Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope)

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.

Super 8*

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.

Snake Eyes

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.

Sweet Smell of Success

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.

Star Trek: Insurrection

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 *

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 Social Network

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.

Stripes

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.)

Shockproof

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.

Shock Corridor

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.

The Social Network

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.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

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?

七人の侍 (Shichinin no Samurai / Seven Samurai)

This got watched in two parts with almost a week between, split in half right at Intermission, but I had the pleasure of watching it with someone who'd never seen it before. Plus, it'd been a long time since I'd last seen it, so all in all I was watching with fairly fresh eyes. The movie splits easily into three parts, each roughly an hour long: act one is rounding up the samurai, act two is preparing the village for attack, and act three is the battle itself. For the most part it does well keeping clear its large cast and crucial-to-the-story geography, though I admit a couple of times someone would get shot and one of us would turn to the other and say, "Wait, which one was that?" (It was almost always cleared up for us in the next scene, however.) Much of this is due to Kurosawa's choice to stay wide during fight scenes, even when it's a single character out of the crowd we are meant to be concerned with. I'm not criticizing this choice, because keeping it wide allows the sheer physicality of the performances to carry much more excitement than cutting into close-ups could sustain, but the result is sometimes all those frantically moving Japanese men in period outfits blur together. So it goes.

I also really enjoyed how clumsy both sides got during the final battle -- the attempt to waylay a horseman would fail, and the villagers would have to chase desperately after a bandit into the village, but then the bandit would have trouble controlling his horse because of the chaos of the battle. It felt kinetic and unrehearsed and gave both sides an amateurish quality akin to realism. And of course Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) proving with every scene exactly why he'd never be a samurai and yet why he deserved that honor just as much as the nobler, better-trained warriors he fought alongside. That he was given a samurai's gravesite without a single word spoke more to the respect that he'd earned than any long monologue ever could have. Allowing the story's biggest beats to be conveyed visually in the background of a scene is a strong choice for a film of any era, but it pays off because it challenges the viewer to put it together himself: it all goes back to the old adage that showing is more impactful than telling.

I know I just focused entirely on surface, fairly obvious cues from one of cinema's most famous and thematically rich films, but it's late and I haven't watched it in a while, so forgive me that. I actually intend to return to the two Criterion commentary tracks (something I don't do often enough), and if I feel like I have enough to say about it, perhaps I'll make a post about their viewing as well.

Skyline *

This is a confusing concept, so bear with me: If I were to sit down right now and make a detailed checklist of Things To Not Do when making a film, especially the kind of film I've been writing lately (and just so we're clear, I have sat down and made such checklists more than once), and then if someone else were to stumble upon my checklist and hand it to some special effects wizards with a very douchey aesthetic and tell them it was an outline for a small-budget alien invasion story… well, that's just about the only way I can imagine Skyline coming into existence.

Don't be inconsistent with your monsters/threat: keep it simple. Make sure the monster's actions, even if we don't know the motivation, remain consistent and follow some kind of logical pattern. If you have something as efficient as giant human-sucking vacuum cleaners, does it really make sense to then round up the individual strays with massive, cyber-cthulhu Matrix squids? If you have something is brutally inefficient at human-brain harvesting as massive, cyber-cthulhu Matrix squids stalking highrise windows and chasing down individuals, does it really make sense for them to ignore easier targets to keep chasing the same target? (I guess you could try and make a case, when you discover why it's harvesting human brains, that a clever survivor's brain is more valuable than a passive victim's brain, but it really felt a lot more like they were motivated to keep chasing the guys the camera was following.)

A lot of people tell you you have to have likable characters. You don't. Or relatable characters. Technically you don't even need that. It's not complicated: you just need characters people care about. One way to do that is to make me like them. Another way is to make me relate to them. The only thing that matters, though, is that I care about what happens to them, and want to spend time with them. Someone should have explained that to these guys. The characters here made me uncomfortable from frame one. They are shallow greaseballs and D-list actors all just barely on the sleazy-tan side of artificially attractive, and their motivations are petty and (worse) inconsistent. I didn't want to know what happened next because I didn't want to be in the same room as these people. It's like being in an elevator with a bunch of Malibu frat guys. All you can think about is the doors opening on your floor and you getting out, walking away, and never having to see or hear these people ever again. I'll admit that I was squirming with dread and discomfort throughout, but it had nothing to do with wondrous magic lights, aliens machines or brain-suckers.

Don't let the level of peril peak too early, and don't make it easy for your hero to beat obstacles. Too many close-calls or irrationally hesitating villain/monster moments and the conflict dissipates. It doesn't make a difference how many redshirts you kill. It only matters about your hero. And if your hero, by the way, is special, like if the magic light infected him with super strength and if his brain is somehow uncontrollable to whatever mecha-control other human brains succumb to, please make it make sense. Your audience -- whatever part of it is generous enough to give your movie the kind of thought you hope audiences will give it -- is going to wonder about stuff like this.

God. The bottom line here is, this movie was bad in the worst way: it wasn't even fun. The story is completely derivative (Cloverfield, Independence Day, The Mist, The Matrix, Starship Troopers and especially the Spielberg War of the Worlds) without adding anything substantial to the equation. There were a couple of concepts that maybe, if played just right and stretched out into weird existential levels (if handled like the tone of act two of War of the Worlds, say), might have been worthwhile -- but they weren't overly great. The aliens need your brains to run themselves, okay. And so -- what do you do with that? That concept could be better used than merely as an act-three denouement/twist. On top of everything else, a couple of times in the movie there seemed to be much more interesting stories going on elsewhere, but the camera refused to leave the side of this band of contributing-nothing-to-society, useless and thoroughly unappealing pretty nobodies.

On a personal note: right this second I feel very much like trashing all my work on my script and starting over afresh, or just looking for a new idea. I have an almost phobic kneejerk terror to the idea of making this movie; to the idea that someone like me will watch a film I've made and feel the way I do about Skyline, too exhausted to even bother rolling my eyes at the screen and saying, "So what?"

I mean, can you think of a worse effect a creative work can have on you than to corrode away your desire to make art yourself?

Seen at the Regal Lloyd Mall 8.

Straw Dogs

After a good talk about helplessness with a friend, I thought maybe Straw Dogs would give me some insight into a slow-build, trapped-in-a-house kind of story. While it didn't -- it's much more concerned with mankind's violent nature and the tendency to deny such things -- it's still a great film to watch. So much tension, and such a slow build! From the very beginning things are begging to fall apart, but Pekinpah isn't going to release any of it for a while. He's going to ratchet things so tight that no element of the story won't snap in the insane, masterful climax.

A lot is made of Amy enjoying the rape, and it's not that I can't see why a lot would (maybe should... maybe) be made of it, but it's also one of the boldest, truest-to-character moments in the story. Her acceptance of her rape, and even her embracing of her former beau/rapist, is a conflicted scene for everyone involved, not least the rapist himself. It's an emotionally telling scene, it's Amy's true nature coming out -- and her relationship to Chris (the rapist) makes it just as akin to date-rape as violent-rape, even though he's holding her down and barking threats at her. But then, true to the themes and true to her character, she is betrayed by her own attempts to find the kind of warmth and attraction that David no longer (if ever?) has for her, when Chris grudgingly holds her down and allows his monstrous friend to have a go at her.

I read in an interview with Pekinpah that he asks critics who call him a woman-hater for this film to watch Bring Me The Head Of Alfred Garcia before passing any final judgments, because he feels that there shows that he ultimately loves women; that in Bring Me The Head they represent the "good pole." I love Straw Dogs, and although I don't think I find it nearly as uncomfortable or unsettling as a lot of people, it's still not an easy watch or one that I need to watch too often. But I'm an even bigger fan of Bring Me The Head, and had never considered it in the light of a counterpoint to this before. Something to mull over, when next I see it.

(On that note: I must hang my head in shame and confess that I've never seen The Wild Bunch in its entirety... something I'm eager to rectify, one of these days.)

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.

The Strangers

On recommendation I finally watched this, as an example of a recent "smart" horror film, with characters, and plot points that matter, and a concern for story as well as for scares. I have to concede that this fits that bill pretty perfectly. It's also right in the wheelhouse for the kind of thing I'm doing, and to top that off, first time writer-director Bryan Bertino wrote the script (then called The Faces) and was a quarter-finalist for the Nicholl Fellowship before selling it to Universal. His first film was a horror because he felt he could connect to his audience by scaring them (according to Wikipedia). Right in my wheelhouse, indeed.

The exercise in setting up some reasonably complicated and emotional relationships between the two leads proves a point I think a couple of friends were trying to make to me about horror the other day: it's a genre about things happening to the characters (with, therefore, pretty passive protagonists and very active antagonists or antagonistic forces), and even with all that set-up you end up disregarding most of it as you enter act two. I don't think it has to be quite as sharp a cut between character development and scary stuff happening as The Strangers has, but even with such a hard line separation I was happier having it all there than having none or having sloppy, lazy characterization fill twenty minutes.

The containedness is good, and gives me something to look at and think about. It's not quite how I want to deal with it, in terms of the threat or the reaction to the threat, but it's thoughtful and it works. I'd definitely like to see if I can find a script for this out there, maybe the Nicholls draft even, something before there was a shooting script. The use of handheld actually worked here, even though it was shakier than average. Something about a wide shot of a room, a girl alone, something out there, that all seems heightened by an unmoving but shaky camera. Static shots rendered handheld. Not like I've never seen it done before, but where I might have dismissed it, here I have to admit it helped the scene's tension.

It's hard not to compare this to Ils, but it actually holds up pretty well, and overall maybe better. For my money I found the masks a little off-putting and not-scary, though I enjoyed the man's mask ("enjoyed" meaning "was slightly unsettled/frightened by") and I enjoyed the blankness of not seeing their faces (though I can't help but wonder about the choice to never show us their faces at all, even when our characters see them in broad daylight... I don't hate the choice, but it felt stilted). But the killers themselves seemed pretty good. It sure has its share of miraculous timing, which is kind of a headache for a script-obsessed writer like me, but there were enough scary moments and enough thought given to the sequence of events and characters that I was willing to forgive. Plus, Ils lost a lot of its terror as soon as you figure out that the killers are a) easily tricked and fallible, and b) menacing children, nothing more; the masked invaders in The Strangers are a decidedly more adult, controlled breed of killer. It's not just their masks that hide their feelings. Their every movement is lethargic, as though half-asleep, they're more a menace that moves like molasses somewhere between methodical and maniacal (partially accidental alliteration! how about that!). In the end, they have two brilliantly telling lines, outlining a frightening M.O. for us without any heavy exposition. The first, in response to Kristen's demands of "Why are you doing this to us?" they respond merely, "Because you were home." Second, as they drive away in their beat-up pickup truck, stopping even to take a religious pamphlet from some young Mormon (?) missionaries, the girl (Dollface) says, "It'll be easier next time." This is (like, yes, Wikipedia points out) a proto-Manson family, calculatedly learning how to torment and kill. There's something plausible about this, unfortunately, which keeps the story a little scarier than a lot of supernatural horror stories. This kind of a creeper is a lot more likely to come breaking through your window at night than a tentacle monster or a fanged beast, or the walking dead, or a man from inside your dreams. These people are out there.

The Social Network *

It's funny to think that Fincher has now done for a social networking webpage what he'd previously done for one of America's most famous serial killers: told its story through a detail-heavy, exposition-rich series of intercutting narratives and charmingly charmless characters. I'm inclined to say it's funny to think that it works, but maybe it's not; maybe of course it works. Either way, it does work.

The trick is really that all the Sorkiny dialogue and cool montages are all set dressing to the real story, which is the complicated friendship between Mark, Eduardo, and interloper Sean. The legal assistant at the end was right: Mark's not an asshole -- though I'm not sure if I'd call it "trying so hard to be" so much as "having a low-level case of Asperger's" -- and he's a difficult character because he's a believably difficult person. He reminds me of an exaggerated version of myself, or of many of my more computer-geeky or engineering-student friends. Actually, he reminds me also of Graysmith from Zodiac, which is maybe telling. I wanted to try and relate these two characters to previous Fincher characters, like maybe John Doe from Seven or the nameless protagonist from Fight Club (maybe the daughter in Panic Room? almost certainly Michael Douglas's modern-day Scrooge in The Game), but it feels a bit like a stretch, and while I suspect there's some of the same DNA in all of these characters, it would take a more in-depth examination than a here-are-my-initial-thoughts-after-seeing-a-film blog to pull that all together. Okay, yes, I'm copping out, totally. It's late and cut me some slack.

Anyway, this was an impressive piece of filmmaking because it tells a complicated story with a lot of seemingly boring details without being a boring story, and it does it in a way that illuminates some tricky, nuanced, challenging characters. I couldn't give a rat's ass about the veracity of this story, because it's a story, and I'd rather have truth about humans than facts about specific people, and The Social Network has that, plenty.

Seen at Pioneer Place's Regal Cinema.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World *

The actual watching of the movie has parts that move too fast and others that move too slow as it rushes excitedly to squeeze as much of a six-book story as it can into its two hour running time. The beginning especially feels a little manic, and I kept thinking, "If audiences don't know this story or these characters, won't they feel a little alienated by how rapidly we're breezing through characterizations and introductions?" But remembering the movie, the choppy rhythm and subplot onslaught smooths down and registers just fine, and I left the theater pretty happy with it, over all.

I know the books, having just finished the series last week (and delaying seeing the film -- sorry box office numbers -- until I had), so I can't say. The internet's calling this the Movie Of This Generation, comparing it to Fight Club. The epithet may be generous but it's certainly not totally without cause. It says a lot in its style and attitude, just like Fight Club did about the 90s, and it does so in a fun and original and vaguely zeitgeist-y way.

They did a pretty good job of keeping all that story in there, of making the manic video-game-fighting/punk-love/comic-geek thing come alive and keeping the heart-on-your-sleeve/idiot-in-love/dealing-with-your-demons themes front and center. The casting worked really well. On that note, I've got to admit I'm pretty burnt out on Michael Cera -- I like his onscreen personality but it's just the one onscreen personality and I can only take that so many times in a row -- but he mostly didn't disappoint here, except for playing some of the high-emotion scenes a little too deadpan (as usual). Actually, I'd say that, much like how I declared Kung Fu Hustle the end of the kung-fu genre (it's all the standard elements of the genre, times 100, blown to beautifully absurd extremes), so too should Scott Pilgrim be the end of the Michael Cera persona for the same reasons. Time to close a chapter, redefine yourself, and move on. Please, Mr. Cera.

My one major complaint about this film, though, which I can't leave without expounding on, is the end. In terms of being a manic 16-bit video-game love story with a face-paced tongue-in-cheek action ending, it ends well, but compared to the book I was pretty let down. See, in the comic series, up until Book 6, I considered the series cute, fun, and amusing. Light, fluffy, but with a lot of elements thrown together that really played well off each other and spoke to our generation. I didn't love it, but I totally liked it, and I saw the appeal. But then in Book 6, I suddenly got really excited, really into it, the end was such a big thematic climax, bringing in elements and plotlines I hadn't even paid much attention to, evolving characters and making the whole video-game-fight stuff and subspace-travel stuff into metaphors for how we all deal with crazy love, especially young crazy love. Book 6 really won me, and almost all of Book 6 felt rewritten (and rewritten well, but definitely not up to the original) for the film. All I can say is, hey everybody who loved this movie? Go read the books. Worth it!

Seen at the Regal Lloyd Cinema.

Sidenote: distressingly, this has been my longest dry spell between movies. It's been a hell of a month.

Stardust Memories

It's hard to believe this is the first Woody Allen film I've seen this year. It was picked essentially because I knew I hadn't seen it in a while and it was a mid-era piece, one of the Three Favorites (he's famously said that only three of his films turned out exactly how he wanted them: if memory serves it was this, Purple Rose of Cairo and Match Point). I'd seen a handful of Woody Allen movies over the years of course, but I wasn't in love with any of them (not even Annie Hall... though as a kid I loved Sleeper) until my first in-theater Woody Allen experience, which was Deconstructing Harry. Somehow that opened me up to the world of Woody Allen, and I began falling in love with his older films as well. To this day Deconstructing Harry remains one of my favorite and most-watched of his. I bring this up because Stardust Memories feels in so many ways like the same film.

In a way that goes way beyond mere auteurism in filmmaking, Stardust and Harry take the same approach to the same story. In the former, he's a filmmaker being celebrated at a weekend-long event, and the story is intercut with expressionistic vignettes, purportedly scenes from the films made by his fictional character (Sandy Bates), while the story explores the three major relationships in his life and the nature and value of his work. In the latter, he's a novelist being honored somewhat ironically at a university he dropped out of, and the story is intercut with expressionistic vignettes, purportedly scenes from the novels written by his fictional character (Harry Block), while the story explores the three(ish) major relationships in his life and the nature and value of his work. (Further, they're both Wild Strawberries; but Woody Allen riffing on plots by Bergman -- who'd have guessed?) The main difference seems to be that in Stardust his adoring fans are ubiquitous, an unavoidable torrent of love and awkward conversations, and the primary conflict is in his shift from bright comedy into deeper, more thoughtful dramatic territory; and in Harry his fans never make an appearance, and the primary conflict is that his work too closely mirrors his own life and constantly gets him into trouble with the loved ones whose quirks or natures he exaggerates for effect.

I know Woody Allen says his films are decidedly not autobiographical and that he hates the idea that people read them that way, but come on. In 1980, when Stardust Memories came out, it was his fourth "more mature" film, including the challenging-at-the-time Annie Hall and Manhattan, and the somber Interiors. How can there be no autobiography in a story about a well known director of comedies segueing into Fellini, Antonioni and Bergman homages as he explores issues of psychology, existentialism, and the idea of perfect love, whose fans are still yearning for the days when he made silly comedies? And then, seventeen years later, after fighting the "this film isn't about me, it's just a story I made up" battle for almost two decades, along comes Deconstructing Harry, a film about an author burning every bridge by writing a little too close to what he knows. I try to respect an artist at their word, at least about the intent of their work (even if I often disregard their intent as tangential to the value of the content of their work), but I find it impossible to watch a Woody Allen story and not view it as self-derived, and wonderfully, honestly, multi-dimensionally so. Like it or not, I don't think any other filmmaker alive approaches the themes and nature of their own life and work with the kind of candor that Woody Allen has for decades. Not every film he makes is a gem, especially these days, and dare I say it: I wish he'd stop rushing one out every year and spend a couple of years per film, really perfecting it -- because when he's on, when he does make a gem, it's an instant classic, a piece of the canon not to be ignored. For me, Stardust Memories is one of those instant-classic gems.