even more like a list of hopefully-not-too-petty problems even more than usual. I legitimately don't know how this story ends; all I can do is judge what they've given me here.

And so, with due apologies:

The biggest problem is the "end" of this half, then, so let's start there. Harry and HermioRon are captured by Bellatrix and the Malfoy clan. Draco is forced to identify Harry, who's had an uglification spell cast on him, and the pressure is really on because, I guess, if he mis-identifies the most famous boy in everywhere, Voldemort will kill them all for the bother -- because Voldymac isn't interested in maybes, only sure things, and he values his soldiers just that little. Anyway, they all fear him and he's crazy and evil and I'm splitting hairs, but no no, let's stay on track here: Draco has to decide if this is really Harry. It's important, suffice to say. You'd think if he was on the fence, maybe he'd be swayed the existence of Hermione and Ron, who he probably recognizes as Harry's ginger sidekick and that one kooky chick who punched him in the nose three or four years ago. But okay, maybe he wasn't on the fence until he saw H&R, and so now he's 50/50 and still unsure. But then Bellatrix (which seems to be Helena Bonham Carter's Jack Sparrow impersonation, by the way... she seems to have wandered in from another, much more spastic film) sees that the snatcher bandits who brought them the kids have the fabled sword of Godric Griffindor. So she decides it's time to mount Hermione (why Hermione? I assume the answer is racism) and cut her a little for being racially impure. While she does this, Harry and Ron are thrown in a dungeon along with Luna Lovegood and Ollivander the wand merchant. Okay, I admit it, all of this is a snarky build up to right here: Ron and Harry are trapped in a dungeon and Hermione is being low-level tortured, and they are in the stronghold of the crazy evil bad guys, and magic is right out -- so how will they ever escape?

This is the kind of brilliant corner a writer wants to get his or her characters into, because it's these kind of moments that really show us what a character is made of, and there's nothing more exciting that when the hero is backed into a corner and still finds a way out. The trouble is, the writer actually has to come up with the way out, and the goal here is that the way out of the no-win scenario comes from an active character and is sufficiently clever to impress us. If the solution is too random or arbitrary or comes from unexpected third parties, well, it's kind of a cheat, isn't it, because our hero just got lucky, and when that is literally a plot device that comes out of nowhere we call this -- you guessed it -- deus ex machina. And if you have an elf magically pop in and break existing rules ("I can use magic; I'm an elf") and save the day with little to no effort, maybe it's called elfus ex machina, but no matter what you call it, that my friends is a plot device, and in case you can't tell from my tone, using it does run the risk of irking your audience. And then they get on their blogs and piss and moan about it, and nobody wins.

But seriously, that was a cheat of the worst kind, and just in case we didn't know how literally the storytellers were taking this Dobby-as-plot-device thing, he is killed immediately after saving the day, so we don't have the excess baggage of another character, one whose super rule-breaking magic might have come in handy again later. And then we have to mourn him, because he "died to save our hero," and the whole thing is just frustrating.

Okay, you know what? I'm being much more sarcastic than usual here, and it's actually not because I have some special hatred for this movie. In fact I don't. This is tangential, but the truth is I've become a little more sarcastic because I have become acutely aware of a funny kind of solitude in writing these Harry Potter rants. I feel like I'm uniquely positioned between those who don't love the stories and therefore haven't watched them all (or at all) and those who passionately love the stories and therefore watch them all uncritically. I may have even taxed my girlfriend's patience tonight with too many questions; even though they were all sincere and open I'm afraid they were all a little leading, as I was seeking out which things were plot holes, which things were shortcomings in translating to the big screen, and which things I merely missed or misunderstood. Long story short, my excess of acid is actually the result of indulgent self-consciousness. The further along in storytelling these mega-blockbusters got, I think the easier time they had selling their fans on each next installment, because they'd established a ride where hard questions weren't rewarded, and everyone had already agreed to enjoy the ride. (And it's not like I don't succumb to this phenomenon: anything from Labyrinth to Star Wars [even the "good trilogy"] to Indiana Jones doesn't hold up if you dig too deep, to one degree or another.)

I have a feeling the long, meandering bit in the various wildernesses of England did not need its full allotment of time to get across its point of hiding and reading, or whatever they were doing when they should have been racing around looking for the horcruxes and all. I have a feeling that that is one place they could have trimmed to get this story down to a single long movie. I have a feeling I will feel exhausted with the number of artifacts and fetishes this final story is going to make us obsess over, as it's already starting to feel like a Sierra King's Quest game with swords and rings and amulets and cloaks and wands and books and potions and everything -- I mean, no good wizard story could happen without magic items but I have a feeling this may constitute magic-item overload here. I also have a feeling all my big-picture questions like what the muggles understand (or experience) as Voldemort and his Death Eaters run around doing what they do, or why it's so hard for a room full of professional adult wizards to ever catch three plucky teens with amazing luck, or how much of the future Dumbledore could predict and how much he couldn't and why he had some glaring blindspots despite other moments of miraculous accuracy -- I have a feeling these will all remain largely unanswered.

On the other hand, I suspect and hope that more of Snape's backstory and motivation will come into play as the muggle genocide gets underway, and that the pathos of his sacrifice will be realized at least partially before we're done. I suspect and hope that many questions about Harry Potter and his parents will be answered, and that we will better understand what Voldemort's master plan actually is, and that the final showdown between Voldy and Harry will be big and nasty and taxing and I'm even holding out hope that despite the Dobby Incident above, the end of the whole series will probably be less of a cheat and more about the inner strength and bravery in Harry, and that love will probably play a part -- possibly the love between Hermione and Ron, which seems a little random from a prophecy standpoint but more or less sound from a dramatic one -- and that we will see in the end that a lot of people worked in a lot of ways behind the scenes to make sure Harry is prepared for that final showdown, and to make sure that Harry wins in the end. I also suspect and hope that things will get a lot worse, a lot darker, before they get remotely better.

But I reserve final judgment on all such things until the whole story is told. And until this summer when Part 2 finally comes out, I shelve all these concerns and complaints, criticisms and witticisms (see what I did there?), and move on to other worlds and interests and passions. From the beginning I feel like I've been simultaneously shooting fish in a barrel and beating a dead horse (and raining on my friends and loved ones' parade, while we're mixing metaphors), but I also feel that for the last ten-plus years I've been goaded endlessly into the position I'm now in, answering the claim by so many people that the series can be enjoyed by intelligent adults as well as dumb old kids.

I'm really not trying to pick a fight with anyone, and I can name a dozen or more popular series I like or would like a lot less than Harry Potter, and I'm openly admitting that the books do sound better than the movies with regards to at least many of my complaints. I do not hold anything (more or less than I did before) against the books. But I get the feeling most of these films only work as dim reflections of the novels, as accompaniment for those who enjoy the books and want to return. It's exactly how I feel about the recent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film, for example, or the Watchmen movie. The bottom line is, I'm not an enormous fan of the Harry Potter movies. They are uneven, overlong, kind of graceless, and lack a certain special something (a certain "magic" if you will). They don't feel like they were made out of passion but out of rote, like they were made because the thing simply had to exist. There was a demand, and the demand was met.

But that's just me. Quite obviously, your mileage may vary.

Seen at the Regal Broadway Metroplex.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2011-01-12T23:41:00.000-08:00

A pet cause I often rant about is the frustrating misperception of a writer's responsibility when adapting a work to another format -- particularly, of course, to the big screen. It isn't exactly a new thought to suggest that what works as a comic book or a novel doesn't always work as a TV show or a film. That an adaptation must stay true to its source makes inherent sense, to an extent, but to most people that seems to mean that the adaptation must be a verbatim translation across mediums, and that even the slightest beat lost or altered is a savage crime against the text. The more religious your fanboys and fangirls get about a thing, the more demanding of exactitude for the sake of exactitude the audience tends to be. But adaptation should be about finding the spirit of a thing, the thing that makes this story great, and keeping that alive at all costs -- literally, at the expense of the details. Sometimes when you are too careful to preserve every bone and sinew when creating a new creature you lose the thing's soul, and the end result is hollow, or malformed (or formless), and the impact isn't just diminished, it's lost. I haven't read the Harry Potter novels, and I'm reasonably sure I never will, but I get the feeling that this is happening here. The fan-enforced painstakingness of translation -- adaptation by committee, essentially -- may be sucking a lot of life and breath out of the work.

I can only judge the movie as-is, as a movie, which is how it is meant to be judged. And so, all considerations of "oh but if you read the book" aside, Half-Blood Prince has some pretty good stuff in there somewhere, but it doesn't seem to know how to get there. Furthermore (and this I think is intentional, but in this case it doesn't help), it's not even a complete story. This is to the Harry Potter series what Empire Strikes Back is to the original Star Wars trilogy. This is "the one where things get dark," and it's also the one where all that tension boils over into romantic entanglement -- by way of easy character development. In fact about half of the story is given over to a lot of really artificial love triangles.

I'm guessing that we were supposed to root for Ron and Hermione to finally "snog" with such passion that every step away from it was meant to be agonizing. Likewise I gather that because Ginny Weasley once came down the stairs excited to see Harry in, like, movie 2 or 3? I forget which -- anyway, because of that we are meant to secretly hope these two will get together. Maybe I'm just too much a cynical thirtysomething dude and not enough of a fourteen year old girl for this, but it all sure feels like forced shipping to me. Anyway, two years ago we had Wizard Prom and the boys and girls were just starting to notice each other. Now, love is really in the air, stinking everything right up. This is part of what feels like a novel to me, because there isn't anything directly linking the continued romantic explorations of these characters to the return of Voldemort and the machinations of his evil ragtag gang of followers. Technically, Potions Class, and potions in general, form the link, but it is a weak link at best. And for the record, not every single scene of this was bad -- in fact, most the actual scenes were well handled (the cast and crew have gotten into a natural groove with each other, and the photography is always very pretty; in general the whole thing's gotten more palatable even when it's a wreck at times) -- it's just that the dynamics at play here feel arbitrary and unearned, and as such I don't actually care much about them. I like Hermione just fine, and Ron is mostly okay, and if they get together I think that's cute, but I don't really care one way or another because it's just as believable that they'd be happy with others as with each other, so it's hard to imagine an hour needed to be spent on who is kissing who and who they'd really rather be kissing. At least when that's not remotely what the story's really about. Anyway, like the film itself, I digress.

In theory, this is the story of Dumbledore and Harry's attempts to stay out ahead of Voldemort and his cartoonish acolytes (led by a cartoonish Helena Bonham Carter... the snob in me wonders whatever happened to that amazing actress I used to admire, but the pragmatist in me realizes that she's getting paid buku bucks to play a horde of fun roles and what's so great about straight-drama?). We "reveal" Snape to be a villain in a scene so direct and unambiguous that, after five films of is-he-or-isn't-he I immediately disbelieve it, which is a shame. They pushed the scene too hard on us, which had the reverse effect of making me read the "second reading" subtext of the scene on my first viewing of it. Even before the final scenes between him and Dumbledore (and despite them leading to [SPOILER?] Dumbly's death), I was ready to bet real money that Snape was an agent of the good guys all along, and that he was going to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to bring down Voldemort once and for all. It would have been nice to feel betrayed, but Snape was never a character capable of that, because we've gone to that well too many times. We are told so often to mistrust him, but oh wait he's good after all and we were wrong to mistrust him!, that it's pretty clear what endgame we're going for. He's got one note as a character, and so we're playing out the misunderstood-ally role to the very end.

(Oh, wait, I just remembered, I have one other complaint about Snape here. It's revealed at practically the last second that the "Half-Blood Prince," which was apparently important enough to name this story after is none other than Our Pal Severus -- but that's it? It's not a clue to anything, or useful to understanding Snape's role in this or Harry's, or a connection to the past or anything -- it's just a random detail. Harry has a note-covered Potions textbook that belonged to a seeming genius at potions, and it turns out to be the gloomy former Potions professor's. Okay, I guess I can see that making sense, but what the fuck does "half-blood prince" mean?? And what does it mean that Harry found and used his book? Surely it's not just a funny coincidence! Come on guys. Is this something the book explains but the film drops the ball, or what? Somebody explain to me the title here.)

Back to the point of how they've used a character in previous installments undermining how they're trying to use him now: I've got a similar beef with our other so-called would-be betrayer: little Draco Malfoy. Seriously, from the first time we met him on he's been one evil dojo away from sweeping Harry's leg, although before this film every single scene of him being a bully or a prick ends with him cowering or humiliated. He is never given a chance to be anything other than an embarrassing petulant brat with the most stubbornly puffed up sense of self-importance ever. He's never shown as capable or deserving of attention or respect long enough to feel worthy of the scene they thrust upon him here. Neither his intent to murder our story's Gandalf nor his pussing out about doing so are meaningful scenes because this is never a character we took any interest in, seriously, as either protagonist or antagonist. At best he's a comical thorn in Harry's side, at worst he's a heckler from the sidelines. He's always been too small in scale for the kinds of trouble that Harry has per story for him to even register as a villain, and suddenly now Voldemort has picked him? I'm assuming Voldy's recruiting pool is pretty small here, if he thought Draco Malfoy was the man for any job. Then again, maybe the plan all along was to find someone pathetic enough that Snape (of all people! or something) would pity him and get pressured into a binding magical promise to do the job for him. Actually, all kidding aside, maybe that really was the plan all along. Anyway, you can't argue with results.

On a side note, I wonder if I'd have found Dumbledore's death more moving if it hadn't been famously spoiled for me. The truth is, I suspect not, because at least in the movie, it felt telegraphed for the majority of the story. It felt more like a game of when and how than if. But I think I can see how this would be a good hard shock in the books.

So things end here appropriately darkly, that Empire Strikes Back ending. It's more of a cliffhanger than an ending of its own, and since this is an ongoing series after all, I try not to fault it for that. We're six films and something like fifteen hours into the epic story here, so you'll get no complaints from me if you bypass the reset-button at the end of every movie and the start of each next. A lot of stuff happened, which is all fine and good. (I managed to rant about so many things I didn't even talk about how odd it was that Harry's preferred choice of action throughout the story is to lurk... that in fact eight or nine different times he is a peeping tom, an eavesdropper, or an out-and-out spy on a situation he's not supposed to see. It seemed like all he knew how to do was hide and watch people, and that was weird.) But there didn't seem to be a lot of strong themes tying together everything we saw, perhaps because the storytellers were much more excited by what was actually happening. Without unifying themes it's sometimes hard to pull together a single story out of disparate elements, or to compare scenes or relationships to each other and see any bigger picture here.

Instead, this is like the second-to-last episode in a serial television show (and I realize how apt that analogy is), where all the pieces are moved around the board to where they need to be for the climax. Dumbledore is dead; Snape is with the baddies; someone named RAB has a horcrux (I'm unclear if this is the last piece of Voldemort's soul or just one they know is out of their reach); Hermione and Ron have pledged their loyalty to Harry as he plans to forsake the school to continue Dumbledore's quest, and they've also pledged themselves to each other (more or less); and somewhere out there is Voldemort, though I'm not sure exactly what he is up to while Bellatrix runs around doing his dirty work. All these things happened to put people where they need to be to begin The Final Race To The Showdown. Unfortunately, because they were all just a bunch of events, it's hard to say if any of them meant anything or not outside the logistical confines of the story.

People are always reminding me: lighten up, Travis, this is just a story. I don't know how to respond to that because nothing is ever "just" a story, and something this many people feel this strongly about is clearly, clearly more than a mere story. I don't feel the slightest bit out of line hoping it means something. And since this episode was all mechanics, that puts a lot of pressure on the two-part finale.

And for the record, I'm not sure it'll all add up to deserving of the passion it's received, but I remain cautiously optimistic that despite its terribly rocky start, the Harry Potter series just might go out on a good note. Here's hoping!

The Social Network

2011-01-11T02:31:00.000-08:00

In my complaints about films not being ambitious enough this year, I kept mentally leaving The Social Network on the fence. It had been three months since I'd last seen it and I couldn't decide from memory how to categorize it. There was no question that Fincher and Sorkin and everyone involved had delivered a pretty amazingly solid film, but would it qualify as "ambitious"? Does it stand out in a year of low-aiming solid work, or is it another of the same?

I don't know. I'm still on the fence. But I'm leaning toward this being more ambitious than average. The problem, I suppose, is the ways in which it's ambitious: it tells a story that didn't need, really, to be told, and a story that should, in theory, be pretty low-key and boring, and it makes it feel like a story that simply must be told and is never for a single frame boring. In fact it's easily one of the most cerebrally engaging films of the year, if not the most. But if there are various ways to pierce your audience -- emotional, cerebral, visceral, spiritual (short-hand for poetic and abstract, speaking to the "soul"), among possibly others -- The Social Network never gets much legwork out of anything but cerebral. I mean, I sympathize to a surprising degree with an unambiguously unsympathetic lead character, but I can't call this an emotional story. A couple of scenes (Eduardo's ousting and Mark realizing Sean is the fuck-up he'd been warned about come to mind) strike an emotional chord, but this isn't a movie about feelings. It's a movie about the pregnancy of ideas so powerful that some of that energy spills over momentarily into emotional or visceral places -- it's still about ideas. But I seem to have wandered off course here.

The point is, it's ambitious in its hard-hitting low-key approach to something we realize not only impacts us all, everywhere, but that sums up the zeitgeist of the times with acidic poignancy. We have always been, all of us, a little bit Mark Zuckerberg, and after the proliferation of Facebook and other sites and interfaces like it, we are a lot Mark Zuckerberg. Detachment of that sort, somewhere between Asperger's syndrome and sociopathic behavior, has become par for the course. We are all either laser-beam focused or completely ADHD, and often, simultaneously, both. So the film is ambitious in that through simple drama and clever energetic exposition, it shows us something in us we don't normally acknowledge. And damn if it's not beautiful, well acted, delicately and sharply written, with almost no missteps at all (Rashida Jones's character's line at the end that Mark "isn't really an asshole, but he tries so hard to be" rings even more untrue to the character and the themes of the story on second viewing, and it rubs me wrong for being an attempt at trite summation; so it's not completely without misstep). So okay, call it subtly ambitious. It's still neck-and-neck for what I consider the best American film of the year.

I don't have a lot more to say, actually. It deserves more viewings, but it's so good at making its own cases I almost feel like I don't need to add anything to it. Or maybe it's just got so many layers to digest that I've got to spend more time working through those layers before I discover anything that feels new or novel and worth discussing. It's such a clockwork masterpiece, and I still think it makes a perfect double-feature with Zodiac as the 21st century example of the intellectual procedural film. It never insults you, but it keeps pushing you forward relentlessly, with what happens next.

And on a side note that has nothing to do with anything, it's also got the classiest physical packaging and menu screens of any Blu-Ray I own, so that's something. Really beautiful and understated.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

2011-01-10T03:44:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm going to be straight with you here. This is hardly a flawless film, but this was the first Harry Potter film that elicited more enjoyment than disdain from me. It's got character development, a single crisis that (convoluted though it may be) ties all of the many threads of action together, and it's even got themes throughout.

In fact, we moved through the Goddamn Dursleys so quickly they didn't even really annoy me very much, and even though the evolution of the Dudley character (into "Big D") was a little embarrassing, they managed to work it into a scene with actual ramifications with the story -- and keep his parents to such a minimum that it felt like a bitter-but-swallowable pill. As to the ramifications, I actually enjoyed how insanely quickly things went from the face-off with Dementors in the tunnel into Brazil into Kafka's The Trial and for about twenty minutes or so I was kind of hoping the entire story would just continue spiraling downward into surreal bureaucratic madness. I didn't quite get my wish, but The Trial did give way to 1984 for a while there, as Umbridge eventually took over the school and began to scrub it clean in a very peculiar and pointed attack on the contemporary education system and its emphasis on impractical rote memorization versus practical applied knowledge or creative thought. And while the whole thing with the Minister's increasing paranoia while Umbridge guts the wizard-education program from the inside-out makes pretty much no sense when you look too closely, it's all in aid of something here -- in fact, it's in aid of both character conflict/obstacles and exploration of the roles and purpose of education and government in our lives -- and in the end, being true to the drama is much more satisfying than being true to logic. (Best to be both, no question, but I prefer to err on the side of emotional truth over logical fact.) And damned if this isn't the first time in about ten hours of story that I've been able to say that.

And although Voldemort plays a pretty crucial role here, obviously, this one works like Prisoner of Azkaban, in that we have concrete antagonists for our heroes as well as abstract ideologies they are pitted against; Voldy seems almost like an additional bonus round when all the rest is said and done. Order of the Phoenix also feels like the first time the storytellers have willingly turned their world on its head and challenged the basic tenets of their society: What is Hogwarts if we remove Dumbledore? What is Hogwarts if we remove magic? What do Harry and the Scooby Gang do if we take away their freedom to cast spells and so on? The answer here is extremely satisfying: they take matters into their own hands, they fight for their own forms of education and applied knowledge, and they form an underground -- a parallel to the Order of the Phoenix itself -- to stand in resistance to the forces of tyranny. All without betraying their characters and, much more excitingly, in ways which greatly develop them as people. Harry becomes a teacher. Hermione learns to paint outside the lines. Ron gains some self-confidence. Even lesser characters grow, as Longbottom learns some spells and Cho deals with the conflicted emotions of liking Harry and mourning Cedric (this last mostly through Hermione's exposition, and it remained unresolved, but it was gratifying to have them address the point, not breeze over it). Harry himself, especially, has clearly grown as a character in a number of ways from beginning to end of this one installment. In the past, most of his development would either come in a miraculous last-minute bout of bravery or off-camera, between years as it were, such that like Luke Skywalker in the original series, he'd simply show up in the next movie a better man. Here, we see Harry grow. I've got to admit, that's nice. Hell, we even get an unusual flashback that shows us how Snape got to be such a dickwad and sheds some less flattering, ambiguous light on the youthful hijinks of James Potter, knocking him down a notch toward mere humanity.

The story is far from without holes or confusing bits. The centaurs, the (ass-lousy CG) giant, Hagrid's role in general, the same stock scenes with Draco Malfoy for the fifth year in a row, and the oversimplistic motivation I touched on above for Minister Fudge and Miss Umbridge, among other things. I could probably go on about those things in as much detail here as I had in previous posts, but it was nice to switch it up, spend a little time talking about something I liked for a change. Lest everybody think my heart is made of coal.

One thing I meant to mention that came up while watching The Goblet of Fire and comes up again here is, all this talk about what kind of an education is needed by these proto-wizards really begs the question, what exactly is the end goal of teaching wizardry? We've seen what the academic life of an adult wizard is like, and some service industry jobs like shopkeeps and busdrivers of course, but this I think was our first actual hint at the world of wizards in a more metropolitan setting (albeit within the various Ministries of Magic). You get your first feel that their world may be just as insular and rat-racey as our own, and so it makes a little more sense -- all things being equal -- to question the nature and necessity of so much emphasis on the Defense Against The Dark Arts. Of course, we've got the return of The Dark Lord and all that, so, you know, all things are hardly equal. Still, all this attack- and defense-related magic... makes you wonder. (On that note: we got to see our first full-on magic combat in Order of the Phoenix, and while it was pretty chaotic and generic, it had the feel of using magic and using it so fast we didn't have time to question which spell was used how... it didn't blow me away but it didn't give me much specific to complain about, either. Nice work, guys.)

Yeah, so anyway, I'm pleased and a little surprised to report that here we have a Harry Potter movie that gives credit to its characters, explores and creatively undermines its world to good effect, and advances the overarching narrative without sacrificing the single story contained herein. Curious what the sixth installment holds for me, but it'll have to wait of course. I ought to get at least a little sleep.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

2011-01-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

Well, I have to say, you have no idea how nice it is to skip the whole muggle/Dursley thing and just get into the story. If for nothing else than that this one felt a little more palatable. Actually, this one almost seemed to launch too quickly into the action and exposition, but considering we've got over two hours of wizarding teenagers to sit through, it's hard to complain too much about that.

A lot of heated debate has cropped up in the wake of me watching these films so critically, which is maybe not so surprising. A lot of this tends to just be about telling me to lighten up and enjoy a simple kid's story without tearing everything apart and raining on the fun -- which, to put it bluntly, I respectfully reject, because you can learn a lot by applying criticism to pieces that don't immediately demand or warrant it, and frankly if it can't hold up to a little scrutiny then it's not for me anyway. Scrutiny and looking into the layers of a thing is how I enjoy a work. It's not like I'm complaining that the world of Harry Potter isn't believable or is too childish; I believe I've done my best to take the work as it stands and look at what it aims to be versus what it is, and I've tried only to judge it accordingly -- or at least I try to own up to moments of personal taste.

Anyway, the specific thing that keeps sparking debate is my claim that Rowling wasn't overly imaginative when constructing the architecture and rules of her world. Magic here is too literal, too direct and plain, too banal. I have quipped that Quidditch could only have been invented by a muggle. I have also quipped that the lady who wrote these stories about wizards has never even seen the inside of a Player's Handbook, let alone partook in a little role-playing in her day (or any other pastime that might give her insight into what being a spellcaster in a historied world of spellcasters might be like). Glib as they may be, I stand by these claims. In fact, especially considering how very Anglocentric the whole Harry Potter universe is, and how much magic and magick exists in the vast pagan-filled history of England, and considering works of fantasy by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Chia Miéville, it becomes all the more egregious how much wasted potential there is here. Imagine for a moment the Harry Potter series as written by Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore and maybe you'll see what I'm saying here. The same basic, simple hero's-quest storytelling but with a stronger sense of history, a more applied and inventive use of magic, and a more consistent use of character and archetype. It's not that Rowling and the filmmakers owe us this, exactly, but to not try for these things shows a lack of ambition, imagination, and initiative, and does not speak of a "great writer." But I'm beating a dead horse here, and so let's move on.

This comes up tonight because my one off-the-cuff idea from the last writeup about magically compressing large structures into smaller ones actually comes up here -- for all of a single shot, in the first ten minutes, showing the inside of a tent as something like a massive and comfortable blanket-strewn Turkish palace. Only here, instead of applying this concept to any storytelling, it appears as a sight-gag, there long enough for (a now awkwardly teenage-looking) Harry to remark, "I love magic!" before we move on with a story that looks like it has more to do with the world's various passions for football (combining the American pigskin-football arenas and budgets with the world's round-ball "soccer" passion and fandom) than it has to do with the concept of wizards or school or character growth. Okay, okay, I digress a second time... yeah, I hate Quidditch, but I'm talking about magic and its application: and here, with this Tardis-like tent, we see another overly literal, unapplied usage of magic.

As to the story itself: well, it's a bit frustrating, since most of the story is about something called the Triwizard Tournament. I have no idea how often it runs, but every once in a while three and only three (or four if your name rhymes with Barry Botter) kids get to compete in what we are told is a brutally dangerous literally life-or-death triathlon of dragon besting, merfolk wrestling, and hedge-maze completing. We are assured that people die doing this, though nobody does (the one casualty is unrelated). We are told it's highly competitive, though in two out of three competitions Harry ignores these rules and plays cooperatively -- and is mysteriously rewarded for such behavior. (But okay, so sports in the wizard realms are far more utopian than in the muggle world; can't fault them for that.) We are told the only prize is "eternal glory," which everyone seems to be taking literally without expecting it to mean literally anything. And we are told that the "contract is magically binding," so there is nothing to be done when Harry's name is slipped in despite it breaking very nearly every rule of the contest (there's an age limit, for one, and it's called the TRIwizard Tournament, for another). Anyway, almost no time is spent at the school learning spells and potions and such, unlike in previous installments (though there is time to introduce a new DOTDA prof, make him incalculably crucial to the plot, tie him into the overarching Voldemort narrative, and then eliminate him from the position by the end, so the apple hasn't fallen too far here). Instead 90% of the story is devoted to the Tournament, and to Harry falling out with Ron (over what it's never clear, but considering they're now 14 year old boys I wasn't too concerned), and to Ron and Hermione wanting each other in what must be the least-demanded most-squick-inducing case of ongoing series shipping since Jabba licked Leia. Oh, and to wizard prom.

One complaint I have that isn't limited to Rowling's world or teen wizards or anything of the sort is, I have a really hard time watching the cheap and artificial attempts of film and TV to depict the hormone-infused chaos and confusion of being a teenager without getting their hands messy. The self-doubt and relationship changes that occur in movies and TV are embarrassingly easy to cope with and clean up after, there's very little anger that can't be soothed out with a couple of words and a hug or two, and sex never even enters into it. It's ghastly the way they depict by-rote scenes of what they call "teens being teens," and -- well, I hate to harp on it, and I know I just said this isn't limited to Harry Potter, and it isn't, but -- the truth is, this looks to me like one more case of the artists being lazy with their material. They have to show "teens being teens," and here they did the bare minimum. Harry and Ron fight, but the reasons are too light (Harry's name being picked by the Goblet) and the solution far too simple (Ron decides Harry didn't put his own name in the Goblet, apparently?). Harry is a little more prickish, but only a little, and it only comes out when he's not busy being pawn or hero. Hermione and Ron have a falling out, but everybody (especially Hermione) is suspiciously honest and expository with their deepest, most vulnerable inner feelings, and so by the end of the movie that's taken care of, too. The one thing being a puberty-stricken teenager isn't is clean and tidy, but here just like all lazily crafted stories about cardboard teenagers, everything wraps up with a neat bow.

And then there's that other 10%, which is Harry's dreams and Harry being lured (suffice it to say through a scheme so convoluted as to make a Bond villain blanche) into a magical cemetery for a ritual to bring Voldemort back and finally give us a chance to cast Ralph Fiennes as the grand villain. (A side note: Goblet of Fire stars Fiennes, Brendan Gleeson, and Clémence Poésy, which makes three of the four main actors from a favorite recent film of mine, In Bruges, which was surprising and kind of cool.) Fiennes here is good and creepy, but it's basically just a teaser "first battle" with an appropriately video gamey "miracle" escape, setting us up for future terrors. That's okay, it's a decent introduction of the archvillain, though I'm a bit confused about how Peter Pettigrew went from supplicant captive at the end of Prisoner to the sycophantic Igor with the suspiciously familiar sounding name of Wormtail, but it doesn't seem worth splitting hairs over. In retrospect, I assume he was just lying to Black and Lupine, and he really was the eager betrayer all along, not just a victim of persuasion. Anyway, it all happens very fast, which is probably good, and plays out as creepy, but since you're never worried if something is going to happen to Harry it's not too scary. Plus, the other kid present, Cedric, dies so quickly there's nothing left to do but deliver the information packets (Voldemort returns, noseless and bald; Wormtail steals Harry's blood; Lucius Malfoy and the seniors Crabbe and Goyle are all "Death Eaters"), put up a bit of a fight, drop some ghostiness on us, and get Harry back in time to deliver the bad news to the guys who, really, should have known all along.

Oh, right, and "Mad Eye" Moody wasn't really himself at all, but was in fact Dr. Who (I'm kidding, but it was David Tennant, playing a villain with a name embarrassing even by Harry Potter standards: Barty Crouch, Jr.). There were plenty of clues throughout about the polyjuice potion (which, if you paid attention to Chamber of Secrets, or you have a girlfriend willing to drop hints for you, you'll remember is the shapeshifting serum), but there was never any call to suspect Moody was anything other than who he said to be because we've never met him before, and that struck me as a little weak. It makes the reveal of him a touch more non sequitur than it should be, which as I've said before is the difference between a really good late-game twist and plain old deus ex machina. You don't want it telegraphed, but if there's no reason to suspect (other than the story's unending pattern of using DOTDA professors as plot devices) then it's a suckerpunch, and unsatisfying. Or maybe I missed clues. Always possible.

Anyway, I suppose I'd rank this one about equal to Prisoner of Azkaban, in that it had less misery than Prisoner (almost no Quidditch, zero Dursleys) but also less interesting characters or advances in plot than Prisoner. Nice dark stormclouds brewing, though.

Ready for number five, about which I know pleasantly nothing.

Casablanca

2011-01-09T18:45:00.000-08:00

There's not a lot to say about one of the most written-about movies in film history, is there? Jen had to watch this for class, and when you watch a classic film with someone who hasn't seen it before, you get something like fresh eyes again, which is always a joy. So here, already familiar with the politics and the double- and triple-crosses, and the thematic and symbolic gestures throughout, I found myself focusing so much more on the straightforward emotional core of these characters. Bogart's performance is a lot more raw and emotional, dark and brooding, than I'm used to seeing from actors from that era or from an actor like Bogart. It's still a little affected, still very much Bogart playing Bogart, but scenes of him as a broken, bitter drunk facing the darkest place in his own heart really resound, and I couldn't help but be moved by his presence and energy. (And as I write this, Jen is listening to Ebert's commentary track to pass time, and I overhear talk of how this was Bogey's first step up from back-up gangster characters and into an A-list role that would make him one of the most identifiable movie stars of his or any time. So, that's cool. Well earned.)

While on the subject: I love Humphrey Bogart, I just love him, and I consider the best romantic co-star to pit against him Lauren Bacall, because she's got a kind of ball-buster fearlessness that bounces against Bogart's sensitive tough-guy behavior perfectly -- but here, against Ingrid Bergman, so much classier, so much more delicate and ladylike, and that her Ilsa can wreck Rick the way she does says more about who Rick was and how he became who he is than if he'd simply met a woman as jaded and cynical as he is, like Bacall.

My favorite thing about this film is the same as most people: the relationship between Renault and Rick, the back-and-forth of the sleazy corrupt official and the noir anti-hero club owner, each of whom hide their own self-confessed "sentimentalism" underneath cynicism and opportunism. They are such different characters, and yet so the same, and in the end Renault is clearly not meant to be merely the "consolation prize" for Rick, who lets Ilsa go. If we accept that Rick is the man "Richard" was changed into by heartbreak, then Renault and Rick are soulmates in just the way Ilsa and "Richard" once were. If the film allowed Rick and Ilsa to escape together, it would do a disservice to the progression of change Rick has undergone between the flashback and the start of the story, and would cheapen the nature of his character into some bland rose-colored tripe. But no, here love can break your heart, and your heart can't always be unbroken -- and this story is Rick's, not Richard's, and such a huge part of it is accepting that who he is now is more than just the shell of a man once named Richard. Accepting himself as Rick and accepting his new soulmate, Captain Renault, is a beautiful and crucial turn for the character: a step forward, not a step backward. Plus, it's the American bucking up and saying, I can't stay neutral forever; time to fight. Considering the exact timing of the film, it's hard not to take that into account. But watched now, almost seventy years later, it's the drama and character that resonate today more than the political activism.

I don't know what else to say. I mean, this is a great movie, just a nice beautiful film that does everything right. Maybe watching this -- one of the most respected pieces of populist art ever, a film that didn't aim to redefine cinema or push any boundaries but just managed to have a near perfect storm of talent, skill, and drama -- should put a slightly different spin on my recent rant about 2010's film output being unambitious. I'm not sure it entirely does (after all, I never claimed that unambitious was bad; I just missed the joy of films ambitious enough to aim for greatness), but it definitely reminds me that you don't have to transcend form in order to be transcendently good.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

2011-01-08T01:44:00.000-08:00

This is my second time seeing this. I really liked it the first time I saw it. Even though it seems a little poppy or silly, it was loosely around the mid-point of a roughly imagined unwritten "Top 10 of 2010" list already. I loved it on second viewing. It's just fantastic. And I like the end a lot more now, too; now that I wasn't hoping for the comic book end to show up I don't feel disappointed really at all. (Still, all that stuff in the books about going inside Ramona and the many different sides of her all fighting the one side of her that still loved Gideon, and Scott actually having to come to terms with his black-outs and constant prickish behavior toward women... that stuff was still the most powerful part of the whole series.)

It's so goddamn ADHD, video-game/music-video hyper, but it doesn't feel like it panders to the short-attention span so much as embraces and celebrates it. In fact so much happens with so much deliberation and forethought -- the effects alone are so smooth and complicated despite the rapid-fire delivery of them -- that it is clearly not a work by or even for those who don't want to pay attention. It's a labor of love that took a lot of concentration and patience to put together. I don't know for sure, but maybe it's all that loving detail that keeps the movie from feeling like a seizure-inducing headache. Or maybe it's just that it's a very simple, very good story. And the endlessly entertaining, understated stunt-casting doesn't hurt. Honestly, so many great roles for so many great young actors, really nailing the tongue-in-cheek, deliberately one-note characters from the book. Almost every character, I wish I could spend more time with. That's rare. And considering how shallow and poorly-developed many of them are, that's crazy.

My friend Chris and I got into a conversation where he said he couldn't believe Scott would fall head over heels for Ramona. I have to confess, I found that kind of surprising. Because honestly, 22-year-old me would have gone apeshit for a girl like Ramona Flowers. 32-year-old me, well, I still think she's pretty cute but she's awfully shallow, full of herself, and doing that unforgivable young-girl thing where instead of dealing with her problems she's just telling you they're there so you'd better deal with them for her... but when I was Scott's age, I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't fight seven deadly exes for a chance to rub up against those damaged goods. That's part of the appeal of the film, I think, is how right it gets the way guys can just go stupid for a girl who is just the right kind of trouble. It's almost like the answer to the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl phenomenon, because rather than having our mopey sadsack hero find a muse who's just a little too perfect and a little too charming, here our pixie dream girl is aloof, difficult, and she comes with baggage. Here we not only acknowledge that Ramona's a mess, but we admit that there it wouldn't be any fun if she weren't a mess -- and Scott is exactly in that place where you see it, but you don't really see it. This film captures that in a way that really hits a secret inner me, a leftover me from a long time ago, and for that I find it actually a kind of emotional experience. For that it deserves to be somewhere in the same orbit as films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Punch-Drunk Love, films that really capture how it can feel to be in love. At least, how it feels when I'm in love.

Plus, on top of all of that, the action sequences really work, and there is something infectiously awesome about watching Michael Cera in convincing, surreally exaggerated fight scenes. He's an actor I've always found charming -- but, alas, just charming, and frankly one-note: one of those actors who plays himself over and over and you can only take so much of that in a lead role. But here the Michael Cera persona is a strength. Some people don't see him as the Scott Pilgrim of the books, but I really do. His mumbling, introspective delivery and exaggerated facial expressions keep the character appealing but cartoony, but those same mannerisms also help him seem like an un-self-aware asshole, which the character needs. I really like him in this role. The fact that he's so preposterously miscast as a fighter and an ass-kicking bass player really work in the favor of the role. For the world of Scott Pilgrim, I wouldn't believe it if Scott Pilgrim were believable in those fights. It would feel less video-gamey, and less fun.

Anyway, I'm gushing. But I just watched it straight through with no complaints or criticisms. I want to spend more time in that crazy silly world, and I was moved by the plight of the main character in ways I felt were both genuine and ironic (the Venn diagram of those two seemingly incompatible terms is most definitely the Edgar Wright model). What more could I ask for?

Naked Lunch

2011-01-06T21:41:00.000-08:00

For about eight or nine years I've had an idea for a story that begins with a man picking up someone else's lost keychain in a convenience store. The basic plot involved him becoming convinced the owner of the keys had been kidnapped, and he spends the story uncovering "clues" and building a complicated, paranoid narrative -- but the trick is, he's imagining all of it; nothing is actually wrong and it's all in his mind. The further he would go the deeper and crazier the conspiracy would seem. The idea started as a novel and never got much farther than fifty or sixty pages of escalating madness, but I always held fondly onto the idea of it. I always considered it my modern-day Don Quixote by way of David Lynch and Dostoevsky, about a man who reads too much Raymond Chandler and, I don't know, John Le Carré maybe. The paranoia and subjective reality always appealed to me, but I never knew how to convey the world as the hero saw it with enough realism that the audience would know what's going on. Well I hit some classics in my mind-webbing of this story, but I forgot an obvious choice for a story of this type: Kafka (which seems weird now, but you know how it is). When Cronenberg put together this script, he definitely didn't forget about Kafka. I wonder if a better, more Kafkaesque film has ever been made.

Rewatching Naked Lunch makes me realize two things. First, I was overthinking the "how" of my character's subjective reality and second, I was underthinking the "what" of that reality. Naked Lunch is such a seductively unpleasant trip, a world where the ground is never really stable to begin with and a hero -- Peter Weller is amazingly nuanced as the keeping-it-together-while-falling-apart Bill Lee -- who sinks deeper each minute. There seems to be no end to the depths of madness and paranoia, assisted here by impossible fictitious drugs that, too, are part of the possibly-hallucinatory whirlwind, and here the boundless sinking becomes its strength. It's perfect to populate this world with Cronenberg's creepy organic models and sexualized, oozing mutants; you can't bear to look at the fascinating grotesqueries but you can't bear to turn away, either, and the deeper Bill spirals into paranoid philosophies of espionage, addiction and homosexuality the more engaging it is to see.

I've never been formally educated on topics like schizophrenia or delusion but I've been around those who've had it, and it feels to me like this is a story that does it right. Each new twist of the crazy screw in Bill's world could be the ravings of a hurt, confused subconscious or the truths of a universe out of control. And I haven't even mentioned the metatextuality of the story, combining elements of the life of William S. Burroughs (who used the pen-name William Lee) and the accidental homicide of his wife into some of the more lucid portions of a stream-of-consciousness novel with no real center. If any of the universe of Naked Lunch exists outside the character's (Bill's) head, then it still only exists, presumably, in the novelist's (William's) head -- or else it is a strange creation plucked right out of the director's (Cronenberg's) head. So when opinions and philosophical musings about the nature of art, editing, addiction, sexuality, gender politics, or anything else come up -- well, it's a mess. To top it off, the character Bill inside the story is, apparently, without his full understanding or cognizance, sending his "reports" to his two best friends (a Kerouac analog named Hank and a Ginsberg analog named Martin). Only this report is a novel, a novel Bill is writing, called of course Naked Lunch.

But none of this ever feels confusing, within the confines of the story. Much of that is due to the careful timing and pacing of the new twists in the conspiracy, the transmutation of each character from ally to enemy, the evolution of drug from bug powder to black meat to Mugwump jism. Each of the increasingly weird typewriter-bugs feeding him stranger and stranger information about the people and world around him but it always feels like an impulsive thought Bill might be having already, a crazy notion of who is his friend and who is his enemy that a sane person would disregard easily. And they come at opportune times, corresponding to moments of solitude, often when he has just or could have just taken drugs, or has a moment to pause and think. Call it insanity, call it drug-induced hallucination, or call it unpeeling layers of the world, but they come in precisely placed points to keep the ground constantly moving without feeling disorienting and confusing. Believe it or not. But most of what I think grounds the story is Peter Weller's performance, and the shifting-but-nuanced performances of those around him, especially of course Judy Davis. It's hard to imagine how you'd go about directing these actors in these roles, even for a man who by this point in his career had been directing people covered in prosthetics and goop for decades. That everything feels pitch-perfect right when you don't even know what key the song is in speaks volumes to Cronenberg's mastery and sure-footedness. Easy decisions aren't made; interesting ones are. The story is fearless, and rushes headlong into new territory with a kind of mad-bastard confidence that I frankly envy.

Inspirational and insane. This has always been one of my favorite films by one of my favorite directors.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

2011-01-06T00:08:00.000-08:00

The Harry Potter movies seem hellbent on punishing you for the first half-hour of each sitting, don't they? My fuck, each movie in the series gets some momentum once it gets into act two and the mystery is moving but it has the hardest time depicting what is ostensibly the real world. Every second -- every frame of film -- I have to spend in the company of Harry's hate circus of a family is like torture, and it's such a strange decision to make the opening act of your film so gleefully sadistic. It smacks of poor judgment but more than that, it smacks of lazy writing. There is a story here, and again it's an improvement on the previous one -- in style and tone, in pacing and performance, in aesthetics and plot -- but like every Harry Potter movie, it takes almost an hour to get there, almost an hour before I care in the slightest. For that first hour, I am so close to turning it off that the truth is, my dedication to finish the series and blog about them as I go is the only reason I didn't switch it off and find something less punishing to watch, like maybe Irreversible or Martyrs.

I have to admit it's pretty frustrating that each film follows such a predictable model -- muggle foster family, misery, hijinks, unauthorized magic, escape, diversion, train (or car) ride, up the stairs into school, a couple of pointless classes whose lessons will be shoehorned in later but feel far more interested in showing off pointless new teachers and pointless new magic spells that are all variations on the same idea (wave wand, incant some really ridiculous sounding faux-latin crap, and pow! magic), and during all this every single person seems to be talking like a 1980s video game NPC, doling out morsels of exposition that add up very quickly to whatever this year's big mystery is that Harry's not supposed to know anything about even though it directly involves him and he'll inevitably step in and save the day, and in the end Dumbledore will wander through with his benevolent smile and say that was very good Harry, like that's how he'd had it planned all along. Along the way we'll meet the new Defense of the Dark Arts instructor who will be incontrovertibly linked to the primary mystery of the story in one way or another, and Snape will show up and act sinister (but if you wait long enough, it will turn out he's acting as the good guy, so don't worry about mean old Snape), and by the end the DOTDA teacher will leave. Harry will clash with Draco in some of the most time-wasting, exhaustingly overwrought scenes that don't involve the Dursleys, presumably because the author assumes audiences wouldn't enjoy a story about high school without some half-assed obligatory bullying scenes, and then -- sigh -- there will be a Quidditch match, and eventually Harry'll start acting out, he (or he and his buddies) will sneak out or do something they're not supposed to, get caught, get away with it, talk with Hagrid, uncover some piece of the big mystery, and away they go on their adventures. Ron and Hermione will each have their chances to save Harry's neck before Harry steps up to the plate and hits the grand slam to win the -- oh wait, wrong lame sports metaphor, let's try that again -- before Harry catches the Golden Snitch and invalidates the score to that point. (Honestly, though, the puzzle of "It would take a great wizard to do what we saw happen, Harry" was solved by "I realized I'd already done it, so I just did it again, it was that easy." That's precisely resolution by grandfather-paradox, and that's precisely a crap end to what should have been a tense and moving scene.)

Don't get me wrong. I actually liked Prisoner of Azkaban pretty well -- a lot compared to the low bar set by Sorcerer's Stone and the slightly-less low bar set by Chamber of Secrets. But that enjoyment comes at a price, which is a heftier dose of suspended disbelief than I'm usually comfortable giving. The world is just so illogical, poorly thought out, and weakly motivated, with so many winking nods to the audience and so many moments of shoehorned exposition and rushed growth, it's a task to let go and say, okay, all right, show me what you've got, I'll overlook what I can. For instance, the characters of Lupin and Black are interesting, and Pettigrew too for that matter, but we went from "Sirius Black is the scariest murderer in the history of scary murderers, and he wants to kill Harry Potter" to "Sirius Black is my father's best friend and a wrongfully imprisoned man who's very gentle and kind and not the worse for wear or bitter at all despite twelve years in a scary prison" all in the space of a single David Thewlis-shaped hug, and I couldn't keep up. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the truth behind this second, all-too-easy lie to be revealed, but nope. The all-too-easy was the end of the matter. Likewise, the mystery of Lupin was telegraphed so much -- I mean, assuming the name alone wasn't a giveaway -- that I was sure there was more to it than that, that another layer was going to be revealed to the mystery of the Teacher Who Disappears Every Full Moon And Makes Other Teachers Paranoid About Werewolves, but nope -- thats it. He's just a werewolf. And he's "used to" the shitty treatment he receives, end of story, so even if it's a tiny bit sad we shouldn't dwell on it -- that's the way the world works.

Part of the thing with the story here is it's rather guileless, and I think this plays into my previous comments that the world is surprisingly unimaginative and blandly conceived. Quidditch isn't the only example of a system that could only be conceived by a muggle. A good writer comes up with a neat idea and writes it out completely and is pleased with that; a great writer comes up with a neat idea and then finds a way outside that idea, looks at it from every angle, and has neat ideas about that neat idea. Think of The Minority Report or Asimov's Laws of Robotics (examples that came up earlier today in a conversation with my friend Rex) -- both show us concrete systems, rules of governing the fictional world (precog crime units; laws of robotics) built on conceits of the story (precognitive mutants; sentient robots), but neither story just shows you this world and calls it done. Both then challenge their own systems from a variety of angles and come up with pleasing stories that show imagination and cunning. In the world of Harry Potter, it is sufficient that magic wands and funny words make things happen; the author felt no need to explore these concepts any deeper than that. When Harry goes to a boarding house -- or whatever the hell he goes to, after running away from home and before getting on the train -- it occured to me that, following the triple-decker bus doing it's "squeeze" routine, it would have been really cool to see the hostel/hotel as a series of essentially plywood walls with doors, almost like a maze and less like a corridor, but every door opened into a large, comfortable room -- compression of space within each wall, via magic. That would have been cool. What they had instead were kids pouring tea from a floating teapot (yawn) or waving their hand to make the spoon twirl in their cups on their own (double yawn). There's no imagination applied to the potential of the world Rowling has created, and the world she's created has pretty boundless potential. In a world so amazing, why are things so literal at all? If you can manipulate reality and defy physics, why are you content to show us the "wonder" of a floating teapot?

But I am caught in a critical digression it's hard to escape. Despite everything, this movie worked a good deal better than the others. It's just a kid's movie after all, and if the motivations are more obvious or the twists more predictable, well, remember that no matter how many adults love it it was written for thirteen-year-olds. The guilelessness is appropriate, the directness of the characters, even to an extent the moral black-and-whiteness of it, it does all work for the demographic age we're writing for here. In fact, by that standard, the unorthodox storytelling and grandfather-paradoxic overlap (though done too bluntly and too blasé for my tastes, not to mention just rewarming stale Back to the Future II plot devices) could be considered kind of bold and daring. That the monstrous villain is so readily a friend and that the rat (which, by the way: the rat? okay, whatever... I'll admit: that twist wasn't predictable, but this time I don't mean that as a good thing -- non sequitur storytelling is just another form of deus ex machina, after all) was the real villain in disguise, and that even he was "kind of" innocent because Voldemort is a hard guy to say no to, and the truth is this movie actually has no villain -- all that's different from your average adventure tale for tweens. The villain is of course the looming shadow of the omnipresent never-there Voldemort, but the only real antagonist in Azkaban is rumor, hearsay, and committee. The Hippogriff and Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew/Scabbers and Professor Lupin are all under fire from the same nameless, faceless foe -- the rules or laws that do not always have the facts right but force men to come to a judgment anyway. (Hey, an actual theme that ties together all the action throughout and actually affects the primary and secondary storylines impactfully? My, we have come a long way!)

In a way I wish the Harry Potter movies hadn't been made when and how they were. If the first one was being made today, with the same cast and art design and all that, it might have been made into an HBO or AMC style television series, one where separate episodes could explore the worlds and rules and systems, and characters could be given their proper due, and the overarching mysteries could be given enough time and attention to really have impact. The plotholes or inconsistencies could be ironed out, much like when we adapt Lord of the Rings or Narnia, or Philip K. Dick, or Roald Dahl, or anything ever from one format to another. As is, though, it feels weirdly disjointed, its episodic structure feels more stilted and unsatisfying. In each film we meet a couple of new teachers -- usually exactly one ringer (always obvious; also maybe always a woman? in 2 and 3 it was) and exactly one who ties into the main story. Our "regulars" like McGonnagal and Snape sometimes feel like walk-ons. (I've been watching a lot of 90s Star Trek lately, and occasionally Geordi La Forge will be in a scene for no reason, and he'll have one line that could have been said by anybody, and you realize that this is probably a contractual thing, to make sure everybody has at least one line and picks up a paycheck that week, even if the story doesn't need them; anyway, McGonnagal here and Snape in the last one kind of felt like that to me.) It'd be nice to give the world some breathing space, but it would require someone with stronger skills than Rowling, if I may dare say, to whip the world into a better kind of shape.

Anyway I daydream because I think it'd be a worthwhile endeavor. I see what people like about these, and each one is a significant step up from the last (though I'm warned not to get my hopes up for the 4th? seems like every film in the series needs the apologies and caveats of someone or other -- not a great sign), but I just can't as easily overlook a lot of the silliness and laziness of both plotting and world-building as my friends can, it seems.