tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91357018349296684132024-03-29T07:03:05.537-04:00They live by night"There used always to be something to say. Now that everyone is agreed, there isn't so much to say."Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.comBlogger186125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-2355841051683477392021-08-19T20:12:00.002-04:002021-08-19T20:17:28.932-04:00Worst Moviegoing Experiences: This One Time, In Moscow...
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="color: black; text-align: left;"><i>Once again, resharing an old post from Ye Olde Nerve Screengrab...</i></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUm_2XWPPiSZ_6kT5G2q9t9qbAyhctRbXANxeTvF_m9K_eMaUKRhe0VY3MgDvx2fJlB36pbdSz3neStKFuEGRyQMVTdYVGF-_pb_ruzcF4z1sr_DmU2Sq8cpnN8a3xfRefr0xchFNfmNVL/s996/romeo-juliet-leo-gun.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="711" data-original-width="996" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUm_2XWPPiSZ_6kT5G2q9t9qbAyhctRbXANxeTvF_m9K_eMaUKRhe0VY3MgDvx2fJlB36pbdSz3neStKFuEGRyQMVTdYVGF-_pb_ruzcF4z1sr_DmU2Sq8cpnN8a3xfRefr0xchFNfmNVL/s320/romeo-juliet-leo-gun.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div>In 1997, I was working for a few months on a film shoot in Moscow. The Moscow Film Festival had just rolled into town, and, having been largely deprived of movies for a few months (despite <i>working</i> on a film), I decided to go see a flick. I wound up in a cavernous theatre, in a packed, premiere night screening of <i>William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet</i>, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. (Let’s ignore the fact that, by a strange twist of chaotic film festival programming, this also happened to not be <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115818/">the film I had actually meant to see</a>.) <div><break><br /></break></div><div><break>
I should preface this story by briefly noting two things: First of all, this was a time when the Russian mob was quite active in Moscow. Indeed, many people held up mobsters as heroes. A local English-language paper ran <a href="http://www.exile.ru/feature/feature1.html">a story on how ridiculously little it actually cost to have a foreigner offed</a>. Secondly, many movie theaters in Moscow had numbered seats. You didn’t always have to abide by the numbers – but in the case of this special, crowded screening, everybody seemed to be sitting where their tickets told them to sit.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4lODGaVhh1HvbyhKKRyE1wAQNPIlZlczvb012goiFg1joqivOEH3ZiS6qquKyQJrTHsIAmeUomw2a50MDc8O0Tj30bdnoQ5cts8jUio6voFS6qFxQPBPbKIXer5bu7DnzXXcj8BCFdOji/s2048/Saint_Basil%2527s_Cathedral_in_Moscow.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1847" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4lODGaVhh1HvbyhKKRyE1wAQNPIlZlczvb012goiFg1joqivOEH3ZiS6qquKyQJrTHsIAmeUomw2a50MDc8O0Tj30bdnoQ5cts8jUio6voFS6qFxQPBPbKIXer5bu7DnzXXcj8BCFdOji/s320/Saint_Basil%2527s_Cathedral_in_Moscow.jpg" /></a></div>
Anyhow, before the movie began, while people were still filing in, a youngish gentleman (whom I will refer to as Youngish Gentleman) a few seats to my right in the row in front of me got up, put his coat down on his seat, and went off to the bathroom. The seats to his sides were empty. A minute later, as if straight out of Central Casting, a big, incredibly tough-looking guy (whom I will call Big Scary Guy) in an impossibly tacky suit, escorting two leggy supermodel-types, came and looked at the seat. He took the other guy’s coat, placed it on the seat behind him (which was empty), and sat in the seat, placing his two dates on either side of him. </break></div><div><break><break><br /></break></break></div><div><break><break>
A minute later, the seat’s previous occupant came back. Seeing that his seat number no longer matched his ticket, he went to Big Scary Guy and said, “Excuse me, you’re sitting in my seat.” Big Scary Guy, without even looking back at him, said, brusquely, “You can sit somewhere else.” </break></break></div><div><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break>
Silence. “No, I can’t,” said Youngish Gentleman. “My ticket has that number. That’s my seat. What does your ticket say?” he asked.
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“Who cares,” replied Big Scary Guy. “Look at these two beautiful women I’m with. Do you want to tell them they have to move?” </break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break> Youngish Gentleman, clearly unprepared for this debating point, hemmed and hawed for a few seconds, then said, “But…that’s my seat. If you have tickets, they’ll have seat numbers for you.” </break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break>Big Scary Guy, still not looking back, scoffed, “Go away.” </break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break>Youngish Gentleman stood there for a second, seemingly wondering if he should buzz off to the other side of the theater and actually sit where his jacket was placed, right behind his scary tormentor. Finally, he sat down behind Big Scary Guy. After about half a minute of silence, he said, “You’re very rude.”</break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break>Again without looking back, Big Scary Guy said, very casually, “After the movie is over, I will kill you.” </break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break>Silence.</break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break>At this point, the lights began to dim, and the movie started. But as the film was beginning, Youngish Gentleman, probably after mustering up untold depths of courage, spoke once more: “You’re very rude,” he said again. </break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break>Without missing a beat, in fact almost interrupting the other guy's statement, Big Scary Guy said, “I will kill you. Just wait.” </break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break>Anyway, on that note, William Shakespeare’s pulse-pounding action adventure about gangland killings and techno music and hot young movie star lovers began in earnest. </break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break>The screening itself was without incident. But as the film was winding down, perhaps spooked by the violence onscreen, Youngish Gentleman quietly slipped out of the theater. </break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break><br /></break></break></break></break></div><div><break><break><break><break> As the credits rolled, Big Scary Guy asked one of his molls, “Did he leave?” “Yes,” she said. “Did you see what he looked like?” he inquired. The girl shook her head no. Big Scary Guy said nothing. Instead, he just gave a sigh of exasperation, as if he’d been deprived of his fun for the evening. I decided at that point that it was time for me to leave, too.
</break></break></break></break></div></div>Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com72tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-54683623738635386032017-07-19T04:16:00.001-04:002017-07-19T15:27:29.931-04:00Here's Everything I've Written About Christopher Nolan (So Far)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've written a lot about this fellow Nolan over the years, and people will occasionally ask me if there's a place where they can find links to all my pieces on him. So with <i>Dunkirk </i>opening, it seems like it might be a good idea to collect it all here. And while it seems fairly certain that I will write more about this guy in the future, for now, here's pretty much all of it:<br />
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-"<a href="https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/07/17/dunkirk-is-the-movie-christopher-nolan-was-born-to-make/" target="_blank"><i>Dunkirk </i>Is the Movie Christopher Nolan Was Born to Make</a>." My review of <i>Dunkirk</i> for <i>The Village Voice.</i><br />
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- "<a href="http://www.vulture.com/article/christopher-nolan-movies-ranked.html" target="_blank">All 10 Christopher Nolan Films, Ranked</a>." For Vulture.<br />
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-"<a href="https://ebiri.blogspot.com/2014/12/interstellar-loneliest-journey-in-human.html" target="_blank"><i>Interstellar</i>: The Loneliest Journey in Human History</a>." My lengthy essay about Nolan's much-maligned by some, beloved-by-others sci-fi epic.<br />
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"<a href="http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/christopher-nolan-the-brothers-quay-film-forum.html" target="_blank">Christopher Nolan and the Brothers Quay Hold Court at Film Forum</a>." A report from a screening and Q&A at Film Forum, where the Quays and Nolan screened some of the brothers' most daring animated works, alongside a short documentary Nolan made about them.<br />
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-"<a href="https://ebiri.blogspot.com/2012/07/you-must-become-terrible-thought-nolan.html" target="_blank">You Must Become a Terrible Thought: Nolan, Batman, and Hope</a>." An exploration of <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> and how its theme of hope fits into Nolan's work.<br />
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-"<a href="http://www.nashvillescene.com/arts-culture/film/article/13044071/with-the-dark-knight-rises-christopher-nolan-brings-his-batman-saga-to-an-ambitious-silly-yet-strangely-beautiful-epic-finish" target="_blank"><i>Knight </i>Falls on Gotham</a>." My review of <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> for the Nashville <i>Scene</i>.<br />
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-"<a href="http://www.vulture.com/2012/04/christopher-nolan-themes-dark-knight-rises.html" target="_blank">What Is Christopher Nolan's Big Idea in <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>?</a>" This is, I think, the first piece where I lay out my theory that each Nolan film is a fugue built around a specific idea. Written before <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> came out, I go from discussing the big ideas in his previous films to speculating on what the new film might be about. (I'm wrong.)<br />
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-"<a href="http://www.vulture.com/2010/07/inception_theory.html" target="_blank">The Hidden Inception Within <i>Inception</i></a>." My slightly-deranged, personal theory, written for Vulture, about what's really going on in <i>Inception</i>. (I'm right.)<br />
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-"<a href="http://www.vulture.com/2010/07/when_its_safe_to_hit_the_bathr.html" target="_blank">When It's Safe to Hit the Bathroom During <i>Inception</i></a>." Service journalism at its nerdiest. You need to take a leak. But you also don't want to miss any key information in a movie packed with data. Again for Vulture, I identify two brief moments in the film when you can run out and run back.<br />
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-"<a href="http://www.vulture.com/2010/07/the_number_of_times_each_chara.html" target="_blank">The Number of Times Each Character Dies in <i>Inception</i>.</a>" It's, like, a lot.<br />
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-"<a href="http://www.vulture.com/2010/12/six_things_we_learned_from_the.html" target="_blank">Six New Things We Learned from the <i>Inception </i>Blu-ray</a>." I don't know if you noticed, but I was kind of obsessed with <i>Inception </i>once upon a time. Luckily, Vulture was there to enable me.<br />
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-"<a href="https://ebiri.blogspot.com/2010/12/this-is-probably-not-last-piece-ill.html" target="_blank">This is Probably Not the Last Piece I'll Write About <i>Inception</i>.</a>" Hilariously, it sort of was. (At least for now.) But this is also probably the closest thing I wrote to a review of <i>Inception</i>.<br />
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-"<a href="http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/christopher-nolan-opens-up-at-tribeca.html" target="_blank">Christopher Nolan Opens Up at Tribeca</a>." About a live 2015 filmmaker talk that Nolan gave at the Tribeca Film Festival.<br />
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com198tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-86916216125850320322016-05-24T09:33:00.000-04:002016-05-24T09:34:34.717-04:00"Wherever it hits me is where it's going to be": Reports from Cannes 2016<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As those reading me at the Village Voice may know, I was at the 69th Cannes Film Festival over the past couple of weeks. Here, for your convenience, are all my reports from the festival (along with the films discussed), in one handy list o' links:<br />
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<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/film/highlights-from-cannes-staying-vertical-i-daniel-blake-and-cafe-society-8616203" target="_blank">First Dispatch: <i>Cafe Society; Staying Vertical; I, Daniel Blake</i></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/film/reasons-to-rejoice-from-cannes-paterson-the-handmaiden-and-toni-erdmann-8623341" target="_blank">Second Dispatch: <i>Paterson; The Handmaiden; American Honey; Toni Erdmann</i></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/film/a-small-sigh-for-the-bfg-the-spielberg-letdown-at-cannes-8623353" target="_blank">Third Dispatch: <i>The BFG</i></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/film/jeff-nichols-s-sensitive-loving-is-the-cannes-premiere-you-ll-need-to-know-at-awards-season-8627995" target="_blank">Fourth Dispatch: <i>Loving</i></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/film/cannes-goods-personal-shopper-julieta-aquarius-and-hell-or-high-water-8632007" target="_blank">Fifth Dispatch: <i>Personal Shopper; Julieta; Aquarius; Hell or High Water</i></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/film/the-least-loved-films-at-cannes-neon-demon-it-s-only-the-end-of-the-world-the-last-face-8643794" target="_blank">Sixth Dispatch: <i>Neon Demon; It's Only the End of the World; The Last Face</i></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/film/more-treats-from-cannes-2016-the-unknown-girl-graduation-after-the-storm-8644559" target="_blank">Seventh Dispatch: <i>The Unknown Girl; Graduation; After the Storm</i></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/film/cannes-2016-winners-highlight-the-gulf-between-critics-and-the-world-8651054" target="_blank">Eighth Dispatch: Awards; <i>The Salesman; Dog Eat Dog; Elle</i></a></div>
Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com329tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-89611949442373641822015-12-22T22:27:00.000-05:002015-12-22T22:27:44.018-05:00Spielberg and Horror<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A conversation about <i>Poltergeist </i>today reminded me of
something I’d been meaning to post about for a while. A couple of months ago I
went through a Steven Spielberg binge – partly for <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2015/10/steven-spielberg-politics-culture.html#" target="_blank">this essay</a> on his
development as a political filmmaker, partly because, hey, Spielberg. But as I
went back over his earlier work, it struck me just how much Spielberg’s filmmaking
language owes to horror. Obviously, several of his earliest films – <i>Duel</i>,
<i>Something Evil,</i> <i>Jaws </i>– actually are horror films. But I’m intrigued by how many
of his other films rely on horror tropes.<br />
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Look at <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i>. Yes, it’s a throwback to
old adventure serials and fantasy films, but it probably has more legitimate “frights”
than most typical horror flicks. (Think of Satipo’s fate; or the entire Well of
Souls sequence; or, Jesus, the big finale.) For all the wonder of <i>Close
Encounters of the Third Kind</i>, it’s really just a couple of degrees removed from
a horror film: We spend the whole movie wondering if the aliens are good or bad; if they turn out to be evil, the whole thing turns and Richard Dreyfuss suddenly starts to look more like a possessed person. Even <i>E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial </i>relies on its share of
jump scares; at the time it came out, I remember legitimately being frightened
by much of it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is an element of Spielberg’s filmmaking that made quite
an impression on me as a kid. But I’d forgotten about it in the intervening
years. Seeing these films back then, for all the wonder and big emotions they inspired,
I now recall that they also provoked a real sense of horror. A very <i>safe </i>kind
of horror, to be sure: You jumped at E.T. suddenly popping into the frame, but
you never quite felt the sense of helplessness and dread that you might in a
proper horror flick. Obviously he’s not the only person
to meld elements of horror into kid-friendly stories. There’s the example of
The Brothers Grimm, after all. And one Walt Disney, who himself was a huge influence
on Spielberg. But I do think Spielberg took it to another level, at times using
the language of horror to tell non-horror stories. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Spielberg would go to that well again: In the <i>Jurassic Park</i>
films (especially <i>The Lost World</i>, which feels like more of a horror movie than
the first one), in <i>War of the Worlds</i>, in parts of <i>Minority Report</i>. And while he
hasn’t gone in that direction of late, take a look at this teaser for his
upcoming Roald Dahl adaptation <i>The BFG</i> (scripted by the <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2015/12/steven-spielberg-pays-tribute-to-et-screenwriter-melissa-mathison.html" target="_blank">late Melissa Mathison</a>,
who also wrote <i>E.T.</i>). In light of his earlier work, it starts to come alive
with possibility.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com293tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-68999734651333805332015-12-16T07:43:00.001-05:002015-12-21T20:25:41.589-05:00Star Wars: The Force Awakens - A Galaxy Not-So-Far Away<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One thing I always found interesting about George Lucas's Prequel Trilogy was the way he expanded the <i>Star Wars</i> universe by going back to his original well of inspiration for the first film: the popular movie genres of his youth. So if the first <i>Star Wars (</i>aka <i>A New Hope) </i>was an homage to old sci-fi serials and Westerns, then <i>The Phantom Menace</i> was a Biblical epic (complete with a chariot race), and <i>Attack of the Clones</i> a combination of noir and syrupy romance and sword & sandal flick, and <i>Revenge of the Sith </i>a gangster movie. Watching Lucas try and bring such oddball genre elements into his otherwise fairly well-defined sci-fi world was fascinating, even endearing -- and it's one of the reasons that I don't hate the Prequels like many others do. Though they're wildly uneven, they're still dazzling feats of imagination, and even their very unevenness feels like a result of a directorial personality at work.<br />
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J.J. Abrams, who directed <i>The Force Awakens</i>, comes from a different generation than Lucas, and he most likely didn't grow up with those genres. The good news is, he evidently grew up watching <i>Star Wars.</i> So, in his own way, he’s made a movie that homages the film genre of <i>his </i>youth. In other words, <i>The Force Awakens</i> feels very much like a <i>Star Wars </i>movie -- maybe even more so than the Prequels. It doesn't expand the universe so much as indulge in it.<br />
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That's most evident on the level of plot. Without giving too much away, I will say that <i>The Force Awakens</i> often feels like a re-imagining of the first movie, with a little bit of <i>Empire </i>and <i>Jedi </i>thrown in. Even the characters sort of match up: Daisy Ridley's Rey gets the Luke role, while Oscar Isaac's Poe Dameron is a Han Solo type, with a bit of Leia thrown in. Adam Driver's Kylo Ren is a new Darth Vader, complete with his own inner torment and family issues. (He's got his own Emperor, too, in Supreme Leader Snoke, and his own Tarkin in Domhnall Gleeson’s General Hux.) Harrison Ford's Han Solo gets to be aging-mentor Obi-Wan this time around. BB-8 is basically R2D2 and Lupita Nyong'o feels like a variation on Yoda. There's a Tatooine-like planet that's not technically Tatooine, a new Death Star that's not technically the Death Star (it’s called Starkiller Base), there's a cantina scene, there are plans hidden in a droid, and so on and so forth. To say more would really spoil matters, but you get the idea: It's a <i>Star Wars</i> mix and match.<br />
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That said, the mix is pretty wonderful. Abrams has a deft shorthand with character -- revealing it through action without having to stop and explain too much. He shoots his action scenes close, and he keeps them fast. He keeps the dialogue fast, too -- a lesson Lucas learned on the first <i>Star Wars</i> film but seemingly forgot in the Prequels. And he deploys humor nicely, even allowing it to undercut the film's more earnest moments. (“Why are you doing this?” “Because it’s the right thing to do.” “You need a pilot.” “I need a pilot.”) The actors are appropriately breathless, and surprisingly physical. Daisy Ridley has intensity to spare and a kind of haunted, brittle aura, which helps temper her character's more predictable qualities. Oscar Isaac turns out to have the dash and charisma of a young Harrison Ford; if he wasn't already in a <i>Star Wars </i>movie<i>,</i> he'd make a fine candidate to play the young Han Solo in the planned spin-off. Adam Driver doesn't get to use his face much, but his rage is white hot and compelling. If Darth Vader was the master of the lumbering slow-burn, Kylo Ren charges around with a constant chip on his shoulder.<br />
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The most interesting of the new characters is probably Finn, or FN-2187 (John Boyega), a young Stormtrooper who has a crisis of conscience early on and winds up joining the resistance. Raised from very early on to be a faceless, mindless killer, he has no idea who he actually is. This is the only one among the new roles that feels like an original – an existential <i>Star Wars </i>character, whose life is a complete blank slate. And Boyega does a nice job balancing the character's befuddlement and very real fear with his growing dedication to his companions. Every character in this film is looking for belonging of a sort, but he’s the only one who seems to understand that belonging isn’t always a good thing.<br />
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<i>The Force Awakens</i> isn't particularly imaginative – it’s missing the more dreamy aspects of Lucas’s better work, and yes, even a bit of the spectacle – but it's very exciting and involving. Abrams showed in his <i>Star Trek</i> films that instead of creating whole new worlds, he's better at exploring existing ones. And so, there’s a tactile quality to this <i>Star Wars</i> that's very welcome after all these years. We learn a little about what Stormtroopers do after they get back from massacring a village. We find out that Tie-Fighters get locked in for the night. And when two of the characters in <i>The Force Awakens</i> come across the old Millennium Falcon, they have to contend with its clunky swivel seats, its outdated display screens, its unwieldy navigation, its thundering cannons. It’s probably the kind of thing every kid raised on <i>Star Wars</i> has wondered about at some point – what it must be like to sit in the Millennium Falcon. In moments like these, one senses the joy that Abrams -- one of those very kids -- must have felt making this thing, and he transfers that same joy to his audience.<br />
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Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com96tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-31794453857639492602015-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:002015-11-04T01:26:57.593-05:00Inside "Out 1": A Revisitation, Of Sorts<br />
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<em>Here’s another one from the archives. Back in 2006, I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Jacques Rivette’s 750-minute long, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_1">largely-unseen 1972 film <strong>Out 1</strong></a>, described by many at the time as a kind of Holy Grail of moviegoing. It’s a challenging film, to be sure, and despite the extreme patience involved in sitting through such a long film I realized it also warranted multiple viewings. Beautiful, haunting, and uniquely engaging, this seminal phantom of world cinema was no less mysterious to me, having seen it, than it had been beforehand. That still didn’t stop me from writing about it for Nerve.com at the time.</em><br />
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<em>The film is now making a <a href="http://www.bam.org/film/2015/out-1-episodes-1-and-2" target="_blank">two-week stand at BAM</a>. I was hoping to revisit it beforehand to try and write about it again, but, well, 13 hours and all that. (It was hard enough to see back in 2006, when I didn't have a family, or a life, or a job, or two.) So I thought I would re-run, with some modifications, the Nerve piece -- which I also revisited several years ago, when <b>Out 1</b> made an appearance on German DVD. Enjoy.</em><br />
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Though some dispute what his original intentions were, Jacques Rivette reportedly hoped that <em>Out 1</em> would run as an eight episode serial for French television. After TV rejected it, the film never quite realized its destiny, screening only once before Rivette whittled it down to a four-hour version called <em>Out 1: Spectre</em>, which itself has also been rarely screened. (The full version is sometimes referred to as <em>Out 1: Noli Me Tangere</em>, which translates as “Don’t Touch Me” – apparently, this is what was written on the first workprint, and adopted by some as the title.)<br />
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Rivette shot <em>Out 1</em> in a startlingly economical 6 weeks. (Unlike other directors’ lengthy <i>films maudits</i> – Bernardo Bertolucci’s 5-hour <em>1900</em>, or Wim Wenders’s <em>Until the End of the World</em>, say – <em>Out 1</em> doesn’t appear to have consumed too large a chunk of its creator’s career.) Filming without a script, allowing his actors to improvise at length, and deliberately abandoning traditional notions of perfection (the film is replete with boom mikes, camera shadows, bystanders on the street staring into the lens, etc.), Rivette was able to turn his film into a discourse on how narrative struggles to assert itself -- on what constitutes story, performance, and, ultimately, cinema.<br />
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If that sounds deadly, you might be surprised. For a work that intentionally goes on and on – with some scenes running for as long as 30 or 40 minutes – <em>Out 1</em> is more than merely watchable. It’s endlessly alluring even with its will o’ the wisp of a plot.<br />
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The opening episode sets the stage as well as the pace. The story -- such as it is -- focuses on two theater groups, each preparing a performance of Aeschylus, one of <em>Seven Against Thebes</em> and the other of <em>Prometheus Unbound</em>. As it so happens, both appear to be Julian-Beck-Living-Theater-style avant garde troupes; that is to say, we won’t see too many scenes of actors trying to remember their lines, witnessing instead the groups’ dancerly, improvised exercises and preparations, the actual text of Aeschylus a scant memory.<br />
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In an early, quite distinct example of what distinguishes <em>Out 1</em> even from the more experimental films of its time, one of these rehearsal scenes actually goes on for something like 45 minutes, right in the middle of Episode 1, in what appears to be a single take. The progression of this piece-within-a-piece, as the actors in rehearsal go from a state of droning, seemingly blissful ignorance, to making baby sounds, to confrontational, animalistic grunting, to rhythmic pounding and primitive singing, and finally to fumblingly articulated thought, and then easing into a relaxed, intellectualized discussion of what they just did, itself suggests a kind of capsule of human civilization. It’s amazing to watch, as breathtakingly kinetic as any car chase, only with an almost obscene rawness, all of it rendered hypnotic by the immediacy of Rivette’s shooting style.<br />
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There are two other initially unconnected story strands: One features a deaf-mute named Colin (Jean-Pierre Leaud, official poster boy of the Nouvelle Vague) who wanders Paris handing people notes telling them he brings a message from destiny, then irritating them with his harmonica, relenting only once they give him money. The final strand involves Frederique (Juliet Berto) a ravishing con artist who comes on to men in bars and restaurants, convinces them to give her money, then hastily flees.<br />
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Eventually, this free-form plot begins to gain some sense of shape, but only barely: We note, for example, that the two theater troupes subscribe to two different philosophies of preparation. One group prefers to be highly directed, coordinated, ruminating on every action they make with a kind of minute obsessiveness. The other group prefers to play out their improvisations, then calmly sit down and discuss what they just did, how it felt, and what it might mean. This divergence proves to be no mere coincidence: One group was formed by actors who left the other one, and their ongoing frustrations begin to fuel further drama, some of which begins to feel like a soap opera -- albeit a very understated and self-aware one.<br />
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Similarly, Colin the deaf-mute’s story takes a bizarre turn, when he, purveyor of cryptic messages, begins to receive cryptic messages himself, which point him towards a mysterious group called “The Thirteen,” evidently a reference to a series of stories by Honore de Balzac. (This leads to what may be the film’s best scene, wherein the director Eric Rohmer appears as a hilariously dry Balzac scholar to describe the author’s work to a befuddled Colin.) As Colin wanders Paris with surreal single-mindedness looking for The Thirteen, trying to uncover who they are, and even wondering if he himself might be a member, Frederique also stumbles onto something, when she steals some letters containing references to potentially shady dealings involving some individuals…who themselves might also be members of The Thirteen.<br />
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Rivette likes to hint at vague conspiracy theories in his work, but only in an amorphous, proto-Pynchonian way, as if to suggest that reality itself is one big, drawn out conspiracy. As <em>Out 1</em> progresses, the exact nature of The Thirteen becomes more and more mysterious and unknowable. One might, for example, note that, with the members of the theater troupes and Colin and Frederique, there are thirteen protagonists in <em>Out 1</em>. Are they “The Thirteen”? As new characters join the story, others seem to drop out. Is the fundamental conspiracy at the heart of this work that of its creator, working to shape it even as he, God-like, allows his actors to improvise endlessly? (Tellingly, the only thing Rivette appears to have scripted are the mysterious notes given to Colin.) Indeed, among many other things, <em>Out 1</em> begins to feel like a meditation on fate versus free will as much as anything else: Rivette springs several <em>dei ex machina</em> in the final episodes, yet they seem to be all but ignored by the characters.<br />
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Despite its seeming plotlessness, all four of the initial strands of <em>Out 1</em> involve individuals and groups trying to impose their will, trying to get others to do something – the theater troupes in the pursuit of a kind of collective art, the two con artists in the pursuit of individual gain. And the many faces of influence – the ways in which we try to force, cajole, convince, trick others into doing what we want -- becomes a central, unifying theme in Rivette’s film. The correlation between this conception of influence and the job of a director presumably wasn’t lost on the filmmaker.<br />
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Similarly, Rivette seems keenly aware of the inherently chaotic nature of making a film, and how it contrasts sharply with the closed off, hermetically sealed environment of the theater, where all sorts of dreams and ideals can be played out in a controlled world. A film about the theater, <em>Out 1</em> thus becomes a spiraling narrative about a Utopian milieu.<br />
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Jonathan Rosenbaum and others have described <em>Out 1</em> as a rumination on the dashed ideals of the 60s, “a bohemian reflection on the aftermath of May 1968.” The theatrical troupes in <em>Out 1</em> cling to a kind of idealized communitarian philosophy, and Rivette himself has said that he wanted to “make a film which, instead of being predicated on a central character presented as the conscience reflecting everything that happens in the action, would be a film about a collective, about a group.” In contrast, Colin and Frederique are out for themselves, duping and annoying strangers into giving them money. But as the film progresses, they seem to find themselves wanting to belong to something: Colin’s search for The Thirteen leads him to a small group of hippies who congregate in a small shop, and then to love. Frederique’s discovery of the conspiracy leads her to make connections that are more than fleeting, and finally to a desperate, doomed love affair of her own. All of these strands ultimately connect in furtive, passing ways, adhering to something resembling dream-logic, where slight associations and chance encounters grow into something larger, only to drift away again.<br />
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The surprising power of <em>Out 1</em> – I say surprising because it so rarely seems to take itself seriously as a narrative – lies in the way that it plays off the human desire to connect with the similar human desire for selfish action. The theater troupes, we come to understand, have come to the end of their days, and for all of Colin and Frederique’s attempts to belong to something greater than themselves, their hopes will fade away. The potential re-emergence of The Thirteen, it is hinted, is due to an enigmatic member’s nostalgia for the glory days of the group. The whole film begins to take on a strangely elegiac tone. Our characters all exist in the dim twilight of an uncertain, impulsive communal awareness. (Could this twilight in some way also be Rivette’s acknowledgement that the <em>Nouvelle Vague</em> had, by the end of the 60s, become a mythical shell of itself?)<br />
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As such, it also makes sense that <em>Out 1</em> moves from the theatrical to the cinematic: In sharp contrast to the loose early scenes of lengthy improvised rehearsals by the final episodes, as the theatrical troupes begin to fray, we see only glimpses of performances, and they’re fragmented, edited: The filmic artifice has asserted itself, imposing organization onto this previously loose, free-form world.<br />
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Something has happened here, Rivette is saying. Something existed here once. Somehow, the communal impulse has now given way to fracture, dissociation and alienation. It makes sense, therefore, that many of <em>Out 1</em>’s final scenes play out in a kind of nostalgic sunset, away from the city and away from the enclosed studios that framed so much of the first half. The floating nature of the early scenes is replaced by a highly edited, narrative style -- as people indulge in conspiracy theories, relationship crises, thievery, and duplicity. All this in turn gives way to a kind of melancholy, wistful solitude in the final episode.<br />
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Like all great works of art, one's relationship with <em>Out 1</em> eventually takes on the contours of one's relationship with an actual person: There's always so much more to know about them, and the vaguely troubling sense that you may never get to know all of it. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface here. For now, maybe we should simply leave it at this: It’s an ambitious attempt by one of our greatest filmmakers to evoke the beauty, frustration, and mystery of existence, and all the forces that act upon it. <br />
<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com112tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-19962241431909794902015-09-29T12:01:00.000-04:002015-09-29T15:46:35.236-04:00The Duke of Burgundy: Discipline and Languish<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It’s hard not to look at Peter Strickland’s portrait of domination and desire and not feel at times like it’s a corrective to how sexuality is portrayed in the mainstream. <i>The Duke of Burgundy</i>, which came out with a whimper earlier this year (right around the same time as <i>Fifty Shades of Grey</i>) but hits Netflix this week, even begins with a nod to the softcore films of the 70s: A beautiful woman in a cape, Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna), rides her bike through a woodsy setting as soft pop plays on the soundtrack. The colors are super-saturated, the credits are blocky and old-fashioned; we even get the occasional freeze-frame. But that self-aware opening belies the film’s deeply felt sense of place and passion – not to mention the rigor of the filmmaker’s vision.<br />
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Strickland’s 2013 <i>cause-celebre</i> <i><a href="http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/movie-review-berberian-sound-studio.html" target="_blank">Berberian Sound Studio</a></i> was a loving homage to Italian <i>giallo </i>films of the 60s and 70s, but beneath its lush, stylized exteriors was a canny tale of alienation and longing. Here, too, he uses that kind of referentiality as a starting point. Evelyn arrives at a well-appointed home, knocks on the door, and is greeted by the stern-faced mistress of the house, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who coolly tells her she’s late. Cynthia then has Evelyn perform various duties around the house, and we quickly begin to sense that what we’re watching is something else: An elaborate role-play of submission and control, in which Cynthia orders Evelyn around, and then punishes her sexually for various errors. (At one point, Cynthia holds up a pair of panties Evelyn forgot to wash. “I can wash it now,” Evelyn replies. “I have other plans for you now.” “Sorry.” “You <i>will </i>be.”)<br />
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Despite the odd subject matter and the oblique, repetitive presentation, <i>The Duke of Burgundy</i> is thoroughly immersive. You can feel the rugs and overstuffed couches and lace curtains and dusty bookshelves of the dimly lit house – it’s an immaculately presented world where everything seems to be in its place, immobile and eternal. Strickland follows the highly-regimented workings of Cynthia and Evelyn’s relationship with a mixture of scientific fascination and studied abstraction. He often cuts away to lovingly photographed rows and rows of butterfly and insect collections, presented like they’re more an intricate pattern than anything designed for research. Similarly, Cynthia and Evelyn regularly attend entomology lectures – but we might be more taken by the occasional mannequins interspersed throughout the audience. (The world they populate is also thoroughly devoid of men – something that’s never mentioned but lends the film an additional, subtle dose of surrealism.)<br />
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The film is erotic, but there’s no real nudity, and precious little sex. You watch these two women enact their routine role-play and you’re seized with a tenderness towards them. “Cynthia, Cynthia, this is all I ever dreamed about…to be owned by someone like you,” Evelyn says at one point, during one of their scripted caresses. There’s real longing there – uncomfortable, yes, strange, yes, but also haunting and passionate. Eventually, the interplay of submission and control reveals interesting vulnerabilities. Cynthia, the ostensible mistress, seems less certain of herself; Evelyn, the servant, is more eager, and more in control – a dynamic that’s probably more accurate about BDSM relationships than the one presented in <i>Fifty Shades of Grey</i>.<br />
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But in the end, what we’re watching isn’t so much a film about unusual sexual practices as it is one about the way all relationships mutate, about how a person we imagine to be one way can become, over the course of time, someone different. That's not an original idea, by any means. But, not unlike the old movies it appropriates, <i>The Duke of Burgundy</i> reinvents that idea to the point where it feels like a revelation. And, as a film about BDSM that uses the subject to reveal broader truths about human nature, it is without any recent equal.<br />
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com116tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-59739191709774816432015-09-09T10:36:00.001-04:002015-09-09T10:36:54.023-04:00Time Out of Mind: Watching Richard Gere Disappear<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As a homeless man wandering the streets of New York in Oren Moverman’s <i>Time Out of Mind</i>, Richard Gere does the opposite of commanding the screen; he vanishes. Not in the way that an actor might “disappear” into a part: Gere isn’t that kind of transformative performer. He vanishes in a more basic sense. He cedes the frame, and the soundtrack, to the people and the city around him. His character has lost everything, and is quickly losing his sense of self as well. The very form of the film reflects that.<br />
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When we first meet George (Gere), he’s being woken up in a bathtub in someone else’s rundown apartment by an angry landlord (Steve Buscemi). We know very little about George – we don’t even catch his name until about halfway through the movie. Kicked to the street, he wanders, helpless, going from an ER waiting room (where he’s briefly allowed to stay the night if it’s colder than 32 degrees outside), to a shelter, then to another shelter. He says almost nothing. The film itself, however, is anything but quiet. We hear snatches of conversations, and cars, and construction, and the hammering cacophony of the city. The film’s booming, ever-changing soundscape constantly keeps us off-balance – in part because there’s so little of George in it. As far as the soundtrack goes, he is already gone.<br />
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One night, George stands outside a bar watching a young bartender (a terrific Jena Malone, who has quietly been having a great couple of years). Meanwhile, we hear another patron’s phone conversation on the soundtrack as he tries to get a girl to sleep with him. We feel like we’ve intruded on a private moment, but George is such a ghost – such a non-entity – that it somehow doesn’t matter. We will eventually learn that the bartender is George’s estranged daughter, but the film avoids spelling things out. George doesn’t want to be seen – and the images and the sounds crowd him out to such a degree that we’re not sure if he could be seen even if he wanted to be. <br />
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For all its formalist qualities, the film still has a very visceral, elemental kick. Moverman eschews context, but he gives us experience instead. George desperately wants to sleep, but can’t seem to do so anywhere he goes. At one shelter, an unseen man’s croupy cough is so agonizing that I almost dry-heaved in the theater (again, that sound design!); at another shelter, a slightly off-kilter younger man keeps George up with a monologue about religion and race and how he’s getting his life on track; later, George becomes friendly with Dixon (Ben Vereen), an aging musician who’s a veteran of the shelters and the streets, and who is as chatty as George is silent. Dixon and others try to help George get registered for services, but the man has no identification, no birth certificate, no utility bills; he can’t even remember his social security number. He’s disappearing even as a data point.<br />
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Though admirably decrepit, Gere hasn’t shed all his smoothness, probably on purpose: He’s lost, but he clearly hasn’t been homeless for long. That subtle, but very present, tension between where he is right now and where he probably once was adds a nerve-wracking unpredictability to this character. We can never really read him, even as his backstory comes through in incomplete drips and drabs. Moverman doesn’t let us get comfortable. Even the film’s final shot – a striking long take –somehow manages to be both hopeful and despairing. <i>Time Out of Mind</i> takes what could have been a standard social issue drama and turns it into poignant, anguished art. It shows us a man in free-fall, and for a while, it lets us fall with him.<br />
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Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com96tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-35458433093618793912015-06-21T11:02:00.000-04:002015-07-04T23:15:05.002-04:00Eden: A Very Sad Movie About Bringing Joy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Save for a couple of brief, telling instances, nobody in Mia Hansen-Løve's <i>Eden </i>ever seems happy. Surprising, perhaps, for a film about DJ culture. Or maybe not. "Between euphoria and melancholia," is how the film's central character, Paul (Felix de Givry) describes the particular subset of electronica he specializes in, “New York Garage with a Parisian twist.” And <i>Eden </i>captures that balance well. It's a very sad movie about bringing joy.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>When we first meet the main characters in the film, they're wandering in the woods in the pre-dawn haze after a rave. The music is distant, inchoate, drifting out from behind closed doors, like something half-imagined. It's hard to tell if these people are strung out, or tired, or just naturally odd: Hansen-Løve isn't much for exposition, and she prefers to create diffuse narratives where the characters we're supposed to focus on only become clear very gradually. (When I first saw <i>Eden</i>, it took me a good 20-30 minutes before I realized Paul was the film's protagonist; it didn't help that he looks not unlike another major character, Cyril, played by Roman Kolinka, with whom I kept confusing him.)<br />
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<i>Eden </i>eventually starts to skip through the years, as Paul and his friend Stan (Hugo Conzelmann) form the DJ duo Cheers and achieve some success. The nature of that success is never entirely clear, by design: They rarely seem to have much money, and Paul continues to live in the same nondescript apartment, but within their insular world, we understand that they're well-known. They even get to go to New York, bringing along their small entourage of friends, lovers, and collaborators, and briefly – for about a minute of screen time, literally – it's as if they haven't a care in the world. And then, the melancholy rushes back: Paul's girlfriend Louise (Pauline Etienne) – the longest lasting in a long line of women he’s with over the years – leaves him, and another friend commits suicide.<br />
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This could easily have been a very melodramatic film: Its broad timeline and the ups and downs of these characters – thwarted love, fame, disappointment, death, etc. – practically call for it. But the film has adopted the distant, slightly too-cool-for-school demeanor of its main character. Paul floats through life, casually shrugging off his mom’s calls to straighten himself up, the slowly gathering financial demands of adulthood, and even the occasional girlfriend’s hint that there’s got to be more than this. He’s always in service to the music around him: When he finds out about the aforementioned suicide, he can't even stop the radio show he's programming; the songs just bounce along as he excuses himself to go break down in an empty stairwell. The beat, for better and for worse, goes on.<br />
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The drifty, ethereal tone of <i>Eden </i>slowly envelops you, and it is one reason why the film, as understated as it is, remains so hard to shake. Hansen-Løve captures both the appeal and the curse of this subculture, the lotus-eater-like wasting away that comes with a life spent pursuing pleasure. But again: Where is the pleasure? Paul's life never seems to go far beyond the boundaries of an increasingly narrow world, and he rarely cracks a smile. Or, to put it another way: Where, exactly, is Eden, in <i>Eden</i>? There's no real blissful moment of innocence or joy one can point to in the film – not even one that's lost, as Edens tend to be, especially in the movies. Rather, there’s something ineffable about the film’s conception of happiness: It’s there in the music, but also forever out of reach. Early on, we see a group of dancers singing along to Joe Smooth’s “Promised Land” (note the title). They’re out of tune and awkward, and their dancing is mostly lifeless, and in the darkness of the club, we can barely see them. But here, then, is one moment of transcendence. It materializes for an instant, then quickly vanishes. Paul himself is almost never a part of it, though. He’s the guy who sometimes gets to make it happen. That’s all.<br />
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But wait. There is one final moment of such transcendence for Paul near the end – after he’s hit rock bottom and pretty much given up on his career, taking on a humdrum day job. He reunites at a club with some of his DJ pals, including Daft Punk, the French electronica duo whose rise to fame has been a narrative touchstone throughout, a kind of veiled, parallel narrative within the film. (They remind me of the way <a href="http://ebiri.blogspot.com/2013/12/inside-llewyn-davis-like-king-midass.html" target="_blank">Bob Dylan is used in <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i></a>, as an indicator that we’ve been watching the story of the guy who didn’t make it.) Late in the evening, Paul stands by himself in the empty club as a female DJ plays “Within,” from <i>le Daft</i>. For what seems like the first time, Paul becomes part of the audience; in fact, he’s the <i>only </i>audience. The typical DJ transaction – they play a song that you like, and become almost god-like in your eyes – has come full circle, and now he’s on the receiving end. It’s the penultimate scene in the film, and an appropriately melancholy bit of euphoria. The beat goes on, even if we don’t. <br />
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Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com58tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-40219667098498751182015-06-14T08:11:00.000-04:002015-08-05T06:59:29.162-04:00“This Is Our Furiosa.” Mad Max: Fury Road and the Moments In Between<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There’s a moment about two-thirds of the way through <a href="http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/with-the-new-mad-max-george-miller-the-michelangelo-of-motorized-mayhem-delivers-a-masterpiece/Content?oid=5091377" target="_blank"><i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i> </a>that speaks to one reason why I love the film so much. It comes during one of the film’s rare quiet scenes. Max (Tom Hardy), Furiosa (Charlize Theron), and their small lot of refugees have arrived among the Vuvalini, the all-female warrior tribe from which Furiosa was stolen, along with her mother, many years ago. Most of the women remember Furiosa only dimly: She was taken, as she says, “7000 days” ago, “plus the ones I don’t remember.” They ask what happened to her mother. “She died, on the third day,” Furiosa replies. And then the Vuvalini reflexively perform a quiet, brief mourning gesture – holding a hand up, grabbing at the air, and bringing it to their chest. After seeing them, Furiosa herself slowly does the gesture as well.<br />
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This exchange lasts all of twelve seconds, and it’s probably easy to miss, or ignore, for some. But every time I see the film, it strikes me as a deceptively profound moment. Watch Theron’s performance here: As she grabs at the air, her haunted eyes watch her own hand, as if she were seeing it for the first time. Her face is that of someone remembering something that was once probably very much a part of her – not just her mother, but this whole Vuvalini ritual, and the sense of belonging it implies. She’s re-learning, in other words, the person she used to be.<br />
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We also realize that, as a captive young girl, Furiosa probably never properly got to mourn her mother. She probably couldn’t – or maybe she chose not to. At any rate, it’s clear that she put this part of herself away for a long, long time; she may not have even realized it was still there. Here, in this quiet gesture, is a world of backstory and development for those who want it. It fires the imagination – but it doesn’t <i>insist </i>on it. Like the best art, it empowers the viewer to drift and dream beyond the borders of the work.<br />
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<i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i> has been widely, ecstatically praised, and that certainly makes me happy. But it has also come under some criticism for its relentlessness: Even some who admire it admit that, as a non-stop chase movie, it’s a little too much of one thing and not enough of another. I can understand that criticism, but I can’t share it, precisely because of moments like these, which say so much more to me – and do so far more eloquently – than reams of exposition or dialogue ever could.<br />
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True, it’s a brief scene right before the chase starts back up again, but its very brevity is the point. Furiosa hasn’t had a chance to slow down and reflect – nor have we. That it’s so adrift amid the madness gives the moment added depth: If we were to then go on and hear more about Furiosa's past, or her mother, or whatever, it would lose its significance amid something more conventional. (To be fair, the larger scene itself does go on, to reveal that "the green place" Furiosa has been dreaming about is no more, resulting in her breakdown. But this little gesture of recognition and belonging is critical to understanding <i>why</i> Furiosa breaks down; otherwise, it would be a mere grace note.)<br />
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Here, I’ll go one step further. <i>Fury Road</i> is, yes, a fantastic piece of action filmmaking – breathless, beautiful, and bold – but it’s also something else. Through its sheer, spectacular drive, it puts me in the same kind of reverie that slow cinema does. One of the great pleasures of watching the static long-take aesthetic – in a film like, say, Tsai Ming-Liang’s <i>What Time Is It There?</i> or Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s <i>Distant </i>– is the way it focuses our attention on small details that gain monumental importance: a pair of wet socks on a radiator, or an otherwise irrelevant small fish swimming around in an aquarium. I would argue that for all the sublime beauty of the non-stop action in <i>Fury Road</i>, it possesses a similar kind of refinement.<br />
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In movies like these, the absence of conventional dramatic development makes us lock in on the smallest of gestures and incidents – not out of poverty, mind you, but because great filmmakers teach us to see all over again. Their work transforms us, changes our inner rhythms and points us in all sorts of directions we may never have noticed. And yes, a film by George Miller at his best does that same thing. Even if, instead of long takes of people staring off into space, he’s giving us fast cuts of trucks and motorcycles flying through the air.<br />
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(If you want to read more from me on <i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i>, you can read my r<a href="http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/with-the-new-mad-max-george-miller-the-michelangelo-of-motorized-mayhem-delivers-a-masterpiece/Content?oid=5091377" target="_blank">eview of the film for the Nashville Scene here</a>, and this longer <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/george-millers-post-nuclear-families.html" target="_blank">essay on the films of George Miller, for Vulture, here</a>.)<br />
<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com115tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-22625592750848646202015-02-26T09:38:00.000-05:002015-02-26T09:38:16.654-05:00Forgotten Films: Rachel, Rachel (Paul Newman, 1968) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The death of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/movies/stewart-stern-92-screenwriter-of-rebel-without-a-cause-dies.html" target="_blank">screenwriter Stewart Stern</a> a couple of weeks ago brought some <a href="http://deadline.com/2015/02/stewart-stern-death-stephen-chbosky-christopher-mcquarrie-rebel-without-a-cause-1201370371/" target="_blank">fine remembrances</a> from <a href="http://invisibleinkblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/thoughts-on-stewart-stern.html" target="_blank">numerous writers</a>, many of whose lives he touched as <a href="http://news.moviefone.com/2005/09/01/interview-stewart-stern-part-one/" target="_blank">a mentor</a> as well as a filmmaker. Obviously, most folks who knew Stern's name -- if they knew it at all -- was as the screenwriter of <i>Rebel Without a Cause</i>. But his passing reminded me that, years ago, I’d written a “Forgotten Films” feature for Nerve.com about another work -- <i>Rachel, Rachel</i>, Paul Newman's directorial debut. Lesser known but almost equally as great as <i>Rebel</i>, it's since been <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Joanne-Woodward/dp/B001KP2J6W" target="_blank">released on DVD</a> by Warner, so now there's actually a chance that people might rediscover it. What follows is a slightly edited version of my original piece. (For more on the Forgotten Films project, go <a href="http://ebiri.blogspot.com/2011/12/forgotten-films-our-mothers-house-jack.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)<br />
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<a name='more'></a><i>Rachel, Rachel</i> is hardly ever discussed nowadays, but it was a hit back in 1968, spending three weeks at the top of the box office and earning four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Those nominations aren’t so surprising – the film is anchored by a stunning lead performance from nominee Joanne Woodward (aka Mrs. Paul Newman) in the title role, and Stern’s excellent screenplay was duly recognized at the time by the Academy as well. But that box office is indeed a bit unexpected, and a sign of how moviegoers’ tastes have changed: <i>Rachel, Rachel</i> is a decidedly elliptical, understated film – “arty” would be the word tossed around today. That such a film ever connected with a mass audience is both baffling and encouraging.<br />
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Unspooling initially like a rural variation on a T.S. Eliot poem, <i>Rachel </i>focuses on the life of a 35-year-old schoolteacher (Woodward) living with her mother in a small town, desperately yearning but unable to connect with the world around her. Rachel’s family was in the funeral business, and her film is often punctuated with flashbacks to her late mortician father going about his grim business – picking up the dead, cleaning the corpses, etc. Rachel has been surrounded by death her whole life. The family car is a hearse – a surreal symbol whose obviousness is undercut by its sheer perversity.<br />
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She also has a thing for trees – a friend gives her a miniature tree as a present, and Rachel dreams of trees when she’s trying to calm down. But her real life is one of suffocating stasis. Her existence in the town of her birth is awash in memories, suggesting that she is circling around her life in an endless, despairing loop. Rachel spends time taking care of her mother, teaching her kids, dreaming of the past, and enduring flashes of what life might be like if something happened to her – <i>anything </i>really, be it good (running away with one of her students, saving him from careless parents), bad (dropping dead in the middle of the street), or merely exciting (an illicit affair with her married principal). She’s the Walter Mitty of mundane happenstance.<br />
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Newman, Stern, and Woodward create a narrative that alternates between fevered longing and chilly entrapment. Despite her daydreams, Rachel resists connection when it comes her way. Another teacher friend Calla (Estelle Parsons) invites her to her church, a kind of hippified variation on a revival meeting. Rachel initially says no, but when she finally attends, she finds herself confronted by a charismatic preacher whose wild exhortations make her nearly suffer a breakdown. (“<i>The animals are less alone with roaring than we are with all our words</i>,” he yells.) Afterwards, the somewhat mousy Calla comes on to Rachel, only to be rebuffed – thus leading to a bad break with what appears to be the one friend our heroine has. Everyone, it seems, is seeking something, and one of the film’s great accomplishments is to give us the full range of human yearning, without passing much judgment on it: The church meeting, despite flashes of absurdism, isn’t treated as a frivolous affair, and Calla, for all her pathos, is one of the more sympathetic characters in the film.<br />
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Rachel’s life appears on the verge of change when she meets an old school friend, Nick (James Olson), whose dead twin brother she saw her father prepare for burial as a child. Nick, in town for a brief while, also comes on to Rachel – but instead of the sudden kiss of a closeted lesbian, his are the moves of a smooth talking ladies’ man: He invites her to a movie and when she asks what’s playing, looks into her eyes and says, “What’s the difference?” The two immediately strike up a love affair, and Nick’s physicality – their first time together, he takes her into the woods, strips down, and holds her – is a stark contrast to Rachel’s buttoned-down repression. Soon enough, Nick brings her out. She spends an idyllic time at his family’s farm, bailing hay, milking cows, learning to ride a tractor, and making love. But we can also see Nick for what he is: Just an ordinary, good-looking guy out to have a good time. As Rachel allows herself to be drawn in more into this relationship, it becomes clear that her dreams are about to be dashed yet again.<br />
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The manner in which Rachel’s raw, unchecked emotions come desperately flooding out as soon as she feels like she may have found somebody – “I am happy. I love you. I want a child,” she says, soon after she and Nick get together – provides a further hint to her inner life. Rachel isn’t a cold fish. Far from it; she’s a person of deep, turbulent feelings, and the script (along with Woodward's performance) makes it clear that her attempts to close herself to the world are a symptom of the shame she feels at them. In many senses, when Calla comes on to her, she becomes a mirror, or more accurately a cautionary tale, for our heroine. Rachel may not be a lesbian, but she too has dreamed of making sudden, romantic gestures like that, and the disdain with which she herself treats Calla epitomizes the scorn she fears she will endure if she ever opens up.<br />
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The revival meeting also suggests that this desire to connect isn’t all that unique: The characters in <i>Rachel, Rachel </i>are all reaching out, then suddenly withdrawing. All too human, they don’t quite know what they want. Sadly, this is true for Nick as well – while he certainly likes Rachel, he himself has no intention of continuing through with their relationship. (One final revelation – not a particularly startling one, but I’ll keep it hidden regardless – suggests that Nick is in his own ways as unable to connect as Rachel is.)<br />
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Newman once said that his one direction for Woodward was “Pinch it.” She certainly appears to have run with that instruction. Her performance here is a clinic in closing oneself off while still allowing the audience to peek inside – how to emote without emoting. Despite his recollection of such modest direction, Newman himself was particularly adept at this kind of performance, too (check out his turn in <i>The Long, Hot Summer</i>), and it’s easy to see both why he was drawn to this material and why he was able to film it so well. His work here is impeccable; even though he made a few other films, I’d say <i>Rachel, Rachel</i> was his best one as a director. And Stern's script certainly ranks alongside his <i>Rebel Without a Cause</i> as a profound study of a fractured, and perhaps distinctively American, soul. Someday, the film will hopefully be better known.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Oh, hello. Did we break your concentration?"</td></tr>
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com78tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-43971377303341808152015-02-07T11:47:00.000-05:002015-02-07T21:34:42.879-05:00My Top 20 (Actually, 21) Films of 2014<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I’m late with this. I’m always late with this. In part it’s because, not having to worry about deadlines, I can be late with it. (None of my outlets ever seem to want a Top 10 list from me, for some reason.) In part it’s because I don’t usually think of my movie year as being finalized until I’ve submitted my poll in Mike D’Angelo’s Skandies poll, which usually closes in February and whose results are being <a href="http://enchantedmitten.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">rolled out as we speak, over here</a>. Anyway, I won’t clear my throat so much, other than to ask: When the hell did I become such a big sci-fi nerd?<br />
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<b>20. Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu)</b><br />
This film has proven to be more divisive than expected, but I loved how its bold, possibly ridiculous high-wire stylistic act matches the bold, probably ridiculous high-wire theatrical act at its center. The fact that the play Riggan Thompson is working on seems to be a turd is part of what makes the film so wonderfully agitating and alive to me. That’s also why I still firmly believe that the film basically collapses in its very final scenes, as it starts wrapping things up and answering questions best left open-ended -- it feels like a betrayal of its very unconventionality. But still. Good job, González Iñárritu. You win this round.<br />
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<b>19. Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)</b><br />
A beautifully acted, energetically directed chamber piece that’s been mistaken for an endorsement of dodgy, abusive teaching tactics. Maybe it's that, but it's also a tragedy. And it can be both at once -- that is the beauty and majesty of art. <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/movie-review-whiplash.html" target="_blank">Here's David Edelstein</a>, putting it better than I ever could: "<i>Whiplash </i>will spark debate—some of it angry—over whether, in the end, Chazelle is vindicating Fletcher’s methods, suggesting that only a harsh taskmaster can push Andrew to the next level. I don’t think he’s that conclusive. But he’s certainly leaving the question open. When you read Jan Swafford’s exhaustive new Beethoven biography or listen to world-class musicians or Olympic athletes talk about their driving parents and lack of a “real” childhood, you see how pushing kids to the brink can in some cases pay off. It can also—more often—be inhuman, soul-killing, even criminal; it can screw people up for life...A good dramatist doesn’t need to reconcile these two sides, only bring them to life."<br />
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<b>18. Big Eyes (Tim Burton)</b><br />
After years in the blockbuster wilderness, Tim Burton pulls back and delivers one of the most human films of his career – as well as the closest thing he’s come to a genuine horror movie. Having seen it several times now, I’m mesmerized by its playful mixing of genres, the way it goes from Sirkian melodrama to Bava-esque thriller to Grimm fairy tale to zany legal comedy. And it’s all anchored by a powerfully quiet Amy Adams performance that does wonders with mere glances and body language. She achieves that wonderful, impossible thing in cinema -- showing thought on screen. Watch her interactions with Christoph Waltz. He’s like a crocodile, his jaw jutting out as if it’s about to open up and consume her, while we can sense her mind racing, figuring out what to do with the surreal tragicomedy her life has become.<br />
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<b>17. Coherence (James Ward Byrkit)</b><br />
Somewhat hilariously, <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/movie-review-coherence.html" target="_blank">when I reviewed <i>Coherence</i></a>, I called it he best science-fiction film I’d seen in years, a statement which was eventually belied by several other sci-fi films I saw this summer. That, however, takes away nothing from this film’s greatness. It’s wonderful, and as a feat of imaginative, low-budget mind-fuckery, it’s absolutely revelatory. I thought <a href="https://thedissolve.com/reviews/875-coherence/" target="_blank">Mike D'Angelo put it well</a>: "Shot over five nights in a single location, and almost entirely improvised, <i>Coherence </i>is no-budget filmmaking at its most delectably inventive. Byrkit’s résumé includes a lot of work in the art department on Gore Verbinski’s films, plus a story credit and voice work on <i>Rango</i>, but there’s no trace of Hollywood in this lean, cerebral puzzler, which trusts viewers to pay close attention to offhand lines and briefly glimpsed objects to piece together what’s happening.”<br />
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<b>16. Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)</b><br />
Tsai returns, bolder and stranger than ever. <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/movie-review-stray-dogs-tsai-ming-liang.html" target="_blank">From my review</a>: “I counted fewer than 80 shots in all of <i>Stray Dogs</i>, each gorgeous and immersive and bewildering in its own way. The power of the director’s cinema lies in its aural and tactile quality — and that’s where we might find a hint of a meaning. If I had to find one word to describe <i>Stray Dogs</i>, it would be <i>cavernous</i>. There is no warmth to be found anywhere in the film. Even the one nice house we see is cold and vast. The impoverished characters are often at the mercy of the elements – the driving rain that pounds their ramshackle bedroom, or the howling wind that blasts Dad at work on that Taipei street, or the huge, chilling blackness of night.”<br />
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<b>15. Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez)</b><br />
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/harvard-sensory-ethnography-lab-profile-leviathan-sweetgrass.html" target="_blank">Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab</a> and about how they’re revolutionizing documentaries and cinema in general; earlier, I <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/04/movie-review-manakamana.html" target="_blank">reviewed <i>Manakamana</i>, here</a>. While it’s maybe not as mind-warpingly intense as <i>Leviathan</i>, this spellbinding film – built out of locked-down long-takes which, by virtue of the fact that they’re fixed inside a cable car, work the tension between movement and stasis -- is a good example of why. In a just world, this would play in a loop at the Ziegfeld or on an IMAX screen, where you could wander and vanish into its visual-aural landscape.<br />
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<b>14. Me and You (Bernardo Bertolucci)</b><br />
This is possibly the first Bertolucci film in decades to not sit right up at the top of my list. But that’s not a knock. I still love this delicate movie, and I love it a little more each time I see it. <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/07/review-bernardo-bertolucci-me-and-you.html" target="_blank">From my review</a>: “For all the limitations of its setting and palette, this is a gorgeous, visually exciting movie…His camera still follows the characters with sinewy long takes, letting different sources of light and dark play across these faces, matching the wild and strange emotions beginning to stir within…The director is kind here, though. He lets the anxiety live on in his characters, but by the end of the film, he still finds a way to leave them on a fleeting, stolen smile. There’s a wisdom here, and it’s reflected in the glancing, gentle nature of this film. One can’t help but wonder if, now closer to the end than to the beginning, but also happy just to be directing again, Bertolucci has chosen to give us a beautiful fragment in time, a glimpse of a life just beginning to be lived. <i>Me and You</i> doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but it feels like the work of a contented man.” (To read my longer profile of Bertolucci from this year, <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/07/bernardo-bertolucci-me-you-retrospective.html" target="_blank">go here</a>.)<br />
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<b>13. John Wick (Chad Stahelski and David Leitch)</b><br />
I expect to write more about this movie soon, but here’s <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/john-wick-movie-review.html" target="_blank">what I said about it </a>at the time of its release: “Filmmakers have been aestheticizing violence for as long as movies have been around, and the idea of yet another action flick with hot music and cool images (however hot the music, however cool the images) may not strike many as cause for celebration. But <i>John Wick </i>commits to its defiant unreality, giving us a fantastical underworld of ritual, mythic figures and color-coded spaces… [It’s] a violent, violent, violent film, but its artful splatter is miles away from the brutality of <i>Taken</i> or the gleeful gore of <i>The Equalizer</i>. It’s a beautiful coffee-table action movie.”<br />
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<b>12. Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman)</b><br />
In the annals of movie stardom, Tom Cruise holds a special place. He has been one of our biggest mega-stars for decades, but he’s also managed a surprising amount of diversity during that time. He doesn’t have much range, but he uses what range he does have in interesting ways. As William Cage, a hapless soldier who keeps coming back from the dead to relive a day until he can become better at it, Cruise has found an ideal metaphor for his persistence. He’s the guy who’s driven. He’s the guy who won’t take no for an answer. He never looks back. He takes what he’s learned and built, and he keeps moving forward. If William Cage has to keep waking up and trying to figure out how to save the world given his particular predicament, Tom Cruise has to approach every part trying to figure out how to do it while, essentially, still being Tom Cruise. (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/06/movies/tom-cruise-battles-invaders-in-edge-of-tomorrow.html" target="_blank">Manohla Dargis's review</a> is also very much worth your time, as it contains this excellent insight: "Mr. Liman brings Mr. Cruise’s smile out of semiretirement and also gives him the kind of physical challenges at which he so brilliantly excels. Mr. Cruise’s great talent has always been body-based; he doesn’t put across complex emotional shadings, tunneling so deep into a character’s psychology that it can feel like a transmogrification. Much like old-school, pre-Method movie stars, he takes possession of his characters from the outside in, expressing their qualities and kinks through his extraordinarily controlled physicality.")<br />
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<b>11. Dear White People (Justin Simien)</b><br />
I think <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/movies/dear-white-people-about-racial-hypocrisy-at-a-college.html?_r=0" target="_blank">A.O. Scott put it best</a>: "Mr. Simien serves harsh medicine with remarkable charm and good humor. He is an incisive writer and a disciplined and decorous filmmaker, framing and cutting his scenes with clean, almost classical economy. Someone says of Sam, an aspiring filmmaker, that she secretly likes Ingmar Bergman more than Spike Lee. Mr. Lee’s <i>School Daze</i> is a clear reference point here, and while Bergman is not an obvious influence, it’s possible to catch echoes of Whit Stillman, Claude Chabrol and even Pedro Almodóvar in Mr. Simien’s feel for the nuances and perversities of social life." (You can read <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/movie-review-dear-white-people.html" target="_blank">my review, here</a>,)<br />
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<b>10. Force Majeure (Ruben Ostlund)</b><br />
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<b>9. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)</b><br />
Paul Thomas Anderson has been futzing around with his name so much he might as well just replace the “Paul” with “Perplexing,” given the last few films he’s made. I loved <i>Inherent Vice</i> the moment I saw it, and I’ve revisited it a couple of times. But today, I don’t know which I love more: The experience of actually watching <i>Inherent Vice</i> and being in that world, or the mildly intoxicated feeling I get some time after seeing the movie. And for all the film’s adherence to its source material (it’s almost ludicrously faithful to Thomas Pynchon’s wonderful novel), that reflective quality is what’s so unique and special about it. Anderson takes Pynchon’s ornate, heavily-engineered (and, might I add, very male) text and turns it into something elegiac, the words spoken by Joanna Newsom as a half-remembered lament for something that may not have ever existed – whether that’s a country, an era, a relationship, or just a plot point. (You can find more of my thoughts on this film interspersed throughout <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/lists/30-best-paul-thomas-anderson-actors-20141210" target="_blank">this ranked list</a> of the best performances in Anderson's films.)<br />
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<b>8. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho)</b><br />
"<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/train-in-vain-how-snowpiercer-became-the-summers-coolest-movie-20140626" target="_blank">I wanted to make an exciting movie about the class struggle</a>."<br />
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<b>7. The Immigrant (James Gray)</b><br />
From <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/james-gray-american-cinemas-worst-kept-secret.html" target="_blank">my profile of James Gray</a>: “[James] Gray makes a type of movie that barely exists anymore. His films are serious, literate, medium-budget dramas — a vanishing middle ground in an industry increasingly polarized between ginormous tentpoles and micro-budget indies. Many filmmakers in that range have migrated to TV, but that’s not where Gray’s passion lies. His films yearn for the big screen; alongside their carefully constructed stories, they also have old-school stylistic virtues like lush production design (on a budget), expressive camerawork, and intimate close-ups that demand to be seen on a 30-foot screen.”<br />
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<b>6. The LEGO Movie (Chris Miller and Phil Lord)</b><br />
If you were reading me in early 2014, you may have noticed that I called <i>The LEGO Movie</i> not only <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/02/movie-review-the-lego-movie.html" target="_blank">a high-water mark for pop-culture referentiality</a>, but also a "Bergmanesque glipse into the mind of God" as well as a pseudo-communist rebuke to our culture's fantasies of exceptionalism, while also being an indulgence of same. It's not that I don't stand by all those things, but what I was really trying to say was: This movie is funny as shit and I loved it and I don't want to ever stop watching it ever.<br />
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<b>5. We Are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson)</b><br />
From <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/lukas-moodysson-interview-we-are-the-best.html" target="_blank">my interview</a> with Moodysson: “My intention behind the film is very much about joy, and how there are always small possibilities of joy and hope and happiness. And I think it was also a film that came out of … well, sometimes there are things that happen to you in life, but you can’t talk about them because it’s someone else’s experience. But there was a time when someone I knew a little bit had had a terrible experience. It was a friend of one of my children, and I just thought, Life is so difficult for young people. So in a strange way, the idea for the film is borne a little bit out of frustration and anger, and feeling that I had to do something that was uplifting. It’s weird, because some of the darker things I’ve written have been made during really happy circumstances, and the opposite.”<br />
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<b>4. Selma (Ava DuVernay)</b><br />
Since so much of the debate around this film has wound up focusing on its Oscar travails, the best thing I can do here is point you to my pal Glenn Kenny's excellent post, appropriately titled "<a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2015/01/maybe-selma-is-too-smart-to-be-an-oscar-movie-anyway.html" target="_blank">Maybe Selma is too smart to be an Oscar movie anyway</a>": "When I saw Ava DuVernay’s <i>Selma </i>last December, I, like many other critics, was terrifically taken with it. And I was also a little surprised. I was not surprised that it was good—DuVernay’s 2012 <i>Middle of Nowhere</i> demonstrated she had both considerable talent and considerable perspective—but at the way it was good. DuVernay stuck to her metaphorical guns with respect to perspective and declined to deliver a Great Man biopic. Instead she wove a drama of considerable intelligence, empathy, and analytical chops. She made a film sufficiently unconventional so as to be called radical, a film whose style—or perhaps the better word for what I mean is 'mode'—I thought, owed more to Steven Soderbergh’s <i>Che </i>than it did to Richard Attenborough’s <i>Gandhi</i>." (Meanwhile, you can read <a href="http://ebiri.blogspot.com/2015/01/selma-of-moral-arcs-and-men.html" target="_blank">my review here</a>.)<br />
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<b>3. Two Days, One Night</b><br />
<a href="http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/marion-cotillards-raw-nerve-performance-makes-two-days-one-night-the-dardenne-brothers-masterpiece/Content?oid=4901717" target="_blank">From my review</a>: “<i>Two Days, One Night </i>isn't nearly as touched by violence or desperation as the Dardennes' previous films, but it has a beautifully suspenseful premise. It is, effectively, a ticking-clock thriller, only in this case our hero isn't trying to track down a killer or stop a bomb. And while the threat of violence isn't entirely absent — at one point, two co-workers briefly come to blows — the filmmakers still manage to find remarkable urgency and tension as Sandra goes from co-worker to co-worker… The Dardennes are known for the immediacy of their camera — close by, hand-held, often following characters behind their heads. But they also manage to find real suspense and urgency in Sandra's otherwise static exchanges with her co-workers, placing obstacles and creating distinct visual fields to underline the distance and alienation between these characters… We're with Sandra throughout <i>Two Days, One Night</i>, but each exchange feels like another window being opened into the world.”<br />
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<b>2. Beyond the Lights (Gina Prince-Bythewood)</b><br />
I gushed about this film in <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/movie-review-beyond-the-lights.html" target="_blank">my review</a>, and then I gushed about it some more when I <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/gina-prince-bythewood-interview-beyond-the-lights.html" target="_blank">interviewed Gina Prince-Bythewood</a>. But having seen it a few more times over the past few months, I feel like there’s something I missed initially: How sad it is. I mean, it’s a drama, and a very patient one at that. But it’s imbued with a deep sense of melancholy from its very first frames. The whole movie is about living lives others have planned for you, and, despite its colorful depiction of the hip-hop world and its swooning romance, it manages to hold the real explosion of feeling --- that final fairy-tale burst of joy – right up to the end. You walk away from the movie dancing, even though so much of it is grounded in the characters’ low-boil anguish. It’s fucking wonderful. (Also, you should read <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/beyond-the-lights-2014" target="_blank">Odie Henderson's review of the film</a>, which contains this wonderful, illuminating bit: "Prince-Bythewood specializes in characters who are as complex as those residing in literature. The people she writes have lives that exist separately from their romantic and societal entanglements. The audience tags along with each of her creations down their separate pathways, so when a character reacts to a certain situation, we know why.")<br />
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<b>1. A TIE: Interstellar (Christopher Nolan) and Actress (Robert Greene)</b><br />
At first glance, you couldn’t think of two movies that are more different. One is a hugely-hyped, hugely-expensive, hugely-huge, immaculately constructed and highly structured sci-fi epic about humankind’s future in distant galaxies. The other is a teeny-tiny handmade documentary (teenier and tinier and more handmade than most) about a woman attempting to re-launch an acting career amid the messiness of life – a movie that seems to embody that very messiness, whose textures evoke the shape-shifting, fragile nature of modern domesticity. And yet, both movies, for all their many other pleasures, hit me in the same spot. Both movies, on some level, are about the choices parents make, are about the balance (or, usually, imbalance) between self-actualization and self-sacrifice, and about how, whether you like it or not, sometimes the sacrifice is the actualization. Greene’s film is called <i>Actress</i>; it could easily also be called <i>Mother</i>. Nolan’s film is called <i>Interstellar</i>, but it could easily be called <i>Astronaut</i>, or <i>Father</i>. Maybe I’m crazy, but I’m hoping that somewhere out there is a lucky soul who saw these two movies on opening day – November 7, 2014, for both, interestingly – who has some inkling of what I’m getting at.<br />
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Anyway, this is <a href="http://ebiri.blogspot.com/2014/12/interstellar-loneliest-journey-in-human.html" target="_blank">from my essay on <i>Interstellar</i></a>:<br />
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“All of <i>Interstellar</i>’s talk of black holes and wormholes; all those massive machines spinning and connecting across the vast IMAX chasms of space; McConaughey riding the universe’s biggest wave; that stentorian score, with its ticking clocks doing constant battle against funereal organ chords…It’s all been leading to this moment – a man replaying the moment when he broke his daughter’s heart. And now, by essentially reliving his separation from Murph over and over again, Coop has the chance to correct it. No, he can’t change the past. He can’t keep himself from leaving. But he can want to stay.”<br />
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And this, <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/movie-review-actress-documentary.html" target="_blank">from my review of <i>Actress</i></a>:<br />
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“At one point, Burre stands in her children’s room, organizing the fake money in their fake cash register, moving the fake shopping cart. Elsewhere, she talks of deciding to play house with Tim. What is an actor or actress but a more extreme version of ourselves, crystalizing the make-believe at the heart of how we all confront the real world? That question, of course, is not just at the heart of this movie; it’s at the heart of every movie. It’s the very mystery of cinema itself, and few films embody it better than <i>Actress</i>.”<br />
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Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-69742892650351651562015-01-04T13:00:00.000-05:002015-08-05T07:03:53.603-04:00Selma: Of Moral Arcs and Men<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of the most fascinating things about Ava DuVernay’s <i>Selma </i>is the way history itself seems to become an actual character in it. But not in a portentous, solemn way. Depicting the explosive events in the Alabama city in 1965, which culminated with the epic march from Selma to Montgomery, the film seeks not to contain the entire Civil Rights struggle, or even to offer a biopic-style portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. (played by the great David Oyelowo). Rather, it focuses on the machinations, negotiations, in-fighting, and backroom dealings that went into the organization of the march and Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Watching the film, I was occasionally reminded of Francesco Rosi’s political dramas of the 1960s and 70s. In films like <i>The Mattei Affair</i>, Rosi gave us the spectacle of men talking and arguing about process, activism, methods, and organizations – history told through the mundane poetry of acronyms and theory, the kind of thing most filmmakers would ruthlessly avoid. It takes a unique kind of patience, sobriety, and skill to make that compelling on a movie screen. DuVernay’s clearly got all of that.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Almost all of the characters in <i>Selma </i>know where history is headed. It’s largely a foregone conclusion throughout the film that some form of voting rights legislation will eventually be passed. But what it will contain, how it will happen, and when – there’s the rub. Waiting things out is not an option, as King makes it clear: If blacks can’t register to vote, he points out, they can’t serve on juries; and if they can’t serve on juries, then people who do things like bomb churches can’t be brought to justice. He also admits that voting rights can’t undo poverty, or crime, or the psychological poison brought on by centuries of oppression; his words are mirrored, ironically enough, by Alabama Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth), who later confesses to Lyndon B. Johnson that he fears voting rights will be just one more step in a march towards blacks getting jobs, political power, and social welfare.<br />
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And so, the dialogue -- tense, gripping, beautiful -- keeps reinforcing the notion that voting rights isn’t an end goal, but a critical step in a longer, deeper historical process. So, too, does the imagery. DuVernay is a ground-level director who likes to tell ground-level stories, and at first, she’s less interested in the more epic qualities of these events than she is in the intimacy and immediacy of faces. She often shoots her characters in close-up, at odd angles, using shallow focus; it’s an effective way to convey the sense that no one quite has the full picture, that even though people may understand the broader arc of history, they don’t necessarily know how to get there. Everybody’s flailing, in a sense, trying to figure out the next step.<br />
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But the focus on faces doesn’t mean that space is unimportant. We often see Dr. King in church or at home – the two spaces between which he finds himself torn in the film. (The scene where he and his wife tenderly reminisce about how he once talked about getting a small-town church, owning a comfortable home, and living a life of quiet domesticity is heartbreaking.) In his conversations with Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), we also sense the burden of Johnson’s office. A discussion about whether voting rights should take precedence over other Presidential priorities is framed with a portrait of George Washington at the center top of the frame, as if it were bearing down on both men. Johnson, too, is looking to figure out the right way to act – to do so in such a way that history doesn’t ridicule him down the line. In Steven Spielberg’s <i>Lincoln</i>, The White House was <a href="http://ebiri.blogspot.com/2012/11/ghosts-in-american-machine-amistad-and.html" target="_blank">filmed like a haunted house</a>, filled with the ghosts of slavery, waiting for the light to finally come in. Here, it’s filmed like a prison, ringed on all sides by history. When Johnson discusses the protesters outside the gates or in the lobby, we sense the anxiety of a man under siege. But we never <i>see </i>those protesters, as if to underscore the idea that they’re as much in the abstract as they are flesh and blood.<br />
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It could be argued that both King and Johnson are two men struggling to inhabit their "offices" -- their greater roles within a broad historical arc. So, <i>Selma </i>culminates in two climactic moments, both of which are filmed with the kind of sweep that DuVernay has studiously avoided for much of the film: The march itself, which intercuts between elegant crane shots and newsreel footage, and Johnson’s “We shall overcome” speech of March 1965, which is given an appropriate level of pomp and circumstance. After all the backroom wheeling and dealing that the film has shown, it’s a refreshingly un-cynical portrait of a political leader assuming the power and nobility of his office.<br />
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Some have claimed that the film downplays Johnson’s role in the Selma protests and makes it seem as if he had to be dragged into signing the Voting Rights Act. I’m not a historian, but that seems irrelevant to me in this context. Because here we have a powerful depiction of what the Presidency <i>can</i> mean, even when it’s been compromised. To take an example from recent history: When Barack Obama publicly came out in support of gay marriage in 2012, for one instant, all the rumors and doublespeak and unfortunate, previously-staked positions briefly faded away. Even though it was clear that a ton of political crisis management had finally led to this moment, the moment still had incredible power. <i>Selma</i>, better than just about any recent historical film, portrays the tension between knowledge and action, between vision and work. It dares to unravel a historical process, even as it celebrates it.<br />
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-27094924045955038942014-12-30T09:41:00.001-05:002014-12-31T01:07:05.195-05:00Interstellar: “The Loneliest Journey in Human History”<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>He wept to think that his dreamless slumber had spanned the entire lifetime of his first child. When he could face the ordeal, he would summon the records that were waiting for him in the memory banks. He would watch his son grow to manhood and hear his voice calling across the centuries with greetings he could never answer…One day the pain would be gone, but never the memory.</i><br />
- Arthur C. Clarke, <i>The Songs of Distant Earth*</i></blockquote>
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You don’t hear the word “subtle” tossed around much in discussions of Christopher Nolan’s <i>Interstellar</i>, but here’s something I found quite nuanced about its first hour: The sly hint of a smile that creeps on Cooper’s (Matthew McConaughey) face whenever he discusses the idea of going off into space. For all his insistence that he has a family he needs to care for, Coop can’t help but grin – ever so slightly – when Professor Brand (Michael Caine) tells him that he’s the right man for a daring new space mission. And watch his eyes as he tries later to justify leaving to his distraught daughter Murph: “They chose <i>me</i>, Murph,” he says, and he seems to be beaming – more a proud child than a regretful father.<br />
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Coop, whose very name suggests restlessness, and whose one previous attempt to go into space was aborted before he left the stratosphere, basically <i>is</i> a child. Early on, when Murph comes to the breakfast table with a broken lunar lander toy from her bookshelf, he says, “What’d you do to <i>my </i>lander?” Coop’s daughter walks around school with <i>his </i>old science textbooks. He’s a loving parent, but not a particularly attentive one. He forgets parent-teacher conferences; he doesn’t know how to deal with his daughter’s problems; he’s more excited about chasing stray Indian spy drones than he is about getting his kids to school on time. He’s a dreamer, out of his time and place.<br />
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<i>Interstellar </i>initially positions itself as Coop’s thwarted dream of flight finally coming true, but over the course of the film, our hero’s dream – as dreams often do in the movies – becomes something of a nightmare. One of Nolan’s greatest strengths has always been his control of tone, and, not unlike <i>Inception</i>, <i>Interstellar </i>is a blockbuster bathed in sadness and desolation. Cooper and his team’s journey is a bleak, lonely one. They travel the far reaches of space and find themselves on empty, barren planets – one an endless stretch of ocean, the other an endless stretch of ice. Meanwhile, Earth is turning into an endless stretch of dust, filled with fewer and fewer people. Humanity seems like an old, dying patient that no one visits anymore – managing from day to day but quietly slipping away. That subtext, of course, is the very subject of the Dylan Thomas poem that’s repeated (probably one too many times) throughout the film – a poem that doubled as a letter from the poet to his father, asking him to fight even as he lay on his deathbed. The first time we hear it in the film, it’s over images of Coop’s spaceship finally leaving Earth.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Endurance...Look closely, it's a clock.</td></tr>
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As <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2012/04/christopher-nolan-themes-dark-knight-rises.html" target="_blank">I’ve argued elsewhere</a>, Nolan likes to structure his films around a central idea, then works that idea from all possible angles. In <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>, <a href="http://ebiri.blogspot.com/2012/07/you-must-become-terrible-thought-nolan.html" target="_blank">that idea was hope</a>; in <i>Inception</i>, regret; in <i>The Dark Knight</i>, guilt; in <i>Batman Begins</i>, fear. In some senses, this is just storytelling 101 – find a theme and stick to it. But Nolan’s works are distinguished by the single-mindedness with which he pursues these concepts; the films become cinematic fugues built around a single motif.<br />
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So, what’s the big idea in <i>Interstellar</i>? I think, on some basic level, it’s survival, in all its many forms – as both humanity’s savior and destroyer.<br />
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(<i>Note: It's pretty much all spoilers from here on out.</i>)<br />
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Survival is what pushes NASA to mount a decades-long secret project to send humans into another galaxy, with no idea what they’ll find. But survival is also why textbooks have been changed to reflect the nonsensical claim that the Apollo missions were just a hoax to help bankrupt the Soviets; the idea is echoed later, more benignly, on the spaceship Endurance, when Coop tells a frightened and claustrophobic Romilly (David Gyasi) that “some of the finest solo yachtsmen in the world don’t know how to swim.” When you can’t escape, you persist. And when Dr. Mann (Matt Damon), late in the film, attempts to hijack the mission, he too is enacting a basic rule of survival. Confessing that he couldn’t accept dying alone on the far edge of the cosmos, Mann admits to duplicitously drawing the other astronauts to his dead planet: “I knew that if I just pressed that button that somebody would come and save me.”<br />
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In other words, the need for survival can both open up the cosmos and close off your mind. It can keep you earthbound and launch you into orbit. A man (or Mann), in order to survive, can kill another and thus doom humanity. This dialectic <a href="https://medium.com/@somebadideas/on-interstellar-love-time-and-the-limitless-prison-of-our-cosmos-ef59ee28fd8e" target="_blank">lies at the heart of <i>Interstellar</i></a>. It’s embodied beautifully in the film’s most resonant setpiece, in which Coop and his fellow astronauts land on a planet where one hour equals seven years on Earth, thus making this big picture/little picture split a literal one. The split becomes even more pronounced as the film proceeds: The further away Coop and his fellow astronauts go, the more Earth itself seems to become a place of death and mourning. The video messages sent to the astronauts by their loved ones take on the quality of quiet speeches beside silent tombstones. (“I talk to Amelia all the time. It helps,” says Prof. Brand of the messages he sends his astronaut daughter, sounding less like a scientist and more like someone trying to deal with loss.)<br />
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In the film’s final act, however, these two narrative worlds – Earth and Space, Family and Species, Mourning and Survival – converge, as Nolan intercuts his action scenes between the film’s two realms. When Mann and Coop fight on the ice planet, the film cuts back and forth with Murphy driving back to her brother Tom’s house to save her sick nephew, also named Coop. (Interesting confluence: Both of these scenes ultimately turn on a woman trying to save someone named Coop from suffocating.) Thus, Murphy’s return to her childhood home precipitates her re-confronting the “ghost” in her room, which turns out to be both a memory of her father and literally her father communicating to her from another dimension.<br />
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This narrative development loses some viewers, but it leaves me a wreck every time. <i>Interstellar </i>has never really been about science; any science in it has always been at the <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/interstellar-2014" target="_blank">service of Nolan’s more poetic ambitions</a>. And here, the film abandons any pretense to physics and enters a strange, wonderful netherworld between dreamy metaphor and literal-minded fantasy. When Cooper the restless wanderer falls into the black hole, he finds himself in what might have once been his worst nightmare – he’s lost inside a memory of a room, a ghost trapped behind his daughter’s bookshelf, seemingly for eternity. He floats inside a maze-like tesseract, seeing time drifting before him like endless streams of colored sand – which reminds me of nothing so much as a sand mandala, the kind that’s destroyed, much like this one, upon the completion of a journey. (It’s worth pointing out that this journey practically began in sand as well, with messages sent to Coop through dust.)<br />
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Memories and moments – repeated, obsessed over – have always held a privileged place in Nolan’s filmography. And so, not unlike Cobb’s dreams of the room in which his wife killed herself in <i>Inception</i>, Coop finds himself back in one of Nolan’s memory chambers. This tesseract here at the end of <i>Interstellar</i>, supposedly created by humans who have mastered five dimensions, is sort of like one of Nolan’s movies, a place of hazy emotions and hard angles; the surfaces may be tough, but at heart, the director’s always been a softy. (That’s why I’ve never bought the criticism that his films are “nihilistic”; if anything, they’re unabashedly earnest.)<br />
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For the Coop we knew earlier, this predicament would probably be a living nightmare. But over the course of the film, his dream has gradually gone from one of exploration and flight to one of return. All of <i>Interstellar</i>’s talk of black holes and wormholes; all those massive machines spinning and connecting across the vast IMAX chasms of space; McConaughey riding the universe’s biggest wave; that stentorian score, with its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Ay_iDRAbc" target="_blank">ticking clocks doing constant battle against funereal organ chords</a>…It’s all been leading to this moment – a man replaying the moment when he broke his daughter’s heart. And now, by essentially reliving his separation from Murph over and over again, Coop has the chance to correct it. No, he can’t change the past. He can’t keep himself from leaving. <i>But he can want to stay</i>.<br />
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And that realization, ironically, turns out to be the thing that unlocks the key to survival – for Coop, for Murph, for their family, for the whole species. It is only after he spells out “S-T-A-Y” through the bookshelf, trying to contact his past self and convince himself not to leave – thereby negating the fulfillment of his own original dream – that Cooper is able to complete his mission. (On a purely narrative level, it’s only after this moment that he hears the voice of the robot TARS and realizes that he can transmit data from the black hole back to Murph, allowing her to solve the seemingly unsolvable “gravity problem” that Prof. Brand had futilely toiled on for decades.)<br />
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But what does it actually mean to survive? That’s the question that <i>Interstellar </i>has been asking throughout, in one form or another. And now, we get one final variation on the idea.<br />
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It could be said that the day your children are born is also the day that the doors of perception become both more present and more closed off than ever; you become more intimately aware of a future without you in it. (You obviously don’t need to be a parent to feel all this, but becoming a parent certainly clarifies it for many of us.) After the tesseract closes on him, Coop wakes up on a space station orbiting Saturn, many decades in the future. There, he sees Murph, now a very old woman (played by Ellen Burstyn), and he’s given a privileged glimpse into the secret, unstated dream of every parent: To know that their child will one day die, at a very old age, happy and surrounded by their loved ones.<br />
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Not only that, but he also gets a glimpse of his own survival. Because what’s really survived is his memory, preserved by Murph herself. Coop’s presence here as a person – as the flesh and blood character played by Matthew McConaughey – is at this point pretty much a glitch in space-time, and soon to be corrected. His being here doesn’t feel right – something Murph confirms when she tells him that “no parent should have to watch their own child die.” Appropriately, Nolan gives these scenes on the space station the quality of a waking dream, as if Coop is drifting through these spaces. You could say that he hasn’t stopped being a ghost.<br />
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But in saying goodbye to him one last time, Murph gives her father a final parting gift: She gives him back his dream. For just as Coop got to relive the moment of his departure earlier and learned to want to stay, now Murph, too, relives it. And this time, she tells him she wants him to leave.<br />
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But Coop has never really belonged anywhere, has he? “You were born 40 years too late, or 40 years too soon,” his father-in-law (John Lithgow) told him earlier in the film, suggesting that his place was not on this Earth. But he couldn’t really find a place out in space, either. If you think about it, his journey has always been an elaborate game of planetary musical chairs. The other worlds in <i>Interstellar </i>were always referred to as if they already belonged to the people who landed there first: Miller’s, Mann’s, and Edmunds’s. Even the humans of the future don’t quite need him. When Coop learns that the space station at the end of the film is called “Cooper Station One,” he remarks, "How nice of them to name it after me" – only to discover that the station is actually named after his daughter.<br />
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And so, he remains <a href="http://letterboxd.com/dannybowes/film/interstellar/" target="_blank">as much an impulse as a man</a>. His place is still out there, somewhere. Is it on Edmunds, “our new home,” where a similarly ageless Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) has already landed, ready to start a new human colony? That’s certainly the implication. But we never see it. The last time we see Coop, he’s vanished once again into the darkness of space – still an eternal wanderer, but finally at peace with his dreams of flight. <br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">* I'm grateful to my friend Ali Arikan for drawing my attention to the film's resonances with Clarke's novel. Those of you who can read Turkish would be well advised to <a href="http://www.dipnot.tv/uzayda-suzulen-tohumlar-interstellar/79665/" target="_blank">read Ali's review, here</a>. </span><br />
<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com107tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-74250528246155346902014-02-25T08:16:00.000-05:002014-02-25T08:16:46.665-05:00The Ice Harvest: Something To Do With Death (R.I.P. Harold Ramis)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The sad and untimely <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/02/edelstein-on-harold-ramis-19442014.html" target="_blank">passing of Harold Ramis</a> yesterday exacerbated my need to revisit his 2005 film <i>The Ice Harvest</i>. The film, shot for a very modest budget, flopped in its initial release, but has gained admirers in the years since. At the time, it struck me as a solid comedy with more than the usual on its mind, but in recent years, I’ve come to think of it as a stone-cold masterpiece. Maybe that’s why it was the first film I thought of when I heard that Ramis had died – not <i>Ghostbusters</i>, not <i>Caddyshack</i>, not even the wondrous <i>Groundhog Day</i>. Or maybe it was something else – something to do with the film itself, which is one of the most haunted and despairing comedies I’ve ever seen.<br />
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For those who haven’t seen <i>The Ice Harvest</i> (and, be warned, I’m about to go into some serious spoiler territory), it’s what we call a <i>post-heist</i> movie. It starts off with Wichita mob lawyer Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) and his shady pornographer pal Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton) having stolen a duffel bag full of money from Charlie’s mob client on Christmas Eve. (“My God, we’re actually doing this.” “No, we’re not doing it. It’s already done.”) The fact that the central crime has already occurred before the movie even begins immediately gives it a certain reflective, almost metaphorical quality, one that the film continues to develop as it proceeds.<br />
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The rest of the plot is straightforward, yet strangely elaborate. The two men are planning to skip town, but they first have to lie low for the next few hours. The mob, however, is already on to them. Meanwhile, Charlie gets embroiled in a blackmail scheme involving beautiful strip club owner Renata (Connie Nielsen). He also winds up spending a surprising amount of time with his drunk pal Pete Van Heuten (Oliver Platt), who married Charlie’s ex-wife. As the complications pile up, Charlie tries to get in contact with Vic, even though they’ve promised not to be seen together before they leave town. By the time it all ends, much of the cast has been murdered, many of them in quite gruesome fashion.<br />
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For all the intricacies of its story, however, <i>The Ice Harvest</i> takes it easy in terms of narrative: It doesn’t spell things out all that clearly. Subplots overlap with subplots, and I often have trouble keeping track of who’s double-crossing whom at any given point. There are two ways to tell this kind of story. One is to do it hyper-fast and hyper-stylized, heightening the already gruesome violence in ways that artificialize and commodify it – the classic “black comedy” style, where you laugh at the film’s darkness. But Ramis takes the opposite approach: He slows things down. He avoids bold and brash and instead opts for understated, and troubling. He allows the film’s darkness to have integrity, and weight. When a man who has killed his wife drowns in a frozen lake after her body is dropped on him, you maybe chuckle bitterly at the irony – but you don’t really laugh at it.<br />
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And so, the film is less interested in narrative and jokes than it is in mood. Dressed entirely in black, the grim figure of Charlie dominates the movie -- the first shot shows him standing against a wide, empty frozen expanse – and he moves through the film’s various spaces with a curious, nervous sense of detachment. In part this is a character point: He doesn’t want to draw attention to himself right before he makes his getaway. But it becomes clear as the film proceeds that Charlie’s demeanor isn’t a momentary tactic; it’s an existential fact.<br />
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At one point, a very drunk and very disillusioned Pete drags Charlie to a Christmas Eve dinner at his in-laws’ house (Pete’s current, Charlie’s former). Before they enter, Pete and Charlie look through the windows at the family sitting down to dinner. “That’s my chair in there,” Pete confides. “You wanna know the truth? I can’t fill it.” Charlie replies, quietly: “Neither could I, if it makes you feel any better.” The scene inside the house seems to bear this out. Charlie coolly greets his ex-wife and his kids, and his young daughter even hugs him, but there’s very little sense of parental affection or even intimacy here. Charlie keeps his distance, awkwardly, standing off to the side and trying not to get involved; it’s almost like he doesn’t exist. His older son even yells at him for being absent.<br />
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That scene is but the most prominent example in a series of exchanges that seem grounded in finality and obsolescence. Charlie’s final day in Wichita seemingly brings him in contact with the various parts of his life – the people he has loved or has known in some way – and as such represents a kind of farewell. The Ice Harvest is a movie about a man who goes through the night saying his goodbyes, only to find that he was never really there to begin with. You could think of it, in many ways, as the polar opposite of <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i>. Charlie’s journey through the night doesn’t reveal his importance, the way it does for George Bailey; it confirms his absence, his meaninglessness.<br />
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At one point, Pete laments to Charlie that “there’s no goddamn life left for men anymore.” Pete’s regret is not so much for some lost code of masculinity but for a kind of extinction. He and Charlie are both irrelevant. One wonders if there’s a personal echo there for Ramis. In Tad Friend’s <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/19/040419fa_fact3?currentPage=all" target="_blank">essential 2004 profile</a> of the writer-director for The New Yorker (written while Ramis was prepping <i>The Ice Harvest</i>), he notes that during the 80s, when Ramis was turning his personal life around and becoming something of a Buddhist (or, as he called it, “Buddhish”), he joined something called “The Road-Kill Men’s Council.” I have no idea what this is – the title sounds like a joke – but I’d like to think it was a somewhat more ironic take on one of those Iron John get-back-in-touch-with-your-inner-man deals. Regardless, the name of the council would have made for an interesting alternate title for <i>The Ice Harvest</i>.<br />
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Still, unlike Pete, Charlie seems to be beyond any earthly regrets. He’s managed to grind his soul down to nothing. As a kind of obtuse explanation for his outlook on life, he relates to Pete the tale of his father and his fraternal twin:<br />
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“<i>Looked a lot alike… him and my uncle. Different temperaments completely. My father, he's a cop. By-the-book guy. Believed in the law, wanted his only son to be a lawyer. Drank in moderation, didn't smoke. Kept up his life insurance premiums. Voted in every election, not just for president….[My uncle] said he didn't want to encourage the bastards. In and out of jail from the time he was 16. Drunk all the time, fucked everything that walked. Won a fortune playing poker, lost it all the same way. Lost an eye in a fight. My father was 54 when he died of a massive embolism, right here in Wichita. My uncle died the very next day in a car wreck in California. So the point is, it is futile to regret. You do one thing, you do another. I mean, so what? What's the difference? Same result.</i>”</blockquote>
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If the films Ramis made in the 1990s, including <i>Groundhog Day</i>, <i>Analyze This</i>, and <i>Bedazzled</i>, were his “redemption comedies,” <i>The Ice Harvest</i> feels like a dark corrective – the comedy of fallenness. It’s a movie not about a man who is searching for meaning, but a man who has realized life’s meaninglessness, and wants out. “As Wichita falls, so falls Wichita Falls” is the film’s constant refrain – a piece of graffiti that pops up periodically – and it seems to suggest an endless loop of damnation, the <i>noirish </i>flipside to <i>Groundhog Day</i>.<br />
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But there’s more to this, I think. Consider: The emotionless, black-clad protagonist. That aforementioned “final night” structure. The constant references to extinction and obsolescence. The oddly huge body count. A prevailing sense of melancholy dread. I’ve never quite been able to shake the sense that <i>The Ice Harvest </i>is, essentially, a film about death.<br />
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Look at the film’s final scene, which is tonally quite different from the movie: In it, Charlie stops by the road to help the bartender from the strip club, who is going on Christmas vacation with his family in an RV that has run out of gas. Charlie lets them siphon off his gas. Then, in a freak accident, he’s run over by the RV (just as he’s writing a piece of “As Wichita falls…” graffiti, suggesting that he’s been behind his own despair all this time). The driver of the RV and his kids don’t see that they’ve run over Charlie. “What was that?” the kids ask. “It was…<i>nothing</i>,” the driver replies.<br />
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But then, we see Charlie get up – a resurrection? – and get back into his car. There, we see that Pete is also in the car, having just awakened from his bender.<br />
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“Where are we?” Pete asks.<br />
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And Charlie smiles, for the first time in the entire movie, and says, “We’re in Heaven.”<br />
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“They got pancakes?”<br />
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“They’ve got everything.”<br />
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Reportedly, Ramis originally wanted to end the film with Charlie being run over, but was forced to add this final moment to assuage nervous execs and an anxious star. But while that original ending would have fit right in with the film’s overall tone, I’m still glad that he wound up with this final magical, perplexing scene – a beautifully mysterious ending to a beautifully mysterious movie. May the man who made it rest in peace.<br />
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-70796507120050722382013-12-21T15:06:00.000-05:002013-12-21T15:07:16.719-05:00The Wolf of Wall Street: Performance, Transaction, and the Big Sell<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Martin Scorsese loves to watch Leonardo DiCaprio. I guess we’ve known that for some time, but it never quite hit me as it did during <i>The Wolf of Wall Street</i>. We can argue all day over whether this is an attempt to remake <i>Goodfellas </i>or whatever (it isn’t), but there’s one thing that’s pretty clear to me: This is as much one of Scorsese’s concert docs (<i>Shine a Light</i>, <i>The Last Waltz</i>, etc.) as it is one of his narrative epics. Jordan Belfort, the real-life “Wolf of Wall Street,” didn’t just become famous for his crooked financial practices; he was also renowned for his revival-like, inspirational speeches full of blustery bullshit to his workers. He sells stocks with messianic fervor; then he sells selling stocks with messianic fervor. It’s a perfect subject on which to hitch an extended DiCaprio concert. Half the movie is just him performing in front of people, and much of the rest of it is people reacting to him. There are even a couple of scenes one could call dance numbers.<br />
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(Spoiler alert for the rest of the review, to the extent that there can be spoilers for this movie...)<br />
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The performance, the transaction, the sell. They’re all interconnected. Early on, when he’s hiring a group of his old neighborhood drug dealer chums to help him build up his company, Jordan goes around a table asking them to sell him the pen that’s in his hand. He then gives it to his pal Brad (Jon Bernthal), the one guy in this bunch who really understands selling. Brad promptly asks Jordan to write his name down on a napkin. “I don’t have a pen,” Jordan replies. “Supply and demand!” Brad crows. It’s a perfect encapsulation of what the whole film is founded on.<br />
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That transactional quality extends to the weird instances of bodily mortification in the film, too. I haven’t been able to shake these scenes. We know from <i>Raging Bull</i> that Scorsese understands self-abuse better than most other filmmakers. But here it’s more than just the self; it’s everybody. People as physical beings get put through the wringer here – be it through violence, or sex, or drugs, or other types of physical humiliation. Once he has money Jordan abuses his body with abandon. He also abuses others. The first time we see him, he’s throwing little people at a Velcro dartboard. Later, he and his coworkers argue over whether it’s okay to turn the little people into bowling balls. During one of his earliest pep talks, they get one of their office workers to have her head shaved in front of them. (Jordan announces that she’s going to get a ton of money for letting them do this to her. And what’s she going to do with that money? Get a boob job.) It’s not so much that money gives you power. It’s that people will break themselves, turn themselves into objects, for it. And once they have it, they will break themselves some more. So much so that after a certain point you wonder if maybe it was all about the breaking all along – a longstanding Scorsese theme. Money is just another Scorsesean excuse for self-destructiveness.<br />
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Take one of Belfort’s final speeches to his troops – the one that starts off with him bidding adieu to the company but turns halfway into a declaration that he’s not leaving. He singles out one of his long-serving brokers, Kimmie (Stephanie Kurtzuba), a woman who now wears Chanel and Armani suits. She wasn’t always like that, he tells us. Together, they remember that when Kimmie first came to work for him, she had to ask Belfort for a $5000 advance so she could pay her son’s tuition. The otherwise blustery and foulmouthed woman tenderly recalls that Jordan gave her $25,000 instead. Yes, it’s a touching moment. And yes, DiCaprio plays it perfectly – I mean <i>perfectly </i>– Elmer Gantry-ing it up with just the right combination of snake-oil salesman and genuine pathos. But could the tears in Kimmie's eyes be for the person she used to be? The transformation is stark. Neither of these people needs money anymore. Kimmie, with her thousand dollar suits, clearly doesn’t. And mega-millionaire Jordan Belfort certainly doesn’t. So why doesn’t he leave? Why does he stick with the bullshit company he founded? Because it’s not even money or prosperity that he’s selling anymore. It’s the sell itself.<br />
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In some ways, these cosmic ambitions work against some of <i>The Wolf of Wall Street</i>’s more mundane aims. At times it seems to want to be a financial industry expose/satire/whatever, but that doesn’t quite work: Stratton-Oakmont was not exactly a representative Wall Street firm, and Belfort keeps declaring himself the outsider, the guy who wants in. Scorsese has bigger fish to fry – more spiritual points to make, as above – but the script occasionally seems to want to drag him back to a more specific kind of social satire and/or history.<br />
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After a while, you start to not care about the story points, even though the film keeps dutifully hitting them. It all gets particularly tedious during Belfort’s fall. This is in part because his rise is already so unappealing – accompanied by so much depravity and horror – that there’s little place for the fall to go. This is where the <i>Goodfellas </i>comparison is somewhat apt, and unfavorable. That earlier film actually gives us a sense of the intoxicating power of gangsterism, and we can see how someone could be seduced by it. Here, we’re disgusted from the get-go. (That opening scene with the little people is funny and striking, but it gives up the game right at the outset.) So by the time we get the usual last-act shenanigans with the wires and the lawyers and the plea deals and whatnot, it’s all anticlimax. Scorsese has already shown us the fall. Hell, he pretty much started off with it. The actual fall becomes redundant.<br />
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But the film’s final scene is quite haunting, and brings everything back into focus, even as it leaves on an irresistibly open-ended note. Now, Belfort has become a motivational speaker. (And is that the real Jordan Belfort introducing DiCaprio in his scene?) This time, as before, he asks members in the audience to sell him the pen. As various people try (and fail) to make that basic transaction, the camera moves towards a group of wide-eyed audience members, sitting there waiting for their shot. And then, it cuts to black on their eager, expectant faces. It’s a profoundly sad moment. Belfort at this point isn’t even selling stocks, or money, or even that pen. At this point, we don’t really <i>know </i>what he’s selling. He has endless supplies of bullshit, waiting for it to become demand. And that demand could be for anything – money, women, tuition for your kid, healthcare, love, respect, dignity. His bullshit will fill our emptiness, whatever it is.<br />
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com87tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-14832922112108400802013-12-05T08:28:00.000-05:002013-12-05T10:08:55.471-05:00Inside Llewyn Davis: "Like King Midas's idiot brother"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A mesmerizing, haunted red herring of a movie, the Coen Brothers’ <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i> is full of glancing blows and half-hidden truths. Every once in a while some kind of meaning or pattern emerges for just a brief shimmering second and then disappears from view, like the cats that keep slipping away from our lonely, dour protagonist. But if this beautiful film seems unnaturally elusive, there’s a good reason for that: The real story is happening somewhere else.<br />
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[Here there be spoilers, so tread at your own risk...]<br />
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When we first meet Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), a talented but melancholy and abrasive singer on the early 1960s Greenwich Village folk music scene, he’s performing in front of a small, admiring crowd at the Gaslight Cafe. Later, outside the venue, a mysterious man in a Stetson accosts Llewyn and kicks the shit out of him. The Coens then cut to our hero as he wakes up the next morning in the apartment where he’s crashing, his friends’ cat perched on his chest. As he prepares to leave, Llewyn tries to keep the cat from escaping, and accidentally locks himself out of the apartment.<br />
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So, basically, our introduction to this guy involves him singing a beautiful song, being beaten, and saving a cat – a perfect triumvirate of Hollywood code for “good guy.” Except that Llewyn isn’t the nicest of guys. He antagonizes his friends, he scoffs at other musicians, he dismisses his family. Nor is he much of a businessman: He signs away his royalties on a potential hit record because of an immediate need for money. He has some semblance of what he might call integrity, but what others might call entitlement, or short-sightedness.<br />
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We all know people like this; we have all been this guy at various points in our lives; some of us still are. (To rearrange the words of the title, there's a little Llewyn Davis Inside all of us, sort of the way That Barton Fink Feeling was something we could all access.) Llewyn is a bit too serious about his art to ever truly sell out; whether he’s good enough to succeed without doing so isn’t a question the film dares to answer. With a lucky break here, a not-unlucky-break there, who knows what might have been? Speaking with Jean (Carey Mulligan), a fellow folkie whom he impregnated and who now hates his guts, Llewyn divides the world into “careerists” and “losers.” And he refuses to be a careerist, which basically leaves him with one option.<br />
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So, <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i> is the story of the guy who didn’t make it. His whole journey, posited at first as one of the Coens’ patented Odyssey variations, is full of symbolic, ominous figures and situations….but they pointedly signify nothing. Take the cat, who escapes from Llewyn several times, and is abandoned by him at least twice later on. Near the end of the film, when he returns to New York, Llewyn revisits his friends’ apartment, and discovers that their cat has returned. Not only that, the cat’s name is Ulysses! And its nickname is Lou – which is the same name that a couple of other characters have accidentally called Llewyn over the course of the film. (“What does the ‘N’ stand for?” John Goodman’s decaying, contemptuous jazz musician asks him at one point.) As he walks to a gig at the end of the film, with things seemingly, finally looking up, Llewyn spies a poster for Disney’s animals-go-on-the-road flick <i>The Incredible Journey</i>. Is that even a slight, ironic smile we see on his lips?<br />
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Except that this is <i>not </i>his journey. Llewyn’s ordeal was <i>not </i>incredible. His name is <i>not </i>Lou, as he himself keeps reminding people. And the cat he’s been carting around for most of the film is <i>not </i>Ulysses, who ran away from him early on. It’s a nameless street cat Llewyn accidentally picked up back in New York, a cat we last saw limping into a frozen forest beside a snowbound highway. And that opening scene we saw earlier – with the strange man beating Llewyn -- was not the opening scene of this story; it was the <i>finale</i>. The whole film, it turns out, was a flashback winding its way back to this moment.<br />
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Importantly, there are a couple of very big differences in the way the Coens now re-present this final section of the film. For starters, they include one additional song that Llewyn sings before he leaves the stage: “Dink’s Song,” which includes the refrain, “<i>Fare thee well, oh honey, fare thee well</i>…”(Pointedly, it's a song Llewyn used to do with his now-dead partner.) Secondly, the Coens alter the sound mix, so that we now hear, filtering out of the Gaslight Café as Llewyn is beaten, the music of the act that followed his performance: It’s Bob Dylan, singing “Farewell,” a song with lyrics remarkably similar to the one Llewyn just wrapped. (“<i>Oh it’s fare thee well, my darling true</i>....”) These lyrics are also echoed in the final line of the film, a close-up Llewyn, badly beaten, whispering, “<i>Au revoir</i>.”<br />
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The film fades to black, and the Dylan song, victorious, plays over the end credits. Somewhere along the way, you figure Dylan has been on his own, significantly luckier trajectory – maybe like the <i>Incredible Journey</i> that Ulysses the cat must have been on. But we didn’t see that journey. We saw the <i>other </i>journey -- the one with some loser named Llewyn and a nameless, wounded cat. In many ways, that's the journey the rest of us are also on.<br />
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com64tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-3059619246774744032013-11-29T16:46:00.001-05:002013-11-29T16:49:01.966-05:00Five Things I Liked about Spike Lee's Remake of Oldboy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook's <i>Oldboy </i>is getting trashed left and right and flopping with audiences. But sue me, I kind of liked it. And while I love, love, <i>love </i>the original to death and still vastly prefer it to this one, I figured it might be worth noting down some things about Lee's film that I thought worked. It ain’t exactly Losey’s remake of <i>M</i> (though let it be noted that that film too was much hated for many decades before its reputation slowly began to repair) but I think this new <i>Oldboy </i>is worthwhile. I’d certainly be interested to see the rumored longer version some day.<br />
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<b>1.) Joe Version 1.0.</b> I liked the fact that Lee’s film spent more time with Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin) before he was captured. (Park’s original has a bit of that, as well, but it clearly positions itself as being about what happens after. If you’ll recall, it actually starts <i>in medias res</i> and then flashes back to the kidnapping.) As a result, this <i>Oldboy </i>seems to be more about transformation than it is about revenge. Unfortunately, this probably also backfires to some extent because we get to spend less time with Joe Version 2.0, and with the revenge storyline in general – which is what gave the Korean film such propulsive narrative force.<br />
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<b><br /></b><b>2.) Josh Brolin. </b>He’s getting slagged by many, but I thought he did solid work here. Again, the transformation is key. In Park’s original, Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) seems like such a badass from the get-go that even after we see him as his schlubby earlier self, he doesn’t quite seem like the same person. And, effectively, he’s not. Here, I liked the fact that Joe Doucett was still kind of a fuck-up even after his transformation. He can fight, but he’s still, basically, a loser. If Park’s film was a re-telling of The Odyssey (the name “Oh Dae-su” always felt like a giveaway to me), then Lee’s version feels more like a fable about transformation and never being able to run away from one’s true nature, like something out of La Fontaine or Aesop.<br />
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<b><br /></b><b>3.) A different moral vision. </b>(Key word here being “liked,” not “preferred.”) I love the fact that in Park's original the villain doesn’t feel that, as a boy, he did anything wrong with his sister. In that world, his revenge on Oh Dae-su is both an attempt to ruin the man’s life but also to try to show him – in a sick, twisted way – what the villain thought of as a “beautiful” thing. Here, though, we don’t have that kind of complexity. There’s a horrific crime that’s been committed here, any way you cut it. The original is better in this regard, but I was glad Lee and co. didn’t try to replicate it, and instead went in a more over-the-top, <i>grand guignol</i> direction. In its own way, this gives the villain a different kind of pathos: He too is a victim of a horrific crime, and yet transfers the blame from the person who caused it to Joe, the person who set these series of particular events in motion.<br />
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<b><br /></b><b>4.) The humor. </b>Maybe it’s just the fact that I always find Brolin funny, but I thought this <i>Oldboy </i>was funnier than the original. It’s interesting that Lee, who can be a real stylist, kept things relatively buttoned down here. Park’s hyper-stylization is, in some ways, what sells the ludicrous storyline of the original. In Lee’s film, though, the style is muted, but there’s a weird, deadpan goofiness, almost like it’s never quite on the level. The film hovers on the verge of comedy, which makes its brutality (at least for me) that much more shocking.<br />
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<b><br /></b><b>5.) Sharlto Copley.</b> I’m just kind of amazed at this dude’s versatility, is all. From <i>District 9</i> to <i>Europa Report</i> to <i>Elysium </i>to this. I mean Jesus.<br />
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Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com65tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-18772251654597739202013-10-11T16:03:00.000-04:002013-10-11T16:03:23.243-04:00Captain Phillips: "Relax. It's just business."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The real-life piracy thriller <i>Captain Phillips</i> opens with what feels at first like an inelegant bit of exposition. Preparing at home to embark on his next voyage, Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) checks the itinerary on his computer for his date of departure, and his destination: Mombasa, Kenya. You may find yourself asking: <i>Wouldn’t the captain of a major cargo ship know where he’s headed well before the day he leaves? </i>You may even have similar thoughts a couple of scenes later, as Captain Phillips listens to one of his crew members tick off the contents of their container ship, the Maersk Alabama. <i>Again, shouldn’t he already know all this?</i><br />
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But what seems early on like awkward filmmaking convention soon reveals itself as the first hint that <i>Captain Phillips</i>, for all its expert, armrest-tearing suspense, is about more than just a ship taken hostage by Somali pirates. “Companies want things faster and cheaper…You gotta be strong to survive out there,” Phillips says in another early scene, and it becomes clear that, for all his protestations of strength, he is a mere cog in the engine of global commerce. It doesn’t <i>matter </i>if he knows where he’s going, or what he’s carrying. But soon enough, he and his men, speeding through international waters off the horn of Africa, are being pursued and boarded by a ragged band of pirates led by a gaunt, intense teenager named Muse (Somali-American actor Barkhad Abdi, in a remarkable debut performance). “Relax, Captain. Just business,” the young pirate tells the middle-aged sailor. He’s right.<br />
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Directed by Paul Greengrass, whose penchant for handheld immediacy has over the years veered between the sublime (<i>United 93</i>, <i>Bourne Ultimatum</i>) and the ridiculous (<i>Green Zone</i>), <i>Captain Phillips</i> is all about speed – the speed of business, the speed of the chase, the speed with which the news of the Maersk’s hijacking spreads in the media, and the speed with which the U.S government and military swing into action. With Navy SEALs who jump out of airplanes and time their landings with uncanny accuracy, facial recognition software that can identify the pirates swiftly and correctly, snipers and commanders who act with automaton-like precision, the film presents a world that functions not unlike a machine: A capitalist machine, protected and enforced by a military machine, both removing the human element from the process as much as possible. Hanks gives one of the best performances of his career here, and an extended emotional outburst from him in one of the film’s final scenes is particularly effective, in part because it’s a resoundingly human moment amid all the techno-speak and cold exactitude of business and warfare. Here’s a man, breaking down, while the matter-of-fact nonchalance of predetermined professionalism continues to buzz about him.<br />
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Seen in that light, the attempts of the Somali pirates to take over the Maersk gain resonance, even a kind of troubling pathos. Somalia is a failed state that’s been pretty much abandoned by the community of nations; one of the reasons why piracy has flourished off its shores. As the pirates rush along in their decaying, puny skiffs trying to capture the giant American cargo ship, we sense a disturbing symbolism: Captain Phillips and his ship are powered through the Indian Ocean by the forces of the global economy; Muse and his men are powered by the dark side of that economy, by the desperation of those the world leaves behind. At one point, Muse even remarks that he and his companions used to be fishermen, before the big ships came and “cleaned out all the fish,” leaving them with no livelihood. “What’s left for us?” he asks.<br />
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But an American sailor nowadays is almost as rare as a Somali fisherman, and the film eventually begins to draw some surprising comparisons between Captain Phillips and Muse. After the latter claims control of the ship, the idea of which of the two men is “captain” at any given point becomes an ongoing bone of contention, a word now devalued beyond all recognition. (It also lends an added hint of irony to the film’s otherwise oddly dry title.) “Last year, I took a Greek ship. Six million dollars,” Muse brags to Phillips at one point. “Six million dollars. So what are you doing here?” Phillips asks bitterly. The same thing, of course, could be asked of him. Both men are ultimately powerless to change their destinies in a modern world that won’t wait for them.<br />
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Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com50tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-10002411100748383372013-08-02T13:00:00.000-04:002013-08-02T14:09:30.914-04:00'80s Action Week: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Okay, it’s hard to do five posts on the best action films of the 1980s and try and sneak in anything remotely surprising in there. (I guess the closest I got to was yesterday’s post on <i>RoboCop</i>, if only because most folks who know me know I’m fairly cool on Verhoeven.) And this, of course, is another no-brainer. It’s certainly the best of the<i> Star Wars</i> films (though a couple of the prequels are better than people like to give them credit for being). But it bears looking into, still: Why does <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i> continue to work so well?<br />
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<a name='more'></a>For starters, it’s right there in the title: It’s one of the few action movies where the bad guys basically win, and we should never discount the way that our standard hero narratives have primed us for the release, the satisfaction, of seeing the good guys vindicated, avenged, saved, ennobled at the end of these stories. Obviously the popularity of <i>Empire </i>has since led to other filmmakers indulging in this sort of rug-pulling, but it’s hard to overstate the extent to which this film’s almost nihilistic finale feels at times like a rip in the space-time continuum of the hero narrative.<br />
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Secondly, with his initial emotional and professional investment in the first film richly rewarded, creator George Lucas was able to let his imagination truly run wild this time around. (Later on, he’d simply try to one-up himself, which often resulted in a lot of cool creatures and ships but fewer “wow” moments.) So, <i>Empire </i>is a film that has the speed, invention, and scale of <i>Star Wars</i>, but the richer inner life of a real movie -- and it ends on one of the great cliffhangers of all time. Remember, this was before the notion of a sequel became synonymous with a mere regurgitating of the original narrative. Back then, sequels – unless they featured James Bond, or Jason Voorhees – were new stories, not copies of the old stories. The idea of the franchise template hadn’t quite taken hold yet. To put it another way: <i>Empire </i>was made back when you could imagine someone saying the words, “Let’s not do that again. We already did that in the first movie.” Nowadays, you’re more likely to hear, “Let’s do that again. Because it worked so well in the first movie.”<br />
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Finally, director Irvin Kershner turned out to be an inspired choice for handling the soap-opera theatrics of <i>Empire</i>’s diffuse narrative, with the Han-Leia, Han-Lando, and Luke-Vader relationships all having their unique internal rhythms and psychological needs. Kershner wasn’t exactly a no-nonsense, point-and-shoot director – <i>The Eyes of Laura Mars</i>, for example, is a downright loopy exercise in style. But he also understood the power of restraint (far more so, I think, than <i>Return of the Jedi</i>’s Richard Marquand, or even the George Lucas who came back for the prequels).<br />
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A few months ago I analyzed the cutting in one of the film’s most devastatingly emotional moments, the scene where <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-AmHZ17gWM" target="_blank">Han Solo is frozen in carbonite before his friends’ eyes</a>, for <i>Cinema Editor</i> magazine. (The article is not on the web, alas.) Looking at the scene shot by shot, cut by cut, I was struck by how smooth it was, basically unfolding through a series of medium close-ups that let the melodrama play out very naturally, with a minimum of fuss. Kirshner and his editors create two emotional spaces here: In one, we get Darth Vader and Boba Fett, two fearsome, faceless figures who speak very little and whose emotions can’t be read. In the other, we see the horrified triumvirate of Chewbacca, Leia, and Han Solo. (Lando, Han’s old friend who betrayed him, is caught between the two groups.) This classical shooting and cutting, along with the restrained acting, actually enhances the heightened emotions of this scene, which may well be the high-point of the entire Star Wars narrative universe. And yet, on a cinematic level, it's all so beautifully basic.<br />
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But let’s also spare a word, here, for all the <i>Star Wars</i> films, for George Lucas’s vision and his deft storytelling shorthand. Whatever his flaws, the man has a genuine prophetic streak in him – not in terms of foretelling the future, but in simply understanding how to make other people believe his own fantasies. Ultimately, the greatness of <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i> comes back to that, too: In the simplicity of its filmmaking, in its no-nonsense shooting and cutting, we sense that it’s the one film in this entire series that recognizes the audience’s disbelief was suspended a long, long time ago. It knows that when you’re dealing with prophecy, sometimes it’s best to just get out of the way.<br />
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Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com69tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-89705010606327796212013-08-01T12:01:00.000-04:002013-08-02T14:12:52.482-04:00'80s Action Week: Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Paul Verhoeven, I still don’t entirely know what to do with you. Yes, you were one of the signature action auteurs of the ‘80s and ‘90s, with films like <em>Total Recall</em>, <em>Basic Instinct</em>, and <em>Starship Troopers</em> to your name, and that reputation is still solid, even though individual films may wax and wane in influence and estimation over the years. <em>Total Recall</em> at the time was thought of as the kind of soulless action flick Hollywood churned out on a regular basis; it’s aged now into a weirdly personal and very, very surreal fantasy, a consciously outsize macho wish fulfillment dream for the Age of Schwarzenegger. <em>Basic Instinct</em> was a bit better liked, mainly for its sleaze; I still like it, mainly for its sleaze. <em>Starship Troopers</em> wasn’t a huge popular hit but a certain subset of critics loved it because of its constantly self-aware, bright neon meta-meta-ness; I never really got it. Along the way there was <em>Showgirls</em>, which I haven’t been able to like even ironically, and <em>Hollow Man</em>, which is exciting and insane in equal measure. And then there were the Dutch films, made before he came to the U.S., many of which are excellent and all of which are idiosyncratic in their own little ways. Anyway, I find him fascinating, but Paul Verhoeven, it goes without saying, is far from my favorite director.<br />
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But he did have one absolutely perfect movie. One film where his signature fascination with gore and gratuitous violence really paid off thematically, while his natural perversity made for an ideal match with the story. Certainly among Verhoeven’s American genre films, <em>RoboCop</em> is his masterpiece. Who else but this director would take what could have been a fairly standard tale of a cop who is turned into an indestructible, crime-fighting cyborg, and then underlined its utter strangeness in such a way that still did justice to its narrative? With overtones of both <em>Brazil</em> and <em>The Terminator</em>, <em>RoboCop</em> is equal parts satire, tragedy, <em>grand guignol</em> gorefest, and sensitive human drama, and it manages to be a parody of itself even as it delivers the goods. (Put another way: It’s the movie everyone seems to think <em>Starship Troopers</em> is.)<br />
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For the first act, we watch the likable Detroit police officer Murphy (Peter Weller) as the film prepares him and us for his grim, grisly fate. We know he’s doomed, so there’s something strangely sadistic about the way the film goes through the motions here – there's almost a Stations of the Cross quality to it all, which makes sense given Verhoeven’s lifelong obsession with the Christ story. Ordinarily I’d find this sort of thing kind of reprehensible, but the film is too self-aware for that: Much like <em>The Shining</em> builds up to the narratively-necessary killing of Scatman Crothers’s character, <em>RoboCop</em> seems to be commenting on the fact that such films (and their audiences) require a blood sacrifice. The film presents a world of commodification and corporatism gone rampant, and it seems to represent it, too.<br />
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But<em> RoboCop</em> goes even further than that. After he’s horrifically gunned down by a gang of hoodlums, we see Murphy transformed into the titular soulless killing machine – only he’s not soulless. Instead, this robot relives his most painful moments over and over again, and slowly begins to remember his past. The machine turns out to have a mind, and it's an obsessive mind at that. Consider the heartbreaking scene where Murphy/RoboCop revisits the now-empty house where he once lived with his wife and child. It starts off like an obligatory “human” touch in a kick-ass action film, but it goes above and beyond the call of duty, placing us firmly inside this tormented machine-man’s head. And thus <em>RoboCop</em> goes from a pop tale of blood sacrifice to a kind of subjective, melancholy narrative of loss. It truly is one of the saddest action films I've ever seen. And, go figure, one of the funniest.<br />
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And you knew this was coming, but all together now: “I’d buy <em>that</em> for a dollar!”<br />
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-19686497339391167242013-07-31T09:00:00.000-04:002013-08-02T14:12:37.176-04:00‘80s Action Week: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981) <br />
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Although the series would define what so many viewers now think of as “post-apocalyptic,” the first <i>Mad Max</i> was not really a sci-fi film at all. Rather, it was a low-budget gearhead thriller about a loose-cannon Aussie cop who takes on some violent motorcycle gangs. Its director, George Miller, a doctor, had been inspired to make it after spending a little too much time around the emergency room – hence all the random cutaways to eyeballs and the film’s almost clinical fascination with realistic violence.<br />
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It was with this second film, known to most of the world simply as <i>Mad Max 2</i>, that director Miller and star Mel Gibson took Max (who lost his wife and child in the earlier film’s shattering finale) and projected him into a post-WWIII future. Now, society had fully crumbled and small, ragged bands of ruthless warriors fought desperately for oil across a bleak desertscape. It was an epic gesture, to be sure, but it wasn’t a particularly grandiose one. I don’t know what kind of budget he was actually working with, but Miller craftily used the natural terrain of Australia to create his science-fiction wasteland. In effect, he did with <i>The Road Warrior</i> what Jean-Luc Godard did with <i>Alphaville</i>, creating a <i>faux</i>-futuristic prism through which to see the present.<br />
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It’s odd to think that, at the time, <i>The Road Warrior</i> must have seemed like a crazed fever dream brought on by the geo-political and cultural neuroses of the late 1970s: Gas shortages, Cold War proxy battles, the punk revolution, the rise of nihilistic hedonism, etc. It’s also odd that, given all that topicality, the film did not eventually become a time capsule – its fears and touchstones growing quaint as they receded into the past. (Think of Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, a lovely movie with a lot to say that has totally dated over the years.)<br />
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No, the filmmaking in <i>The Road Warrior</i> is so powerful that the movie basically created its own reality. If anything, Miller’s vision of the world has become the unstated source material for so many other films. Maybe that’s because this director, for all his box office success with this and other films, always had an offbeat sensibility that never quite meshed with his times. (My near-religious fondness for his insanely stylized and strange medical drama <i>Lorenzo’s Oil</i> is <a href="http://blogs.amctv.com/movie-blog/2008/11/lorenzos-oil-nolte/" target="_blank">well-documented</a>.) He’s not a matter-of-fact action director, but rather a forceful mannerist fond of grand, almost baroque stylistic gestures. How else can one explain Lord Humungus and his murderous BDSM biker gang – still among the weirdest and most disturbing set of action movie villains ever put onscreen? These are not the kinds of figures you’d find in an ordinary action movie, even an ordinary sci-fi movie.<br />
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And so, <i>The Road Warrior</i> is a relentless action opera – with movement, emotion, and music building and building to crashing crescendos of violence and catharsis, with little time for the niceties of plot (which would be a problem -- if the film had much of a plot). Years before Coppola and Scorsese went to town with such techniques in films like <i>Bram Stoker’s Dracula</i> and <i>The Age of Innocence</i>, Miller uses a wide range of quaint cinematic trickery -- from silent-movie-style montages to lap dissolves to, at one point, a rabbit’s-eye-view of the action -- to create a world that has almost no real outside referent. Over the years, <i>The Road Warrior</i> has become canonized as a sci-fi wonder, one of the early F/X blockbusters – acclaimed for its stunts, its action, its appropriately terse heroics. All that may be correct, but I don’t think we’ve given George Miller enough credit for how deliriously strange and stylized – how borderline-experimental -- it is.<br />
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Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com56tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-72512573028022866952013-07-30T10:30:00.000-04:002013-08-02T14:13:08.086-04:00'80s Action Week: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Yes, it’s still good. Steven Spielberg’s 1981 masterpiece hasn’t dated one bit, in part because it was already something of a throwback – a blend of cutting-edge effects and technique with a defiantly old-fashioned sensibility. Spielberg took the template of the action serial – those corny, disposable, cliff-hangery pieces of escapist pulp from the ‘30s and ‘40s – and crafted something whose speed, narrative shorthand, and element of surprise were very much of the moment. Its hero, wisecracking archeologist adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) was a combination of Buster Crabbe, Clark Gable, and, well, Harrison Ford himself, whose cynical cool had just made Han Solo one of the most iconic heroes in movie history. In a sense, this is what Spielberg has always done. (Heck, he did something similar in <i>Lincoln </i>– mixing a post-Nixonian study of the infernal American political machine with an earnest, Capraesque belief that men of good will can still accomplish great things.)<br />
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But forget about positioning and context for a second. I think there are a couple of specific reasons why <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> still sings to us, and why it remains one of the most influential blockbusters of all time. To begin with, for a film that at first seems so cartoonish, it’s surprisingly dark: Scary, gory, elemental. Remember, this is a film that essentially ends with a bunch of Nazis experiencing something akin to a reverse-Holocaust -- a climax that still hasn't been topped by any other action movie, in part because of its simultaneously ironic and poetic sense of catastrophe.<br />
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Secondly, <i>Raiders </i>is a setpiece-fueled dynamo. That is to say, the film builds its energy and its power through its own internal one-upsmanship: Each scene is more indelible than the last -- conceived, written, shot, acted, edited, and scored in such a way that the damned thing just winds you up tighter and tighter as it moves along. But, unlike its many imitators, <i>Raiders</i>’ setpieces themselves work because they have a strong backbone of character. While most filmmakers are content to let people take a backseat to the action – using their actors more like toy figures amid all the pyrotechnics – Spielberg uses action to explore and enhance his characters. Witness the shifting alliances between Indiana Jones and the treacherous Satipo (Alfred Molina) in the opening scenes in the South American jungle temple. Or Indy’s increasing desperation during the footchase through the Cairo bazaar, when he loses Marion (Karen Allen) – seemingly, he thinks, for good.<br />
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Or consider my favorite set of details: the clever back and forth between Indy and the various German soldiers he has to plow through to seize the truck carrying the Ark of the Covenant during the film’s unforgettable extended desert truck chase sequence. They seem like throwaway bits – grace notes, if you will – but they’re actually the building blocks of the sequence itself. No amount of pyrotechnics and effects can make up for that. (If you don’t believe me, track down that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark:_The_Adaptation" target="_blank">homemade, shot-for-shot remake, <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation</i></a>, that a bunch of kids made in the 1980s. It’s silly and low-fi and goofy, yes, but fundamentally, it still works, because the film’s armature remains so wrong.)<br />
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Additionally, Spielberg, his producer George Lucas, and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan understood (and, to some extent, helped define) what makes an action movie character truly relatable: Not just that we watch him experience the action, but that we experience the action <i>through </i>him. This is a lesson that later movies like <i>Die Hard</i> and <i>Speed </i>would take to the bank. But never was it more palpable – never more breathtaking and unforgettable -- than it was here. This is still the best film any of them -- Kasdan, Spielberg, Lucas, Ford -- were involved with.<br />
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-42468297571110963982013-07-29T10:30:00.000-04:002013-08-02T14:13:26.473-04:00‘80s Action Week: Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)<em>So I took an unintended break from this blog for the past few months. Not because I didn’t have anything to write about, but because I had too much to write about, most of it for other places. One of the big things I worked on over this time was </em><a href="http://www.vulture.com/2013/07/25-best-action-movies-since-die-hard.html" target="_blank"><em>a list for Vulture of the </em><strong><em>25 Best Action Movies Since</em> Die Hard</strong></a><em>, a piece that got a lot of people reading and thinking and calling me names, as intended. One of the best things about writing it was revisiting the great action films of the 1990s – kind of a banner decade, what with films like </em>Speed<em>,</em> The Rock<em>,</em> Point Break<em>,</em> Hard-Boiled<em>,</em> Terminator 2<em>, etc. But one of my regrets about the list was that, because we pegged it to</em> Die Hard<em>, I had to ignore a lot of the great action films of the 1980s – an altogether more complicated and darker lot, I think, than most of the ones that came later.</em><br />
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<em>So, I’ve decided to dedicate the first week of my return to the blog to ‘80s Action. For the next five days, each day I will highlight one great, seminal action film from this decade. Here’s the first one.</em><br />
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<strong><em>ALIENS</em> (James Cameron, 1986)</strong><br />
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On the page, it sounds almost like a giant “screw you” to everything that made Ridley Scott’s 1979 haunted-house-movie-in-space so great: While the earlier film gradually revealed its central monster inch-by-inch over the course of its running time, James Cameron’s sequel would feature hundreds – nay, thousands -- of monsters, constantly charging the characters and the camera. While the earlier film unfolded deliberately, slowly ratcheting up the tension via its silences and its helpless characters’ growing fear, the sequel would be an action movie full of big guns and hot-dogging space marines. While the earlier film had a slyly subversive proletarian undercurrent – its characters were sci-fi variations on blue-collar types, ordinary guys who landed on the wrong planet at the wrong time and got screwed over by the powers-that-be – the sequel would be an all-American blow-away-athon. Directed by the guy who wrote <em>Rambo: First Blood Part II</em>, no less.<br />
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But <em>Aliens</em>, go figure, contains multitudes. It actually does many of the same things the original Alien did. It ratchets up the tension gradually and even works in a slow reveal of its own; “<em>Who’s laying the eggs?</em>” Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley asks early on, and we know that we’re going to find out at the end. It presents another case study in growing helplessness – those big guns our heroes wield turn out to be quite problematic, and ultimately rather futile. And – <em>horrors!</em> -- it even manages to sneak in a bit of anti-corporate subversion: The hot-dogging space marines, it turns out, aren’t all that different from the grizzled laborers in the earlier film. For all the soldiers’ bluster, they too are basically just working stiffs who got dicked over by upper management.<br />
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And, amid all that, it’s a beautifully made film: Cameron understands the power of the unknown, and he’s able to use darkness and shadow in much the same way Scott did, while also choreographing elaborate action scenes in a way that utilizes chaos without ever sacrificing clarity. (If you’re ever confused at any point in a James Cameron action scene, that’s because the characters are confused, and he wants you to be, too.) But he’s also a poet of hugeness: You watch <em>Aliens</em> with a sense of awe at how well the director has re-imagined and expanded a world you only saw bits and pieces of in the first film, and somehow done so without sacrificing any of its mystery or terror. It feels like a magic trick.<br />
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That brings me, however, to <em>Aliens’</em> somewhat more complicated legacy in action cinema. It upped the ante so effectively that the “<em>more heroes, more villains, more monsters, more everything</em>” ethos became pretty much de rigeur for action sequels, a trend that has led to a lot of garbage. But that’s because those films I think ignored what was <em>Aliens</em>’ real achievement: Its ability to raise not just the size of its action and effects, but the scale of its storytelling. <br />
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Consider how, amid all the insanity, there are these beautiful little character trajectories: The way the tough Latina Vasquez’s (Jenette Goldstein) distrust and rage towards her rookie lieutenant Gorman (William Hope) becomes one of affection and solidarity in their final scene; the way the boastful, musclebound Hudson (Bill Paxton, in a scene-stealing role) quickly collapses into a whimpering puddle of shrieking terror at the first sign of the aliens, only to eventually reclaim his bravery and honor; and, of course, the way that Ripley, who in the film’s opening scenes weeps over her thwarted motherhood, becomes a surrogate mother to the young survivor Newt (Carrie Henn), only to have her maternal instincts reflected back by the film’s central demon in the climactic face-off. It is for these reasons that <em>Aliens</em> is more than just a kick-ass action flick. It’s a sad, profound, exhilarating, and terrifying one, and you’ll never ever forget it.<br />
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<br />Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9135701834929668413.post-27670326882821025822013-03-10T12:17:00.001-04:002013-03-10T12:18:05.141-04:00An Economic Recovery Plan for the Land of Oz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In his excellent BFI Classics book on <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>, Salman Rushdie comments on the odd fact that everybody in Oz always seems so happy, despite the fact that they’ve apparently been enslaved by the powers of evil. Indeed, the Ozites’ joyous demeanor in the face of political and social catastrophe suggests that they may be ignoring the true desperation of their circumstances. We’ve seen this before – in Greece, most recently, but also in lots of other economies whose “zest for life” was much praised even as those nations were inching towards demographic and fiscal catastrophe. Luckily, in the case of Oz, disaster can still be averted. Here’s a <b>four-point economic recovery plan for the Land of Oz</b>.<br />
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<b>Increase Infrastructure Spending</b><br />
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Oz is a land big enough for four separate countries and one centralized Emerald City, and yet the main mode of transportation appears to be walking, giant floating bubbles and the occasional Horse of a Different Color. This is, at best, inefficient. Yes, automobiles would probably ruin those magnificent yellow brick roads, so maybe you want to steer clear of building highways. But why not invest in some light rail? It would make everything run more smoothly, make it easier to see the Wizard, allow citizens to avoid the Deadly Poppy Fields, and, most importantly, create jobs. After all, it’s a shame to see a skilled workforce go to waste: Apparently, the Tinkers and Tinsmiths of Oz can build pretty much anything, so we have little doubt that Oz would soon have one of the most innovative and effective public transportation systems in the world. Furthermore, more trading between various countries of Oz could promote peace and harmony. The best part is that you wouldn’t even need to raise taxes. As far as we can tell, the Royal Treasure of Oz is just sitting there, serving no purpose other than to let the wealthy and privileged roll around among its gold coins and jewels.<br />
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<b>Create a Social Safety Net</b><br />
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Many of the Oz books tell us that the land’s inhabitants don’t die of natural causes or disease. (Though they can be killed by falling houses, poisonings, liquification, and bloody combat; Munchkin City does have a coroner, after all.) You’d think that this would make the idea of retirement anathema, but think again: As we’re learning in the U.S., people practically living forever is a demographic time bomb. At some point, the various peoples of Oz will become tired of working in the fields, or marching and singing around witches’ castles, or guarding the gates of the Emerald City. And let’s not forget the various Ozites who’ve been injured in the line of duty, especially during the various wars that seem to regularly break out between competing sorcerers and wannabe monarchs: How many monkeys must lose their wings before we say, “Enough!”? All these folks will need to be provided for, lest they become restless, or a burden on their families. To keep costs from running out of control, however, local unions and organizations should be consulted: For example, members of the Lollipop Guild will need generous health insurance plans to prepare for the almost certain onset of diabetes. Members of the Lullaby League, not so much.<br />
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<b>Establish Trade Routes</b><br />
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This land clearly has bountiful natural resources, not to mention some of the finest, most alive china you’ve ever seen. It also has a skilled workforce able to create pretty much anything and everything, including, apparently, dirigibles and giant mechanical steambots. Oh, and some of the most explosive fireworks in the known universe. With such advantages, it could become a real player on the world stage, save for one major obstacle: Right now the only ways in and out of Oz appear to be through unpredictably turbulent weather patterns on the plains of Kansas and, if you happen to chance upon the right pair of ruby slippers, dream-travel. (At least, in the movies; the books are a bit contradictory on just how exactly one gets to Oz.) That makes Oz more isolated than North Korea. This calls for establishing a means whereby the outside world can get in and out of Oz, so that the land’s wonderful resources and craftspeople can compete in the global market. Appropriate diplomatic and security protocols will have to be provided for, of course, as the kingdom’s gorgeous vistas and that aforementioned Royal Treasure will prove awfully tempting to outside interlopers and duplicitous real estate agents.
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<b>Start Building Democratic Institutions</b><br />
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Oz’s susceptibility to frequent, violent changes in regime appears to be second only to Revolutionary Mexico’s. This is no way to build trust among the people, and it will make economic reform that much harder. The solution: Leave all this monarchy business behind and start having elections. The local infrastructure is there: Munchkin City has a Mayor, after all, so it shouldn’t be too hard to establish broader regional elections among the various peoples of Oz. In fact, each country of Oz could have its own system: The Munchkins may want a Parliamentary system, whereas the Winkies might prefer a Republic. Then, create a revolving Presidency of Oz based in the Emerald City, with each of the peoples of Oz getting their turn to rule (with, of course, the appropriate checks and balances). Establish term limits. As for the witches and wizards, they can still hang around; just be sure to establish a clear separation between sorcery and state.Bilge Ebirihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12483062082914593902noreply@blogger.com37