Not being particularly interested in Facebook (though I have a profile on it), or any form of living life online (despite the blogging—really, I see no discrepancy there), I had no drive to see The Social Network, but I found myself watching it on an airplane nevertheless. For an airplane movie, it was brilliant; completely absorbing, with a requisite cast of teenage antics (for some reason, I prefer to watch young people in my airplane movies; you will not catch me watching any of those stuffy English period dramas, like The King’s Speech, on an airplane).
The film is structured with flashback, and might be the very first film I’ve seen structured that way that did not completely gall me. How is it that Fincher does this more successfully than, say, Van Sant in Milk or Boyle in Slumdog Millionaire? Perhaps it’s that the flashing back is only to a year or two prior. Perhaps it’s that the flashback sequences are of substantial enough length and content to avoid that awful sense of watching a series of Gap commercials rather than a coherent film. Perhaps it’s just a story worth telling, with a finely-structured screenplay. In any case, this is a very serviceable film. Artistically groundbreaking? No. Emotionally intense? Not really. But quite direct, competent, and appreciably limpid in a moment when other films are either filled with explosions or violence or fantasy or period costumes or mysterious malevolent forces or all of the above. I appreciate clean storytelling at a time like this. It’s surprisingly brave.
A point to be made that has only tangentially to do with the film: Facebook was the creation of shallow teenagers with poor social skills, by shallow teenagers with poor social skills, for shallow teenagers with poor social skills. As we use it more and more to "live" our lives, we become more and more shallow, and our social skills become poorer and poorer. Online living is unhealthy and I am vehemently opposed to it.
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Movies: Black Swan
I worry about Darren Aronofsky. It seems that each of his movies culminates with the protagonist cutting him or herself apart to relieve whatever endemic psychosickness lurks inside. I worry that some endemic psychosickness lurks inside of Darren.
Black Swan, like The Wrestler, is of manageable proportion for the director (as things were spinning a bit out of control when his greater ambitions led him from Requiem For a Dream to the baggy and confusing The Fountain). In fact, Black Swan is almost a remake of The Wrestler, the same character arc set on a well-cultured young woman rather than a low-class older man. The Wrestler’s violence is externalized, where the ballerina’s violence is internalized, but both give the director the opportunity to sink into that dark space of self-abuse and destruction.
While watching the film, I wasn’t particularly taken by any aspect; being as catty as some of the ballerinas, I found myself not liking Natalie Portman’s make-up in the final scene, not liking Natalie Portman in general (I never really have). But the movie has had an unexpected staying power, and weeks later, memories of scenes keep bubbling up. The real attraction of the film is Mila Kunis, who has the scratchy sex appeal of young Angelina Jolie, in, say, Gone in 60 Seconds or Girl, Interrupted. Cast to seduce Natalie Portman, she seduces us all, mostly in the rehearsal scene where she dances, her hair down, her technique subsumed in free emotion.
My most common gripe with dance movies is poor dancing, but Aronofsky, surprisingly, gets it right. I quit ballet fairly early, weighing too much to go up on pointe (to clarify, I was thin, but not slight, which is the physical requirement). But, I stayed a dancer, and a critical observer of dancers, and felt throughout The Black Swan, in spite of our protagonist’s mental illness, a tearing nostalgia, a longing to dance—but like Mila, not Natalie.
Black Swan, like The Wrestler, is of manageable proportion for the director (as things were spinning a bit out of control when his greater ambitions led him from Requiem For a Dream to the baggy and confusing The Fountain). In fact, Black Swan is almost a remake of The Wrestler, the same character arc set on a well-cultured young woman rather than a low-class older man. The Wrestler’s violence is externalized, where the ballerina’s violence is internalized, but both give the director the opportunity to sink into that dark space of self-abuse and destruction.
While watching the film, I wasn’t particularly taken by any aspect; being as catty as some of the ballerinas, I found myself not liking Natalie Portman’s make-up in the final scene, not liking Natalie Portman in general (I never really have). But the movie has had an unexpected staying power, and weeks later, memories of scenes keep bubbling up. The real attraction of the film is Mila Kunis, who has the scratchy sex appeal of young Angelina Jolie, in, say, Gone in 60 Seconds or Girl, Interrupted. Cast to seduce Natalie Portman, she seduces us all, mostly in the rehearsal scene where she dances, her hair down, her technique subsumed in free emotion.
My most common gripe with dance movies is poor dancing, but Aronofsky, surprisingly, gets it right. I quit ballet fairly early, weighing too much to go up on pointe (to clarify, I was thin, but not slight, which is the physical requirement). But, I stayed a dancer, and a critical observer of dancers, and felt throughout The Black Swan, in spite of our protagonist’s mental illness, a tearing nostalgia, a longing to dance—but like Mila, not Natalie.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Movies: The Mission
My Jesuit high school must have done a far better job of indoctrinating me than I thought at the time, because I found this film incredibly upsetting. Set in 18th Century South America, the story poses a set of moral challenges for its characters and thus its audience, for which Christian theology has clear answers, the Catholic church its own considerations, and human politics some additional complications.
Jeremy Irons is Father Gabriel, the film's Christ-like figure, a Jesuit missionary who has established rapport with a geographically isolated native tribe. He has taught them about God without shaming them; they remain naked and painted, but live in loving community. They have build a modest church, and he has taught them to sing and play musical instruments. The money generated by their labor goes back into the community.
Robert De Niro is Rodrigo Mendoza, an enemy at first to these natives, whom he captures and sells to the Portuguese as slaves. But after killing his brother in a duel over a woman, he is racked by guilt. He imprisons himself, and languishes for six months before Father Gabriel comes, and challenges him to seek forgiveness. Mendoza challenges the Father to accept his likely failure. The deal is done, and Gabriel brings Mendoza to the village atop the waterfall; a journey the haunted man makes carrying all of his metal armor and weaponry in a sack tied from ropes, wrapped around his chest. He carries his burden for days, climbing wet mountains, until one of Gabriel's fellow priests decides it is enough, and severs the cord. Relentless, Mendoza goes back down to where his penance has fallen, reties it to himself, and sets out again to climb the mountain. He is not free until they reach the village, and a native, recognizing the slave-trader turned penitent, cuts the cord. Mendoza becomes a priest, working alongside Gabriel to bring the village closer to God's kingdom on earth.
Political machinations, however, threaten their work. Spain (a Catholic country that does not allow slavery) proposes to cede this land to Portugal (a country that does allow slavery, whose colonies are in fact built upon it). A Cardinal is sent by the Catholic church to inspect the missions of the area, and though he is moved by the Jesuit's achievements, he nevertheless allows the Spanish government to pass the lands to the Portuguese (a political choice, the threat being that, if he doesn't, Portugal will expel the Jesuit order). From a moral point of view, this is the wrong choice: the preservation of an institution, even a religious institution, is of less consequence than the preservation of a population, particularly this sort of a population (cf. the Beatitudes: blessed are the poor, the meek, the pure of heart; those that hunger and thirst after righteousness).
The next moral decision is that of the missionaries and natives: when the Portugese soldiers come, will they peacefully stand their ground, or will they fight? The Catholic Church offers a Doctrine of Just War, with four requirements: 1) the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; 2) all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; 3) there must be serious prospects of success; 4) the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.
Mendoza takes up his arms. Father Gabriel chooses not to fight. Mendoza asks Gabriel for his blessing, but the Father will not give it. He says, "If might is right, than love has no place in the world." While he acknowledges that this might be the world in which they live, he sticks strongly to Christ's instruction to turn the other cheek, and refuses to take up arms. Mendoza, at least so far as the Just War Doctrine is concerned, would be justified in taking up arms, except that he has not point three on his side. The Portuguese soldiers slaughter the natives, who die with blood on their hands, having killed soldiers themselves to protect their home. And in the end, Gabriel, standing in front of the church with one hundred women and children, leads them singing to their slaughter.
What fills me with anger and confusion is the willingness of each Portuguese soldier to follow through with his "duty" and slaughter these innocents. Christ's way to reach these men would be to approach each individual, arms open in loving acceptance, offering forgiveness for the action he is about to take, and perhaps thus preventing it. That is to say, each soldier needed what Mendoza was given, not what Mendoza chooses to give. He has, thus, not completely learned Gabriel's lesson, and dies still ignorant, defiant as we by nature are.
Jeremy Irons is Father Gabriel, the film's Christ-like figure, a Jesuit missionary who has established rapport with a geographically isolated native tribe. He has taught them about God without shaming them; they remain naked and painted, but live in loving community. They have build a modest church, and he has taught them to sing and play musical instruments. The money generated by their labor goes back into the community.
Robert De Niro is Rodrigo Mendoza, an enemy at first to these natives, whom he captures and sells to the Portuguese as slaves. But after killing his brother in a duel over a woman, he is racked by guilt. He imprisons himself, and languishes for six months before Father Gabriel comes, and challenges him to seek forgiveness. Mendoza challenges the Father to accept his likely failure. The deal is done, and Gabriel brings Mendoza to the village atop the waterfall; a journey the haunted man makes carrying all of his metal armor and weaponry in a sack tied from ropes, wrapped around his chest. He carries his burden for days, climbing wet mountains, until one of Gabriel's fellow priests decides it is enough, and severs the cord. Relentless, Mendoza goes back down to where his penance has fallen, reties it to himself, and sets out again to climb the mountain. He is not free until they reach the village, and a native, recognizing the slave-trader turned penitent, cuts the cord. Mendoza becomes a priest, working alongside Gabriel to bring the village closer to God's kingdom on earth.
Political machinations, however, threaten their work. Spain (a Catholic country that does not allow slavery) proposes to cede this land to Portugal (a country that does allow slavery, whose colonies are in fact built upon it). A Cardinal is sent by the Catholic church to inspect the missions of the area, and though he is moved by the Jesuit's achievements, he nevertheless allows the Spanish government to pass the lands to the Portuguese (a political choice, the threat being that, if he doesn't, Portugal will expel the Jesuit order). From a moral point of view, this is the wrong choice: the preservation of an institution, even a religious institution, is of less consequence than the preservation of a population, particularly this sort of a population (cf. the Beatitudes: blessed are the poor, the meek, the pure of heart; those that hunger and thirst after righteousness).
The next moral decision is that of the missionaries and natives: when the Portugese soldiers come, will they peacefully stand their ground, or will they fight? The Catholic Church offers a Doctrine of Just War, with four requirements: 1) the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; 2) all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; 3) there must be serious prospects of success; 4) the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.
Mendoza takes up his arms. Father Gabriel chooses not to fight. Mendoza asks Gabriel for his blessing, but the Father will not give it. He says, "If might is right, than love has no place in the world." While he acknowledges that this might be the world in which they live, he sticks strongly to Christ's instruction to turn the other cheek, and refuses to take up arms. Mendoza, at least so far as the Just War Doctrine is concerned, would be justified in taking up arms, except that he has not point three on his side. The Portuguese soldiers slaughter the natives, who die with blood on their hands, having killed soldiers themselves to protect their home. And in the end, Gabriel, standing in front of the church with one hundred women and children, leads them singing to their slaughter.
What fills me with anger and confusion is the willingness of each Portuguese soldier to follow through with his "duty" and slaughter these innocents. Christ's way to reach these men would be to approach each individual, arms open in loving acceptance, offering forgiveness for the action he is about to take, and perhaps thus preventing it. That is to say, each soldier needed what Mendoza was given, not what Mendoza chooses to give. He has, thus, not completely learned Gabriel's lesson, and dies still ignorant, defiant as we by nature are.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Movies: Sex, Lies, & Videotape
As a child, when we went to the video store to rent a movie, I would wander the aisles of VHS boxes and wonder about certain films, like Sex, Lies, and Videotape. I imagined it was very bad, and of course I could not ask to watch it. And indeed, as an eight, nine, ten year old, I had no business watching it. Even at sixteen, I didn't need to watch something it. But it's not smut. It's one of Soderbergh's best movies, straight and honest and made with a very delicate touch, for its heavy themes of marital infidelity and sexual repression. It's also surprisingly timeless. Watching it now, you don't get the feeling that the film is over twenty years old. It feels like it's pushing the envelope in its frank, spare delivery, even now.
When I picture James Spader, I inevitably see Graham, his character from this film: a shy, strange, and it turns out impotent college friend of boisterous asshole John (Peter Gallagher), who is sleeping with the sexpot sister of his frigid wife Ann (Andie McDowell, who also gives her definitive performance in this film). Spader's character moves around, living in bare apartments and out of his beat-up old car, videotaping interviews with women on their sexual habits. Watching these tapes, after-the-fact, in solitude, is the only way he is able to obtain sexual climax.
Ann's sister Cynthia, open in every way that Ann is closed, can't get Ann to tell her what Graham's secret is, so she goes to his apartment, uninvited, and introduces herself. She makes a tape. Ann is disgusted. Meanwhile, her relationship with John is deteriorating further. She is certain he is having an affair. When she finds her sister's earring in her own bedroom; she is certain. Potent with rage, she goes to Graham's apartment, and demands to make a tape. He tries to talk her out of it, but she refuses. They begin.
Cagey Soderbergh doesn't give us this scene. Instead, we watch the tape as voyeurs, sitting with John, who breaks into Graham's apartment and watches first the one of Cynthia, then the one of his wife. Minutes into that tape, Graham and Ann's bodies magnetically draw closer, and the video halts into snow. Rage. Needless to say, the marriage does not survive.
What I love about this film is its spare simplicity: four characters, six relationships, one issue, unfolding over the course of a few weeks, simmering very quietly, as if in a pressure cooker. Soderbergh is deliberate and restrained, and only films the steam seeping out of the safety valve, but it is beautiful steam, hot and pure.
When I picture James Spader, I inevitably see Graham, his character from this film: a shy, strange, and it turns out impotent college friend of boisterous asshole John (Peter Gallagher), who is sleeping with the sexpot sister of his frigid wife Ann (Andie McDowell, who also gives her definitive performance in this film). Spader's character moves around, living in bare apartments and out of his beat-up old car, videotaping interviews with women on their sexual habits. Watching these tapes, after-the-fact, in solitude, is the only way he is able to obtain sexual climax.
Soderberg is meanwhile making his own meta-videotape, Ann positioned uncomfortably upright on her analyst's couch, talking about her marriage, sex, and irrational fears (pointedly, she is concerned about all of the world's garbage). She is first wary of the stranger's visit, but soon intrigued by Graham's sensitivity. John, conversely, finds him creepy, and doesn't want to spend any time with him. Ann helps Graham find an apartment, and visits him there a few times, nursing a budding friendship until she discovers his tapes, fleeing in disgust.
Ann's sister Cynthia, open in every way that Ann is closed, can't get Ann to tell her what Graham's secret is, so she goes to his apartment, uninvited, and introduces herself. She makes a tape. Ann is disgusted. Meanwhile, her relationship with John is deteriorating further. She is certain he is having an affair. When she finds her sister's earring in her own bedroom; she is certain. Potent with rage, she goes to Graham's apartment, and demands to make a tape. He tries to talk her out of it, but she refuses. They begin.
Cagey Soderbergh doesn't give us this scene. Instead, we watch the tape as voyeurs, sitting with John, who breaks into Graham's apartment and watches first the one of Cynthia, then the one of his wife. Minutes into that tape, Graham and Ann's bodies magnetically draw closer, and the video halts into snow. Rage. Needless to say, the marriage does not survive.
What I love about this film is its spare simplicity: four characters, six relationships, one issue, unfolding over the course of a few weeks, simmering very quietly, as if in a pressure cooker. Soderbergh is deliberate and restrained, and only films the steam seeping out of the safety valve, but it is beautiful steam, hot and pure.
Movies: Cyrus
I am shallow; I did not enjoy watching this film because I cannot stand John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill. They depress me. They are not funny. They are sad. Looking at them makes me sad. Listening to them speak makes me sad. The characters they play make me sad. Awkwardness is not funny; it is sad. Sad, sad, sad.
Let's also be very honest. Marisa Tomei: wow is she hot. Hot, hot, hot. I believe I commented previously on her hotness in The Wrestler. Let's be honest. Someone as hot as Marisa Tomei is not having a child who looks like Jonah Hill. Further, no matter how strange her home life is as the single mother of a too-attached grown son, someone as hot as Marisa Tomei is not falling for John C. Reilly. It's just not going to happen. Especially since she's not stupid or boring or mean or etc. She is super warm and cool. She can do much better than divorced, depressed, going nowhere fast John C. Reilly.
Do I really want to watch John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill, playing the lowliest of low specimens of humanity, engaged in a psychological thumb-war over the heart of this tender, sweet, smart, hot woman? No. I find it totally degrading. She should leave them both behind and move to a city where she can find people of higher caliber.
Let's also be very honest. Marisa Tomei: wow is she hot. Hot, hot, hot. I believe I commented previously on her hotness in The Wrestler. Let's be honest. Someone as hot as Marisa Tomei is not having a child who looks like Jonah Hill. Further, no matter how strange her home life is as the single mother of a too-attached grown son, someone as hot as Marisa Tomei is not falling for John C. Reilly. It's just not going to happen. Especially since she's not stupid or boring or mean or etc. She is super warm and cool. She can do much better than divorced, depressed, going nowhere fast John C. Reilly.
Do I really want to watch John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill, playing the lowliest of low specimens of humanity, engaged in a psychological thumb-war over the heart of this tender, sweet, smart, hot woman? No. I find it totally degrading. She should leave them both behind and move to a city where she can find people of higher caliber.
Movies: Going the Distance
Another airplane movie, Going the Distance was chosen from a selection of forty-something films solely for the reason that, one day when I was volunteering at the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, a set designer who was working on the film came into the store to buy some things to decorate the Justin Long character's room. I scoured that room for our products, but it seems they didn't make the cut. Along the way, though, I got just what I want out of an airplane romantic comedy, plus some. I spent an academic year in a long-distance relationship myself, being in New York only last winter while my fiance was in New Zealand (much harder than the film's New York/San Francisco split—you can fly from one coast to the other for a weekend for $300; tickets to New Zealand run about $1,000, and it takes practically 24 hours just to get there). Going the Distance was thus an unexpected trigger of memories, and an opportunity to laugh very hard about a time that I am very happy has passed.
I do have one issue with the film, which is simply that Drew Barrymore, as cute and spunky as she is, is old enough to be Justin Long's mom (okay, actually not, but it seems that way); basically, they are a poorly-cast couple. But the script is sweet and funny, filled with candy-coated insights, and only one truly stupid gag (Long getting a spray-tan, and its aftermath) that I could have done without. I'm not generally forgiving, but I'll let this one go.
I do have one issue with the film, which is simply that Drew Barrymore, as cute and spunky as she is, is old enough to be Justin Long's mom (okay, actually not, but it seems that way); basically, they are a poorly-cast couple. But the script is sweet and funny, filled with candy-coated insights, and only one truly stupid gag (Long getting a spray-tan, and its aftermath) that I could have done without. I'm not generally forgiving, but I'll let this one go.
Movies: Get Low
Get Low is basically a Cohen brothers' film that wasn't made by the Cohen brothers. A cranky old hermit in an old Western town gets the notion into his head that he wants to have a funeral party—now, before he's dead, so that he can hear the stories people have to tell about him. First he appeals to the local parish, but the priest won't take his dirty wad of money to do something so unorthodox. Bill Murray (one of many Cohenesque touches), a down-on-his-luck funeral parlor owner in a town where no one is dying, gets wind of this through his young assistant, and offers the old misanthrope just what he wants. They take a portrait of the crazy old man and post it all over town, and sell $5 raffle tickets to win ownership of the hermit's property once he does die.
But because the film isn't actually written by a Cohen, it turns sentimental where it should have stayed quirky and smart. After a number of challenges, including theft of the raffle money, the pastor's refusal to speak at the event, and the hermit's threat to call the whole thing off, the party goes on, and the curmudgeon tells his story. As a young man, he had been in a relationship with a young lady, but had fallen deeply in love with her already married sister. At their house one night, something went wrong. There was a fight, and a big fire. He tried to save the woman he loved, but he failed. He lived and she died. No one ever knew. In the forty years since the event, he kept himself isolated in his compound, no one but a donkey and a string of dogs (all buried in the yard) to keep him company.
Redeemed by the truth in front of the town, the man can die in peace, which he does, then having a much more modest funeral, attended only by the handful of characters we have come to know throughout the film. Very nice. Next?
But because the film isn't actually written by a Cohen, it turns sentimental where it should have stayed quirky and smart. After a number of challenges, including theft of the raffle money, the pastor's refusal to speak at the event, and the hermit's threat to call the whole thing off, the party goes on, and the curmudgeon tells his story. As a young man, he had been in a relationship with a young lady, but had fallen deeply in love with her already married sister. At their house one night, something went wrong. There was a fight, and a big fire. He tried to save the woman he loved, but he failed. He lived and she died. No one ever knew. In the forty years since the event, he kept himself isolated in his compound, no one but a donkey and a string of dogs (all buried in the yard) to keep him company.
Redeemed by the truth in front of the town, the man can die in peace, which he does, then having a much more modest funeral, attended only by the handful of characters we have come to know throughout the film. Very nice. Next?
Movies: A Fish Called Wanda
When I was a kid, there were two movies that I was drawn to every time we went to the video store to rent a movie: Sex, Lies, and Videotape, for the promise of titillation behind its cover photo of shadowy mini blinds and the blatant appearance of that potent three-letter word, and A Fish Called Wanda, also for its cover design and title, less illicit, but nevertheless adult and impenetrable, not akin to The Incredible Mr. Limpet or Splash. Do cut me some slack; I was five, six, seven years old.
Somehow, Alitalia knew that I wanted to finally make good on that childhood curiosity, and offered A Fish Called Wanda as one of forty or so films to watch on my way to Italy this Christmas. I had no idea what to expect, and my sense of stymied expectation lasted throughout the entire film (though at a point about halfway through, I did begin to wonder when it would end). I have a few misconceptions to clear up. First, Jamie Lee Curtis is not hot. It seems that, in many films, she is cast as a woman of incredible sex appeal. I am not saying that she is a bad actress; I am just saying that it is awfully challenging to play an extremely attractive woman when you look more like an ugly man. Also, John Cleese is not funny, and thus A Fish Called Wanda is not funny. I have just read that the film had a number of Academy Award nominations, even winning one for supporting actor, and that it has been ranked in the top 50 of a number of Best 100 Comedy lists. But the film is, in fact, incredibly dull, a confused jewel heist in which the four robbers are all trying to steal the loot from each other, with two of the three male robbers thinking they are in a relationship with Jamie Lee Curtis. There is an additional male character, an older, married lawyer, representing the imprisoned Cleese character, who falls for Jamie Lee as well. If anything about this film is funny, it is the idea that I am supposed to believe that three men desire this woman.
Somehow, Alitalia knew that I wanted to finally make good on that childhood curiosity, and offered A Fish Called Wanda as one of forty or so films to watch on my way to Italy this Christmas. I had no idea what to expect, and my sense of stymied expectation lasted throughout the entire film (though at a point about halfway through, I did begin to wonder when it would end). I have a few misconceptions to clear up. First, Jamie Lee Curtis is not hot. It seems that, in many films, she is cast as a woman of incredible sex appeal. I am not saying that she is a bad actress; I am just saying that it is awfully challenging to play an extremely attractive woman when you look more like an ugly man. Also, John Cleese is not funny, and thus A Fish Called Wanda is not funny. I have just read that the film had a number of Academy Award nominations, even winning one for supporting actor, and that it has been ranked in the top 50 of a number of Best 100 Comedy lists. But the film is, in fact, incredibly dull, a confused jewel heist in which the four robbers are all trying to steal the loot from each other, with two of the three male robbers thinking they are in a relationship with Jamie Lee Curtis. There is an additional male character, an older, married lawyer, representing the imprisoned Cleese character, who falls for Jamie Lee as well. If anything about this film is funny, it is the idea that I am supposed to believe that three men desire this woman.
Movies: Salt
There was a time when I would pay to see Angelina Jolie movies in the theatre, even though I knew they would be awful, just for the privilege of basking in her glow. But Angelina has changed. Her movies have gotten worse (is it possible?), and her glow has dissipated. Salt is probably the worst movie I have seen in a long time; it was, in fact, the worst of six airplane movies I saw during my international Christmas holiday. That is pretty bad.
The tag line for the film was, "Who is Salt?" and I have to admit that, though I carefully watched the film, even rewinding and re-watching certain confounding scenes, I am still not sure. But not because the plot is complex and redoubling, like Primer's. The challenge here is that the screenwriting is lazy, and the plot is incomplete. At the film's start, Jolie is an American agent. She is hoping to go home to her adored husband at the end of a long workday, but is called in to interrogate a strange man, claiming to be a Russian spy. During the interrogation, he describes a plot in which a Russian agent will assassinate the Russian prime minister—on American soil. The name of the Russian agent? Eveyln Salt (Jolie). Strangely, she runs. She is chased. She blows some things up in order to get away. Action! Adventure! Explosions!
We have flashbacks. Jolie was an American child in Russia. Her parents were killed and she was taken in as a student at a spy academy and sent back to America to be a double agent. But when the time comes to kill the prime minister, she doesn't do it, only injecting him with a spider's poison, which makes him appear dead for a few days. And so, has she double-crossed Russia? Or are we at triple-crossing now? I am not sure. The film ends with her running through the woods, chased by an American helicopter she has just jumped out of. Where is she running, and what is her plan? Did she truly love her strange, arachnophilic husband, whom we discover in flashback that she had courted intentionally from the start, as a cover? We don't know. Nor do we care.
The tag line for the film was, "Who is Salt?" and I have to admit that, though I carefully watched the film, even rewinding and re-watching certain confounding scenes, I am still not sure. But not because the plot is complex and redoubling, like Primer's. The challenge here is that the screenwriting is lazy, and the plot is incomplete. At the film's start, Jolie is an American agent. She is hoping to go home to her adored husband at the end of a long workday, but is called in to interrogate a strange man, claiming to be a Russian spy. During the interrogation, he describes a plot in which a Russian agent will assassinate the Russian prime minister—on American soil. The name of the Russian agent? Eveyln Salt (Jolie). Strangely, she runs. She is chased. She blows some things up in order to get away. Action! Adventure! Explosions!
We have flashbacks. Jolie was an American child in Russia. Her parents were killed and she was taken in as a student at a spy academy and sent back to America to be a double agent. But when the time comes to kill the prime minister, she doesn't do it, only injecting him with a spider's poison, which makes him appear dead for a few days. And so, has she double-crossed Russia? Or are we at triple-crossing now? I am not sure. The film ends with her running through the woods, chased by an American helicopter she has just jumped out of. Where is she running, and what is her plan? Did she truly love her strange, arachnophilic husband, whom we discover in flashback that she had courted intentionally from the start, as a cover? We don't know. Nor do we care.
Movies: Burlesque
I'm not ashamed to admit it: I am a girl, and I am thus the target audience for this film. Even if I consider myself an aloof intellectual, too critical for television and bubble-gum pop, there is something about dance flicks that I just cannot resist. Burlesque takes its best cues from Marilyn Monroe in Gentleman Prefer Blondes, and at its worst moments is like a Lifetime movie designed for an MTV audience, but I loved it all. Sure, small-town Christina Aguilera standing on top of tables at her dead-end diner job in Nowhere, USA, singing with the jukebox after closing as she scrubs tabletops is an embarrassing fantasy, but it is an embarrassing fantasy in which I myself have partaken (aside from the fact that I've never waitressed). Do I wish that I could go to LA and be a burlesque performer? Um, yeah!—well, maybe not LA. I don't like LA. But who doesn't want to lounge onstage in a bustier made out of pearls, sitting in a giant martini glass? Maybe I did watch too many Marilyn movies as a girl.
Movies: Primer
Shane Carruth only needed $7,000 and a few years to give us the headache-inducing Primer; perhaps the process gave him a headache as well, because he hasn't given us another film since. Of course, things take time when you are the writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and editor, not to mention lead actor, and composer to boot, for the project.
The film's aesthetic is as spare and minimalist as the budget implies. Nearly every frame of film shot was used. Sets include a cheap apartment's kitchen and garage, a motel, and a storage facility. The palate is gray and taupe. Even the dialogue is delivered as if there was a surcharge for any complete sentences delivered audibly, so instead, the script is filled with vague technical mutterings. The camera nonchalantly observes, more like a security device than an auteur's intentioned frame.
All of this minimalism makes room for an impressively baroque timeline of events. Primer is a film about time-travel, with some of the same concerns as Back to the Future, like risking encountering your double, but none of the sweeping historical gestures. The box (not so flashy, compared to the DeLorean) can only take you as far back as the number of hours you're willing to spend stretching out inside, sipping from an oxygen tank: you turn it on, say, Friday at 8 AM, go do whatever you want all day, come back at 6 PM, and crawl inside. You lay there for ten hours, and when you get out, it's 8 AM again on Friday. There's not much you can do in this window of time, except trade stocks based on stats from the evening paper, which is what Abe and Aaron, accidental inventors of the box, do. But things are strange and confusing. Sometimes Aaron, listening to a radio with one earphone, dictates what Abe is about to say. But then sometimes, Abe says something different. One day, Aaron's ear begins bleeding. Later, Abe's ear begins bleeding. There might be two Aarons, and one of them may have drugged the other one and kept him hidden in the attic; these doubles remind us of the nefarious ghosts in the new Solaris, posing as the "real" selves, whether or not those selves are made of any stuff more real than the double selves.
My understanding is that Primer takes a good three or four viewings to even get a basic handle on the timeline of events, and I don't know that it aesthetically could sustain my attention through that number of viewings. But it is an interesting puzzle, and I prefer it to other deconstructionist timeline films (e.g. Memento). For $7,000, it is an extremely accomplished headache.
The film's aesthetic is as spare and minimalist as the budget implies. Nearly every frame of film shot was used. Sets include a cheap apartment's kitchen and garage, a motel, and a storage facility. The palate is gray and taupe. Even the dialogue is delivered as if there was a surcharge for any complete sentences delivered audibly, so instead, the script is filled with vague technical mutterings. The camera nonchalantly observes, more like a security device than an auteur's intentioned frame.
All of this minimalism makes room for an impressively baroque timeline of events. Primer is a film about time-travel, with some of the same concerns as Back to the Future, like risking encountering your double, but none of the sweeping historical gestures. The box (not so flashy, compared to the DeLorean) can only take you as far back as the number of hours you're willing to spend stretching out inside, sipping from an oxygen tank: you turn it on, say, Friday at 8 AM, go do whatever you want all day, come back at 6 PM, and crawl inside. You lay there for ten hours, and when you get out, it's 8 AM again on Friday. There's not much you can do in this window of time, except trade stocks based on stats from the evening paper, which is what Abe and Aaron, accidental inventors of the box, do. But things are strange and confusing. Sometimes Aaron, listening to a radio with one earphone, dictates what Abe is about to say. But then sometimes, Abe says something different. One day, Aaron's ear begins bleeding. Later, Abe's ear begins bleeding. There might be two Aarons, and one of them may have drugged the other one and kept him hidden in the attic; these doubles remind us of the nefarious ghosts in the new Solaris, posing as the "real" selves, whether or not those selves are made of any stuff more real than the double selves.
My understanding is that Primer takes a good three or four viewings to even get a basic handle on the timeline of events, and I don't know that it aesthetically could sustain my attention through that number of viewings. But it is an interesting puzzle, and I prefer it to other deconstructionist timeline films (e.g. Memento). For $7,000, it is an extremely accomplished headache.
Movies: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight
When The Dark Knight came out and everyone was talking about it, I refused to see it. It was a sequel, and I hadn't seen the first movie. In fact, I had never seen a Batman movie, or any comic book movie at all, for that matter. I had no context by which to judge it, so I recused myself.
But I was recently coerced to watch both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight on a living room couch on a big flat screen television (something I'm not so familiar with, having neither a couch nor a tv). For all of their expense, the films struck me (Begins more so, but DK as well), as having been filmed by a couple of eight-year-olds for two dollars. This is an exaggeration. But there is something about the digital video, the depth of field, and its affect on the camera's quick pan during action scenes, that gave me vertigo. If I wanted to describe this effect in a positive light, I would say that it captured the flattened, stylized cartoons of a comic book, but I don't want to be positive. For reasons incredibly shallow and profoundly deep, I feel that they failed their audience.
Let's be shallow. Katie Holmes, Rachel in Begins, is hot. Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rachel in DK, is not. How am I supposed to accept that Katie, ripe-of-lip-and-breast, with her wet eyes and luminous skin, suddenly has become the dried-up, burnt-out, smoker's-skin Maggie? Maggie has her own kind of indie sex appeal in, say, the Agent Provacateur catalogue, but has no business here, in this pulpy fantasy of urban decay.
Let's be deep. A number of the Joker's monologues are deeply troubling. I watched this movie with two boys: one twelve and one seventeen. They are normal American boys, if a bit precocious, subjected to demonstrations of meaningless violence through video games, movies like this, and the suppressed rage in arguments between their divorced parents. And yet, the Joker's discussion of his father holding a knife to his face, asking "why so serious" before slashing a false and permanent smile onto it, is too much. There is pain of that depth in the world, but I don't want my little brothers inducted into it—particularly in this way, where it is not discussed, contextualized, or countered. What is the Joker, but the uncontrollable force of chaos? He is driven by untreated pain, which becomes rage. Batman is intended to be an inspiration, fighting entropy's evil, but the Joker (as we see) cannot be contained or killed; he must be held, accepted, loved. Batman, still struggling to accept himself, is the wrong hero for this task.
I know that I'm risking sounding like a mother, psychologist, or radical Christian in saying this, but it's clear as we watch Joker poison Harvey Dent in his hospital bed, taking advantage of this moment of pain and isolation to turn an idealist into an evil-doer. Harvey can be saved by love, but instead is condemned by unsupported anguish. I wasn't one of Ledger's many mourners, but I think nevertheless that his death was the culmination of the same unsupported anguish, turned inward like Harvey's rather than out like Joker's.
I am not proposing that Christopher Nolan should have inserted Gandhi as Batman's sidekick (or given him vedic training in Begins); plots are problematized and often driven by the hero's own weaknesses and subconscious sympathies with his enemy. But I worry that audiences, skipping along the surface of entertainment without penetrating critically into its depths, are being wounded, unawares. Chaos is by definition uncontrollable; I worry that the Joker's potency seeps out of the film, and that Batman does not protect us. I worry that we are allowing our hearts to crumble like Gotham.
But I was recently coerced to watch both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight on a living room couch on a big flat screen television (something I'm not so familiar with, having neither a couch nor a tv). For all of their expense, the films struck me (Begins more so, but DK as well), as having been filmed by a couple of eight-year-olds for two dollars. This is an exaggeration. But there is something about the digital video, the depth of field, and its affect on the camera's quick pan during action scenes, that gave me vertigo. If I wanted to describe this effect in a positive light, I would say that it captured the flattened, stylized cartoons of a comic book, but I don't want to be positive. For reasons incredibly shallow and profoundly deep, I feel that they failed their audience.
Let's be shallow. Katie Holmes, Rachel in Begins, is hot. Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rachel in DK, is not. How am I supposed to accept that Katie, ripe-of-lip-and-breast, with her wet eyes and luminous skin, suddenly has become the dried-up, burnt-out, smoker's-skin Maggie? Maggie has her own kind of indie sex appeal in, say, the Agent Provacateur catalogue, but has no business here, in this pulpy fantasy of urban decay.
Let's be deep. A number of the Joker's monologues are deeply troubling. I watched this movie with two boys: one twelve and one seventeen. They are normal American boys, if a bit precocious, subjected to demonstrations of meaningless violence through video games, movies like this, and the suppressed rage in arguments between their divorced parents. And yet, the Joker's discussion of his father holding a knife to his face, asking "why so serious" before slashing a false and permanent smile onto it, is too much. There is pain of that depth in the world, but I don't want my little brothers inducted into it—particularly in this way, where it is not discussed, contextualized, or countered. What is the Joker, but the uncontrollable force of chaos? He is driven by untreated pain, which becomes rage. Batman is intended to be an inspiration, fighting entropy's evil, but the Joker (as we see) cannot be contained or killed; he must be held, accepted, loved. Batman, still struggling to accept himself, is the wrong hero for this task.
I know that I'm risking sounding like a mother, psychologist, or radical Christian in saying this, but it's clear as we watch Joker poison Harvey Dent in his hospital bed, taking advantage of this moment of pain and isolation to turn an idealist into an evil-doer. Harvey can be saved by love, but instead is condemned by unsupported anguish. I wasn't one of Ledger's many mourners, but I think nevertheless that his death was the culmination of the same unsupported anguish, turned inward like Harvey's rather than out like Joker's.
I am not proposing that Christopher Nolan should have inserted Gandhi as Batman's sidekick (or given him vedic training in Begins); plots are problematized and often driven by the hero's own weaknesses and subconscious sympathies with his enemy. But I worry that audiences, skipping along the surface of entertainment without penetrating critically into its depths, are being wounded, unawares. Chaos is by definition uncontrollable; I worry that the Joker's potency seeps out of the film, and that Batman does not protect us. I worry that we are allowing our hearts to crumble like Gotham.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Movies: Howl
I have the greatest respect for the intention and ensuing construction of this film: the elucidation of Ginsberg's poem Howl through biography and history, but multiple complaints about its execution.
My foremost accusation is against the animators, a Thai outfit led by Eric Drooker, in a style is too techno-age to suit Ginsberg's time and tone, which nevertheless comes off as dated. This is animation that might have been considered super-edgy in 1995, but would never have been considered—at least by me—as appealing. Nor is it unappealing in the way some of Ginsberg's lines call for: "yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars;" it's not rich enough to demonstrate half of that.
The animated sequences accompany Franco's reading of pieces of the poem (not in entirety, and not straight through, but in jumbled sequences, which I don't mind). His reading is a bit over-studied at times; there is something distinctly schoolboyish in Franco's voice as he reads or recites. But his physical performance as young Ginsberg is more natural, less hiccuping—or maybe still hiccuping, but in a way that jives with young Ginsberg's own uncertainty.
Much of Howl reminds me of Milk—is it just that we again have Franco, in hippy-hipster San Francisco, sorting out being gay? Both films use the dictated monologue-incited flashback structure (which I lamented in Milk), and so it was little surprise to see, when the credits rolled, that Gus Van Sant (Milk's director) served as Producer here. It's hard for me to squelch the gossipy girl in me who wonders if Van Sant has a gay crush on Franco (who is supposedly not gay, but. . . really?), if not more.
I loved Howl from my first reading (in a Catholic high school English class—that's how far we have come from the 1957 obscenity trial), but despite this film's many frustrations, it nevertheless deepened my affection for the work, explaining to me just who Carl is, and what Rockland was, and why that matters. It could have been so much better, but the movie is still good.
My foremost accusation is against the animators, a Thai outfit led by Eric Drooker, in a style is too techno-age to suit Ginsberg's time and tone, which nevertheless comes off as dated. This is animation that might have been considered super-edgy in 1995, but would never have been considered—at least by me—as appealing. Nor is it unappealing in the way some of Ginsberg's lines call for: "yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars;" it's not rich enough to demonstrate half of that.
The animated sequences accompany Franco's reading of pieces of the poem (not in entirety, and not straight through, but in jumbled sequences, which I don't mind). His reading is a bit over-studied at times; there is something distinctly schoolboyish in Franco's voice as he reads or recites. But his physical performance as young Ginsberg is more natural, less hiccuping—or maybe still hiccuping, but in a way that jives with young Ginsberg's own uncertainty.
Much of Howl reminds me of Milk—is it just that we again have Franco, in hippy-hipster San Francisco, sorting out being gay? Both films use the dictated monologue-incited flashback structure (which I lamented in Milk), and so it was little surprise to see, when the credits rolled, that Gus Van Sant (Milk's director) served as Producer here. It's hard for me to squelch the gossipy girl in me who wonders if Van Sant has a gay crush on Franco (who is supposedly not gay, but. . . really?), if not more.
I loved Howl from my first reading (in a Catholic high school English class—that's how far we have come from the 1957 obscenity trial), but despite this film's many frustrations, it nevertheless deepened my affection for the work, explaining to me just who Carl is, and what Rockland was, and why that matters. It could have been so much better, but the movie is still good.
Movies: Back to the Future, I & II
When I was a kid, I videotaped Back to the Future II off HBO and watched it again and again and again. I had only seen the original movie once, and even then probably missed the opening sequence, because when I watched it on DVD last month, it was completely unfamiliar. What surprised me most was the quality—or lack of quality—of the film. Accustomed to the texture of classic as much as contemporary films, this thing looked like it was shot on VHS by a group of fifth graders on a ten-dollar budget. This is not to detract from its brilliance; I was totally captivated.
Plenty of websites are dedicated to the analysis of the technical possibilities and impossibilities of the film, but as much of a nerd as I am, my attraction to these movies has little to do with time travel (despite the fact that one of the other few movies I obsessively watched on VHS as a child was also structured by time travel: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure). Though I am fascinated by the presentation of various “presents” and futures based on seemingly minor edits of the past, I’m more interested in the characters’ emotional development. These aren’t “deep” movies dedicated to character development, but they manage to convey something essential in their sweeping way: our emotional health and stability is derived from our parents’ emotional health and stability.
I could be critical, and insist on deconstructing the movies’ typological characters—Biff of the 1950s is the same bully as Biff of the 1980s, who is the same bully as Biff of the 21st century—he never grows, changes, learns to do anything other than beat Marty McFly over the head for stolen homework. But Biff is a mere personification of everything in the world that is base, lazy, complacent, gross in appetites and behavior. Marty, the plucky hero, the uncertain dreamer, he who knows what is right, though he is often in deeper than he would like, is the counter force, everything in our would that has potential. So long as that shoot is protected and cultivated, the future is promising.
Analysis aside, everything about these movies is simply so fun and imaginative that I spent the four hours watching them yelping in glee. I felt the same way watching ET. There is a quality of wonder and creativity particular to movies of the 80s, and I don’t think this is subjective (I was born in 1982). Culturally, we are so savvy today, so postmodern, so ironic. Nothing ruffles us. We are so cool, we’re cold. We’re dead. Our films are filled with fast cuts and flashy effects and explosions and noises and slick, shining bodies; even our arthouse flicks are cool, over-experienced, jaded. Before the 80s, movies were stuck—grotesquely over-produced in Hollywood, emotionally flaccid in the arthouse. I’m making sweeping generalizations here, and I’m not saying that brilliant movies weren’t made before and after the 80s (obviously—I do enjoy grotesque over-production and slick bodies and emotional impotence, I swear!). I suppose I’m saying that for a moment in the 1980s, movies were as plucky as 1980s Marty McFly, with the potential do amazing things, though still lacking a bit in tools with which to do them. I’m just afraid that, cinematographically at least, we are living in the alternate future of Biff-world.
Plenty of websites are dedicated to the analysis of the technical possibilities and impossibilities of the film, but as much of a nerd as I am, my attraction to these movies has little to do with time travel (despite the fact that one of the other few movies I obsessively watched on VHS as a child was also structured by time travel: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure). Though I am fascinated by the presentation of various “presents” and futures based on seemingly minor edits of the past, I’m more interested in the characters’ emotional development. These aren’t “deep” movies dedicated to character development, but they manage to convey something essential in their sweeping way: our emotional health and stability is derived from our parents’ emotional health and stability.
I could be critical, and insist on deconstructing the movies’ typological characters—Biff of the 1950s is the same bully as Biff of the 1980s, who is the same bully as Biff of the 21st century—he never grows, changes, learns to do anything other than beat Marty McFly over the head for stolen homework. But Biff is a mere personification of everything in the world that is base, lazy, complacent, gross in appetites and behavior. Marty, the plucky hero, the uncertain dreamer, he who knows what is right, though he is often in deeper than he would like, is the counter force, everything in our would that has potential. So long as that shoot is protected and cultivated, the future is promising.
Analysis aside, everything about these movies is simply so fun and imaginative that I spent the four hours watching them yelping in glee. I felt the same way watching ET. There is a quality of wonder and creativity particular to movies of the 80s, and I don’t think this is subjective (I was born in 1982). Culturally, we are so savvy today, so postmodern, so ironic. Nothing ruffles us. We are so cool, we’re cold. We’re dead. Our films are filled with fast cuts and flashy effects and explosions and noises and slick, shining bodies; even our arthouse flicks are cool, over-experienced, jaded. Before the 80s, movies were stuck—grotesquely over-produced in Hollywood, emotionally flaccid in the arthouse. I’m making sweeping generalizations here, and I’m not saying that brilliant movies weren’t made before and after the 80s (obviously—I do enjoy grotesque over-production and slick bodies and emotional impotence, I swear!). I suppose I’m saying that for a moment in the 1980s, movies were as plucky as 1980s Marty McFly, with the potential do amazing things, though still lacking a bit in tools with which to do them. I’m just afraid that, cinematographically at least, we are living in the alternate future of Biff-world.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Movies: The Back-Up Plan
Even on an airplane, some movies are better left unwatched. No one thinks of J-Lo as a great actress, but I'm still trying to understand how one can go from making a film with Steven Soderbergh to dribbling out such a diarrhetic stream of inane romantic comedies, of which The Back-Up Plan is the latest fecal plop. The plot is barely worth recounting; Lopez plays Zoe, a single girl who owns a frou-frou pet store and a dog with no hind legs. Frustrated by dating and ready to be a mom, she gets artificially inseminated—but then meets the man of her dreams later that day. Hilarity, as the saying goes, ensues as their relationship develops and he adjusts to the reality of becoming the father of a stranger's babies (she's having twins).
But what I found most offensive about this movie was not the plot. Instead, it was Zoe's self-absorption, insensitivity, and inability to communicate. Throughout the film, she makes unfair demands of her beau, and again and again, even though he chafes under this treatment, he returns to her and her insanity. I'm more and more disturbed by media that present poor examples of relating as successful models. Women will watch this film, and expect men to smilingly succumb to this kind of treatment; then, when real-life men fall short of these false expectations, real-life women will be disappointed and confused, but won't identify their own spoiled behavior as the problem.
For the record, I am a girl, and I did cry—multiple times. The film is drivel, but it is effective drivel. Luckily, I can keep my critical faculties plugged in and calculating, even when my permeable emotional self is penetrated and besieged. The two must remain as separate as church and state when entering Hollywood's territory.
But what I found most offensive about this movie was not the plot. Instead, it was Zoe's self-absorption, insensitivity, and inability to communicate. Throughout the film, she makes unfair demands of her beau, and again and again, even though he chafes under this treatment, he returns to her and her insanity. I'm more and more disturbed by media that present poor examples of relating as successful models. Women will watch this film, and expect men to smilingly succumb to this kind of treatment; then, when real-life men fall short of these false expectations, real-life women will be disappointed and confused, but won't identify their own spoiled behavior as the problem.
For the record, I am a girl, and I did cry—multiple times. The film is drivel, but it is effective drivel. Luckily, I can keep my critical faculties plugged in and calculating, even when my permeable emotional self is penetrated and besieged. The two must remain as separate as church and state when entering Hollywood's territory.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Movies: Double Take
Unlike Nightfall, which I saw the same night as Double Take, at the beginning of June, Johan Grimonprez's pastiche may require two month's of consideration to understand. Unfortunately, it didn't compel me to give it this kind of thought.
Perhaps my expectations were unfair. I had read about the film before, and understood it to be a collage of found footage synthesized into a plot-driven movie in which Alfred Hitchcock encounters his double, addressing his famous instruction: "If you meet your double, you should kill him." In fact, Double Take is a film-studentish riff that for some reason parallels Hitchcock's self-acknowledged demise in televisionland (Alfred Hitchcock Presents) with the televised conversations between Nikita Kruschev and Richard Nixon, and later John F. Kennedy (at which debates, unaccidentally, the availability of television in every American home is no accident). Hitchcock impersonator Ron Burrage plays himself playing Hitchcock in 1980, encountering (vintage footage) Hitchcock in 1962. They converse over a cup of tea; one finds himself poisoned and dies. Mushroom clouds punctuate the picture.
Perhaps there is interesting potential for an in-depth analysis of Kruschev/Nixon/JFK as doubles (except that they are three rather than two, Nixon is far from JFK's double, and so if Nixon were Kruschev's double, JFK could not be, and vice-versa, so. . . ), but this film does not offer any thorough analysis on the topic. Instead, in amateur fashion, it presents a number of amusing if not potentially interesting selections of footage (clips from Hitchcock's various introductions to his television program, scenes from The Birds, vintage advertisements for Folger's instant coffee, documentary footage of the Soviet and American leaders at the World's Fair) and leaves it to the audience to suss out what the connection is. Die-hard Hitchcock fans will cling to the Easter eggs Grimonprez plants along the way (look, it's a bird! Oh, isn't that Bernard Hermann? I would recognize that soundtrack anywhere!), but ultimately, the film is an artistic exercise flaccidly executed with little relevance.
Perhaps my expectations were unfair. I had read about the film before, and understood it to be a collage of found footage synthesized into a plot-driven movie in which Alfred Hitchcock encounters his double, addressing his famous instruction: "If you meet your double, you should kill him." In fact, Double Take is a film-studentish riff that for some reason parallels Hitchcock's self-acknowledged demise in televisionland (Alfred Hitchcock Presents) with the televised conversations between Nikita Kruschev and Richard Nixon, and later John F. Kennedy (at which debates, unaccidentally, the availability of television in every American home is no accident). Hitchcock impersonator Ron Burrage plays himself playing Hitchcock in 1980, encountering (vintage footage) Hitchcock in 1962. They converse over a cup of tea; one finds himself poisoned and dies. Mushroom clouds punctuate the picture.
Perhaps there is interesting potential for an in-depth analysis of Kruschev/Nixon/JFK as doubles (except that they are three rather than two, Nixon is far from JFK's double, and so if Nixon were Kruschev's double, JFK could not be, and vice-versa, so. . . ), but this film does not offer any thorough analysis on the topic. Instead, in amateur fashion, it presents a number of amusing if not potentially interesting selections of footage (clips from Hitchcock's various introductions to his television program, scenes from The Birds, vintage advertisements for Folger's instant coffee, documentary footage of the Soviet and American leaders at the World's Fair) and leaves it to the audience to suss out what the connection is. Die-hard Hitchcock fans will cling to the Easter eggs Grimonprez plants along the way (look, it's a bird! Oh, isn't that Bernard Hermann? I would recognize that soundtrack anywhere!), but ultimately, the film is an artistic exercise flaccidly executed with little relevance.
Movies: Nightfall
I saw this movie two months ago at Film Forum. It wasn't so challenging that it's taken me two months to digest it, nor was it so tedious that it's taken me two months to rally my sense of responsibility to write. I've just had a busy two months.
Sitting down to write today, I had, I admit, forgotten the title, and, in fact, most of the plot. The only thing I remembered vividly was the action-packed climax: a fist-fight that tumbles out of the driver's seat of a snowplow—the snowplow still proceeding voraciously toward a lonely lean-to, in which the heroine and another character are bound at wrist and ankle. The shot that sticks is the dead-on, full-screen, look into the maw of the plow, which fills the contemporary audience with drunken giggles, though I imagine the 1957 audience sat on the edges of their seats with their eyes wide open, or else closed them, shrinking away in terror.
But how did we get here? The lurchingly sweet Aldo Ray (I always think he would make a good Frankenstein's monster; his body is too big for his personality) has suited up the innocent Anne Bancroft in winter hiking gear, traipsing into the snowy wilderness of Wyoming in search of a doctor's bag stuffed with cash. The money isn't his, but accidentally fell into his hands the winter before, when he was camping with his friend (incidentally, a doctor). When the two of them stopped to look into a roadside accident, they unwittingly found themselves fraternizing with a couple of criminals—bank robbers on the lam, whose bag full of cash happens to look just like the doctor's bag. Not only do the robbers take the campers' car, but they shoot the doc dead with his rifle, and try to kill Aldo Ray, too. He escapes, taking what he thinks is the doctor's bag, but what is actually the bag of money. Somewhere along the way, he stops to sleep in a lean-to, and forgets the bag out in the snow, never realizing its contents.
Months later, Ray is a hunted man. The bank robbers think he has their money, and the bank's insurance investigator thinks so too, though he has a hunch that Ray is innocent. Bancroft unwittingly steps into the middle of this web when she lets Ray pay for her martini and subsequent dinner at a lonely restaurant in the middle of the night—the same night the robbers find him and drive him out to the waterfront to deliver an information-seeking beating. He escapes, but knows that the only way out of this mess is to find the money himself, which is how he finds himself rolling around in the snow, wrestling in front of an unmanned moving snowplow. The bank robber, I'm afraid to say, becomes food for the beast.
Ultimately, the film is basically as generic a noir as its title implies (I at last remembered the title, but had doubts that it was right, it being so generic). For those with a particular interest in really bad bad guys, bank robber number two is a little gone in the head, with a penchant for torture. For those with an interest in 1950s haute couture, Bancroft plays a model, and one of the better chase scenes involves the robbers crashing her rendezvous with Ray at a classy department store's garden fashion show. And of course, for those with an interest in snowplows, it is a must-see.
Sitting down to write today, I had, I admit, forgotten the title, and, in fact, most of the plot. The only thing I remembered vividly was the action-packed climax: a fist-fight that tumbles out of the driver's seat of a snowplow—the snowplow still proceeding voraciously toward a lonely lean-to, in which the heroine and another character are bound at wrist and ankle. The shot that sticks is the dead-on, full-screen, look into the maw of the plow, which fills the contemporary audience with drunken giggles, though I imagine the 1957 audience sat on the edges of their seats with their eyes wide open, or else closed them, shrinking away in terror.
But how did we get here? The lurchingly sweet Aldo Ray (I always think he would make a good Frankenstein's monster; his body is too big for his personality) has suited up the innocent Anne Bancroft in winter hiking gear, traipsing into the snowy wilderness of Wyoming in search of a doctor's bag stuffed with cash. The money isn't his, but accidentally fell into his hands the winter before, when he was camping with his friend (incidentally, a doctor). When the two of them stopped to look into a roadside accident, they unwittingly found themselves fraternizing with a couple of criminals—bank robbers on the lam, whose bag full of cash happens to look just like the doctor's bag. Not only do the robbers take the campers' car, but they shoot the doc dead with his rifle, and try to kill Aldo Ray, too. He escapes, taking what he thinks is the doctor's bag, but what is actually the bag of money. Somewhere along the way, he stops to sleep in a lean-to, and forgets the bag out in the snow, never realizing its contents.
Months later, Ray is a hunted man. The bank robbers think he has their money, and the bank's insurance investigator thinks so too, though he has a hunch that Ray is innocent. Bancroft unwittingly steps into the middle of this web when she lets Ray pay for her martini and subsequent dinner at a lonely restaurant in the middle of the night—the same night the robbers find him and drive him out to the waterfront to deliver an information-seeking beating. He escapes, but knows that the only way out of this mess is to find the money himself, which is how he finds himself rolling around in the snow, wrestling in front of an unmanned moving snowplow. The bank robber, I'm afraid to say, becomes food for the beast.
Ultimately, the film is basically as generic a noir as its title implies (I at last remembered the title, but had doubts that it was right, it being so generic). For those with a particular interest in really bad bad guys, bank robber number two is a little gone in the head, with a penchant for torture. For those with an interest in 1950s haute couture, Bancroft plays a model, and one of the better chase scenes involves the robbers crashing her rendezvous with Ray at a classy department store's garden fashion show. And of course, for those with an interest in snowplows, it is a must-see.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Movies: Two in the Wave
I've long felt obligated to like Godard, and I've struggled with that sense of obligation, because I've not really found his films enjoyable. Thanks to the documentary now showing at Film Forum, I have a better understanding of why: my tastes are too entrenched in the petit bourgeois.
Two in the Wave follows the rise of the Nouvelle Vague through the growing friendship, and after 1968, the growing rift, between Godard and Truffaut, the filmmakers who most defined the movement. Godard himself was petit bourgeois, Truffaut a poor miscreant, and they met writing criticism for André Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma in the late 1950s. Certain they could do better than their stuffy, tired countrymen, they seduced producer Georges de Beauregard into backing Breathless (written by Truffaut, directed by Goddard, assisted by Chabrol). From that point forward, the movement was fairly well-defined: rules were for breaking (jump cuts during tracking shots? Of course!), and cinema was of, by, and for the youth.
As 1968 changed everything for everyone, so too it changed the relationship between these two men. Let's be honest now: Godard is a total prick. You feel it watching La Chinoise, one of the most pretentious pieces of crap ever made, which might actually be good if it was edited down into a 20-minute ironic short. This is a pre-1968 film, and we already see Godard rejecting completely his bourgeois upbringing. The famed student-worker uprisings made him even more political. He wanted another new cinema, a cinema of the worker, and so he torched his friendship with Truffaut on political-aesthetic grounds. Truffaut still believed in art for beauty's sake, quoting Matisse, who lived through three wars but painted windows, women, and fishbowls nevertheless.
The Truffaut films I've seen (Jules et Jim, Shoot the Piano Player, and the post-'68 The Man Who Loved Women) I've found less unbearable, but still not particularly compelling. The fact is that I'm too stodgy for the New Wave, and I'm okay with that. I want elegance, efficiency, and most importantly, craft. If Breathless works, it's because of Belmondo's charisma, not because Godard used a wheelchair as a dolly.
Two in the Wave follows the rise of the Nouvelle Vague through the growing friendship, and after 1968, the growing rift, between Godard and Truffaut, the filmmakers who most defined the movement. Godard himself was petit bourgeois, Truffaut a poor miscreant, and they met writing criticism for André Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma in the late 1950s. Certain they could do better than their stuffy, tired countrymen, they seduced producer Georges de Beauregard into backing Breathless (written by Truffaut, directed by Goddard, assisted by Chabrol). From that point forward, the movement was fairly well-defined: rules were for breaking (jump cuts during tracking shots? Of course!), and cinema was of, by, and for the youth.
As 1968 changed everything for everyone, so too it changed the relationship between these two men. Let's be honest now: Godard is a total prick. You feel it watching La Chinoise, one of the most pretentious pieces of crap ever made, which might actually be good if it was edited down into a 20-minute ironic short. This is a pre-1968 film, and we already see Godard rejecting completely his bourgeois upbringing. The famed student-worker uprisings made him even more political. He wanted another new cinema, a cinema of the worker, and so he torched his friendship with Truffaut on political-aesthetic grounds. Truffaut still believed in art for beauty's sake, quoting Matisse, who lived through three wars but painted windows, women, and fishbowls nevertheless.
The Truffaut films I've seen (Jules et Jim, Shoot the Piano Player, and the post-'68 The Man Who Loved Women) I've found less unbearable, but still not particularly compelling. The fact is that I'm too stodgy for the New Wave, and I'm okay with that. I want elegance, efficiency, and most importantly, craft. If Breathless works, it's because of Belmondo's charisma, not because Godard used a wheelchair as a dolly.
Movies: All the President's Men
Nothing soothes the burn of a trans-Pacific flight like 1975 Pacino and 1976 Hoffman: the best actors the decade had on offer. Hoffman as Carl Bernstein shares his limelight not only with Redford as Bob Woodward (or Woodstein, as their editor at one point calls them), but with a killer screenplay based on those author's book on the Watergate scandal—something I never found very interesting until this film.
I don't find Nixon a particularly interesting character and haven't enjoyed any Nixon movies, but he's wisely left out of this film, which is really an investigative procedural more than a political drama. We already know that Nixon is at the bottom of the Watergate break-in, so are more concerned with whether or not our heroes at the Washington Post will finally get front-page exposure for their story, and whether they'll be able to find a source willing to go on the record. In short, the movie is as much about news room politics as it is about national politics, and, perhaps strangely, I find the former far more interesting, so appreciate that indulgence.
It's interesting to see how State of Play, another of my airplane movies, basically ripped off its entire strategy from All the President's Men. One would have thought, after more than 30 years of innovations and achievements in filmmaking, SoP would have been more compelling, but it's unfortunately not. I found it disappointing when I saw it, but now having seen what so clearly inspired it, I find it insulting.
I don't find Nixon a particularly interesting character and haven't enjoyed any Nixon movies, but he's wisely left out of this film, which is really an investigative procedural more than a political drama. We already know that Nixon is at the bottom of the Watergate break-in, so are more concerned with whether or not our heroes at the Washington Post will finally get front-page exposure for their story, and whether they'll be able to find a source willing to go on the record. In short, the movie is as much about news room politics as it is about national politics, and, perhaps strangely, I find the former far more interesting, so appreciate that indulgence.
It's interesting to see how State of Play, another of my airplane movies, basically ripped off its entire strategy from All the President's Men. One would have thought, after more than 30 years of innovations and achievements in filmmaking, SoP would have been more compelling, but it's unfortunately not. I found it disappointing when I saw it, but now having seen what so clearly inspired it, I find it insulting.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Movies: Dog Day Afternoon
Wait. What is going on in this movie?! At first start, this appears to be a classic much entrenched in a traditional genre: the bank robbery gone wrong. Big-eyed, baby Pacino, smooth of face and trembling of hand, is Sonny, the classic no-good greaser set to rob a bank with a pair of skittish and incompetent companions; the sweaty bank manager and the tellers are taken hostage, and like all good 1970s hostages (see the original Taking of Pelham 1,2,3) well represent their types: the mouthy one who takes control, the quiet one who calls her husband, the vivacious one who is found in the bathroom putting on her make-up. The semi-competent cop comes to talk Sonny down, and Sonny demands that they bring him his wife. And who shows up? Not the fat mother of Sonny's two kids, but a frail, trembling homosexual in a bathrobe with painted nails and a Jewfro, whose most recent residence is Bellevue.
The fact that Sonny is a homosexual who married Leon in a traditional ceremony (in which Leon wore a floor-length white gown—we are shown a picture), in spite of already being married with children (i.e. not divorced, but still married), and that Leon's desire for a $2,000 sex change is one of Sonny's incentives for robbing the bank (which, by the way, has no money, since the truck has already come and picked up all but the petty cash) is treated surprisingly casually, considering that this film was made in 1975. Perhaps we are expected, since it's based on a true story, to just accept facts as facts, but it's hard for me to imagine audiences 35 years ago, going to see a bank robbery movie starring Al Pacino—the Al Pacino they already know from The Godfather—and not balking at his playing a homosexual. . . aside from the fact that he's not a very convincing homosexual, and relates to Leon more like an indulgent older brother.
The fact that Sonny is a homosexual who married Leon in a traditional ceremony (in which Leon wore a floor-length white gown—we are shown a picture), in spite of already being married with children (i.e. not divorced, but still married), and that Leon's desire for a $2,000 sex change is one of Sonny's incentives for robbing the bank (which, by the way, has no money, since the truck has already come and picked up all but the petty cash) is treated surprisingly casually, considering that this film was made in 1975. Perhaps we are expected, since it's based on a true story, to just accept facts as facts, but it's hard for me to imagine audiences 35 years ago, going to see a bank robbery movie starring Al Pacino—the Al Pacino they already know from The Godfather—and not balking at his playing a homosexual. . . aside from the fact that he's not a very convincing homosexual, and relates to Leon more like an indulgent older brother.
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