Just An Amateur

Indiana Jones And The Effective Marketing Vehicle

2008-05-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

I figure its better not to explain why I haven't reviewed a movie in nine months (law school ensure you will do less of everything than you think, except study), and just to start again. Without further introduction...

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (Steven Spielberg, USA, 2008, B+)

How do you know when you're in the hands of a competent? The title credits roll over a scenic desert landscape, Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" blaring in the background, with two greasers and their accompanying bobby sockers driving a muscular Ford V8 convertible on a lonely two-lane road, whistling at a caravan of Army trucks in their vapor trail. So far, nothing out of the cinematic ordinary... until the caravan turns out to be a cadre of KGB agents who break their way into Area 51 by mowing down the security guards (this, it seems, is the Russians solution to most every problem in the film). Oh, and they have Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) stuffed in the back of a sedan. Spielberg understands that the distinguishing feature of an action flick, and especially an Indiana Jones flick, is, well, action, and he's savvy enough not to bog us down in a boring and useless backstory before whisking us into the heart of it. It's as sumptuous as the first ten minutes of an action film gets.

That comes as close to a litmus test for determining whether or not you'll like the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones saga as anything else I could provide. After Indy escapes from the Commies and survives a nuclear test by hiding himself in a refrigerator (!%#@#$), the MacGuffin (crystal skull of unknown origin has to be returned to remote Amazonian enclave) is laid out, Indy meets a new sidekick (Shia LeBouf, with a coat (and a hairdo) he borrowed from James Dean), and he's off to Peru to follow the trail of his friend Ox (John Hurt, looking a lot like he did in THE PROPOSITION). The principle villain, a "psychic warfare" officer played by Cate Blanchett, possesses the requisite series ingredients of being a little too smart for their level of craziness. After that, most of the twist and turns are eminently foreseeable but never anything less than eye-popping (cavern searches, kidnapping scenes, and, of course, the fantastic car chases, which were always the highlight of the first movie for me, an updated version of the train chases in Keaton's THE GENERAL with Ford's dry wisecracks standing in for Keaton's stonefaced stoicism). The encounter with Marion (Karen Allen) also comes as no shock. She and Indy re-ignite their tempestuous love-hate relationship, and I'll forgive Spielberg for the predictable revelation that comes out in their early conversations.

But... is it a great film? It is certainly a good film. The action sequences speak for themselves--you cannot be talked into liking the film if you have problems suspending disbelief or if you're turned off by CGI, but if you're into high speed thrills and general goofiness, you won't be disappointed. The dialogue doesn't crackle like the first Indy film, or like Han Solo's dialogue in the first two STAR WARS movies (Ford's "gold standard" as far as I'm concerned), but it isn't unbearable, and the few Marion / Indy scenes are probably the best in the film (for all of those re-upping their membership to the "George Lucas Can't Write Dialogue" Facebook group, relax, Lucas only provided the "story"--Spielberg would never have made a script like the new STAR WARS films).

Given that INDIANA JONES is meant to be escapism, it's also surprisingly erudite, at least as action films go. Some critics have complained about the time spent belaboring the archaeological puzzle the film centers around, which is a bit like going to Taco Bell and complaining that the menu is dominated by tacos; the whole ethos of Indy is that knowledge, more than strength, speed, and an incredible ability to jump between cars (which has not diminished in a quarter century, apparently) is the real power in the world. This theme ties the piece together, and it doesn't really become corny until the end (when Indy intones that the "real treasure" of the civilization they found was knowledge--he could have been doing an ad for a library). It is also a warning about the possibilities of abusing knowledge--that the movie begins with a nuclear explosion and a "Red scare" episode, and ends, in typical INDIANA JONES fashion, with destruction because a character sought to know more than they deserved to (from a society that sought to know all and see all) is no accident. Certainly, Spielberg didn't try to make A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME--and I think that when people look back on Spielberg's career they will take him to task for continuing to make so much mindless entertainment when he is clearly talented enough to make things like SCHINDLER'S LIST, SAVING CAPTAIN RYAN, and MUNICH--but he cannot be accused of making something totally vacuous.

If it has a major, overriding quality that I don't like, it is sterility; INDIANA JONES is a good time, but it is too prepackaged and preordained to be anything more than a good time. Like an attempt to recreate a great party or trip, there's enough in common with past experience to make you feel as though you haven't wasted your time, but ultimately, it never quite feels the same. Certainly, it is the work of an adept, but for a movie about a man who takes unnecessary and dangerous risks, it seems paradoxically safe and cautious. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK was a great movie because it was fresh, inventive, and unlike anything else that had ever come before it; a digitally enhanced sequel can recapture thrills, but only so much.

More distressing is the movie's final scene, which hints that LeBouf is being primed to take the reigns from Ford when he's no longer plausible as an action star. Which leads to my biggest question, going forward, about action movies in general--can RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK be made again? Not in the sense of literally making that movie again, but will there ever be a new, wholly original universe like STAR WARS or INDIANA JONES that captures the imagination of audiences? The modern Hollywood economy doesn't seem to dictate it. The risk involved in backing a new, original story is too high, given the costs of a bomb. Backing the continuation of a classic series, or basing a new series on something that already has significant cultural cache (NARNIA, THE LORD OF THE RINGS) are the safest options from a business sense--in addition to making significant returns at the box office even if they are putrid based on prior goodwill, they provide substantial opportunities for marketing and licensing that ensure the studio will turn a profit. Of course, those risks didn't stop George Lucas in the seventies and eighties; perhaps success has taken the Indy out of him.

Plan of Action

2007-10-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

For the few that read this site, you may have noticed a drop-off in production as of late--and by “drop off”, I mean no posts. The reasons for that are mixed. Returning to Notre Dame for law school was definitely part of it; studying is a pretty massive drag on my time (as bad as engineering, certainly) and is necessarily taking away from free time for other pursuits. The campus may be the same, but making new friends and becoming a part of the law school community, and it was right for the first few weeks to use my free time to get to know other students rather than sit alone in my apartment and write movie reviews--not to mention that the money spent on movie tickets is better applied to beer when you've done nothing but read for an entire week.

However, part of it was that I simply didn't feel like watching movies, much less writing about them, for a while. The reasons for feeling that way aren't reducible to a single sentiment--lack of anything constructive to say, discomfort about the long-term ramification of the things I was saying, and doubts about whether the gain from staying on the cutting edge of modern cinema was a net benefit to me or to other people in a holistic sense (whatever the morality of morally challenging material in a given film may be, I should add that if I'm not scandalized or tempted by such material that I always find it troubling), and maybe I needed to go a little while without watching movies to give myself a little separation from the problem.

I feel like this sentiment is drawing to a close. I now have a grip on my time constraints, and don't think that a movie review once a week would seriously strip away opportunities to study. Beyond that, I continue to feel a need to write about film because of all the kind things people have said, and continue to say, about my writing. I do not mean to kid myself about my limited talents as a critic; my role is not an essential one, (although, if you think about it, no critic's role is essential, just as art is, in some limited sense, non-essential), and unless there is a dramatic change of course in my life, I won't be anything beyond an avocational critic, slipping the occasional review in between my case briefs and memos. However, I was once taught that burying a gift in the sand, regardless of size, was an insult to the one who gave it, and so I find myself impelled by some small sense of duty to help promote a serious discussion of the arts motivated, as everything should be, by a Christian perspective.

The plan going forward, as of today, is a review per week (anything's fair game--new, classic, contemporary, or something overriding like a discussion of a great director or general kulturkampf observations), with whatever quick bloggy bites I can throw in between classes. I've set up my desktop's note-taking client to post stuff on the blog, so it should be easier and more efficient to throw up a link or post. I should have the links updated by fall break, another three-four weeks away (a lot of people have changed addresses, there are some great new sites that should be pointed out, and I probably need to update the sidebar for last year's top 5; it's doubtful whether I will have see enough 2007 films to put a list together this year, but we'll see what happens).

That's all for now; watch this space...

The Dream Ended

2007-07-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in a while, but I would be remiss if I didn't offer a few words about the news of Ingmar Bergman's death. Bergman's career of over fifty years produced a truly unique body of work that raised him up from the obscurity of his origins in coastal Sweden to the forefront of global cinema. The article from the IHT mentions him in the same breath as Fellini and Kurosawa, and the grouping is not unwarranted--these three men, more than any other directors from outside of America with the possible exception of Jean Renoir, did more to legitimize cinema's status as art than any other group of directors.

I've kept one of the sublime images from Bergman's films on my sidebar since the very beginning of this blog. It's from THE SEVENTH SEAL, and shows the main character, a soldier returning from the Crusades, in a chess match with Death over his soul. I find it emblematic of his work as a whole, brooding and mystical, even dreamlike, but painfully aware of the fragility and cruelty of the world. His work struggles with faith and doubt in a genuine way, always aware, as Benedict XVI wrote when he was much younger in his "Introduction to Christianity," that while the believer may feel as though he is a "clown" in the world, the unbeliever struggles with many of the same fears, minus the reassurance of Divine care. It's probably not a surprise, then, why not one but two of Bergman's films were named to the Vatican Film List (SEVENTH SEAL and WILD STRAWBERRIES, both made fifty years ago).

In short, Bergman represented the very best in art, our weak human attempts to come to grips with ourselves. "The dream ended, the music went quiet that night on the island of Faro," said Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, in eulogizing Bergman, but perhaps he spoke too soon. Let's hope that those dreams and music Bergman's career represented do not fade away upon his death.

The Wrong Man

2007-07-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

SiCKO (Michael Moore, USA, 2007, C+)

"The health care system is badly broken," my dad told me as we drove back from the movie theater after watching Moore's critically acclaimed polemic for socialized medicine. My dad agreeing, at least in part, with the director of BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE and FAHRENHEIT 9/11, is a fairly remarkable event--as a gun-owning, pro-life, self-employed conservative pragmatist, he has little use for most of Moore's ideas. But he's also a doctor who's frequently exasperated by the health care bureaucracy, and inasmuch as Moore is critical of the failures of America's HMO system (unique in the Western world), people like my dad can nod their head in agreement with the American left's favorite documentarian.

Indeed, in the hands of someone less polemical, SiCKO could have become one of the transcendent political films of our age; when Moore sticks to the story of how America's massive, third-party medical insurance bureaucracy works to crimp costs at the expense of their customers' well-being, he is immensely affecting. The exploitation and self-promotion of his earlier work is effaced by a problem that jumped into his lap almost by accident (he claims a post on his blog asking for stories about the health care industry prompted over 20,000 e-mailed responses). He abandons the style of his earlier films by letting the victims take center stage--a man who has to choose which finger he wants reattached to this hand when they're cut off in an accident with a skill saw, a woman who's daughter died of a high fever because her insurance didn't cover the hospital the ambulance stopped at first (a seemingly impossible scenario that my dad, who works at a children's hospital, confirmed as plausible), and a former insurance company employee who testifies before Congress about denying legitimate reimbursement requests because her bonuses were determined by how few claims she approved. He's also harshly critical of the American political establishment, both left and right, for failing to hack into the HMO machine. Moore has especial scorn for Hillary Clinton, one-time backer of socialized medicine, who now gleefully takes campaign donation checks from the same insurance companies she once set out to dethrone (along with many other members of Congress).

Even in the most effective parts of the movie, however, Moore's credibility is occasionally shaky. He correctly highlights President Nixon's complicity in the creation of the HMO systems, but forgets to mention that the primary sponsor of the bill in the Senate was none other than Teddy Kennedy (who somehow seems to be linked to every single piece of bad legislation ever passed in the United States). One of Moore's stories, about a cancer patient who was refused an experimental bone marrow transplant, would have had little chance of success and was almost certainly a correct judgment by the insurer. (David Gratzer's NRO review is a good corrective to some of Moore's distortions, but he's being unfair when he tosses off all of Moore's "hard luck stories" as "unverified.")

But there's at least two other sides of Moore in SiCKO, not counting the one I just described, that cripple whatever credibility Moore might have with mainstream America. Moore as the sober, darkly humorous, righteously indignant critic of the HMOs is appealing on some level; Moore as the manipulative socialist daydreamer, trekking to Paris and London to show just how much better life is over there, is not too far removed from the man who embarrassed Charlton Heston as he was on the cusp of Alzheimer's induced dementia. Moore is incredibly disciplined about showing the 5% of his opponents case that looks the worst, and the 5% of his case that looks the best. His presentation of socialized-everything in Europe is so reverential and so lacking in any intelligent criticism (he mentions, once, that Europeans pay "taxes through their nose," but counteracts that with repeated musings on the beauty of "free, universal health care") that he doesn't even realize he has become a parody of everything his opponents fear about socialized medicine. In the most telling of the "French" scenes, he follows around a government-employed "nanny" who helps new French mothers (not many of those hanging around if you follow the childbirth statistics) adapt to the first few months with their new baby, doing cooking, laundry, and other tasks. Earlier in the film, Moore tries to quell the fear that socialized medicine is a way for the "nanny state" to gain a foothold in American life, as Ronald Reagan argued from very early in his career; he doesn't seem aware of the irony of promoting this symbol as an argument for getting mainstream America to embrace national health care.

But there's also a third Moore, the one that makes him unpalatable to so many people, including some liberals: Moore's need to be the star of a self-created drama to save the nation from its inner demons, a chubby little hero wearing a baseball cap and a t-shirt. In the much-discussed sequence where Moore takes a band of 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba to receive treatment from their ostensibly fabulous socialized health care system, SiCKO transforms into something that's not really drama or documentary, but some combination of the two that is more manipulative than either of the two could be on their own. These scenes are anything but cinema verite; they are acted, not recorded. The best shot in the movie shows one of the rescue workers crying in close-up as the Cuban doctor explains what they are going to do for her, while we see an out-of-focus picture of her children in the background. Now, I suppose that the shot's perfect framing could be a total coincidence, but I think that sells Moore short as the master propagandist he really is. When we finally come to Moore's seminal "gotcha" moment--he anonymously pays the medical bills for a man who runs one of the web's leading anti-Moore sites--it feels so calculated and false that it might as well have come off a screenplay.

I'd like to close by offering Moore a piece of advice: for your own sake, stop making documentaries. Moore clearly wants to be a director of social drama, but perhaps he's afraid that he would be less influential if his stuff could simply be dismissed as fiction. Unfortunately, I'm afraid he's tapped out the potential of this sort of documentary style. If he wants to be convincing, he either has to become a better journalist, or totally sell himself over to fiction filmmaking, and he seems to be leaning more in the latter direction. This middle ground is no longer persuasive to anyone who isn't on Moore's fringe of the American political spectrum. There are some compelling models that would work well for him--perhaps he could become a more political Albert Brooks, or try something along the lines of what Richard Linklater did recently in FAST FOOD NATION, by turning a piece of muckraking journalism into a fiction narrative. In the meantime, he's further poisoned a necessary debate over health care reform, and alienated people like my dad who folks like Moore will need in order to craft a realistic solution.

Quickly Now...

2007-07-06T07:28:00.000-07:00

Because I do have a blog, after all...

RATATOUILLE (Brad Bird, USA, 2007, B-)

You know what Pixar needs right now? A total bomb. I mean it--their recent productions has been good enough to drag the crowd back in, but not bad enough to inspire the sort of critical rebellion that would inspire them to a higher artistic plane (this is the "post-watching TOY STORY again" Mike speaking). The whole movie comes off as smug; it seems to have been deliberately crafted as a parable for Pixar's values system (we don't sell out, we think critics are self-serving and that the audience is the ultimate authority, we're like the home cooking you got when you were little, etcetera). The story arc practically telegraphs its punches, down to the inevitable break-up between heroic mouse and foppish human, and their eventual reunification. The problem is that for all it's internal problems, the animation quality remains unparalleled--how the heck were they able to animate all those individual mice and give them all separate movements, fur colors, and faces? Water and fur have never looked more realistic in an animated film, either. It's so good, in fact, that it can sort of distract you from the feeble screenplay, at least for a little while.

WAITRESS (Adrienne Shelley, USA, 2007, C+)

I'm intrigued to see a story like this presented as comedy, nay, as chick flick, but disappointed in the execution--it's fairly easy to impress people with a sad, weighty story about an unhappy marriage, divorce, and the choice of single motherhood. I'm thus disappointed by the final result, which is stuck between a "gritty" Southern Gothic tale of woe and the latest episode of "Scrubs"--funny and charming in an "aw-shucks" kind of way at times, but too prissy and cheaply sentimental at others. The end of the film is pre-ordained, almost within fifteen minutes, leaving no real suspense about the moral decision Keri Russell's character has to make. Noah Baumbach would have done wonders with this material if the script had located the characters in Brooklyn rather than Biloxi.

Everybody's Got A MIGHTY HEART

2007-06-28T21:07:00.000-07:00

A MIGHTY HEART (Michael Winterbottom, USA, 2007, B)

When I see a movie in an empty theater, I always hold out hope that I'm going to see something terrific that everyone else is missing. Too bad that A MIGHTY HEART isn't exactly a hidden masterpiece--it may be hidden, judging from the crowds (or lack thereof), but it's no masterpiece. More precisely, it's a really good movie interlaced with a really bad movie--a fast-paced, wholly engrossing police procedural combined with the painfully maudlin recollections of a woman going through intense personal suffering, portrayed with little decency and less skill.

Granted, Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie) experienced a rare sort of pain in her life when her husband, Daniel, was kidnapped by Al Qaeda operatives as he attempted to secure an interview for the Wall Street Journal. Yet the great bulk of the film focuses not on her suffering, but on the team of American officials, Pakistani secret service operatives, and WSJ journalists who decoded the plot to capture Pearl. Dense and detailed without being confusing, the film moves with a methodical, documentary-like clip, with matter-of-fact titles announcing time and place set against expansive establishing shots (Mariane intones at the beginning of the movie that Karachi, Pakistani is so large a city that they don't know how to count the people, and these shots, set against the eerie citywide call for prayer by the local mosques over loudspeakers, is a constant reminder of the futility of the investigators' task). When the camera does point at Mariane/Jolie, we're treated to sappy flashbacks, heavy-handed imagery, and flat-out bad acting (Jolie's attempt to provide cries of anguish, in full-fledged Oscar begging mode, felt cheap and exploitative). Maybe there's a reason why the theater's empty.

Fantastic Mr. Movie Blog

2007-06-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I'm not the first person to report this, but I discovered a rather intriguing new project yesterday while browsing through IMDb--a computer animated adaptation of my all-time favorite book as a little kid, Roald Dahl's "Fantastic Mr. Fox," directed by the one and only Wes Anderson. Anderson is working on the screenplay with Noah Baumbach of THE SQUID AND THE WHALE fame (the two worked together on THE LIFE AQUATIC as well), and it's currently on target for a 2009 release.

To my knowledge, this makes Anderson the second major director of "human" films to try his hand at an animated feature, along with Tim Burton, who directed CORPSE BRIDE. Coincidentally, Burton has been involved in two previous adaptations of Dahl's novels--he directed CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY two years ago, and co-produced an animated version of JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH in 1996, neither of which was particularly well received critically.

I think Anderson may be able to beat Burton's track record. Dahl's work does have a surrealist streak that might seem to favor the man who directed EDWARD SCISSORHANDS and BEETLEJUICE, but the results of their convergence have not been well received precisely because the material offers little in the way of restraint to Burton's worst tendencies. I think Anderson's coy, introspective style will be a better complement to Dahl's books. Like Anderson and his contemporaries (Baumbach, Sofia Coppola), Dahl's books often deal with a main character who is lonely and marginalized (the Big Friendly Giant of "BFG," who lives in a cave and is mocked by the other giants for not being mean, comes to my mind first; James and Charlie are also good examples of this). "Fantastic Mr. Fox" is more of a straight-up caper film than any of Dahl's other novels (~~Danny Ocean~~ George Clooney is currently slotted as Mr. Fox's voice), but it certainly deals with an iconoclastic group on the outside trying to rise above a repressive authority. I think the coy rebelliousness that runs through Anderson's work will really shine in a story based on Dahl's novel.

That, and the idea of an animated film with lots of Futura Bold titles makes me chuckle.

More to come on RATATOUILLE, WAITRESS, and A MIGHTY HEART...

Travelin' AFI Film List Blues

2007-06-21T19:55:00.001-07:00

The American Film Institute rolled out a new edition of its 100 Greatest American Films list last night, and while I would only classify this event as semi-serious, it is very bloggable. So, without further ado, notes and quibbles about the new list:

*Seriously, can we vote another film number one? Does every single film list have to put KANE at the top? I'm not saying it's not a great film, but isn't about time that one of these lists made a case for a movie produced in the last, oh, sixty-five years? That would do more to promote the profile of the AFI list than their TV special. Seriously--can you imagine the media play the AFI would get if their poll put THE GODFATHER or VERTIGO or SINGIN' IN THE RAIN at the top? Everyone would be talking about the film that beat KANE, and it would finally give the moribund AFI some relevance.

*Why does the AFI insist with this focus on domestic films? The British Film Institute doesn't (although, to be fair, the British have a very small national cinema so they're sort of stuck here). If the point of a film institute is to educate and promote film art, why does the AFI act like foreign film doesn't exist whenever it's given a national vehicle for promoting itself? One possible fix: a global "100 best films" list, with a counterpart domestic list to promote specifically American classics.

*Worth looking into some sublists of things I care about, inspired by the top 100. First, the top American silent films:

(1) [11] CITY LIGHTS (Chaplin)
(2) [18] THE GENERAL (Keaton)
(3) [49] INTOLERANCE (Griffith)
(4) [58] THE GOLD RUSH (Chaplin)
(5) [78] MODERN TIMES (Chaplin)
(6) [82] SUNRISE (Murnau)

THE GENERAL, SUNRISE, and INTOLERANCE were all new to the list, while BIRTH OF A NATION was dropped from the previous list. Silent films did remarkably well in this revision of the list, given how far off the average American filmgoers' radar they are. THE GENERAL was the highest ranked newcomer to the list, and CITY LIGHTS had the highest climb between the two lists of any film save THE SEARCHERS (John Ford's highly debated masterpiece jumped a whopping 84 places to 12th). I think the last ten years of DVD releases and film preservation have been enormously beneficial to silent film. I wouldn't be surprised to see this trend continue when the poll is taken again in another ten years--we need to get Lloyd on this list, and it would nice to see another director of drama other than Murnau and Griffith make the list (possibly Von Stroheim for GREED?).

As for their particular ordering, I, of course, love CITY LIGHTS and will defend it to the death, so I'm gratified to see it go as the highest ranked silent film (although a silent really needs to be represented in the top ten, so I need to keep pushing it). There's always the question however, of what exactly one is ranking with these lists. If it's historical importance we're considering, I might rank INTOLERANCE higher because it was such a landmark in cinematic technique, opening up new realms of possibility for the art form (INTOLERANCE is a classic case of the problem with all film lists--if you're asking me to list the most genuinely entertaining, well-crafted, thoughtful movies, INTOLERANCE isn't anywhere near the top, but if you're asking me to list movies that are important to the history of the craft, it's going to be one of the first five or ten movies I name). You might even rank THE GENERAL asmore "important" than CITY LIGHTS because it gave rise to the modern action film; everyone knows the Little Tramp when they see him, but Keaton has had more of an impact on the average filmgoers' taste.

Second, the best Hitchcock films of all time:

(1) [9] VERTIGO
(2) [14] PSYCHO
(3) [48] REAR WINDOW
(4) [55] NORTH BY NORTHWEST

and... that's it? Really? NOTORIOUS? STRANGERS ON A TRAIN? LIFEBOAT? THE BIRDS? The first three seem like first-ballot films to me; I would have thought THE BIRDS were a shoo-in because it's so ingrained in the popular entertainment conscience, even though I don't like it very much. Chew on this: Steven Spielberg got one more film in the list than Hitch did (SCHINDLER'S LIST, ET, JAWS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), and his best film was rated higher than Hitchcock's best. Kubrick scored the same number of movies Hitchcock did, but it's worth remembering he made about a third of the number of movies. Hitch at least needs more props than Spielberg--I'd be happy with them taking NOTORIOUS and STRANGERS.

*PULP FICTION at 94? How did that happen? I've never encountered a film critic who didn't have it ranked as the best film in the year it was made and among the best film from the nineties. Tarantino is an enormously influential director. Who did AFI interview to get that number?

*TOY STORY slips in the top 100, representing the massive tide of computer animation that's swept over audiences in recent years. Bravo. I just saw the movie a few days ago with my kid brother and was stunned at how well it held up. Looking back, the animation was actually pretty crude, but the movie still works because it is, above all, a really, really good movie, not just a demonstration of computer power. The plot is lithe, economical, yet seems almost effortlessly executed--I kept wanting to get up and check my e-mail during the movie, but I couldn't bring myself to do it because something important is happening all the time, either in terms of the advancement of the plot or the development of the characters. I was also struck by how adult Woody and Buzz's dilemmas are--it's really a film about mid-life crisis that just happens to be nestled in a children's film. FINDING NEMO and CARS don't even approach it's brilliance (in fact, I'm going to have to revise a lot of my Pixar grades in light of seeing TOY STORY again). I guarantee this film will rise much higher in the next ten years.

*We'll ignore the fact that LORD OF THE RINGS and TITANIC made the list.

OK, enough whining.

I Watched Closely...

2007-06-19T07:55:00.000-07:00

UPDATE (06/28): Blair pointed out that I hadn't given THE PRESTIGE a grade. I didn't give one mostly because I was still trying to settle out the debate between A and A- in my mind, and wasn't quite resolved one way or another. I feel as though I've settled on an A-, and, in case you're curious, it's not because I've realized my argument that multiple viewings are needed to completely and thoroughly untangle the film isn't really valid, or even consistent with other movies I enjoy (VERTIGO, THE RULES OF THE GAME; however, like VERTIGO, the experience of watching THE PRESTIGE after the first viewing is necessarily something of an academic exercise, since the primary thrill or conceit in seeing the film cannot be replicated by the viewer). I'm sympathetic to Stephen Greydanus' take that the film is something of a "Möbius strip" of meaning, with lots of potentially juicy philosophical subtexts running underneath, but none of them converging into anything really coherent.

I finally got around to seeing THE PRESTIGE on DVD this weekend. Consider my mind officially blown. I don't know if I have anything to say that approaches a full review, but I do have a lot of scattered thoughts as to what it's really "about," which I'm putting up here for the sake of posterity (I will issue, at this point, a blanket warning about spoilers for anyone who hasn't seen the movie yet):

(1) The film reminds me of VERTIGO, in that it's posed as a quest of obsession to obtain something highly desired, that ends in the destruction of both the pursued and the pursuer. In both films, the pursuer's fascination with the chase itself ends up consuming the reason for the chase. Angier's (Hugh Jackman) quest to copy the incredible "Transported Man" trick of his rival Borden (Christian Bale) becomes a quest in and of itself, not financial gain or even revenge, in much the same way that Scotty didn't really care about Judy Barton--she was simply a tool to help him envision his total obsession with Madeline.

(2) Along the same lines, or not quite, THE PRESTIGE also deals with the price of deception, the pain that comes with the perfect trick. The magician has to learn how to "get his hands dirty" if he's to be a success, in Cutter's (Michael Caine) words. The second scene in the movie shows Cutter performing a simple "disappearing bird" trick for a little girl (we don't know who she is at this point), cross-cut with Angier displaying his final, greatest trick. What we eventually learn about both tricks is that they necessarily result in death--in the case of "The Transported Man," Angier's clone must be killed off; with the cage trick, the bird has to be killed, replaced by a new one. He is fooled into thinking that Darrow's trick requires no sacrifice, a mistake.

There's a great scene that foreshadows this conflict at the very beginning of the movie. Borden and Angier are partners at the beginning of the movie, young magicians looking to move up quickly in the world of London entertainment. Cutter challenges them to attend the show of an elderly Chinese magician who he admires, challenging them to figure out how he's able to do his routine (making heavy, awkward objects appear on a table seemingly out of nowhere). Angier is mystified that an elderly, hobbling old man would have the physical strength apparently needed to do the trick. Borden recognizes immediately that his poor health, perhaps his age itself, is an illusion, a part of his act; he admires his total dedication to selling the act. Eventually, both men take this sort of dedication too far, but from the start, Borden is more dedicated to it, and understands it better, than Angier does.

Later, after Angier and Darrow have split up, Angier comes up with a new way to do the disappearing/reappearing bird trick. It uses a mechanism that doesn't kill the bird itself. Coincidentally, the bird chosen for this trick is a dove--it is a peace offering by Angier, a chance to start anew without death and killing after he took out a slight degree of revenge upon Borden. Unfortunately, Borden manages to work his way onto the stage and ruins the trick cage by killing the bird. There are no peace offerings in this world--being willing to get your hands dirty simply isn't enough.

There's a general take-home message for the audience here, perhaps, but I also believe--and this is where the VERTIGO similarities come back again--that Nolan is making a comment on the medium of film itself, because it deals in deception of the audience more than any other art. Does the actor, by performing a convincing deception of the audience that he is someone else, that he feels things he does not really feel? Does the director, by creating a world that seems so genuine on the surface but that is, in the end, just a fictional creation, destroy his ability to tell the difference between reality and fantasy in some small way through his trade? I'm not sure it's all that dramatic, but that seems to be where the movie points.

(3) I, of course, loved the character of Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), as only an electrical engineer could. I had not realized that he was something of a mad scientist later in life, although I obviously know quite a bit about the relative advantages/disadvantages of alternating and direct current, and why Tesla's method for delivering electricity worked best. It's interesting how Nolan poses the competition between Tesla and Edison alongside the rivalry between Borden and Angier. The scientists are "wizards" of another sort, facing the same sort of difficulties and imperfections in their "illusion" of precise knowledge of the world ("these things never work the way you expect them to," Tesla mentions to Angier during the testing of Angier's desired device), the same need for illusion to protect their work from interference, and, tragically, the same bitter rivalries over who can do the trick better.

The place of science in THE PRESTIGE's thematic structure is interesting to ponder. Angier's obsession with Tesla's unique brand of magic ends up giving rise to his destruction. He concludes that the only way for the trick to be performed is with the aid of science, with Tesla's machine. He's told several times that he's overthinking it, that there's clearly a double being used (Cutter and Olivia [Scarlett Johansson] both tell him this), but he refuses to believe it--there has to be a better explanation. That leads him to Tesla, who is able to provide something satisfactory, although he, again, has not really learned the secret of Borden's trick. Instead of accepting the mystery, the "trick" if you will, he finds a "scientific" replacement for it, although, as Cutter points out in his discussion with the solicitor, the device "has no trick... it's real."

There's another possible interpretation of the film at this point--Nolan's juxtaposition of an irrational faith in science, versus an irrational faith in illusion (religion?) Both seem to lead to the same sort of human pain and suffering, the same wanton destruction of people (don't the chinese water torture boxes in the hideout with the "prestige" materials look like test tubes with fetuses in them, ala THE MATRIX? Just a thought, I could be wrong).

(4) Some minor notes:

*As anyone would expect from a Nolan film, it's beautifully shot and precisely structured--it took another viewing to appreciate the beauty of how the plot unfolds, as Borden reads Angier's account of his attempt to unlock Borden's diary, etc. The muted colors of the London streets and homes heighten the bright colors and flashiness of the stage acts and Tesla's lab, which have an almost alien quality to them. You would think, being a film about magic, that the style of the technical work would call greater attention to itself, but it really doesn't.

*Acting notes: Jackman, Bale, and Caine are very well cast, placed just far enough outside their comfort zone to be natural without being overly comfortable. The most pleasant surprise was child actor Samantha Mahurin, who plays Borden's daughter. I know, I know--she doesn't talk and her main job is to look cute. But pay very close attention to the scenes where she's with her mother, Sarah (Rebecca Hall), and notice how she's picked up on Sarah's mannerisms, the way she tilts her head and moves her eyes. It's hard to describe but it's extraordinary when you see it happening.

*It's probably a little too dense, if I can fault it for anything--I'm somewhat torn on how to rate movies that need several viewings to make themselves comprehensible. I realize it probably gives you a better understanding of what's happening, but at the same time, there's a certain serendipity to experiencing a movie for the first time that can never be replicated, and your reaction the first time you see something should carry some weight over and above subsequent viewings (this is the sort of movie where I'm glad no one spoiled the critical plot twists for me, unlike, oh, BEERFEST).

---
So, yeah, nothing really coherent, just a lot of things "banging around my head." (Nolan's words, not mine).

Freaking Clooney, Man

2007-06-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2007, B)

I've always liked George Clooney. I'm not saying he's God gift to acting--more precisely, I like his persona as a star, which is the closest thing the modern cinema has to a Cary Grant or Frank Sinatra (although he's more low key than the former, and a better actor than the latter). I like seeing movies with Clooney in them because the sort of character he's good at playing tends to get cast into movies I'm particularly interested in seeing. OCEAN'S THIRTEEN is a case in point--if I have a jones for subject manner of any sort, it's heist or criminal films, especially if the criminals are sophisticated and clever, with vast monetary resources.

What's somewhat worrisome is that OCEAN'S THIRTEEN takes my affection for Clooney's persona for granted, and is unashamed of riffing on it, along with the personas of its other stars (Pitt, Damon, Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Pacino, Garcia, et al). It's a lazy approach to characterization, and fools the viewer into thinking the script is better than it really is (Roger Ebert is being a little unfair to the movie in my opinion, but he's right in saying that the movie about how the hell Ocean's gang got that enormous drill underneath the hotel, without anyone noticing, would be far more interesting). Soderbergh, along with the rest of the cast, don't seem to be annoyed with the arrangement and don't do a whole lot to break out of it, with a few limited exceptions.

Two factors keep OCEAN'S from being wholly irredeemable, and in fact make it worth one's while as summer movie fare. The first is Steven Soderbergh, as fine a technical director as anyone presently working. We never get the sense that he is taking things easy, even though this is clearly not the sort of thing Soderbergh wants listed as his life's work. Like the Vegas backdrop of the film, the visual style is bright, fast, aggressive without sacrificing playfulness, always expressive, and never uninteresting (I'm partial to the final scenes in the hotel, with the dark, violent reds of the hotel walls setting the stage for the ultimate heist). The intricate plot tumbles along effortlessly, perhaps a little too easily at times, as Ebert hints at in his review. The second factor is, for all the laziness of character development, that the cast is very, very good, and it's hard to resist enjoying the relaxed, nonchalant vibe they create. It's a guilty pleasure, to be sure, but that is the point of a summer blockbuster, isn't it?

Taking a Ribbing

2007-06-05T15:17:00.000-07:00

ADAM'S RIB (George Cukor, USA, 1939, B-)

"You do know they had a lifelong affair, right?" my Mom asked as I mused over the easygoing chemistry between Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in this entertaining, but unspectacular, not-quite-screwball comedy. Well, I didn't to be honest (although that's the kind of thing you'd think I know, right?), but that would explain the aforementioned chemistry. It barely even feels like performance to watch them do normal husband-and-wife things around each other, down to the squabbling, and getting the unusual professional dynamic within their relationship (she's a Yale Law grad, he didn't attend any law school worth mentioning; she's in private practice, he's still laboring as an assistant DA; she's quick witted and savvy, he stumbles over his words). They seem to get along fairly well, despite the differences, until they take opposing sides in the attempted murder case of a cuckolded wife (the mistress is played by Jean Hagen, an embryonic version of Lina Lamont from SINGIN' IN THE RAIN). He sees a simple conviction; she sees a women's rights extravaganza and pulls a variety of Johnnie Cochran-like stunts in an attempt to win over the jury.

I should like this movie more than I do, but I can't wrap my mind around the film's gender politics. Perhaps, in 1949, Hepburn's character might have been correct in saying that women and men, having committed the exact same acts in the exact same manner, would be judged differently by society. The problem is that I really don't think Tracy's character is at all opposed to this idea--he just wants to put an unstable person away for doing something bad, and in the end the movie seems to side with his view, directly contradicting the fawning treatment of Hepburn's histrionics. Normally, I'm a sucker for ambiguity--I liked BABEL, for goodness sakes--but "ambiguity" doesn't mean "have the last fifteen minutes of the film contradict everything that came before it." I'd rather see a straight-up feminist puff-piece, to be honest.

Brief Shot: SAFETY LAST!

2007-06-03T21:39:00.000-07:00

SAFETY LAST! (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor [Harold Lloyd], USA, 1923, B)

Lloyd's most lasting claim to fame is the above image, arguably the most famous still from the silent age, taken from one of its most daring and humorous sequences. Yet the film as a whole is less than satisfying, mostly because I can't sympathize with Lloyd's protagonist, a well-meaning putz who fritters every dime of his paycheck on jewelry for his girlfriend in Everytown, USA, to underscore his rapid ascent in the corporate world. The reality is less glamorous, as Lloyd struggles to hold on to his job in the face of difficult customers and overbearing superiors. To get the money the girl thinks he has all at once, Lloyd gets a gig promoting his friend as a building-climber; when the friend gets chased off by the cops, Lloyd becomes both promoter and performer, leading to the famous clock-hang. The comic business outside of the climactic scene is solid but unspectacular, particularly Lloyd's interaction with one customer who insists on examining all the fabric behind the counter Lloyd's working, only to settle on the first piece she looked at, simply to take a sample. Works wonders on the little kids, though--my eight-year old brother watched in awe as Lloyd scaled the building, breathlessly asking me how he did it, certain that Lloyd was actually hanging several stories in the air with birds pecking at his hat. We forget, sometimes, how magical the cinema can be, unencumbered by critical airs.

The (Almost) Final Act

2007-05-29T21:08:00.000-07:00

THE CIRCUS (Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1928, A)

The late 1920's found Charlie Chaplin, then the most famous man in the world, embroiled in an unprecedented level of public scandal as a result of his acrimonious divorce with Lita Grey. The marriage began inauspiciously--Chaplin knocked up Grey on the set of THE GOLD RUSH at the age of 16 (she had met Chaplin during THE KID, in which she held a small role, and before her pregnancy rendered her inoperable, she was slotted for the female lead in THE GOLD RUSH that ended up going to Georgia Hale). Grey would bear Chaplin two sons before their four-year marriage came to a spectacular end. The divorce trial was a national--indeed, an international--sensation. Gery's complaint was published and sold on street corners, revealing lurid details about Chaplin's private life and sexual tastes (while Grey can hardly be counted a disinterested witness on every detail of what happened between her and Chaplin, most Chaplin historians seem to agree that he was sexually voracious in the early stages of his career, with a particular fixation on younger women--his final marriage to Oona O'Neill happened when she was only eighteen years old, and he fifty-four. Curiously, his tastes aligned with those of another towering artistic figure of the twenties, Bertolt Brecht).*

While this was happening, another problem--less obvious, but perhaps fraught with even greater peril--was creeping up behind Chaplin. In 1927, the course of film history was irrevocably changed by the introduction of synchronized sound to the movies, beginning with THE JAZZ SINGER. As a young lad following the goings-on in the music halls of London, Chaplin had seen comics simply "lose" their gift to charm an audience, thrown out of work by the capricious whimsy of the public, and the fear of suddenly losing the ability to make that mystical connection between comedian and audience haunted Chaplin his entire life. Undoubtedly, it occurred to Chaplin that the tyranny of twenty-four frames per second might bring his worst fears to a head in short order; he certainly sensed the pressure his contemporaries were feeling as the studios pushed silent comics like Lloyd and Keaton to get with the times.

It was in this stew that Chaplin made THE CIRCUS, the most poignant comedy he had directed up to that point, and the darkest he would attempt to make for another twenty years or so. It has become something of a lost work, at least in part because of the negative connotations the film carried for Chaplin, which kept the film out of circulation for most of his life (he famously omitted mention of the film entirely, along with the divorce, in his autobiography). Certainly, Chaplin had no need to be ashamed about the final product--Chaplin plays on his insecurities with a bitter and, at times, sardonic glee, yet somehow, the comic action still carries the lithe, carefree grace that makes his work so timeless.

There are two central comic issues in THE CIRCUS, each of which prey on one of Chaplin's demons. The first is that the Little Tramp is funny, but not when he is consciously trying to be funny. Thanks to (wild guess time) the daughter of the circus' manager, played by Merna Kennedy, the Tramp is given an audition with the other clowns in the circus troupe. Predictably, he completely fails to understand the gist of their routines. The heartless circus manager gives the Tramp the boot, only to have him chased back into the ring during a show by a deranged mule. The audience, standing for the rest of us, cannot control their laughter as the Tramp brilliantly muddles the intended function of the various circus routines. Begrudgingly, the director hires the Tramp on as a workman, with strict instructions to the circus crew not to let him know that he's the star of the show.

In these scenes, we can see Chaplin reflecting on his particular place in the comic universe in a very open way. On the one hand, the film is a paean to the sort of clowning that doubtlessly inspired Chaplin. On the other, Chaplin is drawing a line of demarcation between his particular brand of comedy, and the vaudeville/music hall tradition he hailed from. Unlike the rest of the clowns, the Tramp does not seem to be playing for laughs--he isn't in on the joke with the audience and lacks the sort of immediate emotional connection a clown might have. This is what set the movie comics apart from their vaudeville counterparts.

Could this be the fear that was gnawing at Chaplin and his contemporaries, that we were moving away from the visual lyricism of silent comedy, and returning toward the wink-wink nod-nod relationship with the audience that characterized humor in the theater? Certainly, the most successful early sound-era comics, especially the Marx Brothers, thrived on a new style that was far more self-aware, that played to the audience in a more overtly comic way. Perhaps, looking forward to a largely uncertain future, Chaplin was writing the story of his own end as an artist. Chaplin would write another elegy for himself in LIMELIGHT, which deals with many of the same dilemmas, but does it in the name of drama, not comedy, replacing the lithe grace of Chaplin's balletic slapstick.

The second comic issue, Chaplin's status as an outsider who cannot succeed on the world's terms, is a constant across almost every film he made, but it reaches the sort of intensity in THE CIRCUS that it rarely achieved in Chaplin's feature films. THE KID and THE GOLD RUSH end on high notes; CITY LIGHTS and MODERN TIMES achieve a magical ambiguity, managing to be satisfying and yet tantalizing incomplete all at once. THE CIRCUS gives us the Tramp as Pyhrric victor--a noble failure, but a failure nonetheless. He fails at comedy when he makes a conscious effort to be funny, and we understand that, eventually, he will have to leave the circus. He is smitten by Kennedy's character, but she regards him as nothing more than a funny little man, and her heart lies with the circus' resident tightrope walker (Harry Crocker). We feel bad for Chaplin--the tightrope walker is tall, handsome, and a skilled entertainer, but we know somehow that he cannot love with the Tramp's passion. As in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, passion loses out to common sense and pragmatism.

In the film's most enduring scene, Chaplin tries to take the role of the tightrope walker, in a desperate attempt to win over the girl's heart. While planning the film, Chaplin wanted a sequence that would place the Tramp in a totally helpless situation, completely isolated from human sympathy, an object for their ridicule. He certainly had the immense public humiliation he was experiencing at the time on his mind as he planned this scene. The monkeys crawling on Chaplin as he hangs helplessly over the center ring are a bitterly sarcastic touch--the tabloid outcry over Chaplin's moral proclivity may have had some slight justification, but he left little doubt as to what he thought of their tactics.

(Spoilers!)

Yet the film's most poignant image of isolation isn't the tightrope scene, but the final shots. The fate we fear for Chaplin has come to pass--he has given up the girl to the tightrope walker, and has chosen the road over the circus, realizing the futility of continuing on as an entertainer. The wagons circle around him, then trail off of the frame, leaving the tiny Tramp in a cloud of dust, crushed by the desolate horizon (Chaplin is often criticized for his lack of visual imagination, but when the circumstances called for a dramatic setting, he composed a frame as well as anybody). With an insouciant kick of an errant can, he simply walks away, back to the audience. It is a defiant gesture, one that must have resonated with a public that was fascinated with Chaplin's private failings. It has the feel of a requiem, a funeral happening for someone dead before his time had arrived, and perhaps that's how Chaplin, his public image crashing in on him and his profession in jeopardy, had planned it. Luckily, Chaplin saw through this rough period, long enough to direct two more cinematic good-byes, in MONSIEUR VERDOUX and LIMELIGHT, but none worked quite as well as this one.

*sources: The Independent, London; Johnson, Paul, Intellectuals, HarperPerennial, 1988.

What Do You Do With A Drunken Filmmaker? Or, Kobe Bryant v. Johnny Depp

2007-05-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END (Gore Verbinski, USA, 2007, B-)

The film critic for my local rag, The Fresno Bee, wrote breathlessly in Friday's paper that the PIRATES franchise has, at long last, "jumped the shark." Really? I didn't know there was a shark to be jumped. Yes, PIRATES is everything you'd want in a rousing summer popcorn flick; yes, it delivers (somewhat) on the setup in the transitional second film (although my thought as I left the theater was that I'd somewhat overrated the snoozefest that was DEAD MAN'S CHEST). But it is what it is--a loosely logical (at best) concatenation of furiously brilliant and hugely improbable action sequences, a sure-fire crowd pleaser that nobody will think twice about in fifteen years. The only way a series like this becomes anything more than cheap thrills (or, as my ten dollar theater ticket testifies, high-priced thrills) is if the surrounding mythology is halfway decent (ala STAR WARS, HARRY POTTER, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS). However, in both sequels, Verbinski seemed eager to throw as many pirate-sounding plot elements into the mix willy-nilly, and the story is distinctly unsatisfying as a result, worth quite a deal less than the sum of its parts. As good as Johnny Depp is in the lead role, he really can't bring the film onto a higher plane than this by himself--like Kobe Bryant, he's the lone genius on a team of lackadaisical role players, in desperate need of another star to elevate the team. Another Bryant parallel: because of the lack of talent around him, the Sparrow character has never evolved in a substantive way past the first film (still the best, both as a film and for Depp's performance). If I were the GM/director, I would have traded Bloom for Viggo Mortenson, a couple of "extreme body type" extras, a second round draft pick, if for no other reason than to give Depp an actor with a pulse he could push against. AT WORLD'S END is what all the other PIRATES movies have been--a rousing good time, but nothing to write home about.

(Final NBA note: I love how the other captain's name is Barbosa. Really, though, he shouldn't have been in at the start of movie; he's much better when he subs in at the middle of the first reel to give the cast some more offensive firepower. Why didn't the NBA choose this movie to do their goofy movie/conference finals promotions?)

Go Tate!

2007-05-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

THE FRESHMAN (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor [Harold Lloyd], USA, 1925, A)

Harold Lloyd has long been considered third place among the great silent comedians of the 1920's, trailing well behind Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. However, in the 1920's, Lloyd was as highly-regarded by American audiences as Chaplin was, and his popularity dwarfed that of Keaton. Why the change? For decades after his retirement from movies, Lloyd resisted the urge to put his films back into wide circulation, out of fears that distributors would not present them properly. The fears were well founded. Tom Dardis, a Lloyd biographer, estimated that one half of the output of the silent era was irretrievably destroyed after the 1920's by the studios, who believed that synchronized sound had rendered silent film worthless. Later, initial video releases of Lloyd's classic films were indeed systematically butchered by the Time-Life Corporation, confirming Lloyd's fears. Chaplin was able to overcome this onslaught because of the degree of autonomy he held on the business end of the filmmaking process, which allowed him to control how his films were presented after the end of the silent era. Keaton was nearly wiped out once the silent era ended and lacked any personal control over his work, but in an incredible stroke of good fortune, he was rediscovered and greatly admired by the nouvelle vague school of critics in the late fifties and early sixties, enabling his work to reach audiences in their intended form.

However, the lack of appreciation for Lloyd is not solely a function of business dealings. Both Chaplin and Keaton made movies with comic sensibilities that more accurately reflect the tastes of modern audiences. Keaton's emotional passivity (nicknamed "The Great Stone Face" by his fans) and over-the-top physicality predicted the modern action film; Chaplin's deeply introspective approach, postmodern sensibilities, and ability to not merely balance comedy and tragedy but to show how the two concepts spill into one another, inspired a generation of highbrow comic filmmakers from Woody Allen to Noah Baumbach. By contrast, Lloyd was resolutely a product of his age--his films are full to bursting with the sort of roaring 20's optimism that some find hopelessly naive. Yet Lloyd was a more perceptive judge of the character of life than many give him credit for, and he is unparalleled as an architect of comic narrative. A complete restoration of all his important feature-length and short films, executed by Lloyd's family trust, is now attempting to restore the great master's reputation; hopefully, it is not too little, too late, for Lloyd's comedy to make a comeback.

Typically, those with a passing knowledge of Lloyd will be familiar with SAFETY LAST, which features the most iconic imagery in all of American silent film--a helpless Lloyd hanging from the clock on a high-rise building, performing a stunt that will hopefully put his character on solvent financial footing. However, SAFETY LAST, with its paltry plot and grand theatrics, was always somewhat misrepresentative of Lloyd's filmmaking ideals; he resented the "King of Daredevil Comedy" tag that followed him after SAFETY LAST was released. A better slice of Lloyd's essence is THE FRESHMAN, a sterling college comedy that catches Lloyd at the height of his powers. On full display are all the elements that made Lloyd unique--the strong middle-American moral sensibilities, the innocent romance, and, above all, the meticulous construction and flawless execution of each sequence of gags. Combined with Lloyd's unique physical style and aw-shucks self-immolation, THE FRESHMAN, a full eighty years after its initial release, still has the power to send audiences rolling into the aisles.

THE FRESHMAN centers on a hopelessly idealistic entering first-year at fictional Tate College, played by Lloyd. The opening scenes take place in his home before he heads off to school. As a "regular guy," like much of his audience, going to college would have been seen as a tremendous privilege, the ultimate fulfillment of the American Dream (Keaton would later exploit this dream himself in COLLEGE, a crude shadow of THE FRESHMAN; Depression-era America delighted in the Marx Brothers' HORSE FEATHERS, a shameless parody of the excesses of college life). That idealization seems to have had little do with actual academics--we never see anyone attend a class in THE FRESHMAN--and more to do with the glamorous lives those students led, especially on football fields across the country on Saturday afternoons. Much of the film's humor comes from the conflict between the popular culture's portrayal of college and the reality of entering into that world of privilege from the outside. Lloyd's character greets everyone he meets with an indescribably funny handshake cum jig that he learned from (surprise) another movie about college, and indulges in the typical dreams of starring for the football team despite his lack of physical coordination (all part of the illusion; Lloyd was well over six feet tall and a tremendously gifted athlete) and being the social king of campus despite his meager resources and delusional ideas about his peers. His parents seem mildly confused by all of this; his father, working an amateur radio downstairs, gets excited when he accidentally overhears his son executing the Tate College cheer at the top of his lungs in his bedroom: "I've found China!"

The obvious screenwriting approach to this situation would be to completely wipe Lloyd's character out in the first forty minutes or so, followed by a rousing comeback. But what actually takes place is, in some ways, more cruel by being less of a disaster, at least at first. Lloyd is without a doubt the laughingstock of the college from the moment he jumps off the train, yet his antagonists in the upper crust of the Tate College community, rather than telling him off completely, delude him into believing he is one of their own. He is told that he has made the football team despite a total lack of skill, kept on as a waterboy to prevent his heart from being broken. He throws money at the student body, thinking he is making friends, unaware he is simply being used. In a way, it's twice as cruel as being told the truth. Lloyd plays masterfully on one of the central fear of human existence--that the comfortable circle of acceptance we have built up is a mirage, and that the people slap us on the back when they greet us will stab us in the back when we've left the room.

It's also painful for Lloyd's non-college student girlfriend, played by Jobyna Ralston, who realizes what's being done to Lloyd but can't stop it. She's introduced to us by a title card as "The woman your mother surely was," and exudes the kind of radiant, girlish beauty that was idealized in the twenties. Her innocence and simplicity stands in opposition to the freewheeling college students, with their contraband flasks of booze and their unrequited cruelty towards Lloyd. These fears finally reach a breaking point at the massive dance Lloyd throws for the entire school, which descends into total chaos as his last-second tuxedo falls into pieces while he's wearing it (the scene is to Lloyd what the train rides in THE GENERAL mean to Keaton), and ends in the crushing realization that his massive efforts to become the school's social king have gone to naught. Still, Lloyd is able to hang his hopes on--what else?--the big game the next day as a way of reclaiming his spot at the top of the social chain, leading to the climactic final scene of the film.

The obvious comparison to make here is between Lloyd and Chaplin. Indeed, their approaches to life were similar in many ways--they shared the same fierce drive to succeed in their chosen fields, reached phenomenal heights of popularity, and often seemed to be playing out their paradoxical fears of rejection on the screen, even as they were the apple of the public's eye. Like Chaplin, Lloyd's most enduring films, especially THE FRESHMAN, ride that razor-thin edge between the comic and the tragic; we laugh because, otherwise, we'd cry. The difference, again, comes back to that twenties optimism that seemed so engrained in Lloyd's psyche, and that was so foreign to Chaplin. Without blowing the ending (although, if you've followed along so far, the logical ending of THE FRESHMAN hardly requires a leap of faith), Lloyd would have never imagined an ending like the Little Tramp's lonely walk-off in THE CIRCUS (another to-be-reviewed film in the next few weeks that I can't get my mind off of). That sort of hope will, no doubt, seem contrived and hokey to some people; however, with the world as sad as it is, isn't it all right to dream that the good guy wins and gets the girl at least once in a while? Unlike Chaplin, Lloyd understood the power of hope, of overcoming the odds to win, and all of his work is imbued with this optimism, even when things turn bleak. If Lloyd is dated, then he certainly represents the best of a gilded age.

Hynkel Sez...

2007-05-23T21:22:00.000-07:00

Translation: Hellish spring semester is over! Amateurish movie ramblings return full-time! Danke, herr Hynkel.

I've got a lot planned too: a redux on Harold Lloyd and Chaplin's THE CIRCUS, all the summer blockbusters, the best of the 2006 crop that slipped by me, along with whatever random tchotchke I can scrounge up over the next few weeks while I'm in "recharge the batteries" mode. Then it'll probably be back to light blogging mode for the start of law school. So if you're a friend, you can once again justify turning to this page on a regular basis, and if you're not, glad you could come by during a window of productivity.

A Strange Start

2007-04-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

MEET THE ROBINSONS (Stephen J. Anderson, USA, 2007, B-)

As it happens, my first new movie of an insanely busy year comes over Easter break with an animated cartoon my little sister wanted to see (budding cartoonist/animator that she is, which makes older repressed artist brother deliriously proud, and she gets an extra-special hat-tip for catching THE GOLD RUSH reference that I totally missed). The first fifteen minutes or so of the film does nothing to make one feel good about being subjected to this, especially since GRINDHOUSE was playing in the theater next door, with a solid helping of mind-numbing feel-good pabulum. Young orphan Lewis is a scientific super-genius who can't seem to get an adopted family, and he's almost reached the drop-dead date of thirteen years old; cue teenage angst about not being accepted, complete with the kind of useless dialogue I hate (no, really, I get it, you're pissed, Lewis). The Disney animation sans Pixar doesn't seem to look right, with fat, taut faces that look as though they'd pop if one hit them with the tip of a needle.

Mercifully, a time machine and demented people get involved, and things get significantly better, at least in spots. At its best moments, MEET THE ROBINSONS morphs into a mash-up of BACK TO THE FUTURE, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (no, really, and these perversely brilliant scenes do a lot to redeem the movie), The Jetsons cartoons, and DUCK SOUP ("Why does your dog wear glasses?" "Because his insurance couldn't pay for contacts," and, as in any Marx Brothers movie, the humor isn't so much in the joke itself as in the momentum developed from the seven previous one-liners and the rapid-fire editing pushing things faster than we have time to contemplate them). Rather contrary to what I'd been led to expect, MEET THE ROBINSONS offers, at times, a darker, more subversive take on the cookie-cutter animated message film, while not severing itself entirely from that tradition, ala THE TRIPLETTES OF BELLEVILLE (today's selections: "If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try, Again!" and "Everybody Deserves to Be Loved For Being The Incredibly Special Person They Are Deep Down Inside"). Ultimately, so much of the film suffers from the malaise of the first fifteen minutes that it has trouble building upon its strong points. It may be too early to speculate--we'll know more once the first non-Disney Pixar film, RATATOUILLE, comes out for purposes of comparison--but it seems like some wonderfully creative concepts were lost in poor screenwriting and directing. The uneven animation is also a concern, and it's not simply a matter of the humans looking bad (I never had this problem while watching THE INCREDIBLES). Still, it's a better start than I expected. I also saw something I hadn't seen in ages at a Disney screening, an old Mickey Mouse short. MEET THE ROBINSONS' ain't exactly STEAMBOAT WILLIE, but the reconstructed Disney animation unit now has some promise to build on, and, hopefully, it will look to the proud tradition of masterful storytelling Mickey represents to push it forward, rather than relying on today's overworked, message driven filler.

The JAA-vies, 2007 Edition

2007-02-11T13:02:00.000-08:00

I like that name--it gets the point across that this is the "B-team" of year-end lists. Without further ado...

FIVE FILMS THAT DEFINED 2006...

(5) OVER THE HEDGE
I almost forgot about this movie as I was contemplating my top five, but the more I thought about it, the more I asked myself, "did I ever have as much fun at a movie theater this year as I did when I saw OVER THE HEDGE?" Answer: probably not. An exuberant, colorful, good-natured thrill ride from start to finish, with clever voiceover work (Willis, Carrel, and Shatner are all superb) and just enough of a point to keep it from being totally mindless, while not being annoyingly didactic (unlike CARS, which, in retrospect, was surprisingly heavy-handed for a Pixar production). It's everything you could ask for from a cartoon--brilliant pastels, ridiculous characters, and monumental absurdity controlled with pinpoint precision. My hopes for the future of DreamWorks animation unit are high... once they get over the idea that SHREK is entertaining.

(4) THE QUEEN
There are so many ways THE QUEEN could have gone wrong, and yet--miraculously--it all goes so very right, and one can't help but be sucked into its wake. It's a docudrama, at heart, but it's also a film of rare poignancy and emotional perceptiveness that understands the greater significance behind the events it's concerned with. It is true that there are occasions when tradition must adjust to modernity, as Hollywood has been telling us for time immemorial; but it's also true that modernity, on occasion, needs to bow to tradition, and few movies do a better job of reminding us of both of these realities. Everyone's said it already, but Helen Mirren really does give a terrific performance--stern and imposing, she hides a tortured conscience that only occasionally comes to the surface. Yet there's a lot of praise to go around here, especially for screenwriter Peter Morgan, who deftly avoids the gaping potholes threatening any movie about Princess Diana, and actor Michael Sheen, who handles the unenviable task of playing Tony Blair with consummate grace. I didn't even mind that I was the youngest person in the theater by at least 20 years.

(3) UNITED 93
The right movie at the right time. Paul Greengrass captures the vertiginous mayhem of September 11 as perfectly as one might reasonably expect, eschewing 20/20 hindsight for the world-altering confusion we all felt that day. Unlike Oliver Stone's pleasant but flawed WORLD TRADE CENTER, Greengrass' decision to keep the scope of the movie confined to just a few places--the planes and the command centers--holds the emotion at fever pitch, which is exactly where it should be. It's a bit like watching a really good 2-hour episode of "24," stylistically speaking, because of the masterful juxtaposition of command center banter with the actual situation, and the nausea-inducing handheld camera work (for once, I got sick watching a movie and actually liked it). We may never know for sure what happened on that flight that day, but, like all great movies of this sort, it is the power of the storytelling, rather than the precise factual accuracies of whether the passengers reached the cockpit or not, that will carry this film's reputation far into the future. You owe it to yourself to see at least once, if not for the entertainment value, then, at least, so you can remember what should never be forgotten.

(2) MARIE ANTOINETTE
Victor and I can cry together over this one, I suppose, which got completely snubbed in this year's Skandies. If you're not impressed, just read the exaggerated criticism the movie is absorbing over at IMDb. No, it's not a historical film, in the sense most people probably expected it to be (although this has been immensely overplayed); and no, it doesn't particularly matter to me that the film seems to be as much about Sofia Coppola as it does about Marie Antoinette. If the film were only lavishly beautiful (the clear winner for costumes, art direction, and, in a new category, Best Pastry Chef), skillfully helmed by one of today's most underrated masters of pure cinema, and anchored by one of the year's most underrated performances (Kirsten Dunst in the lead), that would be good enough for at least an HM in a year where LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is actually a serious Best Film contender at the Oscars. But, on top of that, it's profoundly true in ways many the film's critics might be afraid to admit.

MARIE ANTOINETTE is not an old story that Coppola is trying to make "relevant" through unorthodox casting and out-of-place musical choices; why would a director, accused of pandering to audiences with a "better" version of the French Revolution, make the life of the protagonist so utterly miserable? The other day, I saw an episode of MTV's "My Super Sweet Sixteen" for the first time, and my thoughts jumped to this film almost immediately. The cultural milieus of the French monarchy, circa the late 18th century, and that of America's upper class (and even its upper-middle class), circa the early 21st century, have a lot in common, especially in regard to the behavior they encourage in their young people. In both the TV show and the movie, the paradoxical shallowness of a culture basking in material wealth, and, perhaps more importantly, the unrelenting attack on the innocence of children as society forces them to become more and more adult-like, earlier and earlier in life, are painfully evident.

"MSSS" is, obviously, an extreme manifestation of American culture at its very worst, but it's not hard to find this theme in everyday life if you take a look around--the persistent creep of adult sexual issues, including pregnancy and venereal disease, into youth culture and, to a lesser degree, the unhealthy emphasis on committed "relationships" as being a culturally normative part of the "good life" for young people; the extremely competitive nature of the high-achieving high-school student, manifest in AP tests, rampant cheating, and modern college admissions; the overcompensation for that competitiveness now found in college (a lot of today's universities, even the very elite ones, bare more than a passing resemblance to Marie's country estate, where she could escape the protocol of Versaille and supplement her decidedly lackluster sex life with the attentions of more attractive men than her husband); and, ultimately, the dreariness of a life lived within these bounds, with no future except further ascension in that world, devoid of any higher meaning. MARIE ANTOINETTE is not crass pandering, but a ringing criticism of modern culture that only points at a historical figure incidentally; perhaps the very finger being pointed at us is what makes this movie so uncomfortable to watch for so many people.

(1) THE DEPARTED
Intricate, intelligent, and riveting until the very end, THE DEPARTED reaches deep into the well into the most venerable of American film traditions, the crime drama, and, like all great movies, it contributes as much to that tradition as the tradition contributes to it. One of the questions I always ask myself as I write these capsules is, "what will you remember about the movies of 2006 twenty years from now?" This year, it happens to be an easy answer--I'll remember the calculating calm of Matt Damon, the cool lechery of Jack Nicholson, the levelheaded wisdom of Martin Sheen, the ferocious intensity of Mark Wahlberg, and the grittiness of Leonardo DiCaprio, who turns in the year's finest performance in a film, male or female. I'll remember the stunning, glossy blacks in Boston's back alleys; the shock of watching Sheen fall off a building in total silence, as if time had been suspended; the armrest-clutching tension before Nicholson's last stand, framed by the thumping backbeat of the Dropkick Murphys; and, of course, that emblematic and slyly graceful final shot. Yet, above all the technical and stylistic brilliance--especially Bill Monahan's superb adaptation of Asian crime film INFERNAL AFFAIRS--we'll remember this film as Scorsese's return to the form that had eluded him since GOODFELLAS by digging back into the ethnic urban environment where his best films were made, and, especially, by digging back into the faith of his youth in a serious way. It's one of those rare theatrical experiences that reminds you why, exactly, you started paying attention to movies in the first place.
~~~~~~~~~~
...Five More Films Worth Seeing, In No Particular Order...

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (Jason Reitman, USA)
BABEL (Alejandro González Iñarritu, France / Mexico / USA)
WORDPLAY (Patrick Creadon, USA)
DREAMGIRLS (Bill Condon, USA)
BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (Larry Charles, USA)

...One Film That Technically Doesn't Qualify, But If It Did, Would Probably Be #2...

ARMY OF SHADOWS (Jean Pierre Melville, France, 1969)

...Five More Films I Didn't Get To Because I'm An Engineering Student (updated as films move into my 'view' column)...

THE PRESTIGE (Christopher Nolan, USA)
APOCALYPTO (Mel Gibson, USA)
VOLVER (Pedro Almodovar, Spain)
CHILDREN OF MEN (Alfonso Cuáron, USA / UK)
OLD JOY (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

...And Five More Films I Apparently "Don't Get."

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris, USA)
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (Clint Eastwood, USA)
~~~~~~~~~~
PRODUCTION AWARDS

Best Cinematography: UNITED 93.
HM: THE DEPARTED, LOWER CITY.

Best Screenplay: Peter Morgan, for THE QUEEN.
HM: William Monahan, for THE DEPARTED; Sofia Coppola, for MARIE ANTOINETTE.

Best Director: Sofia Coppola, for MARIE ANTOINETTE.
HM: Martin Scorsese, for THE DEPARTED*; Paul Greengrass, for UNITED 93.

Best Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio, for THE DEPARTED.
HM: Sacha Baron Cohen, for BORAT; Jamie Foxx, for DREAMGIRLS; Ray Winstone, for THE PROPOSITION.

Best Actress: Helen Mirren, for THE QUEEN.
HM: Kirsten Dunst, for MARIE ANTOINETTE.

Best Supporting Actress: Rinko Kikuchi, for BABEL
HM: Jennifer Hudson, for DREAMGIRLS; Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, for A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION.

Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy, for DREAMGIRLS
HM: Sacha Baron Cohen and John C. Reilly, for TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE LEGEND OF RICKY BOBBY.
~~~~~~~~~~
*Yeah, I realize how ironic this is in light of my campaigning for Scorsese to win a Best Director Oscar; just to make it clear, if both Coppola and Scorsese were nominated for BD, I would still vote for Scorsese, simply on the basis of righting the historical record where he was wronged in the past (for TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, etc.)

Let Us Confuse Their Language

2007-02-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

I'm about ready to cut my losses on 2006 and post my best of list--hopefully, that will be up within the week. But first...

BABEL (Alejandro González Iñárritu, France / USA / Mexico, 2006, A-)

"Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

--Genesis 11:7-9

Well, it looks like I was wrong: there's a lot more to BABEL than the "globo-CRASH" moniker I gave it prior to seeing it based on its pre-release hype, although it's worth using the latter as a point of departure for discussing the former. The difference between an industry hack absorbed in political correctness and 19th-century style romanticism trying to win an Oscar (Paul Haggis, JAA Public Enemy #1) and a good director with a powerful idea and a commanding style (Iñárritu, teaming up for a third time with screenwriting compadre Guillermo Arriga) is hard to define in a short review, but it should be blindingly clear to anyone who's seen both movies. Despite the vast expanse of space it covers, with stories running Los Angeles, Mexico, downtown Tokyo, and the Moroccan desert, BABEL remains intimate and genuinely provocative. Iñárritu's greatest strength is his power to suggest, with images and sounds, what most directors given this type of film would try to assert with words. His fleeting images, like the glimpse of the gun slipped in the back of Gael Garcia Bernal's pants or the pulsating strobe lights showing Rinko Kikuchi's dumbstruck expression as her friend makes out with a boy they met on the street corner, say more about the way his characters perceive the world than one could ever hope to verbalize. Music is especially important to the film; the structural similarities between the cultural musics of these three worlds serve as a mental bridge between the ultimate similarities between three very different worlds. Technique and context mesh beautifully, and, at times, almost miraculously, from the hair-raising hand-held camerawork as Brad Pitt races to get his wife to shelter to the colossal wide-view shots of the desert as Adrianna Barraza and her two young charges, specks in the massive wilderness of the Mojave, struggle to find a safe haven.

I can see the reasoning behind complaints that the film is utterly incoherent from a storytelling standpoint--the various plot lines are strung together rather tenuously, and Iñárritu swirls the timeline of these incidents so thoroughly as to make the temporal relationship of events almost pointless. That was my original thought when I left the theater, but as I thought about it more carefully, the method behind the madness became better defined. BABEL isn't really about one thing in particular the way CRASH, say, was about racism. As the title of the movie might suggest, it deals with the universal struggle to be understood and loved, and the barriers that prevent us from doing so. Deaf people in an aural society, Americans in the North Africa, innocent young sheepherders caught up in an international criminal incident, rich American children meeting their poor Mexican counterparts, and Mexicans who are not legally allowed to be in the place where they have made their lives are symptoms of the problem, but not THE problem (that's not an endorsement of illegal immigration, by the way, but a recognition that we live in a fallen world). In this context, the fast and loose way BABEL deals with time make sense, just as PULP FICTION's disturbance of the temporal realm raises Tarantino's thematic notions about human honor above the linear progression of the story. Iñárritu's great accomplishment here is reducing a difficult set of issues down to a personal, experiential level without being uppity or corny--his ability to suggest the big questions to us, without prodding the viewer into asking them, turns out to be BABEL's greatest strength, and the reason why more attention will be paid to it twenty years from now than its far inferior, LA-based counterpart.

Knee-Jerk Reactions...

2007-01-27T08:46:00.000-08:00

...without the benefits of visual aids:

MARIE ANTOINETTE (Sofia Coppola, USA, 2006, A)

Wow. Has any movie this year been as wildly misjudged as this one? The murmurs in the theater after the screening--"it wasn't what I was expecting," etc.--probably have something to do with it, but then again, I think it's silly to take this movie on the level as historical fiction / docudrama. If you can handle the fact that it's not really about Revolutionary France (as Coppola herself admitted during the film's press junket when it premiered at Cannes, and was the most divisive film of the week), I think it holds together better. The juxtaposition of fastidious art design with a modern soundtrack, subversive casting(Schwartzman as King Louis? Rip Torn as his father? Kirsten Dunst as a period-piece female heroine?), and a generally superficial attitude towards its material points towards an allegorical understanding, with M.A. standing as a figure for young women trapped in the celebrity culture (Coppola probably sees a little bit of herself in Marie, too). That could quickly become insufferable, but Coppola's screenplay is a masterclass in visual storytelling--the scant dialog serves as a continuity cue for Coppola's precise vocabulary of rich images, creating barriers, friendships, and aspirations that are rarely spoken, but intuitively understood; at times, it's a bit like watching a superb silent film. Like the shots of the hunting teams seemingly chasing nothing, this movie is really about how indulgent cultures, modern or otherwise, destroy themselves, and not about telling a straightforward story about history's most infamous queen. It is timeless, and I think that will be borne out in the years to come.

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2006, B-)

If you ever wanted to know what would have happened if Paul Haggis had written SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, well, here's your chance; IWO JIMA is often powerful, especially when it sticks to the war scenes (although there's actually not that many of those), but just as often, it's baffling and incoherent. Eastwood is, at times, absurdly formal at junctures where it's simply uncalled for in the context of a chaotic war film (a shot of a Japanese soldier committing suicide with a grenade is followed by a perfectly composed shot of disembodied limbs propping up family photos, for example). The characters complain about the bugs and the heat, but where are they? Haggis' influence on the screenplay further botches the movie's ability to balance a gritty, realistic war film with high art conceits. It's a rich topic, to be sure, and Eastwood probes a couple of different layers of meaning in the Japanese's sick code of honor, but it fails to make the decisions of its principles convincing in the end. The difference between a confusing film, and a film that's richly ambiguous, is the ability to make a variety of perceptive yet paradoxical observations; Haggis and Eastwood, flitting back and forth between an overabundance of storylines and viewpoints, never really accomplish this. The film's last shot is symbolic, but not in the way Eastwood intended--a movie surrounded in good ideas but flailing at them, unable to communicate or connect with the viewer in any substantive way.

Oscar Noms

2007-01-23T11:28:00.000-08:00

Oscar nominations came out today. I expect to provide pretty full coverage of the Best Picture race--I will see LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA this week and BABEL two weeks from now when it screens at DPAC, and hopefully we can have some fun when Scorese is humiliated once again by GLOBO-CRASH or LITTLE MISS STICK-IT-WHERE-THE-SUN-DON'T-SHINE. Just looking at the list, a couple of questions / comments come to mind:

*Seriously, could they really not find a movie better than LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE for the last Best Picture slot? How did it edge out DREAMGIRLS? (and that's leaving out the obvious criticism about deserving indie movies and the year's glaring major release snubs, THE PRESTIGE and MARIE ANTOINETTE; DREAMGIRLS would have been a logical nomination on the lines of the Academy's typical logic, although the more movies I watch the more I'm convinced the Academy doesn't have anything like that).

*Speaking of those last two, THE PRESTIGE pulled down a "Best Cinematography" nomination and seems to have as good a chance as anything else of winning, with none of the other nominees being "Best Picture" candidates; MARIE ANTOINETTE gets a well-deserved "Best Costume Design" nod, although it's in a rough race against THE QUEEN and THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA

*Penelope Cruz snags a "Best Actress" nomination for VOLVER, but the movie fails to garner a Best Foreign Film nomination for itself (my guess is that it's some issue with AMPAS' silly rules on foreign films which seem to exclude most of the noteworthy production, but if it was eligible, I'm not sure how to respond).

*DiCaprio gets a well-deserved "Best Actor" nom... for a movie other than the one I expected him to get it in (BLOOD DIAMOND). However, it looks increasingly like a two-man race between O'Toole and Forest Whitaker in any case, with a slight edge toward O'Toole who was given one of those loser "Honorary Statuettes" a few years ago, just so he can skip this mortal coil with his just desserts.

*Eastwood manages to get his mug on the proceedings once again in the "Best Film" and "Best Director" sections, but at only two years removed from his victories for MILLION DOLLAR BABY, he doesn't seem like a serious contender; it's even more unlikely when you consider he'd be picking up his third statuette for "Best Director," while Scorsese, despite status as America's premier working auteur, still hasn't won one (I hope that changes this year, but I'm highly skeptical).

*Sasha Baron Cohen couldn't convert his "Best Comedy/Musical Actor" win at the Golden Globes into a "Best Actor" nomination, unsurprisingly, but did claim a "Best Adapted Screenplay" nomination along with three others for BORAT, although it seems like THE DEPARTED (William Monihan) is running well out in front here.

*OVER THE HEDGE was left out in the cold in the animated film category (although we all know the Pixar movie is going to win anyway). That was a sentence I didn't think I'd be writing eight months ago.

*Nominating three DREAMGIRLS songs for "Best Song" but not including "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" is downright criminal. Did the voters get confused does it have another title and I'm misreading the list?

*All of you Gibson fanboys out there can take solace in the Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, and Makeup noms for APOCALYPTO. The third one might actually come through; the other films in the running are a Mexican production (PAN'S LABYRINTH, hadn't even heard of it until now) and something prominently involving Adam Sandler (CLICK), so there's a chance--not an overwhelming chance, but a chance--that APOCALYPTO will pull through despite the poisonous association of Gibson, even though these awards are only voted on by those in a particular technical field.

*Some liberal will be happy when the "Best Documentary" award comes out, it seems, regardless of who wins; I look to AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH to carry the day, in all likelihood, for sheer size of the audience alone, the way MARCH OF THE PENGUINS did last year. It's too bad more of these films don't get a wider screening to make the contest fair. Then again...

More later...

Bak Two Skool; THE QUEEN

2007-01-17T18:22:00.000-08:00

The academic calendar begins anew this week, meaning I'm probably going to be scarce in the weeks to come. I should be getting out to more movies at the DPAC this semester because the schedule is simply too delicious to pass up--VOLVER, MARIE ANTOINETTE, BABEL, PERSONA, BIRTH OF A NATION, GREED, RULES OF THE GAME, and NORTH BY NORTHWEST are all on the docket; I will make an effort to attend all of them. However, expect only brief overviews of things seen in the immediate future.

And if one more person tells me how wonderful LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is, I may snap and write a ten-page tome condemning it from the mountaintops. Consider yourself warned.

~~~~~~

THE QUEEN (Peter Morgan, Britain, 2006, A)

I've heard THE QUEEN described as a "docudrama," which is just a fancy way of saying it's a historical film about an event that everyone still remembers (in this case, the aftermath of Princess Diana's death, ten years old this May). Normally, "docudrama" has negative connotations because of the dozens of only marginally competent ones made for television, but THE QUEEN may well redeem the genre. The superabundant praise dumped on Helen Mirren appears to be well-deserved--it might take a couple of viewings to fully appreciate the beauty of her balancing act, as she juggles a need to fulfill her God-given duties (preservation of tradition, maintaining dignity, resisting populist mood swings) and a sense that her values are being attacked in a very significant way (the sincere outpouring of grief for Diana, the inability of the Royal Family to deal with a 24-hour media cycle). Her quiet dignity, even in the face of grief, anger, and humiliation, set the tone for the movie as a whole. Morgan deserves more credit than he's getting in the deluge of praise for Mirren; this could have easily descended into liberal sermonizing about everything conserative / authoritarian, or into a weepy chick-flick palatable only to tabloid readers, or into an uncritical paean of how wonderful Diana was, but every trap is circumvented. Diana is the flawless young deer killed at the peak of her beauty (this will make more sense if you see the movie), but she is also the girl who threw everything she was given back in the Royal Family's face. Neither aspect of her character is rejected for another. It's hard to evaluate an actor playing, say, Cherie Blair, simply because I'm already too familiar with what the real Cherie Blair is like, but I think as time passes (the only true test) that the ensemble performance and production values will stand up; a lot of study seems to have been put into every line, and it shows. THE QUEEN is not an overwhelming film; it creeps up on the viewer in small, fleeting, poetic moments, and one only begins to appreciate its depth and power after stepping away from it for a time. That quality of understatement is, perhaps, the movie's greatest asset.

Shepherds Quake At The Sight

2007-01-13T09:14:00.000-08:00

THE GOOD SHEPHERD (Robert DeNiro, USA, 2006, B-)

Luther has already pointed out how THE GOOD SHEPHERD is trying to be the GODFATHER of spy movies, and how it doesn't really succeed on those terms. It's not a bad start at describing the movie. Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson, a quiet, intense man who takes a leadership role in a protean version of the CIA during World War II, and grows up with the organization over a period of roughly twenty years. Like GODFATHER II, it uses a back-and-forth structure of events in the movie's "present" (a loosely factual account of the failure of the "Bay of Pigs" operation in Cuba) along with flashbacks showing how Norton built his sad little empire of espionage. In this way, Wilson is a mixture of Vito and Michael Corleone--both the ruthless and methodical architect of his organization, and the flawed leader who cannot stop his monster from destroying the ones he loves. The movie is a success, in part, because it does manage to sweep us up in the epic sense of its topic, the way a Coppola movie does. For all the film's historical inaccuracies (also detailed in Luther's review), it's successful at calling to life a secret world of influence and power that is typically hidden, like a mob movie. It's a slow, languishing ride, probably too slow for some tastes, but that's at least part of its power in my eyes, as it sweeps from the Skull and Bones club at Yale, to London, to Berlin, to Washington DC, and beyond.

The problem for me, personally, was not its being too long, but too short; or rather, too short to deal with the story DeNiro was trying to tackle. It's in a no-mans land, with too many themes and too many stories to tell, and not enough time to develop them all satisfactorily . Many of the story threads take too much time off before dipping back in again and the resolutions tend to confuse more than they elucidate; some of the symbols the movie seems to believe are important come seemingly out of left field, especially the religious imagery (the title still makes no sense to me, not that it affects my grade, but as a whole, the religious parallels are either heavy-handed or baffling). The story also seems to have been deliberately twisted in order to turn it into an Iraq war critique; by questioning the military strength of the Soviet Union, the implication is that they, like Iraq, were a desiccating nation that we had no need to fight a war over. Norton is clearly a liberal's idea of a Bush-figure (Skull and Bones at Yale, eerie coolness as he watches a suspected Soviet spy being tortured by Norton's subordinate).

The only criticism of the movie I can't really understand is the flack Matt Damon is taking for being too dull, quiet and boring. His performance is far more subtle than his critics have let on. The first flashback of the movie is the real key here, when we see Damon in drag performing for a musical review in his college days (the scene is audacious, one of my favorite parts of the movie). Norton, on the surface, doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd do that kind of thing, but that bifurcation is what makes his character so intense and engrossing. Beneath the glasses and the cold, pensive expression is a man endowed with a rare degree of shamelessness and derring-do, and I think Damon plays off that divide very intelligently. It's understandable, however, to see how it got lost in the malaise affecting the rest of the film.

Some Grand Illusions

2007-01-05T09:40:00.000-08:00

First things first: this does stink, for those wondering if I dodged the horrific reality of last week's game, but I didn't think we had a chance of stopping them on offense anyway, not with their 370-pound linemen and coterie of 6'4" wide receivers who can run the 40 in 4.4 or 4.3. On the plus side, Ambrose Wooden and Rhema McKnight can't hurt me anymore. Oh, and Brady, the Houston Texans just called; they said that JaMarcus Russell definitely hasn't passed you on their draft board.

The real victory will be on national signing day, when ND lands its second straight top five recruiting class under Charlie Weis. It has become evident that ND's problem is one of athleticism at this point--after a game effort in the first half of the Sugar Bowl, LSU simply wore Notre Dame down. Weis may be a pro level coach, but he doesn't have pro-grade talent (thanks again to Tyrone Willingham), and while that may be a match for the big boys once in a while (witness Boise v. OU), more often than not you're going to get blown out the way ND did Wednesday night. With the exception of 2005's Michigan St. game, the Irish have won every game they were expected to win, and lost every game where their physical tools were simply inadequate to compete without everything going right for them (ala ND - USC in 2005). Next year will be interesting to say the least, with a lot of sophomores and probably some freshmen needing to step in and play at a high level if ND is to meet its win totals of the previous two years (and that might mean starting freshman quarterback Jimmy Clausen, the #1 recruit in the nation). The early part of the schedule next year is a veritable house of horrors--an eight-game stretch without a bye week, starting Sept. 1, includes road trips to Penn State, Michigan, Purdue and UCLA; and home games against Georgia Tech, Boston College, USC, and Michigan St. Obviously, not a lot of breathing room, especially for a young team. Notre Dame will have to go at least 7-1 in that stretch to make a BCS game because they will not have a high pre-season ranking in the polls; anything from 6-2 to 4-4, on paper, seems more likely. Of course, the last time we said these things about ND--2005--we were pleasantly surprised. As embarrassing as the losses ND has suffered in the last two years have been, there's no cause for anything but optimism with Weis guiding the program.

So, ANYWAY, to keep this from turning into the Football Comment Blog...

GRAND ILLUSION (Jean Renoir, France, 1938, A) [Vatican Film List: Art]

To those who haven't had the pleasure, watching a Jean Renoir movie is something that must be experienced first-hand to be understood. In the commentary track for the Criterion DVD of Renoir's masterpiece GRAND ILLUSION, Peter Cowie makes a distinction between filmmakers who are great technicians and filmmakers who are great storytellers. I think it's very useful to consider Renoir in these terms. I don't mean to intend to dismiss Renoir as technically naive by saying he is primarily a storyteller and not a technician; there are very few thoughtless compositions or movements in a Renoir film. Rather, what I think the distinction hints at is that a Renoir movie doesn't inspire our admiration from outside of the film. The main attraction is the narrative, the characters, the human drama unfolding within; whatever technical style or prowess resides within the film is meant to serve this story and not call attention to itself, even though it is obviously executed with a great deal of thought. Distinctions into groups like this are rarely cut-and-dried, but I think Renoir would go alongside directors like Chaplin, de Sica, Rosselini, and Ford in the "storyteller" category; the "technician" category would include directors like Keaton, Hitchcock, Fellini, and Welles. Some directors are more difficult to put in one class or another (Kurosawa? Coppola? Scorsese?), and I don't mean to assign inferiority to one group or another by this. I do think, however, that we're not as accustomed to watching movies that are this substantively literary or narrative anymore (narrative, in this sense, meaning not that we're getting a play or a very preachy film, but a film that subordinates technical flair to bring out the warmth and depth of the human element.

GRAND ILLUSION follows the arc of three French officers who have been taken as prisoners of war in World War I: Marechal (Jean Gabin) is a mechanic from a modest background; Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) is a wealthy Jew pressed into the officer corps; de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) is a career officer from a patrician background. Pressed together in an awkward situation, they conspire to escape from the German POW camps--"a tennis court is for tennis, and a prison is for escaping," says one of their fellow inmates.

As with RULES, Renoir is very concerned with the social barriers that interfere with human relations. The most important player in the cast outside the trio of officers is Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), the man who captures Marechal and Boeldieu at the beginning of the film and the commander at one of the prison camps. Because of their similar backgrounds--wealthy, highly educated, patrician, career officers--there is a certain kinship that exists between Rauffenstein and Boeldieu that can't exist between Rauffenstein and Boeldieu's companions, or even between Boeldieu himself and his companions. Boeldieu is not a mean man, and wants to do all he can to help the officers below him escape from prison and maintain hope in a bleak situation (although from at least a historical standpoint, one might assert that the officer POW camps as depicted here are a little nicer than they were in reality). However, there is an unstated barrier, or awkwardness between him and his accidental comrades. As patriotic and sincere as Boeldieu might be, he is always slightly reserved around his subordinates, never able to become fully one of them; he is most "himself" when he is around his captor, which allows him to discuss his favorite high-end restaurants in Paris and slip into English (their lengua franca as members of the upper class). As the pressure to escape prison heightens, Boeldieu's respect for Marechal and Rosenthal becomes incompatible with the fraternal rapport he and Rauffenstein enjoy; his choice between them lies at the center of the Renoir's social dilemma.

This is the sort of movie where one can't help but be absorbed into the characters, their struggles, and the eccentricities that make them more than characters for the two hours you spend watching it. No part is written without thoughtfulness and sympathy, no performance given without great feeling and detail. There are no simplistic villains or heroes to root or jeer (although the film does not deny the possibility of heroism), even in a prison film, where "good guys" and "bad guys" might seem to be essentials. Gabin's imposing frame masks a very sensitive actor who's performance is most alluring when he's doing the least; Fresnay was best known as a stage actor, and the unnatural stilt in his voice and demeanor (which made him a bad choice for many film roles) meshes with Boeldieu's personality; Dalio, as in LA REGLE DE JEU, is fascinating to watch, a man of wealth who is seemingly in control of things, constantly teetering on the edge of disaster. Yet it's Stroheim, at the peak of his powers in his second career as an actor, who steals the show. He seems as though he's having more fun than he should be allowed to have--the white gloves on the hands, the grotesque neckstrap, the monocle, the shaved head. With his sweeping cape and robotic French voice, he's like a 1910's version of Darth Vader (my sister, age 15, pointed this out--how cool is it to have a 15 year-old sister who will watch commentaries of 30's French art films with you?). Yet, when he needs it, Stroheim is able to endow the character with a certain heaviness of heart that makes him as pitiable as he is cold-hearted and callous. Even the minor parts have untold treasures lurking within; a prime example would be the great Julien Carette, who plays an officer on Marechal's pay grade that was a vaudeville performer before the war. Carette is the French "everyman," a lover of food, drink, women, good jokes, and laughter in the face of adversity. Ultimately, it is Carette's attitude that wins out in this movie, that transcends it, even as its characters wear under the persistent gnaw of war.

**spoilers!**

So what is GRAND ILLUSION, in the end, about? What is "the great illusion" (the traditional American name for the film is actually a mistranslation)? After Marechal and Rosenthal escape from prison, they nearly lose their friendship under the strain of starvation and cold. They are taken in by a German widow (Dita Parlo), who hides them from the German troops and nurses them back to health. The warmth of this woman changes the perspectives of these two French officers--where they expected to find the end to a miserable journey, they find warmth and love--in many ways, the beginning of a new journey. As they prepare to cross into Switzerland, completing their escape, Rosenthal expresses a hope that, someday, the silly illusions that divide man against man and class against class, the illusions that create a "war of gentlemen" where millions of the non-privaleged die, will someday fade away; Marechal chides him not to be so optimistic about man's ability to recognize his faults. Marechal, it turned out, was right.

Just A Few More Thoughts

2007-01-02T20:35:00.000-08:00

Some stray thoughts I couldn't fit into my "review" of Boise - OU:

*One thing that's hard to appreciate, looking at the game in the rear view mirror, was the serendipity of the moment, the building sense that something extraordinary was happening. I might not have turned on the game had it not been for my friend Adam (who's excellent summer blog on the "Jankees" needs to become a year-round affair once he obtains some free time) IM-ing me that something weird was happening down in the desert in the middle of the third quarter. My friend Blair also IM-ed me to give a "heads up." As the game went on, we alternately watched and sent messages back and forth in shared amazement of what was happening. A game that pulls together friends in California, Indiana and New Jersey by the aura of its... wonder? absurdity? ... is a game for the ages.

*"The Greatest Game Ever" should look something like this, not what we saw last night--although that does not undo the uniqueness or "greatness" of Monday's game.

*Pat Forde emphasizes the populist angle of the win for Boise. The piece catches the mood of the evening well, and why, I think, America has responded to the game as enthusiastically as it has (60% of voters in ESPN.com's "unscientific" poll picked the game as the best finish in the last twenty years of college football). Forde also points out that OU had the "Statue of Liberty" play scouted--Boise had run it earlier in the year against WAV rival Idaho, and the OU defense had seen the tape of that game and prepared for the play. This, I think, lends more credence to the explanation that OU was so confused by what had gone up to that point that covering anything was a tall order.

Pass The Potatoes

2007-01-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

"Here in Idaho, we have a little something called pride."
--school principal, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (which I still don't like, BTW).

"This is the biggest thing to hit Idaho since the potato."
--Idaho Governor "Butch" Otter, on Boise State football

Forget movies--let's discuss what might be, in terms of sheer over-the-top theatrics, the greatest college football game ever played*:

Ignore, for a moment, that none of this would have happened were it not for Boise State's miscues. The Broncos allowed 25 unanswered points in a quarter and a half after assuming a commanding 28-10 lead midway through the third quarter. They turned the ball over three times in that span, including the devastating interception OU returned for a touchdown that, by all outward appearances, indicated "game over" for Boise. The prattle by the FOX announcing team that Boise deserves a shot at Ohio State and that this victory validates the need for a D-I playoff is nonsense. Boise did what underdogs often do on the big stage against a superior foe--they came out landing haymakers like they had nothing to lose and jumped to an early lead, but once the collective realization that they might win the game settled in, the combination of Boise's inexperience and OU's superior athleticism (it's worth noting that there wasn't a single player on the Boise State team that was on Oklahoma's recruiting radar) produced a predictable result--a one-touchdown lead for OU with a minute left to play.

What wasn't expected was that Boise would come out with a minute left, drive the ball to midfield with :17 left on the clock, and then execute what will go down as one of the greatest plays in college football history, up there with Colorado's "Miracle at Michigan," Cal's "The Play," and Flutie's famous heave. I can't believe that I'm writing this, but Chris Peterson, Boise's first-year head coach, simply outsmarted Bob Stoops here. The play call was brilliant--Peterson knew OU would be defending against the first down on 4th and 19, meaning they would certainly allow a comeback route underneath the first-down line that would have little chance of going for 1st down yardage on its own. Once the defenders had converged to tackle the short ball, they wouldn't be able to stop the misdirection introduced by the lateral, leaving a free path to the end zone. The only thing left to chance was the execution, and after the OU defensive backfield jumped to tackle Drisan James after he caught Jared Zabransky's pass, the touchdown was a fete accompli.

Yet even after that play, I still didn't think Boise would win, especially after Adrian Peterson ran over the Boise State line and blew through the second level for an easy touchdown on the first play of OU's overtime possession. OU looked too strong, too athletic, and, at that point, too determined. Solution? Open the trick play bag once again. The biggest play of Boise's final drive was, obviously, the 4th and 2 touchdown pass after a direct snap to QB-turned-tailback Vinny Perretta (the throw was not that easy either, as Perretta had to loft the ball over a defender's grasp with little room in the back of the end zone), but a close second would have to be the ball Perretta ate on the first play of Boise's possession. Lesser men, given the momentum of the previous ten minutes of the game, would have thrown up a game-ending interception in that situation, but Perretta's levelheadedness saved the ball game for Boise.

The decision to go for two looks better in retrospect then it did at the moment, but, win or lose, it was probably the right call--the momentum for Boise was there, OU's defense looked totally out of sorts after the touchdown, and Boise's defense didn't appear to have another stand left in them. That being said, I'm amazed the Statue of Liberty worked--given everything that's happened, if you're OU, why do you bite on anything Boise throws at you? It wasn't so much the play itself that was brilliant, I think, as was the cumulative sum of Boise's playcalling over the course of the game which left OU unable to tell up from down, figuratively speaking. The Ian Johnson run for the game-winning score was then followed by a genre-defining double fist-pump and a marriage proposal to Johnson's cheerleader girlfriend, which sealed the game's stratospheric position among the classics.

So what does it all mean? The game's seminal moments seem destined for year-round exposure on YouTube and every college football TV show next season, as Boise attempts to replicate its undefeated season and make it back to the BCS. The path is certainly open--the only out of conference games which even appear remotely challenging are against Wyoming at home and Washington in Seattle; in conference, road trips to Hawaii and Fresno St. loom large (assuming Fresno St.'s horrendous 4-8 campaign last season was a fluke), but appear manageable; San Jose St. and Nevada figure to be the toughest home games on the schedule. The rumblings that mid-majors deserve a title shot are going to be noticeably louder from now on, but that's still a ways off--until Boise steals recruits from Colorado and Nebraska, plays a better non-conference schedule (which will involve stadium expansion to allow home-and-home games with major schools), and finishes off the big boys the way they should have finished off Oklahoma, most of the people who actually have a say in these things will continue to put one and two-loss teams from major conferences ahead of an undefeated mid-major team. Boise's best chance at someday winning a national title, given that a playoff will probably never be approved by the university presidents, might lie in getting invited to a major conference. In that arena, a Big-XII invite seems most likely--perennial deadweight Baylor could be dropped in favor of the rising Broncos, who would be a natural rival for Colorado. Their biggest hurdles, at the moment, appear to be that they aren't a "peer school" with the rest of the Big-XII, and that they don't have balance throughout their athletic programs.

The former concern leads to an interesting question--namely, whether the Fiesta Bowl heroics of Ian Johnson and Co. will have an effect on Boise State similar to the "Flutie Effect" on Boston College. The "Flutie Effect" is, no doubt, exaggerated by some--a winning football team does not, automatically, lift an academic institution to greatness, and I may be overselling what happened Monday night unjustifiably. We may even have it backwards--Boise State lies in the heart of a region some observers have dubbed the "new West," and the rising power of Boise State may simply reflect a growing region's strength. All of these things will be interesting to watch as the repercussions of the feel-good sports story of the new year take shape.

As for OU, this is the most devastating college football loss I can ever remember watching, beating USC's loss to Texas in last year's Rose Bowl, and, yes, Notre Dame's loss to USC two years ago. In those other two games, one could at least hang their hat on losing to one of the best teams ever assembled by a storied opponent (ND v. USC) or to a once-in-a-lifetime player having the game of his life (USC v. Texas). OU lost a game they should have won--indeed, a game they had won--to a team who's previous source of notoriety was the shock-blue FieldTurf at their home stadium that hasn't even played in the first level of D-I football for a decade. To make matters worse, OU-Boise takes the cake in terms of devastating plays that make a fan question God's existence--the "hook and ladder," a TD pass out of a direct snap, and the "statue of liberty," all within about ten minutes of each other. Take it from someone who knows, OU faithful--this loss will change your life as a fan, especially if you are younger. If a loss lingers like a hangover, and a bad loss stays like a scar, OU is practically in a coma right now.

I may look back on this post a year from now and laugh at how much I exaggerated the importance of the game in the immediate shock of its brilliance, but at this point I don't really care. The best thing I can say about this game is that it reminded me of why I love sports. Here were two teams I couldn't care less about--including one team I've often rooted against in cheering on my beloved Fresno State Bulldogs--and yet I was totally absorbed in the drama of the game and the emotions of its participants, including the fans (I couldn't help but feel for the poor OU fans, who looked as though they were collectively on the verge of tears). Sport, as ABC once advertised, offers "The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat," and last night was a much-needed reminder of the poignancy of that simple principle.
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*Notice I did not say "the greatest game ever played," period. I haven't seen enough of them to make that claim, and there are several knocks against this contest from a competitive standpoint (the lack of national title implications and the sloppiness of some of the play, most notably) that make it a sketchy candidate, at best, for inclusion in that class. However, for sheer audacity, this game takes the cake in my mind, even if you compare it to the other candidates I give in the article (Stanford-Cal, Colorado-Michigan, Miami-BC, etc.).

Some Reviews For Yeaux

2006-12-31T18:37:00.000-08:00

My will to write feverishly hasn't really returned during break the way I expected it to, but I have to keep this blog rolling, so without further ado...

THE LADY VANISHES (Alfred Hitchcock, Britain, 1938, B+)

Alongside LIFEBOAT and NOTORIOUS, this anti-isolationist allegory for pre-World War II Europe is among the most obviously political movies Hitchcock ever made. In Hitch's fictional universe, the fears about the looming threat posed by Nazi Germany are replaced by the fears of Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a bride-to-be who is taken care of by the governess Mrs. Froy (Dane May Whitty) after a brick was dropped on Iris' head before boarding a train headed west out of Switzerland. Iris discovers upon waking up from a nap that the governess has disappeared, and (initially) no one on the train acknowledges the lady's existence. Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a lighthearted man with a passion for regional music, decides to take on Iris' cause merely to entertain himself, but (like Scotty in VERTIGO, minus all the depression) ultimately finds himself wrapped in a mystery from which he cannot extricate himself. I was amazed I didn't catch the political angle of the film the first time I went through it, what with its German "man of science" villain, moronic Italians being paid off by the Germans to keep quiet, and British vacationers who care more about the test match in Manchester than the possibility of the civilized world destroying itself (Hitchcock even distinguishes between those in the isolationist movement sensible enough to join the fight when it's upon them and a suicidal pacifist mentality).

A strong script with good characterizations, especially in the minor parts (especially Charters and Caldicott, the cricket obsessed gentlemen who try to keep the crazy lady out of their way), manages to overcome some of the spotty acting, which, I'm beginning to discover, is part and parcel of the early Hitchcock. The trademark Hitchcock romantic angle is there, but it lacks strength and in the end is wasted as comic relief, which there's plenty of already. I'm not sure I like how the movie is paced, either--before anyone gets on the train or ladies begin vanishing, Hitchcock spends a half an hour in the hotel where the protagonists are staying, doling out introductions; it's not unlike the social scenes in THE RULES OF THE GAME that take place before everyone retreats to the hunting estate. Renoir got this to work in RULES; the scenes are efficient, and they're vital to a movie that is mainly concerned with precise descriptions of personality, psychology, and the incoherence of human emotions and actions. That's not what THE LADY VANISHES is trying for (which is not to say it's a simplistic movie), and that's why I think it was a mistake to spend so much time lollygagging around without a clearly defined conflict. Once it gets going, the crescendo and climax largely redeem the introduction, but without the clever political angle I have questions as to whether or not it would be as well regarded as it currently is. Looking back, it doesn't compare favorably at all with the wire-to-wire acrobatics and romantic intrigue of NORTH BY NORTHWEST, still the Macguffin/action/chase film par excellence; the change of scene Hitchcock made not long after this movie seems to have been needed.

WE ARE MARSHALL (Joseph McGinty Nichol [McG], USA, 2006, C+)

First of all: Where does this guy get off calling himself "McG?" Please. You're a director who is given millions of dollars to make movies. At least use two names.

This really isn't as bad a movie as I've rated it, if by "bad" one is simply evaluating whether or not you will be entertained/moved/feel like you got your $9.50 worth at the movie theater (translation: Blair, you're safe to go see this). However, I felt like the movie, which tracks the fallout of a plane crash in Huntington, West Virginia that killed most of the Marshall University football team and many of the town's leading citizens, could have done something really unique, in explaining the emotional and psychological dynamic of a town that was devastated by a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions. Instead, it takes the easy route of "inspirational" sports movie, destined for the DVD shelf alongside REMEMBER THE TITANS / RADIO / GLORY ROAD / INVINCIBLE. Painting in the broad strokes of the sports genre, it never seems more than even tangentially aware of the power of its material. After about five minutes of inspired action scenes (sports scenes in movies are now so uniformly good that they almost aren't worth discussing anymore unless something goes dreadfully wrong), the movie begins to run on autopilot (ie, once the coach in the last game pre-crash says "winning is everything," we all know that the rest of the movie will be structured to teach us that winning ISN'T everything, character development and thematic logic be damned). The production value as a whole is really not worth discussing either, except to say that it's competent and on par with the recent spate of sports blockbusters, with three exceptions: the relatively flaccid character development of the players on the field, which I always feel is essential to a good sports movie; Matthew McConaughey, who is annoying and childish; and David Strathairn, who I find myself enjoying more and more with passing films. To be blunt about it, I left the theater feeling as though I didn't understand the mindset of the people of Huntington and the players and coaches who sacrificed themselves to play for a tormented community any better, and, for me, that made the film a failure.

No more for now... oh, yeah, wait, two more things:
1) Happy New Year!
2) GEAUX IRISH!

Good DREAMS

2006-12-28T14:48:00.000-08:00

DREAMGIRLS (Bill Condon, USA, 2006, A-)

It's nice, for once, to see an overhyped movie actually deliver on some of its hype. DREAMGIRLS is a loosely fictionalized portrait of Diana Ross and the Supremes ("Deena Jones and The Dreams") in the context of Motown's rise to prominence in the American musical universe, with Beyoncé Knowles playing the Diana Ross character. The first half of the movie is, thematically, reminiscent of the "dignity, always dignity" sequence in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, as we watch how the group, originally conceived, is manipulated by the rapacious car salesman turned talent agent, Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx). This primarily involves the seduction and subsequent disposal of Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), because her size makes her unacceptable as a lead singer (especially when Beyoncé is just hanging out in the wings, for crying out loud) and her immense talent comes packaged with an ego that prohibits her from playing second banana to anyone.* Another victim is James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy), an amalgamation of a couple Motown figures (Little Richard, Marvin Gaye, and even some James Brown), who struggles to adapt his style to the demands of Taylor's "new sound." The second half of the film explores the fallout from Taylor's ruthlessness, from the perspective of both its beneficiaries and its victims.

To get to everyone's real question about this movie: yes, the music is phenomenal from start to finish (the biggest surprise was Murphy, who handles R&B, soul, and funk with equal amounts of flair and power). Other critics have noted how the film parallels Knowles and Hudson in real life--Knowles plays the pop-chart acceptable supermodel with an attractive, yet shallow, voice (apparently, she took voice lessons to prepare for this role, and while I suppose I have to give her some credit for a wonderful performance, this is hilarious, is it not?);Hudson (a runner-up in American Idol competition) plays an immensely talented singer who will never "make it" in the pop world. Mercifully, DREAMGIRLS is Hudson's show, despite her lack of lead billing (apparently, the marketing department didn't appreciate the movie's moral). "Singing your guts out" is as trite a description of musical talent as you're apt to get from me, but it actually applies to Hudson; her voice is powerful and resonant, almost operatic, and she's at her best when the movie needs her the most from an emotional standpoint. I got the sense, as I watched her dig deeper and deeper inside of herself for the anger and desperation in her voice, that she really felt the part personally, that Effie's story was her story, writ large. I realize that she doesn't have a chance at a pop career simply from a business sense, but somebody needs to give her an arena to shine in so those of us who care about how music sounds can enjoy her in the future. As consolation, I will be physically ill if "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" does not win an Oscar for "Best Song."

The songwriting works like a revue of the various Motown styles from the late sixties / early seventies period, and even though many of "The Dreams" numbers are a little bright for my taste (the needs of a musical don't always jive with the relaxed style of early Motown), the spirit of the era itself, rather than mocked-up nostalgia for that era, manages to come through. The screenplay was clearly manipulated to allow most of the singing to occur in realistic settings, even when the pieces are essentially meant to convey interior moods (and, in some important cases, as ironic counterpoint, which is when DREAMGIRLS is really at its best); I wouldn't consider this an error on a grand scale, but it's awkward to watch Knowles singing what essentially amounts to a confessional piece directed at Foxx's character at a recording session he's producing, to give just one example.

As with a lot of musicals, actual acting is very much auxiliary to what the movie's about. The various "Dreams" are competent when they're not singing, but they don't have to be more than this. Foxx's role is a perfect fit for him; as he charms and strong-arms his way to the top of the music world, an intriguing dark side to Foxx's persona emerges, one that was latent but never fully exploited in RAY. He registers false emotion perfectly, sincere enough to convince a victim, but with just the slightest touch of reservation and discomfort. Throw in a little singing, and you have one of the year's best and most unique performances. Murphy, as much as I hate mentioning him as an aside, is also fantastic; Early is an embryonic version of the hip eighties characters Murphy made a career out of playing, and the comfort level is palpable.

In any film about black America from this era--especially a film with awards season aspirations--a civil rights angle is going to be unavoidable. I don't have any objections to discussing the issue, of course, and DREAMGIRLS isn't a class-A offender in the "this Film has an Important Message which you Ingrate Viewers must understand" category. However, Condon can't help himself by indulging in a little preaching. Taylor's studio nobly presses recordings of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches while "I have a dream" echoes in the background, as if the parallels between the rise of "black music" to respectability and the civil rights movement as a whole was going to be lost. There's even a recording session that goes down while a riot is happening in Detroit and customary montages of TV footage showing the looting, as if to underscore the point. These were poor decisions by the screenwriters, not because I think the civil rights angle is illegitimate, but because that message came through so clearly on its own in a film that's already too long in the middle section (my only real structural critique).

There's a brilliant turn in the opening half-hour of the movie in which The Dreams put down a brilliant number that sneaks onto the bottom of the pop charts, only to be buried when a pasty-white rocker records his own version of the song (completely lacking the depth of the original) that shoots to #1, complete with an American Bandstand spot featuring geeky suburban co-eds slow dancing to its horrifically dead beat. That's how musicals should talk about racism, and if DREAMGIRLS is to be faulted for anything, it's the lack of trust it seems to have in itself. When it sticks to its substance--as it does most of the time, especially as it races towards its flawless and powerfully bittersweet final number--it has the power to overwhelm.
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*This actually happened, according to my dad, a part-time rock historian; if you listen to some of The Supremes recordings before they were "Diana Ross and The Supremes," you can hear an almost overpowering voice in the background vocals. That's Florence Ballard, the real-life Effie White. Wikipedia has more on what happened to her after she got the boot, but for the sake of those concerned with spoilers, I'd recommend not reading on until after the movie.

Absolve, Domine

2006-12-24T11:13:00.000-08:00

THE DEPARTED (Martin Scorsese, USA, 2006, A)

Forgive, O Lord, the souls of all the faithful departed from all the chains of their sins and may they deserve to avoid the judgment of revenge by your fostering grace, and enjoy the everlasting blessedness of light.

--Tract, Requiem Mass, Roman Rite

"Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light."

--Matthew 11:28 - 30

Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the leader of an Irish gang that dominates ethnic South Boston, descends in a Colonel Kurtz-like shadow upon a young Colin Sullivan (the grown man is eventually played by Matt Damon) in the opening frames of Martin Scorsese's latest feature. With a bag full of groceries and a wad of bills, the arrogant old man earns the trust of the shy little boy. Scenes of Sullivan incensing the altar at Mass are cross-cut with Costello's seminal piece of wisdom. The Church tells you when to sit, when to stand, when to kneel, says Costello. But you're a smart boy. You need to make your own rules, and start thinking about what's best for yourself, rather than letting them tell you what to do. Jumping forward, we see the world falling at Sullivan's feet as he rises in the Boston police department, becoming one of the organized crime unit's most respected officers while leaking information to Costello. He has made his own rules and succeeded, but as time wears on, the fearsome logic of his rules comes back to haunt him.

Sullivan's role as a criminal in the police force is mirrored by the path of Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), a cop who is assigned to undercover work with Costello. Costigan is mentored by the good cop / bad cop pair of Capitan Queenan and Sargent Dignam (Martin Sheen and Mark Whalberg, respectively), who recognize in him a rare combination of raw intelligence, stubborn determination, and emotional sensitivity. Still, the work takes it's toll on Costigan--as he becomes more isolated from reality by his partaking in the ways of Costello's murderous clan, his natural sense of goodwill begins to shatter. He becomes reliant on the friendship and anti-depressants given to him by Sullivan's girlfriend Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), a psychiatrist who works with the police department. This is barely enough to help him get by the horrific reality of his day-to-day existence, working with bloodthirsty criminals while in constant fear of being unmasked and murdered. Yet he suffers nobly, and is finally rewarded with a penultimate meeting between himself and Sullivan, his dark shadow.

The premise might seem too superficially formalistic to work, but Scorsese molds this rather gimmicky premise--which is based on the little-known Hong Kong thriller INFERNAL AFFAIRS--into a riveting human drama of honor and deceit. The talent Scorsese marshaled for THE DEPARTED is almost CRASH-like in terms of sheer numbers of A-list thespians--Nicholson, DiCaprio, Damon, Wahlberg, Sheen, Alec Baldwin, with the very talented yet less well-known Farmiga and Ray Winstone on board as well--but, unlike CRASH, THE DEPARTED has a skilled craftsman at the helm in Scorsese, and this talented ensemble delivers a rich and deeply authentic performance. However, DiCaprio demands singling out--his work is nothing less than spellbinding, brimming with barely suppressed (and sometimes unsuppressed) rage, fear, and sorrow; he's able to give his character a gritty, virile edge, without losing the intelligent, introspective young man wrapped beneath his sinuous frame.

In addition to the superb acting, THE DEPARTED is as technically polished a film as I have seen since I began this blog. Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker took a story many would find ungainly and made it lithe, comprehensible, and gripping. The manipulation of tension compares favorably with the best of Huston and Hitchcock's criminal chases, as the race to find "the rat" reaches seemingly untenable peaks of anxiety before dropping off and plunging the viewer deeper into the psyches of both criminal and cop. DP Michael Ballhaus also merits praise for the film's imposing beauty, from stark city skylines at high noon to the rich, mysterious shadows under which Costello and his colleagues work, as does William Monihan, who adapted Sui Fai Mak and Felix Chong's original screenplay to a Boston context (Scorsese did not receive a writing credit but his signature on the text is unmistakable).

Martin Scorsese has always been a post-Catholic artist, in a very meaningful sense. His movies have long spoken to a profound disillusionment with the religious and moral traditions that were treasured by the ethnic Italian community of his boyhood years, a tradition that almost led Scorsese to the priesthood before he chose a career in movies. Yet one wonders, after watching THE DEPARTED, whether or not Scorsese is beginning to reexamine faith later in his career. Certainly, THE DEPARTED is not an unambiguously positive statement about faith and morals. But while Scorsese does not rejoice in the sweetness of Christ's yoke, he does acknowledge, in very immediate and visceral terms, how heavy the world's burden can be when we deny honor and truth. It is precisely the little rules of Christ's Church--when to sit, when to stand, and when to kneel--that allow us to order our lives in wisdom; without those rules, we become as muddled as Damon's character in our ability to make moral sense of the world. After years of wandering in the desert, Scorsese has realized on the screen the chaos of disobedience, even as he maintains, like Costello and Sullivan, his non serviam to the faith. Scorsese has already announced that his next planned project is Shusaku Endo's Silence, an account of the Japanese persecution of Catholics in the sixteenth century. We can only hope that Scorsese has made a definite turn toward serious considerations of faith and morality; it seems, in the case of THE DEPARTED, to have brought out the best in one of the cinema's true modern masters.

In Brief: CHARLOTTE'S WEB

2006-12-22T08:16:00.000-08:00

CHARLOTTE'S WEB (Gary Winick, USA, 2006, B)

E.B. White's spry and joyous story about a pig, a girl, and a spider is one of those tales, like The Wind in the Willows and Little House on a Prairie, that no childhood is complete without. It also happens to be the perfect target for a new film adaptation, thanks to the recent advances in computer animation (the original cartoon version, which drew inspiration from Garth Williams' illustrations for the book, is competent but definitely showing its age). Credit goes to Susannah Grant and Karey Kirkpatrick, the screenwriters, who do an excellent job preserving the lilting quality of White's prose (it's a bit like adapting Jane Austen; there's only so much harm you can do to a story that's already well crafted). The voice talent is effective but overbearing: Wilbur (Dominic Scott Key) sounds far too cute, with nothing "piggish" about his voice; Charlotte (Julia Roberts) just pours on way more sap than is necessary; the other choices are uninspired. The only human actor worth caring about is Dakota Fanning, who plays Fern. I may be making too big a deal about this, but through some combination of writing and acting, Fern's character has been subtly morphed into a social protester. The innocent little girl who imagined the animals talked to her and thought of Wilbur as her best friend is deemphasized in favor of an activist who's on track to be a future campus president of PETA. The movie seems to reward not her sense of wonder, but her defiance of societal norms (I was particularly struck by one scene that unfolds in front of a church), and Fanning flings herself into this headlong. This will, of course, be way over the heads of the film's target audience--I went to see it with my eight year-old brother's second grade class, and they were in unanimous approval. That, ultimately, is a more important vote of confidence than anything I could provide.

In Brief: ROCKY BALBOA

2006-12-22T07:35:00.000-08:00

ROCKY BALBOA (Sylvester Stallone, USA, 2006, D+)

Some movies are so bad, they're good; Stallone made a career out of such movies in ROCKY II - IV (most Rocky fans I've talked to swear that ROCKY V never happened). This is not one of those movies. I have never seen a director work with as much desperation as Stallone, shamelessly cribbing the past episodes of the franchise for something, anything that will hold the viewer's interest. It is a nostalgia power play from beginning to end, and almost none of it works: the plot writes itself in about 2 minutes (although I did expect that), the "inspirational" monologues Rocky gives the boxing commission and his son are downright cringe-inducing, the other characters are none-too-clever retreads from the older films, and the score--which is basically just "Gonna Fly Now" rearranged, with a few especially odd tracks thrown in to complete the befuddlement--is the worst I've heard in a long time. Even the bad guy, a normally strong point of previous ROCKY movies (Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago) is uninspired and pathetic--Mason "The Line" Dixon (I couldn't make up stuff this bad if I tried) doesn't even look remotely like an undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. The "plus" is for the fight scene, which replicates an HBO broadcast and is kind of cute, but by the time Stallone got into those bizarre montage sequences involving his dead wife anytime Rocky took a big hit from Dixon, my sympathy was killed off (Adrian, by the way, would never have approved of this fight--"YOU CAAAAN'T WIN!"). If Stallone was trolling for sympathy with this movie, he seems to have succeeded; I can't explain the critical success the movie has received so far other than by people's fond memories of the previous movies and Stallone's palpable need for a pat on the back.

Learnings of the Cinema For Make Benefit Legion of Blog-Reading Procrastinators

2006-12-19T14:29:00.000-08:00

I like you! I like movies! And I like Christmas break (for once, time to write about / watch movies)! A shotgun summary of things recently viewed follows...

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (Larry Charles, USA, 2006, A-)

Wow--my expectations were high, but Sasha Baron Cohen delivers in a big way. It's really nothing more than an extended version of DA ALI G SHOW, with just enough of a plot (Borat cuts a swath through the American South in a quest to marry Pamela Anderson) to string the pieces together coherently, but when the material is this good, a plot that thin will do. When he's at his best, Borat is really just a modern-day Charlie Chaplin--totally out-of-step with the world about him and an infuriating nuisance to everyone he meets, but infused with a plucky resilience and pitiable naivete that makes us sympathize with him even as we're shocked and disgusted by him. As funny as the film is on a purely visceral, gut-busting level, it's impossible, I think, to take it too seriously--Cohen is playing a coy intellectual game with his title character by blurring the lines between fiction and reality so thoroughly that the line in between them becomes almost indiscernible. My only gripe is that the political and social commentary is a bit heavy-handed because of the lack of representativeness in the targets Cohen picks, but otherwise, I doubt he could have done a better job meeting the hype this film generated. A top-five selection at the end of the year, almost certainly.

THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (Jacques Demy, France, 1967, A-)

Either you like French musicals, or you don't. I do. If you'd rather not be subjected to the next paragraph or so of effusive praise, you may want to skip ahead...

...now that I've weeded all the poseurs out: the real star of this movie is not Catherine Deneuve, who plays the more important of the two star-crossed sisters (as in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, she gives a delicately balanced performance, seductive yet innocent and vulnerable), or Gene Kelly playing an "American in Paris" (laugh, people) who falls in love with the less important of the sisters, but Michel Legrand's marvelous score. Demy and Legrand shunned an operatic approach in UMBRELLAS for a more conventional musical, but this only seems to have spurred Legrand on to greater heights; starting with a few simple themes, Legrand unfurls a nearly seamless tapestry of energy and emotions, bouncing back between free-wheeling French jazz numbers and deeply felt ballads hearkening to the great MGM musicals of the 50's . The music is by turns kinetic, defiant, soaring, romantic, and always worth savoring a little longer than we're allowed to, before Demy urges us forward into another space and mood.

YOUNG GIRLS forms an interesting, albeit puzzling, companion piece to UMBRELLAS. Whereas the former essentially argues that true love is illusory and that one can be just as happy in a relationship formed out of practical necessity, YOUNG GIRLS is nothing short of an apology for the idea of "soul-mates," complete with complementary love themes sung by the separated couples and a slew of improbable reunifications at the end of the movie. Yet the ebullience is offset by a bizarre sense of foreboding running underneath the surface, with the constant thump of soldiers' boots in the background (recalling the young man in UMBRELLAS who is separated from his beloved by a draft summons) and the murder of a retired actress by a regular at the frites stand run by the sisters' mother. Deep down inside, Demy seems to have wanted this movie to be tragically oriented, but for whatever reason--didn't want to make another heartbreaker, fidelity to the American studio tradition he's clearly paying homage to here--he couldn't pull the trigger. Essentially, my complaint amounts to the realization that I never feel at home in this universe the way I did in UMBRELLAS. I realize that's not an objective statement of cinematic value, but I don't know how else to describe this movie's tone. Watching it is like trying to date a close friend that you know you can't have a romantic relationship with; you might still have a lot of fun when you are out with them--they're your friend, after all--but there's always something within that prevents you from letting go, and you always feel afterwards as if you're betraying yourself.

To those still reading, thank you. Now entering the "undeserving of pictures" segment...

YOUNG AND INNOCENT (Alfred Hitchcock, Britain, 1937, B-)

Not bad, really, but given what I know Hitchcock can do, this is a lazy film. It's basically an embryonic version of NORTH BY NORTHWEST without any of the intrigue of a spy plot, jaw-dropping camera angles, a strong romantic thread, or top-shelf acting. To give any more details than this would be a waste of my time. I will add that the final scene, in which the plucky young girl who buys the hero's story (Nova Pilbeam and Derrick De Marney) tries to find the real murderer at a dance hall, just about redeems the whole movie; it's as riveting as the symphony scene in THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and the tennis match in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, and might be even better. It's pure cinema at its best, a swiftly edited flurry of bulging eyes and dripping sweat. This is why Hitch will always be my favorite director--even in a seemingly lost cause, he pulls something out of the hat that makes you feel as though you got your money's worth.

THE LADY VANISHES (Alfred Hitchcock, Britain, 1938, B/A)

More to come, once I've watched it again. I think it was really good, but I want to check myself before I say anything further.

BEERFEST (Jay Chandrasekar, USA, 2006, D)

I'm sorry! I know! My friends had rented it, I was at their house, it was the evening after the last day of classes, I was sleep deprived... I watched an 80 minute movie that probably cost me five points on one of my finals. In terms of brain cell count I would have been better off going a couple of rounds with Jose Cuervo. Although it does beg the question: why doesn't someone make a good movie about drinking, rather than festering pieces of dung aimed at 16 year-olds? The only reason I didn't give it an F was, well, I have a bit of the 16 year-old in me, and I did chuckle occasionally--there's maybe one gag in the whole movie I'll remember for more than a week.

...and that's it! THE DEPARTED, THE LADY VANISHES, and ROCKY VI (come on, can we please call it this?) coming soon...

Can You Stay Forever?

2006-12-18T19:21:00.000-08:00

KICKING AND SCREAMING (Noah Baumbach, USA, 1995, B+)

"I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now. I can't go to the bar because I've already looked back on it in my memory, and I didn't have a good time."

--Max, KICKING AND SCREAMING

As a college senior, I've often asked myself, "What would happen if I just kept trying to be an undergraduate?" The answer, I fear, might be something like KICKING AND SCREAMING, Noah Baumbach's directorial debut. The story follows five shiftless college grads as they attempt to deny the reality of life after college. Max (Chris Eigeman) confronts his insecurity about relationships by hooking up with his friend's girlfriend and dating a sixteen year-old; Skippy (Jason Wiles) signs up for another full slate of classes and does his best to placate his girlfriend, Miami (a much younger Parker Posey); Otis (Carlos Jaccot) freaks out at the prospect of mechanical engineering graduate school in Milwaukee and tries to seek intellectual fulfillment through a video store job and a book club. They are, variously, inspired and annoyed by Chet (Eric Stoltz), a perpetual college student who tends bar at the local watering hole and scares away females with his fatuous attempts at intellectual discourse.

But these stories are really just satellites orbiting Grover (Josh Hamilton), an aspiring writer who simply seems to lose his will to do anything when Jane (Olivia d'Abo), his girlfriend, leaves for Prague to do graduate work. He tries to move on by ignoring the desperate messages she leaves on his answering machine and hooking up with random freshmen the way he did before he knew her, but he's unable to escape the void of her absence. Grover views his own world with sweetly sad introspection and a sense of the tragedy behind his own miscalculations, a sensation best summed up in a series of sepia-toned flashbacks to the beginning of his relationship with Jane. Baumbach really doesn't have an answer for the viewer about why some adult men, at twenty-two years old, are too afraid to do anything with themselves (although this is a fascinating, and increasingly more pressing, societal ailment); he's content to explore the dynamics of the question itself, and trusts in the ability of the audience to make what they will about the mess his characters make.

As with THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, KICKING AND SCREAMING is a writer's tour-de-force. I'm always amazed at how Baumbach is able to balance a strong, sympathetic, central character that plays off of a rich supporting cast without being wholly overwhelmed by it. The writing is relaxed and conversational without being cheesy and dull, smart without being smug, obnoxious, or preachy. It's clear, however, that Baumbach was still developing as a director at this point--it's a rather humdrum film largely lacking in images that are interesting for their own sakes, and the paucity of the music reveals a fault in general with low-budget indie-flicks. Regardless, KICKING AND SCREAMING represents a great artist approaching full throat, and you'll be having bad memories about the thing being over well before the final credits hit.

I'm Still Alive!

2006-12-05T12:58:00.000-08:00

You may have wondered what's happened to me over the past couple of weeks, or how that random review of THE NINTH DAY showed up on here. Well, to quote Samuel L. in THE NEGOTIATOR, "I'm still alive!" A quick summary:

*THE NINTH DAY review was intended for the Irish Rover, Notre Dame's conservative biweekly of note, but got undercut because of the need to cover Loyal Daughters, Notre Dame's home-brewed attempt to make a play about sexual abuse without demeaning things like, say, the Catholic Church or virginity. I did not get a chance to see it (the story of my life this semester), but what I've heard from those who have is that this version is (shock of shocks!) not that much better. The campus-wide response has been, as one might guess, decidedly undecided--Fr. Jenkins, who initally came up with the idea for a student-authored play, revoked his support for it within a few months, and the campus has pretty much divided along the lines it was on for "The Vagina Monologues," although this debate seems less far less intense (could simply be me, as will be clear in a few minutes).

The "Vagina Monologues" / "Loyal Daughters" / gay film festival / academic freedom / sexual abuse debate at Notre Dame was at one point interesting to me, and perhaps it can be again; but, in its current form, it has turned into a parody of an actual discussion. Don't get me wrong, we really need a serious debate about all of these things--the problem is that we, in fact, have a grab-bag debate that encompasses all six of them, without really answering any questions about them. I have a lot more to say about this, and hopefully, over break, I'll be able to put together something more complete about these questions; but it's becoming clear that, whether or not the "Monologues" or "Loyal Daughters" sticks around (and I think they'll both go away, eventually), Notre Dame has a serious identity crisis with regard to faith and reason, and the resolution of the issue during Jenkins' tenure may result in radical change at Notre Dame over the next 10 - 20 years.

The moral: run a blog if you want anything published ever.

*Movie going has had to take a backseat this semester for a variety of reasons. Schoolwork is, as usual, quite burdensome, and becoming a senior really hasn't made the work any less demanding. Applying to law school and taking the LSAT's consumed a huge chunk of my time. I ended up taking the LSATs twice after my test-day score went up 0 points from my baseline after my Kaplan class. I assumed there was no way I could do worse, and so taking it again, regardless of whether law schools averaged my score or took the highest of two, seemed like a reasonable option. As I hoped, the second test went much better. Thanksgiving break provided no opportunity to get blogging in--I was in LA for the game that I like to pretend never happened between Notre Dame and the USC ~~Raiders~~ Trojans, and all I had time for was some homework due the next week, a final practice LSAT, and the most awful cold I've ever had).

To top it off, there just hasn't been as much compelling stuff at the DPAC this semester, to date. WORDPLAY and ARMY OF SHADOWS were both superb. I wanted to see INTO GREAT SILENCE and a sneak-peek of APOCALYPTO but had school conflicts in both cases. There's a Godard retro going down this weekend, which I'm tempted to check out simply to raise the hackles of the internet's premier Godard fanboy ;), but, alas, this is finals week, and we all know what that means (Mike crawls in little hole in Hesburgh Library and doesn't come out for a week and a half). And, finally, this is the last year I have with the best friends I've ever had, and I'm not that inclined to spend a weekend evening sitting in a movie theatre by myself when my friends want to go to Finnegan's (our favorite dive bar in downtown South Bend, formerly known as the Blarney Stone).

So that's it. I promise many movie reviews after finals review, just bear with me a little longer...

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

2006-10-24T20:48:00.000-07:00

THE NINTH DAY (Volker Schlondörff, Germany, 2004, B)

Note: THE NINTH DAY will appear at Notre Dame's Faith and Film Festival this weekend. For more information, visit the DPAC's website.

The most arresting feature of THE NINTH DAY is the face of its protagonist, Abbé Henri Kramer (Ulrich Matthes). His emaciated cheeks and shaven head are the marks of a man who has gone through far too much suffering, yet his intense eyes and quiet expressiveness reveal a strength of resolve that seems capable of overcoming any hardship. These two strains in his character are masterfully juxtaposed in THE NINTH DAY, which is based on the true story of a priest who was released from Dachau for nine days as part of an effort by the Nazis to recruit priests who would publicly approve their reign of terror. The storytelling is brutally efficient, moving swiftly between Abbé Kramer's daily sessions with the Nazi propaganda officer Gebhardt (August Diehl) that form the film's emotional and moral nexus. Schlondörff deftly integrates brutality and intense anger with tenderness and deep sorrow, without forcing the tone to into unrestrained horror or tear-jerking melodrama. The film's treatment of the political realities surrounding the Church's relations with the Nazis are equally well handled--while unafraid to ask the sort of questions one might reasonably ask in a time of spiritual and moral crisis, THE NINTH DAY avoids the popular myths regarding the Vatican's relations with Nazi Germany promulgated by the likes of John Cornwell and Garry Wills. Like ROME: OPEN CITY and A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS before it, THE NINTH DAY is one of those rare works that not only talks about the call to faith in the midst of the adversity, but gets into the believer's soul, with all its doubts, fears and hopes, in a way no other artistic medium is quite capable of replicating.

Can There Be OPEN SEASON On Nature Exploitation Flicks, Please?

2006-10-18T21:01:00.000-07:00

OPEN SEASON (Roger Allers and Jill Culton, USA, 2006, C-)

(NB: before you conclude that I've totally lost it, my birthday present for my 15 year-old sister was to take her out to lunch and to a movie, and this was the pick. Trust me, I'd have rather spent my hard unearned dosh on something else).

I can see this one being pitched in the backrooms of Sony: "Hey, guys, lets make a film about a wild animal who's exploited for profit by clueless human beings, only to be flung against his will back into a natural habitat he's ill equipped to handle! The main character should be a really scary animal, but one smitten by insecurities, and he should have a half-crazed sidekick which presents zero physical threat. And at the end, so it doesn't look like a totally shameless ripoff of [insert your favorite nature cartoon here]..."

OK, I won't spoil everything, but seriously: how many times do we need to repeat this tired one-note samba? MADAGASCAR, OVER THE HEDGE, the ICE AGE movies, THE WILD--not identical, no, but all basically riffs on the same theme. This particular incarnation is amusing enough, but it's basically running on autopilot for ninety minutes; competent, but utterly lazy. The vocal talent is good (Martin Lawrence as the bear sounds just right; Ashton Kutcher as the crazed sidekick less so) and the comic sequences occasionally reach a level such that they could honestly be dubbed "inspired." But the plot really is nothing more than the unimaginative wisp described above, or, more correctly, the wisp plus some poorly developed subplots and a few gaping inconsistencies. None of the characters or moral implications are dealt with in meaningful ways that might make the movie interesting, but have the harmful side effect of possibly offending someone. Before I end this, some final notes to the filmmakers:

*Performing circus animals are more than a little morbid in the post-Sigfried and Roy, post-Steve Irwin era. Really, please, think of something else.
*The caricature of hunters as nature-hating, foaming-at-the-mouth extremists doesn't sit well with a lot of people.

From Amongst The Shadows

2006-10-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

ARMY OF SHADOWS (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1969, A)

What happens when you make a World War II movie, but take away all of the conviction of moral right? Imagine CASABLANCA without the uplifting strains of "La Marseillaise," or PATTON without the rousing oratory before the American flag. ARMY OF SHADOWS is as fine a film as either of these, but watching it today, one can understand why it would not have been accepted at the time of its release, while the "Greatest Generation" was still in middle age. There are no paeans to freedom, no salutes to the flag--simply the gnawing despair of men whose sense of truth and goodness has been turned upside down.

The story's central protagonist, Phillipe (Lino Ventura), best exemplifies the movie's demeanor. The former engineer shares a fond reminiscense about his old job with a fellow inmate in the power plant of the prison he is sent to in the beginning of the movie, and the callous precision of that dark, cramped room foreshadows his later actions. Melville's canvas is muted by deep greys and metallic blues, and Melville's long takes and heavy deep-focus absorbs every sad corner of this morose universe. As Phillipe is chased from village to village, checkpoint to checkpoint, Ventura's even-keeled, tight-lipped performance masks an intense emotion which occasionally looses itself in a sharp glance or a few angry words. His value to the Resistance is precisely his ability to stomach the unpleasantness of his work and to place "the cause" above all other ties. "The war will be over when the French can see this film," an associate tells Phillipe as they leave a London screening of GONE WITH THE WIND in between meetings with British resistance organizers. But just as GONE WITH THE WIND represents an inevitable, irretrivable loss of innocence, war causes these men to lose sight of the ideals they signed up to defend. The cause becomes everything, and occasionally, it is as ruthless and methodical as the apparatus they are fighting.

Incredibly, this masterpiece had not been given a commercial release in the United States until this year. A brilliant restored print that has been touring the United States this summer will hopefully give ARMY OF SHADOWS a well-deserved revival of critical appreciation for many years to come.

Welcome (Back) To My Blog, Ya Broke... Readers...

2006-10-03T21:33:00.000-07:00

I like putting film reviews on my blog. It's the most baller thing you can do to your website. And I haven't had a chance to do it in a month because of the LSATs (which, God willing, I won't have to take ever again). So it's time to get back into it. Look in the days to come for reviews on:

*WORDPLAY (Patrick Creadon, USA, 2006)
*ARMY OF SHADOWS (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1969)
*Something from the multiplex if I stop being lazy--hopefully, the new Scorsese movie, or HOLLYWOODLAND, or THE BLACK DALHIA, or even MAN OF THE YEAR (which appears to have a promising, TRUMAN SHOW-like premise, and matches my mood of utter indifference as we approach election time). Fall break is in two weeks, which may be my window to seek these things out.
*Perhaps, something from the vault--I've always wanted to do SOME LIKE IT HOT or Chaplin's THE ADVENTURER, and maybe this is my time.

Also, has anyone in my esteemed audience seen the film described in the trailer below? Is it worth seeking out?

Um... Yeah...

2006-09-03T17:45:00.000-07:00

So, moving out of St. Louis and the beginning of the school year happened, and movies went clear out the window. LSAT studying is probably going to make me scarce until, oh, October 1 or thereabouts. Until then, I'm going to be filling in spots for ND's Irish Rover newspaper and trying to catch the odd movie every now and again, although I can't promise much.

A brief summary of what happened between the last couple of posts:

*Last film in a theatre: LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, which gets about a C. Beware of films where bizarre, over-the-top behavior takes the place of actual character development. Why does the cranky grandfather also have to snort crack? Why does the difficult high school student also have to take a vow of silence and be obsessed with Nietzsche? Just a lazy film overall, with one pretty decent sequence near the end at the beauty pageant that redeemed the film a little bit, but blew a hole into the central logic of the plot (how did they let the girl into the qualifier pageant in the first place?). In fact, the whole movie would have been better if they had spent more time making fun of beauty pageants for seven year-olds, but the direction is way too aimless to capitalize on its own comic possibilities

*Best film since last I wrote: Harold Lloyd's THE FRESHMAN, although the disc Victor burned me petered out with about five minutes left, so I've been left in suspense. I won't grade it until I've seen the end but it's angling toward A/A+ category--it's the funniest, and truest, film about teenage angst I've seen in a long time.

*Someone in the dorm burned a bootleg of SNAKES ON A PLANE, and I couldn't resist watching at least a little bit of it. However, I'd had eough by about halfway through. Just a terrible, terrible movie. If you haven't put up the change to go see it yet, spare yourself for God's sake. Even DODGEBALL was better than this.

Drive slow, homies.

Getting The SCOOP

2006-08-13T16:23:00.000-07:00

SCOOP (Woody Allen, Britain, 2006, B+)

Sometimes, sterling execution can redeem an otherwise worthless premise. The early Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals, like TOP HAT, are an excellent example of this. But is it possible that an intriguing premise can overcome slipshod execution? I'd better hope so, because that's my defense for liking SCOOP. It's not, by any stretch of the imagination, among Allen's best films, but it's interesting and thought-provoking in ways that are easy to overlook.

Earlier this summer, much was made of how Robert Altman's A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION functioned as a sort of epitaph for Altman himself. It certainly wasn't masked--PRAIRE HOME included an angel of death; a man dying on set; the closing and destruction of a historic theatre; and Guy Noir, who, alternately, reminded the viewers of a long forgotten time in entertainment, and inspired them to blow their brains against the wall whenever he came up with another cheesy one liner. The film balanced this morbidity with the fond reminiscinences of the performers, most notably those from the sisters played by Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep. Death is saddening, Altman says, but the memories of a life fully lived can bring us comfort in the face of it.

Similarly, it's hard to look at SCOOP without considering that Woody Allen is drawing near the end of his movie-making career. As in PRAIRIE HOME, the morbid themes aren't exactly hidden--the movie begins with a shot of a boat cruising down the River Styx, with a host of deceased people on board and an honest-to-goodness grim reaper at the helm (how that image is resolved vis a vis Woody happens at the end of the film, so I won't spoil it, only to say it's the most memorable final frame of any movie I've seen this year). Woody's reflection on death works better than Altman's, however, for two reasons. First, the morbidity is less grotesque because Woody plays it up as comedy. The camera relishes every scene on that Bergmanesque float trip, from the stories the passengers share to their futile efforts to get the attention of the grim reaper. Secondly, and more importantly, SCOOP does more than just toss around fond remembrances of the way things were, but actually pays tribute to Allen's particular craft by being, itself, an allegory for his career, similar to Hitchcock's VERTIGO or Chaplin's LIMELIGHT.

SCOOP tells the story of Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), an American journalism student visiting London who is recruited by the ghost of deceased newspaperman Joe Strombel (Ian McShane). Strombel believes he has unearthed the identity of the "Tarot Card Killer" who is terrorizing London, a young Brahmain by the name of Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman). She is pressed into taking on a sidekick for her investigation, an expatriate magician named Sid Wasserman (and with a name like that, you'd better believe he's played by Woody Allen). Sondra, who seems only vaguely aware of the effect she has on men, gets Lyman to fall in love with after convincing him she's just another rich American on vacation with her father, setting in motion SCOOP's central dilemma.

A couple of commentators (including Victor, who saw the movie with me and will probably disavow ever knowing me after I post this review) have noted the film is reminiscent of something Hitchcock might have done if he had made films that were more explicitly comic, complete with a bad guy who's too nice, too wealthy, and too suave to really be a murderer, and an attractive blonde lead who is unwittingly flung into the teeth of danger. I not only agree this, but I think the Hitchcock allegory goes much deeper than this. Like some of the best Hitchcock films--REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO, in particular--SCOOP was deliberately crafted to be a statement by Allen about the way he has worked in his medium. I think the most enlightening way to watch it is as a lighthearted tribute to his career as a director and writer, fully aware of the profession's joys and frustrations.

We see Wasserman "directing" Pransky from the very moment Wasserman first meets her (and before that, Pranksy botches a possible story on a film director when she allows herself to be seduced by him). He picks her out of the audience at his magic show, giving her laborious details about what's going to happen when she's in the magical "box" on the stage (Strombel appears to her there). When they visit a posh London athletic club to instigate a meeting with Lyman, he instructs her to "act" like she's drowning in the middle of the pool where Lyman is swimming. She catches on quickly. When Lyman saves her from the pool, she gives him a false name and pretends Wasserman is her father, a role Wasserman is happy to play up with absurd stories about his investments and art collection ("I bought my first Rubens playing poker." "You bought a Rubens?" "Sure... Ruben sandwich.")

Eventually, Wasserman and Pransky come into conflict about Lyman--is he a good man falsely accused, or a murderer who's exceptionally skilled at covering things up? As Pransky gets more involved, she takes the former stance, while Wasserman urges caution. One point of contention is a random fragment of an envelope Wasserman pulls out of Lyman's briefcase, with the phrase "Betty G" written on it. Wasserman thinks it's a clue--Pranksy, and the audience, reject his speculation as absurd. But is it? The seemingly irrelevant scrap turns out to be vitally important... and by the time Wasserman unlocks its significance, Pransky is too deep in trouble for him to do anything about it. The lesson? The auteur knows what he's doing, stubborn actresses be damned. If VERTIGO's Judy had decided not to go along with Scotty's ideas about recreating her image, I could see Hitchcock planning a similar fate for her. (As an aside, both Allen and Hitchcock had contentious relationships with their leading ladies at various points in their career, although, to be fair, Allen's misdeeds are far and away more disturbing).

That's not to say that intriguing subtext excuses every fundamental flaw a movie has. Woody is bordering on the intolerable in a lot of scenes. Johansson is way out of her league playing a nerdy, utterly non-self conscious heroine after her simple yet superb turn as a completely self-conscious tramp in MATCH POINT. She's plainly trying to play the type of character Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow made so endearing in previous Allen movies, and while she's brilliant in spots (the ever-present glasses and the retainer she wears to bed are adorable), the intensity of her performance waxes and wanes. Allen's touch as a comic writer has been deteriorating for a while, and SCOOP has more than a few sequences that just don't work. And no, I don't think every gap in the plot can be explained the way the envelope scrape can. But I found these things more tolerable in the context of the film's concept as a whole. I gave the movie about the same grade I gave Chaplin's LIMELIGHT, which also dealt with an old, fading performer mentoring a promising young talent. Like LIMELIGHT, SCOOP is lacking in many ways, but it's more important to recognize it for the wry, sweetly elegaic reflection on a life in movies that it is, than to fixate on its creator's diminishing talents.

A 9/11 Film From The Fifties?

2006-08-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

WORLD TRADE CENTER (Oliver Stone, USA, 2006, B-)

Oliver Stone has been confounding American sensibilities for years, but the only aspect of WORLD TRADE CENTER apt to puzzle the viewer is how utterly conventional and close to the vest it is. "Conventional" does not necessarily equal "bad," but the topic is so extraordinary that its saddening to see it transformed into something as punchless as this is. Part of the problem is sprawl--the movie follows two Port Authority police officers, played by Nicholas Cage and Michael Peña, their families, and their rescuers over the roughly 24 hour period from their arrival at the Trade Center to their miraculous extraction from the rubble. WORLD TRADE CENTER compromises a truly harrowing emotional experience to accomodate everyone's perspective as fully as possible, which is what a general audience "expects," although a consensus approach doesn't typically amount to anything noteworthy. The star power added by the casting of Cage and Maria Bello probably helped at the box office, but it adds to the general feeling that this is just another movie. There's even throwaway comic relief while the cops are buried underneath the rubble, although I'd be stunned to think its intentional. For example, Peña's character has a vision of Christ holding a water bottle, complete with an Hispanicized color scheme in the backdrop. It comes off as cheezily funny, but I don't think it should--it's a battlefield joke, it should be darker, more upsetting than truly funny.

Again, the film isn't bad or unwatchable, quite the opposite. Stone may not have taken any risks here, but he works well within the suprisingly limited bounds. The performances lack the emotional immediacy some new faces might have brought to it, but they're solid and heartfelt. Perhaps most surprisingly for people familiar with Stone's previous work, it's unambiguously patriotic, even conservative and religious. In one remarkable scene, a former Marine (Michael Shannon) who goes to the Trade Center by himself to help find surviors is seen praying in his church immediately after learning about the attack, before leaving to help. Stone uses two-shots between the Marine's face in close up and the cross above the altar (without a corpus--hey, he's a Protestant, what can you do) to point out the spiritual nature of his mission to help others. After 9/11, so the backstory says, he reenlisted in the Marine Corps and (horrors!) served in Iraq. Perhaps the best thing I can say about WORLD TRADE CENTER is that it's more like a better-than-average Hollywood film from the 1950's--sincere, inspiring, and professional, but disappointingly shallow.

Ready?

2006-08-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

If you're not, just watch.

Great things about this video:
*The best moment in any sporting event I can ever remember watching--Zibikowski running back the punt for a touchdown against USC. It was a critical juncture in the game and put the Irishahead for the first time. I've never experienced anything quite like the euphoric pandemonium that broke out when the student section realized he had broken it.
*The "commentators say the darndest things" segment, featuring Lee Corso and Mark May.
*The, "WTF just happened?" look on the Purdue coach's face.
*Charlie's speech at his introduction.
*Those great jumping hi-fives from Samardzija and Stovall
*The clips from the ND-Michigan game, still my favorite game from last year.
*The Zibikowski interception return in the Tennessee game where he was running through defenders like he was shot out of a cannon.
*The music:
"I've been crawling in the dark
Looking for the answer..."

Sex And The Cinema

2006-08-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

I would never direct a scene that would embarrass the Blessed Mother
--Alejandro Monteverde (dir., BELLA)

Recently, I have been having a rather difficult internal debate at the moment on what legitimate artists should and shouldn't be allowed to show with regards to sexual content and nudity in their films, and to what extent filmgoers are justified in exposing themselves to such content. It is a question of moral reasoning that lacks easy, cut-and-dried answers, unlike, say, abortion or contraception--there are about as many opinions on it as there are educated Catholics seeing movies. In recent years, we've seen more and more contentious debate on these issues, as Catholics who wish to take the world of art seriously are being challenged by those who see an overanxiousness to flirt with morally challenging films as frivolous and spiritually harmful.

The debate is also confusing because it involves what I believe are two distinct dilemmas--the duties of film producers, and the duties of art patrons. By definition, their duties are not the same, but there is not a lot of guidance as to how they are different, and how those differences guide one's participation. For example, a director may direct a scene that does not exercise restraint, but if there are other reasons to go see the movie, and one does not see it with the intention of titillating one's senses, is one allowed to see it? I'm going to try to deal with both of these questions, not with the intention of providing any cut-and-dried answers (which I'm not certain really exist), but of providing a guide in which to frame discussion of the issue, and to guide intelligent decision making on such things.

(Note: when I mention "sexual content" from this point, I mean to include whatever nudity goes along with it; I don't mean to discuss non-sexual nudity here, which I feel falls under a less debated standard of scrutiny).

There's very little specific guidance in the matter of movie production from the Church's official teaching. The Catechism's only related discussions for serious artists occur in the sections on pornography (CCC 2354) and on modesty (CCC 2521-24). 2354 and 2523 cross-reference each other. While I do not hesitate to join those who condemn the "adult entertainment" industry's devastating effects on individuals, families, and society, I believe that a discussion of serious films, even those with difficult content, is not well served by conflating or comparing it with pornography. The definition of pornography provided by the CCC is fairly broad--"...removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties"--but those with teaching authority in the Church seem to have interpreted it to attack its main target, the pornography industry, and not artists. (If it's not already clear, I don't believe pornographers are artists in any sense of the word, or that they are entitled to any of the protections granted legitimate artists).

Those entrusted with teaching authority in the Church have long recognized this distinction, even in movies they believe do not exercise proper discretion. In their "O" review of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 classic LAST TANGO IN PARIS, the USCCB's Film Review Board pointed out that while they believed the sex scenes in LAST TANGO were "needlessly extended and explicit," this did not qualify the film as pornography. The Bishop of Arlington, in a recent letter on pornography, made the distinction even clearer:

Artists have often portrayed the human body, clothed and unclothed, in various depictions and poses. While the danger of immodesty exists even with regard to works of art, the evil of pornography is greater and more insidious. Pornography depicts the body solely in an exploitative way, and pornographic images are created and viewed only for the purpose of arousing sexual impurity. Hence the production, viewing and spread of pornography is an offense against the dignity of persons, is objectively evil, and must be condemned. Source

Thus, it seems the discussion is better framed in terms of the CCC's discussion of modesty. Their discussion is rather broad, and refers to a wide variety of contexts which includes "the media," but does not deal exclusively with it. The most relevant passages:

2521: Modesty means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden...

2522: It keeps silence or reserve where there is evident risk of unhealthy curiosity... (This passage, for the most part, deals with relationships between men and women before marriage, and with one's personal conduct)

2523: There is a modesty of the feelings as well as of the body. It protests, for example, against the voyeuristic explorations of the human body in certain advertisements, or against the solicitations of certain media that go too far in the exhibition of intimate things... (as I mentioned, this section in particular cross-references the CCC's discussion of pornography).

2524: The forms of modesty vary from one culture to another. Everywhere, however, modesty exists as an intuition of the spiritual dignity proper to man.

I think there are a couple of points to grab hold of here. The first is that modesty is inherently situational and cultural. This is a rather obvious point--it's appropriate to wear a bathing suit if you're at the beach, but not if you're going to Sunday Mass. This principle can also apply to actions--clearly, actual sexual contact is only reserved to married couples, but various other intimate actions can be allowed between people depending on their state of life and the proximate likelihood of being tempted to grave sin by such actions. Likewise, the degree of permissiveness entitled to those in a film might not be the same as that applied in everyday life. The second is that the Church has not passed out an absolute ban of "the exhibition of intimate things." If we make sense of the cross-reference, the Church seems primarily, although not exclusively, concerned with pornography here.

So what is "too far"? It is at this point that things start getting fuzzy. The Vatican II document on the social media, Inter Mirifica, is potentially helpful at this juncture. I am quoting sections six and seven of the document:

6. The second question [the first is about journalism] deals with the relationship between the rights, as they are called, of art and the norms of morality. Since the mounting controversies in this area frequently take their rise from false teachings about ethics and esthetics, the Council proclaims that all must hold to the absolute primacy of the objective moral order, that is, this order by itself surpasses and fittingly coordinates all other spheres of human affairs-the arts not excepted-even though they be endowed with notable dignity. For man who is endowed by God with the gift of reason and summoned to pursue a lofty destiny, is alone affected by the moral order in his entire being. And likewise, if man resolutely and faithfully upholds this order, he will be brought to the attainment of complete perfection and happiness.

7. Finally, the narration, description or portrayal of moral evil, even through the media of social communication, can indeed serve to bring about a deeper knowledge and study of humanity and, with the aid of appropriately heightened dramatic effects, can reveal and glorify the grand dimensions of truth and goodness. Nevertheless, such presentations ought always to be subject to moral restraint, lest they work to the harm rather than the benefit of souls, particularly when there is question of treating matters which deserve reverent handling or which, given the baneful effect of original sin in men, could quite readily arouse base desires in them.

Inter Mirifica provides some goalposts for filmmakers to shoot through. Artists, like everyone else, are bound to respect the "objective moral order." The depiction of even moral evil (including, presumably, sexual evil) can "glorify the grand dimensions of truth and goodness," but should be subject to "moral restraint, lest they work to the harm rather than the benefit of souls". Linking this with what's been previously discussed, I believe the this "moral restraint," which is necessary to prevent the public from being scandalized by immodesty, is the criteria we must keep in mind when discussing what it means to go "too far in the exhibition of intimate things," as the CCC describes.

There are two popular notions, in particular, I would like to address here. The first is Monteverde's statement, cited at the beginning of the piece, that he would never direct a scene that would "embarrass" the Blessed Mother. If we're to take Inter Mirifica at face value, then I think this statement only muddies the waters of our discussion in pious-sounding platitudes. The whole point of showing bad behavior, including bad sexual behavior, in the movies is that such behavior should "embarrass," shock, and sadden somebody who cares about following Christ and living according to the Gospel, especially the Blessed Mother. While I certainly respect Monteverde for trying to make morally uplifting, serious films that have appeal to the wider Catholic and Christian audience, I don't think this standard is very helpful in coming to any conclusions on what artists are permitted to display in their work.

The second involves an exchange my buddy Victor had with a film professor at San Diego's John Paul The Great Catholic University, Martin Harold. Harold wrote the following:

Is there value in portraying vice as it is--a destructive, disgusting, and degrading reality? Or does the Christian filmmaker become complicit in the evil act he depicts, even if he stands in judgement of that act? I can see it both ways, but I tend to side with Monteverde in favor of a sanitized aesthetic. No matter how hard a filmmaker tries to emphasizes the consequences of an act or the spiritual death of sin, a sensual aesthetic never reaches its audience on an intellectual level. Many Christians believe we can change the culture through this kind of "subversive" content, and that by refusing to glorify sin they have somehow stripped it of its luster and attraction. I disagree. I don't think the audience of The Sopranos or Kill Bill thinks much about the causal ties between endless cycles of death and the multifarious sins of the characters. It seems much more plausible to me that they are instead participating vicariously in the rush of adrenalin that accompanies such vile acts.

Victor responds:

I think anything is, in principle, legitimate subject matter, Mr. Harold not so much. I think our disagreement is in his statement: "a sensual aesthetic never reaches its audience on an intellectual level" to "a sensual aesthetic never reaches a sensualist audience on an intellectual level." [emphasis Victor's] The latter statement is obvious but it underlines that it really matters who your audience is (though in current times, this leads me "practically" to a cultural-political stance probably indistinguishable from his). But I've seen unfaked sex in "legitimate" movies and never once been tempted by it -- almost always I've been repulsed by it, and rarely that I recall to good effect in the context of the work.

As I believe I've hinted at before, I don't think the first part of Harold's statement, siding with Monteverde, fully appreciates what Inter Mirifica is trying to say. I'm more interested, here, in dealing with the second part, which I think brings all of the issues fueling the Catholic debate over movies to a head. I tend to find Victor's view more in tune with my own intuition here, as well as the more Catholic view of the situation. The beauty of Catholic moral teaching is that it recognizes what things are absolutes (abortion, contraception), and which things must be left to discernment. I believe the preeminent problem with smut in the movies in the current culture, which both Harold and Victor are cognizant of, is that films with fairly explicit sexual material are marketed at teenagers, and I'm sure we can both think of films that throw sex and nudity at inappropriate audiences. Having been a teenager recently, I can tell you that it's definitely true that sensual aesthetics almost never engage teenagers on an intellectual level. The same may be true for a lot of adults, as well, given the massive scope of the pornography problem in society.

However, I don't find Victor's answer totally satisfying, and would re-frame Harold's question in this way: is there a point, short of pornography, where a sensualist aesthetic becomes so extreme that the likelihood of anyone benefiting intellectually from it is so small that it should be jettisoned, even provided that there are differences between how individuals perceive them? Victor doesn't admit to one explicitly, but his mention of seeing actual sex in movies leads me to believe that there is, and perhaps the intensity or graphicness of sexual content, or the amount of it in a particular production, is an area in need of further debate.

Another nuance to the issue that isn't really discussed much is when the sort of sexual content being portrayed isn't at all morally evil. The popular culture at large seems to have forgotten about it, but sex often occurs between happy, well-adjusted, married persons, and there's nothing in that act which the Virgin Mary, or Christ himself for that matter, would be ashamed of. In fact, I wish more films would tap into the beauty of married love; when John Paul II had the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel restored to reveal the privates of Adam and Eve on the giant Creation mural, he was, in an indirect way, sending a message to artists that they shouldn't be afraid to explore sexuality in a way that affirms its true beauty. Even here, however, filmmakers must be aware that they are dealing with something sacred and intimate, and their portrayals of sex in this context should be guided by a similar restraint and respect for the moral order. A sensualist aesthetic can pose just as much of a challenge for problem groups when it displays the rightly ordered use of sexuality, as when it displays deviations from the moral order, so even in this way, film promoters and producers should consider who will be watching and whether it is likely to cause problems. There might also be a "last straw," as I mentioned before in discussing Harold and Victor's dispute.

To close, I would like to discuss how those with authority to teach have applied these ideas, and what we can learn from them in making our own choices. The USCCB's Film Office has ranked films including sexual content anywhere from "A-III" (adults only) to "O" (morally offensive). Inter Mirifica says that the faithful should consult such ratings, but doesn't make them binding authorities on whether or not to see a movie. Indeed, while the USCCB does a good job outlining what one is going to be confronted with in the theater, its record at deciding what is or isn't a morally offensive use of such material is inconsistent, to say the least. The USCCB's film reviewers are human, and there can be legitimate disagreement over whether a given film uses depictions of sexuality in an appropriate way. For instance, the USCCB gave PULP FICTION, DOGVILLE, and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN "O" ratings, and some would argue that all three of these films, if not necessarily Christian, do use the depiction of sexual depravity in ways that illustrate moral truths while showing a degree of restraint comparable with films that did not merit such a ranking, and would classify them as "L" (limited adult audience). There are also examples of movies working the other way (ask Victor about Larry Clark's KIDS).

Finally, we look at the example of the Vatican Film List, which provides 45 films emblematic of artistic and moral excellence, as described by Inter Mirifica. Stephen Greydanus characterizes their treatment of sexual activity, when it occurs, as follows:

Not all the nudity in the films of the Vatican list is nonsexual. Sexual nudity, sexually explicit dialogue, and depictions of sexual activity can also be found in Schindler’s List, The Decalogue, Andrei Rublev, and others.

Some films on the list are practically catalogues of disturbing, immoral, or otherwise problematic behavior necessary to their theme or purpose. Andrei Rublev, set in medieval Russia, is full of poetic imagery, moral and existential questions, and religious themes. But its imagery can be disturbing: There is a restrained depiction of a ritual pagan sex orgy, with nude pagans running through the forest and coupling on the ground; a naked witch sensuously kissing an Orthodox priest bound cruciform; a horrifying scene of pillaging and warfare that includes footage of a live cow on fire; a bawdy jester who displays an upside-down human face drawn on his buttocks while walking on his hands; and an instance of an extremely strong and offensive four-syllable obscenity. Another "Religion" honoree from the same director, The Sacrifice, includes a poetic, non-explicit sequence depicting a man having sex with a witch (levitating in midair above the bed) in order to avert the end of the world.

The point of this is not say, "ooo, look how risqué the Vatican is getting!" Rather, it shows that those with teaching authority in the Church do not understand it to mean an absolute ban on all sexual content in films, provided that artists emphasize restraint according to the principles set forth by Inter Mirifica and the Catechism.

Greydanus also points Catholics towards the Bible as an example for guiding their decisions, both as consumers and producers. He mentions the episode in the story of King David discussing how David watches Bathsheba bathe, and notes that it would be difficult to argue that a restrained, cinematic depiction of this would be unjustified. We might argue similar things about a filmmaker attempting to recreate the description of Sodom and Gomorrah given in Genesis (on the "bad" side), or a film that employed the spirit of the Song of Songs in describing a married couple's love for one another. Certainly, not every film you could make on either of these two books would be recommended for all moviegoers (for example, I think Victor is just about the only Catholic out there who could ever see IRREVERSIBLE), but, at the very least, there's a case to be made.

Having said all of that, what should guide us? I don't propose to set anything in stone, but we might glean the following from this discussion:

(1) The preponderance of the evidence suggests that sexual content and nudity, when guided by a desire to tell the truth about human existence and a sense of moral restraint cognizant of the ideals of modesty, can be employed by film artists. In producing and distributing these films, the target audience of the film (general adults, teenagers, arthouse fiends), the duration and intensity of the scenes, the extent to which it is necessary for the integrity of the story to include such material, and the moral well-being of those involved in the production. To a certain extent, the seriousness and intellectual content of the film is important here--I don't want to say that sexual content is the sole property of drama, but I do think it is rarer for a comedy to have a legitimate need for it. At the same time, the Church's absolute condemnation of pornography must be upheld, as should the targeting of films with inappropriate content to audiences who cannot engage them on a serious level, as well as filmmakers who seek to use sexuality to advance an agenda opposed to Catholic morality.

(2) Those attending films should consider to what extent a given film would be a near occasion of sin for him or her, based on its content, weighed against its likely artistic and moral importance as a whole, and the benefits to be had by seeing it. This means different things for different people; obviously, a professional film critic has a different obligation to avoid temptation than a mere film enthusiast, a fifteen year-old boy, or someone recovering from a pornography addiction. Near occasions of sin, of course, are hard to avoid completely, but the desire to avoid them can be taken to a point of absurdity that might eliminate us from watching any serious film involving sexuality, which is not the point of the Church's teaching. Self-awareness of our moral frame of mind and our potential to benefit from such presentations should be balanced by prudence, realism, and a trust that God will protect us if we act from a sincere intention to be brought closer to the truth.
------

Any and all charitable comments would be appreciated--I understand the contentiousness of this subject and I hope that I have done it some justice, although I doubt my picture is perfect.

In Police Procedurese, Without Subtitles

2006-08-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

MIAMI VICE (Michael Mann, USA, 2006, C-)

No, it's not because MIAMI VICE has practically nothing to do with the original TV show, other than a white cop (Colin Farrell), a black cop (Jamie Foxx), some drugs, and, well, Miami. Mann's film is visceral and glossy, which is not a bad thing, except when the movie has nothing else to offer. The cops are actually named Sonny Crockett (white) and Ricardo Tubbs (black), and, as far as I could make out, their mission is to pose as drug traffickers to get inside a powerful smuggling cartel. One of the heads of the cartel is a Chinese lady named Isabella (Gong Li) whose role in the operation is not well explained, although she provides a good opportunity for Crockett to get in "too deep" by getting romantically involved with her. By far, MIAMI VICE's biggest sin is being a little too far inside the world it inhabits for us to understand, with characters mumbling underneath their breath in the code of their profession replacing actual dialogue. This might work in a different context, but the visual scheme is too impersonal and objective to make the approach effective here. It's cheaply constructed around a few "cool" scenes, like a hostage scenario where a member of the Aryan Nation gets his face blown off and Farrell's tropical vacation with with Gong. Most of the time the movie left me scratching my head and asking questions like, "what did Jamie Foxx do while Farrell and Gong went off together? Is sex in a chauffered automobile when you're picking someone up from the airport a local gesture in the Caribbean? And how the heck did the Aryan Nation get involved in all this stuff, anyway?" It can't even capitalize on "In The Air Tonight" (though the cover by Nonpoint is respectable--the Phil Collins version is showing its age--as is most of the music). You're better off just watching the YouTube clip below and saving your money:

Save Me Adam McKay!

2006-08-06T15:17:00.000-07:00

TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY (Adam McKay, USA, 2006, B)

I'm probably a tiny minority here, but I found the latest McKay/Will Ferrell to be much more enjoyable than the breakout ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY. The structure should be familiar to fans of ANCHORMAN--Ricky Bobby (Ferrell) rises from his job as a pit crew member on the Laughing Clown Malt Liquor racing team (the laughingstock of NASCAR) to become the circuit's most popular driver, complete with obesquious wingman (John C. Reilly) and gorgeous trophy wife (Leslie Bibb). Enter Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen of DA ALI G SHOW fame), a Frenchman who reads Albert Camus on his victory laps, spins Ricky out of a race and begins dominating the circuit. Everything goes to crap, and a defeated Ricky retreats back home, first to change his life, then to rehabilitate his career under the tutelage of his long-lost father (Gary Cole). TALLADEGA NIGHTS does a lot of what ANCHORMAN does right--terrific writing, great performances (Ferrell and Reilly are solid, but Cohen really steals the show here) and some supremely hairbrained and wildly funny scenarios (a man pretending he's on fire and running around the track in his skivvies? A cougar in the backseat of a car?). Like ANCHORMAN, it's also a bit episodic and it's never really more than the sum of its parts. The biggest improvement over ANCHORMAN is that TALLADEGA NIGHTS remembers why we're at the theatre in the first place, and doesn't get bogged down in a romantic angle, absent-daddy syndrome or (what really wrote ANCHORMAN's death knell) feminist posturing. All those angles are in the mix in TALLADEGA NIGHTS, but not to such an extent that we lose sight of the proverbial checkered flag. The summer's been a bit disappointing, but TALLADEGA NIGHTS is a worthy, if unspectacular, front-runner for the best blockbuster of the summer.

The Red Light Was My Mind

2006-07-24T21:37:00.000-07:00

I meant to tie this post in with a general cultural observation, at first, but as I got deeper into it, I realized that I had simply crafted an elaborate excuse in my head to write about what I really wanted to write about. And since the whole point of the blog is defeated if I can't write about what I want to write about, I decided to drop the pretentions and put down some brief notes about the greatest of blues guitarists, Robert Johnson.

If the history of American muisc could be subjected to a Darwinian analysis, Robert Johnson would be the "missing link" between the folk musics of the Mississippi Delta, and the music we today call "blues" or "rock." Yet, in spite of his widely acknowledged importance, he has remained something of a closed book to historians. Johnson only cut 41 total tracks, including alternate takes, and the photo above is one of only two extant photographs of him. He might be the closest thing American music has to a mythological figure; he was said to have traded his soul to the devil for his guitar-playing chops as a young man. Johnson died in 1938 at the age of 27, a man no doubt run down by drinking, bad women, and the trials of life as a travelling bluesmen.

Johnson was the first blues artist with truly "big ears," and his style reflects a very wide range of musical influence for the time. His virtuoistic technical skills allowed him to play in a style more reminscient of the "stride" pianists of the day (Duke Ellington for example), which gave his songs a harmonic depth that was as rare at the time as it is now. Along with Armstrong, he proved that a singing voice didn't necessarily have to be technically polished to be effective. His distinctive middle-register drawl, interspersed with mournful, soaring wails, still has the power to haunt the listener; the unpolished quality of the recordings at the time only made the sound more effective.

Yet his greatest legacy might be as a lyricist. Johnson was never complex or subtle, but he wrote with an emotional rawness that's kept him relevant for some seventy years. The songs are almost surely drawn from his personal experience, at least in part. In many ways, Johnson predicted today's hip-hop artists. Long before 50-Cent, who "always wanted to be a gangsta," became a motherf-----' p-i-m-p, Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil, was making jokes about the juice running down his leg when you squeezed his lemon. True, 50-Cent does have the bullet wounds, but Johnson wasn't exactly a stranger to violence. In "32-20 Blues," he threatens to "cut in two" a woman who's cheated on him, warning that a 38 special will be "most too light" if revenge becomes necessary. He even dared to combine sex, violence, and humor, as in "Stop Breaking Down Blues":

Everytime I'm walkin', down the streets, some pretty mama start breakin' down with me
Stop breakin' down, yes stop breakin' down
The stuff I got'll bust your brains out, baby, hoo hoo, it'll make you lose your mind.

What separates Johnson from contemporary artists is that Johnson didn't pretend his life was worth glorifying. What better title for a music about a world cloaked in moral bleakness than "the blues?" Another legend surrounding Johnson is that he asked the redeemer to "take me from my grave" on his death bed, and one can see why--as compelling as Johnson's music is, it doesn't make you aspire to his lifestyle. Occasionally, this self-awareness comes to the surface--in "Cross Road Blues," for example, Johnson finds his soul being dragged into the ground as he begs God for mercy. The "Cross Road" is a metaphorical one for a man trapped in sin. This attitude is the exact opposite of the worst parts of today's hip-hop culture, which portrays a lifestyle devoid of both moral restraints and their consequences.

I've known about Johnson since high school, but I haven't listened to him consistently throughout that time frame. I move on to something else after listening to him for a while, but somehow, I always seem to wind up back at the fifteen or so songs of his I own. They're like a point of reference no matter how far adrift I go, although it's hard to know when the urge will come up again. The other day, while I was getting a playlist ready for my trip out to Peoria, I came across Johnson's "Love in Vain":

I followed her to the station with a suitcase in my hand
And I followed her to the station with a suitcase in my hand
Well it's hard to tell it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain
All my love's in vain

When the train rolled up to the station, I looked her in the eye
When the train rolled up to the station, and I looked her in the eye
Well I was lonesome I felt so lonesome, and I could not help but cry
All my love's in vain

When the train it left the station, 't was two lights on behind
When the train it left the station, 't was two lights on behind
Well the blue light was my blues and the red light was my mind
All my love's in vain

Ooh... Willie Mae...(vocalized verse)
All my love's in vain

...Had I heard the song before? Sure. But this time, the experience was just... different. Maybe the knowledge of what it's like for love to just get up and leave, literally or figuratively, changed the song for me. Perhaps I didn't listen as closely before--the metaphor of the train lights jumped out this time, and that vocalized verse where he's certainly calling for the girl who's going away finally clicked...and before I know it, I've been sucked back in again. I listened to nothing but Johnson on the way home from Peoria, and the scratchy persistence of Johnson's guitar, along with his soaring voice, seemed like the perfect companion for a dark and lonely road. We will always live life at the "cross road" between sin and righteousness, joy and sorrow, pain and laughter; few artists have been able to speak to these fears the way Johnson did, and that's why he'll always have a privileged place in America's musical heritage.

In Brief: A SCANNER DARKLY

2006-07-24T21:07:00.000-07:00

It's been over a week since I saw a movie because my LSAT class started and I used my only really free day, last Saturday, for a road trip to Peoria and back that took all day. Before I completely forget:

A SCANNER DARKLY (Richard Linklater, USA, 2006, B)

Impressive at first blush, but left me feeling underwhelmed the more I thought about it. I happen to like the rotoscoping (animation layered over live actors), not for the look in itself which is occasionally disjointed (especially when the camera is standing still--you can pick out background elements that clearly look like they weren't brushed over), but for the way it allows cartoonish effects to settle into a movie that otherwise resembles real life. It makes sense that there should be a medium that marries the realism of live performance and the creative freedom of animation, and this story demands such a marriage, with its hallucinatory visions and pulp-comic sensibilities. Mike D'Angelo commented that the film looks like a drug trip, and, while not being familiar with what a drug trip feels like, my guess would now have to be, "A SCANNER DARKLY in first person." The film has a handful of surreally beautiful moments--the tight, confessional-like close-ups of Robert Arctor (Keanu Reeves) and the final shot are particularly noteworthy. The problems with this movie ultimately come back to fundamentals. The plotting never feels as if it has any real direction, and the twist at the end is more of a "Huh?" moment that comes from out of left field and leaves you scratching your head than an "Aha!" moment that we might not have seen coming but that completes the story's logic. The performances are extremely uneven; Robert Downey Jr. steals the show as Ernie Luckman, a half-crazed drug addict with his mind set on helping the police apprehend fellow druggie and Orange County anti-drug analyst Arctor. Reeves and Winona Rider, who plays Arctor's love interest, are competent if a little disengaged. We would certainly be better off if Woody Harrellson and his "crazy-ass redneck druggie" routine had not been rolled out for this movie. There's a great movie in here somewhere, although this isn't it--in a final scene, Rider's character discusses why God would cause Arctor to suffer so hideously in his double life, and the movie seems to try at a theological answer, but, like everything else about this story, it's woefully incomplete and has no relation to what came before. Probably only a not-miss if you're addicted to those rotoscoped Charles Schwab ads.

Finally Getting OVER

2006-07-10T18:46:00.000-07:00

OVER THE HEDGE (Tim Johnson & Karey Kirkpatrick, USA, 2006,
A-)

"Look at that big TV!"
Little boy sitting behind me at the movie theatre before OVER THE HEDGE started. You ain't seen nothing yet, kid.

I might have guessed that a computer-animated film would be at the top of my provisional "Best Of" list for 2006 in the summertime. This is mostly due to accident--since I'm without the benefit of a major film festival, I don't get a chance to look at the early 2006 prestige crop until those films come out on DVD or hit DPAC later in the year (when its cheaper for them to show such films). The summer film list is therefore something of a grab bag, including big-studio rollouts and a comparatively limited batch of independent films with enough oomph behind them to get a summer release. However, I'm quite surprised that it's THIS film in particular I'm touting, and not the far-more-anticipated Disney/Pixar release CARS. It's perhaps a little patronizing, but it seems that the DreamWorks people have finally learned Pixar's "secret." The best-known DreamWorks films until this point--SHREK I & II, A SHARK'S TALE, and MADAGASCAR--were certainly technically competent, but tended to have rather rote plots and far too much elbow-nudging pop culture in-jokes (MADAGASCAR being perhaps the worst offender here). Unlike these other films, OVER THE HEDGE is superior storytelling that feels genuine through and through, a rollicking, carefree romp which belies a rather profound social understanding.

Based on the eponymous comic strip, OVER THE HEDGE begins when RJ (voiced by Bruce Willis), a streetwise raccoon, gets caught red-pawed trying to steal a hibernating bear's (Nick Nolte) stockpile of goodies stolen from unsuspecting campers. To escape consumption, RJ promises to replace the stash by the time the new moon comes along. Retreating to suburbia to find the tasty treats the bear requires, RJ stumbles upon a "family" of cuddly woodland creatures--with a bit of an edge--led by the cautious turtle Verne (Garry Shandling). Verne's clan has woken up from hibernation and discovered a hedge which cuts into the sky like the monolith from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and, with RJ as their guide to the nuances of the development that has replaced their beloved woods, the hedge too becomes a sign of cataclysmic change (...and there's the most bizarre movie analogy I'll make all year). Verne instinctively fears the change and finds himself in a heated fight with the interloping RJ for the affection of his friends. As RJ's deadline comes closer and the humans become wiser to the methods of the animals, the movie spirals toward a conclusion that is 4/5 brilliantly executed comic caper and 1/5 thoughtful social commentary, which is just about right.

The underlying issue of the benefits of rapidly-expanding suburbs in OVER THE HEDGE will not be lost on most adult viewers, and it hit home especially deeply for me. Fresno is increasingly becoming characterized by this type of development, as more and more orchards and farmland are rezoned, sold, and developed to accomodate a rapidily growing population. My house, itself a harbinger of this trend, used to be on the very edge of civilization. Now, fifteen years, a couple of public schools, and a dozen or so major development projects later, the town has bulged out, and the edge of civilization is no longer visible when I pull out of my neighborhood to head into town. Even the impact on the local fauna is noticable--it's not uncommon to find coyotes or odd birds hanging around the neighborhood, no doubt forced inward by the building boom. One might say now that they got caught on the wrong side of the hedge and can't make it back. However, these changes are not so much inexcusable as they are inevitable, and we'd be naive to say that suburbs don't bring with them certain benefits (they do). I think OVER THE HEDGE balances these strains pretty effectively--it positions suburbia as something that we shouldn't be afraid of, but maintains that there's more to life than simply the next development or strip mall. In the end, it becomes clear that RJ is more in need of the charity of Verne and his friends than Verne and his friends are in need of RJ's skilled hand around garbage cans. Rural values and traditions matter, even in a world that has to scrub away more and more of its nesting place every day.

I appreciated that the family wasn't quite the collection of usual "types" that this kind of an arrangement lends itself towards. The vocal casting is wonderful (Victor expands on this much better than I will), especially Steve Carell's as a hyperactive squirrel, Bill Shatner as an overdramatic single father (he loves "playing possum"), Avril Lavigne as his coy yet affectionate daughter, and Wanda Sikes as a skunk with a big mouth to match her foul scent. The style of humor is very different from the earlier DreamWorks films, with sly punchlines that slip in the back of the frame and a much better command of truly visual storytelling taking the place of flashy animation with zingers, a dumb plot, and insider references (one of the most difficult and best handled scenes is when Carell's squirrel first tries caffine... the build-up was huge and the payoff was worth it). Most importantly, the film feels right--it doesn't drag on longer than it has to, the story's serious themes don't hamper the comic intensity down (Verne can't even describe his discomfort without talking about how certain parts of his body "feel funny" when the crap's about to hit the fan), and it wholeheartedly embraces the absurdity of its universe, unlike so many of the ostensibly lighthearted, fantasy-minded films to hit theatres recently.

So will OVER THE HEDGE be the best movie of 2006 when I make my list early next year? I can't say for sure--there's too much out in theatres as yet unseen to be able to say. But for the first time all year, I've found a movie that I wouldn't be ashamed of giving such high regards.

Argh!

2006-07-07T20:45:00.000-07:00

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST (Gore Verbinski, USA, 2006, B-)

Two men were sitting on a train heading into Scotland. One of the men had an oddly-shaped suitcase. The other man asked, "What's in the suitcase, sir, if you don't mind telling?"
"This?" Said the other, "why, it's a MacGuffin."
"A MacGuffin? Never heard of a MacGuffin before. What is it?"
"Oh, it's for catching tigers in Scotland."
The interlocutor furrowed his brow. "Surely you realize," he said after a short pause, "that there are no tigers in Scotland."
"Oh! Well, then there isn't a MacGuffin then, either, is there?"
--My lame version of Alfred Hitchcock's famous joke

Dear Mr. Verbinski,

I had the privilege of paying eight dollars to see your movie today. This does not include the overpriced Diet Coke I bought after waiting about ten minutes in line behind the people who were apparently ordering a large drink, a super-large popcorn, and a coronary procedure; or the over half-hour of advertisements I was subjected to. However, these fiscal and temporal barriers were not sufficient to dampen my enthusiasm for your latest film, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST, which promised another delightful thrill-ride with the lovably eccentric Johnny Depp, the just-plain-lovely Keira Knightley, and Orlando Bloom (sorry, but after Orlando took down that giant elephant in the third LORD OF THE RINGS film, he hasn't really impressed me). I even ignored the tepid critical response the film had been getting from most critics, so fervent was my passion to see Jack Sparrow do his thing.

Well, the movie's now over, and I'm sending this note along to you because I think you forgot something very important in the process of writing this movie--the point of the MacGuffin. To be sure, DEAD MAN'S CHEST has a marvelous MacGuffin--the still-beating heart of Davy Jones, for cryin' out loud! However, the MacGuffin only reason to be there is to give some surface legitimacy to what we're really there for--swordfighting, Jack Sparrow's gesticulations, general pirate mayhem, and Keira Knightley (you may notice this is a recurring theme if you read the letter closely enough). This was perhaps best illustrated by Alfred Hitchcock in his NORTH BY NORTHWEST, which I have no doubt you are familiar with. In that movie, the characters themselves seem barely aware of the thing they're chasing, to the blissful ignorance of the audience, which is caught up with crop-dusters and climbing the face of Mount Rushmore and Eva Marie-Saint.

You, however, seem to think the details of the MacGuffin are of dire importance. To that end, you spend an inordinate amount of time explaining to everyone the gory details of the significance of the Dead Man's Chest to everyone in the cast. If I have it right, Sparrow needs the chest so he can continue pirating in bliss without corporate interference and that blasted Davy Jones guy on his back; Orlando needs the chest so he can get a compass from Sparrow, so he can give it to another guy who wants to put Orlando and Keira to death for helping Sparrow, pardoning the both of them; and there's another guy who wants the chest who I didn't remember from the first movie and whose presence is completely inexplicable. Then I think Orlando met his dad somewhere along the line and part of finding the chest was so he could save his dad from this lifetime indentured servitude to Davy Jones, but I'm not sure because I gave up trying to understand all this about 90 minutes in. I'm sure this pirate mythology would be fascinating stuff if you could sit down and explain it to me, but it doesn't work in the movie because the audience a) won't remember it, and b) couldn't care less as long as they get to see Sparrow being Sparrow, Keira being Keira, and pirates being pirates. Your movie is two and a half hours long and believe me, it felt all of two and a half hours long--material like this should zip and swoop like a little sailboat, and you made the thing into the friggin' Queen Mary.

There are, of course, some good things to note about your movie. When they stop talking long enough to do anything, the things that made the first movie enjoyable make their presence known. Depp's performance is somewhat hampered here by the labryntine nature of the plot, but it's still marvelous to behold--part scallywag, part master negotiator, with all those odd hand movements emphasized just enough to be comic, while somehow keeping us convinced of his rugged anti-heroism. I happen not to like looking at these hybridized fish/men you seem so fond of, but the execution is flawless and I suppose I'm not supposed to like them anyway. As a matter of fact, all the special effects are excellent, although the movie isn't really visually spectacular or interesting. Also, props to the makeup artist, especially for the creepy makeup Sparrow has applied to him when he's capture by a tribe of islanders. Finally, you'll be glad to hear that my lukewarmness towards this movie has not curbed my enthusiasm for the next film to come in the PIRATES series, which already seems to have a lot more genuine intrigue that I can actually understand than this silly wild-goose chase about an organ.

Sincerely,

Michael J. Gerardi

He's Baaaaaaack...

2006-07-03T19:53:00.000-07:00

SUPERMAN RETURNS (Bryan Singer, USA, 2006, B-)

I'm not a big comic-book movie fan to begin with; I haven't seen the original SUPERMAN movies (more of a hole in my pop culture quotient than in my filmic knowledge, I think) and my only other interaction with the Man of Steel involved those animated cartoons from the 1940's which I vaguely remember watching at a young age. However, I'm apparently amongst the minority. SUPERMAN RETURNS follows in a long line of popular comic heroes moving to the big screen: X-MEN I, II, and III; SPIDERMAN I and II (III coming soon); BATMAN BEGINS (with a sequel in the works--BATMAN CONTINUES?); and a number of duds, including THE INCREDIBLE HULK and FANTASTIC FOUR. Throw on top of that the numerous "graphic novels" and long comic books that have been translated to the big screen (AMERICAN SPLENDOR, V FOR VENDETTA, SIN CITY), and SUPERMAN RETURNS seemed not merely predictable, but inevitable. Next to THE DA VINCI CODE, and possibly the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN sequel, this was the summer movie with the most pressure to succeed, and certainly the movie with the biggest budget ($270 million, estimated).

But, as time has proven, money and reputation a good movie does not make. Like most of the new superhero movies, SUPERMAN RETURNS is caught between a more serious, realistic take on its subject, and the lighter, sillier feel the source material had. For example, in an early scene, Superman (Brandon Routh) saves a crashing airplane, with Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) in tow, that's about to crash. The special effects are utterly convincing when it comes to Superman stopping the plane and lowering it safely on the middle of a baseball field during a game (if he was really so "super," wouldn't he have set it down someplace that wouldn't have interrupted play? I guess modesty isn't a superpower). However, this creates some absurd contradictions; Lois is thrown against the airplane cabin like a ragdoll (as we expect), and only the magic of editing and selective continuity saves Bosworth's 96-pound body (it was in the tabloids, it must be true!) from being a bloody pulp. The realization of Superman on the big screen is impressive--too impressive for the good of the story, as conceived here.

Moreover, unlike the best of the new breed of superhero movies, like BATMAN BEGINS and the SPIDERMAN films, SUPERMAN RETURNS never really gives us a reason to cling to anything or anyone. The good guy/bad guy interaction is uninspired, although Kevin Spacey is a delight as Lex Luthor; he's certainly more impressive than the somewhat empty looking, Brendan Fraser-esque Routh. There's something anticlimatic, almost unfair, about the way the struggle ends, and I felt as though Lex hadn't gotten a fair shot at being evil (you comic book geeks may all start hating me now). The movie drags on for another lackluster thirty minutes after the penultimate battle, taking away any of the momentum it built in the audience's conscience, and settles for a lame "Scooby-Doo" ending instead of a definite victory over the bad guy to set up the sequel. Same goes for the love triangle, if it can be called that, between Superman, Lois, and Lois' honey (James Marsden). There's even a Token Daddyless Child, as if the film were lacking in lame attempts to tug at the audience. I also found it rather annoying that the movie engages in so many elbow-nudging insider references to the previous SUPERMAN films--yes, I realize it's interacting with the original films, but when nearly 30 years have elapsed between sequels, it doesn't come off right.

The one thing I will give SUPERMAN RETURNS over the other films is that its scientifically implausible plot to destroy civilization is definitely the most hilarious. If Al Gore really cares about Manhattan getting flooded when the polar ice cap melts, he ought to check into what Lex Luthor's planning. Al Gore's expose of Lex Luthor--now THAT would be a good movie.

Something In The NACHOs Made Me Sick

2006-07-03T18:41:00.000-07:00

NACHO LIBRE (Jared Hess, USA, 2006, D)

My relationship with Hess' feature debut, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, is tenuous. I hate watching it, but it's an eminently quotable movie that's earned a place in the pop culture universe, and I'm too weak to resist an occasional "gosh!" or "frickin' idiot!" once in a while (also, a discussion with my younger brother or people in the marching band is impossible without having seen it). My theory to explain this is that DYNAMITE is the perfect film for a world with YouTube and podcasting--funny in many small sections of no more than a minute or two, but with no overriding structure or sense of timing to link together the parts into a whole. It's a skill that separates the great funny films from the mediocre and bad ones, and I think it takes a while for a director to hone in on it--even the Marx Brothers made a number of duds (THE COCOANUTS, ANIMAL CRACKERS) before they hit their stride, and it's no fluke that their greatest success came with one of the best comic directors of the early sound era in Leo McCarey. Unfortunately, NACHO LIBRE doesn't show much comic progress, and even feels as though its slipping backwards.

Jack Black plays Nacho, née the friar Ignacio, who under a mixed but simplistic set of aspirations begins to moonlight as a luchador, even though it's condemned in no uncertain terms by his religious order. He enlists a street thug named Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez) as his tag-team partner and starts an awkward platonic relationship with the new teacher at the monastary's school, Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera). It's not an unsalvagable premise, but the handling of it is in NACHO LIBRE so heavy-handed that there's very little worth salvaging at the end. It's a crime that Jack Black could be rendered this humorless, given how fond my previous memory of him from SCHOOL OF ROCK was. He's clearly trying to do the Pedro Sanchez thing from NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, which is distantly a take on Buster Keaton, but it's not the right fit--he's too naturally emotive and energetic. His self-restraint is palpable, never a good sign in a movie that shouldn't be so onerous.

This film also makes it clear that the Hess' succeeded in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE partly because they grew up in the rural Idaho Napoleon inhabits, and you always write/direct better about what you know. But their understanding of Mexico, of the luchadores, and, yes, of the Catholic Church, is about as perceptive as that of Summer Wheatley's in DYNAMITE ("so, who wants to eat chimmny-changas for lunch next year? I didn't think so!"). Never mind that everyone in Mexico suddenly speaks English like every comic Mexican in 1940-50's Westerns did, which I suppose is necessary if you're making a film about Mexico for Americans although the way it's done here seems so crude. The only joke they can come up with about monastic life is how funny it would be if a friar had the hots for a nun, and they beat it relentlessly. Lacking any other wells of humor outside of the fights (which aren't that impressive), they settle for more of the uncalled-for close-ups of food that overpopulated DYNAMITE (including the nasty beans Ignacio cooks; it's not exactly BABETTE'S FEAST). Finally, the Hess' resort to a previously untapped vein of comedic gold--snot and poop jokes. Billy Wilder would have been proud.

One more note: did someone forget to tell the Hess' that professional wrestling, American and Mexican, is fake? I can almost see Napoleon arguing this point with Kip in some scene from DYNAMITE that never got filmed. Sadly, the whole film seems to work on that level, and unless you can bring yourself down to it, you're better off seeing something else.

Deal Or No Deal?

2006-06-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

THE PROPOSITION (John Hillcoat, UK/Australia, 2006, A-)

"There is a happy, happy land..." a young boy sings over the opening credits of THE PROPOSITION, the movie's most persistant musical theme. The song gives a haunting sense of irony to the unsettling still images of the brutality of the Australian outback which form the background for the credits, and the shootout which opens the film, replete with dead Asian prostitutes and puddles of blood. Violence is a way of life in the Australian outback, accepted uncritically by men on both sides of the moral divide, including Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), who has an iron will to civilize this land but doesn't seem to realize that the "decent" Australians are just as much responsible for it as are the native Aboriginals and the gangs of criminals roving the outback. Stanley does rightly identify that the key to beginning to reform the land is Arthur Burns, the leader of a family of violent miscreants, including brothers Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mikey (Richard Wilson). When Mikey and Charlie fall into Stanley's hands, he offers a pardon for both brothers if Charlie can eliminate Arthur. It's a cruel deal, but these are cruel men living in cruel times--with a horse and a gun, Charlie heads into the outback.

This sounds a bit like the premise for a western (southern? southwestern?) slasher, and if you're looking for that, THE PROPOSITION surely won't disappoint. But I don't think it can be dismissed so simply. Screenwriter Nick Cave is best known as a musician, and as all great musicians know, dynamics occasionally need to be overexaggerated to bring out the full range of a composition. THE PROPOSITION is often shocking and horrific, but just as often, it has a mystical quality that's as fragile as the Christmas ornament Stanley's wife Martha (Emily Watson) ships over from England. The story makes abundant use of the imagery of religious repentance--Charlie is sent out into the desert to make reparation for his sins; Mikey is given a PASSION OF THE CHRIST-like scourging to atone for the sins of his manipulative brothers. Like the Australian outback itself--a melting pot of overwhelming bleakness and stunning, untouched beauty--the film often reaches inexplicable moments of transcendence, caught between a beautiful meditation and a frightening reality.

THE PROPOSITION isn't as overtly philosophical as John Ford's THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, but it nonetheless takes on that film's themes of the meaning of justice and the necessity (or lack thereof) of a legal structure with great seriousness. It's characters seem cognizant of a cycle of violence indelibly engraved in the state of the human condition, although they are unable to articulate it and stop it. A vicious drunk played by John Hurt howls like a coyote about civilized man's decent from the monkeys and the aboriginies, declaring the fundamental depravity of the world they live in (the racist tendencies of the time are an important part of the film's thinking about the nature of evil, so much so that a title at the beginning of the film warns any viewers who feel uneasy about this to dismiss themselves). As part of this decent, man is inherently inclined toward evil--revenge, by whites and aboriginies, good citizens and outlaws, is not merely commonplace, but expected. Even Martha, who is given a strange luminosity by Watson's wonderful performance, cannot escape this cycle, to her own horror--she clamors for Mikey's blood in exchange for the harm inflicted on her friends, a decision she comes to regret as the cycle of violence loops back to attack her. The ending is especially dark and ambiguous, much like the climax of LIBERTY VALANCE; actions that violate the legal order seem to be the only way to stop an endless cycle of ruthlessness.

Charlie Burns is certainly an unlikely, and deeply ambiguous, heroic figure. Much like Tom Doniphan in VALANCE, it seems that the harder one works to unearth what makes him tick, the more confused one becomes about his essential qualities. During his stay in the desert, he seems to realize that the culture of death he lives in is the real threat against he and Mikey, and that culture encompasses everyone--soldiers and bandits alike. He stands alone at the end of the film, having finally broken the culture, seeing the fallacy in standing with one side or another and the necessity to stand with justice, the only side that really matters.

Update: Victor hated this movie. My response, from the combox.

In Brief: A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION

2006-06-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (Robert Altman, USA, 2006, B)

It's hard to argue with a living legend of cinema, let alone a living legend with such a deep appreciation for his subjects and a slew of talented actors working for him. A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION may be the brainchild of Garrison Keillor, who wrote the screenplay and plays himself, but the stamp of Robert Altman is all over this movie, from the deep focus to the non-conventional placement of actors within the frame to the improvised, unstagey acting (in other words, this movie has "art film" written all over it). As Mike D'Angelo points out in his review of the film, it's hard to ignore the fact that Altman is composing his own elegy in this movie--like the radio show's old-fashioned modes of expression and its audio portraits of a way of life that has died away in the United States, the world is slipping away from Altman, too. The fault, oddly enough, is mostly with Keillor's screenwriting--not convinced in the power of his own radio show, he dumps a number of unnecessary side elements into the script that take away from the power of the subject. The radio show on its own has a tone that's very difficult to describe--funny, and often joyous, but just as often tinged with regret and subtle melancholy. It certainly doesn't need an angel of death, a man dying on set, Lindsay Lohan writing songs about suicide, and a goofy character plucked from a 40's Warner Brothers film noir played by Kevin Klein who I wanted to give THE BIG SLEEP to after about forty-five minutes. The movie does the radio show justice and is recommended to the show's devotees and anyone who's genuinely curious, but it is frustrating to watch a film that could be so much better get buried by heavy-handed writing.

Note: JAA reserves, at all times, the right to post Lindsay Lohan pictures. She nice. We like.

Turning Up The Heat

2006-06-28T06:26:00.000-07:00

Three films to blog on over the next couple of days--all new releases, all seen in the theatre...

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (Davis Guggenheim, USA, 2006, B+)

This is a grade for a film, not a scientific point of view. In fact, one might say that the big absentee from this film presentation of Al Gore's lecture on global warming is science as practiced by objective, non-motivated scientists, which Gore is not. He takes theory (the much-disputed "greenhouse effect") as indisputable fact without any empirical basis for doing so, other than that there's a funny cartoon by Matt Groening in his slideshow that illustrates his point and mountains of seemingly correlating evidence. He assigns phenomenon that we would simply refer to as natural change (retreating glaciers, for example) to this insidious created cause. While most of the film's facts aren't disputable, Gore does include a good deal of schadenfreude--for example, he brings up the usual tired canards about how Americans produce more waste than other nations, even adjusted per capita, but fails to mention that one of the reasons for the waste is that the world is so dependent on much of what we produce. Perhaps most laughable is Gore's ridiculous assertion that "no one" in the climate science community disagrees with global warming, as outlined in this Senate E & PW Committee press release. In the last class I took that talked about global climate change the professor opposed exactly the kind of ember-stoking Gore engaged in here (my professor also showed us the supposed "secret" charts correlating CO2 and temperature from ice core samples that "no one" knows about--perhaps the oil companies are hiding it).

I think the primary problem with the film is that cinema is the wrong format to present the kind of argument Gore is trying to make with any kind of credibility. However, it is, as my friend Victor Morton pointed out, an excellent format for propaganda. Even if you don't think very highly of Gore's alarmism, the film itself is engagingly crafted. Turning statistics, charts, and a few personal stories from Gore into a film worth seeing at the theatre is no mean feat. Guggenheim manages to bring a man I always thought was a lifeless stiff to, well, life--Gore is more relaxed than I've ever seen him before (maybe it's because Tipper isn't in the film at all), and he seems to be genuinely passionate about this subject, which covers a lot of faults in my view. But a film just isn't the venue for a scientific argument, especially one as complicated and politically involved as the global warming debate. The audience is at a disadvantage from the very start because they can't raise their hand to ask a question about what they are being told, or check a footnote after a questionable point has been raised. There's a reason why the types of questions Gore is asking are hashed out in arenas where the scientific community can scrutinize them--even Ph.Ds make mistakes in addressing these types of questions. I'm recommending this film because I think it's entertaining and involving, but whether or not you agree with global warming, don't make this the sole source of information you consult on the issue.

Smoke, Smoke, Smoke Those Cigarettes

2006-06-22T16:26:00.000-07:00

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (Jason Reitman, USA, 2006, B+)

The first post of the St. Louis summer... I saw this movie at the Hi-Point theatre near Highway 40 and the Washington University campus, really a beautiful theatre although the projection was slightly off-center.

At first blush, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING is merely a slickly crafted spoof with a wickedly dark sense of humor, until you realize that not only did people like Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) really exist at one point in a form not too far removed from the one we see here, but that American politics is crawling with Nick Naylors--apparently, the new occupation he picks up at the end of the movie has been paying huge dividends. The great strength of the movie is the way it stradles an invisible line between parody and reality--none of these characters, although they're obviously fictional and their actions are seen to be comical, feel contrived or in any way symbolic. William Macy's impression of Jim Jeffords and Katie Holmes' sluttish investigative reporter are the best examples of this outside of Naylor, who was the guy in your college dorm sitting in the lounge arguing with anyone who came by, always leaving the other person flummoxed and sputtering. It doesn't quite reach the Wilder-esque levels of comic mayhem it could be capable of, though--some of the omniscient narrator storytelling devices take away from the power of the performances and writing, giving us the unfortunate reminder that we're watching parody, not reality.

What might surprise a lot of people who've only heard of the movie in passing, or who've read other people's descriptions of it, is that the movie is only tangentially about smoking, even though people talk about smoking a lot (there's actually not a physical cigarette or a person smoking in the entire movie, a telling signal). Naylor isn't a smoking advocate so much as he's a sophist who happened to wind up at a cigarette company--he could just easily have been working for an insurance company or a pro-life organization (I don't mean to compare Naylor to the courageous people who do pro-life activism in Washington today; my point is simply that given Naylor's criteria, he could shill for anything). In the conversations he has with his son while he's on a business trip in Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Naylor's technique isn't one of evildoers persay, but of anyone looking to win. It just happens that we have an extremely indulgent culture that prefers sound bites and grandstanding to actual debate, science and morality be damned (the image of the slice of apple pie, adorned with a slice of American cheese and Old Glory, is closer to being the film's axiomatic image than anything resembling smoking). The political critique of Reitman (from the left), which is as indebted to Christopher Buckley's source novel (son of, yes, that Buckley, showing how far talent can take a conservative) as it is to Reitman's screenwriting and direction, is perhaps one we can all appreciate in a time where political debates have been reduced to semantics (will the real definition of "amnesty" please stand up) and schadenfreud from Democrats and Republicans is not merely common, but cyncially accepted.

Bleh

2006-06-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

Not much blogging this week since I'm getting ready to head out to my internship in St. Louis, and because the NBA Finals are on (if you're not watching you really should--Finals plus the US Open Championship in golf makes this a great week in sports). I really wanted to write about ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, but I really needed to see it twice and didn't get to, and I'm too busy/tired to do it anyway. Expect film blogging to come back with a vengeance once I'm settled in.

Also, I'm having some problems updating the film log and film list. Apparently, OIT at ND is updating the web-based text/HTML editor that comes with the online interface for their file server, which is the way I typically edit those pages, and it just doesn't work right now. Since I don't have real hardcore HTML editing software (seems like overkill), my only other tool is Word, which does this weird thing to all my apostrophes when I upolad a page. Once I find a way to resolve this the pages will look better / be updated.

Finally, a quick poll: what is funnier?

a) Al Gore making a global warming movie.
b) Roger Ebert's cooing and eminently predictable response to it

I vote "b." Read the article and decide for yourself.

Get Your Motor Running

2006-06-10T22:01:00.000-07:00

CARS (John Lasseter, USA, 2006, B+)

Not since the last golden age of Disney animation (THE LION KING, THE LITTLE MERMAID, ALADDIN) has the American public been as alive to a given production company's work as they are right now about Pixar. I took my little sister to see CARS last night at the local six screen and was as delighted at the response of the extremely diverse crowd to the picture, as I was with the picture itself. As progressive as these computer-animated films are, Pixar is in many ways a throwback to a bygone era, from the short they show at the beginning of the picture (ONE-MAN BAND was shown before CARS, and it probably merits an A) to the G-rating. They are confident in themselves, and in their franchise--look closely and you'll notice that everyone in the fictional auto-world of CARS rides "Lightyear Tires" (there's even a Lightyear Blimp), a wink and a nod at the TOY STORY films. I can't think of another group of artists working today who can simultaneously aim a film at a seven year-old, a seventeen year-old, and a forty seven-year old (it's officially not a "kids movie" any more when the Car Talk guys from NPR get a cameo and Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is referenced), and not have it feel focus-grouped or forced.

Despite the lofty standards, CARS is a worthy addition to the Pixar family. No one can match Pixar's technical prowess; CARS is certainly equal to predecessors THE INCREDIBLES and FINDING NEMO in terms of breathtaking visuals (I liked the races and the "tractor-tipping" scenes the best), and the fast-action sequences might be even better than those earlier efforts. The attention to detail is meticulous. Take, for example, the anthropomorphization of the cars, which would be very easy to botch (you might remember the TV ads Chevron ran a few years ago featuring talking cars, which I always thought were extremely rigid). I, for one, had always assumed if my car did talk, its mouth would be the grill and the headlights would be the eyes. Not so, says Pixar, and one sees why they're so spot on in examining the finished product: the windshield forms the eyes (although the pupils look a little dead), which conveniently lets the windshield wipers take the place of eyelashes. The grill becomes a sort of nose, or, in the case of Lightning McQueen's archrival on the Piston Cup circuit, a really grotesque mustache. The front bumper, it turns out, is a far better mouth; the lights are simply ornaments (perhaps, on the cute little she-Porche McQueen meets, the lights are Keira Knightely-esque dimples). Americans have always humanized their cars, and this film, a labor of love from start to finish, seems to tap into that distinctly American love affair.

All that being said, the general consesus from critics that CARS rings a little bit hollow seem justified. The narrative is a bit stale--McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson of WEDDING CRASHERS fame), a race away from the greatest prize in American racing and a chance to escape from redneck purgatory into the limelight of auto endorsement celebrity, is abandoned in the ghost town of Radiator Springs by virtue of his own hubris. The next step, introduced the audience to a lovable cast of characters voiced by famous celebs, is almost mechanical--the curmudgeonly mayor Doc Hudson (Paul Newman) who has a secret to hide and a none too well explained antagonism towards McQueen, the Porche (Bonnie Hunt) who opened a motel to escape life in the fast lane, a tow-truck named Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) who epitomizes everything McQueen hates about his job, and some funny, if stereotypical, immigrants (A Fiat with a goofy accent and his son run the local tire shop; an Impala, voiced by Cheech Marin, provides paint jobs). Of course, McQueen learns important life lessons during his brief stay, and makes it to the big race in enough time to apply the lessons he's learned. There are enough twists to keep the movie from being overbearingly formulaic, but it remains true that this is not the most original idea every conceived. The structure only allows the movie to go so far; for all its beautiful execution, it feels like the film had something much greater on its mind, but didn't want to say it.

Perhaps it's because the film's parallel universe so closely resembles our own. I might be crazy, but I think CARS is as clearly coded an apology for life in what's known as "the heartland," "flyover country," or "red states," (is it a coincidence that McQueen is painted red, while his rivals are painted blue and green, political charged colors both?) as I've seen in a while. McQueen initially wants glamor and glitz, an escape from the uneducated rednecks who form his support base. What he learns in the film is that for their lack of sophistication, that his admirers have a can-do spirit, inplacable pride, a fair share of cunning and common sense, and, most importantly, a soul. The film's appeal to the fifties as a halcyon era, where people loved their world enough to watch the horizon roll along along as they winded their way from Chicago to LA on Route 66, only strengthens the film's conservative sensiblities (certain aspects of the movie remind me of Pat Buchanan's "Right From The Beginning," another modern paean to a better era,) About the only thing that's missing in CARS advocation of "the heartland" is religion, which would probably be awkward with cars anyway, and might point to a limitation in the subject matter. It seems incredible to me that a film so supportive of the Southern/Midwestern ethic, from its affectionate embrace of NASCAR (and, curiously, elegaic tribute to Dale Earnhardt), to its derisive view of the celebrity set, could have come out of a studio in California's Bay Area; perhaps that's why the message, which seems so deliberate, doesn't ring quite as loudly or clearly as it could. For all it's problems (and they're there), CARS is far more dense than one might initially be led to think; we should probably let it age a bit before drawing any hard conclusions.

Man With The Film Review Blog

2006-06-07T21:34:00.000-07:00

MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA (Dziga Vertov, USSR, 1929, B*)

My grade on this film isn't necessarily a judgment on its artistic merits, which are abundant--it simply reflects my response to a movie I thought was equal parts painful to consume and fascinating. It's evident from the start that Vertov isn't making this movie to make friends or entertain people, abandoning the narrative and dramatic forms we're all accustomed to in order to create a film in the "pure language" of cinema. What follows is a dizzying 68 minute-ride with no plot, no dialogue, and no characters except for a lone "man with a movie camera," capturing life in the USSR as he sees it. On one level, it's simply a scatterbrained love letter to communist society (see Russia at work! see Russia at play!), and if it's at times headache-inducing, it's also sprawling and engaging. However, the evidence in the film makes it abundantly clear (the title of the movie, the opening statement explicity outlining the film's purpose, the depiction of people entering a movie theater to watch the movie we're about to be shown) that Vertov is primarily concerned with film itself, that the things he films are merely vehicles to forward his ideas about the cinema.

Perhaps the quality that best describes Vertov's conception of film is "transience." For example, a shape or image in the real world (the windows on a train, an elevator passing by, the gears of a machine) is, by itself, simply what it is. This is what we see at the beginning of the film, mere objects--examples include a bus depot and ads for champagne. These images take on different meanings over the course of the movie, as Vertov uses countless similar motifs to show how the camera manipulates reality to create impressions. There are countless visual similies, in the real world (bus windows, elevators moving in a shaft, various factory machinery) that come to represent the apparatus not only of society, but of cinema itself, drawing the viewer into the allegory between this art form and our everyday existence. The camera itself takes a number of different roles--it is at times an omniscient observer of events, unknown to the viewer, rising above the tumult of society; at times an unseen character which the people it is filming mug and preen to; at times a part of the picture as an observer above the "man" watches him follow a promising lead; and, finally, when Vertov returns to the movie theater for the first time since the opening scene, the camera itself becomes a subject of the editor's machine in a stop-frame animation sequence. The editor also has a special role, as the movie occasionally goes back to the cutting room, showing her (the editor's a she in this movie) ability to manipulate screen reality in a series of still-frame shots, as she seems to pick out which impression she wants to create. The film is also conscious of how dependent the good filmmaker is on luck in crafting his message--Vertov cuts between scenes of life and death, marriage and divorce, and shows how matters of timing or location, in the hands of a skilled director, can affect our impressions of a city, a nation, an ideology.

This is all neat stuff, and you're not even hearing the half of it, or of how Vertov's numerous innovations in the film (multiple exposure, super-rapid cutting, cinema's ability to reflect upon itself) are still pertinent to modern viewers. But even for people like me who are willing to watch almost anything, the experience of watching this is often unpleasant. Even INTOLERANCE, as odd and dull as it is, doesn't try to induce an epileptic seizure in the audience. For all the technical bravura, there's a reason why filmmakers have stuck with narrative and dramatic forms 99.9% of the time.

This is Teh Awesome

2006-06-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

From left: WC Fields (?), Chaplin, Keaton, Groucho

Murder Most Fun

2006-06-02T06:51:00.000-07:00

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (Frank Capra, USA, 1944, A)

If you want to send a message, try Western Union.
--Frank Capra

Frank Capra, along with John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, was one of Hollywood's most prominent Catholic directors during the 1940's. Like the other two, Capra often dismissed the notion that he sought a loftier aim than "entertainment" in his filmmaking. Yet this attitude, exemplified by the comment above, doesn't make sense when contrasted with Capra's film output. MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON still ranks as one of the best movies about politics ever made; his most widely-beloved film, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, was given a propitious spot under the "Values" category of the Vatican Film List. Seemingly contrary to his own stated beliefs, Capra was actually a remarkably perceptive populist; his films stand with what we hold dearest, family and community, against government corruption (WASHINGTON) and corporate greed (WONDERFUL LIFE). He might have been America's first Crunchy Con filmmaker. More likely, Capra was making a statement about how to make good movies; rather than making a film that "sends the right message" first and subjects the narrative to that message, (*cough*CRASH*cough*) Capra strove to entertain first, and have meaning rise from the context of a story well-told.

At first glance, it may seem that ARSENIC AND OLD LACE doesn't fit in with Capra's pattern of populism. WASHINGTON and WONDERFUL LIFE starred the epitome of populist, homespun American virtue, Jimmy Stewart, while ARSENIC is headed by Cary Grant; one can't imagine two stars from that era who were such polar opposites in terms of persona (they were brought together in Cukor's THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, to delightful results). Stewart played a Boy Scout leader who was drafted to Congress and the operator of a benevolent S&L who becomes the patriarch of Bedford Falls in the two most-loved Capra movies; Cary plays a very much put-upon drama critic--a profession not exactly known for its representation of populist virtue. ARSENIC is also one of the darkest films Capra made, featuring not one but 24 murders (without showing a single dead body, of course) and a handful of mind-twistingly creepy performances, not simply from Raymond Massey and Peter Lorre, who play a pair of murderers on the run from the law, but from two old ladies who are the matriarchs of their Brooklyn neighborhood. However, in spite of the environs, this film is no less populist than Capra's other work; in fact, it may be the most deeply insightful, and certainly the most humorous and entertaining, movie Capra ever directed.

"Brooklyn, where anything can happen, and usually does," a title tells us before cutting to the opening scene, a fight at a baseball game between the then-Brooklyn Dodgers and the then-New York Giants. Baseball isn't ever referenced after the opening scene, which simply seems to prepare us for the idea that violence can come from unexpected corners. Things get rolling when newlyweds Mortimer Brewster (Grant) and Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane) visit the aunts Brewster (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) to say goodbye before engaging in all the newlywed guff Mortimer long despised (he's written a number of books condemning the practice prior to his nuptials). The discovery of a dead body in his aunts' kitchen and an admission from his aunts that they were the murderers turns the suave drama critic into a mess of facial contortions, frenetic activity, and comically incoherent babble. A Brewster uncle who's convinced he's Teddy Roosevelt (John Alexander) and the arrival of Mortimer's long lost brother with his partner-in-crime (Massey and Lorre, respectively), further complicate matters, especially since the duo have their own body to bury. Grant works overtime to get his uncle out of the reach of the homicidal aunts, keep his wife out of the way (she's conspicuously dressed in black after the wedding ceremony; along with the graveyard in the neighbord, she anticipates the stench of death), get rid of his brother, and maintain his own sanity.

Based on a stage play by Joseph Kesselring, ARSENIC AND OLD LACE isn't as tightly confined as it could be (think Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER), but it's pretty close, with 90% of the film taking place inside the house of the Brewster aunts. Capra was never known for having a style that called attention to itself, and this movie exemplifies the clean, classical style of editing and composition Capra was known for. Mood is altered within the confined space primarily through lighting--there are some particularly elegant and creepy shots with the lights turned out in the house, as the criminals attempt to move their dead body into the cellar of the house. There's also some inventive, comic use of deep focus; in one particularly funny scene, Grant discusses a play with an extremely banal method of tying a man to a chair, while his brother, working behind him, begins to implement that very same method on Grant. Yet, in the end, this is a screenwriter's movie; the best lines are probably from the mouths of the two murdering aunties, who talk about their mercy killing practices as if they were working at the Vincent de Paul Society or baking cookies for the neighbors, although Grant gets some ringers too ("Insanity runs in my family; it practically gallops"). The ensemble of actors is excellent all the way round; it's rare to see this many actors really buy into their story, in the face of its sheer absurdity. This is especially true for Grant, who is actually more enjoyable as a put-upon, exasperated nephew than as the debonaire socialite (although this role contains a little bit of the Grant we know, enough to make the Grant who's spinning off of his planet much, much funnier).

From the beginning, it's pretty clear that the old ladies represent the Puritan moral strain in America, a pattern of thinking that has existed almost as long as America itself, and that found its heydey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Paradoxically, it is the righteous concerns of the old ladies that lead them to violate righteousness. This would have resonated with Capra's background as a Catholic and an immigrant, the behavior of which the "moral reformers" of the progressive movement were often targeting. Despite the good intentions of, say, Prohibtion, their actions produced more harm than good, just as the high-minded charity of the ladies spills into murder. Perhaps, also, Capra is aware of a strain of this type of thinking arising in people who should be on his side--the old ladies engage in small talk about the vulgar movies they show nowadays, and how they shouldn't be allowed in public, which seems to be a knock at the Catholic-dominated Production Code and Legion of Decency. However, the film is not unsympathetic to its targets. While the moral equivalence Capra draws between the criminals and the old ladies is pretty clearly coded (they kill the exact same number of people; Lorre's character quips that the ladies are perhaps more skilled than they, since they had to travel the world to find their victims), Capra also engages in contrast--the ladies don't deserve to be carted off to jail or run onto the street, and Mortimer sees to it that their fate is not the fate of criminals. They are not evil, but they are certainly deluded at times. Capra hopes that his targets see something unpleasant when he turns the mirror on them, but he means to do it in a spirit of magnanimity and common cause, not bitter antagonism.

Screening Notes, 05/24 - 05/30

2006-05-31T09:51:00.000-07:00

Charley Chase Shorts:

BAD BOY (Leo McCarey, USA, 1925, B+)
BE YOUR AGE (Leo McCarey, USA, 1926, B-)
DOG SHY (Leo McCarey, USA, 1925, A)
THE FRAIDY CAT (James Parrot, USA, 1924, B)
MUM'S THE WORD (Leo McCarey, USA, 1926, B+)
WHAT PRICE GOOFY (Leo McCarey, USA, 1925, B)

(Thanks to Victor for sending these along. They originally appeared as a Silent Sunday Night feature on TMC).

Surprise, surprise--it turns out silent comedy doesn't have to be limited to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, the three undisputed giants of the genre. These shorts, made for the Pathé company in the mid twenties, are by no means as sophisticated as the work these former three giants were doing contemperaneously (Chaplin directed THE GOLD RUSH in 1924, the same year Keaton made the beloved SHERLOCK JR.), but they're still enjoyable, seemingly effortless pieces of fluff, headed by a grizzled veteran of silent comedy who had his act down to a science. Chase had been working at movies since the twilight of silent comedy, working alongside Chaplin in films for the Mack Sennet group. He appeared in over seventy films from 1915 until 1920, followed by a (relatively unproductive) period from 1921 to 1922 in which he acted in only eight movies. His career was revived in 1923 with the Pathé deal and a new comic persona, Jimmy Jump. He was also benefitted by a talented director working for Pathé named Leo McCarey, who would go on to fame as the director of DUCK SOUP, widely considered the best of the Marx Brothers comedies. Chase would appear in 57 shorts from 1924 to 1926, usually as Jimmy Jump, but almost always playing a similar character.

Jimmy Jump's persona was bears a resemblence to the characters Buster Keaton played--a wimp who, inspired by love, overcomes his handicap to earn the respect of the ladies. That's not to say they're identical, however. While Keaton's "little man" was usually a wuss, he was often a very brave one, even as he failed to succeed time and time again (perhaps the most emblematic Keaton episode is the scene from COLLEGE where Keaton, having knocked down every hurdle except the last one after a sprint around the track, tips the last one over in exasperation over his lack of athleticism). Jimmy Jump is afraid even to try, usually--he has phobias, he runs and hides, until a final outburst of manic activity that borders on foolhardiness. Similar to the Keaton shorts, the quality of the film of the whole largely hinges on how this transition from cowardice to bravery works--sometimes, as in FRAIDY CAT, the change is sudden, jarring, and out of character, although the results are pretty funny (watch Charley jump on to a carriage after chasing it down riding a bull!) Other times, as in BAD BOY and DOG SHY (co-starring an adorable acting dog named Buddy), the fear is part of a broader context of the character's comic dilemmas, and the result is a much tighter, less contrived narrative. Chase was a fine comic talent who excelled at keeping an even keel until the very last minute, when his face often explodes into comic contusions as he realizes what's happening to him--in this, he borrows more from Chaplin's school and less from Keaton's, sort of an intermediary between the two styles. He was also capable of playing a relatively convincing well-to-do cad, and this persona, combined with his latent fears and comic contortions, usually produced the best results for Chase and Co.
***
KING KONG (Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, USA, 1933, B)

It's hard not to compare this film to the new version released last Christmas, which I saw but didn't review. KING KONG is usually thought of as one of the greatest "B" movies of all time, and the film certainly suffers from a lot of the flaws of B movies--bad acting (sorry, Fay Wray fans, she was a great screamer but that was about it); stagey, unnatural writing; shaky character development; and plausibility gaps large enough to drive an oil tanker through. Given the times, the special effects are actually pretty impressive, although there's simply no way to watch these seventy year-old special effects and understand the fear they struck into audiences (however, I should add that my seven year-old little brother was absolutely scared to death by this movie). None of the cinematography or other production values outside of the sequences involving Kong, however, really stand out, not that they were supposed to.

The new KING KONG fixes a lot of those problems. There's not a single actor from the old version that I would switch into the new version, the storytelling and character development is far richer, and, of course, the visuals are nothing short of breathtaking (it's hard to compete with stampedes of brontosauruses and a battle where Kong takes on not one but three T-rexes). Yet in spite of my better judgement, I find myself rooting for the older version. The problem with Jackson's KONG is that he took a story which was originally meant for cheap thrills and tried to raise it to a high art, all the while retaining the cheap thrills that had made the original so beloved. In the new version, Kong is a sympathetic beast, misunderstood by the greedy opportunists who capture him, a victim of society's intrusion into nature (not unlike Werner Herzog's GRIZZLY MAN). But it's hard for the viewer to accept this relationship on its face, not with all the technical fireworks Jackson is shooting in the air. The story just doesn't allow the kind of bredth Jackson seems to impose on it, and even if it did, his adaptation skills aren't in the league of someone like Hitchcock, who often worked with crappy source material but only used it is a theme to develop a complex idea. The result is a movie that resembles its protagonist a little too much--bloated, plodding, and excruciatingly long (at nearly three hours).

The old version, by contrast, understands its limitations and isn't concerned with impressing us. At a mere 104 minutes, the old KONG has the lightweight, unserious feel it lends itself towards. Kong is simply a villain in the 1933 version, a crude beast. Unlike Watts' Ann Darrow, Fay Wray never warms up to the ape. In one scene after Ann is captured in the old version, the gorilla is seen derobing Ann on his mountain refuge, hinting that Kong's sexual imagination is as violent as his behavior (there's no nudity, but this still ranks as the movie's creepiest scene--the Production Code was still not being enforced in 1933, and it's doubtful that this scene would have been allowed to stand once the Code was in force a year later). In the new version, Kong's affection is far more innocent, almost sisterly. Watts' Darrow juggles for Kong, takes him ice skating in Central Park, refuses to show up for Kong's public exhibition in New York, and tries her best to dissuade the US Army from blowing Kong away. In the older version, Darrow is complicit with the captors, ready and willing to profit by their actions. Carl Denham, the oily film director, can accurately say at the end of the 1933 version, "'twas beauty that killed the beast." Darrow was his tool all along--the bait to capture Kong, and the object of desire that drove Kong to the top of the Empire State Building. When Jack Black intones the same words in a seemingly identical situation, the words and the truth are totally at odds--HE killed the beast; beauty tried to save it. Jackson is close here to saying something truly profound, but he's too limited by the original film to really break it free from the inherently cheap, "B"-quality horror flick nature of KING KONG. I'll take a "B"-quality horror flick that understands what it is over an "A"-quality production that tries to have it both ways every time.

Never Before, Never Again

2006-05-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

INTOLERANCE (D.W. Griffith, USA, 1916, A-) [Selection on the Vatican Film List under "Values"]

One gets the feeling while watching INTOLERANCE that a movie about the man who made it might be more fascinating than the movie itself. To not merely conceive such a project, but to believe that one could execute it and then actually execute it, requires a degree of mad genius and derring-do seen infrequently in Hollywood today. INTOLERANCE doesn't have everything, but it comes close: four seperate story threads, spanning thousands of years; the most elaborate sets ever built up to that point, including a life sized Babylon that is as breathtaking today as it was ninety years ago; and thousands of extras, involved in three battle scenes and one crucifixion--yeah, Griffith slipped a life of Christ in there, too, and he manages to somehow make the film pro-Christian even as it presents unfair caricatures of Catholicism and Protestantism at their absolute worst. To top it all off, Griffith tells the stories in non-linear fashion, giving a little bit of one story before moving to another, until the stories converge at the end, achieving something completely new in cinema. "The continuity," remarks Louis Giannetti in his textbook Understanding Movies, "is no longer physical, or even psychological but conceptual--that is, thematic." If BIRTH OF A NATION ushered in the cinema as a popular art, it might be said that INTOLERANCE heralded the cinema as a fine art, capable of communicating abstract concepts that went beyond narrative and images.

It's almost impossible to look at INTOLERANCE today and judge it fairly. It is rarely entertaining, if we take it by today's standards. The camera movement was still not very advanced at this point, so a lot of the movie appears stagnant and slow to modern viewers. The acting is, at best, wildly inconsistent--some interesting performances are overwhelemed by the worst kind of formalistic silent film camera mugging. Ninety years later, the narratives seem predictable and tried, complete with stolen babies, star-crossed lovers dying in each others arms, Homeric betrayal, and fantastic races against time. I would suggest a couple of ideas to keep in mind while watching this movie (and if you care about movies you really must find it). First, place yourself in a movie theatre in 1916--what would you have thought of it then? It's astounding to think that cinema moved from those simple little Lumiere vignettes (for example, A TRIP TO THE MOON), to something of this magnitude and complexity, in about a decade. INTOLERANCE was no less jaw-dropping and wonderful to the viewer of that era as movies like FINDING NEMO and MI:3 are to today's audience, and we need to try and understand those sensibilities in order to appreciate INTOLERANCE. Second, just forget about the details and marvel at the audacity of David Wark Griffith, a man, for better or worse, unlike any other. While he made more socially significant (BIRTH OF A NATION) and possibly better (BROKEN BLOSSOMS) films during his career, I feel that he's probably best remembered by this film, a glorious "sun-play of the ages" to use his words, by a man with more than his fair share of mad genius.

Screening Notes, 05/19 - 05/23

2006-05-24T09:58:00.000-07:00

COLLEGE (James W. Horne [Buster Keaton], USA, 1927, B-)

Keaton made COLLEGE after finishing one of the greatest silent films ever made, THE GENERAL. It's not surprising, then, that this film feels lackadaisical and unfocused. It's a more or less standard Keaton plot--the high school valedictorian, played by Keaton, loses his sweetheart because she hates his effete, athlete-bashing ways. Keaton, determined to prove her wrong, enrolls at nearby Clayton College, with a suitcase full of uniforms to test his skill at various athletic ventures (one thing the movie never explains is why Keaton's character initially didn't have enough money to get through school but apparently did have enough money to buy the snazzy uniforms). After the setup, the film basically vamps on whatever comic business it can find involving Keaton trying to be an athlete or Keaton making money to stay in school. After being afflicted with failure upon failure, the dean finally bails Keaton out and gives him the coxswain spot on the crew team--will Keaton be able to save the Clayton crew program by leading them to victory? (nervous pause...) It probably would have worked better as a short (it's only 66 minutes in duration to begin with)--the track sequence, in particular, is overlong and kind of boring (watch USC athlete do something; watch Keaton try to imitate him, to hilarious results; rinse and repeat). The final "Keaton comeback" (standard moment in all Keaton films where he becomes a kind of superman capable of running faster than Jesse Owens and hitting harder than Joe Louis) happens a little too late in the game and is only mildly amusing. That being said, it's still Keaton and there's still a lot of very funny bits of comic nonsense to revel in, and few filmmakers at the time were more inventive at editing, trick photography, and composition. The baseball scenes are particularly good, and the final shot--a sort of silent, visual "happily ever after"--is perhaps the movie's best and most original sequence.

Some asides: for the USC fan in your life (you poor soul--and I have many of them so I empathize completely), most of this movie appears to have been filmed on or around the USC campus, although it's a bit difficult to recognize because of all the building that's happened there in almost 80 years. The track and field scenes were certainly filmed in the Los Angeles coliseum, across the street from USC (the facade is unmistakable), and the IMDb page credits a number of USC athletes as having made appearances in the film. Horne is listed as the film's director, but according to historians, his contribution was almost non-existent. Keaton, who is not credited in the titles, basically directed the film by himself.

PARADISE LOST: THE CHILD MURDERS AT ROBIN HOOD HILLS (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, USA, 1996, A)

You may have seen the website www.wm3.org advertised before, if you frequent websites with lefty political sympathies (as I do, when tooling around for movie reviews) or live on a college campus (as I do). Almost thirteen years ago, three eight year-old boys were found murdered and mutilated in a river bank in West Memphis, Arkansas. A month later, the police arrested three teenage boys with "Goth" tendencies, one of whom explicitly claimed to be a Wiccan, in connection with the murders. PARADISE LOST chronicles the case, from the discovery of the bodies to the verdict almost seven months later, in a sprawling 150 minute documentary that, for all I cared, could have been twice as long and just as fascinating. The film seems to begin on neutral ground, but as time passes and the filmmakers become more convinced that the boys may simply be convicted on the basis of their being "not like everybody else," opinions become slightly more noticeable. The film doesn't proselytize for a particular outcome, of course. but the film is clearly edited to tilt sympathies towards the defendants, rather than the victims (for example, you can choose, after a verdict is read, to show how the defendant's girlfriend acts, or how the parents of the children act. These kind of choices unavoidable in a doc, no matter how unbiased it claims to be. Watch for these choices and the film's bias becomes apparent). This wasn't necessarily a problem for me--while the filmmakers opinions are clear, PARADISE LOST doesn't become so preoccupied with the kind of sympathy towards criminals that is so fashionable in considering cases like Guantanamo Bay because it remains so intensely focused on the innocent blood that was spilt.

There's a lot of grist for discussion in this piece--the role of the media in shaping the public's perception of events (the shot of the new reporter taking four takes to get a newscast teaser right is priceless), the rise of the "Goth" youth movement which condemns these boys before evidence can be marshaled against them, and the crumbling social fabric of the town (I can't recall off the top of my head a single family, victims or defendants, that wasn't affected by divorce or teenage pregnancy). Great documentaries typically owe as much to good fortune as they do to perseverance and superb craftsmanship, and PARADISE LOST is no exception--no amount of training can prepare you for moments when an enraged parent paces up and down a river bank, cursing the murderers of his son, praying for God's vengeance to fall upon them, vowing that he'll piss on their graves someday; or to watch that same father blow away a pumpkin with his handgun at the shooting range, all the while pretending he's blowing the brains out of the West Memphis Three; or the shadow of a Christmas tree star that falls on the father of one of the murdered as he prays at his son's grave; or the reading of the verdicts; or a surreal moment when the filmmakers become part of the proceedings themselves, when a piece of evidence inadvertently falls into their hands... I could go on, but make a point of seeing it for yourself. Truth really is stranger than fiction, and, often, more entertaining to boot.

DA Whole Truth

2006-05-23T07:13:00.000-07:00

THE DA VINCI CODE (Ron Howard, USA, 2006, No Rating Given)

So is it as bad as everyone says? Well, I find myself somewhere in between the positions of Roger Ebert and Mike D'Angelo. This is not a "superior entertainment," by any means. It's overlong by a significant amount. There's no coherence to the visual style. as Howard shifts between noir, horror, caper film style, and something entirely different when Langdon starts seeing words magically appear out of nowhere in a misguided attempt to make cracking the codes more "visual". The camera position seems unduly arbirtary, as we're constantly looking out of things we have no way to crawl into in the first place, like holes in the ground and holy water fonts. It has the typical fault of many of these types of blockbusters where the film calls to itself how it's straddling the line between being an R movie and a PG-13 (either make the police officers curse like real police officers or forget about it--everyone in the audience realizes what you're doing when people conspicuously drop the s-word two times in a movie). Too much of the dialogue doesn't forward the plot at all, like that confounded interview about tea Langdon has to go through so he can talk to Ian McKellen's character, or comes straight off of the movie poster ("we are dealing with the greatest coverup in the history of mankind!"). Initially, it seems more impressive than it really is, but once you've thought about it a little you'll realize how many absurd coincidences the movie is predicated upon (not entirely dissimilar to CRASH). So it's basically your typical Hollywood blockbuster--no wonder the French hated it.

That being said, like most typical Hollywood blockbusters, it isn't completely unentertaining. Most of the time, the pace is brisk, the action sequences go down smoothly, and the performances of Hanks, Tautou, and McKellen are by no means unpleasant. I can imagine it would be more boring if one knew what was going to happen beforehand, and perhaps a lot of the critical backlash is in response to that (wouldn't be the first time). There's another reason, curiously, why I think I found it more engaging: whatever critics are saying about the movie, they seem to all agree that it's "just fiction," that the movie is meant to be mindless entertainment (Ebert praises the film as such; Anthony Lane at the New Yorker more or less crucifies it as such). Well, BIRTH OF A NATION was "just fiction" too, as was Maria Monk and the Protocols of Zion.

If the movie simply portrayed Christianity as a half-pagan religious mutt, founded on the basis of the repression of information and the murder of dissenters, using Opus Dei as crack assasins with mindless slaves entrenched in powerful positions to protect "the real truth" about the faith at beck and call, that any promise Christians make (like the seal of the confessional) can be violated so as to protect that truth, maybe it could at least stake a claim to being just risibly idiotic, to being "just fiction." But these critics, largely because they don't come from my worldview as one of those dastardly non-"cafeteria Catholics," are making a huge omission, for two reasons. First, because the movie seems to believe its conspiracy theories and lies are just as valid as mainstream Christianity (Langdon: "the only thing that matters is what you believe..."). To say this is "just fiction" is the kind of thing that could only be uttered by someone who thinks all religion is essentially a superstition. Second, I know from personal experience that people really are taking this material seriously, and that they don't know enough about the history of their Church to contradict such hokum. Anthony Lane fears for the taste of 40 million people, but I'm more afraid for their souls--why would anyone become a Christian if they a) thought there was a risk they were getting into a homicidal cult dedicated to stifling at all costs the revelation of the divine feminine wisdom (Tautou's character, in perhaps the film's lone symbolic touch that isn't pounded over our heads, is named Sophie, Greek for wisdom) or b) if they thought that the actual content of what one believes is irrelevant? And point b) never feels like more than a CYA anyway--the film seems pretty confident in what it believes and doesn't believe, what it thinks is true and unture, and it doesn't lump the Nicene Creed in the "true" category. Perhaps the reason I found THE DA VINCI CODE more watchable than other people did was because I found it so offensive, like a looky-loo on a freeway trying to catch a glimpse of the victims of a highway crash. I knew, as I was watching it, that I was seeing a powerful piece of propaganda unfold in front of me that people had been, and were getting, sucked into by the thousands. How could I recommend something like that in good conscience given the current cultural climate, regardless of the movie's (mediocre to sub-mediocre) quality?

Addendum: I don't think I explained what I meant by the camera setups being "arbitrary" well enough. Think of it this way: this is a mystery movie, a puzzle movie; as I stated earlier, it predicates itself on the idea that "the only thing that matter is what you believe." And yet the camera positioning constantly works against this, starting from spaces or moving into spaces that we shouldn't be allowed into. The last shot [spoiler alert, I guess] is the best example of this--Langdon is experiencing this supposed moment of faith where he thinks he's found the Magadalene's tomb, underneath the Lourve. Then we get this absurd crane shot that goes beneath the museum, showing us the tomb. Uhhhh... a classic case of form and content running headlong into each other.

Also, I about died laughing when Lane's article compared one of the flashback sequences to a Beastie Boys concert. True dat.

Addendum Part 2: I revised the extremely long run-on sentence in the first paragraph at my mother's behest. Lazy, lazy me.

Playing By THE RULES

2006-05-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

THE RULES OF THE GAME (Jean Renoir, France, 1939, A+)

I'm very pleased to talk about THE RULES OF THE GAME, because out of all the movies I've made, it was clearly the biggest failure... One student asked me, "Could you tell me, Mr. Renoir, why this movie is considered controversial?"...At the movie's premier at the Colisee, I saw one gentleman in the audience very solemnly unfold a newspaper, take out a matchbox, strike a match, and light the newspaper, with the obvious intention of lighting the room on fire. I think any film that provokes a reaction like that can be considered controversial.
--Jean Renoir, in his introduction to THE RULES OF THE GAME.

Everyone has their reasons...
--Octave, THE RULES OF THE GAME

Maybe Ron Howard shouldn't feel so bad, after all. For all the critical flogging THE DA VINCI CODE is getting via the entertainment media complex, no reports of arsonry at screenings of Howard's latest have been reported. (BTW, does the critical stink over DVC throw a wrench into a lot of theories people of faith and conservatives have about the film media being incorrigibly biased in favor of these sorts of things? Or are critics holding their tongue, and the movie is even more awful than they let on? It's a fair question). Maybe, in his heart of hearts, Howard knows that he, like Renoir before him, will be vindicated when he's old and grey, his film trumpted as one of the great masterpieces of world cinema, his name registered in the canon of great directors for all time. Or, more likely, he's licking his chops for when THE DVC goes bonkers at the box office.

However, the point of this entry is to talk about Jean Renoir, not Howard. I did decide, after all, not to see THE DVC on its opening night so I could review the relatively unknown European equivalent of CITIZEN KANE. But if Howard was looking to critique something as large as the Catholic Church, perhaps he should have started with THE RULES OF THE GAME, the societal critique de luxe. The differences are fairly obvious: THE DVC deals in secret codes, ancient myths, and intricate conspiracies, while THE RULES OF THE GAME plays itself off as a simple-minded farce. Yet through its precise exploration of character and relationships; its violent shifts of tone and immense good humor; its technical prowess and its astonishing simplicity; and its utter lack of pretention despite its endless layers of meaning, THE RULES OF THE GAME's observations on human beings as they really are has more meaning hidden within it then all the cryptography of THE DVC could ever articulate.

That's no light accomplishment, considering the film's subject matter. THE RULES OF THE GAME is about a handful of predominantly single-minded twits. They must be twits--what else are we to think about a pilot who finishes a trans-Atlantic flight, then tells the press that he's unhappy about his successful mission because his lover wasn't at the airport? The movie is similarly single-minded about love--there are no larger issues, no greater concerns distracting from "the game." The opening scenes of the film establish the intertwining relationships between lovers in a clever and highly visual manner, using the radio broadcast of the landing as an audio cue for the editing. Even in these early scenes we see Renoir's preference for long takes and significant depth of field, which stresses the links between the people we're being introduced to and how they will interact in the future. Yet everything that Renoir is doing looks so easy--the great director Wim Wenders once marveled at how THE RULES OF THE GAME could have been made in an era before Steadicam, so light and effortless is the camera movement.

Eventually, the entire cast heads out to the country estate of the Marquis de La Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio). The trip has several potential land mines lying underneath it. Christine (Nora Gregor), the wife of the Marquis, is the love interest of the pilot Andre Jurieux (Roland Toutain), although she doesn't seem to understand the power of her actions--she's originally an Austrian and doesn't understand the intricacies of the "rules" of the Parisian upper class. She and the Marquis are persuaded to invite Jurieux out to the estate by their mutual friend Octave (played by Renoir himself). Octave also encourages the Marquis to invite his mistress, Genevieve (Mila Parely), out to the chateau in an attempt to set Jurieux up with her. Seeing the possibility of a practical silver bullet (if Jurieux falls for Genevieve, the two problems he seeks to deflate--Jurieux's love for Christine and his affair with Genevieve--are both effectively solved), the Marquis agrees to this too. Meanwhile, another romantic subplot threatens to boil over--Lisette (Paulette DuBost), Christine's maid, is hesitant about returning to the country and to her husband, Schumacher (Gaston Modot), the (decidedly Germanic) game warden at the estate. She has lovers of her own, including Octave, and Marceau (Julien Carette), a poacher of the chateau's rabbits who befriends the Marquis and quickly falls head over heels for the wife of his constant rival.

At the point where all the characters have been introduced, we are barely halfway through the film, and yet their personalities are fully formed. The Marquis, despite his power and wealth, is deeply insecure--he spends his free time playing with music boxes and mechanical birds, as opposed to the "mechanical birds" Jurieux flies for a living, and Dalio, who wasn't an obvious choice for a Marquis, gives the role an air of uneasiness, a sensation that the other foot is about to drop at any moment. Jurieux has what the Marquis lacks in terms of virility and passion--"I love her," he confides to Octave, "If I don't see her I'll die." No other character is as forward about his passions, but his daredevil attitude also seems to prefigure a certain catastrophe. Christine is the kindest and most endearing character, but her naivete harms her on multiple occasions--she is the last person in the chateau to know of the affair between the Marquis and Genevieve and doesn't seem to understand the power of her own actions over men. Genevieve's character is smarter than Christine's--she's the classic Parisian socialite, and unlike Christine she understands exactly what she's getting into, and knows how to manipulate the men in her circle to get her way. Lisette seems more dedicated to Christine than to any of her male suitors, including her husband, but unlike Christine, she doesn't seem willing to reciprocate anyone for his feelings. It is she who introduces chaos into the house--on the occasions where she meets Marceau alone, she is seen eating an apple, alluding to Eve, who's choice to eat the forbidden fruit casts humanity out of Paradise. The Chateau company is rounded out by some noteworthy supporting turns, including a grotesquely fat lady, a grumpy chef, and two old veterans of these sorts of get-togethers, the General and Saint-Aubin, who serve as a sort of knowing commentary on what is really happening.

Then there is Octave, the most fascinating character in the movie, who deserves an entirely separate treatment. He is the one character who is allowed to exist outside of the film's neat groupings of the cast into gentry and servants, French and German, lovers and friends. Octave studied music in Austria underneath Christine's father, and he loves and protects her like a sister to honor the father's legacy (although we see from very early that Octave's love could point toward something deeper). However, because of his relationship with Lisette and his lack of independent means, he more readily associates with the paid staff than he does with the Marquis and his friends. He stands at an intersection in the relationship between the Marquis, Jurieux, and Christine, and within the crossfire of the love triangle between Lisette, Marceau, and Schumacher. He laments the moral perfidy of the entire cast--"Everyone has their reasons," he wails in frustration to the Marquis, dazed at his inability to sort out the moral claims of his friends. Octave stands both inside and outside a desiccating society, desperate to move to something better yet unable to escape it, just as Renoir is attempting to criticize it while he himself is a member of it. In an important scene that finds him alone with Christine, he amuses her by giving an imitation of her father walking out to conduct the symphony. Poised on a front porch with circular steps, we see Octave turn to conduct a symphony that isn't there with perfect command, before he realizes his own uselessness and sits dejectedly on the steps. This is Renoir's conflict--there is the appearance of an outside control or critique, yet he controls nothing.

Before the tinderbox explodes, the gentry go out hunting. In a sequence as dazzling as it is shocking, Renoir portrays a bevy of rabbits and gamebirds being systematically driven out of an orchard and blown away with shotguns. The last rabbit to die folds his front paws over his chest, like a man in a coffin. The symbolism is clear--society preys on the innocent, and destroys it. It will later become clear which of the party members represent the hunters, and which represent the hunted.

And yet, as good as the first part of the film is, and as likely as we are to believe that the ending can't help but disappoint, the denouement of THE RULES OF THE GAME is arguably the most brilliant thirty minutes of film ever created. It contains an extended screwball comedy scene in which Schumacher, enraged at his wife's dalliances, chases Marceau around the mansion in an attempt to kill him, while Lisette hangs at Schumacher's feet begging for mercy. Meanwhile, a masquerade is reminiscent of something from THE SEVENTH SEAL, but slightly more burlesque (see the still of the chess players on the sidebar if you don't know about THE SEVENTH SEAL). There are a few brawls, and Genevieve manages to have a complete nervous breakdown in the course of everything. Meanwhile, as he's in jeopardy of losing his wife, the Marquis carves out some time to display a brand new music contraption to his guest, and one can't help but notice the contrast between the perfect order of the machine and the pensiveness of the Marquis, who knows things are spiraling out of his control. Octave manages to shelter Christine during the chaos, and in the tumult their true feelings for one another rise to the surface. Finally, things turn tragic as the worlds of the guests and the servants tragically collide. As Saint-Aubin says, the incident gives new meaning to the word "accident," as all the principals spin what happens to suit their prejudices. Somehow, Renoir edits this mess into a slick, coherent whole--the use of depth of focus is incredibly rich, with characters constantly sneaking in and out of the different planes of the frame, often changing the dimensions of the action on the fly. The film transcends the comic form pioneered by American directors like Capra, Cukor, Hawks, and Sturges; it uses plenty of slick dialogue, true, but it often undercuts it in an ironic way with the use of visuals. Often, it is more revealing to watch what's happening behind the primary action than it is to watch the primary action, to look at who's standing behind someone while they speak than to listen to what they say (which is usually polite prattle anyway).

THE RULES OF THE GAME is certainly among the most challenging and dense films ever made (I haven't spent much time touching on the specifics of Renoir's social critique, with its clear pointers at the looming Nazi threat over France in the late thirties in the German characters). It is a masterpiece of rich details and careful planning; the critical viewer will find a wealth of little nuances and great revelations to delight in, and yet it is endearing and fun to watch, in a way that other canonical films, such as POTEMKIN, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and even CITIZEN KANE itself, are not. How can we not giggle at Marceau's childish attempts to possess Lisette and thrill at the chaos of the chase scenes? The film works whether we choose to engage it like scholars or sit back and enjoy the ride. If only every controversial film were so good.

Screening Notes, 05/16 - 05/18

2006-05-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (George Clooney, USA, 2005, B)

Gets everything right, except for the facts, with critics attacking Clooney's shaky interpretation of McCarthy Era history from the right and left. Successfully evokes a better time in America, when journalists celebrated a great broadcast by bouncing over to the bar for scotch and cigarettes (not to mention, a time when they actually let you smoke cigarettes in a bar). The black and white photography is smooth and seductive, gliding through the studio space, glancing off of the windows, and wafting through the endless clouds of smoke. Clooney avoids the temptation to "open up" things too much by keeping the proscenium space tightly confined, rarely drifting outside the CBS Studios--even the music is provided by a jazz quintet working in a neighboring studio (it's quite good, too, although I'm suspicious that the selections were a little too "cool" for mainstream network television of the era). Still, when a movie poses itself as a matter-of-fact historical recreation (the film seamlessly blends new material with vintage television reels from the era), it's under an obligation to be fair. Instead, it engages in simplistic one-sided idol worship, with Murrow as the much put-upon moral beacon of journalism, toughing out mindless interviews with idiot celebs so he can make his Great Contribution To American Journalism. There's too deep an imbalance here between the richness of the performances of the studio staff (Straiharn as Murrow and Clooney as Fred Friendly both give exceptional performances) and McCarthy, who appears solely in newsreels and is reduced to a kind of cultural virus, because, to Clooney and Co. he isn't, like, a real person. Definitely recommended, but try not to listen to too much of what's being said.

CRASH (Paul Haggis, USA, 2005, C-)

The Best Picture for the Year of Our Lord 2005, according to the Association for the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is exactly what they would pick--a star-studded morality play obsessed with Importance, and a rather insubtle one at that. Chaplin once said, "I don't mind coincidence but I despise convenience," and Haggis violates this principle again and again in a movie that starts out tolerably and grinds itself into an exceedingly tedious series of magical happenstances. If the movie had been about anything less than one of the Great Issues of Our Time--say, a Rob Schneider comedy--critics would have been beating the doors down to lambaste CRASH for its utter silliness (please tell me how the Persian storeowner manages to find the Daniel Ortiz who fixed his lock... in an afternoon... in the LA Basin, where there must be a hundred people with that name... using the white pages... esp. since he barely reads English to begin with?) and inability to stage a key moment without slobbering all over it via slow-motion, a syrupy, tear-jerking score, and bizarre sound editing. CRASH takes every moment it might capitalize on a little too far, from the policeman who pulls a woman he molests the night before out of her car as its about to explode to the high-maintenance DA's wife (played by Sandra Bullock in what was actually my favorite performance in the film) who tearily tells her Mexican maid she's the only friend she's got. Michael Sicinski's review is a little more cruel than I would like to leave it, but I find very little in it with which I can disagree (and I swear on my scout's honor that my use of capitalized Importance and the convenience/coincidence distinction was my own and not stolen from him--these things are just not that hard to see, folks; the full review linked at the end is good, too). Like most films, it has its moments, but CRASH does too much wrong for us to enjoy them in any way as one braces for his intelligence to be insulted yet again.

P.S: Blair, I know you will hate me for this review. Looks like there won't be anymore beach volleyball, doesn't it?

I'd Rather Be Lucky Than Good

2006-05-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

Phew! Finals are over and I'm back at home in Fresno. I'll be interning in St. Louis in a month, so things are still pretty hectic around here, but there's plenty of time to catch up on what I haven't seen over the last year and to brush up on great classic films (I'm pondering a review of Renoir's LA REGLE DE JEU at the moment, but I'm so enamored with the film and its nuances that its going to take me a while to unpack it completely). I also plan on overhauling the film log to make older reviews more accessible, which I've wanted to do for a while but simply not had time to fix.

And in case you were curious: I do plan on seeing and reviewing THE DA VINCI CODE like any other film, if not the first weekend it comes out, then shortly thereafter. It's too important a cultural moment for me to ignore, in spite of the pretty well-established anti-Catholic bias of the source material.

Happy reading!
***

MATCH POINT (Woody Allen, UK, 2005, B+)

One tear that falls so furtively
from her sweet eyes has just sprung,
as if she envied all the youths
who laughingly passed her right by.
What could I want more than this?
She loves me! I see it.
One moment just to hear her heart,
beating so close next to mine,
to hear my sighs like they were hers,
her sighings as if they were mine!
Heavens, please take me now:
All that I wanted is mine now!

--"Una furtiva lagrima," L'Elisir d'Amore, Gaetano Donizetti, 1832

The first thing that grabbed me about Woody Allen's latest offering, MATCH POINT, was the face of Jonathan Rhys Meyer, who plays the film's ruthless protagonist Chris Wilton. Take the face of Buster Keaton; make it more handsome, the lines sharper, the eyes more intense; and completely drain the humor and gentleness from it, and the finished product is Rhys Meyer: cold, meditative, callous, and exacting. His character behaves in much the same way--he's formal, polite, and chivalrous in a way that borders on the mechanical; he rarely tells a joke; and he's exceptionally good at deceiving everyone around him, putting the same care into organizing trysts with his lover (Nola Rice, played by Scarlett Johansson) around the schedule of his adoring wife and inlaws as he does in planning a date with his wife to a musical, a passing shot, or a business meeting. One might call him the Allen-ian Superman, down to the tennis skills (Alvy Singer meets Annie Hall while playing tennis), the modest roots (the scenes of Allen's humble New York Jewish childhood from ANNIE HALL and CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS), and, of course, the cultural savvy (Wilton's taste in opera and fine art fits right in with Allen protagonists past, although from what I know of professional tennis players, their tastes don't usually gravitate toward Donizetti).

And yet Wilton's life in Woody Allen's critically acclaimed MATCH POINT (hard to call it his latest--the super-productive Allen has a new comedy, SCOOP, staring himself, Johansson, and Hugh Jackman, already completed and with a distribution deal in place from Focus Features) seems inexorably oriented toward chaos. For all his seemingly meticulous control over things, Wilton flings himself into an affair that promises to undo all the hard work, all the calculation, all the planning, and all the good bounces. "The man who said, 'I'd rather be lucky than good,' saw deeply into life," Wilton says in a voiceover that accompanies an opening shot of a tennis ball careening back and forth over the net, then hitting the tape and rising into the air, the fate of the point uncertain for a seemingly endless moment. But Wilton seems to go out in the world determined to hit the tape whenever he can, to tempt luck, to see how far he can push the limits. He ends up going too far. The most pressing question one asks when watching MATCH POINT is whether or not luck can favor him again after he's expended more than his fair share.

The answer from Allen is yes--there's no karma, no Divine retribution for our actions, so luck is just as likely to lend us a hand after we push its limits as it is when we respect it. Science proves that the world came forth through random events, Wilton opines in a dinner table conversation, and this randomness controls our fate. God doesn't exist, of course--Wilton despises his religious father, who "lost two legs and found Jesus" and clearly came up on the short end in the trade, as agreed by everyone else. His view also has a strong fatalistic twist--both Wilton and Rice know the affair is coming, both know it will eventually destroy them, and yet both pursue it anyway out of "lust" (Wilton's words, spoken to a confidant but not to her). Like the world around them, their lives are determined randomly, by the passions they are incapable of controlling--lust, yes, but also anger and fear. That Wilton is an evil man is not questioned by Allen (in a Fellini-like dream sequence, Wilton himself acknowledges this), but isn't particularly relevant to the film's analysis either--the whole point is that evil people, if they're lucky, can defy anything. MATCH POINT gives a poignant voice to a worldview that sees nothing but a ruthless, chaotic world, utterly devoid of justice.

Thematically, the film works like a sequel to CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, stripped away of the comic undertones and the ambiguity introduced by the film's rich philosophical and religious themes. CRIMES asked whether the eyes of God really do look down upon us or not. MATCH POINT says the answer is an emphatic, "no." It's hard to compare the two, because they're intended to affect the viewer in different ways. CRIMES has dramatic heft, but is fundamentally a comedy--the dixieland jazz, the Allen subplot, the comic cultural references. The characters in CRIMES are older, softer, more easily empathized with; their romance seems more innocent and less carnal. MATCH POINT abandons all this to achieve a haunting intensity. Since opera and modern art form the film's primary motifs, its hard for anyone short of an opera buff or art connoisseur to understand the particular import of everything Allen samples, but I think these are meant to be more esoteric so as to haunt the viewer, to pull him into that sense of despair the characters share. Wilton doesn't seem to know what the words of the opera mean himself--he enjoys the opera because it expresses the "tragedy" of life, and the film certainly achieves this. The old opera recordings Allen uses as the film's soundtrack are particuarly spooky; check the Wikipedia page for MATCH POINT to listen to some uncut samples. The only easily understood reference is to Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical "The Woman in White" (which I believe is based off a Wilkie Collins novel), which refers to Nola's attire when Chris meets her for the first time. The allusion is perfectly timed, and if you see the movie I'm certain you'll agree.

I still think that, between the two, CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS is the masterpiece, while MATCH POINT is simply very good. Allen's not quite as confident at times in his writing as we might expect--the film references key pieces of its symbolism and philosophy in a very clumsy way, and there are moments where Wilton's character simply becomes a little too mechanical to take seriously. Rhys Meyer is very good, but he's almost too wooden, and by virtue of his being on screen for almost the entirety of the film, he occasionally wears on the audience (the contrarian in me would like to have seen Hugh Grant do this movie--he would have added a certain verve and grace to the role that Rhys Meyer doesn't have, and the casting against type would have made the part of Wilton all the more intriguing). Still, MATCH POINT marks a return to form for Allen after several years of disappointing output, and is among the most haunting and deeply affecting films of 2005.

French Thrillers, Italian Neo Realism, Notre Dame Finals

2006-05-02T21:33:00.000-07:00

The end-of-the-year crush means that I haven't had much time to blog lately--the only thing I've seen recently, if memory serves, is Altman's THE COMPANY (interesting and beautifully made, and often engaging, but it feels hollow. It's missing a really strong narrative we can hold onto. I gave it a B+). This week I'll hopefully get to see CACHE, one of 2005's most acclaimed foreign films, and ROME, OPEN CITY, Rossellini's neo-realistic masterpiece. Pray for me over the next ten days that I may be enlightened (especially about geology...ESPECIALLY...)

Can FICTION Sanctify?

2006-04-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

PULP FICTION (Quentin Tarantino, USA, 1994, A)

Jules: Wanna know what I'm buyin' Ringo?
Ringo: What?
Jules: Your life. I'm givin' you that money so I don't hafta kill your ass. You read the Bible?
Ringo: Not regularly.
Jules: There's a passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17: "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."

I been sayin' that s--- for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherf----- before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some s--- this mornin' made me think twice. Now I'm thinkin': it could mean you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. 9mm here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that s--- ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd.

--PULP FICTION

Is PULP FICTION, as Victor Morton puts it, "A tale of a providential religious conversion, albeit one heavily salted with surroundings of rough language, violence, and pomo [that's postmodernist for those of you not on Victor's wavelength] irony?" Or is it an amoral exercise gone dreadfully and horribly right, the worst of what our culture considers to be the best?

Before addressing this more difficult question, let's start with something no one questions--PULP FICTION is perhaps the most important movie made in the 1990's, and, from a purely technical standpoint, it deserves these laurels. PULP FICTION is as savvy and elegant as it is violent and disturbing. No film has more truly breathtaking, memorable passages--the surreal twist competition at Jack Rabbit Slim's, the heart-pounding adrenaline shot Vincent Vega (John Travolta) gives to Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), Butch Coolidge's (Bruce Willis) eerie search for his watch in an abandoned apartment where the gangsters he betrayed are looking for him, the deadly chase and capture sequence involving Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) and Butch, and, of course, the climactic robbery in the restaurant. Tarantino is known for chatty dialogue that emphasizes the verisimillitude of his characters (the prolonged conversation between Vega and Jules Winnfield [Samuel L. Jackson] about what Quarter Pounders are called in Belgium and the significance of foot massages before they deliver a hit is perhaps the most famous exchange), but in this film, unlike the earlier RESERVOIR DOGS, the most riveting scenes are those in which the dialogue is either background noise, or non-existent altogether. The camerawork and editing isn't as static as it was in DOGS, far more inventive and playful--the rapid, sharp cuts before the adrenaline shot is administered are horrifyingly perfect, and the apartment scene has an understated visual horror that reminded me of Hitchcock.

To call PULP FICTION "salty" is putting it lightly, with its copious amounts of cursing, drug use, violence, and sexual deviancy (although it's more reserved than RESERVOIR DOGS, incredibly). Yet there's nothing glamarous, pretty, or neat about Tarantino's world of lowlifes and professional criminals--the only normal person in the whole movie is a character played by Tarantino himself, who is revolted when Jules, an aquaintance, pulls into the driveway with a dead man in the back seat. This is a world without hope, where very bad people do very bad things to one another. The only glimmer of hope comes from Jules, who experiences a moment of what he considers divine intervention during a hit, and who performs the only decent-minded, selfless action in the entire movie. The structure of the movie (which I won't give away other than to say that it isn't straightforward or linear) seems to favor the interpretation that Jules has transcended the world of crime, and his confession opens up the possibility that he might someday become a shepherd. The other principle characters end up being killed, or so mired in a manipulative, violent mindset that even their seemingly heroic actions are done out of sheer self-serving utility. They think in terms of revenge, and only revenge. Most viewers will overlook Jules' closing speech (which is reprinted above) as another morsel of savvy dialogue from Tarantino, the spiritual element being part of the aura of "cool" he is trying to evoke (a legacy from the film noir of the forties and the noir-influenced directors of the French New Wave, like Jean-Luc Godard). But while the speech certainly serves this purpose, the placement of it and the dramatic weight Tarantino gives it (we look almost directly into Jules' eyes as he speaks--it feels like a confession) certainly don't exclude Victor's interpretation. It's a bit like reflecting on hell for two hours, then seeing someone escape before its too late.

Livin La Vida AQUATIC

2006-04-14T10:27:00.000-07:00

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (Wes Anderson, 2004, B+)

This movie was anti-recommended to me by a friend--she thought it was awful and couldn't understand why her friends thought the movie was drop-dead funny. Well, it's not drop-dead funny, but then again, I don't think it's meant to be. I should have had higher hopes for this movie because it was co-written by Noah Baumbach, who's writer/director effort in THE SQUID AND THE WHALE was one of the best in 2005. And while THE LIFE AQUATIC can't equal the precisely observed bittersweet air of SQUID, it still has a charming eccentricity about it that makes it compulsively watchable.

The movie follows the famed ocean documentarian Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) at a low point in his life--his films are considered passe, his partner was recently eaten by a gigantic shark they were unable to capture on tape, and his wife (Anjelica Huston), the brains behind Team Zissou, doesn't want to work with him anymore (when asked what Steve means to the project if his wife is the brains, a crew members answers, "The Zissou," and that's good enough for me). He meets Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a southern pilot whose mother had a fling with Zissou thirty years prior, at a post-party for the premier of his latest movie, and both are led to believe they are father and son (although the movie stays ambiguous on the question). Re-energized by his son's funding and the promise of a puff-piece on him in Oceanographic Explorer by attractive but pregnant journalist Jane (Cate Blanchett), the good ship Belafonte along with Zissou's crack crew and unpaid interns, sets out on a vengence mission to punish the shark and revitalize Zissou's career. The tone is loose and playful throughout--even when things get violent, the film's jaunty mockumentarian style (complete with titles broadcasting Zissou's next move) is never lacking in wit and sarcasm. There are some occasional departures from this style, including usage of a full-sized cutaway recreation of the Belafonte, but I'm not sure the sacrifice of spontaneity was worth the bizarrely comic effect (THE LIFE AQUATIC is weird enough without it, believe me).

The film revolves around the interplay between Zissou's past failures (as a father, as a filmmaker) and his attempts to revive himself by confronting these demons (the awkward attempts of Zissou and Plimpton to unearth a bond between the two of them, the mission to find the jaguar shark and reestablish his noteriety). These themes are never pushed on the viewer--rather, it's something we pick up on in glancing blows during daring missions to rescue the "bond stooge" from pirates and robberies of the base station of Zissou's scientific rival, Capitan Hennessey. Jane is a particularly sticky matter for Zissou--both he and Ned are smitten by her, and their rivalry reinforces Zissou's struggle to properly order his relationship with Ned (they debate Zissou's dictate not to let Ned call Zissou "dad": "I let you call me Stevie!" "It doesn't mean the same thing"). In ways, THE LIFE AQUATIC is just another take on a "absent daddy" theme that Murray seems to have been typecast into (although his performance here is much more enjoyable than a similar one in Jim Jarmusch's BROKEN FLOWERS last year), and while it's doesn't succumb to the sappiness of most of these stories, it doesn't add much of an original angle on them either. However, it's still moving and well-executed. While Zissou ends up triumphing in a certain sense, THE LIFE AQUATIC leaves one with a lingering sense of regret, uncured by jaguar sharks or professional success, that is utterly unique.

Magnificent SEVEN

2006-04-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

THE SEVEN SAMURAI (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1954, A+)

I first saw THE SEVEN SAMURAI five years ago, while I was participating in a "summer seminar"-type college camp at Southern Cal. One of the offerings at the session was film production, which at the time (and perhaps even today) seemed a lot more interesting than the engineering seminar I was taking. I had some friends taking the film seminar, and one day, as I was coming out of the library at USC where my class was being held, I saw some of them hunched around a TV in the media center, getting ready to watch SEVEN SAMURAI as an assignment for class. What the heck, I thought--I decided to stick around and catch a few minutes of it.

I didn't leave the library until nearly three and a half hours later, after the movie ended. Something clicked in me that day that boiled underneath the surface until last summer, when I began watching movies in earnest. I had seen the full potential of something that had been masked in obscurity before, and the effect was powerful. I've seen the movie a couple of times since then (the latest being last Saturday at the DPAC, my first time seeing the movie on a big screen), and every time I see it, I'm transported back to that experience in the library, so engrossed in what happens on the screen that I lose track of time and tussle with the nuances of various scenes in my mind time and time again.

I would be willing to wager a significant sum on the proposition that one could not possibly make a movie like THE SEVEN SAMURAI today. It would either be the uplifting, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced tale of a band of brave samurais who fight against all odds to save a peasant village from merciless bandits (which it is, sort of), or the art-house approved critique of class identity and militaristic culture (which it also is, sort of). THE SEVEN SAMURAI bridges a gap between art-house pretentiousness and mega-blockbuster energy that is being driven further and further apart in the modern movie culture.

Consider a scene at the beginning of the movie in which Kambei (Takashi Shimura), the eldest samurai, is introduced through a daring rescue mission. On one level, it's simply an entertaining, tension-riddled fighting sequence (although we don't see a sword being swung at any point), finishing with a beautiful slow motion shot of the dying criminal falling to earth, a whirlwind of perfectly composed setups and pristinely timed cuts. But look closer, and the scene reveals itself to be so much more than this. Notice the faces of the peasants in the crowd, watching this selfless warrior sacrifice his pride to perform an act of charity, their hopes suddenly lifted that perhaps they have found a man who can save their village. Notice the handsome young man looking on with fascination--it turns out he's an inexperienced samurai, (Katsushiro played by Isao Kimura) looking for a sensei or master, and who believes he has found a man worth emulating in Kambei. Finally, notice the fellow who seems like he's on the verge of making an impudent comment to Kambei, his demeanor a seemingly impossible combination of aloofness and rabid curiosity. That's Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), the hard-drinking, swaggering tough who's a samurai in name only, and this short sequence just hints at the depths of his complexity. Following this sequence, we see all of these characters on a road, headed to no place in particular, with the peasants, Katsushiro, and Kikuchiyo all following Kambei. If THE SEVEN SAMURAI is trying to make any point at all, it's that all our destinies are intertwined in this way, whether we can see it or not. The film spends the next three hours explaining how this relationship works, and the realities of it are equally parts exhilirating and haunting.

THE SEVEN SAMURAI actually tells a handful of distinct, yet interwoven stories, all of which influence one another, and eventually conflict with one another, as the inevitable battle with the bandits comes to pass. Katsushiro comes of age, learning on the job from Kambei and the master swordsman Kuyzo (Seiji Miyaguchi) about what makes an honorable warrior. Kikuchiyo shows he is as immature as Katsushiro, but far more stubborn, and his braggadocio is both essential to the success of the mission and the source of his downfall. The other samurais have their own reasons for being here--hunger to fight, desire for companionship, sympathy for the peasants. The peasants themselves are torn internally as to what to do about the situation--they fear the samurai, but fear the bandits just as much, and reluctantly fall under their sway to save the village. One villager, worried about a samurai harming the honor of his beautiful daughter, tries to hide her as a boy by cutting her elegant hair, but only makes things worse as the forces of war drive her into a desperate romance with Katsushiro. This is just a taste of the film's complexity--giving away much more would spoil the movie for those who haven't seen it and trying to unearth all the nuances of the realtionship would be hugely frustrating anyway. In this way, it's similar to Kurosawa's earlier RASHOMON, which looks at one event through the prism of four different witnesses, without concluding one way or another which person's story was correct or not, in that the story takes one major event and views it through the perspectives of so many different groups, all ostensibly on the same side, but often enough at odds with one another. What's different about THE SEVEN SAMURAI is that the multi-perspective approach is integrated into an utterly gripping narrative, without the contrived cyclicalism of RASHOMON.

I could write pages and pages about THE SEVEN SAMURAI, but I will constrain myself to only pointing out two more things. The first is the genius of Kurosawa as a director. The detail which was put into every shot and every cut is nothing short of extraordinary. Things that look so simple and elegant on the screen--the pan shots and cuts that match the direction a character is looking in, the shots of the samurais discussing their plans that show all of their faces in focus simultaneously, the use of composition and frame placement to tell stories as in the rescue mission sequence--are the result of meticulous planning and careful execution, not coincidence. In this regard, Kurosawa is a legitimate peer to Hitchcock, Hawks, Welles, Ford, and Wilder, with the exception that Kurosawa was also capable of directing action sequences that were decades ahead of anything these directors tried, including Ford. His influence on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas is palpable.

The second is Mifune's performance, which is utterly incredible. Mifune was to the samurai film what John Wayne was to the Western, an iconic image of virility and boundless courage (and there's a lot of similarities between the genres--in fact, the western THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN was inspired by THE SEVEN SAMURAI). But Mifune is a better actor by a wide margin--he has a magnificient range, equally capable of comic clowning (two of my favorite scenes are his imitation of the cowardly villagers at the arrival of the samurai and his deadpan exortation to the villagers the day before the battle to "give their wives plenty of love tonight"), righteous indignation, stumbling drunkeness, and even, in one utterly astounding scene, bitter regret. His performance catches every nuances of one of the most complex action movie heroes ever created, and THE SEVEN SAMURAI is worthing seeing for him alone.

Phantom Planet Live At... St. Mary's?

2006-04-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned in passing before, I'm a great fan of the band Phantom Planet, which plays the infamously anthemic song "California" that plays before every episode of THE OC. But they're not the prissy pop-rock band you'd expect them to be--they've capitalized on their OC-driven noteriety by becoming one of the most daring and eclectic rock groups working today. Somehow, St. Mary's College, ND's sister school, coaxed them to come play a show here while working on their new studio album (their fourth). This gave me my first chance to see PP live and in person, and they did not disappoint. They were energetic, technically polished, tightly coreographed, and surprisingly varied and nuanced in their interpretation of older songs from their book.

The set list, for those who care (not in order):

*First Things First
*Big Brat
*Making a Killing
*Knowitall
*By The Bed
*The Guest
*California
*Lonely Day
*Always On My Mind
*Anthem (including a medley of other PP B-sides and obscure cuts)
*Turn Smile Shift Repeat
*All Over Again
*A song they were working on from their new album, the name of which I didn't catch
*Encore: Born To Run (yes, they covered Springsteen! Off the charts...)

One Just Lets Nature Take Its Course

2006-04-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

Comments on films recently seen:

TOP HAT (Mark Estrich, USA, 1935, B+*)

A delightful dollop of treacle--has the wisdom never to take itself too seriously and the poise to sling breezy one-liners with a wink and a grin at the audience, and the dance numbers are still marvelous. The plot's pretty lame-brained--Ginger Rogers falls in love with Fred Astaire (the characters probably have names but does anyone really care?), then confuses him with his bumbling London promoter, leading to an hour and forty minute debacle which could have been solved in five minutes by reasonable people. So? The movie invites you to have fun and forget about logic, and unless you're an absolute curmudgeon you can't help but accept it. I think one of the keys to making a good film is to either be deathly serious or not serious at all, and TOP HAT certainly achieves the latter. Howeverm I wouldn't put it in the masterpiece category because it hasn't worn as well as other films of that era. While the Hermes Pan / Astaire coreography borders on the sublime at times (the best numbers are the title piece and "Fancy Free"--in the latter Astaire and Rogers move so smoothly that it looks like slow motion), the music is simply not that good (typical novelty orchestra sound of the era). Moreover, unlike SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (still the standard for Hollywood musicals) the choreography really doesn't integrate singing and dancing (usually, the singing is done with Astaire/Rogers staying static, and then it breaks out into the dance routine--whether this was an issue with the technology they were working with at the time I'm not sure). Maybe I'm being too harsh but B+ sounds about right--still worth checking out if only so you can understand the joke in the title.

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (Roland Emmerich, USA, 2004, C+)

And now we switch to a movie that's just as lame-brained, but in a very, very bad way. A film can be lame-brained so long as it's put together intelligently, but TOMORROW is just the same-old tensionless, predictable action movie with a smidgen of science and politics added to change pace. The formula is something like 1 part WEST WING, 1 part Tom Tomorrow, and 1 part Greenpeace fantasy, and it doesn't manage to combine the three very well (the clumsy parody of Dick Cheney was the most annoying--his character is about as subtle as the slavemaster from "Uncle Tom's Cabin"). Gets a plus for the special effects work, at a time in my moviegoing life when I really didn't think I could be impressed by computer animation anymore. But the script is an abolute mess--the outcome feels as though it's been predetermined, all the tried-and-true subplots (absent daddy syndrome, love in distress) are there for the taking but aren't explored well enough to add depth to the piece's thematic whole (if it has one other than "Cheney is Eeeeevil"). Could probably have been a great movie in the right hands, but this version won't hold interest for anyone other than the hardcore environmentalist for very long.

THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES

2006-03-24T12:16:00.000-08:00

Note: This article solely reflects my personal opinions, and should not be construed as relecting the views of The University of Notre Dame, Keough Hall, Keough Hall Council, or any other student groups affiliated with the University.

About three weeks ago, I had the good fortune of receiving a complimentary DVD copy of THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES from the on-campus organizers of the event through ND Student Government. I’m the academic commissioner for Keough, and we were all given a copy to further the debate about the play's continued sponsored performance at Notre Dame. My thought had been to keep a Bill Simmons-like running diary of my experience watching the MONOLOGUES, to try and have fun with something that I thought everyone on campus was a little too uptight about to begin with. I finally watched the DVD over Spring Break, dutifully pausing after each episode to jot down some brief notes about what I’d seen with time stamps in hopes of making the diary a reality.

Halfway through the play, I realized that the Bill Simmons approach just wasn’t going to work. Not because there wouldn’t be a lot to say about watching it—there is a lot to say, and I hope to cover it in this review—but because they simply don’t lend themselves to the kind of jabbing repartee that makes Simmons’ diaries endlessly entertaining. Seriously, could you really think of a clever, one-line response to a lady bemoaning her shaven pubic region? THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES goes to town on these kinds of stupefying moments, when the only polite response is to say as little as one can reasonably say.

The shock value of THE MONOLOGUES has been discussed ad nauseum on campus, and it tends to live up to its billing. It does not delve as deeply into the sort of lurid, pornographic detail that I had expected, but it hasn’t been misrepresented by its opponents either (although I have reason to suspect the Notre Dame version of the play was toned down slightly from the original text, based on other reports--I haven’t read the play or seen the original production on DVD by author Eve Ensler). While I would venture to guess even the most ardent vagina warriors would say that such numbers would be more at home on Comedy Central than on campus at Notre Dame, the straight-out comedic sketches like “The Angry Vagina,” and even the incredibly misguided cheerleaders engaged in their selfless quest to reclaim the c-word, have enough self-awareness to make their vulgarity somewhat palatable.

As I watched THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, I was reminded of Almodovar’s HABLA CON ELLA, a film I find repugnant to my beliefs but must respect because of its artistry. Not even THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES can top HABLA CON ELLA in terms of bizarre sexual scenarios. It cranks the none-too-subtle necrophilia in VERTIGO to unheard of levels and includes a vignette called “The Shrinking Man” which I can say without exaggeration is the most twisted seven minutes of celluloid I have ever seen. And yet HABLA CON ELLA is far more cogent and engaging, despite its gross-out factor, than THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES could ever hope to be. Almodovar has put down enough of a framework to prepare the audience to accept the audaciousness of what he’s suggesting. It’s quite incredible to look back and see how even the most audacious scenes in HABLA CON ELLA fit together, keeping us on that line between being so shocked we can’t leave our seats and so offended we can’t stay in the theatre, all while emphasizing the point he’s making about the power of human love and the futility of God.

By contrast, THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES simply throws a lot of filth at us without amuch contrast or overriding thematic structure. When Ensler tries to leave the realm of writing light comedy, she quickly loses her ability to rouse the audience in a way that makes sense to anyone other than herself and her supporters. Using a collection of short sketches does make the challenge of doing this much greater than for a typical narrative play, but it’s certainly within reach, and there’s nothing here as well developed as the parallel stories in Griffith’s INTOLERANCE or Woody Allen’s CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (to give more film examples). The play moves from a sober account of serial rapists in Juarez, to the jolly tale of a 24 year-old’s woman’s seduction and “education” of a 16 year-old girl, to a breezy paean for very short skirts (complete with the actresses wearing skirts much shorter than you’ll see 95% of Notre Dame women wearing), to the triumphant tale of a former lawyer who quit her job to become a full-time lesbian sex worker, without much of a rhyme or reason, other than some vague blanket of “girl power.” Both HABLA CON ELLA and THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES have the minds of dirty middle-school students, but at least the former doesn’t have a seventh-grader’s attention span.

The play’s message can be boiled down into a factoid--female identity is sexual. It’s not simply true that women should stand up and respect themselves, vaginas and all, but that their vagina is, in some substantive way, their self. “I want to see you,” the play’s one sympathetically portrayed male says to his girlfriend, eager to take a long romantic gaze at her crotch. Like a dirty-minded female Descartes, Ensler constructs an entire system of women’s rights on the idea, “I have a vagina; therefore, I am.” Many of the conclusions of this idea are legitimate, as both critics and supporters of the play seem to agree, but they’re built on a philosophical foundation that’s too faulty to bequeath any significant dignity to women. You might say that the difference between a raving misogynist and a vagina warrior is that one abuses women as sexual objects, and the other uplifts women as sexual objects. At the end of the day, women are still sexual objects, and in the long run the two views are more accurately thought of as two sides of a coin, instead of diametrically opposed forces.

Since sexuality is the nexus of identity, it makes sense that the identity is only consummated through sexual experience, through an orgasm. It doesn’t particularly matter who’s doing the deed--a sensitive vagina warrior-approved male, another woman (professional or amateur), and even masturbation will do the trick. The sex worker in the next to last sketch is solemnized as a sort of priestess, complete with an undeniably impressive array of impersonations of women in bed, achieving their highest moment of being (the compulsory shot at Notre Dame’s parietals rules about visitation in our single-sex dorms is also included by the charming co-ed—and in case you wondered, the triple orgasm was by far the most impressive from a performance perspective).

Perhaps the most disturbing comment of the play comes earlier, however, when the emcee gives giddy praise to a seventy-two year old woman who gets herself to orgasm for the first time. Ah yes, how praiseworthy this act is at a school like Notre Dame where we scoff upon virgins … or, maybe not. It doesn't take a moral theologian to show that something is gravely amiss here. Supporting the V-Day Movement on campus while arguing that it cannot interfere with our Catholic mission requires a deep intellectual disconnect from the University's fundamental values, and it’s sad that it’s taking us so long to acknowledge this crude assault for what it is.

Hmm...

2006-03-17T10:13:00.000-08:00

SiteMeter shows that one of my hits today was from a search for the terms "lher first big dick" on Yahoo!

I'm fairly certain that isn't a good thing...

When The Legend Becomes Fact, Print The Legend

2006-03-15T18:13:00.000-08:00

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (John Ford, USA, 1962, A)

On a level of fundamentals, you might suspect the film is in grave danger--Jimmy Stewart was 54 years old, and John Wayne 55, when they reprised their iconic personas as the young idealist bent on reforming society and the renegade tough guy who prized justice over law, respectively, in VALANCE. It probably doesn't matter all that much for Wayne, since his character's relation to the story as a whole doesn't make being a bit older a huge disadvantage, although he lives an awful long time for a onery drunk with girl troubles (the girl in question is Vera Miles, and in case you asked, she was 33 when she made VALANCE--I guess she was after older men). Stewart's problem seems harder to overcome--Ford's basically asking him to reprise the classic 30's (MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON) and 40's (IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE) man-of-the-people role, but he just doesn't have the bounce anymore to be convincing. I've frankly never enjoyed Stewart's social crusader persona much anyway--it takes a fairly sizable third to his immensely enjoyable socialite (THE PHILADELPHIA STORY) and his darker roles (REAR WINDOW, VERTIGO) because it so easily spills over into self parody. Combine this with all the familiar faces from every Ford moie since STAGECOACH--the illiterate Swedish couple that runs the restaurant, the inept town marshall, the immensely funny and wholly sympathetic drunkards--and it seems more like a tribute than a movie with high aspirations.

And yet VALANCE sure doesn't play out like an old-timers game--try a fight to the death. Like Ransom Stoddard (Stewart), the audience is attending a funeral for something that was broken in its prime and killed off too soon by forces (not necessarily malignant) that couldn't be stopped--not simply Tom Doniphan (Wayne), but an entire way of life, and, perhaps, even Ford's film career itself. The choice of black-and-white film underscores the sense of nostalgia (although nostalgia seems too blithe a word to describe Ford's purpose), as does Ford's timeless style, good humor, seamless editing, and acute sense of dramatic tension and pace. Seeing these old-timers break out the chaps for another go at a Ford film adds to VALANCE's sense of a mythical past that will always be admired but can never truly be reclaimed. Their shared desire to rid the town of Liberty Valance only barely manages to overcome the angst between the naive optimism of Stoddard and the brash pragmatism of Doniphan. Hally's need to choose a lover between the two of them complicates matters, although Stoddard, in his "aw-shucks" munificience, doesn't mean to horn in on Doniphan's gal. Although Stoddard's ideas eventually gain acceptance, Ford leaves little doubt as to how the West was won in practice. It doesn't leave us with simple answers, but lets us marinate in a tragic paradox that we may never be able to solve. There is a real sense of angst in this movie that is missing in other Ford productions, from the advanced intensity of the violence (moreso than in any Ford film, thanks to the loosening production code in an era post-PSYCHO) and the film's bittlerly ironic conclusion (there's no moment like a walk in the sunset to console the defeated Wayne--he is simply cast aside). When I stop thinking about ways Ford could have restructured the movie to get younger men to play Stoddard and Doniphan, I always seem to return to VALANCE's pervading sense of memento mori that cloaks it like a fog, and remember that for all the quibbles, no other Ford film has stirred me quite as much as this one.

And Stewart? Well, he's still a little annoying but not quite as bad as in the other movies I cited.

Alternate soundtrack for the movie: "I Ain't As Good As I Once Was," by Toby Keith.
***
PS: if you've been stung by Victor's recent hiatus, are interested in the question of modesty/decency in movies, or both, read Amy Welborn's comments on THE SOPRANOS and the ensuing combox explosion. Some questions for VIctor:

1) Why aren't you using the combox time to write something on the blog, where it will be better appreciated and more intelligently critiqued?

2) The Catechism says the following on pornography:

2354 Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials.

Now, to make this concrete, I think most reasonable observers can see the difference between a legitimate movie that contains simulated sex acts (say, DOGVILLE or even certain episodes of THE SOPRANOS), and the shlock they put on Skinemax at 3 in the morning, and I can't see Nicole Kidman being guilty in the same way a porn star is guilty of immodesty. But the Catechism seems to suggest that any time one "removes real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners in order to display them deliberately to third parties," porn exists. How do I reconcile my intuition with the Catechism, since it seems your definition of pornography must be in conflict with the Catechism's?

And anyone else is welcome to take a shot at this, too, BTW...

The New Rating Scale

2006-03-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

I'm officially fed up with the JAA rating scale. It has quickly become too coarse in its ability to seperate movies at the top of the spectrum, and doesn't have nearly enough flexibility in terms of rating bad movies.

From this day on, I will be moving to a letter-grade format. To avoid some of the confusion inherent in letter grades, which I initially tried to avoid in formulating the original grading scale, I have decided to use Ryan Wu's grading scale, which I find to be the most comprehensive and fair among the options in the online film geek world (10 points, 100 points, James Bowman's absurd 3-point scale). I've eliminated some of his gradations (like A-/B+) for the sake of simplicity--I usually give movies the benefit of a doubt when I'm stuck between grades anyway, unless it's an odd circumstance. "The P&B Scale," modified for JAA, thus goes as follows:

A+: Pantheon
A: Masterpiece
A-: Great
B+: Near Great
B: Recommended
B-: Recommended with reservations
C+: Not Recommended but with redeeming values
C: Poor
C-: Crap
D+: Utter crap
D: Foul, disgusting crap
F: Burn the negative

My favorite part: the negative ratings.

I will also maintain my convention of marking ratings that differ from canonical opinion, as regards classic movies, with an asterix. I am now working through the process of updating my film log to accomodate the new scale. I hope you will find it more informative in discerning film choices.

I (don't) ♥ HUCKABEES

2006-03-11T21:34:00.000-08:00

I ♥ HUCKABEES (David O. Russell, USA, 2004, AC)

In an attempt to prove that I don't give everything a rating above HR (it just happens to be my luck lately...)

HUCKABEES must be given some credit for a handful of excellent performances and a few genuinely funny moments in its parody of typical SoCal weirdos, but in the end, I must ask, along with the great Theo Panayides, "What's the point?" (or, as I was tempted to ask at times, "what's the *(#$(* point?"). Or, rather, what's the point of me watching, since it seems fairly clear what HUCKABEES point is. Poses itself as an all-important "Search For Existential Meaning" in the lives of an idealistic poetry-writing open space crusader (Jason Schwartzman, former drummer of JAA's official rock band Phantom Planet), a rising junior executive in a Wal-Mart like firm (Jude Law), his model girlfriend (Naomi Watts), and a petroleum-obsessed firefighter (Mark Wahlberg), all rudely proded along by a pair of so-called "existential detectives" (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) and their dark side rival (Isabelle Huppert), with the former preaching total interconnectedness and the latter preaching no connections whatsoever.

Doesn't read very well as a spiritual meditation, with the characters saying any absurd thing that comes to their mind and sounds vaguely Nietzschean in an attempt to make this movie seem hip, so all we're left with is a rather simplistic spoof of American life, complete with derisive portrayals of bourgeoise Christians and the corporate world. Of course, the environmentalists, while occasionally silly and introspective, are the real heroes, not that I can't stomach that in and of itself, but if the film was trying to make a subtle point it sure missed. In the end I wasn't really taken in by any of these characters, didn't care what happened to them or whether they learned anything--what was clearly meant to be fresh and biting is crude and unfunny (and I don't know where they got off on the sex scene, which would be gross if it wasn't so damned goofy, random, and pointless). Maybe you just have to have the right sensibility to watch this movie--I sure don't, and I don't want to find out what mood I'd have to be in to get that way.

Power of PRIDE

2006-03-11T09:26:00.000-08:00

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (Joe Wright, USA, 2005, S)

I had mixed expectations going into the latest adaptation of English literature's most enduring romance novel, mostly because there are so many pitfalls in adapting a masterpiece. If something's already reached the apex of its form--the definition of a masterpiece and a fair characterization of Austen's book--how is it possible to break it down, translate it into the language of cinema, and produce even a crude reflection of that masterpiece? The answer, I suppose, is this movie, which I think stands to be better and more fondly remembered than any of this year's Oscar candidates, or anything else made in 2005.

At roughly a quarter the length of the much-beloved A&E adaptation of the story, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE does not attempt a detailed recreation of all the novel's particulars. Do we lose some of the temporality of the story as a result? Sure. Do certain characters get short shrift? Absolutely. But these are inevitable trade-offs in any successful adaptation. What we're left with is something that's infinitely more cinematic even as it sacrifices a literal transcription of the novel, preferring to explore the internal states rumbling underneath the precise ritual and perfect manners of Austen's England. In place of Austen's precise observation is a visual vocabulary that gets at the heart of these characters and their struggles, delighting in picturesque and often surreal juxtapositions of light and darkness, intimacy and distance, clumsiness and grace, even fantasy and reality. Perhaps the film's most iconic image is Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) in extreme long shot--the distant beauty, isolated and tortured by her human failings. There are other touches like this that take shape over the course of the film--the duel of words and gestures in the dance line between Lizzy and Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFayden) , the nervous shots of Mr. Darcy's hands when he talks to Lizzy, the playful allegory between Lizzy and caged birds when she visits the Lady Catherine de Berg, the interaction of shadow and light on Lizzy's face in her moments of despair (Wright's use of light is reminiscent of Gabriel Axel's in BABETTE'S FEAST). Also note how the film brings out contrasts the book doesn't make explicit, especially between Darcy and the bungling Mr. Collins (Tom Hollander), who provides abundant comic relief and serves as a less-than-suave shadow of the graceful Mr. Darcy.

What I mean to say by all of this is that PRIDE AND PREJUDICE deserves to be remembered for more than just being "the movie version of "P&P" they made in 2005 with Keira Knightley," but as a great work all its own, a feat of unbridled joy and unabashed bravura. It's evident from the very beginning, a graceful tracking shot that introduces us to the Bennet family and to Lizzy's primary conflicts--against her family, against her suitors and, if we look in her eyes long enough, with herself. The scoring and sound editing is some of the best I've heard, emphasizing the transience of the line between inner and outer states (listen carefully for a song that's played twice, once poorly, once well--it's one of the film's great moments). The quality of almost all the performances cannot be quarreled with, especially Knightley's turn as Miss Bennet. Knightley's utter joy in making this movie is nearly palpable--she is the ideal visual filter for the complex moods of Austen's most beloved heroine. Donald Sutherland is also a delight as the put-upon Bennet patriarch (one way to tell if a film is a rarity: the most satisfying image in the movie is not the kissing couple, but a delighted father's smile, long hidden away by months of annoyance). I was surprised to read significant criticism of MacFayden's turn as Mr. Darcy. I don't think it's possible to be too taciturn with the part, and although I may be reading the novel onto some of his facial expressions, I certainly didn't perceive him as being non-emotive. [Insert comments about Judi Dench and British role players being awesome here].

Granted, it's not everyone's cup of tea, especially if you loathed the novel, and I may have been highly delusional when I saw it. It may not be the best film from 2005 I've seen, but it is certainly the most fun I've had in a movie theatre in a long time--rich, colorful, giddy, powerful, unforgettable. Give it a shot, even if you think you'll hate it.

THE BIG SLEEP

2006-03-07T08:24:00.000-08:00

THE BIG SLEEP (Howard Hawks, USA, 1946, S)

[Note: Yes, I realize the post title isn't very original. Mea culpa.]

Watching THE BIG SLEEP made me wonder why I don't watch more film noir from the 1940's--when it's good, it's really really good, and SLEEP is about as good as it gets. The plot is like one of those threads in a shirt that gets longer and longer as you pull on it and seems to have no real end--private dick Phillip Marlow (Humphrey Bogart) is hired to settle a blackmail relating to Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers), daughter of an old general who likes to sit in a greenhouse and drink brandy while she lives in the fast lane, and sister of Vivian Sternwood Rutledge (Lauren Bacall). But the blackmail isn't so simple, Vivian turns out to be a lot more interesting than Carmen, and the severity of the crimes escalates quickly (say that in your best Ron Burgundy voice). Hawks follows Hitchcock's admonition to focus on the chase and the characters rather than the MacGuffin to a tee--if the MacGuffin of THE MALTESE FALCON was "the stuff that dreams are made of," then THE BIG SLEEP uses something even less tangible. There are important characters we never see, people who seem to be important when we meet them but never see again, an ending that doesn't tie up all the plot threads, a title that is never explained, and hell, we don't even get the compulsory fade-out kiss between Bogie and Bacall. All irrelevant--as long as you have fun going where you're going, even if the destination is a little ambiguous, everything works out because it's uncertainty, in the end, that engages the viewer. Real life never resolves on a major chord anyway. An especially nice touch that comments on this idea is how Hawks lulls the audience into thinking things are settled about midway through before plunging us even deeper into the murk in the film's second half--even when we think things might be settled, they rarely are.

It will hardly do to talk about Bogart and Bacall, other than to say their performances are axiomatic--Bogie's character is essentially Sam Spade in Los Angeles and he didn't need Hawks to tell him how to play the role well, and Bacall's everything a director could want for the role, with her alluring yet stoic face and sultry voice. I was really struck by the uniform quality of the other actresses, especially Vickers and Dorothy Malone, who plays a girl working in a book shop (the opening scene that introduces Carmen to Marlow is utter brilliance, and it's not just because that skirt she's wearing probably raised hackles at the Legion of Decency--it's the voice, the gait, the tongue rolling around in her mouth, the perfect fall into Marlow's arms--Hawks takes the old "sexpot" role and turns it into something completely fresh). Also worth noting is the visual style--Hawks worked in many different genres, from screwball comedy to Westerns to noir, yet he seems totally at home with this material, matching the mood of the piece with a darker, smoother cinematography than I've seen in other Hawks movies that's much more active in the back plane of the frame (again, this is another film the French nouvelle vague directors would reference in the future). I have only mentioned the writing sparsely, but as with the performances of the leads, Hawks' razor-edged repartee is so highly-praised that it hardly merits mentioning (I now understand Theo's heading for the film list section of his website). In sum, a tremendous collaboration of a smart studio, a great director/writer, and legendary performances that hasn't dated a bit in 60 years.

Trouble In PARADISE

2006-03-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

PARADISE NOW (Hany Abu-Assad, France / Germany / Netherlands / Israel, 2005, HR)

For those who follow film and the filmmaking industry, the Academy Awards are a point of orientation. it's not so much the awards themselves that matter, but the awards season gives cineastes a time to reflect, to make sense of the year that's come and gone in cinema, and to anticipate what the future will bring. This year, most of the buzz has focused on the dominance of political and social "message" films in the Best Picture category. Name a hot-button issue--race (CRASH), homosexuality (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, and to a lesser extent CAPOTE), the Middle East (MUNICH), or those rascally Republicans (GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK)--and the Oscars have a Hollywood-approved opinion waiting for you. Less interesting to casual observers, but perhaps more significant in terms of the future of the film industry, is the dominance of independent films among this year's slate of nominees--only MUNICH is a child of the major studios. And playing as a sort of sideshow to these stories (and to the usual banter about how will win, who should win, and runway fashion trends) is the strange tale of PARADISE NOW, a film seen by next to no one in the United States, a nominee for the Best Foreign Film statuette, and, if you ask the right people, a grossly offensive political statement.

From the very first frame, PARADISE NOW works with a dire urgency. It's palpable in the face of a woman (who we later learn is named Suha) making her way through a security checkpoint in Gaza, her alert, expressive face a symbol of stoic bravery in times of fear and uncertainty. Abu-Assad and his crew went to the trouble of shooting significant portions of the film in the Gaza Strip, where they were quite literally in the line of fire, and the realism of the setting along with the no-frills filmmaking (there's little music, and very little was done to ornament the stunning environs) gives PARADISE NOW an authenticity that cannot be bought for any price. The girl is a friend of two disaffected Palestinan men, Said and Khaled, who seem to have little purpose in life beyond fixing cars and smoking hookahs until they are called upon to execute a suicide bombing mission in Tel Aviv. The film explores the emotional and psychological tension that must accompany a decision to give one's life for a cause with a quiet tact, focusing on body language, voice inflection, and above all the eyes (not that there's VERTIGO-like eye closeups, but I found myself drawn into them naturally). One would think the tension of sudden separation from family and the eerie details of preparing for a suicide mission would provide enough suspense, but the writers insisted on convoluted plot-twists that stretch the film out but don't really add anything interesting. The middle of film feels like an intermission to a moving introduction and a spellbinding conclusion that, for a fleeting moment, transports us from a seat in a theatre to a seat on a bus, our thumb sweating over a button that marks the line between life and death.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for a film about suicide bombers told from their perspective, activists groups have been protesting PARADISE NOW's nomination for its lack of an unambiguous condemnation of terrorism. Set aside, for a minute, the fact that the film's political leanings do not preclude it from being a great movie. While PARADISE NOW does seek to explain why someone would die for their nation given the circumstances of the Palestinian state, understanding why someone would do something isn't the same as supporting what they do. The film poses suicide bombing as an emotional reaction imposed upon the ignorant and bitter by those who should know better, rather than a legitimate form of political protest. The final shot is a clue to the film's true opinions on the subject--we don't show two virgins taking a noble martyr to paradise, as the "martyr mission" organizer claims, but a blank void, an eloquent statement that terrorism is a road that leads to nothing, and certainly not a road that leads to lasting peace.

PS: Kudos to whoever gets the reference in the title, even if it is only Victor.

Still Alive...

2006-02-24T21:37:00.000-08:00

But it doesn't feel that way. I promise to get back to movies once the man stops beating the (*&% out of me.

Something To Do On JPW

2006-02-14T08:35:00.000-08:00

I'll be busy entertaining my parents this weekend so movies will be out of the frame, so to speak. But in terms of what I can personally recommend, you should definitely check out:

LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE (Sylvain Chomet, France/Belgium/Canada/UK, 2003, HR) [Plays at DPAC on Feb. 17-18 @ 10 PM]

For those who think modern animation has to be computer generated, anime, or straight-to-DVD-and-cable filler, LES TRIPLETTES OF BELLEVILLE offers, well, something different, to be sure. TRIPLETTES centers around a determined French grandmother; her grandson, a bicyclist kidnapped after falling off the road during the Tour De France; an obese dog; a group of French gangsters with a decidedly perverse idea of entertainment; and three old ladies who play jazz on common household appliances. The visual style is similar to the classic Warner Brothers shorts from the forties, with a lot more dirt around the edges, in both looks and material (name the last time you saw an animated film that included a Parisian nightclub scene complete with topless black dancers and numerous abuses of frogs). It plays just about every darkly humorous card it can turn up, from the cruel to the crude to the gross. It lampoons Americans as overweight grumps and Frenchmen as inebriated incompetents. Oh, and there's no dialogue either, other than some singing by the musical sisters and other garbled, incidental speech.

Now, while I'm sure most of you are already going online to book a ticket, since my description of the movie has surely convinced you that this movie is THE MOST AWESOME THING EVER(!!!), the dull ones out there may still be confused as all-get-out. Yes, TRIPLETTES is a weird movie, and I'm not even sure my description does it justice, but somehow it works. That we're even able to stick around for the length of the movie is a tribute to Chomet's direction--he certainly tries to hold on to his (many) odd scenarios for as long as he's able to, but to keep the larger movie in balance (and to have some mercy on the audience) he rarely holds them longer than that. Buster Keaton would have been proud of the deadpan seriousness of most of the primaries and of the unbridled glee of the film's incredible set pieces. But there's also moments of Chaplinesque zaniness--seemingly drab moments spiral into gag after gag after gag, tugging on the audience with sparse sounds and sudden movement--and, like MONSEIUR VERDOUX, TRIPLETTES underscores Chaplin's view that the gap between perversity and humor is very small (the lack of dialogue makes the silent humor analogy very apropos, as does the film's 1920's France/New York backdrop and catchy Django Reinhardt-influenced score). But when it's all said (or not said) and done, the film's bizareness brings out a story that is heartwarming and deeply sincere in the way that other food seem more sweet by comparison after you've eaten a lemon, and achieves something that most polite films on similar themes can't even envision.

Oh, I Forgot, I Run A Blog Now Don't I

2006-02-07T21:23:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know, but things have been supremely busy as of late (and my LSAT class hasn't even started *gulp*), and there haven't been any movies lately that I both a) have the time to see and b) want to see. I rewatched RIO BRAVO over the past couple of days while reading Robin Wood's BFI monograph on it (which is both one of the stupidest and most perceptive film essays I've ever read--it reaches throes of brilliance, and then he has to talk about things like gay subtext between Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin). That, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG and how it really is the standard by which all awesomeness must be measured, so I moved it into my top ten list (sorry, Gene Kelly, but don't worry I still love you).

After this weekend the DPAC abandons its schedule of PC film fests honoring different minority groups in lieu of showing the broader spectrum of cinema. It's going to be hard to decide between GONE WITH THE WIND and the new WALLACE AND GROMIT thing, but it's a nice decision.

I'm going to sleep for as long as I can now. Laters.

We Have Our Best Men Working On It

2006-01-30T13:59:00.000-08:00

There's a new blog out dedicated to supporting Fr. Jenkins' stand on academic freedom and Catholic character... and you may know one of the guys leading off the festivities of defending the cause for all things good and awesome. It's a slightly modified version of my earlier post, which was done to eliminate ambiguity between forums and the works those forums may contain.

The blog is called The Truth Will Set You Free, and here's a permalink to my post. You'll need it because people are writing up a storm on this stuff...

BTW, the still is from HORSE FEATHERS, the part after the football game where they're playing cards while the college burns down.

JAA's Awards For 2005

2006-01-29T00:27:00.000-08:00

BEST FILMS OF 2005 (Year of commercial release in US)

1. NOBODY KNOWS (Kore-eda Hirokazu, Japan)

2. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (Joe Wright, USA)

3. THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (Noah Baumbach, USA)

4. GRIZZLY MAN (Werner Herzog, USA) [Herzog's documentary of environmental activist Timothy Treadwell is an unforgetable character study, proving perhaps once and for all that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction. If your documentary experience is limited to MARCH OF THE PENGUINS and FARENHEIT 9/11, you simply must watch this if only to understand that a documentary can be more than a) an ambling nature doc (although MARCH OF THE PENGUINS does this perhaps better than any other) or b) political agitation, but c) a deeply personal work of art that, in its respectful yet critical exploration of the specific, becomes a statement about humanity's universal search for meaning. Treadwell's footage is jaw-dropping, and Herzog's dark empricism finds a home within this material, and better still, brings us into this worldview, if only for a brief time].

5. DOWNFALL (Oliver Hirschbiegel, Germany) [This epic recreation of the fall of Berlin to the Russians in World War II is among the greatest war films ever made. The unspeakable horror of the front lines is on full display, to be sure, and yet it is the kind of movie where the most horrific moment happens in near perfect silence, broken only by gentle sighs. The acting up and down the ensemble is superlative--Bruno Ganz's Hitler and Ulrich Matthes' Goebbels have an eerie perfection about them, and the leading ladies, Alexandra Maria Lara as Hitler's personal secretary and Juliane Kölher as Eva Braun, give the film an unexpected warmth in the midst of a cold, lifeless chaos. If I shuffle things around in this list later on, this film will surely be moving up, not down, as its image seem to grow in strength in my mind.]

Next Five (In No Particular Order):
CAPOTE (Bennett Miller, USA); 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong); MUNICH (Steven Spielberg, USA); CINDERELLA MAN (Ron Howard, USA); MILLIONS (Danny Boyle, UK).

AWARDS

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: 2046. Honorable Mention: MARCH OF THE PENGUINS.

BEST ACTOR: Bruno Ganz, DOWNFALL. Honorable Mention: Russell Crowe, CINDERELLA MAN.

BEST ACTRESS: Reese Witherspoon, WALK THE LINE (James Mangold, USA). Honorable Mention: Keira Knightley, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMER: Paul Giamatti, CINDERELLA MAN. Honorable Mention: Catherine Keener, CAPOTE.

BEST SCREENPLAY: THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. Honorable Mention: MILLIONS.

BEST DIRECTOR: Kore-eda Hirokazu, NOBODY KNOWS. Honorable Mention: Werner Herzog, for GRIZZLY MAN.

Northeastern Intellectual Punks

2006-01-27T05:47:00.000-08:00

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (Noah Baumbach, USA, 2005, S)

It's hard to watch THE SQUID AND THE WHALE without noticing the similarities to Woody Allen--the setting in 80's New York City, the cast of hip intellectuals, the sophisticated cultural references (RISKY BUSINESS, PSYCHO, Pink Floyd's "Hey You"), the personal problems the characters deal with, and (thankfully) the crisp writing. But this movie--which deals with the travails of a divorced couple and their two sons--takes an approach that Allen would never have considered. This is a movie we laugh at, (and cry at, and wince at, and rage at) rather than one we laugh with. Whereas Allen tends to look at his stories from the inside (often with his "Woody" character) and lament what is happening, as in ANNIE HALL and CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, Baumbach prefers to stand outside the situation and observe what is happening. Compare and contrast the structure of Allen's gags to the naturalistic humor of SQUID, or Gordon Moore's formally flawless cinematography to the handheld shots and doc-like ambiance of Robert Yeoman's work.

The result is a refreshingly different kind of film that is smart without being pretentious (and actually railing against pretentiousness) and richly ambiguous in its look at human relationships gone bad. The performances of the four family members, led by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, have a wonderful transperancy to them and feel almost improvised. The plotting of the central conflict within the family is perhaps a bit too obvious in the beginning of the movie, but SQUID catches more and more nuances of the complexity of the relationship between the different family members to one another as time goes on, and is remarkably textured in terms of its psychology given its length. The message is fairly blatant--"joint custody blows," one of the few important lines in the film from someone not in the family--but we're moved into it slowly rather than having our heads dunked in it, as the oldest son, played by Jesse Eisenberg, whose struggle we end up caring about the most, comes to realize that for all of the faults of his parents, he needs both of them to complete himself. A lot of people I talked to after the screening (at Browning Family Cinema in the DPAC) didn't like the film's frank treatment of the sexuality of the younger protagonists, but I dare them to find another American film this year that speaks so forcefully about the problems with modern culture as this one (domestic, because this is in a class with NOBODY KNOWS). The movie's dissonant final image is unforgettable--you'll want to plan a trip to the New York Museum of Natural History the minute the credits roll.