Lost in the Movies

This blog is no longer active.

2010-06-07T17:00:00.000-04:00

My blogging activity has now been centralized on The Dancing Image.

The Lives of Others

2010-05-25T10:49:00.000-04:00

#66 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.

Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is a top Stasi agent, not the kind whose flashy skills and pride draw attention to himself, but the kind who quietly and methodically does his job, never questions authority, and seems to actually believe in the principles he operates under – or at least has never given them enough thought to really object. Then again, it’s hard to tell; the very reticence which makes him an ideal snoop and a hard-to-read interrogator means that we can’t quite be sure what’s going on in his mind: is he a loyal soldier, or merely someone who knows his place? German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s debut film, the 2006 winner for Best Foreign Film, The Lives of Others is about Wiesler’s slipping grasp on his own stoic rigidity, internal and consequentially external as well. The suggestive title conflates state-sanctioned snooping with sympathetic voyeurism, and indeed as Wiesler spies on a bourgeois artist couple, playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), his impassive surveillance gives way to emotional involvement – eventually one will have to give in to the other. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman has astutely noted the similarity to Wim Wenders’ seminal Wall- era Wings of Desire, writing, “No less than Bruno Ganz’s empathetic seraphim, Wiesler longs to be human.” Indeed, after listening in on a robust lovemaking session, Wiesler orders himself a home visit from a busy (and buxom) prostitute; though perhaps physically satisfying, it doesn’t quite scratch the spiritual itch Wiesler has been developing. Perhaps more telling is an encounter on an elevator just prior. A little boy, bouncing a ball casually asks Wiesler if he’s “really Stasi”; asked if he knows what this even means, the boy inadvertently informs on his father’s bilious characterization of the secret police. “What is the name of your f-” Wiesler stops himself, and pauses: “…of your ball?” The little boy chuckles and runs off, not knowing how close he came to turning the old man in. And Wiesler probably wonders what possessed him to show mercy, a quality he may not even have realized was within his power until now.

Continue Reading »

The Gleaners & I

2010-05-11T07:33:00.000-04:00

by Joel Bocko

#59 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.

"Again one hand filming the other hand, and more trucks. I'd like to capture them. To retain things passing? No, just to play.

In Agnes Varda's documentary The Gleaners & I (a more literal translation from the French would be "The Gleaners & The Gleaner", or even "Gleaneress") play, investigation, and contemplation are all intricately yet loosely wound together - each element distinct yet forming an upretentiously ambitious whole, much like the found-object artpieces Varda highlights throughout. Her subject, as you might have gathered (no pun intended), is gleaning: in all its forms. We are introduced to the classical gleaners, the peasant women who would follow the harvest by crouching and stooping through the fields, rummaging for leftovers once the more illustrious agricultural bounty was carried off. We see such gleaners in famous French paintings, and meet one or two who reminisce only - it seems that this more traditional form of gleaning has fallen by the wayside: mechanized reaping has become too precise and so few crops are left behind these days. This we learn in the first five minutes of the 90-minute film; what follows is an eager, inquisitive investigation of gleaning in all its latter-day manifestations...

Continue Reading »

L'Enfant

2010-04-26T12:24:00.000-04:00

#57 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.

You’re about halfway through L’Enfant when you realize whom exactly the title refers to. Sonia (Déborah François) has just had a baby boy, and when the movie opens, she’s seeking the child’s father. He’s not at his apartment, which is occupied by a surly couple who slam the door in her face (a gesture that will be repeated throughout the film, although eventually she’s the one doing the slamming). When she finds him he’s on the street, wandering between cars stalled at a stop light, begging for change. Bruno (Jérémie Renier) is a scruffy young man, who could be anywhere from mid-twenties to early thirties. The indeterminacy of his age is telling; while his thick features suggest a manliness, his mop of hair, puppy-dog eyes, and perpetually mischievous grin suggest perpetual boyhood. Though Sonia is clearly his junior, she manages to mix a girlish playfulness (she’s constantly goofing around with Bruno, amidst shrieks of laughter) with a motherly concern for her new charge. Bruno, on the other hand, as soon as he’s left alone with the baby, tries to sell his own son.

Continue Reading »

Tropical Malady

2010-04-13T12:35:00.000-04:00

#55 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.

We’ve heard that love’s a bitch, and a battlefield, but in the 2004 Thai film Tropical Malady, writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul tells us it’s a tiger too. Or at least that’s one interpretation. Actually, at times it can be hard to know exactly what Apichatpong is after. As with the filmmaker’s later Syndromes and a Century (reviewed in a previous incarnation of this series), Tropical Malady divides neatly into two halves, but the way the halves relate to each other is different. In Syndromes, the different parts of the film are symmetrical, like parallel lines – they relate similar events in radically different surroundings. Malady on the other hand connects it’s first and second half with a joint and then lets them spin in entirely different directions, until the thread connecting them seems stretched awful thin. The two halves are perpendicular rather than parallel – maybe they’re better considered as two separate films, but here they are presented together, their interconnections left for us to tease out.

Continue Reading »

Twin Peaks at 20

2010-04-09T22:17:00.000-04:00

Spurred on by Radiator Heaven's declaration of "Twin Peaks week" (the series premiered twenty years ago yesterday) I'm taking a momentary break from my break, to re-present my 2008 episode-by-episode analysis of the groundbreaking TV show. It covered all of season one, the first half of season two (through the conclusion of the murder mystery), and the final episode. I also wrote about the disturbing and powerful prequel film, Fire Walk With Me, and put out a few other, random posts on the series as well. Without further ado, then, I prevent a centralized nexus for all my "Twin Peaks" pieces:

Introductions

That gum you like is going to come back in style...
Twin Peaks in context

Season 1

Twin Peaks (the pilot)
Twin Peaks: Traces to Nowhere
Twin Peaks: Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer
Twin Peaks: Rest in Pain
Twin Peaks: The One-Armed Man
Twin Peaks: Cooper's Dreams
Twin Peaks: Realization Time
Twin Peaks: The Last Evening

Season 2
Twin Peaks: May the Giant Be With You
Twin Peaks: Coma
Twin Peaks: The Man Behind Glass
Twin Peaks: Laura's Secret Diary
Twin Peaks: The Orchid's Curse
Twin Peaks: Demons
Twin Peaks: Lonely Souls
Twin Peaks: Drive With a Dead Girl
Twin Peaks: Arbitrary Law

Final episode
Twin Peaks: Beyond Life and Death

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (the movie)
Critical idiocy vis a vis Fire Walk With Me

The picture came from Jeremy Richey's always eye-catching blog, Moon in the Gutter. Check out his post on the show.

Now playing: How to Train Your Dragon

2010-04-06T11:14:00.006-04:00

by Joel Bocko

[As I am currently on hiatus, posts like this will be more the exception than the rule. For further details, see here.]

If there's one form that's been thriving recently, it's the animated film. In the live-action realm, other genres have proved popular without really tapping it into the traditional sources of America's cinematic strength (imagination, storytelling, fantasy). Non-animated movies often seem to have lost touch with the power that old Hollywood exuded. Contemporary screenwriting focuses more often on themes and ideas than stories and feelings, technique has adopted the fragmented point of view, and while naturalism has been avoided a surface "realism" is all the rage - blockbusters are darker and grittier than they were in the past (though, ironically, excessive CGI has rendered their textures less real than ever). Live-action films have achieved a "flatness" - a focus on surfaces and text - while animated films thrive in a world of created depth, in which computer animation is finally un-shackled from its obligation to dutifully mimic reality and allowed to range free. Most of the great animated films of the epoch have been Pixar movies, but How to Train Your Dragon may be Dream Works' strongest contribution to the pantheon yet.

It's appopriate that this movie comes from the studio Steven Spielberg founded. Its tale, about a gangly, awkward Viking boy who befriends a wounded dragon - even as he's supposedly training to kill that very species - is obviously close kin to E.T. The central creature, a "Night Fury" serpent of the sky, even looks a little bit like the famous alien, with his big eyes and wide mouth. More importantly, the storytelling is embued with the Spielbergian sense - a close eye for familial relations and youthful imagination filtered through the glorified tropes of modern mythos, in this case medieval fantasy rather than science fiction. Which is to say that the movie does not particularly subvert nor expand upon certain devices - the firm father, the dreamy boy, the "Hero with a Thousand Faces" story points starting with the call to adventure. Instead, it utilizes these devices in a new context, investing them with a specificity that makes them seem unique rather than stereotypical. In doing so it reminds us of the virtues of classical storytelling and mythology, even as it adds new tweaks here and there.

The question of why animated films demonstrate these once-ubiquitous strengths better than live action (or the hybrid cartoon/live action form which predominates today) is worth considering at length. Among other hypotheses, the team-oriented nature of animated filmmaking may bear a closer resemblance to the process behind the great works of Hollywood's Golden Age (TV, too, utilizes this framework and is experiencing a renewed burst of creativity). Perhaps, the target audience being children, the virtues of simplicity are employed whereas most blockbusters, aimed at adolescents, cater to the superficially complicated pretensions of that demographic. One could rattle off a litany of plausible causes, but what of this particular film?

Hiccup is a Norseman - or rather, Norseboy - whose scrawny frame, brainy neurosis, and whiny voice immediately put him at odds with the brutish, hardheaded community. That said, his elder Vikings - and even his bullying, stupid peers - are not portrayed in one-dimensional fashion. Though their thinking is eventually shown to be misguided, we're led to understand their motivations for fearfulness, to admire the pearls of wisdom scattered throughout their ignorance, and to sense the humanity beneath their tough exterior. Anyway, Hiccup wants to prove his worth and successfully shoots down the most mysterious and terrifying of dragons - a Night Fury. Yet he can't finish the job, and finds himself repairing the creature's wounded wings instead of slaying it, and then learning how to ride the dragon (nicknamed "Toothless") instead of running away. There's a girl, a tough tomboy in the spirit of the times (see also Wall-E) whom Hiccup eventually impresses and woos - riding a dragon is one hell of a first date - but Hiccup's greatest concern is to balance the violent, aggressive world of his father with the freedom and sense of exploration he discovers with Toothless. Superb, exciting sequences follow, and while Hiccup can be grating, Toothless is a fantastic animated creation, one of the best in an especially strong era.

Yet the film, for all the simplicity and classicism I've celebrated, also offers more to chew on. The story has been accused of harboring a "left-wing" agenda, and the suspicions are not altogether unfounded though to put so narrow an ideological tag onto it is rather over-explicit. The movie's message is that we fear what we don't understand - a moral which has graced entertainment (particularly children's entertainment) for a good century now. Nonetheless, the ways in which this storyline dovetails with revisionist histories of Western civilization are compelling (and I'm especially attuned to this right now, as I'm reading several historiographical works, left-wing and otherwise - like Edward Said's Orientalism, which is actually pertinent here). The sensibilities of the Vikings are warlike but also technocratic - their notion is that one must be trained into a system of organized and informed hostility (there is a whole training regimen in place; wrongheaded the Vikings may be but they are also quite thoughtful and even sophisticated in their approach to dragon-warfare and indoctrination into manhood/warriorship, which are seen as one and the same).

How to Train Your Dragon ultimately mutes its critique of militarism in two fundamental ways - and the title gives one clue how. The dragons in the movies are animals, ultimately domesticated: the movie is ultimately not about transcending the bounds of one's own civilization to empathize with another. Rather, much like the Orientalists Said decries, the purpose of its educative process is to exploit and utilize the other culture for one's own race. It's telling that the "other" is an animal - not a human like us in another film, but another creature altogether, and a fundamentally lesser one as well. For better or worse, How to Train Your Dragon is not about the journey from genocide to multiculturalism but rather the transition from a warlike approach towards other societies to a more sophisticated, and even more controlling, imperialism. The film is thus much less subversive than Avatar, but it's also far smarter - in the way it equalizes the ground between the Vikings and dragons (instead of making the Vikings merely exploiters) and in the way it refuses to simply indulge in the same black-and-white dogma it's decrying, just with black and white reversed (as Avatar does).

The second way the movie mitigates its critique of the fearful, militant mentality is by giving us a villain who confirms all the worst suspicions of the Vikings: a gigantic super-dragon whose "Queen Bee" status exploits all the other dragons. In the climactic battle, the film actually provides a ringing endorsement of Western cultural values: the facility of battalions made up of free individuals against a totalitarian hive mentality. Herodotus said that the Greeks defeated the Persians because they were free: the same could be said of the Viking teens who improvise a strategy while whirling around the colossal monstrosity, "winging" it both literally and otherwise. Now it should go without saying that one can enjoy the movie without employing this level of analysis and metaphor (most of which is probably unintentional, though still indirectly inspired by the ideas I mention). Indeed, it's more enjoyable the more one reserves this sort of appreciation for after the fact, the more one lets onself be swept along in the myth and spectacle. But that's just the point: the imaginative approach and storytelling framework which animated films emply yield a multitude of riches.

The film certainly has flaws (foremost its unnecessary reliance on rather glib, and poorly mixed to boot, narration in the opening and closing minutes - a sop to the hey-we're-modern temptations that Dream Works cartoons usually fall prey to). But it's a fun, imaginative, and, yes, ultimately even thought-provoking experience. It comes highly recommended, from these quarters anyway.

New on DVD: Sherlock Holmes

2010-03-31T09:59:00.008-04:00

by Joel Bocko

Also out on DVD this week, previously reviewed: An Education, about a schoolgirl's coming-of-age in early 60s London, and The Baader-Meinhof Complex, the true story of the Red Army Faction, a group of radical terrorists in West Germany.

He never says "Elementary, my dear Watson" and never once dons the infamous double-billed hat. He smokes a pipe, occasionally anyway, yet trades unflappability for a frenetic messiness which allows his peerless skills of deduction to remain the calm at the center of the storm. Remaining a bachelor, he nonetheless has a love interest, a criminal to boot; but he does not let his heart distract his mind (shades of "I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck."). He retains a faith in the remarkable powers of reason to knock down walls and illuminate the hazy, even in the face of a supernatural foe. It's Sherlock Holmes, all right -and that we accept Robert Downey, Jr.'s reinterpretation of the character (or is the word now "reboot" - speaking of which: a "reboot" of Jurassic Park? Seriously?? But I digress...) indicates the degree to which some fundamental aspect of Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth transcends his common pop cultural trappings. Downey, director Guy Ritchie, and a bevy of screenwriters bend and twist Holmes with enough force to make Gumby snap, yet Sherlock remains Sherlock.

The movie is a good deal of fun; hardly perfect, a bit glib in the ways it necessitates certain mutations, but that comes with the territory. Because a blockbuster these days must have action, the brilliant detective is now a fierce fighter too, and not only when chasing down the baddies - in his free time he engages in bare-fisted boxing matches, keeping his cool until his opponent spits on him (at which point, he still keeps his cool, while turning that analytical remove to his advantage, calculating and executing a succession of moves which will leave the other fighter "emotionally scarred for six months."). As indicated in that parenthetical elaboration, the action is made to fit the overall design in clever fashion: early clashes slow down and anticipate the punches, kicks, ducks, et cetera, as Sherlock and even the dutiful Watson (Jude Law, embracing his suave priggishness as all his best roles do) use superior intellectual firepower to defeat villains three or four times their size. It may be a ridiculous world in which brain not only beats but facilitates brawn, but it's a charming world nonetheless.

Sherlock's opposite number, in this adventure, is an aristocratic sorcerer named Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). Blackwood is captured in the opening minutes of the movie, tried, hanged, pronounced dead, and promptly resurrected. He has promised death and destruction and soon the heroes are up to their necks in secret societies, graceful femme fatales (Rachel McAdams plays Sherlock's ex-lover, ambiguously back in town), and apocalyptic technological threats. It's up to Holmes to determine how Blackwood's reappearance has occurred, and how - or indeed, if - such a force beyond nature can be defeated. In these times, with the much publicized battles between faith and atheism, fundamentalism and Darwinism, the story topically confronts the rational with the irrational, the magical. It's bewildering at times, yet it ultimately pays off, making the mystery, if anything, more enjoyable in retrospect than while it's unfolding. In addition to introducing an element of the supernatural into the plot, the screenplay replaces the gestures of a whodunit for the trappings of a howhedunit, with mixed results.

We miss the cool, enjoyable frisson of conventional sleuthing - searching for a suspect is one of the supreme pleasures of this genre - and it doesn't help that Blackwood's a bit of a cipher. Strong has regal bearing but seems hollow inside; at first glance his eyes smolder with the intensity of Andy Garcia in his better parts, but ultimately he lacks the gravitas to hold the screen. The mystical mumbojumbo is initially intriguing but grows tiresome when it becomes explicit and absurdly overdrawn. Batman Begins suffered from a similar case of freshman overreach - when rebooting a franchise, the (re-)creators always attempt too much. Fearing that they won't catch our interest, they set the stakes so absurdly high that it becomes difficult to accept the plot with the necessary modicum of sincerity. Here we have not just the destruction of Parliament in the offing, but the recapture of the United States by Britain and a hidden class of Illuminati. We're a long way from the Baskervilles.

But plot is secondary to character in a venture like this, and here the film succeeds. This Sherlock Holmes is a mess, except where it matters most - inside his head. An eccentric bachelor who fires pistols into his wall, drugs his dog, and is rude to friends' fiancees, Holmes is the exempler of the so-ADD-he's-Zen school of sleuthing. There was always something asocial about the detective's bemused obsession with logic and politely arrogant manner of ease, and for an obvious age, Sherlock Holmes makes this impossible to miss. Downey has a ball, and ensures that we do too. Law plays along gamely. Sherlock's relationship with Watson stretches contemporary bromance to the very limits of just-kidding homosexuality - his obsession with keeping the good doctor in the bachelor pad and in the business knows no bounds, and one suspects that McAdams was brought in just to assure us that Sherlock's really not into dudes, thank you very much. Another in the long line of heroines who are carefully set up as self-reliant and savvy, only so this can be subverted when a damsel in distress is needed, neither McAdams nor her character bring much to this affair; the movie would have been stronger sticking to its homosocial undercurrents (though apparently, Doyle provided Sherlock with a love interest early in his series as well; or at least, an early film adaptation did - I can't remember which. No Holmes am I.)

Anyway, without much hesitation, I can recommend the movie. Its weaknesses are around the periphery, and its central feature - Downey's performance as Sherlock - is solid. I suspect that a sequel will be even better, especially if it settles down and focuses on a seemingly more mundane yet ultimately more rewarding mystery (please, though, eschew the customary second-time-around pathos; a sensitive Bond is iffy, a touchy-feely Holmes is positively undesirable). At any rate, this is a good start. Evoke an atmospheric Victorian world, give us problems to solve, and most of all, provide us with a memorable, effective, impressive Sherlock Holmes, and you'll have done your job as an interpreter of the material. It's elem... eh, never mind.

Now playing: Greenberg

2010-03-28T11:55:00.012-04:00

by Joel Bocko

If you've seen the previews, you know that Greenberg features Ben Stiller in midlife crisis mode, wandering around L.A. looking lost and offering sardonic observations (at a coke party, he informs the kids that they were too pampered, growing up listening to "Baby Mozart"). If you've seen Noah Baumbach's recent films - the excellent divorce memoir, er, fictional piece The Squid and the Whale or the repulsive Margot at the Wedding - you'll know that the film's bound to have more up its sleeve than the genial trailer indicates. Indeed, Stiller's character - Roger Greenberg - is more asocial and pained (and oddly enough, more grounded) than the ads suggest. What's more, he is introduced gradually, tangentially, with the movie initially focusing on Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig), as she runs errands and does household chores for the rich Hollywood family she works for. She'll be looking after their house and dog while the yupster clan cavorts in Vietnam; meanwhile Roger, the brother of Gerwig's employer, will be staying in the home and supposedly building a doghouse - ostensibly for the pet, but it might as well be for himself.

Roger's life has been off-track for fifteen years, ever since he destroyed his popular rock group's chances at a record deal. His buddies never let him forget it, but their spite is also tempered by pity, particularly in the case of former best friend/recovering alcoholic Ivan (the most likable character in the movie, played with sorry grace by Rhys Ifans). While they've all grown up (to the extent one can "grow up" in L.A. where, as Roger observes, all the kids dress like superheroes and the adults dress like kids), raising families and making money, Roger remains mired in the past, in stasis. He's just emerged from an indeterminate stint in a hospital ("not that kind of hospital" Roger's brother wryly corrects Florence, when she asks what he's got). A Gothamite ever since college, he's out of place in the City of Angels where - to drive the point home (no pun intended) - he can't even operate a car. We gather these details bit by bit; after following Florence for the first fifteen minutes, our point-of-view transfers to Roger when the two have an awkward run-in at the house, and for the rest of the film we'll oscillate between the characters, picking up inklings about Roger's personality and past along the way. Actually, these anecdotes and quirks merely fill in the details. From our first glimpse we know that he's odd, somewhat charming, pathetic, and - in some hard-to-pin-down way - sad.

This being a Baumbach production, there must be at least one aggressively offputting sequence. This time there's no pre-pubescent masturbation or fascination with the yuckier aspects of the body (no vomiting or merciless long shots of Laura Linney peeling skin). Instead we get a thoroughly unromantic hook-up in Florence's bachelorette flat in which Roger shares a few sips of Corona and goes down on the young woman, his brother's employee with whom he's exchanged a few cursory words, post-haste. He seems vaguely scummy - all the more so when he puts Florence down, coldly tells her not to invest herself in him, and then comes running back again, as he's wont to due for the duration of the storyline. Sound unappealing? Perhaps, yet the movie is quite engaging: it has a relaxed, naturalistic texture in which life unfolds in a pace and style somewhat akin to reality. Roger's dilemma, which in the trailer seemed like a self-indulgent device out of touch with the economic times, here registers with a note of individual truth. He doesn't for a moment fit in with a younger generation, but he hasn't moved along with his own - and he's stranded.

One of Roger's OCD traits is to write indignant, carefully worded complaint letters to a number of offending parties (American Airlines, Michael Bloomberg, the "pet taxi" fleet). He also leaves a long voicemail for Florence after a drunken, drug-fueled party - a message he describes as "more of a letter" than a phone call. The film itself is a kind of letter, a love note from Baumbach to the younger generation. It may be written in invisible ink - the kind that fades after it's penned; the filmmaker's ambivalence manifests itself through the interplay between the intrigue and dismay with which Generation X faces the Millennials. At its best, the younger crowd (once known as Gen Y, before they emerged from X's shadow) is represented in Florence - flaky yet responsible, eccentric yet self-aware, melancholy without self-pity. At its worst, see those little shits at the aforementioned house party, led by James Franco's giggling little brother, whom Roger castigates with that Baby Mozart put-down and numerous confused, out-of-touch references to My Space and Facebook. Even here, obnoxious as the arrogant twits are, they don't seem to fit into the generalizations Roger imposes upon them ("I read an article about you guys once...").

Above all, the film is touched and challenged by "mumblecore", a movement of primarily video-based young filmmakers employing handheld camerawork, improvisations, and collaborative filmmaking to examine relationships in the viral era. (They don't like the term "mumblecore", but they're stuck with it, like the beatniks and Indians before them.) While navel-gazing and at times amateurish, the mumblers emanated a freshness that was needed in this age of increasingly expensive indies and ever-slicker blockbusters - besides, how many other directors under thirty come to mind? How about under-thirty-five, industry stalwart Jason Reitman aside? Anyway, Gerwig, after starring in Baumbach protege Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs, became the poster girl for the group, and her presence here is an indication of the director's regard for the kids. The film also features Mark Duplass, one half of the mumbler's quirky answer to the Farelly Brothers (the new Duplass movie, a relatively mainstream if odd-looking comedy starring John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill, was advertised before the feature). Baumbach's style remains his own, though the sun-dappled close-ups and casual aesthetic seem reminiscent of no-budget mini-dramas. Occasionally he cribs a page from the mumblers for satirical effect: as when he has Gerwig share a rambling, seemingly improvised weird anecdote about a sexual tryst and a baffled, disgusted Stiller storms out of the room, grumbling, "What the hell was the point of that story?"

The film concludes on an ambivalent, half-finished note that recalls the work of Andrew Bujalski (by far the most talented filmmaker of the young generation). It's not out of character for Baumbach either, of course - both Squid and the Whale (which, preceding mumblecore, seemed informed by another contemporary filmmaker, Wes Anderson) and Margot at the Wedding finish with uncertain anticipation rather than full-on resolution. Yet (spoilers ahead - if you can call them that) this can be counted as a happy ending, lacking Margot's bitter aftertaste (we can't imagine mother and son are suddenly going to be happy after all the misery we've witnessed) or Squid's melancholy grandeur (the museum display offers a metaphor, but certainly no solutions). In Florence's cozy apartment, sunlight filtering through the blinds, the lovers finally seem to have mellowed out. Florence is still recovering from an abortion and the effects of anesthesia linger across her tired expression, while Roger has just nixed an adventurous jaunt to Australia in the company of his chatty, adolescent step-niece, and is still coming down from the adrenaline surge accompanying another escape. They both seem perfectly content, for the moment anyway, to be where they are. "Life is wasted on the living," Roger remarks bitterly in an early, amusing scene but while the film doesn't exactly fall for the glib notion that "life gets better out of forty" it finally observes that maybe it can, if we want it to.

100 Classics of Silent Cinema

2010-03-28T08:00:00.000-04:00

Allan Fish has today concluded his ambitious countdown of the one hundred best films from the early years of cinema. You can catch up with the full selection here and read his entry on the #1 film here. Don't forget to take the poll either - myself, I'm working double-time to catch up with and re-watch classic silents over the next two weeks so I can feel up to participating. But even if you don't have time for reappraisals or first-time screenings, let your voice be heard! The more the merrier.

Apropos of nothing, my review of Greenberg will be up on Lost in the Movies later today, linked here tomorrow. And by the way, merry Palm Sunday - as a lapsed Catholic, I fondly recall this holiday. I always enjoyed the theatrics of reading the liturgy aloud in church, and of all those palm fronds waving in the air.

New on DVD: Brothers

2010-03-24T08:00:00.048-04:00

by Joel Bocko

At first, all you can notice is how damn young everyone looks. Capt. Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) has the bearing and attitude of a grown man, but looks small and scrawny when uniformed as a Marine. He and his wife Grace (Natalie Portman) have two daughters, both well out of toddlerhood, and yet when they shepherd them through the living room or seat them at the dinnertable, they look like nothing else so much as two kids playing house. Sam's brother Tommy (Jack Gyllenhaal) is the only one here who really looks his age - yet as if to compensate for this physical maturity, he's the most immature in behavior, picking fights with his dad, getting drunk, banned from driving the car as if he's a 16-year-old who's been grounded. These characters hover uneasily between the youthfulness of their appearance (and perhaps the youthfulness of the roles we associate them with) and the gravity of the world they inhabit. The three characters - posed like Calvin Klein models in Brothers' weird poster - must face death, trauma, war, and the disintegration of a marriage, while raising children and trying to maintain their own sanity. They do this, or attempt to do this, as adults; this is one of the first movies to treat the Millennial generation as grown-ups.

The film essentially updates The Deer Hunter to the 21st century, turning that film's hunting buddies into actual siblings, and splitting the De Niro duties so that one gets tortured overseas by the enemy (albeit without any touches as potent or inflammatory as Deer Hunter's Russian Roulette) while the other romances the wife of a missing friend - or in this case, brother. Sam is preparing for another tour of Afghanistan just as Tommy is finishing up a prison sentence for armed robbery. When Sam's helicopter is downed and he is presumed dead by the Corps, Tommy starts spending more time with Grace and they grow closer (initially, she despised him), even sharing a joint and a kiss at one point. Meanwhile, Sam is alive but not well - captured by the Taliban, he endures an event that will probably shatter him for the rest of his life. Returning home, he's like a grinning skeleton, never quite there - a million miles away, until the moment when he'll snap.

There's something about Brothers that sticks with you, in spite of its flaws. The film contains some committed, sensitive performances (at least once it gets over its first-act jitters) and is able to sidestep some, if not all, of the melodrama inherent in its premise; though Jim Sheridan hasn't exactly been a model of restraint in the past, he keeps the drama simmering at a slow boil this time. Even the explosions of violent rage manage to skirt the edge, bypassing the point of no return at which they would succumb to trite histrionics (although they skate darn close, perhaps too close for some). The screenplay is from David Benioff, whose post-9/11 adaptation of his own novel 25th Hour displayed a skill for tapping into America's national trauma with intense, personal dramas, and it's filled with minor scenes which accumulate and central set pieces which work subtly rather than bombastically. Regardless of these virtues, the movie never quite coheres; despite strong moments and some deep resonances, it feels ill-fitting, hastily assembled, a bit lost and disconnected, like Maguire's character when he returns home from war.

Maybe it's that very quality, that sense of being home yet far from home at the same time, which both hinders the movie and gives it strength. I suppose it needs a firmer foundation to pull off this sense of alienation without losing its bearings - but either something went wrong in the cutting, and the potent material was mismanaged, or the filmmakers got to the editing room and found that they didn't quite have what they wanted. The crosscutting between the war and the homefront siphons some of the former's power; while the footage of "Afghanistan" (which according to online information is actually California or New Mexico) is striking, the scenes don't meet the threshhold war films from Saving Private Ryan to The Hurt Locker have maintained in order to seem "realistic." And scenes don't carry a charge from one to the next, any energy dissipates and must be kindled anew. Apparently, the movie is a remake of a Danish film, reputed to be its superior - perhaps something ineffable got lost in translation.

Yet if the movie doesn't work as a whole, it does work in spurts, and sometimes that's more satisfying, at least for the moment. What Brothers does have is a sense of life lived offscreen, or better yet an onscreen life which does not seem limited to surfaces or hewing to some superficial structure; this is a quality so rare in contemporary films that it's certainly worth celebrating. The two little girls (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare) manage to mug convincingly, giving the sort of hyper yet naturalistic performances that most directors don't even bother to seek. (Sheridan also solicited winning performances from children in his 2002 In America.) The film has atmosphere, and its characters do exude a sense of history - one believes that their pasts extended before the film began and while the dialogue explaining these pasts is often clumsy and forced, the actors and the direction often sell us nonetheless.

The actors may be miscast, but they give the roles their all, despite appearances. If Maguire is too skinny to convince as a jarhead early on, his wirey intensity is just right for the physically and mentally scarred man who returns, and his gaunt fury and confusion is something to behold. Portman is lovely; she hasn't seemed so heartbreakingly attractive in years. If it's difficult to accept her as the mother of two elementary school-age girls, her warmth in the role (perhaps she should play these sorts of parts more often) compensates for any implausibility. At one point, Tommy teases Grace, telling her he thought she'd be more of an N*SYNC fan; it's startling to realize that mature, adult characters in a movie are still young enough for that reference to be apt. For those in a certain age group, the observation may seem poignant, and may resonate in a way that movies (with their celebrations of perpetual adolescence) rarely do. One doesn't have to be a war veteran or ex-prisoner to understand this. Anyone who has looked about a family gathering, realizing with shock that one's own generation has now taken up the reigns, can relate to this wistful sensation: of the immediate past being close enough to see, yet severed from the present by some irreparable divide (shown in the film when Grace gazes at the innocent portrait of her and her husband as teenagers in the nineties).

Taking the wide view, then, there's just something "off" about Brothers: a forced situation, stilted dialogue, dramatic lumpiness. No wonder some audiences recoiled at the more overwrought passages (see reports of laughter on the IMDb message board) and the awards groups passed it over, even while celebrating far more limited, yet more cohesive, movies like The Blind Side. But it's a film of little moments, passages, gestures, that click. Add it to that recent surge of movies which, like Rip Van Winkle stretching his arms and yawning after what seemed to be a brief nap, look about and realize that years have passed by, and we and the world have changed in the meantime. Though I've criticized the script, I suspect that writer Benioff had some hand in this accomplishment - after all, 25th Hour was the only movie of the Zeroes to capture the mood between September 11 and Iraq. That film existed in the calm just before the storm (indeed, that film ends with Edward Norton's character going off to prison, while this one begins with Jake Gyllenhaal getting out). Brothers exists in the aftermath, its children-men (and women) wandering through the rubble, trying to orient themselves. Messiness aside, Brothers is worth seeing, if only to catch glimpses of our own reflections in the scattered shards.

Also hitting disc yesterday: The Blind Side, which I reviewed last week, and Fantastic Mr. Fox which will be reviewed eventually in my "Best of the 21st Century?" series on Wonders in the Dark.

Elephant

2010-03-23T09:59:00.000-04:00

#51 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.

Of the two most cited interpretations, the most frequent reading of Gus Van Sant’s enigmatic title holds that it refers to “the elephant in the room,” which nobody wants to talk about. Yet this is facile – was it really true that nobody wanted to talk about Columbine in the wake of the 1999 high school massacre? Was this true even beforehand, given that Columbine was actually the climax to a spate of school shootings, all of which received ample press coverage, rather than the kickoff? Furthermore, what exactly is it that’s not being discussed? Social isolation? The influence of the media? Video games? Gun control? Violence in America? Not only were all of these issues seized upon after the killings, but Van Sant makes a point out of eschewing all these explanations in his film (giving each of them a bit of airtime before moving on to other matters). So no, there’s no elephant in the room here, and if there is, no one’s ignoring it. The second reading, the one that it seems Van Sant actually intended, references the allegory of the blind men and the elephant, each touching a different part of the body and varying wildly in how they describe the animal. Likewise, Van Sant’s meditative, almost cruelly cool film is, at 81 minutes, too vast to take in from one perspective – which is not to say it’s particularly deep.

Continue Reading »

"Spring was moving in the air above"

2010-03-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

Saturday was the first day of spring. In honor of the equinox, in lieu of a longer post, and in anticipation of my Wind in the Willows series (which I'm about to commence work on, having re-read the book): an excerpt, a continuation of my vernal greetings one year ago...

"Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged , and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, 'Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

'This is fine!' he said to himself. 'This is better than whitewashing!' The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side."

Now playing: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2010-03-21T10:43:00.002-04:00

by Joel Bocko

When The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens, investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) has just been convicted of libeling a wealthy industrialist, the reporter's muckraking exposé having itself been exposed as a fraud. Blomkvist knows he was set up, that phony sources and fabricated evidence were used to lure him into a trap, but his sense of stoic resignation is palpable: he refuses an appeal, leaves his publication, even breaks off a relationship with a colleague. And then what does he do? With six months before his sentence begins, six months to relax or reflect or maybe run away? He accepts a job in a barren, isolated region dominated by a sinister, imposing family corporation called the Vanger Group. One of the Vangers, now a very old man, has a mission for Blomkvist: find out what happened to his teenage niece who disappeared in the sixties, and whose case has remained unsolved for forty years. With only half a year before he's behind bars, Blomkvist throws himself into work once again. That's dedication, and its very best, The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo is immersed in this very sense of dedication.

In a way, dedication is the strongest thing the film has going for it. Based on the bestselling mystery novel of the same name - a mystery tale which transcended the boundaries of its genre by garnering widespread acclaim and popular enthusiasm (a Hollywood adaptation waits in the wings) - the movie offers few clues as to why the book has been such a massive hit. Don't get me wrong; it's absorbing, very well-made, thoughtful - but it also does nothing to challenge, betray or even exemplify the conventions of the thriller. At least as presented onscreen, the story is a solid procedural, with interesting characters and a notable theme (the original Swedish title of the movie is Men Who Hate Women). It's a bit of a slow burn at first, the hook is only mildly enticing, and some unnecessarily brutal sex scenes risk alienating us right away. But that dedication of Blomkvist, of the titular female, young hacker Lisabeth Salandar (Noomi Rapace), who joins Blomkvist in his investigation, and of the film itself eventually win us over, drawing us into the mystery and, more importantly, the hunt for its answers.

The missing Vanger is named Harriet; she babysat Blomkvist when he was a toddler, but otherwise the two have no connection and so the hunt proceeds across the distance of time. The film enjoys playing with the past, allowing old media - tourist snapshots, newspaper photographs, newsreel footage - to interplay with high-speed digital media, in a crime-busting collaboration. Amidst all the Ingmar Bergman references (a snarling dockside fight that recalls Hour of the Wolf, intergenerational warfare that recalls all his films, gloomy weather and isolated countryside - or does that just come with the Swedish territory?) there are unmistakable nods to Blow-Up - this time the detection involves not just a single frame enlarged repeatedly, but a slew of other, discarded frames discovered and explored. When Salandar hacks Blomkvist's e-mail to send him clues - involving obscure, brutal Biblical verses about punishing women - he invites her to take part in the investigation, and she joins him in his cabin.

What Lisabeth Salandar brings to the hunt is not only her formidable detective skills and photographic memory, but also a simmering, bruised connection to the very meat of the mystery. As it becomes increasingly clear that the case revolves around sexual and physical abuse of women (a series of vicious, bloody murders become clues in the larger investigation), Salandar's emotional wounds become more pronounced, seeking their cure in revenge. We've already seen her endure and then overcome the advances and eventual exploitation of a legal guardian, who threatens the parolee with bad reports and financial withholding if she does not submit to his perversions. Here, the movie may overstep its bounds: there are two sequences, not graphic (no body parts are shown) but among the most brutal I've ever seen, particularly the second scene. What purpose do they serve? By the end of the film, it becomes clear that they are meant to give us raw, unfettered appreciation of what Lisabeth Salandar - and others like her - have endured. In this sense the movie is not about "men who hate women" but the women who are hated.

Yet this could be conveyed with suggestion, or even a few shocking moments of brutality. The length and cruelty of the two rape scenes (and the sadistic vengeance which follows them) seem excessive, and they don't really belong in a movie which is otherwise a conventional thriller (indeed, before we come to accept that the story has its heart in the right place - if we do come to accept this, given the lurid draw of some of the final revelations - these early scenes seem merely exploitative). The resolution of the mystery (spoiler alert; skip to next paragraph if you don't want any clues) also feels like a missed opportunity, the lines between good and bad in the family remaining sharply drawn - it would have been more provocative and honest if the abuse had been presented not as the activity of several warped individuals in the clan, but pervasive. Imagine if the lovable octogenarian uncle had also molested Harriet? Wouldn't that have been enough to finally crush her spirit, and cause her to flee Sweden forever? Yet the closing reunion scene short-circuits this possibility, and lands us in the realm of safe escapism, in which evil is vanquished and the demons put to rest. The final punchline, with Salandar in a blonde wig, absconding with millions of dollars on a tropical island completes this effect; it feels like something out of a James Bond movie, or perhaps Silence of the Lambs.

That last reference is telling - with its dark atmosphere, focus on a female investigator, and exploration of a serial killer's demented psyche, the book, at least, has been compared to the celebrated Thomas Harris novel and its film adaptation. Morally, despite its excesses, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is far superior to Silence, which tut-tutted the depravity of Buffalo Bill but tittered at the upscale murderousness of Hannibal the Cannibal (oh, but his victims are just so gauche!). When Girl conflates social graces with murderous impulses, through a flashback at the end of the movie, it effectively makes bourgeois cordiality seem cold-blooded, rather than cold-bloodedness seem tastefully admirable. Dramatically, however, Girl loses out to Silence, the latter with its made-for-the-tabloid nicknames and female-detective hook; one can see exactly why Silence broke out of its niche, whereas with Girl it's harder to detect.

After seeing the movie in theaters, I perused the novel in a bookstore and was able to draw some hasty, but interesting, conclusions. Firstly, the prose of the book appears to be clearer and simpler than the film's brooding, dense texture. Even as it casts aside subplots (the book seems to have Blomkvist take a Vanger daughter up on her offer of romance), the film does not convey the same straight-ahead, humming clarity I glimpsed on the page. Secondly, those brutal early scenes work much better in the book. The descriptions are not sparing, but they are brief and to the point. Without leaving too much to the imagination, they do not indulge. They tell us, brutally, effectively, what happened, and then they move on. The movie should have followed this approach. Finally, and as I suspected, the novel appears to further explore the accumulating anecdotes and details of the depraved Vanger clan, as only a novel can. This may be something the movie is missing, one reason why it seemed, however well-done, disappointingly straightforward. You can't quite get lost in it, the way the material seems to demand. When Blomkvist lays all those photos out across the wall of his cabin, fashioning an impromptu, rotten family tree, we want to pause and look at each branch in turn, suspecting that there are numerous tales to be unravelled in each twig and bud.

Nonetheless, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is worth seeing. In the end it reminded me of Roger Ebert's incisive observation about Blow-Up, "We are happy when we are doing what we do well, and unhappy seeking pleasure elsewhere." The characters in this movie are never really happy - Lisabeth Salandar certainly isn't - but they come closest when they are immersed in their work. The film respects this and follows suit, resulting in an enjoyable, thought-provoking thriller. Sometimes, dedication pays off.

And then there were 10...

2010-03-19T06:43:00.000-04:00

Today on Wonders in the Dark, Allan Fish kicks off the final stretch of his ambitious Top 100 silents countdown with The Battleship Potemkin at #10. What movies will fill the final nine slots - especially with such classics as Pandora's Box, Intolerance, The Gold Rush, and The Birth of a Nation already accounted for? Be sure to visit and found out, as the countdown finishes over the next week and a half. And don't forget to vote in the poll for your own picks.

To catch up with the rest of the selections (including the top 25 for the 30s, and the top 50 for every decade since - except for the one just passed, which Allan will be tackling next), visit the round-up on my blog.

New on DVD: The Blind Side

2010-03-17T16:12:00.013-04:00

by Joel Bocko

[Although The Blind Side does not appear on disc until next week, I'm reviewing it now, in the absence of new releases I wanted to write about. Next week I will review one or two other films released on March 23.]

"The Charge of the White Brigade"

In a clip that received continuous play on Oscar night - featured on both the Barbara Walters special and as a favorite of the Awards broadcast when highlighting the nominated Blind Side - Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), a blonde, beautiful, sassy Southern housewife with wealth and attitude to spare, confronts several young black men sitting on a stoop in the projects. Leaning forward after one of them calls her "bitch," she stares him down and fires back with everything in her arsenal. She lets him know that if he comes to her side of town, he's in for a world of hell, that she lunches with the D.A. on a regular basis, and that she's a full-fledged member of the NRA who's always packing. Earlier we've seen the sinister youth threaten gentle giant Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), Leigh Anne's adopted son, with his own gun, all while boasting about his criminal operations and salivating over Leigh Anne and her teenage daughter. Yet now, confronted with a woman in heels, surrounded in his own territory, he cowers. Whatever his own prowess and presence in the ghetto, he can't touch the threat of a pistol-packin' mama with an open line to the enforcers of political authority. And how are we supposed to feel about this? After all, as the young man is written, he deserves to be threatened and "put in his place." Yet the racial elements are impossible to ignore - as is the reflection that the film must know this, but proceeds anyway, without acknowledging the diatribe's deeper implications.

It's an extremely unsettling scene, and as such a fascinating one - and its fascinations appear periodically throughout the movie, which is best appreciated as inadvertent pop sociology and perhaps minor entertainment if you can cast aside desires for subtlety and complexity. By now we're used to Hollywood's demonstrations of white liberal guilt (usually insensitive and condescending) but rarely in the past twenty years has a racially-themed movie so unapologetically celebrated white paternalism - or, in this case, maternalism. The film's Best Picture nomination is an immense head-scratcher; while production values and visual competence are adequate, in terms of storytelling and characterization, Blind Side is virtually indistinguishable from a Disney Channel movie-of-the-week. Sandra Bullock, this year's Oscar winner, is fine as Leigh Anne, which is to say she fully embodies the very limited part; rather than attempt to stretch the boundaries of the by-the-numbers screenplay, she builds a cozy nest within those parameters and digs in.

And yet it's "based on a true story." Michael Oher was a real kid, homeless and quiet, taken in by a white family who gave him security, luxuries, and a path to play football in college and eventually the NFL. Perhaps the most illuminating take on what exactly the movie is trying to accomplish would be to compare book and film side by side, see where the changes were made, and deduce why this was so. Meanwhile, we can only reflect upon what's onscreen. Occasionally there are tremors, like glass vibrating hundreds of miles from an earthquake, to reflect some consciousness of the Tuohys' human flaws (they must have had some, right?) or, more importantly, Michael's own point of view (the Village Voice observed that his dialogue, taken together, would probably constitute about two pages of the total script). There are uncomfortable moments when the family seems spoiled or smug in its nouveau-riche cocoon, but the film always errs on the side of accepting them as eccentrics and never questioning their attitudes or lifestyle. Whenever the film steps forward with an ambiguous action, there's a reciprocal gesture or reverse shot to help it go down easier (usually this softening of the blows comes from Michael, whose sheepish grin or warm obliviousness lets us know it's all ok).

Hearing about Blind Side's controversy before seeing it, I thought the claims about its "racism" must be overblown. In fact the movie combines two ways of dealing with race in America, to ill effect. On the one hand, it attempts to ignore color: Leigh Anne adopts, coddles, and teases Michael as if he's the same as the rest of her kids (while the dramatic difference in size and shade constantly reminds us otherwise). She's supposed to be allowed uncomfortable behavior - like when she threatens castration after he looks at two passing (white) girls - because, hey, she'd say that to her white son, so why treat the black one any differently? Yet at others times, race and class are front and center; when Leigh Anne meets with Michael's drug-addled birth mother or confronts his neighbors in that aforementioned scene, the film can't look at the other way (or close its eyes, as Michael's mother once told him to do whenever she was doing something bad - an escape hatch the movie takes as its ethos). How the screenplay deals with these confrontations is telling; the situation always redounds to Leigh Anne's benefit, either by exhibiting her compassion or displaying her resolve (even if this involves an unapologetic resort to white supremacy).

The narrative comes closest to treating the family and their aims ambivalently at its climax: an NCAA spokeswoman raises the possibility that the Tuohys were acting out of self-interest, rather than benevolence, when they took Michael in, and the young man is heartbroken. Indeed, his new parents are ardent Ole Miss boosters and they aren't shown pushing him hard about his grades until he needs that football scholarship. The movie finally raises the intriguing possibility that there's more in it for Leigh Anne than just being a good Christian but it quickly shoots down this ambiguity and returns to its "Seventh Heaven" vision of familial harmony. Did the thought really never occur to Michael before? Indeed, what was he thinking all this time? The movie never lets us know. How compelling it would have been if we could have experienced both his hope and fear, sympathized with the family's good-hearted naivitee even as we were allowed to cringe at their insensitivity. If we ourselves could have wondered what ulterior motives lurked in the background - not just of the Tuohys, but of Michael, who is always allowed to be so inhumanly goodhearted that he never seems tempted to take advantage of the situation. And didn't he ever, maybe only once, want to punch his twerpy little brother/trainer "S.J." in the face, just to shut him up? I know I did.

None of this would have mitigated the possibility of a "feel-good" film or one which embraced the Tuohy's gesture. Indeed, it would have strengthened these qualities, because they would have been earned, instead of handed to us like one of the family's ubiquitous fast food meals, pre-wrapped and paid for (Mr. Tuohy owns eighty-five franchises in the area). But then the movie isn't really keen on "earning" (the Tuohys are Republicans but more Kennedyesque than Reaganite in their social vision): Michael is handed his opportunities wrapped in a big bow and expected to behave himself in return, displaying gratitude by toeing the line. His final essay for school, the one which wins him a B+, an acceptable GPA, and admittance to Ole Miss, is on Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade." And what is his interpretation, one fully endorsed by his dad (who takes a break from sitting on the couch, watching basketball, to extol the virtues of stoic self-sacrifice and dignified duty)? That sometimes one can't ask questions and must do as one's told. Under the voiceover, we see images of Michael's worlds - the sequestered Christian private school he attends, the luxurious Tuohy home, the cluttered streets of the projects (pictured under the intonation of the "Valley of Death").

The film's message seems to be that if we keep our heads down, if we do as we're told without asking why, maybe good things will happen. It's a passive moral, and one peculiarly un-American (though not un-Christian). Roughly speaking, the same exact story could have been slightly fleshed out, shot and performed in a more ambiguous way, and allowed in a few more perspectives (namely Michael's) and it would have been ten times more effective - both as drama and as a promotion of good deeds, if the movie still wanted to draw that conclusion. However, the movie has its own "blind side" and it's not just race (towards which it's intermittently nearsighted), or even class (to which it is functionally blind, recognizing disparity but having absolutely no interest in addressing its very human origins or perpetuation). No, The Blind Side is primarily blind to humanity, to the complex shades of human nature, which it inadvertently suggests from time to time before running scared in the other direction. Where's the recognition that good and bad can go hand-in-hand, that security brings its own discomforts, that regret and ambivalence accompany ascendency? The light is always accompanied by the dark. Tennyson may have promoted order, celebrated submission, and subordinated individual judgement and conscience, but at least he recognized that much.

The Posters of David Lynch

2010-03-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

My latest DVD review will be going up this afternoon at Lost in the Movies. In the mean time, stroll through the strange world of David Lynch. Most of the posters are actually not that weird, though the best of them suggest something intangible and haunting beneath the surface.

Summer Hours

2010-03-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

[#48 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.]

_________

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

_________

“I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

_________

“Poor Mole stood alone in the road, his heart torn asunder and a big sob gathering, gathering, gathering, somewhere low down inside him, to leap up to the surface presently, he knew, in passionate escape. … Meanwhile, the wafts from his old home pleaded, whispered, conjured, and finally claimed him imperiously. He dared not tarry longer within their magic circle. With a wrench that tore his very heartstrings, he set his face down the road and followed submissively in the track of the Rat, while faint, thin little smells, still dogging his retreating nose, reproached him…”

. . . . .

Summer Hours, The Decline and Fall of the French Bourgeoisie, Three Generations. Olivier Assayas’ absorbing and poignant film is first an observation of life’s fleeting moments (one might say it’s more observant than the characters who experience these moments, without really appreciating them). It is also a wailing elegy to a France crumbling away in the globalized world, letting its culture and its people dribble from its borders like sand from a smashed hourglass. And finally the movie is a portrait of one family, three generations (old, middle-aged, young) and three siblings in that middle group (brother, sister, brother), who slowly and willingly lose their country home, and with it their fragile communal identity. These two triumvirates, the generations and siblings, are each anchored in the center – chronological in the case of the age group (those in the middle of their life dominate the running time of the film), geographic in the case of the brothers and sisters (the deceased matriarch’s eldest son lives in France and tries to hold the family together, while his sister flees west to New York, and his little brother flees east to China). Alas, as is so often the case, the center does not hold.

Continue Reading »

Where the Wild Things Are

2010-03-15T07:00:00.000-04:00

To a certain extent, great movies defy explanation. They pop up in the least expected place, ignoring conventional rules and expectations - they defy relevance (a quality I've just finished celebrating in another review) in the name of a deeper resonance. These films can often be ungainly, hard to swallow - they strike us at odd angles and approach us on their own grounds, not on ours. I think Where the Wild Things Are may very well be a great movie. It's certainly a visionary piece of work, highly original and unique, unlike anything else I saw in 2009. In this sense of difference, of vision, of effectiveness on its own terms, it reminds me of two (of course) very different movies: Inglourious Basterds and Antichrist. Together, they form a trilogy of challenging, rich, rewarding movies, all of which I had numerous problems with. Yet I could eventually and only embrace as examples of artistic accomplishment - among the most singular of this epoch.

Wild Things exists both as an aesthetic experience and a meditation on resonant themes: a combination most great narrative films employ. The screenplay, by Jonze and novelist David Eggers, sensitively "updates" Maurice Sendak's classic - respecting the power of the original while setting out on its own ground, and thus avoiding both of the traps most high-profile 00s adaptations have fallen prey to. At its core is a simple, eternal story: that of a child watching his innocence and exuberance slowly dissolve into the melancholy mists of pre-adolesence. He stomps around in his wolf suit, engages in goofy dances to make his mother laugh, acts more childish than his age should probably allow, but it's clear these are nostalgic gestures rather than unconscious actions, a display of imaginative naivitee to conceal the pain inside.

The movie creates several correspondences between the real-world opening and the surreal dreamscape of the Wild Things - a fort is crushed just like Max's snow igloo; a female monster runs off with her friends after the fashion of Max's sister; in climactic moments, tokens of affection are broken in both worlds - less as an act of hostility towards the original recipient of said tokens, than as a masochistic slaying of whatever was tender and guileless in the giver. Brilliantly, the movies does not spell out its central theme, the most important correspondence in the movie: between Max's relationship to Carol, a brooding, sensitive, sometimes brutal beast, and Max's connection to his absent father. The only sign of that missing paternal presence is a globe in Max's bedroom, which reads, "To Max, Owner of this World, love Dad." We never meet the man, but feel we get to know him through Carol (who spends the film yearning for a female friend grown distant; with a power that would dwarf a grown man, he lashes out in a childlike rage). The sense of displacement and repression only adds to the resonance.

Carol is a brilliant creation, a collaboration between James Gandolfini's sad, tentative, yet authoritative vocals and the expert mimicry of Jim Henson's Creature Shop (and, presumably, some digital enhancement to enhance the facial expressiveness). It's one of the great performances of the year; indeed all of the monsters are wonders to behold, fully realized characters crafted from singular traits and yet basted in larger-than-life warmth. By comparison, some of the human performances are a tad weak: Max Records is everything he needs to be as the star, but Catherine Keener's delivery is sometimes stilted (though her sensitive features work wonders in close-ups), and a classroom lecture about the end of the solar system feels forced and awkward.

The film skates just this side of mawkish cutesiness, going whole-hog for the childlike indie mood of current hip culture, with its Karen O vocals, earnestly Peter Pan-like nostalgia, and quirky sense of humor. It works, in part, because of the purity of its vision and because of Gandolfini's weighty presence - at times the actor's voice reminds us of another narcissistic boy-man who loomed large over the cultural zeitgeist, one prone to romanticism but hardly a sentimentalist. In his bruised self-pity and ferocious violence, Gandolfini makes the stretches of desert, wood, and beach on this magical island seem not so very far from the New Jersey Expressway. This aura of brooding darkness gives the film just the edge it needs to prevent it from sliding into the cozily blinkered worldview that has characterized creative youth culture in the past decade.

In the era of CGI, when Avatar's splashy debut is intriguing but frustratingly distancing spectacle, Spike Jonze has crafted a work with actual texture. While the film incorporates computer animation, it as an element in the overall design, a touch, not a template. Above all, the movie conveys the quality of being handcrafted - it has soul, and the soul is embodied on the very surface of the movie. This is not to suggest I fell into the movie's bear hug right away. Jonze initially employs a dizzying, off-centered compositional strategy - in the nighttime forest scenes, it's very hard to follow the action with all the whip-pans and blurred shapes moving through dark palettes. But when the camera moves out into the sun-speckled deserts and windswept beaches, it settles down somewhat and we can immerse ourselves in this world, which an IMDb commentator quite simply and effectively tags "a child's kingdom."

It's a kingdom made of sand, and the movie is content to watch, sadly but wisely, as the last granules of the sand castle are swept out to sea with Max's little wooden boat, away from the shore of dreams and into the wide world from whence he escaped, momentarily. Earlier in the movie, Carol takes Max to a secret hiding place, a cave in which he's built a miniature world (the scene plays as a tribute to Jonze's fellow music video auteur, the childlike genius Michel Gondry). "It's gonna be a place," he tells the boy wistfully, "where all the things you wanted to have happen...would happen." Jonze and Eggers are wise enough to flirt with but not indulge this fantasy wish. They allow us to visit a magical world, all the while reminding us of its fragility. Meanwhile reality to bangs at the door like a jackhammer, finally blowing into our sequestered little room, and sucking us back outside. But we remember what we've seen, treasuring the crumbs that we were able to grasp as if they were keys. Keys not only to a place of escape, but a pathway into something deeper than the everyday, where the roots of our vague stirrings and longings are planted. And that's art.

Now playing: Green Zone

2010-03-14T12:44:00.012-04:00

by Joel Bocko

I was in a shopping mall when the first bombs dropped on Baghdad. It was spring break, 2003, and I was vacationing with my family in Florida, taking a breather from an unsatisfying freshman year of college and the incessant march to war that had accompanied it. Always a history buff, I was both fascinated and repelled by what was happening - the notion of invasion never made sense to me and Bush's justifications appeared half-baked at best, yet it was with a sense of relief that the inevitable drumbeat reached its crescendo (if it's going to happen, happen already!). And of course it was a bit overwhelming to experience such a historic moment, and to feel so frustratingly sidelined. That evening, in fact, sitting down for dinner at a plastic restaurant in the middle of touristy mega-plaza, I quizzed my parents about their own brushes with history: where had they been when JFK was killed? When a man walked on the moon?

I think we were onto the fall of the Berlin Wall when our waitress approached and let us know that they had just started bombing Iraq - earlier than expected, since Bush's 48-hour warning to Saddam had only passed a few hours ago, and the bombing had not been expected till tomorrow morning. The young woman also mentioned her twin sister, stationed in Kuwait at that very moment, awaiting the ground invasion. She kept her cool, but looked shaken. That night we huddled around the TV set in the hotel room and watched the eerie orange glow over the ancient city, and I remember feeling irked that, when we flipped the channels, normal programming was on some of the cable networks. The next morning, vacationers splashed and swam in the swimming pool but an uneasy sense of irreality hung in the air. In the lobby of the resort, families - I particularly remember the old men in Hawaiin shirts - gathered around the TV as a Rumsfeld press conference unfolded.

There we were, surrounded by palm trees and the heat, half a world away from the action. It was an unforgettable sensation. Why do I mention all of this, particularly when I try to avoid these autobiographical, anecdotal asides in my pieces? Because Green Zone re-awakened the feelings of that moment: the odd mixture of pride, frustration, confusion, and helplessness that accompanied the most ambitious and dramatic start of an American war since World War II. I saw the film the other night in a crowded multiplex (though the lines forming through the lobby were for the 3-D Alice in Wonderland) and before the movie we were deluged by Avatar advertisements for Coca-Cola and embarrassing promos for Kirstie Alley's self-humiliating new reality show (during which I put my head down and tried to read a book I'd brought along). The audience chatted and chuckled ironically at the self-aggrandizing trash flaunted across the screen, but they fell silent when the screen went to black. The mood was quiet, intent - suddenly we all seemed to be in the same boat again, riding stormy seas, this time headed into the maelstrom instead of huddling on the horizon, trying to squint and glimpse at what was going on inside.

Green Zone is, of course, "just" a movie. A thriller at that, a genre piece. Paul Greengrass has directed United 93 and Bloody Sunday, as well as two of the Bourne films, but Green Zone is closer to the latter than the former in its simultaneously cluttered yet streamlined storytelling, its emphasis on action over tension, its simplification of messy reality into a single narrative. The movie opens with Shock and Awe, and then cuts to Chief Warrant Officer Miller (Matt Damon), whose mission is to find WMDs - so far every operation has turned up, as he puts it, a big "doughnut." Confronting the brass and a slimy government official (Greg Kinnear), he finds himself allied with a grizzly CIA agent in an attempt to track down a Ba'athist general and to determine who the source was for the bad intel. Along the way, we get the greatest hits of the Iraq War: the settling of the titular operations base (there are carefree tourists at this swimming pool too, ironically), the "Mission Accomplished" speech, the press conference announcing the disbanding of the Iraq Army, glimpses of prisoner abuse, night-vision hunts through Baghdad alleyways, the marginalization of the CIA, the ascent of Department of Defense, the compromises of a journalist hungry for inside information.

It's rather startling - and impressive - how Greengrass is able to stuff so much of the early occupation into a single film, one shaped no less like a clear-cut action movie. And it's disconcerting when he takes complete leaps into fiction (spoilers ahead). Why make the Defense lackey a complete fabulist and a killer to boot - isn't the truth, that the government filtered out what it didn't want to hear from the intel, bad enough? (Maybe it's not "dramatic" enough which points to tensions between the film's attempt to comment and its attempt to entertain.) Meanwhile, the movie treats war-torn Baghdad as a zone of complete mobility, in which officers, agents, and Iraqis zip around the smoking metropolis with the ease of, well, characters in a Bourne film. There's no chain of command in evidence, and at times the war seems to be reduced to a mano e mano between Miller and whomever he's confronting at the moment. The film's conclusion takes an Inglourious Basterds cudgel to reality, making Miller a WMD whistleblower and exposing a conspiracy with historical consequences, yet one which never actually happened.

At the same time, much of the film - however compressed and streamlined - does correspond to the facts as we know them: the ill-advised dissolution of Iraqi military, the behind-the-scenes bickering between Defense Department and other government agencies, the poor information on WMDs, the neocon push for instant democracy and early triumph, at the expense of long-term security or cautious strategy. (Interestingly, and commendably, Greengrass does not suggest greed or even power as the operating motive here, but ideology - this comports with my own take on what unfolded.) For those who can't abide a film like JFK, the film will probably still be too far from the truth, but like that film it represents a myth of American history, something I welcome as a cultural-aesthetic enterprise even when I disagree - and this film hews much closer to the broad contours of what happened than Stone's picture.

Yet the thriller mechanics and the drive to capture history don't quite gel. On the one hand, the film is very effective as entertainment: gripping, forward-driving, surprisingly easy to follow given the convoluted plot. Greengrass' legendary aesthetic (as influential and expressive of 00s tropes as - on the opposite end of the spectrum - Wes Anderson's candy-colored nostalgia) is on full display here. In the past I've found his shaky handheld, fast-cut, close-up style to be distracting and, ironically, distancing. It works well in Green Zone; I think it's because he steps back a bit from the action, even as the frame shudders and the angles cut in time to the staccato machine gun fire. The lenses during the final chase scene appear to be wider than those he used in Bourne; hence, we don't get blurred noses and chins in chopped-up fights, but full figures racing through recognizable environments, the colors a blur, yet the overall sense of motion through space clear enough.

Effective as a genre piece, compelling as an exercise in cultural myth-making, Green Zone is nonetheless difficult to digest. Already, it's been decried as anti-American propaganda, while others have celebrated the way its message resonates with them; a few protest in vain that it should be judged as entertainment. When it ended, I was left with the suspicion that, with more distance from the events onscreen I could have enjoyed it primarily as creative work without continually falling back on the historical record and my own memories. The film might have been easier to take then - but I welcome this confusion. Indeed, 2009-10 feels like the end of a cinematic and cultural hibernation. As I wrote at the end of the Bush administration:

"But we have to look elsewhere for a coherent statement on post-9/11, intra-Iraq America. Since this is a movie blog, we might as well look in the annals of cinema, right? Fat chance! If other realms provided disappointments when it came to representing the zeitgeist, the film industry proved itself a disgrace. Not only was it unable to produce more than a handful of major fictional works which even tangentially grappled with the era, it couldn't even come up with many major works to begin with. Comic-book adaptations, endless sequels, turgid remakes - these provided the lifeblood of the most unimaginative decade in Hollywood's history."

This analysis was a bit harsh; in retrospect there were films which bit into, or at least nibbled on, the zeitgeist. But by and large it was a cinema - and a culture at large - of inertia and myopia. Yet last year, movies broke out of their shell and connected again, in terms of both content and/or fluidity and expressiveness of the filmmaking. (On the latter note, arresting and largely non-"relevant" films like Antichrist, Inglourious Basterds, even Where the Wild Things Are seemed somehow more liberated than even the better works of the previous five years, for reasons - if any - hard to pinpoint). In the immediate wake of Hurt Locker's Oscar victory, Green Zone confirms this trend, and I'm thankful for that. Agree with it or disagree with it, the movie has found just enough distance to convey its insights and reactions with clarity. That doesn't mean it's easy to take or "respond" to, just that the sense of relevance and expressiveness is a head-spinning relief. I'd continue to welcome any films which grapple with our times or our mood (to do the latter, no specific topics need to be broached), whether current or recent, conservative or liberal, mythmaking or realistic, or both. On the surface, sitting in a multiplex is not much different than roaming around a shopping mall, but when the lights dim and the screen is illuminated, anything can happen. It's not an end, but it's a start.

For an incisive and far less ambivalent takedown of the film, please visit Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.

New on DVD: Precious and Capitalism: A Love Story

2010-03-11T21:58:00.018-05:00

by Joel Bocko

[Every week, usually on a Wednesday - sorry for the delay this time - I'll review one or several new DVD releases. And every Sunday, I plan to review a new release hitting or lingering in theaters. Stay tuned.]

Among its other bounties, March 9 brought two disparate, yet somehow overlapping, movies to disc. Both Precious and Capitalism: A Love Story are members of that rare breed, the socially-conscious American film. One is a narrative (based, as the advertising campaign never tired of reminding us, on a work of fiction by the author Sapphire), the other a documentary. One takes place twenty years ago (Precious is set in 1987), the other spans decades with the emphasis on how this history has culminated in the present day. And in the same spirit as these other differences, the films employ divergent approaches to their subjects. Precious zeroes in on the travails of its protagonist - the film touches on issues of race, class, sexuality, welfare politics, and education alternatives, but eschews didactic lectures (if not necessarily didactic characters or devices). Capitalism is, by nature, didactic - it's a Michael Moore film, after all, and even if he's toned down his personal appearances he still likes to tell us what he thinks and what he thinks we should think on the soundtrack.

Putting aside these obvious differences, take a moment to look at those posters. Some would suggest that their iconic, blocky form - employing recognizable silhouettes rather than detailed features - represent their explorations of American society: simplistic, broadly defined, perhaps cartoonish. I wouldn't necessarily go that far but the two movies are linked by a certain bombastic, preening thrust - and also by the very fact that they peek beneath the increasingly tattered surface of the American Dream, and can't help but be self-conscious about doing so.

____________

The titular character of Precious is a morbidly obese teenager, a young black woman living in Harlem with her abusive single mother, whose activity consists of verbally whiplashing her daughter, watching television, and collecting welfare checks. Precious has already had one child with her (now absent) father, and another rape has result in her current pregnancy. She's illiterate, and despite her mathematical aptitude she languishes quietly in school (a school staffed mostly by out-of-touch whites). An alternative classroom and sympathetic teacher (Paula Patton) provide Precious with a path out of the ghetto, but not before one more brutal revelation crashes down over her head (much like the TV set thrown down several flights of stairs by the girl's angry mother).

Such a plot suggests soap opera, and director Lee Daniels' flamboyant, baroque direction does not exactly make the film any subtler. Yet Gabourey Sidibe's stoic, unsentimental dignity gives the film weight (no pun intended), and Mo'nique is a tour-de-force in her Oscar-winning role as Precious' mom. Though essentially playing a stereotype, she brings the cliche to ferocious life. The mother's final, made-for-Oscar-clip monologue (if the show had actually used full clips this year) is actually rather brilliant in its go-for-broke melodramatics, given that both actor and character are performing. The rest of the ensemble are lively, lending personality to various too-thin and too-broad characterizations, while Daniels, for all his flashiness, imbues many sequences with warmth.

Precious' real title was supposed to be Push. I'm told that the reason for the name change was quite simple: an action thriller beat the producers to the punch by several months. Hence Push became Precious: based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire. The original title may be the more telling, because Precious' message is in fact a classic American credo: work you way up (these words are even imprinted on a poster which hovers behind the heroine's head in a crucial scene). Precious does not employ this hardheaded attitude in the straightforwardly Reaganesque fashion of, say, The Pursuit of Happyness; however, there's no mistaking the film's distrust of welfare, veneration of education, and impatience with self-pity and anger. While set in 1987, the movie firmly hews to the spirit of the Obama years (or at least the president's election-year ideals): it synthesizes both strains of the culture wars.

While focusing exclusively on women (virtually all of them minorities, many impoverished, and at least one gay), Precious avoids casting stones on external enemies - even the abusive father is never actually seen, except in a passing flashback: the damage has been done, and now the question becomes how to move forward. While celebrating certain programs which employ self-empowerment, it presents Precious' mother - the film's one true, and highly memorable villain - as the incarnation of that old Republican staple, the money-grubbing welfare-queen of legend. And Precious' case worker Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey, misdirected in a part that seems to have been cut down after the fact) is viewed both sympathetically and skeptically. In the end, it's clear that she can't really help Precious and that handouts can only hold one down.

Indeed, Mrs. Weiss' ambiguous race seems to be a signifier of her uncertain status - helper? patronizer? - a questionable tactic, but not an isolated one in this film. Other than Precious and her classmates, all the good-natured black people in the movie are light-skinned, with soft features, for which the film has been criticized. Yet, racial politics aside, it would be going too far to suggest that Precious' advancement is entirely contingent on the good will of others. The best they can do is show her the way and let her walk it; and the film is ultimately uncondescending towards its heroine. If the broad contours of the story and initially offputting stylization of the picture suggest that faceless icon we see on the poster, Precious ultimately fills in the details and allows its characters and their milieu to breathe - when it succeeds, it's due not so much to the social issues it tackles as the way it moves beyond them to seek the human element.

__________

The human element in Michael Moore's films is usually not very hard to find. A great believer in demonstrating his points via "human interest" angles and easily digestible (and entertainingly conveyed) narratives, Moore's approach is similar to that of the mother bird: he chews up the prey and then regurgitates it in softer form so the babies can gobble it up. With Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore may have bitten off more than he could chew. This documentary culminates several trends in the filmmaker's work, and it's hard to see where the director goes from here. Following his breakthrough Roger & Me, his simplest and probably best movie, Moore has grown increasingly ambitious: from the closing of a GE plant to a broader look at corporate culture in the 90s to the entire gun control issue to the war on terror to the decades-long health care crisis, and now, finally, the economic system which has been his real target all along.

Meanwhile, since at least Bowling for Columbine, Moore has tried to temper his talent for agitprop with a more nuanced approach, asking questions that can't necessarily be answered and moving outward to tie issues together rather than condensing multiple topics under a single approach. And since Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has been effacing himself from the screen; no longer is the man with a microphone the central piece on his chessboard - it's just one more tactic in a battery of techniques. These growing tendencies have mixed results; on the one hand, the ambiguity and subtlety are refreshing - Sicko was a much more thoughtful film than Fahrenheit 9/11, which in turn was less shrill than Bowling for Columbine. Yet they also highlight Moore's weaknesses as a traditional documentary filmmaker and remind us that his greatest strength might be making Michael Moore movies, for all their flaws.

Capitalism, which never delivers on its intriguingly ironic subtitle (here's an area where Moore's personal angle would have been more welcome), tries to cover so many bases that it overextends itself. It alternately misses opportunities to craft a throughline narrative - Moore's films, for all their digressions, usually have a firm structure - and tries too hard to stuff complicated events into easily-digestible bits (the stimulus, which has some support on the left, is presented purely as a Wall Street "coup d'etat"). The result is a very messy dish: tasty in bits but lacking in texture, with an indistinguishable mush resulting from the cacophony of ingredients. For a helpful contrast, revisit the 2007 documentary Maxed Out. Though released a year and a half before the meltdown, which it essentially predicted, the film does a much better job of summarizing how we finally got to the spot we're in. It does not eschew specific anecdotes nor goofy found footage - indeed, its one Reagan movie clip trumps the whole half-dozen of Moore's, both for shock effect and relevance. Yet it manages to build towards its conclusion with drive and clarity, chugging along on an engine of moral outrage and fascinated horror. (I reviewed the doc in 2008, as part of my countdown to the election.)

Speaking of that election, Moore includes footage from Obama's victory in the film, which results in Capitalism's most powerful, if largely irrelevant, passage. Even given the disappointments of the president's first year in office, this transformative historical moment still resonates. It also indicates one of the problems with the movie: timing. Earlier sequences, going for Timothy Geithner's jugular, suggest a disillusionment with Obama, yet when we get to the Election Night images, they are presented without irony. Moore even suggests that the president-elect facilitated an uprising of the disenfranchised, resulting in sit-ins and reseizures of foreclosed homes - if the film has any particular "message" it's that we could finally be headed on the path to socialist revolution. Of course, this notion rings hollow in the year since Moore rushed Capitalism to its premature finish. Tea parties, Scott Brown, the bogged-down health care bill, all suggest that the country, whose irritability has undoubtedly been stoked, is moving not in one specific direction but several, including ones which Moore might not like. Obama himself has become identified with the institutional problems he was elected to fix; meanwhile under the regime of stagnant unemployment, the mood is less one of revolutionary discontent than impotent malaise.

As for Moore, what's next? Perhaps an environmental doc, as its global scope might be the one thing to trump his scale here. Should he return to more intimate filmmaking, perhaps in the vein of his 90s TV show "The Big Lie" (cancelled when he was not yet a wealthy, er, capitalist and household name)? Or is the scruffy subversive of Roger & Me no longer compatible with Micheal Moore Inc.? Perhaps Capitalism is Moore's own "End of Cinema" - his ne plus ultra and closing statement, in which the bird finally chokes on his own prey. The doc's worth seeing, as most Moore movies are, but after being alternately provoked, disgusted, and impressed by the likes of Columbine and Fahrenheit, it's somehow disappointing to see what should have been his most inflammatory, ambitious manifesto turn out so underwhelming. Perhaps the volume and inscrutability of our current collapse has rendered even Michael Moore unable to land his punches; if so, we should all be worried.

The Posters of Steven Spielberg

2010-03-10T09:51:00.000-05:00

Today I very much wanted to establish what I hope will be a pattern: every Wednesday, reviews of DVD new release(s) on Lost in the Movies. However, due to miscalculations and the desire to cover several movies in one post, that particular piece will have to wait until tomorrow. Please stay tuned for a review responding to Precious, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Where the Wild Things Are.

In the mean time, another entry in the ongoing series looking at directors' posters. Here we have another filmmaker of iconic status, one of my personal favorites, and one whose posters can do as good a job as any of summarizing the various zeitgeists he worked under. (By the way, there's one version of an early Spielberg film not included, but please check it out.)

Still Life

2010-03-09T14:37:00.000-05:00

First things first, it’s very hard to capture the life of Still Life in a still. There were numerous images that caught my eye while watching the movie, and when it was over I tried to go back and pause certain moments to create a screen-capture on my computer. No dice, though I finally settled on the enticing image seen above. The problem was that all of these impressive visuals contained the essential value of movement, either of the camera, within the frame, or both. One particular sequence seemed ripe for pictures: a quiet scene in which characters dance on a rooftop at dusk, with the half-constructed metropolis blazing in the background and a yawning, unilluminated bridge stretching towards the hilly horizon. Yet each time I paused the simple panning motion, the still did not capture that visceral pull of the visuals, the interruption of a simple sweep somehow stripping the shot of its power.

Continue Reading »

And the winner was...

2010-03-08T06:35:00.000-05:00

After recovering (barely) from an excruciatingly embarrassing opening number (of which we need not say any more), the Academy Awards ceremony proceeded with few surprises last night, but nonetheless proved a satisfying experience. As hosts, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin managed to pull off a surprising amount of the clunkers they were handed (this was one of the worst-written telecasts in the show's history, which is saying something). More importantly, at least within the parameters the nominations set, many of the winners were deserving. Apologists and naysayers alike could agree on the merits of Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges was by consensus the "his-time-has-come" victor for Crazy Heart, and while I'd probably suggest Quentin Tarantino was the "best director" of his bunch, I'm much, much happier to see Kathryn Bigelow win.

Bigelow's victory was the high point of the night, and is sure to be seen as such in the Oscar coverage (at least the coverage unhindered by early deadlines). She was of course the first woman ever to win in this category, a victory only slightly hampered by the fact that every man onstage seemed to be groping her. James Cameron took his ex-wife's victory in stride; and while he never made it to the stage, Avatar swept plenty of awards - except for the top one. I was glad Hurt Locker pulled off its predicted success; while I don't think it was the best picture of the year (Antichrist probably deserves that honor) or even necessarily of the nominees (the often frustrating Inglourious Basterds just may look that way in retrospect, though I'm more comfortable calling Tarantino the "best director" than the movie the "best picture") - but it's the right Best Picture for its time. The greatest movies don't need Oscars, anyway.

Nor, for that matter, do the greatest personages, though it's nice to see them receive the recognition eventually (and belatedly). Which brings us to the biggest blemish on last night's broadcast (and I'm not talking about the this-is-my-first-appearance-in-a-school-play of the Twilight tots nor the intervention-staging of the Best Actor/Actress presentations). Where were the honorary awards? We know, of course. We were told, very briefly and superficially, that the reception of these awards happened off-screen and that Roger Corman, Gordon Willis, and Lauren Bacall, among others, were honored. We even got to see brief snippets of the ceremony, which the show's producers seemed to think was enough, returning us quickly to the more important matters of who's wearing what, stale repartee, and interpretive dances of The Hurt Locker (question: was that guy supposed to represent the Bomb Disposal outfit or a walking IED?).

An institution which ignores its own history deserves only scorn. I'm sure Willis and Corman, as a behind-the-scenes craftsman and B movie auteur, respectively, don't expect to be openly celebrated in the limelight beside vapid celebrities and the like. But Bacall? Couldn't Hollywood have honored one of its leading lights, a woman who stole scenes from Bogie, openly and prominently? What must it have felt like to be the first star to be palmed off in this manner? That she didn't put her lips together and blow the Academy a raspberry is to her credit, and an indication of the grace and gravitas the industry's public face was once capable of.

For those who missed it, I rounded up all my reviews of Oscar-nominated films (as well as the reviews of several others) on Wonders in the Dark this weekend. Including a couple recent reviews of Bright Star and Inglourious Basterds.

Inglourious Basterds

2010-03-07T08:00:00.005-05:00

by Joel Bocko

Inglourious Basterds' hook is clever, canny, and seemingly irresistible. A squadron of Jewish-American soldiers, led by a gentile backwoodsmen (is there any other kind?), drops behind enemy lines in 1944 Germany and sets about killing as many Nazis as possible. While Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads his titular squadron on an Apache-inspired campaign of terror against the Germans, a quiet, beautiful young cinema owner endures the unwanted attention of a chipper Aryan sharpshooter. Unexpectedly, these overtures lead to a meeting with Goebbels, a tense dinner with the man who killed her family (he does not recognize her) and the opportunity to exact retribution on her kin's murderers. The climax sees the Basterds' official mission unknowingly collide with Shoshana's personal revenge plot, as a propaganda print and occupied theater goes up in flames, and the Fuhrer goes down in a flurry of bullets. Yes, the movie's hooky all right, but in the finished film the goofy high concept (Nazi-hunting Jewish guerrillas) is probably the least interesting element; one frequently wonders if Tarantino couldn't have made a better film by foregoing the cartoonish central device and withholding the residual hipster winking (dramatically toned down, but still a dominant element in the director's style).

The very best sequences in Basterds don't need postmodern parody or black comic nihilism. They are about character, and wit, and tension - these are passages that would be at home in a Melville or Hitchcock film. Primarily I'm thinking of two scenes. There's the initial visit of the jovial "Jew hunter" with his ridiculous pipe (that rare touch that strikes just the right note of whimsical exaggeration), loquaciously wearing down a French farmer hiding "enemies of the state" beneath his floorboards. And then the ingenious drinking game in a cellar tavern, which begins with playing cards on foreheads and winds up with genitals blasted all over the cobblestone. These scenes are often diabolically clever, wildly referential, and ruthlessly merciless. Yet they could easily be all of these things, and still exist within a moral and/or "realistic" framework. What does Tarantino achieve by eschewing the acute moral viewpoint of a Melville or the dry sense of humor of Hitchock (whose subversive jokes were subtle)?

Well, for one thing, a number of excellent moments in Basterds (and they are mostly moments) do rely on Tarantino's self-conscious grasp of film history, the winding relationship of pleasure and plot, and a wild bending of tone and style (plus the director's trademark willingness to slaughter plot and character for effect - i.e. spoilers ahead). For example, the burning of the theater as Shoshana's face fills the screen, the revelation of her Jewishness to the Nazi audience at best coequal to the bevy of associations arising from her gigantic blue visage - and the sheer kick of the visuals taken in isolation. Or how about Shoshana's death, only a few minutes before her larger-than-life screen image goes up in flames - scored stirringly to a sweeping Ennio Moricone pop elegy; or Shoshana's preparations for the deadly premiere to the tune of the delightfully anachronistic (and yet, it goes without saying, perfectly appropriate) Bowie tune "Cat People" - subtitled, ahem, "Putting Out Fire" with the requisite tongue-in-cheek obviousness.

Indeed, Shoshana, or rather Laurent, proves to be a fashion pin-up extraordinaire in her prole chic tomboy gear; a number of shots and/or costume changes exist only, it seems, to glamorize this smoldering young actress. Rightly so, of course - what was it Godard said once upon a time? Yet, ironically, the gun gets the girl in the end and one watches Shoshana's beautiful death throes with discomfort. While her demise could be explained in plausible dramatic terms, following the torture and strangulation of another frustratingly gorgeous screen goddess (Diane Kruger as German movie star Bridge von Hammersmark) it just seems that Tarantino's proving he's above beauty or that beauty, violence, sexiness, and cool are all the same thing, man...

Are they? This brings us back to my fundamental discomfort with Tarantino's overall approach here, and the nagging suspicion that a work of full, here's the word I'm looking for, maturity might ultimately be superior. From the perfectly composed yet wildly divergent opening credits (complete with anachronistic "MMIV" under the main title) to the various chapter headings to the impulsive needle drops to the stylishly cartoonish performance of Brad Pitt - and indeed, all the Americans - Inglourious Basterds stubbornly hangs on to the adolescent showoff in Tarantino's persona. This, even as the writer/director (emphasis on both) branches out and imbues much of the work with new levels of subtlety and sophistication.

Also it must be said, the central conceit often borders on tastelessness, exemplified by the boorish "Bear Jew" (Eli Roth) jeering a dignified German before bashing in his skull with a baseball bat, or trapping a captive audience in a chamber of death in which it's the Jews who stand aside to watch their enemies squirm and scream and bellow like slaughtered cattle. At what point does the conceit of switching Jewish and German roles as victim and victimizer - while maintaining the moral culpability of the latter - cease to be clever and become merely offensive? Probably at its very inception.

If the Basterds represent Tarantino's boyish, brutal side, the brash geek puffing out his chest and slumming with the tough guys, then Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the aforementioned "Jew hunter", gives voice to the filmmaker's canny, amoral sophistication. Erudite, perpetually cheery (because brooding through mass murder would be so gauche), effeminate at times, but always able to assert her power when need be, Landa loses his composure only twice: choking a crippled film queen to death (in an eccentric burst of patriotic violence - though Landa will soon betray the Fatherland too), and faced with the thick blade of Aldo's bowie knife.

Blankly dishonorable (whereas Landa is impeccably disingenuous), the American calls the German's bluff and decides to leave one last grisly tattoo, a sort of farewell gesture to the Basterd habit of mutilating those who are spared death. At this point we realize that if the film has had any hidden structure, beneath the sprawling, often un-intersecting storylines, it has been the war. Not the one between the Allies and the Axis, nor the Jews and the Germans, nor even reality and whatever fantasy parallel universe we've dropped into. No, it's a war between the two duelling aspects of the Tarantino persona, until this film cunningly integrated: the brash, gimmicky show-off who emulated exploitation flicks and indulged in gruesome violence, and the smart, sophisticated scribe whose articulate, playful dialogue betrayed the latent adult sensibility behind the teenage shenanigans. Here, at last, Tarantino leaves no doubt as to where his ultimate sympathy lies. After Aldo carves a grisly swastika on Landa's brow, the crude roughneck leans back to admire his handiwork. "Yep," he drawls. "Think this may be my masterpiece."

Cut to "Written & Directed by Quentin Tarantino" in bold, yellow, stylized font, cue the arresting Morricone selection, and suddenly we're inclined to agree. Yes sir, with that stellar close admiration swept away most of my doubts, objections, and hesitations. It reminded me that boldness is a virtue, and that if Tarantino had not quite made the film I might have hoped, he had nonetheless fully realized the film he had made. Tarantino's frustrating that way - it would be nice to dismiss Pulp Fiction as a dated relic of the ain't-it-cool nineties, but the film is so sure, so well-shaped, so confident and strong that it holds up despite our better judgement.

Likewise, Inglourious Basterds knows what it's doing, does it well, and ultimately commands our recognition. Is it great? Quite possibly, though repeat viewings will have to confirm that. If so, it's great despite the carelessness with which it dispatches with the hook, luring us into the theater with the novel concept and that diverting our attention elsewhere. Like many a great film, Tarantino's movie renders its flaws indispensable to its achievement and embodies its own vision so thoroughly that our complaints are rendered relatively toothless. Inglourious Bastereds is something to behold - a fascinating, unruly, sometimes frustrating, very rich tapestry. If it's a masterpiece, it's a shallow one, but these are plentiful shallows nonetheless. Objections duly noted, and overruled. Like another difficult, impressive and occasionally transporting film (Antichrist) it must rank as one of the singular achievements of 2009.

Bright Star

2010-03-06T08:24:00.004-05:00

by Joel Bocko

Bright Star, the tale of John Keats' and Fanny Brawne's doomed romance, unfolds over several seasons in Hempstead, England in 1819 - autumn, Christmas, lovers' springtime and summer, another autumn of mortality, finally the desolate winter of death. Its soundtrack makes ample use of Keats' pregnant poesy (in a bout of facile alliteration, I almost stupidly wrote "pregnant prose"!), but the film takes its emotional and narrative cues from Brawne's more innocent sense of first love. This makes for a simpler, gentler, and perhaps less compelling film than one focused on the great artist. Not that Brawne was dull or simple - her acute sense of fashion is well-reflected in the film's delicate artfulness (particularly the Oscar-nominated costume design), while her obvious intelligence is displayed in the movie's dialogue, particularly her own early exchanges. Yet she is still in many ways a girl (emphasis on youth rather than gender), a very young woman in the throes of first love. The movie reflects this too and is imbued with an often pleasing naivitee which at times runs the risk of seeming prosaic.

Keats, to a certain degree, remains offscreen. Not that he isn't, physically at least, frequently in view - embodied by Ben Whishaw in an understated but effective performance, the poet leaves the Brawne home behind many times but is always drawn back like a boomerang (to borrow an analogy from Campion's home continent). Yet his inner state often remain beyond our grasp. Telling Brawne that he's uncomfortable around woman, that his feelings may be "improper," Keats nonetheless dissolves in her arms like a puppydog; no doubt this is how it felt to her, but what drives and urges was he struggling to repress? Likewise, his frequently-voiced fascination with the end of life - though we hear him cry, "I have been half in love with easeful Death" and moodily counter wishes for an eternity in Brawne's presence with "or else swoon to death," this morbid fatalism never really takes ahold of the movie proper. Instead death is something glimpsed, whispered about, a phenomenon frightening and mysterious and only dimly understood - here as elsewhere, the movie embodies Brawne's fundamental innocence.

This is not a flaw of course, but it does entail certain consequences. One of them being that the film lags in the middle: the initial intellectual flirtations of Keats and Brawne and the eventual tragic poignance of the doomed romance momentarily are overshadowed by a catalog of romantic cliches, often charming, but thinly so. To Brawne, of course, these images of a blooming lovers' springtime are new, intoxicating, heady - but to 21st-century audiences they are familiar, and in need of a bit more flavor. Unfortunately, Campion does not temper the arthouse gentility with a great deal of passion or invention, and so the wit of the early passages gives way to a slightly swooning romance (a riper melancholy waits in the wings). It is at these moments that we wish for a bit more of Keats, for the perspective which sees the deeper amplifications of this fleeting love, or the sad mist of mortality hanging over it all. As it is, we hear him reciting his poems over the picture-postcard scenes of the English countryside, but somehow it didn't quite seem enough.

Yet of course the movie should not give us Keats' full perspective, and is wise to stay with Brawne, even if I wish it could have infused her romantic daydream with a bit more verve (a verve the real Brawne, with her sharp eye and keen wit, no doubt exuded). Abbie Cornish gives a supple, sensitive performance as Brawne, though at times Campion flaps this butterfly's wings a bit too forcefully - when Brawne stalks the woods reciting her dead lover's poem aloud, it feels a bit forced. Cornish is far closer to 19th century ideals of beauty than those of our own era - a bit plump and wan she is nonetheless lovely, particularly in certain lights, wearing certain outfits. As she falls deeper into love with Keats and becomes more conscious of her own appeal to him, we see her bloom, the still childlike bud of the early scenes blossoming into something more womanly.

The quiet effectiveness of a few closing sequences - particularly when Brawne sobs uncontrollably - leads one to suspect a rivulet of wild, aching emotion just beneath the film's pretty surfaces. Maybe even that dissatisfying middle is ripe for the picking if approached in the right spirit. Could Campion have exposed this strain just a little more, giving us more of an "in" to slip between the movie's at times distancing historicity and enthusiasm-damping arthouse devices? Perhaps. Maybe the right attitude circumvents these flaws (though I can't see how it can render them virtues). Campion, at any rate, is a filmmaker unafraid of falling into "art film" cliches - take her acclaimed The Piano (the only other Campion feature I've seen, though her short film "A Girl's Own Story" is a refreshingly stark, poppy, and surreal treat). Like Bright Star, The Piano embraces a lush mixture of stately voiceover, wordless "poetic" slices of imagery, and exquisite attention to props, costumes, and period detail.

The potential greatness of that film derives from its radicalism - the way the movie's external beauty seems both to give voice to and suppress the frustrated yearnings of its mute heroine. This subversive strain is altogether absent from Bright Star, which humanizes even the potentially villainous characters. Indeed, the film's best performance is given by Paul Schneider, who articulates Charles Armitage Brown with a fine, lilting Scotch brogue, a near-demonic teasing intelligence, and a wounded mixture of admiration and jealousy when it comes to Keats, to whom he confesses literary inferiority. Brown is the character who comes closest to given Bright Star an edge and a tension.

Bright Star is a fine film, full of exquisite craftsmanship and excellent performances. It may be even better than I allow - it has the air of a work which yields its treasures slowly, cautiously, requiring the viewer to chip away bit by bit. Whether or not this is the case (and some, incidentally, have not needed any chiseling to breathe its air fully and deeply), it is a movie worth seeing and savoring. To regard Campion's taciturnity with a dash of skepticism is not to forget that such delicacy is exceedingly rare; if the filmmaker underplays her hand, so that at times gestures seem to outnumber insights, at least these gestures are not overbearing. Bright Star may be powerful or merely ok - but its restraint leaves room for the possibility of such power, which is certainly something.

Oscar round-up

2010-03-05T13:00:00.000-05:00

A round-up of Oscar reviews is up at Wonders in the Dark.

The Hurt Locker

2010-03-02T05:00:00.006-05:00

by Joel Bocko

This is the first entry in my renewed Best of the 21st Century series. It is cross-posted at Wonders in the Dark; the rest of the series will unfold exclusively on that site.

Two pictures to sum up a decade. One, a man encased in defensive armour, surrounded by explosive cannisters. He's a stranger in a foreign land, an embattled American, homemade bombs weaving a spiderweb in the desert sands beneath his feet. The devices are all aimed in his direction like gigantic bullets, together forming a silent threat simmering just underneath the surface. Two, a man in a cavernous, overwhelming, colorful yet utterly sterile supermarket, faced down by hundreds upon hundreds of cardboard boxes, each containing processed and mass-produced snacks. More significant than the contents is the packaging - this is nutrition second, consumption first, and an empty, dissatisfying consumption at that. The bombs are existential threats; the boxes are not, and yet somehow their spiritual threat seems deeper. As Jason Bellamy astutely notes (in an observation which inspired the pictures and paragraph which open this piece), "In staring at all the cereal boxes on the shelf, he is presented with a multitude of choices, just as when he's disarming a bomb, but his choices don't mean anything. There's no 'wrong' choice. It's a reminder of how he misses the rush of duty, when every decision has a potentially life-altering consequence."

Pick your poison. Sgt. William James has certainly picked his.

The Hurt Locker stands, solid and rather lonesome, at the end of the zeroes casting a glance over its shoulder, taking in where we've been. Locker may very well receive the film industry's top award, a recognition not only of this fine film's achievement but also of its significance: here's an Iraq War film that was a success, that was critically acclaimed, that in this limited sense fufilled director Kathryn Bigelow's rather head-scratching claim that the movie can offer "closure" for the conflict. It can't do that, but it can offer closure (or, perhaps, a fresh beginning) in the ongoing cultural attempt to grapple with the meaning of the Bush era. By eschewing grand statements, The Hurt Locker hints at essential truths about a troubled time, one in which a lingering sense of unfulfilled duty and potential nagged at the wider populace.

We don't meet Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner, in a truly impressive performance) right away. In a desire to subvert audience expectations from the get-go (and if that's not warning enough, the spoiler-weary are advised to flee the scene), writer Mark Boal introduces us to the standard three-person EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) unit on the ground in Iraq: the solid and responsible Sgt. JT Sanborne (Anthony Mackie), the youthful, occasionally panicky Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), and the team leader Staff Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce). Thompson is the kind of guy who would display a comfortable, good-humored ease, a quintessence of leadership, plunked down into the most hostile environment in the world - which is not far from the truth. He's an anchor for both his men and the audience, which is why Boal dispatches him within five minutes. Thompson is the victim of a secondary bomb, planted specifically to take out any personnel attracted by the first, decoy explosive, triggered by a cell-phone wielding figure in a butchershop.

Thompson's replacement is Sgt. James, but at first neither we nor the men under his command know what to make of him. Presented first in a dark room, listening to thundering hard rock as he pensively and intensely smokes a butt, the new team leader does not seem to be part of any "team" and has a funny notion of "leadership." "You'll get it," James arrogantly informs Sanborne at one point, after the experienced sergeant accosts the new leader for taking unnecessary risks in their first mission. (James insists on defusing the bomb personally, launches a cloud of decoy smoke and pulls a gun on a cab driver, staring the Iraqi down until he backed off and is whisked away by soldiers - "If he wasn't an insurgent before, he is now," James drily observes.) Sanborne never really does get it - at one point he half-jokingly humors the notion of an "accidental" detonation taking the hotshot cowboy off their hands. Yet James is very, very good at his job - and while defusing bombs is his specialty, and his passion, he's a handy spotman to Sanborne's sniper during a desert ambush, in the film's best sequence.

Close as the two men will grow, Sanborne remains perpetually perplexed by James' gung-ho risk-taking - a trait which is demonstrated repeatedly. The film is composed of about eight or nine missions, of such intensity that they will inevitably draw the participants together, should they manage to survive. A single roadside IED leads to a daisy-chain cluster of deadly explosives; a car weighed down with bombs causes James to cast aside his protective suit and headset ("If I'm going to die, I want to be comfortable"); an accidental rendezvous with British mercenaries turns into a bloodbath and slow, meticulous shootout; the discovery of a little boy's mutilated "body bomb" spurs a misguided revenge mission deep into a night-cloaked Baghdad neighborhood. In almost every case, there's a fine line between James' ability to extricate himself and his men from dangerous situations and his exacerbation of those very situations with forthright recklessness.

So when Sanborne finally expresses his incomprehension, James muses, "I don't know. Do you know why I am the way I am?" The question sounds rhetorical, but it is not. Finally Sanborne shakes his head and responds, "No. I don't." Then we enter that supermarket, cutting adroitely from a bevy of angry children chasing a humvee to a shopping cart coasting down the asile - an edit as jarring in its own way as the leap from that bone to the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a scene praised by just about everyone who's seen the movie, particularly veterans, James feels completely displaced in this once familiar location, and just like that, indeed just as he said we eventually would, we "get" it. James' ensuing speech, delivered to his infant son who can only coo in enthusiastic incomprehension, runs the risk of being too obvious yet somehow it resonates powerfully. Admiring his child's ability to be delighted by something as simple as a jack-in-the-box, James warns the baby that as he grows up, he'll begin to love fewer and fewer things. Maybe just one or two. "With me," the melancholy soldier muses, "I think it might just be one."

Cue the adrenaline-fueled conclusion: James' triumphant return to Iraqi soil on another deployment - ambiguous because of what came before, but superficially thrilling and enticing. "War is a drug," the opening caption informs us, but better yet is the title of the Chris Hedges book from which this quote is taken: "War is a force that gives us meaning." To the extent that The Hurt Locker could be construed as openly political, its accusing finger is pointed not so much at war or the military, as at a society whose blandness and disengagement from contemporary challenges fuel the desire for some, any sort of outlet. Even this reading is implicit rather than overt; but the film does contain some more passive ideological threads too. Once the film entered the controversy-laden award season, the film's generally blemish-free press gave way to doubts from several, often conflicting, directions.

Before we meet James or even his predecessor in the EOD unit, we are introduced to Iraq. "Introduced" may be a misleading word, implying familiarity: what we see is resolutely alien, a juxtaposition of traditional Middle Eastern garb and remote-controlled robots wheeling down crowded streets. The Americans, when finally presented, provide a relief, a source of identification for the viewers (of the Iraqis we mostly see feet and passing figures; we're unable to get a hold on anything relatable). From then on, the Iraqis that hover on the film's periphery are vaguely threatening figures - the movie must strike a balance, representing the soldiers' often embattled point of view without turning the Iraqis into the cartoonish evil "enemy."

The Hurt Locker achieves this remarkably well, impersonalizing but never dehumanizing the local population. In the marvellous 2006 documentary Iraq in Fragments, the American presence was a vaguely ominous, intangible reality; the figures in helmets and dark shades provided an overarching presence before which the central Iraqi figures scurried around for survival. The Hurt Locker takes the opposite perspective. While we never doubt the authenticity of the Iraqis' emotions and motivations, we never see what they actually are. There's a human reality there, but it remains resolutely unreachable. This has troubled those who want an Iraq movie to take in the whole picture; a criticism which has admittedly been limited - most reviewers, liberal or otherwise, celebrated what they saw as the movie's apolitical hardheadedness (or even projected an antiwar message onto it). Still, it has grown louder as Hurt Locker competes in the Oscars sweepsteakes against a film that openly empathizes with an anti-occupation insurgency, however fantastical (Avatar is, incidentally, directed by Bigelow's ex-hubby James Cameron). And it's worth grappling with directly; how important is it for Hurt Locker to represent the Iraqi point of view in the war?

To my eyes, Hurt Locker delivers what Platoon did twenty years ago: whereas Oliver Stone provided a grunt's eye view of that draft army, Bigelow and Boal offer up a personalized perspective on a professional volunteer force. Of course Stone, for all his dramatic liberties, was himself a Vietnam vet, and this leads us to another criticism lobbed at the film: that it fundamentally misunderstands the U.S. soldier, and particularly the EOD bomb-techs. Criticisms of minor or even major factual inaccuracies are largely beside the point. More pertinent is the general drift of these (again, minority, though relevant) critiques: that the movie transforms professionals into reckless daredevils.

Yet hardly anyone has discussed the film's relationship to its indirect source: Mark Boal's 2005 Playboy article "The Man in the Bomb Suit." Before tackling The Hurt Locker, Boal had already adapted an earlier Playboy article, "Death and Dishonor", into the Paul Haggis-helmed screenplay In the Valley of Elah. Though names were changed and characters added in the Elah adaptation, the central events of the story remained fundamentally the same. This time, Boal creates an entirely fictional story from a grab-bag of real events, moulding it around a character obviously inspired by Staff Sergeant Jeffrey Sarver, an eccentric but extraordinarily accomplished EOD team leader, with whom the journalist was embedded in 2004. The article is an excellent read (and Boal himself is, incidentally, a lively interview subject) - at once more real and more moving than the resultant film, which is not to say it's better, just different.

Still, reading about Sarver, there can be little doubt that Boal transformed the real-life figure, a complex man with an erratic home life but a flawless job performance, into an at once more sharply defined and morally ambiguous film hero. Onscreen, James' bomb-defusing skills are never in question but his leadership seems lacking. Consistently placing his men in harm's way, displaying poor judgement on repeated occasions, breaking rules and regulations left and right, James' competence does not necessarily entail effectiveness.

Ultimately, it is difficult to weigh the good (defused bombs, though it's implied the robot could have taken care of some of them) against the bad (a man down, a death made possible by James' lingering on the scene, a home invasion that could have resulted in something far worse for both parties). James' one attempt to do an unmitigated good deed - stripping an Iraqi of an explosive vest he's been forced into - is rendered inert when the timing device runs out and the various locks prove insurmountable. This final episode only adds to the ovearching impression of futility, a futility whose allegorical implications seem clear.

The titular "hurt locker" by the way, is never mentioned in the movie. If it's there it's buried too deeply, tucked away like one of those bombs Sgt. James retrieves from their sandy cover. Boal's original piece ends with Sarver bursting into tears, weeping in a confused outpouring of grief, longing, and remorse, torn between responsibilities he knows he can't keep and the lure of a necessary and challenging job he loves, but whose draw leaves him uncertain. James' pain is muted, twisted - his battle is not between a sadness and a joy but between feeling and not-feeling. The antitheses of "the things you love" are not "the things you hate" but the things you can't feel at all.

In a drawer under his bed in the barracks, Sgt. James keeps IED pieces as souvenirs - "these are the things that almost killed me," he declares proudly. The Hurt Locker is the portrait of a man, and a unique one - hardly universal in his particulars. Yet as painters once began to include landscapes in the backgrounds of their historical scenes, subtly exploring the world around them under the guise of a focused gaze, so we can begin to trace the contours of our one-time zeitgeist between the glossy endless corridors of the supermarket and the windblown sunstruck streets of Baghdad. Our own hurt locker has begun to be cracked open.

An Education

2010-03-01T07:00:00.043-05:00

by Joel Bocko

Of what value is an education? Humanity has sought experience and knowledge since the dawn of consciousness, and for just as long has been casting doubt upon its own learning. In particular, the highly structured, conventionalized "educations" of modern civilization have inspired criticism and confusion; counter-arguments have often used mere tradition as a recourse, to little satisfaction. In An Education, Jenny (Carey Mulligan) listens to the tired defenses of her elite school's headmistress (Emma Thomson) - "There's also the civil service" she declares as a last resort. Unimpressed, Jenny informs the older woman that she'll have to do much better if someone asks for the point of all this experience in the future; an education which merely perpetuates itself (all those encouraging Jenny to complete her schooling have themselves become teachers) seems senseless to the young schoolgirl.

Ironically, then, the education which An Education ultimately calls into question is that of the real world rather than the academic sphere. Jenny has fallen in love with a charming rich rogue, David (Peter Sarsgaard) who seems to have everything she wants in spades. He can take her to classical concerts, tony art auctions, and nightclubs; her parents, the supposedly prim and proper guardians of her adolescent liberty, are instantly melted by his charms. Even the knowledge that David is involved in shady business deals and outright thieving is not enough to disillusion Jenny; she realizes this is the price she must pay for the rewards of her romance. Yet there's far more to be paid, as she eventually finds out - before the big bombshell drops, she's already faced with a discussion: pursue her relationship with David to its logical conclusion, or continue to devote all her energies to studying and getting into Oxford, her goal since - it seems - infancy.

As it turns out, not at all to our surprise, David is not what Jenny thinks he is. As the final twist reveals, in a device admittedly as old as the movies, the erstwhile lover is in fact already married and Jenny - who has dropped out of school to become engaged - is neither the first nor presumably the last of his conquests. Capsized on the cusp of adulthood, Jenny must struggle to fix her sails and continue towards the university horizon, crippled by this romantic tempest but determined to stay the course and conceal her scars. The movie concludes when she is accepted to Oxford - we witness our heroine biking with other boys ("they were all boys" she notes of her collegian lovers, with a note of condescending resignation) and informing us that while she appeared as fresh-faced and naive as her peers, she was not. When invited to Paris, where she had already travelled - and fornicated - with David, Jenny tells her foolish boyfriend that she'd love to go: "I've never been."

Here then, we have two educations, one discredited, one celebrated - with roles reversed at the conclusion. Jenny's immersion in real-life experience ("I never lived before I met you," she tells David) is rich and rewarding in the moment, but contains no lasting value. No, not even the value of growing up, except in the sense that she now knows what not to do: as the film informs us, the young woman must deny her past in order to fulfill her future. Meanwhile, the formal education - the much-satirized rigidity of the teaching corps and the primrose path to Oxford - is finally upheld after being slagged for two hours. Nothing grows on trees, as Jenny's father and boyfriend both tell her, and the striving acquisition of knowledge and conventional experience (in the sense that it unfolds on the expected timetable, in the expected ways) are ultimately the only potential seeds of success.

Strangely, the movie - which seems to take this conclusion at face value - has never really answered Jenny's nagging criticisms of the headmistress. It's still unclear what her future holds, except for honesty if you believe that to be its own virtue; we've seen why her alternative to a conventional education was hopeless, but not why that conventional education is much better. An Education seems to blink in the face of nihilism, and retreat. At any rate, the movie's "message", however incomplete is less a hindrance than some of the flaws in its execution: the script is often too on-the-nose (Jenny's father gives her a pep talk through the bathroom door which doesn't tell us anythng new; Emma Thompson's satire of a proper snobbish anti-Semite is amusing but superficial) and at other times too unconvincing (David's ability to hoodwink Jenny's parents never quite rings true, though it has an interesting foundation in class envy).

The most fatally unconvincing element of the film is Sarsgaard's performance as David. The actor is unfortunately miscast at the charismatic heel - and here's a case where miscasting is due not to inability (Sarsgaard is a fine actor I've enjoyed in many roles) so much as the wrong presence. David should be less overtly sinister, more superficially appealing, a monster whose completely easy manner conceals a sociopathic ferocity. But Sarsgaard makes us uneasy from the moment he starts flirting with a 16-year-old girl; he's more often creepy than charming. A David who could both seduce this foolish romantic girl and her bourgeois parents should be effortlessly aristocratic, with his Jewish background less an outsider red-flag than a simmering discontent motivating his subversions. He should win us over emotionally, allowing us to welcome his presence and believe in his promises on a surface level, even as intellectually we know something's amiss. Sarsgaard broadcasts his malevolence through melancholy hardset features and a trademark physical unease - then when it comes time to display his cowardly, malicious qualities in their full measure he's not quite able to sell this either. Again, due more to a disconnect between the actor's tangible presence and the character's supposed personality than to any insufficiency in Sarsgaard's ability.

Carey Mulligan more than makes up for Sarsgaard's miscasting. Indeed, the film rests on her shoulders, or rather her touchingly awkward but enticing gazes and glances (no matter what she's actually looking at, Jenny always seems to be her own object of contemplation, like a classical figurine). Director Lone Sherfig has given the movie a gloss which captures early-sixties chic and eternal romantic idealism, but these would be empty signifiers without Mulligan's heartbreaking moodiness to enliven them. Almost always onscreen, she collapses the movie in her absence; floating past its own flaws and cliches on the wings of her sad little eyes and crooked smile, the film achieves a kind of cool, sincere grace. Mullignan's soulful countenance convinces us that she's sucking the juice out of every moment (even those she believes"boring" - probably her synonym for resltessness rather than lifelessness). This romantic willingness effectively, and subtly, belies the movie's commitment to a "sensible" education, and almost convinces us that, foolishness aside, Jenny's romance was the more valuable experience. But then movies always have a way of making ephemera more attractive than acquisition; whether this holds true for reality, I leave it for you to decide. Educate yourself at will.

28 Days In, and out...

2010-02-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

Nothing to do with zombies or Sandra Bullock...just the fact that February has only 28 days, and so we find ourselves at month's end today. This was a good, active month for me, with the debut of a new blog, the promise of more to come on Wonders in the Dark, increased activity right here, and two big posts at The Dancing Image, more than I'd managed there for months.

March should be arriving like a lion, with more Oscar-nominated films being reviewed before the big show and the kick-off of my renewed 21st Century series. If all goes as planned it will go out like a lion too; but lately I've been breaking my no-resolutions resolution (much to my chagrin) so I will keep my mouth shut for now.

Anyhow, the purpose of this post is to look back and offer what will hopefully become a monthly round-up (yet another attempt to rescue posts from the curses of chronology, particularly in the wake of a woeful Blogger overhaul, but I digress...)

Lost in the Movies

This new blog, launched just last week, got off to a nice start with my review of Avatar. However, I actually prefer some of the subsequent reviews, all of which are part of my attempt to catch a whole bunch of award-winning films from '09 in the last few weeks before the Oscars. And also to reacquaint myself with contemporary cinema before settling in for my expected new-release-every-Sunday routine. Here's what I've reviewed so far:

Up in the Air

Invictus

A Single Man

Let me know what you thought of these films as well (I try not to read reviews of new films I haven't seen yet; so if you've reviewed these already link up below and I will re-visit). And of course, more where those came from in the next week or two (after that, a steady reviewer beat, so stay tuned...)

The Sun's Not Yellow

As for this very blog, it took a strong visual turn this month (presaged by this post in January); I kicked off February by rounding up a diverse array of abandoned screen-caps, and then followed up with a tribute-in-images to Pierrot le fou and a great Godard quote. Spontaneously inspired by a morbidly comic Rimbaud poem I also paid tribute to a variety of "danses macabres". Finally, I launched what will hopefully be an ongoing series on this site, a look at the advertising art of varied auteurs.

Captured screens

Two Things We Know About Pictures

Danses Macabres

The Posters of Martin Scorsese & Stanley Kubrick

The Dancing Image

That last bit was inspired by a paeon to the posters of my youth, and the spirit of early moviegoing they evoked, which went up on my very first blog, which I know save for more spatially and perhaps thematically ambitious enterprises. One week after this line-up of images, another. I celebrated the Film Preservation blog-a-thon with a great deal of help from the visual backlogs of many fellow bloggers. Plus, it includes images from every single film on Allan's countdown which remains unavailable on DVD - check it out if you haven't already!

They Once Were Coming Attractions

The Restoration

Wonders in the Dark

Finally, a couple announcements on Wonders in the Dark, harbingers of where I'd been and where I'm going. A round-up of 44 pieces previously published elsewhere, and a peek at upcoming reviews as part of my relaunched 21st Century series. Thanks to Sam for hosting me (and I promise next month will be more eventful).

End of the Examiner

Best of the 21st Century?

Please feel free to use any of these posts as springboards for further discussions, however tangential to the original post. Free association in the name of film! And we'll do this again next month, unless Punxsutawney Phil has something else in mind...

"I'm not crazy."

2010-02-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

I can't imagine why this didn't make the finished film.

A Single Man

2010-02-25T06:21:00.016-05:00

by Joel Bocko

In A Single Man, George (Colin Firth) wakes up in bed, his hand dipped in a puddle of spilled ink. He had just dreamt about his lover's fatal car accident, picturing himself approaching the overturned automobile, snow crunching underfoot, the glassy-eyed Jim laying motionless in the snow. George leans over to kiss the corpse and when he awakens, the kiss has left its mark. Imagining that his finger was tracing a pool of blood rather than ink, Jim absentmindedly brings his hand to his mouth and smears a bit of black ink across his lips. It's a physical manifestation of his grief, an evocative one, but resolutely external. It's indicative of the approach the overall film will take to George's suffering, but unfortunately not in terms of its suggestiveness (it is effective) but rather because its ritualistic, exterior quality.

Narrating the movie right away, George informs us that after he's adjusted to waking life he needs about a half hour to put on his disguise. The character wears a mask, to conceal his homosexuality, his grief, anything that makes him vulnerable to the outside world. George, an English professor at a Californian college, wears this mask impeccably, not just the frames or the suit but the expression of sophisticated world-weariness; the pose of sullen intellectual does not so much cover up his discontent ("you look like shit," a co-worker tells him) as give it an acceptable form. He will never again look as hurt and uneasy as he did in bed on that cold morning - even when he's figuring out the best way to blow his brains out.

The suicidal impulse was apparently added by director Tom Ford and co-writer David Scearce; it's not present in the novel by Christopher Isherwood. Not everyone has accepted its imposition. Roger Ebert writes, "His game plan is apparently to complete this day in an orderly way, and then shoot himself, still above reproach. Isn't it pretty to think so. It may work for George, but it didn't work for me. I sensed there were shrieks of terror and anger inside, bottled up for years. ... I think it was Ford's responsibility to suggest [this], perhaps through violations of the facade ... If Ford doesn't scream inside, and I have no reason to believe he does, perhaps the film faithfully reflects his idea of himself and George. Such a man will never kill himself."

Indeed, the film didn't really work for me either. The movie is well-modulated; first-time director Ford (a famous fashion designer) elicits some strong performances from the cast (though only Firth really shines), has firm control of the crisp photography and editing, and unfolds the story with a keen sense of structure. Yet it rings false. As Jim, Matthew Goode is awkward - an awkwardness that only works during a flashback to his first meeting with George. The period details are too forced, with Cuban Missile Crisis bulletins on the air, the costumes and hairstyles too highlighted, and characters compelled to deliver phony-sounding speeches on "being prepared for a nuclear strike" and the "persecution of hidden minorities." (Ironically this second speech is delivered in part to tease out the sexuality of a flirtatious student - but Kenny, played by Nicholas Hoult in an exceptionally frizzy sweater, isn't "hidden" at all - he's practically shooting flames out his fingertips.)

And the switches to color (from a usually desaturated palate) are a bit too on-the-nose; dialed down a bit they could suggest the momentary lifting of George's depression rather than imposing this meaning on the scene. (It would also help if the little girl whose cheerful obliviousness lifts George's spirit wasn't cajoled into such a ringingly artificial delivery. The later shift to color, during an encounter with a Spanish hustler, works better because Ford also shifts the view and distance of the camera, making us conscious for the first time of the warm L.A. air - till now we could've been anywhere, as George's funk has made him indifferent to his surroundings). Other grace notes are intriguing, like the slow-motion pan across an all-American lawn in which cheerful toddlers rip the wings of butterflies, but ultimately not impressive enough to live up to their obvious progenitors (David Lynch, Sam Mendes - the latter hardly the most evocative exampler himself).

Ford has been scolded for bringing too much of a designer's touch to the movie, which nonetheless has won acclaim - relatively unequivocal from some quarters, focused primarily on Firth's performance from others. It's been said that his movie is too superficially beautiful and arty, too heavily designed and contrived and art-directed. While I see where this is coming from, I was actually surprised that the film was not somehow more lavish in its effects; Ford's direction is relatively restrained, perhaps too much so, as Ebert astutely notes. The visual metaphors are not particularly bold, the flashbacks rather plainly expositional, and the general palate tasteful without being provocative. True, that expression of hurt and confusion, flickering across Firth's face initially, must be cast aside.

However, just think of that line from "Eleanor Rigby" - "wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door". (As an aside, it reminds one of that palpable vitality of the sixties, just on the horizon in '62 - when this film takes place - but nonetheless too repressed in Ford's version of the era.) That face could be either the public face, the one we see George wearing throughout the film, or else the real face, the one we see so briefly right off the bat. Either way there's another visage somewhere, a shadow face, and the film does not really have enough presence or depth to convey this (a trait it shares with most movies today, "art" or otherwise - in which gestures supplant naturalism, and iconic imagery supplants depth, but I digress...). More could be more (a bolder, more suggestive style) and less could be more (an elimination of flashbacks and tighter focus on George's maddening repression within the moment), but in this case "just right" is not enough. To be truly effective, perhaps A Single Man would have to be A Double Man and leave that trace of inky blood scarring Firth's lips throughout - metaphorically, anyway.

The posters of Stanley Kubrick

2010-02-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

To take shift focus for a day (tomorrow I will properly link up Invictus, already up on my new site, along with whatever else has been written there), a new entry in my ongoing series looking at directors' posters:

(The first image was doubled by me so as to provide an appropriate poster size without stretching the stamp-sized file beyond all recognition.)

After putting this post together, I discovered this piece which discusses each of Kubrick's major posters. Definitely worth checking out. A great picture of very young Stan at the top, too, camera in hand.

I originally had the "storybook" version of Lyndon up but re-considered and put in the more famous Saul Bass version, which I had ironically forgotten about. One of the tough things about these poster posts is that there was often not just one "primary poster" for a film, so one has to choose what best represents both the director at that period and the aesthetic of the age (as well as what, out of competing images, was the most iconic). Take that as you will.

Invictus

2010-02-23T13:48:00.013-05:00

by Joel Bocko

Invictus, Clint Eastwood's tale of post-apartheid South Africa's momentary unity with the success of the national rugby team, could be described many ways: slight, obvious, familiar, underwhelming. Despite running well over two hours, it's not very weighty and even as characters give too much time for exposition the movie can be difficult to follow (and not just for those unfamiliar with rugby or the Afrikaaner accent). It's another entry into that disreputable genre, the feel-good true-life sports film, yet lacking in many of the tropes of that genre - we don't really get to know the team members, the games themselves (except for the last one) fly by in a few quick montages, and the main character is not even an athlete himself. Invictus sometimes gives the impression of a just-add-water "Instant Genre Film" mix in which someone forgot to add the water.

Did I mention that I liked it?

Most of these drawbacks have a double edge. The light quality of the movie means that it's often economic, unpretentious, and unassuming. Eastwood's much-touted working technique (don't tinker excessively with the screenplay, shoot things in one take if possible, leave out the frills) leads to a productive output but often has mixed results onscreen. His work occasionally has the air of sloppiness, carelessness, a kind of rushed economy which eschews fine-tuning. But, yes, this approach has its charms as well. Particularly in an era where movies are slicker and emptier than ever, it can be pleasing to experience a mainstream movie with rough edges, one that does not go down smoothly and indifferently but sticks in the throat here and there.

Besides, the director has a more serious Achilles' heel, emphasis on "serious." Many acclaimed Eastwood pictures of the 00s, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby in particular, drowned in a sea of weepy somberness. Their humorless self-pity sat uneasily next to some of the sillier narrative contrivances and unsubtle directorial touches. Invictus, while not without sentiment, is an altogether more pleasant experience. In this it is anchored by Morgan Freeman's performance as Nelson Mandela. Freeman has just the right mixture of gravitas and comfort in his own skin, and unlike the histrionic Penn or mopey Eastwood in the previous films, Freeman's good humor allows the movie to float along unsullied by the languorous morbidity of past Eastwood efforts. The sun and palpable warmth of the climates on display here may also help in that regard, fairly or not.

Invictus gives the impression of plain prose, with a pleasing aftertaste. Its screenplay, taken in isolation, is not inspired but by taking this at face value, without trying to force anything additional out of the material, Eastwood cultivates a nice menageries of effective little scenes, ruminations and associations which inevitably arise from the scenario, and relaxed, effective performances with enough breathing room to enable the appropriate comfort level. Matt Damon doesn't do as much with his limited role (as team captain Francois Pienaar), but he doesn't need to. He's perfectly cast as the quietly awe-inspiring, rugged young athlete; a few years ago, a random Boston poll asked whom locals preferred, Damon or Ben Affleck. Guess who won hands down? (Affleck seems to have improved his lot by stepping behind the camera.) Few other movie stars so convincingly give the impression, onscreen and off, of being such a heads-down, unpretentious hard worker; as such, Damon is a natural in the role.

The film chugs along, stripped of many (if not all) unnecessary subplots. The team's one black player is out with an injury and eventually returns, yet this development is barely acknowledged. Quite thankfully, Pienaar's wife (Marguerite Wheatley) is not forced into the ritualistic jealous-spouse role, and Wheatley registers an appealing, unforced presence in her brief onscreen time. The film's scope remains resolutely national and even international - Invictus' only real subplot being the tension between the president's black and white security guards which, of course, has national implications (not only as a metaphor). Eastwood ultimately satisfies by not adding that water to the recipe, by letting the film remain sparse and yes, occasionally somewhat rote. All that's left is the machinery of the come-from-behind sports victory and the sociological paraphenalia cluttered around it.

Finally, Invictus is inspirational, but in a curious fashion. Its inspiration is melancholy, barely even bittersweet: South Africa's moment of triumph was Mandela's release and electoral victory, not what came afterward (AIDS, continual grinding poverty, waves of crime). By setting itself after the climax, the movie cannot escape the inexorable sense of disappointment, nascent disenchantment, persistent difficulties mundane and otherwise. The national attachment to a rugby tournament carries an air of wistfulness, as if everyone knows it will not resolve tensions or solve the country's nasty issues with poverty or crime - the beauty is in the gesture, not the outcome. Above all, it makes one nostalgic for a certain flush of international optimism, an intangible flavor in the air during the 1990s, especially the early part of the decade. True, the nineties had their Gulf War, their Bosnias, their genocide in Rwanda.

But we too have had our genocides, our own ethnic strife, and yes, our very own Gulf Wars too - far more intractable and deadly. What we have not had is the same sense of liberation which the collapse of Soviet communism and South African apartheid accomplished - that feeling of stepping out into the sun and stretching our arms and greeting the crisp morning air with cheerful resolve. We came close, at least in the United States, a couple years ago, but that jubilation was already colored by a grim sense of the challenges to be faced. The hope that such challenges could be met with the spirit of the cheerful warrior has fallen by the wayside since then. Invictus, with its exuberant African choruses on the soundtrack, its gritty but determined attitude towards challenges and tensions, its sense of a global springtime in which humanity has breathing room to improve itself, may fill one with a sense of longing. We may wish we could freeze everything, as the movie can, in that moment of triumph and bask in its glow forever.

Best of the 21st Century?

2010-02-23T10:07:00.000-05:00

The "Best of the 21st Century?" series has been re-booted and re-launched on Wonders in the Dark. The first review will be of The Hurt Locker, cross-posted on Wonders and Lost in the Movies one week from today. For now, there's a new list and a new intro.

Here it is.

A review of Invictus will be up on Lost in the Movies later today, ~~with another film reviewed early tomorrow~~ . Also, in case anyone missed it, I tackled Up in the Air yesterday, on the same site.

Up in the Air

2010-02-22T06:00:00.003-05:00

by Joel Bocko

In one sense, Ryan Bingham is living the golden life. Soaring over the heartland, dipping in and out of fly-over country and hotter tourist spots, indulging in commitment-free trysts with women on the same ever-turning page as he: who could ask for anything more? True, the actual job which pays for this - firing strangers whose bosses are too cowardly to give the boot themselves - is not ideal. And the lifestyle doesn't allow much room for comfort or stability. But a guy like Bingham, who bears a remarkable resemblance to George Clooney, can coast by on his looks and his charm: he tells "clients" that they're Abraham Lincolns and Harry Trumans in the making, that they have to fail badly in order to succeed, and then he quietly hands them their packet and pushes them out the door (and away from the nearest window) while they mull this over. As for the security, the places to warm your feet by the fire at day's end, Bingham professes no interest - indeed, he's built an entire second career as a motivational speaker who advises stressed-out audiences to unload their metaphorical backpack and hit the skyways, real or otherwise.

Yes, it's the logical conclusion of the American Dream: to consume, to move restlessly onward, to live with style all while your feet barely touch the ground. Bingham suggests as much in the film's conclusion, over images of puffy, dusky clouds, his voiceover backed by the muffled sound of an airplane's engine roar, his ambivalent tone not quite mitigating the allure...

"Tonight, most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and screaming kids. Their spouses will ask about their day and tonight they'll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places. And one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wing-tip passing over."

Riding along with him on that wing-tip, for the moment anyway, is Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick). She's an up-and-comer at Bingham's company, full of ideas about streamlining and digitizing the whole process. The film does not convince us that Natalie's colossally insensitive approach would ever actually be considered, nor that the layoffs themselves would take so calmly to their dismissal. (Don't get me wrong: they protest, they weep, some even lash out violently, but never to the extent that a good deal of writerly dialogue can't unfold in that bleak little room.) Nonetheless, the device of pairing Natalie and Bingham humanizes a movie which began life as a snazzy if very cold fish. Also thrown into the mix is Bingham's fellow traveller Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga); both agree that their "relationship," resumed and abandoned whenever their flight paths cross, will mean absolutely, positively, thankfully, nothing. ("Just think of me as you, but with a vagina," Goran suggests helpfully to a hesitant Bingham). We fully expect this to change, and it does, but in a fashion that is both surprising and dramatically satisfying though the logic may be a bit a slippery. Still, for the bulk of the movie, Bingham remains remarkably consistent in his attachment to this ephemeral journey with no destination, that perpetual motion which gives him the illusion of forward momentum.

Of course, Up in the Air is a Hollywood film, and not even a Hollywood-film-in-indie-drag as was director Jason Reitman's previous Juno. So it goes without saying that the movie must both flirt with Bingham's carefree lifestyle and ultimately bring him back to earth with a confirmation of domesticity's virtues. After all, the American Dream contains both wanderlust and the hope of settling down, and these two competing ideals must always be allowed for in works which appeal to our commonly-held yearnings. The movie accomplishes this with more subtlety than might be expected; furthermore, as the closing statement suggests, the character's edge is never completely shaved off. More problematic than this belated peon to home and hearth is Up in the Air's criticism of Bingham's glib grab-and-go consumer ethic. Reitman is an extremely mannered, slick director; paired with the always stylish Clooney the film's form is so sharp one begins to gag. The opening montage, slicing and dicing aerial views of America in rhythm to the music (a jaunty, poppy cover of "This Land is Your Land") is both tantalizing and frustrating. One doesn't know whether to resent the film for codifying and commodifying the rich American landscape, or to applaud it for so fully conveying and implicitly condemning its protagonist's superficial view of the land of promise he traverses.

Ultimately, suiting both title and character, Up in the Air is trapped between two attitudes - satirizing and embodying a shiny, flat, empty Americana. In this it resembles Steven Soderbergh's low-budget quickie The Girlfriend Experience, which used another metaphor - the high-price call girl - to expose glib, sleek consumerism on the cusp of global meltdown. Soderbergh's film went further both in embodying and subverting this mindset - as such it was at once more successful and less enjoyable than Up in the Air. There was no way out in Soderbergh's rather rancid social and aesthetic view, but while Up in the Air points to an exit, the options outside that door are not very encouraging. The film exists in a post-2008 world where layoffs and economic insecurity have become the new norm: Clooney is like a last holdout from the Clinton/Bush years trying to live a life of irresponsibility without consequences. What is not clear at film's end is to what extent his openness about this approach, and the eventual vulnerability this entails, is actually a more honest version of the way everyone else is living. This ambiguity is to the movie's credit.

Whether intentional or inevitably resultant from the film's dual commitments to social statement and entertainment industry ethos (I suspect it's a bit of both), this dodginess ultimately lends Up in the Air a complexity which it might otherwise lack. The warmth and strength of the performances (though Kendrick couldn't convincingly cry if her grandmother was run over by a tractor) also humanize the film. Good actors save Up in the Air from the glib pyrotechnics of its advertising techniques and the confused enclosement of the screenplay's world (in which a hotel tech-fest is made to stand for personal liberation, without the requisite irony). Aside from the stars, "real people" - non-actors from the working (or now non-working) world - are interviewed throughout the film. The device makes an uneven fit with the rest of Up in the Air: ultimately, this is not a film about American reality but about American dreams, and the way they brush up against reality, a reality which remains resolutely offscreen. In the end, that nervous glint in Bingham's eye exists not because he's afraid reality might come pouring in to his airless life, with all its requisite pain and discomfort. His greatest fear is that he'll continue to float above it all, up in the air where neither suffering nor real joy can reach him.

We Are the Silver Screen Preservation Society...

2010-02-21T08:10:00.000-05:00

My last-minute entry in For the Love of Films, the Ferdy on Films/Self-Styled Siren blog-a-thon, is up at the Dancing Image (I know, two posts in one week over there - it's a new record!). Meanwhile, of course, my first review is up at Lost in the Movies, but I'll highlight that tomorrow.

Here is "The Restoration."

And of course (though there's a link over there too):

Donate to the Foundation.

Avatar

2010-02-21T08:00:00.009-05:00

by Joel Bocko

Drifting momentarily out of consciousness he wakes up - with a jolt! - in a new body and, with it, a new life. Bursting out of the laboratory constraints and into the open air - for the first time in the whole movie - he weaves drunkenly through the tangles of exotic flora, wobbles on his legs (no longer broken by war, if now blue and elongated) and our own viewpoint swoons and stumbles alongside his. As in a liberating dream, our hero - and we as well - are intoxictated by the new sense of freedom; in three dimensions, in bright color, with a shimmering, unreal sheen, the new reality beckons and overwhelms. We are realizing the promise of virtual reality: not a return to our natural roots but an evocation and improvement of these roots through technology - a new world built to resemble, transcend, and perhaps replace the old.

During his medically-induced "sleep" Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), awkwardly inhabiting the blue body of an alien avatar, will find acceptance amongst a tribe of native Na'vi whose planet (Pandora) his own people have colonized. When Jake emerges from his slumber, the crippled Marine will find the transition between these two worlds (increasing freedom and knowledge with the Na'vi, physical constriction in an enclosed environment with the humans) jarring and disorienting. Writer/director James Cameron suggests these differences visually - while human and alien society alike are presented in 3D, the avatar scenes are fully computer-animated. Cameron also employs a richer visual scheme and texture in the lush jungle settings than in the colony interiors. As a spy for the hardbitten Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), an observer for the more purely curious biologist Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), and an individual experiencing life with the Na'vi, Jake begins to feel that his virtual avatar existence is more "real" than his stunted human "reality."

Yet do we? Not exactly. The Pandoran sequences are a rich escape, a visceral thrill ride, an exciting fantasy - yet somehow our hold on them is slippery. Emerging from Avatar, we recall snapshots, impressions, occasional souvenirs of the experience, nothing as lasting as Jake's own spiritual awakening. This fleeting quality is both good and bad - on the one hand, it suggests that Avatar is a singular experience (it is), hard to categorize amongst our usual trips to the movie theater. Yet the lack of a lingering power also means it's difficult to connect deeply with this brave new world, which exists uneasily (if more successfully than any other previous experiment) between animation and live-action, spectacle and story, gimmick and art. Ironically, the film seduces us into its completely fabricated reality with an ethos of naturalism and purity, and vice versa.

Cameron's aesthetic and storytelling decisions compound one another, adding to the tangle. Beneath its stunning veneer, Avatar is a very conventional action film, in both narrative and style. It follows a three-act structure complete with love story and streamlined villainy (narrowing its initially broad skepticism of human society to focus on one nasty individual and his minions); meanwhile the visual approach is saturated in close-ups, whirling camera, and fast cuts rather than long "takes" which would provide a deeper immersion into this imagined universe. Indeed the latter point is most unfortunate, as the film's technique actually could allow for less cuts if Cameron dared. Instead of soaring and swooping with the dragons in uninterrupted space and time, we are volleyed between different angles while Cameron unadventurously tries to juice the action along with traditional editing. Hence, the film's latent sense of natural and spiritual wonder is constantly short-circuited. As bedazzled as we are, we seldom forget we are watching a movie.

There are a few stunning exceptions to this rule. The early scenes in the Pandoran bush successfully evoke exuberance and curiosity. The final battle is a seamless set piece, though triumphant more as a thrill ride than a narrative event. Between curiosity and catharsis, the middle is less inspiring; however, the movie hits occasional high notes which allow us to momentarily forget the 3D glasses, scraping before convention, and punting on the storyline and dialogue. The highest of these is potentially the most New Age-y: a thick circle of Na'vi commune around an ethereal weeping willow in a grotto, attempting to transfer the dying Dr. Augustine's soul into an avatar body. From the initial images of the creatures shuddering and convulsing in unison, giving themselves over to the great spirit at the bleeding end of magic hour, through the unmistakably voodoo intonations and motions of the ceremony, to the melancholy conclusion (evoked through moody lighting as much as any other element) the interlude carries the charge of pure cinema - it's the film's greatest triumph.

That scene and its exotic enticement also indicate at least one of the many ideological hurdles Cameron sets up and trips over. Cameron wants to ingratiate us with the Na'vi, and yet they remain the perpetual "other": his affectionate gaze remains patronizing. What's more, he condemns the human race, yet sets as his protagonist a human who is able to transcend not only his own ethos but his own biology, in order to go native (meanwhile those who, like Cameron himself, are absorbed with problem-solving and technological know-how are forgiven their sins). Cameron proposes to attack militarism, war, and hubris. Yet he stupidly bypasses the overlords to set up soldiers as the enemy, resolves the tension with successful Na'vi violence, and gives us a hero whose hubris is so great he imagines it possible to re-invent himself entirely - and succeeds in doing so. Besides, why is the self-proclaimed "king of the world" offering lessons in humility?

As for the first point, the best condemnation of Cameron's blame-the-soldiers approach to Iraq allegory (a tone-deaf political formulation if ever there was one) comes from Bob Clark, a commentator on Wonders in the Dark:

It’s strange to see how in “Avatar” the military-commander is the big-bad of the bunch, with Giovanni Ribisi’s corporate weasel (the guy who’s causing all the genocidal rampage to begin with over his quest for MacGuffinite) gets to save face by aiding the good guys towards the end. It’s exactly the opposite moral-code that was present in “Aliens”, where Paul Reiser’s company-man was portrayed as a greedy little shit who’d sacrifice just about anybody for the sake of the bottom line, and recieved just comeuppence in the end. Why is it that Cameron, with all his blue-collar heroes, is suddenly turning the white-collar into a good guy, and the green-collars into monsters?

Indeed, isn't a bit suspicious when Cameron's blockbuster merely scolds Ribisi (though I don't recall him actively subverting the battle so much as appearing contrite), the uber-capitalist who put the boots on the ground in the first place? Reserving scorn for the military command and the thoughtless grunts (who are presented, not as mercenaries but, as Bob puts it, "the equivalent of the National Guard") makes narrative sense because the fighting men make better opponents than a CEO safe behind enemy lines - a problem that Cameron nonetheless resolved in Aliens. And yet this scapegoating also dovetails nicely with Cameron's ultimate moral, which is that we can have our cake and eat it too: blockbusters which preach anti-capitalism, expensive CGI films that are "green", lofty disdain for brutality with enough room for an action-packed finale.

Some have accepted this message at face-value. Here's Gilad Atzmon, in Adbusters (a publication which knows a thing or two about having it both ways). Asides are mine:

Avatar may well be the biggest antiwar film of all time. It stands against everything the West is identified with [including Coca-Cola? Or did Atzmon's screening not open with that Coke commercial in which consumption of the soft drinks miraculously results in the sprouting of a Pandora-like uber-green Eden?]. It is against greed and capitalism [to the tune of $2 billion worldwide, but who's counting?], it is against colonialism and imperialism, it is against technological orientation [???????!!!!!!!!!!!!!], it is against America and Britain. ... It sheds light on the true meaning of ethics as a dynamic judgemental process rather than fixed moral guidelines (such as the Ten Commandments or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) [I knew Moses was on the far Left's shit list, but who knew poor Eleanor Roosevelt was a closet reactionary?].

And so on. This rather naive celebration of "Hollywood paving the way to the victorious return of German [idealist and early Romanticist] philosophical thought" even includes the following observation: "It advises us all to integrate with our surrounding reality rather than to impose ourselves on it." Despite Atzmon's disarming sincerity, one only ends up wishing for the days when leftist cultural critics had formalist chops. What would Godard make of such a steadfast denial of the film's material reality in order to celebrate its surface "message"? In reality, Avatar is probably the single greatest movement away from "integrating with our surrounding reality" in the history of the movies. This is why, even with the kinetic charge of its visuals and the surprising warmth of many Na'vi, we can't quite hold on to the experience.

Yet in the end, despite the political hypocrisy, stylistic compromises, and screenwriting limitations, Avatar remains largely satisfying as entertainment and is - most importantly - an enticing endeavor. Doubts aside, we want to see more. Particularly this is true of the film's most singular creations, which I've saved till last: the Na'vi themselves. Wisely, Cameron and his collaboraters do not attempt to create facsimiles of live-action expression and movement. CGI, however refined, always has a cartoonish quality and finally filmmakers have embraced this - the extraterrestrials' exotic excitement stems, in part, from the fact that they're so clearly animated. Even when Jake is inhabiting a Na'vi body, his avatar seems like a motion-captured physical performance, while the true Na'vi move with a sinuous grace which transcends the "uncanny valley effect" (by which simulated humans are so likelike yet artificial that they become creepy). Watching the creatures in action, we don't feel we're watching people or even tangible, living beings; for all their talk of being connected to the earth, the Na'vi are not organic but virtual, ethereal, almost vaporous in their light presence and easy fluidity.

At the same time, their alien charms are not as fleeting as that of the Pandoran landscape and bestiary - in particular, Naytiri (Zoe Saldana), Jake's rescuer, guru, and ultimately lover has more charisma and screen presence than any of the actual people in the film. Other Na'vi don't register with quite as much strength, although Naytiri's father and mother make a dynamic impression, with their bearing and vocalization (by Wes Studi and CCH Pounder) meant to evoke Native American and African tribal culture, respectively. Forcefulness aside, Pandora remains an animated world, its freedom and appeal resting on that very fact; in both theme and style Avatar is essentially a more earnest version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Like Eddie Valiant crossing over into Toontown, Jack Sully unmistakably enters a new, unlimited physical universe; meanwhile, Naytiri emerges as the sexiest cartoon since Jessica Rabbit. (This animated heroine is initially less sultry than fierce, a wise warrior who must watch over Jake. The film slowly and subtly relegates her to subordinate status, but the near-final image of a gigantic Naytiri holding a baby-like human Jake in her arms is one of Avatar's most effective gestures, even, dare I say, a moving one.)

Without a light touch by which to defend itself, this mega-hit may eventually endure an audience backlash, much as viewers eventually soured towards Titanic. Once again Cameron unapologetically wears his romantic heart on his sleeve, and a dozen years down the line he's got the same tin ear for dialogue, simplistic good/bad social critique, and penchant for syrupy ballads (compared to Avatar's send-off, Celine Dion's was a model of restraint). However, a potential backlash of unmitigated scorn and mockery would be too extreme a reaction, just as an uncomplicated critical embrace of the film can lose too much sight of the longer view. The movie is entertaining and immersive; whatever its flaws, it's worth seeing - that is if you, like me, are one of the handful of people only now catching up with it. In the final analysis, Avatar resembles Jake Sully upon his first awakening: excited and awkward, genuinely curious but careful not to wander too far off the compound. How far will future films, different filmmakers take Cameron's breakthroughs? Can the slipperiness of virtual reality ever be overcome? Should it be overcome?

Just what kind of a box has Pandora opened anyway?

Welcome to "Lost in the Movies"

2010-02-20T19:45:00.008-05:00

By way of quick introduction, my name is Joel Bocko (the site is maintained under my screenname, MovieMan0283, but here I'll sign my pieces with my own name). I've been "lost in the movies" since I was a little kid and have been tying to communicate the experience for almost as long. The purpose of Lost in the Movies will be to review contemporary films - in theaters and on DVD. For the past two years, as I've focused on the classics in viewing and writing, I've seen a lot of great movies, but fallen out of touch with what's going on at the moment, for better or worse. On my end, hopefully this site will rectify that; on your end, hopefully I can bring you a new perspective and stimulate interesting discussion on new releases.

Every Sunday, beginning tomorrow with a review of Avatar, I will be visiting a movie currently on "the big screen." For the next two weeks, I'll be writing rapidly on the bevy of late '09 releases which are currently winning and up for awards: in addition to Avatar, I'm anticipating reviews of Up in the Air, A Single Man, The Hurt Locker, and Crazy Heart, among others. After early March I will hopefully be able to review movies the weekend they come out, with my take up by Sunday. Followed by - ideally - a new-to-DVD review (sometimes contemporary, sometimes classic) on Wednesdays.

I will continue to write for The Dancing Image - several series are in the works there and a fresh piece is prepared for Sunday morning - and The Sun's Not Yellow will remain the hub for all my online activity; I encourage you to keep that on your blogroll if you want to know what I'm up to here, there, or elsewhere. Finally, this week I will be introducing a series on Wonders in the Dark - a review of 21st century "classics" which I haven't seen. The first piece, on The Hurt Locker, will be posted on Lost in the Movies as well as Wonders next week. Meanwhile, I'll dive head-first into contemporary cinema over here, so stay tuned to this spot. If you want to support my efforts, you're welcome to follow the blog, leave comments, or just lurk. If you have pecuniary interests in mind, as Mr. Micawber would say, you are welcome to buy DVDs or other products through the Amazon by clicking on their advertisements here. It's my understanding that this will ultimately benefit the site, though I'm pretty new to this aspect of blogging.

Thanks again for your interest and support - and let me know if you've any tips or suggestions on how to improve Lost in the Movies. See you tomorrow.

Stromboli

2010-02-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

(Though already written before I was aware of the series, I am now submitting this as an entry in the For the Love of Films: Film Preservation Blog-a-Thon of Ferdy on Films & Self-Styled Siren. A full-fledged entry will be appearing on the Dancing Image on Sunday, the last day of the blog-a-thon. Stay tuned.)

Despite seeing many of his films, I've never really responded to Rossellini the way many cinephiles do. His holy simplicity has occasionally struck me as, well, just plain simple. Flowers of St. Francis (a blind buy on my part, and a satisfying one) is charming and Voyage in Italy compelling - though I wonder if Antonioni didn't eventually pick up Rossellini's ball and run further with it a few years later. Europa 51 I found embarrassing and remain rather mystified as to how its obviousness is supposed to be transcendent. Open City and Germany Year Zero are effective and absorbing but they're films I respected without being enthralled by. Neither one seemed to capture the lingering, simple, pure power of Bicycle Thieves (though both are overripe for revisiting, especially in the wake of the recent Criterion releases). Paisan was compelling in the abstract but I found its actuality too messy. Unlike Rossellini's acolytes (one recalls the zealous cineaste in Before the Revolution who admonishes the protagonist, "Remember, Rossellini is a god!") I was always unable to take the raggedness of his work in stride, to embrace it as not just a necessary evil but somehow fundamental to the work's appeal.

All of which is preface to my enthusiastic viewing of Stromboli. Rossellini's first film with his new (and newly controversial) wife Ingrid Bergman, it's bursting with energy, invention, and showmanship. The film ripples with rich tensions, between its desire to simply document village life and its allegorical overtones, between frustration with Bergman's spoiled character and sympathy with her own frustrations, between the melodramatic extremes (heightened by the literally incessant music which at one point pounded consistently for about half an hour!) and documentary naturalism. Certainly between Bergman's professionalism and glamor and the untrained "performances" of the nonactors in the movie - a healthy balance is struck here, with the real people convincingly inhabiting their characters and a terrific Bergman dialing down her polish while turning up her acting chops. The provincial folks and the Hollywood goddess gel remarkably well.

The centerpiece of the film perfectly demonstrates the subtle synthesis of Rossellini's artistry with his method of understated observation. A squad of fishermen are out at sea, as they are every day, but this time Bergman's character is out there with them to observe their activity. Slowly, as they pull in their nets, shapes begin to emerge beneath the watery surface, and then a chaotic explosion of whitewater and flailing fins. I had experienced this scene years ago, excerpted in Martin Scorsese's "My Voyage to Italy" and been blown away. Oddly enough, I couldn't quite remember why anymore. Now it came flooding back - these fish are gigantic! Their capture and seizure is brutal, violent, beautiful; the set piece is so strong that it overpowers everything else. Allegorical readings are possible but unnecessary - the forcefulness of the scene empowers the rest of the film rather than vice versa. The way a note will shift the "meaning" of a piece of music without our being able to articulate exactly why, so this sequence prepares the way for Bergman's journey across the volcano in the film's climax.

The ending is very abrupt, but of a piece with the movie's ragged, punchy, honestly intense and intensely honest effect. This is that rare and satisfying discovery - when an auteur's appeal becomes apparent not in a mitigation of their usual approaches but in taking these approaches to their extreme and making you see, in the burning light of their purity, what they were up to all along. The film is like its titular volcano, not exactly dormant, not exactly active, but rumbling, quaking, occasionally erupting in spurts - in short, living but limned in by all the limitations which usually encumber life though they need not extinguish its flame.

It occurs to me that, in speaking in abstract and vague terms about the movie's appeal, I may be doing it a disservice. Perhaps a better approach would be to tackle it in clear, precise, yet pungent language, language which mirrors the film's own aesthetic. This may be the case, yet having seen it about a month ago, I'm trying to recollect its fragments, like lava rocks in the wake of an explosion.

Anyway, see it if you can.

Donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation.

The posters of Martin Scorsese

2010-02-17T10:00:00.000-05:00

Inspired by my recent post on The Dancing Image, I'm going to initiate a feature here which looks over a director's career by combing over the posters for his films. I think this will be fun because it not only gives us a sense of the filmmaker's development but of the transformation of pop cultural aesthetics over time. We'll start with Martin Scorsese:

They Once Were Coming Attractions...

2010-02-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

Recently, a recollection of my early years of moviegoing, along with a thorough collection of a hundred or so posters from that era, has been posted on The Dancing Image.

Here it is.

Danses macabres

2010-02-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

"Zig, zig, zig, Death in cadence,
Striking a tomb with his heel,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zag, on his violin.
The winter wind blows, and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden trees.
White skeletons pass through the gloom,
Running and leaping in their shrouds."

-extract from text for Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre.

THE HANGED MEN DANCE

On old one-arm, black scaffolding,
The hanged men dance;
The devil's skinny advocates,
Dead soldiers' bones.

Beelzebub jerks ropes about the necks
Of small black dolls who squirm against the sky;
With slaps, with whacks and cuffs and kicks
He makes them dance an antique roundelay!

Excited jumping jacks, they join thin arms;
Black organ lofts, their fretwork breasts
That once beat fast at beauteous damsels' charms
Now clack together in a perverse embrace.

Hurrah the jolly dancers, whose guts are gone!
About the narrow planks they jerk and prance!
Beelzebub roars the rasping fiddles' song!
Hop! They cannot tell the battle from the dance!

Hard heels, that never wear out shoes!
They've all put off their overcoat of skin;
What's left beneath is hardly worth excuse -
Their skulls are frail and white beneath the rain.

A crow provides a crest for these cracked heads,
A strip of flesh shakes on a skinny chin;
They swing about in somber skirmishes
Like heroes, stiff, their armor growing thin.

And the breeze blows for the skeletons' ball!
The gibbet groans like an organ of iron;
In violet forests the wolves wail;
The distant sky flames with hell's own fires!

Oh, shake me these dark commanders down!
Who slyly rake through broken fingertips
Love's rosary across their pale ribs:
This is no monastery, you dead men!

And there in the midst of the danse macabre
One wild skeleton leaps in the scarlet clouds,
Stung with madness like a rearing horse
With the rope pulled stiff above his head.

He tightens bony fingers on his cracking knees
With squeals that make a mock of dead men's groans,
And, like a puppet floating in the breeze,
Whirls in the dance to the sound of clacking bones.

On old one-arm, black scaffolding,
The hanged men dance;
The devil's skinny advocates,
Dead soldiers' bones.

-"The Hanged Men Dance," Arthur Rimbaud, very loosely translated by Paul Schmidt

The dance lasts for about a minute and a half, and begins around 55 seconds in:

More "danses macabre" here, here, and here.

Top picture: Remedios Varo,"Les Feuilles Mortes", inspired by its use here.

The Overriding Importance and Value of Professional Film Criticism

2010-02-11T22:38:00.000-05:00

With that title, Sam Juliano kicks off a passionate defense of critical tradition as well as a trenchant and at times contentious debate about the merits of amateur criticism vs. professional criticism. There couldn't be a more pertinent topic to tackle within the blogosphere, and I hope you all check out both the post and the discussion. I'm sure it will continue in days to come so don't feel discouraged if you come to this a few days late. My own thoughts are shared in the thread.

Is Indie Dead?

2010-02-11T09:00:00.000-05:00

Recognize the cover? It is of course, a riff on the famous "Is God Dead?" TIME Magazine cover of the mid-60s. It perfectly fits its subject in a number of ways: the entrenched, self-conscious irony of "indie"; the essential triviliaty of same (from asking about God to asking about indie in forty years); and perhaps even a nascent self-loathing (ever notice how the most vociferous critics of hipsterdom have themselves a wide streak of hipsterism?). The article itself is compelling; you can read it here. It's timely, at least for me, because I was going to post a similar inquiry on the Examiner a while back, where I myself had been designated "Indie Movie Examiner."

That's the first time I've used that full title myself, and there's a reason for it. I just don't like that word. Jim Jarmusch famously said, paraphrasing Goebbels (by way of Godard, most likely): "When I hear the word 'independent', I reach for my revolver." I don't have too much of a problem with that word - politically in particular I think it has a strong, potent ring to it. While it's accrued some negative connotations in the film world - smallness, marginalization, unpalatability to wider audiences - it still strikes me as an appropriate term for films made outside the box, whether that box is financial or conceptual. But "indie" is another matter. Its twee, quirky shortening smacks of a marketing moniker, and the very fact that it shrinks the term "independent" only highlights those inherent drawbacks of the term I mentioned above (except perhaps for the unpalatability, as "indie" has proved quite popular in recent years).

The Paste article focuses almost entirely on the term as it applies to music. So did a commentator on the Examiner, when I panned (500) Days of Summer while noting a redeeming quality: that it seemed to be waving goodbye to the "indie" aesthetic even as it embodied it. One Chaddy wrote (before moving on to declare I had "no soul" and was "obviously not a Smiths fan" - ?!), "Blahhh. Indie expresses an affinity for a particular music style, not necessarily an aesthetic." In my response, which unfortunately went unheeded, I wrote, "And much, much more. To most people, 'indie' can apply to films as well as music, and there are all sorts of aesthetic signifiers which have clustered around the world in the past 10 years." (I described much of this phenomenon in the review itself.)

Of course there's overlap between the indie music phenomenon and the indie film movement. Not so much at first, as in the 90s "indie movies" connoted dialogue-heavy low-budget features without much of an aesthetic at all. But the turning point probably came with 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums; Wes Anderson's childlike, referential, playful, and precocious style had a monumental influence on rapid growth of the quirky, "indie" aspects of the zeitgeist (particularly title and poster design). I actually think it's an exceptional film, despite its malign influence - it captured an elusive mood and sensibility which had never quite been articulated to this full extent, a fact which explains its persistent impact on pop culture (which is probably only matched in independent movie terms by Tarantino's roughly 10 years earlier). While according to "Indie is Dead?" the term is so indefinable and hard-to-pin-down that it's essentially meaningless, I'd submit that, like pornography, you know it when you see it.

Still, as the article points out, if the term is no longer defined by the very conditions which birthed it (i.e. actual independence from the industry, be it music or film) isn't it time to retire it, or at least radically redefine it? This seems to be what they're after with their title question - has "indie" become so ubiquitous, achieving an erasure of the original need for itself in the process, that it might as well declare "mission accomplished" and "game over"? This isn't what I meant to investigage with my own indie-is-dead article: for one thing, I think there may be the first stirrings of a movement away from the 00s form of "indie"; for another I think the phenomenon which the word applies to is still severely limited, despite its ubiquity. As I said to JAFB beneath a recent post:

I'd welcome a renewed underground but also a fresh cultural approach which neither eschews the mainstream nor cowtows to it, but rather redefines it the way the 60s counterculture did. Marginalization and fragmentation, imposed and self-willed, have lasted too long.

And finally...death to the word "indie" itself! I was actually going to write an Examiner piece about this, pending a name change from "Indie Movie Examiner" to "Independent Movie Examiner." The word indie is so self-consciously quirky, twerpy, and wimpy. It reminds me of those aesthetically unappealing, stamp-size ads which used to bug me when I was a kid, eagerly flipping through the pages of the Boston Globe looking at the big posters for Jurassic Park or The Fugitive or (next summer) The Mask. Granted, many of these ads were for movies which actually turned out to be quite good (often better than the big-budget flicks I drooled over) but if my taste has changed, I still wish independent cinema wasn't so acquiescent in its marginalization. Think big, this is cinema! True, the dirt-cheap talkfests of the 90s are over but the overly stylized subculture movies of the 00s still haven't quite broken out of the ghetto.

Ultimately, the notion of independence - from both industrial and cultural norms - will have to transcend its own limitations, cast off the dead weight of the slight, cutesy term "indie", and prove itself not merely a watered-down or even reflexively contrarian "alternative" to the mainstream but a transcendence of it. The 60s counterculture became the dominant culture for a reason (demographics aside) - because it was unapologetic, stronger, more diverse, richer than the increasingly thin gruel of "adult" pop culture. Any similar achievements of the DIY scene and the offbeat ethos will have to achieve the same. With technology increasingly accessible, the kindling is there. The coming decade will see if the true fire of independence begins to blaze in full force, or if we're only able to warm ourselves by the increasingly pathetic flames flaring up here and there.

Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

2010-02-10T10:30:00.000-05:00

Just as Howard Zinn, the famed Boston University professor and historian who wrote The People's History of the United States, felt it was impossible to be "neutral" and undesirable to be "objective" about human history, so it's been near-impossible for anyone to be neutral about Zinn himself. The Left adored him; the Right loathed him. The historical community seemed split between those who felt he added a stirring chorus of voices to the historical choir (helping to popularize history amongst a general readership in the process) and those who rankled at his methods and tone, feeling that he was not playing by the proper rules of the game. When Zinn passed away a few weeks ago, of course, the emphasis was on the positive and the same is true of this documentary which was released around 2003, a time when Zinn's call for dissidence seemed more relevant than ever.

Much as I enjoy elaborating and extrapolating, sometimes a simple blurb says it best. (Not that I'm going to keep it short myself here; in my defense, neither would Zinn - A People's History runs 682 pages!) In this case the blurb is J. Hoberman's. The Village Voice critic (himself of a definite leftward tilt, though not of the populist variety) wrote of the film, "Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's fond portrait, less documentary than infomercial, is unrelentingly and in the end self-defeatingly positive -- albeit effective in showcasing Zinn's charismatic personality." That about sums it up - though I'd add that the doc is also hindered by an amateurish and rather ineffective style. Still, it's primary purpose is to provide a snapshot of Zinn's life and personality, and it does achieve this, particulary when it comes to the professor's early and middle years.

As a rightward-leaning high school student (partly the contrarian in me, as most of my peers seemed to be liberals, and knee-jerk ones at that) I often found Zinn's work irritating. Contrary to the notion that Zinn's radical re-evaluation of history remains anathema in hidebound American education, A People's History was assigned reading in several of my classes. Open-minded despite my skepticism towards the left, and genuinely curious as to where they were coming from, I would dig into a fresh chapter eager for a bracing subversion of American mythology. But by the end of each I found myself wearied by the monotony of Zinn's focus on exploitation and victimization, the contrary stubbornness of Zinn's refusal to grant quarter to any American leader as anything other than an dictator in disguise, and mostly by the lack of an intellectual tension or complexity in the work, something I relished even then. Though I still appreciate this quality above all others, in history, in art, in just about anything, I'm much more open to Zinn's approach now.

Re-reading A People's History in the wake of Zinn's death (I'm about 150 pages in at the moment) I no longer find it wearying but completely absorbing. The focus on the economic imbalance and abuse of those with less power seems more like a provocative and openly admitted bias, one which gives the narrative drive and clarity though it certainly works better in some passages than in others. (The colonial years are convincingly rendered via one long cry of moral outrage, directed at the barbarism of a greedy and ruthless culture whose cruelty was only matched by its hypocritical arrogance. However, when it comes to Revolutionary times, the author has trouble portraying Jefferson as essentially an elitist, one whose intellectual adventurousness and passion for liberty were basically beside the point. Even as Zinn struggles to demystify the words of the Declaration of Independence, the quoted passages remain stirring.)

I mention this as a segue back into Zinn's character. Underpinning the seeming one-sidedness of his focus are two qualities which are often missing on the intellectual left: a personal complexity in terms of his relation to the country he's criticizing, and, conversely, a simplicity and moral straightforwardness which is in the best tradition of American radicalism. On the first note, Howard Zinn was an antiwar activist who had fought and killed in war, a fierce critic of air bombardment who had himself been a bombardier in World War II. His positions were not so much contradicted by his history, as necessitated by them; it's quite possible that if he could have re-lived his life he would not have served, but his story is far more compelling in the fashion it occurred: it gives him a moral authority which stems from humility, humanity, and experience. He is not hovering above what he condemns, pointing the finger from a place of purity (like some of the college kids who jeered at soldiers without ever having been in their shoes, either literally or conceptually).

Likewise, Zinn was not an academic theorizing about the working classes after receiving a healthy dollop of Marxism, he was a slum kid who worked menial labor for years before attending college on the G.I. Bill (while struggling to support his growing family). Hence his championing of the underdog was not merely a self-loathing nose-thumbing at the bourgeoisie, as it seemed to be with so many sixties intellectuals. This may also explain his much-noted good cheer and patience with opposing views, at least according to those who experienced him as a teacher. His revisionism was bucked up by a history of patriotic service (however much he questioned it later), and - despite his unwavering criticism of those in power - a relative deficiency of personal bitterness (in the sense that Zinn tended to see almost everyone as tangled in the web, even to a certain extent the spinners). This leads to one of the film's most compelling moments (though it bungles the delivery, it can't really taint the fascination of the anecdote). In North Vietnam to receive some POWs whom the Communists have agreed to release, the representatives of the peace movement (including Father Berringer and Tom Hayden) are invited to sing, as is the tradition at Vietnamese gatherings. Zinn stands up and sings "America the Beautiful."

The later years, following Zinn's involvement in the civil rights and antiwar movements, are not as compelling when presented in the documentary. Zinn's feud with BU president John Silber is a potential source of drama, but it's defused instantly when, after beginning to develop the conflict, the filmmakers tie the story up quickly with a rather rambling response by Zinn in a lecture hall. In this and a later speech, Zinn dismisses his critics through guilt-by-association (talking about a historian who criticized his work, he haltingly begins to engage the historian's criticism and then falls back on, "He supported Nixon" and the film leaves it at that). This was the favored tactic of Zinn's more right-wing enemies ("he's a Marxist" or "he's a radical leftist" therefore his arguments must be wrong) and it's no more satisfying coming from Zinn than from them. Indeed, as the filmmakers document Zinn's dogged dedication to dissidence, they ironically display the American left's descent into something of an ideological rut.

Contrary to the teeming mass of freshly radicalized students we see in newsreel footage from the civil rights and Vietnam era, the crowds at the Iraq rallies and book presentations which close the film give the impression of having made up their mind long ago. Asked what she thought of Zinn's talk, one young woman says she liked it because "it basically confirmed everything I already thought." This is a far cry from Zinn's earlier intention to rattle the public's complacency and turn the way students and historians approached the past - and the present - on its ear. To be fair, Zinn himself did not want to preach to the converted; he's shown at one point inquiring, "Are there lots of people there who haven't made up their minds yet? 'Cause those are the people we need, the ones we want to reach." He's assured this is the case, yet in the crowds we see it looks like the usual suspects, clothed in the garb and speaking the language of the self-enclosed guardians of the flame. The heirs of the New Left are no longer new, and their world has become as sterile and fixed as that their progenitors rebelled against.

Anyway, to the end Zinn remains a charismatic presence - and the film, narrated by Matt Damon (who famously name-dropped his Cambridge neighbor in Good Will Hunting), is most successful at giving that presence a channel through which to communicate. Whatever his flaws, the left today could use a healthy dollop of Zinn's good humor, moral clarity, and most importantly and suprisingly, his all-Americanness. Zinn's ideal Left was less one which thrived in a brooding marginalization and alienated sense of "difference" than one which sought to demolish senses of difference, to establish an underlying humanity, and to reclaim the United States for "the people". A mere Marxist catchphrase for many (their particular misanthropy belying their vague anti-elitist rhetoric) the notion of "the people" seemed to have real meaning for Zinn. At his best - which is what I'd like to focus on here, given his recent passing and my renewed appreciation of his work - he can remind even those skeptics among us of radicalism's moral foundations, and constructive potential.

Tony de Peltrie

2010-02-09T10:33:00.000-05:00

I saw this cartoon when I was a little kid. It terrified me - I think it gave me nightmares. Reminded by Max's icon of Tony the Piano Man, I sought it out on You Tube this morning. Still scary.

Apparently this was considered the first successful reproduction of a human form in CGI. It's certainly among the creepiest and, now that I'm a bit older and can take it (I hope), the coolest...

Bed and Sofa

2010-02-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

Husband and wife are lying in bed, early in the Moscow morning. Kolia (Nikolai Batalov), the husband, is up first, groggy but awakened by the couple's energetic pet cat, who's leapt onto the bed. Mischievously, he grabs ahold of the kitty and shoves it in his sleeping wife's face. Liuda (Lyudmila Semyonova) reacts as any interrupted sleeper would, batting it away and jerking up from her comfortable recline. Rubbing her eyes, smoothing down her bobbed hair and bangs, she glances at the grinning man-boy in bed next to her with a mixture of amusement and irritation. He laughs, but he's playing with fire by provoking her so. Before the day's over, he'll have introduced a creature much more threatening into the marital bed, even if old Red Army buddy Volodia (Vladimir Fogel), visiting from out of town, is initially relegated to the sofa.

Silent films and early talkies are often more provocative than the movies which followed (due to state censorship in Germany and Russia, the Production Code in America). Still, how many silents can you remember which stage their climax in an abortion clinic? Bed and Sofa, a 1927 sex comedy/drama (even its genre is not clearly delineated) engages most of the taboos: abortion, adultery, divorce, free love, menage a trois - all that's missing is homosexuality (though this certainly comes to mind amidst a long kiss on the lips, during which Volodia, embracing Kolia, thinks he's kissing Liuda; the conclusion, which finds the two men alone in the room, deciding who'll sleep where, also hints at this subtext). Indeed, this is a film where the wife's affair is revealed halfway through the movie - in most melodramas it would lead to a climactic fight; here it only begins the roundelay which finds both men passing in and out of the woman's affections and between her bedsheets.

Unlike with Jules and Jim, it is not the woman whose fickleness is made to seem crazy, but the men whose bullheaded pushiness makes us sympathize with Liuda. Embodying both Jazz Age and Slavic ideals, with her modish Louise Brooks hairdo topping a stockier, more boxy build, Liuda is torn between her attraction to the two workers who claim her affections - to the comforts of Kolia and the novelty of Volodia - and her frustrations with both of them. Meanwhile, an ominous portrait of Stalin - who had only just taken power in '27 - hangs on the wall alongside a calendar. Initially this seems like a necessary political gesture on the filmmaker's part, but eventually it leads one to tease out allegorical resonance in the onscreen threesome. Could Liuda be like the young Soviet Union, volleyed back and forth between different leaders who claimed her loyalty? Just as Stalin would eventually erase deviant Bolsheviks from Party history (he was already beginning to do this with Trotsky), Liuda replaces Kolia's portraits with Volodia's all around the room (Stalin, of course, stays put).

Whether or not all the picture-swapping is supposed to have political ramifications, it pays off dramatically in the end. Liuda rushes home to an empty apartment from the abortion clinic (where she went, not out of her own desire to end the pregnancy, but at the behest of her beaux, who jealously regard the incipient infant as the other man's). There she writes a goodbye note and takes her own picture out of its frame, at once liberating both her image and her body from the home where her initially adventurous sexual experiments came to be one more form of imprisonment. The movie concludes with the two male saps, one on the bed, one on the sofa (they've been switching back and forth throughout the movie) wondering what to do next. Meanwhile, Liuda leans out the train window, breathing the fresh air and rushing out of town just as we saw Valodia arriving in the beginning (his train bears him into Moscow, to borrow Churchill's characterization of Lenin's similar journey in 1917, "like a plague bacillus").

The film is composed of concrete units, a series of two-shots, close-ups, and inserts of important objects (or cats). The camera punches in and out of different elements within the scene, and switches angles without any movement. Not as reliant on the abrasive qualities of montage as were Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, director Abram Room utilizes editing to create a sense of space and drama, and divisions within both. Scrolling through the images on Netflix (where the film is available for instant viewing) I was surprised to discover that there are almost no shots featuring all three protagonists together - it's usually Liuda with Kolia, or Liuda with Valodia, or the two men with each other.

This subtly heightens the sense of claustrophobia, visualizes the trio's inability to accomodate one another, and highlights the film's assembly through relational cutting rather than juxtapositional montage or single, wide shots. Likewise, the movie is dialectical but not as aggressively or obviously as Eisenstein's works. Aside from the dichotemy of the title, Bed and Sofa opens and closes with the rushing train, features an airplane ride above - but significantly not out of - Moscow in the middle, and punctuates its narrative with comical and often symbolic feline interludes. The film is almost entirely enclosed in the apartment and various workplaces, but is bookended with outdoor sequences.

Ultimately, the portrait of Stalin is telling. Bed and Sofa seems to have its ear to the ground, and it buries both its style and even to a certain extent its message (both quite modern) beneath the cover of conventional storytelling. Soviet films would have to just that to survive in the years to come, yet even this subterfuge would not be enough. Liuda's quite fortunate in the end, to be escaping from the scene of her entrapment...her country, and its cinema, would not be so lucky.

What's up...

2010-02-07T13:11:00.000-05:00

A few updates are in order. Firstly, I attached a brief addendum to the opening of my "End of the Examiner" announcement on Wonders in the Dark. It's worth reprinting here in full:

(disclaimer 2/5: I’ve slightly modified the piece and want to issue a clarification at the outset – whatever my issues and disagreements with the site, the experience was largely a positive one. The post is not intended to be a critique of the Examiner, but rather an explanation of my new direction.)

Secondly, I wanted to point your attention to my previous piece on The Sun's Not Yellow (the one topped with the Wizard of Oz pic). In a sense I buried my lead but it was supposed to be more of a discussion-starter than a stand-alone musing, in which I posed the question of whether or not mass re-discovery of classics was possible, and particularly if any of you could think of any candidates for the type of re-discovery that Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life enjoyed. I'd hoped to see some back-and-forth on that subject, but maybe you're all as stumped as I was. So far only Adam Zanzie's bitten (and even he had trouble thinking of examples outside of scholarly circles). Come one, come all.

Finally, I've updated and streamlined an old post on The Dancing Image. It originally appeared on the site last summer, as a round-up of all my work on that site. Ironically, it preceeded a drop-off in postings there, so that it has not been updated much in the past six months. This weekend I linked up to all my writing online, not just for that particular blog. It now serves - and will continue to serve - as a master directory for all my online work. Comments on old pieces are always welcome.

Here's the directory.

With all that out of the way, I've a number of projects on the back-burner though as always my no-resolution resolutions keeps me silent on what exactly (not that I haven't frequently tipped my hand in the past). Stay tuned, as The Sun's Not Yellow should continue its steady output in the coming week with hopefully more on the horizon for other sites throughout February.

P.S. Check out Stephen's skewering of the sacred Citizen Kane - a film I adore, yet I thought his takedown a bravura piece of analysis. Read, recoil (or rejoice), and respond here.

Popular, eventually

2010-02-04T13:26:00.000-05:00

Frank Morgan, today remembered best (and by most people, only) as the foolish but lovable wizard of Oz, died in 1949. One prominent obituary, in listing the actor's credits, declined to even mention that particular role. After all, the film - only marginally attended and mildly received on its initial release ten years earlier (I don't think it even recouped its production costs) - had been largely forgotten.

Television changed that dramatically in the 1950s - as it would later transform a long-overlooked late Capra gem into the linchpin of its filmmaker's (and perhaps even its star's) lasting legacy. Both The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life owed their newfound popularity and eventual ubiquity to the medium that was ostensibly a threat to the cinema. I'm not sure TV is capable of such a transformation today, there's too many channels, attention is too divided, and if people want to watch a movie they're more likely to rent the DVD anyway than to tune in for a special showing.

Given the diversity and fragmentation of present pop culture, are mass rediscoveries of forgotten films still possible? I'd like to think so, but I'm not sure how. This phenomenon persists in critical and scholarly culture - fueled by retrospective screenings, new books, and DVD restorations, among other things - but while this reappraisal can eventually trickle down into public consciousness, it doesn't seem to have the same impact. In some ways, this is its own phenomenon, overlapping to a cetain extent with the other form of rediscovery but with its own history and icons. (Vertigo, The Searchers, and to a certain extent Citizen Kane come to mind).

In the long run, there's a place for obscure films celebrated by the devoted, for mishandled or unjustly criticized works being reappraised, and for movies which came and went to re-colonize the mass imagination. However, while the first two trends continue as strongly as ever I'm having trouble locating any examples of the third in recent years, even recent decades.

So then, do any recent Wizard of Ozs come to mind? Or any films (from any era) which, while not actually beloved icons, feel like they have that potential? Share your thoughts below.

End of the Examiner

2010-02-03T10:51:00.000-05:00

I've left the Examiner and moved of all my pieces elsewhere. The announcement, as well as links to the reviews and features in their new homes, is up at Wonders in the Dark.

Two Things We Know About Pictures

2010-02-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

____

"Pour faire un film,
il vous faut obligatoirement
une fille
et un pistolet"

"All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun."
-Jean-Luc Godard

Captured screens

2010-02-01T11:30:00.000-05:00

These screen-grabs have been on my computer for a while now - many were intended to crown blog posts that never materialized. Others were going to be entered in the "Guess the Pic" challenge on Wonders in the Dark, before that contest died a long, painful death at the hands of Philip Johnston. One was supposed to be a DVD menu for a disc that never got burned, and at least one was taken just because it looked good. So here they are, apropos of nothing. Click on the pictures if you want to see 'em full-size:

And this one, a composite:

Sources: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Made in USA (I think - actually, later in the day, I'm pretty sure it's Pierrot le fou), Michel Gondry's music videos, the Quay Brothers' short films, Sans Soleil, The End of St. Petersburg, The Big Lebowski, and Hail Mary.

The Lost Weekend

2010-01-31T17:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Don Birnam (Ray Milland) is a writer - in theory - and an alcoholic - in indisputable fact. Coming off a bender, telling himself he's finally going to write that big novel, Don's itch to drink is palpable as his brother (Phillip Terry) helps him pack up for a restful long weekend in the country. Instead, drawn to booze with the stubbornness of a boomerang, Don ditches his brother and his long-suffering girlfriend (Jane Wymann) to gulp down several shots of whiskey at the local establishment. Don, who was uptight and irritable in the first scene, loosens up, waxes eloquent on the wonders of whiskey, and flirts with a sassy hooker who picks up johns in the bar. It's a clear and effective depiction of why drinking appeals to this insecure artist - and it will be the last such moment. Having presented the magical deliverance of the ennui-quenching rye, writer/director Billy Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett proceed to display, in merciless detail, all the drawbacks of the addiction. Don becomes a kind of 40s Dante in reverse, descending from brief intoxicated Paradise, through a purgatorial search for satiation, and finally into the depths of DT Hell. Only his longtime lover can hope to rescue him from the depths of his own self-hatred, of which the hard drinking is both partial cause and persistent symptom.

Compulsively watchable, with its strong performances (especially from Milland, who manages to be both pleasingly theatrical and harrowingly natural), juicy dialogues and monologues, and its de facto structure. The use of a single weekend as a framework (although the filmmakers cheat a bit by using flashbacks) focuses the action and makes Don's decline from sobriety through every stage of drunkenness to suicidal withdrawal all the more effective. The Lost Weekend is a very good movie, but it isn't great - and it's one of those films which can be frustrating to watch at times, because you can sense greatness within its grasp. Though the flashbacks are effective in laying out Don's pathology and explaining his mysterious relationship to Helen (whose affection for him and patience with him initially seems unwarranted), one wishes a less artificial construct could have been found. The film is sharpest when it stays on its one-weekend timeline, and when it unfolds by keeping pace with its hero's descent. Even the flashback photography is not as precise and focused as the images of the "present" - as if Wilder and fantastic cinematographer John F. Seitz were aware that their explanatory history wasn't as strong as their demonstrative real-time. There's also an overemphasis on explaining the addiction, which is after all as much chemical as anything else, but one is tempted to forgive the frequent psychological self-analysis, as it's so artfully written.

The film was marked as "realist" at the time of its release, when it won an Oscar for Best Picture in 1945. However, "realism" is not the same as "reality" and part of the film's appeal lies in the friction between the pleasures of Hollywood style (despite its location shooting, the films falls safely within the framework of studio filmmaking) and the darkness of the subject matter. The classicism gives us an familiar frame within which to view the grim reality of alcoholism, and The Lost Weekend is all the more effective for it. Like many thematically ambitious films, it dates more than movies which may have seemed less "edgy" and "relevant" at the time - when it lectures, explains, or at times overdramatizes Don's drunkenness it can seem out of touch. Mostly, however, the movie is still stirring, evocative, and engaging. The bat in that infamous scene does look embarrassingly fake, but the set piece has a great, grisly finish which still sickens. An excellent movie, flawed but a classic.

(Incidentally, many will adjust the balance more in favor of the latter than the former - take Tony d'Ambra, curator of filmsnoir.net, with his marvellous and celebratory write-up on the movie; you should absolutely follow the link for a more in-depth view of the movie.)

The Lost Son of Havana

2010-01-31T16:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in July 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Thirty years after the chants of "Lou-eee, Lou-eee!" have faded from Fenway, six miles from the spot of a very important and long-awaited 1975 reunion, the National Amusements Showcase Cinemas in Revere screened The Lost Son of Havana in Theater 1 at 7:35 pm; one of four daily screenings for at least the remainder of the week (if it is not held over any longer). The name of the movie was left out of the "Now Playing" flyers adorning the lobby, and there weren't any placards emblazoned with large quotes from Entertainment Weekly or video installments running trailers in loops. When asked for a ticket to the film, one of the theater's employees warned, "You do know it's a documentary, right?" Apparently, this disclaimer was necessary: some customers have been complaining. No one complained on this particular night, though - the four other people in the near-empty theater seemed perfectly content with their choice of entertainment.

If you do know it's a documentary, and you don't mind, please go out and catch this moving and very enjoyable picture, which observes beloved Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant's career, family life, and return trip to Cuba after 46 years in exile from the impoverished Communist island on which he was born and raised. Tiant's upright dignity is colored by a wry humor and pride, and also by a looming melancholy, and his charisma carries you along for the hour and forty-five minute running length. The filmmakers (director Jonathan Hock, backed by the Farrelly brothers, of all people) get out of their subject's way - the style is not flashy (though occasionally grainy film stock punctuates the video footage to represent Tiant's subjective impressions; it's a nice and subtle effect). The structure is the by now traditional call-and-response of the present (Tiant's visit to Cuba) and the past (his dogged up-and-down career in the majors); there is a narrator (the ever-dignified Chris Cooper) but he only steps in to introduce photos and footage from the 60s and 70s, tending to efface himself when the now elderly Tiant is onscreen.

Tiant is a man who has not had one athletic career, but several. First there are the years in Cuba, building up his skill, while his father - once a player in the American Negro leagues (the narration lyrically describes "seventeen summers on the backroads of America"), and a genuinely great one at that, considered by some a greater pitcher than Satchel Paige - hides in the bus roundabout across the street, watching his son play in the park despite his own disapproval of the boy's dreams. Then Tiant goes to the U.S. - and stays there when Cuba clamps down the door on ballplayers, insisting they either give up their dreams of a professional career and come home, or else abandon Cuba for a U.S. career. Tiant, with his parents' approval, chooses the latter path, and while this ensures all that is to come, to this day he seems to feel he must make excuses, and occasionally he voices mournful shame over what happened.

At any rate, success is by no means immediate. For a while he follows his father's path, playing across the Jim Crow South, and though civil rights breakthroughs were on the horizon, Tiant recalls the virulent racism of the time - another reminder that the trading-family-for-freedom narrative is not so simple as that. When he breaks in to the big leagues, he breaks in big time, pitching no-hitters, developing not one but two signature pitching styles, rising and falling between the majors and the minors, becoming a star, becoming a nobody, and becoming a star all over again...for those who are unfamiliar with the story, I will say no more, and let the movie work its magic on you. While many of Tiant's accomplishments would be at home in a feel-good sports flick, there are constant reminders that reality is messier: a powerful moment before the World Series followed by disappointment; ultimately, an inevitable fading from the scene despite comebacks; most importantly, a muted fatalism and sadness detected in Tiant's countenance.

All of this only makes the miracles that much more amazing, and the movie climaxes as Tiant's family life, the political relations of the U.S. and Cuba, and the baseball fortunes of the Red Sox converge in the autumn of '75, in a formulation that no fictional screenplay could get away with. Meanwhile, of course, the film cuts back to Tiant as a much older man, quietly surveying the baseball aficionados in Havana who, asked about the greatest Cuban exile ballplayer, come up with many other names before they remember his. His reunions and reconnections with old family and friends are emotional, but more in a quietly sad key than with a celebratory tone.

Early passages in the movie are informed by a firmly anti-Castro tone, a bit overbearing in Cooper's narration and in some of the bleak footage, but politics are neither the filmmakers' nor Tiant's concern; frustration and anger with the Castro regime's imprisonment of Cubans on their island (and in a decaying version of the past, a kind of national arrested development which foreigners seem to find romantic, but which many Cubans themselves appear frustrated by) give way to simple observation, with the emphasis on endurance and empathy, but in surprisingly uncloying ways. Repeatedly, the film eschews sentimentalism: though Tiant's family welcomes him with admiration and love, some old neighbors scold him with tears in their eyes for abandoning them - meanwhile, elderly aunts feebly remember the years lost and, in some sense, wasted, while younger cousins flat-out ask Tiant for money. Looking at their severely decayed surroundings, we do not wonder at it (and neither does he, providing the bills they require).

This is in keeping with the spirit of the man, whose determination is laced with regret, whose withheld feelings slip out from behind his reflective shades and can be glimpsed beneath his drooping gray mustache. In one scene, Tiant's narration informs us that he does not believe in an afterlife, even as the camera pans to a crucifix in his car; in this man's life, God exists to help one make it through, but there is no reward waiting on the other side. All that you have is what you make, what you've lost can never be regained, and yet one cannot linger over regrets for that very reason. That a few viewers have wandered out of the theater, apparently dismayed that they weren't seeing Transformers 2, is probably something Tiant could handle; he's been through much worse. The fact that his story is onscreen at all is triumph enough - and the experience is not to be missed.

The Leopard

2010-01-31T15:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in August 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

If Italian films from the forties and fifties were dominated by a hard-bitten look at the present, with a transforming Italy moving from fascism and war through poverty and ruin to the cautious construction of a modern postwar world, then Italian cinema of the sixties can be seen as one long, mournful elegy for the lost past, in a variety of different keys. At the dawn of the decade, neorealism had already been relegated to the past, but that movement's overarching social critique and devotion to intense observation of daily life continued to inform works crafted by the best Italian directors. These qualities were put to work in a series of wildly different yet equally powerful films, which together paint a coherent picture of a nation caught in the whirlwind, its people having severed their roots once and for all, yet unable to establish connections to the new world being born around them.

Ermanno Olmi, in Il Posto, tracked an upwardly mobile member of the working class as he moved into a professional job, finding the financial security that his family lacked. Yet in order to gain tenuous ground in an uncertain future, he was leaving the familiarity of a more traditional world behind. The fiery Pier Paolo Pasolini's characters had far less opportunities, but were no less driven - often into self-destruction. In his Mamma Roma, it is not the world which is fluid and unstable, but the people in it, represented by the cut from the wild grieving of a heartbroken woman to the static cityscape out her window. Solid and implacable, the vista may mock her ferocious energy and ambition, may even defeat it, but such energy could not be negated - Italians were on the move, whether or not Italy itself was ready or open to such movement. (This sensation was also evoked earlier in the film, as an adolescent roamed through a hilly landscape dotted with looming stone monoliths, their weirdly erratic stability contrasted with his - and the camera's - restlessness. The tense, plangent classical score on the soundtrack echoed his own inner stirrings.)

Of course there was Michelangelo Antonioni, whose highly formalist portraits of alienation also juxtaposed humans to landscapes, though in this case they seemed to cower, uncertain in the face of looming reality. Not content to let these implications speak for themselves, the writer/director of L'Avventura stated his intention baldly and boldly: "And today a new man is being born, fraught with all the fears, terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation." Even the fantasist - and (hence?) most popular of the Italians - Federico Fellini - focused his two crucial early sixties works, La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, on anxiety caught in the cross-hairs between past and present, desire and responsibility. Meanwhile a younger generation, even less situated in Italy's past than its elders, regarded the last holdovers of an old society with a mixture of bitterness and nostalgia. The bitter was best represented by Marco Bellochio with his scathing debut Fists in the Pocket - a brutally funny, and frightening, screed against the nuclear family in which the rebellious and murderous outbursts of our protagonist, initially seeming free-spirited, were eventually revealed as the self-realization of a fascist.

And then there's the nostalgia. Two directors, one very young, one middle-aged, looked longingly upon the trappings and conventions of civilized life, even as they ambivalently touted the revolution. Ironically, it was the younger of the two directors - Bernardo Bertolucci, who was about 23 when he shot Before the Revolution - who clings most fervently to the old ways. Bertolucci's hero, a young Communist, is unable to break his bonds to the comforts of the upper class and "the sweetness of life before the revolution." (Bertolucci is still exploring the tensions between his sensual, poetic sensibilities and his political radicalism - the recent film The Dreamers was a meditation on that very ambivalence.) The older director - Luchino Visconti - sees change as inevitable, but is just as ambivalent as Bertolucci about its desirability. Unlike the work of the younger sensual Marxist, Visconti's period picture The Leopard (based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa) is not set before the revolution, but after. Hence the world being mourned is experienced only in its dying gasp, like a life flashing before one's eyes at the moment of death.

It is worth noting that The Leopard does not open after the aristocratic ruling class of Sicily has fallen (to the unifying revolution of Garabaldi and, more importantly, the bourgeoisie). Instead it opens with the beginning of the end, albeit with a hint of the complete destruction that awaits its upper-class characters. The credits unfold over images of empty courtyards, seemingly abandoned towers displayed in their crumbling glory. We're not sure yet if we're in the nineteenth century or the twentieth; these shots could just as easily belong to a documentary about Sicilian landmarks as to a feature which takes place when those landmarks were still in use. Finally, as the titles end, the camera begins to move, and with its movement we are swept into the past: a pan along the exterior of an old mansion, accompanied by muffled Latin prayers and shouting in the distance, eventually reveals an open window through which we can see the Salina family kneeling for an informal Mass - only to be interrupted by a growing clamor outside: a dead soldier has been found in the courtyard.

Like the detached ear in Blue Velvet, the dead soldier represents an incursion of the strange and threatening into the enclosed, comfortable world of the protagonists; but the Salinas are already aware of what the soldier represents, and know that he is just the first drop in the bucket. Indeed, as they "celebrate" Mass with their affable yet comical and ineffective priest, they are all costumed entirely in black; while this is most likely their common Sabbath dress, the image undoubtedly calls to mind a funeral. Thus the very first time we see the family they are grieving for the loss, not of a specific person, but of their own way of life. Although Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (a justly celebrated Burt Lancaster, dubbed into Italian for this print) spends the entire film maneuvering to preserve his family's status, even as its actual power slips away, there is a sense that a line has been crossed and with time, the new Italy will completely shake off the privileges of the aristocracy. (When the Salinas are warmly welcomed to their secluded vacation home, they step out of the carriage covered head to toe in dust; as the camera pans over the family sitting in church all that redeems their ridiculous appearance - and the irrelevance it suggests - is their self-contained dignity.)

Some aristocrats are able to ride the wave of change into the heart of the new society - Tancredi Falconari (Alain Delon), the Prince's charismatic but entirely opportunistic young nephew, even fights alongside Garabaldi before joining the new state's army and marrying Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale), the gorgeous daughter of the shrewd but gauche bourgeois official Don Calogero (Paolo Stoppa). On the surface, the Prince seems to be one of those malleable nobles, making public gestures toward the the nation-state, courteously suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous manners when entertaining the new elite, even setting up the marriage between Tancredi and Angelica (whom he seems to be a bit in love with himself; her dazzling looks and inadvertently awkward social skills perfectly embody the enticing yet rude new world of the bourgeoisie).

Yet despite all these gestures, the Prince knows that his time is running out. When offered a position in the Italian senate, he politely declines and offers a fatalistic viewpoint on Sicily, speculating that it is impervious to change, that its people will never warm up to progress even if it's in their best interests. His feelings do seem reflected by the harsh landscape and backward society around him, but it's also clear that the grim sentiments are more an expression of his own self-view than that of his people: he has accepted his own decline gracefully, even wistfully, and the final sequence - a grand ball which consumes the entire last act of the epic story - seems to show him recognizing, completely and directly, what it is he has lost.

Keep in mind that despite the movie's running time and grand sets, the film focuses mostly on scenes of dialogue, of customs and interactions, backroom deal-making and diplomatic maneuvers. There is one battle scene, which at times feels too orchestrated, and one of the conversations is held on a hillside overlooking the broad expanse of the Sicilian town, but for the most part the epic qualities are relegated to theme and character - and to the grandeur of the interiors - rather than to expensive set pieces or expansive narrative developments. The exception is that final ball, not only because a cast of tens of thousands pours into the ballroom and banquet, but because the Prince had made all the arrangements for the future and is now face-to-face with his irrelevance and mortality for the first time.

Something hangs in the air, barely articulated, yet it is felt deeply, and is displayed as the Prince dances a final dance with Angelica, as he sits alone in a room pondering the deathbed in a painting, and as he silently broods in the early dawn, disappearing into the shadows of a back alley, when several shots ring out. A small band of soldiers, who had deserted to rejoin Garabaldi's forces, have been executed - this is not yet their time; meanwhile the Prince's has already passed. And so the Prince himself disappears, dying a spiritual if not corporeal death, into a new world which also, in time, will come to pass (see those films set one hundred years later). Which reminds us that all of society exists in a state of impermanence and that, one day, the Prince's fate will be our own too - the only question is with how much dignity and stoicism one faces the cold dawn.

Ivan the Terrible

2010-01-31T14:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Over the course of two films, released fourteen years apart due to Soviet censorship, legendary director Sergei Eisenstein chronicles the infamous Russian tsar's ascension to and assertion of power. Ivan (Nikolai Cherkasov) begins as a handsome young prince, crowned at the opening of Part I while the corrupt nobles whisper conspiracies under his very nose. By the end of Part II, Ivan is a wizened, shrewd tyrant, foiling an assassination plot by using a simple-minded relative as bait. In between, he leads troops into battle, throws decadent parties, loses a wife to poison, and is betrayed repeatedly until his paranoia makes him wise beyond his years - and authoritarian beyond his foes' wildest expectations.

The film is a masterpiece - the above plot description guides the action, but the essence of the movie is in the extreme close-ups Eisenstein lavishes upon the bizarre faces of his players, the lavish yet cleverly designed set pieces (dinners with huge white, and later black, swan statues; a diplomatic detente in which the figures are placed on the checkered floor like chess-pieces), and the magnificent score contributed by Prokofiev. One should not expect a historically accurate recreation, a politically correct manifesto, nor even an especially straightforward narrative; to enjoy the movie one has to appreciate the campy effects Eisenstein employs and recognize that their campiness is not really unintentional. Even Ivan the Terrible seems in on the joke, half-flirting with an effeminate usurper just to get his way, wickedly grinning as he poses for Eisenstein's flamboyant camera. Part II is even better than Part I, if only because it further abandons the dutiful rollout of Ivan's rise to power for the immersion in his decadent, paranoid, baroque milieu.

Eisenstein had been one of the signature pioneers of Soviet silent film, when his films focused on the power of "montage" - rapidly cut sequences which often employed visual metaphors and rhyming images. Ivan the Terrible employs a wider variety of tricks, but the execution is still tight, controlled, and rhythmic - not in a cold fashion, but bursting with enthusiastic passion. As Stalin clamped his iron fist down on the Marxist state and narrowed the range of the arts, preferring drab socialist realism to inventive avant-garde agitprop, it was hard to see where Eisenstein fit in this totalitarian vision. He was freed up to create Alexander Nevsky, a heroic history film and his first collaboration with Prokofiev, in the late 30s. But the film's anti-German slant became a mark against it with Stalin's ever-shifting political line and it was a good five years before Eisenstein was cautiously given permission to proceed with Ivan, seen as a tribute to the latter-day despot. How times change! Suddenly ostentatious monarchism, nationalistic xenophobia, and subservience of the masses to the rule of one man were celebrated in the name of the Leninist revolution. Apparently, Stalin approved of Part I, was dismayed by Part II (whose release was delayed until after his death), and canceled Part III. Eisenstein's career was over, he died in captivity, and the Soviet cinema entered its deepest deep freeze, only to be alleviated with Joseph the Terrible's own demise. Today, some see Ivan the Terrible as a Stalinist apologia, while others find in it a subversive attack on the dictator. Perhaps both viewpoints are correct, which only adds to the attraction of this warped classic.

(500) Days of Summer

2010-01-31T13:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in July 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Punningly, the title is a winking reference to Tom Hansen’s (Joseph Gordon Levitt) girlfriend, rather ludicrously named Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). Appropriately then - and look elsewhere if you don't want the ending spoiled - the film’s own seasonal mood is rather autumnal, focusing as it does on the decline and expiration of a “quirky” romance. The movie also anticipates and tacitly acknowledges the death of the very hip/quirky/indie aesthetic that its own contemporary success would seem to vindicate. Just as “indie” trendiness hits saturation point in the media, the movie whispers to anyone who’s listening that the show is over and the queen is dead – the movie is an allegory for its own demise (and that of its audience) and even more surprisingly, an apologia for such.

Only after seeing the film does this become clear; after all, the marketing campaign won’t tell you a thing about the story or the message – not even a high-concept hook to get you in theaters. Instead there are constant pictures of Zooey & Joseph making googly eyes at each other, Smiths-saturated TV spots, and self-conscious affectations in the titles and graphics (normally indulged in those ubiquitous crayon/pencil-drawn titles, here reserved for the songlike parenthesis around “500”).

In other words, the ads focus purely on “the look” and (500) Days of Summer comes to seem like nothing more than a culmination of the past decade’s “indie” development – a move away from actual independence (like Juno and Little Miss Sunshine, this film is thoroughly enmeshed in Hollywood casting and financing) towards signifiers of "indieness." All that remain for public consumption are the soundtrack, Zooey’s adorable hair ribbon, Joseph’s hip messenger bag and especially his big black headphones (admittedly a relief after those twerpy white earbuds) – all of which quirky outsiders-cum-insiders in the audience are supposed to identify and identify with.

But the movie is more intriguing, if ultimately unsuccessful, than its empty viral promotions would suggest – even contradictory of the adverts. One has to see the whole film through to arrive at this moment of truth, and one has to ignore the various flaws and shortcomings along the way to recognize what the movie is actually offering, but once discerned an at least grudging admiration emerges for the anti-romantic aspects of the story. The narrative flashes back and forth among the 500 days of Summer and Tom’s romance, during which it becomes clear that Tom is a romantic and Summer is non-committal, something she admits and he chooses to ignore. Ultimately, she dumps him and he comes to accept that their wispy, whimsical, and trendy “connection” existed almost exclusively in his own mind.

That the film is superficial, “sensitive” without any penetrating insight, and stylistically dressed up with no real place to go ultimately becomes a case of form imitating content (presumably unintentional, but compelling nonetheless): just like the couple it presents, the movie is flat and limp beneath its quirky, ethereal surface. That the actual film recognizes, condemns, and moves beyond the very scene its success is reliant upon is promising (if hypocritical); however, the film can’t capitalize on this maturity as it is too enmeshed in the quirky trappings it sets out to subvert, and its writing and style are too mediocre to truly deliver – either the “indie” goods or the subversion thereof.

This is in spite of some nice touches, like a party conducted in split-screen, the left side showing Tom’s supposedly reasonable explanations of a rapprochement with Summer, while the right displays the disappointing, and ultimately crushing, reality. However, even here the idea remains mostly on the page, as the actual execution does not notably expand on the above description. Contrast with Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) – the obvious inspiration for the films’ beginning/end back-forth structure – in which clever ideas also become hilarious, and occasionally moving, scenes (think the subtitled conversation on the rooftop, or the split-screen analysis sessions).

Director Mark Webb has difficulty moving beyond the conceptual toward the textural; the film’s conceits remain just that. The structure does not reveal any telling juxtapositions in beginning and end (it merely exploits a few jarring contrasts within the same location); the set pieces begin with an idea (a musical number after Tom gets laid) but leave it there (TV commercials have done this sort of thing before, and more stylishly - even when the intention was anti-style). The filmmaking is not bad; it's just mediocre.

Meanwhile, the screenwriters (Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) pile on half-delivered clichés ripped from earlier offbeat hits like The Royal Tenenbaums (a narrator who pops up haphazardly and offers a pale imitation of Alec Baldwin’s rich voiceover in the opening minutes of Wes Anderson’s classic) and Juno (a precocious girl-guru, in this case closer to six than sixteen). Elsewhere the screenplay indulges in the most tired cliches, worn-out parodies of parodies vis a vis European art cinema (a mime carrying a balloon, yet another spoof of The Seventh Seal) - where, ironically, many of this movie's own watered-down stylistic tics originated. The film seems genuinely uncomfortable with the offbeat vibe it initially cultivates.

Furthermore, but on that same note, the movie has a surprising but telling alternative to the strained and already half-square quirkiness of its characters (consistently placed in front of corporate logos culminating in a “playful” visit to Ikea, in a scene which is either not as subversive as it intends to be or more discordant than it knows). When Summer marries an offscreen beau and Tom combs his hair and puts on a suit, images speak louder than words: though she's supposedly found true love, and he's ostensibly pursuing his dream job as an architect, the visuals recall standard images of Hollywood success: glossy, upscale, any quirks finally slicked over. The movie can't imagine any other viable alternative to the (thankfully exposed) limitations of earnest quirkiness: genuine rebellion or even detachment from the expectations of the characters' generation and media image don't even enter the picture.

Still, connotations of selling out aside, the conclusion at least brings maturity to the film’s characters, a sense that they've outgrown the cutesy perpetual adolesence which Garden State, among others, wallows in (until the last twenty minutes of the film, Tom and Summer's looks and behavior have conformed to a junior high student’s conception of the young adult world). A scene at another couple’s wedding has a nice rueful and elegiac tone, and Deschanel strikes a rare moment of truth when reuniting with Tom on a park bench: a flicker in her expression suggests to the viewer that there may be a parallel film going on here, and a more interesting one at that - her side of the story, perhaps wiser and deeper than Tom’s. A brief clip of The Graduate comes off nicely though it inevitably makes one long for the earlier film. (500) Days' statement that Tom grossly misread the ending of the 1967 classic is just about the best bit of characterization in the movie, for better or worse.

In the end, despite its overall weakness, the movie lingers - there's something at work here, even if the film itself doesn't really work (audiences seem smitten with it, but it's hard to see how the infatuation withstands closer and more long-term scrutiny; again, parallels with the subject onhand). And one can’t fault (500) Days for acknowledging that Nick and Norah's playlist won't bring them together, nor will listening to the Shins change your life (in this case, it’s the Smiths, admittedly a better band but surprisingly under-used given the constant name-dropping). As the "indie" movement hits saturation point in the mainstream, (500) Days arrives, perhaps inadvertently, to bury rather than praise the milieu; to sound a death knell for a certain type of cultural artifact.

Even if (500) Days’ buzz inspires a cluster of knock-offs (sprouting up from Hollywood studios’ faux-indie arms like the multiple Zooeys in one of the film’s ads), we’ve clearly reached saturation point with this particular manifestation of the zeitgeist. Trendspotters must start to look elsewhere for the new and edgy – perhaps even something with real edge, necessary now that the bubble (which fostered quirk culture, along with other manifestations of the ostrich-head-in-the-sand Bush years) has burst.

Summer’s over; bring on the fall.

Chop Shop

2010-01-31T12:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), a Queens urchin, lives and works amongst the junk heaps and stolen cars of the local chop shop - both a street-savvy preteen and a naive dreamer, he knows how to navigate this adult world yet innocently hopes to purchase a van and turn it into ice cream truck. His older sister (Isamar Gonzales) shows up one day and sticks around, spurring him on in his dreams - yet she also wounds him, when he discovers she's turning tricks to make ends meet.

An excellent little film, glowing with a surprisingly warm poetic touch. The performances, turned in by nonprofessionals, are uniformly engaging - though limited in technique, the actors nonetheless convey buried emotions as they shuttle between ambivalence (feeling overwhelmed by their conditions) and resolve (working incredibly hard, pursuing - fanciful? - goals). The boy's heartbreak on discovering his sister's secret is deeply affecting. Director Ramin Bahrani engages with his protagonist's lifestyle without condescending to them; he demonstrates how a barely-furnished hovel above a garage can become a vaguely comfortable home with the presence of a loved one or a resolution that one will take what one can get. The story, while loosely structured, moves forward through its eighty-five minutes, accumulating memorable details and privileged moments along the way, keeping us curious, allowing its characters to grow but not too much. Most of all, the photography captures the vitality of a location: this may not be the ideal home or workplace but Bahrani does not leer with mock horror; he shows us, as with that hovel, how the little boy fits into his landscape, the camera capturing the latent beauty much as we suspect the precocious adolescent does.

Neorealism, as a pseudo-documentary style following the lives of fictional, but realistic, poor people, first made its appearance sixty-five years ago in postwar Italy. Bahrani, a young American filmmaker, has taken up the torch amidst today's multiplex blockbusters and twee indie quirkfest (in which it's taken for granted that money is not a concern). This 2007 film is his follow-up to Man Push Cart, a highly praised but (to these eyes) overrated debut in which the pretty surfaces, contrived storylines, phony performances, and aggressively pronounced camerawork distracted from the heart of the story. Chop Shop feels much more naturalistic, and less uneasy about its own romanticism, which comes with the territory: Bahrani is obviously attracted to beauty, however slummed up, and to pretend otherwise would be dishonest. Here he does not try to disguise his penchant for street poetry, but rather integrates it with the hardscrabble life he conveys and the rhythms of the human society on hand. Roger Ebert has called him "the new great director." I would not go that far - his milieu still feels a little forced, his poetic touch slightly overbearing, a certain intensity still lacking - but he's certainly showing promise. His latest film, Goodbye Solo (unseen by me, but very highly praised by others) is now on Netflix.

My Brother is an Only Child

2010-01-30T18:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Two brothers: one, Accio (Elio Germano), a fascist, the other, Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio), a communist. As the Netflix envelope tells us, they "remain close despite their opposing political views, but when they both fall for the same woman, the rift between them grows." Actually, the story is more complicated - and interesting - than that. Manrico's commitment to his cause is greater than Accio's; the latter is a right-winger by virtue of heady testosterone, lingering Catholic traditionalism, and blistering sexual frustration. Besides, about two-thirds of the way through the film, Accio is no longer a modern-day Mussolini wannabe, so the film's potentially glib hook is not in play anymore. Meanwhile, the woman, Francesca (Diane Fleri), remains Manrico's lover throughout; and Accio's attraction to her may actually bond the brothers closer rather than split them apart. The film spans fifteen years, though the siblings don't quite age accordingly, and the storyline offers a political progression to match the familial dissolution. In the end, My Brother is an Only Child is an entertaining and at times though-provoking movie, if not a terribly deep one.

At its best, the film is a wry, warm portrait of sibling rivalry, a kind of coming-of-age comedy shot through a prism of extremist ideologies. While its heart certainly seems set on Manrico's leftism, the movie humors Accio's fascist blustering, seeing the bumbling blackshirts of the 60s as inadvertent comedians rather than sinister hoodlums. Occasionally, a satirical slingshot is aimed at the radicals as well. Particularly amusing is the Beethoven concert, initially a moving tribute from young revolutionaries to a musical iconoclast. Quickly, though, it becomes a silly socialist singalong when "Ode to Joy" receives embarrassing new lyrics, by way of placards extolling the virtues of Mao, Lenin, and Stalin. Accio himself eventually joins "the movement" (he's astonished to find out he doesn't get a membership card) but his political insight is still outstripped by a headlong obsession with "action". Meanwhile Manrico heads for the thickets of radical terror - while the name "Red Brigades" is never evoked, it seems clear that the once idealist worker has descended into Italy's version of the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof Gang. At film's end, only Accio seems to have a clear idea of how to make the struggle real, fusing political activism and family commitment in one impulsive, yet surprisingly intelligent, action.

The political history of 60s and 70s Italy is painted with a rather broad brush. One does miss a deep understanding of the Communist Party's relationship to radical activism (the film paints the two as glove and hand, respectively, when in fact their interests did not coincide until well into the 70s), as well as the actual role fascist recidivists played in state repression (indeed, the state hardly registers, save for the climax and a brief aside leading up to it - in this film, the political is very, very personal). At times, with the brothers representing differing ideologies, and with most of the action focused through the backwater Mussolini-built town of Latina, the movie takes on the quality of a fable, so it seems appropriate that the politics are simplified and streamlined. Besides, how much intricate ideological parsing can an audience take? Even so the era is evoked with some sharp flourishes; for example, the TV flashes images of 1968's international revolution, while Accio sits down in front of a hot plate and informs us, via narration, "The revolution never came to Latina. I think I spent most of that year in the kitchen."

The relationship between the brothers plays with goofy charm and warmth. You end up liking both of them - Accio, despite his political idiocy, and Manrico, despite his callous self-centeredness (he coasts on his charisma to bed women and then leave them hanging; ultimately, it's his own family he leaves hanging). Germano, as Accio, is magnetic with his enigmatic smiles and self-effacing jokiness, though occasionally, he tries a bit too hard to echo Robert De Niro (the two even look a bit alike). Ricardo Scamarcio is not quite as intriguing, but he's just as good as he needs to be for the part. Taking what could be a thankless Che Guevera pin-up rad doll and infusing him with humanity and genuine charisma, we can see why the youthful activists and old mamas of the village alike fall under Manrico's spell. Meanwhile, Diane Fleri embodies Francesca with such engaging warmth that we can sense immediately how both Manrico and Accio could fall for this pretty young activist in their own way; her bright smile outshines any red star or Mussolini medallion. One scene, in which Accio bids her farewell with a playful fascist salute and she returns the gesture with a grin and a mock fist of solidarity, rather nicely evokes the humanist way in which the film attempts to transcend political boundaries.

It's a Gift

2010-01-30T17:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

W.C. Fields plays Harold Bissonette (pronounced "Bis-o-nay" at his pretentious wife's behest), a henpecked husband and besieged shop owner who's also a man with a dream. When his uncle dies and leaves him a bit of money, Mr. Bizonet, er...Mr. Bis-o-nay doggedly ignores his wife's blistering putdowns and admonishments, and buys an orange grove in California. The family sets off for the promised land in their old jalopy, wreaking havoc along the way; needless to say, when they arrive at their destination it isn't exactly Solla Sollew. But there's one more surprise awaiting them; in the end, Harold will have oranges aplenty, all the better to add a touch of flavor to his tall glasses of gin.

The above describes the plot, all right, but if it conveys a humorous situation comedy in which the gags all arise from the premise, then I've given the wrong impression. One's sense of It's a Gift will be determined in the early scene when Fields attempts to shave. His teenage daughter charges into the bathroom and commandeers the mirror. W.C. bumbles around the room trying to determine a new way to cut his whiskers, but the humor arises not so much from his solutions, which are nonetheless amusing, as from the man himself. I watched for a minute or two and found myself thinking, "This isn't really very funny." Then, unexpectedly, I began to chuckle. And the mirth quickly became bountiful: Fields is so offbeat, so singular in his timing and expressiveness, that he's hysterical. He never seems to be milking a gag for laughs: he's like the juggler who keeps several balls in the air while drinking a glass of milk (spiked in this case) and talking to a friend - the comedy is simply effortless and natural. The constant assaults of the outside world - the family first and foremost - are never-ending, and the humor is to be found in Fields' flailing endeavors to find off these assaults, particularly the incessant verbal volleys of his withering wife. All of which can only be truly appreciated by watching the man in action, and as such, It's a Gift comes highly recommended.

It's a Gift is also wonderful for how it situates Fields' wild, desperate humor in the context of Depression realities, from the hardscrabble Jersey town where Bissonette raises a family, works, and suffers (all the same, really) to the Californian Eden of parched orange groves and sequestered mansions. In the end, Fields is a man who's achieved the American Dream in true individualist style: by being his own cantankerous, ever-enduring, ever-soused self.

Mutual Appreciation

2010-01-30T16:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Wannabe rock star Allan (Justin Rice) shows up in New York to pursue his career, experience city life, and hang out with his friends Lawrence (writer/director Andrew Bujalski) and Ellie (Rachel Clift) - Lawrence's girlfriend, whose feelings for Allan may give the movie its sly title. As Allan and Ellie skirt closer to the edge of a sexual and emotional engagement, they realize they're playing with fire - without care, their happy trio could quickly go up in smoke.

As with all of the talented Bujalski's films, a plot description does not fully convey the movie's appeal. Actually, Mutual Appreciation is one of the best films of the decade. The attraction lies not so much in the story, which gives the fleeting moments and prevailing mood a context and a destination (though as always, a climax is present without a full-on resolution), as in the texture of the film. The beautiful, grainy black-and-white 16mm film look suffuses the proceedings with a melancholy, romantic atmosphere. Bujalski elicits charismatically naturalistic performances from his entire cast, and the improvised feel of the exchanges (though they are, in fact, hardly improvised) deepens the relaxed sensation of being immersed in an authentic universe which the filmmaker, like a Deist God, set in motion and then left to spin of its own accord.

Mutual Appreciation's rock musician hero and hip Brooklyn setting (touristy exteriors are eschewed for just-as-evocative apartment rooms and occasional basement clubs) are double-edged swords. They create a buzz and excitement around the film which can draw viewers in (Bujalski's first film took place in a more grungy post-college setting; his third in a workaday, more practical thirtysomething milieu). However, these elements also allow some to smugly deride the film as trendy or "hipster" and thus dismiss it. In fact, Bujalski's prevailing mood is a warm engagement with life, limned with melancholy; he eschews arch, ironic distancing for exposure of the raw feelings which race beneath young people's social interactions. He even has the guts to show the discomforting parasitism which underlies the musician's free-wheeling life, as he stumblingly phones his dad for money and endures a lecture about finding a job. Bujalski's first films spawned a movement jokingly dubbed "mumblecore" (these films can be intriguing but remain mere snapshot details of Bujalski's larger, richer canvas). Most other filmmakers of this milieu would have you believe that their characters survive on unconvincing half-baked "cool" jobs or some nebulous notion of financial independence. (This honesty manifests itself in different ways in different Bujalski films: in Funny Ha Ha, the character struggles through dreadful-looking temp jobs while Beeswax gives its characters relatively un-hip professions like lawyer and store manager). Anyway, after Bujalski kicked off an under-the-radar movement (of which most filmgoers remain blissfully unaware), he lay low for a while, appearing in a few of his peers' films but apparently waiting until the buzz blew over and he could go back to making his own unique, inimitable movies without being pigeonholed.

8 1/2

2010-01-30T15:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Guido (Marcello Mastrioanni) is a filmmaker. Suffering from director's block as his big-budget shoot draws nearer, Guido finds himself tossing and turning between baroque fantasies, an even more carnivalesque reality, and childhood memories both soothing and haunting. Serving as guide on the artist's quest for inspiration is the fleeting image of a beautiful muse (Claudia Cardinale); she appears every now and then like a splash of cool water - all too briefly. Then Gudio is submerged once again in the sweltering sauna of questioning producers, condescending writers, boorish acolytes, tormenting cardinals, preening mistresses, hectoring wives... The concluding image, which captures the film's wild characters marching around a circus ring with the director as the ringleader, nicely sums up the spectacular nature of the movie. The opening images (and sounds) - with the director trapped in his car, barely able to breathe, before floating in the sky like a balloon, with a mysterious figure tugging on a rope attached to his leg - also set the tone, establishing the artist's alternating claustrophobia and free-floating imagination, while preparing us for a film which will be told, most often, viscerally rather than narratively.

8 1/2 is widely regarded as Federico Fellini's masterpiece, yet however one judges it against the Italian director's body of work, it's an essential movie. Usually placed alongside classics like Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Godfather in lists of the greatest films ever made, 8 1/2 has had an immense impact on popular culture since the 60s, furthering the idea of free-associational storytelling, glorifying the artist's humorous explorations of his own hang-ups, privileging the power of imagery and style over devotion to exposition and objectivity. None of this was new, of course, and even that which was relatively new already had already found expression in the vibrant New Wave films pouring forth from France. Nonetheless, 8 1/2 was one of those films which consolidated innovations and gave expression to the zeitgeist in a particularly memorable way. As such, its influence was carried on through all the envelope-pushing works of proceeding decades; today its idiosyncratic vision, devotion to individual consciousness, and modish style have perhaps found their latest home in the more innovative television series. This may say as much about the precarious nature of the filmic medium at present as it does about the eternal adaptability of "Felliniesque" flamboyance.

As for the marvelous movie itself, it remains sumptuous, romantic, entertaining. It is both timeless in its airy, imaginative, highly stylish approach, and charmingly of its time, as a portrait of early 60s chic on the cusp of mid 60s Pop bohemianism. The night scene, in which the director climbs the scaffold of his eerily empty outdoor set with his wife's lesbian gal pal, sharing his existential neuroses, perfectly summons a contemporary mood of melancholy dislocation. That feeling, for the moment confined largely to intellectuals and attributed variously to the Bomb and Sartre (both a bit old-hat by '63), would soon explode into the public consciousness, carried by the surging youth with their psychedelic drugs, hedonistic rock music, and apocalyptic politics. For the moment, at least, the seed of this mass mood was sprouting in a series of remarkably fresh and adventurous movies bursting forth from Europe, 8 1/2 being but one of the most notable. Personally, I find several Fellini films I connect more deeply with - beginning with his coming-of-age (somewhat after the fact) I Vitelloni and ending with that aching elegy to the good life and cynically cool celebration of the "sweet life," La Dolce Vita. However, there's no doubt that 8 1/2 is a summit in Fellini's cinema, and in the history of movies: there's nothing else quite like it.

Ludwig

2010-01-30T14:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in August 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Seen in the light of of the lugubrious Death of Venice, the impressive but stoic Leopard, and the emotionally devastating Rocco and His Brothers, the decadence and historical pageantry of Ludwig can seem almost refreshing. True, it has its psychological intensity, what with the physical and mental decline undergone by its hero (a deeply romantic, and possibly insane, Bavarian royal of the 19th century, whose reign saw his little kingdom swallowed up by the new Prussian-led German state). And at four hours long, it's hardly a sprightly jog through the park. Yet the film is lush, lavish, and entertaining - its long runtime absorbing due to the hero's wildness (he represents all the opposite tendencies of the aristocracy when compared to the melancholy, savvy, and dignified Burt Lancaster in The Leopard: self-indulgence, withdrawal into fantasy, irresponsibility).

Not everyone seems to feel this way, and the film was widely savaged on its initial release in 1972. Actually, this may be the rare case in which the longer version of the film actually makes it move at a more enjoyable pace, simply because the viewer actually knows what's going on, with all the footage finally in place. Take Roger Ebert's perplexed description of the cut released in the 70s:

In a film filled with unresolved scenes, one stands out. Visconti shows Elizabeth of Austria arriving in her carriage at one of Ludwig's castles. She enters, walks upstairs, and stops at the threshold of an incredibly long, ornate hall. She waits there (first in medium shot, then in long shot) for what seems like a good minute. After a while, there is the off-screen cackle of maniacal laughter. Nothing else happens. Fade out; the scene, the visit and the occasion are never referred to again. I wonder if that was Ludwig laughing, or Visconti.

In the version screened at the Museum of Fine Arts last weekend, the scene was perfectly clear: Elizabeth (Ludwig's cousin and his platonic love) arrives at the castle; Ludwig, in his decomposed and debauched state, refuses to come out but invites her, through his servants, to stay until he's ready to greet her, perhaps days or weeks in the future; a distraught and perplexed Elizabeth promptly leaves the castle, realizing that her endearingly foolish friend has gone off the deep end. Actually, there's a kind of charm to the obliqueness of the scene Ebert describes, and it allows him to deliver a humorous line for his conclusion, but undoubtedly the lengthier version of the sequence makes more sense.

Indeed, despite the madness of its subject, Ludwig is one of the more accessible Viscontis screened in the MFA series. It was shown following the at times inscrutable Death in Venice, which takes Thomas Mann's intense novella, obscures and transforms many of its meanings, and stretches scenes out for mysterious purposes (one is often left with the lingering suspicion that Visconti is simply in love with his sets - how else to explain the long pans across the room which abandon both our intellectual hero and the pubescent object of his intense affection?). Despite Ebert's claim that "I thought Visconti had just about used up the possibility of penetrating stares in his last movie, 'Death in Venice' which contained nearly 15 minutes of them...[b]ut, no, his characters are staring all the more penetratingly in 'Ludwig'", the film is actually quite talky and hardly consumed by wordless effects.

The first half of the movie may even be too talky, and at times - despite its grand locations and lavish sets - it seems oddly stagey, like a well-produced TV movie. In the second half, as Ludwig puts aside all concerns of state and any last traces of interpersonal relationships (at least with his equals), the visuals take over and the movie becomes more "cinematic." Here there is no question that Visconti is in love with his sets, but such self-indulgent adoration suits the subject (and indeed, the "sets" are often the actual locations they are depicting: fairy-tale castles which Ludwig himself built). In more ways than one: Ludwig is played by Helmut Berger, the director's lover - Visconti's passionate gaze is fully on display here, once the king discovers why he didn't want to marry Elizabeth's pretty sister when he had the chance.

Also on display are Visconti's love for opera (the king was infamously a patron, and a badly used one at that, of Wagner, played here by the game Trevor Howard) and for depicting the decline of the aristocracy (it would be hard to pick a more extreme example than Ludwig, who begins in a palace as lord of the land, and winds up in cramped confines as a mental patient overseen by stuffed-shirt bourgeoisie). The movie ends abruptly - as soon as the king is discovered dead, the frame freezes and the credits flash over the image of his corpse - but while this might be a crucial flaw in a more ambitious film, ultimately Ludwig seems more like a pet project than an attempted masterpiece. The movie allows Visconti to play with his favorite toys without recourse to an exacting discipline. As such, Ludwig is not great but it is highly enjoyable.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

2010-01-30T13:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Around 10:00 at night, Domnul Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu), a 63-year-old Romanian widower who likes to drink, is feeling a bit queasy. By 6:00 the next morning, he's lying on a gurney in a hospital room that looks more like a morgue - he's comatose and his head is being shaved in preparation for surgery. In between, Lazarescu is escorted from hospital to hospital, indifferent doctor to indifferent doctor, his only sympathetic companion the nurse who rides with him in the ambulance and becomes increasingly frustrated with the cold shoulder - or outright rudeness - they encounter on their journey through the night. None of this is giving much away - indeed, the title is more suggestive than the movie, as we don't actually see Mr. Lazarescu die (though it doesn't seem like it will be long by the end). Lazarescu is what Hitchcock would call a MacGuffin - a device to hook the audience so they'll stick around for the real point: an exposé of a shockingly careless and overcrowded Romanian medical system and, even more pointedly, a fascinating study of human nature and "professionalism" in action.

In a way, this is problematic. When we meet Lazarescu, he is slovenly, inarticulate, and pathetic. Still, he earns our sympathy simply by standing (or slumping) in front of director Cristi Puiu's camera and struggling to articulate his ills, to which his mildly friendly neighbors seem mostly indifferent. Yet as the film wears on, and old man Lazarescu becomes increasingly disheveled and sickly, he becomes less subject than object. By film's end, Puiu and we in the audience are almost as guilty of neglect and indifference as the various doctors who shuttle their patient off to the next unlucky medic. The nurse becomes our protagonist to a certain extent, suffering alongside Lazarescu and moving from scolding him to (ineffectively) scolding the practitioners who refuse him care (various excuses are used: he's an alcoholic and doesn't deserve treatment, he needs surgery and we can't do it here, the patient's still conscious - he's not - and thus has to sign a waiver, etc.). Even she is gone by the final moments.

The film could be bleak, but instead - perhaps because Puiu cheats by withdrawing us from Lazarescu's largely interior suffering - it is fascinating and times even comic. Puiu has described the movie as a "black comedy" and indeed, it is at times darkly humorous to see the gap between the doctors' cool assurance and their inability to save one man's life or even ease his pain. The film also holds the fascination of documentary - even the more authentic forms of reality television - as the shaky camera voyeuristically picks up on little details: the cute young doctor's assistant blushing and flirting with the slightly older doctor between bouts of curtly trying to dismiss Lazarescu, the brash young doctor (he looks about 19) who orders everyone around and fatalistically assesses Lazarescu's dim chances of surviving the night, the hushed tone in the receptionist's voice as she describes the end of all-night shift, while in the background, a vacuum drones monotonously, its tones oddly soothing. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu won prizes across the globe in 2005 and 2006, in film festivals and critics' societies. Curiously, despite the comic undertones existing subtly alongside the verité authenticity and grim hospital decor, the box declares this film "the most acclaimed comedy of the year" (emphasis mine). Now that's funny.

Drag Me to Hell

2010-01-30T12:00:00.000-05:00

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

The pulp-fiction title provides one clue, the quite literal visual depiction of said title one more. And sure enough, Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell is to horror films what the spring's Taken was to action movies: a satisfying, straightforward, well-made example of its genre, smart enough not to take itself too seriously, but self-possessed enough to avoid smug camp. Such films become rarer and rarer as Hollywood finds itself torn between high-profile (though not necessarily highbrow) adaptations and lowest-common denominator schlock, usually with a self-consciously "ironic" edge. For relief, there's the occasional clever, high-concept movie, but pure genre films - which satisfy an itch, do so with great skill and craft, and don't feel it's necessary to saturate themselves in a jokey postmodernism - have largely fallen by the wayside in the 00s.

Yet one of Drag Me to Hell's virtues is that it feels so unpretentious: the concept is more or less summed up by the title (we begin with one unlucky victim literally being dragged down to hell; for the rest of the film our heroine will try to avoid the same fate), and the execution is an exercise in evoking good, solid, jumpy thrills. After the 1960s prologue in which a young Hispanic boy is sucked through the earth by demons, we settle on the initially mundane life of our protagonist, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a loan officer gunning for promotion, while trying to avoid insecurity in her relationship with hotshot academic Clay Dalton (Justin Long). Her well-ordered life spins out of control when she denies a demonic old gypsy woman an extension on her mortgage; furious that she will be losing her home, the hag attacks Christine in the office and then jumps her in the parking lot, initiating one of the scariest/funniest carjackings in recent memory. Christine quickly comes to realize that the gypsy has cursed her - in three days she will be going to hell unless she finds some way out of the curse. With the help of a psychic, her freaked-out boyfriend, and eventually a talking goat, she tries to do just that.

The plot is rather ridiculous, but rather than try to complexify or satirize their storyline, the writers (Raimi and his brother Ivan) just run with it. Although she won't be pleasing any real-life gypsies with this portrayal, Lorna Raver is suitably horrific as the old hag (at one point, her dentures dispensed, she gums her victims' chin with ferocious gusto). Raver's performance, both disturbing and darkly amusing, sets the tone for the movie: acknowledging the inherent campiness of the material, but quickly moving on to more important matters, like grossing us out and occasionally giving us the creeps. (The old lady is not terrifying so much as revolting, but in a very fun way.)

Raimi, who pioneered a new form of horror/comedy with his iconic Evil Dead trilogy, is certainly no genre naif. That he largely chooses to play it straight is a testament both to his faith in horror traditions and his confidence in his own ability to manipulate and entertain audiences. Or does he "play it straight"? That interpretation will be doubted by some, even by many. Scott Tobias in the AV Club, celebrating Drag Me to Hell as "junk film-making at its finest" claims that Raimi wants us "to nudge each other over the transcendent ridiculousness" of what we're seeing. And a writer on IMDb declares the film "a live action EC comic". Fair enough - but there's a goofy sincerity to the ridiculousness (which only makes it more ridiculous, and more enjoyable) - and a warmly rendered sense of nostalgia inherent the IMDb writer's analogy. Even while aware of its pulpiness, Drag Me to Hell doesn't make much of this aspect, a refreshing approach to irony in this day and age.

Ultimately, the film can be enjoyed equally by kids looking for a grotesque good time, by cinephiles appreciating a fine filmmaker's craftsmanship and classical storytelling (itself a rarity in today's twisty-turny, multistory narratives), and by those who dig the wacky nastiness of the set pieces and the often silly behavior of the characters (who nonetheless are played straight).

Fair warning, though: animal-lovers will not be so pleased, and may feel that the threatening statement of the title can't come soon enough for our sweet-faced heroine.