They live by night

7 Times Oscar Got It Right

2012-02-26T02:36:00.001-05:00

Yes,I know I’m not supposed to care about the Oscars, but, well, I do, and if you’rereading this, chances are you do, too, maybe just a little bit. Anyway, I’vedone a couple of Oscar things the past week for Vulture – I contributed to this piece prognosticating the winners and suggesting witty things to say when they're announced, and I also wrote this piece about some of the best performances in the worst Oscar bait films over the years.

But I also wanted towrite this list here. We spend so much time grousing about the worst BestPicture winners and whatnot, that sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves ofthose occasions when Oscar actually gets it right. So, here are the BestPicture winners from the past forty years that I actually agree with, inchronological order. And by “agree with,” I mean, “Yes, that movie actually was-- or was at least close to being -- the best motion picture release of thatgiven year." You will certainly disagree with a couple of these choices. Know thatI would probably disagree with a couple of yours. Enjoy.

THEGODFATHER (1972)

Don’tneed to explain this choice too much. I’m not including The Godfather Part IIbecause, as much as I love that film, I think I love The Conversation andChinatown more. The first one, though, is a perfect example of the ideal Oscarmovie. A prestige adaptation of a big, pulpy best-seller that, in translationto the screen, expands and becomes a true work of art on an exquisitely grandscale.

ANNIEHALL (1977)

Yeah,I know, Star Wars was also this year, but this is basically the Star Wars ofromantic comedies. Woody. Diane. Tony. Shelley. Wallace. Marshall. ChristopherEffing Walken. “Touch my heart…with your foot.” “You mean, my whole fallacy iswrong.” “Jew eat yet?” Manhattan might be the better Allen film, but Annie Hall is so,so full of iconic moments that it just cannot be ignored.

AMADEUS(1984)

Um,I think we’ve said enough about this one for now.

THELAST EMPEROR (1987)

Ilove this film so much it’s obscene. I saw it ten times during its initial runin theaters (I was fourteen at the time, and just getting into BernardoBertolucci and Italian cinema) and I’ve come back to it over and over againover the years. Forget, for a moment, the fact that it’s quite possibly themost opulent and beautifully shot film, like, ever. (Not that one should everforget such things – this is cinema we’re talking about, after all.) It’s also deceptively complex– it features a thoroughly passive protagonist who, despitehaving great symbolic power, wields almost no actual power and must liveconstantly at the mercy of others. Somebody at the time described it as an“anti-epic” and that seems about right. Other directors would have scaled their aestheticdown to match the personal drama at the story’s heart. Only Bertolucci wasperverse enough to create a film whose very hugeness served to highlight his central character’s smallness.

UNFORGIVEN(1992)

Fulldisclosure: It took me several viewings before I could embrace Clint Eastwood’sgrim Western masterpiece. And 1992 does in fact have one American filmthat I would easily rank higher than Unforgiven: George Miller’s sublimeLorenzo’s Oil, the most underrated film of that decade. (Go here to readsomething I wrote on it.) But Christ, is Unforgiven magnificent – taking thewhole melancholy cowboy motif and turning it on its head by (ironically) reallycommitting to it. Interesting thing to watch out for: Note how often peoplemake references to being dead or being in the Afterlife in the film. Unforgiventakes our mythic ideas about the Wild West and fashions a kind of bleakpurgatory out of them. (Seriously, can you believe this won Best Picture??)

TITANIC(1997)

No,fuck you.

NOCOUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

Thisone gets a bit of a bad rap, in part because fellow nominee There Will Be Bloodhas come to seem like the more timeless film. But the Coen Brothers’Neo-Western is still amazing, a gripping dirge of desperation and menace thatjust builds and builds until it reaches near-abstraction. Was it the absolutebest film of its year? Maybe not – I’d give it to Jafar Panahi’s Offside (and,retroactively, Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light, which didn’t open in the U.S.until 2008), but No Country belongs alongside There Will Be Blood and Zodiac asone of that year’s major American masterpieces.

SEE THIS MOVIE: Reign of Terror (aka The Black Book) Now Available on DVD

2012-02-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Glenn Kenny for alerting me (and the rest of theworld) to the fact that one of Anthony Mann’s most neglected masterpieces, Reign of Terror, aka The Black Book, is now available in a nicenew burn-on-demand DVD from Columbia Classics, which you can order through the fine folks at the Warner Archive. This is joyous news – the film haswallowed in some strange obscurity for years, not just because it was publicdomain (and hence available in a lot of crappy, fly-by-night editions but nogood ones) but also because it’s a bit of an unclassifiable oddity.

Mann would, of course, eventually gain notoriety for his corrosive,psychological Westerns (The Man fromLaramie, Man of the West, The Naked Spur, etc.) and darkly operatichistorical epics (El Cid, Fall of the Roman Empire), but his earlycareer took off thanks to a series of low-budget film noirs, many of them madewith the great cinematographer John Alton. Reignof Terror was one of these, but it’s not just a noir; it’s also a periodpiece. It’s a stylized adventure set amid the chaos of the French Revolution as well as an over-the-top gangster movie where the chief baddie is MaximilianRobespierre, and where the plot is basically a hard-boiled re-imagining of hisdownfall.

The film begins inmedias res, with an ominous narrator introducing us to the key players inthe Terror (“Maximilian Robespierre -- afanatic with powdered wig and twisted mind!”) and setting the stage in theatricalfashion: “In 48 hours, France becomes adictatorship. 48 hours. Unless…” The story is a thoroughly fictional one,featuring Robert Cummings as Charles D’Aubigny, entrusted by the exiled Marquisde Lafayette to go undercover in Paris, posing as a bloodthirsty prosecutor togain Robespierre’s (Richard Basehart) confidence. D’Aubigny is soon entrustedby the chief villain to search for his “black book” -- an elongated enemieslist which, if it fell into the wrong hands, could lead to revolt. Robespierreadmits that he needs the fear the book’s existence breeds to rule: As long aspeople aren’t sure whether their names are in it or not, they will go out oftheir way to display their loyalty. Along the way, D’Aubigny also has tocontend with Robespierre’s chief of secret police, Fouche (the great characteractor Arnold Moss), who seems to be out for his own good, even as he pretendsto do his boss’s bidding.

Make no mistake about it, despite its period setting, Reign of Terror is a noir – it’s got anantihero ping-ponging between loyalties to various mob factions, a visualaesthetic full of deep shadows, stark lighting, and distorted lenses, not tomention a narrative steeped in paranoia and a femme fatale whose icy demeanorbetrays a good soul (Arlene Dahl, aka Lorenzo Lamas’s mom). It’s even got some great, twisted gangsterdialogue. (Robespierre to Fouche: “Idon’t know whether to promote you or denounce you.” Fouche: “Where in all Paris would you find anybody asdisloyal, unscrupulous, scheming, treacherous, cunning, or deceitful as I? Oh,you’d have to do some tall looking, Max.” Robespierre: “Don’t call me Max!”)

It’s probably not a coincidence that Reign of Terror was released two years after the first Hollywoodblacklist was instituted in 1947. But to see it as a specifically politicalallegory would probably be wrong – and, indeed, it’s hard to parse out justwhat kind of political point the film is even making. As J. Hoberman reveals inhis excellent study of American cinema during the early years of the Cold War, Army of Phantoms:

Still known as TheBastille, the movie was languishing on the shelf in March 1949 when[Producer Walter] Wanger happened to read an account of the Cultural andScientific Conference for World Peace that claimed unnamed,Communist-influenced culture critics had used “an intellectual reign of terror”to coerce writes and musicians into supporting the peace conference. Alwaystopically minded, the producer seized on the phrase. “The best way to make alot of dough with this,” he wrote associate Max Youngstein, “would be to go allout and maybe have some of the ads warn the public that we will be goingthrough a REIGN OF TERROR in this country if we don’t watch out and that thereis a REIGN OF TERROR all over the world.”

Hoberman also adds that Communist critics like GeorgesSadoul at the time took exception to the film, even though “in the Americancontext, the Jacobin terror unavoidably suggests HUAC.” That’s all just a wayof saying that Reign of Terror’sostensible politics, such as they are, are surface-thin and mostlyopportunistic.

No, in the end, what makes Reign of Terror so special isn’t its political dimension, or even howwell it adheres to, or explodes, various genre conventions. What makes it greatis that it’s an incredibly well-made, gripping, exciting film. Not unlikeHitchcock, Mann is a very material director – that is, he understands how togive objects weight and importance, so he can then use and manipulate them tocreate suspense. Witness the scene where our heroes’ escape is almost thwartedby an old man fumbling with a key at a locked gate. Or the scene where theblack book is inadvertently left on a bed, on which Robespierre’s chiefhenchman then decides to take a nap. It all seems effortless, and yet so fewdirectors can do this sort of thing with the kind of ease and grace Manndisplays here.

Mann also possessed an incredible gift for action, thanks inpart to his eye for intense physicality. His films are full of brutality, butnever of the casual kind: His camera comes in close to shots of physicalviolence, which serves to up the narrative ante and to heighten ourinvolvement. (The amount of abuse Jimmy Stewart endures in his Mann Westernsmore than justifies their revenge narratives.) When one of the villains getsshot in the mouth near the end of Reignof Terror, Mann makes sure it occurs in close-up, confronting us with thecruelty of a moment that should, by all pre-existing conventions, be asatisfying resolution. But by rubbing our noses in it, he complicates the issue.Indeed, everywhere you look, you’ll find small little details that suggest adeep irony lying beneath the film’s often broad-strokes narrative: Consider abrief cameo at the very end of the film by a young man named Napoleon Bonaparte.

Amadeus Blogathon: Updated Links

2012-02-14T12:30:00.000-05:00

An updated list of posts from the Amadeus Blogathon.

- Here’s a great piece Ali Arikan did a couple of years ago on the film. My favorite part is when he discusses Salieri’s first glimpse of Mozart’s music, and then compares and contrasts it with one of my own personal bêtes noire. Money quote:

Now, remember, the floating plastic bag in American Beauty, and Wes Bentley’s rambling, ridiculous, monologue. Regardless of the differences in writing (I will not stoop to making tawdry comparisons between Peter Shaffer and Alan Ball), both sequences are similar, in that the characters recall their first encounter with what they perceive to be a divine force. Yet where one merely hints at the notes, the other approaches them with the subtlety of a steamroller driven by a drunk. 1984 was definitely not a vintage year, and film, in general, hasn’t grown worse in the past 25 years. But the Oscars have. And the contrasting duality of the sheer awesome power of Amadeus and the anemic mediocrity of American Beauty only served to remind me of one of the motifs of Amadeus itself.

- Thought it would be useful to include some links to interviews with Milos Forman from over the years, particularly ones that feature Amadeus prominently.

- An AV Club interview from 2002, in which Forman discusses the Director’s Cut of the film in some detail.
- A New York Times piece from 1983, describing Forman’s return to Prague for the shoot of the film.
- A 2002 interview/profile from the Telegraph.
- A transcript from a fairly in-depth BBC interview with Forman, dating from the period after Man in the Moon.

- Here’s a piece by me on the idea that Mozart’s music in Amadeus should essentially be seen as a character separate from Mozart the man and Salieri. (I’m not including a “money quote” from my own post, because that would be gauche.)

- In a brilliant new essay, Victor Morton (who knows a thing or two about devotion to God) digs deep into Salieri’s supposedly pious reasons for giving himself over to God, and finds some surprisingly selfish impulses. Money quote:

“Salieri sees Mozart as God laughing at him, and is determined to have the last laugh. Which is conceptually incoherent of course. Even an atheist can realize that had his plan come off, he’d only have fooled men not God. His theological error, intact from boyhood, comes in seeing men and fortuna as manifestations of God. And in the end, Salieri doesn’t even get that, as the Requiem Mass is locked away from him and Mozart’s body is dumped in a pauper’s grave. Even to the end, his claim to have murdered Mozart is an effort to impress men, to give himself the immortality that his music didn’t. And if he didn’t murder Mozart in the sense of stabbing or strangling him, well, that’s God’s fault too, he tells the priest, ‘destroying His own beloved rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of His glory.’”

- Here's Tim Grierson on the film's unique approach to audience identification. Money quote:

"[T]he film illustrates a basic principle of indelible antagonists: They think they're the heroes of their story. Watching Amadeus, it's easy to assume that Salieri is the hero. (From a simplistic Robert McKee perspective on Hollywood writing, Salieri is the active character who drives the narrative forward.) But look at what Salieri represents: envy, pride, stubbornness, moral corruption. These aren't the qualities of your typical "good guy." But can Mozart be the hero? Sure, he produces all those great musical works, but he's a brat. He's conceited. He refuses to act the way a proper hero should."

- Over at Adventures in Cinema, Andrew Welch discusses Amadeus – and in particular the final scene where Salieri and Mozart work together on the Requiem – in light of Graham Greene’s theory that art should show us the world not just as it is but as it should be. Money quote:

"And yet, that doesn't explain his expression of undisguised awe as he looks into his rival's eyes and says, without a hint of exaggeration, 'You are the greatest composer known to me.' Salieri is still acting out of revenge--that's only too clear--but now we catch a glimpse of sincerity, of humility, and even remorse, especially as Mozart, barely able to speak, whispers to him, 'I was so foolish. I thought you did not care for my work, or me. Forgive me.'"

- Here at They Live by Night, Zach Ralston offers an appreciation of the film, focusing in particular on Salieri's unique relationship not only to Mozart but also to Mozart's music. Money quote:

"But what we do end up remembering from Salieri is how he speaks – and particularly how he describes Mozart's music... [He] describes one concerto as starting off by sounding like 'a rusty squeezebox' before an oboe soars high above it all, only to be taken over by a clarinet rescuing the fluttering notes. It's powerful imagery, and underscores Salieri's hidden genius – a music critic."

- Another oldie-but-goodie: Paul Clark of Silly Hats Only ruminates on the special place Amadeus has had in his life -- first in his impressionable youth as an aspiring musician, and then in his more reflective, adult years. Money quote:

"[A]s the years pass, I find myself drawn more and more to the character of Salieri than to my former role model Mozart. When we’re young we’re told we can do anything, but life soon teaches almost everyone otherwise. This can be a painful revelation, especially for those who honestly believe they’re destined for greatness. To be good, but just not quite good enough, is difficult for people to accept. Take it from someone who struggled with the idea for years."

-Over at Some Came Running, the great Glenn Kenny reflects on the multiple and diffuse origins of the film -- from Forman to Shaffer to Shaffer to Hall to Shaffer to Pushkin, and what they reveal about the work. Money quote:

"Amadeus is the most seriously ironical motion picture of its kind. No, Forman does not take the film to the absurdist/surrealist heights of his Czech The Fireman’s Ball, from 1967; and being that its very subject is Great Art/The Great Artist to begin with, it can’t begin to even find some of the Pataphysical implications of Forman’s earlier work. But as costume dramas go, Forman’s cinematizing of Peter Shaffer’s eloquent but rather more conventional-in-perspective play is replete with bits of near-absurdist bite; sometimes they're moments of slapstick (the way Salieri falls out of the bed when Constanze walks in on he and Mozart sleeping off a night of working on the “Requiem”), and the tang is always there in the way Amadeus portrays Salieri’s piety as both hateful and tedious."

- Here at They Live by Night, guest writer Matthew Wilder discusses the specific and unique place that Amadeus held in the cosmology of Eighties moviegoing – representing a crucial link between the high-minded art film and the audience-pleasing spectacle, complete with the explosive sound of a blockbuster. Money quote:

“Amadeus plays like science fiction; it in no way resembles the real world. Its pomp and customs, and its insistence on black hats and white hats, bring it very close to the technologically heightened childishness of the George Lucas universe… [I]t plays as a terrific eighties teen movie, an adolescent’s version of the war between the compromised grownups and the playful ne’er-do-well juveniles.”

- In a beautiful, insightful piece over at his blog, Peter Labuza discusses the way that Forman’s use of music in the film creates a kind of subjective space for the character of Salieri. Money quote:

"It would have certainly been easy enough for Forman to simply populate the soundtrack of Amadeus…with the music of Mozart without much thought in why they chose any particularly piece except the emotions felt. However, Shaffer and Forman use the music as specifically a subjective experience and commentary by Salieri. The music cues…offer insight both into how the spectator can understand the genius of Mozart and how the film uses Salieri’s knowledge of Mozart to comment and create a narrative of a man haunted by another."

- In a touchingly personal, older piece, Victor Morton discusses how Amadeus was the film that made him want to be a critic. He also addresses the film’s depiction of Salieri’s anger at God. Money quote:

“God’s gifts are both delight and a cross, and it’s the special cursed gift to Salieri that he alone can hear God’s voice and how sweet it is, while that same gift lets him know how inadequate his own work is. It’s key to the film that Mozart and Salieri both know the court musicians, emperor and Viennese public are fools; making their praise of Salieri and his popularity worthless to him…As Salieri says to the priest: ‘if He didn’t want me to praise Him with music, why did He give me the desire?’”

Amadeus Blogathon: A Music Apart from Men

2012-02-12T10:00:00.000-05:00

Let’sget one thing very clear: Amadeus isnot history. Nor, for the most part, does it pretend to be. Milos Forman’sfilm, for all its acclaim, has attracted its share of scorn over the years,often from those who find it to be an inadequate portrait of the real-lifeentity known as Mozart (to say nothing of the real-life entity known as Salieri,an accomplished composer who in his later years actually taught some of thegreatest musical minds of all time). Liberties taken with thehistorical/biographical record are nothing new – especially for a film basednot on fact but on a stage play, which itself was based on another play which became an opera. But there isone aspect of Amadeus’s poeticlicense that’s worth dwelling on, because it reveals something very profoundabout the film’s intentions – and, just perhaps, brings us around to (gasp) abetter understanding of Mozart himself.

Therehave been a number of discussions (both here and elsewhere) about Amadeus as a two-handerbetween Mozart and Salieri – the genius versus the mediocrity, the sublimeversus the earthbound. Amadeus is also certainly, on some basic level, Salieri’sstory. It is through F. Murray Abraham’s face and his words, after all, that weenter the divine realm of Mozart’s genius: Sometimes within the space of oneminute – as in this remarkable scene below -- he has to express surprise, love,resentment, disgust, exaltation.

Butwho, then, is Mozart in this portrait? If we are to believe Salieri, he’s avulgar, childish man undeserving of the God-given genius bestowed upon him. Ormaybe we should ask it this way: Who is “Amadeus”? In his painstakinglydetailed book Mozart in Vienna,Volkmar Braunbehrens, clearly no fan of the film, observes this about the name:

Mozartnever called himself “Amadeus” but always used simply Amade (or Amadeo), in anattempt to translate his baptismal name Theophilus (Gottlieb, or “love of God”).It is therefore quite appropriate that the theater and cinema associatethemselves with “Amadeus,” thereby announcing that they want nothing to do withMozart’s actual life.

Nobodyever really calls Mozart “Amadeus” in the film (aside from an early referenceby Salieri). Indeed, he’s usually “Wolfgang” or “Wolfie.” So, consider for amoment the fact that this film is not a back and forth between Mozart andSalieri but rather a triangle – between Mozart (or Wolfgang) the person,Salieri, and the music of Mozart (the divinely tinged “Amadeus”).

Salieri would have it that Mozart has been given a glory he himself can never have. Perhaps, but then again, Mozartthe character does not exactly have a happy life in Amadeus. Yes, we see him partying a few times, and yes he displays,as Zach Ralston observed earlier, all the hallmarks of a rock star. But he’salso constantly in debt, almost always at odds with his father, and oftendenied the things he wants – commissions, prestigious teaching assignments,etc. His operas usually run for a few shows and then close down. One couldeasily mistake this man for a failure.

Butthose are all external forces acting upon him. What about his internalaccomplishments? Can we see, on the face of this little man, the contentment ofbeing God’s instrument of musical grace? Not really. He has moments of pride, certainly– as when he boasts, awkwardly, that The Marriage of Figaro is “the best operayet written” – but rarely do we sense the joy of creation in him. In fact, thefirst time we meet Mozart, the orchestra starts playing his music without him,and he has to rush to conduct them. It’s a funny gag, but it also suggests themusic as a force separate from Mozart the person.

The Romantic (with a capital “R”) notion ofMozart’s instinctive genius – that he was merely channeling the divine -- has comeunder some scrutiny, and it was a sore spot for critics of the film aswell. Pauline Kael wrote at the time:

Thecorniness in Amadeus is that the view of artistic accomplishment which Salierispouts – that if art comes without plodding it must be a gift from above – isat least half shared by the writer and the director. They don’t appear toregister that the whole notion of dictation from God is an insult to Mozart.

Andhere, too, is Robert Craft, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1985,suggesting that this is also historically inaccurate:

Amadeusgrossly misleads … in the inference that Mozart’s music effortlessly sprangfrom him, a notion that does not need to be contradicted by reference to theevidence of human trial and error, the rewriting, the composition of new ariasto improve his operas, the many abandoned fugues (including the much correctedK.401), and Mozart’s own description of his quartets for Haydn as “the fruit of[two years of] labor.” Innumerable constructions in Mozart’s music in “clean” manuscriptstestify to efforts sustained at a scarcely imaginable level.

Inother words, the real Mozart was not some guy who sat down and felt genius flow out ofhim. He worked ceaselessly, and often had to hold fragments of his musical visionsin his head until he could find a way to complete them. As Alex Ross observed,in 2006:

Mozart’smind may have been like a huge map of half-explored territories; in a way, hewas writing all his works all the time. The new image of him as a kind ofimprovising perfectionist is even more formidable than the previous one of God’sstenographer. Ambitious parents who are currently playing the “Baby Mozart”video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozartby working furiously hard, and, if Constanze was right, by working himself todeath.

Butlet’s consider how the film presents Mozart’s music. Observe this celebratedscene, where Salieri, after his first glimpse of Mozart, walks up to his sheetmusic and, in voiceover, eloquently breaks it down.

It’sa magnificent moment, but also an ambiguous one: We could choose to read Salieri’sdescription of the music as symbolic – Mozart is the oboe floating high aboveSalieri and his “rusty squeezebox.” The scene, however, is more cunning thanthat. Here’s how Salieri describes the part of the music that takes his breathaway:

"Andthen suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there,unwavering. Until, a clarinet took it over, sweetened it into a phrase of suchdelight. This was no composition by a performing monkey. This was a music I’dnever heard. Filled with such longing -- such unfulfillable longing -- itseemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God."

Inother words, Mozart’s music is one of transcendence. The oboe and the clarinetare almost an abstraction, the sound of perfection and grace floating highabove the “rusty squeezebox” of reality – a reality that belongs to bothSalieri and Mozart the man. Indeed, we often see Mozart use his music to escapehis reality – as when he retires to his desk while his father and his wifebicker, or when he transforms his mother-in-law into the Queen of the Night in TheMagic Flute. “Wolfgang” can create this music, but he cannot become it. Remember, the longing Salieri senses in themusic is “unfulfillable.” To quote Ross again:

LeopoldMozart once said of his son, “Two opposing elements rule his nature, I mean,there is either too much or too little, never the golden mean.” Often, an artistsets forth in his work what he cannot achieve in life, and Mozart’s music is theempire of the golden mean…Like the rest of us, he had to live outside thecomplex paradise that he created in sound.

Thedivided self is a running theme in Amadeus – Salieri talks about feeling like aman being torn in half; Mozart’s loyalties are often divided -- between hisfather and his wife, between the work on the Requiem Mass and work on The MagicFlute, etc. Leopold Mozart’s two-faced carnival outfit has even become the film’sdominant image. And Mozartand Salieri are the central duality in the film – the two faces of reality, thevulgar and the brooding, the loyal and the rebellious. In the end, however, themusic exists outside them. Or perhaps because of them: Amadeus presents theRequiem as perhaps Mozart’s most monumental work (the piece became a hit in thefilm’s wake) and, in the film’s fictional presentation of events, it wouldn’t existwithout Salieri.

That’snot the only time that the film presents the music as an almost collaborativeeffort. In an earlier scene, where Mozart is first introduced to the Emperor,the young composer is presented with a march Salieri has written in his honor. Mozartsits down to play the piece (all from memory) in front of the court, and, as hedoes so, he begins to comment and improvise on the music: “That doesn’t reallywork, does it?” he asks, before riffing on a few keys and improving the piece –by turning it, then and there, into the tune to “Non piu andrai” from The Marriageof Figaro, an opera he has yet to write. Here again we have a sly kind ofcollaboration – Mozart creates great art, but with an assist from Salieri.

Thefilm isn’t saying, of course, that Salieri helped Mozart write his music.Rather, it’s setting the music apart from the men. It is ever-present, as arethey: Every time Mozart conducts, there, too, is Salieri, in his box, taking itall in and marveling at it, the only one who truly understands the genius ofthe work. It's almost a kind of conjuring between the two. The two men, the composer and the listener, stand under the shadow of great art: Theycan create music, they can hear music, but they can’t touch it, or live in it. It belongs to the ages, and it will be playing long after both are gone – Mozart to his miserable early grave,and Salieri down the corridor to his madhouse of mediocrity.

Amadeus Blogathon: A Miracle! Amadeus, Critics, and Rock Stars

2012-02-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

This entry in the Amadeus blogathon comes from TV producer and erstwhile critic Zach Ralston.

By Zach Ralston

“I'm a vulgar man. But I assure you, my music is not.”– W.A. Mozart

What do you remember about Antonio Salieri? Chances are,it's not his music – it's his words. And that goes not only for the realSalieri, but for the Salieri character in Milos Forman's magnificent 1984 film Amadeus(titled, of course, after Mozart's middle name, not its protagonist Salieri).

In the opening scene, when Salieri begins what isessentially a 24-hour confession to Father Vogler, “the patron saint ofmediocrities” (as he later deems himself) plays a couple of his tunes for thepriest, who doesn't recognize them. The third tune he plays is Eine KleineNachtmusik by Mozart. That, Vogler recognizes*, and so do we. Instantly theaudience sympathizes with both characters – the priest, for being as familiarwith music as we are (no more, no less); and Salieri, for the sadness of havingno popular tunes.

But what we do end up remembering from Salieri is how hespeaks – and particularly how he describes Mozart's music. Thanks to PeterShaffer's sensational dialogue (he adapted his own play for Forman's film), weget succinct, fantastic analysis of Mozart's great genius. Salieri describesone concerto as starting off by sounding like “a rusty squeezebox” before anoboe soars high above it all, only to be taken over by a clarinet rescuing thefluttering notes. It's powerful imagery, and underscores Salieri's hiddengenius – a music critic.

Now, Salieri wasn't Greg Kot or Lester Bangs. He actuallydid compose music, a lot of it, and did very well throughout his career, so hewould pass Teddy Roosevelt's muster. But he knew so much about it that he wasable to see what others (like Jeffrey Jones's perfectly goofy Emperor JosephII) could not – when the conventional wisdom was that Mozart was using “toomany notes,” Salieri saw how – even in first draft form – Mozart's piecesrarely wasted a single measure. “Take away one piece and the structure wouldfall apart.” And when face-to-face with his rival, Salieri honestly tellsMozart just how sublime a composer he really is.** Unfortunately, he can'ttranslate that understanding into his own compositions, and is left to bemerely competent in the face of genius. This is made clear to him in the film'sclimactic bedside dictation, one of the great scenes in movie history. PoorSalieri is struggling to write down the beauty soaring out of Wolfie's mouth,protesting, “You go too fast, you go too fast, one moment please!”

So what can we take from this? Being a great critic does notnecessarily lead to being a great composer. Salieri could talk the talk, but hedidn't have the divine inspiration of his rival. Conversely, being a greatartist doesn't mean you're an intelligent analyst. Have you seen QuentinTarantino's list of the best and worst movies of 2011? The guy is one of thebest filmmakers alive in the world and his taste sucks.

Salieri’s humiliations in the face of Mozart's genius extend to theworld women as well. Mozart, of course (much like QT) is a rock star.*** And assuch, he has sexual charisma that Salieri, for all his desperation, does not. Salierilusts for opera singer Caterina Cavalieri, only to discover that Mozart – or,as he calls him, “the creature” – “had had my darling girl.” And afterCaterina, we never see Salieri go after any women at all – let alone succeedwith one. (He does solicit the sexual favors of Stanzi, Mozart’s wife, but it'sonly to humiliate her and Mozart.) In real life, Salieri was married for muchof the time he and Mozart were colleagues, but the film chooses to treat him asvirtually celibate to contrast him with ladies-man Wolfie.

But the scales weighing the critic vs. the artist don'talways tip in favor of the genius. Whereas Salieri lives with considerablewealth (even using some of it to overwork – and in his mind, kill – Mozart),Wolfie lives in poverty, the prototypical starving artist living above hismeans and scraping to get by while contributing magic to the world. Hisperformance of Don Giovanni, an opera of staggering complexity,darkness, and skill (and given show-stopping choreography and production byForman) is received with hilariously tepid applause. It's the way David Finchermust have felt when he released Fight Club in 1999 only to have it opento not-even-tepid returns.

Both critics and artists are necessary in all forms ofmedia, whether it be film, punk rock, fine art, or classical music. And so aremediocrities, for without them, there are no geniuses to deify. But as much asthe critic has the mighty pen to guide us through the experience of art, it'sthe select few with the power to create those works of genius that makes it allworthwhile. They may get all the girls and all the glory, if not all the money,and perhaps their legacy will last centuries.

Before I close this out, I want to get back to the subject Iraised earlier – the comedy of Amadeus. This is a very funny movie, anaspect of it that gets forgotten when people consider and discuss it. It wonits fair share of Oscars in 1984 – and for my money it's the best film to winBest Picture in at least the last 30 years, if not longer.**** Its costumes arebrilliant, the makeup fantastic (a rare example of truly believable old-agemakeup), and of course peerless photography, writing, acting, and direction.But people remember the music, the dramatic Requiem, and the final act leadingto Mozart's death. I think the comedy element gets unfairly ignored. (PerhapsI'm just not reading the right stuff about this film).

Let's go back to the opening scene with Vogler. Salierikeeps asking if the priest has heard his tunes, and Vogler continues to shrug,“I can't say I know that one.” But as soon as Salieri mentions Mozart, Voglersays “The man you accuse yourself of killing?!” And Salieri replies, “You'veheard that?!?!”

This is a pretty funny line. Vogler knows none of Salieri'ssongs, but he's heard of the murdering-Mozart rumor. And the pride with whichthe great F. Murray Abraham delivers the line shows that he's fairly giddy torealize that this rumor has gotten around. The scene this time around made methink of Phil Spector's recent scandal – here is perhaps the greatest producerin the history of pop music, and many people (though clearly familiar with hissongs) can't name any singles he was involved with; but they know he shot awoman in the face. Can we choose what our legacy is?

Anyway, Forman and Shaffer get more comedy mileage out ofthe ironic use of “miracles” in Salieri's life. The first time Salieriproclaims a miracle is when his father dies. The second time is when Josephyawns during a Mozart opera. Speaking of Joseph, Jones plays him just funnyenough to be the butt of jokes, but not so buffoonish that he becomes an SNLsketch. I love his reaction when he sees the dancing in Figaro without music.“Well look at them!”

Forman also uses hard cuts to punctuate jokes. When hisfather writes him with an express order not to marry Constanze unti he gets toVienna, Forman insta-cuts to a church where Mozart is getting married. WhenMozart owns Salieri by revising his march, Forman hard-cuts to Salieri glaringcruelly at a crucifix and waging war against God.

There is some slapstick to the comedy (Mozart creativelymooning the Archbishop by bowing in front of open doors), there are a couplefart jokes, and Patrick Hines's Kappelmeister gets some low-brow reactionshots, but for the most part the comedy is mined from dramatic irony and sharpwit. It makes Amadeus a gloriously entertaining sit, one I can't wait to goback to time and again.

* Vogler's exasperated sigh when Salieri turns back to thepiano for name-that-tune #3 is the first bit of rich comedy in a film chockfull of it, which I'll get into more later.

** Though still able to criticize, to Vogler at least, thetimes when Mozart would waste “ten minutes of ghastly scales and arpeggios.”What I wouldn't give to have Salieri write for Pitchfork in 2012!

*** Forman does his best to paint Mozart as the rock star ofhis day, most notably in the scene where Wolfie goes shopping for wigs andtries on the most punk-rock pink-mohawk hairpieces he can find. Those '80s-fabpunk wigs are one of the only touches that actually date the film. But Wolfie'srebellious attitude and childish insouciance are clearly hallmarks of thestereotypical punk rocker.

**** The first two Godfathers, Lawrence of Arabia, and AnnieHall are actually the only other films in the Academy's history that canchallenge Amadeus in my mind for the title of greatest Best Picture.

Amadeus Blogathon: Antonio Salieri's Totally Awesome Eighties Flashback Weekend

2012-02-08T10:30:00.000-05:00

This entry in the Amadeus blogathon comes from filmmaker Matthew Wilder.

The Eighties were a rough time to come of age as a movielover. Almost all the good stuff snuck in through the back door. Brazil, BladeRunner, Once Upon a Time in America, The King of Comedy, Southern Comfort, KingLear, Do the Right Thing; the only great moviemaker in that era pulling up to aVIP parking space and whistling while he worked was Steven Spielberg. It bumsme out now when today’s retro-minded hipsters go to a revival joint and GetThat Eighties Feeling, putting on their rainbow-colored wrist-sweat-bands andcovering their torsos in fake Rubik’s Cubes, watching crapola like Legend andLabyrinth and Willow and Just One of the Guys and Lost Boys and Goonies andSatisfaction and—well, all the shit people at the time were cringing through toget to the good stuff. That’s what’s now called “the Eighties.”

One movie that bridged the gap between the high-minded andthe genuinely popular was Milos Forman’s Amadeus. Smart teenagers of the timedug it. The gibes against it were obvious. First and foremost, it was“middlebrow”—an adjective John Simon, Andrew Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann and LaPauline could all agree upon. Based on a play by Peter Shaffer (or wait—was itAnthony?), Amadeus focused on what everyone concurred was a pretty banal theme:the war between cagy, politic, shucking-and-jiving mediocrity, and God-givengenius. And yes, depicting mediocrity as hand-wringing, evilly cackling Salieri(a hall-of-fame F. Murray Abraham) and giggly, pottymouthed, infantile Mozart(one-hit-wondrous Thomas Hulce) was cartoonish, simple-minded. And then therewas the matter of Milos Forman’s style: the periwigs, the beautymarked boobies,the Barry Lyndonian candelabra, the firehose of Metro Goldwyn Mayeresque excessthat the Czech expat spritzed across the stage—er, screen.

Yet to those of us at the time who clicked into it, therewere some other compelling things afoot. First and foremost, there was Forman’suse of sound: Neville Mariner’s muscular and sumptuous handling of the Academyof St. Martin’s in the Field. The only recent movies that used music and soundwith such assaultive, all-surrounding shock-and-awe force were The EmpireStrikes Back and Ken Russell’s Altered States. My friends and I would see themovie over and over in the theatre, and each time there was a collective gaspwhen the door of Salieri’s humble room is knocked open, and the terrifyingopening violin slashes greet an enormous dolly movement slamming into afrog-faced, theatrically made-up F. Murray lying on the floor, covered in squirtingblood. Throughout, the juxtaposition of large-scale merriment and gale-forceturbulence in the woodwind sections, heard against the eerie silence ofSalieri’s loony bin, has a chilling, hammy severity. Forman works sound,especially non-musical sound, with a stylized abandon. The sound of sheets ofMozart’s handwritten music falling to the floor is as epic, as gruesome as anoverwrought cue in a Jeunet-Caro extravaganza.

Amadeus plays like science fiction; it in no way resemblesthe real world. Its pomp and customs, and its insistence on black hats andwhite hats, bring it very close to the technologically heightened childishnessof the George Lucas universe. And so, if you can ignore the shallowness, Amadeusplays as a terrific eighties teen movie, an adolescent’s version of the warbetween the compromised grownups and the playful ne’er-do-well juveniles. Theclever kick of Forman’s movie is that it is firmly on the side of the schmuckyadult. It brings you into middle-aged mediocrity the way The Dark Knight (or—ifyou want to be charitable—Revenge of the Sith) brings you into anti-heroism.The next major representation of Compromised Grown-upness versus FlailingDysfunctional Adolescence would come with Paul Gleason’s study proctor daringJudd Nelson’s stoner with “one more, how about one more?” in The Breakfast Club—anequal but opposite display of the theatricality of totally arbitrary rules.Ingeniously, Amadeus takes us inside the pleasure of the bureaucrat findingways to spiritually cockblock the id-driven outpourings of the rule-floutingyouth. At some level (due largely to the ebullience of Abraham’s acting) wewant the law-and-order capellmeister to punish the cackling hippie: did anymovie so fully express the emotional exhilaration of the Reagan revolution?

It is haunting indeed that no one involved in this surprisehit went on to reenact his early success. Forman went on to utilize more wigsand more high-school-play age makeup in the stillborn Valmont and Goya’s Ghosts,and completely misread the American Zeitgeist in the First Amendment paean ThePeople Versus Larry Flynt. (The original Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewskiscript, in which Flynt was an ironically ingenuous gee-whiz lover of thebeauties of the female sex organs, had a ghost of a chance of recapturing Amadeus’sadmixture of the teenage-gleeful and the rancid.) Amadeus perfectly captured acertain kind of lightning in a bottle: the ruling baby boomers’ feelings ofconflictedness, vacillating between a cynical love of the sweet life, and theeasy-riding pleasures of “just being yourself.” Released just before the 1984presidential election, the film ended Reagan Chapter One, and as America movedinto the period of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, the air strikes on MuammarQaddafi, and the morass of Iran-Contra, Salieri-ism roundly defeated thefreewheeling imp of the perverse. For American movies, solidly lining up behindformula until the arrival of another giggling nerd (an equally idiot-savant-ychap named Quentin Tarantino), the libertine movements of genius definitelyconstituted a case of too many notes.

MATTHEW WILDER is the director of the forthcoming Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story with Malin Akerman and Matt Dillon. He directed Your Name Here with Bill Pullman and Taryn Manning. He graduated Yale College in 1989.

Amadeus Blogathon: A Brief Introduction

2012-02-08T10:29:00.000-05:00

So, a couple of months ago a few friends and I got into a discussion about Milos Forman’s Amadeus. It seemed to us to be one of the great “Oscar” movies – a grand, award-winning entertainment that was also a genuine work of art. But it was clear that not everyone felt this way. Indeed, Amadeus often pops up on some folks’ lists of the less-deserving Best Picture winners, and it had many detractors at the time of its release as well, particularly among highbrow critics. (We’ll be getting into this a bit with a couple of our pieces.)

So, why not do an Amadeus blogathon, we asked ourselves? To discuss the film in its many aspects – some obvious (say, F. Murray Abraham’s Oscar-winning performance, which, sorry, only a profound cynic could fail to admire) and some not so obvious (you’ll see). That’s when this mildly cracked idea was born.

Now, because blogathons are usually reserved not for individual films but for broader subjects (say, a film genre, or a director’s overall body of work), this is by necessity a smaller endeavor. Over the next several days, we will publish these pieces – on our own sites and blogs for those of us that have them, and on others’ for those that don’t. I’ll keep track of everything here, in a post that will be refreshed regularly at the top of the page.

I didn’t much publicize this blogathon ahead of time -- this is my first time organizing something like this -- but anyone who feels the desire to participate should feel free to, obviously, and if they send me a quick note I’ll be happy to include them among my links.

Forgotten Films: 7 Women (John Ford, 1966)

2012-02-05T10:00:00.000-05:00

(For an explanation of the Forgotten Films project, go here.)

You’d think that John Ford’s final narrative film would havegreater visibility -- especially since a number of influential film writers considerit to be one of the director’s finest. But it’svery hard to see, with no DVD of it available. (TCM does show it from time totime, and there was a widescreen laserdisc from MGM available back in the 90s.)It was a financial disaster upon its release, relegated to the bottom half of adouble bill with The Money Trap -- this despite the fact that many influentialcritics and filmmakers of the 1960s were at that moment naming Ford as oneof their greatest influences. Why, then, the widespread indifference to 7 Women?Perhaps because it seems, on its surface, such a departure from theprototypical Ford film.

Set in North China in 1935, the film takes place inside afemale-run Christian mission besieged by an army of Mongols. Butdespite the potential such a logline offers for spectacle and exotic locales,Ford’s film turns out to be something of a chamber piece. The film was shot ona soundstage, a far cry from the director’s beloved Monument Valley vistas, andmuch of the action occurs indoors. More importantly, his concern here liesnot with the rampaging hordes or windswept plains, but in a subtlepsychological tug-of-war between the conservative, repressed head of themission, Agatha Andrews (Margaret Leighton) and the adventurous, decidedlysecular Dr. Cartwright (a very spirited Anne Bancroft), a free-thinking modernwoman who blows into the mission and disrupts its rigid ways. Raising thestakes is the fact that one of the women in the mission, Florrie (Betty Field)is pregnant and in her 40s, and desperately needs medical care. That a choleraepidemic breaks out doesn’t help, either. By the time the Mongols actually takeover the mission in the second half, the tribulations of this helpless band ofsisters puts to shame those of the Western pioneers Ford so lovingly depictedthroughout his career.

For all its extremes and surface incongruities, 7 Women ismost definitely a John Ford film; indeed, one could argue that it’s one of hismost refined, most personal films. The director always focused oncivilizing forces in his films, and often on personal conflicts within thoseforces. Indeed, the conflict between Dr. Cartwright and Agatha Andrews in 7Women bears some similarities to the final act of The Searchers, in which John Wayne's wounded, puritanical rage clashes with the compassion of half-breed Jeffrey Hunter over the fate of Indian captive Natalie Wood. Alone and uncompromising, theolder matriarch finds herself unable to understand the complexity of thetroubles she is facing. Only someone like Cartwright can lead these women to safety; only a woman of the world can know how heartless the world can be.

Early on in the film, Ford shows Andrews glancing longinglyat the youngest member of this sisterhood, played by Sue Lyon (who had achievednotoriety as a teenager with Kubrick’s Lolita). The implication is that Andrewsis something of a closeted lesbian, but it could also be seen as a suggestionthat she secretly longs for intimacy of any kind, after a lifetime ofrepression and denial. (This film would make quite a double-bill with Black Narcissus.) The hierarchy Cartwright disrupts istherefore one of both social stasis and sexual repression. But it’s no surprisethat she comes from an outside world that will also eventually bring in theMongol hordes. Andrews’s attempts to keep her mission completely isolated fromthe world is an attempt to prevent its decay. Ironically, though, it willlead to the very destruction she fears so much.

Although it’s a historical film, 7 Women is utterly divorcedfrom actual history. Ford’s depiction of the Mongols reminds one more of theway Indians were depicted in Westerns than anything else. Their two leaders areplayed by two actors with a combined height of 13 feet -- the Ukrainian MikeMazurki and the African American Woody Strode, both in garish makeup –and their gurgled language is left untranslated (one wonders if any of it isauthentic). When the two enormous Mongol chiefs strip down and begin to wrestleeach other to the death, Ford leaves us at a loss as to why.

A viewer casually watching the film may view such scenes asoffensive, but it’s clear that Ford doesn’t intend for this to be taken asauthentic in any way, shape, or form. Instead, he’s presenting his femaleprotagonists with a foe that is purely masculine. If the women at the center ofthis film can be considered a refinement of that which is most civilized in humans– childbirth, compassion, piety, medicine, generosity – then the invading hordeis its macho opposite – aggressive, irrational, ignorant, unthinking, andimpulsive. Whereas in previous Ford films it was the gunfighter and the soldierwho had to mediate the world between civilization and savagery, here it’s thepants-wearing female doctor Cartwright, and her ultimate fate suggests thatFord in his later years was becoming significantly darker and less optimistic.

In some ways, it’s better to think of 7 Women not as ahistorical film at all but as some kind of bizarre science-fiction fantasy.(The Ming the Merciless make-up on Mazurki and Strode makes it easy.) It’s the one genre Ford never touched,but his depiction of a world where the feminine, civilizing impulse has beenisolated and beset by the unchecked aggression of the masculine, destructiveimpulse would not feel out of place in a speculative, apocalyptic sci-fiscenario.

One could chalk up 7 Women’s failure at the time as a signthat the aging Ford, with his classical filmmaking style, was gradually findinghimself outdated by the free-wheeling, edgier cinema of the 60s. And yet, it’shard not to look at the film today and see that, in his own way, Ford wasindeed keeping up with the times. The raging war in Vietnam may well havebeen a potential influence for Ford (whose next credited film would be the 1971USIA documentary Vietnam! Vietnam!), who perhaps saw in the modern conflicts ofthe late 20^th Century a more complicated and destructive strugglebetween civilization and aggression. Certainly this film’s cynical, oftenbrutal exploration of gender, identity, and society could stand upalongside the greatest works of the era.

Why Were So Many Sundance Movies about Break-Ups This Year?

2012-01-31T10:00:00.000-05:00

An Over-Simplification of Her Beauty

Inrecent years, it seems that no Sundance is complete without at least onebreak-out film about break-ups. Whether it arrives via something intense anddramatic like Blue Valentine or lightheartedand wistful like (500) Days of Summer,romantic angst has seemingly become the festival’s bread and butter. And whilethis year’s festival didn’t appear to generate a true stand-out in the vein ofthose earlier films (though you never know – 500 Days didn’t initially feel like it was going to be the hit itlater became), it wasn’t for lack of trying. Indeed, break-ups, in all theirvaried forms, were ubiquitous onscreen at this year’s Sundance.

Thefilm that initially seemed set to seize the BlueValentine/500 Days crown was Lee Toland Krieger’s Celeste and Jesse Forever, in which Rashida Jones and Andy Sambergplay a husband and wife with very different personalities who decide to divorce-- only to discover it’s quite hard to quit one another, even as they pursueother relationships. Playing a fairly buttoned-down, successful career woman,Jones gets the film’s juiciest part, as she becomes increasingly neurotic andobsessive after her ex begins to seriously see someone new. The film initially metwith a tepid response from critics (Lou Lumenick of the New York Post called it“Young Adult with training wheels”) butit seemed to win over audiences. It’s also gotten picked up by Sony PicturesClassics, which means it’s assured a fairly prominent theatrical release. So,who knows? Maybe we’ll be talking about it a year from now as this year’s bigSundance break-up movie.

Aninteresting analog to the Celeste andJesse relationship could be found in the decidedly more lighthearted Save the Date, a romantic comedy inwhich Lizzy Caplan’s character breaks off a long-term relationship after herrocker boyfriend (Geoffrey Arend) proposes to her in the middle of a concert. BothDate and Celeste tackle the very difficult process of trying to weanyourself away from someone who has been a very important part of your life,though they find themselves in different places. Celeste and Jesse indulges in the very real torment of trying (andfailing) to move on from a break-up, while Savethe Date chooses to turn its focus towards newfound love: Caplan’scharacter begins seeing someone new (Mark Webber) as soon as her otherrelationship is over, and the film is more interested in her ability to juggleheartbreak and possibility -- and whether the new man in her life represents agenuine connection or a simple rebound. Interestingly, however, both filmsdecide to use pregnancies as their third act dei ex machina – suggesting that, at least in the world of theSundance relationship movie, the drift towards commitment sometimes needs anextra little shove.

Celeste and Jesse Forever

Break-upsalso figure prominently in I Am Not aHipster, a strange comedy-drama where an indie musician wrestles withauthenticity, in the wake of a relationship; in Liberal Arts, where a thirty-something Josh Radnor wrestles withhis attraction to college sophomore Elizabeth Olsen, in the wake of arelationship; in Hello, I Must Be Going,where Melanie Lynskey wrestles with her attraction to 19-year-old ChristopherAbbott, in the wake of a relationship; in SimonKiller, where Brady Corbet wrestles with his emotionally violent need forParisian prostitute Mati Diop, in the wake of a relationship; in That’s What She Said, where MarciaDeBonis, Anne Heche, and Alia Shawqat go out on the town, in the wake of tworelationships. Seriously, we could go on: Even Black Rock, Katie Aselton’s gory midnight movie about threegirlfriends being chased by crazed Iraq veterans on a remote island, turns outto be partly about a broken relationship. Are we sensing a trend yet?

Andthat’s not even counting the films that are about relationships under strain:From Ry Russo-Young’s Nobody Walks,in which young artist Olivia Thrilby throws John Krasinski and RosemarieDeWitt’s marriage into turmoil, to Smashed,in which husband-and-wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul struggle withthe perils of alcoholism. Even one of this year’s biggest documentaries, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present,finds its most touching moments in the depiction of Abramovic’s powerful 13-yearrelationship and inspired collaboration with fellow artist Ulay (aka Uwe Laysiepen), with whom sheis still close.

Manyfilms use the shorthand of a break-up narrative to provide some quick charactershading: After all, we can all pretty much relate to stories of dashed romancein some way, so this is an easy way to get us to identify with the charactersonscreen, even if we know next to nothing about the relationships themselves. Simon Killer, in fact, uses thisphenomenon with some narrative savvy – by allowing us to identify with Simon’slovesick melancholy before slowly revealing to us how emotionally twisted andmonstrous he really is.

Keep the Lights On

Rarely,however, do these films tackle not the just narrative of break-up(attempts/failures to move on, etc.), but the very nature of the relationshipand break-up itself. This year’s fest gave us two stand-outs on that score: In Sundanceregular Ira Sachs’s somewhat autobiographical Keep the Lights On, we watch the development and disintegration of aturbulent long-term, gay love affair between a filmmaker and a drug-addictedlawyer. The story is told in multi-yearincrements, giving it an introspective quality – as if the filmmaker is goingback over snatches of details and charting their trajectory from initialpassion to emotional enslavement. While other films give us characters broodingabout their broken hearts, Keep theLights On, with its obsessive attention to detail and its weaving ofmemories, is a film one of those characters might have actually made.

Buteven that film is not quite as obsessive as the tiny, dazzlingly experimental An Over-Simplification of Her Beauty, inwhich director Terence Nance utilizes documentary footage, an old short film hemade, animation, onscreen text, voice recordings, and narrative recreations togo over the ups and downs of a particularly heartbreaking relationship andbreak-up. Here at last we are in the belly of the beast: Despite itshyper-specificity, and the fact that he and his former paramour are oftenonscreen to fill in the details, Nance’s film (which is often as hilarious asit is devastating) winds up being a stand-in for every doomed love.

Indeed,he even acknowledges the phenomenon of mis-identification in a bravura sequencewhere he makes his girlfriend read a passage from a Louise Erdrich novel hethinks carries some deep echo of their relationship. As she reads, the filmportrays onscreen all the ways that their love resonates with the one in thebook. This cinematic reverie is broken when she finally puts the book down, casuallysaying that she doesn’t see the similarities. In a few quick minutes, Nance,much like Sachs does in a more narrative framework, captures the confounding push-and-pullbetween the emotional universality of heartbreak and the unspoken specificityof individual experience. How appropriate then that these two films, byspending most of their screen time depicting the actual relationship, wind upbeing even more astute about the break-ups themselves. Along the way, they manageto cut the viewer’s heart up into little pieces and deposit them all over theRocky Mountains.

An Over-Simplification of Her Beauty

There’ssomething else to be said about these aforementioned films: They’re almost allAmerican. What does that imply? Is it simply that American filmmakers(particularly young American filmmakers) are more emotionally indulgent thantheir international brethren? Is it that they simply lack enough hot buttonissues like social upheaval and sectarian violence to make movies about? Maybe.Or maybe it’s that in an America where independent films cost less and less,more and more filmmakers are turning more inwards, towards stories told inminiature. Let’s not forget that, back during the days of the French New Wave,it was the Europeans who had the requisite frankness and emotional nakedness tolook at love and loss, while Americans were too busy making bloated studioepics and genre pictures.

Tobe fair, there were some break-ups and divorces in some of this year’sinternational films at Sundance -- but they seemed like relatively minor plotpoints, almost afterthoughts. But then again, the international contingent atSundance this year did give us at least one true, honest-to-god break-up story.Actually, they gave us the ultimatebreak-up story: Andrea Arnold’s much-acclaimed adaptation of Emily Bronte’sstormy and (yes) emotionally indulgent tale of passionate love found and lost, Wuthering Heights.

Sundance Review: Room 237

2012-01-24T13:01:00.000-05:00

Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 might be the best film I’ve seen atSundance this year. It’s certainly the film to which I had the most personalresponse. My Kubrick obsession is fairlywell-documented, and in my early 20s the thoughts swirling in my head weren’tunlike the ones expressed in the film. I wasn't much of a conspiracy theorist, to be fair, but I spent a lot of time – alot of time, too much time, time that probably should have been better spenthaving a life – arguing about this sort of stuff.

So it was perhaps a given that I’d respond to a film aboutall the various theories (some of them quite crackpot) that Kubrick fans haveformulated over the years about The Shining. The ideas themselves are all overthe place: There’s the relatively well-known (and mostly accepted) one that TheShining is on some level about the genocide of the Indians. There’s thesomewhat less familiar one that it’s about the Holocaust. There’s also therather insane one that the film is Kubrick’s own confession about allegedlyfaking the Moon Landing.

The film doesn’t seek to judge any of these theories,and there’s no space given to confirming or debunking them. For example, manyKubrick associates are on record that he did indeed do a lot of research intothe obliteration of the Indians. He was also reportedly researching (andplanning a film on) the Holocaust around this time, and for some years later. ButRoom 237 isn’t about whether anybody’s right or wrong; it’s about the fact thatthey’re obsessed. It’s not a film about conspiracy theories; it’s a film aboutmovie love.

To that end, Ascher avoids talking heads and relies insteadon audio interviews to narrate scenes from the film -- as well as clips fromother films, including some Kubrick ones (most notably Eyes Wide Shut and2001: A Space Odyssey). He often manipulates the footage– rewinding, slowing down, speeding up.Sometimes he zooms in on one part of a film frame. Occasionally, he’llmanipulate the frame in more dramatic ways: The opening shot is of Tom Cruise inEyes Wide Shut walking up to a theater display showing The Shining; in theactual film, he’s walking up to Nick Nightingale’s nightclub. (How Ascher andhis team will be able to clear all this footage is beyond me, so see this filmat a festival if/when you get a chance.)

Thus, Room 237 becomes a maze of references to other movies,so that at times the entirety of film history appears to be engaged in acall-and-response with itself. And that’s what movie love is all about – anengagement with the art where the films all exist in a kind of continuum witheach other, where the long shadow of Mephistopheles in Murnau’s Faust cancomment on the sight of Jack looming over The Shining’s hedge maze, where thechance appearance of an actor from Jesus Christ Superstar can suddenly pushyour interpretation of a totally unrelated film into a different realm. The film expresses, better than any movie I can think of right now, the feeling of being lost inside the world of a film, and by extension being lost inside the world of film There’sa strange kind of power in this, at least for some of us. This stylistic gambitturns out to be Ascher’s most brilliant stroke, raising what could have been aglorified DVD extra into the realm of art. And, incidentally, wiping the floorwith me.

Sundance Review: The Comedy

2012-01-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

Remember how in Ghostbusters II our heroes had to battle paranormalslime that had been formed out of all the negative energy in New York Cityoozing down into the sewers? Well, The Comedy is sort of like that slime -- it's the negative runoff of all thoseJudd Apatow comedies we’ve been watching. If you’ve ever wondered whether stufflike Knocked Up had a certain nasty, cruel, sad subtext – now it's become the text.In fact, maybe those are the comedies the title refers to, since the filmitself is not meant to be funny in any way.

Director Rick Alverson appears to have adopted theApatow house style – many, if not most, of his scenes consist of the film’sprotagonist, Swanson (Tim Heidecker, of Tim and Eric fame), tossing ironic, seemingly-improvisedriffs and rants at the people around him. It’s all sarcasm, all the time – he seemsincapable of expressing a genuine thought. This alienation, however, isn’t justrooted in an artiste’s sense of self-superiority (unlike, say, the character in I Am Not a Hipster, a film with which The Comedy could make a pretty irritating double bill). Swanson is the scion of awealthy family and currently in line to inherit a lot of money from his dyingfather. So the posture is really that of a guy who probably doesn’t think hedeserves it; he’s smugly self-loathing, and the only way he can express himselfis to completely refuse to do anything honest.

All that might have made for a fascinating film, except thatThe Comedy is brutal and in-your-face and repetitive. Go figure, scene after scene of a character aggressivelyrefusing to engage with the world can get pretty stultifying after a while. There’ssome semblance of style here – Alverson does seem to have a pretty good eye –but it’s not enough. There are bits and snippets of backstory, but it’s genericstuff: family dysfunction, loss of innocence, etc. The Comedy wants to have it both ways – it wantsto be corrosive, but then settles for soft, cliché methods of charactershading. As such, it’s unable to put us in a truly dark place. With a characterheld at such a remove, and any attempts to bring us closer to him ringingtrite and false, the result is a non-movie.

Sundance Review: Detropia

2012-01-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s Detropia probably isn’t thedefinitive documentary about the collapse of Detroit. It doesn’t provide thekind of historical detail and social context that you might need if you wantedto understand the issues behind the Motor City’s economic decline. No, Detropiais as much a ghost story as it is a documentary. It’s an impressionisticjourney through the gray soul of a major American metropolis that is slipping –nay, has slipped – into nothingness, lonely but not quite empty.

That’s not to say that Detropia is some kind of experimentaltone poem or something. Grady and Ewing give us a number of lively characters –the president of a UAW chapter, for example, or the owner of a local club that’shit hard times, or a couple of young artists who have moved into a blighted,cheap part of the city – and use them to explore this environment. So we get,for example, scenes from an auto show where one of our protagonists marvels atthe relative cheapness of a Chinese electric car versus a Chevy Volt. Orglimpses of a union meeting voting to not even bother to vote on a particularlycruel deal to reduce their pay. But that’s just what these are – glimpses. Youcould imagine Frederick Wiseman making a four hour epic about thataforementioned union meeting (or even that auto show).

Grady and Ewing aren’t interested so much in directobservation as they are in giving us a kind of emotional truth about what it’slike to be in this place. So, Detropia privileges mood as much as it doescontext. There are extraordinary images here – an overhead shot of solitary, spectralfigures walking along empty streets, or the blasted side of a demolishedbuilding waving uncertainly in the breeze, like some drunken beast. The result is a marvel, an achingly beautiful film about a town that once lay at theheart of the empire, and now seems to be drifting off its forgotten edges.

Sundance Review: Me at the Zoo

2012-01-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

Years ago, when I wrote for a print magazine covering theInternet, we used to sit around and think about the day when the online experiencewould become so ubiquitous that our magazine would become completely obsolete,like a print journal about telephones. The day came soon enough, but I don’tknow if any of us imagined the direction in which digital identity would go.Back then it seemed that the Internet would become the savior of niche culture,that it would turn all of us into particularists free to indulge our strangestinterests with small groups of like-minded folks.

It has certainly fulfilled that promise to some extent, butI’m not sure how many of us predicted the rise of viral culture. Or at leastthe extent of it. Certainly at the time there were already people who hadbecome famous on the Internet – from Cindy Margolis to Mahir Cagri, a guy whoI’m not proud to admit I spent almost a year trying to interview. But the ebband flow of viral celebrity, the concept of not just making something silly orfunny that everyone becomes obsessed by, but the idea of having followers, ofhaving millions of people lip sync to your online rants, like a planet full ofpuppets… That kind of mass give and take between mostly anonymous people Icertainly didn’t see coming.

Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch’s Me at The Zoo, adocumentary portrait of Chris Crocker, better known as The “Leave Britney Alone”Guy, uses the story of one troubled and fascinating individual -- avideo-blogger, Britney Spears superfan, and YouTube celebrity long before hewent universal with his tearful rant advising the world to leave Ms. Spears alone at the height of her troubles -- to chart the rise of viral phenomena. Spears kind of came of agealongside the Internet, so it seems somehow strangely appropriate that a boywith an unhealthy obsession with her would be the ideal representative of thismadness. Moukarbel and Veatch portray what it’s like to be in the center of itall, to be at the mercy of the affirmation and condemnation of millions ofpeople who possess essentially the same tools and voice that you do.

From that perspective, the great equalizer of the internetturns out to have a scorpion’s tail. The film captures this social whiplash,the way imitations rain down on you when something goes truly viral, when therumor-mills start buzzing or when the death threats start coming in, ashappened when Crocker claimed that he couldn’t care about the anniversary of9/11 because he was so worried over Britney’s recent troubles. There’slittle time to reflect at the center of this storm. Appropriately, the movie isfast, frantic, and at times unbearably sad.

On the other hand, the film doesn’t really offer an insidelook at Crocker’s life. Those looking for some intimate, boy-behind-the-curtain(or, in his case, behind the sheet) moments may well be disappointed. Asidefrom some touching moments with his very troubled mother, there’s little herethat someone following him online wouldn’t already know. In other words, thefilm doesn’t need to reveal the inner secrets of this guy’s life. He’s alreadyput it all out there.

Sundance Review: Simon Killer

2012-01-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

Antonio Campos’s debut feature Afterschool was one of myfavorite films of 2008, so I had very high hopes for his follow-up SimonKiller. And while the style is still distinctly his, the new filmplays in part like the opposite of the earlier. Whereas Afterschool was heavilystructured, with a downright intricate script, Simon seems deliberatelydisjointed, almost improvised. Whereas Afterschool’s central character wasalmost catatonically passive, Simon’s protagonist is intensely there, aliveand fierce in his tightly-wound little way. And while actors seemed almost likean afterthought in Afterschool (the camera so often wanted to turn away fromthem), Simon practically hinges on the grand gestures of performance.It may not be as successful as Afterschool, but it feels rawer, more personal –a quality enhanced by its curiously unformed nature.

In that sense, the central attraction in Simon Killer isn’t so much Campos the budding auteur but rather Brady Corbet’s deceptively complex performanceas a young American visiting France after a recent break-up with a long-termgirlfriend. Simon meets up with a young, beautiful prostitute (Mati Diop) andenters into a physical, surprisingly emotionally open relationship with her.But he’s a bit of a rattlesnake. He tells little lies, then big lies,and soon enough we realize he’s become something of a monster. Corbet thus hasto give a performance that hinges on two almost opposite modes of being: He’sboth inward – repressed, closed-off, even scheming – and yet also intenselyphysical. Simon is both broken boy and desperate, driven animal; by the end,you want to think that the former mode is just an act but the character stillbelieves himself, even if we no longer do.

Corbet is something to behold, even if the movie, packed thoughit is with lovely moments, isn’t entirely successful. Campos has a very precise style that needs thegoverning framework of a tight structure (as in Afterschool), and this is whereSimon sometimes loses out. The film drifts, perhaps by design but not always toits benefit. Campos’s images have a brittle coolness that makes them feel likepieces of a puzzle; unlike Fassbinder or Denis, they don’t drift well. He’smore in the Kubrick vein, where everything feels deliberate, like it’s pushingtowards something greater, like it’s all part of a plan. In Simon Killer, theplan doesn't always feel like it's entirely there.

Sundance Review: I Am Not a Hipster

2012-01-22T08:00:00.000-05:00

I saw almost every move in Destin Cretton’s I Am Not aHipster coming from a mile away. Depressive indie musician gives awkward radiointerview? Check. He’s suffering through a bad break-up and will surely dosomething stupid? Check. His dim-bulb best friend turns out to be more with-itthan originally thought? Check. Objectively, it may well be a terrible movie. Sowhy then did I kind of enjoy it?

For starters, it’s got some nice distractions: The music isgreat, and Cretton is wise to foreground the lo-fi performances, Once-style,letting the songs carry us through the film. As a result, we want Brook (DominicBogart) to succeed, despite his smug sense of forlorn superiority. And evensome of the film’s cliché developments have their charms. When our glum hero’sthree lively sisters show up one morning, you know where it’s all headed, butthe three actresses are so charming that you don’t quite mind. (Of course, thefilm then falls back on its face by also saddling Brook with a father problem –one not entirely explained, so its inevitable resolution feels more like ascreenwriter’s conceit than anything we might want to care about.)

But even when he isn’t singing, Bogart has his moments. Thefilm puts his character through some tough beats – many of them inorganic andcheap. But every once in a while there’s a real emotion, or an honest gesture,and the actor nails it. The movie around him is mostly disposable, but letthere be no shame in saying that he’s captured the essence of this arrogantlyself-pitying dickhead.

Sundance Review: Robot and Frank

2012-01-21T22:47:00.001-05:00

Robot and Frank supposedly takes place a few indeterminateyears in the future, but it might as well be taking place on a differentplanet. Director Jake Schreier doesn’t go overboard with the sci-fi elements –in fact, the only thing at first that would suggest anything futuristic is atiny car driving by in the background – but he uses behavior to create anotherworldly context for his drama.

Frank Langella plays Frank, an aging thief slowlygoing senile living alone in a big, comfortable house. He’s got nothing to doexcept visit the local library, where lovely librarian Susan Sarandon informshim (and us) that Frank is the place’s only customer. Meanwhile, Frank’shippy-ish daughter (Liv Tyler) and his yuppy-ish son (James Marsden) worryabout him in their own little ways. While she’s off traveling and doing good inTurkmenistan, the son gets Frank a robot helper (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard, whoshould do more robot voices) to cater to his needs. Frank’s reluctant at first,but sure enough he starts to bond with his machine friend. Before we know it,he’s using the robot to help plan an elaborate robbery of his neighbors.

Everything in Robot and Frank feels a little off. Thecharacters don’t quite behave like real people. The film’s milieu, even thoughit seems like a fairly normal privileged suburb, doesn’t quite seem real. Thatsounds like a bad thing, but Schreier makes it work: His film regards itsuniverse with the same low-key, bemused contempt that Frank does. And everyonce in a while we recognize little moments of recognizable behavior – it’salmost as if humanity itself is becoming quietly forgotten. Like we’re slippinginto the same fog as Frank’s fallible memories.

I don’t know whether to call Robot and Frank a comedy or adrama. It’s certainly got its funny moments, but it’s also a staid, quietlittle film that at times feels like a one-man show. Langella has a lot to dohere, but not a lot of emoting; hisFrank is a distant figure, and while the slow onset of dementia hasn’tcompletely taken him over, we can sense him floating away, ever so softly and with aminimum of fuss.

And yet the film never quite holds the weight of a drama. Itcertainly has myriad opportunities for symbolism and sentimentality, but Schreierand writer Christopher Ford keep things loose and airy. Thus, what the filmloses out on pathos, and maybe even some narrative drive, it gains in honesty.It also affords the right to spring one quietly devastating emotional twist onus late in the final act – one of those out-of-the-blue moments that in a morecloying film would have been the last straw, but here makes everything shine alittle bit brighter.

Forgotten Films: The Stranger (Luchino Visconti, 1967)

2012-01-15T15:27:00.003-05:00

(For an explanation of the Forgotten Films project, go here.)

Forgive me for a second if this gets a bit personal. (Don’tworry -- not that personal.)

The other day, while suffering from a rather grotesque boutof food-poisoning, I found myself thinking back to the last time I’d beensimilarly laid low. And, amazingly, I could remember the exact date: I'm pretty sure it wasNovember 27, 1997. Newly returned from nearly a year in Russia, I had justcooked myself a surprisingly delicious Thanksgiving meal of Georgian chakhokhbili and wasnow suffering from the even-more-surprising and previously unbeknownst-to-me fact that the chicken hadbeen thawed and refrozen before I’d gotten to it. Worse: The following day MoMA was having a very rarescreening of Luchino Visconti’s The Stranger, a film I’d been tryingdesperately to see since the age of thirteen, and the reason I'd chosen to remain in New York during Thanksgiving in the first place.

I thought about going, but the fact that I couldn’t even sitstill without wrapping a blanket tightly around myself to keep away the chillsseemed to dictate against that. When suddenly, I realized: This is MoMA we’retalking about! Their movie theater is full of crazy people with blankets andbags! I’ll blend right in. So I gathered my blanket, tried (and probably failed)to make myself presentable, and dutifully, miserably trudged out to MoMA tofinally catch what had been, for many years, the Holy Grail of cinema for me. Iwas proud that afternoon to be an inmate in that particular asylum. I’m notgoing to pretend I was a particularly attentive viewer, shivering and hoveringin feverish uncertainty between this life and the next, but it was kind of aperfect way to see The Stranger. And perhaps the fact that I love it so much isinextricably tied to the lengths I went to see it. But I’ve since re-watchedit, and it still seems to me a truly great film.

So, anyway: More people should know about the existence ofan adaptation of Camus’s The Stranger starring Marcello Mastroianni and AnnaKarina, and directed by Visconti at the height of his career. That such a filmhas gone largely unseen for so many years boggles the mind. I’ve never understood why it’s so impossible to find on video – crap bootlegsdo show up now and then – but I can only assume there is some kind ofcatastrophic rights dispute preventing its release.

Visconti, in many senses, would not seem like the idealperson to adapt The Stranger. Although his debut feature, 1943’s Ossessione,had helped bring about the Italian Neorealist movement, in the 1950s and 60sthis scion of one of Italy’s oldest and richest families (he was also, as luckwould have it, a communist and a homosexual) moved towards a more aestheticizedrealm, staging immaculately reconstructed, operatic period pieces such as Sensoand The Leopard. Actually, Visconti’s flair for elaborate historic recreationswas really just an offshoot of the same impulses that led to his firstkitchen-sink films: To take the surfaces of the known world and put heightenedversions of them onscreen, utilizing setting and mood to achieve a kind ofacute psychological realism. Many Visconti films have been criticized for beingall texture; but in a Visconti film, texture is the inroads to understandingcharacter.

So where does that leave The Stranger? Camus’s slim novel ofexistential despair seems miles away from the historic, epic tomes Viscontiliked to adapt (he preferred expansive writers like Thomas Mann and GiovanniVerga). Indeed, the melodrama that is often the central focus of other Viscontifilms is here reduced to an object of distant observation: Camus’s centralcharacter, Meursault (Mastroianni) is a Frenchman living in occupied Algiers,profoundly alienated from the world around him. Unable to feel anything, hegoes through the motions of his life. He feels nothing at his mother’s funeral,he feels nothing at the sight of a man viciously abusing his girlfriend, and,most notably, he feels nothing as he kills an Arab on a sandy beach, in theblistering heat and blinding glare of the North African sun. In the trial thatensues, he is condemned not so much for his crime but for his cool, seeminglyuncaring demeanor. Which makes him about as un-Viscontiesque a character as onecan imagine.

Somewhat surprisingly, The Stranger is an extremely faithfuladaptation, at least on its surface. But in translating Camus to the screen,the director and his screenwriters (among them his longtime collaborator SusoCecchi D’Amico) bring an earthiness to the story that gives it a strange newkind of life. From the opening images of Meursault sweating away on a bus,through his days in the sweltering heat, his free-spirited dalliances at thebeach and in the sea with the lovely Marie (Karina, sigh), this is a film that isvery much about the physical reality of a character whose mind seems toconstantly be elsewhere. The heat is certainly also a part of Camus’s novel,but the extent of its presence in the film -- with sweat constantly seepingthrough Meursault’s shirt, fans everywhere blasting away helplessly, and nearlyevery character existing in a strange netherworld of fierce passion andfrustrated exhaustion – is striking.

This tension –- between the deeply-felt, impeccably-filmedtextures of the physical world, and the distant, alienated nature of Meursault’sinner life -- makes The Stranger a profoundly disquieting film. This is whereVisconti truly broke out of his comfort zone: If before surface and mood hadbeen an inroads to character, here they become a dead-end. To Visconti, thetragedy of Meursault is the fact that we can’t quite know him, or access him. Themore Visconti tries, the more opaque Meursault becomes. Or rather, the more blurry hegets, like a phantom rising out of the North African heat.

I suspect that much of the world wasn’t ready for this filmat the time –- at least, not from Visconti. The director was roundly castigatedfor making the film a period piece (it’s set in the time frame of the novel).It fit in with many critics’ view of him as a director who was only athome in the past, the kind of charge they’d level at Merchant-Ivory many years later.(How odd it is to learn that Visconti actually wanted to make the film set incontemporary times, but was forced to turn it into a period piece at theinsistence of Camus’s widow.)

Furthermore, Mastroianni is considered by many to be a bittoo good-looking and cool to play Meursault. But part of Mastroianni’scharm was his very affability. Even though by the 60s he had become aninternational symbol of Euro-cool, there was always an Everyman quality at theroot of his appeal; remember, in the film that made him an icon, 1960’s LaDolce Vita, he was the journalist lusting after the movie star, not the otherway around. Indeed, by casting such a likable, good-looking actor as Meursault,Visconti adds to the tension between his character’s inner and outer worlds.

The Stranger is rare, but it isn’t impossible to see. As I notedabove, it tends to show up in retrospectives of the director’s works. I’malways encouraged by the enthusiastic response the film gets from viewers atthese screenings. That not only suggests that there is interest in it (whichbodes well for a release, some day) but that audiences are finally able to seeit for the remarkably haunting work it is. It deserves to be seen by morepeople. I hope one day it will.

Norwegian Wood: Rubber Souls

2012-01-14T11:18:00.001-05:00

I had hoped to get this piece on Norwegian Wood up sooner,but, well, let’s just say I’ve been distracted of late. But there are still some chances to see it: The film is still playing at the IFC Center, and it will hopefully be making an appearance on VODsoon, if it hasn’t already. So run, don't walk, etc.

The French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung is a curiouscase for me. I remember snoozing my way through both viewings of his gorgeous,acclaimed (and Oscar-nominated) debut The Scent of Green Papaya back in 1993,and filing him away as one of those filmmakers I just didn’t “get.” But Iadmired his 1995 follow-up Cyclo (which, admittedly, had a bit more narrativekick to keep me awake), and I adored 2000’s The Vertical Ray of the Sun. That lattertitle got a tepid critical response, but the more years I live the more it feelslike one of the greatest films ever made.

Tran seems to be one of the few filmmakers who can trulypull off languor onscreen – not stillness, not austerity, not quiet, butlanguor, the tactile and delicate quality of characters just doing nothing butpassing time in their own ways. Vertical Ray was about a trio of sisters, onebrother, and their husbands and lovers in various stages of relationshipdisarray, but the repeated refrain in the film – a sister and brother who werenot so secretly in love with one another waking up in the morning – became aleitmotif, a strange projection of innocence, familiarity, and doomed,submerged passion. Tran has since also made a strange English-language genrefilm, I Come with the Rain, starring a post-stardom Josh Hartnett, which isstylish but didn’t do much for me.

And now comes Tran’s film of Haruki Murakami’s NorwegianWood. I haven’t read the novel (though like many people I know everything thereis to know about the song), so I feel a bit under-equipped to comment on thenature of the adaptation. However, Tran seems to have returned to the style ofVertical Ray with this film – perhaps taken it to even greater extremes. Thestory explores a series of tangled college-age relationships – and one uniquelytragic one in particular -- during the turbulent 1960s, though the politicalturmoil of the time only shows up ever so briefly, as if to help underline thefact that everything seems so unhinged. But the film, as diffuse as it isnarratively, actually has a resolute focus on the affairs of the heart. We seeso little of the other parts of these characters’ lives; if someone asked me todescribe what they did all day, I couldn’t tell you. Tran seems to only careabout how love and desire and need, in their various forms, drift in and out ofour lives. That could get monotonous, but the film is in fact a rollercoasterof emotion; he finds as much to show us in a scene of two people sittingquietly as he does in a scene of them making passionate love.

If Vertical Ray took a very linear, structured approach toits multi-character, multi-arc narrative – delineating every storyline clearlyand distinctly – Norwegian Wood takes the opposite tack, creating an almostkaleidoscope-like effect where time bends and relationships bleed into eachother, even when they’re occurring in different time periods. Stylistically,this is a remarkable challenge, but the director, ever the sensualist, seems upto the task. The film never gets confusing, perhaps because we’re being carriedaway by the lush imagery or the eclectic music choices on the score. (Much likeWong Kar-wai, to whose 2046 Norwegian Wood bears some similarities, Tranunderstands the importance of surface in film – that if something looks andsounds right it can bridge a million gaps.)

I don’t know if this aforementioned, fever-dream-likequality of the story comes from Murakami or Tran, but it feels emotionallyright. A friend once told me that any given relationship between two people existedin a secret continuum with all the other relationships those people had everhad. I don’t know if I agree entirely, but Norwegian Wood is one of the more compelling cinematic evocations of that thought I’ve seen.

A Separation: When Worlds, and Actors, Collide

2012-01-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

Ashgar Farhadi’s A Separation is already probably the best-reviewed film of 2011, so nobody needs me to sit here and rattle on abouthow great it is. But there is one aspect of it that I want to get into, a bit.

I’ve discussed elsewhere the problem of different actingtemperatures mixing in the same film – most recently in my review of Young Adult, where I felt Charlize Theron was giving a bullet of a performance ina different movie than the rest of the cast, and not in a good way. I’ve chewedoff many a friendly ear over the years talking about this phenomenon. AmericanBeauty is a particularly egregious example; every single actor in it seems tobe in a completely different film, and it drives me up the wall. Literally -- Ionce drunkenly scaled a wall to express my hatred of American Beauty.

But A Separation (and Farhadi’s work in general – really, he’sone of the best filmmakers working today, anywhere) represents a good exampleof when this sort of thing can be done right. That may sound like a strangething to say, since A Separation is in no way the kind of broad, pointed,vaguely satire-y work that American Beauty and Young Adult are. And yet, youcan see right from the beginning that Farhadi and his cast have carefullyshaped these characters such that each seems to carry within them a distinctemotional charge, and part of the joy of watching the film is in seeing howthese ions collide and play off one another, and how they send the story spinningoff in different directions.

Early on, we see Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (LeilaHatami), the married couple whose technical divorce sets the story in motion(she wants to go abroad, he needs to stay in Iran to take care of his dyingfather), going through their things. “I’m taking this CD,” she says, quietly,holding up a disc. “Take whichever you want,” he says frustratedly,dismissively. “No, just this one,” she says, pleasantly enough, though you cantell she too is dying inside. Immediately, you can tell that these characters aredealing with their current heartbreak in distinct ways: She’s being reasonable,practical – forcing herself to be, of course – and he’s being bitter, totalizing,almost apocalyptic.

We see that, left to his own devices, Nader is kind of anall-or-nothing fellow, and this hard-charging attitude of his in part resultsin a catastrophe once he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), the young, pious, poor womanwho begins working for him unbeknownst to her traditionalist husband. As playedby Bayat, Razieh is quiet, constantly withholding, and afraid to allow herselfto be in anyone’s space – in part because of her religion, but also because, wesuspect, that’s just how she is. Her refusal, or rather inability, to let Naderknow what’s going on with her – she’s pregnant, and unwell – or to seek anyhelp from anybody else even though she clearly needs it butts up against hismile-a-minute obstinacy in the film’s central event, a misunderstanding withrather dire consequences that in turn send the rest of the story into thebyzantine folds of Iran’s judicial system.

Now into the mix comes Hodjat, Razieh’s husband (ShahabHosseini), a completely new emotional movement unto himself. He’s impulsive,potentially violent, frustrated, self-loathing -- a strange dynamo of constanteruption and pullback (his classic pose seems to be to put two hands over hisforehead and almost slap himself, a strange little mixture of anger and regretthat we Middle Eastern men unfortunately do a lot). Once Hodjat enters thestory, the chemistry of the whole thing changes. Watch the way he interacts –or, more accurately, combusts -- with Nader, whose bourgeois stubbornness lendshim a self-righteousness that Hodjat, for all his anger and resentment andpiety, can never have. It’s thrilling – that is, if something that is ultimatelyso heartbreaking can really be called “thrilling.”

But that’s the thing about A Separation. It’s a relationshipdrama where you’re constantly worried for everyone’s physical safety. And thatI think is partly due to these weird emotional/chemical reactions that Farhadiand his cast set off. Every once in a while, these characters seem tocrash against each other, and the film explodes along with them -- gainingurgency, power, danger as it moves relentlessly along, never quite allowing youto see where it might go next.

Top Ten Films of 2011: “Nothing stands still. Or keeps its place.”

2011-12-30T12:44:00.002-05:00

I guess I’d better do this before it’s too late. Here’s myTop Ten List for 2011.

As my title suggests, it’s a tentative one. I usually don’tconsider my Top Ten list finished (not that it ever is) until I file one for theSkandie Awards in February; so I’ve actually got a couple more months of 2011 leftto go, lucky me. I’m not even going to begin to tell you what essential 2011films I haven’t yet seen. Life’s humiliating enough.

And the list has been changing already over the past fewweeks – this one is a bit different from the Top 20 I sent in for the FilmComment poll, which was different from my Top Ten in the Village Voice poll,which was different from my Top Ten in the Indiewire poll.

I was going to wait until I wrote up a review of ASeparation before I posted this, but, well, that didn’t happen. In cases whereI wrote something pertinent (a review, or whatever) about a given film, I’ve linked to it. The excerpts below thetitles…um, not sure how to explain those. Some are from my reviews. Some arefrom…other things. Sorry if they sound pretentious, but I'm pressed for time over here.

Okay, that’s enough throat-clearing. Onward.

1.) The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)

“Perhaps Malick chooses this approach because he wants us toremember what it’s like to lose something. Ordinary narratives treat the lossof innocence as something tangible, locatable, quantifiable – cue the leadcharacter’s first visit to a brothel, or his first fight, or the first time heheard about the Atom bomb, or whatever. But in Malick’s world (and, let's faceit, in ours, too), innocence doesn’t just vanish. We look up one day andrealize it’s been gone for a while, and we wonder where it went.”

2.) Melancholia (Lars von Trier)

“You see these people? All of us? And all the people alivein the world today. A hundred years from now, we’ll all be dead. That isimpermanence.”

3.) A Separation (Ashgar Farhadi)

“Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of theNeolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High,the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they haveborne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as theirattitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essentialstructure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals andseemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself,just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushedone way or the other.”

4.) Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)

“It's a very close look at somebody who learns the hard waythat you can't get the world to do what you want because there are millions ofothers right next to you trying to do the exact same thing, and that onceyou've run through your idealism, all you've got is your character and yourcapacity for love.” (See here.)

5.) Psychohydrography (Peter Bo Rappmund)

“A premise that is simple, yet curiously hard todescribe. Rappmund charts the journey ofthe water in the Los Angeles River from its origins in the Eastern SierraNevada mountains, on through the L.A. Aqueduct, and finally to its emptying outinto the Pacific. The film is composed of a series of static frames. But eachframe is also a series of stills – thousands of them, creating a time-lapseanimation of what little movement (if any) is onscreen…It unifies the whole evenas it fragments the particular…And so the film’s attempts to harness naturaleffects echo its depiction of man’s attempts to harness those same phenomena inreal life…[T]his harnessing gradually becomes a kind of mediation, and by thetime the water reaches the ocean, we’ve truly entered a different world.”

6.) Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

“Her hands when she is very old: those worn hands that onceheld so much that was dear to them, that once he could take and hold as tightlyand for as long as he wished. Soon he must lose her, too, with all that heloves.”

7.) Poetry (Lee Changdong)

“To write poetry is

To remember mother’s hands,

Joint swollen,

Washing the white rice

At cold dawn during winter solstice.” (from the film's Cannes presskit)

8.) The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg)

“Few artists used the physical stillness of the comic frameas well as Herge, and few filmmakers have used the movement of the film frameas well as Spielberg. So now the characters zip past us, constantly in motion.Maybe something has been lost in the process, but dammit if it doesn’tsometimes feel like Spielberg has liberated them as well.”

9.) General Orders No. 9 (Robert Persons)

“It begins with a hand quietly contemplating objects fromthe past – the skull of a bird, a coin, something that looks like a bullet, asingle die -- and then drifts into a deeply personal rumination on communityand place, and how they have become disjointed in the modern world… [N]aturebends methodically and gently towards a kind of social organization. This worldstill has roots, it is still definably a place, with a center…Later, however,that sense of order is overwhelmed…[T]he almost soothing progression ofcounties and towns on the map of Georgia becomes, as it spreads out across amap of the U.S., a nightmarish contagion of jigsaw-puzzle-like fragmentation.What once were carefully drawn boundaries now look like a thousand cracksacross a nation made of glass.”

10.) We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)

“We never remember things as they were, but rather the waywe want them to have been, or the way we fear they were.”

10-11, maybe.) Potential Dark Horse (har har), pending a second viewing: War Horse (Steven Spielberg)

"If War Horse seems old-fashioned at first, that’sbecause it has to be. It’s about how the old world was torn to shreds by thenew -- which is, after all, the ultimate story of World War I."

War Horse: You Can’t Go Home Again

2011-12-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

Steven Spielberg’s equine bildungsroman has been calledold-fashioned, and it is, I suppose, to a point. Because it’s essentially aboutthe very idea of old-fashioned-ness itself. It starts off in a kind of bucolic,poetic reverie in the lush countryside of Devon; the first scenes are admirablywordless, as boy (Jeremy Irvine) meets horse. Then it settles, for a littlewhile at least, into a kind of particularized geniality that has led many torecall John Ford films like The Quiet Man and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.Seemingly uncinematic problems -- such as whether a thoroughbred can be made toplow a field, or whether a kind-hearted, drunk farmer with a limp (PeterMullan) will be able to make rent -- are filmed with a wide-eyed momentousness.

Some will find this hard to take, but that’s what epics do: They make everything bigger and bigger until thewhole world is screaming, and then they force us to choose what’s important. Andif War Horse seems old-fashioned at first, that’s because it has to be. It’sabout how the old world was torn to shreds by the new -- which is, after all,the ultimate story of World War I.

So these early scenes are bathed in golden hues, and therolling fields are filmed with a sensuousness that renders the whole thing unreal,as in a dream. (Meanwhile, John Williams’s score goes into full Ralph VaughanWilliams mode.) The film occasionally goes back to this register, even as theplot departs England and moves on to the continent; the fields and farms arenow just French ones, and they don’t look too different.

But as the cruel pestilence of war spreads across the film’s imagined countryside, each idyll isupstaged by the thundering, churning machinery of combat. The rich colorssuddenly turn stark and virtually monochromatic, and the exchanges betweencharacters veer towards madness. A track-in to a sword on one end of a battleis mirrored by a track-in to a machine gun that’s about to tear an entirebattalion apart. This is all part of the film’s most bravura sequence: acavalry charge that begins in a dreamy, softly-lit field of tall grain andwinds up in a massacre in the dark heart of an unnamed forest. The gunseffectively rid the galloping horses of their riders, like an absence factory. Thatscene virtually encapsulates the entire movie. The noble values of the old meet the mechanized ferocity of the new. One wonders if this might be thelast cavalry charge in human history.

War Horse is far from perfect. Much of the dialogue bears acertain staginess that betrays its theatrical origins. This eventually becomes itsown stylistic thing, but it also lends some key scenes a kind of hard, awkward edgethat left me curiously cold. Yet the film has a compelling sense of narrativedesign. Not unlike Spielberg’s earlier Munich -- which took its ever-falling charactersfrom relaxed apartments to dark, cramped safe-houses where they had to sleepnext to the people they had to kill -- War Horse’s very trajectory seems to be itspoint. The weaponry keeps getting bigger and more surreal throughout the film –from swords, to machine guns, to heavy artillery, and finally to gas. A similarpattern follows the soldiers as well – they start off as noble officers and graduallybecome more cynical and murderous as the film progresses – so that theirredemption in the final act has the force of a genuine deliverance.

For all the alleged indulgence of the film’s stylization,there is in fact a very pointed, melancholy quality to the camerawork andlighting here. A distinctly Spielbergian crane up in the first act reveals arich, black, freshly plowed field, while the same camera movement towards theend of the film gives us dull, dark acres of British corpses; in both cases, ourhorse hero was made to drag the instruments that made this possible. The film’sfinal scene is deceptive – it’s bathed in a kind of otherworldly red that maymake you think we’ve returned to our rolling idylls of before. But we haven’t.The red never goes away, and the actors move in silhouette, like shadow puppets.The scene might as well be taking place on Mars. It’s ostensibly a happyending, but it leaves us feeling queasy and unfulfilled. We barely get to seeanybody’s face.

Despite all the associations (mine included) with John Fordand David Lean, the director War Horse evokes most is…well, Spielberg himself.In some weird way, the film feels like a précis of the director’s career – akinetic portrait of how the boy who dreamed big fantasies of friendship andwonder eventually became the man who wound up making movies about genocide,terrorism, slavery, and war, even as he tried to find ways back home from the chaos. Yes, it’s melodrama. Yes, it’s broad. Yes, it’sold-fashioned. But there’s also an unfathomable darkness to War Horse that willconsume you if you let it.

Two Last/First Things on "Margaret"

2011-12-24T15:00:00.000-05:00

Actually, I'll probably have more to say later (a pedant's work is never done), but for now, two timely things about Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret worth noting:

- Margaret re-opened at the Cinema Village in New York yesterday. I'd like to think this had something to do with its impressive showing in a couple of year-end critics' polls (to which I feel honored to have contributed) as well as the fairly constant internet campaign conducted on the film's behalf by a number of bloggers, writers, ordinary folks, etc. (Not to mention its newfound popularity in the UK, where it recently opened to rave reviews and, reportedly, some solid box-office.) Anyway, go see it, if you're in NY. Don't expect it to stay there for long. I'll be there, too, at some point.

- I did actually get to see Margaret again several weeks ago, when the good folks at Fox were kind enough to schedule some year-end awards consideration screenings. (In case you're wondering: The damn thing does even more than hold up.) Since this was my first time seeing the film at an actual critics' screening, it was also the first time I saw the film's press notes. Though I knew plenty about the film by this point, I thought I'd read the notes, given the various complications (already discussed) around promoting Margaret. And I was a bit surprised to discover that, while writer-director Lonergan is legally not allowed to say much about the film, the presskit does open up with a surprisingly forward description of the film by him. I thought I'd share it here, as it encapsulates his work rather eloquently:

"I've wanted to tell this story for a long time. It's meant to be a kind of a teen epic -- a documentary urban opera built on the everyday details, frustrations and obstacles that make real life so challenging, so funny and so painful. It's a very close look at somebody who learns the hard way that you can't get the world to do what you want because there are millions of others right next to you trying to do the exact same thing, and that once you've run through your idealism, all you've got is your character and your capacity for love."

To which I say: "Testify!"

The Adventures of Tintin: Bodies, Unrest, and Motion

2011-12-22T08:00:00.000-05:00

I’vebeen waiting for a proper Tintin movie for pretty much my entire life. Thefirst time I saw a movie on TV (any kind of movie) was a Turkish TV broadcastof Tintin and the Blue Oranges, a live-action Belgian attempt from the 1960s tobring Herge’s comic book characters to life. Even my six-year-old self at thetime knew enough to call bullshit on that one. I remember that halfway throughthe film, the power went out in Ankara and plunged us into darkness, as ifwilled by my refusal to accept some random dude pretending to be Tintin.

Therehave been some 2-D animated attempts over the years. Those have stuck quiteclose to Herge’s original character designs, making them at least seem moreauthentic and acceptable. But a proper film should bring Tintin closer to therealm of reality, sort of the way superhero movies function; such films have tomatch our imagination’s capacity to place unreal things in the real world, otherwisethey feel strangely impoverished. Which is a challenge: Tintin the boyjournalist (he famously never grows up) is such a unique looking character,with his comically slender frame and that odd tuft of blond hair giving hishead the distinct appearance of an orange onion; any live-action attempt isbound to fail. He does not actually look like any human who has ever lived.

Whichof course makes it pretty much a stroke of brilliance to do Tintin as a motioncapture computer-animated movie, because that medium seems to hover between thereal and the imagined. The Tintin of Steven Spielberg’s film is the Tintin I’vebeen waiting for – just physically present enough to let you believe he couldbe standing there, and yet just animated enough that he still looks likeTintin. In fact, Spielberg invests this whole world with such physical weightthat it’s hard not to believe it’s all actually happening in front of us.

Butthere are other challenges here, too. There was always a certain deadpanslapstick quality to Herge’s work; the static nature of the frame was the keyto his visual inventiveness. His characters are so often suspended inmid-pratfall, or frozen in bewildered shock. You can’t really replicate that on film, and it wouldn’t makesense for a guy like Spielberg to try. So he goes in the opposite direction,which makes for an intriguing echo: Few artists used the physical stillness ofthe comic frame as well as Herge, and few filmmakers have used the movement ofthe film frame as well as Spielberg. So now the characters zip past us,constantly in motion. Maybe something has been lost in the process, but dammitif it doesn’t sometimes feel like Spielberg has liberated them aswell.

Orrather, he’s Spielbergized them -- and that’s not a bad thing, not here. Yes,at times the film feels like Spielberg’s Greatest Hits. (Characters beingwildly chased through Middle Eastern towns? Check. Someone slowly gettingdragged towards an airplane propeller? Check. Pirates and boys who refuse togrow up? Check. ) But if there was ever a director from whom a Greatest Hitscompilation would be more than welcome, it’s Spielberg.

Somemay complain that the film refuses to slow down, that even Raiders of the LostArk had that great scene between Marion and Indy on the ship right before thefinal act. (“It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.”) But Tintin storiesdon’t slow down, not really. There’s little room for reflection in this world,and certainly not for intimacy. Remember, Tintin is essentially a blank slate: Hemight be 14 or he might be 17. He’s a reporter who is never seen writing asingle word. He’s a young boy who lives alone with his dog and can go and dowhatever he wants. He has no family, no backstory, and almost no characterquirks, or even traits. He certainly has no romantic life. (If you want to knowwhat happens when Tintin discovers love, try Frederic Tuten’s masterfullystrange novel Tintin in the New World: A Romance, a dreamlike reverie thatimagines the intrepid boy journalist lovesick and lost among the characters ofThomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.) Aside from his onion head, Tintin's blankness is his one essential quality.

No,this movie doesn’t stop, nor should it. What this movie does is move. Ofcourse, there’s a strange perversity to the idea of elaborate tracking shotsand stunts done in animation – since there’s no physical danger or challengeinvolved. But that actually highlights the nature of Spielberg’s achievementhere. Despite the fact that we’re only just watching pixels, he makes us care;he takes our breath away with the death-defying derring-do of his characters. Atone point, during an already-justly-celebrated, eye-popping single-shot chasescene through a village, Spielberg keeps the perspective ever-changing; theforeground becomes background and vice-versa, helping to plunge us headlonginto a dizzying chaos that has been expertly choreographed and realized. It’s acrazy scene. A moped breaks in half, then breaks even further, though eachpiece seems to still go in its own direction; a dog and a bird fight over apiece of parchment in mid-air, flying through windows while dodging humans andclotheslines and all sorts of other things; someone inadvertently rappels off abuilding hanging onto a single tire, which then further breaks up into nothingin their hands; a flood pushes an entire hotel down a street, its gravitysomehow commandeering a tank along the way, whose gun snags one of our heroesand leaves him hanging and helpless amid the frenzy of the chase. And somewherealong the way, I realize I’m six again, and I never ever want it to end.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: The Ghost in the Machine

2011-12-17T11:51:00.000-05:00

I’ve watched Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spytwice now and I’m still not sure I understand all of it. The story, at least in its broad strokes, is fairly simple, butstructurally it burrows into little pockets that are sometimes hard tountangle. The film moves not like a river but an octopus at the bottom of the sea; you sense theoverall form sliding along, but you can’t always follow the individual tentacles. Andyet, I can’t tear myself away from it.

As I’ve said elsewhere, a film you have to see more thanonce should also be a film you want to see more than once. Tinker TailorSoldier Spy draws you into its atmosphere of dread and anxiety, and it’s hardnot to feel uneasy while watching it, even if you don’t quite understand what’shappening. But the thing that’s making me come back to it over and over againis something other than this hard, nervous, thriller element. In fact, it’squite the opposite. Much like last year’s The American (and not unlikeAlfredson’s earlier Let the Right One In), the film seems to be sayingsomething about how tenderness insinuates itself into a tense,unfeeling world -- how the soft edges of desire collide with the cold angles of the machine.

Ostensibly, this adaptation of John le Carre’s classic spynovel is about the hunt for a mole in a British Intelligence unit (called “TheCircus”). Of course, these aren’t glamorous, James Bond-style spies, or evenThird Man-style spies. Yes, we get interludes in Budapest and Istanbul, and yes,we get the occasionally nasty bits of violence, but for the most part the filmchooses to focus on the methodical drudgery of espionage, and on the gray,airless world that these spies inhabit. The search for the mole is methodicaland precise: each section of the film focuses on a different individual in TheCircus, as baits are set and traps are laid. But ever so slowly, the search, at least to the audience’s eyes, beginsto reveal some other things about this world and its inhabitants. The intensifying,tightening focus on their doings threatens to expose secret lives, secretdesires. These cogs turn out to be – gasp -- very human ones.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy uses mood the way other movies might use plot points. Into this impeccably crafted recreation of a dry, drab, smoky bureaucracy, Alfredson carefully allows sharp little pangs of emotion: A jealous glance, a furtive embrace, a barely-glimpsed and hasty goodbye between two lovers. Maybe that’s why the film always feels like it’s ending. It’s shot in this persistent, autumnal glaze that makes everything seem like the last act of something, which is perhaps the ideal way to make a movie about people hiding very important things.

I haven't read le Carre's novel, but the filmmakers have spoken elsewhere, briefly, about their own addition of homosexuality into the film. But they've added it in such a glancing manner that you could easily miss it -- in fact, even as I write these words I'm not 100% sure to what extent the element is there, particularly at the end. But that very uncertainty seems to be part of the film's design. It’s amazing how often we’ll catch a glimpse of a body in the film,without ever seeing the face. Like there’s a story not quite being toldhovering on the edges of the frame, constantly fleeing from our judgmentalglance. We’re never getting the whole story.

In a way, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy seems to be saying thathumans, even when placed into a well-oiled machine, will find ways to populatethe place with their desires, to cut through the oppressive air of the mundaneand find tenderness and human warmth – however fleeting, however wrong, howevercorrosive. In the end it's a film about intimacy -- perhaps even love, perhaps even ofthe forbidden kind – and how it burgeoned in this steely, unfeeling space.

We Need to Talk About Kevin: Mother-dämmerung

2011-12-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

Thestriking opening image of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a birds’ eye view of anarmy of bodies writhing in a sea of crushed tomatoes (we may wonder ifit’s blood at first), lets us know more than we may suspect about the film. Thischaos of red, with its stumbling and slithering human forms, is an image out oftime and space; we don’t know where we are, or when this is happening, or ifit’s even real. It’s probably the “Tomatina” festival in Valencia, and sinceour lead character Eva (Tilda Swinton) is a travel agent, this is probably anevent she’s been to at some point in her mangled life. But still. We knoweverything about the feel of the thing and nothing about the why, or the how,or the when, or even the who. That seems to be a good way to describe LynneRamsay’s cinema in general. This one, however, stands out.

Imight be the only film snob in the universe who wasn’t a huge fan of Ramsay’searlier films. Morvern Callar and Ratcatcher both felt too ethereal and distantto me; in my mind, they immediately vanished into the ether. So I wasn’t quiteprepared for the cutting precision of We Need to Talk About Kevin. There’ssomething about the movie that seems etched in stone. Every moment iscontrolled, every composition perfectly arranged. But along with this comes a certain lost-ness. We don’t always know what we’re looking at,or how much to trust our own eyes. It feels like a film one of Ramsay’scharacters might make -- unreliable yet persistent, exacting yet dizzy. But in a good way.

Asyou may already know, We Need to Talk about Kevin is a film about Eva dealing –or, more accurately, failing to deal -- with her young, probably psychotic son(played by several actors, most notably Afterschool’s Ezra Miller in histeenage years). The film cuts back and forth between Eva as she is in thepresent -- a nervous wreck living alone in a rundown house, working as asecretary in a modest travel agency -- and as she was in the early years ofKevin’s life – a self-absorbed and successful career woman with a lovingpushover of a husband (John C. Reilly) and a beautiful, cruelly unresponsivebaby boy.

Inthe flashbacks, time passes: Kevin grows; a younger sister is born; the familymoves to suburbia; a pet hamster meets a horrific fate. In the present day, however, time seems tostand still: Eva works away at her dead-end job, endures strange looks, keepsto herself, and is occasionally approached by strangers with some kind of axeto grind. Except of course they’re not strangers: I’m not really giving anythingaway by revealing that the film builds to a harrowing massacre perpetrated byour titular adolescent beast, and these strangers’ children were Kevin’svictims. (In the present, we also see Eva visiting Kevin in prison, so the filmisn’t really keeping any of this a secret.)

Itsounds pretty upsetting, and it is, but it’s not exactly unbearable – perhapsbecause Ramsay isn’t going for realism. This is an outlandish film, right downto Kevin’s chosen instrument of murder. It’s a horror movie-cum-domesticallegory, re-imagined as an absurdist, almost comic fever dream: The Omen meetsParenthood, only stranger. Is the son evil because the mother doesn’t love him,or does she not love him because he’s evil? Or is it possible that none of thisis real in the first place, and that Eva’s memories are instead a recasting, areinvention of a horrific tragedy designed to somehow make it make sense.

It’stelling that the present day of the film seems to consist of a series ofpunishments. Which seems a mite unfair: Eva herself is a victim of Kevin’scrime, in more profound ways than might at first seem. So why then do theseother characters and the movie punish her so? Maybe because it’s not reallythey who are doing the punishing. Consider the fact that the punishmentsthemselves seem decidedly unreal: Early in the film Eva opens her door to findher house covered – and I mean, covered – in red paint. But the red paint isstreaked across her bathroom mirrors, too. Did they get inside? Was the windowopen? Or is all that red paint coming from some place within Eva? Similarly, wesee her scratching something caked and red from her hair at one point in thefilm. What is it? More paint? Blood? Tomatoes?

Onecould argue that the film stacks the decks against Eva – Kevin seems so cruel,and she at times so selfish -- but let’s not forget that memories tend to stackthe deck against us as well. We never remember things as they were, but ratherthe way we want them to have been, or the way we fear they were. This all seemsin keeping with Eva’s mindset. At one point, a couple of well-dressedmissionary types come to the door asking her if she knows how she’s spendingthe afterlife. “Oh, I’m going straight to Hell. Eternal damnation, the wholething,” she says pleasantly, and the expression on Swinton’s face is one ofrelief. There, she seems to be thinking, I said it. What she anticipates,however, has already happened. We Need to Talk about Kevin is a film about awoman who craves her own damnation, and, in fact, makes it inevitable.

Young Adult: Beautiful Monster

2011-12-14T14:00:00.001-05:00

As Mavis, the messed-up, sorta-black-hearted former prom queen determined to head back to the small town of Mercury, Minnesota to win her ex-boyfriend back from the clutches of his unassuming wife and newborn daughter, Charlize Theron gets to be both deeply ugly and supernaturally beautiful. She cakes her face with make-up and she looks amazing, but in close-ups we can almost reach out and stroke her cheeks; they seem like they’d be brittle to the touch. It’s a tough balancing act – both emotionally and physically – and Theron pulls it off remarkably well. In some way, it’s the kind of role she was born to play, far more so than her Oscar-winning performance in Monster, where she had to endure hours of prosthetic makeup to try and make herself mundanely ugly. The problem is that she’s in the wrong movie.

Everybody around Mavis/Theron seems basically decent and normal and understated, and the actors give realistic, down-to-earth performances. That could have made for a bracing contrast, and one suspects that’s what Diablo Cody’s script is going for; one of the film’s main themes is the yawning chasm between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. But director Jason Reitman doesn’t quite have the directorial chops to shift and mix tones to create something greater. He’s not a bad director, but he has The Mike Nichols Problem (all things considered, not the worst problem to have). Nichols has an almost godlike ability to direct performances as long as they are uniform and consistent, be they stylized and broad (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) or stylized and submerged (The Graduate) or naturalistic (Silkwood). But when he has to mix different performance styles, he falls apart (Biloxi Blues, Closer, Primary Colors, etc.). Reitman did a sterling job with the mostly naturalistic Up in the Air, but he seems lost here. A central character this nuts kind of needs the movie to go a little nuts around her. Otherwise it’s like a boiling cauldron of soup placed into a freezer; it threatens to turn everything rotten.

The movie also has an occasionally irritating tendency to dodge the issues it’s addressing. Patton Oswalt gives a pretty sensitive performance as Mavis’s high school chum Matt Freehauf (actually, she basically just ignored him) but his touching and terrifying backstory feels out of place: He was beaten to within an inch of his life by a bunch of “jocks” (they’re always referred to as “jocks”) who thought he was gay. We never see the grown-up versions of these jocks (Mavis’s ex Buddy Slade, played to dim perfection by Patrick Wilson, was a jock, too, but he appears to have been one of the nicer ones). Not that we need to, but the movie’s insistent need to indulge in Matt’s injuries puts the lie to its own vision of Mercury as a basically decent place full of basically decent people. Again, theoretically, such contrasts and inconsistencies might have worked. But the film doesn’t really know what to do with them – Matt even gets a late-inning monologue about his predicament that feels like a cheap attempt at some third act tears, not a dark reminder that this pleasantly tolerant slice of smalltown suburbia has its violent, psychotic side as well.

All that is a shame, because Young Adult isn’t a bad movie. At times it’s even a good one, and there's a hair-raising final scene that almost sends it hurtling off into a new direction. Plus, it has a dynamo at its center. Mavis is funny and terrifying and sad, and her predicament has a lot to say about our own lives – about the way that we hang onto a vision of our idealized lives and selves long after such ideals have vanished, about the way that things don’t always work out the way we expect them to. That identification-repulsion dynamic works overtime in Young Adult, but the movie itself doesn’t quite know how to reconcile any of it. It’s a bunch of parts looking for a whole.

Forgotten Films: Our Mother's House (Jack Clayton, 1967)

2011-12-05T11:30:00.001-05:00

Years ago, when I was writing (and later editing) Nerve.com’s now-defunct film blog The Screengrab, I introduced a regular feature that proved to be quite popular, focusing on films that were, for one reason or another, forgotten – that is to say, unseen, under-discussed, under-appreciated. Happily, some of the films I featured in the series have since become significantly more appreciated. I did a huge piece on Alex Cox’s Walker in mid-2006, and even Cox himself seemed surprised at the time that there were people out there who remembered his film and considered it a masterpiece; now, the film is available in a lovely Criterion edition, go figure.

Screengrab is long gone; not even its leaf-strewn sarcophagus appears to be cached anymore. So I hope the Nerve folks won’t mind if I reinstate that feature here and, to kick things off, revisit one of the forgotten films I felt most strongly about, Jack Clayton’s masterpiece, Our Mother’s House, since it is among my absolute favorite films of all time and is still very, very hard to find. (Ahem, Criterion…or, really, anybody.) So here goes nothing.

First, though, a few words about the director. Most people, if they’ve heard of Jack Clayton, probably know him as the guy behind the great, twisted 1961 Turn of the Screw adaptation The Innocents. But he's one of the great unsung masters of English-speaking cinema. He had served as an assistant director for Alexander Korda and an associate producer for John Huston before branching out on his own as a director. Indeed, he had won an Oscar before his very first feature, for the short 1956 Gogol adaptation The Bespoke Overcoat. His debut feature Room at the Top (1959) was something of a phenomenon in its day. So was the aforementioned Innocents. And 1964's The Pumpkin Eater, scripted by one Harold Pinter and which won Anne Bancroft a slew of well-deserved awards, including Best Actress at Cannes and an Oscar nomination, was nothing to sneeze at either.

Jack Clayton directs Deborah Kerr on the set of The Innocents (1961)

Things went decidedly downhill from there, however. Our Mother's House, as we shall see, was something of a flop, and Clayton wouldn't direct again until his much-maligned though not-entirely-bad 1974 Great Gatsby adaptation starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. (I wrote a bit about that one, here.) That left him even more wounded, and he took an even longer hiatus, returning in 1983 with the somewhat unlikely Disney-Ray Bradbury adaptation Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is amazing but from which he got himself fired. He did, however, manage to make two quite lovely and very personal films near the end of his career -- The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987) and Memento Mori (1992), which alas now probably deserve their own "Forgotten Films" entries.

Our Mother’s House’s curious blending of genres likely proved problematic in 1967, preventing it from finding an audience; it was somehow both too old-fashioned and too weird. (Not to mention dark, dark, dark – Jesus is this movie dark.) But I remain awestruck to this day by its effortless blending of gothic unease and touching lyricism, by its ability to work both as a meditation on repression and a sharply drawn character study.

Adapted from Julian Gloag’s novel, the film bears some initial similarities to The Lord of the Flies. It begins with the death of Mother (Annette Carell), an invalid living in a rambling Gothic mansion with her seven kids, the oldest in their mid-teens. The children, profoundly devoted to their loving and deeply religious parent (who has decorated the musty, darkened place with crosses and Biblical passages) and suspicious of the outside world, are afraid they’ll be sent to an orphanage if her death is discovered. So they decide to bury Mother in the garden and act as if nothing has happened. They go to school and come right back home, making sure not to share anything with their teachers or their friends.

They soon have the run of the house, occasionally arranging for candlelit séances where their eldest, Elsa (Margaret Brooks), rocks in a chair channeling the spirit of their dead mother. Needless to say, being children, their activities range from carefree, to inspired, to cruel, and Clayton switches registers with uncanny ease. The free-spirited, handheld camera follows the kids playing in the yard one minute, then cuts into the dusty, dim tomblike house the next, the interiors' baroque shadows and expressionist unease clearly the mark of someone who came of age in the 30s and 40s.

But Our Mother’s House is not just a movie about kids running wild. Into this unholy idyll one day walks a strange man: Charlie Hook (Dirk Bogarde), these kids’ father – or, more appropriately, Mother’s husband. The kids decide to let Charlie in on their secret, and he begins living with them. But the exceedingly likable Charlie also turns out to be a generally unreliable deadbeat. He tears up Mother’s will, and cons one of the kids into forging her signature so he can raid the family savings account. He also brings an assortment of loose women into the house, introducing these repressed children to the wonders of pot, gambling, promiscuous sex, and pop music. Mother left the children a rigid, timeless world of absolutes. With Charlie and the rest of the world come a thousand questions about the very nature of reality. I’m sure nobody intended it that way (especially given when it was made), but right here in Our Mother’s House is the entire Sixties experience in miniature.

That makes the film sound like a portentous, Big Theme picture, but it’s quite a bit more than that. Clayton was a master not just of mood, but also of shifts in mood. Early on, when the impossibly adorable and energetic 8-year-old Gerty (Sarah Nicholls), takes an enthusiastic ride on a stranger’s motorcycle, she provokes the ire of the older kids, and the sight of them chastising their young sibling feels like a comic allegory at first. (“Harlot!” screams one.) Then, however, Mother is summoned from the dead to “punish the sinful daughter” and the penalty is decided upon – to take away Gertie’s comb (which she took from Mother after her death) and cut off her hair – and the scene becomes ever more macabre. As Gertie’s hair is hacked off, amid her piercing shrieks, we witness the unbearable pain of being a child in a vengeful world whose rules have gone haywire. Clayton calibrates his tone so smoothly, we don’t even realize we’re watching a horror film until it’s too late. But what makes this particular horror film so scary is that all of these characters are so recognizably, heartbreakingly human.

I also need to put in a word for Georges Delerue’s magnificent and haunting score (hear a bit of it here), and for the way Larry Pizer's camera stalks through the narrow rooms and corridors of this fairy tale house. And of course, for the remarkably naturalistic performances of the kids, most of them acting for the first time in a film. Clayton was always known for his strong direction of actors, but his easygoing patience was reportedly instrumental in getting these children to perform so well, especially given that this was material most of them didn’t even understand.

Despite its obscurity, Our Mother’s House is a surprisingly influential little film. Bogarde’s performance here reportedly inspired Luchino Visconti to cast him in The Damned and Death in Venice. Apparently, Steven Spielberg was such a fan that he advised Quincy Jones to use Georges Delerue’s score as a guide when making The Color Purple. And it was mainly due to his performance here that 8-year-old Mark Lester was cast the following year in Carol Reed’s hit musical Oliver!

I first got to see Our Mother’s House in a pristine new print in the Summer of 1995, a few months after Clayton’s death, when the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, did a full retrospective of his films. Sadly, I don’t think that retro traveled much further. As far as I can tell, there are no foreign DVDs of the film floating around, nor was there ever even a VHS release. It does pop up on Turner Classic Movies now and then – often at odd hours of the day – so you might still be able to catch it. More importantly, it means a decent transfer of the film exists out there, which could be used for an eventual home video release.

Still, in some odd way, it feels strangely appropriate that Our Mother's House would be tucked away in a dark corner somewhere. Because it’s all about dark corners and things that rarely see the light of day, both figuratively and literally. It’s a creepy, poignant, sad little film, and pretty much perfect in every way. And until you can see it, you'll just have to take my word for it.

A Letter for "Margaret"

2011-11-30T16:00:00.014-05:00

Do this for me.

There’s a petition to get Fox Searchlight to send out year-end screeners of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (which I wrote about here) to critics and other voting groups. Please sign it.

The film, having had a long and litigious post-production history (it was shot in 2005, went through many different cuts and quite a bit of legal wrangling), was only released briefly in a few cities a couple of months ago. Writer-director Lonergan wasn’t talking -- possibly due to a non-disclosure agreement -- so its box office prospects were limited to begin with. This wasn't a deliberate burial so much as a case of a studio not knowing what to do with a film that had already been orphaned a while ago.

The folks at Fox Searchlight are terrific people. They've released some staggeringly great films this year. And Margaret is one of them. It's gained a sizable number of admirers among critics and other film buffs. I personally know a lot of writers who missed it and now want to see it. I also know many critics who were mixed on it but are willing to see it again, having witnessed the groundswell of enthusiasm it has inspired. And I know a lot of writers who (like me) want to see it again so they can write even more about it.

One of the more unfortunate things about Margaret’s release was that many (though not all) first-stringer reviews were mixed on the film, so initial word wasn’t particularly strong. It was only after other critics – many of whom weren’t assigned reviews of it – had discovered the film that its profile began to really rise. Unfortunately, by that point the film was gone. This seems to be an opportune moment for a savvy distributor to strike and, for a minimum investment, inspire newfound enthusiasm for a film that I know people will be watching for years to come.

You can read about the film’s protracted and contentious journey to the screen, here. There’s also a good piece in the January 2012 issue of Sight & Sound, by big-time Margaret supporter Vadim Rizov. (The latter is not online, sadly.)

Here’s a link to a great review by Glenn Kenny. And another fine review by Alison Willmore. And yet another wonderful one from Time Out NY's Keith Uhlich. And a short but excellent one by Mike D'Angelo.

Plus, The New Yorker's Richard Brody has also taken up the cause.

Finally, again, here’s a link to my own piece, posted earlier on this blog.

Not Made for This World: My Brief Journey with Coriolanus

2011-11-29T11:00:00.000-05:00

I was very excited when I first heard that Ralph Fiennes hadmade a film of Coriolanus. Excited, and a bit perplexed. Some years ago, I briefly considered trying to do something myself with Shakespeare's tragedy – either turn it into an ultra-low-budget film or maybe stage it somewhere. It didn’tresult in anything, but I spent a lot of time thinking about how and whether the play could work today. The reason I decided not to do anythingwith it, though, was a surprising one.

I’m not planning on reviewing Fiennes’s film, which I mostlylike. I think David Edelstein does a nice job in his very favorable review, here. And Fiennes holds forth eloquently in an interview with my pal Sam Adamsfor the LA Times, here. I’m not entirely convinced, though, that Fiennes hascracked the story’s connection to today. In fact, one of the things I likeabout his film is how resolutely un-modern it is, despite the updating of itstime period.

Coriolanus isn’t one of Shakespeare’s better-known plays,but it has been for some years one of my favorites. This probably hasless to do with my obscurantism and more with a stalkerish obsession I had in highschool with T.S. Eliot, who notoriously held this one in quite high regard. But while Eliot’s endorsement certainly held some sway withme, it doesn’t appear to have made much of a dent in the culture at large:Almost nobody stages Coriolanus nowadays.(Christopher Walken did do a celebrated turn in New York back in the ‘90s; andthere’s an excellent, excellent 1984 BBC production starring Alan Howard, available on DVD.)

There are probably a couple of reasons for this: The Bard’slast tragedy, it has a bit of a reputation for not having the poetic andmetaphysical oomph of works like Hamlet or Lear. But the more relevant reasonmay be that its hero seems to be a bit of a twat.

Coriolanus is one of the few Shakespeare plays that doesn’treach across the centuries and crash upon the modern consciousness. Its tragichero is resolutely ancient, and its concerns seem somewhat quaint, at leastwhen they’re not offensive. The text is famously open to interpretation, butthat may also be because it’s so troubling to the modern sensibility.

Writing well before the age of populism (and fully cognizantof the chaos that reigned before the Tudors consolidated power a little morethan a century before), Shakespeare conjures up a world where the heavingdesire of the masses to feel themselves equal to the best, most noble membersof society – in this case, a Roman patrician warrior-general – is a corrosive force. Yes,Coriolanus the character has too much pride, and this is his undoing. But there’s never asense that his pride is unwarranted. Why shouldn’t he be superior to thepeople, the play seems to ask. Who the hell are they, and what have they done to distinguish themselves?

As I assessed the play, I came to understand that the key challenge in doing Coriolanus today is to try andrepresent the play’s central dilemma, and its hero, in a way that wouldwork for a modern audience -- not to rewrite it or to soften it, but tounlock it. The play’s terrified vision of democracy may have connected with audiences atthe time, but how could one make that same impact today, when democracy and a public voice are our most cherished rights? True, we hold oursoldiers in very high regard as well, but we still accept that they are people,just like us. A soldier too proud to bring himself to the level of mere mortalswouldn’t really fly -- even if that very pride is the tragic flaw that brings him down. Soldiers aren't supposed to be like that anymore.

So I was ready to conclude that there might not really be a way to make Coriolanus's pride, his superiority, palpable for today's viewers.

Unless, I thought, you made him a superhero.

That was clearly the solution. To accurately convey the relationship between Coriolanus and the populace,you’d need to create a relationship whose asymmetry people today wouldaccept. The only answer, it seemed to me, was a guy with superpowers – be theyfrom another planet or through a radioactive whatsit or a magic cape or whatever. Somethingthat clearly set him apart – biologically, physically, galactically – from therest of us.

And then I realized that Pixar had already made this movie,and that it was called The Incredibles.

7 Kids' Movies by Great Directors Who Don't Make Kids' Movies

2011-11-26T12:01:00.000-05:00

In honor of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (which I’ll probably get towriting about one of these days), and also because I feel guilty about nothaving posted as much this month, here’s a quick list I thought up: Great kids’movies made by great directors not known for making kids’ movies.

There are some willful omissions, so here's the obligatory disclaimer: I didn’t include Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam becauseso many of their films hover somewhere close to the genre, even when they’rebeing irredeemably adult and dark. I thought about including studio workman RoyRowland, he of 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T fame, except that he had a lucrativecareer helming Margaret O’Brien pics so kids’ movies don't seem like they were particularlyout of his wheelhouse. I also thought about including Fritz Lang and Moonfleet, but I don't know that Moonfleet is a kids' movie, strictly speaking.

And I know some folks will gripe about my not includingAlfonso Cuaron and his Harry Potter entry here, but I first got introduced toCuaron as the director of 1995’s A Little Princess (which I still think is his best film, believe it or not), so he always seemed to haveone foot in this world.

Popeye (duh)

Popeye (Robert Altman)

The first thing I made my mom do when she and I arrived inthe U.S. was take me to see Popeye and The Empire Strikes Back. I didn’t speakEnglish so she had to whisper-translate the movies for me. Being seven, Idecided both of them were awesome. I still recall the wonder of seeing thePopeye comics brought into the “real” world and given heft and dimension.(Remember, all this was before CGI.) Many view this as a dark spot on Altman's career, but, well, they’re wrong. The director onceclaimed that the film made a great babysitter, and he was right – kids reallydo respond to it, because it's just so damn fun. And despite all that, it’s still so clearly Altman's – that's hisgenerous framing; his reflective, bemused outrage at the world; his attentionto the little gestures that make a character a person; etc. Plus, it wasn’t even the flop many claim; it made it into the Box Office Top Ten of its year.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)

To be fair, Anderson’s style always seemed like it’d bewell-suited to the children’s movie genre, so most folks didn’t blink uponhearing he was going to make an animated version of the Roald Dahl classic. ButI think very few of us were prepared for how terrific this one turned out to be– blending Dahl’s flair for the macabre with Anderson’s fondness for inventionand for tales of families under strain.

The Witches

The Witches (Nicolas Roeg)

For all his deranged stylization and irreverent sensibilities, Roeg has always had a certain innocent streak running through his films. (I once considered the idea that many of his films -- The Man Who Fell to Earth, Insignificance, even Don’t Look Now – were best understood as being told through the eyes of a child.) So perhaps it wasn’t surprising when he took a Roald Dahl story (him again, go figure) and turned it into something unhinged, both freewheeling and terrifying.

The Secret Garden (Agnieszka Holland)
Those five minutes when Holland briefly went from being a well-liked festival mainstay to a major Hollywood director (before apparently being exiled to TV and cable) was an interesting time, not least because it yielded this lovely little adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic, which was perfect for this director: Holland was always a master of atmosphere, and The Secret Garden is essentially a story all about atmosphere. Also, here's a thought: Most kids’ movies could benefit from a score by Zbigniew Preisner.

Millions

Millions (Danny Boyle)

Dark, perhaps, but in a nightmarish way that really feels like childhood to me. In tackling this twisted little tale of two brothers who stumble upon a bag of stolen British pounds on the eve of the country’s switchover to the Euro, Boyle and his go-to writer Frank Cottrell Boyce re-imagine a standard crime drama as an exuberant fairy-tale-cum-meditation on loss, luck, ethics, kinship, and charity.

Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles)

I suppose this stretches the definition of “kids’ movie” alittle, but not much. True, Sayles’s trademark cynicism isn’t really inevidence here. His matter-of-fact approach to storytelling is, however -- andit serves him surprisingly well, given that this is all about a young girldiscovering the existence of mythical seal-like creatures on a wind- andsea-swept corner of Ireland. That’s not to suggest that it’s dry. On thecontrary, Sayles takes great care to foreground the elements (wind, waves,seagulls, etc.) so that you feel like what’s onscreen is just another force ofnature -- both organic and magical, fantastical and very, very real.

Little Buddha

Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci)
No, screw you. We’ve probably been through this before, but I consider Bertolucci’s strange hybrid of children’s adventure and Siddhartha biopic to be one of the greatest films about death ever made -- a gorgeous storybook about impermanence and mortality. So, uh, will kids enjoy it? Who knows. Check back with me when my son is nine or something.

Honorable Mention (Maybe):

Bugsy Malone (Alan Parker)

Why is this gangster movie acted by kids (Jodie Foster,Scott Baio, etc.) not a part of the main list? For starters, I can’t decide ifI actually consider Alan Parker a “great director”; unlike some of my fellowmovie nerd friends I have little love for Angel Heart; indeed, the only reasonI’m inclined to give him the benefit of a doubt is because he did make theawesome film version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. But the real reason it’s notpart of the main list is simple: I haven’t seen it. Everyone assures me thatit’s terrific, though.

Recent-ish Work: Muppets, Immortals, Kumar, Nick Ray

2011-11-25T11:56:00.001-05:00

It’s been a slow month round these parts -- in part because I’ve been working on a couple of longer pieces (one of which, my exploration of the curious similarities between The Four Feathers and The Deer Hunter, I posted here recently), but also because I’ve been a bit busier on the reviewing front. So, here are some links:

- For Vulture this week I reviewed The Muppets (which I mostly liked).

- A couple of weeks ago, for the same folks, I reviewed Immortals (which I mostly didn’t).

- And a week before that, I reviewed A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (which I loved).

- Related to the Harold & Kumar review, I also did a Vulture piece on why 3D (at least for me) works better with low-end schlock and genre spoofery than it does with Great Cinema, which attracted mild vitriol from some quarters. I realize linking to it again on the weekend Martin Scorsese’s lovely Hugo opens is probably asking for trouble, but, well, there it is.

- And I also recently did a longish piece for The Nashville Scene on the cinema of Nicholas Ray, a retro of whose work is playing at the Belcourt Theater as we speak. I focused mostly on the privileged moments in Ray’s films – those big bursts of style and emotion and (sometimes) sensuality that make even some of his weaker films worthwhile. And it occurs to me that maybe I should do a blog post one of these days just listing some of those scenes. I’m thinking of stuff like the childbirth scene in The Savage Innocents, the healing-the-afflicted scene in King of Kings, maybe the planetarium scene in Rebel Without a Cause, etc. But that’s for another day.

Is The Deer Hunter a Remake of The Four Feathers?

2011-11-21T14:00:00.000-05:00

Well, is it?

Okay, perhaps that headline’s a bit misleading – I’m notexactly saying that Michael Cimino sat down and chose to remake The FourFeathers when he made The Deer Hunter. Hell, I don't even know if Cimino's seen Zoltan Korda's 1939 masterpiece, now out in a gorgeous new Criterion edition. And God knows there are enough controversiesover where Cimino’s film actually came from, or for that matter over whetherit’s even any good. And perhaps those who see in The Deer Hunter a kind offascist imperialistic fantasy (such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose famous, eloquent 1979 pannot only trashed Cimino’s movie, but also managed to dismiss Coppolaand Scorsese in the same breath, with a half-swipe at Days of Heaven along the way) may not be so surprised to hear that it hassome similarities to a film made from a Victorian tale of imperial derring-do.

But the two films benefit from the comparison; for it’s clear that The Four Feathersis a lot more reflective and complicated than its reputation suggests, and thatThe Deer Hunter is about a lot more than just Vietnam. Personally, I find ithard to think of one film without the other nowadays; and the striking echoesbetween them reveal important, sometimes subtle, thematic concerns.

The two films do share a number of seemingly randomelements. Both feature a group of very close friends who bond at home beforethey have to go off to war in a distant land. (It’s four British officers headed to Egypt in The Four Feathers, whileThe Deer Hunter features three friends who go off to Vietnam, while a couple ofothers stay behind for what appear to be health reasons.) In both films, a major character is permanentlyincapacitated (blindness due to sunstroke in The Four Feathers, legs amputatedin The Deer Hunter) and has to be saved by the film’s hero. Both films feature something of aninterlude back home (partly having to do with the aforementioned injury) beforeplunging back into the madness of war. Both films show our heroes put in cages and held up for ridicule by an enemy “other.” Bothfilms include a character who essentially goes mute, and a character who seems to “go native.”And both films make a great to-do about blowing one’s brains out: The DeerHunter quite famously through its controversial (and historically inaccurate)Russian Roulette scenes, and The Four Feathers (rather surprisingly, for the kind of movie it is), through its references to acowardly soldier who killed himself and through the despair ofRalph Richardson’s nobly suffering character John Durrance, who attemptssuicide after discovering that he can no longer see.

All these elements – some major, some not-so-major – havecontributed to my weird sense that these two films are somehow cosmicallyconnected. But there’s something deeper here that seems to inform the twoworks’ notions of manhood.

Interestingly, though one rarely thinks of either in thisway, both The Four Feathers and The Deer Hunter are romantic triangles. In TheFour Feathers, Harry Faversham (Jon Clements) is engaged to be married to EthneBurroughs (June Duprez), while his best friend John Durrance admires her fromafar. In The Deer Hunter, Nick (Christopher Walken) is engaged to Linda (MerylStreep), while his best friend Michael (Robert De Niro) admires her from afar.

Both films present their respective love triangles ininterestingly understated and touching ways: In Feathers, Ethne’s brotherblurts out his sister and Faversham’s impending engagement to his threefriends, and we sense the life drain out of the scorned romantic rivalDurrance’s eyes before we’ve barely had a chance to meet him. The Deer Hunter,on the other hand, uses a series of glances between Walken, De Niro, and Streepto convey their complicated longings.

The most powerful example of this occursduring the film’s justly celebrated wedding sequence early on. At one point, asshe dances with Nick, Linda’s eyes meet Michael’s, watching her. It’s clearthat he’s hurting inside. But then, just a little bit later, the tables arereversed: Nick pushes the two of them – his friend and his fiancée -- togetherinto a dance. After Michael makes a few fumbling efforts to dance, he asksLinda if she’d like to go get a beer with him from the bar instead. The two ofthem walk off together. Nick watches this from nearby, where he’s dancing withanother girl (who was, interestingly, making eyes at Michael earlier), and we canpretty much see the bottom drop out of his stomach at the sight of his girlwillingly walking off to the next room with his closest friend. He gets it –perhaps because he’s known that the attraction was there all along. It’s thebriefest of looks, but watch Walken’s eyes -- the submerged melancholy of thismoment will wipe you out.

Both Nick and Faversham are also torn about the prospect of war, and the empty ideals ofheroism that inundate the world around them. The Four Feathers is all about Faversham’s supposed“cowardice,” (as represented by the symbolic white feathers his friends sendhim after he resigns from the military on the eve of battle). Spooked by hismilitary family’s tales of bloodshed on the battlefield since his childhood,Faversham has been living in dread of combat all these years – he’s thesensitive black sheep of a macho, warlike gene pool. A brief speech he gives tothe befuddled Ethne justifying his decision to quit the military is full ofdetermined noblesse oblige, but it also genuinely undercuts the supposedpatriotism of the film itself:

“The futility of this idiotic Egyptian adventure…the ghastlywaste of time what we can never have…I believe in our happiness. I belive inthe work to be done here, to save an estate that’s near to ruin. To save allthose people that were neglected by my family, because they preferred glory inIndia, glory in China, glory in Africa.”

That’s a far cry from Nick’s brief, painfully inarticulateconfession to Michael in The Deer Hunter, wherein he struggles to express hisambivalence about going off to war:

“You really think about Vietnam?”
“Yeah… I guess I think about hunting the deer. But going toNam…I like the trees. I like the way the trees are in the mountains, alldifferent. The way the trees are. I sound like some asshole, right?”

Nick is grasping at something he can’t quite figure out, butin his own way he’s saying essentially what Faversham is saying – stating theimportance of the here and now, of the world he knows, compared to an ominouswar in a distant land. (It helps that in both cases we’re watching men who haveto abandon their own countries during peacetime to go off and fight a war whosecauses aren’t entirely clear to them.)

Cimino and Walken establish Nick’s apart-ness in otherinteresting ways – Walken always seems to be a step or two away from hiscomrades, and he often watches the action with a certain animalistic hesitancy,like he’s waiting to see what happens next. In a remarkable scene later, still during the wedding, Michael,Nick, and Steven see a green beret who has just returned from the war, sittingquietly and menacingly at the bar. Michael tries to toast him, but the manremains silent. Nick jumps in with a bit of uncharacteristic bluster: “I’m thebest man,” he says, seemingly talking about the wedding, but then adds, “I hopethey send us where the bullets are flying and the fighting’s the worst.” It’sclear though that he doesn’t quite mean it; he then immediately steps back andcarefully watches what his friends do and say to the man (who himself memorablyresponds by repeating the words, “Fuck it.”)

Click here to watch the scene.

In both films, the slowly simmering rivalry between the leadmale characters fuels the narrative. Although Faversham is the ostensible“hero” of The Four Feathers, at first Durrance, the man who wasn’t picked byEthne, seems to be the braver man, a noble officer who refuses to even let hisfellow soldiers know that he’s been blinded and continues to try and lead hismen. (This leads to some powerful and strange scenes in the film perched betweenslapstick and tragedy – where Durrance keeps running into things in a seeminglycomical manner. Korda and Richardson skillfully playthese moments for both yuks and tears: Your heart breaks for the guy, even as you stifle your giggles, which in turn makes it that much more painful.)

On the other hand, Faversham, by going to Egypt disguised asa member of a rare mute Sangali tribe, displays his courage through an act of self-negation:He completely gives himself over to his new identity, even allowing himself tobe branded on the forehead. Even later when he’s left alone with the woundedDurrance, whom he saves, he doesn’t announce himself; rather, he secretly hidesa card with a white feather attached to it on Durrance’s person. His worth and bravery is more important than friendship.

In The Deer Hunter, the rivalry between Nick and Michael isa lot less pronounced, but it’s still there. When the three friends (Michael,Nick, and Steven) end up as prisoners of the Viet Cong and are forced to endureendless games of Russian Roulette, Michael ends up devising a plan to break outby convincing their captors to put more bullets in the gun. Nick is terrifiedof the idea but Michael isn’t having any of it. “Side by side! Me and him! Meagainst him!” he cries to the guards – he wants to face off against Nick, usinga gun loaded with three bullets. Thus do the subtextual rivals of the filmsuddenly, briefly become literal rivals. (It won’t be the last time, ofcourse.) It’s an absurd tactic, but of course it works and soon enough Michaeland Nick have blasted their way out of there, with Steven in tow.

Michael and Steven eventually make it back home. In Pennsylvania,with Nick now presumed lost and/or dead, Michael finally strikes up hispreviously-forbidden relationship with Linda. Similarly, in The Four Feathers,the wounded Durrance becomes engaged to Ethne upon his return toEngland, as Faversham too is now missing, presumed dead. Like Faversham,however, Nick has remained back in the war zone – albeit in Saigon, where,after quietly convalescing in a hospital, he became drawn into the world ofunderground Russian Roulette gambling (a fantastical and ridiculous idea for agambling subculture, but an incredibly compelling one in the context of thefilm). It’s also worth noting that Faversham and Nick announce themselvesthrough similar, indirect ways: Faversham through the white feather (and bit ofsand) he has placed inside a letter on Durrance’s person, and Nick through aseries of mysterious, unidentified mailings of cash he’s sent to the woundedSteven. Both men thus secretly let those back home know that they are stillalive and, more hauntingly, that something of their identity still remains.

Russian Roulette has become a kind of symbol of Nick’sdespair, and his total immersion into this world – his complete subordinationof his identity to it – is clearly a result of deep hurt. One could say it’sjust a form of PTSD, but within the ecosystem of The Deer Hunter I suspectit’s something more. (This is, after all, more a drama about friendship than awar movie.) What is it? A form of penance -- a Scorsesean attemptat redemption through violence? If so,redemption for what? For his seeming cowardice during the earlier RussianRoulette scene? For his ambivalence towards the war, and for the violence he’salready committed? Or maybe for a kind of inadequacy in the presence of Michael– who could be argued to have proven, through his bravery, that he is thebetter man (or “the best man,” to bring things full circle to the encounterwith the Green Beret at Steven’s wedding)?

Maybe it’s all these things, and something more – a finalact of revenge, both against Michael and against himself. Perhaps Nick’s finalconfrontation with his best friend is both an acknowledgement of romanticdefeat and a final act of one-upmanship.

Click here to watch the scene.

Interestingly, The Four Feathers ends with its own act ofself-negation, except in this case it’s Durrance ceding his ground. Though he’s now engaged to Ethne, uponhearing of Faversham’s heroics, Durrance decides to leave – or at least to sayhe’s leaving. He had just seen a German eye specialist about his blindness,only to learn that his situation is incurable. Nevertheless, he dictates aletter in which he lies to Ethne:

“I've just had some splendid news. I've been to a famousGerman eye doctor, and my sight can be restored. It means a long treatment inGermany and I leave tomorrow. When I can see again I shall return to the army with thehappy memory of all you have done to help me through. Just heard the splendidnews of Peter and Willoughby and Harry Faversham. I enclose a little souvenir of a journey through the desert with a dumbSangali native. If you give him the chance that he deserves you'll find he'snot as mute as I thought he was."

It’s a brief letter, from a man who might have been a lover but is now nothing, and Richardson plays it with a curious air of foreboding. Where will Durrance go?He has already admitted he knows Faversham is back, so this isn’t just a coverfor a graceful exit. So why lie at all about going away, or at least hisreasons for going away? He’s spoken a number of times about “blowing his brainsout” – earlier in this very scene, in fact, he notes that he might have done sohad he known from the outset that his blindness was incurable. And while it maybe a bit of a stretch to say that that is indeed his intention, it’s hard notto think that this letter is more than a brief missive from a man who’s goingaway for a little while – and Richardson plays it with an air of despair thatit’s hard not think this exit is, on some level, a final one. (It’s also worthnoting that the person who takes down Durrance’s dictation is Dr. Harraz, afamily friend who was also the one to vouchsafe an earlier message from Faversham onthe eve of his departure, that if he hadn’t been heard from in a year it wouldmean he was dead.)

The roles are reversedhere in a curious way: In The Deer Hunter, Nick is the hesitant, sensitive onewho has to prove his mettle, but he’s also the one who, ultimately, loses out.In The Four Feathers, Faversham is the one who has to prove himself, and it’sthe more conventionally brave Durrance who loses out – at the very least, losesout on the girl he never really had. In The Four Feathers, all is set rightwith the world, and things are, at least in the hero’s universe, back to the waythey were. The Deer Hunter’s vision of male bravery is both more romantic anddespairing.

Still, I can't shake the fact that both of these“departures” – Durrance’s in The Four Feathers, and Nick’s in The Deer Hunter –are prefaced by brief, almost loving acknowledgements of friendship. Durranceinserts that line about giving Faversham “the chance he deserves.” And Ciminofilms Nick’s final act almost as if it was one of generosity. Michael, tryingto convince Nick to stop the game and come back to America, reminds him of thatconversation abut war and home they had a lifetime ago: “Remember all thetrees? The different ways of the trees? Remember the mountains?” he asks. Nicksmiles a hint of recognition. He remembers… and promptly blows his brains out.By shooting himself, Nick acknowledges that neither of them can ever go back towhat they were. He lets Michael have Linda, but also proves, once and for all,his willingness to face death – even more stoic than Michael, who now has somuch to live for, could ever hope to be.

Eulogy for Lutfi Akad (1916-2011)

2011-11-19T14:40:00.001-05:00

Kizilirmak Karakoyun

The Turkish director Omer Lutfi Akad has passed away. This cameas a bit of a surprise to me, since I could have sworn that I had heard reportsof his death a few years ago. But I guess things like that happen when you get to be 95. Nevertheless, he now rests in peace, and a few words should be saidhere.

Along with Metin Erksan (director of the recently-restored Dry Summer), Akadwas probably one of the two senior giants of Turkish cinema during a rathersignificant time -- the period in the 1950s and 60s when the medium was moving awayfrom the canned-theater efforts of early pioneers like Muhsin Ertugrul andstarting to tackle more complicated material, against pretty much every odd inthe universe. Neither society nor technology had yet caught up to theimaginations of these artists. The equipment was still ancient (the firstTurkish film to edit together two separate audio tracks wouldn’t come until1978) and so was the political atmosphere: the country was at the time entering itsmulti-decade cycle of having a military coup every ten years or so. You’d thinkthis wasn’t a great time to be a filmmaker with a social conscience; and yetthere Akad was, forging ahead with work that, for all its roughness, stillendures.

His best films (and I should admit I’ve only seen a handful, since theytend to be hard to find) combine a certain rough-hewn poetry with arefreshingly direct, no-nonsense style. The two approaches are not thatincompatible, it turns out. Lacking fancy equipment, much of a budget, orreally anything resembling a reasonable production schedule, Akad and hiscompatriots were often forced to shoot things on the fly, at eye-level, but in his hands,this became a powerful thing: In two of his masterpieces, 1967’s Ana (TheMother) and 1966’s Hudutlarin Kanunu (The Law of the Border), you can prettymuch always see the horizon, which in turn has a curious effect on theelemental, mythic melodramas playing themselves out in the foreground. (Thelatter film, which appears to be available in all its untranslated glory onYouTube, also starred Yilmaz Guney, himself later to become one of Turkey’s greatest filmmakers.)

Ana (The Mother)

Indeed, so many of Akad’s films are perched on thisuncertain edge of myth and realism. There’s a shocking moment at the end of one of hislater TV dramas when a character, to spite another, cuts off his own arm andthrows it at the man. There’s almost no blood or pain; the guy just cuts hisarm off, angrily tosses it, and then storms off into the distance, as thecredits roll. In anyone else’s hands this would be ridiculous; butsomehow Akad calmly allows the moment to build with an almost supernaturalanger -- so you just accept it, like you might accept something out of anancient fable or the Old Testament.

Speaking of books, Akad was also the author of one of thebest filmmaking memoirs I’ve ever read: Isikla Karanlik Arasinda, whichtranslates as “Between Light and Darkness.” Despite not being the quickestreader of Turkish, I remember wolfing down the 612-page book within a matter ofdays back in 2003 -- a testament to its clean, fascinating, direct prose. It’sa mesmerizing record of his journey in film -- a craft he essentially stumbledinto, as there was no such thing as a path to filmmaking in Turkey back then.

Throughout the book Akad’s practicality shines through, but also a certainwonder in the possibilities of the developing medium. He writes with curiosityand delight of the time when, in 1954, his cameraman picked the camera up inhis hands and moved during a take, to achieve a particularly difficult composition;it was the first time Akad had seen a camera used hand-held. There are alsogreat vignettes featuring some of the biggest names in Turkish cinema: I lovethe part where he describes how the great Guney (who considered Akad his mentor) would hang out with his character’s pet black sheep on the set of1967’s Kizilirmak Karakoyun, while virtually starving himself to make sure heunderstood the hunger of a poor shepherd. (Yes, Yilmaz Guney was apparently a Method actor.)

For those who understand Turkish, or just want to see someclips of Akad’s work, there’s a documentary about him available here:

I leave you with this, a perhaps uncharacteristic Akadmoment – a pretty keen aping of a Hollywoodized romantic ending from his lovely1959 drama Yalnizlar Rihtimi (Port of Lonely Souls). But in all its stormyswoony grandeur it still displays the director’s patience with the moment, andhis simple command of the craft. Plus, it’s a great ending to a great movie.

8 People Who Should Have Become Directors

2011-10-28T16:00:00.000-04:00

Film buffs love to talk about people who didn’t direct enough (top of the list: Charles Laughton and Jean Vigo, of course) or people who should never have directed (I’m not naming names, but take your pick, and make sure your pick includes Eric Schaeffer).

But rarely do we talk about people who should have directed and never did. And yet every once in a while I’ll come across someone who was so instrumental to the success of other filmmakers and clearly so brilliant, that I’ll think, “Why on Earth didn’t this guy/gal ever direct a film themselves?”

Sometimes the answer is simple: They never wanted to. Sometimes, you’ll find that they did get to direct one film along the way: For example the legendary stunt director Vic Armstrong did in fact make one forgotten Dolph Lundgren movie; Eric Schwab, a longtime Second Unit Director for Brian De Palma and the one person who comes away from The Devil’s Candy with his reputation intact, did get to make one totally forgotten crime thriller; Tonino Guerra, the great Italian screenwriter for Antonioni, Rosi, and the Tavianis, did direct a documentary, in collaboration with Andrei Tarkovsky (!).

For those reasons, I’ve kept those folks and a few others off this list. And really, it’s meant to be a discussion-starter more than anything else. So here are my choices for 8 people – critics, motion picture professionals, etc. – who should have become directors at one point or another.

Polly Platt
The late Platt was ostensibly a costume and production designer, but she obviously had a huge influence on the magnificent films she collaborated on with her once-husband Peter Bogdanovich (Targets, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc, Paper Moon), who was never quite the same director after he left her. Her later work as a producer (Say Anything, Broadcast News, Bottle Rocket, etc.) confirmed her talent, taste, and abilities. Did she ever want to direct? I don’t know. But she should have.

Irving Thalberg
In Thalberg’s case, directing was probably too beneath him. This was, after all, the man who practically defined the uber-powerful producer in classic Hollywood, even though he rarely ever took a credit on the films he produced. Just take a gander: The Crowd, Anna Christie, Greed (which he butchered, alas), Red Dust, Mutiny on the Bounty, A Night at the Opera…really, it just goes on. He did reportedly direct parts of Von Stroheim’s ill-fated Queen Christina…but really, who didn’t?

Andre Bazin
Simply based on the sheer number of critics-become-directors he inspired (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, etc. etc.), Andre Bazin would at the very least given us something to talk about, had he had a chance behind the camera. But alas, he died in 1958, at the age of 40 – before he got to see the cinematic revolution that his protégés enacted in his name.

He got into filmmaking the old fashioned way. He eeeaarrned it.

John Houseman

Full disclosure: Though I abstractly understand that he was for many years a legendary producer and collaborator with some of my favorite filmmakers, when I think “John Houseman,” I still think of the perpetually irritated, upper-crust grandfather he played on Silver Spoons. But we must never forget how important he was to the history of film and theater -- absolutely instrumental in the careers of two of America’s greatest filmmakers, Orson Welles and Nicholas Ray, and a producer of major films by Vincente Minnelli, Fritz Lang, and Max Ophuls. He was behind so many great artistic moments, and rarely took proper credit for them. He does have one directing credit for television, but I think most of the work there was done by Nick Ray, his assistant at the time. So maybe he too just wasn’t that interested in directing for film. But something still tells me he would have been pretty darn good at it.

Franco Arcalli

Arcalli died at the untimely age of 49, so we don’t know where his career might have taken him. He was, of course, Bernardo Bertolucci’s editor on The Conformist – famously suggesting the film’s stylized flashback structure to the director – and later became his trusted confidante and writer (he co-wrote 1900 and Last Tango, and also served as an assistant director on the latter). He also had editing credits for Antonioni and a number of the stranger Italian films of the 60s and 70s, including Django, Kill! Death Laid an Egg, and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Perhaps he was more an enabler than anything else, but I’d have loved to see what films might have come out of that twisted mind of his.

Eleanor Perry

I’ve written at length elsewhere about Eleanor Perry’s contributions to the films she made (which include The Swimmer, Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Last Summer) with her husband Frank back in the day. And her novel Blue Pages, a vaguely fictionalized account of a woman trying to make it in a male-dominated Hollywood after a messy divorce with her director-husband, is a heartbreaking account of what trying to get ahead in the movie business took out of her. Her short, glorious career as a screenwriter and erstwhile producer is a testament to her artistry and vision.

Jerry Ziesmer

First of all, Ziesmer’s memoir, Ready When You Are, Mr. Coppola, Mr. Spielberg, Mr. Crowe, is probably the best book about filmmaking I’ve ever read. So, you know, check it out. Most movie buffs today who know of Ziesmer probably know him as the lucky guy who got to be the First Assistant Director on the fantasia of narcissistic collapse that was the production of Apocalypse Now. To be fair, Ziesmer himself doesn’t seem to have ever wanted a directing job, and Assistant Director, despite the title, is not necessarily a job track to directing. But for all his organizational and human management skills, Ziesmer clearly has the soul of an artist: His book, while superbly informative, is also surprisingly touching. It would have been interesting to see what he might have cooked up.

John Cleese

Again, Cleese seems like the kind of guy who’d instantly be given a shot at helming if he wanted it; one assumes that he might have at least handled those duties on one of the Monty Python films if he had a burning desire to direct. I include him here mainly because as a writer-star of such dominant sensibility he essentially is the auteur of so many of his films and TV shows – including A Fish Called Wanda, which was officially directed by my beloved Charles Crichton and may have been unofficially directed by Cleese himself, which just goes to prove my point.

SEE THIS MOVIE: An Injury to One, finally on DVD

2011-10-25T09:30:00.001-04:00

An injury to one is an injury to all.

This week sees the long-overdue DVD release of one of my favorite films of the last decade. Travis Wilkerson’s An Injury to One is, technically speaking, a documentary, but I almost never think of it that way. It’s also been called an essay film, and agitprop, and countless other things. What it really is, I think, is a ghost story.

Wilkerson’s film is basically about the sad, tragic history of Butte, Montana – a once-thriving mining town reduced to a wasteland of toxic despair thanks to runaway capitalist greed. The specific period An Injury to One focuses on is around 1917, when the Anaconda mining company, flush with profits thanks to the need for copper during WWI, found itself facing the charismatic Wobbly labor agitator Frank Little. Not surprisingly, Anaconda chose to deal with Little in murderous fashion; one of the men involved in his killing was reportedly a young fellow named Dashiel Hammett, who would later use Butte as the inspiration for Poisonville in his masterpiece Red Harvest.

That description does pretty much no justice to the unique power of An Injury to One. Wilkerson does everything differently: Instead of straight archival footage (not that there is any available) he offers up maps, photos, and strange collections of numbers, often counting up or down, leading to some powerful statistic that achieves its own strange poetry. He interrupts his story with long, static, empty shots of Butte today, and overlays folk tunes and protest songs over these lovely interludes. The film has a unique tone that’s simultaneously very disquieting and strangely lyrical. When it first came out, I found myself returning to it over and over again, both captivated and puzzled by it. There seemed to be something missing from it.

It took several viewings for me to realize what it was that made An Injury to One such a strange and beguiling experience.

The film has no people in it.

Well, it has a few – Little, for one – but they’re very strategically and pointedly placed when they do show up. This is one of the loneliest films I’ve ever seen. There is a human voice narrating, which belongs to Wilkerson himself, but that is one of the few human presences here. Instead, we get a lot of faded, distorted photographs. A lot of signs pointing to absence. And a lot of empty, abandoned spaces.

This emptiness isn’t just some stylistic choice. It is, on some fundamental level, the main thematic thrust of An Injury to One. Butte is in many senses still a ghost town today. Wilkerson has talked about what it was like to move to Butte in 1982, when he was 12 or 13 years old, at a time when everyone else seemed to be moving out. His imagery lends his milieu a wasted, almost post-apocalyptic quality.

But Wilkerson doesn’t stop there. When he plays labor songs on the soundtrack, he doesn’t give us any voices. Instead, he gives us the words to the song, cut rhythmically to the music -- like a kind of dark, bitter exhortation for us to join in a spectral sing-along. So in some senses, the absence of people in this film is a result of the absence of activism. And Wilkerson ties that into our own direct absence, both as viewers and as active figures in our own democracy.

That I think is the source of this magnificent film’s eerie power. Metaphorically speaking, at least, we are the ones who must provide the voices for the songs. To put it another way: What’s missing from this film is us.

Let the Mystery Be? On Leo, Alan Turing, and The Mind-Matter Thing

2011-10-22T16:00:00.006-04:00

“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life will remain completely unanswered.”

Just a quick, personal note (which I’d meant to post before) about this whole business with Leonardo DiCaprio supposedly playing Alan Turing in a forthcoming biopic called The Imitation Game. Could be an interesting project. Or it could not. (How’s that for wishy-washy?) The potential involvement of Ron Howard suggests that he may be desperate for more Oscar glory a la A Beautiful Mind; or maybe he’s just doing penance for the insane liberties A Beautiful Mind took with its depiction of John Nash’s personal life – because no way in hell are these guys gonna be able to whitewash Turing’s.

Over the years, Turing – the brilliant philosopher, breaker of the WWII Enigma codes, artificial intelligence pioneer, uncloseted homosexual and all around fascinating human being -- has become something of a mini-obsession of mine. It started when I somewhat foolishly took an artificial intelligence class in college, back when I thought I might be able to understand such things; the section on him was probably the only point at which I paid any attention.

My obsession though is with his personal story and his character; as a complete dolt when it comes to math and science, I do not presume to grasp even a tiny minute fraction of Turing's thinking. I do have a collection of his writings that I’ve made several foolhardy attempts to get through. Let’s just say that Turing was never really writing for the average reader. In fact, let’s say that Turing probably wouldn’t know what an average reader was.

Turing was famously literal-minded, and this literal-mindedness was both the source of his power as a thinker and scientist and the cause of his personal torment. As a philosopher, he made monumental strides in addressing the centuries-old issue of the Entscheidungsproblem, called by some “the main problem of mathematical logic”: A mechanical and methodical process for testing the validity of any assertion. On the other hand, Turing reportedly never could understand why his mostly open homosexuality was a problem for others; unfortunately, in mid-20th-century Britain, it absolutely was, and he suffered monstrous psychic and physical torture because of it. Seriously, what they did to him (“chemical castration,” jesus) sounds like something either out of a Medieval nightmare or a futuristic dystopia; alas, it belonged to our time.

Furthermore, I think any film about Turing would have to get a particular kind of longing right: Not just the longing for a solution to the problems of mathematics and the question of mind vs. matter, but also a longing for a clarity and openness about life and relationships that never came. Life was complicated, and unlike many of the rest of us Turing was never quite able to reconcile himself to it.

There is already a touching little Turing biopic called Breaking the Code, starring the great Derek Jacobi, that aired in England in 1996, based on Hugh Whitemore's 1987 play (also starring Jacobi, who unfortunately looks rather old to be playing Turing in the TV film). Here’s a key scene from it, which also contains my opening quotation, attributed to Wittgenstein:

In the end Turing’s lifelong project may well have been what his biographer Andrew Hodges has called “our common natural mystery of birth: the mystery of how matter comes to support human mind.” In fact, maybe the best way to try and explain Turing a little bit is to excerpt the powerful 1998 oration given by Hodges at the dedication of a plaque at his birthplace:

There were wounds throughout Alan Turing's life; and many veils which can only be partially lifted. Beneath the irreverent wit of his famous paper of 1950 on the future of artificial intelligence, there is a serious anxiety over the relationship of thought and action, the individual and society. This reflects his own experience of life, and in particular his exclusion from the Manchester engineering culture, which respected only the outward and visible, valued the hard machine and not the soft….

[A]fter fifty years Turing is still the Trotsky of the computer revolution…Silenced by secrecy, Turing could never speak of having led British intelligence from defeatism to industrial-scale supremacy. In 1939, in Turing's words, no-one else was doing anything about the naval Enigma signals and so he could have the problem to himself. Alone, in naive unrealism, he broke the unbreakable; then, intransigent, saw it through into Allied mastery of the Atlantic by 1944. But he could not draw on this investment to execute his peacetime plan, the computer of the future.

[W]ar took Turing away from his profoundest explorations, thinking the uncomputable. The decision that Turing took in 1938 lies behind another veil. I doubt whether Sigmund Freud, by coincidence exiled here in Turing's birthplace in that year of refugees, could have analysed how Turing chose to bite Snow White's apple, and forgo the paradise of pure mathematics. That decision is too deeply embedded in the complex bonds between the unique individuality of genius, and our common planetary home. In the perspective of centuries...Turing's decision may seem a sacrifice of the truly long-term: losing the marathon of mathematics, for a sprint to save a self-destructive world.

Um. So there. Don’t fuck this up, Leo.

BTW, Hodges's site devoted to Turing is pretty excellent. And his exhaustive biography of Turing, subtitled "The Enigma of Intelligence," is terrific, too. It’s also a bit of a beast. For a shorter, equally lovely, bio, you can try David Leavitt’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.

And if you want to watch all of Breaking the Code, it’s available on YouTube:

We Live in Public: Brief, Belated Thoughts on "Margaret"

2011-10-18T18:00:00.001-04:00

I saw Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret last Thursday (along with a small group of other film writer pals), its final show in New York City. I went in with a mixture of heightened anticipation, thanks to the endorsements of many other writers of good taste, and some trepidation, thanks to its complicated post-production story. Once the film unspooled, however, I was elated to discover, as did so many others (but not enough of them, alas) that it’s a marvelous movie – in particular, a great New York movie. And frankly it deserved better from this city.

There have been, and will be, a lot of very smart things written about Margaret. (Consider Glenn Kenny’s very astute appreciation, here. And Mike D'Angelo's brief but equally astute appreciation, here.) Indeed, I’m a little wary of wading into this whirlpool. There’s so much to tackle in the film, and it probably requires a couple more viewings before I myself can say anything particularly smart about it.

However, I will say this. Better than almost any other film I can think of, Margaret nails something very distinct about New York: the very public nature of life in this city. We do everything in front of other strangers here. We eat in front of them, we cry in front of them, we have our moral debates in front of them. Heck, we even die in front of them. It’s just part of the ecosystem of the place. Everything is a potential intersection, a potential quandary, and everyone a potential ally or an enemy. And for the most part, all these strangers ignore each other; in his review, Mike correctly notes all the various shots of people not listening to each other in the movie.

But that apathy is matched in turn by the kind of judgment these characters render when they do occasionally pay attention: whether, for example, you’re pretentious if you yell, “Brava!” or “Bravi!” at the opera. You’re invisible – until suddenly you’re not, and then all of a sudden you want to be invisible again. This is the texture of life here, and something very few films truly get. The King of Comedy, by Lonergan’s mentor Martin Scorsese (who also apparently tried his hand at editing Margaret at one point), is probably the only other true contender in this regard.

The sheer number of bystanders and extras that Lonergan’s camera captures is astounding, with even their voices often intruding noticeably on the soundtrack. The city and its eyes and ears -- its total openness – feels present in every shot. There are no lonely streets in this film. No empty restaurants. And just about everybody somehow manages to navigate this world with remarkable ease. In one scene, while Lisa (Anna Paquin) is in her bedroom with a boy after politely requesting that he take her virginity, the front doorbell rings. She goes and opens it. It’s her younger brother. He walks in, she greets him casually, and then she drifts back to her deflowerer/non-boyfriend in the bedroom, who sits on the bed casually smoking a joint. The body language in this scene is remarkable: Everybody’s at ease. We sense no panic, no frantic cleaning up, no Oh-my-god-you-have-to-get-out-of-here-now moment. The constant presence of others is just the background noise of life.

At first the surprising length of the interstitial cityscapes peppered throughout the film – shots of buildings at night, pans across densely developed neighborhoods, long takes of Lisa walking on the street -- seem to be a byproduct of the epic battles waged in the editing room. (David Edelstein said it made him want to ship Lonergan back to film school.) But I found myself falling in love with these moments: In many ways, they are the movie. And they’re strangely mesmerizing, despite not being ostentatiously stylized or beautiful. I feel like I could easily watch them on an endless loop. {Insert wise-ass joke here about Lonergan’s film being said endless loop.}

I have no idea if these things add up to anything more than just some artful coloring on Lonergan’s part. But there may be something here. Consider the fact that, in the film’s final act (which some have found problematic), our heroine’s final confrontation in her epic struggle to get a bus driver removed from his job happens over the phone, with the woman who is the object of her rage reduced to being a voice on speakerphone -- many miles away, out of reach. Or maybe just this: That Lonergan allows perhaps the most sympathetic major character in his film – one person who never quite fits into the constant, ever-present public-ness of the film’s milieu -- the dignity of a lonely death. Far away, it seems, from the other characters, offscreen and out-of-mind.

Growing The Tree of Life: Editing Malick's Odyssey

2011-10-12T13:00:00.001-04:00

Earlier this Spring I wrote an article for Cinema Editor magazine, the official publication of American Cinema Editors (ACE), in which I interviewed some of the individuals involved in the editing of The Tree of Life, which just hit DVD and Blu-Ray this week. (Some of the research for this also overlapped with my piece on Q and The Tree of Life for New York Magazine in May.) Cinema Editor has now graciously allowed me to publish the piece on this blog. (But you should consider subscribing; it's a quarterly publication, and there's lots of great stuff in there.)

The article was written long before I actually saw the film, so it has to dance around certain elements, as did the editors themselves. (God knows, I would have had so many more questions had I been able to see and give specifics about the film before I spoke to the editors.) But it was still a fascinating experience doing it. Enjoy. And watch this space for some more Tree of Life thoughts later this week.

GROWING THE TREE OF LIFE

In the Beginning…

There are few films more highly anticipated this year than Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, a project that has been shrouded in mystery and wonder ever since it was first announced on the heels of 2005’s The New World. In fact, this is a film the legendary writer-director had been working on and thinking about for a long time, having originated as a project called Q back in the late 1970s, following the release of his 1978 classic Days of Heaven.

Tree is both intimate and ambitious in scope, intertwining the story of a Texas family in the 1950s with the story of the origins of the cosmos and the natural history of the world. “This movie deals with some huge issues,” says Billy Weber, one of the five credited editors on the film. “It’s about life and death and the meaning of it all, but it does so in part through these very small, intimate scenes.”

Malick’s highly personal and unique approach to filmmaking is the stuff of lore: He loves to improvise on set, often changing the whole tenor and tone of a scene from take to take. He loves to try unusual things, like asking his actors to do an entire scripted scene without actually speaking any of the dialogue. And he loves to shoot lots and lots of footage – some of it featuring the actors in the film, some of it just capturing the wonders – both grand and small – of the natural setting around him.

Such unorthodox shooting methods also call for an unorthodox approach to editing; in his recent films, Malick has opted to use teams of editors, and his latest was no different. The five credited editors on the film are Weber, Daniel Rezende, Jay Rabinowitz, Hank Corwin, and Mark Yoshikawa.

Weber, a longtime friend and collaborator of Malick’s who had edited Days of Heaven and was one of the Academy Award-nominated triumvirate that cut The Thin Red Line (along with Leslie Jones and Saar Klein), had also worked on the original Q project back in the day. He was the first editor on The Tree of Life, working for about three months: “I wasn’t able to be in Austin continuously for longer than that,” he recalls, “and I didn’t think Terry should edit the film in Los Angeles,” noting that the press-shy director prefers to work near his home base in Texas.

Malick’s reticence to leave Austin is perhaps understandable, as even the editing space sounds like a setting from one of his films. First assistant editor and associate editor Chris Roldan recalls that the team was nestled in an edit room in Austin that “had a lot of wildlife at the windows, which is something I had never experienced in an edit room. There were a lot of deer that would feed off of our windows and also a Tarantula that hung around outside the edit room, which Billy named ‘Tranny’.”

Handling All That Footage

Each editor worked on the film for about three months – except for Yoshikawa, who found himself working from the Spring of 2009 through September 2010, when the editing wrapped. (“I was in Austin for so long that Terry started buying me Texas Longhorns merchandise,” he laughs.) As might be imagined, each editor also had different creative and technical needs, and it was up to Roldan to make sure that they “could get up to speed on the project and into their creative zone as quickly as possible.” Roldan did this by giving them what he terms a “map” to the film. “I am probably the only person in the edit room who saw all of the footage,” he recalls. “To make it very flexible for the editors, I had about three different ways of organizing the footage, but ultimately I became the go-to person for what was shot where and on what format.”

Although the film was mostly shot on 35mm 4p, Roldan says that there were also elements of RED 4k, HD, SD Video, 65mm and even lo-res QuickTimes that they were working with. As a result of this huge amount of media, the film was cut in standard def, using 14:1 meridien codec. He also notes that it was a bit of a “juggling act” to run multiple systems seven days a week. “I am the type that likes dependability over ‘latest/greatest,’ so I had us running on a Unity with Mac OSX 10.4 clients and Avid MC 2.6. We rarely had any problems.”

Meanwhile, second assistant editor Rachel McPherson compiled a Filemaker Pro database that would allow the team to quickly search by scene, actor, subject, weather, costume, dialogue, or concept. Roldan notes that this made things easier particularly towards the end of the editing process, “when we would be looking for a particular shot of a location or character that would match for light or wardrobe.” He adds: “Another thing we did for the editors was paint the main edit room with magnetic paint and create scene cards with magnets on the back.” This allowed the team to have broader discussions about structure.

“The film is really built around a lot of little scenes – hundreds of little scenes and moments,” says Weber, who adds that unlike with a traditional feature, Tree of Life didn’t start off with an assembly. “There was too much footage for that.” And, of course, that footage, courtesy of director of photography Emanuel “Chivo” Lubezki (who was nominated for an Oscar for The New World), was gorgeous, and nothing like any other filmmaker’s. While many directors will film a lot of set-ups of the same scene, Malick prefers to shoot a lot of different scenes but not too many setups. “There was a lot of handheld shots, where the kids in the film would be running around, and the Steadicam operator would just be in the middle of this whirlwind,” says Yoshikawa.

Roldan adds: “Chivo and Terry shoot in such a spontaneous way that the camera has a sort of consciousness to it, so it was not unusual to get a shot of a bird or insect in-between takes or at the end of a roll.” As a result, he had the idea of organizing the footage more along the lines of a documentary, allowing the team to browse the footage by subject. “We had folders for Earth, Sky, Water, Animals, Miscellaneous, and then within those, bins that were more specific,” he says. Roldan also organized characters into bins for when they were alone and when they were together with other characters in specific combinations. “We were constantly refining this system according to the needs of the editors.”

Weber says that Malick’s approach to shooting is something the director has been developing over the years – an attempt to give an impression that everything has been shot on the fly. “We call it ‘walking down the garden path’” he says, “where nothing is locked down, where you don’t know where you’re going, or where the film is taking you. The New World was where he really experimented with that, and by the time he got to Tree of Life, he and Chivo had perfected their system. Every take was different.” Perhaps needless to say, that presented its own set of challenges for the editors. “There was no logic to the slating, even,” says Weber. “It’s not like Take 3 had anything to do with Take 2. It’d be a different scene.” Despite those challenges, however, Weber feels that Malick’s stylistic approach pays enormous dividends artistically. “I’m sure Terry would have trouble describing why he does it, but I think it’s because it feels more human, in a way – more spontaneous.”

Yoshikawa echoes that sentiment, adding that Malick wanted to avoid anything with “even had a hint of being presented or intentional. We tried to avoid the traditional shot-reverse shot approach to cutting scenes.” It also meant that because of the director’s improvisational, loose shooting style, sometimes there would be multiple scenes covering similar ground, meaning that the editors had to choose which scene best represented what the film was trying to do thematically. “We were always wanting to find unique moments of subtle and spontaneous action that also allow the camera to do the cutting,” Roldan says. “Sometimes those moments were as obvious as a butterfly spontaneously landing on Jessica Chastain's hand, and sometimes they were as subtle as a shoulder shrug or eye movement.”

The Freedom to Try Anything

Luckily, Malick likes to give his editors a lot of flexibility. “Terry is willing to try anything, Absolutely anything,” says Weber. “Sometimes we’d cut a character out of a scene, or cut all the dialogue out of a scene, just to see if it worked. And when you’ve worked with him for any length of time, you can even try that without asking him about it first. He’s very open to looking at anything that you try.” That flexibility reaches even to the way Malick likes to give direction: Yoshikawa observes that while the director has a very deep understanding of the technology of film, he prefers to speak in metaphors. “Terry isn’t the kind of guy who would ever give a direction like, ‘Cut ten frames from this shot.’ He’d rather say something like, ‘Make this scene feel more like a fleeting thought.’ I spent so much time in Austin working with him that I started speaking in metaphors as well!”

Since this is a Terrence Malick film, music and voiceover also played an important role in the shape of the final work. “As usual, Terry experimented a lot with the voiceover – recording different people,” says Weber. “At first, Terry didn’t know if he wanted any of the kids doing the voiceover in the movie. But he thought he might, so he recorded them.” Yoshikawa says that Malick enjoyed recording voiceover with Hunter McCracken, the young boy who plays Jack, the oldest of the three brothers in the film. “Hunter is also from Texas, from a small town near Dallas, so Terry and he would just keep going in these recording sessions.” He adds that the way Malick uses voiceover is unlike many other filmmakers: “It can be non-narrative. We’ll even use voiceover where you can’t understand all of what’s being said. Even if it’s just a whisper -- Terry likes that.”

As for music, the team had to work with both music that was being recorded by composer Alexandre Desplat and classical music that Malick had specifically envisioned for the project. “He was looking at the score as he was looking at the rest of the film,” says Yoshikawa. “He didn’t want it to feel manipulative. Sometimes, it would seem like there’d be an obvious point to put in a bit orchestral score, or to have the music swell during a particular scene. We would always try to stay away from those.”

As usual, Malick brought his prodigious knowledge to bear on his choices, bringing in music as varied as the French Baroque composer Francois Couperin and Twentieth Century experimental works. Roldan notes that it was a big challenge just to keep up with the music “and knowing, for example, the differences between the Atlanta Symphony and Sir Colin Davis versions of the Berlioz’s Requiem. I think I may have heard every good version of that symphony that has been recorded in the last 40 years.” He adds: “ I had very little exposure to classical music before, but by the time I was done on Tree of Life, I knew Smetana from Gorecki.”

Taking Final Shape…

There was, however, one thing that Malick hadn’t worked with before, but which was very important to Tree of Life. For a film that tackles the history of the universe, needless to say, Visual Effects were crucial. Malick didn’t want to edit the film and then wait for effects to be finished. Rather, he wanted to have effects ready that could then be cut into the film. VFX supervisor Dan Glass set up an office right next to the editing suite, allowing the director to shuttle back and forth between the different teams. “Terry was very specific about how he wanted those VFX shots to look,” Yoshikawa says. “He probably spent as much time with them as he did with editorial.”

“Dan and Brad Friedman, our Digital FX supervisor, were wonderful to work with,” says Roldan. “They were able to turn ideas around very quickly so that we could try them out in the cut as early as possible.” Douglas Trumbull, the legendary artist responsible for many of the VFX in 2001: A Space Odyssey also worked on the film. “He came in and did a lot of amazing home-made experimental VFX that became incorporated into Dan and Brad's work,” says Roldan.

Amid all this wild experimentation, the editorial team also had to be careful about maintaining the unique rhythms and emotions of this highly unusual film. Weber and Yoshikawa both agree that Tree of Life is probably Malick’s most experimental work – which may have given them a lot of freedom, but also presented new, unforeseen challenges. “Even on The New World, we had some specific plot points that we had to hit,” Yoshikawa says. “We knew that John Smith had to leave at a certain point, that John Rolfe had to show up – that sort of thing.” But with Tree of Life, because the film was built on so many small moments, that made structuring the film a challenge in itself. “Because a lot of the film isn’t really centered on plot, you could make some huge change to a scene, or cut a whole scene out, without losing anything plot-wise. But then later on you might look at the film and feel like something was missing emotionally, and you’d realize – it was because of this change you made earlier down the line.”

It all resulted in a work that was ever shifting as it approached the finish line. Yoshikawa, with his newfound propensity to speak in metaphors, likens the process to the voyage of a ship. “When the ship starts sailing, there are lot of different ports where it could end up, and the directions you take out at sea will determine where you end up. In the end, you’re trying to find a good port to land in.” But perhaps the final word should go to Roldan, who, as first assistant editor and associate editor, probably had to see the complete film more times than anyone else during post-production. “I have seen the film 49 times, and I'm waiting to pay for a ticket to see it for the 50th time,” he says. “It was always evolving, sometimes at a rapid pace, so I'm sure it will be a new experience when I see it again.

Fuel for the Fire: Some Brief Thoughts on "Incendiary"

2011-10-08T17:00:00.002-04:00

A recommendation: If you’re in New York and looking to be engaged and infuriated by a movie this week, consider heading to the IFC Center and seeing Incendiary, a ridiculously timely documentary about the 2004 Texas execution of Cameron Todd Willingham -- a questionable case which has recently bubbled back up into the spotlight thanks to the (now thankfully faltering) Presidential run of Texas Governor Rick Perry. This isn’t an irate, strident movie, however; rather, Joe Bailey, Jr. and Steve Mims offer up a mostly sober, analytical work that quietly plants little time bombs in your brain. It’s the kind of film that gains power by pretending to pull its punches.

I didn’t really know anything about this case back when it was actually a case. I only learned about it from David Grann’s justly-acclaimed 2009 New Yorker article “Trial by Fire.” (And I didn’t even get to read that piece until I had to review Grann’s essay collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes for Bookforum. Tangentially, for those interested, the story that gives Grann’s book its title is a non-fictional account of the same case that inspired the novel The Sherlockian.)

What makes Grann’s story so powerful is his sensitive depiction of what may very well have been Willingham’s monstrous predicament: that he had to stand accused of, be convicted of, and get executed for the arson murders of his three young children – all the while, presumably, he was himself grieving over those deaths. It’s the kind of dilemma I can’t even really think about for too long, for that way madness lies -- and Grann’s piece is probably the only article I’ve ever had to put down a couple of times because it was too painful to keep reading.

Incendiary could similarly mine this horrific predicament, but it does something different, and quite interesting. Instead, it launches straight into a depiction of the science involved in fire forensics. Whereas Grann relates his narrative in pretty much linear fashion, deliberately waiting to give us the reasons to doubt the initial findings of arson, Incendiary starts off with a heavy-duty scientific tear-down of the state’s case against Willingham.

Is it a brilliant stroke? Not really. It may just have been a choice to avoid replicating Grann’s piece. But it also works beautifully, for it puts the real headline up front: That the arson Willingham stood accused of very well might not have been arson. That there might, in other words, not have been a crime.

That last part is important. Perhaps even more so than the recent Troy Davis execution, the Willingham case may prove to be the wedge that begins to really force the public to think hard about the death penalty. At the time of the Davis controversy, I remember wondering why more death penalty advocates didn’t become involved in the case – for if you believe in the death penalty, then surely you must also believe that it’s even more crucial that the U.S. justice system (which also includes clemency boards, stays of execution, etc.) work pretty much flawlessly; otherwise innocent people will die. A conservative friend suggested that it wasn’t about the justice system, but about the moral clarity of the death penalty. Except that if an innocent person is being killed by the state, there’s no morality to be found there, and certainly not much clarity.

But at the same time, people could point to the murder that Davis was accused and convicted of, and ask, “What about this? Let’s not forget about what happened” – a meaningless point if the guy is innocent, but a viscerally powerful one for many who (misguidedly or not) fear a culture that privileges the rights of the accused over the rights of the victim. That’s where the Willingham case is different – because, ultimately, there might not have been a crime there to begin with. and therefore no moral imbalance for justice (and state-sanctioned murder) to right.

For better or worse, the politically engaged documentary appears to be with us to stay, and Incendiary is one of the more artful ones I’ve seen recently. In part it’s because the filmmakers don’t have a lot of footage to work with: This wasn’t one of those court cases that was broadcast for all the world to see, there weren’t people giving interviews left and right. Plus, the powers that be have a vested interest in making sure very little of what happened actually got out. Bailey and Mims manage to turn these liabilities into an artistic advantage – their film is less about the suspense of what happened and more about the light that retrospective analysis can bring. And we should be thankful for it.

SEE THIS MOVIE: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

2011-10-07T15:30:00.006-04:00

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which is surely some sort of masterpiece*, will play the New York Film Festival tomorrow (its first and only screening at the fest) and it will open theatrically later in Winter (early January, I believe), courtesy of the fine folks at The Cinema Guild. I’m working on a longer piece about Ceylan’s oeuvre for Moving Image Source right now, which will appear around the time of the film’s actual release. So I have a lot to say about Anatolia, but can only say so much right now. Before I get to my brief assessment of the film (after the jump), allow me to recommend my friend Ali Arikan's lovely, hilarious, and highly personal take on it, here.

As for me, I can say that this director who was once pegged (even by myself) as moving somewhere along the continuum between Kiarostamian impressionism and Jarmuschian deadpan has journeyed now into a fiercely more ambitious and cosmic cinematic realm. And Anatolia has more in common with something like 2001 or Stalker than it does with, I dunno, Through the Olive Trees or even Taste of Cherry (as much as I love those films, and as much as I love Ceylan’s earlier films).

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia seems to me to be, more than anything, a film about death -- or perhaps more specifically, mortality. The first half focuses on the search for a murdered body, as an alleged killer leads the authorities on something of a wild goose chase. There’s plenty of room for humor here, and Ceylan seizes it (especially if you speak Turkish and have a feel for the cadences of the language, Anatolia is a very, very funny film).

But in Ceylan’s hands, this landscape becomes a metaphysical one. The endless dark valleys of the Anatolian night, where giant stone faces lurk watching and where the characters’ own memories seem to live on forever, never quite register as a real place: He never shoots his locations with an eye towards mapping their geography in any meaningful way; characters drift off in different directions; and the supposed killer is perpetually confused, not just as to whether any given location is the right one, but even about the burial site’s distinguishing features (a ball-shaped tree, a fountain, soft earth, etc.).

The abstract, dreamlike nature of the film reaches its apex during an extended section in a village which seems to be something of a ghost town – in between praising his wife's lamb, the local official informs our heroes that the place is populated almost entirely of old people, that they often can’t bury their dead because their children (who have emigrated abroad or to the big cities) keep saying they want to travel back and kiss their parents' corpses, and that they need a new morgue and a place to wash and prepare bodies. The scenes in this strange, mostly unseen town are punctuated by a final, quiet passage of such confounding mystery and spectral beauty that even to describe it would be to drain it of some unearthly power.

The unreal nature of these early scenes gives way to a more immediate shooting style in the film’s final section, set the following morning in the central town. Anatolia now displays a harsher, more interrogative camera (a new thing for Ceylan, BTW) which gets in closer to the characters, following them around (sometimes handheld) and ceding the previously highly composed nature of the frame – extras intrude, characters slip in and out of shot, snippets of dialogue and random sounds muscle in on the soundtrack. Stylistically, narratively, and thematically, the second half of the film is the opposite of the first: The prosecutor takes statements, the doctor conducts an autopsy, townspeople react to the news of the killing and the death. The mythical gives way to the mundane; the mystery of death is gone, replaced instead with its physical and social consequences. And a film that began in the enveloping, sensuous darkness of a dream ends in the cold, hard light of the painfully real, and it's up to us to determine where eternity lies.

* I am well aware, of course, that several of Ceylan's previous films -- including Uzak (Distant), Iklimler (Climates), and Uc Maymum (Three Monkeys) have topped my Top Ten lists in their respective years. So for me, at least, this isn't a case of Ceylan finally making a masterpiece as it is a case of him yet again making another masterpiece. But that doesn't change the fact that Anatolia is a film of staggering ambition, even for this director.

8 Directors Who Played Villains in Other Directors' Films

2011-10-05T14:30:00.003-04:00

With the rather startling news that Werner Herzog will be playing the villain in the next Tom Cruise flick, I couldn’t help but be reminded of all the other times that a great director has been enlisted to play a villain in another director’s movie, with often awesome results. There are a surprising number of them, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but here’s a quick rundown of some that came to mind…

Otto Preminger, STALAG 17

Preminger was the very image of cold Teutonic cruelty as the POW camp commander Von Scherbach in Billy Wilder’s classic. Given Wilder’s proclivities, it’s hard not to think of the casting choice as a kind of in-joke on Preminger’s directorial reputation as something of a slavedriver. The irony, perhaps, is that thanks to his turn in Stalag Preminger was able to create a side-career playing this type of ruthless authority figure – up to and including Mr. Freeze on the Batman TV show.

Orson Welles, THE THIRD MAN

Well, take your pick with Welles, but really, how can anyone argue with this?

Quentin Tarantino, PLANET TERROR (GRINDHOUSE)

Tarantino’s one of the credited directors on Grindhouse, but since Planet Terror was directed by Robert Rodriguez, I feel confident including QT’s totally oily performance as “The Rapist” here. It’s also worth noting that Tarantino, not a particularly talented performer, seems to do consistently terrific work for his pal Rodriguez – I’d argue that his turn in From Dusk Till Dawn is the best acting he’s ever done.

Erich Von Stroheim, GRAND ILLUSION

To call Von Stroheim’s character in Grand Illusion a villain is kind of to miss the point of Grand Illusion, but nevertheless, an iconic performance in an iconic film.

John Cassavetes, THE FURY

Of course, Cassavetes had a lengthy acting career alongside his directing. But this film, and this part, are both so strange that the fact that this cold-hearted bastard is being played by the guy who made Faces just adds a certain, well, something. And let’s not forget that insane final scene.

John Huston,CHINATOWN

The most breathtaking noir villain of them all, played by a man who himself made some of the most legendary noirs (including The Maltese Falcon, which some would consider the first). Strangely enough, the thing I can never shake from this performance is the way he so casually pronounces “Gittes” as “Gitts.”

Roman Polanski, A PURE FORMALITY

Almost nobody remembers this terrific (and terrifically tense) two-person chamber drama from Giuseppe Tornatore – perhaps because not that many people saw it to begin with. Gerard Depardieu is a reclusive author being interrogated by Polanski’s cop. A crime has been committed, but we’re not sure what it is. To spoil the plot a bit, Polanski isn’t actually a villain, but at first he seems like one, never missing a beat, pursuing every thought, every avenue of possibility, not letting up on Depardieu one bit -- until the film gains the unreal quality of a morality play. Then, Tornatore gives us one final, startling, sublime twist. And I’ve now said too much.

Lars von Trier, THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS

What gives, you ask? The Five Obstructions is, after all, a film credited to Von Trier. I’m cheating, if only because he shares the credit with veteran filmmaker Jorgen Leth, to whom Von Trier poses his “obstructions” in an attempt to get Leth to create new versions of his short film “The Perfect Human.” It’s an amazing turn by Von Trier -- not just a director playing a villain, but a director as villain: As the obstacles and limitations pile up, you can see the Melancholia Dane relishing his role – flaunting the caviar and fine living in front of his no-doubt significantly poorer fellow filmmaker. All he needs is a white cat to stroke.

Salo and Me: (Not) A Love Story

2011-10-04T22:03:00.000-04:00

The other day a Criterion Blu-ray of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Daysof Sodom arrived in the mail. I was excited to receive it, even though I have no idea when I’ll watch it again. I’ve already seen it several times, and according to some, that may well be a couple of times too many. Since Salo – twisted, disgusting, horrific, soul-destroying Salo -- is supposed to be all about its own unwatchability. (Here’s a brief Slate piece all about whether one should really even bother to visit it once.) I mean, what do you do with a movie that supposedly dares you to watch it?

However, I don’t actually find Salo unwatchable. And maybe, if I share my own personal Salo story, I can explain why.

I became a big Pasolini fan after seeing The Gospel According to St. Matthew at the AFI Theater in Washington, DC, sometime in 1987 or 1988 – so I was 14 or 15 at the time. Hunt down his films after that wasn’t easy – very few were available even on black market VHS. I scoured the mail-order video catalogs – most of them trafficking in Z-grade dupes of exploitation flicks and other, er, disreputable material. Along the way, a screening or two happened. The Museum of Modern Art in DC screened Medea. I found a Spanish language VHS of Oedipus Rex in Addams Morgan. And memorably, during a trip to New York, my dad and I caught a screening of Decameron projected off 16mm in a makeshift theater in the back room of what appeared to be someone’s loft. (I'd found it advertised in the Village Voice.)

Salo, on the other hand, was virtually impossible to find – it was not only an obscure Pasolini film but also a scatological nightmare that had been banned left and right.

But one day, there it was! Listed for mail-order out of some store in (I think) North Carolina. I can’t remember how much it cost, but it was expensive. (Could it have actually been a hundred bucks?) Too expensive for a 15-year-old, at any rate. So I did what any enterprising kid would do. I went to my friends at school, told them I could get this incredibly outrageous movie if they chipped in. In my desperation, I might have even used the word “sexy.” And pretty soon I had five willing accomplices splitting the cost of Salo with me. In exchange, I’d dub them copies of the film.

A few weeks later the tape came, an unmarked VHS. It was a pretty lousy recording of a pretty lousy print, and every twenty minutes or so, at each reel change, there was about 10 minutes of white noise. (Whoever recorded it apparently wasn’t familiar with the pause button.) Hilariously, it was letterboxed.

I watched it. It was very different from your average Pasolini film. Sure, it was full of outrage and unspeakable cruelty. But the vibrancy of Pasolini’s work – the “earthiness” critics loved to talk about – was missing.

However, I couldn’t focus too much on what I thought of the film. Because I was suddenly terrified at my own predicament: I had taken money from my friends and I had to deliver what I’d promised was a wallow in salaciousness, the kind of thing a 15-year-old boy might want to see. These were not film buffs, or burgeoning artistes. (Actually, that’s not entirely true. One of them became an acclaimed poet, believe it or not.) Like all ~~15-year-old~~ boys, they wanted to get their rocks off. And I was going to show them – hell, I was going to make them copies of – fucking Salo. I was doomed.

I dutifully made my dubs. I arrived at school, a dead man walking, lugging the tapes in my backpack. One of my friends suggested that after school, we gather in an assembly room (where there was a TV) and check out the goods. Already having given up on life, I assented.

Later that afternoon, I made my way there. We put the video on. We fast-forwarded to “the good parts.”

And then, something truly awful and unspeakable happened.

We exploded in laughter.

To this gaggle of 15-year-old boys, Salo was hilarious. We couldn’t stop laughing. Because, you know what, in this context – or rather, devoid of context -- it was kind of hilarious. This wasn’t a realistic movie. It was absurd. It was awful, but the awfulness was distant -- like a transmission from another planet. A planet where they ate shit with razor blades.

A middle-class 15-year-old boy, who probably knows very little of genuine horror or pain, wasn’t going to connect with this stuff. He might as well laugh.

What he can’t understand is that with Pasolini’s distance comes Pasolini’s sorrow. What he can’t understand is that Salo is just about the purest expression of the unfathomable despair of the man who made it – who, by the way, had been found brutally murdered right before the film came out.

Salo is, in a way, like something out of Bosch or Brueghel; the crimes onscreen often happen deep in the frame, tiny violations enacted on tiny stick-figure people. Pasolini doesn’t want to rub your face in the monstrousness on display. He isn’t interested in exposing the horrors of Fascism (because, duh) but rather wants to express the way that consumption and power reduce human beings to faceless objects. The distant shooting style – at one point even filming the violence through a pair of binoculars, silently – echoes, or replicates, our numbness to the pain of others.

To be fair, I do have some difficulty watching Salo today. And I can’t speak for others, but it’s not because it’s too gruesome or whatever. It’s because it brings me face to face with my own numbness. The feeling I get from the movie isn’t one of revulsion, but of regret. And I guess, ultimately, that I’m afraid to explore that regret. Because somewhere in there, I fear, is a dark truth about what makes me a viewer.

Somewhere in there is Pasolini's final time bomb, still ticking away...

Il maestro

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control; Or How Everything Becomes Junk, Before It Becomes Nothing At All

2011-09-23T15:30:00.001-04:00

Like everyone else I’m finding the whole Netflix/Qwikster kerfuffle kind of hilarious. I don't have much to say about the business angle of it, though I'm inclined to agree with Roger Ebert that ultimately what Netflix is doing in terms of focusing more on streaming is probably pretty smart. One aspect of the situation, however, captivates me in a different way. It has less to do with the specifics of Netflix’s conundrum (which I need not summarize here) and more with, well, something a bit harder to express. It's times like this that I wish I had a little more time and a lot more brain, but nevertheless, I’ll try.

Let me rewind a little. Actually, let me rewind a lot. Like many other film geeks my age, my initial movie education came via videotapes. Sure, there was the occasional retro or whatever when I was growing up – Washington, DC was actually kind of an underrated moviegoing town back then, with a healthy number of arthouse and retro theaters. But video was still the primary venue. Even if a film hadn’t been released legitimately, it could often (though not always) be hunted down – via gray market mail-order cult shops, or recordings off late night TV and arty channels like Bravo. (Believe it or not, once upon a time Bravo ran pristine copies of Les Carabiniers and Before the Revolution – uninterrupted! -- instead of sleazoid reality TV marathons.)

Always, though, there was that chill of excitement when I finally received the video tape in question. Or, better yet, labeled a long-sought-after film I’d finally recorded off TV; when it was a movie I knew I would keep, I’d write the label in pen, instead of pencil. The movie I loved could finally be possessed.

Of course, it wasn't the movie I was possessing; it was a cheap plastic box filled with springs and tape that was going to wind up in a landfill sooner or later. But for a while that cheap plastic box seemed to be an integral part of the collective dream of movies. I’ve known other people around my age who went through some of these same feelings. For us, cultural objects of love were precisely that – objects. And, without getting all Frankfurt School about it, the art and its status as product became somehow inseparable in my mind. Whether it was a VHS tape, a laserdisc, a DVD, or a Blu-ray.

(Aside: Did all this lead to a certain inability to more fully engage with the work at hand? After all, John Ford made a movie called The Searchers; he didn’t design a DVD jacket. When a movie becomes an object, is it harder to think of it as something alive? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I’m sure there are those who’d say yes. So maybe. Who knows?)

We still buy DVDs and Blu-rays, but we’re more keenly aware of their impermanence, thanks to the speed with which formats change, and our understanding that somewhere out there all this stuff is available, if not for free then at least for very cheap. The ownership society is on its way out, and nobody needs to lament it when it’s all gone. A generation raised on iTunes probably has relatively little need to hold a movie or an album in their hands or to become familiar with its physical feel. Besides, stuff costs money and takes up space.

At the same time, though, when things cease to be objects, what happens to our understanding that they need to be preserved and taken care of? When something can be copied, deleted, altered, shared, traded, etc. endlessly, does the thing become meaningless in itself? As someone who has done all of these things at some point or another, I'd like to say no. But I have my fears, too, I guess.

Now let's fast forward, just a little bit. The Blu-ray/DVD of The Tree of Life will hit stands in a couple of weeks. And maybe, a couple of months after that, I’ll see it on the new releases bargain rack at my local Rite-Aid (The Social Network is there right now). And when that happens I’ll look back at that period in April-May when I would have gladly murdered a hobo just for a chance to get to see this film a couple of days early in the theater. From breathless anticipation to mere afterthought, all within the course of a few months – this is the universal trajectory of the artistic object nowadays. Not the artwork itself, mind you. The movies don’t go away. But something else does. I'd hesitate to call it "aura", cause it's not. But it's something. Something graspable. Maybe it's graspability itself.

I’m not saying anything new here that others haven’t said more eloquently before me. But I do find a certain parallel in what I’m seeing in the Netflix situation right now. Netflix was both a wonderful resource and the face of doom; it killed the video store, and it may have on some level helped kill the DVD industry as well. Everything was already becoming cheaper and faster when it came along, but it was a key catalyst in making it all even faster and even cheaper.

And now, here they are, victims of their own speed-to-market and the fact that we now live in a fully networked, nanoworld where some dude whose Twitter icon is Elmo smoking weed can hold sway over a multi-million dollar company. Would it be ironic if Netflix’s own brand was consumed by the same whirlpool of speed and cheapness that it helped stir up?

I used to think that my desire to possess was some kind of basic animal need, but I wonder now if that’s true. Even many film buffs are fine not owning the movies they love, as long as they know they’re available to them in some way. But presumably they own other things. And maybe our ultimate possession nowadays is our identity – consciously expressed in countless social ways, and adorned on places like Facebook with lists of our favorite films, favorite books, etc. Maybe that’s the final object of our love and attention – the socialized and networked self, whose material being (at least for the time being) still belongs to us.

Which is just another way of saying: Part of me hopes that Qwikster takes those dudes for all they've got.

Seriously, This New Jaws Book is Pretty Great

2011-09-16T10:00:00.007-04:00

Many serious film types have an allergy to coffee table books about movies. Maybe it’s the price (if you bought too many of these things, you probably wouldn’t have any money to spend on seeing actual movies). Or maybe it has something to do with a perceived superficiality – why spend time with large, glossy pictures when you can pore over a dusty, dense bit of theory or a thick biography. Of course, there are exceptions: Taschen’s Stanley Kubrick books are a perfect example of big, expensive art books that are nevertheless seen as essential reading as well.

To these I think I can add another one. Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard, written by Matt Taylor and with a foreword by Steven Spielberg himself, is a dense, beautiful (and relatively inexpensive) volume full of anecdotes, interviews, photos, illustrations, and contemporaneous articles about the 1974 shoot of Spielberg’s blockbuster on the island. Of course, the culture at large has an image of Martha’s Vineyard as some kind of haven for wealthy elite types (witness the media silliness over Obama’s recent visit there) but its actual residents appear to be anything but. And Jaws is a film whose shoot was deeply intertwined with the community at large: town residents actually played parts in the film, and the film itself is steeped in a unique kind of atmosphere that no studio set would ever have been able to match.

It’s also valuable for the way that it portrays a key dynamic of certain films shot on location. To you and me, Jaws will probably always be a two-plus-hour thriller defined by its scenes of terror, its performances, etc. To the people who worked on it, however, it will have been a real-life experience, locatable in time and place -- an extended time spent somewhere different, around people who were quite different from the usual Hollywood crowd.

From the couple of times I’ve worked on location shoots, I can vouch for the fact that this isn’t just a minor angle on filmmaking: Sometimes, a movie becomes its location, and vice versa, as Jaws did with Martha’s Vineyard. There are other examples, and of course I’d love it if some visionary publisher decided to give those films and locales a similar treatment: Woodstock, IL and Groundhog Day; Marfa, TX and Giant (the shooting of which also inspired the Robert Altman masterpiece Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean [which wasn’t shot there, alas]); and, of course, Smithville, TX and The Tree of Life.

Anyway, it’s a great book, beautifully laid out and lovingly detailed. And any fan of Jaws should consider owning it. Hell, any fan of the filmmaking process should consider owning it.

Earlier this summer we conducted a brief interview via e-mail with author Matt Taylor, about his book and about the strange intersection between Martha’s Vineyard and Jaws. Here it is.

Looking at this book it's apparent that Jaws simply would not have been the same movie if it had been made elsewhere. How did MV's local culture and attitudes affect what the production was able to get on film?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the wonderful quote that came from Shari Rhodes, who was the location scout. In the book, she's quoted as saying, "The greatest thing about the Islanders we cast for the movie was that they didn't know enough about acting to be intimidated."

Spielberg wanted his actors to sound less scripted, and more everyday, and loose. For the lead actors, he allowed a lot of improvisation to create a very natural, real-life type of tone. For the secondary roles, which were filled primarily by Islanders, the filmmakers wanted an equally realistic, everyday feel for the characters, and so doctors were cast as doctors, selectmen were cast as selectmen, and so on.

What about the island's geography?

The island is obviously a pretty geographically isolated place, and so it was a lot cheaper to cast locals in the movie, who wouldn't have to be put up in hotels. I think, too, that they saved considerable money by not using Boston-area SAG members for a lot of roles, such as Mrs. Kintner, who was played by Lee Fierro.

And so Martha's Vineyard provided the perfect, old-time New England backdrop, a smooth, sandy ocean bottom with perfect depths for the mechanical sharks, and a bevy of locals who were so far removed from filmmaking and Hollywood that they were able to bring a kind of weathered feel to the film that would have been impossible to achieve with trained Hollywood actors.

The locals had obviously seen the making of the film up close behind the scenes, but when Jaws was released, did it scare MV resident participants as much as it did the rest of the nation?

Yes. Multiple locals I interviewed for the book who had roles in the film all reported jumping out of their seats at certain points in the film -- just like the rest of the world, and despite the fact that in many instances, they were just a few feet away from the camera when the scenes were shot. Susan Murphy watched the filming of the scene where Roy Scheider is chumming and the shark comes up, and even though she knew what was about to happen the first time she saw the movie, she jumped just as high out of her seat as the rest of the audience.

What kind of cooperation did you get for the book from the filmmakers and actors involved in the film?

The people we involved from the Hollywood faction provided enormous amounts of material for our book, most notably production designer Joe Alves, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, production executive Bill Gilmore, and Shari Rhodes. I wanted to include quotes from those particular people specifically because they worked most closely with the islanders involved with the production. In the beginning, I was leery about including any of the Hollywood people because I was afraid it would make the book feel too much like a traditional, Hollywood "making of" story, and I didn't want to jeopardize the book's small-town, "Hollywood comes to Mayberry" type feel.

Did any of the filmmakers, cast or crew revisit the island in subsequent years and decades? Did any of them make MV a regular vacation spot or even residence?

I know that Michael Chapman, the camera operator, kind of "discovered" Martha's Vineyard while shooting the movie, and subsequently, has had a house here for many years. Richard Dreyfuss has always come back, too, I think for a bit just about every summer since 1974. I spoke with Joe Alves the other night on the phone. He was just here on the island 2 weeks ago for the book launch. It was his third time ever on the island. He just seems to love it here so much, and I told him, "I think you made a mistake when you decided not to buy a house here 37 years ago." His reply was, "I know. I do, too."

Make Me Ugly: 25th Hour and 9/11

2011-09-10T12:01:00.004-04:00

There's been a lot of discussion recently about films and other art works related to 9/11. Allow me to put in a word here for what I consider to be not just the best film about 9/11, but the best film of its respective decade, period: Spike Lee’s 25^th Hour. A film that, despite its measly box office and rapid fade from theaters, still keeps popping up in the cultural conversation, with many defenders as well as quite a number of haters. This isn't really meant to be a defense of the film (many more eloquent than I have made the case for it) but I do want to address one aspect of it.

Although the film opens with images of Ground Zero and is set against the backdrop of the period following the attacks, many feel that 25^th Hour has relatively little to do with 9/11 -- that the topicality feels welded on, and awkwardly at that. The film is based on a novel written pre-9/11 (I haven’t read it) and as such the attacks and their aftermath do not seem to directly figure into the plot. Indeed, in interviews, Lee has said that the reason he brought 9/11 into the film was really simple: He was shooting a movie about New York, in New York, and it seemed absurd not to. Others have said that the 9/11 backdrop gives the film an Open City-type feel, the sense of history intruding in on a narrative and into the very fabric of a film. And certainly, the sense of devastation in post-9/11 New York enhances the desperation and desolation of the central story – not to mention its foregrounding of the city’s many ethnic and social enclaves (the characters at its center all seem to represent different social and/or ethnic strata –Wall Street hotshots, well-meaning intellectuals, club kids, Russian mobsters, etc.).

But allow me to suggest that 25^th Hour is about 9/11 in more direct, profound ways, too.

“I need you to make me ugly.” Those are the words convicted drug dealer Monty Brogan (Ed Norton) utters to his friends in the film’s climactic scene. Monty has just lived his last night as a free man before beginning a seven-year stint in Otisville prison. And he wants his friends to pummel his face in so that he’s not so good looking when he goes behind bars in a few hours; he doesn’t want to be the pretty boy who gets raped.

Many have taken this scene quite literally. To them 25^th Hour basically devolves into a movie about a criminal who is afraid of getting raped when he goes to prison. Some have also suggested (I’d say ludicrously) that the film is indulging in gay panic, as if prison rape is supposed to be an opportunity to broaden one’s horizons or something. The film is certainly about maleness to some degree – there’s a lot of talk about eligibility, families, and lineage. (I’d argue that the 9/11 backdrop enhances this breathless, almost survivalist atmosphere as well – this is one of those rare films where male-female sexual dynamics are directly tied into survival, as if the thick air of catastrophe has suddenly brought things into ruthless focus for everyone.)

But there’s more to it than that, and it gets to the heart of why this film is, in fact, about 9/11 on a deeper level. Let’s rewind a bit: In an earlier scene shot (in one single take) against the smoldering ruin of Ground Zero, Monty’s friends Frank (Barry Pepper) and Jakob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) discuss their friend’s impending fate: “I love him like a brother, but he fucking deserves it,” says Frank, to Jakob’s shock. Both of them understand, however, that Monty has wasted the opportunities given to him; they were all friends at the prestigious private school where Jakob still teaches, where Monty first got his start dealing. Over and over, all throughout the film, the notion of Monty having thrown away a promising life, and his friends’ silent complicity in it, is brought up. Later, Frank corners Monty’s girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson) in a club about the fact that they let him do this to himself:

"What’d I do to stop him? What did I say to him? Nothing…Last ten years I’ve been watching him get deeper and deeper…I didn’t say shit. I just sat there and watched him ruin his life. And you did, too. We all did."

Even Monty realizes the waste he’s brought to his own life. In what might be the film’s most powerful and notable scene (to be fair, there are a couple of other candidates), he delivers an extended tirade in front of a bathroom mirror in which he tells basically everybody in New York and around the world to go fuck themselves, one by one.

Everyone who’s seen the film knows the scene – he kicks off with the squeegee men, moves on to Pakistani cab drivers, aging uptown socialites, Jewish jewelers, Korean grocery owners, then winds his way to corrupt cops and Al Qaeda, before turning to (and on) his friends and family, finally ending with himself. But right before he does that, Monty unleashes his most toxic vitriol on the city itself, every corner of it, using language of such eloquent loathing it would make Travis Bickle blush:

"Fuck this whole city and everyone in it. From the row-houses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue, from the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in Soho. From the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park Slope to the split-levels in Staten Island. Let an earthquake crumble it, let the fires rage, let it burn to fucking ash and then let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place…No. Fuck you Montgomery Brogan. You had it all and you threw it away, you dumb fuck."

So later, when Monty finally asks Frank to kick his face in, he's not just asking for a favor from a friend, he’s asking for the punishment he knows he should have had all along: “I think you can,” he says to the protesting Frank. “You know what, I think you want to, too, a little bit. You think I deserve it a little bit. For years you’ve been giving me that look, like you want to smack some sense into me. This is your chance. I need it, Frank.”

In other words, this scene, in the context of the film, isn't about rape at all; it’s about self-annihilation. In order to actually get Frank to actually beat him up, Monty has to threaten Jakob with violence. He needs to lash out in order to inflict damage on himself. That echoes the “Fuck you” mirror scene in its trajectory – the same way Monty had to express his hatred of the world to work his way back to himself, Monty has to attack the helpless Jakob.

This strange brand of self-annihilation and loathing, this deep need to be “made ugly” in order to find salvation – or to even have any hope of finding salvation – seems to me to be the key to the film’s 9/11 metaphor. It’s not one to take too literally – Lee has plenty of incendiary political beliefs, but I don’t think he’s necessarily making a 1:1 comparison between New York City or America and an entitled drug dealer. Rather, this is a manifestation of the idea that 9/11 “made us ugly” – that is to say, hurt us and stripped us of our illusions. It broke us but also, maybe, allowed what remains of us to survive. It's an unforgiving and cruel calculus, to be sure, but it does allow a glimmer of hope. And it’s this dynamic that fuels the very first scene of the film, wherein Monty finds a wounded dog left for dead and takes it in, eventually naming him Doyle.

From that first scene with the battered Doyle, we go to the opening credits, featuring the “Tribute by Light” at Ground Zero. The final image of the film is the final part of this triumvirate: Monty’s bloody, bruised visage leaning against his father’s car window, his cratered face a map of his own self-loathing. Thus, the broader arc of the film draws the connection explicitly – from a broken animal, to a broken city, to, finally, a broken man. We are all ugly now.

Do You Know What It Means to Lose Ettore Scola?

2011-09-01T10:00:00.009-04:00

First things first: No, he’s not dead. Rather, the great Italian writer-director Ettore Scola, who gave us We All Loved Each Other So Much, Le Bal, La Terrazza, La Nuit de Varennes, The Family, Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (aka Down and Dirty), Passione d’Amore, and the little-seen but wonderfully-titled -- and just plain wonderful -- Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?, just announced his retirement, at the age of 80. (He’s 80?? But then, that would make me….rgahaaaaggh…)

I felt a little chill up my spine upon reading the announcement, because, I shit you not, I had just the previous night finally caught up with his long-hard-to-find 1964 directorial debut, the portmanteau comedy Let’s Talk About Women, and halfway through watching it I had the strange premonition that I was going to wake up to the news that Scola (about whom I had not thought for some time, admittedly) had died. Instead I woke up to the news that he’s finally retired, citing “production and distribution requirements [he] can no longer identify with.” ("I didn't want to become one of those old ladies who wear high heels and lipstick just to keep youthful company,” as he put it.) I guess that’s not as bad. But still. Waaah.

I'm sure plenty of readers are right now wondering, "Who the hell is Ettore Scola?" It's an understandable question, I guess; like I said, I myself hadn't been thinking about him in recent years. And for that we can probably blame the fact that no U.S. distributor has shown serious interest in any of his films since the 1980s. Not to mention the fact that those films of his which were once released in the U.S. (and even, for a little while at least, available on VHS) have not re-appeared on DVD on our side of the pond. And forget about any retros. This is, needless to say, unfortunate. Scola’s work was one of my gateway drugs into cinephilia. But don't take my word for it. His films have been nominated for numerous Oscars, he was for many years a mainstay at Cannes, and his influence is by no means negligible: His lovely 1982 melodrama Passione d’Amore was the basis for Stephen Sondheim’s Passion. Of course, Scola was known mostly as a comedy director, and that’s probably why his films never quite caught fire abroad the way lesser work by other, more “serious” filmmakers did. (Indeed, his greatest successes in the U.S. tended to be his more dramatic works, such as the aforementioned Passione d’Amore and the tightly focused WWII chamber piece A Special Day.)

Passione d'Amore

But even those who know of his work sometimes peg him inaccurately. Mira Liehm, in her otherwise quite thorough history Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present, spends relatively little time on Scola, praising him (somewhat begrudgingly) thus:

In his best films, Scola makes good use of his two primary skills: his writing ability, which enables him to endow his characters with psychological credibility, and his ability to create a believable socio-historical background.

Well, sure, and Visconti had a thing for costumes. Scola was certainly good at these things (and these are indeed important things for a filmmaker to be good at), but Liehm (and others) apparently didn’t notice that Scola was also one of the most limber filmmakers of the Italian cinema, astutely switching visual and narrative styles not just between films but even within films. Take, for example, his masterpiece, the astounding We All Loved Each Other So Much – an expansive socio-political history of post-war Italy told through the friendship of three former Partisans and their collective fondness for a beautiful aspiring actress (played by the exquisite Stefania Sandrelli). Narratively, it makes a surprisingly coherent whole out of Marxist activism, political disillusionment, professional ambition, rabid cinephilia, the mid-century game show craze, the moral swamp of the Italian construction industry, the mundane deceptions of family life, and a rather beautiful rondelay of romantic regret, all within the confines of a bourgeois comedy of manners that forays occasionally into absurdist satire.

It’s also the kind of film that, immediately after two of its characters take in a performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, actually adopts the style of the play, incorporating self-conscious pauses in all onscreen action during which characters offer soliloquys and directly address each other with their most intimate thoughts (and sometimes even get responses back). It’s really a marvel to behold -- fleet of foot, confident, never self-important but also never frivolous -- and Scola packs so much into it you walk away from the 2-hour-and-4-minute long movie thinking you’ve just been through an entire season of a rather bizarre but wonderful TV show (a terrible comparison, perhaps, but, well, there you go).

We All Loved Each Other So Much

Even when his ostensible narrative ambitions are more limited, Scola has a way of infusing his work with historical scale and a unique kind of emotional sweep. The aforementioned A Special Day takes place over the course of a single day, and it concerns an extended, chance encounter between a devoted, overworked, pro-fascist housewife (Sophia Loren) and a suicidal homosexual radio broadcaster (Marcello Mastroianni) who get together over the course of a single day in 1938 – May 6^th, to be exact, the day Hitler came to Italy to formalize his alliance with Mussolini. (The woman’s husband and children are off at the rally.) It’s a not-entirely-original concept (Vincent Canby called it “pure theatrical contrivance,” and it bears more than a passing resemblance to contemporaneous films such as Nikita Mikhalkov’s Without Witnesses and Istvan Szabo’s Confidence) but within the space of this simple little film we can find, if we look closely enough, an entire history of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

For all his writing prowess, and his expertise with dialogue and clear character delineation, however, Scola also had a marvelous way with the unseen, unspoken, suggested thought – ideal, perhaps, for a director whose characters so often inhabit the fuzzy border between bad faith and the true self. In one of the episodes of Let’s Talk About Women, Vittorio Gassman (who stars in each vignette – really, the movie should have been called Let’s Talk About Vittorio Gassman) plays a delirious prankster, the kind of guy who has a ready quip and a hand-buzzer for everybody he meets over the course of his workday, be they co-workers, street vendors, or traffic cops. On and on he goes, feverishly jesting and joshing, until he finally gets home to his long-suffering wife and son, and immediately adopts the manner of a serious, glum, and very tired patriarch, who just wants to sit and read his paper before dinner. He chastises the boy for joking around, before sighing, “I can’t wait until I retire.” The vignette pretty much ends right there, with our hero reading his paper on the couch while wifey gets his meal ready.

Seems like a simple, shallow (albeit funny) sketch -- until we begin to think about what is actually going on here. Are we looking at a prankster at heart who has to assume the mantle of a dour family man because that’s what is expected of him, or are we looking at a broken soul who has to joke around to get through his ultimately very sad life? Is this a drama of domestic despair or a grand cosmic joke? Teasingly, Scola never quite tells us, letting the question hang in the air for those willing to ask it.

This is a voice I will be sad to see go. And you should, too.

We All Loved Each Other So Much

(Hat tip: Movie City News)

The Greatest Opening Credits Sequence of All Time

2011-08-09T15:30:00.004-04:00

For some reason there's been a lot of buzz recently about title sequences. Of course there's always the estimable site The Art of the Title Sequence, which regularly posts and analyzes opening credits from films. But in the last few weeks, sites like The Fox is Black and The Atlantic highlighted Jurjen Versteeg's cool new short A History of the Title Sequence. Back in February IFC.com did a whole thing about The 50 Greatest Title Sequences of All Time. And for some reason a bunch of my Facebook friends sent around a bunch of credits clips last week. Long story short: This is a great excuse to post what I think is my favorite opening credits sequence of all time, for the amazingly bizarre Italian omnibus film Le Streghe (The Witches). Video after the jump.

Nice, right? One of the great things about credits sequences, of course, is that one can approach them without having to give any consideration to the film in question. Even more so than with trailers, you can just watch the credits and riff drunkenly on the kaleidoscope of wonders they insinuate and promise, even if the film fails to live up to any of them. (That said, there’s a lot more to The Witches than meets the eye, about which more in a bit.)

So, back to the matter at hand: God, do I love the credit sequence to The Witches. And not just for Piero Piccioni’s catchy music and the crazy animation, but because there’s something so beautifully other about it. Sure, there’s a defiantly mid-60s mood to the whole thing, particularly in that twisty score, but at times it feels like a template for a decade that never happened. Or, more accurately, it feels perched between the decade that once was meant to be, and the madness that came after.

The Witches was made in 1965, as an attempt by star Silvana Mangano’s producer-husband Dino De Laurentiis to highlight her range; it consists of five segments, each featuring Mangano in a completely different role, directed by such masters as Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Vittorio De Sica. However, the film wasn’t released for several years (it wasn’t exactly beloved, by either critics or audiences). By the time American viewers saw it, it was 1969 and the world had pretty much gone to hell.

But you can sort of sense that encroaching chaos in these credits -- in their refusal to settle down into anything approaching harmony. The music skips. Sound effects intrude loudly, then vanish in a flash. Photos interchange with hand-drawn figures. The awkward animation sometimes flows smoothly, sometimes devolves into collage. Everything seems to come together and then careens into visual and aural cacophony. And all through it Silvana Mangano dances, dances, dances.

And The Witches itself is a similarly cacophonous film: The five segments, as mentioned above, are wildly divergent. In Visconti’s piece (probably my favorite of the bunch), Mangano is a famous actress on the run from paparazzi; in Pasolini’s, she’s a pseudo-mystical green-haired deaf-mute; in De Sica’s, a day-dreaming, bored housewife married to boring businessman Clint Eastwood(!) Still, despite that aforementioned attempt to highlight her versatility, Mangano didn’t actually have much range to speak of, so she’s either sublimely cool, or sublimely melodramatic, but rarely anywhere in between.

That is not, strictly speaking, a bad thing. In the end, I do love this strange, beautiful, deformed movie. For a glimpse of how weird it actually is, check out the Eastwood-Mangano-De Sica sequence here: