Fucking Åmål [Show Me Love] (1998). Credits. Sharper observations about the insensitivity of teen sensitivity are offset first by the pushy handheld that from the 90s developed into the movies' own prolonged adolescent fixation (we're still in it), a regression of earnestness and credulity; then by the plan of contrivance, thus projection and wish fulfillment, whimsy rather than observation. This latter is actually the correlative conceit of this great Bildungsroman indulgence that passes for serious or "real" or "independent" cinema or art over this same period. It's the intersecting lives problem. The breadth or complexity that -- so many characters, itself referring to the excess of perspective -- is supposed to give, if not demand, is reversed as device, convenience. Here a wheelchair serves as the machine of this deus, to float its character into every opportune moment, making each precisely less pertinent. What's realized by such realism is really the adolescent fantasy of showing them. Something like A Christmas Story (I happened to see a day before this) which cites and parodies this kind of imagination, as imagination, is thus more shrewd, as this perception, if not more realistic. The handheld camera demonstrates this in another way. The problem of immediacy is only more pronounced by reaching for a more subjective kind of view. Are we supposed to be actually there, and if so, filming with a personal video camera? Not only does our own subjective view not move so violently in relation to us it makes us sick, but the director's own choices, such as when he rapidly pans or zooms the camera to something else, are not only forcing our view, but also the issue of selection as emphasis, contrivance, shrillness. It's a kind of mise en scene violation of mise en scene, more conspicuous than editing even as it's trying to break the familiarity that's made it unnoticed. The tone of this can't be ambiguous when it arrives at the sort of after-school special, feel-good triumph concocted for the ending. For the kids all gathering around the bathroom, really, isn't it kind of hard to imagine anyone in a high school caring as much as this filmmaker? The real is precisely the trump of any one view of it. Or, in other words, as any teen can gainsay: get real. [12/25/10]
Humanoids from the Deep (1980). Credits. Use one part Creature from the Black Lagoon, one part Jaws and one part Alien. Sprinkle in T&A. Was this the first gratuitous rip-off of the Alien chest-bursting scene? [12/16/10]
The Steel Helmet (1951). Credits. A somewhat pithier version of multi-culturalism is delivered in TV soapbox manner. Notable that this Samuel Fuller effort has Robert Lippert as executive producer, whose legacy I'd recently seen remarked by the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 gang, with The Lost Continent and King Dinosaur. [12/15/10]
Winter's Bone (2010). Credits. It's hard to fault a movie that abstains from the longstanding bias of action, and the more recent one of hyperbolic spectacle. That it's a drama of the effects of previous action isn't just a joke or fortuitous, in what effects can mean for relations. It's like the famous Greek tragedy in this respect, even a curious suggestion with hands for eyes. While this movie's ambition seems more modest compared to so much modern spectacle, it's exceptional for just that. But there are still notes that ring false for something that's being so careful to be close to its subject. The tidy little resolution of the mysterious source of money is a melodramatic device, but its worse effect is cutting against the grain of the exposé. It's a forced relief precisely from catharsis, a false catharsis as if the fear and pity were something that needed to be quickly dispelled. The scenes with the apparent non-actors gathered around for music offer the example of the sort of anecdotal quality the movie's dramatizing is not, and it gives to imagination how the simple telling of a story can have even more tension, more in this removal, the distance between what is told and what is seen. For comparison to something more candid and that doesn't offer this kind of resolution, dispelling of effect, see Nobody Knows, or for an even more unassuming approach to the profound The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. [12/4/10]
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). Credits. The captain wants to go down with the ship. As if David Lynch wanted to show that he was not exempt from the sinking of Twin Peaks -- it went on beyond the resolution with Leland Palmer to become the sort of soap opera it spooked, farmed out to other directors who just didn't have Lynch's touch -- after stepping in and dealing a deft death blow to the series with it's final episode, something that also returned the spark, if it can be called that, of the uncanny, the blunt, sparse, oddly frank humor and the thick slightness of dream logic, he then produces this. His attempt to go back before the events of the series only expands its impertinence. He goes back even before the going back, but nothing about the murder in another town, which is the evil twin of Twin Peaks, any more than about the material we are shown with Laura Palmer, gives us anything keen or profound, or even interesting or evocative, towards the series or where it ended up. If the series was interesting also for being set off by the appearance of Laura's dead body, and showing its effects at the same time as trying to uncover and resolve what happened, why, precisely, go back on that? Even more of a waste is material with Agent Cooper, and not just because of the outrageous pop-in of David Bowie. Cooper was the destination, the cost of the whole enterprise, something Lynch shrewdly played with that same gallows offhandedness. Here, he's just tangential in a way that gives no sense to what occurs later, offering premonitions that short-change both further. If Lynch was trying to show Laura Palmer insulated, lost, he's done so from any sense of relation to Twin Peaks. [11/29/10]
Simon (1980). Credits. The lesson is one about being a messiah even more than following one, and Alan Arkin's character is an allegory for the way anyone can feel singled out against the crowd, the mass, culture. It's about the neurosis of control of others even by exception. There are clever observations, mostly in an assimilation of technocratic control and popularized mysticism, how these amount to the same obsession, and serve the willing up to exploiters. The immediate reduction of all this to a think-tank of five geniuses who are simply toying with the world is the main stroke of this blunt humor, the minimalism serving to mock the inflation, the emptiness of exaggeration (like conspiracy theory). It's a socializing move ("you should eat something"), and a debunking of the obsession even with debunking. But this minimizing is too slight in another way, too much of too little. Arkin's (almost literally) washed out persona is given little play and even less to play off of. The society he's responding to is reduced to his girlfriend and a TV cult, itself a redundant abstraction of the same point. Time gets wasted on a silly subplot with the military and Arkin is never really turned loose to give society in the movie what they want and society watching the movie to have this dramatized, except in a shorthand way by appearing on TV screens. It has as much to do with the frugal production, but it's too palliative to be surreal. [11/26/10]
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Credits. Conceit. Everything this connotes is demonstrated well by Woody Allen, and by this time, most often quite well. A mental activity, an opinion or consideration of self, a fancy trifle or fanciful idea, an elaborate or even forced metaphor, even a device or gimmick, an organizing theme or concept: Allen has the panache of taking this on, taking this up as the arms of artifice, including this reflexive frankness about the work and its author, that's as lucid and self-ironic, and witty, as Freud or even Nietzsche, even if the character of Allen in this movie pays them (somewhat ironic) short shrift. In the line of his movies leading up to this one, Allen has increasingly used a device -- human chameleon, schmaltzy agent, characters stepping out of movies -- but it's contrivance as an axis on which to turn things, an angle, a cast of light. Here it's like a tapestry of these woven together, assembled around a timeline of Thanksgivings, the reverie that gives onto the whole, as if wondering in and out of the various people at such gatherings. Matching the three Thanksgivings are three sisters, and the satellites of mostly their lovers who orbit them. Allen himself is located more tangentially, a kind of broader view of one's self among others, but also of the scope of this setting off. And there is the relay of voices, the voiceover thoughts, of different characters, also locating Allen among them, like Dickens in Bleak House, and a precursor to Terence Malick's broader conception of this in The Thin Red Line. There's even the strains of the device, such as a double double sister switch, along with Allen's version of melodramatic formality, happy ending, the optimism of a new romance, no matter how overtly he's stated the folly and unpredicatability of such -- and here he says it outright. The strain is also part of what Allen offers frankly about him, but thus the, self: no less than irrational dread, irrational hopes and projections. Allen's movies serve as another kind of representation, even document. To look back on them is to see this kind of frankness about the times they were made, the sentiment precisely by virtue of the artifice involved and an artifice of that sentiment, for all the things of the time -- "my city" -- and not the sort of maudlin flight from reality of so much fare of his contemporaries. The hommage to Duck Soup is more eloquent and well placed than that to cartoons in Sullivan's Travels. [11/25/10]
Jurassic Park III (2001). Credits. What Alien did as subtext is now ubertext. This movie, for example. [11/10/10]
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). Credits. The pandering to teen boy version of the techno geek version of macho bullshit gainsaying. Science used for badass superlative. Slop out a good portion of that, then jump to action. Please, please, please, why can't anything about dinosaurs, nature let alone extinct nature, not be fucking human family solipsism. Technocratic fiction. Note how a movie about dinosaurs has to be about concocting all these other protracted predicaments with special doodad gizmos and great long buses. What, we don't want to watch them just run down and eat people?
The Social Network (2010). Credits. Writer Aaron Sorkin writes all the characters the same way, they all have the same pitch of dialogue, and director David Fincher only augments this with his delivery, actors and editing. I'm not sure whether ultimately it serves better to portray clamorous people, clamorous culture, a clamorous world in such a clamorous way. Clamor itself has become a meager way to express the level of chase-ass we've attained, particularly with commercial, movie/video and digital hyperbole. Does the symptom become the cause, then, when this young Werther, Facebook perpetrator Mark Zuckerburg, has us all addicted to his rhythm of sublimated social conquest? [11/6/10]
Paranormal Activity 2 (2010). Credits. Hard to disguise narrative when it's a ghost story. Interesting proposition this produces: ghost story as general form of narrative -- generalizing the rules. Formalizing or making it model. The point of a ghost story is not to disguise that it's narrative. The familiarity of its form is also precisely this reassurance of the sublimation, of the fiction, of dealing with fear by other means. This at the same time, especially when, dealing with the most credulous kind of superstition. See The Exorcist, and extension here, the maid making this more explicit. Both of these factors are equally pandering, and the commercial movie form of this is only exploiting the fireside storytelling one. So no matter how much sophistication you add to the verisimilitude, it cannot -- because it must not -- disguise that it's narrative. Great effort is made to show the verisimilitude effects, the semblance of it, the emphasis of the similitude over the verity. [11/6/10]
Vanya on 42nd Street (1994). Credits. As with My Dinner with Andre, director Louis Malle is involved with Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn in a neat little trick. It could be called minimalism or clearing the palate, or a different tack of naivete or naturalism, but just thinking of what to call it (as "realism" or "naturalism" already betray) shows the conundrum of adequation, any zero degree of conceit. These collaborators know that, too, in their way, and that's part of the charm and sophistication. This one may even surpass My Dinner in its ingenuity, what it accomplishes. The trick of that previous movie involved the simple premise of a dinner conversation.
The trick with film in particular involves its tension between simply recording or documenting activity (a kind of realism without or minus realism) and formalizing it in other ways that this documenting process allows: from the beginning of its history, either showing utterly mundane subjects like workers leaving a factory, or using theatrical sets and editing to show devils appearing and men going to the moon. The dinner conversation was scripted and staged (see comments for detailed explanation of its trick), it was not simply a recorded or improvised conversation. So these collaborators were already using film as a kind of, paradoxically, more intimate theater. Here, they "stage" a play, and not just any play, but one by Chekhov: the most significant step in the development of realism, literary and theatrical; The Cherry Orchard and its influence in film history with things like The Rules of the Game; the conflict between Chekhov and Stanislovski, whose turn leads to the whole heritage of American theater and its bad absorption of ego psychology, and which is why David Mamet is mostly the contradictory conceit and whose adaptation of The Cherry Orchard is particularly wrong, all the reasons he states outright. Mamet's adaptation of Uncle Vanya is used as the basis for Gregory's for this film, but the problems are not as great, pertaining to the one thing that is the whole issue with Chekhov and what makes him so significant: the anti-climactic. This could also be called tableaux vivant or banality, but Chekhov, with the stroke he so perfected in short stories and which is perfectly accepted in literature, notoriously "submerged life in the text," as Vsevolod Meyerhold put it, even in his theatrical works: his four plays that stand for all this. He returns characters to the fabric, to the environment, their dramatic or climactic moments as if swallowed in a denouement that shows them obstinately -- as dramatic devices, if unconsciously as the people portrayed -- unaffected. While this is his climactic turn, and certainly was historically, it is so against the grain of the dramatic, of tragedy, of climax, historically. But it is also cathartic in its way, even outbidding the formula since Oedipus: the characters return to psychological blindness, to an oblivion more assured and compliant than the zealous self-punishing act of the incestuous usurper. It's a sign, if not symptom, of how much this grain of tragedy has persisted in spite of his development that Chekhov's trailing back into idleness still baffles or frustrates translators, directors and actors perhaps more than their audiences.
The neat trick, here, that does service to this, is staging a filming, filming a staging, of a rehearsal of the play in what is not quite a theater. It's an old abandoned one, to be sure, where the Ziegfield follies were once held, and even this statement of the matter poses the theatre itself as the crumbling state, and estate, of the Russian gentry. But it serves the same sort of informality, the actors of a company assembling to do a run-through, with a few guests invited who are devices to give us some explanatory notes such as we'd get on a program in the theater. Again, Malle and company don't make bones about all this being played, just as with Chekhov (and rather against Stanislovski) it's a kind of formalism of the mundane, an attention to what resists the very awareness of the drama. By the trick of this movie, the theatricality of both stage and film is cleared away. The milling around the looseness of the rehearsal makes the chatter trail right into the dialogue of the play, and this is particularly the environment for Wallace Shawn, whose sloth-like offhandedness gives a piquant analog for these obsolete figures. His kind of candor is a feeling of closeness poking through obscurity, as, for example, seeing something from the 30s in color after all the black and white. [10/23/10]
Teorema (1968). Credits. This approaches Godard style agit-pop more than Pasolini's other movies, his more "organic" or dressed down punctures of bourgeois patina, and there's a 360 pan in a farm courtyard that matches Weekend enough to be a reference to it. This film came out after Godard's, but Godard would seem more like the mock-up, just from his tone. The other thing that comes to mind, in the second half of the movie after Terence Stamp leaves the family he has smitten, is Leonard Cohen's song, "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong." It's the same story, right up to the anguished wail, with a similar morbid humor. The part with the young man becoming an artist also makes a statement, with all the contradictions for eloquence, of Pasolini's work itself, even if he didn't intend that. [10/22/10]
Mother [Madeo] (2009). Credits. "Heart of a fireball." It's as much by whimsy and lurching, in evidence more in his film The Host, that director Bong Joon-ho here stumbles onto more tempering moves: turns in the plot and thematic complications, as well as more interesting shot rhetoric. For example, in the middle of one of the most fanciful -- really, in a way that clashes with tragic aspirations, though perhaps it doesn't with "fireball" seriousness, the kind of pop conceit of martial arts movies -- devices of his plot, a makeshift police interrogation, with shakedown, at an amusement park, there's a shot of a girl's face lit by her cell phone and the suggestion of the photos she has there. The placid aspect of her being rapt, a comment itself on the phenomenon of this apperceptive daze better than any of the requisite movie scenes of cell phones that are an infatuation covering an infatuation, plus what she says, that she's sick of it but doesn't want to stop, is the one great stroke of counterpoint in the movie. The closing shot of the dancing on the bus, the one shot telephoto through the side, is the most interesting shot of the film and actually makes the rest a grain to cut against. This is far more effective rhetorically than the opening credit sequence, where the single dancing figure in the sweeping field, detached as it is from context and despite the interesting ambiguity of that, unfortunately wavers also with connotations of artsy poshness, movie-theatrical thickness. There's always going to be groping, straining, wringing, people who think art = extent, intensity, extreme of emotion, expression or just triggering reflexes in an audience. There's also going to be movie hyperbole. The two of these together are a kind of aesthetic -- or a better way to put it, aesthete's -- sensationalism. How this allows differentiation of a Lars von Trier from any teenager who wants to make gross-out horror movies is an interesting question. But I guess if some of these manage to slip into some kind of restraint, reflection (as opposed to pure projection, self-indulgence or self-pity), such as here with the theme of the ambivalence of motherly obsession, if not mother instinct or motherhood in general, it's a kind of backing into art by overreaching. [10/10/10]
Whatever Works (2009). Credits. Whatever works also doesn't. This could be the clearest statement of Woody Allen's summary resolution, the endings that abruptly and quickly tidy everything up with romantic beginnings. It's his own version of the happy ending, also that of melodrama, and perhaps most resembling the Shakespeare comedies. To what extent this movie's pairing -- or triangling -- everyone off neatly resembles Shakespeare tragedies more than the comedies, or more than the comedies resemble the ensemble killing of the tragedies, is a question to the point of just in what way these are a deus ex machina for Allen himself. A way to get out of the project? A kind of ironic or empty gesture that signals as much futility, or the division between wish or fantasy and reality? A sort of modernization of old Hollywood melodrama, signalled as much as accompanied by the jazz music scores? This is one of the worst turns of the trick, and not only by the way it makes a pretense of some sort of perception about homosexuality for an even more convenient, contrived conclusion. Maybe, as Allen has more eloquently in the past -- sadly, yes, but such is the passing that even escapism refers to -- put it himself, there is nothing but diversion, we can do nothing but leave the irresolvable by turning back to society, but even cheese can get old in a bad way. Not even Larry David can mitigate this, here, despite everything his own work shows as an alternative -- as, well, the way not working or unworking works. [10/1/10]
The Lost World (1925). Credits. The plan for King Kong is there. But in bringing the fallen beast back to civilization, to the big city, London, this movie is the pioneer not only of stop-motion (not quite the first), but of the giant monster attack on a city. It prefigures not only Kong in New York, but The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Giant Behemoth, all the other Ray Harryhausen model destructions of famous cities, the ritual destruction of Tokyo by Godzilla and peers, etc. In hindsight there is a quaintness to the contrivance: Wallace Beery's "Professor" "Challenger" who's as ready for fisticuffs as disputation, and takes one guy out a window; the stand-in for the movie's own sensationalism, here a journalist, by Kong unabashedly a movie director; the ingenue who will end up in the middle of the adventure, so there's all this business about how she can't go, it's no place for a woman. But that hindsight should really be pointed the other way. No matter how much more sophisticated the effects, special and otherwise, whatever cache of modish reference, however new the tricks, Jurassic Park is the same old dog. This is supposed to be part of the charm, the Lucas/Spielberg reinvention of their childhood fare, the appropriation of everything in reference as if bestowing some ancestor reverance indiscriminately on whatever quality, as if it weren't also verification of hucksterism. [9/24/10]
Witness for the Prosecution (1957). Credits. Billy Wilder opened up Agatha Christie's play with all the business of the Sir Wilfred character having suffered a heart attack and nagged by a nurse, thus a role for Elsa Lanchester with her husband Charles Laughton. It serves the purpose of giving a few bits of exposition to Americans, as if their unfamiliarity with the British legal system is presumed. Worse than that it serves the presumption that the courtroom scenes are boring and we need extra fidgety entertainment. This goes on over the dialogue, additional dialogue in the gallery drowning out the examination of witnesses. A good case for demonstration of how an actor like Laughton -- or, well, perhaps nobody like Laughton -- can make even this kind of added corny shtick interesting -- his childlike absorption -- whereas Tryone Power and, unfortunately, in a whole other kind of way, Marlene Dietrich, can make the dramatic strokes of the play seem like corny shtick. It may have something to do with the fact their characters are named like a Monty Python joke: the Voles. [9/20/10]
Inglourious Basterds (2009). Credits. Laughing with or laughing at Hitler. What if laughing at is laughing with? Tarantino's fishbowl of badasses scheme has a whole different sense in the post-9/11 context, as if Hitler and the Holocaust wouldn't have made it seem impertinent enough. The cheeky strongarm and torture stuff, no matter how symbolic or sublimated, makes it seem that becoming a monster to fight monsters is only an idea to relish. Superman via Ubermensch leads to appropriating the banality of evil as symbolic compensation. And in the context of "torture porn," movies that are ordeal gimmicks, Tarantino's more inventive, somewhat citational version becomes no less crass for being more, well, quaint. The broader social projection of this sublimation, what it means for an insulated leisure society to want to fantasize this way, also changes its tenor when this leisure society is becoming ever more self-justifying, egocentric, supremacist if not outright imperialist, externalizing for compensation and internally scapegoating, and self-destructive as part of the cycle of this justification. In other words, more like Nazi Germany. Maybe Tarantino was trying to say something like this with his explicit reflexive stuff about movies -- the cinema setting, the movie within the movie that's used as bait, nitrate filmstock as the weapon, a figure of it as the literal medium of violence -- however nerdy and convenient, but this also comes with the entire bag of Tarantino reference indulgence that with Kill Bill became unadulterated. The first note that rings sour with that, here, is when Beethoven is turned into Morricone. Tarantino already beat us over the head for two films with his Sergio Leone epiphany. That note would have been tolerable if it hadn't foretold all the other ridiculous pasting: 70s freeze frames with titles slapped on; a few jags of Samuel Jackson narration, given no context; and the mostly lifted soundtrack, much of that from Morricone, itself careening into the goofiest collage with David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting out Fire)." What's this got to do with Hitler and the Holocaust, you may be asking. Precisely. There's a -- joke? -- about a Nazi hero, a sniper who was stuck in a tower but took out more than 300 American troops. This leads to a parody of Nazi propaganda movies, a mock black and white montage of a ludicrous battery of American soldiers being shot. This is even included separately on the DVD. It's an extrapolation from the outside, an exaggeration of principle, since it doesn't come from anything, isn't using any real object, like Jude Suss. There are reaction shots of Hitler sniggering at the shooting spree. Right after that we watch two Jews mow down the Nazi elite movie audience with machine guns. Is Tarantino inviting us to snicker like Hitler? Does this scene show us, even if in spite of Tarantino, the conundrum, the paradoxical implication of movies, watching and violence? Is the implication of that audience for us inadvertent? Hitler's laughing happens to be the one moment of parodic edge that cuts through the pulp awe, the thickness of Tarantino's manipulations. He -- Tarantino, although not unlike Hitler in this respect -- is like a teen boy staging crashes with his toy cars. His arch just isn't arch much more than that. Compare the scene of Hitler watching footage of his own demise in Tomorrow I'll Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea. Also at the end of Basterds, an interlocution set-up looks remarkably like the Coen brothers, and a scene in the woods after makes it even more particularly like Miller's Crossing. While that film is one of their worst efforts, for reasons similar to this, the Coen brothers bear out for Tarantino that reference doesn't avoid derivation, in the pejorative sense, and even good derivation doesn't avoid comparison. If nothing else, sometimes you shouldn't invite it. [9/19/10]
Elmer Gantry (1960). Credits. There is something about Burt Lancaster that is like the Elmer Gantry character. Rather, the way he acts is an analogy for the way Elmer Gantry does. The former serves the latter. There is something about Lancaster's acting that is false, cheesey, hammy -- ham and cheesey? -- not with that overwrought Stanislavskian sense of conviction, but in the sense of a carnivalesque, and a movie one of that -- this resumption of Hollywood in the technicolor, biopic, potboiler epic via the 50s -- conviction. There is something false, but that paradoxically rings more true. The conviction of conviction, an integrity of pretending, without even the uncanny absorption of Charles Laughton. There is something charming and enthusiasitic about Lancaster's ballooning gesture of the depiction, his floating, glossing manner of speech. Thus the analogy of any acting is not the verisimilitude of acting (in the restricted or derivative sense), its correspondence to some real underlying all behavior, but of acting to acting. Or this correspondence is not merely a passive one of imitation, a negative or inferential one, but one of production or presentation. Richard Brooks, who directed as well as wrote the screenplay, has turned Sinclair Lewis's novel into that sort of Hollywood message movie social lesson, which means it's a bit preachy even about preachers, particularly here through the mouthpiece of the Arthur Kennedy jounalist character. [9/11/10]
Blissfully Yours (2002). Credits. What's there. Accent. Beyond the question of what is aesthetic, beyond the question of culture -- the line between what is cultural is already this double axis, the sense of high and low or one culture or another -- there is the question of what is significant. That question is not simply a defiant one in reaction. Whether a work explicitly asks it or not, regardless of the intent or how pointed or express a statement of the author. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul seemed to state this more directly with Mysterious Object at Noon, where storytelling was itself the matter, and including all sorts of it meant defying narrative or other "aesthetic" considerations, by some other standard or perhaps by some other director's choice. It strained the the limits of aesthetic consistency or decorum, crossed those boundaries, but precisely as this matter of showing how storytelling is a part of life. The line between fiction and documentary was not just blurred, but shown to be blurred -- invention/discovery -- by having "real" people make things up on camera, in all sorts of forms they do anyway. Here, Weerasethakul has -- apparently -- more carefully composed a story, or, perhaps it should be called account, for where that word loosens up the narrative sense, includes the ambiguity of testamentary or embellished relating. There are extremely long shots and the inclusion of drawings referred to by a character in a voiceover, themselves as supertitles on transparency over the film shot. There are many things about this movie that could be described the same way bad movies are: the aimlessness and drifting form. What makes the difference? And between this and say Rohmer or Bresson? Weerasethakul certainly tests the reflexes for the mundane, to what extent you find that interesting, or have reinforced your taste for flight. [9/6/10]
Perfect Murder (1998). Credits. Michael Douglas has the peremptory act polished and director Andrew Davis does a good job of not hamming up the heavy a la Wall Street. By contrast, however, it's too much the same note with Gwyneth Paltrow, who's given only one scene of respite from dour poses that, for lack of other apparent reason, are supposed to be sultry. Studious direction in an intrigue drama -- it's another version of the play Dial M for Murder that's surprising from this director's track record. [8/28/10]
Double Jeopardy (1999). Credits. The Fugitive, with some Vanishing thrown in. If you don't want to go to all the trouble of breaking up with your wife, running off with her best friend and getting custody of the children, then just fake your own death, frame your wife with the foul play circumstances, change your identity and move your life. For this, Ashley Judd takes out her frustration on anything Tommy Lee Jones drives. [8/26/10]
Marathon Man (1976). Credits. To make a potboiler, you put in ingredients. But it's really what the potboiler makes of the ingredients, a kind of expedience of exoticism. So it could be Paris, history professors at Columbia, or the Holocaust. Note here the footage of a marathon runner enhancing the photos in Dustin Hoffman's slummy apartment (an equally expedient accoutrement). Whatever way the book may explain this, the movie creates an associative shorthand, to put it politely. Director John Schlesinger has an offhand manner that's good in moments. It gives a more candid sense of violence (that James Bond can scarcely allow), for example, or, more broadly, it allows all the threads of the plot to seem not so destined for each other. But ultimately this detachment lends to the high-spun quality. The scene with Roy Scheider and Laurence Olivier, for example, is handled so badly, so brusquely, after the earlier sequence in the hotel room, that if it's not just giving in to the pure pop hokum, it seems intended to lighten Olivier's character. The opening scenes of the two old men has a pithiness, some ballast to it despite what it lurches into, but the movie floats up as such a melodramatic balloon, the climactic sequences sublimating, again to put it politely, any serious implication of the material. This is pretend seriousness, suspense or thrill substituting for drama. [8/7/10]
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). Credits. Strong rhetorically, regardless of ultimate worth. But that's just it. "Values": already contention. Ferris Bueller says he doesn't believe in "isms," he only believes in "me." Instrumentalism, official myth or entertainment. Director John Hughes has a kind of sing-songy, adolescent earnestness that comes with all this preening and mugging. Life is a convenient backdrop and the crassness of Americans is not so much in either having this naivete or peddling it, but in the way all this becomes an imposition at the expense of any other perception or understanding. When English or particularly history are abstracted as boring classroom subjects, it's hard not to feel it with a weight greater than a joke about adolescent attention spans. Ferris Bueller becomes a measure, then, of how strong this is a factor of American culture, and even its inconsistencies are taken in, its gaps and pock marks become part of its own fashionable fabric. Sure, this joy ride is affecionately and quaintly a testimony to what's already there, no more a cause than The Sorrows of Young Werther, right? But in the way it treats everything as accessory for this purely stipulated ego, the sickeningly blessed projection of a character that is a cipher enough to hold any attribute you want him to have (rather like Superman, in that sense of unrestrained wish fulfillment), whose capability is measured even by exploiting sickness, even consumption becomes consumerism. If you think this is a stretch, an overbearing reading that takes this movie too seriously (as if this movie weren't an overbearing reading already), note the way the whole matter of the Ferrari is dealt with, which is to say, not dealt with. Would it have been too much to have had the confrontation scene in this light-hearted movie? When it wasn't too much to set it up? Ferris Bueller gets off.
Americans sublimate this destructive consumption (see Bataille's The Accursed Share), this maverick rite of passage, as a rite of entertainment. It's a kind of detached and frilly allusion to conflict, violence turned into empty kinetic semblance. See Risky Business as another sample of this same charmed boy fantasy. Killing Joke and Cabaret Voltaire are made as decorous as the British flag or school penants, a reduction that cuts both ways. This does not mean that the movie is inaccurate by this, but that it takes up just as enthusiastic a suitcase stamp value as does any frat boy or "real life" Ferris Bueller portrayed. Part of the myth of this kind of "coming of age," the Hughes leisure bildungsroman, is that nothing really happens as such development. There's only the currency of wacky hijinks and moments of heartfelt posturing. What development this would amount to is the supreme pun on that phrase in American culture: the age it comes to is an adolescence it gets permanently fixated on. Never mind learning anything about even the history of one's own narcissism, anything critical about "me" or ego as precisely another "ism." Never mind developing past this stage. You know you want to remain in the state of you know you want it: the teen boy as the model ethos of consumer. It's showing demand as a model for demand, a kind of imago of narcissistic projection -- note also how Bueller addresses the audience, in asides looking at the camera -- a capitalized reflection of ourselves as only favorable consequences of our desire: universally popular, capable to the point of manipulation of any and all means even of our own entrapment.
There is not even regard for any physical rules of the consumption: a baseball game that would take up most of a day is just one stop in a montage reality. Note the principal and all his strawman slapstick stuff. The fact that the principal paying so much attention to one student is not supposed to be taken seriously, is supposed to be such a completely contrived device, no matter how fruitless, or humorless, its humor, is precisely how narcissistically convenient the movie is, even in this denial of analogy, microcosm, of itself. That this is strong rhetorically, or becomes so by the ceremonious rehearsal of its audience (cf. the scene where Bueller takes over a parade, the leap into pure projection, lip-synching the 50s for pat liberation value, for this kind of whimsy, the cheesiness of it), says nothing about an absolute or objective value. As with economics, the "real" value is the demand for it. What could be liberating in even a cream-puff life, a sense of gratuitousness and a make-up world, becomes itself the oppressive sense of real as a dependency. [8/7/10]
The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002). Credits. The golden ass. Robert Evans may not be the most worthy of time or footage, for any of the projects he played a part in and that are touched on here, let alone among everyone else in the world. But as they say, it's not so much the story as the way it's told, and in this case the way it's told is the story that tells all, that tells that, that tells on Evans even as he's telling it like it is in his own trumped up way. Evans betrays himself even as much by portraying himself candidly, and all that's worked up with the film-makers' snazzy effects -- faux 3-D movement rendering of stills, lush setpiece presentation of Evans' prize house, reappropriation of the movie soundtracks he patronized, and Evans himself doing the voiceover narration of his own story -- a kind of autobiography version of documentary. It's at once a Hollywood tattling, schmoozing, name-dropping, vanity production, and an expose of the subject even as doing just that. Here's a movie about a man who held the strings for movies, who was an asshole by profession as much as anything else, who nonetheless presided over a remarkable period of success, not just financially, because or in spite of that, who manages an honesty about himself that endears us even to the worse conceits, and in its own taking on of his chutzpah, this song and dance, it manages to be as dramatically ambivalent as many of the great works of his legacy: Rosemary's Baby, The Godfather, Chinatown. Evans is allowed plenty of rope to hang himself. There's his platitudinous sing-song, his cheap overworking of metaphors, when not cliches: "Then lightning struck. Bad lightning." Co-director Brett Morgen is credited with the "adaptation" of Evans's own book, so even at that stage, Morgan saw fit not to clean up the prose of a bussinessman often more lurid than the pulp he peddled. If that doesn't do the trick, of all the pecadillos and tragic acts of choice and fate, the most telling thing of all is Evans on Robert Towne: "I knew he was a brilliant scriptwriter, even though I didn't understand a word he wrote." Here is the separation of the man in ironic distance, even as self-portrait, profession, confession. It's scarcely necessary to note that Evans doesn't discuss the art of these projects. That's not something that consumed his life or his telling of it. Does Evans deserve to be lifted to the same status of art? That, too, is the amazing ambiguity of this movie's art. He's made a character on par with J.J. Gittes or Michael Corleone. That may be the assumption of his life. [7/27/10]
What a Way to Go (1964). Credits. A parade of Edith Head costumes and star husbands is a showboat for Shirley MacLaine. Pastiche, vignette style unrestrained narrative -- she just swims up to Dick van Dyke's boat -- and parody of movies seeming quite derivative of Singin' in the Rain, especially since Gene Kelly's here, too, all done with such photo studio polish, the performances get lost in the glossy widescreen spread. The tendency to slide into wa-wa slapstick -- a therapy couch that inexplicably has a hydraulic lift and gets milked more than once which was too much; or falling in a pool to get out of an already not funny gag (with that way 50s/60s movies have of hanging on the end of these scenes as if for laughter, that only makes the gag die harder) -- foreshadows the wackiness of the whole when it's wound up with too many twists, all pointing to domestic bliss as baby machine, a more lavish couching of domestic servitude than Bewitched. What's given off by the structure of the thing, inadvertent if not intended, is a fickleness of MacLaine's character that has other than comic tones. It's movies like this, even with Gene Kelly's mocking of stardom pitched in such brassiness -- see in particular here the "Lush Budgett" attempt at parody that fails also as self-parody -- that make populism seem as codified and calculated as state propaganda. [7/24/10]
The Invention of Lying (2009). Credits. Ricky Gervais and his American Friends. I have a joke about Vulcan women not being able to fake orgasm. Ricky Gervais has now made a movie like that joke. Major in a minor key. Heuristic exercise as fiction, here movie fare -- like Woody Allen, posing a problem, turning the whole premise or form along some other axis, while it's also a gimmick, is actually something more fruitful, if simply because it's not done that much. This can stumble on something as profoundly parabolic as Kafka, even if in an unassuming way, as Groundhog Day did with the eternal return. Here, there is an approach to religion, sort of from the other way around, which reaches the height of Nietzsche's own compact surgical device, the sweep ad absurdum of Life of Brian, and with Gervais's own exasperated mundane dialogue. Gervais works backwards from a projection of naivete. But the weight of this tilt makes Gervais teeter on the edge of a gross disingenuousness, just as the series Extras did, an enormous gambit of having your cake and eating it, too. In some ways this is prescisely the audacity that makes him interesting, and he does finneagle all sorts of great flourishes, mostly because his self-deprecation is far more sophisiticated than, well, the fare of his American friends. Like in that series, the way this can get away from him is the justification for everything he's also taking exception to, but in this case it risks an even grander rationalization: for mendaciousness as exploitation in earnest. (Compare to Peter Cook's presentation via Faust and the devil in Bedazzled: "There was a time when I used to get lots of ideas. I thought up the Seven Deadly Sins in one afternoon. The only thing I've come up with recently is advertising.") Gervais's fence-riding act can be noble as admonition and even slouching, but not always in just how much he's wedding. The whole thing ends up on a very mundane, very movie mundane, very American movie mundane track, where it hits the buffer stop: romance. Even in a church, fercrissakes, where even the for Ricky's sake joke can't quite overcome the world mass of the cliche. The line of earnestness in the movie rings The Graduate here, and kinks up the scheme of this Vulcan pure division of truth and lying even more than the insuperable problem the movie asks us to suspend (if even to demonstrate it). But just like a third party to a romance, one well observed by Ricky himself, the nutshell couple at the sidewalk table -- just like a friend of Ricky's, I kept cringing at his, the movie's, involvement with this girl, not only actress Jennifer Garner, but the character that plays her of Gervais's own conception. Why, Ricky, are you so assiduously presenting her as everything that is not worthwhile, but persisting with the idea you will make her so? Of course this will end with the usual melodramatic climax, the good old fashioned family values sublimated innuendo, which is really an anti-climax, a denoument, the great obviation of love (both about it and by it) we've all -- contemporary men and women, with and without the demographic overdeterminations -- taken on as a gentlemen's agreement. But then, there's another twist. Another capsize of everything. Another profound catastrophe, just like that. Just by switching angles. It all works best as the world inside his head: the character or, perhaps even better, Ricky Gervais, since this is his (and Matthew Robinson's) concoction. Then, if paradoxically, even the snag of this love interest, him, the whole thing being hung up on this, reverberates outside his head. [7/21/10]
Coven (2000). Credits. Where there's a will and no way. Mark Borchardt documents his own complex as well as the "maker" of the film about him, American Movie, does -- and I use quotations here because the question of authorship is given an inflection that might be therapy, self-examination, something like a therapeutic dialogue or analysis, and the relation of any of this with art. Perhaps representation is more general for all of this, and since even a clinical encouter is a species of the broader matter of communication. Ed Wood and similar arguments, however much more eloquent they may be for the freedom -- perhaps "chance" is a better way to put it -- of expression, however eloquent that may be, and which may mean not eloquent. There is the problem of "expression" itself, the presumptive simplistic model of a core of identity, a pat value that is interior or immanent, from which the other matter of success, sustenance or just economics, feasibility or fungibility, derives. Is free enterprise a contradiction for a broader democratic principle of freedom of expression? Does the freedom to express yourself mean that anyone else is obligated to care, even hear it or see it or partake of it, let alone buy it? Do you sink yourself, suppress yourself, any further by tying yourself to this restricted notion of expression, representation or success? And all this, you might say, from the story of a guy trying to make cultish horror films. This is also a case of the distinction between ability, talent (however rough, raw, uncultivated or in contrast to whatever), and the way it's used, something all the more pertinent as it is overlooked. This film is included in the DVD of American Movie. [7/16/10]
Shadows (1959). Credits. Cassavetes's first film is his best. By obvious and self-proclaimed analogy with jazz, this is improvisation cut well, in marked contrast to the gaping, grasping indulgence of later Cassavetes projects. Its sharpness and freshness, still, have as much to do with its roughness and naivete, a determination that gives it a sophistication for refusing another, like Rosselini's Rome: Open City earlier, or at the same time -- it was in the air -- the French New Wave, most notably Godard's Breathless and Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It's also got a plan, whether this was improvised or not, mapped beforehand or cut after, with one shrewd dramatic stroke as the centerpiece, a route of access to the drama of a discovery that doesn't patronize the audience by trying to pull the biggest surprise. (Cf. Satyajit Ray's Devi.) [6/20/10]
District 9 (2009). Credits.
Atonement for the sins of aliens, or those against them. Monsters are for show and aliens are others (cf. etymology). The other within. Outer space affords the literality of possibility: the sky. Thus in the advent of Enlightenment, science, perhaps even more prescisely in the 20th century, a kind of technocracy, it's the place for all those boogies that superstition and imagination used to find in the dark places here on Earth, or as the metaphysical other-worldly. Aliens from outer space have been visiting us since at least H.G. Wells and in the movies the barrage especially came in the 50s. There, in the placid, docile, triumphant, trim Earth of predominately American conception, we proved to be astonishingly paranoid about the power of the other, while we ourselves created the most ghastly power in fact. They were the unworldy in worldly things, invading us as vegetables, disembodied brains, gorillas with diving helmets. Perhaps worst of all, they preyed on our fear of being shown up, as snobs of some universal standard that we would prove not to have lived up to. Even if they might have a lesson to teach us about our own resentment, it was hard not to see the sum of it all as keeping up with the Klaatus. The fun cloddy, kitschy and campy allegory of this 50s pasteboard technocracy became more refined with movie-making, story-telling, and the sophistication of audiences. The outer space alien's moment as the very edge of this refinement was Alien, which also dovetailed the monster movie line in the same refinement. Since St. George and the dragon, if not before, the condition of dangerous confrontation with the other has become the standard of assertion of the species, an identification mechanism that uses fear and persecution to justify privilege, dominion.
This movie involves some social or political adjustment of this Rocky of the species triumphalism, as well as a twist on that 50s social status of us and them. The fact it's a South African production makes it seem no less a stroke that it's set in the location of its allegory. But Alien already involved this troping, less placard, more subtle, its implications wound in the material of another ordeal fantasy, with a reflexive twist: the worker v. company relations; uberanimal, machine and "Mother" being precisely a manipulation of man; and the twist of woman no longer being protection-fantasy bait but surviving on her own was significant in its own right as well, in movie history, but also as part of the larger, and for this subjectification of "man." Plus, it's hard to consider anything sophisticated allegory when what it's really doing is so much more derivation. This is Alien via other routes, interbred with Independence Day, with a good measure of The Fly and Robocop thrown in, all with the ADD faux verite that Slumdog Millionaire served up as life's rich palate. Can you ever do them right? [5/26/10]
Tomorrow I'll Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977). Credits. Between Alphaville and Groundhog Day, perhaps with a hint of Solaris, there's this quaintly odd or oddly quaint jag, if you can find it. (See See Through Film.) It manages a whole other conundrum of the time travel idea: subject/object. As with the grammatical matter of making yourself the subject and object of a sentence, there are strange ripples. In its own ingenious little way, this movie has used another silly cliche contrivance, that of the double or twins, to provide a solution to a time travel conundrum, much also of its own devising. The ending, even though it's just as cheeky and happy as any other melodrama, albeit in its 70s travelogue music way, cannot escape the uncanninness, such as suggested in Death and Eroticism by Georges Bataille: when the cell splits, what has happened to the identity? Which I am I? It's not so madcap as its bustle, or the dispatch of its actors, suggests. The time travel tangle doesn't get going till at least half way through, and about the time the possibilities are brimming over in your head, the plot is reining them in, resolving them. At one point there was a turn that would have been truly amazing as a break from the tradition of fiction -- drama, melodrama -- a line that may be as irrevocable as that of time, having to do with the fate of the protagonist, and that really raised the question of which I is I by way of the protagonist. When this turn proved to be not what it appeared, it looked as if the movie had no idea where to go with that one and fled entirely into the line of more ordinary cheap plot tricks. With that abyss nonetheless looming by suggestion, the plot did manage something of this uncanny of identity in the disguise of a melodramatic tidying up, wearing that sort of mask the way Groundhog Day does. The best joke about Hitler happens right up front, when a parrot chimes in with a round of "Heil, Hitler." But the most affecting artistic stroke of the movie is a passage involving a handheld movie projector (here the movie hit a target in its imagination of the future, presaging handheld computer devices), when Hitler watches historical footage of the fall of his Reich, the black and white newsreel stuff that is so iconically the mark of that past -- this alone poses all kinds of ripples, working in the opposite direction of trying to imagine what the future looks like. With Pola Negri singing "Tango Notturno" accompanying (the filmmakers did some homework), the more lush tones of the dark room and light from the projection give a more poignant contrast, a kind of light dark humor of poetic justice: Hitler sentenced to watching the History Channel. [5/8/10]
Plenty (1985). Credits. Fiction of compression, compression of fiction. Theatrical v. cinematic elision. It's not so much that a life would not have these dramatic moments as what they are as a dramatic scheme. The cumulative theatrical declamatory effect eventually works counter to revelation. The reunion with the Sam Neil character is so elided as to make it confusing: a flashback? This is one place where Schepisi's intent to mingle all the settings, to exploit confusion in such movie juxtaposition, to convey evocation, one place suggesting another, actually creates a problem. It's anticlimactic in an admirable way, the point that the same effects in the other person would not make it possible to return to what that other remained as ideal. The material is not the problem, just the sliding of it, a kind of lateral impertinence inversely proportionate to the bluster. This may be Schepisi's intention, or his achievement in an inadvertent way. He's working counter to playwright David Hare, more conscientiously applying this montage elision to this theatrical declamation. But for contrast, see House of Mirth, where the construction of the dialogue and the airy, fluttering composition by director Terence Davies work together to present a completely anticlimactic downward spiral that is just as dramatic in its indirection and obliqueness. [4/14/10]
High and Low (1963). Credits. Kurosawa's second best work after Seven Samurai is based on a novel by Ed McBain. Like Samurai, this is a social parable given breadth by Kurosawa's plan and execution. It's the anatomy of a police investigation and manhunt that becomes a social cross-section, like M or A Cry in the Dark. Kurosawa's emphasis is on the figurative, allegorical aspects of the contrasts for the social: high and low, public and private, open and closed. The first part of the movie becomes the schematic of the wealthy man's position turned on him, physically, topologically, as well as in the other ways. Kurosawa's widescreen mise en scene gives the paradoxical claustrophobia at the same time as it presents a wealth of interaction in tableaux in the main room of the entrepreneur's house on the hill, where he is trapped by his visibility to a lowly voyeur hidden in the masses. "Please don't worry about my son. No human being could kill an innocent child." Police turn toward the camera in the foreground facing the audience from embarrassment or deference, away from Toshiro Mifune (Gondo, head of a shoe company) and the chauffeur. Gondo turns away from the camera at the back of the shot, and then there is the wife's reaction. We then go from the breadth in this room to that of the investigation, having to open up the whole city and more. Even this contrast evokes the vastness of the task. The Japanese title means something more like "heaven and hell," but the sense of this as social comment is in the English title along with the great pun with searching. [4/3/10]
Broken Embraces (2009). Credits. Expanding and contracting. This movie demonstrates the better and worse of Almodovar, the way his gliding stories can expand through characters and plotlines, but then reduce again to melodramatic narrowness. Here, it's all in the family, and this undercuts not only the formal exhiliration but a broader sense of relation. No matter how primal this is, there's also a line by which it's trite. How Almodovar skips and relays in and out of stories is what makes him so great, as well as the superbly inventive passages that trope lyrical elaboration, here the X-ray montage flowing from the staircase scene -- and it's also his keenness to orchestrate something like this so that it is formalized expression and not just melodramatic or implausibe action. It's like dance. But, despite the greater formality of his melodramatic elements -- and his dispatch is part of this, he knows how to let off the throttle or cut off something just as well as how to lay it on thick; he knows how to use the curt ending -- a kind of Douglas Sirk ritual more lush than Fassbinder's, there's still a patness to his resolutions, an absolution almost as impertinent as Woody Allen's. [3/12/10]
Logorama (2009). Credits. More than just the best animated short, this was the best Oscar film tout court. Trumps Avatar and The Hurt Locker at one fell swoop. The world made entirely of corporate logos rushes to oilgasm. As if we needed the BP gulf disaster to realize it. [2/20/10]
Russian Ark (2002). Credits. The experience of the film and the film of the experience. Although any film is this and this can be a focus, the difference between watching the movie as the fiction it presents or as the making of it, there are movies which, more or less inadvertently, bring out the latter. In the 60s there were lots of movies that were scarcely more than parties of famous people, even if this wasn't explicit as part of a fad for portrayal: Casino Royale, not coincidentally another with Peter Sellers actually called The Party. The former, along with the film that named the franchise of sequels, The Pink Panther, are both examples of where this swanky hanging out makes a pretense of anything else: parody or even much humor or caper. They're boring unless you see this alone as fun. Russian Ark is a movie that in some ways suffers a similar fate, but somewhere along the way, about the time they enter the room with the orchestra and ball, this turns inside out to become a fascinating document and experience in itself, an experience of the document, simultaneously more "real," as in testamentary, recorded, witnessed, and surreal. What comes to the fore is the sense of being a part of this experience, empathizing not with characters, but with the people who are doing this movie, being there with the actors, performers, in this period-dress ball. It's thinking that it would be more fun to make this movie than to watch it, but then that has been conveyed. This projection has been projected. As a matter of it's own fiction, its devices, what's refreshingly Russian about the movie, the unencumbered is also what becomes cumbersome. Having people frankly discuss art, history, philosophy and even pose as figures from it while acknowledging the camera's taking part were a perfectly good stroke without having some overreaching character usher us into some allegory of it all. There's a way in which the reprisal of Dante, the play of famous personages meeting outside of history, has become the most naive aspiration, and this film demonstrates a good reason why: are the paintings in the Hermitage not enough to converse with, to convey the sense of their times? The parade of history along with it seems condescending, like the pandering that so many museums do nowadays, as if we need someone to imagine for us, or make mawkishly literal, that history comes to life. Cutting the character of "The Stranger" out of the movie would have made it less condescending, the sense of going through the museum through historical eras more detached, surreal, suggestive. [1/2/10]
The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Credits. [12/31/09]
v.
The Go-Between (1970). Credits. [1/1/10]
Odets v. Pinter: stage to screen. The former brings too much stage with him to the movies, the latter already tried to bring cinematic obliqueness to the stage before he then went to movies. The Sweet Smell of Success is razors blazin', an only slightly tonier bitchiness than All About Eve. Odets gives us the reaction rather than the things to react to, versus The Go-Between, where Harold Pinter's cast of adults are played off a boy, with even conflict played in a portrait of the niceness and deference of the period. The latter's is a laisser-aller style, the characters' intentions, schemes, conflicts do not seem contrived. But Pinter's flash-forward thread becomes too inconsequential by contrast. A grandson and stuff about marrying are not necessary and disproportionate to the lightness of the rest.
The Hurt Locker (2009). Credits. I'd like to recuse myself from comment on this film, but since it's supposed to be a good thing that movies would make us talk about things, I'm going to tell why. It may be no fault of its own that this movie is no more special than it was the first time around, when it was called Black Hawk Down -- cf. dripping neo-sepia-toned, heavy-hand-held, rapid-cut clamor telling us the situation is tense, as if we wouldn't think so otherwise. It's also no fault of this movie's that it comes from a line of movies about men in action by its director, Kathryn Bigelow, whose apparent virtue is that fawning over machismo is more objective because not by the usual male director (cf., again, Ridley Scott, and just about anyone else at random in the movie ads right now, e.g. the "new" Sherlock Holmes of Guy Ritchie; and for Bigelow lineage, direct or incidental, see James Cameron, whom she was once married to, and the whole Aliens ethos of expanded comradery, if not machismo, that while it may be more sensitive and inclusive, is no less shy of bravado and sensationalism). All this is from a book called War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges, which is making the argument that would be made more allegorically in the movie, if the addiction weren't the drug carrier itself. The writer of the script, Mark Boal, was with a real bomb squad "embedded," a term that has persisted despite -- because of? -- the flagrant pun it allows, "in bed with." The conceit is there in the movie's title, an obvious epithet. The cheekiness or bad-assedness -- bad-ass-cheekiness? -- is left free-floating. It's also no fault of this movie that The Thin Red Line came before it, or for that matter, Duck Soup, and that war movies that continue to feel it necessary to show their own impressionableness with danger, terror, violence and, well, bad-assedness, just can't quite evoke that ambivalence as well. If all that wasn't in the way, if this movie were as great even a war film as all the press have made of it, I can't get around it amounting to this: if we want to respect our soldiers, see things from their perspective as is not portrayed by news shows or documentaries and as if this didn't amount to a gross indulgence in contrast to anyone else in the matter, a population made subordinate to the meaning we make the soldiers have for us, why do we put them in harm's way? The reasons have all been shown to be lies, ulterior, violation of national and international law -- it's not even a war -- so why do we keep them there? This story has the benefit of trying to make a similar point, the allegorical upshot providing even a reflexive punch. The message of addiction to thrill, violence and warfare, however, can't abate the sacrosanct ritualistic aspect of entertainment it's delivered in, and the vanity of the reflection: soul-searching for the narcissist as another level of narcissism. Here, the "me" is spelled "U.S." I also happened to see before this movie The Onion's spoof of the Call of Duty video game, really of all team-play war video games, that shows ultra-realistic military duty: sitting around waiting, having to listen to banal arguments, dig holes, repair Hummers, and then getting shot out of nowhere. Sorry, Hurt Locker, but your pent-up episodic compression is still, no matter how well meaning, sensationalism. Be careful if you become a monster, lest you make other monsters to fight. [12/09]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). Credits. Charmless, witless, hyperbolic version. Tim Burton has now lowered his fetishes to be nothing more than another pretext for CG renditions. Johnny Depp, Burton's goth pixie, is this time an inexplicable shade of green with flesh-eating lipstick and dentures -- to go with Burton's completely unnecessary and hacky reduction of the Willy Wonka character to a mollifying psychologism that redoes Edward Scissorhands as much as waters down the whole to family value pulp. Burton's simply paying off, as he's getting paid, on the coddling gooey center to his fun creepy coating. Depp comes off a bizarre cross of Michael Jackson, Francis McDormand and Eric Idle's bourgeois American woman having a dinner conversation in The Meaning of Life, this apparently part of the specious imprint where Burton wants us to see how original he is by contrast to the other film version, which can all the more not be gotten around. Every bit of the charm of that movie, no matter how spectacular the chocolate factory business with theatrical effects or not, was in Gene Wilder's delivery (and whether it had Roald Dahl's approval). It's what was different about that movie from other children's fare that struck me as a kid: the counterstroke to sentimentality. Even the fact that it was a moral tale was troped by this wry, dispassionate take, a reaction to the excesses of the children rather than an imposition on them. The Oompa Loompa song was the refrain of that moral, and as if the Oompa Loompas aren't bad enough in this version -- Boba Fett clones for Buzby Berkeley numbers, with that bad attempt at pandering with music that can't avoid being Disney adult pop -- Burton has altered the one kiddie comeuppance that makes the least sense to do so: turning Varuka Salt's goose and bad egg joke to -- squirrels and bad nut! Burton's ham has gone bad. [11/26/09]
Play Time (1967). Credits. Two parts: the quaint, slow bumbling of the first sets up the orchestrated destruction of the restaurant scene. Tati's trope, here, is a slapstick of banality with the spread of Man with a Movie Camera, Berlin: Symphony of a City or M. The detachment partakes of that fascination of watching humans, as Beckett says, as termites: gratuitously, vicariously. That and the lightness gives an affectionate tone to the jabs at some of the conceits of modernism, the index of this being the posters of the cookie-cutter block buildings. The reflection of the famous sights of Paris in the doors and windows, the glass that is everywhere in the movie, is also the flash of deftness for the whole, a reflexive, regressive depth that makes the contradictio in adjecto of the superficiality of the surfaces. The film reflects on its -- film's in general, by extension representation's -- own indirection; the ripples of this shallowness run deep. [11/22/09]
The Damned United (2009). Credits. Sometimes modesty is a virtue. This is the object lesson within the movie, its story, and it's also what the movie demonstrates. This movie wants to be an example of what it's saying. But: there's the "sometimes." Meaning in the right context. As with anything, it gets complicated, and the gesture we make -- or don't make, the restraint we use -- can become a different kind of gesture. Peter Morgan, who wrote the scripts for The Queen and Frost/Nixon, also with actor Michael Sheen, has refined his act. Tom Hooper makes the most efficient work of Morgan's yet, something between the other two: if not as subtle as Stephen Frears, certainly much less brassy than Ron Howard. Morgan draws the action down to mainly four characters and the casting for these is another case for the film of good intention that doesn't come out quite right, much as he did in the others, but here it has the virtue of avoiding the grandeur of sports movies. Instead of opening up plays, he's reining in movies, bringing them back to the drama of dialogue, the encounter, revelation, confrontation, reaction. There's some action, some physical contact, but it's minimized, glancing. This is partly a function of integrating with actual footage of football matches, but has the merit of avoiding the clumsy choreographed reproduced sporting events. The movie, perhaps inadvertently, has the sense of one of those football (soccer, to you Yanks there who don't have this world perspective) manager games that's more about building the right team than the arcade experience of game action, but which are every bit as popular in the U.K. because the managerial side of the sport is also widely valued. Sometimes, however, this modesty turns into its own extravagance. The cheap lining shows through the great effort made for at least 60s/70s set design and cinemtography facade. It tends toward cheap metonym, like the way local news channels pass for "live" events by standing in front of places where nothing is happening. Here it's all the meetings that happen on pitches or in the stadiums, entry ramps or stands or locker rooms. The TV interview encounter as the climax is key for all of this: the way Morgan shifts to show the emphasis of this drama not in the sports event, as in sports movie cliche; how Hooper, with another rendition for Morgan of the TV climax (Frost interview and the queen's speech), is more restrained than Howard, if still too infatuated with the reflexive ripples (all the shots of the TV camera images next to their subjects), since the sports metaphor was at hand (Howard had to inject too much boxing match into his). [11/19/09]
Tulpan (2008). Credits. The world frankly. Or what word to use to describe this type of film, examples of which are accumulating from all over now. Time of the Gypsies, Abbas Kiarostami, Bahman Ghobadi. "Naive" comes to mind for the subjects of these films, and Time of the Gypsies even partakes of their imagination and beliefs. But, on the one hand, both Kiarostami and Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) evidence that this is not a naive art form for being unencumbered, relatively ingenuous, but is quite capable of artistic sophistications like reflexivity, complications of representation, levels of narrative frames, for example. This "naivete" seems to allow what has become no longer palatable to commerical sophistication. Some of these works, such as this one, are directed by documentarists who are able to give dramatizations that feel very unhampered, and sometimes strikingly un-dramatized, as here with the dust devils popping up and the attemps to assist in the birth of sheep. What this director, Sergei Dvortsevoy, harkens to as the precursor for all these movies is Robert Flaherty, with Nanook of the North and Man of Aran, for example. Now, of course, we have the frankness of cinema where more subjects have caught up to its means, and by which almost everyone of these tales must also depict the mingling of the world: the influence of the civilized world and its industrializied pop on these outlying, often refugee people. But there's another factor that defines this particular swath of movies: they are frank by contrast to another product of the developed world, a precious world cinema. Against the grain of an international film festival, lyrical and celebratory exoticism, these moves are unflinching in (re)presentation, sometimes comic pathetic and often harsh. Jia Zhangke, particularly with Unknown Pleasures, though this is also somewhat the case for Kiarostami, shows this as it differs within a political culture as much as outside it.
Tulpan is a dream you never see. Literally in the film, she's the bride Asa wants that we never lay eyes on. We see her peeking through the flap of a yurt, then the back of her head through a door to a shed. More broadly, it's what Asa draws on the underside of his navy uniform collar flap: a paradise in his own home. The story gives the poignant twist of a dream of making it in one's own place, however backward it may be, and it's not presented as particularly bucolic idyllic, since it also happens to be a foolhardy character's dream. Asa's brother-in-law, by contrast, more engrained in this land, lives it as matter of fact, and is so able and pragmatic he can't bear his daughter singing. Her singing, following her mother, stands as the defiant burst of expression out of the banality of this life, in emphasis in a shot where we see her crouched at the side of the yurt she's been banished from, her face straining to belt the song as loudly as she can. The other sort of foolishness, dreaming of escape to the big city life (of Almaty, Kazakhstan, or Sakhalin, Russia) is the tractor-driving tradesman, with his big boob magazine pin-ups and his eastern technopop. Dvortsevoy makes a realist expression of unrealism, and marvelously shows the cost, necessity and benefit of each of these excesses. Such is his frankness. [11/15/09]
A Serious Man (2009). Credits. A parable about the ambiguity of parables begins with a parable instructing us it will be a parable about the ambiguity of parables. Or, in other words, how parables, legend, exegesis, disputation, the rabbinic tradition, perhaps even Judaism and all of it -- belief -- is like a shaggy dog story. Certainly behaves like one. Not to mention jokes, humor and movies themselves. There's a big one in the middle, a much more obvious one, where the Coen brothers might as well be telling us "Don't look for the meaning in this movie," and losing nothing in the conundrum that is itself the point, a meaning. There's the joke of "perspective" in this movie -- and the Coens telling everything so much as a joke, here a modern twist on the Job story. "Modern" by contrast to those biblical times, which is as much recorded time to legend. But it's the Coens' virtue to be keen to the legendary character of telling anything, old or new, real pretend or pretend real, and if this is Jewish about their sensibility, mordant wit, seeing the comedy in tragedy that makes the latter more so (not unlike Kafka in that regard), they're at least examining the case here. The representation of the representation, the little story at the beginning of our little story, gives a kind of background, but is also disconnected. It's an accent. But it's also a double trick, echoed not only by the more obvious one of the teeth story the rabbi tells, but the ending of the whole. It's the magician showing us how the trick is done, and the only mystery that would be left is if we were, indeed, like the main character, asking "but why even bother doing this trick?" The Coens have struck on a marvelous one, perhaps inspired by the story they recreate at the beginning, that is also one of those modern movie cheats on the happy ending: it closes on foreboding which simultaneously reiterates and shifts the measure of what's gone before. It's also a trick on reigning movie fare, fortuitous or not, ending right where all the sensational qua "real" tragedy and CG armageddon begins. It's an open ending, and a suspense-frustrating one at that, with formal closure, like one of those jokes that's also a joke on punchlines. The trouble, here, however, is the cost of the Coens' arch comic treatment. Despite what it contributes (cf. Kafka remark above, Fargo, No Country for Old Men), it can become the dramatic version of sing-song, run-on, a kind of episodic shrill pitch. Miller's Crossing is one of their worst this way, though also for wringing more at drama and suspense, and here, there's sitcom cadence. Much of it has to do with their leading man and his character. Using unfamiliar actors is great, but the Coens go too far with Michael Stuhlbarg's bewildered cipher. While it has dramatic effect, the function of an empathetic empty suit waking up to his own life as we're seeing it, it becomes so airy that it needs something to ground him, not so much to clear the palate, but to give some real taste. The slouching produces the anticipation of some result, some reaction, like with the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down, a trap here just as there it was with the character not losing sympathy. Here, Larry Gopnik almost needs to lose empathy, if not sympathy (his being an unfailing pushover takes care of that), for a moment, to become distinct, something separate from this function, if not to seem so from us. Compare Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo: a guy we can feel quite separate from in his folly and who -- thus and nonetheless -- makes us cringe because we can see ourselves in everything he does. [11/11/09]
L'Emploi du temps (2001). Credits. Done well but doesn't add up right. The stories we tell. Jean-Claude Romand told his family -- his parents, then his wife, children and mistress -- for years that he was a doctor, pretending to go to work each day, then when he was afraid they found out, he killed them. He failed to kill the mistress and apologized to her, but he did kill the family dog. Laurent Cantet tells a story much like Romand's -- note the ambiguity, there, in the term "story." The compulsion to not be evil. Interesting proposition: that this drama of a man acting out his life was compelled not to follow the story of Romand. The choices that were made make sense, and are interesting for other reasons. But what they lack is hardest to ignore by contrast to the Romand story. Cantet brings in the profile of the man as an afterthought late in the film. The most compelling matter of all from the events of Romand is the compulsion to kill the audience. He had to be something to others to the point where they had to be eliminated rather than himself. This is the peculiar extent of status, of egoism. Cantet has made a positive story. The matter demonstrated in Heavenly Creatures of why it can be better to "show" rather than not show is here on a larger scale. While the fact that Cantet's story is not about murder serves the laudable purpose of not reducing all drama to death, violence and that sort of action, precisely in this case it eliminates what in the Romand incident is a perverse extent, and apothesis, of status, of the egoistic complex of this compulsion for success and recognition. Cantet's ending is chilling in posing the alienation of the working world (white collar in a more existential way than the forced blue collar one, cf. Cantet's own Human Resources), but it nonetheless has the feel of a tacked-on happy ending. [11/4/09]
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Le scaphandre et le papillon] (2007). Credits. The temptation to use subjective camera leads to the trap of formal consistency, which is really the trap of the desire to show, of demonstrativity. It's a betrayal of that, of the handiness of omniscience, of our suspending recognition of the matter of subjectivity and vision. If you begin with subjective camera, as with the character who becomes Humphrey Bogart after plastic surgery in Dark Passage, you provoke the sense of cheating to get out of doing it for the entire film, whereas if you start by establishing the character with the anonymous camera, subjective becomes a flourish of point of view. Julian Schnabel has a pretext, a device along the lines of Dark Passage, but he doesn't even hold to that. He cheats even more, can't hold it, flitting out of subjective to show us his actor's face. This is really the problem of the whole film, something it attests to inadvertently, when it's supposed to be a testament to a man's suffering, or to at least the experience he suffered, the point of view of the paralysis of this point of view -- and what's made even more ostensible, and a bigger cheat that's more just dropping the ball, his flight into memory and imagination. [9/11/09]
Tokyo Sonata (2008). Credits. The best thing about this movie is the way it makes an additional turn on a very romantic one. But you have to suffer through that first. This makes it hard to tell just which traits the movie itself has, and this has implications for all art, for representation, for the indeterminateness or arbitrariness or porousness necessary for representation to function, but even more pointed or ambivalent when it comes to irony or citation. The piano-playing ending, as nicely as it's executed, most emphatically brings this down on the other side again. Is there a contrast of such beauty with such banality that does not idealize either? [7/19/09]
Watchmen (2009). Credits. Another example of 60s suckling that scotches the 80s, a revenge on the punk snarl with sell-out dopiness, a kind of rebunking. The soundtrack is the main thing that does this here, Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel and even Leonard Cohen marshaled for 60s infatuation via Wes Anderson, all the posey historical redo crap in the credits over-reaching the anthemic before the posey shots in the movie for currency rip off of things like Dr. Strangelove. Up front: while this is not the level of bad of Dark Knight, something I feared from the hype, and that is due in large part to Alan Moore's story and basic plan, the script following that in large part, like so many of the comics movies of this cycle, it is the making manifest what is already wrong. By making movies of this type of comics -- superhero comics, for the most part, the apotheosis, the "super," of pulp melodrama, but also this particular sort of lurid seriousness -- the movies are outdoing the comics by accentuating them precisely in the worst way. As I said about Sin City, "graphic" means something different, has a different effect, in movies than in print. Here, the lock-on details of puncturing and snapping are so much de rigeur of all these dumb computer movie trends, the luxurious aspect of the violence is even becoming blasé. Moore's story uses the comic panels well to do even something more dramatic in the older sense, the Greek sense, and that is refer to fait -- to what is done, to action as past. The shrewd strokes of the whole conception are the capsizing of the superheros, something not necessarily original, as with X-Men, but the way he does it is. He parallels Frank Miller also in this 80s grittiness, but this snapshot world even among comics, Moore's own diorama of heroes, is clever. His social complication of them, going even further than Marvel's psychological complexity, keeps even the revelry of action tempered, and then, the other, perhaps shrewdest stroke, the criss-crossing conclusion that, despite some derivation of its own (cf. Failsafe, thus this director's own Strangelove honk), brilliantly tangles up not only the members of the hero group, even to the point of, and formally allowing for, their mortality, but also good/evil simplistic solutions. Moore gave -- back then -- precisely the complication that Iron Man begs for. For all this eloquence, Moore is still heavy-handed in the pulp fare way, as with his Swamp Thing, which was also exceptional and fun and even campy as much for Moore's kind of excess, a purple prose pulp, intended or not. To his credit, he's distanced himself from all the movie products of his work. The cast is one of the best yet at matching the comic characters, a subtlety that's striking in so much that isn't. This has one glaring contrast in turn: Malin Akerman. Matthew Goode is particularly good, and for this director Zack Snyder gets some credit, for giving us a composure that, avoiding the trumped up portrayal of heroes and villains (cf. especially The Dark Knight), suits the ambiguity of these characters. [7/18/09]
The Wind (1928). Credits. Victor Sjostrom's steady leering quality, also from The Phantom Carriage, is here complementing Lillian Gish, and just as well, Lars Hanson, a great actor from the Swedish stage that Sjostrom must have brought into the project. Sjostrom is not without the silent era extravagance, but even in the oscillations between Gish's more composed expression and the gaga crazy looks, as much imposed by Sjostrom, and between Hanson's cowpoke bust-out giddiness and his sober heroism, it's all more modulated, caught up in a larger composure of Sjostrom's. As with Carriage there are shots that are strikingly candid for breaking up the proscenium, for poking into the spaces, making us feel we're crossing the axis of the characters into the rooms with them. There's a panning, pulling shot early, then the sequence with Gish and her assailant, including great lighting effects from a swinging lantern, leading up to a gunshot, is the height of this. That lighting effect, too, extends the image, fills it out, evokes the space. The redemptive ending, a nasty cop-out of wife servitude, apparently tacked on, shows as much how to be shrewd with emblematic hyperbole, but whether or not the script was cheating in that direction, Hanson's character was already noble in a way that contradicted his earlier caricaturishness, and that absorded all the value of the woman's fortitude. Sjostrom has his own sense of redemption -- again, cf. Carriage -- but it was more unflinching. As with so many Bette Davis movies, the capitulation of the woman shows neither real fortitude nor the real plight of ruin. [7/11/09]
The Captain's Paradise (1953). Credits. The really active place for the drama, the vein of all the potential, is how the two wives want to be the other of what the man tries to make of them. Alec Guiness's character has a line about how finding half the qualities in two women takes less time than finding the perfect woman, and this sets up something like a chiasmatics of aspiration that is the slip or turn even on integrity or perfection. Perhaps by even the 1950s, elaborating that would've been thought too wordy, an Importance of Being Earnest or such. In the worst way of one of these Ealing comedies, perhaps social comedy or polite comedy more generally, there's too much business elsewhere that's presumed to be more action, including a ridiculous suspense scene of the women meeting each other. Even this encounter would have had more punch if the really workable part of the premise had been expanded. [6/7/09]
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Credits. Terry Gilliam demonstrates that being lurid does not avoid being prosaic. He demonstrates it across his work, but more so here (and in the extreme, at worst, with 12 Monkeys or The Fisher King). Johnny Depp, though he makes a good attempt at a Hunter S. Thompson vocal impression, is too youthful and, well, just not jaded in the right way, to suggest Thompson as it is, but on top of that, he's got Gilliam directing him and everything else like a Tex Avery cartoon. This constant wa-wa crescendo does not deliver even the charm of Thompson describing utter drug-state debauchery. Gilliam's graphic impulse, to show, depict, is not just literally demonstrative. He's a sort of precursor to the hyperbolic graphic impulse of the computer era, and his direction is this same concentration on exaggerating detail in default of an arc of orchestration for the whole. Thompson's book is significant for a kind of outbidding of the drug generation, a personal ride through all that giddy optimsm to the mucky truth of the effect ("the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait"). Unflinching. One of the best summations of the failure of all that, one of the best shots ever taken at it, near the end of Thompson's book -- "the desperate assumption that somebody -- or at least some force -- is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel" -- is cited here in Depp voiceover, in the penultimate sequence. If you make it through the tedious clamor of this movie, you might, too, manage to hear this, wake up and take notice. And wish you'd spent the time on the book. [6/6/09]
Labyrinth (1986). Credits. A Terry Jones attempt at Lewis Carroll and some of Jim Henson's more compelling creations, with a creepy edge to cuteness, can't come unhinged enough from some cringing shrill pop metal contrivances, notwithstanding David Bowie, or perhaps vice versa; some equally shrill 80s glossy, rainy night, horror movie effects; and an insufferable encore ending, all at Henson's direction. [6/6/09]
The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). Credits. Without the skew of, for example, the morbid premises of The Ladykillers or Kind Hearts and Coronets, or the broader thrust of social satire of The Man in the White Suit or Passport to Pimlico, Ealing Studios quaintness is -- well, just that. Here a nice little tale about rescuing a small train line from extinction. [6/6/09]
Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Credits. It's even worse than I feared. Lurid, sensational. Portrays the abject conditions of Mumbai with the regard of a James Bond movie, condescending to Bollywood at the same time. As with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, somebody has to make a posh hype version of or reference to an entire history or line or culture or genre of movies so the West can give it official recognition (e.g., the Oscars). [2/27/09]
Wendy and Lucy (2008). Credits. A disaster well planned, timed, done even if somewhat in the pejorative sense of well made. Sometimes you get credit not for doing so much, but for not doing so much else. Great plan, some great particular scenes -- the fireside at the beginning. And a reflex to cut out almost anything that strikes as a line, as buzz or movie hype. But there is a preponderance of deadpan effort that tips over into its own conceit. Perhaps the most jarring is when looking for the dog she runs into the guy that caught her again, behind the store. The awkwardness of the scene is from the artistic conceit of stretching it out, not from that of such a moment it represents, the "real thing." There is a shot early on, very quick, that suggests one of Terrence Malick's in Badlands, but by comparison, Malick can do so much in a single shot, can be so evocative, in a way that is neither strictly realist nor expressionistic. Director Kelly Reichardt seems to have wanted to kill off even that sort of impulse, which is not a bad tack considering the excesses that prevail. [2/25/09]
Chance Double: The World and The Crowd
The World (2004). Credits. Saying Jia Zhangke's gesture is ambitious involves a trick of the qualifier. Is he ambitious in making the gesture, or is he with this gesture imitating that curiously ambitious one of the "world." The trick is there in the title. The world Jia refers to is a scaled down synecdochic one, a bizarre tension of scale and tribute and kitsch built in Beijing: an amusement park that replicates world landmarks, or even iconic skylines. It covers a large enough area to require monorails and hotels, but is a sort of grandiose toy version, about 1/3 scale for the Eiffel Tower. Many of the buildings replicated produce the black box conundrum: they have no inside. And the New York skyline, which must be scaled down even further (and still contains the World Trade Center towers), is placed on a little island in a canal -- the same one that has the London Bridge a few yards away -- so that you have to maintain a skyline relationship to it, and don't get to be Godzilla. All the problems of scale involved here are certainly interesting, not just the physical aspect, but China as Vegas or Disney, or vice versa. One character comments that the workers in the amusement park are guarding imperialist property, so there is the slightest allusion to the political matter -- if not problem, if not contradiction -- of China as government control of captialism in the name of communism. Jia repeats the stroke of all this, with an ambiguity about inadvertence to match that of the ambivalence of naivete of the subject. All Jia really had to do was point his cameras at this inflationary grandeur, at these grandiose trinkets. And that's about what he did. Much of the "story" of the workers at this park seems little more than a pretext to have the stand-in monuments in the background, to play with that sort of film trick (there's a scene where a couple tries out a booth that records them on a flying carpet, the video with shots of the landmarks laid in on the photo blue background behind). Jia contrasts that with the innards of the place, the backstage and tunnels and bunks and eating places, as well as a few other mundane spots in the lives of the workers, and his attempt is to further contrast this view, the sense of such a representation, in such lives. Tao Zhao's character repeats the slogan of the park, seeing the world without leaving Beijing, with some irony, but also a determination in her place, while her ex-boyfriend passes through on his way to Mongolia. Many of the workers come from villages and thus are seeing this as contained by the bigger world of Beijing, a sort of parental obligatory view. But Jia's dramatization of these lives is neither plain nor expressive enough. The script is a sketch, while Jia's contrast is applied much more in the literal images. His long static shots make of people in small rooms vistas to match those of the park. His most sumptuous composition, across several films beside this one, is in the big dance numbers done at the park, including a close-up at the beginning that is striking for also being so rare, again in all his work. There is also here the strange device of animated sequences that cut in apparently in relation to cell phones, and seem to give flight to the kitsch appeal. But another sequence demonstrates the difficulty of Jia's impulses here: a note written by one character is carried by another and shown to another. Jia doesn't want to disturb the objective view of the reactions with a shot of the note, but at the end of the scene, he pans across the wall and has the note superimposed, in a way that's not without some elegance, but that juts in, is incongruous. This is a microcosm for Jia's treatment of the microcosm. If the attempt to show the emptiness, or least the space, in this inflation, is itself airy, does that fail or succeed? [2/09]
The Crowd (1928). Credits. Like The World this has its own version of life against a backdrop, a microcosm. That teeming world of its own, New York, is stipulated (with seven million at the time), then in images with a montage of angle shots of skyscrapers. This has its own nifty model trick shot, to climb a skyscraper and zoom through a window, then onto a vast beehive of office desks, isolating one (cf. The Apartment among other later versions, Christmas in July for other affinities, too, like the slogan thread). The figure of the title (the multitude marching, the world, everyone) is even more in the background than Jia's "world," off screen most of the time, alluded to by comments on opportunity, then making appearance at crucial moments. One of them is the big melodramatic turn. Prior to this, the movie was a kind of Greed inverted to optimism, or at least glee. It's psychological realism comprised conjugal vicissitudes as touching and keen in hopefulness as the degradation in Frank Norris and Von Stroheim is dark or in It's a Gift is comically pathetic. Then comes the grand turn of that silent film Victorian romanticism, the arcade opera: the kind of lurch that strikes us now as funny as it's supposed to be tragic. It's the compression that's part of this: here, jumping up and down with wild happiness sets up wringing catastrophe. But from this comes an eloquent bit of counterpoint (even for such silent-era soaking) by a cop that is another entry of that background "character": the rest of the world can't stop for one's misfortune. King Vidor (he co-wrote as well as directed) makes the parallels throughout. The great stream of life is also paradoxically and dreadfully impersonal, but that cuts in the other way, too. The protagonist, played by James Murray with a face and hair that seem to transform with the stages of his characer, enjoyed riding along on this current, the exhiliration of the big city, the thrill of bus and carnivals and crowded beaches, and even bringing more into it, and looked down on someone poorer having to be a literal clown. The poetic justice is complete. The ending sublimates all this, I would say redeem, if that didn't fall into what it avoids. Just when you think it's going to be another stroke of melodramatic fortune, the protagonist, fortune and all are placed right back in the title figure, in a grand shot reflecting the audience (and in a way that's even more dramatically ambivalent than Sullivan's Travels). [2/09]
Johnny Handsome (1989). Credits. Mickey Rourke and Ellen Barkin decide to check in on each other and see how their shitty movie careers are going. She introduces him to Lance Henrisken, who, fresh off his success with Aliens, is into his shitty follow-up career, too. Another Rourke brooding rough with a heart of gold vehicle, this one is also a Walter Hill tough guys are golden vehicle. Rourke gets some extra caché in a handicapped role and in the movie make-up craze that is soon to culminate in the latex 90s. After miraculously being chosen the beneficiary -- and carefully informed, by Forest Whitaker who shares a pair of giant 80s glasses with Elizabeth McGovern, not the guinea pig, although that would have made more sense after the convict labor farm -- of a massive reconstructive surgery program that manifests no worries about movie budget, Rourke gets a job in a Coca-Cola commercial this is America montage. Meanwhile, Henriksen and Barkin have made the smooth transition from pistol-whipping poseurs to bar managers, so dedicated they never leave the office overlooking the bar, until Barkin needs to get snagged on Rourke again. Morgan Freeman is curiously more likeable when he's kind of an asshole. [2/09]
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
