A.I. Artificial Intelligence

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.

The Angry Red Planet

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.

旺角卡門 (As Tears Go By)

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.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

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.

Alien

Alien is about the most classic trapped-in-a-confined-space horror film there is, with the mysterious threat lurking in the dark and nowhere you can run to. The crew reacts intelligently, and distinctly. The main story is not one of personal growth but simply one of survival. The story is told with such incredible forward momentum and a masterful, delicate touch (Blade Runner will always be the more fascinating world and philosophical realm to play in, but Alien is easily Ridley Scott's best-made and tightly-controlled film) that it is almost impossible, after so many viewings, for me to analyze it critically. The detail of the world is engrossing, the construction of the villain/monster is the biggest selling point of all (and why so many sequels would follow), and the tight focus that suggests a broader world is fantastic.

In fact, I recently read an article suggesting stories can either be plazas (environments where you can easily see a global/big picture view of the whole thing) or warrens (environments where only what's in front of you is visible, and the grander view is enshrouded in a fog of mystery, almost impossible to view holistically). The best worlds are warrens. Blade Runner is a warren. The original Star Wars trilogy (especially the first film) is a warren. By contrast, Harry Potter is a plaza. The universe of the latter Star Wars films is very much a plaza. The Alien universe remains a warren, and that's very much part of the appeal. The story is so tightly focused with so little backstory or set-up we barely know what the Nostromo is up to, or why it's out there, but we gather enough. What's important is: a crew of space truckers come across a malevolent new form of life, and it kills them one by one, because it's a predator and a monster. It hides in the dark, doesn't look or act like anything we've seen before, and it's scary as fuck.

I meant to fall asleep here. In fact, I meant to only watch part of it tonight while getting ready for bed and then probably turn it off, but the movie wouldn't let me. It never lets up, it's never boring enough for me to stop it. On the contrary, I could scarcely look away, and I've seen it maybe twenty times or so now. I enjoyed the details of the world, the clear action and geography of the ship, and the endless cascade of schemes and setbacks that make up the plot. The crew remain active protagonists throughout, even as things get more and more hopeless. It's a beautiful script, in a beautiful world, with a wonderful cast. If it weren't for a handful of -- forgivable, for my money -- effects that don't hold up so well (Ash's severed head most notably, and occasionally the xenomorph is too clearly a dude in a black vinyl suit with a funny headpiece), I'd call this film flawless. Nothing to change or complain about. A lot of people seem to consider Cameron's Aliens the best of the series, but to me there's no question that the series opener is the most pure story in the set. Alien is everything it needs to be and absolutely nothing more. It's as elegant and as brutal as its titular antagonist.

Ansiktet (The Magician)

This is really a delight to watch, because the themes and philosophical questions come into light early, but the rest of the story is a dense and complicated riddle. What is truth? What is its value? What is magic, or faith in magic? Does it have value, even as a sham? Does the faith people put in a thing give it its true power, and which is more valuable: the faith of the magician or the faith of his audience? Go ahead and replace "magician" with literally any role where one asks for the faith of others.

But The Magician doesn't offer up answers quite as readily as it does questions, partially because it's cleverly playing both sides of the fence. Is there magic, or supernatural forces, or God? Do ghosts haunt us? Do Granny's witch's spells and potions do anything? Does Vogler have any power about him at all? The answer seemed to me to be both yes and no, to all of these questions. (I'm no Bergman scholar, but I know he was obsessed with, among other things, religious faith, and I suspect in some form or other he was a firm believer himself. No matter! Let it never be said he was afraid to dabble in skepticism.)

The best I can say is, this plays out like The Prestige crossed with The Rules of the Game, starring a traveling sideshow act of snake oil salesmen, and taking place in rural Sweden circa 1846. The delineation between the house staff and the upper-crust, and how each is scammed in their own ways, says a lot about the world of the story, the nature of faith and hope, and how it breaks down along class lines. There were many, many great confrontations, monologues, and turnarounds throughout. (I could do better than to point out it "says a lot" or "there were great bits," but this is just a recording of preliminary reactions, and much of it will take more time to digest.) The bit with the fictional love potions -- a collision of cynicism and idealism where both sides colluded to believe, and therefore to produce the supposed effect, was fantastic; both con-man and mark were culpable, as it is with fantasies and faith. For me personally, the actor who is not a ghost but is, who believes he is dying but isn't, who is more successful and convincing as a specter than he ever was as a thespian, was perhaps my favorite embodiment of the questions the film was asking, and there was something haunting in "mute" Volger's way of letting the actor take center stage. The antagonism between Doctors Vergerus and Volger was intense, and sharp, and fascinating -- and only slightly distracting because Gunnar Björnstrand looked shockingly like Kevin Kline with chin scruff in this.

So many layers, and I'm sure I didn't even scratch the surface on my first viewing. This is one disc I'm likely to check out the (Criterion) special features on.

(NOTE: Interestingly, after checking out some of them, I learn that The Magician is seen as a parable about the creative process, about film- and play-directing, about performance, and the relationship between a fickle audience and even fickler critics and the artist himself. All that's super interesting and totally there now that I see it, but I stand by my assessment as well, vis-a-vis faith and magic and truth.)

Awake

Boy, I remember when this came out in 2007 and I read just the first paragraph of Roger Ebert's review which advised, "Do not believe anything you hear about Awake, do not talk to anyone about it, and above all do not even glance at the poster or ads, which criminally reveal a crucial plot twist." And so I closed the browser, I avoided posters and trailers, and I promised myself I'd see the movie. I missed it in theaters, then I forgot about it on DVD. It crawled so slowly up my Netflix queue that when it arrived, I'd forgotten at first what it was -- only that it starred Hayden Christensen and I was supposed to avoid any spoilers.

And so finally, about three years later, I sit and watch the film, remembering that maybe it's a little scary -- I know the movie's about surgery and anaesthesia and the film is called Awake and so... put two and two together. Anyway, I hope it will kickstart me toward writing. I'm prepared for twists that will ruin the movie. I can at least say the spoilers remained unspoiled (there's a much prettier poster of the movie I wanted to use for this entry, but to my shock the overly long tagline right there on the movie poster spoils the final twist in a series of twists). But what I wasn't prepared for was how god-awful amateur bad this movie is.

The story is okay, and the premise (without twists) should actually be enough to make me squirm in abject terror. From an opening crawl of text you know that the story is about a man who is rendered paralyzed but otherwise is perfectly alert, awake, and sensate during a heart transplant operation. Yes, they saw open Anakin Skywalker and clamp open his chest and he can feel every moment of it, but cannot move or act. That should be goddamn fucking terrifying. The performances are so flat and even-keel that it only registers as slightly squeamish. The twenty minutes of preposterous writing and acting that precede the actual surgery don't help. Zero thought was given to what the life of a young billionaire might be like. Too much effort was put into weird areas. For example, as far as I can tell, his megacorporation is swallowing up other companies at a rate or two or three a week, but we're supposed to like him because he keeps talking on the phone about all the jobs he's creating; but we're never actually given any real idea of what Clay wants or needs, aside from the fact that his fiancée wants him to tell his mother about her, and his mother seems to have some hold on him, only she really doesn't. Or something.

Anyway, the whole story is about Clay Beresford, Jr., who is laid out on an operating room table unable to act while feeling horrendous pain and hearing some things he'd rather not be hearing. Meanwhile he's the object of a tug-of-war between his hot young lover and his rich milfy mother, and in both relationships he struggles because he is unable to act. As the story goes and the mysteries and situations get more complicated, as bad people reveal themselves and their motives become known, all of the drama unfolds while our protagonist is laid out, unable to act.

Honestly, I have to say, it's a no-brainer why this script doesn't work. It's the world's most passive protagonist, by definition. It makes for an interesting challenge, at least, to tell this story with nothing but deadweight at its center (and poor Hayden Christensen, I keep wanting him to do another role on par with Shattered Glass, but this was definitely not it; he's as much deadweight as an actor as Clay is deadweight as a character). But if you ask me, Joby Harold doesn't get us there. I liked the wandering out-of-body bits and the structure was interesting (despite the überpassive protag) but nothing in the script rings true, not the relationships, the medical details, the procedure, the motivation for the schemes or the schemes themselves. Each heightened emotion clocks in way too low and forced, and for all of the nice photography it never really felt in aid of anything, just pretty.

I know Ebert gushes about the film, and it's not even that I disagree with his points so much as, I couldn't overlook what he overlooked. The movie lost me from the beginning and then just trudged along, one eyerolling scene after another, never rising above. I'll admit I didn't see the twists coming, so that's something, but a story still need strong characters and(/or) a sharply focused theme or throughline to string all those twists on.

If I don't care which direction things are going, why am I going to care if you take me for a sudden right-angle turn?

An American Tail

Watching this as an adult is a curious experience. I didn't realize how many times I must have watched this as a child, but it was a movie whose dialogue rhythms felt so familiar to me it was like an old song. I've had this experience a couple of times before, most notably with the first Star Wars movie. There were lines in this that I realized I'd heard a million times, knew the sound of, but hadn't understood the words. I'd been too young. It's like hearing a song you grew up on and suddenly realizing what the lyrics are about.

There's not much to say about the story of An American Tail. It's a kid's movie from an era when kid's movies were allowed to be a little darker emotionally but were expected to be even more simplistic narratively -- a trade off, I guess. Like revisiting Pinocchio or The Secret of NIMH, it's marvelous to see how varied the world can be, how legitimately frightening at times, and the songs mostly hold up better than I expected (I'm not generally a fan of musicals, as the pace of them is always a mess, but I can appreciate good songs from a musical). Each and every character (even Fievel) is fairly one-note, but they're distinct and interesting and everybody is given something to do, and something different to want, which is nice. Story wise, it feels a little like it was cutdown from something at least twice as long -- and in particular it shies away from action sequences in a way that's decidedly different from now; nowadays we'd cut short the fun and games or character moments to squeeze in more action, but I think animating chase and fight scenes was a lot harder and more expensive in the days of drawing shit by hand.

Overall it's not great, and I can't not look at it through the rose-colored lenses of my youth, when I loved the everloving shit out of it, but it's also most definitely not terrible, at all. It holds up as well as I'd hoped, and not much more than that.

Ariel

For the first fifteen minutes or so of this film, it felt suspiciously like Aki Kaurismäki took the beat sheet from Shadows in Paradise and wrote new scenes with the exact same impact/plot, but when it veers away it's very satisfying. On the one hand it's fun to see the same style of story with ratcheted-up tension and stakes, almost like a more commercial "bleak-comedy" about desperate losers finding love. On the other, though, it makes for an interesting what-if, as things go from bad to worse and from worse to a lot worse, only to (SPOILER?) kind of work out in the end.

I'm really focusing more on tone and style than story, though, and there's a lot to digest here. Ariel feels funnier than Shadows (though my one big laugh was very meta, when Matti Pellonpää shows up sitting in a jail cell, looking almost exactly like he did in the last film... for a minute I expected him to introduce himself as Nikander, and for us to learn that things didn't end so well for him and Ilona), but also a lot darker, opening on a suicide and having so many guns and knives, thieves and robbers, throughout. The story consistently offers sight gags and ironic twists to keep the audience from overdosing on hopelessness, and like I think I said last time, what really saves it is that Kaurismäki isn't afraid to laugh at losers suffering desperation. It's the tenet of every writer worth his salt that the hero is the one who suffers the most -- sometimes it feels like you have an obligation to make as many things as you can go wrong -- but here we are invited to chuckle every time it does. It's as if he's saying "Look how depressing... isn't that funny?"

I wonder if there's any way I can pull this off in my story. I sure hope so, because this is the tone I'm going for here.

L'Argent de poche (Small Change) *

It's amazing to take my childhood experiences and compare them to American films about children vs. European films about children. If you didn't know better, you'd think American kids were wholesome cuties incapable of nuanced emotion, confusion, fear, lust, or envy. But I was an American kid, and I know much, much better. Watching something like I'm Not Scared and even moreso this film, I'm embarrassed by how little we address or even acknowledge the childhood experience in American art and media. I've tiraded before about our puritanical denial that a sexual impulse might enter the head of anyone less than seventeen and eight-eights years of age, but this is so much deeper. Just simple things: envy, doubt, fear, experimental cruelty, deceit, self-denial, exploration of social roles, resilience, determination, actual innocence, bemusement. Is there an unspoken rule that children can't experience life in a film?

Anyway, I seem to have gone off topic. Small Change is an interesting story, because it's got almost no structure at all. It repeats itself a little bit, allowing the same kind of situation to unfold to one character after another with different variables and different results. Events lead characters around corners that go unexplored. Everybody develops and adapts but not down a singular, controlled path. There are no "arcs," in a simple sense. The world exists just as abundantly beyond the edges of the frame as it does where the camera's pointed. And the film isn't afraid to scare you while being cute, to creep you out while being charming.

I am about to write children doing children things, and before seeing this I wasn't really cognizant of how young and naive a 14-year-old (for example) really is. It's so easy to write the words STACY (14)... and then to imagine someone roughly seventeen or eighteen, and then to write a character who's essentially twenty-one or twenty-two. Fourteen is a kid! Eight is a little kid! This both terrifies and thrills me as I move forward with development. It's certainly going to make casting a bitch, but I think it's going to be worth it if I can pull it off.

Anyway, I'm really glad I got a DVD copy of this. I'm going to have to revisit it. Hollywood and America in general refuses to acknowledge anything genuine about kids and their lives, so I thank my lucky stars we're not the only voice out there. Truffaut seems to know a thing or two about childhood, and this film is a beautiful, amazing, nuanced tapestry devoted to that very subject.

Seen at the Hollywood Theater.

The Aviator

The first time I saw this film, I remember being preoccupied with how bloated it was -- too many events, too episodic, more bio- and not enough -pic. I remember saying of this movie and of biopics in general, "It's less a single story and more a series of 'And then that happened, and then that happened, and then that happened.'" I didn't hate it, but I didn't care for it either. Watching it again, though, it seems like pure Scorsese, the venn diagram of stylistic nutbaggery like Bringing Out The Dead with the more visceral stuff like Goodfellas and Raging Bull. Plus, it's the story of a man driven (among other things) by a firm and auteristic ego to make films his way, which gives the first act a nice touch... maybe it's not autobiographical, but it still makes Hughes and Scorsese kindred spirits. Scorsese's vision of Howard Hughes is a fascinating, frightening man, and his descent into the famous Howard Hughes madness is great.

Mostly what strikes me though is how expressionistic this is, how nonliteral. It's a colorful whirlwind of visual metaphor and inner worlds made physical. This isn't a big Hollywood biopic; it's a fairly insane art film, something like Natural Born Killers or even a Lynch film. And to that end it's quite a lot of fun, even if the story's massive and epic and spans decades longer than my movie-watching instincts want it to (sounds familiar, actually: like a little project I'm obsessing over myself). Also, Leonardo diCaprio feels young for the part, but his performance as a psychically disintegrating Hughes is one of his better roles. And he does look a little Hughesy with that mustache.

There is, however, an awful lot of Woody Harrelson's Larry Flynt in there, and that leads me down a rabbit-hole I can't get back out of: there are enough parallels between this and The People vs. Larry Flynt to be suspect. A self-made southern man, driven to buck and defy the status quo in pursuit of a dream, becomes a giant in his industry and a threat to the old guard. He becomes embroiled in legal troubles which he turns into a media circus. He suffers a major accident which leaves him with a broken body and a stronger-than-ever spirit. He never takes no for an answer, at his own and his loved ones' expense. He is surrounded by a crew of brilliant character actors who trust him implicitly, no matter how crazy he gets. And in the end, he fights for a crucial American institution (in Flynt, free speech; in Aviator, protection against monopoly) and exposes political figures as lapdogs to corrupt groups (Christian coalitions in Flynt; Pan Am in Aviator). I mean, both even end on a similarly nostalgic, bittersweet note: one has Flynt watching video of the love of his life, still alive and happy, as he speaks wistfully to her ghost ("we did it, Althea, we did it"); the other has Hughes fighting off another tic ("the way of the future, the way of the future,") and seeing a vision of a young, unspoiled, ambitious young Howard Hughes in the bathroom mirror speaking with the ghost of his mother. I'm not saying Scorsese ripped off Milos Forman here, but there's no denying that the maps of these movies have similar terrains. I guess that's your American Figure biopic formula for you, huh?

The African Queen

I think this might be a movie whose reputation preceded it a little too well. Bogart's only Oscar, National Registry, color film shot on location (with clunky Technicolor cameras! in Africa! in 1951!) by the great John Huston, famous romance between Bogey and Hepburn, famously rough shooting conditions, not to mention the movie's longstanding unavailability on DVD (it recently came out both on DVD and BRD, which is how I saw it) -- I think it all added up to more hype than the poor movie could live up to. It definitely wasn't bad, at all, but I don't think this would make my list of Top Ten Bogart films. The decision to act is far too hasty, the descent into love too smooth and bump-free (c.f. the rocky romance between the gruff sailor and the prissy journalist in Lifeboat... very rare I give points to Hitchcock over Huston for characterization!). Plus, the stakes seemed inverted. The river, the leeches, the gin, the rapids, the engine, the rain: these all seemed legitimate and threatening, but they were tangents, side quests, nuisances along the path to victory. The actual confrontations with the Germans, both at Shona and against the Louisa, these feel too calculated, too easy, honestly a little bit ridiculous. And I've already said, there really was no hesitation on the parts of Rosie and Charlie, no regret or missteps. Once they kissed awkwardly they were as good as married -- in that 1951 movie way where "married" equals "completely frictionless and essentially one soul with two bodies and a lot of pet names."

Huston made the world real, though, and Bogart did his damnedest-best to inhabit a very complex but un-Bogart character, which is always a pleasure to watch. Seeing him play dumb, gassy, and meek is kind of fun, and they really made use of his awkward teeth and slightly goofball grin. Still, Treasure of the Sierra Madre has Bogart playing the other end of the spectrum of un-Bogart-esque, wherein he is cruel, charmless, and creepy, and that's also John Huston and that I believed more than this. Maybe because it lacked the hamstrung romance. Huston seems better at manly adventures and urban male psyche stories than he does at believable love stories. Or at least the stuff I've seen. Anyway, I've rambled, and criticized a classic harshly, but it was good and I'm glad I've seen it. It just got stuck in the massive shadow of its own legend, and frankly I've seen all these players do better, is all.