Persepolis (2007). Credits. It's hard to tell how much the uneasy contrast between the repressive order inside Iran and the "liberation" outside of it is inadvertent here. Perhaps this testament seems more eloquent the more unconscious it is. But that uneasy contrast also begins to color the animation, and not only because it's black and white -- save for its own scheme of contrast, which has an irresolute framing bit in a Paris airport in colors, as if for no other reason than to designate the rest of the film as the narrated past. That bit of reverse wizardry of Oz, for example, is far less eloquent, and may be a case of second guessing. By itself, the black and white animation seems to have its own charm and its own contrast. But is this narrated time really darker, a starker contrast, than the inconclusive present it leads to? The more "intentional" -- perhaps concerted -- this autobiographical (as they say redundantly) account, the more therapeutic, psychologistic, not to say indulgent, with everything becoming background to the "personal" story. The alienation of supposedly liberated Europe is understandable, especially when it's a matter of being forced from home faster than getting tired of it, but the friends and lovers met outside Iran get swept into this episodic pattern of the wallpaper (same effect as Lost in Translation even if arrived at on a more judicious path). This has its effect on the anecdotes at home, cast even back to minimize the very circumstance of its production. Marjane Satrapi is a case of the unfortunate need for even this much freedom, but that's to say her circumstance makes poignant what from cozy Westerners would be lame (cf., again, Lost in Translation). Another axis of the contrast: as a comic book or graphic novel, this story provokes less the sense of making quaint or euphemizing than as an animated film, but that's more for the context of animated movies, their track record, what they are nowadays. And perhaps, on the other hand, because of Waltz with Bashir which made this displacement of depiction, psychological repression, its premise. What still images, even in panels, storyboard, instantiate, but as glance and allusion, moving images can pass into gesture, convention, banality. What is the sense of "prosaic" in either? [2/09]
The Queen (2006). Credits. Almost an exact opposite of Frost/Nixon, also written by Peter Morgan and with Michael Sheen, in that here the direction comes off well in spite of the rest. Stephen Frears manages to give a sense to this, alongside, beneath, that it doesn't quite seem to have otherwise. In fact, the script itself keeps so daintily to the matter -- Diana Spencer's death, Queen Elizabeth's refusal to offer a public acknowledgment, and Tony Blair's therapy job to reconcile tabloid public with beloved monarch -- that it's as impertinent as the monarchy it apologizes for. That is not to say, however, the royal family's position is entirely unworthy of sympathy, because, as the archival footage of the Diana cult's sacralization by her death expressly states its own contradiction, yielding to the Diana-vehicle populism exploited by Blair himself -- what's all but avoided here -- is a fairy-tale ending, in the even more nasty kind of paliative sheen of adult pop music. (Elton John indeed.) The queen's Deer Hunter moment is the worst note of all. This sort of soul searching is projection, obscenely presumptuous for enemies, let alone as an attempt to claim friends. While Ron Howard's direction tries to stoke up the grandeur of action movies for Frost/Nixon, Frears manages somehow, amazingly, to minimalize all this obligatory pomp. He actually gives a subtle form of paparazzi view, carefully matching the movement of the video archival footage, aspects of it like telephoto. This may be saying that he does something as easy as not shaking his handheld cameras all about in the clamorous, overwrought pretense of portable device vidcam reality we're still getting going on 20 years now. In a war room scene with Blair's team responding to tabloids, Frears shows how this jumble of focus can be done dramatically without having to be done so much literally, that is without making you vomit to prove it's real. (Funny how the handheld image has that effect when seeing things yourself doesn't. How real is that.) The music score for Howard's film was also part of the problem. Frears has a score by Alexandre Desplat that gives just this gliding, almost jocular undertone of suspense, suiting the director's touch even with dropping in and out of archive. The closing shot is one of the greatest strokes of this film, thought it almost seems to belong to another, or to bring the undertone to the fore. It has the sort of medias res of an opening credit sequence, and while it opens onto a royal garden and better terms for the queen and prime minister, the music's light and dour counterpoint makes it all seem, suddenly, a very curious affair. [2/09]
Frost/Nixon (2008). Credits. The best thing is the acting of Frank Langella and Michael Sheen. They are a model not just for acting, but for scriptwriting and directing, too, of how to strike a fine line between caricature and, for lack of a better term what I'll coin here, live-ability. Not plausibility or believability or verisimilitude, but a kind of fullness of character all its own. This is where any acting, whatever method, achieves the formalism of its own reality (and, incidentally, the paradox of something like the Stanislavki method that would stand for any other). In perhaps simpler terms (though not that it doesn't entail the complexity of these reverberations), or more conventional, it's acheiving a sense of character that is more analogous to the original than just imitating. (The paradox involves whether this is, itself, better imitating.) Sheen does a really clever job of turning up the David Frost impersonation when he's being Frost in front of cameras, then at little rhetorical moments when he's being a Frost asserting himself in "real" life. Sheen's Frost is a marvel of reaction shots, demonstrating, despite that great Frost air in speaking, how acting without speaking is just as important, and how this figures in the whole matter of media and mediation. His reactions to Nixon in their parting encounter are as important as anything in the film: an amalgam of deferential and astonished embarrassment, grace, renewed fascination and incredulity, politeness but from exception. Langella seems to have arrived at all these mannerisms for a Nixon by sketching from a biography, perhaps of Nixon, perhaps of himself, likely both. His vocal registers imply other causes, factors, for Nixon's: the age in the breathing, the nasality; the weariness that could be "true" exasperation, but then made into a cover by Nixon himself, hiding in his own qualities, feigning, trumping up, the whole beleagured act of persecution that is the ruse of indignant tyranny. But, as also to demonstrate the difference, the distance, in the representation -- the making equal of two things which are not even in a verismilitude, "realism" -- a strange effect of Langella's performance is that he gives almost too great a stature to Nixon, a presence that even Nixon didn't have. In keeping with the script, there is a kind contradiction in this sort of bare dignity, the minimal humanity, as well as the way Nixon could have his charm, if that of a scoundrel. But Langella has a kind of grace with all this, with even degradation, and I kept thinking of how awkward Nixon always came off, playing the piano or walking on the beach or trying to seem personable, something attested in the script (the Nixon character's exchange with the Frost character about the difference in appeal). The script is astute in that way, the pertinence of this junction not just for the notoriety of that interview, or Nixon's famous betrayal of himself Frost eventually provoked, but more broadly in the development of the media's part in politics, which Nixon was a part of in an earlier moment alluded to, the five o'clock shadow debate with Kennedy. Peter Morgan's play has its conceits: Nixon's outburst in a drunken phonecall to Frost juts out as the most stage-preachy. But it's also more subtle and clever about characterization -- even in that same speech -- than Ron Howard's direction, which reduces to the conceits of movie suspense, and thus more narrowly than the play to analogy with a boxing match. [1/31/09]
The Wrestler (2008). Credits. This is nothing like the level of badness of Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream thanks to a different scriptwriter. It's engaging, but the pretense of exposé is more Hallmark moments, despite the turn away from upbeat conclusions. It cheats on the wrestler being washed up, since there are still matches to defer to, and even worse the lurid appeal of an extreme pain and gross-out spectacle. The fact this leads to a heart attack smudges on the effect of that. The culmination of this cheap trick reality-ism is a meat slicer: using that for easy suspense and then having Mickey Rourke punch it, for big effect, but with no further effect. There is no realization peculiar to this subject, nothing dramatizing the banality of wrestlers or expressing their interest, compulsion or predicament. As a movie formula, it's about as scripted as a wrestling match, without doing anything interesting to that effect. Even the obvious parallel between stripping and wrestling seems to be left on the canvass, or even worse, presents another double standard of men v. women. Rourke has even lost something, and it seems due to steroids. Even his facial features, his lips, the edges of his eyelids, are so weirdly swollen, that trying to do even his shrugs and side looks is as strained as when he tries to dance with all that bulge. Aronofsky lays on the handheld, and uses over the shoulder shots of Rourke so much from the beginning, that he wears out the figure before the trick of contrasting Rourke's entry to a comedown deli job with that of a fight arena. The actors' immersion exercise, for Marisa Tomei as well, and wanting Rourke's character to be likeable and sympathetic, with all his fuck-ups -- as Rourke himself with the similarities to him, his movie/boxing career(s), and there's likeable stuff, perhaps most of all his comment about 80s music and how Cobain ruined it all -- doesn't make it more than the conceit of drama. And not the wrestling kind. I do like the idea, however, of Rourke turning the Academy Awards into Oscar Smackdown. "I question your authenticity, Sean Penn! I don't care if you're badder than Dracula and Nixon, Langella! And I want you next, Brad Pitt! Nobody's man enough to take the Oscar from ME!" [1/25/09]
Stand by Me (1986). Credits. Perhaps the most direct testament to the hackiness of Stephen King, this movie not only attempts to be so prosaic, it has the terrible framing device with Richard Dreyfuss narrating. In other words, delivering this hack writing's smug tribute to itself. Perhaps Dreyfuss should be commended rather than scorned for his delivery, or maybe excused, since it's every bit the smugness of the author. The closing parenthesis, with Drefuss appearing again to give the wistful epilogue, should be enough to demonstrate. The kind of phrasing and couching and general holding of things represented by the words he types on his old green-light terminal is a turn taken away from -- well, editing, most immediately, but -- literature, prolix though it is. King is the epitome of dishing it out, dumping, slopping, expedience and conspicuous effect (see the vomit scene discussed below), and no critical reflex. He's the triumph of movie populism before it gets to the movies, the triumph of this over books. The tale within the tale, as illustrious a device as that has been in the history of literature, of the fat kid getting his revenge by starting a puke fest, is here the self-justification of the simplest, most petulant wish fulfillment. And it's made further into the case of self-justification of the author's ability, staged as his own critical sense, against a flat-footed response. This more unabashed infantilism is supposed to make the framing plot more -- what, grown-up? But the story around the story is an even more weaseling sort of wish fulfillment, with the little boy projection holding big tough guy with a gun, and doing a pre-adolescent imitation of Clint Eastwood that ought to be funny but is too drippy with the sanctity of this wishing. And all this in turn to be made more sanctified as adult projection by the Dreyfuss frame. But, what, is it not O.K. to recall childhood, to project it, keep even childish fantasies of revenge? Is there nothing else to see in the world, the back yard, the self? [1/09]
Waltz with Bashir (2008). Credits. Perhaps its great stroke and its greatest merit is giving a reason for doing animation, a premise for it. I don't mean to slight the story of this man, these men, and the whole issue of Israel's part in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the persistent problem that represents (the recent Gaza attack), but there is a recurring scene, an important one having to do with the film-maker's memory, that has music that sounds very much like Hans Zimmer's score for The Thin Red Line, and that's an unfortunate comparison, because that movie is a more eloquent statement of becoming the monster you fear. As with Heavenly Creatures, this also makes a case for why some things we might not like to see should be shown. When I realized there was a reason for having the animation in the premise, I thought, well, then, would it become necessary to drop it? To switch to "live" or non-animated material? The film strategically does so, and here the necessity is for the actual recorded, not the dramatic suggestion. The animation process, which is not just tracing of filmed subjects, creates its own version of cinematic effect, something slower, deliberate. Whether intentional or not, this also suggests that dream pace or movement, as if everything's in syrup. There are surprising benefits, for example, that guns seem heavier than they usually do in "live" action. An image of a horse's eye is the peak of all the effect, emotional as well, just as it is in the particular anecdote relating it. There are times the animation slips into something more prosaic or cliche in a comic book way, some rock montages, for example. The film makes explicit the way soldiers are trying to make war, horror, the abject, into something mundane or even like a holiday, but citing the music as part of this, and giving us another war movie scene with soundtrack are different things. [1/09]
Fascination (1979). Credits. More of Jean Rollin's formula, if only not to say fetish: a group of women in a castle frolicking and skirting lesbianism as well as some variation of vampiro-zombism, are put upon by an outsider, who is in turn in conflict with another group of outsiders, and somehow necessarily involving a ceremony of prancing in see-through gowns. An opening sequence stumbles into the sort of aburdist height that only one of Rollin's movies does in entirety, Le Viol du vampire. After some fluttery female hands quickly caress an ancient book, two costume period women (that the costumes match a period is irrelevant) are standing in front of hanging ox meat on a bloody floor. Other costumed patrons enter, and proceed to partake with the former of wine glasses filled apparently with blood. One man explains it's the latest fad for treating anemia, which somehow calls for or leads to a close-up of a woman's finger daubing blood from the glass, then a close-up of lips as she spreads the blood on them. This shot, characteristic of Rollin, lingers on for effect. If the effect on you is laughter, the next shot confirms your response: a reaction shot of the hardy ox attendant laughing. From there the film quickly degenerates into only the more strained attempts at plot that Rollin became progressively through the years. [12/08]
Million Dollar Baby (2004). Credits. Like Eastwood's acting, there's earnest effort, but it's just not that good, the kid who's all heart. Perhaps if he'd hired someone else to do his Burgess Meredith impersonation, he could have avoided the analogy. There's one really great stroke in this film, with repurcussions for all boxing movies, for boxing as a figure for life. Just about the time this more minimal, restrained, less sensational story turns into all that it was trying not to be, with its own villain of implausibility, and I'm rolling my eyes saying out loud, "this is just another dumb boxing movie" -- pow. The scriptwriter, Paul Haggis, and Eastwood are aware of this, and of all the metaphor allows. And painfully they make us aware they are aware. But they also pull its punches. [12/6/08]
The House of Mirth (2000). Credits. Right off this is the antidote to so many costume prestige movies, to the sort of reclaimed or sublimated Victorianism that has become the prim taste sometimes PBS, sometimes BBC, sometimes Merchant Ivory, but could be from anyone, even Martin Scorsese. This movie is even particularly an antidote to his The Age of Innocence. All this is good also for the particular work, Edith Wharton's novel, because that's a particularly unflinching portrait of the plight of women. Director Terence Davies cuts against the grain not by being more muck-raking, but by being truly elegant, not posh or florid or fluffed up, but with a detachment, a tone for the period that's like the echo in the rooms. There's a space around this drama like the shallow focus of early photography that makes figures appear to be cut out of the background. It's an aesthetic effect that is at once more clinical and more affecting. You can also see it in the color palette. The more muted and hazy and sun-bleached colors here are like the painting of the period, the naturalism that had taken on impressionist influence, and Davies and cinematographer Remi Adefarasin's attention to this is an exception to modern movie palettes, to the sort of excesses of effect given in to so pervasively. Davies also doesn't have a soundtrack, not in the conventional sense of some overripe score composed for the movie. Instead, he uses pieces from Cosi fan tutte (a shrewd stroke by itself as the opera they go to in the story, and the contrast for the women's issue of the story) or Haydn or, the one that may as well tell the whole marvelous approach of the movie, "Shtiler Shtiler (Quiet, Quiet)" by Alexander Volkoviski Tamir, in a way that comes up as subtley as the camera moving on the scene, as if incidental to rather than imposed over the action. All this returns a favor. Well, maybe a favor for a bad habit. Here's England doing American accents with Glasgow posing as 1905 New York. They didn't get a bunch of English actors to do workshop diction versions of the accent, the way so many American movies have done with England since the beginning of movies. Davies has done more TV than movies, but, like at least one such famous example, Robert Altman, a less illustrious background goes hand in hand with a knack. He's a model, at least here, of why "moving pictures" is knowing how and when to move the camera, and that how much means also how little. Davies creates several affecting tableaux by waiting, then just barely moving sideways, a subtle, glancing motion that's like a small breeze in a still room. The timing seems almost involuntary, at least not by any conventional tempo, and it has an uncanny effect of evoking a stir, an understated way of bringing to life, movement in an almost counterpoint way. This has a chilling reversal in the closing shot. The script is keen to give Wharton's line of action, a straight tragic decline. Davies has the confidence as scriptwriter and director not to usher us in, do fanfare or some feature story lead, because his elision is allusive rather than reductive. He drops us right into the web of repartee, the tangle of politesse and refinement where wit and skill in expression must sublimate to a fault. The frankness of Lily's visit to the bachelor's residence, what sets off the the action merely because it operates against the structure of conventions, is immediately belied by their inability to be frank in speech, so much so that they tie themselves in a knot of misapprehension that will be part of Lily's demise. I can't think of a script that better achieves this with the dialogue so that we aren't just getting the overly mannered or other curious attribute of a period, like verbal wallpaper, but the drama itself that is this language, the trap set for this society by itself, more particularly for women, most particularly by one who defies this order, even in spite of herself. [11/08]
The Hours (2002). Credits. Bringing out the closet. This is error. The offense is not moral so much as aesthetic, but in this case, if not all of them, that's worse. And it may amount to the same, since this aesthetic conceit to go so much in one direction is along with leaving alone so much else (see below). The petty literary conceit of doing homage by including the object of reverence, a kind of altar work of citation, is not only a matter of doing the opposite of justice to the original, but betraying even the reverence, a kind of sanctimonious, superstitious appreciation that has little understanding. It's a show of fawning. The index of this sort of thing, and the tendency toward it, is the scene of the writer (or artist) in her solitude. What is the temptation to show this? All it can do is replace the object with another conceit (cf. Control and the desire to portray suicide). To wonder about someone's solitude, creative process, inner dialogue, conflict, torment, to discuss it, describe it, etc., is not the same thing as to present it in theatrical terms, certainly not in movie terms, something which is immediatley contradictory to any sense of realism, fidelity in representation or at the least, plausibility. But it's even a contradiction formally: how do you look into the "inner" process with an expressive projection, with making a scene, a big screen, a preening giant image of everything manifest? And as if this problem could be boiled down to terms of taking a brooding Romantic bust and signaling all the inferno with the awful conventional seething that is nothing but the latest extension of silent movie acting. To formalize this impossibility or absurdity would be to represent just that. To ignore it with lush, rhapsodic, and more particularly, modern movie dramatic conventional sentiment, is to suspend not only disbelief or reason, but discernment.
The movie says nothing about homosexuality. It certainly says nothing expressly, but in this case that amounts also to saying nothing, to not saying anything. It's a kind of dramatic politesse almost as egregious as that dramatic conceit of the great writer in the act. To leave it implicit -- who is afraid of Virgina Woolf -- is to leave it as if understood in the most puerile way. [11/08]
Ben-Hur (1959). Credits. Seeing this legend in the Oscars' mind after Monty Python's Life of Brian and the SCTV skit of a Three Stooges version makes it almost impossible to take it seriously. Not that it would've been easy to take it seriously before, as those things attest. That Judah Ben-Hur had a really interesting life. I can just see him telling about it to a travelling salesman, or on a talk show, or maybe at a signing event for his ghost-written bio. Five-time chariot circuit champ, once a galley slave, was a prince of Judea even before that! "And I was there for the passion. That's right. Saw it with my own eyes." This General Lee Wallace created a Civil War version of sugar-coating, and no wonder it makes for a 1950s spectacle: just the right amount of diversion -- action, drama from the conqueror's vantage, the rich ushering us through lowliness, revenge -- to deliver the Christian message. Which is itself the grandest diversion scheme of all. Like The Greatest Show on Earth or Around the World in 80 Days. And who better to play a Jew than Charlton Heston? I mean, Moses, fercrissakes. Well, this time for Christ's sake. Heston leads a cast of seethers, though he's outdone by Stephen Boyd, who's actually a better actor even with this sort of heaving and hawing. Or at least a more entertaining one. Heston looks like he's straining with pain even when he's supposed to be happy. So the scene where Heston goes to see Boyd who's been hoist by his own chariot shenanigans has a double punch: the jump in pitch that's supposed to be more tragic is like self-parody. After Boyd's rasping and seizing, Heston's yelp of anguish provokes a burst of laughter. That's the second one after the geniunely inadvertent slapstick moment in the chariot race, when Heston is thrown over the front of his chariot. The way it's done with the cut from the stunt to far less precariously dangling Heston is fine comic execution. Is this why it won the Oscar for editing? I mean, sure the ten others where owed it for reverence to our Lord. Speaking of which, all that excitement and humor even before we get to Jesus. [11/08]
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004). Credits. Directed as if hostages are about to be killed. Peter Sellers is portrayed by such pranks and flourishes that the portrait is even more what it's saying the object is: a balloon. What does it benefit Sellers, the players here such as Geoffrey Rush doing him, the depiction, us, to want to repeat the parlor tricks? It's that sort of fawning for fame, an inflationary, desperate claim, wanting to tell us we know that we know, and make us feel that we too are wearing the costume of history, an inflationary spiral casting banality as spectacle. This is even worse with the utterly inane soundtrack, when not a useless repeat of Sellers' movies, a dopey hit parade period index that hammers songs with a party jock's sense of profundity. Rush is actually made worse of in this jumble. By this contrast, you can appreciate how his own talent is more sly even than Sellers's, and wasted in the effort. [11/08]
Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). Credits. After Fitzcarraldo, modest and even quaint can be a relief. But this movie is also another step in a path away from the inspired squalor of Werner Herzog's 70s movies. Maybe it's the accent. Even when not the misty heights of Aquirre, Heart of Glass or Nosferatu, something like Stroszek was eloquent in its bare pretending, even at the abject. Green Ants perhaps wants to be more light-hearted, a bit sunnier with its black humor, but its detachment is both more amateurish and quirky in a way that seems all too 80s pop, especially in Australian accent and with Road Warrior whirly-birdman Bruce Spence. The courtroom scenes, for example, come off skimpy and quaint, compared to the amazing punch of something like Kiarostami's Close-Up, which rivals the best efforts of Herzog for the crossing of the line between fact and fiction. [11/08]
Platform (2000). Credits. So slack and removed it becomes inapt. Director Jia Zhang Ke got much better at this with Unknown Pleasures, a film which followed the line of Yellow Earth and The Story of Qiu Jiu in outstripping programmtic socialist realism for a grittier, more jaded look, an opening of the eyes to more difficult psychological problems, a kind of neo-realism departing from socialist rather than bourgeois fantasy. The exercise here is ambitious -- it's 154 minutes and there are even longer versions -- but it's a two-edged sword. Compare it to Lust, Caution and you can see the merit of its plan, its tack, but on the other side of that, its own kind of failure of execution. Both films are about the offstage activities of theater groups. In Lust, Caution the group becomes involved in political intrigue as part of the revolution, but in this film, the post-revolution group shows the social transformations of Chinese society from the late 70s to the late 80s that engulf even their own purpose. The ambitious naturalism of this film makes Ang Lee's work look very bourgeois indeed: heavy-handed but lightweight. Jia cuts out so much melodramatic and demonstrative fat, however, that it goes in the opposite direction. He eschews close-up, but there is such a preponderance of the camera being set off, mid to long-shot range, the viewer is like someone in the back row of one of the theater group's traveling performances. A nice idea and effect, but it's even hard to distinguish characters at such distance, to avoid confusing them, let alone become empathetic. And his very dry juxtaposition, which does something analagous with time or plot, a kind of off-tempo mundane, including strange scenes of idling significance that are cut out and cut in at once, with no other explanation -- you don't know any other details about the scene -- accumulates as much disconnection as useful disinterest. The contrast of this distance and a very un-heroic banal becomes more refined with Unknown Pleasures also, but is well in hand here: "open cinema"-like tactics, the pans on vistas, the emphasis of space whether wide open or cramped, the dialogue with characters taking turns obscured by a corner, the lingering shot of twin girls posed in the same dejected state. [11/08]
Paris qui dort [Paris Sleeps, aka The Crazy Ray] (1925). Credits. Rene Clair plays with freeze frame, imitating it theatrically on film before actually doing it -- in the same movie. Clair played with so many things that are now commonplace: slow motion in Entr'acte, stock footage cut-ins on chase sequence in Les Belles de nuit, sounds cut over images in Sous les toits de Paris and Le Million. Here, a shot that appears to track a man running down a spiral staircase of the Eiffel Tower was lifted by The Lavendar Hill Mob, though the latter expanded on the incongruous joy true to the spirit of Clair. This little short is a whimsy about running around Paris with everyone else harmlessly disabled, akin to those childhood dreams of being trapped in a department store. The lack of imagination is hard to hold entirely against the film as it raises the point that those few exempt are very quickly bored: what use are riches in this free a market? So the film relegates itself to the heights of the Eiffel Tower, where most of its drama is made from those crazy 20s people frolicking about in high places. Their infatuation with new heights was a little heady. With fabulous views of Paris, of course. A nice animated diagrammatic cutaway follows an equally quaint characterization of the mad scientist's calculations on a chalkboard, all of which only direct him to throw the same lever he did before. It's a more prosaic than truly dada Entr'acte, but seen as a kind of absurd comedy expression of Atget, it has its own charm. [11/08]
Sin City (2005). Credits. Sin City Frank Miller himself has left the path (see The Dark Knight) for action video (because of games, too) hyperbole, even in his comics. This is not so much the imagination of brutality as brutality of the imagination. The live-action attempt at comic book -- rather "graphic novel" -- can't be quite cartoonish enough when every point is violence. Underground comics have always gone further in imagining, whether it be for art, sublimation or just to make the biggest stir. Going from novel to movies, it just doesn't play that way, as the word "graphic" demonstrates. True Lies may have been the movie that signaled we'd passed the point where violence was the ulterior to sex. This is well after that. The infatuation with the alpha male notion, he-man lust, if it's not just men desiring men, is the graphic novel nerd generation's dramatic conceit, subsuming the pulp novel and comic book ones. The awe of goons that was latent or incidental in Frank Miller or Quentin Tarantino has been made outright, and there's very little left of the sardonic humor about even that. Cf. Kill Bill. Tarantino's episode here is as flat-out and flat-footed gushy, and the drippiest of cliches: the cop's last day on the job. The only one of the episodes that is interesting is the Mickey Rourke one, where the reflexive aspect with Rourke's own life flavors Rourke's performance -- he's still got that effortless shrugging style and makes Bruce Willis look even more strained -- and the characters are pitched another hyperbolic level, near superhero. Rourke's make-up is like a prosthetic expression of his own boxing career face, but also makes him look something like RanXerox, a very graphic character of punk 80s comic/novel fare. Even here, you can see the heavy lean, with a serial-killing cannibal made also a fighting bad-ass, a fancy that couldn't care less about the plausibility of psychological profile for its own sadistic enjoyment. The way Elijah Wood is presented, shot, cast, even while being chopped up and fed to the dogs, is the comic geek's version of teen boys making explosion noises. The B&W photography with one color element is crisp and shrill, auto-body art rather than film noir, and itself dated in an inadvertent way: the exercises of Rumblefish and Schindler's List couldn't escape the bad sense of reduction. See, here, yellow bastard. Despite all that, the most tortuous thing is the repetition of the credits. Giving us the serial idea is one thing, even the short-joke segment at the beginning like coming in at the end of a movie and the confusion that results in the first end credit roll. But making us go through full corporate credits with the same music every time -- I guess it's not macho enough if you don't make them take your stink. [10/08]
Match Point (2005). Credits. A comedy of manners with no comedy. If there's a Dostoevsky in the first act, it's going to go off and a landlady will be killed in the third act. Scarlet Johansson worked well, was directed well, too, until she turned into the nagging lover. To her credit, the part is written and directed so poorly at that point -- Allen's kind of ellipsis is really bad when it's straight -- but she's definitely straining her whinging range, here. Ellipsis, or what? Allen's comic matter of factness when serious -- straight -- comes of as expedience. But then why tell so much of the story, the set-up of the tennis player? Start with the Johansson part, that way it's more mysterious. [10/25/08]
Scoop (2006). Credits. Johansson now doing Woody Allen, as happens when he's in the film with his stars, especially the closest female. The attempt to have her be charmingly dissembling, in a nerdish way, only betrays the conceit of how sexy they think she is. She's not even good at playing the offbeat types that were supposed to have launched her. To strain to play a kind of offhand is a double error. Allen somehow makes Hugh Jackman utterly uncharming, unsexy, uninteresting. The part is terrible, written badly enough by Allen, but then Jackman is shackled to it by Allen's direction. And Allen, himself, here is jittery and pushy with his act, but with nothing funny made of it. Even the wisecracks are dull. In Broadway Danny Rose he played a pathetic, corny character. Here he's coming off as one. [10/25/08]
Evil Dead (1981). Credits.
Evil Dead 2 (1987). Credits.
This is haunted house gags, affable fare and hardly scary. It's as clever and tiresome as that. Whatever poetic or dramatic interest comes in that form as well; only in those strokes is there something less hokey than the frame. The minimizing of plot and even dialogue is shrewd enough -- why not just avoid that problem -- but it makes an even thinner string on which to hang the tricks. There are lots of gaps and long lingering shots of stares and reactions, what becomes even more mugging by the sequel. On the way from cult to camp, this preoccupation with effects is part of the technocratic takeover of the movies that, while it was at the time (beginning of 80s) a liberation from the staleness of script convention, commercialized melodrama high and low (cf. Star Wars contra The China Syndrome, and Sam Raimi belongs in this same wave with Spielberg as well), would actually strangle a root of inventiveness it now, 30 years of digital hyperbole on, sorely needs. [10/08]
The Dark Knight (2008). Credits. A spade is a spade. Let's not dally with politeness or any pretense to consideration of worthiness. You can see my comments on Batman Begins if you want further explanation. There's no buts or althoughs or hold-outs or exceptions, there's nothing to salavage some sense of "cool" or going along with the dopey faddishness of thinking this is so dark or hip or sadistic or rad. This is shit. And right up front, Heath Ledger's Joker is the shittiest part of it. Hambone crazy acting pinched more from Anthony Hopkins than Jack Nicholson. Well, except maybe for Maggie Gyllenhall, whose cock-swallowing accent seems to be getting worse. To be fair to Ledger, since the fact he died makes everyone else want to be so much more awed, the shitty lines and the shitty direction called for it. And what's with that stupid voice Christian Bale does when Batman? Have cowl, will growl? Come on, movie audiences, this isn't embarassing? This juvenile preening version of inflation, by which you stuff in more stupid plotlines and sweeping, swirling, swishing, banging, really really orange or really really blue or really really flourescent pale shots, cannot compensate for the fact that every stroke and gesture is fatuous, the cheapest kind of melodrama, even gobbier and goopier than comic book pulp. This is increased dosage for the addicts, pulphead pulp. However many one or two-second shots in 152 minutes of wrong don't make a right. And on that note, once again, read Frank Miller's The Dark Knight from the 80s for everything the entire Batman movie line since, including this one that finally uses that title, is not. There was inventiveness, playful twists on the iconography of Batman, satire that was edgier than 60s camp for the mores of the 80s. If Reagan and Superman and the cold war were taken with a grain of salt, the return in this movie, despite the title, to overawed credulity can only seem like the tenor of the times in which the ticking bomb hypothesis could inspire the sacrifice of civil rights (the social experiment scene in this movie with its lesson of good-heartedness notwithstanding, an idea that might have been interesting, if it hadn't been another bit of soppiness crammed in). Miller's mini-series has come out again everywhere in connection with this movie, although thinking they're comparable is a another demonstration of indriscriminate taste (cf. the Tolkienites and the Lord of the Rings movies). The legitimate heir of its spirit in the movies is the Robocop series. Why does everyone who thinks this new Nolan/Bale series is so much "darker" than the 90s Batman movies, and therefore does more justice to some sanctimonious idea of Batman, not see the same infatuation with latex and hyperbolic production design, and an even cornier one for gadgets because throwing in a really stupid James Bond aspect with Morgan Freeman, the same double-up of villains and even more gangs and even greater pile-on plot? The Batman TV series of the 60s, and even Tim Burton to some degree, knew that the more seriously you took this idea, the sillier it would actually be. [9/08]
Burn After Reading (2008). Credits. The dirt fast. The Coen brothers are making movies that have so many good things, while so many are making movies that can't do one of them. Not that others want to. George Clooney and Brad Pitt here provide contrast. The modish bluster of Oceans 11 can't come close to the intrigue and sheer fun of this, not least because it can't the characters for Clooney and Pitt, and the kind of message movies Clooney thinks are serious are shown up. The Coen brothers even when ostensibly more comedy are better at social commentary, and when supposedly more serious, like Fargo or No Country for Old Men, are tragedy with the deftness of humor. This variety across their work, their willingness to play broad, almost screwball, or to be able to compress that same archness into sharper strokes, is getting better within each one, going at least from No Country to this one. While No Country has the most serious mien, which the comedy salts, a kind of gallows absurdity that also makes it more pithy and poignant, Burn After Reading uses an apparent turn back to more screwball, a la Intolerable Cruelty or The Big Lebowski, in a one-two with a very nasty punch of seriousness. In a market of generic distinction, this lightness and gravity may be as confounding as Kafka, unless you just cash in the nervous laughter as smugness. In a sly way, too, done in passing, this is about the part obsession with bodies and fitness plays in the kind of wild ambition a la Fargo that is folly. John Malkovich's acting has always had the kind of relish that is perfect for the Coen brothers, so here he is with Frances McDormand on her home turf. His character, the perfect twist for Malkovich, is over-the-top serious, a flustered patsy that can't be as pathetic as Jerry Lundegaard, but becomes as tragic, even more destructive, because he has no sense for the humor in which he's played. [9/08]
Fiddler on the Roof (2008). Credits. The opening number, before credits, "Tradition," is lined out well. Despite dips into Broadway candied fare -- the first number with the three daughters, and then most numbers after the "Entr'acte" -- the film provides a much pithier rendition of what is already a pithier form of that sort of Broadway. There is inventive avoidance of musical staginess in the use of voiceover, various schemes for this. Although it became a 60s, 70s easy listening cliché, "Sunrise, Sunset" is given a very nice treatment with this voiceover tactic, faces in candle glow, and the whole long segment of the wedding is not only the centerpiece and anchor of this production, but it's a great stroke of cinematography by Oswald Morris prefiguring Terrence Malick's attempt at natural light at the threshold of the fast stock era, the literally golden (colored) age of cinematography that would later do much to ruin movies just as Dziga Vertov proposed. Formal repetition also expresses variation and the narrative line weaves layers of events, trailing off or diffusing, ultimately as diaspora, the experience of not only the Russian Jews in the pogroms but Jews throughout history. [9/08]
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Credits. How tawdry the grandeur. The Cold War, including a nuclear blast, is now a bourgeois plaything the way the Nazis became. That and Shia Laboeuf's Brando drag -- color only heightens the aspect -- make flagrant Lucas and Spielberg's sucking back up to the 50s as the kind of serial pasteboard of earlier eras they watched then. If it wasn't apparent with Raiders of the Lost Ark, after American Graffiti as much as Star Wars, then look at this painted up old harlot version of the same thing at this stage in the long era of this headlong dive into technocratic hyperbolic fawning for mythical suburban innocence. It's like having a wet dream for one's own virginity. How not to see Lucas and Spielberg as contributors to, not merely the pop index for, the Reagan era. The fact the commies can now be made into stock villains in the movies is a result of having really made them into stock villains in the fiction of politics, along with our willingness not so much to suspend disbelief as just want this crap. British actresses with bad Hollywood mishmash accents and a sort of cornball version of dominatrix get-up can serve up the even more paltry modicum of titillation -- the Lucas era's honorary boy status for women is a factor of social ineptness, not social consciousness -- and you get a landscape more barren than Victorianism. There's no voluptuousness to repress revealingly when family values means the biggest simulated bang for your buck: teen boy fixations and money fetish take over for prurience. The operative meaning of the Greek root of "porn" is to sell. If you think this is going too far, what about that media conglomerate jingoistic pimp act Lucas and Speilberg did for this movie, at Cannes and everywhere else? How could you have avoided seeing it? [9/08]
Le Viol du vampire [The Rape of the Vampire] (1968). Credits. Jean Rollin has made B zombie/vampire/lesbo films (as well as straight porn and even some cable fare soft porn stuff, like one of the many Emanuelle sequels) ever since this one. But unlike the more run-of-the-mill bad fun his later stuff became, this one is so bad it's something else: absurd, surreal, avant-garde. Few of even the legendary bad movies achieve this. For example, Plan Nine from Outer Space is actually boring after about five minutes, once you get the idea, whereas Robot Monster is so completely whacked-out mis -- what? -- applied? -- it's surreal. Dario Argento can approach the dreamlike when one of his fantasies, on top of being weird and silly, takes one of its jumps, pulling a whole extra plotline out of -- well, wherever. The Rape of the Vampire does something uniquely astounding: it is inadvertently a Godard film. Which means that it manages to loop back, since Godard was inspired by B movies, to produce a kind of exponential, or regress, of jump-cut aesthetic from depravity. It jumps, lurches, skips, glances, leaves plot and narrative so gleefully uncared for, despite there being some bizarre fetish of a premise going on somewhere. It's a sort of beat poet, avant-pop, horror movie pretense, and by the wanton neglect involved in all its conceit, it manages to be so much more entertaining, even interesting, than any of these. There are four women that are somehow by turns witches, vampires, zombies -- undead and living dead -- blind, not really blind, then eyes seared shut, then another woman and her duo of 60s dudes -- French of course, one of them à la Jean-Pierre Léaud -- a Black-power vampire queen wearing at one point -- I kid you not -- fuzzy shorts with a bat on the front, some cool cars they borrowed for the movie, like a 50s Caddy, a Triumph and a Citroen, some extra see-through-veiled girls appearing next to the tall blood dispensers -- after, of course, the necessary sword fight by the sheer-clad women backlit by fire -- silly actors passing for psychologists just as suddenly passing for bio-tech wizzes, and then laughing over the microscopes . . . There are dreams in which the sense of humor presses with the same eerie persistence as nightmares, where this absurd stipulation is a second degree of absurdity. You wake, and thinking back on it, ask why that was supposed to be funny. And then it's funny you thought that was funny. That's what this movie does. [7/08]
The Incredible Hulk (2008, credits) and Iron Man (2008, credits). So fast, so drawn, so led on. In the degrolution of digitainment, these are monster movies as cartoons on steroids. Action hyperbolization has led to everything on the monstration principle: that is, the monster movie strip tease of don't really quite show everything. But the tension to that is the CG principle of showing everything. The sheeny balloons that all "bogies" (both of these movies have a military radar use of this term) are now ("bosses" in video game terms, but it's just as well the protagonists) have to suggest some sort of catachrestic titillating bad-assedness at the same time that they have to bounce and lurch like the giddiest kiddy pixel characters. This is expedience to the point of crassness -- but that may be the point -- especially in The Incredible Hulk. While making the whole movie as a trailer might be a method for avoiding so much other crap, here it only exacerbates the assembly-line gimmickry. Character attributes become the worst stereotypes at this pace, as do plot turns, reactions, shots, angles, cuts, soundtrack pieces, really awesome new fancy CGIs on the super-high-tech computer systems (that always take too long showing their fancy shit), etc. It's a hyper-pandering, for which the super-drugs in the plot are -- well, maybe not inadvertently -- a figure. The people behind the Marvel branding, displaying their own control of profits for movies based on their comic book characters (Stan Lee's cameo is now obligatory), apparently felt it necessary to redo the Hulk to set up for an Avengers project alluded to by the appearance of Robert Downey, Jr., i.e. Iron Man, at the end. But effectively they shirked Ang Lee's 2003 rendition -- which, script and less pixie-bad-ass CG aside, was one of the most interesting attempts at a movie rendering of the comics, including the panels -- in favor of this. Apparently they had to make a matching set with Iron Man: along with all that described above and the duplicate instances of "We've got a bogie," the plotlines duplicate renegade heroes whose boss rivals are created from the same material. In Iron Man this forces the hand of the naivete of the dream. Vigilantism is nothing but the dream, the driving principle of military escalation, to top it all out. The awareness of Tony Stark (and Robert Downey, Jr. playing him, as he was reported to have called for this in the script) that he's part of the problem is cut off at a duplicitous partner. The evil within is conveniently made external. Where it would have got interesting was if Stark had come to the realization of the same problem after the superhero act. And as if this wouldn't be apparent, the coming out scene for this reduction to naive simplicty is Afghanistan. If the setting hadn't seemed exploitative already for superhero wet dreams, a dumb movie cliche knock-off of villagers being terrorized, with kid pulled away from father, makes Iron Man not just heavy-handed, but lead-footed in the mouth. [6/08]
Wilde (1997). Credits. If homosexuals, or homosexuality, have a right (I'm using the idiom here) to be portrayed as much or as openly as any other type of relationship, intimately or physically, does that mean they have to be portrayed as profusely or sappy as any heterosexual romance? The question does cut more than one way. There are exhibitionists of various persuasions, as well. But the question about rights and portrayal may be the more pertinent, or tricky, or go broader or be more complex. Oscar Wilde's trial touches off this matter particularly for being as inadvertent, because of how it was Wilde who sued for libel and in British law the burden of proof is on the accused to prove the truth of the slander. This film skirts that matter, as it does everything, trying to sweep the life story of Wilde into feature length, and becomes rather the eternal problem of the biopic. One of those stately British mini-series with carriages and re-polished halls and re-fitted Victorian dining rooms would be better suited than a stately British feature movie with carriages and halls and hats. So would we do this movie injustice to here talk about a matter it does scant justice: the matter of justice itself, where it's a matter of rights, portrayal, "decency," morals? Wilde's marriage, the onset of his fame and fortune, the character of Bosie, an aristocratic brat as intolerable as he is compelling even as a psychological study, the whole cross-section of homosexual life and activity of the times, the Greek ideal form of the older-younger couple in contrast to a more modern (also paralleling hetero mores) recipriocal or mutual or homogeneous relationship, the contrast of the perfectly legal awful, and hetero, behavior of the Marquess of Queensberry, Wilde's time in hard labor prison (fer crissakes, have we had any account of this beyond or behind "Reading Gaol"), his demise abroad, and more -- are all swept along with such a blithe and dainty finery (the detached angelic obliging wife, the eccentric supportive Vanessa Redgrave mother, are in such sing-song cliche, they're like riffs in this sort of chamber music redo, which, by the way, has obtrusive modern swells of magesty and melo-tragedy) as to seem just less pertinent enough anymore not to disturb, as if we all take it for granted with, our costume drama. [5/08]
Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Credits. Showing the truth about the way people believe in the truth. The investigator of the photographs who says that no matter what the spin, the photo still tells what happened, thus stating, testifying, to nothing so much as his own conviction of this immediate or un-mediated, unretouched truth. The levels, ripples of this. Morris is shrewd enough to understand the pretense of a transparency of the "documentary" form of the medium. But does Morris's own empathetic involvement, the interview process with his "interitron," give us a kind of justification for this empathy? He talked before the showing of this film about the smile of Sabrina Harman, how all disappears behind that smile (Cheshire cat). No less her complicity. The fact that she wrote letters to her love, which Morris re-presents particularly in her case, could be no less a ruse, and there is nothing else re-presented here to corroborate her genuineness, ingenuousness or disingenuousness. The same, then, for everyone, including the CACI Corp interrogator, whose shrugging style of comment could trade as much bullshit for straight talk. We all know how we work ourselves up into portrayals of ourselves that will be more presentable, how we hedge when we are in a situation that seems to press for both truth and repute. Dr. Death and The Fog of War were mostly about this account of oneself, Morris making it most clear his films are testaments of that more than some naive objectivity. Morris's style for this more recently (since A Brief History of Time, in my opinion -- compare that to Fast, Cheap and out of Control) v. The Thin Blue Line. A bit of ingenuousness trap for him, analagous to J.R.R. Tolkien and allegory. Perhaps if Morris weren't so dismissive of style as associated with this simplistic sense of truth, he'd be a better stylist. While everything he does now can be explained in contrast to the purpose of re-enactment, at least naively construed, there's still the matter of the repetitive or cumulative aspect of these thick, soupy, slo-mo close-ups, with the equivalent Glass-like score (here by Danny Elfman, for heaven's sake) and the context of them when serving to acquit a man on death row, re-enact impressionability and suggestibility of testimony or evidence, than in merely lyrically illustrating dramatic points or figures of people's accounts. The Hawking movie has been the most ambivalent presentation, the presentation of the most ambivalence, with the illustrations carrying out the flat-footed figure that refined scientific minds are given to. Nuremberg comes to mind, here, too. [4/29/08, San Francisco International Film Festival, Kabuki Theater, Errol Morris present.]
Lust, Caution (2007). Credits. Ang Lee at his best and worst. His first problem was the script, by James Schamus and Hui-Ling Wang. While it's easy to see the temptation for the flashback structure -- to first show Wong Chia Chi, played by Tang Wei, in the milieu of the Shanghai wealthy and then show how she got there -- it makes the addtional jump backwards more clumsy. The opening scene at the mah jong table is so rushed you wonder what the suspense is about. Then in the flashback, the student theater troupe stuff is run off in similar pace. So much exposition has to be thrown down in abrupt lines of dialogue, developments come off capricious, contrived, even if, somewhere, in real life or fiction, there is a story that is not. It's another case of trying to cram too much story in too little time (cf. Batman Begins, Camille Claudel). Someone said that short stories make better movies than novels, and this is a lesson why. The movie spends its time in the wrong places. The dramatic centerpiece, Wong Chia Chi's relationship with Mr. Yee, played by Tony Leung, has been made only part of this movie, and even at that, there's a scene where the woman tells others what's going on in that part. Which means the movie is not dramatizing that for us. After establishing Mr. Yee's sadistic bent, the jump to this explanation is, well, just that: a jump. We had no time to see why there was any real ambivalence on her part. Maybe the scriptwriters were worried that without the extra background parts, the whole thing would come off too much like Notorious. All these scenes with her meeting contacts, one of whom is holding back his love for the sake of her mission, make it all too Notorious. Maybe that's also why they make a movie-poster reference to Suspicion instead of Notorious. But for trying to avoid the camp aspect of that, inadvertent or not, they don't avoid the flightiness of the plotting. Lee, as with other material, notably Hulk because it was some of the worst to deal with, makes something more of it, particularly with Wei Tang, the newcomer selected for this part. Wei Tang is the sort of thing Zhang Ziyi was meant to be. Without being so in the conspicuous way, Tang can be more plain, more cute and more seductive. And in scenes on the street or in the cafes in Shanghai there is a wispy quality that harmonizes with Tang's looks, not just in the sense of her appearance, her guise -- and there is grist in this movie for a trick on period piece costume drag, though, again, not made the most of -- but of her regard. There's an alternative hypothesis, however, that Lee suggests, a kind of passive verison of the auteur theory, something like a Vincente Minelli or George Cukor, as opposed to a Hitchcock or even a Howard Hawks, that he's more obliging to than imposing on his scripts. [3/08]
Volver (2006). Credits. Almodovar is a cross of Fassbinder and Fellini. He does things fast and florid at once. About the last four or five Almodovar movies have left me feeling like a date holding a beautiful flower but stood up. Women on the Verge was the peak of Almodovar for me, when it all came together best. Somewhere in that streak was Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, and The Flower of My Secret, that had the beautiful passage with the handbills falling down. He's like Fellini in the sort of lyrical, fluid style, but also in that he makes great passages, really great fabric, but not really great works as a whole. He's even better than Fellini -- try that one on -- in that respect. He's more wily, more sophisticated, more shrewdly and supplely sensuous. That dash is also because he's more offhand. Watching Volver, the Fassbinder part hit me. Like Fassbinder, he does everything fast. The stories are told really quickly, everything run off and crammed in. And that in turn makes him like Jim Thompson, that sort of pulp pace even though there's something more there. One chapter will be amazing, the next throwaway. But in his recent movies, Almodovar's melodramatic tone is mixing such abject stuff with the burlesque that it makes things impertinent. In Volver, for example, the murder of the man is so rushed into the rest, but played so seriously at that. It's lurching. And despite the fact it ties in with the revelations of the conclusion (and what the title is also expressing), dramatically, the way it's played, it's frivolous. Yes, also like Fassbinder, it's a burlesque of something like Douglas Sirk, or melodrama, and also part of that drag is dressing up stuff that is much racier, which really means not dealt with. But it's also still grasping, reaching for too big a dramatic bang even with the glancing, cheeky treatment. [3/08]
Untold Scandal (2003). Credits. Exercise in futility. Maybe they should stop trying. Why is it that Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses inspires so many people to make movies? It's an epistolary novel, in the form of the letters between characters, and if that form didn't present difficulty enough, the convolutions of amorous intrigue, of duplicity, of ambiguity, of betrayal in the technical sense, meaning how one person betrays his or her own feelings, and in writing, let alone someone else's for him or her, makes for a necessary failure in dramatic portrayal with third-person omniscience. But for some reason, this work keeps inspiring people to make movies, and try they do. The difference in the endings is what tells the slant. While Roger Vadim's modernized (for the 60s) version had the most horrible deux ex machina punishment of the woman, the 1988 Stephen Frears version (of the play by Christopher Hampton) narrowed this down to manipulation of just such repute, closer to the book, at least in the spirit of comments about this by the Marquise character, the double standard of repute for men and women. This Korean version, directed by Je-young Lee from a script by him and Dae-woon Kim and Hyeon-jeong Kim, shifts in favor of true love, so that it's not just that the marquise and the vicomte (here Lady Jo and Lord Jo) are snared in their own wiles, or disabused of the conceit that one drives feelings rather than being driven by them. The ambiguity of passion itself is undercut by the tears in the seducer's eyes, and one of the few voiceover readings of a letter is used for him to declare this. That there is a line between "true" love, fidelity, on the one hand, and "games," roguishness, seduction, on the other, that this line would not be also in "love" itself, that "true" passion would not be as incidental, momentary, deceptive of its own account, not to mention as selfish, arrogant or manipulative, and subject to representation -- and that this is what would equally confound those who think they can be certain on either side of it, libertines and moralists forming a perfect couple, complementary, sharing the same presumptions -- is left open by the novel, in spite of its catastrophic ending in the form of high tragedy. The transfer to the Chosun dynasty is what's apt about this production. The manners and effects of the so-called hermit kingdom -- repression of Catholicism and Western influence is portrayed here -- are served nicely by the story. As for modern Korea, this movie shows, at least to a West that may not be getting much of it, the level and range of production, alongside things like The Host and Chunhyang. There's at least the level of lavish period pieces, if that's anything but an index of industry. The placid establishment-shot presentation of the finery is scarcely different from American or European costume dramas, no matter how Korean the finery is, indeed much like the 1988 Dangerous Liaisons. The Chosun reproduction is certainly interesting, the colors of the clothes and especially the food. The greatest contribution, however, is the performances, particularly the two main female roles. Mi-suk Lee as the Lady/Marquise has beauty, age, fragility, cunning, spite all composed with such subtle fluctuations, she makes Glenn Close's performance seem gaudy. Do-yeon Jeon as the chaste Lady Sook achieves what is so difficult for the role, which is to play humility without making it an affectation, even though it may also be an unconscious affectation! American actors are so marinated in this culture of demonstrativity that it would be very hard to imagine one able to bring off this aspect of a retiring countenance (Meryl Streep is the notable exception to prove this rule). I don't know about the Korean it's translating, but that English title is an oxymoron. [3/08]
Auto Focus (2002). Credits. Maybe it's appropriate this movie is like a sitcom, if that can be an excuse to be bad like one. Episodic, convenient introduction of material, frantic, too busy with trying to compress so many incidents, instead of taking the time with any of them to be more evocative. It's a biopic expository style, with expressiveness tacked on as effects. Paul Schrader here directed the script by Michael Gerbosi and it's hard not to compare it to Taxi Driver, where Schrader wrote and Martin Scorsese directed. What was achieved for Travis Bickle, milieu and character together, is missed here. The attempts at the jocularity, debauchery, the optimism and degradation of Bob Crane and these people in the 60s, and at framing them all ironically with sitcom insouciance, Crane's narration even to post mortem testimony, end up with none of them, with something nondescript. Kinear gives another good acting effort, but here his confusion in character keeps looking like confusion about the character. Willem Dafoe has been amped up to such a strange chipper quality, it seems more of an evasion for the character than something to express about him, as if the writer or director worrying about someone taking offense. [2/08]
Dead Man (1995). Credits. Is it only because of Johnny Depp that Jim Jarmusch here comes off as a Goth princess, his attempt at a gallows humor vision of the American West pixyish? For that he's got Cripsin Glover, too, the very stamp of self-satisfying weirdness. The black-punctuated scene presentation is only effective in the opening train sequence, where it gives a nice sense of the elapse of time, but even that, despite the train journey signified, is dragged out -- and on to Glover. For the rest of the movie, this curtain falling and raising effect works with the outdoor set look to be perhaps like dioramas, but it's more like 50s or 60s westerns, or even TV. This is a Tim Burton Daniel Boone. Reference, if that's what you can call something foisted, to William Blake does not mitigate this. For all the business of the spiritual journey with the wandering loner Native American called "Nobody," with a shot to the heart, wanted posters, the scourge of the country, and even the Blake that's quoted, it seems some potential has been missed, as if we've walked through too canny to notice the allegory. Perhaps that was the very idea, but Jarmusch has still given us something too flat-footed. The ham-handed stuff with Robert Mitchum and Lance Henrikson (hammy hand stuff with him) certainly doesn't help. Perhaps Jarmusch wanted to insist on himself being a stupid white man (I'm citing the movie), perhaps he wanted to stick to his own guns, the naive or at least minimal style that worked nicely in Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law. Here what comes off best for that is Gary Farmer. With all the other star parts and appearances that just get too cute, Farmer's is the one compelling performance, apart from Depp's eyes. Depp is a passive actor, but for that a screen presence in the sense Bela Belazs thought of the face. (By contrast, Depp does not come off well when trying to be too active: cf., if you can bear to, the Pirates of the Carribean movies.) It's the way he looks, both actively and passively. He's an imago as a mirror, a stand-in at the same time as an object for the audience: infatuating because infatuated. This was apparent by Edward Scissorhands and it's easy to see why people want to use him for this sort of cipher protagonist, although it's also too easy to rely on. Trying to get more from less can also seem like chewing too long on too little, as with Neil Young's music for the soundtrack. The main piece that is played again full in the closing credits is a great blend of Young's accoustic and electric composition, but the use of the music in the movie is too repetitive of just some riffs. [2/08]
Killer of Sheep (1977). Credits. How to make something of nothing. The relative nothing available to Charles Burnett was both the means and the subject matter. The something he made from it was like a zen principle or judo move: use the sparseness to your advantage. In this case, it was to evoke even broader sparseness. Non-actors, poor quality film stock and sound production, readymade music (this was a reason the film did not get a wide release in its day, copyright issues), none of that is a loss or detriment when you know how to assemble and compose, to shoot well and use dry apposition. The lack of narrative, at least of some dialectical progression, is the strength of this expose of enforced idleness. So when we see a boy laughing while he's being tied to the railroad tracks under a parked boxcar, the sense of foreboding is left to evaporate. This isn't a drama of climaxes. It's a tone poem of the anticlimax of these lives. Even literally so, and the way Burnett plays the conjugal malaise is equally deft. While others made louder statements, indignant, brash or what they thought would be revolutionary, Burnett made something in the opposite direction: a figure that is all the more chilling for being quieter. It's right there in the title, and what's killer is the final stroke, the last two scenes juxtaposed. [2/08]
Aliens v. Predator -- Requiem (2007). Credits. The winner between the franchise creatures before this team-up got started is the predator, in the sense that the combo idea is nothing like Alien. The original Predator movie was a cloddish production that just happened to be fun because of the turnabout on macho bad-asses. The fact that it was made like those Commando movies only enhanced that effect. Alien degenerated into its own species of parasitic sequels. Now, all the unflinching carnage to the contrary, the humans have won completely, because this is nothing but a dumb slasher (if that's not redundant) movie with some monster fights in it. For that part, at least, it's better than the previous Aliens v. Predator movie, and for not having to somehow tie itself to that one, although it blows that by having to add its own twist-tie to the already degraded Alien storyline. They keep making the monster scenes dark, almost too dark. Whether this is to hide or blend in the computer graphics, rubber suits or whatever mechanical effects, or whether it's just fatuous emulation of more particularly the first copy, James Cameron's Aliens -- the rain, the military units, the same strobe effects and beeping sounds -- amounts to the same. Some time ago, when this idea of aliens v. predator was being kicked around on the Internet by its own species of fandom -- and this is a case of fandom bringing about the movie rather than vice versa -- before the videogames that preceded the movies, I read some stupid scenarios and realized just how awful this project would be if it were nothing but this kind of clamor. In high school, I had a joke with some buddies. We'd pretend to be little boys and say, "Ew, what if alien versus Jaws"? Any dialogue that followed was a parody of absurd gainsaying. But the idea did have one good possibility: What if there were a movie with no humans and no dialogue? A sort of invented nature film, or at least a pure excursion of two made-up creatures. Exactly what wouldn't happen. If Alien and Aliens were Rocky movies for the human species, we now see the extent of our anthropocentrism: no matter how much worse than the monsters the human characters are fabricated, we still think they have to be there for anything else to matter. [2/08]
There Will Be Blood (2007). Credits. There Will Be Bowling Pins. The proportion is all screwy. Paul Thomas Anderson has refined his moviemaking, the directing part, if he still hasn't got the knack of screenplay, the foundation, the story, the broader conception. Perhaps, then, better than anyone currently, he serves as a demonstration of the difference between the two, writing a script and directing a movie in general, more specifically the problem of movies now. While the bid for everything else about movies to be their own form of garrulousness has left behind the screenplay and story-building, and most directors have gone with it, Anderson, by some accident, seems to be quite capable. Here he shows study of, or favorable similarity to, Terrence Malick and perhaps Elem Klimov in, respectively, the elliptical montage style and the conflation of sound and music tracks, the music conceived often as the same effect of the noise of the scene. Anderson also shows the deftness of an artist to imitate another art, using themes in the musical sense, the music as an arc across scenes rather than as decorum flush with them, a line to weave scenes around rather than be subordinated to. Unfortunately, this is to a fault, as he also shows the risk of his own extent of this. The original music, by Johnny Greenwood (also of Radiohead), often slips into the kind of suspense theme response conditioning that with this conception feels not only like it's hammering the sense of one scene, but dragging or pushing you to the next one. Anderson's music selection -- he made as much fun of this sort of indulgence with the cassette tape joke in Boogie Nights -- can also be pushy, as with the Brahms violin concerto, a famous showboat, here delivered shrill to the point of distortion and haranging incongruously from the rest of the soundtrack as well as inexplicably in the context of the scene. Anderson's tack is a snickering, muckish naturalism, which for finally making a subject, in other movies, of the porn world, was a propos. But the same problem he had there with matters of broader conception, the sloppy convergence of lives stuff that became an orgy in Magnolia, he has here with the allegorical or emblematic aspects of Upton Sinclair's story Oil! Even the title change tells (on) Anderson's story. If Oil! wouldn't suffice, it wasn't so much for sensationalism, as for a more tawdry joke. Otherwise, it's just pretentious and stupid. If you don't see the black screen with title that opens the film as a kind of joke played on drama and tragedy, the upshot carpet pulled from under the the polite formality of pretending we don't see what's coming, the same title is shown immediately after Anderson's utterly snickering, muckish climax. It's as if Anderson wants his movie to spoil itself for you, as well as the story it was based on. The antagonism, here, is between this cold steak chewing, Anderson's rakish detail, and the symbolic purpose of the characters, which was supposed to be the antagonism. As perhaps conceived by Sinclair, the clash between preacher and oil man, who can't get around their own conflict despite a common pursuit, is as apt today as it was when the novel was written. In Anderson's movie, this is sidelined, then the last scene brings it back as the payoff not invested. Whether excesses of Sinclair or Anderson, making the oil man the central figure, following all his other paths, in particular the time spent on the man who claims he's the brother, makes Anderson's wallowing finale all the more impertinent. The confusion about Paul and Eli Sunday also contributes to this, as does Anderson's major casting flaw for this, Paul Dano. The preacher character needs more the stature of an Elmer Gantry (to add more to the confusion of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis), but with Dano he's like one of those movie-cliche Amish, or John Boy Walton, with his careful diction. Next to Daniel Day-Lewis's absorbed and absorbing caricature with Teddy Roosevelt oratorical style, Dano makes the preacher a mismatch, and the oilman comes off inordinately more savage a bully. Even if symbolically this is apt, or simply the comment intended, on the level of the code, dragged out to banal analogy (milkshakes) after already petty laboring, it's exorbitant. Do you see what I'm saying? O.K., look. Let's say that the level of the representation is this bowling ball, and the symbolic level is -- no, let's say the bowling ball is the bowling pin and the symbolic level is this person's head. [1/08]
The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Credits. It's that kind of movie where observation is ejaculation. Why, there's even circle jerks, the scenes set in restaurants and bars with the carefully selected table setting of friends, the camera floating around them to make them spin like a lazy Susan, because somehow that just says how everything is so fucking lush we can't hold it. Movies like this are apt records of the psychological tailoring of what might be otherwise documented. As if we cared about the future with movies like this (a certain strain of movies have been stuck in this adolescence since about 1977), perhaps some day someone can look back on this and see this day's equivalent of Capraesque folksiness: the justification of shitheel treatment as "character." Meryl Streep's manicured peremptoriness could be a sharp shot at this nasty status in the "free" market of demand -- and the world of fashion could just as well be that of doctors, lawyers or the movies for all the exploitation of interns and "assistants" (at least whores ask a price). But it's hard not to feel her performance and Stanley Tucci's, which is also good, are wasted by a sort of vile affection. While it wants to be big enough not to have screwball revenge, the plot goes for twists of that tonier sort of American message movie melodrama (but isn't that how it goes -- haute couture always puffing up shlock), and with all the Friends-ied and fluffed up stuff, it's as vain and presumptuous at it's little scheme of double-dealing as the speech Streep delivers of the fashion world appropriation of all our choices. You have no choice, consumer. You know you want it. [1/08]
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). Credits. An exercise in the mundane, realism beyond the "realism" that's really a name for a film period/movement/style. Despite more obvious differences, this is similar to Irma Vep as an unabashed consideration, if not celebration, of the mundane. An old man in a block of flats in Bucharest one ordinary dim-lit evening with his cats is having persistent headaches and vomiting and calls an ambulance. The movie is the run of his evening's ordeal, with everyone, his sister on the phone, the neighbors, the medical staff, moralizing and lecturing him about his drinking before paying attention to his problem. It's done with just the right touch, a sort of gossipy glancing to the whole thing, no attempt to be any more dramatic, catching that Eastern European colloquy where even reproaches and insults can be delivered as polite formalities. Until a senior doctor appears who is the biggest fucking jerk of all, no matter his reason for it. The old man's neighbors tell the ambulance driver what he's been drinking, a home-made concoction of vanilla, caramel and alcohol. The vice is as much a sweet tooth as anything. Although the movie uses "handheld" camera (I hold it off in quotes because, having always been a sort clumsy descriptive term, redundant and not really specific, it's such a ridiculous affectation, now, with the cellphone, amateur pandering to everything, and nothing should be exempted from the fault of this pretense), they actually manage to make something interesting out of that, such as the opening shot where the windows of an apartment building seem to float in tandem in the darkness. This shot is one of the best uses of handheld I've ever seen, actually uses it for something, does something with it. The whole movie is low, incidental light, yellow, a kind of warm, cozy, unimposing tone for the subject matter. It has that sort of din of the ordinary, and this contrast to the possibly dire drama is, at the same time as commentary on medical bureaucracy, that benign indifference, as Camus called it, of nature. It goes on, especially in hospitals, when a particular person's life crisis is washed in with others, but anywhere else as well, even with the best of our care. [12/07]
Intolerable Cruelty (2003). Credits. What better myth might look like, if pop went Moliere as the opposite proportion of the Disney air-spun folk pretense, if it were adult rather than sublimated infantilism. That's more the effect of this movie than the Shakespeare quoted in it. This may be the first time the arch style of the Coen brothers seems necessary, to serve some other purpose. Farce played as screwball, with Clooney doing almost Cary Grant mugging (better for being not quite so), provides caricature so that there is no mistaking this for the swank of either current movie drama or prestige comedies, or for the kind of smugness that passes for quirky in what is uselessly called "indie." Despite it being a difficult package to accept, a match-up of two glamor pusses that also happen to be the two biggest bobble-heads, Clooney and Zeta-Jones are well served by walking this same line. Clooney already showed, in Batman Forever and the Coens' own O Brother, Where Art Thou, that it's better to be the parody than the target. While he's more recently eschewed the Batman role for supposedly more serious aspirations, the super matrionial attorney here in a similar way benefits from the same parallax, if not paradox: it's more sophisticated to be able to do satire of the sophisticated, to be able to play comedy well. The senior partner sounds like the Martin Short character that's the show-biz counterpart, but also suggests Sam Jaffe in The Lost Horizon. [12/07]
Batman and Robin (1997). Credits. Dillutions of grandeur. The ice beam on the whole city, Anod's strain to do the souped up acting called for by Joel Schumacher, the loads of bad concert lighting and latex and gloss, the hero in any of these movies is the hero sandwich, the pile-on aesthetic. So much goes into stacking things together, hyperbolizing, aggrandizing, trying to outbid the flourishes on the 1970s roccoco of the costumes and vehicles for crissakes, that there is no care for anything else. By now, Burton's idea of stacking villains has become the formula, and it's as if they've given up on trying to script one decent plot for a pile of plot elements from a script meeting brainstorm. George Clooney, in spite of all of this, is actually just the right current star for the role, solving all the problems the Batman revival has brought with Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer. Clooney is as good for Batman as Batman is for him, because of the serious swagger that can only be taken in an arch way. Take him too seriously, just like Batman -- a man in a cowl with pointy ears -- and it's the strain of melodrama. Even Clooney's bobble-head tic is useful for this. With tongue-in-cheek seriousness, Clooney can, by contrast, be more dashing, because of the self-ironic way. Look at Cary Grant, or the difference between Alec Baldwin hosting SNL and then in some of the terrible heavy thrillers he's been cast in. Clooney is not camp the way Adam West was. Whereas Michael Keaton was a similar move as West, he was a turn away from current action-movie macho -- a very good idea -- but he also added the other contrast of trying to do serious acting with Batman. Despite trying too hard at the brooding, he did a good job, but he was working against the iconic weight of the lore -- literally in the movie with the latex and paint and wires and gadgetry to bring it off as spectacle. Clooney, precisely, is an offhand rendition. Unfortunately, everything working against him is the how bad the rest of the movie is. They got the right Batman as the whole series was hitting the bottom. [11/23/07]
No Country for Old Men (2007). Credits. The law is too late. As Nietzsche noted the complication of causality, effect actually precedes cause: first the effects are discovered, then the cause is sought. This is, of course, often tragic, and what tragedy is founded on (cf. Oedipus). The Anton Chigurh character is an exterminating angel, but his manner is that of an exasperated expert. That's the comic flair that makes the tragic more insinuating. He doesn't suffer fools lightly, but he makes his business life and death. Thus he also shows the horror of acting on those impulses, of making his criticism destructive, literally. What may be the shrewdest turn of this story, something put in plain sight so that it can go unnoticed, is that this sense of divine judgement Anton has is that of the vigilante (as Woody Harrelson's character says, you might say he has principles). What is accepted for every action hero, all the more pertinent in the rest of us for being symbolic, is here simply shown as psychopathic. We all feel at some point, to some extent, alone in our judgment, and have despotic impulses, a taste for justification as poetic justice if not vengeance. Those who act on this are supposed to be the bad guys, and those who don't, or can't even get to, who are supposed to be the good guys, are eaten up with it nonetheless. There is no final solution, there are only real problems. The Coens give us a scene to let us know this Anton figure is also symbolic, right after the sheriff says he may be a ghost, a puzzler of disconnection that suggests the fantastic, and another scene to let us know this figure is all too flesh and blood. My one problem with the movie is that the latter scene also acts as a concession to the symbolic recrimination the story has gone great ways to depart from. While in tone this movie seems closer to Fargo, actually the concept is similar to the Coen brothers' best film of the unrestrained -- at least, if not surreal -- variety, Barton Fink. It's Barton Fink done as Fargo, but whether that's some kind of apotheosis, culmination or just dovetail of their oeuvre, doesn't really matter. Cormac McCarthy's story has the same kind of impatience for ceremony -- action or crime or suspense genre fiction convention bullshit -- his Chigurh character has for pleasantries and rationalizations. This leaner, meaner drama could be called brutal, but with the preponderance of hyperbolic action wish fulfillment and revenge fantasies, it's hard to see how the brutality lies on the side of something else. And this something else not only uses the git-to-it manner of its characters to better dramatize (than just tell), it makes from the same dispatch an elegant statement of the haunting of the law. A virtue of necessity. The Coen brothers give all this snap. That sounds belittling, but it's a great stroke, one kind of deftness with another. The whole thing has the sort of in media res fascination that makes us watch and find out, rather than simply be told. Like Vertigo or The French Connection, it's the way sound films become silent ones. The Coens have, in some cases, pared down the characterization to such quick strokes, it's almost unnoticeable, incongruous with their lavishness in other movies and here. It's a diversionary subtlety, change of tempo or tone. The casting alone was a brilliant stroke, going afield not only with Josh Brolin, but abroad with Javier Bardem (Kelly MacDonald, too, but for some reason they brought her in to do the Texas accent). The two of them just look so much out of the fabric of current movie stars, they helped make even the TV commercial feel different from any other fare. [11/07]
Batman Begins (2005). Credits. The gesture of this movie is worse simply by the conceit of the title, an attempt to wrest the Batman conception which nonetheless only follows suit -- latex, too -- of the Burton and Schumacher Batman line. Batman has always been different versions, different renditions, in the comics. Even the Frank Miller Batman, which the makers of all these movies were supposedly inspired by, but somehow never brought off anything like, takes poetic license of the broadest strokes without any such supercilious announcement. The Ra's al Gul character and story line, started in the 70s by Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams, gave a more epic, James Bond air to Batman, later a leaner, more cinematic drawing style. Here that pretense is in sweeping epic vista photography of settings for Asian warrior training, sans latex, with Liam Neeson, doncha know, who, despite being a good match from the star pool for the character in the comics, just can't help ringing too Jedi. What breath of fresh air the Batman character actually gets in this setting with his cowl off is spent by the pace, a ridiculous cram-it-all-in job that, while also symptomatic of current inflationary trends -- action and computer effects mean clamor and hyperbole -- is also strangely similar to the 1988 Camille Claudel, which was just trying to cram too much biography into a movie. In the more contemporary vein there's the atrocious "action" editing that actually edits out all the action. It's just a flurry of shot, the movie effect of flash and bang that's in every trailer and TV commercial cut, now. There's also something almost pathetic about the line-up, here, Michael Caine, for example, giving the role of Alfred a wryness it never really called for, let alone deserved. The appearance of Gary Oldman is like a joke, if not one in just the pejorative sense. I really don't know how to explain that one: if after all the vein-bulging performances he's given, when it cuts to kindly young police officer named Gordon and it's Oldman in proto-commissioner hair and glasses, you don't have a burst of laughter -- well, maybe you eat this stuff up. And then Morgan Freeman on top of that -- as Batman's Q! Absolute throwaway stuff, and throwback to Victorian, silent movie melodrama, are scenes of Bruce Wayne sacrificing his reputation for the sake of others. A dumb scene with a sports car and two bunnies serves no other purpose, but even dumber is having Wayne pretend to be drunk to shew away the guests at the mansion. If Ra's al Ghul cares so little for these lives, why have him wait for this, and if they're going to have the place burned down as an astonishing plot twist and blow to Wayne/Batman, why wouldn't they do it with the guests there? That's of course letting alone why Ra's al Ghul would bother at all if he's destroying Gotham whole. This movie is firmly in the line of Batman movies since Burton in the way it wants to squeeze so much in. The whole pretense of a darker, more serious rendition of a Batman origin has to pile on all that and an extra villain, too. Any one of the Batman rogue gallery would be worth feature movie length on its own, as the Joker was (and although that had to be twisted into the Batman origin), and Scarecrow is apt for the whole theme of the use of fear. [11/07]
Control (2007). Credits. Not nearly as inventive an evocation of the era, and even Joy Division, as 24 Hour Party People, this movie nevertheless does a good job of honoring the spare style and tack of those guys at the time, not trying to be grandiose in either brag or muck. Sam Riley is good as Ian Curtis, gives that sort of soft assertion that comes off at least from the videos of Curtis. Samantha Morton is good in the more conspicuous acting way as Debbie, Curtis's widow, whose account this script is based on and who co-produced the film. Tony Wilson, of Factory fame, also co-produced, and is played here in resemblance to Steve Coogan's rendition as much as Wilson. New Order was involved as producers and with the soundtrack. There's much to be said for banality, but I've read much more perceptive and interesting banality about Curtis in liner notes. The meting out of events, unfortunately biopic, is a strange compromise. It's admirable that Debbie would want to honor even what took Curtis away from her, most conspicuously his lover, less so his thought that would also have included the art, the writing and music. The film does give the impression, if not exactly intended, that she missed out on lots of what he might have thought, as he grew away from her. It's admirable, too, that she want to make this about Ian Curtis rather than just her. But less compromise would be involved if this really had been about her, her account, from her perspective. Then the distance, the contrast, the ungraspable aspect of Curtis would have been featured in that way. The banality of the biopic itself, as opposed to a representation or evocation of banality, is perhaps in large part due to this paradox: you can't portray the solitude of a subject, or even truly subjectivity. This film gives the idea, and not as a bad one, that this 20-something fellow really needed to lighten up. He was taking everything far too seriously. But rather like The Lives of Others, Control only brings up the most interesting aspect as just one thread among others, almost a sidebar, and here way too late. The really compelling thing about Ian Curtis, what should be more pertinent now, is how he didn't want to be a star. Even the sort of rapturous artistic summit -- it could also be thought of as low rather than high -- that people imagined as somehow beyond or outside pop back then turned out to be not that sort of pretense for Curtis. What he gave of himself, in a way also that was perhaps too serious, became alienated to him when it became a wider, more popular phenomenon. The lines about this in voiceover are not identified for any context: did they come from a letter, something he wrote in a journal? The temptation to portray more than the perspective of Debbie is counterproductive. All concerned on the project wanted to recreate Joy Division performances, and despite the fact Riley does a good job of that, too -- really, what can be added there? Worse is the temptation to portray what nobody could be privy to, Curtis's last night and day leading up to his suicide. Of course we might be curious, but the audacity would be in refusing the temptation to portray this. If they'd stuck to the portrait of the relationship, they'd have done better to give a view of the apparent contradictions, or at least mystery, of Curtis, that we don't otherwise have. We've got the music, which of course, if even only in general, defies that sort of explanation. Or, the greater risk, even of including it in the movie, expresses it all better.
The tragedy of dying young: Ian Curtis. The tragedy of not dying young: John Lydon (aka Rotten). Curtis took himself out of the clamor for definition, including self-justification, and his wife offering this account at least has the merit of showing there's no closer for anyone to get. [11/07]
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005). Credits. One thing this little project fails to explicitly mention, that is, rip off, is the 1996 Irma Vep. Why does that movie matter rather than the work the film's title cites? Well, this movie Tristram Shandy wants to succeed at failing to be a movie of Sterne's great sham on storytelling. It does this by dropping into 20th century moviemaking self-conscious paralysis a la Felini's 8 1/2, this signaled by the biggest rip-off of the soundtrack, which also lifts Nino Rota music from Amarcord, Michael Nyman music from The Draughtsman's Contract, and Handel's Saraband already well lifted by Stanley Kubrick for period counterpoint effect. It's as if somebody here -- director Michael Winterbottom or writer Frank Boyce, or could it be actor Steve Coogan, or just whoever was wandering around on the set (but is it a set?), to believe this story -- thought borrowing for movie soundtrack compilation carried to the level of other movie soundtracks was another darling stroke of "post-modernist" self-referential irony. The problem is none of that is the equivalent of Tristram Shandy -- and at least here the older art preferential treatment with italics serves a practical purpose of distinguishing. Coogan as himself in an interview of himself makes comment along a well worn path that the novel Shandy is "post-modern before there was modernism to post," that comment itself well post of the faddish term "post-modernism," which was to begin with a misnomer post the heels of a misnomer. If you've somehow lost sight of the generic sense, then try this from one so-called post-modernist, Jean-Francois Lyotard: every modernism begins as a post-modernism. For Sterne, or Swift, Diderot, Voltaire, Fielding or even, if less reflexively, Dafoe, Goethe or even Smollett, to strike us as modernist may betray the reading habits of we belated 20th centuryists more than something unusual about then. This is a joke played too narrow and close, a party in-joke. It has nothing like the breadth of Sterne's parody, a great joke form plays at the expense of conceit. The movie has the good stroke of going into its characters' conceits, but that, too, suffers from the implausible compression, the scope of a movie production in one or two days. Why on earth did they feel compelled by Aristotelian unity when they had something closer to Aristophanes? Why tempt verisimilitude when you are holding up perhaps the greatest model of prolepsis, digression, of not coming to the point? Thus when Coogan as himself betrays that he's neither quite read nor is quite capable of reading Tristram Shandy, it produces the idea, if you didn't get it already, that the whole cast and crew haven't read this book, literally if not figuratively. (They don't miss on the trick of anticipating their own criticism -- the joke about two stars -- but the citation level can't guarantee hitting the mark, let alone immunity.) The character of driver Jenny with her boorish film spiels could be a straw man for more extensive consideration. Which brings us back to Irma Vep, that is, inasmuch as it doesn't. That was a movie celebrating banality behind, beneath or in spite of the movies, or even the banality of movies themselves as opposed to their grandiosity, but also as the same sort of thing for a travel experience where nothing quite works out, all the better for the charm of life. Tristram fails to be either sort of charming digression. Did Steve Coogan have his real-life girlfriend and baby on the movie set of this movie set, waiting around as he rushed off to get ready for scenes with his on-screen girlfriend and baby? Or was that his real-life girlfriend and baby? [10/07]
Crash (2005). Credits. Further proof the Oscars have become as regressive as the Grammys, a rear-guard trade show, more eulogy than recognition of innovation: some 20 years on, the interlocking lives craze becomes most hackneyed and gets awarded. This craze, which has gone all over the world, was mostly sparked by Robert Altman's Short Cuts in 1993, itself derivative, and in many ways in the pejorative sense, of Altman's own Nashville of some 20 years before that, which, of course, the Academy did not award. [9/07]
City of Ghosts (2002, credits) and Factotum (2005, credits). Writer, director, actor. An actor directing himself is like having no director, removing the throttle from the conceit of acting. To get his own property and even write the script compounds the problem. Matt Dillon has his own timidity, his retiring or unassuming manner, to thank for avoiding the grandeur of, on the one hand, the movie star (especially considering his near teen idol beginning), and on the other, the actor. He's a quieter presence as a star because he's serious enough about acting, but modest enough about that as to not make a spectacle of his conceit. If he's not Robert De Niro in the stature of his profession, neither is he Sean Penn in the professing of his stature. Dillon helps demonstrate this both ways, in the contrast between City of Ghosts, which he co-wrote (with Barry Gifford) and directed, and Factotum, written by Jim Stark and Bent Hamer and directed by the latter. The interesting thing here is the quieter way in which the conceit fails. In City of Ghosts, it's easy to tell that the tone and stance of the whole thing is not assured, assertive. The story meanders around its trappings, and the central character comes off as almost a cipher, with only pat motivations standing for characterization. With this sort of looseness, it's hard not to fault for even worse, such as using Cambodia as an exotic backdrop for the psychological indulgence of the westerners, no matter how serious, i.e. Oedipal, it may be. Dillon's compensation for this is the melodrama of bestowing a local with a bunch of money and then going after love (what flirtatious whimsy passes for) and art, an act of contrition only less inexplicable than Michael Corleone's because less of an attempt was made to explain it. Despite all that, Dillon's movie is not intolerable indulgence, either in self or anything else. (It's curious, too, how actors directing themselves end up looking worse when other actors in the movie come off quite well, perhaps because of professional courtesy or the same lack of throttle. James Caan, here, for example, is particularly good when he takes a turn at singing.) Perhaps it's because of, again, Dillon's more retiring manner. Bent Hamer takes as his premise an exercise of indulgence, and, doing justice to Charles Bukowski as not mere indulgence, also gets from Dillon's diffidence the sort of detachment that makes Bukowski almost majesterial in his circumstance. Hamer and Stark also created a script that presents Bukowski's writing better than it ever has been, and Dillon's rendition of it in voiceover may be the best thing about his performance. Without doing the hammy immitation of Mickey Rourke and Barfly in toto, Dillon gives an askance air that in Hamer's glancing conception is far more affecting. [9/07]
The Host (2006). Credits. The family that slays together. Asian pop -- and this is not so much a generalization of all Asian places as in contrast to the U.S. and Europe -- can have a kind of affecting earnestness. That may be only because so much of the U.S. movie business is trying to affect the same thing, but only comes off affected, whether because of the level of disingenousness by now, the build-up of sheen after so much corporate tailoring and pandering, ineptness nonetheless, or because of the pinch of familiarity: when it's your own language or idiom, it either sounds more dumb, or you can see and hear just how dumb it is. The lack of that sort of sophistication (meant in the more original sense, as degradation) does not mean there aren't the same pop aspects, motives, causes: marketing, targeting, formula, cliche. After all, it's narrative drama. Jump straight to the bullseye of a climax in this movie to see all the derivation: what was aimed at. This Korean Godzilla, which in a strange reversal of the recent path of movie production, has a special effects design team that calls its home San Francisco -- do they not farm the work out to South Korea, or Taiwan, Indonesia, India, the way the rest of the digital Hollywood has? -- benefits from tighter plotting and pacing, just as from reining in the proportion of the monster. The closer scale allows for finer detail in the blocking of the crowd attack sequence. The whole creature gets in the frame, rather than say, a colossal foot, and closer in gruesome fascination. Apart from those touches, which are hardly more than modish, it's so much more like Godzilla in what was not Godzilla in those movies: subplots. This, too, places it in the vein of pop more broadly Asian, Korean or Japanese or Hong Kong, for example, whether sophisticated or not, of the tendency to jump to another plotline rather than develop an existing one. Like the perpetual gyrations of fight coreography, which has spread from martials arts by degree into the bullet ballets and by kind into all other elements, plots have to take frequent turns around corners. You find yourself realizing after a while of some slapstick-pitched espionage that you'd forgot about the monster, or even whether this has anything to do with it. The other strange way this film is similar to the original Godzilla is in the pathos. Despite the fact it's also wrought in such a manic way it's hard to tell whether it's meant to be funny, there's a portrayal of suffering, even mourning, in a way you just don't quite get in American horror movies, more generally in action movies. The latter are too efficient, too instrumental, and it's precisely the unruliness by comparison that allows other interesting aspects, signification or tones, even for pop, no matter if it's flighty or silly. While Japan used Godzilla for the sentiment of a nation, the Koreans, here, are more modern bourgeois, as this monster draws together one strangely dysfunctional family and pits them as much against the overarching protection of an equally sinister state. The Americans are present as the model for that, though there's an exception thrown in for measure. The Korean student protests are represented, too. It's not quite the giddy topicality of the 60s Godzillas, but it has it's own high contrast of pandering references. The meditation on losing is a strain quite different from American melodrama. [9/07]
The Phantom Carriage (1921). Credits. A Christian (more emphatically protestant) cautionary tale is made more broadly affecting by its diffusion to fable, some complications of the salvation schematic which result, and by strokes of Sjostrom: dummy bodies for souls; some great tableau composition, such as a prostrate man filling the horizontal base of the frame and his adjunct sufferers making the vertical line on one side, and a clock face set off to the right at the upper edge of an otherwise dark frame; and, played by Sjostrom himself, some uncompromised malevolence, towards a jacket mended as charity, towards children and leading to a menacing moment that is a precursor to The Shining. Bergman inevitably must be mentioned where Sjostrom's influence is concerned, and the horizon line pushed high in the frame with the reaper driving the carriage was lifted for The Seventh Seal. Sjostrom's composition for faces seems not so directly to prefigure Bergman as the greater composition with light. It's enough of a directorial stroke just to have Hilda Borgström to put on film. Her eyes are incandescent with pathos, and she has the sort of elegant droop to her features, somewhat like Jeanne Moreau or Marie Trintingant, that can be pitiful or downtrodden without further effort. The flashbacks, a digression regression, are at first promising, for the charm of getting carried away, but become only a formal complication slightly more interesting than the point on which they converge. This redemption ending, a strain even for melodram, is a cheat not only on tragedy and catharsis, but the fable's own rules and groundwork. Better if it had ended with his duty as the carriage driver (more complicated for, or as, a Christian scheme, as well), or perhaps, a gesture too sardonic for such silent fare -- it's hard not to think of Guy Madden when you see a silent film now -- his drinking the poisoned tea. [4/07 Castro Theater, as part of San Francisco International Film Festival. The 50th Anniversary of the Festival coincided with that of Janus Films, which gave the former a new print of the film to mark the occasion of both. The Film Festival also had an original score composed and performed live by Jonathan Richman and an ensemble.]
Bound for Glory (1976). Credits. David Carradine playing Woody Guthrie is a decent choice for the time, considered against the type of actor that could have been chosen. As in the hotel audition sequence where Guthrie is contrasted to a glitzy crooner, Carradine has an offhand presence that is against the grain of staginess. He also gives an admirable effort, but in too many ways, it's just not right. His offhand quality is retiring, low key, whereas Guthrie, even with laid back flourishes or tones, was spry. Carradine tries hard with the songs, but the way he wants to even honor Guthrie is by giving the music soul, which is unfortunately also an idiom and cadence contrary to Guthrie's, the epitome of unforced play in more than the musical sense of the word that is everything "folk" would do best to describe. Carradine shouldn't have to shoulder too much of the blame, as an actor, since this un-artsy sense of art is also where so many musicians who carried "folk" as a banner missed (Bob Dylan foremost). Hal Ashby's direction has a slow, creeping style to match the lying-in-wait aspect of Guthrie's attributes and development, and to showcase Haskell Wexler's photography. A very long take from the top of a train is the showboat extent of this, but it's also good mise en scene and is even more welcome in contrast to movies in the 2000s. Wexler's work here, with all the grain and horizon lighting, is paving the way for Terrence Malick in Days of Heaven (which Wexler also worked on). Poor direction pokes through in lots of stuff, such as the bad cowboy movie fighting, and the terribly handled scene in which Guthrie tells the rich woman he's married. Keeping track of that side of Guthrie, how his noble pilgrimages, his "touching the people," also happened to be galivanting and irresponsible to wife and children, was the right idea, but the execution is sloppy even for soap opera. [2/07]
On seeing approximately ten minutes of National Treasure (2004). Credits. If the budget of this movie were spent on the security system for the Declaration of Independence, maybe it would be as redundantly sophisticated -- or could that just be sophistic -- as it is portrayed. The balance act of sacred and profane, here, revering for a sensational thrill, could be as calculated by the political range of an audience as it could be flip or smug or just tossed off. The net result is the same, as familiar as every beat of this movie, a populism that is politically volatile and culturally mundane. Like all the "work" portrayed and of the portrait, all the gizmo lust and skip-cut, rock beat subterfuge, anything allegorical, even as a dramatic or interesting or workable ambiguity, is so much fatuous competence. In other words, trade any point about the aporia of the Declaration of Independence itself -- a rogue gesture as the grounds for justice, breaking the law in order to establish it -- for that of peddling its name value in the right climate. There are lines to that duplicitous effect spoken by Nicolas Cage, but it's the name of his character that may be most demonstrative. In an overwrought eponymous combo, the head of the Microsoft pirate clan is coupled with a founding father: Benjamin Franklin Gates. Aye mates, make off with the booty. That's our national treasure. Trademarked. [2/07]
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
