Ecstatic Text

Catching up on missed 2011 films…

2012-02-05T16:28:00.004-05:00

The average, mainstream non-movie-buff type person, in my estimation, does look to the list of Oscar nominations as a shorthand way of getting a snapshot of the quality of the year in films. Yes, many people do not think of the Oscars in this way, but for those who don’t see many films during the year, but do watch the Oscars, this is the chance for Hollywood to communicate the worth of their profession to the masses.

That’s why it is a real shame they blew it like they did this year. I will be issuing a correction (and unofficial apology) when I release my top ten list the night before the Oscar telecast. It’s been a surprisingly deep year in quality films, and as a reflection of that I feel forced to expand the format to 15 films, especially as I catch up on DVDs of films from earlier in the year or that were released later in the year but flew entirely under the radar. I’ve seen a number of great films over the past couple weeks on DVD or Netflix Streaming. Here are my favorites:

The Names of Love (Michel Leclerc, 2011) - The original title of this French film literally translates to “The Names of People,” which I find more interesting, and also more accurately descriptive of what the film is really about. Masquerading as a meet-cute love-story, it’s really about the legacy of political repression in families as passed down from one generation to another. The film is lively and lovely, funny and intelligent, and charmingly made. It’s a rare example of what a romantic comedy can actually be.

Blackthorn (Mateo Gil, 2011) – An old-school Western about Butch Cassidy as an older man, living a quiet life in Bolivia. Like any good Western, Blackthorn is really about the fundamental questions of civilization and morality. It is about a specific time and place, and the advancement of technology and how this affects how people live. The film has stayed with me strongly in the weeks since seeing it. It is directed with a spare and poetic eye by Mateo Gil, who previously wrote Open Your Eyes and The Sea Inside for director

Alejandro Amenábar. Sam Shephard plays Cassidy as wizened and wistful, weighed with regret. The Bolivian landscape is beautiful and punishingly vast, the perfect setting for a Western. Unfortunately, the flashback scenes featuring Cassidy with the Sundance Kid as they make their original escape to Bolivia are cheesy and unconvincing.

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2011) – An ambitious film from South Korea from the director of Oasis and Secret Sunshine, Poetry is similar to Margaret in its non-prioritization of tonal consistency in favor of reaching for the richness and complexity of an individual life over a short period of time. Mija, an older woman, joins a poetry class at the same time as she is confronted with a horrible truth about her grandson, whom she raises alone because her daughter is working elsewhere. She is not wealthy and she receives government assistance, which she must supplement by taking care of a sick old man who doesn’t always treat her with respect. This woman seeks to be more spiritually in tune with the world around her, only to find others who are cold, jaded, lewd, or just dumb. To seek truth in the world around you is to be confronted with the pain of living. To see how Mija negotiates her response to this realization is when Poetry is richest.

Terri (Azazel Jacobs, 2011) – Terri is probably my favorite of this bunch. It is a very small film, and it isn’t about anything overly-ambitious nor groundbreaking. Terri is an overweight high school student in California, who takes care of his uncle, who vacillates between lucidity and dementia, because his parents are not around. He is an intelligent and sweet kid, who just has had a hard life and needs psychologically healthy formative

experiences. John C. Reilly plays the school principal who recognizes Terri’s potential, yet also recognizes the need for concern for his stewardship, as Terri begins to consistently show up late and wear pajamas to class. All of this sounds like well-worn territory, but Terri is not deliberately quirky, nor predictable. It does not exploit Terri’s problems for easy sympathy. It is strange and unique and utterly human, and I fell in love with the characters and the film.

Putty Hill (Matthew Porterfield, 2011) – A fictional film with a bare wisp of a plot which serves as a hook to let the camera (and by extension audience) meditate on a portrait of a town, and a reality of life. The subjects are families poor and white, and their disaffected youths. Director Porterfield chooses to shoot as if it were a documentary, letting non-professional actors play versions of themselves while the camera rolls, and at times asking the subjects questions from behind the camera. The aesthetic may seem gimmicky to some (it was a bit jarring at first for me), but I stopped worrying and just went with it. I soon became absorbed in the accumulated portrait of a town full of people who go through life with, as one character says, a heavy heart, not just because of the specific events in the film, but also, the film implies, because of the cycle of poverty and the effects thereof on the entire community. It is a loving portrait that feels true, respectful and intelligent, and also very sad.

And the nominees are...

2012-01-25T00:25:00.017-05:00

Oscar nominations 2012

The last several years have seen a surprising array of challenging, emotionally difficult films get nominated for Best Picture and other major awards at the Oscars. This year, we see a return to that emotionally safe "bufferzone" at the heart of the mainstream, the only exception being Terence Malick's strange and beautiful Tree of Life. Still, out of 9 nominees, you'd think I'd agree with at least two of them, especially after wholeheartedly supporting Black Swan, The Fighter, 127 Hours, and The Social Network last year, and The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, and Up in the Air the year before. I don't always agree with the eventual winners, but at least the Academy wasn't completely embarrassing itself with its nominees lists.

This year, I'm dismayed. I liked Hugo a whole lot, but where are any of the following?: Shame, Margaret, Melancholia, Contagion, Drive, A Dangerous Method, or Young Adult? All of these are the kinds of films the Academy has nominated in the past. This year, the only nomination among this group is for Drive, for Sound Editing, a category in which I certainly feel it deserves to win.

By the way, no Pixar film this year! My theory of the Annual Pixar Best Picture Nominee is out the window. Of course, Pixar didn't actually release anything this year, so I think my theory still holds. Perhaps they are saving up their energy to come out with a really big film in the hopes of actually winning the big award next year. I hope this does not happen.

After reading absolutely nothing in the press about who is favored, I am going to make my predictions. The favorites for Best Picture have got to be The Artist, Hugo, or The Descendants, with an outside chance for The Tree of Life to take it, although maybe I'm overly optimistic about that. Clooney will take Best Actor, continuing his remarkable success at the Oscars. (Side note: Michael Fassbender's exclusion from this category for Shame is criminal.) Best Actress has got to be between the venerable Glenn Close and Meryl Streep, both in very "actorly" roles. This category is boring. Why wasn't Charlize Theron nominated?

Best Director category is up for grabs. Scorsese is the obvious choice, but the Academy just gave him an award recently, and given their previous stinginess with regards to the great Marty, I remain suspicious of the relationship. I suppose the winner will likely go along with whichever film gets picked for Best Picture). I will make a pick but I must say I think the odds are pretty evenly spread out between the top three.

I haven't seen enough of the nominated films yet to convey my opinion of who should win among this pool of presumably mediocre nominees. I did see The Descendants and didn't particularly care for it. I thought it was a good movie about real estate, which was supposedly the B-story. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was all art direction and no plot. My girlfriend fell asleep for nearly an hour and when she woke up, she hadn't missed a single beat of tangible forward momentum. The Artist was largely unoffensive, though a very light piece that fails to truly cash in on the potential of its premise. Moneyball has no core to it, nothing to make you really care about the lead character. Midnight in Paris is a Woody Allen movie, so it's good and I encourage anybody to see it, but it struck me as irredeemably sexist and not one of the Woodman's more emotionally honest works. Hugo is a wonderment of cutting edge 3D cinema in ode to the wonderment of the fantasies of George Melies, who pushed cinema at its earliest stages to inhabit the dreamworld. It has a needlessly overwritten plot, but is thrilling and intelligent nonetheless.

My predictions are in italic.

Actor in a Leading Role
Demián Bichir in "A Better Life"
George Clooney in "The Descendants"
Jean Dujardin in "The Artist"
Gary Oldman in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"
Brad Pitt in "Moneyball"

Actor in a Supporting Role
Kenneth Branagh in "My Week with Marilyn"
Jonah Hill in "Moneyball"
Nick Nolte in "Warrior"
Christopher Plummer in "Beginners"
Max von Sydow in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

Actress in a Leading Role
Glenn Close in "Albert Nobbs"
Viola Davis in "The Help"
Rooney Mara in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"
Meryl Streep in "The Iron Lady"
Michelle Williams in "My Week with Marilyn"

Actress in a Supporting Role
Bérénice Bejo in "The Artist"
Jessica Chastain in "The Help"
Melissa McCarthy in "Bridesmaids"
Janet McTeer in "Albert Nobbs"
Octavia Spencer in "The Help"

Directing
"The Artist" Michel Hazanavicius
"The Descendants" Alexander Payne
"Hugo" Martin Scorsese
"Midnight in Paris" Woody Allen
"The Tree of Life" Terrence Malick

Best Picture
"The Artist" Thomas Langmann, Producer
"The Descendants" Jim Burke, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Producers
"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" Scott Rudin, Producer
"The Help" Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan, Producers
"Hugo" Graham King and Martin Scorsese, Producers
"Midnight in Paris" Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum, Producers
"Moneyball" Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz and Brad Pitt, Producers
"The Tree of Life" Nominees to be determined
"War Horse" Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers

Oscar voting changes again again...

2012-01-17T21:48:00.003-05:00

The documentary category of the Academy Awards was the only category that required its voting members (the Documentary Branch) to see the eligible films in theatres. Voting members couldn't watch Academy Screener DVDs from the comfort of their own living room. Okay, so not a big deal, right? Let me point out that last year 124 documentary films qualified for Academy consideration.

The Washington Post points out:

The process was so time-consuming and inconvenient that, historically, only retirees had the time to commit to it, resulting in nominees and winners that were often deemed too safe, too conventional and, as documentaries began achieving purchase in the marketplace, woefully out of step with audiences."

Films that had found large audiences would routinely get snubbed by the Academy. Hoop Dreams was snubbed. Last year, Waiting for Superman was snubbed. This year, Senna.

Until now. The rules for voting in the documentary category have changed. Films can be viewed at home, on screener DVDs. Duh! No brainer, right?! Academy Governor Michael Moore (whose Roger and Me was also snubbed back in 1989) pushed for a series of rules changes, including this one. The field of eligibility has gotten slightly narrower, because of the requirement to have a legitimate theatrical run in NYC and LA, which has a lot of documentarians crying foul, but Moore defends this change by pointing out that documentaries that don't have a real theatrical run most of the time wind up on TV, where they are eligible for a different kind of award - an Emmy!

Sheila Nevins, the notorious queen of HBO docs, was on Moore's and others' minds. Nevins apparently likes to get her HBO docs into consideration by renting spaces for her greenlit projects to screen in NYC and LA. They would qualify even though they were not legitimately distributed to a general audience. So, narrowing the field to films with ACTUAL distribution is common sense and makes the process more streamlined.

All of these changes make sense. Don't listen to the haters, they're just jealous.

Scream 4

2012-01-12T22:17:00.012-05:00

Scream 4 (Wes Craven, 2011) - In 1996, the original Scream established a new model of self-reflexivity in the horror genre. For years before, slasher films were mired in dull retreads of Freddy and Jason films. The plots of these films were so consistent, audiences became acutely aware of a set of “rules” (i.e. if you have sex, drink, do drugs, or say “I’ll be right back,” you are going to die). Kevin Williamson’s script reveals his status as “fan” of Halloween, et al., yet also tacitly acknowledges the need to push the genre further, to escape the staleness of the conventions. Scream was a very new and different film, not simply a remake or homage. The self-reflexivity is a form of distanciation; it’s filmmakers are asking you to deconstruct the plot while you are watching it, not really to be scared or horrified, or to be subjected to “torture porn.” Therefore, Scream exists on a higher moral ground than pure exploitation films.

Scream 2 and Scream 3 had to, respectively, deconstruct the legacy of the deconstruction already underway in the first film, and then deconstruct the deconstruction of the deconstruction. The films became increasingly distanced, with the bursts of violence having diminishing impact. To make up for this, the plots had to become more complicated and more suprising with their payoffs. The satirical edge kept getting sharper, to the degree that it was sometimes hard to see much of a difference between the Scream franchise and the parody Scary Movie franchise. (Although, the Scary Movie films aren’t particularly funny nor scary, and the purpose of their existence has always been questionable – why does a satire need a parody?)

Scream 4 was not a part of the trilogy as originally conceived by Williamson, and it comes 11 years later, during which time advancements in information technology changed how young people interact with each other and the world to an astonishing degree. Scream 4 is different, and it’s about something different than just a deconstruction of a stale genre.

The importance of character motivation and logic of plot is miniscule. Since everything is so “meta” to begin with, these films have the easy potential to evoke metaphorical meaning. Scream 4 tries to cash in on that potential, by criticizing the impact of the empty consumerist, twitter-loving, society that creates fame out of infamy. “I don’t need friends, I need fans!” exclaims the killer once revealed. The implication is that the megaphone of the media combined with the fandom of the “crowd” (in this case, all of America) are in part to blame for the vicious murder spree.

There is something interesting about the film's depiction of Sidney as a victim of Big Media. She makes a conscious decision to live a quiet, humble life away from the spotlight, out of the grasp of money-grubbers and exploiters such as Rebecca, a publicist. But because she does not take control of her representation in the media, Sidney gets labelled an "angel of death" even though she is a totally innocent victim. The ending echoes that of Taxi Driver, wherein an evil-doer gets lauded by a story-hungry press, turned into some sort of folk-hero. I wish these ideas were more thoroughly fleshed out, and not undermined by the fact that Sidney releases a book about her life, which doesn't make sense for her character. In any case, Oliver Stone already covered this territory in his insane Natural Born Killers, which is the true grandaddy of this narrative idea.

The script, again by Kevin Williamson, is not as clever as it should be. The film’s dialogue often dips to cringeworthiness, in the small scenes meant merely to move the plot forward. Anthony Anderson’s presence is a bad casting mistake, since he is in the Scary Movie franchise, and the Scream franchise needs to maintain a solid wall of separation from the former in order for it to work. (Also, Anderson’s character’s name is Anthony Perkins, which isn’t so much offensive as it is kind of dumb.)

While there are references to Facebook and Twitter, and texting and IM do occur somewhat, the film does not really know how to realistically depict young people’s interaction with these technologies. So, they kind of give up and just recycle the original use of the telephone, which they already know how to make scary. In a similar vein, the building of celebrity is done in the same old way, with reporters doing stand-ups on sidewalks. Neither the internet nor blogosphere have any play in the proceedings. The killer is filming all the attacks, but never broadcasts them over the web. The commentary on modern technology is fumbled and remains half-baked.

Wes Craven has received, and deserves, a lot of credit for his direction in each of these films. The camera moves swiftly and is always in the right place. By this I mean Craven directs with a wonderful sense of offscreen space, often leaving us straining to peer behind doors and around corners. Craven’s use of film score and sound effects to tease tension, set the right tone, and deliver shocks reflects a sure-handedness and traditional filmic craft that is refreshing, and a measure above the standard for the genre. However, the photography during the daylight scenes is too washed-out in this fourth film of the franchise.

Putting all the rest to Shame

2011-12-11T18:11:00.014-05:00

Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) – Every year since I started making my top ten lists in 2004, I’ve tried to see every film that sparked my interest. Every year there are films that I don’t get to see before I publish my top ten list, but I see after and regret leaving them off. In 2005, it was On the Outs; in 2006, it was Climates; I missed Nights and Weekends in 2008; in 2009, Voy a Explotar. All of these films, had I seen them on time, would have been in serious consideration for my top ten. Steve McQueen’s Hunger from 2008 is the crown jewel of all the missed, and then caught, films. Not only would it have been a lock for my 2008 top ten, it is one of the best films to come out in any year since I started this ambitious “see-everything” quest.

After viewing Hunger, I was left slackjawed at its visual beauty. I read up on Steve McQueen. Given the bravery of that film, the unafraid willingness to provoke discussion and to speak about things that might be considered impolite, it made perfect sense to me to find that he came from the art gallery world. Hunger was his first feature length film to play in theatres, and while I absolutely loved McQueen’s breathtaking formal craft that was complimented by a daring yet pitch perfect sense for how to shoot scenes with powerful dialogue, I couldn't help but think of Hunger potentially as an outlier. It was easy to think that McQueen could only make a certain kind of film. Here's what I wrote about it in my review:

"Hopefully McQueen in the future finds a way to more synergistically combine his considerable visual mastery with the dialogic needs of narrative filmmaking. If I had any complaint about Hunger, it is that the central scene is so compelling, well-written and well-performed, that I would like to see McQueen tackle stories with more talk, and not be so frightened that the dialogue and visuals would step over each other."

Well, Shame puts any hesitations to rest, definitively. With Shame we see McQueen move closer to the mainstream, utilizing more shot-reverse-shot than in Hunger, and covering a fictional story of people with whom he hopes we identify. Don’t read that as saying he “sold out.” See Shame and you would never consider such a critique. Make no mistake, I am saying that McQueen is a titan of our time, to be mentioned in the same breath as P.T. Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, and Andrei Tarkovsky. I am also trying to explain that I was happily surprised to find McQueen’s artistic intelligence elastic and engaged, willing to reach out, to tell us a story, rather than to see him retreat to the protective walls and tempered expectations of the gallery world.

Michael Fassbender is fast proving himself to be the most committed, daring, and talented box office star since the 70’s and DeNiro and Nicholson. (Don’t just keep an eye out for him, go see everything he’s already done.) In Shame, Fassbender plays an attractive, successful, single man in Manhattan with a social development problem. We later learn that he and his sister (Carey Mulligan) escaped some sort of "bad life" in Ireland when they were young, and they each wear their scars in their present. Very early in the picture, her devastating rendition of "New York, New York" at a night club, shot in extreme closeup, brings tears to her brother's eyes. Suddenly, after only a few short scenes, their lives spring to full, three-dimensional, complex life. The past is something that is approached through the lens of the present, where the two characters are left to deal with the past, or to escape it.

But, regardless of what the film is literally about, what makes it a masterpiece is how McQueen articulates all the small moments that add up to a whole. Each scene really seems like it's been cinematic from the moment of conception, with the director closely attuned to what needs to be articulated and how the composition, focus, blocking, pacing, all determine how we engage with it, shaping our experience, and thereby speaking complexities to us. He shoots using a dazzling array of styles. The stable wide shot, long and graceful tracking shots, shallow focus, and unblinking close-ups suddenly feel like they’ve never been used with such clarity of intent before. Just as impressive is his use of various editing techniques, like long takes, quick-cut montage, intercutting of scenes that result in a complex depiction of time and causality. Every choice McQueen makes serves to enhance our understanding of the story, and never to distract or interfere with it.

Thus, I find it incredibly difficult to discuss this difference between “form” and “content,” under any context, for there is no such demarcation apart from our invention. That said, it is not form above and apart from content that determines the quality of a film; if it’s stupid and immature, it’s stupid and immature, no matter how visually impressive it is. Shame is very adult, and very serious. I suppose one has to ask a hybrid question: "How well does the director articulate his ideas, and are those ideas worthy of articulation?" When I ask myself these questions, Shame looks like the best film of the year, and of many years.

-> Read Sean Burns's interview with Steve McQueen here.

Restless

2011-11-17T22:53:00.003-05:00

Restless (Gus Van Sant, 2011) - Gus Van Sant’s latest film came and went from theatres very quickly. I urge you to check it out on DVD when it’s released. It’s about living with the tragedy of untimely death: the death of loved ones past, death standing beside you in the present, and the lonely life that comes after. Two young people who’s lives are consumed by death form a mutually-lifesaving bond that is informed by their own troubled sadnesses. Each moment they share, whether it be about playacting or sex or escaping the outside world, is filled with meaning as one can see how they both are cherishing the moments that they have. The fights are bitter yet sweet because you know these two are too self-aware to miss the bigger picture, but they’re human and they act irrationally out of pain or pressure.

With Restless, Van Sant traverses a middle ground between his experimental arthouse films like Elephant and his mainstream hits like Milk, and he succeeds wildly in bringing out the best of both worlds. The emotions are clear and straightforward, and yet it remains unconcerned with cliché or bound by the predictable parameters of the mainstream box office.

I have to admit that I cried during a majority of this movie. I identified with the characters so strongly and thought the story so glorious and tragic, so messy and yet life-affirming. I truly connected with it.

Note: This small, low-budget film debuted at your source for independent cinema: AMC 42nd street.

Cliff Martinez

2011-11-17T01:15:00.005-05:00

Two of the best films so far this year are Drive and Contagion, and each film is scored by Cliff Martinez, who was once the drummer of Red Hot Chili Peppers. The music in both films plays a crucial and powerful role in making the stories resonant and impactful.

The shoegaze-nightclub vibe of Martinez's score for Drive oozes style and goes very far toward creating an indelible identity for the film. It's hard to separate Drive from Martinez's music. (I must point out he didn't write everything that is used in the soundtrack, but Martinez edits and mixes them with his original compositions to create a seamless symphony, and one big throb.)

Contagion relies almost as heavily on its score as Drive, propelling the drama forward with pulsating urgency. Director Steven Soderbergh often dramatically drops all other sound from the track and lets the beats and mysteriously beautiful minimalist piano carry us. The rhythm is like a heartbeat and the repeated hooks grow throughout each segment, gradual but steady, like a virus.

I've long been a fan of Martinez's scores for Soderbergh's The Limey and Solaris. In a way Martinez is lucky to have found such wonderful collaborators as Soderbergh and Nicolas Winding Refn, who so skillfully use his music. It rather feels like they built their movies around the music, so integral is it to the respective films' construction. This is good for all of us. Look for his name in the future. I'm rooting for an Academy Award.

Drive

2011-11-15T22:03:00.003-05:00

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) - A woman sued the distributor of Nicolas Winding Refn’s genre-bending anti-thriller Drive because it wasn’t the Fast and the Furious-type action film she expected. She also sued the theatre where she saw it. “There was very little driving in the motion picture,” she said. This rather amazing bit of news item is relevant because Refn’s film does indeed consistently undermine expectation. After a completely riveting action sequence opening, with getaway driver Ryan Gosling deftly outmaneuvering a swarm of police in downtown Los Angeles, the film becomes an eye-rollingly swooning-heart love story, and then unexpectedly slo-mo’s into a study of hyper-fetishized violence. I actually hated it for the majority of the picture. And then it ended. And the ending was so satisfying and it made me understand the entirety of the picture in a way that suddenly made sense. It’s hard to explain what the film is about. It’s not a very “heady” picture. But it gets to your gut. It is able to articulate a strangeness and a slow-burning horror at the inhumanity of man that stays with you, long after you see it.

Also, it is one of the best composed and blocked films I’ve ever seen. Mr. Refn has a unique ability at putting together a scene.

Eyy, Amigo!

2011-11-15T21:20:00.003-05:00

Amigo (John Sayles, 2011) - I’m not very familiar with John Sayles. I saw Lone Star, a critically acclaimed Western in the mid-90’s with Matthew McConnaughey, and thought it was dull, and lost interest in him. I gained interest recently due to his tender,

intelligent short episode of Paris Je T’Aime, so when I heard he had made a movie about the American invasion and occupation of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, I was eagerly excited to see it. This is a topic that is hardly spoken about, but it should be, as it prefigures the same situations we found ourselves in later in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We invade a country promising to liberate its people from an oppressive regime, and then stay there, installing military rule in order to hang onto power.

Not that you would get any sense from Amigo of the relevance or importance the occupation of the Philippines has to our sense of nation and its legacy. The film, focusing exclusively on the banal and overly general happenings in one occupied village, is the epitome of dull. There are some complex moments involving a son who hides out in the forest with the rebels as juxtaposed with the father who remains as the leader of the small community, but they are rendered so lifeless and nonspecific by the performances and direction. The American soldiers start out as cartoonish and become more nuanced, capable of bouts of human understanding, but for the most part remain self-interested and loutish. Filipinos seem like genuine, salt-of-the-earth type people, and they don’t like it when they are militarily occupied, beaten, and their babies are killed in the crossfire. And that’s it. That’s the meat of the story. That’s as revelatory as it gets. This is a real shame in light of the subject matter. And it takes forever to make these small, rather simple-minded points.

Note: This small, low-budget film debuted at your source for independent cinema: AMC 42nd street.

The Man Nobody Knew

2011-10-05T22:21:00.001-04:00

The Man Nobody Knew (Carl Colby, 2011) - The Man Nobody Knew is a new documentary covering old material – the Vietnam war, Nixon, the CIA – that somehow managed to make me see things from a fresh perspective. By “things” I mean how America thinks of itself. The film isn’t supposedly about this. Supposedly, the film is about a son’s personal quest to understand his deceased father. The father in this case is former CIA director William Colby, who also implemented the Phoenix Program in Vietnam when he was the Chief of the CIA's Far East Division. The search to discover the “true” William Colby comes across as half-hearted, and it is awkward how the interview subjects keep referring to Colby as “your father,” acknowledging the relation of the interviewer. But the question of how America thinks of itself, and how political movements and forces shape American government, resonates today in our epically fluctuating political environment.

The question “Who really is William Colby?” is the wrong question. In my eyes, Colby isn't a cipher, and the conceit presumes some layer or complexity of character in Colby that we never get to.

But the strengths of the film are many, including the enlightened choice to depict in depth the critical moment at which our presence in Vietnam turned morally bankrupt and inextricable: the overzealous, and frankly criminal, actions of President John and Chief of Staff Robert Kennedy in support of a coup d’état against the President of South Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm. The moral high ground shattered, suddenly the US had to take full responsibility for the survival of South Vietnam, and the tanks started rolling in. Carl Colby remarks that this was not the same war his father had been fighting before.

Colby went on to become CIA Director under Nixon, and then, in the midst of strong anti-government sentiment in the mid-70’s stemming largely from the Left, and as a result of a big scoop in the press thanks to a slip of the tongue by President Gerald Ford in front of a journalist, was brought before an inordinate number of Congressional hearings on the secret and possibly illegal activities of the CIA. Colby did what nobody could have predicted: he answered questions honestly, up until a point. The film enters very complex and nuanced territory here, successfully. Trust is the coin of the realm, and the truth builds trust. Yet, there are secrets, should they be revealed, that would undermine the very country everyone at those hearings (ostensibly) loved so much.

Contagion

2011-09-24T18:02:00.003-04:00

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) - Contagion is a great film with a misleading advertising campaign. It is not the Outbreak of 2011. It is great because it is really smart, and doesn't get distracted with stupid Hollywood clichés and blockbuster tropes. It asks intriguing and tough questions about the socio-political implications of an epidemic, and it doesn't care that mainstream audiences might be bored by its reality-based, scientifically plausible approach. As excellent films tend to do, it is holding up a mirror to our society, and asking big questions with no easy answers.

One thing in particular that I liked is how it portrayed institutional and governmental organizations across the globe. It is a superior depiction of complex organizational systems. In our scary political climate where the very idea of government is under attack from the Right, Contagion nobly tries to change the terms of the dialogue. Global problems can and should be addressed on a global scale, in coordinated fashion.

The extremes of the Right and the Left merge in the zone of conspiracy theory, a phenomenon that I feel can best be described as an unfortunate mental disease. Globalism, which for rational people is just a fact of modern life as a result of the natural evolution and growth of social systems and technology, for conspiracy theorists is a plot put in motion by an elite class of super-rich trying to control every aspect of human life so as to make profits. In Contagion, Jude Law plays one such conspiracy theorist, and his crackpot ideas, combined with a climate of fear and the massive microphone of the internet, has the potential to do serious harm through misinformation.

Contagion isn't a perfect dramatic picture, but it is brave and intelligent and concerned about the course of society. Just don't go expecting a typical Hollywood blockbuster.

Glee Sucks Blog

2011-09-24T15:59:00.004-04:00

Last week was a big week of premieres for television, Glee included. Another premiere was that of gleesucks.com, and it was an impressive season 3 debut for the hater site. They revamped their comment system and rewrote their Mission Statement. The writing seems to have gotten a bit sharper and less sprawling. With the changes, I better understand why I instinctively was drawn to this site, not just because I agreed with the premise, and not just because it is fun to hate and most of the time the jokes land hard, but because it is a rare instance of deep thinking about TV storytelling in the popular world, a rare instance of taking the utter crap on television and actually thinking about it in the context of the REAL WORLD. From bullet point 3 of their new Manifesto:

3. Glee is a movement, but in the shallowest ways possible.

Glee has been very effective in forming a community of people who feel defined and validated by the show. A perfect example is a recent email we received:

I love Glee because all my life I’ve been completely tormented and Glee understands what it’s like to be an outcast. When people hate Glee, it’s like they are screaming in your face, “You suck! You are a fake! You’re just a loser!” Glee makes me feel like I’m apart of something, you know? Glee encourages to always like who you are, and you can think what you want- I won’t try to change your opinions, but I hope that you can see why some of us depend on Glee so much. It’s our voice.

More than anything, that email crystallizes what we really dislike about this whole “movement”. Fans tend to use the show to define themselves, and thus they feel that any attack on the show is an attack on them.

To these fans, we say: Don’t let Glee be your voice, because it doesn’t stand for anything. Glee is at its core, simple consumerism. The entire point of the show is to sell, and any kind of art or comedy gets homogenized[1] and pureed[2] into something palatable to the masses.

Senna

2011-09-11T14:18:00.004-04:00

Senna (Asif Kapadia, 2011) – Senna is a sports documentary of the type you might find on cable television: straightforward, to-the-point, crowdpleasing. Sometimes these documentaries can be exceptional because the stories themselves are so dramatic and the approach to the material is so simple. I stumbled upon Assault in the Ring late night on one of the ESPN channels, and that story continues to haunt me to this day. Senna is a better film than that, with a deeper emotional center and a story with undeniable mass appeal. There’s a reason it’s made it all the way to a limited theatrical release with a small but smart promotional campaign behind it.

American audiences will benefit from knowing nothing or next to nothing about Ayrton Senna. So, I will try to reveal as little as possible. Senna was a Formula One driver, proudly representing Brazil at the sport’s most elite level. The filmmakers tell his story without any voice-of-god narration nor any shots that were set-up by a camera crew. It is 100% archival footage, with new interviews from people who were there, helping us interpret the images. These people are identified with text on the screen, and nothing more. The filmmakers keep their own personalities as far in the background as possible. The choices they make are so sharp, and the fact that this footage exists, that this story really happened, almost seems too good to be true. Documentaries are often re-enacted or stylized in certain ways, or they are just talking heads, because the primary footage of the events depicted doesn’t exist. Ah, but here, we see it all happen before our eyes. Ayrton Senna is a quiet, contemplative, yet utterly noble and confident person. He carries himself in a way where his emotions are played out all over his face. The filmmakers didn’t have to resort to tricks or testimony from others for us to feel like we know Senna.

So, yes there is an element of luck here. I don’t know much about Asif Kapadia, and perhaps with different, less-amazing material, he would struggle to put together a great film. But this is just speculation. What I do know is Senna is a great film, one of the best I’ve seen this year.

(Assault in the Ring is very unsettling, but if you're interested here's the link.)

Tabloid filmmaking

2011-09-11T14:11:00.002-04:00

Tabloid (Errol Morris, 2011) – Errol Morris is a deconstructor of talking-head documentaries. He uses each character’s testimony as a means of calling into question the narrative put forth by the others. Morris cuts his films so as not to prejudice us too much one way or the other, and the effect is that we get a uniquely unreliable sense of what the Truth is. The supreme example of the Errol Morris style is The Thin Blue Line, because the story in that film is so dramatic and moving it counteracts the coldness left by Morris’s clinical approach to the material.

Tabloid is about a mixed up young woman who falls in love with a Mormon. They make plans to get married and have a family. Then he runs off to the UK on missionary work. She claims he was abducted by his fellow Mormons. So she tracks him down and abducts him for three days, tying him to a bed and having her ways with him. Or perhaps he went with her of his own volition, and the sex was consensual.

Unfortunately, Morris finds the story of the kidnapping beauty queen much more interesting than I do. Further, he fails to fully articulate a point-of-view regarding the value and phenomenon of tabloid journalism. Rather, his narrative is more like a catch-all, with Morris standing back and remarking how funny everything is, in a quasi-patronizing fashion. Morris interjects himself frequently into the telling of this story, using big block letters that say the exact thing that we are hearing the interview subjects say, a style that first came about in those Denis Leary Ford truck commercials. I hated those commercials.

I also hated the IBM commercials Morris has done over the last few years. There’s a forced-cuteness and personality-free element at work in his films that often are counteracted by the heaviness of his subject-matter. The lightness of the material here only brings out this negative trait.

Map of the Sounds of Tokyo

2011-09-11T14:08:00.004-04:00

Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (Isabel Coixet, 2010) – Coixet follows up her quietly powerful Elegy with this film about a young, sad, Japanese woman with an unusual career and the Catalan lover she meets in his wine shop in Tokyo. There is a narrator who never really comes to fit into the story, so he becomes nothing other than a barricade to our involvement in the narrative. Worse than this structural problem, Coixet seems most captivated by all the wonderous visuals Tokyo provides her, paying much less attention to the inanity of the words coming out of the characters’ mouths. It’s beautifully vapid, which is a shame because of how difficult and intelligent Elegy was. Map of the Sounds of Tokyo is like a bad student film, filled with longing glances, delicately composed shots filled with silences, with over-serious pretensions and no real, relatable emotions ever clearly articulated.

Apart at the Seams

2011-09-11T14:06:00.000-04:00

Coming Apart (Milton Moses Ginsberg, 1969) – Coming Apart, had it grown a following of any size at all, surely would be hailed by critics as a watershed moment in development of the American New Wave. Inspired to pick up a camera after watching the films of Antonioni and Resnais, Milton Ginsberg makes an experimental and self-reflexive narrative. Because it is borrowed heavily from his own life in New York, the film is intimate and personal, like a more penetratingly dark-honest version of the playful experimentalism of early Godard or Truffaut. Rip Torn plays Joe, a mid-30’s professional shrink who uses his office and the comfort of his therapy sessions as a means of getting into various women’s panties. We see a chronological series of scenes from a single, largely motionless camera which is hidden in a sculpture in the office. It’s Joe’s camera, and he knows it is there, while the women do not.

The film is unnervingly adult and willing to explore the psychological hang-ups and disturbing patterns of dependency and abuse that define the relationships between Joe and all of his women. No relationship is the same. Each reveals something more about Joe’s character, who is overly clever, selfish, and emotionally short-circuited. The film is also about New York, the kind of New York where smart young people go to have careers during the day and party wild at night.

Coming Apart is fascinating because it presages the webcam revolution and Big Brother, I suspect not because Ginsberg got lucky, but because he was tapped into a certain psychological obsession with filming oneself, knowing oneself, seeing oneself at his or her most desperate and naked (literally and figuratively). Unfortunately, Ginsberg seems as much interested in the conceit of his camera being a part of the diegesis than he is in the characters themselves. Ginsberg said part of cutting down the film from its initial epic length meant chopping down Torn’s long self-confessional monologue that comes about ¾ of the way through the film. While how Ginsberg treats the scene is quite interesting, he doesn’t let the scene play out. We don’t get the confessional monologue. Our failure to hear the cathartic breakdown of our central character leaves an emotional hole in the heart of the narrative, which prevents Coming Apart from being a truly great film.

Beats, Friends, and Captain America

2011-07-29T16:05:00.007-04:00

Manhattan Movie Marathon 2011

On Saturday, July 23rd, the heat index was through the roof, and it was a perfect day to spend in a movie theatre. So, my girlfriend and I decided there was no better place than our “source for independent cinema” – the huge multiplex at AMC 42nd St. (In a city with IFC Centre, The Sunshine, The Angelika, Anthology Film Archives, Cinema Village, and Film Forum, AMC’s claims of “independence” are audacious to say the least, and it is the irony of the situation that I find so appealing.) This past year alone we’ve seen Black Swan, Win Win, and Tree of Life at AMC, all of which were produced “independently,” though the last with a bloated budget reportedly in the $150 million dollar range. (At that level of cost, the meaning of the word “independent” grows a bit abstract.)

Beats, Rhymes, and Life (Michael Rapaport, 2011)

We started with Beats, Rhymes, and Life, the “independent” documentary from Michael Rapaport, that white dude with a thick Brooklyn accent and a knack for playing dumb guys in good films. Rapaport has a strange kind of streetwise charisma, and recently I half-jokingly hypothesized about putting together a Michael Rapaport film series (as a rival to that of Mark Rappaport, a truly independent, experimental filmmaker who worked in the 70’s through the 90’s). I could program True Romance, The Basketball Diaries, Kiss of Death, Cop Land, Small Time Crooks, Bamboozled, Big Fan, and Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks. I’d go see that film series! I could even throw in Deep Blue Sea as a midnight movie crowd-pleaser.

And now I could add to that lineup his directorial debut, a chronicle of a Tribe Called Quest, the pioneering New York rap group from the 90’s. Rapaport seems to be friends with all these guys, and the film has a wonderful offhanded, unpretentious quality. Rapaport seems to have chosen clips that feature his interview subjects at their most charismatic and performative, not at their most factual and buttoned-up (which is a common pitfall for

talking head docs). He makes the most of urban lingo and the Tribe’s specific style of speaking which is a large part of their appeal. Rap is a spoken word artform, after all. The whole thing hangs loose, in the best sense of the word, as it is entertaining as hell. We follow their rise and height of fame in the early 90’s with albums like The Low End Theory, and Midnight Marauders. We see the neighborhoods where they grew up, such an important factor in their lyrical content.

And just as you are riding along thinking this is a nice crowd-pleasing but fairly surface-y picture, it gets deep. The group has a falling out, gets back together after years of acrimony, and then has another falling out in front of Rapaport’s cameras. Scenes are intercut effectively and you fully understand Q-Tip and Phife Dawg’s respective positions and how collaboration can cause such friction. They are fully realized three-dimensional characters whose wishes and desires lead them to see past each other, and Ali Shaheed and Jarobi are like the kids who want to go cry in their corner because their parents won't stop fighting. Most importantly the film contains a subtle yet powerful message about the importance of music itself as a means of bringing people together, and how truly divine that pleasure can be.

The lights came up and I had a smile on my face, as did everyone else I saw around me. I realized I didn’t know how long the movie was, it meandered so pleasurably. 2 hours might’ve gone by but I wouldn’t have known or cared. I only hoped the next two films would be as good.

Friends with Benefits (Will Gluck, 2011)

Next up was the new “anti-romantic comedy” starring two talented hotties of the moment, Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis. The commercial for Friends with Benefits included a line I thought set up an appealing question: “Why don’t they make movies about what happens after the big romantic kiss?” The implication is that FwB would be that kind of movie – that goes into all sorts of messy and complicated anti-romantic areas of distrust and difficulty. This was my hope, and for the first 45 minutes or so the movie was snarky, sarcastic, self-reflexive, and funny, albeit a bit too cutesy and eager to make pop culture references.

But then, Dylan/Justin oddly invites Jamie/Mila to spend a week of vacation with his dysfunctional family in California in the house where he grew up, even though he claims to want to keep things at the booty-call level, the film goes off a cliff. Suddenly we’re dealing with early stage Alzheimers and heavily symbolic fears of heights and longwinded, meaningless, “deep” speeches of advice to the respective lovers from their single parents. Any pretense that this story might exist in the real world goes flying out the window. It stops being funny. It starts cynically exploiting the very things it mocked in the first 45 minutes.

Perhaps they went for complexity but hit dramatically inert instead. I really think this is a case of good intentions meeting lack of skills on the part of the filmmakers. They promoted the idea of distancing themselves from the standard romcom shlock, but had no alternative ideas of their own. So when we got to Act II it’s as if they threw their hands up in the air and said, “Fuck it, we’ll just do the clichés. Our intended audience won’t care, it’s already rebellious enough for them.” (As a side note, the subject matter was handled with greater maturity, intelligence, and hilarity in one 22 minute episode of Seinfeld.)

FwB represents a ritual sacrifice of good storytelling for the purpose of cynical marketing. It revels in pop culture name- and issue-dropping. The whole conceit is no deeper than a reference to the idea of causal sex, just as Woody Harrelson’s character is no deeper than a reference to the idea of mainstream acceptance of male homosexuality. It represents everything that is shallow and disgusting about the small-minded, insular world of mainstream capitalistic synergism. I really hated it.

Captain America (Joe Johnston, 2011)

Speaking of synergism, I returned once again to the Marvel Universe. After having laughed and shaken my head through the awful X-Men: First Class, my expectations were quite low. Actually, I came to realize that Marvel’s approach to the genre has made the quality of the individual film irrelevant. How the individual film fits into the Marvel Universe is what matters. And actually, there are 2 Marvel Universes, the Avengers Universe and the X-Men Universe. (Although, maybe I'm wrong about this, and where Spider-Man fits in, I’m not sure.) Captain America is the final piece of the puzzle Marvel has been building since the Ed Norton Hulk reboot. As in Iron Man 2, and I presume Thor, the film’s reason for existing seems merely as prelude to 2012’s big Avengers film where all the superhero characters get together and 12 year-olds around the planet get their parents to shell out $12 a pop.

See, the appeal of the Marvel movie is that of a franchise, of collectibility. “If Ed Norton won't be in the new Avengers movie, what was the point of Tony Stark showing up at the end of The Incredible Hulk!” “Is X-Men Origins: Wolverine out of canon because of discontinuity regarding the mutant Emma Frost?” “Is X-Men: First Class an origin story or a re-boot?” “I wonder who would win in a battle between the X-Men and the Avengers.” These are the questions weighing on the minds of the fanboy. The films themselves are almost irrelevant.

I complained extensively in my X-Men: First Class review that one of the regrettable aspects of these films is the fact they are waaaayyyy overplotted. And this has to do with the appeal I mention above. The more characters and little nuggets of plot you fit in, the more reasons the fanboys have to engage with the film in a way that is meaningful to them. Captain America, thankfully, is not overplotted.

I like Captain America as a super-hero. There’s something refreshing about how uncomplicated his heroism is. He is just doing what he thinks is right for his country because he is a genuinely good person. It’s World War II and the Nazi threat is a clear and present danger. There is no equivocating, there is no dark side to the character, there is no ruminating about what is right and what is wrong. It’s clean and simple. To me, this makes a lot more sense than, say, The Dark Knight. I mean, these are people who fight crime while wearing tights! Penetrating psychological analysis is discordant with the comic-book super-hero premise. At least for me. I know I’m in the minority here.

Now, of course academia and the film cognoscenti can rip this wartime propaganda for what it is, and certainly I would want viewers of Captain America to see the hypocrisy of a clean-cut, blond, blue-eyed patriot battling Nazism. But this film is not genuinely propagandistic; it is nostalgic for a time when such propaganda was prevalent and accepted. So, to me, this post-modern longing for an uncomplicated past makes the film interesting. And the top-notch retro art direction goes a long way to foster this feeling.

The film’s story is utterly generic, and not smart enough to fully exploit its nostalgic qualities. It explains everything it needs to plot-wise, in simplistic dialogue that mostly avoids being longwinded and forehead-smackingly tone-deaf (as in X-Men: First Class). The love interest has no depth nor relatably human characteristics, except for being attracted to hot dudes, and thus this part of the story falls flat. Despite their complete lack of spatial coherence, the action scenes worked on an impressionistic level, which I appreciated for saving us from getting further bogged down in plot which doesn’t really matter. Along the same lines, the villains (Nazi-spinoff Hydra and its leader The Red Skull) are given little depth. Johnston borrows from Speilberg’s Raiders of the Lost Arc and its supernatural mysticism combined with Nazis storyline. But beyond that, The Red Skull basically wants to take over the world because he thinks he’s a superior being. Simplistic, yes, but at least it has an airtight internal logic (unlike X-Men: First Class), and besides, didn’t Hitler try to do the same thing for the same reasons, in real life?

One final thought, about the 3D technology as employed in Captain America. Now, previously, the only film I had seen in 3D was Avatar. Avatar, while a stupid movie for lots of reasons, was a must-see for the technological breakthrough. It was gorgeous, a fully-rendered three-dimensional world. Captain America seemed like a world with 3 two-dimensional planes: foreground, midground, and background. It looked WEIRD. I wish I had seen it in 2D. Are all non-Avatar 3D films like this?

His name was Nim Chimpsky

2011-07-21T16:35:00.002-04:00

Project Nim (James Marsh, 2011) – James Marsh’s first film since his Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire follows the dramatically up-and-down life of a chimp who was raised exclusively with humans. A group of linguists in the 1970’s at Columbia University, led by Herbert Terrace, set out to prove that a chimp could learn language if raised among people who would care for him and constantly use sign language. The chimp was named Nim Chimpsky because the purpose of the experiment was to challenge Noam Chomsky’s assertion that humans were uniquely capable of language. Alas, in the end, Terrace acknowledged that Nim never learned grammar and used the signs he learned merely to beg for whatever he wanted.

Oddly, Marsh’s film never mentions Chomsky nor Nim’s full name nor much of the academic context in which the Nim project was situated. Instead, we learn about every person who came to work very closely with him and to love him. They were mostly women, each with their own agendas, ideologies, rivalries and allegiances. Marsh does a nice job of revealing the man-made chaos surrounding Nim’s life, and finding seriously mistaken mentalities in nearly all the constantly rotating cast of humans involved. Terrace himself comes across quite negatively as cold, arrogant, womanizing and a sloppy scientist. The women kept seeing a human soul in a chimp’s body, which did nothing but cause shock and confusion when Nim’s aggressive chimp instincts kicked in.

The project was flawed from the outset. “It was the 70’s,” remarks one of the women in Nim’s childhood, in defense of the pot-smoking, free-loving, no-rules environment in which Nim grew up. How can you raise a chimp like this and expect to be able to carry out rigorous training and experimentation? When the project abruptly ends, Nim is forced to interact with chimp society for the first time, and the depth of Nim’s stunted growth becomes clear. He is not human, but not ready to be a social chimp. The humans who loved him created an environment in which Nim grew dependent on an individual, only to have that individual ripped away from him, to be replaced with another on whom he’d grow dependent. Nim had the capacity to remember each face, and each betrayal, to the day he died.

The story of Nim is fascinating, especially for what it says about New York humans in the 70’s and their ego-driven short-sightedness. Marsh lets the story unfold in chronological order, largely keeping out of the way, which is kind of the problem. The story needs to be interpreted more strongly. Too much here is left to the audience to draw meaning. Often the movie is just getting a powerful theme going, and then the plot turns, and suddenly it’s about something totally different. It needed more clarity, more directed thematic development. That being said, for all its flaws, the subject matter alone makes Project Nim well worth seeing.

X-Men: I'm Bored

2011-07-07T22:08:00.006-04:00

X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn, 2011) - At best this movie is redundant and unnecessary. At worst it takes the first film’s somewhat nuanced themes of outsiderness and social bigotry and makes them dumber and more simplistic. The big divide between the mutants in this film is that one side literally wants to murder all of humanity, and the other side doesn’t want to do that. Somehow Mystique gets convinced to join the side that wants to kill all of humanity, even though she seemed like a perfectly nice person with feelings and compassion during most of the movie.

There are many sins in this “prequel,” and I will try to summarize. It is far too self-serious. It is not funny at all. The details of the Cuban missile crisis in this film differ dramatically from the one that really happened, and its use as a plot device is curious as no significant metaphorical parallels are teased out. (By the way, much, much better films have already tackled the absurdity of Mutually Assured Destruction – Dr. Strangelove anyone? That this classic masterpiece is evoked in this film is unfortunate as any comparison would be unfavorable.)

The dialogue is sometimes serviceable, but often completely tone deaf. As an example of the poor writing: Xavier gets shot in the spine and we hear him repeat, “I can’t feel my legs.” We immediately dissolve to the next scene where the human CIA love interest for Xavier (who manages to be simultaneously ludicrous and boring) asks him how many mutants he expects to enroll at his school once he’s “up and running.” This as she’s wheeling him around in a wheelchair! She then leans in to kiss him for the first time, again after he gets paralyzed from the waist down! What timing!

Another classically atrocious line comes after Xavier unveils Sebastian Shaw’s grand evil plan to destroy the world. He looks to his colleagues and deadpans: “This is going to be significantly harder than we thought.” Wow what a stiff!

The motivations of the 'bad guy' are somewhat unclear. If he really believes in the brotherhood of mutants and is willing to slaughter humans so as to make way for “evolution” (this guy failed science class I guess), why is he willing to sacrifice all the innocent mutants who will die in the World Nuclear War? Also, if Shaw can turn himself into a nuclear weapon, why doesn’t he just do that to begin with and hold the world ransom, rather than all these backroom deals and payoffs and threats with military brass to engineer a complicated conspiracy which brings forth Nuclear War, provided the USA and USSR act in accordance with their philosophy of deterrence? Seems like this would be the behavior of a desperate human being, without superpowers. If Shaw (or even Magneto for that matter) wants to destroy all of humanity, why doesn’t he just go around and kill everyone? Both of these mutants are powerful enough to kill any human being really easily. Sure it’ll take some time to get to everyone, but persistence, guys! It pays off! A little coordination, a secret underground lair somewhere in Antarctica – and I don’t see any army being able to stop them.

These childish movies that divide sides up into Good vs Evil… it is very difficult in such a black and white world to depict reasons why a character might switch from Good to Evil. Empire Strikes Back is the best example of this because it is relatively morally complex, dark, depressing, discouraging. And that film doesn’t even end on a conversion, just the convincing possibility of one. X-Men: First Class is more like Revenge of the Sith, which also fails to provide convincing reasons for a Good person to turn to Evil, and instead just made Hayden Christiensen scowl more and more in each successive scene and hoped we didn’t think too hard about it. In X-Men: First Class, the screenwriters avoid any moral complexity or difficult conversion to Evil altogether. Magneto seems to have always been bad, at least after the initial scene at the Nazi death camp, and was just playing along with the good guys because he needed a telepath to help him kill Sebastian Shaw, and steal his neat hat.

Xavier’s character considers himself everyone’s wiser, more just older brother, and treats everyone around him with an aura of smug contentedness. (The screenwriters’ lame attempt at depicting him drinking and flirting at bars is unintentionally hilarious.) It’s amazing anyone can stand him. I guess his pad is pretty sweet, so the others might be pretending to like him just for the sweet digs.

Other than being completely lame, Xavier’s beloved sense of morality seems to surface only whenever it is convenient for him and he sees an opportunity to talk down to his colleagues. One minute he is controlling a Soviet commander’s mind to make him blow up another Soviet ship, but in the next, when Magneto has Shaw, the chief architect of the Evil Plan to Destroy the World, cornered, Xavier begs and pleads with Magneto not to kill him! What, does he just want to put him in jail? The mutant who just turned himself into a nuclear weapon???? This is a (stupid) way for the filmmakers to avoid the messy questions of “collateral damage” and the “greater good” by allowing Xavier’s hands to stay clean. Sure, that boat was full of dead humans as opposed to alive ones (at the hands of one of the “bad mutants”) but Xavier didn’t really know that. But it’s enough for this pandering, simplistic film that we know he didn’t actually kill anyone innocent.

The plot pacing is strange. Why not try to stop the nuclear conspiracy when they first discover it in Russia? Instead they take months off to “train”, letting the plot to bring Soviet nukes to Cuba move forward before stepping in literally at the very last minute before the Nuclear War is to begin.

By the way, the “training” montage is hilariously stupid. First, the mutants can’t control their powers. Then Xavier tells them they can control them. And so after a few more tries, the mutants can then control their powers. It just took a little overbearing insistence from their self-anointed leader.

There’s an early scene where Magneto is in Argentina stalking escaped Nazis. He enters a bar, and the trifecta of actor Michael Fassbender, Nazis, and a wooden bar instantly recall Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, another association that this film should loath to conjure. At the end of the film I thought back on it as the only interesting scene. But at the time of watching it I felt it was too fast and boringly shot, and thus diluted of its potential power. I pined for QT’s direction. It needed more intensity of emotion. Fassbender was great in this scene and easily the most compelling actor in the film. Jennifer Lawrence was simply horrendous. Watching her scenes with Fassbender was cringe-inducing, as they were completely out of balance.

Like most films from the Harry Potter series, and other poorly constructed adaptations of long, detailed novelistic stories, X-Men: First Class has way too much plot crammed into 2 hours. The film is completely filled with exposition yet still maddeningly confusing about basic turns of plot. It might be hard to pick up on how much of the plot doesn’t work at all because it moves so goddamned fast and we are distracted by all the explosions. But, even the action scenes were boringly shot, so it doesn’t work on that level either. The screenwriters didn’t know what was good about it, so they just leaned on introducing a ton of mutants and demonstrating their abilities, which might be good enough for the fanboys, but not for someone who cares about filmic storytelling.

Duel

2011-07-06T20:50:00.005-04:00

Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971) – An ordinary man gets out on the highway for an important business meeting. He has a little trouble passing a pollution-spewing truck. Soon a normal bit of road rage turns into something more sinister, as the truck appears to stalk the driver. Spielberg slowly turns the screws, building suspense through camera angle, pacing, and sound effects. The evil truck is shot from low angles, always creeping up into frame at the last second without being noticed, realistically an impossible task given how large, slow-moving, and noisy the vehicle actually is. Realistic or not, Spielberg’s employment of the visual language of cinema is impressive even in this earliest film of his.

One can also see the development of thematic preoccupations. Clearly Spielberg is interested in the idea of an ordinary man placed in extraordinary circumstances (which shows up again and again, most recently in War of the Worlds). Spielberg’s interest in the family unit and the effect of a father’s actions on his children shines through in the short scene of the man’s wife and kids, as he makes a phone call home to say he might be late for dinner. Duel prefigures Jaws in its depiction of normal people dealing with an unknowable death monster intruding on their lives. Spielberg knows the suspense is enhanced by keeping the monster off screen and instead allowing it to become mythologized and therefore scarier.

Duel is loved by film historians because it is a way to see Spielberg’s visual style in an early, stripped-down stage of development. It’s so minimal in concept and action-oriented, and there is so little dialogue, I’m sure it has been held up by some as an example of “pure cinema,” a term that attempts to identify films that exemplify cinema’s unique properties.

Duel may be “pure” but it is not “good.” There is a dystopic vision lurking somewhere beneath this story, where seemingly decent, everyday people irrationally turn on our stalked and innocent protagonist, whose plight is increasingly boxed-in. Scorsese's After Hours is an excellent example of this kind of depiction of dystopia, and there are others. But Spielberg just doesn’t have that darkness in him to pull it off. Instead the movie amounts to little more than a genre exercise, and a silly one at that. I kept wondering over and over why the driver didn’t simply drive in the other direction. That meeting he’s going to sure must be important.

The Tree of Life

2011-06-17T19:04:00.014-04:00

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) - Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is a grand experiment in form, and for the most part it is wildly successful. This film is a fever dream, a stream of consciousness that pushes the form to such an extreme as to leave one breathless at the innovation and mastery of visual language on the part of Mr. Malick. It’s hard to think about what Malick achieves with The Tree of Life and not think that a gauntlet has been passed down to all other films. “This is what you can do with a camera. Can you match that?”

The conceit of The Tree of Life is undoubtedly ambitious. Malick is attempting to put all of human existence into perspective, informed by a sense of spiritual connectedness with nature and everything through all time. The plot involves the lives of a family of three boys. We hear the spiritually inquisitive thoughts of the oldest, both when he was about 12 years old growing up in Waco, Texas, and when he is older, some sort of business executive wearing suits, crawling around skyscrapers. We also hear the inner thoughts of the father, played by Brad Pitt, who struggles to succeed in business while raising his boys to be tough and learn to fend for themselves in a harsh world. We follow the boy through birth, learning how to walk, learning that he can possess things, learning jealousy, learning violence, and finally learning how to love and respect. In Sean Penn’s older incarnation, we hear regret, confusion, fear of death, and further questioning of God. “Is there nothing deathless?”

Finally, and most controversially, we witness the beginning of time, from the big bang to the first signs of life on earth, to dinosaurs and the meteor that wiped them out. One gets the sense Malick is biting off more than even he can chew. I personally don’t understand the need for all the undersea shots of protozoal organisms (this isn’t a science course) and the presence of CG dinosaurs is aesthetically jarring, given all the gorgeously intimate camerawork throughout the rest of the picture. But, putting the rest of the film in this context informs how we should relate to the human story. It's completely audacious, and understandably these sections will draw ire from some quarters. I definitely think the evolutionary opening can be trimmed, and the ending, which logically should take us to the end of time, is a bit stupid and definitely overlong, but without these visual ideas, the film would be a much less challenging experience, and I expect to grow to like these sections upon repeated viewing.

But, even in my first viewing, I grew to be quite tolerant of the film’s excesses because I was sitting there completely enraptured by the weight of Malick’s achievement with his camera when he focuses on the human story. He approaches the material as if from the POV of God. The camera floats in and out of scenes, and we catch a line or two, that feel completely natural, but singularly perfect for understanding what that scene is in the big scheme of things. There is an extreme dearth in dialogue, and many shots of characters speaking but without us hearing the words. Instead, we hear some sort of droning hum or naturalistic ambiences, or better yet, one of the several gorgeous pieces of classical music Malick has selected. This keeps our mind on the big picture, connecting scenes separated by time and circumstance, thus expressing the spiritual connectedness that animates the film.

The aesthetic works with the inner thoughts we hear – questioning God – and also with Christian elements of the plot. We attend a church service and the pastor asks the question, “Are we not in God’s presence when he we see him turn his back?” The characters, along with the filmmaker, are Christian, but the spirituality of the film is universal. I would say Malick is evoking the Japanese concept “mono no aware” – a gentle sadness at the passing of all things. Malick leans into the specific but then, constantly, jumps off the specific and flies into an exploration of the universal. It is universality through specificity, and thus grand perspective.

Malick is able to coax unbelievably naturalistic performances from the boys. The camera is almost always outfitted with an extreme wide lens, and hovers close to characters faces, so we have the effect of instantly understanding a POV and the environment in which that subjectivity is formed. But then the camera floats to a different character. It is a mutable intimacy, which comes closer to achieving the spiritual effect and God-like perspective than the bookends Malick uses to place us in an evolutionary übertext.

The Tree of Life is not perfect, and not just because of the bookends. The film needs to be cut down. Yes, I’m sure it was utterly painful for Malick and his editors to cut a single frame from this gorgeous work, but it needs it. There is too much repetition of story elements, which ironically leaves it feeling rather thin in parts. I say ironically because of how damned ambitious it is in its plotting. But, in terms of unique "story ideas," there's not quite enough here to hold the running time. This is a problem that can and should be fixed with additional editing.

There are a few other films like this. Tarkovsky's The Mirror is definitely apt - and similarly masterful. Kubrick's 2001 is an obvious comparison, but only when comparing the bookend sections which I believe work the least well. Last year’s Enter the Void was similarly ambitious, with the floating camera, the formal innovation, and the obsession with spiritual concepts. However, Gaspar Noé’s film is juvenile and gets off on punishing its viewers with extreme noise. Malick’s film is far gentler, and the spiritual inquiry is far more penetrating. Its maturity is effortless and its seriousness is sincere.

Alice...

2011-06-16T18:23:00.002-04:00

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974) – This early film from Martin Scorsese (made after Mean Streets but before Taxi Driver) is a testament to Scorsese’s powerful direction, regardless of subject matter. (It's on my short list for best Scorsese films of all time.) Alice (Ellen Burstyn) is caught in a strained relationship with a working class, perpetually angry husband. Her son Tommy is a smart-alecky, precocious, pain-in-the-ass ten-year-old who doesn’t respect his simple-minded father, and acts out his frustrations by pushing his mother’s limit. Alice is desperately trying to keep the family unit from exploding every night over dinner, while at the same time keeping a happy face in case her husband feels frisky in bed, something he’s been all too infrequently lately. On some level she still loves her husband, but ultimately can’t hide her misery.

All of this plot comes merely from the opening 15 minutes with efficient, potent scenes set up by Marty and executed with a flawless cast. For such complex material to feel so completely real and understood on an instinctual level in such a short amount of time is impressive. The quality of filmmaking never falters beyond this opening, as Alice and Tommy hit the road for Monterrey, where Alice had a singing career before meeting the man who would become her husband. Her life in pieces, she’s searching to recapture the happiness she once felt. The relationship Marty builds between Alice and her son is very sharp. I myself can identify with it. Their repartee is a form of subtle rebellion for them both. There is much unspoken between the two of them.

Now, from my opening description, you might think it were a bleak, sobby melodrama. But, it’s actually got a great sense of humor, and Alice’s jokes and gentle ribbings belie the deep-seeded disappointment she feels. It’s a beautifully complex use of humor with drama, perhaps the best such use I’ve yet to come across in a film.

The film is not at all pretentious, it’s just smart. These are jaded, down-to-earth people used to disappointment. They can find humor in the small moments of life, but they are also tested when things begin to bubble out of control. There is great chaos in the film, not just in the opening domestic scenes, but also at Mel’s Diner, the setting for the TV sitcom spin-off Alice. In these scenes and many others, I was laughing through my tears.

The opening shot is a twisted vision recalling Alice in Wonderland, with dirty language and hellish red skies. It’s a subversion of those idealistic youthful dreams, a dose of reality puncturing the dreamfactory of Hollywood. Things don’t always work out, kid, get used to it. Why, you ask? Cuz a dame’s gotta make a buck, that’s why.

Oscar Voting Changes... again

2011-06-15T13:16:00.008-04:00

Oscar voting rules have changed again, this time affecting how they nominate films (not how they pick the final winners). Just 2 years ago they expanded to 10 nominees, and implemented a preference voting system that gives a more complete picture of a film's support than simply the one with the most first place votes.

This time, they are only awarding nomination to films that have at least 5 percent of first place votes in the initial tally. The exceptions are that if there are fewer than 5 nominees with 5 percent of the vote, they will pick a total of 5, and with more than 10 nominees with 5 percent, they will pick only 10. But they don't want a situation where they are nominating a film with much less support than the other films just because they needed to get up to an arbitrary number like 10.

I'm happy with the change.

Resources: here and here.

Dogtooth

2011-06-01T23:56:00.000-04:00

Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2010) - White Ribbon is about a society perverted toward its more fascistic, vengeful and violent impulses. The behavior of authority figures in that film was horrible, but almost naively so. Forgive them father, for they know not what they do. In Dogtooth there is no society, only the insular world of the perverted family. And what the parents do to their children is monstrous, but lacking in motivation or context, which alienates me from the film.

What did bring me into the story was the children’s slow yet violent struggle toward real human emotional experiences. Their actions, as bizarre and frightening as they are, are manifestations of their deep and bitter discontent, which cannot be kept locked in a prison of rules, manipulations and lies, and bubbles to the surface in violent outbursts.

For a vast majority of the film, I hated it. As artfully directed and performed as it may have been, I felt there was not a sliver of recognizable humanity in the film. But as the end approached, my feelings began to change. The consequences for the children of the parents’ grave sins come full circle in an emotionally satisfying, though ultimately unresolved, way. After an hour and a half of carefully composed shots from a tripod, we see our first handheld camera work, of a panicked father searching in the dark, at the very end of the film. Suddenly I realized, this is a horror film, and should be thought of as such.

Imagining a Perpetually Perfect Past

2011-05-31T23:09:00.007-04:00

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011) - There’s something profoundly comforting, if overly familiar, about Woody Allen’s consistency. Regardless of what is happening in the real world, be they disasters nuclear or financial or environmental, or the rising popularity of soul-deadening reality TV and American Idol, every year or so there will be a movie about a writer falling in and out of love, worried about his career and his happiness. The consistency is part of the charm of Woody’s films, and also part of the point (something like, art is timeless?). Also part of the charm is that Woody is always dealing with the big questions – love, sex, death, art, the meaning of it all. Whether the individual film is satisfying depends largely on whether the conclusions he finds avoid wallowing in the protagonist’s narcissistic fatalism without making the moral message adequately complex.

Midnight in Paris is the latest feature from Woody, set in Paris, starring Owen Wilson in lieu of Woody himself, who fits nicely in his shoes. Rachel McAdams is his fiancée, and the film’s biggest flaw. McAdams’s character is treated as a piece of trash. It is one of the most hateful characterizations of a woman in a Woody film. There have been plenty of women in previous films of Woody’s that have taken their fair share of abuse from the protagonist, but usually the protagonist’s own insecurities and personality flaws are laid to bare as well, undermining the hateful portrayal of the woman. This is not the case here. Wilson’s character is let completely off the hook, and McAdams’s character is manipulative, shallow, cruel, and quite boring. This is troubling because McAdams is such a wonderful talent, and because it speaks to how Woody feels about women generally.

Wilson’s character romanticizes the Paris of the 1920’s, in the form of artists such as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, etc., etc., all of whom spent time in Paris during the 20’s. Woody portrays them partying, womanizing, pontificating to each other about art, and otherwise living up to their legends. Woody explicitly and properly deconstructs the nostalgia for the past by having these characters also imagine a perfect past era (the 1890’s). Also undermining Wilson's nostalgia is Woody himself, who opens the film with a beautiful montage of present-day Paris streets. The overall point of the film is that we perpetually imagine a perfect past because life as it is is imperfect.

This point is smart and good, but the problem arises in how Woody romanticizes “the next woman,” the product of romantic lust which he never properly deconstructs here. The next muse in the form of a pretty young thing is what makes life worth living. Combined with the portrait of McAdams's deceitful, unfeeling fiancée, and it's the virgin/whore dichotomy, an uncomplicated cliché of the masculine psyche, exceedingly problematic because of all that we know about aging male artists and about Woody in particular. At his best (Manhattan), Woody acknowledges this trait (confusing animal lust with inspiration) as a flaw, and casts it in a charmingly naïve light. He fails to do so here, and the result is quite problematic.