Godzilla (1998). Credits. The only reason it's not a simple recash of Godzilla is because it's a recash of Jurassic Park, a little copycat decoy, there, except the little is supposed to mean colossal. Size does matter, particularly the size of a name recognition when it's outbidding another. Godzilla has been reduced to the value of a bigger Tyrannosaurus Rex. If you doubt this in any way, suffer the entire offspring plot, where the absurdity of insisting on Godzilla as a "he" while having this idiopathic organism lay fertilized eggs, cashing in on Aliens while they're at it, is all for the sake of creating another velociraptor sequence, or one to outbid it. All the charm of Godzilla, what that name even means, the currency of it, the hokum of the rubber suit which had itself already outbid on a representation of scale and franchising for returns in kitsch, has been swapped for a kind of assembly line goofball sheen. By comparison to the goofiest of the Japanese sequels, this Hollywood version makes Americans -- and here it's more generally Westerners, including the French and Germans, cf. the plot and the director -- look even more foolish for taking it so much more seriously. It's a jock mawkishnesses, despite the fact the cast is curiously not full of studs, by jock or casting standards: compare the same writer/director team's Independence Day. Did they have to use so much of the budget to pay Toho Studios for the right to use the Godzilla name? More curious is how this cast, second-rate by some box office standard, is actually a better one for acting. And so Matthew Broderick, and Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer whom we get to see little of out of their Simpsons masks, are wasted on this expedient, yuck-yuck marketing ploy. [3/06]
A History of Violence (1998). Credits. This turn amounts to a wrinkle in the history of infatuation with violence. A bit of a kink. What some may have seen as a commentary apart from violence, its pop celebration, or even vengeance fantasy, is only a pretense, if commentary exists at all in this movie. The only twist here, the only inversion, is to have the circumstance of vengeance -- the necessity, the construal as logic of it -- seek out the protagonist. Even at that, there's still the whole last act of hunting down the brother, by which point any ambiguity useful as a different sort of drama, or as allegory, has been eliminated as cutely as one of the badass hero's takedowns. For David Cronenberg, this is the wrong way to take schlock. Furrowing your brow and playing it earnest only make schlock more, well, schlocky. Granted vengeance is sacred, or at least sanctimonious, at least in the U.S., and it has been dressed up in Academy Award formal wear with Unforgiven and at least given a more problematic, ambivalent or mysterious air or context with In the Bedroom. In moving to fancier production, Cronenberg's pulp sensibility sometimes came out as a sort of camp off-handedness -- a good thing, if that's not clear, in, for example, The Fly and Naked Lunch. [1/06]
March of the Penguins [La Marche de l'empereur] (2005). Credits. The English narration, obsequiously delivered by Morgan Freeman, matches the music score for its monotonous wringing. Not only does it tell us where we've been, it tells us where we're going, the manner in which we're going there, the sense we're to have of it. It's pandering in the tone of a moral tale imposing reverence on children. This is inadvertent, since it seems they were only attempting to be, you know, dramatic, if precious. But the fact this was released as a feature film for theaters does not lift it from the unfortunate context of what's happened to science programs in general, mostly for TV. The writing of narration for these programs is tailoring for sensationalism, allowing the worst sort of projection, teleology, subjective justification passing for objectivism, solipsism for science. That's even when it's not blatant hyperbolic pitch and hook crap, as on Animal Planet. In spite of all that, there's a movie, here, in the composition of images, and this demonstrates, along with this film's box office performance, how nature film does not have to be restricted to TV. [8/05]
Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith (2005). Credits. Star Whores: Revenge of the Shit. The empire schlocks back. "Only the Sith deal in absolutes," says Ewen McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi. In which case Lucas must be telling us he himself is really a dark lord of the Shit, because otherwise what has he meant by "evil is everywhere," the dark side, the whole bad premise of this conveniently bloatable franchise? Anything will stick, or get sucked, in this vast empty space of capitalizing fantasy. It's convenient space. The true conflict is between allegory and hyperbolic action. McGregor's flashes of roguishness in Obi-Wan provide a spark of the ambiguity that would make the drama in Anakin/Vader interesting enough without reaching so far, dealing in absolutes, and remind us of the swashbuckling fun, rather against a grain of sci-fi pretentiousness, that Star Wars was when it was young, and before it was so hyperspaced out on computer graphics. McGregor and Ian McDiarmid are actually the stars, here, getting to shine through all the high gloss and show us just what might have been. McDiarmid stole Darth Vader's thunder once already in Return of the Jedi, when as the Emperor he was about the only good addition to what was the beginning of the pure trash of the series. Here, he shows what can be done with acting alone, though Lucas doesn't trust that, throwing in more dopey effects around him. Hayden Christiansen, despite McGregor showing him up, is not quite the bad that it seems popular to make of him. All that scorn should be heaped on Natalie Portman. As if she weren't bad enough -- that voice -- there's a scene where they've got her made up so that when she faces the camera, she looks as if her hair has been caught in a tree. And that's the scene when "Annie" has to say she's so beautiful! Lucas should hire scriptwriters and directors (as he once did, The Empire Strikes Back being the example, the best of the series) instead of just armies of obedient storm trooper technicians. The trick of here's where we came in for the whole series is a fun idea but then horribly served because of the throwaway stuff for it: the birth and expedient wrap-up for Luke and Leia, the equally expedient birth of the empire. The big payoff of how Darth Vader came to be so decked out is a Frankenstein rip-off, which, like the cookie-cutter plot structure by the time of the fourth movie, has the tenor of a tawdry whore presuming everyone wants the same tricks (not that many of us don't). And as if that weren't enough, it's intercut -- another trick that's just ingratiating and indulgent, as it was by the time Lucas's old buddy Francis Ford Coppola rehashed himself doing it in Godfather III (on that note, cf. a Saturday Night Live skit with Alec Baldwin playing Darth Vader as the Al Pacino from Godfather III) -- with the most awful thing in the whole series -- yes, worse than the Ewoks, Jar Jar Binks or Yoda fighting -- the birth scene (it rivals the end of AI for the leap into the dippiest sci-fi, if not anything else). Even as a fantasy empire, there is the delusion of grandeur: a conceit of breadth by stipulation and reference, now by the preposterous vista scope of computer replication, and very little done that is worthy of the myth or lore that is sought. This last film of the second trilogy shows the balance of the inflation. What this "prequel" set promised, how Darth Vader came to be, is only effectively dealt with in this film (ramshackle as it is), and if there had to be another trilogy to give an even gaudier symmetry to it all, the material in this film alone could've formed the basis: the exploits of Obi-Wan and Skywalker as Jedis, the intrigue of the chancellor and the lure of Skywalker, then the development of the Empire. That way the latter wouldn't have been a meager plot twist, and we wouldn't have been treated to so much more crap that filled up the other two second-sequel-predecessor movies: Qui-Gon, Jar Jar, Darth as a little kid fer crissakes! The allegory of the Bush administration and current events going on here is, well, perhaps in some way, an admirable attempt. But it's hard not to think of liberalism in the older sense for Lucas, as well as the California mythmash for the newer sense. Does Lucas get to capitalize on this sort of angle as well, when the solipsistic exchange of his central figure's tragedy is part of Lucas's own nuclear family metaphysics, his ego-centric galaxy? The "scenes," however they may be got, appear as a kind of grandiose resort hotel, some of them (for example, the climactic confrontation between Emperor and Anakin) as dimly and blandly so as a Marriott. Sets have been reduced to passageways, as if everyone is running around in the access corridors outside the main spaces, which are computer graphic hyperbolic vistas. Is it even as rash of any spectator to attribute to this spectacle the projection of a mad proliferation of civilization, buildings, clones and drones, arms, an imaginary Wehrmacht culture that has as its efficient counterpart a corporate merchandise empire turning even morals to pretext? [7/05]
Le Million (1931). Credits. Nietzsche wrote: "I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play: as a sign of greatness, this is an esential presupposition" (as translated by Walter Kaufman). Le Million is the pinnacle of this in the movies, the experience of it and the expression or realization of it at once, because of this factor -- very important, the very important one, because for the notion of importance -- the realization of artifice itself. Le Million is a celebration of artifice. It's a celebration of how artifice invokes things, evokes the feelings for anything, the feelings we are most serious about, but in the overriding joy which is that thrill of this motion of artifice itself.
Rene Clair, whose short silent film Entr'acte, which accompanied Le ballet mecanique, had been a distilled meditation, as a humorous riff, on movement, and who had made the first French sound film Sous les toits de Paris by extending the principles of the emphasis on moving image to sound, that is by refusing to subordinate sound to circumstance a la "talkies," culminated all this in the deftness of the stroke of Le Million. The story is silly, whimsical, trifling, except for precisely the fact that it redoubles the sense of pretext, of the way activity, motion, bustle overrun narrative or the sense of plot. He made the musical all on its own an entirely different principle for the movies, developed entirely differently from the predominant American silent film, Hollywood already set by then, and its dependence on music hall and theatrical models. Like so much of the avant-garde Europe with whom he mixed (many of whom are in Entr'acte, e.g. Marcel Duchamp), dadaists and surrealists, and like the Russian constructivists and the early Soviet filmmaker-theorists, Clair was interested in the process and material of the medium as much for how that expressed anything else. And his overriding sense of this precisely for cinema, moving pictures, "movies" was -- what else: movement.
But it was also his sense of what that was. There is the principle of the chase in his films, the sort of kinetic spectacle that had developed the earliest forms of film narrative, but Clair didn't want to be left with the sort of dichotomy of the two paths of the movie: pure fantasy v. document. He mingled them. Prosaic movement, the ordinary, is not fled for imaginary spectacle, but is itself invested with this fantasy, or even fancy, with significance often working like a pun. His surrealist whimsy Entr'acte had a prolonged joke about a funeral procession, the mourners' obsequiousness leading to unmournful pace when they try to keep up with the hearse carriage rolling down a hill. The ostensibly more fantastic Paris qui dort (called The Crazy Ray for the English version), which played with the freeze frame to figure the movies' still photography genealogy and the future of this effect, saw the imaginary as much infected by the banal as vice versa in the exchange.
The chase plays its part in Le million, and is even the main plot device, such as it is: two poor artistes trying to find a missing lottery ticket. The action springs off in imaginary flourishes: two groups of men trying to get the same jacket (the lottery ticket is in the pocket) are suddenly accompanied by the sounds of a rugby match, their action then taking that form. Just as the jacket is passed off like the rugby ball, so all theses senses are deftly passed, the sense of movement and the movement of sense. Sound to music, dancing coming up from the rhythm of mundane movement itself, like marching up the stairs, or frolicking about, and then, the crowning moment of the epiphany of it all, the flash of all this coming together is also that reflexive one of artifice, that life is also its own play. It's a paper moon. An artificial one, anyway.
Along with all this, Le Million is also a homage to La Boheme. It not only reproduces it in large part (the poor artists, lovers jealous of each other's dalliance), but expressly marks this by containing an opera performance that is an obvious reference even by another name. But Le Million also inverts the tone, the frame, and comments on this aspect of the emotional citation or representation. It couches seriousness in even this lightness, of movement, of daily whimsy, of play, by mocking opera as melodramatic, which of course was the name for it that has come to mean this mawkishness or being overwrought. It does so with material in the story, such as the indulgent opera singer preening over the right slovenly effect he wants of the jacket. But the real payoff to this trick is when the two lovers are suddenly caught literally in the middle of the opera, trapped on stage when the curtain opens. They are in the artificial surroundings, held captive and thus forced to endure the signification of the words being sung, a love song, and their own feelings and susceptibility. The seriousness of this point is thus no less made, all the more so, through the playfulness of the scene and of all this.
And then that peak, that flash: a cut to the artificial moon. A stage moon taking up the entire frame of the image, the movie. It's at once beautiful, pathetic, charming, silly. It is poignant not just about what it evokes, but about evocation itself. That even these funny little cut-outs of reality we make are the way we swoon over the reality itself. A shot of a frilly little theatrical moon for the "real" cutaways we do with the moon in the sky, like the flutter of notes in the musical score just then, the remote, wistful depth held in that shimmering shallowness of reflection. Which really holds the other, cites the other? Which is really the picture of the other? [6/25/05]
Of Human Bondage (1934). Credits. Whatever the qualities of the book itself, merits or otherwise, the movie is a study of that manner of adaptation we've come to call "Hollywood." It's not only that so much chintz and so much gloss together with some craftiness could be pacakaged as prestige, that sort of mawkish aspiration by which the movies showed the mean older step-sister arts in its own petulant vanity. For this, by the way, Bette Davis is the avatar of Hollywood, the luminous extravagance obviating any concern such as a terrible accent. This adaptation shows more particularly the conceit of the day, the 1930s mode of studied misdirection. The director, for example, built the whole movie on jutting, mugging reaction shots, when the script had boiled the novel down to pedestrian efficiency. That novelistic detail or interior monologue would be transplanted to the expression afforded by filmed dramatizing is only a pretense where so much has been, not only discarded, but taken for plot, and a shabby sense of even that. [9/04]
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986). Credits. The waves of renown for Texas Chainsaw Massacre gathered force and Hooper rode the barrel on them. This sequel is really a projection of the same plan on a larger scale, the scale of set design, anyway. Instead of the house full of bones, shot in nice sun and shade contrast of the 70s film, there's something like an abandoned amusement park with a labyrinth of tunnels, rigged up to shame the Pirates of the Carribean ride and shot in a kind of 80s gloss, the faster film stock notwithstanding. In this grander setting, there is a rehash of the dinner table sequence of the original. If it wasn't stretched out enough there, the laborious repetition here makes it cult ritual, in pop art terms if not something else. Nothing to fear, though, because the broadening also makes the horrific effect diffuse. Oh, there's plenty of ghastly stuff in the movie, mostly about large flaps of skin, but it's more a kind of gross-out thrill, now. As with any encore project, the revelations have already been made, the allegory is out of the bag, and all that primes the follow-up, gets trumped up. [8/04]
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Credits. Oh, the hobbanity! Computerized movies are digital games that you can't play and this one is more than three hours long. A quota of hipness, or at least topicality -- New Zealand topos (it brings to mind Dwight Macdonald's crack about The Greatest Story Ever Told, that it was shot in Utah because the real holy land wasn't grandiose enough -- here New Zealand has to be made literally mythical, if that's possible), vista cinematography, computer graphics, director and cast -- and the Tolkien phenomenon is back in sway, the Tolkienite mythotechnocrats come swarming back and win new hordes to their innocently detached world-historical scheme. Ring wraiths morph wraiths. Make it new. The old story of bootstrap mythologizing, of creating your own roots. The wizard blows smoke from his pipe and it forms the image of a ship as it glides off. Does it make any difference to criticize the impulse to hang whatever cheap cutesy CG gimick on a work that is a giant indulgence of fancy? No one seems to care about aptness, even for the beloved source, only about lapping up. The effect of this movie was so radically, well, hum: a kind of movie noise or din that, without being quite awful, managed to evoke nothing like the book did of whatever quaint, tumble-down, Nordic, medieval fairy fare. Not even the smell of myth.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002). Credits. I'm going to use this movie as a pretext to talk about something else instead. Why? Because I don't believe one can escape allegory, I can imagine whatever I want and it's more fun than this movie. Is it necessary to use this movie to discuss the phenomenon of Tolkien's work, whether it's fiction as belief or myth as juvenalia and diversion? I had friends in junior high who tried to convince me Middle Earth really existed, whether as a joke, as social coercion or because they wanted to believe themselves, it makes little difference, like Trekkies or Wagnerians or any fans who want the guise of this other world. Tolkien said that he loathed allegory. It's too bad, because he might have made a better one. The infatuation with number, as if number alone conferred mysterious power, like a naive's abstract of mathematical functions: they were nine and four were they and seven did they forge, etc. This formal or superficial play with numbers is the pretended -- meaning, here, also, the holding before the fact -- encompassing of complexity, division, extension, and the pretended occultation of the object is similarly an infatuation with manipulation. It's the cult aspect of the thing, of objects, reappropriated. And there's that lordy ring. Is it innocent to imagine absolute evil? To abstract? Allegory, asymptote? What distance is closed by Tolkien's distinction, or abjuration? Is this the type of innocence we need, or want to have, even for play? Orcs are bad, m'kay. In Mordor, they lived their evil days, sleeping evilly in their evil beds, putting on their evil shoes, eating their evil meals, drinking their evil drinks, playing their evil games, in perfect homogeneous, insular, evil society. If someone slips up in Mordor, do they become not so bad? One wants to have the form of this absolute other, even if "purely" fictive -- and the leap of faith here, the transaction involved between myth and a kind of will to fiction, not to mention, on the other hand, contradictions between Christianity and Nordic or pagan myths, the dogmatic pronouncements against imagination, fictions, other beliefs, myths or gods -- the form that would be cast on something in real life, for example -- but isn't it the example? -- the thing itself through the history of Christianity -- the Jews. Mordor would just as well be the Nazis, of course, if there were allegory. The paradoxes, the implications that abound are of no interest to the "innocent" imagination, or perhaps the entertained or distracted or obviating imagination. Evil is abstracted, a kind of convenient value, a convenience of value, as the sheer product of a contrast, a shadow world indeed. Is pure fiction the same as the fiction of purity?
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Credits. And that title serves nicely for several layers of ulterior, for an outbidding of allegorical trumping, intended by parties part or partisan, or other, foreign, perhaps even across the imaginary divide of an absolute border of territories of good and evil. (Tolkien went so far as to literally draw maps of this territorialization of evil, and their simplicity loses nothing of their worth as schema.) Division within and without. What is the difference between difference within and difference without? A xenomania already right there in the saying. Tolkien may have been hiding, if barely or badly so, the Christian herald in that title, the rapture, the second coming, despite his disingenuous disclaimer. But invading, infecting, creeping and slithering right in with that, corrupting it, we can read a marvelous statement of the problem of sovereignty itself (held up for scrutiny by Derrida), in the form of Freud's return of the repressed. Why is it that we good democrats keep returning to the king? Or are we not democratic, we who won the war against fascism? Why do we insist on these fairy tales? Why do we capitalists keep betraying our feudal underpinnings? Are we as good Christians necessarily absolute monarchists, because of this absolutist hierarchy, and thus at odds with ourselves as good democrats?
The equation of fascism: the matter of crypto-, or saying other, allos agoreuein, allegory, more specifically, the other is in relation to what is spoken publicly, since the agoreuein is from agora. Is it unfair to suspect this very sort of duplicity on the part of Tolkien's remark on allegory, a disingenuousness, a polite, public lie? Susan Sontag makes recourse to "all totalitarian regimes," in her essay "Fascinating Fascism," as subtending fascist and communist, nominally or otherwise, dictatorships. Her famous remark -- spoken publicly -- about communism being fascism with a human face, had a rhetorical situation. Sontag's call for vigilance about fascism was at a time, in the face, of a creeping fascination, a faddishness. On the one hand, the perspicuity: useful in the face of the presentation of Leni Riefenstahl, by herself and others. Beyond that, useful in seeing a larger frame, beyond the letter of Nazism, of German fascism, or even fascism, in the Alpine supremacist myths before the Nazi propaganda per se, or in the simplistic universalizing supremacism of Riefenstahl's post-Nazi work. And then she extends this to the ambivalent fascination in "popular" culture, also calling attention to similarity of "structure" in what are apparently innocent works, works not professing this particular other.
This doesn't mean that any such must amount to fascism. We should no more make that facile equation than one with communism and fascism. In Sontag's lurching for fascism as a sentence against 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, she risked leaving alone the plain fact of drippy pretentiousness, what might be as damning or, again, a common element. Nonetheless this impulse of mythic whismy, of a sort of boundless, even irresponsible poeisis, can have or be complicitous, if not a factor of complicty itself, with shrewder purposes. Shouldn't it be curious enough that in an exercise of pure fabrication there is this simplistic abstraction good/evil?
But why fascism? Is this stuff really "there"? Let's not forget Lord of the Rings is a rip-off -- O.K., then, what? -- a homage? -- of Wagner's Ring cycle of operas. From the four parts, the trilogy-plus-one plan, right down to the ring itself, the key of the unification of mystical powers. This is not to say that just because the Nazis claimed Wagner, anyone else who does so is a Nazi, or even necessarily a fascist by another name. But Wagner's reach for Germanic folklore, his twilight of the gods, was part of a more general 19th century trend involving Romanticism, competitive outbidding for origins or roots, and a lot of crackpot dabbling in mystical elements, as with Nietzsche's sister and her husband. These proto-Nazis, whom the Nazis took up ideologically, believed that the supreme Aryan race once had mystical powers that were lost due to dilution through interbreeding. The similarities between these politically hypostatized myths and those of shamanism benignly dabbled in by, for example present day Northern Californians, ought to be striking, if only because not widely noted, as if something like the term "New Age" weren't Reich-ish enough. (Star Wars is of the same stock, with John Williams explicity making the lineage with Wagner in the music: listen to the Ring theme and the Force theme, if you haven't got the idea already.)
What is the larger matter of this ab/ob-jection, the making the abject of objection, this abject objectification? How do we make an absolute evil out of fascism, but beyond that, how does this maneuver match, duplicate, how is it homologous with fascism itself? In the essay by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "The Nazi Myth," that broader scope, environment, in which Nazism, particular German fascism, arose, is examined. The question goes further: not just the context historically, but the possibility, the condition for it, in political, cultural, social movements, history, in Western or any other philosophy, in perception, conception, thought.
It's, yes, the geneaology of good and evil. Nietzsche is often yanked in wholesale, as by Sontag, as if no attention has been paid to precisely how he has turned this question, investigation, suspicion, on the very ideal -- ideological and Idealist -- "structure" (to use Sontag's word) that is supposed to conduct it. (Not to mention how all these good conscience forces everywhere still today, by virtue of the same misreading, omission, ignorance, make of Nietzsche exactly what the Nazis tried to, believing this an identification of him rather than of themselves.) It's not just a Manichean evasion of some Kantian imperative -- but why would it be? -- as if the arguments on the problem of the origin of evil are settled, in which case, there is an axiom, an end, a kind of epistemological -- gnosological, then? -- limit to the interrogation (cf. Schopenhauer on causality). Anything pure is pathological, as Nietzsche put it in short form. Fairy tales are not the absolute truth; the absolute truth is a fairy tale.
This ab/ob-jection, then, can only avoid the mad spiral of narcissistic paranoia, more hopefully thought of as (mere or neutral) subjectivity, if the interrogation, the solicitation, is of the -- precisely -- self. One must also look at the division within one, if the abject other is not to be found only outside, across the border. To what extent do we have, partake of, submit to, this idle/idol fascination? The backward-turning projection, the mythic aspect, in common with Nazis, if opposed to the racist aspect? In the pettiness of the grandeur of Tolkien, the grand wizard of 20th century sci-fi/fantasy nerdism, with a Roman Catholicism underlying a pulpish fascination for biblical dimension, for cosmology, the myth of a pure fiction, the fiction of pure myth, is also of this detachment from allegory, a fantasy of undivided, impermeable identity on the level of representation analogous to that taken for real by fascism, but which also, conversely, is inextricably representation. Is there a counter-example? In other words, must fantasy necessarily produce such a simplistic moral scheme? Jonathan Swift, who considered himself a Christian no less than Tolkien did, even if he was less of one, made a fantasy of other lands, if not worlds, and creatures, that was not only a parody of the popular travel journals of his day, but a clever allegory for cultural exchange, and the relative change to the subject that results (Gulliver's size). But perhaps one has to also not loathe parody, humor, that sort of lightness or deftness, and the crossing of representation, to be able to have one's fantastic characters comment so overtly on the humans they're not supposed to allegorize. [7/04]
Schultze Gets the Blues (2004). Credits. The distance of touching. Michael Schorr has made a film that is touching without being sentimental in the manner of "feel-good" movies: a sentimental comedy that doesn't have a melodramatic upsurge, that ends with a death, but which in turn is not sad. It's as if a feel-good movie had been taken over by Fassbinder or even Herzog, the result being something like Jim Jarmusch, but sharper. It's about lonely travelers in foreign lands, particularly a German in Texas and Louisiana, and in his case late life. It's not maudlin, it's an even beautiful ode to the aged, the unspectacular (I think of Walter Benjamin's affection for unwanted books), to hopes and dreams and a taste for elsewhere even when it amounts to little or never comes off. In this way it's a celebration of experience in the vein of Irma Vep. [5/04, San Francisco International Film Festival]
Lost in Translation (2003). Credits. So much for what the U.S. thinks of as indie or even art. I don't know why people are so easy to please. Sophia Coppla's movie is slack, the script is even immaturely bad in places. It's a far too easy indie movie, one of those adolescent smug things where nobody understands me, with straw-man tactics: the respective spouses are drawn far too cheaply (a real drama would be if they had spouses they really liked, too), the depiction of Tokyo as alienating is cultural insulation if not chauvinism (it's supposed to just be funny, but even the Japanese friends are reduced to buzzy montage background, a bad habit that "indie" romanticism shares with the Hollywood it wants to contrast), and whether Sophia stole the idea from Autumn Moon, the 1993 film by Clara Law (I have not seen or heard this mentioned by anyone else), or not (Murray getting cheap hotel sex in addition makes it more likely), she suffers by comparison, because while that one is far more subtle and more dramatic in having a non-romantic relationship, Sophia of course has cheated towards romance. One of the errors she makes as a scriptwriter -- but how can she be singled out or blamed, since this passes as good film-making even among her peers -- is to forget direction, film-making, which is more easy to hold against her when she's also the director. More unfortunately, she also forgot direction a lot when she was shooting. Much of the film is not so much directed as made, even that hotel blankness not so much stated as passed for by Sophia's own. Bill Murray is barely touched, his value taken for granted. This doesn't approach the performance of Groundhog Day, even as a failure. There are two or three times when Coppola does actually do something with film, and one of them is the ending. Lots of films are great and have bad or disappointing endings. Coppola either had a great idea for an ending, but didn't know how to get there, or solved her problem too late: the one line she wrote most beautifully, as a film-maker and not a scriptwriter, is the one she didn't write at all. [4/04]
Unknown Pleasures (2002). Credits. Even more low-key poignant than Zhang Yimou at his pithiest, this approaches Abbas Kiarostami in its combination of shot-from-life style and dramatic deftness. As with some of Kiarostami's work, it looks like it was shot on video, at least originally. And as with his work, it's so street-bound that it seems boringly banal when it begins, but it has precisely that virtue of letting things be seen, and accumulates, scenic material and depiction, so quickly as to become fascinating before you notice you've been taken in. Perhaps even more sophisticated than Kiarostami, however, and approaching Zhang with an even grittier air, is Jia's scope, the unsentimental compass of his sentiment, which is poignance. After Zhang, Jia continues what I see as a development of something more complex than neorealism, from the opposite direction (though perhaps not really so). Jia's depiction of pop culture in the lives of his subjects (the title of the film is also that of a Chinese pop song, though there is also reference to the Joy Division album) is more like Almodovar than, say, Tarentino or Wong Kar Wai, because there is a more dramatic trope, in his case pathos at the same time as testimonial. You can see this in the ending, where one of the characters sings the pop song, and which is more stark, like something from Truffaut, The 400 Blows, or even Herzog. [4/04]
Demonlover (2002). Credits. There's a good idea in here, or at least one of my own: power brokers becoming their own capital. The stroke of having the French guy behind it all was good, the far more banal, less mysterious-chic kind of evil: the world of pricks. It certainly turned around that conversation of theirs at that later dinner, which prior to that twist, was awful, a really weird stab into bad sophistication. Perhaps that's what director Olivier Assayas intended, to make it that much better a bubble to burst, but as with that scene, the film at large was something unsatisfying even as a projection of narcissistic yuppie control mania. The strange cutaways (for example, to marginal characters) and the stabs of sound were his attempts at the warp to the fabric, which is supposed to be point-of-view, the tony swagger of these people, the milieu. But there is somehow no edge to it. Assayas got out of his element by trying to slip on another skin, trying to make a villain play rather than something closer to home, as in Irma Vep. In that he had something to refer to; here he's projecting. The difference is articulated another way with these films: Irma Vep has a closer horizon, something more ordinary, but expands so much, expounds on it, elaborates it, while Demonlover imagines something more grandiose but sets it too closely. This latter is an error that is endemic. The interweaving lives idea is a threadbare cliche going on 15 years, now, and the instituted mistake is that the circle is too small, there's too few characters, let alone social breadth, to be pertinent: convergence has no dramatic sense if there's not some divergence, if there's not some space or time. Assayas probably thought it was significant to have such a small set, more incestuous and claustrophobic, but it also makes it more artificial in a not really useful way, convenient as in a sitcom. Having the assistant, for example, the Chloe Sevigny character, be part of the racket, is too easy an upturn trick and in fact it's the scenes with her that make the least sense, the ones in the car with the gun. The comparison to Irma Vep is not just the limit of my perspective. The similarities are like a flashing signal: the girl in tight leather or latex suit, the sneaking and climbing around in a hotel, the scene shopping for pop women's clothing -- the entire line of action can be seen as parallel, with an airplane arrival, a hectic work world, a woman moving from outside the frame of her work to inside it. But what is being signalled? There are only the possibilities and nothing that says one of them wins out: Assayas has a fetish (one of the suits, the one when she escapes for the car chase, is after The Avengers, and certainly the hairdo is Diana Rigg, but gosh, is Assayas cultivating his own cultdom); he's making a comment about fetishization of women that is about the ambivalence of it, within either of the films (and perhaps his others) or between these two; he's retreading (pun with rubber intended). The problem, however, is that even more by comparison to Irma Vep, this suffers, because all the beauty and charm of that exercise, of the fascination of life behind the scenes, in waiting, accidental, when connections aren't made, around the edges and out of bounds, are simply not here. Demonlover is not to Irma Vep as Dante's Inferno to his Purgatorio, it's quite the opposite relation. The dinner scene in Irma Vep, when the leftists abashedly show old films, the two film directors, that stuff makes everything in Demonlover seem high-spun. Despite that, Assayas still shoots beautifully, does something like hand-held that is far more elegantly eavesdropping and doesn't make me sick, and he's very good at action sequences, making them seem a bit slower, giving them the sense of erupting from the mundane. That seemed to come more from the situation of Irma Vep, the way the rooftop shooting sequence is even more suspenseful as a realistic contrast to hyperbolic action, but Demonlover shows that even in something more fanciful, he can affect action in a similar way. [4/04]
Kill Bill [Vols. 1 and 2] (2003). Credits. Back after. When Quentin Tarantino came out -- really came out, hit it big -- with Pulp Fiction, he made good by going in what could be seen as two directions, deceptively expressed in the title. He embraced a pop that was less tony than the movies of the time, and of the tony-faction the movies have always done. At the same time, the deceptive part, what was actually a subtlety, a sophistication in the good sense, behind the announcement, he played with plot structure in a way that was more inventive than either, pulp or pop. If, after all, such a distinction even makes sense anymore, as if movies aren't the pulp of our times, or the triumph of pulp over everything (cf., for broader scope, the entire publishing business and its Hollywoodization, figuratively, it's subsumption by the same conglomerates directly). It's really not two directions in the sense that, leaving aside so much ceremony (not to say ass-kissing, whether it be of consumers or corporate nabobs) that industry passes for craft or even art, whether ignoring it or abjuring it, Tarantino would be free to play with things that would not be played with otherwise. Like Godard growing up on B movies and making virtue of them, to turn against the professional movies as their lack. Which is by no means to say that Tarantino is a Godard in other respects -- that's the point of this circuitous path. More apt as an analogy for Tarantino is Jim Thompson, who as presumed pulp writer hit upon the same scheme as a supposedly literary modernist Nabokov: cf. Pop. 1280 and Despair.
Not mistaking Tarantino for Godard is not to say, however, that fun or amusement aren't to be taken seriously, that play with form or structure, art, has nothing to do with that. Godard's earliest work was a burst of laughter, as a tack, a tactic, a method (cf. Alphaville for the figure of this, when Lemmy Caution is told a joke then punched in the stomach), but that was not left aside when Godard developed in a way Tarantino has not. With Jackie Brown, Tarantino showed more of this subtlety, a sensitivity, and not just the conspicuous one of a "softer" theme over the sensational aspects of Pulp Fiction. This was a cooler move following the crest of that wave and the sort of overindulgent fandom it created, and it predictably cooled their presumptuous expectation. Meanwhile, fame brought appearances of Tarantino himself, and he showed that his passion for pop was not so subtle as his direction. He was like a bad guest at a party. Yeah, yeah, we really liked your movie, don't bug us anymore.
It seems as a reaction to the reception of Jackie Brown that Tarantino has reversed direction. Kill Bill shucks any of those advantages and is everything awful Tarantino's person betrayed. The pop-reference gobbing of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction was at least delivered in a clever way. This is heavy-handed, sheer and gloppy at once, fatuous reverence. It's homage as the sheerest sort of smug fandom, which makes it a foregone conclusion to suffer for one feature length, let alone two. The sum of Tarantino's creativity in this two-movie long exercise is the stroke of playing anime as spaghetti western. When you see the sources, however, such as Lady Snowblood, even that package was already complete: the 60s. And it's not like Yojimbo hasn't been around for 40 years. Quentin, how can we like you if you won't go away? [2/1/04]
Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones (2002). Credits. Lukie's symbolic father: Do you want to know if it's plausible for a person to be unaware of his own duplicity? Just look at George Lucas and everything Star Wars is outside its plot. As just a sidebar, there's a point about the aesthetic or mythic path to enlightenment having a fundamental blindness, egoism, all the more for its abnegation of self, this idealized purification having nothing to do with, no taste for, worldly scrutiny. But in a fantasy where that is accepted, suspension of disbelief may be of criticism as well. Mystical, gnostic force an allegorical problem? No, it's all just for fun. Cf. The Lord of the Rings. The entire enterprise by this point may as well be a modern Wagnerian drama of good conscience. Lucas's pulling himself up by his own bootstraps is at the same time building his ladder from the sky. The efficiency of these movies, their assembly line construction -- all built on the same plan, with the same climax of intercut lines of action, the plot mapped and timed out for the introduction of new gadgets, characters, landscapes, the six movies lined up like big, pricey modular homes (the spot for the last one is already there) -- are as much an ode to capitalism and democracy as the tinsely allegory in them: the Republic and the Trade Federation are the two powers in a conflict that is contrived by the looming evil empire. Even at the rate of "entertainment", how do you explain a queen who was elected, besides populism's infatuation with supremacy? By this movie, she's been made a senator. For every new plot module, installment character or element, there is a cheese off on the overall plan following up from the first three movies. Count Dooku (the name is close enough to Dracula for Christopher Lee -- Lucas is a cultural re-seller) is brought in but Boba Fett gets tied to the entire clone army. Lucas is knitting too close. The love story is tempered as expression of the broader aspects of Anakim's character and there's an attempt to make Darth Vader in waiting, just as the political allegory, a complication, the seeds of evil within the good, at least. But, apart from the strained performances even of gawky adolescents by Hayden Christensen and more unbearbly Natalie Portman, at the bottom of all that is still simplistic dichotomy (love can't be shown to be on the side of evil), and that resides on the impetus of the Darth Vader character itself, its popularity from the previous series. Dooku and Yoda had a chance for a showdown of greater abilities with force, but they decide light sabres is the way to settle it! I did not want to see Yoda have a sword fight. That was not something I would have imagined even as pandering payoff. In the making-of material sold with the "Clones" DVD, not only do we get to see the way Lucas has sold out his own republic for an empire of mercenaries, but there is a scene in which he demonstrates that he had the better thought, but couldn't act on it. He tells a graphics AD they have to be careful or Yoda in a sword fight could look stupid! Trust your instincts, Luke. Don't force it. [03?]
Stolen Kisses (1968). Credits. Francois Truffaut made a series of films with Jean-Pierre Leaud as the same character, Antoine Doinel, which was based on Truffaut himself. In this one, the second feature installment (a short film with the character was made before), life is like a Charlie Chaplain movie for the people who grew up watching Charlie Chaplain. While they may be more physically mundane than rollerskating on the edge of a landing or eating a shoe, the affairs of life sweep with the same whimsy. This includes the affair of a lifetime with Delphine Seyrig -- she plays the wife of a shoe store owner and the impressionable young Antoine's ideal. The older woman has read the same book Antoine was reading in the army jail, where he is discovered at the beginning of the film, and tells him he is unique like everyone. With or without the paradox, Truffaut's Antoine is a still a vagabond, as much as the Tramp or the young delinquent of The 400 Blows, and regardless of bourgeois relations: he's a spiritual vagabond, an avatar of the circumstantial. He's the man without qualities, the fall guy of vicissitude, and as such for Truffaut, a variable in the algebra of life. Truffaut doesn't use the jump cut per se, but the story has the principle of it. Ellipsis with this droll tone gives hours, days, weeks the same pace, and everything is subject to its own circumstantial principle. This may be Truffaut's greatest stroke, the depiction of events not as teleological, but as unfolding, spilling out, a sort of byproduct or indirect progression, not the strict causal logic of a mystery or melodrama. A detective causes Antoine a mistake that loses him a job, he joins up with the detective's agency and as part of an investigation pretends to work in the shoe store where he then has a fling with the owner's wife. [8/02]
Gosford Park (2001). Credits. Acting peers. Jean Renoir is the artistic predecessor of Robert Altman, so for Altman to do a movie about aristocrats and their servants on a hunting weekend is a nod, intended or not, to Renoir's most acclaimed film, The Rules of the Game. That film was made in 1939 and this one is set in 1932. Bob Balaban, the actor playing Moris Weissman here, is credited with the idea for the film along with Altman (both of them were also producers) and the script is by Julian Fellowes. And it's not just Altman's Rules of the Game. It's also Altman's Upstairs, Downstairs and a bit of whodunit iconoclasm, foiling generic ceremony the way McCabe and Mrs. Miller did for westerns, or to some extent The Long Goodbye did for film noir. It's the most involved ensemble mise en scene Altman has done since the 70s, things like M.A.S.H. and McCabe and Nashville, and less successfully A Wedding and Health, and possibly ever. In his more recent work, of the last 10 years or so, he's had ensemble casts and crowded scenes, but nothing really like this sustained ensemble in one setting, and it's the most satisfying that way since M.A.S.H. or McCabe, all the roving jumble and conversations overlapping, characters relaying the action in one shot, creating a big stream of activity that also gives the sense of clipping and wandering off dramatic emphasis, a sort of offbeat rhythm. There's even a conceit to this with Altman, but here there's so much business, and it's done so well, that's it captivating and fun, no less for being fairly serious, or let's say seriously executed (as opposed to, say, Ready to Wear, which in trying to be fun was just goofy). There's also the effect of Altman doing a period or costume piece, like Mike Leigh with Topsy-Turvy: a realist's attention to detail in the acting, the action and relations and the way the actors execute them, creates so much more of a context for all the interesting old clothes and setpieces. Compared to Renoir and Rules of the Game, this is a more intricate and convoluted naturalism. But for that, it lacks what Rules was as a broader stroke, and beyond that, what was the shrewdest stroke of all from the grand predecessor of these realists, Anton Chekhov, in his The Cherry Orchard: the anticlimactic that was the dramatic point about the characters themselves. Altman's mundane detail is not really so mundane as it appears, since his bustling effacement is still a way of couching dramatic turns. More contrary, however, is the way Altman's scripts tend to have big dramatic events, something, in fact, climactic, and often over-reaching. Here it is the scenes of revelation about family relations. It's not necessary, we get all the clues, the official murder investigation is not finished, the cops shown not only subordinate to the aristocracy like the servants but also irrelevant, so there is no need for the theatrical cliche of Oedipal family revelation at the end. How much more clever to just leave all the clues, the way it's done with the whodunit bit? And even dealing with it that way, it's the abject alibi problem in drama, that death, mostly equal to murder, and birth are the only things that make anything else significant. All the details and the business showing the relation of the servants and masters, and particularly the whole aspect of the servants living vicariously in the masters, is subordinated by the illegitimate relations matter, as if it weren't pertinent or significant except in light of the gentry's irresponsible sex. Actors love to do Altman movies (for some it means less money) because Altman's ensemble pieces make a structural principle and an exemplar from the platitude, "there are no small parts." His movies are not just parties for actors (the way certain 60s movies were), they're acting parties. Actors can trade off whatever desire they have to lead, to star, for the desire to be a peer; they trade off being a ham for being in the society of hams. It's fun just to see whom Altman has cast, how they work in the whole and how they are next to the other interesting selections. And this time it's, with only a couple of exceptions, a group of British actors, an assortment from several generations as well as milieux. There's Alan Bates, whose major movie starring roles were in the 60s and 70s, and someone you might've imagined in a British Altman movie back then. There are relative new darlings, like Emily Watson, already cast by Altman's protogé, Alan Rudolph, in Trixie, and who benefits greatly from Altman's style since she can be an awfully serious ham. Michael Gambon benefits from a call for a more subtle performance, since he's often asked to play heavies too heavily. He plays the axis of all the drama, the Lord all the others are orbiting, living off of or trying to, and he's detached and drifty in his imperious old age. Clive Owen is the most interesting of the newer faces. The cool reserve he gives his valet character can seem like disdain for the gossipy intrigue of the other servants, and then in his willingness towards the masters, it's something startling. Owen makes it seem he's appropriating all the pleasure of being served to himself as the servant, but as something devious or ironic, a Hegelian smugness about who is in charge. There's a practical reason for this satisfaction, a ruse, but Owen also makes it broader. Maggie Smith is something of a revelation in the Altman context. Her polish makes her seem more refined than Altman rough gems, like, say, Shelley Duvall, the formalism of the English stage in contrast to American movie naturalism. But Smith has such ease and grace, and such a gliding comic style, she makes even caricature naturalistic. [3/02]
Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Credits. A long Brechtian corny joke. Easy to see why people wouldn't tolerate it. But, generally, there have been two responses: a witless admiration of the film as a "masterpiece," and an equally humorless reproach of the film on the basis of its portrayal of sex. But it's the faulting of the portrayal for the thing portrayed. The film is not "about" sex, certainly not if that means an obligatory celebration of eroticism or somehow appropriately erotic. It's interesting that it provokes just this scheme of reactions, the (not really so) strange bedfellows of the moralist and the libertine, or their crossbreed, the psychologistic reactionary that plants the same notion of a proper for sex somewhere else. Foucault's sense that Victorianism has only been inverted is in evidence. Fulfillment in either case: pregnancy, fruition, production, property, telos. This film is about not having sex. The punchline doesn't violate that scheme, not frontally anyway, and leaves us with a scene of conjugal rehabilitation. [3/02]
Ghost World (2001). Credits. Prosaic as plot at the cost of iteration, this becomes an ode to a passage, the post-graduation diaspora accomplished in one summer. Mixed blessing, as the high school stuff at the begining, despite its place in the trajectory, situates the characters, domesticates them, makes them less detached (or ghostly), and it's rather pat at that. You don't yet have enough information for the sense of Enid's ironic interest, so their appearance at the graduation dance seems contradictory, after they've just expressed their repulsion for the high school world they are leaving. It seems smug and staged for the characters if not the filmmakers. The cinematography is also uneven. The dusk color of the opening tracking shots, with the telephone lines starting off, gives way to something more ordinary, for film, that is, not life. The opening photography comes in at the end again, as do the wires. Terry Zwigoff got his Crumb influence in with these shots of wires and all the banal fixtures of the city circulatory system that become invisible taken for granted. With things like that as the revery of perpetual outsiders, flaneurs, why clip it down to a graduation story, to an adolescent swan song, why give the devil his due? The Crumb/Zwigoff stand-in, played by Steve Buscemi, offers evidence this is not just wayward teens before they settle, so an identification of the two in the serial indefinite of, say, a comic book would have less the effect of a moral tale. Except the script is co-written by Daniel Clowes, author of the graphic novel. Here's my message: Why does everything have to be turned into a story, a plot? When it's precisely a matter of people who reject the quaint, ludicrous resolve of everything, the bourgeois instrumentalist cul de sac in which an art teacher's political "consciousness" is as supple as a movie concessions manager's rules for fleecing, the concern shouldn't just be for identifying with this world, but also for identifying in this world. Clowes and Zwigoff nonetheless manage to be eloquent with this passage, the way the girls grow apart by necessity more than intent, the way Enid messes up everything for herself even as she is justified in hating all the options. They botch their own ending, however, with just flat-footed story-telling. Enid sees a bus arrive for her curious constant, but they can't leave it with that figure. There is no need for what they give us after that, practically or aesthetically. Though they have a low-key appeal, Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson are less lively than the comic book characters. They are more like awkward sulky drab early adolescents until dramatic moments, crying or getting mad, and when Birch is interacting with Steve Buscemi. Buscemi's Seymour character in the economy of the movie script has been made the foil for Enid. This has a movie plot expedience, again, that minimizes what is exceptional about these characters, what makes them misfits and would interest them in each other -- it's just traits, references, stuff about them, though this is in accord with Seymour's self-effacing. This is a drama of their passage, through the world of ghosts or as ghosts, but perhaps my sentimentality is for having it turned inside out, through their art, Enid's, or the records they love, or what they find in each other. Maybe they couldn't do it in this two hours, but you can see Crumb. [3/02]
In the Bedroom (2001). Credits. This is superbly directed by Todd Field, well cast and acted, especially by Tom Wilkinson, but with the slight exception of Sissy Spacek. She's done much better work, and in one scene, in the prosecutor's office, she's particularly strained. Field's direction is counter to the hyperbolic sentiment prevalent in movies ("indies" in their way as much as "Hollywood"). His script is an elliptical chain, and his execution of it has the same unforced rhetorical effect. The expression always has its place in the line of action, but this is also because the action is this expression, response and reaction. Point of view and general comment are cleverly confused and thus commented throughout. Shots that seem to be Field's comment are followed with a reaction shot that catch them in a character's perception: example in the DA's office with family photos seen by Fowler, later the DA's mouth followed by a close-up of Fowler's eyes in turn by a close-up of the DA's hand fiddling with change in his pocket, and perhaps the payoff for all these, a cut to Marisa Tomei during the crucial action that she hears rather than sees, which later proves to catch the viewer in the same problem of witnessing. The movie opens on lovers outside, with grass and leaves blowing in the wind, and this unassuming presentation, without any other context or signifying, is all the more tender and intimate for having a sort of passiveness or remove. It's similar to Terence Malick's openings and cutaways of benignly indifferent nature. The wind has much to do with it, this sound of the scene, by contrast to music, and there is a general plan to this. Throughout the movie, Field has all sorts of banal sound in the scenes, cars and trucks passing, baseball on the radio. This has the remarkable effect (remarkble that it is an effect, too) of locating the drama. Rather than cutting things out of this background and dramatically magnifying them, with music, for example, Field gets the play of effect, often with silent characters, in this day noise. This presents grievance in a way that seems new (it's not, exactly, and other directors have used this sort of dramatic rest -- Spacek's character refers to this in music -- for suspense and horror as well as death, for example, Bergman in Winter Light or Antonioni in Blow-Up), and is certainly affecting. A catastrophe overturns or ruptures the order of life just as this order, this banality, persists, but becomes uncanny, strangely independent. Devoid of what it all seemed attached to, built up around -- a loved one -- it is meaningless, but it also at any instant means this absence, is this absence. Still again, it's the empty solace of an absorption, a play for the sheer semblance of that order -- as Spacek's character watching TV. The whole segment of this film about mourning is one of the most eloquent on the subject in film, and that alone makes the movie significant. But then there is the final segment. The way in which the film had so eloquently commented on mourning, and even seemed to work through bitterness and anger makes the final act seem all the more incongruous. Some have said the last part is like a thriller movie. Field carries through with the same subtlety, and perhaps what he's attempting is a provocation about what people carry on inside them despite what we may think. The ambiguity of the ending is whether it's provocativley ambiguous or conveniently, opportunistically ambiguous. "The bedroom" is also a term used for part of a lobster pot, and Tom Wilkinson's character, Matt Fowler, tells his son's girlfriend's son that when more than two lobsters are trapped together, there are violent results. This is a foreshadowing of the domestic trouble, but it can also be a nasty naturalist causal logic, one that, on the other hand, may be what comes back to haunt Fowler when he sees a photograph of the estranged husband and the woman his son dated. Lobsters may do harm to each other, but do other lobsters seek revenge to feel better about it? Is Fowler shown to be caught in a trap of this causality, is that given by the film as the portent of the ending, when Fowler remains awake in bed, sees that the finger snapped by a lobster has healed, but doesn't respond to his wife when she calls out? Have the shots of the quiet town at the end left tremors unseen? Todd Field and script co-writer Robert Festinger may be doing some finespun, high-toned hedging with a story written by Field's deceased friend, Andre Dubus. The movie, for example, has this happen to an Ivy league educated doctor and his teacher wife, their son bound for college as an architect, even though he has a lobster fishing job. Why, then, this sort of people rather than fishermen or a store owner (as it is in the story)? Did Field want to back off the suggestion of some milieu for people who have no qualm about revenge, for whom revenge is expiation (like the families of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing who wanted front-row seats at Timothy McVeigh's execution -- and Field has put the name McVeigh in the script, as the name of a mother who lost a child)? Or did he want to show instead that revenge as a sentiment, capability, a taste, is not limited to one class, social group, or degree of refinement? The ending is unsettling both ways, as either an injection of mollifying (dramatically or otherwise) moral conscience (as Francis Ford Coppola did in The Godfather, Part II before getting silly with it in Part III) to hedge against, or as a subversion of, a vindictive deliberation. Dubus is said to have westerns in mind for his story, and Field may have sought to show just what that notion of "justice" would look like in a modern context. [3/02]
Martha (1974). Credits. "Ja, ja, kornflakes." Gliding mordant wit. But not for that purpose. It's the touch of Fassbinder, and always best when there is some melodrama to foil (Douglas Sirk as pretext or relief). Fassbinder made movies fast and his movies are fast. His composition is not trifling, it's even excessive, but at such a toss-off pace: the theatrical and its antidote at once. He's a naturalist with a satirist's flair, a hybrid of realism and absurd. [2/02]
Artificial Intelligence (2001). Credits. A Spielbrick production -- is Kubrick Spielberg's robot or vice versa? The ripples of implication about representation and authenticity, evoked more gracefully by Blade Runner, here become fairy-tale makeover cant in portentous tones. After the mother casts the mechanical kid off in the forest because she can't bring herself to return him to the company which will thus destroy him, the artificial love becomes a cloying tape loop of "Make me a real boy," and "Where's the blue fairy." This becomes a joke not quite as expected when the kid prays to a blue fairy statue for 2000 years, a joke, too, on the eternal childhood ethos of Spielbergiana. Whatever the relationship between Kubrick and Spielberg for this project, the temptation is to take it as a parting Kubrick joke, a twist on iconography similar to that of casting Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. I resent Spielberg's presumptuous inheritance of Kubrick, even though what he wants to take up is the mantle of mawkish profundity of 2001, billing the movie as a Stanley Kubrick production. If Spielberg is not disingenuous, wasn't he worried about the honor and magnanimity smelling like a prestige label? But after seeing the movie, I think the obsequiousness adds to the joke of Spielberg doing Kubrick and being done by him. The material is there in the first part of the movie, the alleged 80 pages of script written by Kubrick that Spielberg took over and finished. You can see the appeal for Kubrick, and as a Kubrick vehicle, in this Daedalian story (by Brian Aldiss) of uncanny simulation. The premise of a mechanical boy having emotions start up like a program is a ready-made for Kubrick's Brechtian trick of drained, mechanized acting. Spielberg manages to make it more somber and remote in the first part, that is, he doesn't fawn all over everything with his craning camera, and if for the material alone, the movie has an air that's not quite like anything else he's done, and thus interesting. He still pokes through with his heavy handling of dialogue and his goofy decorous infatuation, like the light through gobs of smoke (where are the cigarettes), and though he plays along with the voice of the teddy bear, it's like a fuzzy Ewok with the voice of HAL, and he can't help doing lots of tricks with it and showing it gawking much more affected than mechanical. After that moment in the forest, the Spielberg machine takes over. The film turns from an allusion to Pinocchio into an obsession with it, and like his peer George Lucas, Spielberg tries to aggrandize and solemnize it as archetype. Gigolo Joe, who with Kubrick might've been a dose of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, has become Dapper Dan at a bunch of carnivals, the Flesh Fair is clunky fantasy potboiler stuff, and the submerged Manhattan and 2000 years later are a mix of gawky sci-fi and gushy epilogue, all the more hokey as a play at the metaphysical trip ending of 2001. Whether or not Kubrick had it in mind, another trick of this movie is the way the simulated boy in the plot plays on the simulation that is character and plot, the representation itself. The robot boy, the scheme of artifice as manipulation for love, and the ambiguity (not made explicit by Spielberg) of whether love itself is not some artifice of reflexes, are a figure for art itself, and an amazing one for Spielberg and all his puppets of sentimentality, human or mechanical, the special affects of his movies. When representation makes real/simulated a theme, the mirror it holds up is also an abyss. What's there in the story but somehow strangely missed as emphasis by Spielberg, in all the weird hullabaloo about being "unique" and individual and real, is that the peculiar anguish of this being is in not being mortal. It's an inversion of the situation of the replicants in Philip K. Dick's story that was the basis for Blade Runner. There the androids were too much more ephemeral, and their anguish at not having "genuine" memory, combined with this resentment, made them curiously all too human. This story offers a ghastly implication of living too long, like the immortals in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Being a "real" human would mean being as phantom as memory, and death as an end to the mourning of others. It would also mean growing up. [1/02]
Chunhyang (2000). Credits. The film begins with a singer (Sang-hyun Cho) and drummer (Myung-hwan Kim) on a stage. The throaty, florid, narrative song, punctuated by the poom-tock sounds of the drum, is the Korean pansori. Kwon-taek Im's film dramatizes the story told in the pansori, with the pansori performance over the action, but with cuts back to the singer and drummer on the stage. This presentation is without further comment, and the film has a poetic grace because of it, especially at the beginning. The action glides, often with the reveries of the song, and the words of the song often add description to the action. Pansori, somewhat like the Japanese No, is a declamatory style of presenation, but at the same time remote and concise, having an economy of evocation like much Asian poetry and painting. Im has transferred this remarkably to a movie. The story of Chunhyang is also an old favorite folktale, dating back centuries. It's Romeo and Juliet and The Odyssey and it's also an ancient form of a potboiler. Im transfers that, too. When the story really becomes a plot, about halfway through with the introduction of the bad governor, it loses much of the poetic grace it had even as a narrative. There are contrivances for suspense, to provoke and hold the audience, but if they seem like a sudden gust of movie banality, Im also has the excuse of dramatizing what has been cliche for thousands of years (The Odyssey, for example, had the whole bit about the disguised hero holding off as he watched his own ruin). In later shots of the singer and drummer, Im shoots from behind them on the stage to show the audience watching them. The audience has already been heard responding out loud, chanting back parts of the song, and then we see them, clapping or slapping their legs, crying, and one person even standing and moving in reponse. In this way, as Truffaut did with the children watching the puppet show, Im documents or at least cites the popular aspect of the tale. The theme or moral of this tale is fidelity, particularly as a development against custom and class division. But it's posed as the woman's fidelity to the man. When Chunhyang defies the governor's claim to her, as the daughter of a courtesan, it's by virtue of her belonging to the man she married, if illicitly, and that she loves. She uses the analogy of the governor's service to his king, that he does not serve two. This may strike modern ears as a progression from barbarous to civilized ownership of women. On the other hand, what is more civilized than modern fare is the comeuppance. Intelligence and civility are the heroic values: the hero's poem to trump the bad guys tells of their exploitation of the people, and the bad governor is dealt with in a dialogue when he is in custody. Good or bad, all of it is rendered wonderfully by Im. [1/02]
The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1998). Credits. Here's a documentary not nearly so grandiose or at least self-important as Ken Burns's TV epic on baseball, and so much better, also because of that. It's deft and witty, and its fleet pace and light touch with its material echo the lightness of the participants and the spirit of Greenberg himself. And this is something else: The way this movie is done as much as what it's about is a tribute to "Jewishness," as is said of Greenberg in the movie. How much better a coverage, a celebration, and even a triumph, when even prejudice and setbacks are caught up in this quick spirit, rather than in gravity or solemnity, ingenuous or not. There's nothing particularly profound about this work, or novel in the material, but Aviva Kempner has the art of assemblage. Along with topical footage and photos, other footage is used in a cheeky demonstrative way, not only giving a broader sense of the times, but making a syntax with the rest, often a twist in sense or a punchline. It's not just moving picture book illustration (allow me to pick on Burns). Bad puns or not, as with the example of a photo of Greenberg holding a great push broom like a bat right as they mention him moving to the clean-up position in the batting order, it's great composition, as the film rolls along in relay of words and images. The interviews are similarly edited for the flow of the comments, and as one great stroke for the whole, the story is told like this without a narrator. There's no pandering, nothing has to be explained, what representation is socially or culturally -- Greenberg, baseball, being Jewish, American -- is taken right in stride by this representation. Everything that is touching and terrible is there, and perhaps more affecting as counterpoint. Greenberg's encounter with Jackie Robinson is an amazing intersection, the end of one story and beginning of another, but significant also as momentary. Aptly, the film doesn't beat the drums about this, the implications just have to be let in, an ominous note after Greenberg's success, and the deftness here is in allowing emotion, not wringing it. Greenberg is seen mostly in clips from an interview he did with Dick Schapp (who's also interviewed in the film) back in the 70s or 80s. Maybe it's just his old-fashioned politesse, but he seems as joyful and gracious of his baseball past as he ever may have been when he was playing, as, for example, when he says it was a thrill just to get to chase Babe Ruth's home run record even though he didn't break it. [1/02]
Sisters of the Gion (1936). Credits. Appearing the same year, Sisters of the Gion is much like Osaka Elegy in the 30s quality, the plight of women and as far as Mizoguchi's work. I like Osaka Elegy more, but Sisters is great, and definitely with Osaka shows how Mizoguchi's earlier stuff is better than his later, for example, Ugetsu Monogatari, which I think is disproportionately famous. Sisters is also reminiscent of Ohayo, one of the best Ozu and Japanese movies. Sisters is about something more grave, but the way in which it is banal and light, while all the conniving is going on, is similar to Ohayo. Cleverly done is the way the two sisters, who are geishas, are opposite reactions, two sides of the coin of the problem: selflessness and selfishness towards men. It could be too schematic, but here it's brought off well, naturalistically, as the manner of the girls, which is not implausible at all, since people tend to be a particular tack or even the repetition of one reaction, and then between two people, a vicious circle of reactions to each other. Also clever is the way this keeps either from being the center or the protagonist in the sympathetic sense. And it allows for the ending with the demonstration of how both women are screwed (if that pun doesn't detract from the tragedy too much). Nice girls and naughty girls get dumped. The moralizing is also shrewdly located, as each woman chides the other from her own perspective. The outburst at the end, when the shrewd sister in bed says she wishes geishas didn't exist, is harrowing and effective for the way it comes about, as a burst of reaction rather than just theatrical declamation, and the movie ends abruptly after. [1/02]
Amores Peros (2000). Credits. Love is a dogfight.
The Endurance (2000). Credits. Ironically named ship provides the title, what became an expedition in endurance after the ship itself was stranded in ice. As with the Apollo 13 mission, this is a story of failure as a greater test than the planned achievement. There's something pat and juvenile in the notion of accomplishment and acclaim, no matter how grand, something of the Guiness World Records speciousness even in putting your body on the top of Everest or at one of the poles. (Werner Herzog makes this exact comment, explicitly, in Encounters at the End of the World.) This doesn't mean it's less of an accomplishment for being mystified or pompous or egotistical, or just one's lot in life. Even the will or longsuffering or endurance or whatever it is of Shackleton is a trait, almost freakish, and as he is quoted on the matter, makes him ill-suited to do anything except wander in the wild. At one point in this film, the navigator is quoted in a way that counters the awe of his dead reckoning, "merry luck." Something amazing in this story -- barely exploited by the movie -- is a broader retort to this: society at large involved in its own absurd adventure when these men returned: World War I. There are ripples of implication for the gratuitousness of any serious endeavor. The history of error: it's in an ordeal like this, Apollo 13 or the Shackleton expedition, that we actually see just what the successful missions accomplish, all the dimensions or conditions, the risks, what is taken for granted. The fortune of Shackleton, like the Apollo 13 crew, was this ridge between success and failure, a precipice of misfortune, in which being turned aside produced a more amazing route of survival and feat of endurance. The astounding luck was the failure, but survival, at every turn. Tragedy has been the cost of exploration, too, men who died in polar exploration or burned up on the launching pad in the space mission, and this is the cost, the foolhardiness, the conditions of these endeavors. In this story of Shackleton, trekking across the ice continent would not have presented half the hardships they instead faced. The documentary is a bit quaint and cosmetic, in the PBS fashion, with its soundtrack and actors reading the various participants' journals like parts. [12/01]
Joy Ride (2000). Credits. Like one of those scary stories of campfire or sleepover fare, with a moral for smart-asses. Director John Dahl gives us movies that are a bit more old-fashioned and subversive at the same time. In the middle of a fad of indie noir glamorizing, gun thrillers and fugitive couple movies, his Red Rock West was more like old film noir, for its intrigue and for the point about self-defeating self-interest, the stuff of The Maltese Falcon or, even further back, Greed. The Last Seduction offered a modern trope of the femme fatale, but as much as saying that the man wise to her, the gumshoe or man outside the law, has almost become extinct. More than even those, Joy Ride is a pop thriller, but it's more thrilling than contemporary thrillers for being less hyperbolic, at least with special effects. It's a tall tale, with plenty of exaggeration. Just remember: Don't fuck with truckers. [10/01]
101 Reykjavik (2000). Credits. Iceland's bleakness is rather decorous, and malaise sounds like life's rich pageant, MTV or commercial style. It's not that sweeping aerial shots of snowy ridges aren't great or exhilirating in their own right, remarkable views, it's just that they're part of a tone of breezy infatuation that never lets you mistake the wonderment for actual drama. [10/01]
Best in Show (2000). Credits. In a world with Gates of Heaven, Best in Show would be a runner-up only if it were as good as it is popular. It's derivative of the documentary, and even if that is inadvertent, the comparison bears heavily because Best in Show misses so badly on every thing Gates of Heaven brought us. Why try to re-invent this commentary on people through their pets, why mock them up with improv comedy, when Gates of Heaven so shrewdly presented those subjects themselves? And even just for fun, Best in Show is limp and easy and sometimes insultingly cheap, as with the Flecks. What is it telling us when the hotel manager offers them a cleaning closet? The dogs are the premise but have nothing to do with what's portrayed of the people, then comes the default drama of the dog show, with no insight or connection about these characters and the competition. The one attempt is a shrill caricature of two preppies, who are the exceptions to our characters winning their groups. The only decent parodic portrait is, curiously, during the dog show, but also not related to the characters: Fred Willard's idiot masher commentator. [9/01]
Nurse Betty (2000). Credits. Another quirky fishbowl movie, this one with more a problem of too many threads than too many characters. The quiltwork of subplots makes characters change in capricious ways, and ultimately they're all adrift, awash in some funny business. With guns, of course. There are great lines in this movie, and some great dramatic situations, but neither the script nor the direction have built a whole situation for them. The Tarantino pretense here makes for some awkward swings in tone. [7/01]
Insomnia (1997). Credits. Deft, engrossing. A little too haphazard with its calculations, too calculating with its haphazardness, but it's compelling as a crime drama and more. It's a Nordic version of The Killer Inside Me and benefits from a quieter, more subtle subject and exposé, a kind of patient unsettling like that of The Vanishing. Culpability is introduced with suspicion almost at the start and sympathy for the cop is soon trumped by a worse predicament. Stellan Skarsgård is beleaguered and peevish even before his run-in with the midnight sun. The medias res makes his past as dramatic as his future: it's an echo from the empty dark of a cop's wasteland. The nobility of his profession becomes little more than a righteous devotion to hide behind, to throw at others as a decoy, and when he (literally, too) gropes in blind desire, apparently as deprived or depraved as the suspect he stalks with habitual bitterness, his shrewdness is only in working it as leverage. The good cop's ability is conniving reflexes. His sleeplessness is an obvious metaphor for the guilt, but the particular guilt is only the obvious part of the identification with the killer that the cop is suppressing. The killer even taunts him with it, and the film in the same way performs the crime fiction rendition of catharsis, hiding in plain sight. And the other obvious thing about the metaphor, the allegory of the milieu, manages to sneak up by lumbering there all along: What was this cop thinking? In the land of the midnight sun, everything happens in broad daylight. [7/01]
One, Two, Three (1961). Credits. Manic stage dialogue with Jimmy Cagny out front, yelling and snapping his fingers so much he seems on the verge of heart attack. The script of I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder (from a play by Ferenc Molnár) is supposed to be their Cold War comedy. It's a bulletin board for (probably mostly Diamond's) taglines, a stream of referential bon witz delivered like a great honking machine at Wilder's direction. It's supposed to be good-natured scandal, disarming camp, but the comedy is as shrill as any of the ideology it's trying to burlesque. Explanations, plot twists, character conversions all out of a hat, it scarcely matters how or why, just to get out the witticisms, and all too wink-wink. [7/01]
The Devil, Probably (1977). Credits. Robert Bresson is the apotheosis of French walk-through style, the dry, blasée, nonchalant. (He stopped working with professional actors after 1945, prefering to use what he called "models.") But if he draws on common stock, he's not returning it in the same way, for the same reasons. He's controlled, not slack the way much of Rohmer is. The indictment of society itself, for example in this movie with the footage of pollution, is like another example, the meeting with the psychoanalyst which allows the expression of circumstances against a psychological explanation. Bresson doesn't offer the passion of one of the points of view. By working decidedly against dramatic hyperbole, Bresson is articulating so much more about the situation, or at least creating a passivity (the kind Maurice Blanchot argues is more active) that is an opening to see more. The drug addict, for example, everything that explains why he would do it, is given to us with this drab action, not in any speech. Because he's an addict, will do anything for money, because this drive makes him unconscionable towards others and he demonstrates this with Charles in the church, but even beyond those simple explanations, the movie shows us the way Charles does exactly what this addict friend wants. He goes to help him indulge his pleasure to avoid other trouble. And elsewhere Charles says he is all for pleasure -- there is no pyschosymptomatics, here. He has an appetite, for food, for sex. He has a reflex against death, is aware of it, even has a problem with it. He understands his reflex to be alive and have pleasure. Bresson wants us to see and listen to the plea, the question, not quash it with an answer. This is not faddish 60s or 70s student movement bluster, but the 76-year-old Bresson's gesture of yielding. How can we presume to know, correct or even oppose, if we don't hear the complaint, let alone see everything it refers to that we have in place? There's something of Ozu in Bresson, which creates a funny analogy, since in being such peculiarly French film-making, he would seem like someone so peculiarly Japanese. But the similarities are curious for the path each arrived at them: the composure, the flat, direct almost pedagogical acting style, the treatment of dialogue in this way, and the way dialogue is emphasized over the more sensational reaction of conventional drama. [7/01]
Traffic (2000). Credits. Decodrama. What serious, message movies must be, now. Soderberg is less annoying than elsewhere, but still uselessly artsy. Decent stuff in the script is wasted in so much ridiculous stuff in the end, especially at the end. Such as Michael Douglas going off to look for his daughter by himself. Such as Zeta-Jones going to meet the drug lords by herself. Must have been a couple thing with those two. It's hard to accept that sort of thing as a hard-hitting look at the real problem of drugs. Plus, the movie skirts the issue of the U.S. involvement in the drug trade. It does not implicate the U.S. the way it does Mexican authorities. Convenient, especially as it had real congress people in it, like despotic twerp Nickles of Oklahoma. Even justifies DEA action (forfeiture and seizure) in the view of Douglas's character. [7/01]
The Road Home (1999). Credits. This is the most conventionally sentimental of all Zhang Yimou's movies, and the music is just too much, that typical wonderment music, especially the crescendos. (I don't understand why people think that sort of music is beautiful and poignant when it's screaming like banshees). Zhang Ziyi is in it, the darling of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and she's being the darling, here, too, with too many shots of her adorable face with adorable wide-eyed gazes (she's gaga for the village's new teacher). There are nice touches from Zhang of his more usual style, which is counter to maudlin, and the general plan is to show us the mundane business of a romance and respect for the personal past of people who are now old, but it's just so much more lush in that way most people think his other movies are, like other Chinese films of a certain grandeur that aren't anywhere nearly as good as Zhang's. It was as if someone -- the Chinese authorities? -- told him to make a nice movie without all that other stuff that seems so mean and, you know, hard to take. Not One Less, which came out in the U.S. before this one, is also about a girl and a school, but it's a whole different exercise, touching in a much more subtle and encompassing way, and many times better. Zhang Ziyi and her character seem like a fairytale compared to the teen-age stubbornness of the girl in Not One Less. The Road Home is about obsequy, it is an obsequy, but it's obsequious in other ways, and that have implications beyond the fawning of and over one woman's love. It's situated as an appeal to the significance of customs beyond superstition, and this in relation, allusively, to the Cultural Revolution. But even if dogmatic zeal is indiscriminately destructive, is anything else ultimately justified? There is mention of how the love for the teacher goes against the tradition of arranged marriage, a progression against that for personal freedom. But this personal freedom can be self-destructive (the woman risks winter cold, even after she falls ill) and self-centered. The mother's wish to memorialize the road where she waited for her love requires money and labor and many people. The village mayor reports that the beloved was trying to raise money for a new school, and when the matter of paying pallbearers is brought up, there is no mention that this is money which could go to the school, and thus honor the dead man's desire and aim in life. Beyond that sticky particular, the romantic and funerary slant give an abstract homage to the work of education, like the kind of public service cant that says reading is important without saying anything about what is read, the kind of dramatic convenience if not willful peachy abstraction that Not One Less avoided with its crafty demonstration of the practical use of education and the broader problems that affect it. Obsequiousness, then, or reclamation of the past, can be just as indiscriminate as the fervor to topple it. [6/01]
Requiem for a Dream (2000). Credits. Victorian melodrama with a dildo. Hocks a dramatic loogie. Shoves our noses into a split-screen juvenile scare-bait fantasy and forces us to watch its addiction to a few montage tricks. I don't know if gullible or credulous is the way to describe the extent of this earnestness in movies and music for about a decade now. There's something too passive in those terms. This is willful pursuit of the drippiest naivete. Here, you get a bizarre appropriation of those cautionary exaggerations of moms and authorities in the 60s and 70s, syllogisms like if you smoke pot it will lead to heroin and you'll walk out a 16th-story window. Maybe this film is picking that up as part of 70s redo and I'm just not getting the camp. Its grandiose intercutting climax is certainly like a big joke -- drugs cause women to do sex parties for evil yuppies (the climax of the junkie girl's downfall, the big black two-headed dildo ass to ass with another girl routine) and put blacks in Florida prisons (one at a time with all the Dixie crackers, of course) -- but it's too sappy to be funny. "Drugs are bad, m'kay?"[6/01]
The Sorrow and the Pity (1971). Credits. Roger Tounze, journalist for La Montagne remembers the news that Marshal Petain had signed an armistice with the Germans. Tounze says he understood the armistice part, but not the "Marshal" part. Even before the official capitulation to the Germans there was a collapse of the military and the government of France that was as astonishing a turn as what followed. This film shows not only what a bizarre situation it was, to put it mildly, but the remarkable off-handed way it is expressed. It's the documentary exercise in what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Marcel Ophuls, Claude Vajda and company, shot interviews and assembled a movie about France's cooperation with the Nazis, the shame of a nation (for any side in the affair), with a disarming nonchalance. For a former French prime minister (after the war), also Jewish, who was given a show trial and imprisoned and then escaped, the chatty demeanor shows a certain grace. With a former German officer, whose interview shows him still living high, surrounded by family gathered for his daughter's wedding, smoking a big cigar and proudly wearing his medals, grace is not the connotation. Thus the fold of demonstration, all these interviewees, these witnesses, participants, actors in the events, tell and show themselves at once. Ophuls and company had to do little in the way of betraying them, as all were still ready with their parti pris. But the panache, the insouciance, of the project and the execution is exceptional, and courageous not so much for the confrontation, for the effort of asking the questions, as simply being done for the sake of addressing the subject. Ophuls is there in the interviews, mostly off camera, little questions and redirections coming from the side. He doesn't conduct the interviews as the high drama of investigation, doesn't grill the subjects, but with conversational ease and his own unflappable manner, puts things to them frankly. The dialogues thus have an unspectacular air but are engrossing and more than four hours just rolls by. Towards the end, there's another turn of the screw in this casual expose manner, the no less shameful retaliation. The lesson, if we wouldn't quite shudder to use such a word after this, the worth or pertinence of this is in seeing how peccadillos, gossip, differences, resentment, calculation, can become the proportions of world war, conversely the pettiness of supremacists. As Walter Benjamin put it, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." [6/01]
It Happened One Night (1934). Credits. Its ingenuity or charm, if not merely popularity, is a just so story. Pandering just so: the extent to which Clark Gable wearing no undershirt and Claudette Colbert growing fond of showers in autoparks would appeal to a broad movie-going public. The devious but scrupulous regular Joe (who happens to be a newspaper man) v. rich folk may seem an old-fashioned schematic, until you see the same kind of thing in today's fare. What's most amazing about this film is how Capra got the modern formula -- or just how it is this formula has stuck around so long. It's doffing as populism, and Madonna is rank even in this line. The star system was already in place, and there were plenty of road movies and slumming movies and tough broads and wisecracking pomp-busting newspaper men (and women) before this one -- more clever, too -- but somehow this one evened out the romance, the moxie and the glamor into one fluffy soup. The chintzy contradictions of Capra poke through when Gable gabs his dream romance, a tropical island under the moonlight, and Colbert, listening from the other side of the "walls of Jericho," gets all teary-eyed and realizes that's the talk for her. Why, she's just like any girl watching a movie. Waddaya know? This is a movie! Does it occur to anyone in this character/audience merry-go-round that even if tropical islands could be somehow less stuck-up than rich folk lore, the desire for rapturous flight -- from this life to some other -- is as impetuous as anything, and momentary in any life? [5/01]
The Day I Became a Woman (2000). Credits. Three segments apparently unrelated come to have a physical relationship as well an allegorical one. Works as a parable while it still has realistic content. It opens with a mother waking her daughter on the day she has become a woman, and there immediately is the drama, and the pathos right after as the 9-year old's friend, a boy, comes to see if she can go get ice cream with him. The mother and the grandmother tell the girl and her friend that they can no longer play together, as the girl is now a woman. The girl resists this, as a kid would resist anything else, a nap or homework. Eventually her charm with her mother and grandmother is enough to win her one more hour of childhood, a technicality the mother helps with by remembering the time of day she was born. This first segment is much like the children's films we've seen from Iran, such as Kiarostami's Where Is My Friend's House? and Panahi's The White Balloon, patient, matter-of-fact, a naturalism that achieves an empathy with the children without a maudlin justification of them. There's an amazing sequence of unforced mundane revelry when the girl feeds the boy candy through a barred window (he's captive by a homework order). As they grow a little giddy from the joy of it (and perhaps the sugar), the girl's play with a sucker becomes suggestive, but whether in the minds of the children is completely ambiguous, and this only serves more the contrast with the imposition looming over the girl -- of "knowledge," "culture," laws, like the harsh light of the sun causing the shadow to disappear on the stick the girl has learned to use as a sundial. The opening shot of the film, a teetering horizon of water with a makeshift sail in front of it, is echoed rather quickly, when two boys use the girl's chador for their raft. The formal circle has already closed, and we leave the story of the girl. Her name had been announced to us, and now another one is. Now there is a man on a horse, and after we watch him ride for some time, he brings us to something even more mysterious: a thin winding rode along a coast with a long line of women on bicycles. The women are covered, but have pants beneath their robes, and a modest form of sneakers. They have shiny new sport bikes. We hear the whir and hum of the bikes, no words from the women. The man on horseback is a husband chasing down his wife. This segment gives more the sense of parable or allegory, but by the simple operation of contrast, the material given against what is not (no exposition), and against the previous segment. Without being broadly allegorical, this middle segment is the most heavy-handed of the three. The third segment seems to be the most absurd, though it, too, is never without some practical explanation. But when "dowry" is mentioned as links are made to the other segments, the three segments come together like the verses of a poem, about the desires made errant by enforced womanhood. [5/01]
Wonder Boys (2000). Credits. Affable but ultimately pointless conceit, the quirky slice of life variety. In its meandering, it tries to fall to some sort of point, and that's precisely what makes it less sharp, more sing-songy, and in its ending, pure fluff. There's a peak in this drama, which is half the film's running time if no particular instant. Prior to this, the movie is intriguing because the characters and the plot are in a kind of unwinding, careening off in little sleeper jags. You don't know what to expect, there's enough business going on, it's still hanging on an edge of farce or social comedy over you don't know what. But then it crests. Perhaps it's my imagination or my predilection, but this seems to coincide with incidents of "truth" or phrases to that effect in the dialogue. I don't know whether a portrait like this is more apt for movie people or book people -- or, is there any difference anymore? -- with this breast-pocket version of "truth." When the characters here are supposed to be reading lines from the books, you cringe, but you're not so sure it's because of the object of the portrayal. Like comics and other popular forms, and no less so now than when they were an arcade attraction trying to be prestige theater, movies are only low in proportion to their fawning for grandeur. This is of course true of any art -- anything -- but, in general, the professional publishing world has become an arcade of grandeur. Hollywood is the model. It's harder to write this story off to the same notions, the script itself, for example, rather than what it portrays, because there's so much going on that's trying to debunk that pretense. What this movie may be posing, however, is a "truth" beneath the lofty pretense, which produces another kind of ambivalence. It could be a self-toppling modesty, monster coddled manuscripts blown away in the wind, but when there's a shot of Toby Maguire basking in applause, there's a chilly cross-current of cynicism, of which the cozy ending is a refrain: don't be pretentious, embrace opportunism. That might be a step up for pretentious opportunists, but not as a universal moral. [4/01]
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Credits. High and low, or crouching to conquer. What is special about this film compared to countless martial arts movies of now several generations? Perhaps Ang Lee & Co. had no difference in mind, but wanted to make a "straight" martial arts movie, for fun, enjoyment, affection or nostalgia. Here in the U.S., as most recently indicated by the Academy Awards, it seems either this film is taken for something greater than all those movies, or martial arts are finally widely enough accepted to be bronzed. It certainly follows the American formula of movies and movie stars: late in the game you apply cosmetic surgery to your tired old act, with a puffed up production you aspire to glossy seriousness, and the whole thing becomes a pathetic play, neither high nor low. Maybe it's only my good will that makes Ang Lee's movie seem much more innocent than, say, one by Kevin Costner or Mel Gibson, or even last year's Ridley Scott. What's different practically from the martial arts genre: prestige = music score, fancier sets and costumes (rooms that look like antique shows or museums, for example), not so much fancy cinematography as film stock (not even middle-brow good, however, is the lighting in this film, just bad theatrical lighting that cuts out depth and color in night or dark scenes, makes them look like they're in a gym -- probably not far from the truth -- I thought they were trying to hide wires with all the night-time scenes, until they had a daylight one), and that high-toned directorial lushness that everywhere in the world, now, passes for art. Soap opera and fighting are compound tedium, here. Fighting is not drama, in this case it's not good choreography and it's bad editing. There's a little fun in the leap-flying up walls and over rooftops (the audience cheered this as if they had been deprived of it), but there's no explanation for it in cheapest pulp tradition (just as there is none for the film's title). Martial arts is perhaps supposed to be a pure kinetic thrill. But that doesn't explain the need for plot, or the specific content of fighting -- why fighting, for example, rather than dancing -- and then why the plot once necessary is so throwaway. What, is there a need for the semblance of a plot? By contrast to violence in Western, especially American, movies, there is still greater formality in generic martial arts spectacle, and it's even notable how the process is not as subordinate to the end, especially to the vengeful death climax (perhaps a case where, as opposed to e.g. Hegel on the alphabet, the West has regressed from the East). But that doesn't avoid the brinksmanship common to both, and the particular pandering sham of the sage who preaches restraint but kicks everyone's ass. Martial arts, even the professed defensive ones, has the curious tendency in and out of the movies to become brag. There's the even broader appeal in these dreams of flying and striking to the desire to break limitations, to be able to strike someone down with sheer will, what accounts for the abandonment of plausibility. There's something liberating in this, the pure thrill of invention, but as with Superman stories, the lack of even clever obstacles makes it sheer repetition of this impulse, a sort of infantile pleasure, and thus monotonous to lots of us. Even with all that from the genre, this movie is actually a regression, because the prestige aspect, the seriouness, the high tone to the melodrama, subtract the camp value of cheap martial arts movies, the goofy inventive kinetics of Jackie Chan, the tongue-in-cheek development of Chinese Ghost Story, the hard-boiled turns of John Woo's gun ballets. [3/01]
Erin Brokovich (2000). Credits. Maybe it's admirable that this movie is based on the actual single mother of three who, by lack of patience or restraint or tact, went to work for attorney Ed Masry and then stirred up a case against PG&E that became one of the biggest settlements in U.S. history. Maybe it's admirable that, along with telling us that PG&E poisoned water, the movie gives a bit or two of basic information such as how water records are supposed to be available to the public. Maybe it's not only admirable that the real Erin Brockovich did this, but that it be expressed in terms of heroism and character, self-reliance, esteem, etc. Or that the film also tells of her situation as a woman. Maybe it's an admirable role for Julia Roberts, if somehow you could get around the currency value of that, or the fact that she's not the best thing for the role. But director Steven Soderbergh, in his milder, more sophisticated way, has given us another melodrama with furrowed brow, one of those American movies where seriousness, importance is a vehicle. It's a kinder, gentler sensationalism. All that might be aggrandizing or displacing the fact that Soderbergh's direction is just bad. There are some good plotting touches, such as the glimpses of resentment in the office, Albert Finney's pushover lawyer, and an attempt at a low-key happy ending, due as much to the script as the direction. But Soderbergh, if less spectacularly, still gives us the leering, fawning empathy and photogenic realism of commercials. [3/01]
You Can Count on Me (2000). Credits. A sophisticated kind of tearjerker, and that's not to be disdainful. More patient than the bulk of movies, even supposedly serious ones. Development is dramatized, rather than just told. Although some things seem too convenient, if not entirely implausible, in that pre-fab plot way, like the brother's construction job and his control over a game of pool, they serve another purpose in characterization, and the drama played out in such scenes, his relationship with the boy in both those cases, is compelling enough that the other doesn't matter, or at least bother you so much. The ending is affecting, at the very least because of the premise, the way the story is about the siblings, but also because of it's scheme. The scene at the bus stop is stretched out and is manipulative in its way. The inescapable artifice is that it's being shown to us and we aren't the participants. Here, it's not the maudlin ploy of, say (among thousands of melo-tragedies) Dr. Zhivago, it's not a crude calculation or just sensationalism. There's another reason for it, the snowball effect of the brother's white-lie assurances and the sister's disconsolation. Similarly, the early scene with the brother and sister in the restaurant, has a strange pitch. There's crafty editing and camerawork in this scene, a subtle bit of action or suspense style for the tension, but this is the least subtle part of the script. It evens out, through the revelatory process, when the character of the brother proves less wild, but the scene strains a bit for the drama. The most unfortunate part of the movie is a pre-credit sequence. It's well conceived and executed, but the inclusion of the material provides an easy causal relegation of the characters. The rest of the film doesn't treat the characters this way, and suggests that scene is a part of the picture, not the explanation. But just as The Ice Storm allowed for a terrible interpretation of retribution in spite of itself, this film's material about the parents allows the characters to be reduced, to be seen as more particular effects and thus less broadly pertinent. What the film does best is implicate one character's behavior with judgment of another's, religion, business conduct, parental guidance all given sly qualification. [2/01]
Gladiator (2000). Credits. The U.S. has its version of an artistic dogma, a theme and a manner of conveying it that is as repetitive and didactic as anything devised by totalitarian regimes, as despotic as any socialist realism doctrine, as imperious as the myth of any conquering power. It's this family crap. Everything, certainly every "big" market American movie, must have a prejudicial reverence -- an idiot joy -- for "the family." And the state of this now, in the 21st century, is far worse than in the supposedly naive 1940s and 1950s, first of all because we are supposed to have learned from then, but most of all in the way our movies are slapping this sticky ideology all over the past. There is a difficult enough problem of portraying the past. It's the difficulty of evoking something different that no one really knows (the problem, perhaps more simply or at least schematically, of the old Star Trek series, sci-fi in general, and aliens). There is a certain amount of contrivance that we accept because of this unavoidable problem, an artifice without the guardian of plausibility: Shakespeare, for example. But then there are artistic endeavors which don't care about this problem at all, and that's a whole swath of predominate movies, now, Oscar winners, the darlings of the state. Mel Gibson's anachronistic jingoism, Shakespeare in Love, and now, Gladiator. This film is Ridley Scott's rehabilitation to the state doctrine. The cinematography, art direction, production design have the Scott attention and tone, but they tip over into Star Wars exaggeration, such as a scene on a balcony overlooking digital Rome in a sunset sky the effusive golden color of fingernail polish. A couple of times, the blur of of the tigers in an arena scene is so obvious it seems intended, a sort of brandishing of the technology, as if to assure people they are getting computer graphics. Costumes, as in most period movies, now, have a grandeur not seen in any era of history. The grand white climactic outfit of Commodus, for example, has the lushness of latex: this is Rome of the Batman movies. I don't know the history of gruel, so I can't speak as to the authenticity of the gruel they serve in the slave camp. The temptation to redo things with modern technology comes at the same time as, if not because, no one knows how to to do anything else -- write a script, for example -- except ring the moronic bell of the family. So you get a constant supply of absurdly profuse images and puerile dialogue. This film, while still managing to be better than Gibson's Beefheart or other grand goo, approaches something far worse, however, in making the gladiator games reflexive, a figure for movies as spectacle, too. Here, this movie begins to preach to us the wisdom of its own pandering. It's not just the way Oliver Reed's speech becomes high-handed -- let's not forget the rankness of all this, that usually the pretense to high drama, now, is just drippy diction -- when he starts in with "win the crowd," but that this is casuistry, a justification, of the film's own vengeance formula. In making a sort of moral of the usual bloodthirsty melodrama, you get this absurd circularity. The vengeance of this movie, Gladiator, playing us as its crowd, is in the plot of the movie what pandering is the means to achieve. The perversion of the family principle is presented here, too, but the opposition between Commodus and Maximus is so clear, and Maximus so saccharine-sanct, that the ideal family can't produce a holy monster, only the negation of it can. Richard Harris's acting seems politely useful, as if he can't take any of this seriously. Russell Crowe, in the lead, is betraying his range. His routine of speaking softly, tilting head, looking sideways to telegraph holding back great emotion, was apt for Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider, but for the duration of this glorified Death Wish, it becomes a sulky gimmick. Curiously, the best stuff in this film comes from the role of Commodus and the acting in it of Joaquin Phoenix. Despite the melodramatic leaps, such as the mano ā mano, the villain presented here is not the cartoonish diabolical genius of most films nowadays. Commodus is shown to be a terror because of his faults, his failings, his desperation and desire. The hero we're given, this general with flashback views of peasant Earth mother and child from an HMO commercial, is wooden, whereas the envious emperor as played by Phoenix is the most human thing in the film. [2/01]
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Credits. The Odyssey is a shaggy dog pretext for a ramble through the zeitgeist of America in the 30s, while the film's title tries to stitch the whole thing to Sullivan's Travels -- it was the name of the movie Joel McCrea's character wanted to make. Three fugitives from a chain gang get a screwball deliverance through a stream of references including Robert Johnson, Baby Face Nelson, Huey Long, pomade and the Ku Klux Klan, in no apparent order of importance. The best evocation is from the film's nice assemblage of music (e.g., "Indian War Whoop," "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues," "I Am Weary (Let Me Rest)"), left to make the fabric the rest of the movie is too jocular to bother with. The Coen brothers' bellowing humor and comic book conception creates a different effect with this target, in contrast to The Big Lebowski, where a modern L.A. was apt for toppling to arch pop. Here, goopy allegory becomes goofing run-on, neither the surrealist joke unity of Barton Fink, nor the sharp thread of Fargo. There are details that give the sense of that raspier, quirky invention of the era: the suit worn by Chris Thomas King, the look and sound of Tim Blake Nelson, even the wacked-out caricature of Stephen Root. But for all their facetiousness, the Coen brothers are too tempted by big movie tones, so their siren sequence is a kind of swank lush that's incongruous. These sirens don't drop in from Homer, but from some cable soft porn. The KKK sequence is also strangely swank and lush. It's meant as a burlesque, and the choreography and chanting suggest The Wizard of Oz -- a funny idea, but it doesn't come off funny, just as a kind of sensationalism. And the climactic sequence, of the Soggy Bottom Boys and the political candidate, is just bad melodrama, not even the value of a good turn, let alone allegory or humor. [1/01]
Am I Beautiful? (1998). Credits. German entry in the intersecting lives festival. Juvenile, even contemptible, when, for example, an indulgent suicide is smeared all over us as one other capricious sensation. Movies as protracted adolescence, the dramatic equivalent of playing with Barbie dolls. The one great turn, which comments on this very narcissism, is converted right back into life's rich fabric. A young woman's deceit about an illness is what this whole movie is, and just as the deceived character says, it's disgusting. This might be intended as reflexive, knowing, testimonial, as the title might suggest, but it's in a litany of fawning cliches, contrived encounters of meaningfulness and discovery and renewal and poignance. [1/01]
Non-Stop (1996). Credits. Unfortunately not non-stop, in terms of the main figure. Perhaps to have kept up the running would have seemed to stretch a gag, but the impulse to bake things into a plot weakens it in another way. There are good ideas, the premise, but it doesn't take the figure and run with it. The running figure begins to sag, as is perhaps appropriate, but the pace is droopy all along. The climax with the gangs and cop stand-off, really brings it down. Plus it's been done so many times, Red Harvest long before John Woo, and thus Kurosawa. [1/01]
The Matrix (1999). Credits. Do you swallow the mirror or does it swallow you? How about when it's force-fed? This shlocky movie is supposedly a sci-fi thriller. But sci-fi equals computer effects and these folks haven't got past the thrill of sunglasses and leather jackets. The script is supposed to be a heavy trip about our world as the facade of something ghastly, an Alice trip into a horific mirror, but all this movie reflects is lots of other pop. It's another quiltwork of calculated derivation, especially dependent upon John Woo movies and Alien. It has the stud-quaint, my crew conceit that has become a cliche from the latter, and then serves up a heavy dose of the former in commercial photography. The freeze-and-rotate 3D effect is such a goofy set piece, especially when its object is two men diving towards each other in mid air with guns. Remember how it became hackneyed to throw the empy pistol? Now there's some strange compulsion to have the shooter follow the bullet, gun and all, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a gun. This secret inner world of teenage boys, holding up cool props and imagining explosions, has a line through kung fu movies into Woo and other latter day action films, where it's been somewhat comically troped, though it retains its syrup. The kung fu training sequence, here, in this movie's version of the holodeck, has the mechanics of recent commercial spoofs of kung fu, but without the camp and with mawkish gravity, the metaphysical purple prose of comic books. And please, how many times do we have to go over this messiah bit? What is revolutionary about "the one" who is born to save us all? The messianic, in general, is an abyss movie plots are not willing to swallow, but when played in this tame and ultimately reassuring way (there's a whole other realm beyond this one's nightmare), it only leaves us at very naive and anti-social presumptions, not far from, for example, The Lion King -- supposedly innocent pop makes all the more regressive politics. Perhaps, by some suspension of disparagement, the corn in this movie prevents the high-minded seriousness of 2001 or Dune. But when the weasel of the plot justifies his treachery by saying he prefers the illusion of this world to the dismal truth of the other, it's hard not to agree with him, and not to feel like outside the frame of some heavy-handed fluff like this, the premise would be the pitch of a cult. This is supposed to be part of the fun, like vampire movies where superstition subtends science. The setup, here, of the real world as the cozy dream of humans in a subjugated fetal position, a kind of parasitic prosthetic womb, is a good stroke, effective even beyond being chilling. But another good stroke, the ambiguity of possible views of this, is foreclosed by the melodramatic conventions, and we get so many mystical taglines and dorky poses from the over-awed directors (the Wachowski brothers who, as I've held up for scorn before, actually bill themselves that way) that rival anything interesting about the premise. And every new movie that is just a cheap pretext for computer morphing, like run of the mill musicals for the song and dance numbers in the 30s and 40s, claims to revolutionize special effects. Part of the infatuation with computers is this narcissistic aggrandizement by the technical, an idea that's the most penny popular of them all. One sure sign of bad direction: trying to get too much acting from Keanu Reeves. [12/00]
Not One Less (1999). Credits. Zhang Yimou is one of the best directors in the world, and may be the best filmmaker as a dramatist. Like Satyajit Ray before him, Zhang can be stylized, but it's not any particular element or stroke or touch, or even style, it's an art for orchestration, for assembling, for combining things dramatically, which is, of course, the art of direction. It's often difficult to describe, even though it seems so obvious while you watch. The reason for the difficulty is that it's not one positive thing, and in fact much of Zhang's talent, like Ray's, seems to be restraint, expressible only in the negative, what he doesn't do. Ray composes a narrative so that one close-up can carry all the necessary dramatic force, all the conflict, ambivalence, circumstance and reaction, and this moment, this crux, strikes you at the same time as it does a character. In Not One Less, there is a moment like that, a moment when all the layers of circumstance, intention, signification, come together, where, just as you realize all the turns of implication involved, the character is also going through the transformation of this realization, a realization that is of transformation. The scene of the first TV interview, the first question asked to Teacher Wei and the close-up of her when she can't respond verbally, is a moment as great as that in Ray's Devi when the son returns home and sees what has befallen his wife, and may be even more complicated. What's more, this moment is repeated, the effect itself extended, and it dramatizes an effect of broadcast or photographic reproduction that we often take for granted, but that can be precious in the right situation. Like The Story of Qiu Ju, this film has an affection for everyday workings and even naivete which might amount to being naive, but there is nothing naive about the way Zhang gets us there, all the nuance involved. Zhang has stricken a path that's neither the fanciful sentiment of Western movies, nor the promotional realism of earlier communist films. His characters and their situations are mostly counter to the heroism of both. Here, the 13-year-old is not surprising for finding some mine of talent within her, and the drama runs counter to a whole genre of Western films about educational uplift. It shifts from being even apparently that kind of story, without ever having the same magical transformation, to something broader about the plight of impoverished children and the willingness of adults to pay attention (for that, similar to the children films of Abbas Kiarostomi). The teenage girl is stubborn for a selfish end, persistent without even being clever about it. She petulantly tries to corral the children rather than figure out how to educate them. But her weakness becomes a strength. Her lack of conventional reasoning pushes her on through countless adult dismissals, and then gets turned into something even she quite didn't have in mind by, of all things, television. The moment of the reaction shot on the TV interview is a payoff in all sorts of ways American movies scarcely imagine, one that has dramatic compromises for everyone involved, including TV. Beyond that, still, with the reaction of the lost boy, and his summation of all their problems due to poverty, we realize that even the teenage girl's selfishness is qualified by necessity. [11/00]
Shakespeare in Love (1998). Credits. Useless "homage" to Romeo and Juliet, which it quotes in absurd amount, the worst, most embarrassing of it being a long music video montage in which the love-makers quote the play: Shakespeare as hammy sex music. Does for Shakespeare what 10 did for Bolero. Tom Stoppard gives an even more high-spun confection of Shakespeare worship than his Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead. Historical liberties are intended to reflect Shakespeare's, but the results are like nothing in Shakespeare, comic or tragic, or even in the history plays. Shakespeare is reduced to quaint, mollifying pop, in a way that makes something like Amadeus look sophisticated. Anachronistic jokes include an apothecary who gives psychoanalysis, which gives a reduction of Freud to the bad theatrical and analytical conceits of modern ego psychology, Shakespeare's writing a result of whether he's getting sex. All of this is given in TV-style hustle and bustle, events recombined and reverse-engineered to fit desired effects, and which thus fail to produce them, such as the sword clash with Wessex, as inexplicable and inevitable as anything in a blockbuster action movie. Even played so poorly, the worst is that this movie misses the point, precisely, of artifice in Shakespeare. Joseph Fiennes, in the lead as a Tiger Beat Shakespeare living out his own Romeo fantasy, is bad, sometimes laughably so, in a way I don't think was quite intended. His glowering looks and poses rival Mel Gibson or Keanu Reeves as a bad conceit for Shakespeare casting. Gwyneth Paltrow manages to show she's a better actress than the ridiculous conceit of her character, but that's saying a hell of lot less than she was thanking for in her horrible Oscar acceptance speech performance. [10/00]
Groundhog Day (1993). Credits. People don't intend bad art (to try to make it is something else, camp). But trying to make something great or even good is as much chance as talent or skill, or even will. Every now and then, through all the intentions, things fall together, serendipitously, but surprising for being so matter of fact. You see the result and say, but that was easy. When you try to repeat it, it's not the same endeavor. Groundhog Day is an example. The Eternal Return is a meditation on such attempts and this movie is a rendition of the notion of eternal return, whether Hindi or Nietzschean or whatever. It's an unceremonious treatment, at least as far as being an event. There's no great pretension about it as art or philosophy, or even as film. It's surprising that such an idea, a kind of redress to religious escapism and fairy tales, would get picked up for a typical entertainment, for even one of those modern attempts at something Capra-esque. This film does try to domesticate the idea, make it more quaint, and even turns it into Capra fairy tale at the end. But banality is apt for this notion of a progressionless progression, and even to see it played out in the most routine way would suggest an abyss, would reverberate that routine in infinite regress. The execution of the movie is not just routine, however. It's best quality is its dispatch, not so much that it's sharp and efficient, as that it's undemonstrative. Perhaps it's that Harold Ramis is a better director than a scriptwriter, as, for example, his Ghostbusters was precisely the sort of garish comedy this one is not. Much of it is due to this script, by Danny Rubin, but the direction follows suit. This pretext of reiteration is a marvelous figure for all the repetition in moviemaking itself, like a candy store of possibilities. The movie does a great job of economizing with suggestion, not ignoring those possiblities, but using them as the larger context, referring off-camera, so to speak. This pays off dramatically, elaborating in all sorts of ways. There are sequences like a series of movie takes. There are passages where the dialogue and dramatic action elaborate, stipulating precedent, as when Bill Murray demonstrates to Andie MacDowell that he has learned every instant of a sequence of time in the diner and every bit of information that even variation on that sequence has allowed him. And in a broader dramatic way, Rubin has not foreclosed, either. Murray as Scrooge isn't even novel literally, but not even Scrooge was subjected to this kind of lesson. Rubin runs this character through the exponentialization of his mistakes, of his solipsism and misapplication. [10/00]
Would I Lie to You? [La Vérité si je mens] (1997). Credits. Violence and comedy equated as entertainment. "Dark and comic" as a blurb said of the score, for heaven's sake. It's only -- ahem -- fitting that this movie is about commercial enterprise, because that's what the movie is. It's as garish a combo as anything in the flashy Parisian garment district it portrays, or "does." The protagonist looks at himself in the mirror and we know nothing about him. We quickly learn he is without a job, then almost as quickly learn he is resourceful: he knows how to exploit. Except this doesn't explain why he was without a job in the first place. His character is just a capricious empathy dummy, and like some cheap fashion, as shrewd as anyone is gullible enough to buy it. He makes use of mistaken ethnicity to get his job, then comically betrays his ignorance of Jewish customs. Again, there is no explanation for why his resources fail him, here. In the scene where he is taken to the home of his new Jewish co-worker friend, the capriciousness of the whole film is shown in microcosm in the gag of him drinking the wine. As clever and observant as he's supposed to be in other endeavors, and no matter how inept he'd be socially, there's no reason for him to carefully watch the way the others drink the wine, then sniff and gulp it down. No reason, except to be a crude gag about French drinking habits. The violent extent, when our hero without an explanation all serious like kicks the crap out of a man in a restroom, is even creepier because of all the pat justification. It doesn't even make sense -- like the receiver of bad news killing the messenger -- unless as some sort of empathetic comeuppance, Mr. Regular Guy destroys the Suave. The other big bit about the Jewish customs -- and there's really only two extended gags about this "theme" -- is when the man betrays his lack of Jewish background when he and his bride to be visit a rabbi. Once again, leaping to broad comic mode, the man lacks not only resources but tact. The scene is rude in a grim, not funny way, because it's, if inadvertently, not just irreverance of convention or religion, but inconsiderate of the woman, and it's not just the irreverance of her or conventions of love and marriage, it's the arbitrariness of the man's own feelings. This scene has the symbolic upshot of a goon's solipsism, a rogue's kneejerk dream of upending. The weight of it shifts from it's ostensible object, and some comment on the lofty or righteous, to the perspective it comes from, a sort of Charlie Chaplin for gangsters. [7/00]
American Movie (1999). Credits. There's a moment when Mark Borchardt asks his friend, Mike Shank, if he knows what "catharsis" means. This moment ripples out and serendipitously cinches the film. This is cathartic documentary, of the gonzo variety, in the general line of Gray Gardens and Sherman's March. Hanging on the hip of its subject, Borchardt, skipping around to follow his own scattered pace, this film undemonstratively figures failed aspiration and film-making at once. It's the real McCoy of Bowfinger, and, at the same time, funnier, and poignant in ways Bowfinger could not have been because the latter is fiction. [7/00]
The Insider (1999). Credits. An interesting dramatization because it makes tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand the point of empathy, then switches to show the way 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman is caught in the same position. At the same time, this is another Michael Mann exercise in profusion, film-making prose that is flowery, in some undersea sense of the term. Mann is like an American Sergio Leone: stylized, concentrated, compelling, thick and silly. So you get mixed results. For example, Manhunter, despite some action-movie heaviness, is a far more intriguing and affecting version of the potboiler novels than the dumb Silence of the Lambs. The Last of the Mohicans, despite some typical lackluster grandioseness, is actually an American outdoor movie where the cinematography is not just relying on the landscapes. Then there's Heat, a stylized but senseless load of bluster and swagger, as if the whole thing were based on Al Pacino's acting. The script for Insider, by Eric Roth and Mann, is fine, a good plan. The direction by Mann is responsible for the good and bad of the film. The material anchors Mann's direction, and Mann's direction lifts the material from prosaic documdrama. The cost, however, is some silly flourishes along the way, which don't ruin the whole, but which can't be ignored. The worst of it is the scene where Wigand meets Brown and Williams chief Thomas Sandefur, played by Michael Gambon. In an otherwise canny script, this scene is absurdly melodramatic, a bit of action-movie overawed villainy. Thankfully, Mann and Pacino have both toned it down on Pacino's acting, so he's not kicking down the scenery. You just have to get past the fact that Pacino is looking like some kind of drag queen. Russell Crowe earnestly reproduces Wigand's reserve, his tight-lipped combination of resolve and deference. [7/00]
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
