Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). Credits. Returning to the original threesome means the best and worst of it, but at least that's an escape from the second threesome. J.J. Abrams is responsible, but he also brought in Lawrence Kasdan, who was largely responsible for Return of the Jedi, which is where the whole thing went downhill. No. 2 is no. 1, no. 1 is no. 2 and the other 4 tie for 6th. This falls in between, which is still, mercifully, somewhere above everything from Jedi after. Where it matches the best, Empire, is in its look. The best thing about this attempt at Star Wars is the graphic composition, which also means more interesting than sheer computer graphics. As I said about the second trilogy, there were posters that were more interesting than the movies themselves, did more in one stroke, and were also better than typical movie posters, which Star Wars usually has. Here, the images of Empire machinery, including star destroyer, as ruins in the desert, are the most compelling form of the ancestor worship, the nostalgia trip this is. The scene with light sabres at night in the snow -- for just that, for the color, the lush tones, the contrast -- accomplishes the same with modern composite image, green screen and CG, as the way Empire did with lots of matte and composite shots with the special effects of its day: you can say, in even older terms when they were called lighting photographers, it looks well lit. The night snow scene with that more composed pictorial dramatic quality gives an air to the whole light sabre, Jedi confrontation, that perhaps the series never had from the beginning: something more like the best comic books or graphic novels, or like Kurosawa, the way slower composition gives drama besides or better than kinetic or sheer action. But it's almost entirely the pictorial quality here. What's going on in the story is not as distinguished. The worst part of this movie is the same kind of ham-handed adulation as Jedi, though it doesn't reach that degree. The idea of giving us newcomers, outsiders, also stand-ins for us, who then lead back to the original series characters, so that we discover what they're up to, is a nice idea. But it gets short-circuited. The sense of playground, excursion, leaping through space from one imaginary landscape to another, despite the ingenuity mentioned above, maps itself way too much to the originals, not only in the cookie cutter plot structure -- yes, remember, this began as a homage to serials, and in fact it's so many other pretensions that make it worse -- but in an overly eager way that smacks of pandering: the R2D2 replacement and a whole early action sequence with it are too Pixar; the update redo of the bar scene is a waste of effort (not to mention the new planets are mostly matches of the originals -- Jakka is not Tatooine?); we don't really need to see Han Solo still in action and one sequence is like something out of Firefly, while on the other hand the more sedate encounter with Leia is done in that horrible way of Jedi like stiff family photographs -- there's only one encounter that's carried off in a really good dramatic way; the suggestion, expressly by a line if you don't get it otherwise, of Darth wannabe can't avoid parodic connotation, even Spaceballs; and then it's the damned family thing again. Does one family run the fucking galaxy? The Sopranos in space? [12/29/15]
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Credits. To ask why another apocalypse movie, why another nuclear one when so many other kinds of apocalypse have made it obsolete, along with the 80s anarchic style or disregard for style, often just bad fad by the time it got to pop movies, and why one of the originators of the 80s style apopalypse (in 1979) would want to remake that now, might lead to a discussion of reasons for this obsession with apocalypse, pragmatic or symbolic, if it weren't such a tiresome cliche. The world really, practically may be going to Hell -- really is in ways, as always, now maybe more ways -- but the ridiculous CG conceit of playing it out over and over is something else. What George Miller has managed to do is almost beside the point. He's made something that transcends the genre, or perhaps a much broader swath of movies that would include biker gangs and car action and social allegories whether sci-fi or fantasy or just plain B or bad or camp (how many movies featured in Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- it's like imagination 101, this idea of society degree zero, George Orwell and William Holding notwithstanding). Miller, whether he's been making the same movie all his life or by just a happy accident, has hit the right way to do it. The whole thing is like a dream. He jumps in, doesn't dally in any of the exposition or even much dialogue that often kills these movies because of bad acting if not the strain of the premise. The action editing, with the moody sweeps but dispatch of the best trailer or montage sensibility, keeps the whole thing with its own oblique logic, and even when it droops into more silly action choreography convention, that comes off too as in a dream, ritual, absurd, the sense that imposes itself and we follow, in this case yanked along like the title character who has become an even more hollowed out center. This also allows the other thing that makes it great: the social dimension and pathos open up by discovery, as with Seven Samurai, still the model adventure film. The difference between a great story or a great movie isn't necessarily the premise, but the way it's told, and here action adventure, desperado, post-apocalypse, even social allegory, are done, both the script and execution, with the grace and compression of poetry or dance. You might find that incongruous, but this really is eloquence for all that: warlord men with their rigs fighting over oil enslaving women, spoiling the environment. Not so far-fetched nuclear or otherwise, cliche or not. Who killed the world? [9/2/15]
Event Horizon (1997). Credits. So slapdash and pastiche it doesn't seem to matter whether it's parody or horror, camp or straight. It's Aliens and 2001 and Solaris, but as glossy shock movie, with one big dumb stunt from The Shining, all as Omen III: The Final Conflict. [8/18/15]
Welcome to New York (2014). Credits. The straight walk-through style of this movie, a sort of minimal dramatization, fails at a lot of things, but one of them is Abel Ferrara's more typical excesses. It's not the silliness of things like 9 1/2 Weeks, or the less silly but still overwrought Bad Lieutenant. There's a curious counterpoint to the actual events -- this is based on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair -- that nothing is mentioned of who this character is in the movie -- perhaps Ferrara and company are banking on the notoriety of the movie as well as the events -- until well into it, and never that he's head of the International Monetary Fund. It's an oblique presentation, and in that way as if locating the drama in all the places not seen, only referred to, in the media coverage: the hotel rooms where the acts were committed, the service areas of hotel and police stations where the questioning and arrest occur, the jail cells, and a $60,000 a month apartment in New York which even in its finery stands for all the desolation in private. The scenes in this apartment are by far the best thing about the movie, and work almost by themselves. The same goes for Jacqueline Bisset's performance in these scenes. There's a candor to all her reaction that's striking, and in these scenes the low-key camera take creates the contrast that is the shorthand for all of this: all the expensively sparse design and appointments, the kitchen track lighting the characters wander in and out of with contrasting evocation of warmth and comfort and estrangement and isolation, at one point all the boxes and wrapped paintings of the moving lying around. We see these characters in the wings of their public, wealthy lives, and even the amount of money that provides ridiculous comfort for an accused criminal is of no use in dealing with the matter between them. Bisset's contrast is also to Gerard Depardieu. In these scenes, his shambling performance works as a pathetic foil to everything the Bisset character expresses about the situation. In the rest of the movie, Depardieu is too much Depardieu. Ferrara even knows this in a way, and adds a bit at the beginning where Depardieu appears to be talking in an interview as himself. His own recent scandal is hard to ignore and Ferrara seems to be inviting the consideration. But even Depardieu's hair, here, stubbornly doesn't fit into this portrait. However tawdry or saggy his own conceit has become, 70s or 80s artiste doing 19th century romantics doesn't even work as analogy for the veneer of the modern international mandarin (no matter what smattering of professor or socialist). That element is a glaring omission for just this treatment: we're seeing what's behind the scenes but not of that visage. [8/15/15]
Chance Enounter Bill
Idiocracy (2006). Credits.
Hard to Be a God (2013). Credits.
Chopper (2000). Credits.
I came to these movies by different paths, so I had no idea they would have a common theme. Idiocracy is a Mike Judge spoof of the declining intelligence of American society, cast into a future where reality TV sensationalism has taken over everything. It's a new middle ages living makeshift off the ruins and trash of the last technocratic, or even barely practical one. The intelligent don't have to be purged, they simply don't exist anymore, bred out by being outbred. When a perfectly average man of current times is frozen and wakes up in this 500-year extrapolation, the worst persecution they have for his being smarter is to say he talks faggy. Doing worse to him comes about for other reasons of their own stupidity. In Hard to Be a God, a 2013 Russian film version of a 1964 novel (there's also a 1989 film version that was a German-USSR co-production, with Werner Herzog as an actor), the projection is to another planet which is going through its version of Earth's middle ages, and the men out of time and place are Earth scientists who traveled there only to fall into the debauchery of despotism. Intellectuals -- whatever is objected to as that, of course -- are expressly being eradicated.
While Idiocracy is a jaunt through studio-set bleakness, make-up grime and shiny sweat-like slouchwear (disposable, pulled out of boxes in the wall like Kleenex), Hard to Be a God is a wallow in ambience, a mix of artifact collection and heavily applied makeshift. It's like a muckraker's medieval fair. Some authentic, or at least impressive, armor, swords, other effects, castles are mixed with carefully wrought squalor, clothes and shanties, all for location, then the actors slosh around in this together with the camera -- they often look right into it -- covered with water, mud, food, animals and carcases, flapping birds. The characters are constantly spitting out food and drink, or blowing snot out their noses (the obsession with the nose here seems intended, to suggest humanity has regressed to an earlier state, like pack animals). All this is like a Tarkovsky version of Touch of Evil, long takes with everyone crowding around the camera going in and out of frame. What it probably owes the most to is Bela Tarr, specifically Werckmeister Harmonies. That film is a far more effective phantasm of a degeneration into the arbitrary, mob or goon rule, and it also makes many more interesting rhythms out of its looming, tracking camera technique. Hard to Be a God goes on for three hours and its claustrophobic mise en scene becomes a heavy-handed conceit well before then.
Of course it's hard not to think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, too. The manic sort of anarchy there provides disjunction that's absurd, surreal, and allows figure and satire that American comedies almost invariably fail at because of one thing: being plotbound. This is not a sacrifice of acumen, as Holy Grail is also a portrait of medieval squalor, in the artistic direction as well as the humor, though it also varies its tone. The Black Knight scene is perhaps the most brilliant example of the combination of absurd exaggeration and photography suggesting renaissance painting. If you crossed Idiocracy, which has a lighter view even for the outcome, with Hard to Be a God, which is sort of like being drunk at a party with everyone in your face, you might get something like Holy Grail, sublimation of the savagery for the comment.
Chopper is closer to home in time in place, Australia mostly in the 70s and 80s. While not quite the middle ages past or future, it does show us something of the forces at work in the cultural battle, with its subject Mark "Chopper" Read having become a bestselling author in Australia writing from prison about his life as a career criminal. This is a dramatization of the story -- with Eric Bana as Chopper, and if you don't know about him prior to his American movie career, you might be surprised -- and the line that makes this point is also the one that cinches it thematically to the other movies here. Chopper says, "What about those poor bloody academics, those college graduates, battling their guts out to write some airy-fairy piece of exaggerated artwork?" One of those airy-fairy types got the last word: co-writer and director Andrew Dominik floats the interview and confrontation banality into another kind of theatrical focus, with lots of monochromatic effects. [8/7-8/15]
Red Knot (2014). Credits. Malick or Marker-like elliptical montage style is here not so much a liberation from plot or narrative dialog or dramatic realism, in favor of memory or evocation, as an avoidance of them or what they might develop or resolve. The kind of matter of fact that goes with Malick (brutally so in Badlands, for example) leaves other kinds of discovery. Whether plot is predictable becomes moot, and the bonus is often it's not. Here things are tilted so that you know where it's going. The whole thing is like a predisposition, and then that is not explored well, by the couple or the movie. The reconciliation is based on a concession, a discovery in name that is not elaborated. [7/18/15]
It Follows (2014). Credits. Such a great title opens the door for all kinds of play. Why not the terror of logic? Why not the monstrosity of the confusion of causality itself? Ah, but why bother looking any further when you can use low-key "indie" tactics for the repetition compulsion itself: perpetually rerun the effect, the spectacle at that level, the threshold play of arbitrariness, where the conveniently supernatural, what can defy any condition, is conveniently mastered by the spectator. Yes, these movies play out, or allow for it as easily as any symbol or signifier allows association beyond intent, sublimation, mastery and subjection, the haunting of the other and the switching off of the ghostly: the ghost is not just abject, not just other, but I am the ghost, also because of the other, the other of me, the other I am, that other that is I. How little that's cared for, no matter how much more artsy with the easiest and most obvious scare tricks, like ghosts stories at campfires -- and it really is suspense, just as "real" ghosts stories are, perpetually holding off the object, the carrot for the ass -- if anyone ever actually found bigfoot it would ruin it with banality, the phenomenon (and more literally for that word) would pass away as another new fad, into the boredom of the record, fact and science. If these chasers are supernatural, just appear anywhere, can walk through walls, etc., why don't they just get you right off? Appear right in you, possession accomplished? So it's suspense: the perpetually about to get you. [7/18/15]
Serpico (1973). Credits. It starts out scrappy and scattered, with odd, patchy music, but then you realize this is a movie compression of a biographical account, and then, that it's not going to be really about the police work itself so much as the conflict that occurs with Serpico and the corruption in the department. The way it's scripted, directed, and more than likely the way it's been cut down, it's loose, about as "open" in its own undoctored way as anything conscientiously so in 70s cinema, sort of staggering through its dramatization scene by scene. But this has a cumulative effect, and especially when it settles into the longer scenes about the drama in relationships. Serpico's own view is broadening. He's seeing a broader way to fit in, so much more that the police are out of touch with, with results not just for undercover work, but for social interaction and what the police are. For wanting to expand what fitting in is, he quickly becomes a misfit. Serpico's story, and this movie, may suffer from the same paradox, or parallax, as racism and corruption in general have since: obvious and anachronistic at the same time. We take it for granted as if we passed through all this, as if progress itself rendered all that obsolete like the 70s hair and clothes and cinematography. It plays like an old fashioned moral tale, or civics lesson -- like a lot of 60s and 70s movies do, e.g. All the President's Men -- the way 40s and 50s message movies, like Gentlemen's Agreement or The Best Years of Our Lives, did in the 70s. But these 70s movies, however much they popularized in their way, were not just about politesse and social convention, and their incongruence is almost that again now, where if not sheer reduction to protagonist and revenge fantasies and hyperbolic action, there's other kinds of stylization. With fewer exceptions, dramatic realism now leaves exposé to documentaries, or something as rare and exceptional as The Wire. [7/18/15]
Me and Orson Welles (2008). Credits. Richard Linklater directed this script by Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo that is more clever and involved than some of Linklater's other movies. It's a bit quaint, making a My Favorite Year out of Orson Welles, with hijinks having to motor it along, but it's observant enough that it actually makes a better version of that. Shifting the perspective to someone so incidental to Welles in part shows the cost or insensitivity, but it also shifts the perspective so that the concern for art is equated with this in Welles, as his ego, flaws and over-indulgence, and the alternative is a more innocent love of art. The scriptwriters are not extreme about this, not quite as schematic as fundamental v. sophisticated or degraded, but it's there. They're keen to show everyone having to negotiate this: the junior of wonderment to the boy wonder having his own ambition and fickleness; his amorous encounter is a particularly salty and quick lesson in grown-up love, and it's this moment that also shows how young he is and how un-boyish the character and the portrait have been otherwise; the success of the production of Caesar wraps up all the foibles in a triumphant moment for the art itself, that here is not simply melodramatic. So even the run-on pace works not just as hijinks, but also as offhand for what is not compromised in the observation of Welles and the other people involved. Citizen Kane is so unlike movies of its time that you don't notice this except by contrast to it's contemporaries because its innovation and developments are now assumed in movies in general. We don't have the same record of this for Welles's theater, so there's the ambivalence, or at least parallax, here, too, that locating it in another coming of age movie is a double upstaging. [6/1/15]
War of the Worlds (2005). Credits. The relative merits of this compared to the other adventure and sci-fi fare, and to Steven Spielberg's other fare, also serve as a reminder of how the 1953 movie was compared to its contemporaries. More reserved, a more direct line of action, little explication (it's like The Birds that way), this is much more undemonstrative. There's no overview, no swagger and bravado of things like Independence Day or even Spielberg's own stuff, certainly not like Minority Report or AI, but not even that of E.T. or Close Encounters. And for that, it's surprisingly some of the best work for both Spielberg -- emphatically including his attempts at the seriousness of drama like The Color Purple or Schindler's List -- and Tom Cruise. The situation of the main characters is so quickly caught up in the events that it's allowed to be offhand, indirect, dramatized and not brandished at us (the way the family stuff in Jurassic Park is and is the worst thing about the movie, turning dinosaur pandering into preaching). [5/31/15]
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Credits. With CG the movies are as malleable as the comics now, but they've also made the comics into their kind of formulaic. What we're going through all over again is the sort of outrageous scale that the comics got underway in the 50s when they boosted into sci-fi outbidding, and although Marvel tried to bring a more human scale in the 60s, it didn't stop them either from the grandiose that continued into the 70s. The superhero teams had to be the height of this, as the kind of antagonism required involved the fate of the universe in every issue, or multi-part series anyway. The Avengers is this outbidding in the movies. Joss Whedon has to take everything already outbid in the first movie (see The Avengers for what that is, for what these heroes represent too), each of the heroes own scale, then add a couple more, a super super villain to subsume the last one and all the mythic origin material, and another super thing out of that, etc. Tony Stark's ambivalence is a good bit, that general line used best by Watchmen, but here also made grander. All the quips that are like rewarding in-jokes have to really sum up the drama and twists of the heroes and their interaction and cramming all this in means it's at such a ridiculous pace, it's like a mini-series of trailers. And still it comes down to a superforce that is really fodder for the heroes, some goofy colossal impromptu technology, more super tech GUI, and crashing lots of skyscrapers. (Perhaps the one interesting thing here is that now 9/11 can be a cliche of evocation.) The more we want is always the same more. [5/23/15]
Harry Potter: The Whole Series. The tender loving overkill of Harry Potter. Whatever the books are like -- and they would never stand a chance on my reading list even if I wanted to check one out -- the movies represent them as definitive obliging juvenalia for the digital movie era. If Star Trek is science as magic, Harry Potter is magic as processed storytelling, pandering and contrived effect. The medieval trappings of witches and warlocks are not really updated in any interesting way, so much as pasted as easy stock, like a Halloween costume, on teen drama and CG effects, modern as they happen to be, no matter how thickly done so with the kind of artistic direction bent on spoiling children as consumers. The spatial paradox magical world is more steroidal Dickensian. Though it would also be passing this grandiose Hogwarts as meditation for teens on their passage to college, we see scarcely any learning of spells or potions or other arts, all the more glaring when stretched out over however many movies in the series. There's little to nothing in the way of clever or interesting exchanges of magic, like the counterplay of special powers in the X-Men movies or even in some Disney movies of the 70s. Instead there's a ridiculous sport, like Rollerball for broom riding, a glaring, oafish attempt to pander, and even that was done more cleverly as anthropomorphism in Bednobs and Broomsticks. The magic wands might as well be blasters from Star Wars and the whole thing is really like the modern version of a pinball game. The plot is as regulated a run of trouble brewing and escape as excuses for FX doodads. The dream of being a wizard or prince or princess really being a front for going to an upper class British school (conveniently made co-ed), or even that really being a member of the aristocracy, is hardly worth pointing out when there's the whole other mess of Harry as the messiah. [Up to and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, 5/16/15]
Under the Skin (2013). Credits. As with Christ, there is the tension of something that is supposed to be empathetic and beyond the scope of empathy. The tension of the example: belonging to the set and out of it; a sample and an exemplar. The tension of god become human is in the devotee's insistence on the beyond comparison, an even mad or impossible superlative resisting even the necessary comparison or analogy, and thus the terms of empathy. The analogy is not just the alien character here, if that's what she is, but the figuration itself, the analogy, the story, the movie. This kenosis (thus also The Man Who Fell to Earth, more later) also falls into that conundrum that this abject, absolute other, this exemplary beyond empathy, is also what is being empathized, like the attribution to objects, including the work of art. Another alien dependent on this consumption of humans. Human, all too human. Glazer and company's rendition of this story pitches the passer-by mundane against aesthetic abstraction, dropping the prosaic of plot and sci-fi exposition that even frames special effects. We're the journalist's man from Mars as a tourist in a foreign city. We are the alien. (Note how this works for Christ, in an angle perhaps not seen with the imitation.) The fact this is a woman preying on men, and Scarlett Johansson as this, has all sorts of remarkable empathetic contortions too (god became a man, even any man, thus being restrictive, and the other inclusive exclusion that makes, the exemplary of woman). But Glazer's emphasis on affect also becomes a reduction. The voyeuristic refinement that makes it cinematic, in the sense of of the experience of watching and fascination, the way movies like Vertigo or even The French Connection are more like silent movies, showing and not just telling, or declaiming with dialogue, also turns out to be a lack of development that makes alien Scarlett's descent into personal pathos feel like a droop into something much more conventional, even if that is The Man Who Fell to Earth. This makes some of the other affect feel misplaced, misused, the beach scene, for example, inordinate weight for a sci-fi premise, as if only as a special effect. The use of one passerby also seems unnecessarily exploitative, but this ripples back over the hidden camera tactic for all the unwitting actors. Glazer here (as opposed to Sexy Beast) is more like his contemporaries who learn all about affect and recreating effects and not about putting them together or why, or about pertinence or having a real object of the observation. The fact he's more skillful at it in this case is in some ways worse. All movies, stories, to some extent lose their mystery as they go -- the problem of the ending. Like monsters, gods and women. They become familiar, the generic, the mere, men. [7/18/14]
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). Credits. Showing up. Sometimes sketch and revue form is just that, sketchy, as if by fault of lack of another form, as if it were lazier or easier to present a jumble or loose assemblage than to give it a structure, which would perhaps be narrative. This is a case where those terms are not just reversed, or shown up, but displaced, where even that estimation or necessity is held up as convention, and the disarray is itself well-formed to show that even the well-formed had its assemblage. The unruliness plays the rules. Another way to express drag. So it's not just breaking out of our refusing the limitations of, say, narrative, or what might really be a reduction of that, a more specific form of narrative that has come to pass for the general, but forming in a different way. Of course this has significance for the cultural matters here, displacing the distinction between form and content, or perhaps more commonly, style and message. What's apparent with Hedwig too is how all this is a matter of wit, cleverness, a kind of observation which is not just keenness. Even the distinction between conception and execution gives way here because the sensibility, the temper, the ethos, are not just in the contents, the story or the character, but the character is in the whole form, style, execution. Similar to The Nasty Girl, this is between documentary and fiction, something like an artistry of testimonial, but even that sounds a bit fusty for what it is. It's a burlesque of a collage, and even the play with just so stories, however much its appropriation of lovers' cosmology may risk not only much less romantic consequences of amor fati, but the determinism for biological women, comes with John Cameron Mitchell's satire that is most withering as self-irony. [5/25/14]
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Credits. Eccentricity, civility, law, justice. What is eccentric? Which is eccentric? A natural order, or an artificial one? Is a civilizing order more or less eccentric than any "natural" order, any instinct or imperative underlying language, decree, culture? The paradox of the imperative itself, what the natural is already found to borrow or derive from the culture or representation that supposedly only borrows from, or represents it. The law ultimately bears this division -- (in) itself. Everything that would be extrinsic in, or out of, this story, the plotline, this work, of The Ox-Bow Incident, nonetheless "naturally" or accidentally, whether as a congruence or catachresis, of itself or by force, takes part as this kind of figure, becomes this theme of the extrinsic and the eccentric. The Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan characters are outsiders from the beginning, and then there is the strange entry into the plot, or line of action, of the stage coach, the woman of the Henry Fonda character's past, and her husband from San Francisco. All this outside gets snagged and tangled with the inside: the stage drivers mistake the posse for raiders, and the posse chases after the stagecoach as fugitive as well. (The stagecoach men are let off without any question about any crime committed, indirectly referring to, or at least by accident representing, a sort of social presumption below the law or rules of retribution.) The San Francisco husband gives his speech to Henry Fonda that is at once more formalized and more frank. It's an overly mannered form of admonition, and a call to civility as if out of left field.
Beyond the more obvious social lesson or parable, the neat stroke of this civics lesson of due process, and why we have formalized procedure of law, there is something much less tidy and more shrewd about the film, what might pass for merely acute characterization, caricature if not observation. Unlike the more prim and pamphlet-like message movies such as Gentleman's Agreement, The Ox-Bow Incident is a kind of formal play, a dance of figures, of social contrast, relation and context, almost like a demonstration of Levi-Strauss's principles of kinship for a larger social body. Each character is shown to have his or her own line of eccentricity playing against, in and out of, the group. The group is broken up this way, diffused and condensed on approach, broken down into its constituents, which are also thus divided and composite. Ex-concentric. It's in this way, among others, a kind of anti-western, before the more famous kinds, or even something like McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
The question of justice, also. Justice also bears this division, is rent this way, with this violence, the violence between its senses but also containing the one sense of a violence in exchange for violence. [5/13/14]
Big Bad Wolves (2013). Credits. While the concentration on the drama with the actors makes it more interesting relative to so much formulaic suspense and hyperbole, it nonetheless also veers from the broader implications. Its literalness is itself less broad, compared to the fantasy of action movies, more intricate, but it's certainly not wanting to be very figurative, allegorical. Compared to Once upon a Time in Anatolia, for example, this is a thriller, and still quite fanciful. The plot points and turns defy action melodrama in favor of turning the screw, and while the climax also thankfully avoids mano a mano, the temptation couldn't be resisted for another twist that unfortunately has unavoidable consequences for the cast or slant of the whole. Sometimes you have to be more careful with the presumption that you can avoid allegory, period, for the sake of avoiding bad allegory (the object lesson of Tolkien). While there's ambiguity in the ending that also hedges against a decision one way or the other, even letting the suggestion in the door shows how easily this changes to a parable of justification. In particular, what's cast back is the suppression of evidence by the drama itself as a manipulation. The fact we are not given anything for why the police have this suspect becomes a contrivance of overturning presumed innocence, due process, the whole concern for actual prevention rather than sadistic vengence.
The major problem with so much fiction about serial killers, from Silence of the Lambs to True Detective, is that it is not about serial killers. In varying degrees it ignores facts, eschews observation. There is a necessity to this, when the point is instead to make a ritualistic boogie, a sublimated thrill out of something so difficult, to put it mildly, to accept, which is the fact of deception itself, of a kind of fundamental ambivalence, that involves, inhabits, infects, things we want to be distinct. What's operative with serial killers, that they are passable, that they can represent something else, that there is a susceptibility in the victims and often a lack of concern for people who are victims by the rest of us -- and not just that we aren't watching our children (Big Bad Wolves does have a good suggestion about this for all the parties involved, the way the police get so absorbed in the pursuit of criminals they forget the real object of what they're doing, who they're supposed to be protecting, even their own), but, for example, prostitutes or in general anyone not just outcast or ignored in a worse social way, but ignored routinely even as a matter of so much good conscience -- is itself passed over for a representation of an abject evil. This also paradoxically makes the killer character more powerful in a less explicable way, often curiously realizing the sort of fantasy of this psychology. Quite simply, this thriller appropriation of the nightmare, if not the facts themselves, gets the profile wrong, or makes it so, and you can measure the degree of it, from stories which make the serial killer into simply a badass, to those that may have a fascination with detail enough to appropriate that, sensationalize it.
Whether this sort of fantasy is necessary, perhaps even collectively, has to remain a question in more than one direction when it's a matter of the consequences, if this is at the expense of anything else. A drama like the first Prime Suspect series, or even in some ways Manhunter relative to Silence of the Lambs, shows how even sentiment, sensation, the creepy implication of our interest and empathy, catharsis, don't have to obviate, or cast a counter-spell. The The Ox-Bow Incident, especially at the time, may have been the definitive lesson or at least social parable about presuming guilt, or even presuming punishment or retribution -- it's about a lynching -- but is largely forgotten, as a western not about revenge or personal triumph. And of course what may still be the definitive film about a serial killer, and one who kills children, is also one of the greatest films of all, Fritz Lang's M, because it's also a social cross-section, with the clever way it co-implicates law and crime. In Big Bad Wolves, the character Gidi (played by Tzahi Grad), says he doesn't care about the reasons why someone would do something like this, and while this is showing how this character has become a monster in trying to fight monsters, it curiously could also stand for the dramatic vehicle itself, the direction of the representation. [5/12/14]
Narco Cultura (2013). Credits. Antidote to the gaga of Breaking Bad.
The Counselor (2013). Credits. With Cormac McCarthy here writing the screenplay himself and Ridley Scott directing, this movie gives us to realize in another way how the Coen brothers accomplished something with McCarthy's material. No Country for Old Men, both the script and execution, has a deftness that is gliding and rapt, and the dispatch of it, not necessarily quick or expedient -- in fact there's a lot of patience and composure, a kind of fascination, even a calmness -- has to do with a tone that works like dramatic irony or aesthetic distance, but is really sacrificing nothing of the tragic or poignant. The poignant itself is already this twilight, this parallax or mingling of sentiments, and the Coens' own tone, which could be thought of as satiric or black humor, is really more of an opening up. There's a candor, or even a resignation to fact or brutality or what is grim or may be otherwise unbearable, but there's a kind of space around it, a horizon. This is not the reduction of cynicism, a futilism, but more like a sublimation, in which the holding up or the form itself energizes even about what might be a dreadful subject. In this opening space we see not just the terrible acts, but the poignant. This movie, on the other hand, is a morose obsessiveness, sublimating the monster more on the side of identification with it, and Scott obliges McCarthy with a swank pall. [1/31/14]
The Brink's Job (1978). Credits. The Brink's Job has a sprawl to it that's almost epic, but the portrait of just about anyone here is a raggedy dramatization, as opposed to declamation. It's not so much a debunking as refusing to aggrandize, the way even affectionate legend, and certainly the movies, can do. It doesn't want to show people as efficient characters any more than as people with the sort of prowess or even aura of accomplishment we like to idealize and presume for ourselves. Everyone, from the even more bumbling and possibly mentally challenged kin of a two-bit crook, right up through the cops to J. Edgar Hoover, is shown as a matter of garrulous conceit. It's a view that everyone, everything of human endeavor, is really like the Keystone cops, but as a 70s sense of that. Director William Friedkin is returning to The Night They Raided Minsky's in this fare and tone, certainly as opposed to something like The Exorcist (but even that in the larger frame of his work shows how he has a range of tone and quality, for example, The French Connection), but also after a decade of other ensemble, cross-section stuff that's social drama heavily tilted as social satire. I could name many, but just one would suffice as perhaps the culmination: Nashville. The cast is perfectly suited to this, particularly Peter Falk and Warren Oates, already old pros at precisely this sort of ironic pithiness, the kind of portrait that's bursting the balloon the character is blowing up. What's amazing about Falk is how he wears so easily some other shaggy clothes, blends right in, when you think his act even at doing that is so conspicuous, certainly because of how famous and protracted, present, one such act is. Oates's act of the loveable pathetic bullshitter doesn't get tired when it's also got a more serious psychological twist to it here. Friedkin's open staging and pacing, that gives to the way the characters' color goes outside the line of plot and even their own control, sometimes falls into the sloppy flatness of hijinks. But in a curious way, there's something similar about this movie and Dog Day Afternoon, an affectionate banality, as if this one is showing people in the 30s and 40s in the same light, or as being that way, too, back then. [12/21/13]
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012). Credits. Garrulous not just in cinematic terms, but literally, too, with voiceover, to show you how it was in fact overwritten. It's refreshing to see expression break out of conventional movie form, for a movie to discuss things, or be art in different ways than narrative or plot. When it's also so much studentish self-indulgence, which is also now everywhere else -- we're all social media and "selfies" -- in narrative cinema, "indie" and film festival darlings, it's hard for eloquence, whether literary or cinematic, even the Godard-like disruptive kind, not to come off semblance. Terence Nance is confident, assertive, articulate in lots of ways, with music as well as words and images. The way he's tackling and expressing something that's more banal but also the extraordinary of banality is more rhetorically convoluted. He's not afraid to use a diction or writing style that's overblown, high falutin', depending on what or who contrasts it. He's not afraid to get into reflexive complications of what constitutes a work itself. There's even irony that adds twists to all this convolution, shows it ups, becomes self-irony and betrays the aspiration for all this with more self-deprecating retorts that are even touching. The title itself tells this. But when the filmmaker casts himself in shots of oggling and being oggled, rubbing elbows at parties or musems in lots of dusky tones, it's hard to avoid the sense of having your cake and eating it too, and that the title is doing the opposite of what it's saying. [11/22/13]
Gravity (2013). Credits. Reins in from the current excesses, both for 3D and action, certainly space of sci-fi action. Clean segment, as the saying goes about short stories working better as movies. Bullock's performance is fine, which is not a slight. It's affecting, too, but mostly that's, as Kuleshov or perhaps even Hitchcock demonstrated, because it's suitable to the rest, the context of the story and the production, the composition. But it's still an externalized, projected kind of performance, physical the way Tom Cruise or Demi Moore act, and which unfortunately is still one of the things about current movies this movie does not change. All the athletic training and preparation cannot replace the sort of presence or offhand quality that, to Bullock's credit, director Alfonso Cuaron gets the blame for not calling for here. Despite all there is here of a decision to make a movie more plausibly about the experience of space, there is also lots coming back from the other direction, in the contrivances of the plot as well as with music and the acting to heighten suspense. This is still a thriller and a melodrama, if a more effective one. The broad banner stuff that pops back in, the more hand-wringing kind of sentimentality, or the self-conscious triumphalism of the ending, are at the same time contained, situated better, and even with the case of that ending, done well enough, a nice extenstion of the plan to a counterpoint closeness, to the scale of a person. George Clooney sure makes the case, here, for inspiring Buzz Lightyear, for those, like me, who think he and Tim Allen sound alike.
Good premise for and use of 3D. I don't like 3D for lots of reasons, most of all the speciousness of it, but as with CG, there are things which show what can be done with it. So we get computer graphics along with the mechanics of shooting the actors to match them into it that give us all sorts of expressions of being in outer space we haven't been able to see yet, and that's as humans with the kinds of crafts they've made so far, not as superhumans or their spacecraft. When I got to see Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3D as it was originally presented, the revelation was the underwater sequences: fish floated out over the heads of the audience in front of me. This was much better than all the specious poking things at the camera, as SCTV's Dr. Tongue (John Candy) spoofed, though Creature had plenty of harpoons for that, too. Outer space is a great way to do 3D because everything is floating, and in fact the 3D enhances the suggestibility of movement and weightlessness here, with all the spinning by the camera, too, so if you're liable to motion sickness, even playing computer games, be warned. Cuaron and company couldn't resist the 3D showiness, in old fashioned ways, but also in making their own more artsy flourishes. There are plenty of loose bolts floating at the camera, but then a tear from Bullock's eye gets a special 3D focus change effect, and shows the inverted reflection of its source. The motor of the plot is a chain reaction of space debris (the theory of the Kessler syndrome), and there are some nice 3D demonstrations for that, objects shooting out, enough to make me jump once. Cuaron put it nicely himself when he said of long takes, and the overawe of them, that he doesn't want a "look ma, no hands" approach. There is a better call for long shots, that floating around sense again, and even some of the showier things Cuaron does are expressive as well as impressive, such as when the camera, or at least point of view, floats right on past Bullock's visor into her helmet, completing that rotation with the same sense and movement of all the other spinning. [10/27/13]
The Queen of Versailles (2012). Credits. Let show. Even the reality TV conceit may play a part here in the trick turned, not only on the subjects, but even on that conceit. Without doing anything particularly distinguishing, certainly not demonstrative, the filmmakers were following, and assembling, the relations, the implications of this singular vanity, what would have been the largest home in the U.S. inspired, through the peculiar (if not uncommon) inflationary prism of this taste, by Versailles (there are enough shots edited in of other vanity representations close to the gangster patron kitsch Vladimir Putin is fond of, just not done by the same level of artists). Not quite a problem with ostentation, but it's sly the way this subject, the house, is posed as if it makes more incidental that this is from the man behind the largest time share enterprise, not to say racket, in the world. David Siegel brags not only about this, but about single-handedly getting George W. Bush elected, then when asked how, saying it would probably be considered illegal. BS or not, this goes along with his idea that he's positively affected everyone he's touched, his heedlessly many children as well as all his employees, and before he turns on the bankers and lenders he used for his schemes who then have used him for theirs. This is a serendipitous movie, like Lost in La Mancha, where events, even catastrophic, change the nature of the film project, but end up making something more amazing. In this case the catastrophe was the financial crash of 2008. What might have been an underhanded reality TV ruse to show up this humble grandeur becomes the sort of comeuppance we might have wanted to see, but just as in The Magnificent Ambersons, it alters even the disposition for that. It puts these people in the light of a humility, even if one they don't entirely see. It shows how circumstance makes them humble in another way, even if they can't see outside or let go of the broader frame.
While we are given information about the very not positive effects on all those other people Siegel has touched, his employees and customers, there is a way in which keeping the view on these subjects, in the family circle, and on the title figure, Siegel's wife Jackie (that also a sly displacement of the subject), in the narcissistic circle, is even more telling. A couple of scenes have the camera snooping outside David's study, which he's retreated to in what looks like the grander sense of that, all his boxes of documents piled up as if in his bunker, his last stand. The camera operator lingering outside the door peeking in also makes for self-consciousness about this snooping, to not let us escape the awkwardness of that even for an exposé. Siegel talking for the camera, to the filmmaker(s), pets a dog next to him, then even finishes saying to the dog that just the two of them will go live in the undone Versailles house. Then, in a snooping shot outside the study, we see David in a foul mood. Prior to this, he's shown a kind of detachment that's effectively negligence, even of his own indulgence, and suddenly he's seized on the matter of everyone else, the wife and kids, leaving all the lights on. We see the way Jackie hovers around him for appeasement, and uses the children for this, though the oldest daughter, in her own teen defiance, stands up to David and reproaches him for his attitude towards them. Jackie is treated, and is even behaving, like the dogs. We've seen them all about, as part of the whole hoard of chattel, children as well as pets and things. David mentions elsewhere that Jackie can't have one, she has to have a dozen, just as she couldn't have just one kid, they have eight. The other scene in the study talking to the dog suggests he's even made her a pet fallen out of favor. Of course he's also shifted the blame to Jackie, again just like blaming the dog, for even his bringing this about, for his own behavior in all of this, for this very ethos of detached indulgent accumulation, people as animals like pets abandoned in all but name, in internal exile like all the baubles, even the absurdly expensive ones packed away in boxes for their Xanadu. [10/21/13]
Toy Story (1995). Credits. Toy/story. The Divine Play. The descent for reverence.
Paradiso: Toy Story finds a chiasmic formula (a cross): the premise, scheme, is an expression for digital animation financial success at the same time as the digital animation is an expression of the content, the theme. Witness how all subsequent digitally animated features tend to this model: animated also in the sense of anthropomorphic, meaning also voiced, everything becomes toy-like, whether cars, animals or even people (curious loop of anthropomorphing, here, more like a kink, as commented further). The measure of this success even shows to what extent it exceeded measure: Toy Story stores in Paris, surpassing even inclusion in Disney stores and ten years after Euro Disney had all but failed. Disney bought into the technology that would succeed, if not put to death, the art of animation Disney had once helped develop, a new kind of mass production of cartoons, after decades of TV show and movie degradation. The balloony look of computer graphics didn't integrate well with live action, which didn't stop people rushing to do it (George Lucas even went back to stuff if it in his Star Wars movies), and the solution was to have a completely CG environment, like the burgeoning computer games industry at the time, which would still look to movies for the sense of enhanced environment or immersion.
And then, why not a subject whose very essence is artifice, to shift the whole problem of semblance? The built-in merchandising angle is so obvious -- back to Star Wars again, why not come full circle to a movie about the very toys it would sell -- as to make a question about the real motive, how or why they came to this idea, seem silly. The contradictions, similar to those with The Muppets (that particular 2011 movie), begin with the Capra-esque tack of some value that's supposed to be beyond mere representation and selling: and that tack is of course pandering (or populism and demogoguery with Hearst and his papers, or Murdoch and his). Here it's the scheme of old toys versus new toys, Buzz Lightyear posing reflexively for all the faddish stuff since Star Wars. Really, of course, there's nothing outside the circle of the devotion to, i.e., getting hooked on, toys, just as 70s TV cartoons were merciless delivery devices for toys and cereal even before merchandising became a reason for movies. But the faithful old toys are made the protagonist, the perspective for empathy. These movies are not just about the animation of toys, the fantasy of the toys all coming to life by themselves when no one's looking, an extension of every act of imagination with manipulation of the toys. They're about the toys begging us to save them, appealing to our love for them, reversing the position of subjectivity as one device, and as another, narrative suspense to put the toys in more imminent danger of being forgotten. The three films in the "franchise" make this progressively more heavy, to an almost absurd point by the third one, which picked up the series after a decade.
The broader frame to all this -- that could be called fascinating or even fascination itself -- is of course how toys are already figure, a part of the broader matter of figure and representation, but also exemplary of that. Pygmalion, Daedalus.
Toy Story 2 (1999). Credits. Purgatorio: Disney becomes the unlikely authority to lecture us on the difference of use value and exchange value.
Toy Story 3 (2010). Credits. Inferno: Gravitas, the church of Disney. While the beginning is at once more literal and reflexive pretending, flight of fancy, and celebration, this movie becomes so strangely heavy, a toy asylum and then even a pit of hell. It's laughably so when you think about how far, in sort of sop-heavy grown-up terms, they're going with the idea of toys as outcasts. This is grown-ups getting carried away with their childishness in a serious way that is not the good sense of the beginning, or when Nietzsche said to be childlike is to be as serious as a child at play. [10/20, 23/13]
Man of Steel (2013). Credits. Somewhere in here there's a better Superman movie, maybe even superhero movie. Maybe it's just Henry Cavill, who seems to be a solution to the hunk v. actor quandary. He's understated without lacking presence, taking on the more modest, reserved approach to his central role, but showing ingenuous flashes of reaction. He's not unlike Christopher Reeve in this respect, though he's actually less muggy than Reeve was in his Superman movies. That has to do with the direction. Zack Snyder here knows enough to take this tack with Cavill and most of the other actors, even those having to play the heavy-handed Kryptonians, and there's just almost, kind of, an angle here of an interesting relief, a proportion of absurd power to human scale. That touch and the first fight scene are what give this sense the best. In some ways the origin story serves to create this relief, making Superman indirect, and so many Superman cliches are actually avoided, probably by dint of us having seen so many, a somewhat clever time cut-up helping there, as it also adds an interesting feature about cosmic scale. But there is too much for even this Superman to overcome. The origin story is so inexplicably obligatory with these superhero movies, and here it just creates one more specious sci-fi fantasy, purple prose and diction, Star Wars (especially the second trilogy) and Independence Day cliche CG orgy. Why have a movie about Superman, but then all the CG for some rococo, mytho-futurist, super-tech civilization with creatures and spaceships and metal pin art? (The de rigueur super-tech interface scene here has to make it's own specious trope, and it's a kind of 1930s labor or socialist poster style Mongol ironwork relief, holographic of course.) After the first fight scene gives us a good impression of speed and impact, and just how out of control it would be, there's another city scale alien invasion scene -- how many movies and TV series now -- and then after that level of hyperbolic catastrophe, a mano a mano that becomes like a GTA exercise of graphic designers' giddy destruction, Superman and General Zod tearing up their own indefinite supply of skyscrapers (Metropolis, never named here, must be like a Manhattan the size of New Jersey). They returned to the territory of Superman II, also, with Zod and his team from Krypton, which only makes "reboot" or "reset" a thinner disguise of remake. What we get as a contrast to the digital colossal, as the human, are dusky handheld shots and tagline close-ups, the stamp of intimacy even in commercials. Somewhere in all that there's a flash of something different, but it's still inhuman all too human. [10/20/13]
Stories We Tell (2012). Credits. What this movie accomplishes most remarkably, after everything else -- the more superficial sense of plot turns or who it's about, and all the talk about points of view, impression, account, subjectivity and truth -- is to evoke as if the dimension of the subject, as if you were getting a sense of the axis of who is the subject of the story, not as in its theme, or in fact, as if a contradiction in terms, its object, but who is the subject it happens to and even thus who is really telling it. This happens by a curious relay that seems at once shrewd and unintended. The very last bit, a shot and scene which comes in after the credits have started, is like a little joke about this -- and it is laugh-out-loud funny -- but that ripples back over the whole enterprise, like the part left over when you've taken something apart and put it back together, and how that goes right on up to the broadest extent, the supplement that at once defines and defies (a, the) totality. Sarah Polley flickers back and forth between cunning and offhand. She seems like a groping film student in the relatively few times she lets her movie portray herself speaking, but then the circuitous path of the whole, which itself often seems a jumble or at best a kind of accidental pool shot chain of events, slyly operates this being the center only through relief, a kind of triangulation, of all the others. It's not more sly for one or the other, diverting to all that comes back to the self or showing the large framework, like Levi-Strauss's kinship structure, of self, but because how both are there, how she lets them show or be shown. This would make a great double bill with Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, and not just because they're both Canadian. [10/13/13]
La Roue (1923). Credits. Abel Gance's Napoleon put impressionistic, subjective camera tactics at the service of such teleological, great man worship, and next to the grandiosity of other devices like his tryptich screen conception, that it was hard to take as working the opposite way, lowering, making banal or ordinary or more human, even in the depiction of Napoleon as a boy. In Gance's earlier La Roue, the development of these rhetorical devices -- symbolic and metaphorical dissolve; montage cutaway compressed recapitulations of the material of the film serving for when one character tells another what has happened before, or, more significant, a rapid-fire version that is life flashing before the eyes, the flashing part made literal; lifting of the use of iris to almost the main plan of the film, and singling out objects in a shot for character viewpoint -- doesn't in any other way sophisticate the very thick Victorian melodrama. While the subject suggests L'Atalante, with it's man living almost right on the railroad the way the barge man does the river in that other, it lacks none of the more realist dramaturgical refinement, or if it's not that, just the offhand style of Vigo. The at once meager and broad premise and conception, the disasters and wild jumps that make all the characters stewpots, the hand-wringing and oscillation between self-sacrifice and savage impulse -- by the time it reaches its pitch of madness with the woman crazy in the snow and then painting everything white, it's hard not to see this as a direct source of Guy Maddin, Archangel or Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and laugh at it for the same camp value. Not to mention the fact it's got to be the biggest treatment of googly eyes in movie history. [8/16/13]
Cedar Rapids (2011). Credits. As if director Miguel Arteta, and perhaps scriptwriter Phil Johnston, were a protegé of Alexander Payne, who produced this movie, as Alan Rudolph to Robert Altman, this is a pithy and tempered portrait of Americana in the vein of Payne. Payne's work is at the same time calmer and sharper than popular comedy fare or the smug idea of quirky in stuff that thinks of itself as indie. This movie is even more modest in conception than Election or About Schmidt, and while the commercials for it tried to make it look like a typical guys out for wacky hijinks movie, it's more social satire, astute even for being quieter. An indication of this is how well Sigourney Weaver is used and does in a small role, here, more subtle than The Ice Storm. What's particularly nice is the way the characters are all involved and implicated, familiars on a convention circuit, a wet towel on movie plot confrontations, but much more interesting nowadays if for only being against the grain. That is, until it heads right into movie fare, a party at a drug house with fisticuffs and bravado (Isiah Whitlock's self-referential jokes about The Wire notwithstanding -- and this is stretched thin), and then the curiously cliche coming clean at a microphone before an audience. It's amazing how often American movies come to this device. Is this the equivalent of the dream of going to school with no clothes on, or for actors going on stage not knowing your lines, for the American business set, an obsessive dread of public speaking? [8/8/13]
Audition (1999). Credits. Surreal enough not to be too much a thriller, but still too much a thriller to stray further with the surreal. On the way from Psycho to torture porn, via Fatal Attraction, background material of the killer profile kind gets too much emphasis, in time and heavy-handedness, compared to, for example, phantasmatic flashes of a flapping tongue, but this also serves to balance out the misogynistic tilt of the parable, just as the woman making reference at the crucial moment to the sexism of the audition formalizes the turnabout, despite how ghastly otherwise. Towards that end, what's so effective is the contrast between the slow, sweet (if morbidly so) composure of the woman and the gore, rather than say the crazed outbursts and violence of Fatal Attraction. This makes it at once more fun as camp sublimation, imagination of deviance, but also excruciating (not to mention the fact it outbids needle shock tactics) and another kind of misogynist cast. A double-cross on the waking from a dream trick also contributes to, what is made explicit by more than one line, a lesson of looks being deceiving, of being too taken wtih attraction, which makes all the horror, even as play, more excruciating conditioning. It primes any ambivalence. [8/3/13]
Now You See Me (2013). Credits. Movie magic: conspicuous production. Near the end of this movie, there's a scene where the cops or the feds bust into the -- hideout? -- of the superstar magician con gang and what they find there for the relentlessly mobile camera to pour (sic) over is an exaggeration and oxymoron that ought to be a joke: evidence as spectacle. There is not some shred of evidence that the keen eye and acumen of some investigor must find out to betray the perpetrators, but a profusion of material showing off, as if the superillusionists were also multitasking techno dynamos, hyperbolically skilled in engineering and architecture, in addition to their already demonstrated talent in defying physics, if not plausibility. And the fine point this comes to: there's a Lego model of the building where they're staging their next spectacle caper! They have the time -- they would take the time -- to build a Lego model. We've already seen the absurd disproportion of conveniently excised preparation to the task itself, which makes all this, including what this reflects about making movies, a gross extent of those people whose efforts to avoid work end up being more work. Instead of stealing a safe, the superhero-like magicians have a giant mirror they put in the room where the safe is to make the cops think it's stolen! More absurd than that is a scheme for an elaborate diversion involving a crash on a bridge with a city bus. Dumber is going back and explaining these tricks (with Morgan Freeman in a cliche sage role -- there needs to be a moratorium on him and Michael Caine for a while, if people can't quit making these cliches of them), rather than just leaving that out, because it only makes express the ridiculous setup presumed: it involves a double for a car attached to the bus (which one of the magicians is also driving) then released at the right time! I'm not making this up. The explanation does not involve the driver of the duplicate vehicle, and of course all the other details of how the characters would have brought all this about -- well, with blueprints and Lego models, presumably.
Imagine if "profile" referred to serial killer and Facebook at the same time. Even the title of this movie amounts to a turn of two phrases for outbidding narcissistic investment, not just screaming "Look at me!", but making that a presumption that flops the significance of what's elided. How can we miss you if you won't disappear? This is movie magic betraying movie magic. It reflexively incorporates the height of self-indulgence we now have with the "extras," no more simply recovered but planned, for the DVD releases of movies. The overindulgence in all the props and preparation, as demonstrated by Wes Anderson's DVD comments on his movies, is what this movie amounts to, its ethos if not so intentionally its premise or story or frame. As Star Trek, especially The Next Generation, played out almost every kind of wish fulfillment, science fiction assumed into magic, this movie is giving us setup and staging for movies, in a showy excess, for the fantasy of manipulating and disposing of such an excess. The filmmakers themselves take the time for the absurd background stuff, the absurd setup, as if the characters could, and now you see it, never mind all you don't.
Plausibility is moot precisely because the desire for manipulation is to defy physics or reality, but what's also sacrificed, a price gladly paid, by this ignoring what can't be conveniently resolved, is something like the rules of the game itself, or perhaps better, what a structure provides to the articulation of the game. What's being sacrificed wholesale is ingenuity itself, certainly in script writing, because the more characters can simply pull out of their hat, even if they are magicians, the less there is involved in the accomplishment. Would it just be a minor consideration, a quibble, that the magician's code is broken, not within the plot but by it? Or is that really more to the point that this is all currency for spectacle, cloak and subterfuge and diversion and disappearance all themselves given the sleight of hand of scriptwriters, director, editor, and perhaps the heaviest hand of all in this, executives, because just as the tacky sheen of Las Vegas shows, including those for superstar illusionists, has been subsumed by that of TV shows like American Idol, the tone of that in this movie goes along with what it's most willfully reflexive of: pandering. Mad orbiting fly views, self-congratulatory pop hipness, gotcha humor (including Woody Harrelson's "mentalist" character shaking down a couple, with similar convenient stipulation, making all this a more nasty kind of exploitation) make all the magic and manipulation, the movie excess for the convenience of imagination, into the curious contemporary inversion of the absolute gaze, as with Facebook, where eveyone imagines all the attention is on the self, despite the immediate conundrum. This is the spectacle of wanting to be spectacle. [6/29/13]
Inception (2010). Credits. With hurried pace from the beginning, to cram in so much or really compress the time (a bad reduction of the theme in the movie to the calculation for the movie); almost all the dialogue delivered in the same crisis declamatory way, a pretense of intellectual tone that just excuses exposition (there are unintentionally laughable moments when a character who just spouted off expertise will then ask a question of incongruous ignorance only to prompt another character's exposition -- in a hurry, of course); a music score that has such an annoying tenor of ticking off all this for us like a clock that it's the converse of waiting room music, as if patly designed to keep people from falling asleep in the subway or rush them off (Hans Zimmer's score was so great for Terrence Malick on The Thin Red Line this makes me think he's too adaptive, compliant), this is constant crescendo. Or to be more precise, it's not proper crescendo because there's no low that it rises from, no crest, no arc, it's all peak. It has some clever uses of CG, the best being Paris folded over on itself, and mercifully lacks many of the cliches (the great rushing explosion wave, for example, though there are other things here that come close). But for trying to go so far with dream, imagination, ideas, and even how this is reflexive for movies themselves, this is a great demonstration of the literal-mindedness of American movies, particularly because of action and plot. What we get, also in spite of the characters constantly gearing us up -- this isn't just dream within dream, but movie as as its own PR inside it -- for all the wicked consequences of losing grip, is not the release of prosaic logic into dream state, but the reduction of dream to plot. By being too literal-minded, too, in getting carried away with so many levels of dream and different dreamers and then having to keep those straight as sets, it often gets silly and creates its own inconsistencies. It's also a reduction to action movie plot, for one thing, because of the way car chases and guns have to work. Not how they have to, but that they do. One character tells another one he should dream bigger and then produces a bigger gun. But what about getting beyond that frame, and having bullets not able to get to their targets, the way punching or running is often ineffectual in dreams, or, let's just say for example, having the guns turn into butter. There's hardly any expansion into the figurative dimension of dreams, and the dream-within-dream levels have to be so confined to their setting, that there's none of the rebus-like fluidity of dreams. Christopher Nolan seriously missed a chance (intentionally? -- was this tailored?) to resonate even more with the contemporary problem and anxiety of manipulation and conspiracy theory, how the spread of electronic networks and their control, and the flak of information, where all sorts of error, rumor and calculated misinformation reduces everything to the same level of suspension, if not suspicion, realizes paranoid fantasy. When near the end, the wife (Marion Cotillard) of Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) suggests that the whole order is inverted, that all this corporate espionage and political thriller stuff that also happens to be the premise of the movie is really what's just in Cobb's head, it could have put the viewers into a limbo even more effective than the one so foreboded in the movie, that turns out to be all too much just a matter of spectacle. The contrast is David Lynch's Inland Empire which subjects even things like plot, how topology is suggestive and the confusion that allows in movies themselves, and character transference and transformation, to such a shuffling of relation that it turns the light on the very trick of using a fiction to tell us that there is a stable, objective level outside all the other ones we can use only for reassuring amusement. [6/22/13]
Incendies (2010). Credits. It's intricately plotted, and perhaps best for the way it gives the sense of all the trouble, time, of trying to find someone, not just all the physical and logistic problems, but administrative ones. For this it may even be exemplary. It doesn't come off feeling manipulative by contrivance that way (see, for example, Cabiria and silent melodrama in general), but instead makes us think or feel the experiences of travel, waiting, feints, starts, misdirection, backtracking, etc. The intercutting of the chronology, mother's earlier story and her daughter trying to find her, is understandable, commendable, productive in some ways, and even contributes to that sense of the trouble of the search, but because of that same trouble, this intercutting is often confusing, also because of the resemblance of the mother and daughter (which is also useful confusion). In other ways, too, the ambition of the story, originally a play by Wadji Mouawad, contributes to the confusion, and is burdened by the confusion. A tone of earnest, furrowed brow reverence is also stretched too much over everything so that it's counterproductive, as if we wouldn't get the seriousness of the subject or events themselves. [6/22/13]
Iron Man 3 (2013). Credits. Despite the Tony Stark act, or perhaps better Tony Stark as the Robert Downey Jr. act, really about the only thing that could still resemble charm in all this fare by now, this is so rapid-fire cram-in, and then its hyperbolic contribution is a fight sequence on some giant contraption with scads of Iron Man suits against scads of genetic fire minions. Wee ha. [6/16/13]
Cabiria (1913). Credits. Cabiria is the influential early silent spectacle that influenced D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, among others. While its sets and costumes are the most obvious source of inspiration, what's really the notable development is the camera movement, which might go unnoticed because of the way it enhances the impression of the costumes and even more the sets. Though cameras had been placed on trains or trolleys, or even in airplanes, before this, the use of dolly shots in Cabiria is significant as a step of formalization, a cinematic step from theatrical presentation. There's a parallax effect of seeing this now, as a modern viewer looking back, where, after handheld digital flaunting and even before that the Spielbergian swoosh-up, camera movement is as stock as proscenium setup was back then. All Cabiria does is move the camera in, slowly and usually at a slight diagonal. It seems an echo of modern expression, slight, timid by those terms, but as a forecast, already assertive, the effect assumed. In comparison to silent fare, however, those static shots that seem as slavishly bound to a notion of theater as to the limitations of the camera, it's amazing to see the proportion of even this slightness to effect. The shots here are first static, thus like other silent films, then the camera begins to angle in, barely, with the deliberate stretching of emphasis even documentaries have learned for use on still images. But immediately what's dramatic is the sense of depth, by contrast to the static, en face placement of the camera, the breaking up of the sense of the image as just the horizontal scroll. And because of the diagonal, moving in as well as towards a side, we get the sense of dimension along both axes, not just a closing in or enlarging, but as if we're entering the set and getting the sense of it as surroundings. Cabiria's static composition is often itself more assured and sophisticated, but it's this movement which makes it seem much less like movies of the teens, more advanced. (Although on that score, too, a note must be made on projection speed, frame rate, if you get to see any restoration version that has adjusted this so that it doesn't have that inadvertent giddy effect of seeing silents without adjustment.) Director Giovanni Pastrone and his co-writer Gabriele D'Annunzio use a more narrative approach to the titles, often describing beforehand what the action is going to be, but, whether concerted or not, this avoids the excessive intercutting of dialogue titles. The drawback is that since the actors are speaking longer in shots, they apparently felt it necessary to have them gesticulate more to try to convey what they're saying. Despite even this, the acting style is subdued compared to a lot of that Victorian swooning style, with more a penchant for sultry poses, including some looking at the camera (something that seems to have influenced Lang for Metropolis as much as the Moloch set). It's silent fare for the plot, however, its historical airs, and perpetual capture and rescue cycle that becomes monotony rather than suspense, although apparently not enough to keep them from dragging out the characters in serials. [6/15/13]
Haxan (1922). Credits. Show and tell. Despite its subject matter, the most notable thing about this movie is the candid presentation, such as, in the first of seven parts, showing artifacts, illustrations, documents, engravings, some ostensibly Medieval, and even having pointers come into the frame and point out details. But at the same time the division into parts, which perhaps mimics or takes on the form of a book, is a more formal presentation, and also a pretense to, or aura of, authority. Again despite the witch theme, and the lurid quality even as an ulterior to serious study, real or pretended, there's an almost jaunty quality to the personalized exposé and illustration, writer and director Benjamin Christensen addressing the viewer. The the way it engages the viewer directly is interesting as an anticipation of even the Internet, not thinking of this medium as requiring quite the formal presentation. In some ways this tempers the more lurid quality, and in some ways keeps the film-maker from facticity. He's not necessarily pretending to present fact, he's presenting his own musing on the subject, however sensationalized or impressionable. It's thus candid in a different way for the time period. It thus also anticipates behind the scenes documentaries and programs, and now the extras of DVDs, as well as the Internet. But beating all those to the punch, this sort of MC-ing, or openly discussing material -- which works, in some sense, the opposite way of illustration, as if the title card interaction with the director were adding more relief to what we see than vice versa -- holds up, reframes the fictive, theatrical material, too. It's like it's own sociological or archeological distance from absorption in the lurid enactment, the swooning and hand-wringing and heaving and making absurd mad faces of silent movie fare, which is here, too. The sets, costumes, even casting and use of subjects, the composition and photography of them is impressive, but more so a remarkable citation relief later, when Christensen tells of the experience of the filming itself, as with the actress wanting to try the thumbscrews, and the old woman actress who believed in witchcraft, with the shot of her looking up resituated "outside" the frame by the narration, how that then is an account of her "modern." This accentuates the matter of time all the more for us now. These are marvelous plays of context. They could be just as calculated, just as much contrivances, and they are nonetheless, amount to that, in a de facto way if not intended to a greater degree. [6/14/13]
Odd Man Out (1947). Credits. Centrifugal character. The central character is the relief, or what would be the relief of all the others is the action around him, reactions to him, characterizing him, and corresponding to that we get subjective jags. The peak of all this is the bubble sequence, where spilled beer forms a facet-eyed reflection of all these people speaking about him. Directed by Carol Reed, this came before his The Third Man, and is something of a parallel exercise to David Lean's Hobson's Choice. It's notable in ways similar also to some of the psychological or subjective imagining of Brief Encounter, also by Lean. James Mason may seem underused by this central character under erasure, but what we really get is a marvelous concentration counter to lines and voice, with all the other characters reacting and projecting, a bit like The Passion of Joan of Arc. Also notable is Robert Newton, better known for the more blustery Bill Sykes of Lean's Oliver Twist or Long John Silver, as an eccentric painter and the offhand presentation of his Bohemian lifestyle along with a failed medical student played by Elwyn Brook-Jones. [6/1/13]
Modern Times (1936). Credits. The opening sequence in the factory, with the conveyor belt and automated feeding gags, and Chaplin literally overtaken by the machinery, fed into the giant gears, has become the definitive representation of the movie, but it's really a small part of it. It's also mostly because of this part that many, especially the production company of Rene Clair's A Nous la liberte, think Chaplin stole the idea from that movie. Clair reportedly was embarrassed by the dispute, which took years to settle, considering it an honor that Chaplin would have borrowed from him, and besides that Chaplin's due, since Clair like any other great movie maker of the 20s or 30s borrowed from Chaplin's earlier work first. Modern Times is really another City Lights, and one of those Rube Goldberg progressions for gags. Chaplin didn't only persist with silent film this late in the 30s with his use of overlayed, minimal sound effects, his own music score and title cards (this was also like Clair's insistence on not subordinating all the visual invention of the silents to dialogue, not wanting film to become a sort of mere adjunct theatre, his methods to this end demonstrated with Sous les toits de Paris and Le Million most notably). It's also still very much a silent in being one of those dramas -- comedy notwithstanding, more about the melodrama in a bit -- in 16 acts. Blink and you might miss a plot turn. That's not just rhetorical. As Guy Maddin has so cleverly observed and made hay of, the silent plots were so twisting and episodic you can look away and look back and lose track: how did they get here? Where did this character come from? Why are they doing this now? It's not so much the switch to earnestness as the staginess of it that makes Chaplin's pathos drop into the maudlin (and beneath Buster Keaton in my estimation). When we first see Paulette Goddard, here, it's not just the way we know right where that's heading, Chaplin's off-screen love interest, too, but the way that her dress is like a cut-out caricature more for decorum than burlesque. Everything about Chaplin's iconic tramp getup is contrived in a comic way, as travesty, and has a counterpoint, both pathetic and endearing at once. He's a poor man with manners, sadly clinging to a conceit of the good life and at the same time with an air of detachment that's perhaps a more worthy expression of nobility (was it Borges who said, probably quoting someone else, that it's only truly noble to support lost causes). In this he's something like the blissful fool of Stan Laurel, whose expressions and mannerisms, especially reactions, Chaplin sometimes resembles. And he's spoofing, scandalizing the trappings. But Chaplin the director or scenarist doesn't leave well enough alone: all the poignant is there in Chaplin the character. What's deft is the way the touching, moving is in the counterpoint of the comic.
The real pathos of this movie, its allegorical and empathetic upshot, and what makes it as pertinent today as during the great depression -- a trick of the title that turns out ominous -- is the way it plays Chaplin's tramp carried on the stream of circumstance as the plight of the worker. Larry David has only changed this act of culpability by making it less abstract, more excruciating in psychological banality. The marvelous jackpot that Chaplin hits with this human pinball game -- and this is the movie with his act of roller skating blindfold around the edge of a balcony (not a true stunt, by the way, in the manner of Keaton or Lloyd -- Chaplin was smarter about the price he paid for his artifice) -- is the way he is culpable, unapologetic about his side of the plight because the circumstances that demand of him are absurd. The key moment for that is the gag with the ship, with an inverse proporation of brevity to size, and that means of the booboo, too. Charlie's unhesitating exit is as significant existentially as politically, the courage he musters not that of defiance or revolt, but, even as comically unflappable, simply refusal to be psychologically beat down. [5/26/13]
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). Credits. Apes and making faces. Tension in this movie is between it's desire to be a simpler story, a smaller frame, but then the same as pretext for ludicrous -- not in a good way -- burst-flourishes, of the gothic Disney/Spielberg variety, the wonderment and terror-suspense dovetail. The introductory chimpanzee cavort about the house glide is that sort of bad computer graphics that is not really due to incompetence or error but to vanity. This is itself in a montage of aging that becomes an inadvertently funny comment about the progression of a love relationship, here also so expediently taken care of early and then subordinated to the ulterior of keeping everyone rushing around on the verge, with sound effects and music tracks both banging on things. The temptation can't be resisted to wring it more, to have the camera-view-like gryations look more like some well-oiled but syrupy carnival ride. There are some much better CG moments in this movie, particularly the exchanges between founding father chimp Caesar and an orangutan, despite the fact that's also one of the stray threads. In that case, we don't know how the orangutan knows sign language, but better to err on that side than the other, some ridiculous exposition (see Spider-Man). The other case is the other direction: not so much coming from nowhere -- well, it kind of does that, too -- as going nowhere, the lab assistant who dies. The father, played by John Lithgow -- was he cast by simian thematic congruity, Harry and the Hendersons? -- is already a convenient plot-tie, but the other human failure creates contradictory implications. Were they trying to leave it just as much open to kill a sequel as have one?
Compare the elaborate make-up and masks of the original Planet of the Apes movies to the modern pretense, faddishness, the parallax that ought to tell on our trendiness, but even this now is outbid by camp and other kinds of shrewdness not necessarily interesed in just the fun. Despite how much worse each sequel got, reducing literally to the TV series the whole production was in spirit, the one thing that became more pronounced was Roddy McDowell's performance, a sort of heightening of traits. According to anecdote, while other cast members hated the costumes, the horrible long hours in them, Sal Mineo even unable to bear it through an entire shoot, McDowell relished the costume and would drive home in mask so as to get reactions from other drivers or people on the street. What McDowell did with his own exaggerated involvement had really nothing to do with some clever observation or study of apes, as creating a caricature all its own, a tic-ish ape-human blend similuation that became as distinct as the make-up and masks. Consider, for example, the way the snout extension, with false teeth to boot, created other effects, that might as well be limitations or errors or side effects, the way the actors' mouths were moving further back in the masks, and thus moving the fake mouths awkwardly, and how this also created a lisp effect. This is even in the effect of nostalgia, or at least the change in value, these things can have, as for those make-up effects of the old Planet of the Apes, the hyperbolic stage effects of the 80s Superman movies or the stop motion of Ray Harryhausen can now have a charm even if they didn't quite so then, where, for example, they were the same technological pretense, the trendy grandeur of their day. They can have this charm if for no other reason than they were also an endeavor made obsolete by an economy of conceit. Thus always the rise and fall of the planet of aping. [5/17/13]
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). Credits. After a meager start, looking even more like a Quinn Martin production than the original, and with a Charlton Heston light, to boot -- James Franciscus -- this one actually fills up with more goodies the original lacked. Except for Roddy McDowell -- the only movie of the franchise he wasn't in. [5/4/13]
Planet of the Apes (1968). Credits. At the time, Pierre Boulle's more potboiler sci-fi novel could make it's stunning appearance with some heavy duty make-up and mask jobs and a couple of lines delivered by Charlton Heston that would become classic, as much in a camp way. One of them was also in one of the great iconic images of the movies, along with Slim Pickens riding the bomb perhaps the two biggest of the 60s, that was perhaps the best fortune of this movie. It was even the good fortune of a movie version over the book, the opportunity for this tableau. While the book had its twist with the framing device, the emblem of the closing shot was the most effective stroke for the upshot of the whole, even more than the parable demonstration of role reversal. For that, we get to see the grandiose Heston barefoot, all but nude, slung around on a leash and hosed down most of the time. Apart from all that, it's even more apparent after time how TV theatrical this movie is, what little there is to it besides dialogue, more like declamation. Rod Serling co-wrote the script. Another great iconic twist in this movie is Heston laughing at the U.S. flag. And this is the movie that bears out my theory that Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowell are actually siblings, if not twins. I always thought they had the same style of acting like the way people overact in real life. [5/4/13]
Spider-Man (2002) Credits, Spider-Man 2 (2004) Credits, Spider-Man 3 (2007) Credits. These movies are sweeter and almost more naive, in contrast with other contemporary fare, and especially with the conceit of being badass. That's not even surprising coming from Sam Raimi (he co-wrote the script for the third, Dave Koepp and Alvin Sargent the other two, the latter and Ivan Raimi partly for the third), whose Evil Dead and sequels are, despite appearances, tongue-in-cheek haunted house rides. But there are two sides to this: one is the concerted sweetness, a conceit of its own for that sort of nostalgia of when these comics were first devised, the "Smalltown" ideal this hero fantasy, with its more or less conscientious, more or less willful simplification of right and wrong, good and bad, conjures; the other is the more inadvertent way some of the acting, most of all Toby Maguire's, gives a sweeter tone even in spite of what they want to contrive. Obviously Maguire's casting was due to this intention, so they get credit for the conception, but there is a way that Maguire seems to be even more what they wanted than they know, at least than the rest of the movie lets on. For example -- but this is really the main thing, and what is borne out even more by this contrast -- the structure of these movies, the scripts, is such shoddy exposition. Everything is setup. It's the very pulpish problem, common to theater and comic books alike, if in different ways or degrees, of feeling you have to explain everything and getting yourself tangled up in -- pardon me -- that web. The next step is actually a very simple one, and quite liberating, but a sort of "d'oh" one, because it may take so long to realize it: you just don't have to explain everything, so you don't have to dig your own hole of exposition. From the broader origins conceit, which all these superhero movies insist on since the Tim Burton Batman (and Marvel is making as much a nod to their rival, DC, here, explicitly or not, by following suit, as with any intentional reference, such as the line "you're not Superman"). Willem Dafoe can't overcome this re-express exposition, though he gets high marks for one of the best unforced villainous, evil voices. Maguire has a kind of reserve that almost withdraws him from acting, from staginess, but doesn't diminish his presence (or create something like that weird gulping back self-consciousness of William Hurt). It's as if he's saying "I can't believe this is happening to me" as much about being the character in this movie as his character in the movie is saying about being Spider-Man, which makes him an empathetic fulcrum, let alone sympathetic. Doubtless there are those who will take this as unlikely, undemonstrative in the way they want their superhero movies to be, but it's a way that Maquire outbids even what was attempted with Michael Keaton for Batman, plus all the wimp turnabout stuff in the Spider-Man fare. There's a way that comics have, just as TV series or action movies, of getting into habits, conventions, repeating certain gestures that are a currency of grandeur, wish fulfillment. They become a banality of their own, a kind of reassurance. We want this to be larger than life, a banner or emblematic quality, but that is, however curiously paradoxical, an economy of epic scale. Now and then, something can, perhaps by accident, let in a breath of air of the other kind of banality we want to leave behind, and that can show us how to re-situate everything, even formally create effects we didn't realize with all the crescendo. That's what Maguire does in these movies, even if he's also sometimes pushed too much in other ways, sentimental for example. Raimi as a director certainly knows how to vary pace, which seems a huge skill or talent simply because so many action movie directors particularly don't do it. He knows how not using elements actually helps when you do use them, for example, dropping music out of scenes, or even the way the pychological drama (though laid out too much in that cloddy exposition way by the script) is better by this contrast, quiet scenes with long takes as relief for the bursts of action. Raimi even varies this way to a fault, as when he drags out an effect.
Spider-Man 3 is the silliest installment, nothing but pure sequel intent, a run-on repetition of the same ideas, material, even swapping off the same material sequel-like within it in a relay of contrivance (such as having Franco's Goblin Jr. get amnesia till they were ready for him to have another fight with Spider-Man), until even this breaks down into the silliest of all: the scene where evil suit Peter Parker breaks out -- in dance! -- in a night club. [4/26/13]
Room 237 (2012). Credits. It begins with a disclaimer on behalf of Stanley Kubrick, his estate, Warner Bros., anyone associated with the making of The Shining and more: these are not their opinions. You quickly learn why, but even that disclaimer sets up the incongruity. What's detailed are the obsessive interpretations of six people about cryptic meanings of Kubrick's movie, but they are not so much dangerous or seriously controversial. The effect, intended or not, is more humorous, but even at that, it's a sort of document of this kind of involvement. The word "fan" comes from fanatic, but now we need another word to separate the mania now considered common from another level of obsession. Zealots? Conspiracy theorists? Like an Errol Morris project, though notably in contrast because without the talking head interviews (his Interretron), the makers of this film have pulled a stunt like that of the psychologists detailed in Foucault's Madness and Civilization when they put two delusional Louis XIVs together and made them aware of each other. The subjects of this film, who here make any other claim to fame they have incidental to their albatross of The Shining, all like to pick out details in the background as clues to a meaning that, even by some of their own accounts, Kubrick wants to disclose, just in a more hidden way. Of course they often pick out the same detail though it serves as a clue for different cryptic messages. This lesson in over-interpretation demonstrates the hinge of the matter, that is the matter of the hinge: it's the polyvalance of the sign that is operated even in reduction. But it's this reduction that always exerts the greatest force, the greatest temptation, because, since Parmenides at least (of which Nietzsche makes one of the best lessons of this) no matter how grand something, anything -- everything! -- is, you can make it small. Never mind this might also be making it petty, or making the petty into something grand. One of the subjects cites "post-modern literary theory," enough of a gloss alone, as easy justification for the certainty of intent or interpretation displaced from the author, in the same way the qualification or critique of conscious mastery can grant that accomplishment to something else, unconscious, transcendental, mystic. But how, then, does this become certain -- to anyone? The filmmakers outbid Morris's film-clip campy illustration technique by creating their entire movie out of clips, not just of The Shining, or even of Kubrick films, but of many other movies besides, to also heighten the obsessive circle. I've always thought of Kubrick -- and film by film, by the way, each in a slightly different way -- as an edge that produced two opposite reactions equally off the mark, but as such complementary, one being annoyance, resistance, rejection, but the other perhaps even worse, almost religious, of the most over-awed yes man. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the exemplar of this. Here, one of the subjects actually states that his first "religious experience" -- quotation marks to emphasize those are his words -- was that movie. [2/23/13]
Amour (2012). Credits. Michael Haneke's work has been a strange combination of imaginary abject and dry execution that usually ends up being overwrought even when not just the premise. It may be for that reason alone, by dint of seeing Time of the Wolf or Caché before, that the dry manner here, the attempt to be affectless, or straight, or as little melodramatic as possible, seems also to lack another kind of swerve, what might be just pertinence, while at the same time causing a lot of anxiety that's also quite detached. I was expecting this story about the decline of one member of an old couple to serve as another of Haneke's manipulative wolves in sheepish underplaying, that it's caché would be some leap or strain. His movies are overreaching, like so much else the last 20 years or so, all the groping, unrestrained, greenhorn earnest style outré that passes for art, only not played that way. Unlike Robert Bresson, perhaps the acme of pointed understatement in French movies, the directorial hand especially with acting, Haneke's understatement often seems not to be aimed at anything other than this counterpoint delivery of the abject, and thus, well, an affect: precisely an affectation of affectless. Compare to Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? Which is why, here, the big climactic moment is strangely anticlimatic, not in the sort of black bad joke way of Herr R., but also in contrast to Haneke's other premises. Maybe I just hold it against him that an argument for euthanasia as a crime of reasonable passion comes alongside -- after -- apocalyptic indulgence (a kind of ultimate impertinent dramatic point), or the sort of backpedaling narcissism of bourgeois paranoid fantasy. Perhaps if he'd done this one first, I'd be able to see his other work as an extension of dealing with the abject that is not contrived or trumped up, what we like to call real life. There are good moments in this, such as with a pigeon and writing a letter, just as in his other movies there are moments, flashes of observation that aren't just smug provocation. [1/26/13]
Skyfall on the Bond page.
Whores' Glory (2011). Credits. Dog art. There's a shot of dogs fucking in the street in the Thailand segment of this movie. And it goes on. And on. And on. And do I have to press it here to give the idea of how this director presses the point? A pushover's trick. This is lazy fare rather than laissez faire. The movie is about prostitutes in three particular locations, The Fishtank there in Bangkok, a particularly desperate district in Bangladesh, and The Zone in Reynosa, Mexico. It's not even really the muckraking it wants to be so much as slumming. But even this loose net can't help catching the sense of these places. There are moments of eloquence, obviously enough as when a Bangladeshi woman makes a direct statement and plea about the path for women, but it seems to occur almost in spite of the filmmakers. The most exposé sort of articulation is a sequence of a man in his truck cruising back and forth in The Zone, a sort of leering window-shopping, expressing all the terrible contradictory feelings in compulsive rapid fire, deference and denigration run together into a banality of phrasing. Not to be confused with William T. Vollmann's Whores of Gloria, which is a whole different style, degree, level of compulsive absorption, one that shows how this film doesn't live up to its own conceit of immersion. [1/20/13]
Straight Time (1978). Credits. Cool, efficient passion. This is the direction of Ulu Grosbard, but it's also the way the script by Alvin Sargent, Edward Bunker and Jeffrey Boam uses two scenes in particular for all the drama of the empathy, caring or love, between Dustin Hoffman's convict and Theresa Russell's job agency worker. One scene is a jail visit in which his fortune at having someone care about him is met with his own pressing resignation, the sense of futility that's choking everything else out. You see this, feel it in this scene, and it works against expectations, whether set up by other movies we've seen, because of how his date to meet the woman was fouled up by the parole officer (played shrewdly by M. Emmett Walsh with a great, patronizing, weaselly slighting). He had said he wanted ordinary things, like to love and be loved, here's this woman who had to find out what happened to him, and the way the situation is untenable is what's in his response. When he then takes his turn for the worse, we know how much more futile it is, thus the second scene after he comes back from an impromptu robbery of a gun store (after another bungled scheme). These in turn set up the last scene which is a marvelous twist on the blackmail possibilities for endings of "crime" movies, curiously an analogy for the scheme of the convict. Hoffman says he's leaving the girl because he's going to get caught. And drives off down he highway -- form and content. It's neither storybook like The Getaway, nor documentary, but neatly compresses the makeshift life of these people, even their capers. [1/18/13]
Night, Mother (1986). Credits. Not as gimmicky as it's premise would seem, or even the way it starts out, the script actually manages to be eloquent in indirect ways, coming back around even to situate the idea, the motive for not living. And in fact, Marsha Norman, author of the play and the screenplay, has notably performed a judo trick -- without that being the calculation, or quite so trivial the operation or accomplishment -- of avoiding most of the obligatory reasoning, certainly abstractions and platitudes, about the value of life. Without being quite so directly so, again more sidelong, indirect, it's an inversion of all that valuation, so that the logic of valuation can call for this decision. The problem here, with this production, is that while director Tom Moore avoids the obvious way of opening up the stage play -- more settings is what that usually amounts to in a movie version -- he apparently felt the need to do it another way, by livening up the acting. Spacek and Bancroft thus oblige him, and in particular Bancroft shows how serviceable she is, able to bring off what was called for quite well. There's a way in which this serves the characters, too, because the relationship between this mother and daughter is just so to allow this trajectory. It's a perhaps more serious version of the Absolutely Fabulous scheme, where the mother is the detached, apparently care-free, peachy evasion and the daughter is the responsible one, what really amounts to carrying all the load of serious consideration, though she's also an effect of being too much so. And the mother character, Bancroft's, is one of the great strokes of indirection, compelled to a revelation of her own about her relationship with the father, and thus the wider background for the daughter, that approaches the sort of thing in the Addie passage of Faulkner's As I Laying Dying (that's also one of the most beautiful passages in literature, also precisely for the wretchedness it articulates). But in this livening up, there's a cost. There is a way that the direction and execution of the performances were necessary, well done, and wrong. It's in the kitchen scenes, for example, where with the sense of candor about surroundings that we have with movies we don't have with the stage, the sense of the unorchestrated is missing, what would be precisely moments of inarticulateness, the hanging disorder or ungathered of all the import. Spacek presents this problem in another way, because despite the care Norman has taken to avoid preachiness, to be eloquent with the mechanics of situation and dialogue, this is certainly a situation that involves a very big statement and declaration. Spacek's considerable talent, as what she'd done prior only demonstrates (Badlands, Three Women, even Carrie) is for precisely the sort of characterization that is not articulate, at least not in direct statement: characters who show even what they're incapable of seeing about themselves, or articulating, let alone declaiming. [1/5/13]
A Man Vanishes (1967). Credits. Annoying and fascinating at once, this could have been a study for Lynch's Inland Empire. It's a headlong rush, a clamorous assembly that starts out like it might be a non-fiction counterpart to Kurosawa's High and Low, but becomes a scrapbook of interview material, jumbling sound and image, apparently out of some necessity -- some interviews surreptitiously shot or even recorded for sound -- so that it becomes a demonstration, inadvertent or not, of the dual process, as with the work of Christopher Marker or Trinh Minh-Ha. It's like Welles's F for Fake, but also made me think of the Monty Python's Flying Circus jokes about teams of documentarists showing up on every corner. It keeps rippling out, or sliding off, into all the details beneath the surface, and then, in a demonstration of just how much more complicated and even messy this is than Rashomon, even the process of assemblage, gets into the shards of the exploded prism of subjectivity, the problem of objective fact with memory and will, but how that degenerates into gossip and circular bickering. [12/22/12]
Rififi [Du rififi chez les hommes] (1955). Credits. A French film trying to be brassy, Hollywoodien, can't help being more blasé and thus more interesting in certain sequences. There's a song act that's too Gilda (as if that wasn't too already, and the song is supposed to explain the meaning of the title, but the manner is contrary to what's being described), and with a silhouette dance effect that's too American in Paris even for a French gangster club, and one scene looks like one of those stage hovels out of a 30s gangster movie. But it slips into a great, long, quiet heist sequence (for this it's a precursor to The French Connection, though Vertigo just a few years later made it's own voyeuristic contribution to the line of sound movies using the fascination of watching like silent ones) that produces that puzzle of all the craft and work involved in, well, avoiding work. And then there's a sequence at the end with a kid in a cowboy outfit, riding in an open car, the whole thing looking quite careless, even dangerous, supposed to be more serious in the plot, but the effect of it is airy, removed, floating away in the reverie of the motion, like the kid unaware of the gravity of the events, the counterpoint in that way the French can have, offhand precisely like children. It's the sort of bluntness and lightness at once that would become a whole palette with the New Wave, the jazz movies with Jeanne Moreau, The 400 Blows, and that had already made for some of the best in movies, like Zero de conduit or Le Million. The melodramatic posturing, particularly the honor among thieves, has a bit more fatalistic bite, and the movie code of making crime not pay by having the gangsters fail, be punished in some way, manages to come off as more noir code existential, or amor fati. [12/8/12]
Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). Credits. This is like Terrence Malick mixed with Dennis Potter directed by Derek Jarman. The first feature-length film of Terence Davies (after his trilogy of shorts based on the same autobiographical material) is an interesting formal exercise suggesting, if not directly inspired by, family photographs, as if they were a mechanism of repression. Skipping, skimming, like memory following association and not chronology, or at least not the line of a narrative or plot, the film also sets up a contrast between the fond and wistful and the rote or obligatory. Very formalized, it isn't very inviting, but there is also a point to that. The singing gets annoying, but many of the characters get annoyed by it. You see it as even more of a crutch than in Pennies from Heaven. Rather than just the contrast of the beautiful dreamworld and all the reality it's trying to avoid or deny, you're also seeing how the denial itself becomes oppressive. [12/8/12]
Compliance (2012). Credits. There's a point in the movie where I'm thinking, "come on." That was floating between, OK, how could these people be this stupid, and then, this just isn't plausible. The movie flashes at the beginning, before the title, that it's based on true incidents. I went back and forth thinking of it as provocation, surreal, parable, urban myth, based on real incidents, playing it between all those registers. It's the end of the movie that is the most shrewd and really tailors it into something more effective. It's the opposite of what The Imposter was doing. That film took facts and tried to turn them into the drama. Here the writer and director, after dramatizing (and more deftly, by the way, than The Imposter), leave the narrative -- or at least make it more oblique -- to another sense of the events. It's a kind of denouement, certainly in any regular movie terms, which is also shrewd, but the upshot of it is very nicely made in a counterpoint way. Almost a kind of nonchalance.
Then I went and looked up stuff about it. First off, I found that Rogert Ebert was one of the only major or mainstream critics who reviewed it, or at least who was listed in the IMBd critics reviews at the time (12/8/12). Ebert reports on the phenomenon of the movie itself, telling that at the screenings people walked out. He wondered about this. Were they offended at the movie? Was it just too uncomfortable? Does it hit too close to home? Is the movie just not what they really want, which is the sort of entertainment they use to divert from or ignore or deny what it's about? Ebert goes through some of the stairstep of this: is it true, would anyone really do this, etc. But he doesn't go all the way or at least very far. For example, at one point he says, it's true, Google it. That's certainly no way to put an end to rumor or speculation. Rumor, pranks, willful misinformation and manipulation, urban myth, lack of sources or verification -- the Internet has only increased the problem of determining fact.
I kept thinking of the film as being suspended from any point of certainty. What if it's not true? And it still struck me as effective, as parable. Precisely because it's saying don't accept authority. Which would include even itself. Derrida goes into the infinite regress of the counterfeit. The lie cannot work without the truth, at least a tacit acceptance on the most minimal level of a statement. And the whole Nazi lesson about following orders, too. Just because we think we're not Nazis or working in concentration camps -- what would the point of that lesson be? The movie makes these shrewd little comments here and there about precisely this location of the phenomenon. Fast food chains, places of employment no matter their status, any private or proprietary or business rationale that would make acceptable what is not supposed to be under fascism, tyranny or even "government" as a blanket dismissal by certain conservatives or libertarians.
At one point after the ordeal is over, a police officer makes a crack like, "What do they put in this chicken to make these people so stupid?" This refers, even if in a clumsy way, to the whole phenomenon of the workfarm sort of workforce in this country. No education, forced to accept worse and worse jobs for worse and worse pay. And if everything is a necessity, if you're hanging by a thread, then you must follow orders even more. The person who is singled out the most in the movie is the store manager. She's well done in the movie, brought off the most shrewdly, Ann Dowd's performance of Craig Zobel's scripted character, and his direction. And she's a familiar sort, the lower-level representative of the absent authority, given all their dirty work, having to represent all their worst impositions and then take care of any of the problems of the employees.
I had a job at a fairly large chain bookstore in San Francisco in the 80s and Barry Manilow came to make an appearance there, to sign a book. People had lined up on the street in front of the store since the wee hours of the morning for this event. Our manager came down and was standing around in the loading dock with a group of us workers while we were waiting for this to take place, and she casually mentioned that the holdup was because of a bomb threat. We couldn't suppress our reaction, not just for our sake, but all the people gathered there. Shouldn't we leave the building, or at least be given that option? She then realized those implications and had to go back to her superior to discuss how to proceed. They decided they had to offer us the option to leave, and then she was tasked with informing Barry Manilow in his limo. He decided to cancel the event and left.
That's how value is decided. The movie's closing scene is this upshot. It demonstrates something of that mass compliance if not delusion, but it definitely shows how much that manager character is culpable, even if that is also a delegation or passing the buck, a frame-up. Even in all the mechanisms of denial, or her wanting to see herself as a victim. She is being interviewed by some sort of investigative show. The director cleverly elides the scene, so that you see her preparing to go on camera as the interview begins in voiceover. The manager and one employee that went through one of the many instances of this crime (there were many) sued McDonald's. At one point you hear her lawyer advise her not to answer a question from off camera, extending the authority telling her how to act. But the interviewer then asks her why she didn't think something was wrong when she went in and saw the girl naked with the guy. She says she didn't see that, she always had an apron on. The interviewer persists. Then he says they have it on camera. The surveillance camera. And he plays it for her, and she still doesn't want to acknowledge it. Not the portrayal she wants to see. [12/8/12]
The Imposter (2012). Credits. The effects (and affect) of account. There's an interesting story here about a compulsive imposter who may have the tables turned on him, and it's loaded with material for the fact/fiction, truth/appearance conundrum to give documentary the reflexive pretext for dramatization, for the removal of being about account itself. The film makers certainly seem well in the vein of Errol Morris, if only in the way all that is so widespread, for better and worse, mockumentary now de rigueur in sitcom fare. With the main subject facing the camera in interview, and lots of fine rhetorical devices, like dissolve montages, it almost looks as much as sounds like it could be an episode of Morris's First Person series. But it's how you tell the story, and that doesn't get any less tricky for picking up so many tricks, even reflexive ones, readymade. The filmmakers here are so intent on their dramatization, putting the real people side by side with the stand-ins, but then trumping all that up. They skidded away from the emphasis I thought most interesting, the background of the guy, and the family. When he talks about how this situation seemed good to him, that brought up the whole point of just what background do you come from where that seems good. The filmmakers were too worried with making a narrative out of it, or perhaps too worried about a slick story to simply tell it. Kiarostami's Close-Up is a, perhaps the counter example, as far as dealing with even the refexivity of an imposter but not giving up on the facts, not thinking the real story is somehow itself not interesting enough. [12/7/12]
The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Credits. Holier than thou about pulp. The Dark Knight rises. And rises. And rises again. All right, he rises already, I get it. The least annoying one, though perhaps by now it's just having senses dulled. It struck me watching this one, however, that all the convenient contrivance of these comic book movies, regardless of brand (Marvel or DC), moreso because of the compression involved to cram so much into a feature-length movie -- but it's already compression, already modular, handy, prefab material -- is soap opera. The arrogance of this present, that involves CG hyperbole, and for which this "Dark Knight" series has become the flagship, is that it's more serious, badass. This is the prevalence of the ham-handed macho, the ethos of teen boy narcissism, that comes at the expense of any sophistication like satire, irony or even just plain good storytelling. In terms of video games, which are driving this with the movies, though are actually beholden to movies as the real medium for this vanity mirror, and not conquering them as eager proponents declare, see the contrast between Grand Theft Auto and multiplayer combat games. This "Dark Knight" trilogy, as already explained (see The Dark Knight) I hold in quotation marks because that's precisely why it's not the Dark Knight of Frank Miller from the 80s, not only is the same as the Tim Burton and even Joel Schumacher Batman movies -- schlocky, infatuated design, pile-on plot -- but for the far greater self-seriousness, it goes along with every other CG blockbuster in pitching back to utterly melodramatic plot manipulations. So for all the flash and noise, the steroidal facade and ADD editing, all the badasses are sucking it for silent movie or soap opera fare. Case in point here: the have your cake and eat it too self-sacrifice act at the end -- if this is a spoiler to anyone, then it's even worse than I think -- who would not see this coming, especially with how the movie is telling it -- that's not only one more rising, but the extent of the stretching of all the poor, pitiful Bruce Wayne stuff with Michael Caine's tears. Like the curiously effeminate or at least dandy aspect of mafiosos with their dress, these are serious fans who like their hand wringing with latex gloves. [11/24/12]
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009). Credits. Shadows meets Everyone Says I Love You. It's as if this is the idea that was contrived. It's admirable, even a relief, to see that someone wants to do this sort of thing, shuffling, oblique, unassuming -- all that relative to the overbearing sheen of mugging demonstrativity that is everywhere in movies, whether big, "indie" or even "foreign," i.e. where Hollywood = American. While it involves something of a contradiction, here's a view, a demonstration -- that's where the catch is -- of people, young, students (or not), who are cultivating, involved in all these strands of art, culture, expression, that are left aside by the big business of it, and doing it for that, their own involvement in it, what would be for it's own sake relative to the production of selling. In other words, this is the stuff you don't see on American Idol, the sort of talent that's not recognized because not viable in the market of all that shrill commodity. A scene at a party skims over to a seemingly incidental character, who then similary without further ceremony rolls into a song that catches the whole room up in an impromptu number, musicians joining in, and the singer then also takes up a sort of dance and percussion act. It's at least brought off in an offhand manner, jam session style, audience mingled with performers so it's more participatory for all. Another sequence has a woman similarly stroll into song, then later a dance number in the restaurant where she works, with much more the sort of presentation of a musical, but giving that the same sort of incidental elaboration. It's a return to the artifice of the everyday, art's articulation of that and the articulation of art with that, as with at least the pretense of it in Fred Astaire's making dance come out of and take up the incidental, a coat rack or whatever's about, or with the reflexive play of Singin' in the Rain, or the Pennies from Heaven trope of the musical with lip sync to show the tangle with "real life" in imagination. Guy and Madeline unfortunately is a bit too compelled by the incidental, so that this musical feature of it is uneven. That's by design, to some extent, to avoid the too regulated pattern of musical numbers, and there's also the attempt to avoid the line of dramatic significance that, curiously enough as this movie perhaps even shows, has similar pattern. [9/28/12]
Margin Call (2011). Credits. A clean, shrewd stroke from writer and director J.C. Chandor that dramatizes the Wall Street collapse of 2008. You can refer to Charles Ferguson's Inside Job for an explanation of the derivatives scheme, but here you get something more like the plain English version, as each person up the hierarchy of the un-named financial company says in this film, unable to understand the complicated formulas that run their own business, and unfortunately have tied up the world's economy. That's how Chandor is clever, the nuances of banality and sophistication caught up deftly in the compression. Jeremy Iron's man at the top at one point says, "that's spilt milk under the bridge," a nice little sprinkle of all the business-speak inflation we have to put up with every day from these people whose own excellence at self-justification, value adding, has caused, never mind not properly foreseen, economic crisis for all of us. Chandor uses a nice, small slice of time to demonstrate, mostly the overnight from one business day to the next in which the company learns it's already exceeded it's historically determined boundaries of volatility, and can choose no other way out than the self-serving, which is more obviously now the hangman's knot. Chandor's tone is the antithesis to the sort of conventional movie bravado that makes melodramatic swell out of even fact, events or issues or causes (cf. The Hurt Locker, for a recent example of an Oscar and even press reviewers' darling). It's subdued, understated, trusts the viewer to get the tension, and the contrast has another dramatic point, that of the business as usual manner in which all this disaster has been concocted. For that matter, the scenes showing other expressions of the emotion, reaction, are cheating, against the grain here, in particular one shot of Kevin Spacey with his dog. Without that shot, there's a great ambiguity about Spacey's reaction, whether the dog story is a pretext. Spacey, by the way, is part of the good casting, utilization, direction, here, and finally proves that with the right direction he can be good, and not just that showy darling of the overawed (see The Usual Suspects, L.A. Confidential, American Beauty, a remarkable run of easy, high spun schlock that became a standard of good). Demi Moore does not prove similar, being the exception to the good casting, and the shots of her digesting it all alone in her office fall into the haunting intimacy of off-center framing handheld that has become a posh cliche in commercials, the worst note in this movie. [8/25/12]
The Avengers (2012). Credits. There could be no better figure, symbol, microcosm (which becomes oxy-moronic, since it's all about macrogasm), for this hyperbolic era of CG in movies than the hovercraft aircraft carrier in this movie. The pleonasm of the whole idea is in the words. Apart from any problem of plausibility of four colossal turbines lifting that mass, doesn't it defeat the purpose of carrying aircraft if the carrier can fly? And then there's the cloaking technology, because of course whatever enemy would see it coming, though the enemy in this case is an army from whatever Nordic other dimension that doesn't care about making a spectacle, since it's basically bringing the apocalypse. So you want to see Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, and a couple other token extra badasses team up, which is also to see these stars who are playing them together, plus Scarlet Johannson, which is sort of the reason to have her tolken not quite super hero. All the curious conundrums of the superlative, or just excuses for fights and special effects, that would result from throwing together a Nordic god (well, demigod anyway), the avatar of American manifest destiny, a nuclear (or mystical) powered suit of armor, the human psychology version of the atomic bomb, a sort of super-Ninja female with wily persuasive powers, and a super archer, along with the Nordic demigod's adopted brother who's really related to several types of evil spirit, just aren't enough. Because you'd also want Samuel L. Jackson with an eye patch, another sort of cool badass fighting chick, a military aparatchik who really has a heart of gold, the aforementioned army of aerial jet-ski and skeleton train minions, and of course, a flying invisible aircraft carrier. Oh, and don't forget the supertech computer interfaces and the colossal wave of whatever, that everyone has to outrun, even though it's so hyperbolically giant and fast (here it's the earth caving in). Computer graphics came with cliches readymade. There is no plot, there is only the prefab mulch of subplots. You have to throw it down so fast because you're cramming so much more stuff in. Constant action would become boring, as video games do, too much plot is presumptively uninteresting by the premise of the entire ethos of this consumption product, so you have this perpetual skittishness, a tension, and attention, striptease, all dialogue and subplot gyration mapped out in shots of three seconds or less. [8/24/12]
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Credits. The well-mannered alien. Like Them!, this represents the upper class of sci-fi in the 50s: clean, crisp, technically proficient, relatively composed, understated, which means relatively not lurid. It's not so much that it's such an extent of proper or even prim, as that it represents the concern for that in the 50s. If Invasion of the Body Snatchers is (barely) crypto red scare, this is the equivalent for a kind of self-consciousness about superiority in taste, refinement, manners, that a superior civilization would come and show us up. At one point another character makes a crack about recognizing Michael Rennie's British accent, and there may be an inadvertent joke there about American self-consciousness. This alien is the super-British, or the ideal Americans have of them as the model. Not only does this alien know English incredibly well, despite little jags put in for not knowing idioms (like "jittery") -- and the alien knows enough culturally to match it with geography, like New York and Washington D.C., but doesn't know Abraham Lincoln -- but he knows manners better too. He makes an excellent boarder. I guess manners are literally universal. [8/4/12]
La Ceremonie (1995). Credits. And even when you try to avoid moralization or parable, there is the effect of it. Sometimes having some kind of schematic can prevent an inadvertent one, or a moral or message. Claude Chabrol is at his best (see Betty) when he stays in that mode of fascination that, while it perhaps implicates us as snoops or busybodies, goes beyond to what can defy that prejudice or assurance we may want to make of the other, to what opens us to the uncertainty of others, an empathy that defies even that same patness that can be in sympathy. Chabrol wants to lay down or unfold things in an unassuming way, and often the pace of compression serves this, but he's not slack, unpointed. There's one shot in this movie that is a microcosm for this: a pan that catches the daughter and her boyfriend kissing in the dining room as it moves into another room where everyone else is gathered for the daughter's birthday party. But La Ceremonie has so much dispatch that it can pitch the sympathy with the family, what's more, with the father's precipitous judgment of character, even realizes his suspiciousness in a worse way. It's not for lack of background, either, but even the way that is done, again hasitly. The equation of the two women, even with the way they trade off finding out about each other, is too schematic. It turns psychological profile into a contrived equation, something more mechanical. In this case, not knowing everything, about Sophie the maid, for example, about why she is illiterate, more simply not having this rather easy dual setup of previous incidents, would have served better to demonstrate even the absurd attachment to all they resent, their own overdetermination, certainly the way Sophie takes Jeanne's example to the more extreme conclusion. By contrast, Betty manages to map out in a much better, more deft way how this same matter of privilege creates its own contradictions, or certainly galvanizes them, the degradation. To whatever extent this is also inspired by the case of the Papin sisters, the contrast to Jean Genet's The Maids shows the merits but also the cost of this difference between a more formalistic or thematic, abstract schematization, and more naturalistic dramatization. In Genet's rendition, the very failure of the maids to do anything but make a ritual out of their envious attachment is, precisely, ceremony, and presses the point from the opposite direction. The all too ceremonious dispensing with the two, especially Jeanne, at the end of Chabrol's film reduces it to the ceremony of crime melodrama, which may have a kind of ironic formality of its own, but is so hasty as to minimize even the mockery of that sort of moralization. [7/28/12]
Last Tango in Paris (1972). Credits. There's an aspect, a tone to Last Tango in Paris that is, perhaps surprisingly, at least curiously, like that of Chinatown. It's the music, but also the light, a sort of horizon light, and that big movie sweep that is no longer Technicolor, but watery, more lucid, sharper. This also goes with the treatment, what could be described as debunking, subverting, but really is simply a frankness. That's really the swoop of the notorious Last Tango in Paris: they talk about things and in a manner that's simply more like what people do in bedrooms and around sex, and it's also playful in a banal way. There's no drastic exhibition, just Brando talking about farting and rifling off slang terms for penis. This lowering movement or gesture has as much to do with all the upright behavior, in precisely the sort of big movie fare with even Brando prior, that masks it by exclusion, contrast, and, yes, repression to whatever degree. When Brando and Maria Schneider first spontaneously erupt in sex, they do it standing up (clothed, too, so there is very little skin seen), then fall to the floor afterwards. It's there you can see the sort of bubble-burst contrast: how we puncture the behavior that otherwise keeps us from rolling around on the floor after climax. Or that we'd even seen much in movies, never mind the act itself.
This tension is Brando himself, and perhaps what this movie does more than anything is bear this out about him, his whole career. Before the sex scene, there is a panning shot of Brando in the apartment, crossing Schneider. Again, it's the contrast of that sort of panoramic movie stroke with what it's now, here, treating, not necessarily "verité" as was already in vogue, but really just more vernacular. Perhaps that horizon light is a dawn light, a kind of morning sobriety after the 60s, whichever kind of excess, high or low. Brando was made in the movies as Stanley Kowalski and Terry Malloy. He became a star and along with the tension between theater and movies -- Guys and Dolls v. Mutiny on the Bounty, historic figures, war movies, westerns, various Hollywood attempts at theatrical drama or message or concept -- there was always this tension between his own larger than life cast and his acting, which was a "method" of undercutting, debunking, breaking through all sorts of acting conceits for more frank expression, to a fault, as easy detractors made of his mumbling and slurring. This is of course seen as not acting, according to the rendition of the Stanislavski method of Brando's schooling, a clearing away of so much to allow inhabiting, being the character, realizing it. But this, too, is a conceit, and as it turns out, about the biggest one of all, the most prevalent in American theater and by extension the movies, especially as it gained ascent in the latter half of the 20th century. No matter how minor or in opposition, rebellious or revolutionary this seemed at one point, it ran right in with much larger currents, the sort of aesthetic principle or conceptualization of the ego psychology that became so realized in American society, even that was rendered moot as the authority or expression for it. We're now the largely unarticulated, unconscious effect of all that, even as we've displaced it, even the need for actors so meticulously trained for it.
Brando took this tension, this contrast into his acting so that he became the epitome of the whole problem. The fact his career sort of skidded off sideways as far as the kind of roles he had was just as much a matter of the whole method of all this ur-acting completely reversing its service to anything else. Brando was where the process became a narcissism of its own at another level, so that even eschewing all the outside stuff, celebrity, gossip, the real world -- and this is curiously reflected in the whole premise of Last Tango -- overtook all that as an utter indulgence. This was the same year as The Godfather, the iconic role Brando had not had since Kowalski or Waterfront, and which with Tango brought out all the behind-the-scenes attention Brando demanded, the bother he caused. For that, too, compare Robert De Niro, who is the antithesis of Brando even from the same line: undemonstrative, retiring in person, De Niro defers the process to the role so well that he makes himself apt for any role he has, no matter how small and in later years increasingly frivolous.
But what to do with Brando? This would become most apparent with Superman, where Brando became the flagship for outrageous price demand, a star bigger than any role or any movie. Jean-Pierre Leaud by contrast to Brando as an actor was born in the movies, Truffaut's The 400 Blows. His whole thread in Tango, a reflexive jag of wanting to make all life a movie, is too schematic, making the whole more heavy-handed. And if nothing else does, Leaud also calls to mind and invites comparison with La maman et le putain, which is by far a more shrewd observation, articulation, depiction, exposé, than Tango, precisely the thing to show it up. [7/21/12]
Tomboy (2011). Credits. Closer than Kid with a Bike, less extraordinary circumstance, it's well done as nothing fancy. What's clever about this movie, shrewd, is where it's situated: pre-teen, on the verge of so much at that age, as well as moving to a new place and having to go through that transition. So it's not overt about the gender matter, as something like Ma Vie en rose, and is no more playing up to that kind of charm than it is some more conscientious statement. The movie shows the way the other kids deal with this, all the nascent reactions, both bad and good, so at that level of not yet being conscientious. There's no messaging. It's the formative stuff, more open, general, mixed with all that, for empathy as well. It's not hiding gender or sexual preference development, but shows how even that has broader significance, can stand for other things. It's about wanting to be and becomes quite eloquent about that in an unassuming way. There is a moment of real poignant beauty, also because of the way it occurs offhand, deft, where the mother has to express to the child the predicament, and thus the crux of how all of us have to face the reality of what we are versus what we want to be, imagine ourselves. That tension never really goes away. Gender is only one form of it, if one made to bear greater distinction. It's also significant more broadly. It's not just the special problem of some. We all go through this genderization, just as we all go through this tension of what we are. No one is ever normal in any absolute way, and we never stop encountering how we are taken by others. As Levinas suggests, being is escape. [7/14/12]
13 Assassins (2010). Credits. Popping out. This is the most recent derivation of Seven Samurai that perhaps should've been more abashed about the similarities, because the comparison is not favorable. Its long setup is more like typical Japanese TV, Shogun parlor intrigue, though not as intricate, but then it busts out the hyperbolic pitch to its big action segment, with even some CG for rampaging bulls on fire (I'm not making that up), the saving grace of which is that it's more restrained hyperbole, if that's possible to say, than American films, but which is completely counter to what makes Seven Samurai so great (and why viewers fed on modern action movie diet find it boring). Really, the similarities are so obvious they must have been intentional, which makes it only fawningly bad, an over-exuberant misapplication: the tallying up of the samurai as they're collected (even the title only signals this, the same for not calling them "ronin"), and worst of all its own silly, more pixie-ish version of the Mifune character. [7/13/12]
House [Hausu] (1977). Credits. House is a movie so goofy it's scary, as opposed to being just scary, which it was maybe kind of sort of wanting to be, but in a really weird, utterly Japanese, kitschy pop sort of way, with unbearable influence from Western 70s music, particularly as that was funneled from The Beatles. It most approximates a sleepover party with hyper Japanese girls on acid, somewhat eerily fascinating, as in indirectly experiencing something unbearable. [7/13/12]
Flirting with Disaster (1996). Credits. Before the Fokkers there were the Schlichtings -- just check out the couple Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin play here as a precursor to Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand -- and just a couple of years before There's Something About Mary turned the quirky sleeper comedy into a steamroller of a fad, writer and director David O. Russell, after the more modest and "quirky" Spanking the Monkey and before the bigger noise of I Heart Huckabees and the real achievement of The Fighter, and Ben Stiller, right before they made a chain hotel industry of his cottage one, had this little flirtation with the forumula that would later explode. All the observation humor extending the family, meaning mostly to more urban settings, if that doesn't really amount to collapsing everything else into the family obsession, includes things like Mary Tyler Moore as a satirical counterpart to her Ordinary People character, the contrast of something more heavy for her TV persona. Russell has some good observations, tending towards Alexander Payne, but the road movie sex farce, and the various characters thrown together, doesn't produce anything worth the contrivance, and makes a series of wrong turns that aren't the fun and interesting sort of wrong they want it to be. The movie skids off into new character pop-ups and not even particularly hijinks. [5/13/12]
Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). Credits. This is a brilliantly executed drama of discovery, implication and the sidelong provocation of the utter banality of a murder investigation. The sum of it seems almost precisely the opposite of crime drama, but it doesn't work or feel like it's calculated that way. The death is a point of departure, not even giving us the incident or that sort of dramatic concern with the case, but all the incidental business of the investigation and what those involved are thinking. Even the shots in the beginning, in this amazing lucid cinematography, are set up to accomplish the same thing, slowly reveal details that change the sense, the perspective, emphasizing what distance does. We're going along with police, prosecutor, doctor as they are led on a goose chase by a suspect trying to remember where he buried a body. It works exactly the opposite of plot explication, letting you only gather what info you can in this casual observer position, and in fact rather than filling in details of the investigation, the characters start going off on their own strange meditations the event seems to provoke. While they go into the terrible banality of finding the body and performing the official recording at the scene (in a manner that is not the most modern and sophisticated, and certainly not the techno posing of the forensic fad in TV series), there are little things that occur that give us other evidence of what actually happened, but which are never established in any sort of comprehensive way, among the characters in the movie or for us, and then we see more indirect ripples of this event foregrounded, while some of the more obvious effects are in the background, what the point of view of the displaced concern of the officials allows, creates. [4/8/12]
The Muppets (2011). Credits. What's curious about this movie is the reflexive aspect of The Muppets being bought out. While it's a boiled down melodrama villain, an oil man, in the movie, it's Disney outside it. They are now the Disney Muppet properties and characters, in distinction to those Sesame Street still owns the rights to. Those shills for the oil industry who raised a cry about this fell for this deflection even more than audiences who just ate up their -- well, Muppet shit. The other significance, there, is that it was not an evil takeover scheme, despite all that's still foul about the takeover. Jim Henson first approached Disney and tried to sell out, literally. For that also, the other interesting thing is the way the melodramatic climax of a last-second rescue, a telethon in which the Muppets must raise the money to prevent the buyout, is given a satiric undercut, offered also as a general spoof of such movie deux ex machina cliches: Fozzie Bear bumps the electric money tally sign and a hiccup readjusts the decimal point. But this joke, too, despite the wryness and sophistication, spice instead of pure syrup, suggests, if not refers to, the real life matter of the Muppets' diminishing value up to that time. Other than that -- or what that's for the sake of -- it's a parade of references to, rehash of, all the former Muppet stuff, the TV show, the famous songs, and it strikes not just as cheap pandering to the familiar, but peddling the hole line of products to new generations, Disney style. [4/21/12]
Grindhouse [Planet Terror/Death Proof] (2007). Credits. The fake coming attractions, with the double-feature presentation of these movies on DVD, are much better, as homage or celebration, or even in their own right. What is supposed to be derivation by Richard Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and company in these two movies simply shows the contrast between the cheap lurid of 60s/70s exploitation, drive-in fare, and the modern hyperbole of a sort of gross-out challenge, what's been called torture porn. This is so obviously not camp it seems needless to say it. Rodriguez even includes medical photos to make the extreme challenge obvious, like the cheap tactic for cattle-prodding the audience with a close-up of a hypodermic needle going in, that never seems to lose its appeal to filmmakers no matter how many times it's been done. Tarantino's capitulation to pure fannish indulgence is now a foregone conclusion, as is his revenge porn, this film here linking Kill Bill (see comments there for this general matter of Tarantino's progression) to Inglourious Basterds. [4/21/12]
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
