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.

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

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.

Lolita

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.

Paths of Glory

Generally when a film is anti-war and anti-military it accidentally (or at least incidentally) becomes a film which is half war-porn, which is either too concerned with being "fair to both sides of the argument" or simply shows too much bravery and valor and so-called heroism. Either way, the result is often a film which too easily can be seen as pro-war by anyone hoping to see such a thing. But Paths of Glory is much less equivocal about it. This is a film that depicts authority as distanced, amoral and petty, and doesn't leave much wiggle room to see it as anything else. Generals are self-serving and interested only in the prestige of victory, in what it will do for their careers and reputations. The death of their subordinates is shown (in the least uncertain terms I've ever seen) as registering no more guilt or difficulty than the loss of supplies, or fuel, or time.

The drama of the story is strong, anchored by Kirk Douglas and a sharp script. To be honest, not every performer lived up to the material, but it's always easier to forgive that in a movie over fifty years old (it was a different era, etc., etc.) and anyway it's not nearly enough to drag down this film. Plus, the film is deceptively short! Maybe I'm just used to grander pieces by Kubrick, but I expected more from the first trial... and when I didn't get it I naturally assumed the greater story would be the second trial, of the general whose glory-seeking traitorous orders set the story in motion. But no, once Colonel Dax tells off the Major General the story has a quick and beautifully abstract (that is, tangential to the direct plot but resonating on a deeper level to what we've seen and what we know) closing scene, and it's done. In and out in under 90 minutes.

But there's something great about that. Because really, by that point it's said all it has to say. It didn't really wrap up all its threads in a cathartic-resolution way, but each story got enough that I'm not left wondering what next. It didn't overstay its welcome because the message is a little more poetic if it's left unspelled-out, the occasional loose end or raw nerve only making the sting a bit sharper.

And as a side note, just before watching this I'd asked a friend if he could think of any repeat performer in a Kubrick film besides Kirk Douglas. There must be other examples as well, but right here in Paths of Glory, as the outspoken, too-smart-to-be-a-soldier Private Arnaud, is Joe ("Joseph") Turkel, a.k.a. Lloyd the bartender from The Shining, also familiar to film nerds (like me) as Eldon Tyrell, the proto-Jobs/Gates-hybrid CEO/Father/God from Blade Runner -- so young!

The Shining

It was really gratifying watching this with my girlfriend since she had never seen it before (hello, Jen). I mean, I watched it to see how a master handles scary, and how a child's perspective (and performance) can carry a story of this magnitude, and on both fronts I was more than impressed, I was moved -- but having a brand new pair of eyes experiencing it all for the first time really showed how it remains legitimately one of the scariest and smartest films put together. It is scary, not just creepy, and it's intense, not just tense.

It's also got a lot going on, storywise, without ever getting too bogged down in the details. There are at least two kinds of "magic" at work here, and while Dick Halloran connects the mysteries of the Overlook to the power of the Shining, it's unclear if he's being literal or trying to help little Danny understand one by relating it to the other. Even if they're related, the spiritual presence of the hotel and its grip on Jack is not the same as the power that Danny, Dick and Dick's grandma share, but the story isn't bogged down by these separate conceits at all, and of course it's enriched by how they interact. (I know it's all based on the Stephen King novel and that even though a lot gets changed in the translation, I doubt either of those two elements changed... right?) It's interesting to look at at this from a script standpoint and wonder who the protagonist really is, because it's pretty unconventional in that sense, but tonight I wasn't looking at the script. I was looking at the sense of terror.

75% of that terror feels performance-based to me, and while I do think Jack Nicholson may be overacting (arguably, all three leads are, and Scatman Crothers isn't exactly a subtle actor either), but it's the specific way he's overacting which not just saves the performance but drives it out of the park. There's something willful and unpredictable in the directions Jack Torrance's manic reactions take during each scene. One example that stood out was, a hearty gulp of whiskey -- the man's first in five long, miserably dry months -- is greeted with a kind of deadpan slackjawed blankness, rather than the ecstatic joy you'd expect (which would also better suit his dialogue, which conveys a sort of ecstatic joy). Throughout, his reactions are brilliantly over the top in all the perfectly wrong ways, and it's unsettling to watch.

Another 20% or so of the terror in The Shining comes out of the editing, of course, especially when you consider that (unless I'm mistaken) child actor Danny Lloyd didn't fully understand the film he was making and never (at the time) saw a cut of the movie -- it's possible I read he's never, ever seen the actual movie. Still, his hammy-moppet reactions are perfect representations of the kind of overdone shock a child would feel when facing a quick flash of hacked-up little girls, or a tidal wave of blood bearing down on you; and his monologue scenes where he talks to Tony are pretty much pitch-perfect and impeccably timed, for just one child alone, talking to and reacting to his own voice. It was interesting to watch this and really think about what it would (will?) take to get the right performance from child actors in a story of this nature. I'm going to have to be bold. I think I can do it, but it'll be new territory for me.

Anyway, this isn't a blog about my projects, it's a blog about the films I watch. The Shining is a masterpiece, and one of my favorite films by one of the greatest filmmakers (possibly only second to Dr. Strangelove? and maybe, depending on my mood, 2001), and tonight all of that was confirmed.

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

On a personal note, I just stupidly broke my five-year-old custom-made neon sign, a relic from an early short film of mine, and the experience is surprisingly nerve-wracking and even a little depressing. I don't have much (right now) to add to my thoughts about one of my all-time favorite films anyway, but especially after this stupid moment of poor planning and sentimental loss, let's just leave it at, I got to see a film print and that was really awesome, and Dr. Strangelove remains one of the greatest films of all time. Every frame and line and subtle action is potent and symbolically charged and brilliantly played to its fullest capacity for meaning, and the humor is at times subtle and layered, at others direct and overt. I love it. But alas, right now I'm kind of bummed out, so I don't have much to add to the discussion.

Seen (on a film print!) at the Laurelhurst Theatre.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Oh my god, what could I possibly say? If you want to know the truth, this might be my favorite movie of all time. It's funny, it's scary, it's poignant, it's character driven, it's absurdist, the script is tight as hell, original, and thematically rich. There isn't a single scene about sex in the entire film, and yet there isn't a single scene that isn't about sex in the entire film. It's quotable, it moves at such a rapid clip and it's so engaging it makes it hard to slow down and be objective or critical. (But of course it holds up if you are able to.) It's George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and the inimitable Peter Sellers x3. It's everything I want in a movie.

It's also the primary model, in a weird way, for the script I'm working on, and for that very reason I've put off watching it until I could really focus. There's a tone here, where things are happening and they're exciting and ostensibly scary and at the same time, the least realistic story ever told, with impossible characters with impossible names believing impossible things, and saying and doing impossible things. The arguments between President Muffley and General Turgidson are priceless; the stoic speeches General Ripper gives to poor Group Captain Mandrake are just amazing. In both cases, Peter Sellers plays the straight-man (never say the man couldn't do drama) and he's what sells the situations. Reacting deadpan and earnestly in the face of escalating absurdity is exactly what I love here and exactly what I ambitiously hope to capture. Indiana Jones and John McClane and Martin Riggs can keep their head down and run guns-blazing into impossibly dangerous situations and we root them on for it. Well, Mandrake and Muffley are heroes of a different genre, the pitch-black comedy, staring down a different kind of dragon and facing it with just as much aplomb. And I haven't even mentioned the title character, because strangely I feel there's no need to mention him. That man, he speaks for himself.

Oh, Dr. Strangelove, I do love you.