Le Boucher [The Butcher] (1970) Credits. Claude Chabrol may be the real mise en scene master of the French New Wave directors. While Godard and Truffaut developed more glancing styles, Chabrol has a sense for that kind of fascination with watching and listening and a way of composing in the scene or shot to match. This whole movie is built around conversation between a man and a woman, and the way Chabrol unfolds this, or lets it unfold, is like watching other people and then eavesdropping on them, at an event like the wedding reception at the beginning. The jumbly energy of this scene also shows Chabrol in the line of Renoir. We come across the two people among the others, having their own cozy, droll appreciation of the scene. And it follows them as they stroll away from the wedding along the street. Chabrol's moving tableuax have a presence, an elan. They're not slack like a lot of Rohmer or dressed down like Bresson. But it's also the manner of the subjects, as here, where the two people are comically or ironically commenting what's going on, even what they're doing. They roll through the first hardly tentative meetings propelled by the good will, and right into a scene in the woods of more halting admissions. This opens up a great conversation about love, doing with and without it, the two sides of a debate that are the split in any psyche, but the ambiguities both characters show is an amazing scope: he's deferential in his modesty about professing interest, she's gallant in frankness about doing without love though even by that inclined toward him. The scene is topped with a fantastic shot of a lighter in a hand with her face in the background out of focus. It's brilliant but smoothly done, like another shot in a bakery that trades off heads in the foreground and background, changing focus not with the camera but the action in the scene. Chabrol was also influenced by Lang and Hitchcock, and this movie is also about murders, but progresses through all that other, more closely observed and sneakier than Hitchcock. I think there are some awkward changes of register, but it's still fascinating what Chabrol does with that. Stéphane Audran, who was Chabrol's wife, and Jean Yanne make all this work as much as Chabrol. Yanne has that rumpled French charm and Audran, with her wide-set eyes and cheekbones is like a model, something archetypal, maybe doll-like, but there's also such a great casual poise to her. [11/5/21]
Jesus of Montreal (1989) Credits. Jesus and theater are not disparate, in several ways direct or indirect, and if nothing else by attempts to make them so, objections to or prohibitions of art and representation that are even older in culture than Christianity. See also: Dionysius, Plato. This movie's basic premise of a group of performers who form to give a passion play a more worldly rendition touches and crosses lots of lines, intended or not. It's also a clever version of kenosis, rippling out in all directions, for the theater and the regular humans, too. Director Denys Arcand (who also wrote the script) and his cast have a poise, a manner that is dry and can seem formal, somewhat like Atom Egoyan and other Canadian movies generally (this one is French Canadian), but that's also just relative to American mugging and wringing. There's humor, banality, dramatic explosions and even heavy-handedness even with this delivery. There's an unevenness about it, but it also works like the different acts of a play. What works best is seeing how the actor characters go from the way they're introduced to how they act in the passion play, and this movie is similar to the Canadian series Slings and Arrows in framing and presenting theater so well, in a shrewd way (the series may be influenced by this movie). A scene at a commercial audition that is the first parallel of the performers with their content of the play about Christ, making the theater like the temple defiled by the money lenders, gives a line I wish had been the main one. While the "real life" of the actors was necessary as a frame for the theater within the story, and the whole kenosis angle, tying the priest more into those relationships, an extra emergency scene in a subway, and some glaring Christ symbolism are not necessary, more so as resurrection, dissemination or incorporation are made worldly in another way at the end. [11/5/21]
Ocean's Eleven (2001) Credits.
Ocean's Twelve (2004) Credits.
Ocean's Thirteen (2007) Credits.
Every era has its party movies: projects that are just pretexts to get a group of mostly actors together (it can be others or everyone in the crew, too) to have fun, or appear to be doing that for the sake of the viewers. Why the Rat Pack's version of that was the inspiration for a turn-of-the-century collection including George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon (at one time or another the project had in mind Johnny Depp, Luke and Owen Wilson, Mark Wahlberg, Mike Myers, Bruce Willis, Ewan McGregor and Alan Arkin, among others) I don't know, or maybe just don't get, but that allows as much cultural interpretation as speculation about calculation or logistics. The swank of mega-hotel, family attraction Vegas 2001 updating the swank of 1950s casino circuit has lots of interesting analogies and projections with movies, celebrities and corporate entertaiment. For fluff, it's smooth and good-natured enough, providing you aren't looking for any serious intricate heist details. Everything is conjured up conveniently for the turns and twists, in the plot the device is backers with allusively sufficent funds, and at some point it stacks up like Bond villains, that these people must be spending as much as they're trying to take with all the workforce, technology, time -- heck, just the hanging around and hotel stays. This is all ice cubes bobbing in fancy drinks. The formula worked enough to tempt two sequels. In the first, Twelve, they got cute straying from the casino setting and with reflexivity about celebrity (the movies are complete DVD-extra style referential pigouts anyway, with everyone contributing little in-jokes), done pretty poorly by Bruce Willis as well as director Steven Soderbergh. In the second, Thirteen, they went back and tried to outbid the formula of Eleven, outbid Andy Garcia with Al Pacino, and outbid all the contrivance silliness with the bet-tracking superbrain. The first sequel alone wears out the welcome, so the charm of Eleven is not repeated. [9/22-23/21]
Bugsy (1991) Credits. Even for the American romance with the outlaw, this is at odds. Though it's written by James Toback and directed by Barry Levinson, it's Warren Beatty shtick (he was a producer and likely had input otherwise), and by dint of number alone that was getting hard to take. Whether it's Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Bulworth or Dick Tracy, the story gets turned into a romance, and even historical information made the background for that. The most telling comparison is with Dick Tracy. Bugsy is more like that than Bonnie and Clyde, which is also suggested, even if not expressly referred to, by the relationship with the press and the climactic scene, but even Dick Tracy was a less compromised characterization, especially of gangsters. Everything in Bugsy is a meet cute, even the violent confrontations. A scene where Annette Bening's Virginia Hill overhears Beatty's Siegel intimidate someone with an insane fit reduces to a pushy simplicity, certainly overbearing for the woman, but it's as much the way it squelches the very dramatic play that had just been opened up, not just the outburst, which is Beatty showboat, but the juxtaposition of Siegel's pique with Hill's, his handling of others, and her witnessing it for the first time. And it's in the ending where we really see how the romance is at odds. After a big round of self-sacrifice, we get the hit, the climactic moment that is also the payment in kind for the gangster's life, here trumped up with big cinematic gestures, like the movie reflexivity of Siegel watching his own screen test, and a model of the Flamingo hotel hit by a stray bullet, and a very obviously artificial head shot, all that very much not the stroke of Bonnie and Clyde however much it might want to be. Afterwards we go to a scene with Annette Bening getting the news, and as the image moves with her emotion welling up, the emphasis and the tone are tragic romantic, a big swell of that, which immediately frames off, if not undercuts, the gangster upshot. It's not a moral contradiction, but the aesthetic one that's the problem. Some epilogue titles tell us that Hill gave the money back to Meyer Lansky and the gang and later killed herself in Austria. And that's just what was not depicted, not even the tenor of it. It's not even so much that I think that would've been a more interesting story (so much of this story plays like embellishment, no matter the detail), as that they framed it off precisely as a romance, just as they wrote a lot of pushy, smart-assed flirt talk a la The Big Sleep, with the gangster drama, certainly any real detail about any of this, and even the tribute to Las Vegas along for the ride. [9/20/21]
Hussy (1980) Credits. The 80s drift. This was the movie I watched that first gave me this sense. It's an elliptical style or manner that doesn't always seem intended. The movies of the 60s and 70s could have strange abrupt cuts, as if almost into the middle of a spoken line or some action already going on. "Open cinema" of the 60s and 70s intentionally countered the formal crispness of classic Hollywood cinema, not just camera setup, shot composition and lighting, but even tempo. The framing of a shot, the more general framing of what was presented in the scene or sequence, as well as the timing would suggest this "openness," be more slack, not appear so composed or indeed not be so composed. Gappy, arid, suggesting real time and an inference of space beyond the frame. This could be used well, was obviously another formal or rhetorical choice, but it could also be hard to get used to, be used in excess, or be overbearing. After all, in order to emphasize "reality," the referent and not the means of representation, there would be a tendency towards elimination of the medium at all. If you don't want "life" represented or expressed at all, at least by a movie, don't use a movie. By the time we get to the 80s, these tactics and styles are as much received as conscientious, in the script as well as the execution, the shooting and editing. I caught this movie by accident on cable in the early 80s, probably a few years after it came out, and it was the first time I was struck by this elliptical style that seemed as much inadvertent as intended. Nonchalant, slightly off dramatic focus, somehow, from the beginning the characters appear with hardly any ceremony, in medias res. It's like a cat pretending not to notice things or as if the drama is never quite looking you in the eyes. There's a particular air to it in 80s movies, that has to do with the look and tone, too, lots of warehouses and florescent light tones, even with the more obvious neon and flashing colors or glossiness. It's more wandering, ambling, what's going on also as more ambient. The atmosphere seems a bit more dim, even for being more the emphasis, open but fuzzy. The lighting of 80s movies, and even how they appear with the way they've aged, literally how the filmstock has aged, is now part of this.
In this movie, it's the way the leads John Shea and Helen Mirren are introduced among the others in the setup club they work in. Their encounter is halting, anticlimactic, and in the follow-up scene to carry on about those characters, there are other things literally in the wings (the club has a show stage) that suggest other threads or lines, but only have the relevance or quality of character, not plot. It's the way the building of the relationship is skipping and skimming, on a montage principle, which is something every story has to do in some way, but it's also the echo in the rooms, so to speak when not literally, the space that is around the characters, and the way each scene is not announced, set up with establishment shots or priming music. The turns in what we learn about these characters seem to put us behind them, as if we're late on each scene and have to catch up by observing what's going on. Shea's shadier friend and thus background comes right on the heels of the couple's even more "open" dalliance, and Mirren's even shadier acquaintance and his violent propensities comes along with even less ado. [8/28/21]
Val (2021) Credits. Art is so much happy accident. Certainly inspiration or epiphany occurs that way to artists: a coming together of things, a shift in perspective, a different light, that suddenly produces a new result, idea, signification. Sometimes we don't know where the idea comes from, as if the equation or process were unconscious, as in dreams. Robert Evans brought about such a remarkable happy accident as Chinatown, and then the documentary about Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture was another one. Or there's the way Lost in La Mancha became an amazing work of its own documenting the failure of Terry Gilliam's Quixote movie, including getting caught in and capturing a torrential turn of fortune. You try to will an idea, and then something unexpected, as if from the side, flushes up all kinds of significance.
A documentary about Val Kilmer might not seem any more propitious than just that. We might expect to find out something about a person different from what we only knew from publicity or public appearances. As it turns out, Kilmer himself was making a whole other view, video-taping his own life even on movie sets. The document then also became about unexpected turns. But that's not all. Directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott have done a great job of assembling this material, to create or at least allow an onion skin study. There are so many different hinges and circles of perspective and response here. It touches on so many obvious things, or things we think about, but it brings them all together in a surprising expression. And all done in such an offhand way, along with Kilmer's own good humor and self-irony.
You see the vicious cycle of relationship to famous people, or of a life of fame, when he goes on tours and events and conventions, and he tells of the ambivalence of that. Kilmer didn't get to do things quite like he wanted, as he said in other interviews re-presented here. He went to Julliard and trained for theater or more serious acting work. But the box-office fluff he did is how we're still fond of him, even the movies that weren't critical successes or we didn't think of as truly great. That's still how we know him, even though it was so much not him. One of the surprising things about Kilmer is how big his following is for the Doc Holliday character in Tombstone, even compared to Jim Morrison, Iceman or Batman.
About the time you realize that Kilmer can't be doing the actual voiceover you're listening to, they show us his son in a studio recording it, playing his own father's first-person narrator. And later there are cuts to son Jack laughing at something he's reading, trying to record. There's a moment where Kilmer talks about all this recording he did, but that he's still not giving us the way it really was. He knows there's nothing else he can do, but he still feels that way. That's the conundrum of memory, what you realize with the obsession of memory trying to make any kind of record. No matter how much or what you capture, there's always something you don't, something missing. It's not the experience. And that also resonates with the whole tension or vicious cycle that's in all the method acting stuff about truth and illusion and authenticity.
The tension for this authenticity imperative of the Stanislavski and method-based acting and theater, as Kilmer discusses, between illusion and truth, and the Shakespeare line about holding the mirror up to reality -- the imperative of illusion or representation's servility to truth, when obviously the dependency doesn't make for a simple hierarchy -- is a very old, tricky if not thorny matter, at least as far back as Plato, and necessarily. And it's even one with the utmost sort of consequences, both "really," literally, and figuratively. This matter is much more pervasive than just special philosophical discussions, and Kilmer's story here shows that, even in ways he's not telling directly. It also tells on him. When we see the clip of the professor or director taking Kilmer to task about substitution and real experience, the metaphysical dimensions of this method acting and its sense of truth take a religious, if not dogmatic bearing. Kilmer's family was Christian Scientist, and there's also a moment where he comments that he has studied many religions. But it's not hard to see how this sort of weight would bear on assessment of the roles he took, career choices, worthiness of the art and work he was doing, and notions of entertainment -- on the whole "illusion" side of the equation.
Even with that, what we see throughout also is Kilmer's own lightness, humor, playfulness. And this includes frankness even about himself. In the clip with John Frankenheimer during The Island of Dr. Moreau shoot, I think Val was being as big an ass as anyone. That was included, just like when he had to throw up at a convention. Perhaps it's just the chance of Kilmer actually taping all this that we have this view. At one point he talks about "pulling back" -- an apt movie term, too -- to see the planet and how all of life looks from there. [8/7/21]
The Wind in the Willows (1983) Credits. This 1983 version made for TV by Cosgrove Hall Films and Thames Television is stop motion model animation and has fine vocal performances by Richard Pearson as Mole and Ian Carmichael as Rat, and a particularly great performance by David Jason as Toad. Jason was a staple of British TV particularly in a long-running detective series, A Touch of Frost, but he was also in a pre-Monty Python series Do Not Adjust Your Set, with Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, where he showed his comedic versatility. His madly exhilirated Toad boosts the quaint coziness of this charming oddity in its flights of giddy absurdity into even more sublime and sublimated play. Jason's Toad is unhinged even from the consequences of the moral bearing, which adds to this version's parallax quality, old-fashioned and modern, moral and anarchic. A bizarre little crossroads of time it seems now, it must have seemed more in its day. The book was first published in 1908, but its quite full anthropomorphic appointments -- not just fully furnished mole holes, but Toad Hall, for heaven's sake -- and its obsession with motor vehicles seem a precursor for now standard Pixar fare, not the bucolic of A.A. Milne or Beatrix Potter. Though there had been several stage versions made, there had been only a few film versions, a Disney try at animation and a couple of TV shows. The stop motion allows not only animal forms, looking a bit like reanimated taxidermy specimens, as opposed to the much more human forms of several stage play versions that had been done (one by A.A. Milne himself) even if with animal costumes, but also gives it that uncanny quality of the automaton (described since at least Daedalus), something familiar and strange at once. And like other stop motion curiosities from Czechoslovakia or Russia even before this, it also seems somehow close and somehow distant, mysterious and faint and clouded like dreams, but also fascinating and affecting, creeping and poking into the imagination. [8/3/21]
The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Credits. The year before this came out, Alien gave the monster movie its grandest production. Empire was the peak of evolution of the serials of the early cinema that, despite current more widespread popularity in other forms -- almost everything has a serial form now, home delivery and binge watching driving this for movies and cable or streaming service shows -- have been largely forgotten. At the end of the 70s, art and technology had a special kind of intersection in the movies, as much because of popular forms as for them. The legacy of the studio system had as much to do with this as counterculture, "arthouse" cinema, or independent production. The knowledge of movie-making dispersed and had more routes of development. The "blockbuster" was born with Jaws, more like a reorganization of the Hollywood widescreen spectacles that became increasingly less effective through the 60s, but also because of the sort of realist touches and emphasis on composition and dispatch that was let in from new waves and undergrounds and cinema verite movements. Star Wars allowed George Lucas to create his own production system, and for Empire they even developed technology such as an optical printer which could combine strips of film. This development of celluloid effects, construction from different filmed elements, was a big innovation in the composite image, and it's one of the reasons Lucas's retroactive modifcation of his first trilogy is counterproductive. Computer graphic effects don't look the same, don't blend in with the look of these movies, and most particularly Empire, which is also why it has the least of these modifications.
After the adventure of Star Wars, both in the story and getting it made, Empire was an extra step in aesthetic touch and elaboration, mainly because of the look. In something as collaborative as this, it's difficult to single out one person, such as cinematographer Peter Suschitzky or production designer Norman Reynolds, when there are so many others in art direction, set decoration, the art and visual effects teams, or even Lucas himself. But it all falls to director Irvin Kershner, on his watch. After directing Star Wars, Lucas turned those duties over to his former teacher at USC, who had a background in art and photography. Lucas said of Kershner that he knew everything a Hollywood director needed to know, but wasn't Hollyood.
The rich colors, contrast, and attention to natural light or its approximation are what make Empire so striking (the cloud city scenes alone are a marvel of skylight tones, how they're used or approximated), but it's also the sweep and composure that Kershner gives it. Despite the overall dispatch, there is patience in the pacing, even in action sequences, and especially in the climactic duel, so that it's drama and not just action. The movement in the images heightens the graphic appeal, the elegance, doesn't cut it up or step all over it, as with the giant walking machines on the ice planet, or in that same duel when Darth Vader's helmet enters the moving shot. While Kershner keeps this lush tone even with the tempo, it's actually the narrative expedience that makes this so much like those old movie serials, but also makes something so much more of that. The tragedy-like and metaphysical pretensions that would become so much a part of all the other sequels rear their head here, but even those are caught up in the overall movement. It's not too fast to destroy the charm of these environments, but its fast enough to keep it from exposition (or even recitative, see below) or such excesses, heavy-handedness either high or low, and that's even with its villainous turn away from the melodramatic happy ending. Lucas knew he could afford this with the plan of another movie, but Empire is also the exception to the entire series' cookie-cutter formula of the parallel action with a large battle at the end. All of these contribute to a tone, at once a gravity and fleetness -- the love thread with Leia and Han is a perfect example of this, swept along and touched on in just the right moments to remain offhand even in graver suggestions -- that never becomes demonstrative, which by the way, is exactly what the next installment, Return of the Jedi is in spades, and where the series of movies went downhill.
Because Empire is an adventure, a ride, travel to other places, other worlds, and not just by the analogy of space travel with the imagination. It's not only like the old serials. Star Wars already evoked the location appeal, even pandering or exploitaiton, of Beau Geste or Gunga Din, not to mention all those parade floats of the 50s like Around the World in 80 Days. Empire was new wine in all those old bottles, as well as sci-fi and fantasy paperback covers and illustrations, comic books and space movies.
And all of this is seconded, compounded, carried by John Williams's score. The Star Wars score, so influenced by Wagner, here attains operatic or at last symphonic proportion. It's not just the addition of the "Imperial March" (the "Ride of the Valkyries" counterpart) or the love theme or Yoda's theme. The inventiveness is in all the "incidental" music, so that it's not just incidental, but flows to and from the themes. The music for the giant walkers and the aerial battle against them, and for the cloud city, adds to the exotic, intriguing quality, that thrill of these other places. [6/26/21]
Le Trou (1960) Credits. As with the heist sequence in Rififi, this is long on process, and for that reason it's not just the best jailbreak movie. One inmate is moved to a cell with four others, and we become acquainted with them as he does. The camaraderie that develops leads to a moment like that in Seven Samurai when the young samurai is awed with the silent one and tells him he's great. When the new cellmate here expresses the way he's glad to have met these men, it's also like what the viewer feels, responding to these characters and being taken into the story. It has that sort of engagment the way Seven Samurai does. It's an adventure but also a social experience, or one of social breadth. The whole thing works like the kind of fascination we have as children for grownups and their work. In their intimidation and ribbing, but also their hospitality, these men have a distance they reach across. And when they show their courage, cunning and resourcefulness, they're admirable and compelling, but as other, model, imago. They're like the working class version of heroes or athletes. We feel we belong with them by admiration even because we don't presume to measure up. One of them even says something like this of another at one point, how formidable he is, and his partner agrees, and they go on being so in their way. When the formidable one delivers the first blows to the concrete floor of the cell, the camera is right on that. He barely makes a dent and keeps hammering with a makeshift metal tool from a bedframe. Others express their doubts as they and we watch: there's no way to break through that. And director Jacques Becker gives us this real-time sequence of the task of breaking through the floor. He gives the excruciating suspense of the real material. It goes on as they take their turns, and we hear the way one of them exerts himself with the blows. Later Becker will use elision more because we've got the idea, but he still concentrates on all the little material details of the plan, that have already been mostly mapped out in the mens' heads, but that they also have to figure further as they scope out the underground area. Becker cuts to details of filing bars (one of the men hurts his fingers at about the point you think it must hurt) and hinges. Then he matches these detail shots with things like the guards looking at a spider in a web. It's matter-of-fact, but it's not like Bresson. Becker has a feel for the drama and suspense in the details of the situation, and trusts we will too. [6/4/21]
Jules and Jim (1962) Credits. For how much Andre Bazin championed mise en scene, and for example against Soviet montage, his followers Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut made a whole new method and style from the jump cut they picked up from American B movies, where it was not particularly an aesthetic choice. They made a virtue of ineptitude, or at least shoddiness. Godard's Breathless did this in the most direct way, mocking the skittish action sequences, but carrying that anxious, jazzy ellipsis over to even this post card tall tale the characters are making of themselves, with an ironic effect. Later Godard would use all kinds of cut-up and cut-in techniques in a far broader agitprop style. But it was Truffaut who may have first lifted this jump-cut plan to the broadest application in Jules and Jim. Perhaps he arrived at this as much from the necessity of telling a longer story, novelish or at least across many years in the lives of the characters. It's in the voiceover narration and even makes a similar irony from use of that: from one statement to the next is a jump, non-sequitur, changes the subject, or switches from broad setup to some unexpected detail.
Truffaut's kinetic spirit, from The 400 Blows, and that would become the light and airy manner in all his films as well as the Antoine Doinel cycle, is in Jules and Jim like the play Nietzsche says to associate with great tasks. He's racing and soaring, gliding and skimming, through days and years, over morals and mores and dispositions, which at this pace and from this view, seem as fickle as whimsy, through culture and art and war and marriage and children. This dashing has an irony of its own, a flighty insouciance as a counter to the gravity of any situation, similar to Breathless (compare the "tragic" climaxes and their treatment), but it's not just identification with the characters. The v.o. narrator is not one of the them. This narrator makes the statement about the friendship, between the two men, as the ideal, or at least what was most valuable about it, the value now seen in its loss, and this is made at least indirectly in comparison to the love, the mad love or the madness of love, for Catherine, for the woman, and perhaps for women in general, considering the larger context of their amorous pursuits. This has at least two casts: a meditation / comparison on love v. friendship in general; the comparison implying or requiring that between relations among men and those with women. Is the latter "there" in Jules and Jim? In Truffaut?
The flighty detachment doesn't necessarily work well everywhere, has other effects. The scene where Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) tells her story to Jim is rushed in the same declamatory way, and this shows more the forcing of even the dramatization of this. To this extent why dramatize at all? What's the difference between this character saying it in this scene, walking in the fields or among the trees, between the actress Jeanne Moreau saying it, and the narrator? As a formal matter, there's this risk, but there is also that of making Catherine more reduced to the object of characterization, which is the other problem suggested, of the Platonic or homosocial ideal and its misogyny. These men may be as mad as Catherine, or worse fools, as the scene where Catherine jumps in the river demonstrates, and most expressly cites the misogynistic views of the era, Jules (Oskar Werner) ranting after the "Swedish" play they went to see (suggesting Strindberg). But is this comparison between friendship and love necessarily the line of the conjugal, or procreation, and gender, one because of the other? And would that be a product of the times portrayed by Jules and Jim, or also of the time of Truffaut, that's to say a matter of the portrait or what it portrays?
The movie flickers like this, too, along many other lines with allegiances and empathy. It provokes the way our reaction can take the portrait for its object, which is only naive to the extent we're not aware of it, but the awareness doesn't eliminate it. It's always there in the reception, the interaction, empathetic involvement with the story, the drama. Truffaut, perhaps even inadvertently, plays with this, too, but again even as with the ironic space, play doesn't mean only to treat frivolously or unseriously. The flying through or over all of it is neither completely detached, nor completely partisan. It's also flying with, among, but all the better for the observation. These characters, artistes or bohemians of the period, shuck off the petty hypocrisies of bourgeois convention, but then as capriciously appeal to them again, or seem to be driven by them, in their own hypocritical demands. Desire doesn't make promises. But it makes us make them and it demands them. It's easy to react to the arbitrariness of the characters as if it's Truffaut's, the movie's, but this is just as much an observation of the way libertines end up matching the assumptions of moralists, or of the kind of lefty boy scouts who want to be socially progressive but also want to impress with careers or lovers or spouses, and will commit hypocrisies for the same traditional conventions, or whose progressive pretenses never questioned their naive assumptions to begin with. [5/22/21]
The Deer Hunter (1979) Credits.
Like school buildings, this now looks smaller with age. I read an article on the web that surveys nicely all the controversy about it. See "The Deer Hunter Debate: Artistic License and Vietnam War Remembrance," and it's worth going over if you don't know the controversy about the Russian roulette as well as anything else. Like the writer of that article, I went to see this movie on my first date with my high school girlfriend! Even at the time, not understanding all the ins and outs of these details, I still thought the movie was really making a big play at being impressive.
I forgot about the Russian or Slavic heritage of the steel mill people, and this time I also noticed a song sung by the Red Army Choir. I wondered about that, during Cold War times. Apparently there's no sense to that from director Michael Cimino and his co-writers, but the one song is a Soviet era song, not written until 1938! So is that a signal? But I also read of Cimino's silly statments about the movie, first lying about his own involvement in Nam, taking the stance that it's not political, then later in the face of protests saying it was anti-war. I didn't know about all the objection to the movie when I first saw it, even by the time of the Oscar ceremony. Many, such as Peter Arnett who seemed to lead the charge, but even Studs Terkel, called it racist for its portrayal of the Viet Cong, as devilish or unhuman as any Nazi or other movie villains, and especially compared to how the blessed Americans are seen in heartsy, ritualistic terms. And then the "God bless America" scene at the end and how almost everyone considers the irony of it, mentions that, but then says it's not ironic! This is very interesting for the matter of the portrait and the thing portrayed, when something can be at "fault" for that, as far as the reaction to the rhetorical stance of a fiction, and the matter of "literal" or metaphor for the roulette. To me the complication would be for a simplistic either/or of stance, not just as irony, but as desperation. It's not just a matter of portraying people who have these ideas or sentiments or even making such people do this, sing this song, but the ambiguity, the complex that would exist "really" for such a thing.
I noted this time that the scene where De Niro turns the gun on Cazale actually works for the mechanics of the figure of the roulette, sort of justifies its use because the scene with Cazale wouldn't work the same way otherwise. That doesn't change the decision for the overall use of it, why or what to make of it, or in any way decide whether it's ultimately right, wrong, or even apt in any sense, but it does give it more of a mechanical kind of poetic or rhetorical balance in the drama. I still think that the roulette is, at the very least, a bizarre displacement for Vietnam. What about just the "ordinary" horrors of the war? What about the scene where De Niro burns someone alive? Why not the trauma and heavy-handed, syrupy tragic soul searching for that? I also realized that I disagree with Pauline Kael's take on the love triangle, or in her sense, lack of. I get her rhetorical working of it for the sublimation of DeNiro's character, for the more humorous take on how the love for the men and the deer is greater -- and I concur with that about the movie -- but it's not ambiguous or neglect about what's going on between Michael and Linda (Meryl Streep). They get a hotel, they bed more than once. It's a typical war triangle, and thus similar also to Coming Home in that respect.
This is better moviemaking than Coming Home, but not than Apocalypse Now. Like the latter it's more ambitious, but it's even more muddled. The plan, more like graphic for dramatic, is more interesting and cinematic than something like Coming Home, which is more like a play. But just imagine cutting out the roulette and showing even "ordinary" Vietnam scenes, and the whole juxtaposition scheme, cutting between war and home, is fine, even better, and avoids all the problems of the roulette. Something like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly manages to evoke the sorrow and pity of war in passing, and in contrast to three mercenary and "apolitical" men, and its own little dramatic contrivances, license and obvious inaccuriaces (Italian actors and Spanish landscape, at just first glance) without the frame for this being such a heavy pretense. [4/9/21]
Coming Home (1978) Credits. I stayed away from this because I thought it was a message movie and people were making statements about it that way, especially Jane Fonda. On finally watching it, it's at first different than I thought, then more like what I thought, then even quite clunkier than I thought. I was really surprised by Jon Voight because, despite playing an asshole at the beginning, this is the most likeable unlike him in other roles in an interesting way. But then he falls into more awkward, stiff kind of cant and especially in the climactic scene that is the worst of the film. When Voight goes to join the confrontation of the married couple, this is forced, awkward (not just dramatically), strained, slack, goofy, then anticlimactic. It's set up weirdly enough with Bruce Dern getting his bayonet only and carrying it around, and Jane Fonda saying nothing about that, before Voight then comes to the door. And that seems a huge stretch to get to the kind of turn or breakthrough, what would have taken a lot more steps or a different kind of meeting to get to. This may be the first movie to make the pop song soundtrack really problematic, something I thought had only become a fad later by trying to copy Martin Scorsese, who was perhaps the most notable to do it well. What lots of movies do now that's annoying is just the sort of grand entrance of the song: the initial hit, up loud, then cut off. This movies tries the opposite and it's also annoying: playing most of the song, at a lower volume, and it's like the characters have music on in the background but running across their change of locations. Their idea of best evoking the 60s was also to use the most towering songs, too, not just mere best hits: "Hey Jude," lots of Rolling Stones including major ones like "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Sympathy for the Devil," a Dylan song, Jimmie Hendrix. Despite how these songs may work in thematically, they are not apt by being overwhelming, distracting. At times they make the movie story or dialog the background noise. [4/8/21]
Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) Credits.
Now we have a better idea of what was intended, but also why Joss Whedon couldn't make something better of it. This is better for showing us how much more The Flash and Cyborg were involved (and more Ezra Miller is better) -- they were cut down in a way that backgrounded them for Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman. But for four hours we did not need Superman's mother with a U-Haul, Lois Lane delivering coffee, more wistful Smallville farmland scenes, superheros having to do a Mission Impossible undercover infiltration (The Flash needs to take all the time to get a fake ID and disguise to drive into a compound?), or further slow motion extensions of all the action sequences. If The Dark Knight is the dark of adolescent boys, this is the serious or straight of 20-year-old Goth girls in the 90s. Zack Snyder is making DC comics like church. The worst thing about Watchmen was his use of songs, and here that, and his return to Voix Bulgares type vocals (they got too trendy at least once over already, and there's an Icelandic song that is confusedly like the music used for the Amazons), is even more inapt. Yeah, when I first heard Nick Cave's "There Is a Kingdom," first thing I thought of was Aquaman.
And then there's the look: the rainy day drained and burnished colors, and the high gloss of the CG stuff, that makes it look like bad theatrical costumes (in Cyborg's case) or auto-body art, and just washes everything out in heavy CG environments like the villain lairs or Atlantis (the Aquaman movie was one of the most awful-looking ever). The folks making the DC movies are just wilfully headed in the opposite direction of the Marvel movies, and they don't get it, why they're getting their asses kicked. Besides the humor, the easier offhand flair, the playfulness even with the seriousness, there is also the fact that the Marvel movies have sunlight, and the costumes have bright colors. They look more like comics! They're not stuck in some teen-age video-gamer cut-scenes idea of "badass," or the NFL's when they decided to copy the San Jose Sharks' uniforms and make every color look more like black. Like the black Superman uniform which Snyder introduces here for no reason given at all in the script. At the end of this movie (if you can make it that far) Batman has another dream like the one he had in Batman v. Superman. This is the only material that was shot later for this special release of Snyder's version, but it doesn't offer any more explanation, only the setup for some possible other installment to tie it all up. But it does have the kind of touch and somewhat more interesting look that we didn't get in all the other material Snyder shot. Even Batman is still dreaming of a better movie. [3/20/21]
Nomadland (2020) Credits. Director Chloe Zhao made The Rider, one of the best movies of 2017, and she has the right touch of keeping the dramatization in a documentary framework. She uses non-actors and is apparently as unobtrusive filming them as she is with the drama or sentiment. Frances McDormand developed this project and she got the right script writer and director. What Zhao does with McDormand that's so great is use the character as a receiver as much as a transmitter, and this works also with the scanning construction and composition. It doesn't have movie plot or story turns. Everything is caught up incidentally, and even when there are events, turns to their lives, Zhao keeps it in the same minor-key flow, doesn't crank it up or beat the drums. In that way too, marvelous bursts of expression come out of of these people's lives candidly and Zhao captures them with a kind of twilight beauty (the "magic time," as they call the sunsets). This isn't just stylistically admirable or apt. It also works for the broader view this movie is providing of the matter of dwelling. At one point in the movie, McDormand says she's not homeless, but "houseless." While the economic pressure and social plight is here, too, Amazon and the way the American workforce has been turned into itinerant labor again, especially older workers, there is a larger frame to that of the privatization of all territory that forces the issue of residence, and that we take for granted. To the Native Americans, owning land was as strange a notion as owning air or wind or the forces of nature. There is no right to be a nomad, and even the freedom to travel is conditioned by this in ways you don't realize unless you have some unplanned circumstance that shows you how dependent you are on money to stay anywhere overnight. Later in the movie, McDormand's character Fern goes to visit her sister, and it seems to fall into more typical dramatization. But something else is happening there, too, again expanding and developing the scope. There is also choice and disposition and pscyhological circumstance about all this: dwelling, leaving, moving, travelling. It's not just the problem of homelessness, that some people are unfortunate or irresponsible enough to fall out of some presumptuous idealization of living, but the matter of the entire economic and social system of contraints that don't really allow us to come and go as we want or can. [2/20/21]
Happy Death Day (1987) Credits.
Happy Death Day 2U (1987) Credits.
The sequel began with the promise of carrying the Groundhog Day contrivance into one like Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests. That is a series of three plays with the same characters, each set in a diffrent room of the same house. A character's exit in one play may correspond with their entrance in another. That would make an even more original ripoff than what is becoming pretty common with the Groundhog Day idea. But unfortunately, especially in the sequel, this "franchise" wants to borrow or "reference" or nod or represent or spoof or tag or call out or shout out to something else with every breath. Sometimes they do it expressly in the dialog. But all that is then racheted in to the usual slasher constant manipulation and it all goes sour -- well, flavorless actually -- real fast. Groundhog Day becomes an excuse to just pull whatever contrivance you want out of -- well, and then there are other dimensions. Even if you can keep up and figure out how it does matter which reality will cause which boo scene to be more -- uh, significant? -- effective? -- than the last, why would you care? Maybe as some experiment in the most relentless and thus ineffectual contrivance. [2/19/21]
Robocop (1987) Credits. What's striking now is how this glib black extrapolation of Reaganism, first by Edward Neumeier who thought of the story idea while working on Blade Runner, came so close to what actually happened to Detroit, even more uncanny in the sequel where they talk about the corporation bankrupting city government and taking over administration. It seemed like mostly a spoof of cops back then. "This cop doesn't stop for donuts," the tagline of ads when it came out, went along with quips from the movie like, "Somewhere there is a crime happening," and "Your move, creep." Peter Weller, after Buckaroo Banzai and before Naked Lunch, added this to his resume of unconventional characters with his slow, droll delivery. It's otherwise played fairly straight as a cyberpunk-ish thriller, but the manic satire comes in with the TV news show and commercial cutaways (a precursor to GTA's ads and talk radio) and the execudicks played by Miguel Ferrer and Ronny Cox. Director Paul Verhoeven made the American movie scene with this. [2/18/21]
Once upon a Time in the West (1971) Credits. The most ambitious reach of the horse opera, with a woman brought into the theme rotation, is still more a Western than operatic in the way the love story is really ruin, mercenary and conniving. This is the best thing about Sergio Leone's Italian version of the American West: it's noir. But the attempt at grander sweep or loftier material -- town building by the railroad or prospectors, social magnitude -- doesn't disguise the boyish plot mechanics. It doesn't really try. This is why it's more fun than something like How the West Was Won (the opening sequence with Jack Elam alone demonstrates this), but for me The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the one that really sticks to its guns. Leone's Westerns are the movie equivalent of comic books the way they expand the graphic and iconic over the written or literary, literally making images bigger -- giant with the extreme close-up -- on the screen, in the way comic panels would expand details, and often by inverse proportion to how lurid or pulpish the writing. This movie creates the most schematic matching of this to the musical themes, and works best as a delivery mechanism for Ennio Morricone's score. There is setup after setup for announcement, entrance of or cut to character with cut in of harmonica, banjo or electric guitar, and the mellower strings and vocals of the theme that is both epic for the setting and mournful for Claudia Cardinelli's character. It's schematic and repetitive enought to get silly, but Morricone's music provides most of the dramatic force, the way it's hard to imagine Fellini without Rota, or how Hitchcock isn't the same without Bernard Hermann. [2/14/21]
Dirty Harry (1971) Credits. It has a rolling leering quality that makes it compelling to watch, and so much of it is about scoping, it pulls you into the chain of the cops following the killer's obsession. It's made clear pretty quickly that Eastwood's hardass Harry has his heart in the right place, at least with respect to minorities and whom he's protecting (there's even a scene of a rooftop jumper that was copied by Lethal Weapon), but the story is such a setup for the vigilante tactics, you know it's a ludicrous manipulation, and you can resent the nice eerie score and performance by Andrew Johnson as much for admiring them. With the Zodiac killer, it's easy to see how we get to this as wish fulfillment, and perhaps the sublimation is a relief if not otherwise useful, but so many other things are twisted beyond that it becomes not so much a right-wing fantasy as dishonoring real matters by turning them into a straw man. (See the reference in Zodiac (2007) to this movie coming out during the killings.) [2/12/21]
The 300 Spartans (1962) Credits. While not the level of Hercules movies, this is certainly no A-list spectacle. Ralph Richardson lends some clout, but the lead, as Leonidas, is Richard Egan. He has an easy manner, isn't bluster, but just wasn't a big star. Where this movie is really cheap is in two ways. One is the battle scenes. The battle of Thermopylae is set up as the climax with lots of epic-y talking scenes, but the action is far less than expected. It's more like a B monster movie or carnival show lure in that respect. The scenes at the beginning have a far more impressive procession of numbers in costume. In battle, it's likes dozens against hundreds. The phalanx is a single line and the arrows are far from blotting out the sun and on the wrong side. Obviously this is the other direction from the goopy CG overkill of 300. But for the second point, the comparison is more Braveheart. Like that, this movie makes a ridiculous use of history for its own facile jingoistic abstraction. A narrator at the beginning tells us Sparta's sacrifice to save the Greek cause was the defense of "freedom," against the Persians with their slave army. You don't have to be a historian to know that the Greeks, too, had slaves, and Alexander would do more conquering and demagoguery than Darius and Xerxes. [2/5/21]
Deceived (1991) Credits. There are some good strokes here, notably with John Heard at the end, and it's a good idea to try to be more patient with suspense. But the tone and feel of this movie is so strangely sedate, some of the thriller stuff juts in as almost humorous, but so does some of the other setup. The movie is done up and sparse at the same time, the production design and the mood and pace, so it has a kind of detachment I don't think intended. When we jump from talk of marraige to child's birthday, as if that isn't goofy enough, we get attacked by wonderment crescendo music. The suspect lover or spouse, the ambiguity or ambivalence of character in general and especially someone close, is a great vein to mine, but it's also a minefield. The more you tip the scales one way or the other, the more it can become literal, flat-footed, plot manipulation, and eliminate the allegorical play. [2/4/21]
Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah Giant Monsters All-Out Attack Four Guardians Super-Monster (2001) Credits. I want to include this for the title alone. It's like those Stephen Colbert joke event titles that pile high like a cartoon sandwich (I added to the end of the title to extend the joke). If you want to see how rubber suit technology progressed from the 50s to 2001, you'll need to check this out. Strangely, in trying to add mechanics to the heads of the creatures, apparently to make them look more badass, especially Godzilla, they've actually made them look more fake, and especially the eyes are more dead. They tried to do away with the cartoonish eyes, but they now look worse, and that's just another way in general that in trying to "update" Godzilla -- again, and it had been done several times already by then -- they tried to make it more serious again, and not the kitschy goofy kid stuff it became in the 60s and 70s. Of course this only makes for a different kind of silliness. They also try to drop all the kitschy stuff from the history in the story, and refer instead to the 1998 Godzilla movie as the attack on New York City, making that part of this new, more serious history. This movie also reverses the position and disposition of the kiddie movie Godzilla, who, at least by the time of the smog monster, had become friend and defender of the planet, and fought against other colossal avatars of bad things. This movie makes Godzilla the bad guy again, and makes express that symbolic status of Godzilla, but like with everything else it updates and revises and fluffs for the necessary new model specious change, it loses the charm. Godzilla is now a plot-exposition overworked metaphor. They actually say that it -- and they're using the neutral pronoun, at least in dubbed English -- holds all the souls of all the people who were killed in the Pacific as a result of Japan's imperial exploits, so in making Godzilla expressly this guilt, they also made the metaphor clunky and mechanical, like the face and dead eyes of the costume. And Ghidorah, which originally came from beyond Jupiter, is now sort of Japan's official ceremonial dragon, more like what Mothra was before.
The Fly (1958) Credits. It's a 50s Frankenstein. In a crisp, tidy household there's an atomic age lab in the basement (including updated, hopped up light effects) that will upset the order of repressed animal behavior. The movie has its own push to the pervy stuff in the story (the way the flyhead eats, and check out the last push of the spider before the rock is dropped). But there's a clever elaboration. All this is by way of teleportation, which is to say that's the diversion or MacGuffin. The story appears to be about instantaneous transportation, treating all matter and even people on the model of TV, and curing the world of major ills in the process (eliminating transportation costs, immediate delivery of supply for any need, a literal means of redistribution, though they don't discuss the effect on real estate prices). But the scientific naivete is of course the catch in the word "oversight." They don't see the fly in the ointment. And the other wordplay that's more explicit: he wouldn't hurt a fly. The way the story transfers the value in that equation is also ingenious. Cronenberg's version was as fitting for the 80s, when seeing and confronting, putting on in another sense, was almost the inversion of the emphasis of the sublimation, if not repression of the 50s, and he extended the implications of this confrontation dramatically and allegorically: for body transformation in general, such as aging, and suffering with or for another as well. But for the 50s, this has an almost parable perfection. [1/29/21]
The Social Dilemma (2020) Credits.
Assassins (2020) Credits.
Feels Good Man (2020) Credits.
The Social Dilemma purports to be about the toll of Internet technology due to the ulterior and tactics of persuasion by the biggest players. The only information here is that some of the people who worked for giants like Google and Facebook attest to this. What's offered as some greater insight are anecdotes about magic tricks and fear for their own children, and a ridiculous dramatization that's like a bad -- and I mean much worse than -- Black Mirror episode. Two other movies, meanwhile, offer far better insight about just what this social dilemma is and how it works without that being their main objective, and certainly not their pretense. Assassins is about the two women who killed Kim Jong-un's half-brother in the Kuala Lumpur airport. When you see the closed circuit recordings of the act, it's hard to believe there's anything more to the story. But that's precisely the complication beyond making all knowledge suspect. The truth, contrary to even those who want to deceive, is not simple. It requires more than immediate acceptance or reaction. When the attorneys for these woman, one Indonesian, the other Vietnamese, put forth the defense that they were deceived into committing this crime, even as far as what they were actually doing, it seems preposterous. But by the time you get the rest of the information, involving the pretense of a video prank show, willful participation makes less sense and there's no information for it. The socio-economic in even social meda is one of the factors that mitigates even the notion of justice, as the women's fate becomes completely a matter of national interests between the various countries involved, their native countries as well as North Korea and the country of jurisdiction, Malaysia.
Even better, as a demonstration of the how the Internet augments the multivalence of the sign and contention of meaning, and at telling that story, is Feels Good Man, a documentary about Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that became one of the most pervasive "memes" and was eventually co-opted as a symbol by the alt-right and the Trump campaign. ("Meme," by the way, was coined by Richard Dawkins on the model of "gene," and if not with him, it's use with Internet users can be specious with respect to the sign and semiology, linguistics, philology or rhetoric, structuralism or deconstruction. Making an analogy to the gene and genetics, for example, is making explicit what, implicit in thinking, can also be problematic.) This movie nicely assembles and tracks out the progression of this image through various social movements, and serves as a record on many levels: individually for Matt Furie who created Pepe the Frog, and the fate all this was for him; socially for the manner and methods of organization; for the Internet itself and various forms of its use; politically, and even how this became a factor in the 2016 election, and the difference between those who would be direct proponents, and those who wanted to exert a kind of inverted or negative influence; and even serving as a case for symbology or philology (compare this to something like Dr. Martens boots, where dissemination worked in the opposite direction politically). [1/19-21/21]
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) Credits.
Jesse James (1939) Credits.
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) Credits.
The Long Riders (1980) Credits.
Colors. The Assassination of Jesse James is obviously -- conspicuously -- influenced by Terrence Malick, and although by the look of it, from the first shots, Days of Heaven, it's just as obvious Badlands is in mind as the model of a kind of black romanticism. It's involved, intriguing, adds a few interesting graphic effects to the evocative palette of perhaps even a Malick approach (some focus effects, for example), and there are good performances by Sam Rockwell, Paul Schneider, Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt. The case of the last two is indicative of the whole project: even the good is a kind of excess. It's with these two we get the most of this psychological portrait that, while considering even the moodiness, in the more profound psychological sense, of these ornery boys and men, it seems to impose another portrait on them by way of analogy, but as if trying to work that both ways. Affleck's Ford is the overweening obsession of a modern pop star's fan and Pitt's James is the over-indulged star, and writer/director Andrew Dominick offers this, if not as novel insight, as the grain of the study. Again as far as Malick, it's more like The Thin Red Line the way that even violent or abusive relations between men are shown with tenderness. But this is also a tilt, and unlike Malick's elliptical method, it drags out and makes other things, tones or even moods, seem missing in the balance. While there's more here than the sort of Malick derivation that littered especially the 90s, a dramatic treatment of hero or star in folklore and media, which becomes another part of that at the same time, has a lot of precedent, Bonnie and Clyde for example, as well as the fact that "revisionist" is redundant with Westerns, Jesse James in particular.
The early Technicolor movie Jessie James (1939) so abstracted the Civil War politics it could serve as Confederate as much as Hollywood lore. Tyrone Powers and Henry Fonda were so melodramatically noble, and the big train business and government interlopers so villainous, conniving and weaselly, the James gang brutality becomes necessity and Robin Hood style justice, making this movie part of that myth perpetuated even by the press and dime novels of the James era. The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid of 1972 revised that and other Westerns by reversing its revisionist history. Unlike too much of one tilt, Philip Kaufman's movie tried to refer to too much in too many ways, making frank comments about the historical matters of bushwackers and jayhawkers, showing the possibly psychotic mean streak of Jesse James (compare Robert Duvall's pithier performance with Pitt's) and the greater role that others played, notably Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson's most intersting if not best performance), but also commenting on lore itself with all sorts of flourishes more from recent movie fare, Cat Ballou as much as Bonnie and Clyde. Kaufman, even before The Right Stuff, turns things out and calls attention to the show, but in a way that's more Vaudeville or Ringling Brothers than Brecht. Walter Hill's The Long Riders of 1980, co-written and produced by the actors who portrayed the James brothers, James and Stacy Keach, tried to trump that revision just eight years later with a recounting of the same climactic moment of the James-Younger gang: the Northfield raid of the other's title. The revision, as well as the populism here, is less about the showman curly-Qs, and more about lyrical violence. The earlier Technicolor whitewashing is sophisticated by the blunt -- not spoken but shown -- grit of the actions. But a scene where Cole Younger has a knife duel with Belle Star's husband seems as much an infatuation with the lore.
Each one of these movies seems a different angle, or as if lacking what the other provides, and come full circle, Assassination is missing the Civil War politics again (there are only a few passing references, which only seems to emphasize it was more than anyone wanted to deal with), abstracting the characters out of that even if for something psychological or profound about American culture or more general. At this time when we've just seen how alive Civil War politics, not to say conflict, is -- the capitol insurrection prior to the inauguration, and even what's happened in Missouri in recent years -- the whole Missouri situation, not only as context for Jesse James, as well as the exploits of these guerrillas and outlaws, seem especially pertinent and worth revisting. But while The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid may be the one among these that comes closest, the portrait of that is yet to be done. [1/24/21]
St. Elmo's Fire (1985) Credits. Skirts. There are emblematic movies, ones that become social index or phenomena, no matter what they really aren't or how much they don't really have, or even how foolish they may be. This movie is as significant as Ferris Buehler or Risky Business, somewhere between the two in terms of bad faith and warm heart (it flickers between those in almost every scene), but also in another way unlike either of them, as its own extent of look or style. Perhaps I should say artistic production. Director Joel Schumacher has made a film version of lavish theatrical design, if not overkill, and I mean theatrical as in literally the stage. This movie has an haute couture look, feel, sense, not to say pretense, of the theater, like fancy set design for the Metropolitan Opera, but applied to the "lifestyle" of 80s yuppies. It's like these people live in lifestyle commercials, but these sets of pub/restaurant, fancy apartments -- fancy and expansive even when they're supposed to be rumpled -- and even a -- what is it? Chistmas soup kitchen cafeteria? -- all have absurd detail packed into a stage boxlike depth, so that you can see fans spinning in the background, or the tons of props or design paraphernalia piled up. Demi Moore's grotesquely solid pink apartment, with one wall a popstar print (is that Billy Idol?) is shot with such a wide sweep, it looks like a John Ford vista of a stage set. And not only are these places crammed with design stuff, they're packed with people. It's as if the movie cliche of overpopulated police departments was extrapolated to all city public locations: everywhere they go looks like a crowd of over-costumed extras.
The movie keeps almost tipping over into good ideas, something interesting about these characters or people, or just interesting, then just as quickly jerking back into some silly reaction or deflection. Perhaps this is why it's such an apt representation of the 80s: the way that glancing and bustle as preferrable to contemplation or consideration, or some more patient attention or extended scrutiny, became a creed, the birth of "just do it." But worse than that, it became the deception, the confidence game of pop movies, to pass off this skirting as if it weren't that, as if it were really about things, consideration, drama, as in that other dubious emblem, The Big Chill. That's the "lifestyle" PR genealogy from the 50s and 60s into the lush, epic tones of 70s Coke commercials (beer commercials by the 80s, cars by the 90s) that can't really be very well disguised as projections because the lushness itself is all this way of carrying it. It's this photography and music and editing that is the sensibility of "dream," precisely what this word came to mean. From MTV all the way up to Friends (as a kind of degeneration even of this level, in the inflation resulting from the pervasiveness) and the era of the selfie. Materialists, yuppies with hearts of gold. This is the preening of our culture, the culture of preening. The culture is a teenager lost in narcissistic projection.
Through all this, the story zigzags between serious and absurd, the squeaky-goofy conceit of Rob Lowe as a musician (sax player!) let alone artist, supposedly so sophisticated with Georgetown, it's really the 80s version of Where the Boys Are? All the stuff about the wiles and pecadillos a group of friends learns the closer they get and we get to them, and that crosses them all up against each other, might be so much more well-put and fruitful, if it weren't precisely set down like show pastries in these sumptuous boxes. And that's leaving alone a portrayal of stalking more preposterously good natured than The Graduate. [10/2/20]
Battle for Sevastopol (2015) Credits. There are moments from sublime to goofy, but it's in the whole from the biopic way of chasing butterflies, and the main dramatic irony of "Lady Death," the loss she suffers as much as causes, seems all the more obvious for being surrounded by fancy effects and shiny conceits. The Woody Guthrie song about her is used in the movie. And in the portrayal of her meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, they have Eleanor ask, "You killed 309 men?" And Pavlichenko replies, "Not people. Nazis."
"Fell by her gun, fell by her gun, more than 300 Nazis fell by her gun." [4/24/20]
The Report (2019) Credits. Although compelling, and trying to be somewhat dry for that sake in the All the President's Men way, there's still fluffing going on, with the music and some of the faux verite shooting style. And even with that, there's a prettified atmosphere, like sunlight haze in one scene (looking even post-production). Though Adam Driver is good as usual, the script and direction reduce him to two tones of brooding or railing, and the latter gets tiresome, apparently as it seems precisely to manipulate suspense they feel otherwise we wouldn't get. You fear Feinstein's going to tell him to shut up, and you want to. Well, I did, anyway. What was more interesting to me was Annette Benning's rendition of Feinstein (for all the SF connections, too), which is careful and evocative without being an impersonation. It's really from her that we get the sense of all the pressures, good or bad, dangling the report. In the end, the gestures made to punch it up are exactly what make it seem smaller than All the President's Men. What was great about that was how it was really about the banal foibles of reporting, the make-it-up-as-you-go stage fright involved in breaking, perhaps especially, the biggest stories, and then incidentally about the biggest political scandal that should still reverberate today. Now it seems astonishing we were even scandalized, and the point here, of the U.S. skirting, which is really dumping, the principle of the Geneva Convention, is lost in all the other arbitrariness and demagoguery which have drowned the principles of democracy, or even the rights of the citizen. [4/10/20]
Color out of Space (2019) Credits. The Stepfather meets The Thing in a psychedelic orgy. I knew Easter colors were evil. This is the best movie based on H.P. Lovecraft that I know of. The story was adapted before as Die, Monster, Die! (1965) and The Curse (1987). Apart from the advantage of modern technology to render the color, a blood luster pink, what's good is the way even the perspective of the movie gets infected, so that everyone is off. It's got an oblique tone that's sometimes satirical, but definitely distant from the usual slasher heavy-handedness. It dips into some of the more banal kinds of current horror effects, but for the most part tries to minimize that, as well as keep the CG toned down. There's also a great score by Colin Stetson that gives the same balance, tempering all the extremes of movie scores, horror or otherwise. The great idea that's not abandoned is what makes the movie compelling even through some of its clunkier moments. It's like a dream where something is given an incongrously nightmarish tone or register, in this case a color. I once had a dream about TV snow where winter came to have that sense, as if the snow were a metal mist and it was a horrible sickly feeling. A meteorite from outer space seems to contaminate the water and then infect everything. The purple-pinkish color expresses all of it, from the light of the entry and landing, to the manifestation of flora and fauna and then the pulsing energy of all that again. The propagation is like a meditation on mushrooms or spores. I don't mean being on mushrooms, though that could be involved. It's an interstellar ecosystem version of the fungus that attacks ants, drives them crazy and eventually bursts out of them. To its credit, the movie doesn't drop into exposition, but plays out the mesmerizing aesthetic effect, inside and outside the frame, even with some B-movie plot mechanics. The twists of "color" give it the fun of The Stepfather, subversive or ironic sense of family, and like hippie shit going evil (Tommy Chong's role makes this more express), or even a revenge of nature and physics, but opening up that space for tone also gives it room for creepier reverberations. It's similar in that way to Us and some of the more clever, sophisticated updatings of the Twilight Zone recipe (best of all in the series Inside No. 9). The riff on the Jaws tagline would be: You'll never go back to your family again. If you can get away. [2/28/20]
Marriage Story. (2019) Credits. This is easily the best of the Oscar picture nominees I've seen. Far better than Joker, better than Tarantino's or Irishmen or Parasite. I think it's even better than Boyhood. And it's the best of Noah Baumbach. It's painfully impressive how it renders the unfolding into the absurdity beyond bureaucratic, how the fight is produced by the lawyers, and the whole observation of the squeeze of all that, like making some kind of finery or clockwork out of a nasty knot or tangle. All the people who turn up -- Julie Hagerty, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta -- in such great unassuming and unexpected roles, dallying their way through impertinent doddering, like the people who aren't aware they could be models for satire. And it's really well wrought that way, written and directed, with the ironic distance of the time and the art, but still the seriousness, or as if the solemnity now has exasperation. Just the right touch to everything. Scarlet Johannson gives a performance that is most unlike anything she's done, as if she herself were a different person or actress (Jennifer Jason Leigh is the real-life basis, in case you don't know). Adam Driver is just plain great. The first scene with Laura Dern where Scarlet tells the story of the relationship is perhaps the kernel of the whole, the way it's done, and so well. It has a whole kind of frankness we don't see all the time. The deference of Scarlet to the iffiness of Laura's pitch, which never gets nailed down into any stance of the characters, then wandering across the room into the bathroom with the kleenex, and the whole meandering way she tells the story. This is worthy of analysis sessions and all the problems of distractedness when there is a significance that is troubling, but also like the ambling of real life, as Chekhov observed, that is anti-climactic, not leading somewhere big and significant in a movie plot way. And never pushing anything too much, in that Hollywood melodramatic, telegraphing way. The only scene that pushes it is the one with the woman who comes to evaluate the parenting of Driver. The balance of the story seems to tip the scales to the man, but then it was written by the man. But later, in the explosive precipitation of their unloading, and in the languid inevitability of the last scenes, you also see how nobody's a winner. To live -- or, perhaps even moreso -- to love -- is to lose. It follows very nicely this in the whole progression, carries that off, executes, on the whole, the script, the acting, the direction, the orchestration: the way it is inevitable, but not predictable. There are offshoots and tangents that carry this, the contrast and relief of the significance that doen't have a mechanical order. One of the most eloquent, even because seemingly incongruous, is when Driver's character is with his theater company in a piano bar and his impromptu turn at singing -- a somewhat more professional level of karaoke -- produces another unexpected reflection. Artifice snags life not quite like you think. [2/16/20]
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) (credits) is a brilliant expose showing that all the lessons learned and good feelings hard won, as well as all the altruistic cant, are only the ephemera of the Christmas season, and mean nothing as soon as it's over or even for repeating the same mistakes the next Christmas. [12/25/19]
It (2017) (credits) and It Chapter Two (2019) (credits). In It the first part, which isn't titled It Chapter One, there is a scene where they strip to their undies to go swimming. It's incongruous. What's different about it is the sort of grainy candor that, precisely, we don't see in typical movie versions of Stephen King. Even when they're trying to be more folksy and "real life," in a kind of summer camp way, there has to be a sheen to them, a put-on. By the time we get to It Chapter Two, it's full on the same kind of badness of the earlier TV thing only souped up with CG and modern photography, or perhaps moreso, post-production graphic enhancement. It's actually worse for all that, much more wringing in all the ways it jumps around. This is probably the hero sandwich shitpile of all Stephen King hackness: with all his "themes" -- conceits, cliches, contrivances, manipulations -- mixed together, including an even more cloying ending than Stand by Me, beating us over the head that's what it is, and complete with in-jokes about the response to King himself, which he delivers as a character, that are as noxiously twisty as loveable. The whole problem of the imaginary fear -- it's not real, it's not real -- gimmick betrays that of the ghost story: always having to be on the verge, allusive, coming after, about to, even ambiguous. If the supernatural were really so unrestricted by physical law, space or time, what's the hold up? Why doesn't it kill you right off, if that's the intent, if it's so interested? That wouldn't be, precisely, suspense, which ought to tell us something about real ghosts, but certainly tells everything we need to know about the slasher pop scare genre -- book or movie, since they're really the same with King and his ilk. There is no real mystery, this foregone conclusion is even desired, a kind of sublimation insurance, but it makes this drawing out as tedious -- for some of us -- as martial arts sequences. Here, King movie writers only make it worse by extending the contradiction. The imaginary clown-MC version of Freddy the Thing can kill people and physically injure them, but then not when someone -- the writers -- decides it's time to conveniently assert the will against it. This isn't just ridiculously illogical, and it's not the logic of dreams. It's the logic of mollification. It's sucker pop.
What is "it"? There's no character, there's just flailing: wham with wish fulfillment, wham with preemptive scare stuff, wham with identification of "loser," wham with cheesy allegory about remembering childhood. In this movie there is a voiceover montage, at the end, after you've been beat over the head with two feature lengths of it and somehow still need it summed up or spelled out for you, that's bad heavy rock song cliches: believe, be true, stand. Stephen King doesn't have "it." We should probably try not to leave "it" too abstracted, so as not to be mysterious or arbitrary -- try to explain what "it" is that Stephen King doesn't have. But when you don't understand -- or, out of concern to preserve quaintness, only make use of the slightest step of -- ironic depth or indirection, how are you going to get precisely the idea of not spelling it all out? King of horror? But it's not horror and perhaps because it's not literary. King puts up bizarre little protests now and then about criticism of him, and the defense of him and by him is as absurd as that of Marvel movies right now, as if their hegemony can't withstand a sliver of dissent. King's lack of literary sensibility: he can't just cry all the way to the bank, which is the original and ironic and thus clever expression. He can't even laugh all the way to the bank, which is the hackish botching of the expression. [11/21/19]
Brecht (2018) Credits. Blends documentary and dramatization, cutting from one to the other, overlapping the sound, and because the basic stuff is done at such a deft clip, this blends also with the material as presented for Brecht, the barker or clown commenting the carnival act, calling attention to theater and artifice. While it's not quite as inspired in this collage reflexivity as, for example, The Nasty Girl, it has a similar effect for the sort of mini-series style biopic fare. Unfortunately this becomes a liability in Part 2, switching to different actors for the older versions and jumping over pretty much all Brecht's life outside Germany, including in the U.S. The film becomes a fast-forward mini-series, at the mercy of biopic form rather than showing it up, trying to cram way too much into even a second feature, and relegating to rapid-fire allusion other weighty and complex matters to foreground love affairs. While this had the merit in the first part of a kind of Brechtian unflinching expose of Brecht himself -- his double standard jealousy, for example -- in the second part it beomes, even if inadvertently, an all too-bourgeois effect, escapades and tattling. Some dose of more patience or shrewder selection with the material might have made a better figure of party and personal politics, the way even the noblest plans of mice and men, if not women, become tawdry. [11/14-15/19]
Enter the Void (2009) Credits. Ambitious, but sodden, the profundity of sub club junkies and quite particularly male. The telling of the story is everything, but sometimes even that can't hide the shabbiness of the ideas. The Godard rave assault titles belie a very narcotic pace that turns life flashing before your eyes into a draggy movie experience, 2 1/2 hours of it, if not just a drag. For all the headiness of the plot with eternal return, we get a prosaic recycling, once in point-of-view, a second time in first-person shooter style. And then it goes on to a disembodied bird's eye view with the ideas of reincarnation, astral projection, switching off persona and looping in life, but all that through the tripped up pondering of a narrow male view, perhaps more dufus-centric than just chauvinist. The cycle of life is expressed by woman as lover, sister, mother -- sex tied to the mother's breast. The floating perspective can take on any other man's during the act of sex. But why not the woman's? This is as sex-separatist as Plato's idea of reincarnation. The modern photography technology gives a kind of freedom or immersion that seems much more "organic" than even the attempts at subjective portraits of the trippy 60s and verite 70s. Here, however, it's a kind of slighty more immersive 2001: A Space Odyssey but for a black-light Tokyo. Perhaps the movie (maker) is betraying this limited view of its character -- limits only augmented by enhancement. Like Gasper Noe's Seul Contre Tous [I Stand Alone], it flickers between the squalor of the portrait and that of the portrayed. As with doing drugs, this movie is probably much better if you're on something, but it's hard to bear the susceptible awe of others if you're sober. [11/14/19]
Midsommar (2019) Credits. This starts out as not the scare-movie formality of writer and director Ari Aster's Hereditary, but its play at slouching naturalism becomes another scare-movie ploy. Right about the middle, after the act that drops the reality of the commune hard, there's a big droop in the movie. That scene is done well, then undercut at the same time by trying to heighten the impact (pun intended), drag out the effect. But the way the movie continues the slow tone becomes incongruous, as if there were no real effect -- more like the writer didn't really know what to do. It goes on contradicting itself, making the girl want to leave, then having her eating and enjoying herself. Just before the dance, from there on, it falls completely into scare-show willy-nilly, not pertinent. The movie doesn't really offer us anything about breakups, tragedies, rivalry, etc., just makes it mechanical setup for the payoff which itself wastes everything else. [10/31/19]
Prophecy (1979) Credits. Talia Shire in this reminds me of Brooke Adams of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers redo of the previous year, and there is a similar air to this, the cinematography, soft and lush and airy, but it gets into such schlock with tony diction nonsense, like bad TV or cable movies of the era. The special effects are really goofy, looking like literal meat puppets. Frankenheimer had better material. [10/25/19]
Battlefield Earth (2000) Credits. A bit tighter a production than I expected, bad in a more typical movie way, not really enough to be entertaining. This doesn't even rate renown as a fun bad movie. Dutch tilt used constantly and stupidly. Travolta's character is kind of interesting, a sort of fey brute (thus suggesting someone who mercilessly won't leave the public eye right now), but the spread of this becomes so depressingly limited. What does this suggest about the L. Ron Hubbard legacy, sci-fi if not cosmology? What is this view of the entire universe that humans are reduced to Planet of the Apes style stone age savages by technologically superior barbarians (not far off from the Klingons, actually)? The way this movie is directed, with constant awkwardly framed and edited whacks and thumps and blams and tumbles -- a Three Stooges Star Wars -- it's all supposed to be a rollicking diversion. But as allegory or some sort of moral projection, it's as depressing as the morbid resentment of original sin. [10/24/19]
Antz (1998) Credits. When CG could be so bad -- because we were gulping it down as wondrous technology despite all it was not, yet or ever would be -- when it could demonstrate everything about animation it was not, what was wrong with it as even an attempt at animation: vaporous, mechanical, that obnoxious if not just noxious sheen to it (like what MIDIs were to music). But there's actually a merit to this, here, because with such a failure it's even more for the sake of concentration on the voices. You get to hear how much the acting, the character and the ability are in the voices, each of them in their way: Woody Allen, Gene Hackman, Christopher Walken, even perhaps most surprisingly, Sylvester Stallone. Maybe he doesn't come off as wooden this way, or perhaps it's the script compared to some of his others. So much has to be done with the voices, especially when the CG is so uninteresting, but you can also pick up on how actors get into their parts, the way that reading cadence becomes dialog, which is still not quite the same thing as conversation, still a kind of presentation, theatrical, but lived in, so to speak, made offhand. You get a feel for striking that cord just right between showiness and nonchalance, and how the literal verison of that, sound, the voice, serves for the whole as well, for acting. [10/2/19]
Between Worlds
Queen of Blood (1966) Credits.
A Dream Come True [Mechte navstrechu] (1963) Credits.
The Sky Calls [Nebo zovyot] (1959) Credits.
Memory: Origins of Alien (2019) Credits
Queen of Blood: Roger Corman and co. produced a nifty little space vampire thriller that's in the genealogy of Alien. Except it has a mysterious genealogy of its own. Intercut with less impressive set scenes featuring non-alien crew John Saxon, Judi Meredith, Dennis Hopper and Basil Rathbone, and a mysterious Czech actress Florence Marly (the cast and performances are director Curtis Harrington's best contribution), are some very nice "special effects" scenes, with a far richer palette of 50s/60s style sci-fi atmosphere. Some of these are other set shots, shot much better, with lusher color, but some of them are paintings and model effects for outer space and other heavenly bodies. When Basil Rathbone calls all the astronauts for an assembly on a giant plaza before a balcony, the intercut longshot is a similar matte painting effect. But one "giant" statue looks curiously Soviet. So, look up the credits, on IMDb of course, and the whole production design team listed there are -- Russian. Surprise. The film was more of a quickie than one might've thought. They copped it from a Soviet sci-fi film of a few years earlier, and in fact, it turns out, from a couple of them. They pilfered, preyed on, parasitized, sucked the blood of or took over hosts. How did AIP acquire these movies? No details of that have survived in the anecdotal history to be found now -- another example of the state of information available at our fingertips a la the Internet. Most accounts just say Harrington "used" or "reused" scenes from these Soviet movies. American capitalist bandits raiding Soviets who -- what? -- had no copyright laws? Or none capitalists would respect.
It turns out that more than the production design or whole segments were pinched from Mechte navstrechu. Essentially AIP "used" the film to provide a version for American audiences. They reworked it, pumped it up, to something more lurid. But the basic mechanics of the plot are the same, so it's interesting that in even the recent Memory: The Origins of Alien (timed for the 40th anniversary of Alien, 2019) where Queen of Blood is referred to as one of the more obscure influences, the Soviet film is not mentioned. Memory is somewhere between fanboy and journalism and blog gossip, eschewing the sort, or at least tone, of scholastic activity -- interpretation, assessment, analysis, historicization -- that would be too officious or academic or pretentious, but then making sweeping cultural declarations and pronouncements worse than what would be avoided. Alien is the sort of artifact that makes such proclamation redundant, and the worse for it. Like The Beatles. And its fly-on-the-wall or oblique or undemonstrative style or tack -- nicely commented by one of the speakers, here, when he compares it to Robert Altman, some interesting and useful commentary -- is actually what makes it counter to that sort of hyperbole. Of course the whole horror and sci-fi fantasy genre angles would have this appeal, and expression, but that kind of specialty hyperbole is one measure of the problem of the overstatement, proponents of the genre as its own limit. Do we not want a sci-fi or monster movie to be great as much because of the movie part?
What's interesting about the Soviet films is the way they're obscured even with a project like this, that wants to offer more truffles in the specialty market. Mechte navstrechu is the one that really had the mechanics of the plot with the diversion of a non-native craft, some aliens who got there first, an alien queen, and Nebo zovyot has the business interest as the cause of trouble, though it's also notable that the Soviet slant here is humanitarianism and comradery transcending competition or even the competitive regulating ideal. The Soviets are the uniting party, not the winning one. This would seem more a precursor to Alien's Altman -- which is in turn Chekhovian -- style realism, the labor tension and corporate control of space exploration, with "Mother" (the Soviet film refers to the "motherland") and automated agents and expendable crew. It's as if Alien realizes a possibility of Nebo zovyot where business or capitalism wins out, instead of learning the lesson that competition fucks everything up. Nebo zovyot is even congenial about the conflict, and its portrayal of business, with a Hollywood style, city lights montage of somewhat more deco, neon-sign-like poster panels: "buy shares in the Mars Syndicate" and "Cosmic Typhoon." The Soviet films seem all the more grown up, or sedate, or more -- dare we say? -- down to earth, if not to say boring, while Queen of Blood adds the more sensational space vampire angle. And to show perhaps what we've become, that we do think of that as entertainment, but also how Alien mixes both of these up, plausibility even for the dramatic, or lurid, violent, sensational. It's the cyberpunk before the fact (certainly an influence of that) of sci-fi scary movies, but what could be seen as bleak, grim, or even cynical is also counter to so much other naivete or perhaps other kinds of credulity, of whatever system. The Alien production is a happy mutation, accident and antithesis as much as any pedigree or singular strain or ideology, a case as much reflexive of its own situation of art and business. [9/3/19 - 9/30/19]
The Human Tornado (1976) Credits. Rudy Ray Moore flexes his artistic paunch in this second Dolemite movie, pitching hardball humor straight at you in a swanky nightclub getup, plus his bad bad rhymes (bad and bad). Romper Room surreal sex scenes, semi-nude stunts, undercranked kung fu asskicking, a dazzling 70s tapestry of characters, even witches, crazy accents, and fucking to bring the house down, Moore has more entertainment power in his little finger than most folks have their whole lives. [8/29/19]
Stan and Ollie (2018) Credits. Consuming roles. Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly give performances perfectly balanced between imitation and acting, but the entire project is modulated this way. The script by Jeff Pope is clever and patient in all its choices, on the structural scale and with detail. It's not a biopic, so it has none of those problems, and it also avoids them. It's based on a book about a tour of England Laurel and Hardy gave in the 50s when their movie career had faded. In the way that a short story works like a detail study for a larger work, an inset, or expansion of smaller movements, this trip provides a vantage for the crossing of personal and professional lives, hopes and regrets, a reminiscence of their well-known films and a view of them behind the scenes. It's also a view that breaks up into a complicated prism, ripples of point of view and parallax, without having to do any such thing explicitly, because we're seeing the fleeting fame of early film stars, the rapid turnover not only of those in this 20th century medium right from its beginning, but the fickle fate of media themselves. (I remember seeing Dick van Dyke on Johnny Carson probably some time in the 70s or 80s, talking about finding Stan Laurel's name in the phone book in L.A. or envions and going out to find him living alone in a little house. In my childhood days we knew Laurel and Hardy from their 30s movies on syndicated TV, but nobody cared for Stan in person in the 60s. He died in 1965, as this movie says in a closing title, writing material for Laurel and Hardy to the end.) The script also elaborates all this in a grown-up way. It's not a souped up glorification, pandering or maudlin. Laurel and Hardy in nonchalant ways, partly due to habits of leisure and partly due to the weariness of age, carry on about business past and future, their friendship and partnership and how they are tangled, lagging careers and current business, gambling and other vices, their wives. It's as if they're slightly out of character, as if the "on" of their screen personae were dimmed. The climactic moment of a confrontation between the partners is written so well, timed and paced so well, and makes its turns and blows with such offhand deftness, that it's one of those moments that stands out against current movies because you realize how situation, context, dialogue and even the ability to not cry and yell with movie effects or acting, is dramatic, can work by itself. Director Jon S. Baird follows suit and of course is finaly responsible for conducting this. The whole thing works through this patient, composed pace and tone, similar to that lazy Sunday feel that Laurel and Hardy's movies (like that of silent films) seem to work in, or of the English seaside towns and rumpled or cozy circuit hotels they visit. There's a recent British series, Detectorists, created and co-written by Mackenzie Crook, of The Office (British, please, not the American one) fame, that has a similary lazy and mild tone to it, like some weekend holiday, and that goes against the grain of the way the cathartic comedy (as Larry David called it) or ironic portraits have become too hyped up, callous or brittle in their patness now. In the same way, this movie seems shrewdly timed, clearing the palate. This direction also allows all this to go through the performances. In the same way we see Laurel and Hardy as the performers perpetually thinking towards their roles and even slipping into their shtick in "real" life, not on the stage, but then just as much the more sedate, composed, knowing "real" life type of fools they are, we see how Coogan and Reilly have gotten so comfortable in this more dressed-down cadence. We watch the way the mannerisms and accents of the screen characters flicker or flash out of the candid Stan and Ollie. We see also how in the original dumb and dumber routine, it's really Stan who is the mastermind off screen. This adds to what makes the arrogant fool and innocent fool scheme, as the appeal to Samuel Beckett suggested (cf. Waiting for Godot), extend beyond abruptly brutal but cartoonish prat falls. Coogan and Reilly don't just slip into these roles, like the costume or make-up (especially for the older, heavier Hardy), they consume them. They make Laurel and Hardy like them. When the actual photos from the tour are shown in the closing credits, I realized I'd forgotten the difference, the real features of Laurel and Hardy's faces, even though much older than I was used to seeing them, behind the resemblance that Coogan, Reilly and this movie had wrought. Both Stan and Ollie's faces are broader, something more childish about both of them even older, certainly Hardy's baby face (his nickname was "Babe"), but also Stan's sort of chimp expressions. While the movie is kept mostly to this encounter of Laurel and Hardy themselves, the wives also arrive on the tour and are catalysts for the different strands in the relationship, and these are also good performances, by Shirley Henderson and especially Nina Arianda. She gives a piercing presence to both more superficial self-interest and the real sturdiness behind pushy support. Perhaps performances like these -- this whole thing as a performance -- are just too subtle anymore. If you take a look at the Oscar best actor nominees for the 2018 year, the 2019 Oscar show, Coogan and Reilly both were as good or better than any of them. [5/30/19]
Armageddon (1998) Credits. Relentless editing pace crams cliche after cliche in two-second shots, an American Express commercial on crack. Stupidity of family shit, on a line from Jaws through E.T., Aliens, Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump. What was done well in Jaws, as relief, backdrop, contrast of that kind of home life or banality to reckless adventure, has been turned into preposterous bannerism. They're not showing us the fabric of someone's life and letting us be sympathetic, they're stuffing it down our throats, fattening us like geese. The Abyss situation of the husband and wife and the Jurassic Park pushiness is here dopey outrageousness of father and daughter on offshore rig, and this is even set up with an oafish jab at Greenpeace protesters, bad pandering populism. Independence Day outbid for that. [5/20/19]
Shazam! (2019) Credits. I thought to myself about half way through this, this is like a Marvel movie. DC caught on to what Marvel did and has been kicking DC's ass with in movies: you can't take this stuff too seriously. Perhaps it's only appropriate with this character, the original Captain Marvel (and this movie comes right after Marvel's Captain Marvel movie -- I leave it to the reader to look up the history of this character from one comic book company to another). Despite the popularity of the Dark Knight movies, that drippy seriousness is like Thor's hammer to DC: they won't let go of it and it sinks their movies, while Marvel's superheroes, having perfected the formula of self-irony with big-budget CG pandering, soar (and Thor Ragnarok is the state of the art, the latest development of the ironic fun with superheroes -- and especially as the Norse god is otherwise one of the thickest pills to swallow). This also comes on the heels of DC's Aquaman which is perhaps the most god-awful supreme example of overstuffed, CG sheen, and really oafish, grunting, sub-action movie attempts at quips -- meaning failure at the humor -- of all. What Shazam is most like is the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies with Toby Maguire. Good news is, it's that kind of fun with the kids' point of view and vicarious discovery and trying out of super powers, and with the kind of deft humor and delivery for that, by both Shazam actors Asher Angel and Zachary Levi (non-superhero and superhero modes) and especially Jack Dylan Grazer (as Billy Bateson's friend, Freddy). Of course the bad news is, DC's almost two decades later than Spider-Man, and about a decade late joining the party. [4/9/19]
Loveless (2017) Credits. Nobody Knows from the adult's side, with shades of L'Avventura, High and Low, Once upon a Time in Anatolia, and even some notes of Solaris, Stalker and an echo of M. Great score, too, especially the piece by the Galperines that is also on the closing credits, an interesting mix of suspenseful, even disonant or noise effect, and a sort of ambling plaintive that's another expression of what the movie does. What this movie does, whether intended or not, effectively -- it has this effect -- is play with the whole notion of scene or even sequence selection, the expection you have for what the story is showing you, what it's covering. It plays with the whole sense of propriety that way, what is "appropriate," and as it builds up and accumulates, you see how this is the process of the whole that returns even the thrust of that as moral to a kind of interrogation. It's similar to irony, in the way things are held up in different context. And your response to it as a viewer is brought out too, reflected. I kept feeling like the movie was following the wrong things, which of course meant what I didn't want to see, also because I wanted to know more about another character, or some path that was left off. The things I was seeing were also not appealing. There were two different scenes of sexual intimacy that struck as so awkward, uncomfortable, "inappropriate" as we like to say in a more general and presumptuous way, but then I realized that it was the incongruity precisely with the context that made them strike this way, what we were also seeing about the other side of these characters' intimacy that was indulgence in contrast to what they were ignoring. And the same thing with the look of the movie, the cinematography and setting, all the incidental beauty with the bleakness. All of Zvagintsev's movies have this look and feel to them, limpid and muted at once, but here is where it works in with all the rest of the contrast in the most amazing way. For example, there's a scene where the roving, searching (the movie involves a search for a missing child) view happens upon a big satellite dish, and the sort of awe of the view has to do with the way any other sense, tone, even for the movie itself, aesthic quality, is mixed in the context of drama, the tragedy, becomes incidental that way. Like noticing beauty in the midst of a tragedy. The movie (script structure and execution) accumulates the disconnected paths of the various characters in that way too, showing the gaps and spaces that things fall between, a sort of counter-effect, but it's also the field of neglect, indifference, distraction. In this way it radiates, and accumulates the sense of what all these disconnections are doing as they come together. When the estranged husband and wife, the parents of the lost boy, go to see her mother, the fact it seems a tangent or strange jag, or another sort of lurch in the story, provides the payoff in a more indirect or inferred portrait of just how the boy's mother got to be the way she is. The cross-section or anatomy plan of movies like M, High and Low or even A Cry in the Dark, is even given a twist and contribution here by Zvyagintsev (and co-writer Oleg Negin) with this sort of cumulative contrast and irony, the picture of the psychology and relation, but even as the negative spaces in the relation. [1/5/19]
Phantom Thread (2017) Credits. Sumptuous and creepy, this is a parable extrapolation of love as co-dependency. It even made me a bit sick about myself, in a good way. There are whiffs of things like Brief Encounter and The Accident, also from the great whispy and whoozy soundtrack. It's melodrama and perverse. Anderson is getting much better, toning down the drawn out banal stuff, making it more terse and pertinent even as offhand. While The Master is still his best, this is in many ways a better performance. [2/26/18]
Pretty in Pink (1986) Credits. This is the square kids' movie about how to be cool and not be square. It's the movement towards telling you how to conform as a non-conformist, from which we got "alternative" fixed as a label and pat value. Stacked up with Ferris Beuhler, it's Hughes' argument the other way, the humbler than thou side rather than the charmed kid. "Richies" as they call them, here -- and it sounds like made-up slang, something really unhip your mother might say trying to refer to your jargon. Compared to Planes, Trains and Automobiles, where he got everything right, even the cross-checking of rich and poor or snooty and slobby, what's really the irony of John Hughes as the examplar of all this populist messaging is the presentation style that is so much like a position paper. For all the school is boring, anti-intellectual, reactionary, real value stuff mouthed and posed, it's all done in way that's as modular and prefabricated as a school essay. This is the problem of renouncing so much as sophistication or even just the other you think is your bad rap or antithesis, and then repeating the same mistakes. You don't know better for renouncing them, let alone the matter of acquiring any kind of suppleness of thinking or formal subtlety. Here there are some moments of passion and some turns to avoid even bigger cliched ones, but there's still so much about this that is conveniently posed, groaningly schematic: the girl who is convenient combination of appealing, wholesome and quirky, has the cool job in the record store with another character with convenient means to be conveniently eccentric, where they can sit around and talk about their lifestyle all the time. It's a tailored empathy quotient. It's even the kind of problems to imagine you have in order to escape the ones you do. [11/23/17]
Blade Runner 2049 (2017) Credits. The major plot point is the biggest disappoinment, makes the whole thing inflate and wrap around the original with Star Wars-like conceit and doting, and it narrows the scope in the worst way. The scene in the original where Rachel comes to Deckard's apartment and he tells her about the implants was the one stroke that conveyed all the pathos of memory, artifice, ephemera, and that these robots were human, all too human, when it came to this very sentiment. Set against the rest of the background and context, there was a way that Ridley Scott's decorous dystopia had a sense of the space even in these thick sets and settings. By now, in large part a result of him, everything can look good so easily that it's all like a decorous surface. Director Denis Villeneuve has shown in other films that he has something like the restraint or composure Scott had back then, and there's a good attention to sound here, too, though it's mostly more like an effects music score. But whether it's just the script overwhelming it all, everything in this movie seems turned out, a sort of foregone conclusion, most and worst of all Jared Leto as another hammy oddball and his super replicant chick. Their crossing with Deckard provides a very uninteresting and all too ordinary, by movie standards, climax. The themes of simulation and artifice, that the orgininal managed to evoke in its own way and that Philip Dick's story didn't really stand in the way of, are here barely more than repeated, rehearsed. The ideas get tossed around like sci-fi gizmos. There's nothing really originally evocative about even the pathos of the synthetic, despite some interesting pretexts for graphic tricks, like a threesome with a woman and another's image. [10/5/17]
Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) Credits. You can see the pieces come together, the formula. James Bond (which became a sloppy ass-jiggling trend-following whore itself) via the action and revenge "hero" movies, comic books, video games and CG, with a good dose of the gross-out porn of horror films up to the minute -- Temple of Doom via Saw -- but all of this as Harry Potter. It's Harry Potter, or Disney, for grown-ups, but the grown-ups who are now stunted in development as adolescent boys, who grew up on the diet of all this. It's cookie cutter for the teen-boy ethos of culture. Like pot-smokers, people are quick to be defensive about this stuff. What's wrong with it? That you can pass the time with it, that it's entertaining, that there are some good bits here and there, a few genuinely funny moments, or that the complete graphic artist choreography of the whole thing goes along with its cartoonish formalism to make it much less pretentious about its contrivance than, say, American Assassin, as an example at hand, doesn't mean its inherently evil. But nothing is inherently evil, which means nothing has to be not good or a hazard or harmful or just plain uninteresting. It means that even the good bits in the larger context of necessary, because habitual, hackish jabs at the same reflexes -- how long can having famous people say "fuck" keep being incongruous in order to be funny if that's all there is to it -- is just no longer good. Not to say suffocating out anything else. Cliché, stagnation, dessert. A dessert of flashes and bangs. The most whopping contrivance of all, however: portraying Fox News as actual news. That's an injurious stretch. A la Seinfeld, that's to say more an offense to artifice than to "real" news. [9/21/17]
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016) Credits. Does a really good job of telling the story from the material. If you've been through anything remotely resembling a trial, business or family matter, or even any conversation with two or more people who all have something to say, you know the difficulty is precisely of any overarching view or comprehension. The filmmakers here do a great job at both coverage and editing, to compress this affair into a line that still follows all the vicissitudes, the perspectives, the contentions and contradictions, persuasions and reactions, and without sacrificing any larger import to sheer confusion. The statement made here, that the 2,651st largest bank in the country was the only one prosecuted for mortgage fraud after the events that produced the 2008 crisis, doesn't require much pushing. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. pretty much makes it himself, from the other side, when he says it's the principle of the thing, as if somehow that justifies going in that direction, or is not falling on the sword held against him. [9/17/17]
Prisoners (2013) Credits. Denis Villeneuve is a good director, in the way of composer or orchestrator or arranger. It's an unforced manner, of blending all the parts, not demonstrative, not pushing one thing or another at you, tempering, balancing. The sensibility here, whether intentional or not, is that the material has its own interest. It doesn't need to be trumped up. The script, by Aaron Guzikowski, is also treading a line between the sort of Americana tragedy of Fargo, family kidnapping revenge thrillers, cop dramas, and what I guess has to be called serial killer genre. The problem with that latter, certainly since The Silence of the Lambs in movies, if not since the books before that, is a considerable amount of trumping up, even on the riddle-like complexity. So much of that is now contrived for the entertainment value, the way whodunits used to be. The story is at least three acts, so by the time we get into all the serial killer profile and m.o. stuff, we're already long into the suspense of the missing persons, the crossing of cop and renegade dad, among many threads. To launch into the psycho puzzle at that point really just makes all that sag. Same, too, for the allegory or parable aspect, the turns on justice or retribution, tactics or revenge, reaping what you sew. Drama in general, movie plots more so historically, and especially American ones, have the problem of emphasizing event over import. At worst they become too literal minded or just plain flat-footed. Allegory is much easier to take, too, when it's subtle, so that it's not just preaching or cant. Again, Fargo is the best example, if not model, here, deft enough even as plot so that it's all indicated, a gesture or motion more than a declamation. Everything these days seems like its trying the line between movie and mini-series, like anything could be a pilot for the latter, and even the pilots for mini-series cram so many plot points and grand turns and revelations into them, either pimping so many goods or for fear they won't get picked up. That's a bit the feeling here, despite how much more deft it may be with Villeneuve's hand, the acting by the really interesting cast selection -- great roles for Hugh Jackman (even a nice little twist and comment on Wolverine, if you want) and Melissa Leo -- and even Roger Deakins's cinematography. [9/15/17]
A Taste of Honey (1961) Credits. It has a rhythm, that seems familiar from other films of the period, and perhaps the British social realism films, the "free cinema" movement that was breaking out then, Tony Richardson a main proponent. It may be that this rhythm was picked up by other films later and that's why it became familiar. Soft, light, burst. Soft, light, burst. The contrast, what's notable about this film, is that in the "angry young man" current this is about a young woman who's young men are black and gay. But the depiction of even that is not so much the social constriction, oppression and protest, as a kind of elan by counterpoint. For anyone who thinks kitchen sink is cliche, already was with this, or is projecting the cliches backwards, there's nothing here trying to signal gloom or heaviness. The music, the lightness and spring, the skipping of the plot, the sarcasm and irony, the dash of it all, and the bustle of life going on even around the main characters are more than just the bleak exteriors of Salford and Lancashire. The scruffy beauty of it even suggests 1930s movies, injecting that kind of freshness back into the early 60s after all that classic Hollywood and big 50s spectacle posh and polish. And then that verve with the vulnerability: setting out on your own, adventurousness, catch as can aesthetic, any digs. It's that mood of liveliness of casting off from the nest, similar also to Schlesinger's Darling most of all in that despite the other ways. It's also this quality that makes even the historically daring subject matter -- interracial relations, a gay character -- a broader political or social statement. It's the way these characters are getting to make their own relationships, friends, lives -- and even as more than one character puts it, mistakes. As with the women of the punk movement 20 years later, whom Rita Tushingham and her character suggest (Poly Styrene more particularly), the buck of convention is not just the next white maverick male in the law of succession, but the space and play that are there -- to claim, take, demand, if not acknowledged -- for everyone else. It also resembles The 400 Blows in its overall tone and gesture. [9/14/17]
Atomic Blonde (2017) Credits. Waste of a score, especially "Blue Monday." Compare Run Lola Run, which was before the wave of comic, graphic novel and computer effects that took over the movies, at least pop mainstream ones. Pouty and posey. Somewhere around the middle, with the long coreographed sequence made to look like a continuous shot, including the fight on the stairs, this kicks into another gear and is suddenly, and strikingly, like a much better movie. It's compelling and affecting the way the movie is not before and not much more after. The rest of the time it's affectation. The soundtrack is rubber stamping 80s in a way that really has nothing to do with Berlin in particular. So you get this sort of mishmash of punk 80s Berlin cold war East Berlin dingy blare spy Bond graphic novel super badass femme character hot girl on girl stuff that's really not much of any of it. Besides the one fight that approaches something impressive like the one on the train in From Russia with Love, but not by trying to keep from overdoing it, the one other great moment is when after the women have their make-out montage, there is a cut to the men in the interrogation room with aghast expressions. This was a real laugh, and may not have been intended quite so. [8/8/17]
Shin Godzilla (2016) Credits. If Godzilla began as the avatar of the atomic bomb, this movie takes up that mantle again, but what it re-imagines is the tradition of all those crowded room administrative responses, what we're as familiar with as much via things like Mystery Science Theater 3000. Godzilla is now like the Fukushima disaster provoking the anxiety of response preparedness, but then giving way to the dream of all the techno-nerds saving the day, ending up a bit like Godzilla v. Transformers, technology appearing readymade for the climactic battle. Though that's also part of the tradition, in this modernized form it's a kind of whimsy more plausible than rubber suit tagteam wrestling. Making Godzilla more elemental, like a slightly personified nuclear tornado, and far less kitcshy personified, is a welcome trope, though it's also strained through Cloverfield, a bit too much in the early going. [8/3/17]
Halloween (1978) Credits. Halloween is like the cable soft porn of horror, compared to the lurid films of the 70s that wanted to have infamous, underground or even outlaw status: Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes. Going back to see it again, the trick is more painfully obvious because of all the movies, including sequels, that have copied it since. Ambling around to set up for a jolt is supposed to be "real life," atmosphere, and when there is nothing more to it than that, it's pretty laughable what passes for real life, particularly when the acting isn't very good nor the directors handling it even if the actors are. Watching the phony show now causes about the same self-consciousness it's supposed to be portraying of all that adolescent time. It's certainly true this was a big step in the development of making the ethos of our culture adolescent. [7/22/17]
Things to Come [L'Avenir] (2016) Credits. Like a movie version that compresses a memoir, or a biopic, this whips through a woman's life so fast that it's hard not to see the activity in contradiction to the teaching, reading, philosophy, learning that is what her life is supposed to be about. Later when visiting one of her former students at the anarchist collective farm he's now turned to, this sort of criticism is brought up. And we've watched Isabelle Huppert purposefully march around throwing jabs of defiant questions at students, react to marketing wonks in book publishing meetings, tend to her mother whose decline is tragic and frivolous at once, and move flowers around the house -- all of it with the same dispatch. It's hard to tell whether this is the same bourgeois pace of the movie, a comment on the occupational hazards of this -- this? any this? all this? -- life, an undemonstrative style very much in the French vein, or precisely the way to strike the same realization home to us. The payoff moment is in the car with the same former student on the way to the farm, when Woody Guthrie is playing, and she says she's lost her husband, her kids, her mother (she's soon to give up even the cat) and she suddenly realizes she's completely free for the first time. The ambivalence of that is not lost. And we see the woman crying in the same kind of passing and that's when the dispatch is that kind of French nonchalance that is useful, or at least spares us mawkishness or clanging. But at this pace, all the samples of the thinking of these leftist intellectuals come out very programmatic. Even the anarchists sound tidy minded and platitudinous, precisely bourgeois. [7/9/17]
Wonder Woman (2017). Credits. Benefits from a woman's touch with director Patty Jenkins, if that's what it takes or what's responsible for slowing the superhero CG action thing down so we can smell some flowers. In that regard what was perhaps most like this before were the first two Spider-Man movies. Where this movie is at it's best is the figuration that goes on for woman / outsider / and superhero-goddess -- perhaps "pariah" is the best term for all of those. Under the Skin induced some similar play of thought, if it wasn't doing it outright. There are several layers to how Diana is an outsider: what's clever here is the way she is more naive and more sophisticated than the modern world and its people. Having that be World War I era is -- thank the gods -- not just an origin story, which this movie is, but also a better contrast for the Amazonians. With women barely sufragettes, it's the war that violently knocked the monarchies into the modern era, of mass production, the full consequences of the nation state beyond aristocracy, modern warfare's toll on innocents and civilian centers (and ships), collateral damage the end of warfare as honor or career. Perhaps the best microcosm comment about this, and a genuinely laugh-out-loud moment, is when Wonder Woman walks out in her new feminine "modern" wardrobe but still carrying her sword and shield. The topsy-turvy of all this, too, is fun and given room to breathe -- we've had so much apocalyptic overkill of vast cities and earthly or otherwordly vistas. The war where actual cavalries could still go up against tanks and machine guns is where a Greek conceived woman warrior is the most powerful weapon to upset the stalemate of the trenches. But to be sure, all of this is a superhero movie, still couched in fairly dripping terms: as mentioned, this is an origin story -- there needs to be a moratorium; the Amazons' island often looks like a tonier Star Trek resort; there's gimmicky stuff in all the scenes, including the requisite villain characters shtick (it's that sort of inflated environment that keeps superhero movies from being evocative -- by contrast here, note the scene with the play between the inside and outside of the cafe, how much better that is at giving us a whiff of time and place); the conflict with Ares is reduced to a boss fight. On that last note, they missed a great chance for deus that wouldn't be just ex machina: a matter of who wields the thunderbolts in the family. I hesitate to even dip in the waters of a discussion about Gal Gadot, because of how it gets reduced to the same stupid options for women, some of this cleverly commented on in the movie. She's a striking figure in her own right and as Wonder Woman, in more than one way, and carried as such. Perhaps the best way to express it is how she exceeds any reduction: she's not just beautiful, she's not just sexy, not just athletic, not just brains or composure or emotion. While her path so far, via the Fast and Furious series, suggests not the most profound pop sensibility, Gadot has a presence that's not just that. [6/3/17]
Right Now, Wrong Then (2015). Credits. If you want a meditation on versions of a screenplay and versions of reality, on recounting, on the various impulses to conceal or reveal or how to represent, on truth and gossip and reputation, on just what candid or frank would really be, on even the loops and feints and redundancies of the qualifier "really," this would serve. But Hong Sang-soo's way of doing this may not be what you expect, so much so that you may not realize it has anything to do with any of this for quite a while. Hong doesn't go about this by making some grandiose "meta" gesture. In this respect, he falls more generally into company of Abbas Kiarostami or Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It's as if he's subtracting as much effect and demonstrativity as possible, certainly cinematic artifice. He's trying to do the opposite of making a big production. He's trying even to avoid showy muckraking or the formal rules of a realism or naturalism. It's as if he's trying to subtract as much affect as possible from the movie-making or presentation to show the way in which affect is there itself, already, with the minimal contribution by any representation. There are fixed shots with minimal editing, almost no dialog cutting. The movie is almost reduced to just acting, which in a way makes Hong the reverse of Robert Bresson, who draws the acting down to minimalism while still using composition techniques, close-ups, insets, cutting, etc. Hong makes the same movie over and over, so this version meditation works that way, too. He stays very close to home, himself. (My favorite and still I think the best is The Day He Arrives, but each one also casts back over all the others, re-collates.) A good deal of his movies have this autobiographical character of the director dealing with the kind of embarrassing banality of conceit, shame, reputation and, well, embarrassment, never feeling adequate to what others make of him, which comes from what he makes of others, including himself, in his movies. Can these two meet? Even that question is being played out. Hong's brilliant stroke is what he does not comment in the larger way with the frame. When the same "story" is repeated, but then takes a different path, we see all the play between the versions, what might have been left out of one or the other, and then whether either is truth or fiction, or nothing but the director's own imagination, etc. In one scene where a lecture host prompts an outburst from the movie director character, there is suddenly another cast to this, an overbearing sense of unmediated truth that seems the opposite of even the perception or keenness involved to make the movie. Does this separate the character, or is it an awareness of a streak in himself? Does it make a division external or internal? Doubtless there are plenty who would be bored by this, but as the "characters" here say of themselves, there are the types who don't get bored and find that the endless alleys and curves and tangles of relation and recounting go on in life "itself," not just in wild stories -- or perhaps the way to put it is, life already is a wild story. [5/6/17]
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 (2017). Credits. Marvel really has the act down, crowd pleasing, having cake and eating it too. With the tongue in cheek reflexive bit, they're to be CG blockbuster and hipper at the same time. For the better, the slickness is more fun than the original because the silly origin story mechanics are out of the way. (Well, sort of.) It's more of the superhero parody commenting out or aside, reframing like the opening credit sequence, and it actually makes the pure wish-fulfilment power stuff a lot easier to take when it's just this song and dance. While Ant-Man was already taking this quality from the other movies -- Iron Man's Tony Stark was a pretty think slice of it -- and making it a major key, Deadpool was the most blatant play for it. Guardians, especially here, is more supple about it -- if it makes any sense to use such a term where everything is demonstrativity, hyperbole -- because it's not quite so cheeky and smug about it's tailoring. Or at least they just play it better. Chris Pratt, for example, is much more relaxed than the Ryan Reynolds act which is now taken everywhere with him (cf. Life). It also works as or acts like a spoof of The Fast and the Furious -- there's the Vin Diesel connection and Dave Bautista, who's at least a more interesting actor than Diesel or The Rock, as Drax is more clever as misfit machismo identification and comment -- but it certainly gets fast and furious with the families stuff, which means bogging down with it, too many epilogues and too much wringing it at the end. Marvel completely panders with closing credit easter eggs now, and the audiences stay on lappting it up. Despite some more interesting strokes and uses of CG, the movie doesn't really get out of the problem of the CG overload look. Not that proponents want it to. As several trailers -- Valerian, the latest Transformers heap, mess, orgy, splatter -- before the film demonstrate, it's part of the colossal gloss. Kurt Russell has his juiciest part in a long time. The use of effects here for a young Russell are almost frighteningly good, as opposed to the just bad CG Peter Cushing of Rogue One or the by now run-of-the-mill, over-the-top stuff at the end, like Russell melting and distingrating and re-integrating and being all manner of elements, etc. Although I have no idea how intentional, there's an allegory for Trump here, or at least for sheer narcissism or ego-centricity. There's nothing subtle about it, a show-off for effects, and it falls into predictable, boring all-powerful supervillain who nonetheless can't win plot, but it's interesting in the context of other things we're seeing in pop now, Fury Road, the tone especially with the ending of Rogue One, Logan, and it's that expression of the scheme: do you reduce everything to the self, or expand the self with everything. [5/4/17]
The Fate of the Furious (2017). Credits. Cuba is a really hip place, the classic American cars and the butt cheeks. And a Cuban mile is really long. It's even cooler to make the Bond-like change of locations more conspicuous by having the place name set giant in the landscape. They kept asking what does Cipher want, when everyone knows she wants world domination. Super hackers can just type really fast, which is how and why it takes just a few seconds for them to crack anything in the world. There is no security. But since the super hacker smart Cipher is a strategic genius, she also knows that the best way to infiltrate anywhere is to send in one guy in a really fast car. Everyone has their own really fast car. The "team" simply lands their really fast cars wherever they are attacking -- New York City, Siberia -- and then drive the cars really fast, instead of just landing right on the target. When you want to go really fast, you press the turbo boost button, then after that you press the extra boost button, then the extra extra boost button, and so on. Always have another boost button or switch or cleverly rigged option, like using a Coca-Cola can to make your engine heat up like a steel mill and then blow up. That car must have 2,000 horsepower. No 3,000. More like 5,000. They really said that. The scintillating dialogue. You could just hear the teen boy gears turning when they were thinking this up. "And then the car flips over!" "Yeah!" "Ew, stud!" [4/25/17]
Knocked Up (2007). Credits. Born to entertain. The gang this movie gave birth to are irreverant and edgy enough not to be too -- well, square -- if that's even relevant anymore, because they also have to be too reassuring about that to be anything profound or even really original. They were born to romcom, and possibly, tragically, pathetically, born sold out. They're Friends without being Friends, which is what everyone wants you to want to be. [4/23/17]
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996). Credits. Geena Davis is a thrilling machine. Every scene in this movie is a plot twist. When she's on ice skates with a gun going after a car it almost gets absurd enough to be fun bad. Instead of being big budget bad, it really does look just plain bad for a shot or two. [4/23/17]
All That Jazz (1979). Credits. Bob Fosse brings burlesque to Broadway and a more sly vernacular to modern dance, while at the same time fashioning that street sense with something like classical poise and snazzy spectacle. It's in his choreography. He composes movement that's showy but reserved, flashy but smart and fun, seductive and even teasing the lewd while still being stylish and careful. Perhaps the best facet of this, the best example of his touch, is the movement to stillness, posing, the pauses and hangs, the space in the steps. His great taste is at avoiding so much choreography. This anatomy of the artist's mind or psychological state, like the messy house of those too preoccupied with the compulsion of thought, is Fosse's 8 1/2, expressing about the process of creating that is sometimes nothing but disorder. It's satisfying sometimes to simply see it all without falling together too neatly -- like Fosse's choreography. If it seems to fall off as something more meager or anticlimactic by the end, that's as much to the point -- the pointless point. As Nietzsche says, the sweet drop of levity. No matter how profound -- or even if we make show business too serious -- it's all just a song and dance. [4/19/17]
Gone with the Wind (1939). Credits. Take it from someone who held out on seeing this most of his life: it's not really all that. I'll admit it wasn't as bad as all that, what I thought about it when I was a kid and scorned watching it, or a young serious film student and scorned watching it. It's certainly not all that it's over-awed fans make of it, though it is all that in terms of American prestige movies, the kind of perfect Oscar movie. Within that frame it is a model, even a sterling example of the craft, such a bizarre amalgam coming together with a lot of spit and polish as hefty "production values." The early part, with Scarlett and Rhett Butler set against the south, products of this society at the same time as exceptions to it, is deft. And even the arguments for how Margaret Mitchell's book is racist, or complacent or even unintentionally collaborationist would be missing very obvious statements. Gone with the Wind would really be no different from The Godfather in both regards. What is interesting is how the film's story arc becomes the self-indulgence of Scarlett as a way to backstage everything else, a sort of have your cake and eat it too of the star system, passing the star as even a critical character portrait, nonetheless also ennobled. Scarlett is a figure for Selznick, for the kind of Horatio Alger bullshit the studio men used to justify their own commercialization of art or thinking. [3/12/17]
King Kong (2005). Credits. King Kong inflated. Big, dumb, overwrought, sometimes looking like The Fellowship of the Rings: Skull Island, this is everything bad about reboot and CG trumping and if that is homage, then about homage too. At more than three hours, it even destroys that charm of the original, and the very fact Peter Jackson doesn't update the tale makes it almost worse. Trying to inject the 30s with modern blockbuster steroids is no better than trying to outbid Jurassic Park, which is essentially what this does. The first dinosaur attack is a dopey dance of narrow misses under foot, a bad view of the bad parade balloon CG look, stretched out way too long, and then that is carried to even more absurd degree with a stupid chase of brachiosaurs down a colossal self-perpetuating roller coaster ravine with raptor-like predators and humans under foot. This is trying to top Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Tyrannosausus car chase scene in Jurassic Park at once. And trumping up even more movie lore, there's a famous cutting room floor sequence from the 1930s King Kong, where after the men are tossed off the tree bridge and hit the floor of the ravine below, they are eaten by giant spiders. This caused such a reaction at the first screening of the original Kong movie it was removed, never to be seen in release again. This becomes hyperbolic one-upmanship, a Jackson gross-out fest. He gets the place crawling with so many oversized bugs and worms the rescue becomes ludicrous. And then for his big match-up, Kong fights not one T-Rex, not two, but three. The conceit of this is below juvenile. It's playground. Every ravine has to be hyperbolically deeper, every fight and chase has to involve an absurd choreography of impossible elements and conditions, and of course what this always does to the effect on whole is make it silly, bouncy, cartoonish, the exact opposite of what it's trying to do. It's effect inflation. [3/11/17]
The Bad Seed (1956). Credits. I don't know if Maxwell Anderson's play is like this, but this screenplay by John Lee Mahin is a model of so many bad, annoying, embarrassing things about playwriting, which is why it makes an even worse movie. It's staged parlor talk. There's one scene where they turn on a radio just in time for it to provide not only the primary action of the plot, reported, but the man reading the news flash also provides very careful exposition of all the clues, laying them all out for the conclusion we're supposed to draw, which somehow isn't obvious to anyone in the play, er, movie. That's dragged out insufferably when the school teacher and the poor victim's mother come as stage entrance contrivances to the house of the bad girl to pitch monologues at her mother. This declamation between the mother and school teacher is layers and layers of sheen, 50s politesse and indirection and formality, the "real" conversation as conveyed through writing that is itself like that, all taking so ridiculously long for them to get to the point of actually saying, "Why, you're not suggesting she had anything to do with it," when the whole play has been nothing but the most honking "suggestion," and besides we knew she did it from the damned title! And then comes the showboat scene of the grieving drunken mother whose husband was kind enough to drive her to her contrived entrance and then protest for her not to make a spectacle of herself. Everyone who enters is designed to explain the concept for you. They might as well come in and say, "Hello, ladies and gentlemen, I'm hear to explain the next bit." So if you're teaching a class or just want an example of the difference between telling and showing, between exposition and dramatizing, even in just dialogue, this is it. If you can bear it. [3/11/17]
Rogue One (2016). Credits.
Logan (2017). Credits.
The rebellion strikes back. The family and fantasy era grows up.
In 1977 when Star Wars was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, Jane Fonda made a backhanded remark about how four of the five nominees were serious movies. Jane Fonda's path would actually be quite similar to Star Wars, George Lucas's -- enterprising, opportunistic, sellout, suckup, or just plain sucking, depending on your stance -- just nowhere near the same level, unless you count marrying into it. What was serious in movies in the 70s, a period roughly between 1966 and 1977, is what got quickly displaced by the blockbuster (Jaws started it) and the family values of the Reagan era, in large part a backlash to much of the grown-up sensibility of that movie period (which was the exception to prestige pictures in all Academy history). The whole ethos of America has been ratcheted down to that of a pre-teen boy and the movies have played a huge role in this, although they have also suffered by the same sword of pandering, not just artistically, but even by the bottom-line standard they helped install.
Computer technology, in a kind of diffuse way, has displaced movies, though also ensured their survival. This aiming low, in more than one sense, has so thoroughly saturated all culture by way of the movies, that everything is part of the Empire (see my comments about Lucas's second trilogy, especially Revenge of the Sith). Everything must contend with this sellout principle and mostly everyone went to the dark side: Lucas, Fonda herself. When aiming low is the height of your civilization, then even the leaders can be stupid, the demonstration of which we're paying for in spades now. The sinking tide lowers all boats. To quote perhaps the patron saint of all this via the movies, Forrest Gump, stupid is as stupid does. He was righter than they knew.
Although there have been ways that this blockbustering, pulping, kiddy pandering has tried to be more grown-up -- which mostly means badass -- and there have been things like Watchmen that have tried to enter some critical reflection of the pop, and the apocalypse is such a cliché of all this fare, there is a new way in which this pop is now getting grown up. Mad Max: Fury Road was the most striking case, but now we have the latest entry in the Star Wars franchise, that is supposed to be officially outside the main sequence, and the latest X-Men / Wolverine entry, Logan.
Rogue One is by far the least kiddy of the Star Wars movies, the really bad turn of that started in Return of the Jedi (cf. Ewoks) and continued in the latest entry of the main line, The Force Awakens. Director Gareth Edwards is clever enough to know that tone and style can do better by a sort of minor key move. The whole series needs a kind clearing of the palate, and the way this shifts away from all too iconic characters to a group that's in the wings (in more than one way), and not quite so cosmically chosen and fated, also works to create a kind of collective heroism that makes the rebellion more worthy of its allegory. By the time we realize where this is going, it works within the frame of the Star Wars series to give so much more dimension, somewhat like that amazing moment in Seven Samurai when the Toshiro Mifune character opens up the social depth to the situation and even ambivalence for the samurai. It's not only that we get to see Darth Vader at his most no-nonsense badass -- not even swashbuckling nonsense -- but this tone and dimension have already opened up as relief for it. The stroke itself is enough to make the rather easy Star Wars allegory suddenly sync with the times, the rebellion reverberate with the sense of not only what has been lost in a movie series, and the sinister sense that really hangs over the times. If the tone weren't already, the ending is a surprisingly grown-up move for Star Wars. And as with ">Fury Road this is not just the adolescent posturing "darker" tone of The Dark Knight or the Daniel Craig Bond films.
In the same way, Logan presents something much more broken and defeated, a future even beyond the doom of the X-Men, where Wolverine finally feels like the lost cause hero he's supposed to be. Again, pulling everything down a bit, bringing it back to earth from quite the CG fantastic of even the X-Men, seems to make it more in tune with a pessimism not merely for movie suspense. A kind of super-hero version of disease and decrepitude, with a more morbid emphasis than previously for mutants, both with a character played by Stephen Merchant, and with Patrick Stewart's Dr. Xavier taking on catastrophic proportions, gives a different relief to these powers. The tremors of the latter are more affecting here than the constant stupid cliché of colossal waves of whatever disintegrating cities or planets. The exchange between the decidedly less patient Wolverine and the little girl are given a much more grown-up slant, which again works much better as counterpoint.
It's time for some more salt with those sweets. [3/4/17]
Lincoln (2012). Credits. Daniel Day-Lewis may as well have been a Tyrannosaurus Rex playing Lincoln. Trying to figure out whether his stretched legs and strange gate are mechanical or digital effects is distracting early on and his makeup and then the lighting and "photography" of his face look so much like applied CG, and finally the whole look of the movie, the color of it, the "lighting," look so much like post-production digital treatment that you wonder any more whether it makes sense to give separate Academy Awards for makeup, costume, cinematography and special effects. Why not just call it the look? The script is actually some clever phrasing and couching of the paradoxes of abolition and the Civil War, but so effusive as to be another effect hand-picked by this toybox collector of them, Steven Spielberg. The script is delivered most of the time at such ridiculous pace you wonder if he decided most people would be bored but the ones who cared might still give him credit. And then of course the ridiculous Disney-like montage of the lobbying efforts, as if this kind of former chicanery needed to be whipped up that way, and it is a whole other kind of Disney-ism going on here, not only like the Audio-Animatronic presidents, but the sort of currency sensibility of the times. So much of the time it has the feeling of a great clockwork all grinding to one point or tilt. Why is this called "Lincoln" when it's really so much about the vote for the end of slavery? Day-Lewis's very well wrought performance almost contrasts with all this the way Lincoln's character is supposed to. [2/26/17]
Doctor Strange (2016). Credits. It looks like it will be another CG orgy with colossal scale, then settles down into something more interesting. It takes a turn, like vampire movies, into propaganda for the superstitious or mystical, the reversal of "open mind" and science and physics that has really always been the derivative basis of that. In case you don't get it, science is the real magic, power, judo move of letting everything be and getting into "being," etc. Please notice where the thunderbolts really are and what they mean in the world. The magic falls back to cool stud CG and martial arts choreography crap. [1/26/17]
The Goddess of 1967 (2000). Credits. Clara Law is a really good director, maybe a great one, if not de facto from her career. This movie affirms how, fills it out, from her 1992 Autumn Moon, which has the main obvious similarity of the detached, perhaps even deracinated Japanese bachelor visiting another country and becoming a catalyst for a native's experience. What's great is her composition, which is not merely decorous but evocative. It's both graphic and dramatic, a sense of context. This is what makes the ability of directors so intangible sometimes, because it can't be located as any one thing, and it's often a matter of what is not there, the choices not made, what has been avoided, as well as what is implied or suggested. Like a conductor. The framing uses context as what's in it, but also what is outside the frame, and sometimes this is more specific and obvious, sometimes more generalized and indirect. The best examples here are the dance scene and the sex scene, but throughout there are so many touches, such as an opening sequence's montage style, very cleverly skimming and cutting, and in single shots, like one that shows an accident from overhead but then includes a passing monorail. Despite obvious influences of Tarantino -- the very intentionally artificial rear projection (since there is also focus on the car that is the object of the movie's title), the Ventures -- the dance scene has its own expression of spontaneous joy, its own palette. But the sex scene is what really shows the principle for even the rest. There's a necessary impossibility with sex scenes in that presenting those involved is not the same as being involved, being immersed in that relay of perception from one side of it. It makes us more consciously voyeurs than empathetically involved. No matter how romantic you try to make the scene, or how idealized you try to as a viewer, you are negotiating this relay (which is not to say there isn't something of this relay always involved in sex, too -- a different discussion). Law shoots this scene from angles that are not just more discreet or flattering, but that include more of the scene. The room they're in has a big window with blinds. The tone of the light, sort of dusky or overcast, emphasizes this atmosphere of the surroundings, which is also such a strong part of sexual or amorous moments. And the line of action, here, too, goes from working through hesitations, starts and stops, an attempt, to the way that turns into something not as planned, catching them both up in the movement together. Like the car itself, the whole movie is shot with beautiful contrast of dark and light as well as color, thanks to Law and her cinematographer's sense of this. But this is all in spite of the much more ambitious breadth, here, for the script by Law and husband Eddie Ling-Ching Fong. The sheer length of it makes it strain even more as incongruity between quirky Australian comedy and the sort of graspy, gut-feeling symbolism of the The Piano, not to mention where shotgun killings, impromptu car chases and guns, and incest instituted across generations fall in this. Autumn Moon was much more clever and knowing even in its frankness for not trying to be so epic. And the car: this is possibly the greatest movie love letter to the Citroen, including scenes that might as well be a commercial, complete with a Roland Barthes quote. [12/24/16]
Yentl (1983). Credits. The real drag here is the old world Jewish, so that when Barbara Streisand puts on clothes to pass as a boy, that's passing off for the way the movie is passing her off as traditional and a scholar. As Pauline Kael points out, Streisand uses montage to make something else interesting of a musical. It's internal monologue. She's the only one who sings, and this if nothing else bucks the Fiddler on the Roof airs. (That movie had some great, even significant cinematography; this one starts out looking terrible, like miserly TV production, but then gets more into that look too.) While there's great business from this about relaying the gender roles, and even for Streisand to play out, writer, director, actor and singer, and that does start to poke through the stagey, if movie version, period piece sheen, this stays right in movie tradition of montaging intellectual activity, alluding to it, holding it off at arm's length, which is both a mystification and short shrift. There are some clever jokes, as when Streisand and her buddy/lover are asked if they are agreeing or disagreeing, and they each say a different one. But that's the extent. We don't know what they were actually discussing. We don't see the meat of this desire for learning, what Yentl has been fortunate enough to partake of, and even more through her ruse. The farcical turns are played so seriously that it makes the coy stringing along more tedious. I wanted to shout, have a ménage à trois already! And this makes the ambivalence of the ending fall more heavily on the portrait itself, rather than just what it's portraying, the ultimate sexism of even a spiritual partner, and that this desire for learning cannot a wife make. Yentl's acceptance of this is also perhaps too good natured, towards the man, but she doesn't acquiesce. She strikes off on her own on a ship to America and apparently her musical career, as this last scene, complete with sweeping aerial shots, is a complete brassy, belting Streisand number. [11/26/16]
Naked Lunch (1991). Credits. The circuit is made by not attempting to do a movie version of the book. Whether Cronenberg was aware of this, here's a case where making something more litteral is better. There's no way to make a movie version of William S. Burroughs's writing, to do some equivalent. To even attempt it is the wrong premise. It is the writing. Even adaptations of Charles Dickens show how wrongheaded the idea of adaptation can be, when the marvelous artistry of the writing -- passages like the fog at chancery introduction, or the gentry and the falling leaves in Bleak House -- is reduced to plot. The slow, droll deadpan of this delivery, matched perfectly with Peter Weller's performance, gives us a kind of slow motion point of view, as if Burroughs were watching his own biopic as 50s sci-fi crypto-paranoia through a paranoid heroin trip. This way the metaphor chain gets carried on, without any attempt to take the place of the ingenuity of the writing, where Burroughs reaches his own giddy, detached heights, like Genet or Joyce, but with an ear and voice of his own, distinctly cutting an American vernacular into this strain of art. [11/25/16]
Ragtime (1981). Credits. Ragtime is an appealing ambitious bust. And also bustle. It's sprawling and farcical, sociologically giddy and bracing at once, the Keystone cops through hindsight lens. Milos Foreman is giving something like his Firemen's Ball, but in his style it's more like an Altman movie and the risks of that. The spread of the movie is of too many strands that seem like they're going to tie together, but don't really, so they're like dead ends or wrong turns, especially the way the drama then falls to Coalhouse Walker Jr. and the incident with his car. It might have all been the backdrop out of which this emerged, the relief, showing this society and what could emerge that was otherwise a part of the fabric, but there is the feeling that this is indeed fabric, but cut out of something larger, as if a lot more material was edited down and pieces or connections are missing. If this had been a mini-series or like the kind of cable series we have now, it might have had the time for all this, as well as to make one of its principals more of a star in movies, too. Howard E. Rollins Jr. does a fine job, even great in places, but this didn't serve to change his course from mostly TV to major movie roles. [11/25/16]
Sausage Party (2016). Credits. Maybe it's a double trick, one trick passed for another, but then the first one is right there with the title and that joke is played out almost right off. The obvious guffaw snicker is one kind of joke to play on the pixel movies ostensibly for children. But even the fun of the low humor double entendre gives way to something much more clever, and that's a muck-up of the anthropomorphism of the pixel animation movies. Just as time travel movies have all kinds of implication and conundrums they conveniently leave alone, personification -- animation itself in a larger sense -- presents problems never really dealt with. That is really the joke of this movie. The food in the grocery store sets this off immediately on bursting into song, the musical number that spells out their enchanted personified vision of the world, where they will be chosen for the great beyond of the store. The characterization of anything that is disillusionment is where the real adult punch comes in, far more than the naughty wiener and bun, or pot jokes. Seth Rogen, James Franco and company seem to be including themselves as objects of parody here, another way to hook and punk their audience. And there's a setup for even another turn of cleverness. Even though the meta-level is a dose of real grown-up not suspending disbelief, this still creates suspense: how will the plot resolve itself? The grand disillusionment, the food holocaust? A similar turn to the happy ending when all the food turns? Or a melodramatic happy ending that's now been made utterly ridiculous? [11/11/16]
X-Men: Apocalypse (2016). Credits. Your fake roots are showing. In this year of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America: Civil War, it's clear the effect X-Men has had on all superhero movies, even those upstaging them. In the 80s, the X-Men were the mainstream comic that had the best appeal to the new wave of indie comics, and Marvel exploited this more conscientiously with things like The New Mutants (Bill Sienkiewicz's art). And "mutant" was the key. All superheros live in ambivalent space in their worlds. Even if we know they are the good guys and pure wish fulfillment, they are also vigilantes, existential anti-heroes, myths -- demigods (in one case an actual god of myth, Marvel's Thor, to make the connection explicit). Batman dealt in this symbolic fudging and swapping and Superman was an illegal alien from another planet. But they were heroes, and their superpowers were used for good, to protect from other super powers, and they acted out the simple wishes for us to exceed our limitations, to be capable, able, to have the power to. Marvel came along with the idea to call this mutant. And the appeal was then shifted: now the empathy, identification, was more explicitly for prodigies, misfits, freaks, rebels, mavericks, the greater ambivalence of the exceptional. When the X-Men movie came out in 2000, the tone for superhero movies after was set. Now The Avengers are threatened with legal control, just as the X-Men were that first movie. In the DC universe, they're doing the same to Batman, Superman, and now using the term "metahumans."
The X-Men have some more clever mechanics built into their conception, and the movies have set the standard for this, using the script to build circumstance from which all the effects follow, and the way all the various powers shift axes, divide, interplay, and here again, after a fall into more standard cram-it-in, hyperbolic fare with the last entry, the X-Men have more interesting convolutions, if not depth, than those other big superhero internecine events this year. The movies are going through a phase that comics have gone through many times over, having to top levels of, well, apocalypse with each installment. This movie certainly has its share of that kind of cliché hyperbole, along with the concern for origins that has become so de rigueur and thus annoyingly tiresome. (See Batman v. Superman and more on that in a minute.) But even though Egyptian gods are sought as the origin of all mutants, what really only goes back to the 1960s and 70s' Chariots of the Gods, the usual X-Men ambivalence is given that extra dimension, and besides that Oscar Isaac is the actor who lends his extraordinary powers to the all-everything mutant. Isaac has such bearing for everything he does, without being demonstrative, whether it's as truly complex as Inside Llewyn Davis or Show Me a Hero, or as melodramatically serious as Star Wars or this. His appeal to the mutants to stop being human, all too human, and take back over the world, outbidding Magneto's bid for that (which came earlier in the movies but later in the stories' chronology) is at least interesting here in the way the villainy is all about the appeal of power.
What this revamping -- if not "rebooting," and the speciousness of this term is pertinent to the speciousness of all this -- of Egyptian myth makes more apparent is the interarticulation of myth itself with the modern day cycles of these comic book tale structures. This is where origin tales come in. Just as with iteration in myth, where basic parts of the structure are repeated, but many elements or details are changed, varied, due to oral tradition, memory, embellishment, tailoring and pandering, we see these comic book stories redone every few years, now even in new movie cycles. Hindu mythology, for example, is an accumulation of many earlier traditions and myths, Vedic and pre-Vedic, where even the consequences of this accumulation can take their place in the myth themselves: cf. Aditi and Daksa, who are both creator gods, possibly each from a different strand, hypothetically even a matriarchal cosmology replaced by a patriarchal one, and now fixed in the supernatural conundrum of each creating the other. In the same way, each of the two big comics companies, DC and Marvel, has bought up many smaller labels over the years, incorporated those characters, and then rewritten the continuity of its cosmos (as if that were necessary). The mad spiral of economic self-consciousness of this, to enhance the saleable event-ness of issues and series, leading to mini-series and constant "reboots" to make new number one issues, to the point of canceling out the effect, is interesting cross-articulation with that transformation of myths: to see even Greek mythology in light of this as much as vice versa. [9/10/16]
Love and Friendship (2016). Credits. Based on a novella written by a very young Jane Austen, this has the advantage over many costume dramas, especially of those periods, the 18th and 19th centuries, drawing room pieces, of being a quick stroke of a feature film too. The manipulations and gyrations in gossip and letters of a widowed woman for herself and her daughter are given in a clean take-down, one, two, three. There is some jaunty posturing with its own style of portrait introductions and a closing credit sequence. Most interesting about the look of it is photography that allows incidental light, giving space to the rooms, cutting through the lush patina effect of a lot of big costume movie productions. Despite that, and the costumes and sets, the way it's directed it's so atwitter you can barely keep up. It's a whirlwind of dialog, with very little variance in pace to allow characterization in other ways. The one character who does break this pace is overworked quickly, a kind of 1790s version of David Brent. [9/10/16]
Happy End (1967). Credits. As Anomalisa was able to give frank depiction of sex, and even other banalities, with stop-motion puppets, this 1967 Czech film has perhaps the bonus of demonstrating how dismememberment can be tolerable if not funny. Of course this is a film process fake dismemberment, at least of a human, but just like the slaughtering of a real cow and things like eating, it has a whole other fascinsation when presented backwards. This may be the definitive use of reverse for an entire feature film, and it's a pretty straight shot plumbing the gags both for scene and plot. The dialog is delivered forwards per statement or sentence, but those in reverse order, perhaps the most interesting technical feat of the film, and this exploited for humor repeatedly, where a comment appears to follow another and then you get the next one to understand what it really would come after. Example: at the wedding, the priest says "Do you take this woman," then the groom says, "Not at all," but next the priest says, "Are you uncomfortable?" In certain moments, the dialogue is allowed to run backwards too, verbatim, to signify blah blah blah: boring speeches. There's a particular fascination with eating in reverse, the way food is fabricated out of the mouth, and this leads to the most absurdly silly funny scene of the movie, when the clandestine couple eat a plate full of tea cookies. We've already seen their interrupted love-making, so that it has the sense of their being ravenous afterwards, but we also know this really precedes the act, and see their cheeks fill up as soon as they spit out a cookie, over and over, and how many stack up on the plate. Voiceover narration delivers the further throughline to all this, framing it by saying how all love stories begin and end the same way. This one does not, we are told, by the man who sews what he reaps, and he begins with his birth at the guillotine. The whole thing is posed as a fancy, a device, an artifice, and has that air throughout. In this way, that sort of straightforward inventive jaunt, it's one of the best of this whole period of Czech movies spanning the 60s and 70s that began with the new wave and played with the art in all kinds of ways. (See Tomorrow I'll Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea.) [9/4/16]
Sunset Song (2015). Credits. If you want an antidote to the clamorous style of predominate movie fare, Terrence Davies usually provides it, and especially so here. Like Tarkovsky in some respects, Davies shows how it doesn't have to be fast to emphasize the moving in the picture, and Davies is better than Tarkovsky in many ways at the other sense of moving. In this film, there are also dissolves that transfer other senses while also giving a sense of time, of longer duration, and then other apparently transition sequences that are even more significant dramatically, not merely picturesque. Davies doesn't just show pretty pictures or, even more so here than in for example House of Mirth, scenery. Even the reserve with close-ups falls into this integration. There's a sequence here with the sky, a hymn, a group of people, the wheat, a road: it's a dramatic beat of its own for music, image, setting. There's something anachronistic about it, suggesting an earlier era, maybe Dovzhenko or even musicals of the 30s or 40s, but it also doesn't belong to those pasts, either. As patient and unassuming as Davies can be, though, that can become posey in its own right, as with the theatrical performance art piece that was Distant Voices, Still Lives, and there are moments here that are more strained for acting and dramaturgy. The arc of the story, which is that of a long, if not epic novel, gives a biopic feel that may lend to that, hard to defeat despite Davies' touch and sense of movement and duration. [9/3/16]
Oleanna (1994). Credits. Oleanna is articulate and cleverly devised in a certain respect. It sets up the willingness of the professor character to break through the ceremony of education to explain the terms of, perhaps not only education, but even communication. The professor even sees already how the perception of roles and status are getting in the way of what's being said -- even about that. But he doesn't see just what the student's naivete and resistance really consist of, just what the, or how much of a, stance or position there really is. David Mamet's play and even the movie came at a crucial time, just when "PC" was taking hold in this way in universities, and it does frame the problem in an astute way, keen to what happened before in the 60s as well as in a different way in the 80s and 90s. Not just students on the barricades in '68, or women at Yale reacting to a French language program in 1990, but any student of any teacher, any parent of any child, or anyone in a position to receive information from another, can turn this into an absolute demand on the terms of the relationship. This tyranny of ignorance is demonstrated in microcosm here when the student doesn't know what the word "paradigm" means. The professor says it means "model," and she retorts, "then why don't you say that?" The reduction, provincialism, homoiosis, prejudice, is the student's, justified by whatever prejudice imputed to the professor: elitism, classism, sexism. The broadest reach of this, that can be even more depressing, is the tragedy of the double blind of communication: miscommunication and misapprehension are operative, unavoidable, but that can be used as the ego, born of defenses, reflexively or actively, to make even more of a trap, a zero sum game. But Mamet in his way forces the issue. It's a sort of well-made play version of melodrama or suspense, the yarn spun or stretched to draw out the drama just so, and even if it's a theatrical version, and somewhat high minded at that, there's still the cost to framing this matter and this discussion this way. Of all Mamet's work, this shows up most the problem with his dialog. It's not even so much a problem for Mamet the writer as Mamet the director. His writing is paying attention to false starts, checks, interruptions, repetitions for various reasons, but he directs the actors to deliver these with such theatrical formality, such enunciation and diction, it clashes. In movies this is even worse. Even his wiseguy characters in movies like Things Change and House of Games come off sounding awkward. He's got great actors like Joe Mantegna and here William H. Macy who can even manage to minimize this, but it's still the way, specifically, Mamet directs the delivery. The timing, the cadence, is so artificial it makes me wonder about some other intention, perhaps a Brechtian distancing tactic. Mamet's understanding of Chekhov, however, in a preface to his own translation, does not give me confidence in his desire or ability with such a tactic. (I won't take up the doctrinal battle of Stanislavski v. Chekhov, psychologistic reduction in the theater directly counter to the observation and thrust of perhaps the greatest realist work The Cherry Orchard, and Mamet's place for this in American theater, not to mention Mamet's finally making this more express as a conservative political stance.) For this situation, where a professor might use language or at least vocabulary that's not so colloquial, but has this called to attention by the student, and where the professor even recognizes and makes explicit that education can be a ceremony, even a ritual of deference or esteem, and sees the necessity to break through that, it becomes more difficult to accept the well-written or carefully crafted or even crafty manner of the script itself. By the third act, where we see the professor strained and pressed, it's hard to believe he has not been more frank, that there hasn't been more frank manner, expression, language from either of them, until the planned breaking point. [9/2/16]
Batman v. Superman v. Captain America v. Iron Man
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). Credits.
Captain America: Civil War (2016). Credits.
Captain America: Civil War is really an Avengers movie, but it's put under the title of the Captain America "franchise" or series. Or whatever this entity is. Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (how much title to do you need) is really the beginning of the Justice League. So what's next? Giving the movies issue numbers? Or is that the same as sequel numbers like Iron Man? Because now the superhero movies are playing the comics game, spreading all the threads around to tie everything up, and tie you into it, as if they didn't already have a vast obliging audience that's like a super-huge colossal cocaine addict boss (like the giant adenoid in Gravity's Rainbow) absorbing all the powers of entertainment so that nothing can slake it's thirst anymore, and the superhero fare is being drained of all its powers of holding attention for longer than opening weekend. Of course it's fun to see strife among the gods, wonder what would happen if this hero fought that hero, what should result from one imaginary power pitted against another, and there's even more to be gleaned from dealing with all this as figure and the division of power, but when it gets heavy-handed it's superhero worship, and the obligatory selling even of the fun becomes something ceremonious, if not religious. Bread and circuses. Captain America: Civil War shows how Marvel is leaner and lighter, more agile at all this, even the melodramatic seriousness, compared to DC's Dark Knight conceit, which Superman now carries the mantle of as well as Batman. On that score, by the way, Captain America is useful and significant in two ways: he's the old-fashioned superhero, and World War II moral scheme, "literally" (in terms of the plot) brought into the modern world to contrast the modern complications (mainly with arms dealer Tony Stark who was already like Bruce Wayne building a super suit of armor), and he also provides the exception to how all this tainting and complexity have become such a cliché, Alan Moore's Watchmen notwithstanding. That is another source for it, an innovation now made currency, like the real Dark Knight of Frank Miller, which this Batman v. Superman borrows it's central idea from, but is no more like in essential ways than the Dark Knight movie trilogy "reboot." The first Captain America movie offered some relief, against the grain of these modern CG assembly line movies, to see a goodie-good guy hero, and even to see him go on a winning streak. Of course, as with Moore's vision of all this, things are not moralistically simple, either for World War II or any era, and a superhero would not just experience this complexity, but cause it. Now, the Captain America title carries the load (it was The First Avenger to begin with), all this tie-in, pile-it-on free-for-all. Here the entire plot is built of jags. The ridiculous extent of this, however, is Batman v. Superman where -- not just origin rehash, and another superhero, and three other superheros, and a famous villain and another run-of-the-mill superbogey that surpasses all power until it is defeated, none of them with even fight card billing, and the fight with the senate, and relationships with co-workers, butlers, editors, mothers and dead fathers -- a whole setting, adventure and fight sequence pop out of nowhere and it's a dream Batman is having! And why must all these movies go over the damned origin stuff? The scene in B v. S with the bats in the well is the perfect example of these terms of outbidding. No matter how appealing this is as the structure of the myth, we -- filmmakers and audience -- can't trust the ability of the dream, image or symbol itself to make an impression. You couldn't just see a bat and get the idea? [5/26/16, 8/31/16]
Chance encounter:
Soylent Green (1973). Credits.
Tron (1982). Credits.
Days of future past. What's interesting about seeing these movies now is certainly the parallax of pertinence, the anachronisms in all sorts of directions because these are movies projecting: technology, and into the future more or less. But in some ways it's not so much the contrast of what they got wrong and what they got right. It's the way that what they got wrong is right. The 70s' Soylent Green is as famous for the 90s Phil Hartman relay of the icon of Charlton Heston through parody as anything else. Looking backwards from now -- it's the 2022 of 1973 -- it's a fairly effective -- bracing -- view of where we are. What it got right was the overpopulation and climate change, referred to then as the greenhouse effect. What it fell into by a funny double turn is retro late 60s, early 70s style, particularly the thicker parts in the penthouse pad decor and the "furniture," a term also used in the movie to refer pejoratively to women who come with the pad. The gift the aging Joseph Cotton makes his "furniture" is also humorous as a double projection on throwback: the white, curvy, bulby 70s space age style casing of a video game, which looks like Space Invaders, so only about five years into the future, but for the fact those arcade games are a part of the computer and nerd retro of now. Elsewhere you see an old tube TV set, but that's not even available as used or discarded goods anymore.
That also makes this movie's projection about up to Tron, but one other point before we get there is the way Soylent Green achieves its point in terms of Heston. The movie makes much of all the things that are lost in this dystopia, something more shrewdly dramatic, at least for the script, for evocation of the past as much for the future. As Walter Benjamin suggests, better to instruct in remembrance than fall prey to soothsayers. (His "Theses on the Philosophy of History," or "On the Concept of History," in toto is just such a meditation on history as this refraction of the future through the past.) Having Heston constantly refer to these scarce pleasures, and quickly and easily defer to them with his privilege as a cop, humanizes him in perhaps a surprising way. To see that head on high, as Gore Vidal put it in The Celluloid Closet, of Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments here express the pleasure of air conditioning or vegetables and beef or a hot shower makes Heston more mundane than we've seen him, even in Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man. By contrast particularly that latter has Heston as a former colonel living in his fine nest as the gentry of the apocalypse. What gives Vidal's tale such punch is precisely that stature undermined by covert desire, played at Heston's expense. Here, it's like seeing him come out just for some liquor or strawberry jam.
Tron is now interesting -- maybe even more than it was then -- as a prototype of the idea of the avatar in computer technology, not just preceding the movie Avatar, but the more general idea. What's interesting is that they imagined it more specifically as being inside the computer, more in the circuitry or the data itself than in the cyberspace of its representation. The fantasy, already in 1982, was to be a programmer, and then to be projected, not just into a video game, but into its programming. This of course still resulted in something expressed as human characters and action, specifically video game like action, and all of that in the melodramatic trumping up of movie plots. So what we get is really computer programs personified, but also behaving as the same kind of action that would be their output. This was under the auspices of Disney, which at that time was making its move to generalize, diversify, sophisticate, away from strictly children's fare. The result here is something well in line with American movies themselves as technocratic: technically sophisticated and really flat-footed. The allegory is bad, the set-up, framing is clunky. Why even bother with that, a silly explication scene in the cool arcade pad of pirate programmer Jeff Bridges? Why not leave it to be figured out -- leave it to figure -- what's going on, program or user?
The one way this all comes off is the look, the art design, which is even matched well between the computer world and the regular live action. Helicopters and buildings trimmed in red light in the dark echo the imaginary world of the movie effects. The programmer's infinite screen or amorphous space, with the grids giving to line graphics, a mathematically begot topos, and the black and white photography for the humans provides something inadvertently constructivist, or with an anachronistic resonance like the "somewhere in the 20th century" of Brazil. Tron already looked like something else then, which is perhaps why now it doesn't suffer from just looking like passé computer stuff, despite the fact it also benefits from that retro. The actors have a matted, posterish look and echo-y sound, against the more cartoonish but sparse lines, which gives them a distance, something emblematic but more uncanny, and this works against the much more banal effect of the movie cliché plot. The irony of coming from this future to that past is the way that every character in a movie now can be computer generated, but this saturation of computer graphics has also lost the charm of even that representation. Art, at least devising, is also limit, subtraction, not just sheer excess. More notable is the whole rebel v. empire populism being played out in terms of open source v. closed box. Here's Disney, already an empire, selling the new personal computer rebel myth, all the users fighting the overlord, while Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were already leading the way to develop precisely Master Control Program operating systems, expanding far beyond their boxes today, the most legitimate protection racket. Pop culture means always buying it. Don't be evil. Soylent green is people! [8/20/16]
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). Credits. In the Japanese version of the film (available outside Japan on video) there's a scene where the minister of the imperial household is leading the head of the navy to a meeting with the emperor, and tells him this is an empty ceremony, a formal briefing of the navy's readiness for war, decided by the prime minister and cabinet, between two men who were opposed to it. We see the navy commander in chief, Admiral Yamamoto, and then the facing, empty throne. Emperor Hirohito, like President Roosevelt, is one of the historical personages given deference by not being portrayed in the person of an actor. This scene affects a drama of indirection, implication and dramatization of historical comment perhaps better than any in the movie, but it emphasizes what the ceremony of this movie is and unfortunately how it does't do it very well most of the time. Actors are portraying the events and actions of people in past moments as if they were happening, but they are saying things that are historical comment. Even something that was supposedly said at some particular meeting is involved in the complication of citation, varying memories, sources, the matter of confirmation. Of course lots of things do this, and in fact it's what much of Shakespeare is. But this movie makes us more aware of the problem because it's less artistic license or even just artistry and more a kind of historical novelist technical standard, as if that were something between drama and dramatization, or Shakespeare (the history plays or tragedies anyway) and documentary, often sacrificing the merits of either. A Japanese-American co-production, and in fact made like two films put together, the Japanese parts are better and more interesting, even for the intrigue about whether they should attack the U.S., in the larger context of whether they should attack or ally with European powers. The fact they're also in Japanese, with subtitles, helps in not reducing to pat teleology of the victors or the Americans, and in fact, even the foreshadowing of that with a famous saying attributed to Yamamoto adds to the movie's reverse sense of Japanese victory the precarious or at least provisional sense of any situation. [8/13/16]
What are they?
Monsters (2010). Credits.
Pandorum(2009). Credits.
Alien familiar, familiar alien. Two movies demonstrate two opposite paths, or at least takes in monsters or sci-fi. Monsters tries to be more evocative in effect by creating a more realistic or mundane environment to situate the monsters, from which they can occur more incidentally. Of course the situation itself is not so mundane, at least not for snug Americans. It's that of a war zone. Across the top of Mexico, on the U.S. border, is an in infected zone, where alien creatures brought back by a failed space mission are lurking. As if the allegorical suggestions aren't enough, with Juarez and its gang killings, or any of the other civil or ethnic or warlord situations in the world, there's also a giant wall the U.S. has constructed along its border, across the river, to keep the large monsters out. (They're more like dinosaur size, not Godzilla.) Strangely prophetic of Donald Trump? Another way to suggest how outrageous his proposition, or did he see this movie? Is he like Ronald Reagan too? This is more in the vein of Cloverfield though its characterization, more that of an indie road romance, is not of such bad characters, nor quite so annoyingly "real" with the extent of handheld or camera phone. Pandorum on the other hand is giving Event Horizon a run for the money, in the category of strange hybrid. This is zombies in space, although the cannibal creatures here are high-speed to be more like the alien variation in Alien 3. Like Event Horizon, this is steroid pop, trying to be cult, so balls out and frenetic and constantly throwing new twists and at that pace and in that manner also pitching it's high-minded sci-fi concept stuff, which nonetheless is still pretty schlocky. Pandorum is a made-up word, perhaps a mash of "pandora" and "pandemonium." [7/30/16]
Sleeping with Other People (2015). Credits. An opportunity to deal with an interesting complication is at first just too clever, then turns out quite a smug "romcom" -- lots of critics blurbed on Metacritic use the term -- and actually tilted badly toward the male in all kinds of ways, so that if it's not sexist, it sure would have a hard time avoiding being taken for it. It's unregenerate convention dressed up in the modern selfie media shit, including even more outright embracing of cutesy-assed texting scenes, but the guy truly sleeps around whereas the girl's "perversion" is to be hung up on one guy and not understanding what good sex is. The guy -- Jason Sedaikis -- "mansplains" female masturbation to her! Very hard not to see this as some guy writer thinking he's having his cake and eating it too, being sensitive and understanding and talented, but also hip as in shoot from the hip, the presumption that frankness, abruptness, calling out is more truthful than patience or sifting or editing, although even that is really glib passing for genuine. But, oh, wait -- the writer, also the director, is a she. I don't know if the joke about selfie sex in the title is intended, or another way to put it, if this movie is in on the joke about its people. [2/12/16]
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
