I have been remiss - for 2-3 weeks almost. Where are the reviews? My public* hangs, breathlessly, on reviews!** Um - okay then...
The President's Last Bang ***1/2 - Korean film about the assassination of President Park Chun-hee in 1979 by the head of the Korean CIA, told in a strange, dark comic style. A parade of nincompoops - the president, his oafish bodyguard, the KCIA man with a bad liver and worse breath, various underlings, some competent, most not, whores and singers and actresses looking for a break, unflappable waiters, drivers pressed into emergency service as assassins, cowardly generals, dim-witted politicians, and more, enact the sordid tale. It builds to dinner at a KCIA safehouse with the president, an actress and a Japanese singer, the bodyguard (who isn't armed), an obsequious secretary, and the KCIA man - who somewhere in the middle decides, apparently on the spot, to stage a coup. Mayhem and screwups of all sorts follow. For a fuller review, I defer to Filmbrain, who wrote about it last year - it is a very good film.
Music From the Inside Out - **1/2 - documentary about the Philadelphia orchestra, about the musicians, their interests, etc. It is very good at geting across the beauty of the music and the feelings it evokes in the musicians. First rate sound design, blending the music into the noises of the world around it. It's rather slight, for all its merits - enjoyable and respectable, but not terribly deep. But it is enjoyable and intelligent, and worth seeing.
Clay Pigeons - why? well - someone loaned me the DVD... Vince Vaughan, I must say, is wonderful - very funny, compelling and all - just - who wants him to be a villain? Makes me want to see the Wedding Crashers again. Not this though.
The Libertine - **1/2 - somewhere down the line I may have to run up more of a review of this. Not for the film, which while it has merits, has more than its share of problems as well - but for Johnny Depp, who is really on top of his game here. The beginning - he faces the camera, in a dimly lit room, and tells the audience we will not like him - then proceeds, in the film, to play a character that we should hate, but we can't, because it is Johnny Depp, and he is on top of his game. And he plays a character who is a bastard, but has the same beauty and charisma and brilliance Johnny Depp has, and so, whether we should like him or not, we have to love him. The character is John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, a poet and playwright and libertine, who drank and fucked himself to death at the auspicious age of 33, and has apparently come down through history primarily for his deathbed confession. That and some fine, and nasty, poetry... Depp plays him, though, both better than anyone around him, and miserable - disappointed in life - always the life of the party, but with a harsh edge of bile... yet...
Battle in Heaven - *** - in which we move from the cheery, generous spirit of The Libertine to something really nasty... Well - maybe not... This is the new film from Carlos Reygadas - it's about a man named Marcos who is a driver for a general (played by a man named Marcos, who is a driver, apparently, for a government agency where Reygadas' father worked.) We don't see any generals - we see Marcos driving the general's daughter around. We see him riding trains, talking to his wife, visiting the country as well. And - oh yeah - we see him fucking the girl, and his wife. Indeed, the film is notorious mostly for the sex - quite graphic, quite unfeigned, and notable as well for the fact that Marcos and his wife are both quite fat and middle aged.... The actors are all amateurs - and the sex and the strange, robotic acting gives it an odd offensiveness, but there's no doubt that Marcos, especially, has a definite sweetness, as does the spoiled girl, and at times even his wife. There is a plot, involving a kidnapping gone wrong - which leads to other crimes, and then to rather extreme attempts at expatiation of those crimes, that gives it a truly tragic grandeur.... Meanwhile - the film's politics are quite biting: emohasizing the vast gap between classes, between races, the condescenscion and cruelty the rich and powerful show toward the poor. It's a very odd, moving film - much of it shot guerrilla style on the streets (and in the subways and so on) of Mexico City, giving it a powerful look... It is reminiscent (with its graphic sex, amateur actors, and mythic crime & punishment plot) of Bruno Dumont, and almost as good.
Winter Passing - ** - meanwhile, back in the states - a vehicle for Zooey Deschanel, who should be the star of every film... she plays the rather fucked up daughter of a reclusive, very fucked up writer played by Ed Harris. Her mom is dead and she is miserable, so she goes home to look for some letters she has a chance to sell - at home, she finds Will Farrell, in the person of an odd duck, and Amelia Warner as a young,pretty, ex-student who has Suffered... etc. Unfortunately, it sinks into a mix of twee weirdness (the indoor golfing) and sentimental revelations and reconciliations - but it's better than it probably has a right to be, because the actors are so very very good. Deschanel is about as good as it gets - and Will Farrell is superb - watching them is worth the price of admission alone. (Harris can be - but he's also rather overdoing it here - still, he's got enough screen presence he can afford to ham it up a bit.)
* I have a public?
** Good lord, I hope not.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Changes
A couple housekeeping notes - I suppose I've accepted that this is mainly a film blog, whatever else it is - and moved the links to film blogs to the top. I added a few more in the middle - it's still a much shorter list than the list of film blogs I visit regularly, and one of these days I should impose some order on it (even if just alphabetical) - for now it suffices. I also added links to a couple posts collecting links to my film posts - as much for my use as anyone else's: 2006 - 2005... I wish blogger had categories, but I don't think it does, so this will have to suffice.
New blogs on the sidebar:
Dave Kehr's Blog
Wiley Wiggins
Anthony Kaufman
Matt Zoller Seitz
Elusive Lucidity
Enjoy them. I need to try to update those links more often, or add some information about them. I'm not sure how to go about that though.
New blogs on the sidebar:
Enjoy them. I need to try to update those links more often, or add some information about them. I'm not sure how to go about that though.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Differing Opinions
So we have: Annie Proulx vs. Roger Ebert on Crash, Brokeback Mountain, and sour grapes. Proulx is mad because her film didn't win - I can understand that, and she is hardly alone in her contempt for Crash. Ebert, on the other hand, won, and is whining, it seems, because of that contempt for Crash, which he mistakes for, um - anti-homophobia. Or something. Ebert plays politics with it - "The nature of the attacks on "Crash" by the supporters of "Brokeback Mountain" seem to proceed from the other position: "Brokeback" is better not only because of its artistry but because of its subject matter, and those who disagree hate homosexuals." I suppose that's a comfort, but in fact, the attacks on Crash are usually based on the fact that it was a simplistic and badly written film. The words of David Edelstein in Slate carry the day: "It might even have been a landmark film about race relations had its aura of blunt realism not been dispelled by a toxic cloud of dramaturgical pixie dust." Some variation on that opinion was shared by many.
Meanwhile, on a more elevated (maybe) plane, there has been something of a to do about Terence Malick's Pocahontas movie lately. Take a look at Dave Kehr's blog, where his citation of J. Hoberman's comments on the cult of Malick drew said cult (mainly the very able advocate, Matt Zoller Seitz) to refute... Kehr answered - much prose followed, and then some name calling, and now, Moderation in the Comment Thread. For all that, it's an interesting conversation - raising interesting questions about the film, about film styles, about the role of critics, and so on.
The New World is gone from the local theaters, so it's going to be awhile before I see it again. I don't think it's all that good a film - it's gorgeous to look at, it's interesting to look at and think about, but it seems a bit empty to me. I know I have to recheck the thing itself to say that definitively - I don't know if it the longer cuts of it work better - we'll see, someday. For the moment though, I have some thoughts.... One of the commentators on Kehr's site (Kehr himself, in cold fact) compared it to 2001 and 2046 - "striving to induce a kind of hypnotic trance in the viewer, through endless repetition and a heavy reliance on music." Kehr resists - "I want to interact with it as an adult, not as a passive, blissed-out child", quothe he. [I recall that I have promised a review of 2046 one of these years - sad... though I think it appeals at a rather more adult level. The repetition has a direct relationship with the character of Chow - his attempts to keep reliving the past; his misreading of his affairs as being repetitive, when in fact, the situations (the women) are very different, reacting to him very differently - and so on... Someday, I swear it...]
Right now - thinking about The New World, especially in relationship to 2046 - the film that comes to my mind is Ashes of Time. There's a lot of talk about how new and unusual Malick's style here is - but it doesn't seem all that different from Wong Kar-wei's. With any comparison going to Wong, hands down. Not just style, but apparently method - shooting lots of stuff, on the fly, putting the film together later. Wong Kar-wei. These films compare on other levels as well - they are set in the deep past, a kind of mythic past (though Malick makes certain gestures toward the real past.) They are also both dealing with rather adolescent genres - flying swordsmen (who don’t do much flying) in the Wong; Pocahontas and John Smith (and the whole run away and join the Noble Red Man plot) in the Malick - but Wong takes a more critical and ironic approach to the tale. Malick’s film looks loose and unstructured, but in fact is quite conventional - it tells its story coherently enough, without any particular disruption of the narrative, concentrating for the most part on the main characters in the story, their actions and perceptions and so on. What it does, which is admirable, is tell all of this obliquely at times - to fill the actual moments of the film with a kind of flow of images that move the story forward, but rather the way a river moves a boat forward. There's nothing strange about the boat.... It is told in an interesting way, but since the story is so conventional, the impact is lost - the style starts to seem decorative. Certainly compared to Ashes of Time, which is as disruptive at the level of plot and character as it is in style. Malick does shift characters around a bit, starting with Smith and switching to Pocahontas in the middle, but that's not that unusual - compare to the doubles and parallels and transformations of characters in Ashes of Time, let alone the loops and repetitions and so on of the plot itself. For me, Ashes of Time actually earns the kind of consideration Malick's fans are giving The New World - maybe it isn't a world changing film, but it is an endlessly fascinating one. I don't get that from The New World. Maybe I will on subsequent viewing, but the odds have to be against it.
Meanwhile, on a more elevated (maybe) plane, there has been something of a to do about Terence Malick's Pocahontas movie lately. Take a look at Dave Kehr's blog, where his citation of J. Hoberman's comments on the cult of Malick drew said cult (mainly the very able advocate, Matt Zoller Seitz) to refute... Kehr answered - much prose followed, and then some name calling, and now, Moderation in the Comment Thread. For all that, it's an interesting conversation - raising interesting questions about the film, about film styles, about the role of critics, and so on.
The New World is gone from the local theaters, so it's going to be awhile before I see it again. I don't think it's all that good a film - it's gorgeous to look at, it's interesting to look at and think about, but it seems a bit empty to me. I know I have to recheck the thing itself to say that definitively - I don't know if it the longer cuts of it work better - we'll see, someday. For the moment though, I have some thoughts.... One of the commentators on Kehr's site (Kehr himself, in cold fact) compared it to 2001 and 2046 - "striving to induce a kind of hypnotic trance in the viewer, through endless repetition and a heavy reliance on music." Kehr resists - "I want to interact with it as an adult, not as a passive, blissed-out child", quothe he. [I recall that I have promised a review of 2046 one of these years - sad... though I think it appeals at a rather more adult level. The repetition has a direct relationship with the character of Chow - his attempts to keep reliving the past; his misreading of his affairs as being repetitive, when in fact, the situations (the women) are very different, reacting to him very differently - and so on... Someday, I swear it...]
Right now - thinking about The New World, especially in relationship to 2046 - the film that comes to my mind is Ashes of Time. There's a lot of talk about how new and unusual Malick's style here is - but it doesn't seem all that different from Wong Kar-wei's. With any comparison going to Wong, hands down. Not just style, but apparently method - shooting lots of stuff, on the fly, putting the film together later. Wong Kar-wei. These films compare on other levels as well - they are set in the deep past, a kind of mythic past (though Malick makes certain gestures toward the real past.) They are also both dealing with rather adolescent genres - flying swordsmen (who don’t do much flying) in the Wong; Pocahontas and John Smith (and the whole run away and join the Noble Red Man plot) in the Malick - but Wong takes a more critical and ironic approach to the tale. Malick’s film looks loose and unstructured, but in fact is quite conventional - it tells its story coherently enough, without any particular disruption of the narrative, concentrating for the most part on the main characters in the story, their actions and perceptions and so on. What it does, which is admirable, is tell all of this obliquely at times - to fill the actual moments of the film with a kind of flow of images that move the story forward, but rather the way a river moves a boat forward. There's nothing strange about the boat.... It is told in an interesting way, but since the story is so conventional, the impact is lost - the style starts to seem decorative. Certainly compared to Ashes of Time, which is as disruptive at the level of plot and character as it is in style. Malick does shift characters around a bit, starting with Smith and switching to Pocahontas in the middle, but that's not that unusual - compare to the doubles and parallels and transformations of characters in Ashes of Time, let alone the loops and repetitions and so on of the plot itself. For me, Ashes of Time actually earns the kind of consideration Malick's fans are giving The New World - maybe it isn't a world changing film, but it is an endlessly fascinating one. I don't get that from The New World. Maybe I will on subsequent viewing, but the odds have to be against it.
Film Posts, 2006
For my own convenience as much as anyone else's, I have created this post to hold links to all my film posts. If blogger can do categories*, I will turn to that more elegant solution; but for now, this will have to do. These are roughly chronological, within the categories.
[* And as of November 06, roughly, blogger does have a more elegant solution. But this has merits anyway, especially for review posts, since it offers more information.]
Special Posts (essays, lists, etc.):
Altman I: Autobio
Altman II: McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Barbara Stanwyck: (4/13) Baby Face and Night Nurse
Imamura Obit
Altman Obit
Best of 2005 - released films
2005 Lists: Acting, Directing, Scripts, DP
2000s Top Tens by Year
Andy Horbal's Poll - And Results (including my top 10)
No More Marriages Blogathon posts: Near and Dear; Addendum -12/3&4
Reviews and comments:
Reviews: Lawrence of Arabia; Shall We Dance & Follow the Fleet; Breakfast on Pluto; Fun With Dick and Jane; Casanova; Cafe Lumiere; Meatballs & Stripes; Marx Brothers
The Town Hall Memo (Ben Shapiro on politics and the Oscars)
Reviews: Cache; Good Morning, Night; The Passenger; The Matador; The Wild Blue Yonder; Mrs. Henderson Presents
Reviews: Bubble, L'Intrus, The New World
Academy Award Speculation: best film since Annie Hall? and political twittery
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (briefly)
Semi-reviews: 9 Songs, Why We Fight
Reviews (2/19/06): Tristram Shandy, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, Charisma
Reviews: Pulse, CSA, Nightwatch, Springtime in a Small Town
Oscar Comments
Comments on Crash vs. Brokeback and The New World on the blogs (with comparison to Ashes of Time)
Reviews (3/16): The President's Last Bang, Music from the Inside Out, Clay Pigeons, The Libertine, Battle in Heaven, Winter Passing
Reviews (3/22): Innocence, V for Vendetta
Reviews (short): (3/26): Thank You for Smoking, Don't Come Knocking
Broken Down Film/Osamu Tezuka link
Reviews (4/13/2006): Breaking News, Friends With Money, Lucky Number Slevin, Pitfall, 3 Laura Mulvery short films
Reviews (4/17): L'Enfant, Stoned, Kelly's Heroes
Reviews (5/14): Three Times, I AM A Sex Addict, Art School Confidential, Badlands, Days of Heaven
DVD Notes (5/16): Secret Honor, Mr Jealousy, The Apartment, Marie and Julien, Oasis, 40 Guns, Broadway Melody
Art School Confidential - comments
Older Films Seen (6/2) - Spirit of the Beehive, Top Hat, Shall We Dance, Royal Wedding and Gay Divorcee
Reviews - Recent Films (6/3) - Puffy Chair, Somersault, The Proposition, Stolen (with comments on art)
Reviews (6/13) - Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Clean, Prairie Home Companion
Briefly - Banlieue 13 and a link to David Lynch's Lumiere film
Roundup (7/30): brief comments on Rossellini double feature and documentary; Nacho Libre; Leonard Cohen; Withnail & I/Big Leboswki double bill; Scanner Darkly
Death of Mr. Lazarescu - longer review, 7/31
Reviews: Snakes on a Plane, Little Miss Sunshine, The Oh in Ohio (8/26)
Ozu Train Clips
Movie Catchup: Talledega Nights, Half Nelson, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, Something Like Happiness, Lucnacy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Reviews (9/23): This Film is Not Yet Rated, Science of Sleep, plus Murder by Numbers
15 Horror Films Blogathon (10/28)
Reviews (11/06) - Borat and Babel
Reviews (11/13) - Stranger than Fiction; Scream of the Ants
Reviews (11/19) - Fast Food Nation; For Your Consideration
Reviews (12/5) - Ten Items or Less, Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, Enthusiasm
Reviews (12/11) - History Boys and F*ck.
Inland Empire (12/11) - at length
[* And as of November 06, roughly, blogger does have a more elegant solution. But this has merits anyway, especially for review posts, since it offers more information.]
Special Posts (essays, lists, etc.):
Altman I: Autobio
Altman II: McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Barbara Stanwyck: (4/13) Baby Face and Night Nurse
Imamura Obit
Altman Obit
Best of 2005 - released films
2005 Lists: Acting, Directing, Scripts, DP
2000s Top Tens by Year
Andy Horbal's Poll - And Results (including my top 10)
No More Marriages Blogathon posts: Near and Dear; Addendum -12/3&4
Reviews and comments:
Reviews: Lawrence of Arabia; Shall We Dance & Follow the Fleet; Breakfast on Pluto; Fun With Dick and Jane; Casanova; Cafe Lumiere; Meatballs & Stripes; Marx Brothers
The Town Hall Memo (Ben Shapiro on politics and the Oscars)
Reviews: Cache; Good Morning, Night; The Passenger; The Matador; The Wild Blue Yonder; Mrs. Henderson Presents
Reviews: Bubble, L'Intrus, The New World
Academy Award Speculation: best film since Annie Hall? and political twittery
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (briefly)
Semi-reviews: 9 Songs, Why We Fight
Reviews (2/19/06): Tristram Shandy, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, Charisma
Reviews: Pulse, CSA, Nightwatch, Springtime in a Small Town
Oscar Comments
Comments on Crash vs. Brokeback and The New World on the blogs (with comparison to Ashes of Time)
Reviews (3/16): The President's Last Bang, Music from the Inside Out, Clay Pigeons, The Libertine, Battle in Heaven, Winter Passing
Reviews (3/22): Innocence, V for Vendetta
Reviews (short): (3/26): Thank You for Smoking, Don't Come Knocking
Broken Down Film/Osamu Tezuka link
Reviews (4/13/2006): Breaking News, Friends With Money, Lucky Number Slevin, Pitfall, 3 Laura Mulvery short films
Reviews (4/17): L'Enfant, Stoned, Kelly's Heroes
Reviews (5/14): Three Times, I AM A Sex Addict, Art School Confidential, Badlands, Days of Heaven
DVD Notes (5/16): Secret Honor, Mr Jealousy, The Apartment, Marie and Julien, Oasis, 40 Guns, Broadway Melody
Art School Confidential - comments
Older Films Seen (6/2) - Spirit of the Beehive, Top Hat, Shall We Dance, Royal Wedding and Gay Divorcee
Reviews - Recent Films (6/3) - Puffy Chair, Somersault, The Proposition, Stolen (with comments on art)
Reviews (6/13) - Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Clean, Prairie Home Companion
Briefly - Banlieue 13 and a link to David Lynch's Lumiere film
Roundup (7/30): brief comments on Rossellini double feature and documentary; Nacho Libre; Leonard Cohen; Withnail & I/Big Leboswki double bill; Scanner Darkly
Death of Mr. Lazarescu - longer review, 7/31
Reviews: Snakes on a Plane, Little Miss Sunshine, The Oh in Ohio (8/26)
Ozu Train Clips
Movie Catchup: Talledega Nights, Half Nelson, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, Something Like Happiness, Lucnacy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Reviews (9/23): This Film is Not Yet Rated, Science of Sleep, plus Murder by Numbers
15 Horror Films Blogathon (10/28)
Reviews (11/06) - Borat and Babel
Reviews (11/13) - Stranger than Fiction; Scream of the Ants
Reviews (11/19) - Fast Food Nation; For Your Consideration
Reviews (12/5) - Ten Items or Less, Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, Enthusiasm
Reviews (12/11) - History Boys and F*ck.
Inland Empire (12/11) - at length
Film Posts 2005
These are movie posts from 2005. Sorted somewhat, and listed chronologically.
Special (essays, lists, series', etc.):
2005 Top 10 (tucked in at the bottom of a post)
80s Top Ten
Top ten of the 00's so far
Guardian's 40 Contemporary Directors
20 Best Directors List
Top 15 in 15 Years - also, 15 directors since 1990
Busby Berkeley 1: outline of coming attractions
Berkeley 2: evaluative overview of the films I've seen
Berkeley 3: Types of musicals
Berkeley 4: Stage and screen
Berkeley 5: Welcome to the Machine
Berkeley 6: Politics
Naruse 1 (week 1): When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Mother, Flunky! Work Hard!, Every Night's Dream, Wife be Like a Rose, The Traveling Actors, Tale of Archery at the Sanjusangendo, Song Lantern,
Naruse 2 (week 2): Late Chrysanthemums, Repast, Summer Clouds, Floating Clouds, Lightning, The Whole Family Works, Flowing, The Sound of the Mountain, The Wanderer's Notebook
Reviews, comments, etc.:
Goodbye Dragon Inn
Passion of the Christ
Coming Soon, and Semi-reviews: Oldboy, Kung-fu Hustle, Wong Kar-wei, and Eros
Reviews: Oldboy and Memories of Murder
Reviews: Cowards Bend at the Knees, The Man Who Left his Will on Film, Bad Guy (at length)
Reviews: Howl's Moving Castle, The Girl From Monday, Tell them who you are, Crash
Movie Stars (inspired by Lance Mannion's post)
Harold Lloyd 1 - just noting the series
Reviews (mostly in brief): Murderball, Youth of the Beast, The Beat My Heart Skipped, Batman and Robin, 2046 (DVD), Happily Ever After, Batman Forever, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Mysterious Skin
Reviews: 5x2, Wedding Crashers, The Merry Widow, 42nd Street, Showgirls, Zabriskie Point
Reviews: Elevator to the Gallows, Broken Flowers, The Son, East of Borneo
Reviews: Grizzly Man, The Aristocrats, Last Days, Love Me Tonight
Reviews 8/21: Junebug (first of several so far unfulfilled promises of a 2046 review)
In memory of George Fasel, of A Girl and a Gun - plus list of film blogs
Reviews (8/28): Batman Begins, The World, The 40 Year Old Virgin
Reviews (9/25): Brothers Grimm, If Lucy Fell, The Baxter, The Conformist,
Reviews (10/3): My Sex Life (or How I Got Into an Argument), Mutual Admiration, Dial M For Murder, Keane
Reviews (10/13): History of Violence, The Corpse Bride, Good Night and Good Luck
Reviews (10/16): Countess From Hong Kong, Wife Be Like a Rose, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Wererabbit, Thumbsucker
Reviews (10/23): Capote, Burden of Dreams, Pistol Opera, Scattered Clouds, Little Fugitive
Reviews (10/30): Mother, Late Chrysanthemums (briefly recapped), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Three Extremes, Mouchette, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Complaining - attendance at Korean films, Memoirs of a Geisha, etc...
Reviews (11/4): Doppelganger, Where the Truth Lies, The Squid and the Whale & Samurai Cinema: Kill, Sword of Doom, Yojimbo and Sanjuro
Reviews (11/13): Three Outlaw Samurai, Samurai Rebellion, Hara-kiri, 20th Century, The Passenger, Bad News Bears, 40 Shades of Blue
Reviews (11/20): Walk the Line, Smile, Top Hat, Squid and the Whale
Reviews (12/05): Jesus is Magic, Ballet Russes, Seven Men From Now, The Tall T, History of Violence (again), Darwin's Nightmare, Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
Reviews 12/12: Aeon Flux, The Wide Blue Road, Pride and Prjudice, Be Here to Love me: A Film About Townes Van Sant
Reviews (12/20): 2 Wong Kar Wei films (Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, 2046 - more vain promises of comments to come); Alles Auf Zucker, A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera, Brokeback Mountain, Talent Given Us, Rushmore and Royal Tennenbaums (on projected DVD, unfortunately)
Special (essays, lists, series', etc.):
2005 Top 10 (tucked in at the bottom of a post)
80s Top Ten
Top ten of the 00's so far
Guardian's 40 Contemporary Directors
20 Best Directors List
Top 15 in 15 Years - also, 15 directors since 1990
Busby Berkeley 1: outline of coming attractions
Berkeley 2: evaluative overview of the films I've seen
Berkeley 3: Types of musicals
Berkeley 4: Stage and screen
Berkeley 5: Welcome to the Machine
Berkeley 6: Politics
Naruse 1 (week 1): When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Mother, Flunky! Work Hard!, Every Night's Dream, Wife be Like a Rose, The Traveling Actors, Tale of Archery at the Sanjusangendo, Song Lantern,
Naruse 2 (week 2): Late Chrysanthemums, Repast, Summer Clouds, Floating Clouds, Lightning, The Whole Family Works, Flowing, The Sound of the Mountain, The Wanderer's Notebook
Reviews, comments, etc.:
Goodbye Dragon Inn
Passion of the Christ
Coming Soon, and Semi-reviews: Oldboy, Kung-fu Hustle, Wong Kar-wei, and Eros
Reviews: Oldboy and Memories of Murder
Reviews: Cowards Bend at the Knees, The Man Who Left his Will on Film, Bad Guy (at length)
Reviews: Howl's Moving Castle, The Girl From Monday, Tell them who you are, Crash
Movie Stars (inspired by Lance Mannion's post)
Harold Lloyd 1 - just noting the series
Reviews (mostly in brief): Murderball, Youth of the Beast, The Beat My Heart Skipped, Batman and Robin, 2046 (DVD), Happily Ever After, Batman Forever, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Mysterious Skin
Reviews: 5x2, Wedding Crashers, The Merry Widow, 42nd Street, Showgirls, Zabriskie Point
Reviews: Elevator to the Gallows, Broken Flowers, The Son, East of Borneo
Reviews: Grizzly Man, The Aristocrats, Last Days, Love Me Tonight
Reviews 8/21: Junebug (first of several so far unfulfilled promises of a 2046 review)
In memory of George Fasel, of A Girl and a Gun - plus list of film blogs
Reviews (8/28): Batman Begins, The World, The 40 Year Old Virgin
Reviews (9/25): Brothers Grimm, If Lucy Fell, The Baxter, The Conformist,
Reviews (10/3): My Sex Life (or How I Got Into an Argument), Mutual Admiration, Dial M For Murder, Keane
Reviews (10/13): History of Violence, The Corpse Bride, Good Night and Good Luck
Reviews (10/16): Countess From Hong Kong, Wife Be Like a Rose, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Wererabbit, Thumbsucker
Reviews (10/23): Capote, Burden of Dreams, Pistol Opera, Scattered Clouds, Little Fugitive
Reviews (10/30): Mother, Late Chrysanthemums (briefly recapped), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Three Extremes, Mouchette, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Complaining - attendance at Korean films, Memoirs of a Geisha, etc...
Reviews (11/4): Doppelganger, Where the Truth Lies, The Squid and the Whale & Samurai Cinema: Kill, Sword of Doom, Yojimbo and Sanjuro
Reviews (11/13): Three Outlaw Samurai, Samurai Rebellion, Hara-kiri, 20th Century, The Passenger, Bad News Bears, 40 Shades of Blue
Reviews (11/20): Walk the Line, Smile, Top Hat, Squid and the Whale
Reviews (12/05): Jesus is Magic, Ballet Russes, Seven Men From Now, The Tall T, History of Violence (again), Darwin's Nightmare, Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
Reviews 12/12: Aeon Flux, The Wide Blue Road, Pride and Prjudice, Be Here to Love me: A Film About Townes Van Sant
Reviews (12/20): 2 Wong Kar Wei films (Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, 2046 - more vain promises of comments to come); Alles Auf Zucker, A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera, Brokeback Mountain, Talent Given Us, Rushmore and Royal Tennenbaums (on projected DVD, unfortunately)
Friday, March 10, 2006
Friday Music X
Late in the day, but here goes....
1. Son Volt - Ten Second News
2. Cab - Future Days
3. Danielson Famille - Good News for the Pus Pickers
4. Leonard Cohen - Sisters of Mercy
5. REM - Radio Free Europe
6. Boogie Down Production - Ghetto Music
7. Edith Piaf - La Vie en Rose
8. John Cale - Bring it on Up
9. White Stripes - The Denial Twist
10. Dr. Nerve - Not Everyone's as Rich as Your Parents
1. Son Volt - Ten Second News
2. Cab - Future Days
3. Danielson Famille - Good News for the Pus Pickers
4. Leonard Cohen - Sisters of Mercy
5. REM - Radio Free Europe
6. Boogie Down Production - Ghetto Music
7. Edith Piaf - La Vie en Rose
8. John Cale - Bring it on Up
9. White Stripes - The Denial Twist
10. Dr. Nerve - Not Everyone's as Rich as Your Parents
Monday, March 06, 2006
Post Oscar Something
I actually watched the benighted thing last night, so I suppose I have to comment. Had to see Altman get his, though I also had some reading I had to do but didn't really want to do, so guessing there would be a lot of dead time, I figured I could go back and forth between Jon Stewart and commodity fetishism and keep sane. Worked pretty well. So then - the Oscars....
1) Crash winning is a travesty, though not all that surprising - the Academy has a nose for picking the worst available film. The odd thing is that the last couple years, the nominations have not been embarrassing at all. Not the best bunch of films, but respectable - maybe a turd here or there... they managed to step in one.... What's odder, actually, is that if you hadn't seen Crash, it doesn't sound half bad. Oh, the potential for disaster was always there (especially if you're familiar with Paul Haggis, the rotten script he wrote for Million Dollar Baby, say), but so was the potential for something good. Without seeing it - it sounds like a challenging, socially conscious, humanistic. serious film about race in America - it sounds edgy and thoughtful, maybe more serious than the old style romance with a twist that Brokeback Mountain was. (None of the other three films seemed to have a chance, even if they might have been better than those two.) But you see Crash - and I fail to see how you can not see what a lame, hackneyed, contrived, false piece of pablum it is.
2) It doesn't matter though. It will be forgotten before the week is out. It was forgotten before it got nominated for the Oscar, and will be forgotten now, except as a cautionary tale. Probably not the run screaming type of cautionary tale Dances With Wolves or Forest Gump are, but the kind that people just shake their heads and marvel at - what could they have been thinking?
3) On a happier note - Altman was amusing and charming and modest, in an arrogant way - the way he hinted that they were taking him away from his work, interrupting his play in London, his promotion of his new movie, the little hints that they were telling him to go sit in the corner and be quiet, old geezerm and he wasn't about to do it.... Nice. The intro, Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep clowning Altmanesquely [yellow card from the adverb police!] was - odd. Actually kind of nice - maybe a silly conceit, but it was fun watching them.
4) Ben Stiller's bit was an odd conceit too, but he sold it, doing his clueless dipshit routine. Likewise, the attack ads were very amusing.
5) I spent half the day with that damned pimp song running through my head.
6) Altman should have said, "now I'm tied with the 3 6 mafia!" Or did he go on before they won? I can't remember. Nevertheless...
7) Memoirs of a Geisha served a useful purpose, finally - something to cheer against through all the technical awards, way too many of which it own. It can't have deserved any of them.
8) Finally - I kept thinking about what could have been. The films actually nominated for the big awards weren't bad - nothing outstanding, but not bad (except Crash, of course, and again - in theory, it isn't half bad.) Think of what could have been - Memoirs winning all those technical awards - a few years ago, it would have been up for the big ones, too. What if Cinderella Man had been nominated for something? (I haven't seen it, but it's a Ron Howard film - who needs to see Ron Howard films?) If Hollywood is really moving away from rewarding that type of shit, we are all better off.
At the same time, I'd get a reminder, every now and then, of what was on the other side. An original screenplay here - an adapted screenplay there - a cinematography nomination yonder... What if - 1, 2 or 3 of those films (The Squid and the Whale, History of Violence, The New World) had gotten a best picture nomination? a best director nomination? There's a kind of shadow Oscars - the genuinely good, even great, films, nominated here or there, but staying at the margins....
Thinking thus, I had a small epiphany. Something I probably knew, but tried not to think about. I've taken some shots at the Malick film - I wasn't hugely enthusiastic about the Cronenburg. But the fact is, I have seen History of Violence twice (and The Squid and the Whale, but I loved that without reservation) - and with some reservations, probably want to see The New World again. In fact - I'd rather see any of those films again than see any of the best picture nominations again, even if most of the best picture nominees are, maybe, better than the Malick film. It's just that The New World, whatever it's flaws, is interesting - I wish people would talk about that instead of Crash and Brokeback Mountain. Good bad or indifferent - it's alive.
1) Crash winning is a travesty, though not all that surprising - the Academy has a nose for picking the worst available film. The odd thing is that the last couple years, the nominations have not been embarrassing at all. Not the best bunch of films, but respectable - maybe a turd here or there... they managed to step in one.... What's odder, actually, is that if you hadn't seen Crash, it doesn't sound half bad. Oh, the potential for disaster was always there (especially if you're familiar with Paul Haggis, the rotten script he wrote for Million Dollar Baby, say), but so was the potential for something good. Without seeing it - it sounds like a challenging, socially conscious, humanistic. serious film about race in America - it sounds edgy and thoughtful, maybe more serious than the old style romance with a twist that Brokeback Mountain was. (None of the other three films seemed to have a chance, even if they might have been better than those two.) But you see Crash - and I fail to see how you can not see what a lame, hackneyed, contrived, false piece of pablum it is.
2) It doesn't matter though. It will be forgotten before the week is out. It was forgotten before it got nominated for the Oscar, and will be forgotten now, except as a cautionary tale. Probably not the run screaming type of cautionary tale Dances With Wolves or Forest Gump are, but the kind that people just shake their heads and marvel at - what could they have been thinking?
3) On a happier note - Altman was amusing and charming and modest, in an arrogant way - the way he hinted that they were taking him away from his work, interrupting his play in London, his promotion of his new movie, the little hints that they were telling him to go sit in the corner and be quiet, old geezerm and he wasn't about to do it.... Nice. The intro, Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep clowning Altmanesquely [yellow card from the adverb police!] was - odd. Actually kind of nice - maybe a silly conceit, but it was fun watching them.
4) Ben Stiller's bit was an odd conceit too, but he sold it, doing his clueless dipshit routine. Likewise, the attack ads were very amusing.
5) I spent half the day with that damned pimp song running through my head.
6) Altman should have said, "now I'm tied with the 3 6 mafia!" Or did he go on before they won? I can't remember. Nevertheless...
7) Memoirs of a Geisha served a useful purpose, finally - something to cheer against through all the technical awards, way too many of which it own. It can't have deserved any of them.
8) Finally - I kept thinking about what could have been. The films actually nominated for the big awards weren't bad - nothing outstanding, but not bad (except Crash, of course, and again - in theory, it isn't half bad.) Think of what could have been - Memoirs winning all those technical awards - a few years ago, it would have been up for the big ones, too. What if Cinderella Man had been nominated for something? (I haven't seen it, but it's a Ron Howard film - who needs to see Ron Howard films?) If Hollywood is really moving away from rewarding that type of shit, we are all better off.
At the same time, I'd get a reminder, every now and then, of what was on the other side. An original screenplay here - an adapted screenplay there - a cinematography nomination yonder... What if - 1, 2 or 3 of those films (The Squid and the Whale, History of Violence, The New World) had gotten a best picture nomination? a best director nomination? There's a kind of shadow Oscars - the genuinely good, even great, films, nominated here or there, but staying at the margins....
Thinking thus, I had a small epiphany. Something I probably knew, but tried not to think about. I've taken some shots at the Malick film - I wasn't hugely enthusiastic about the Cronenburg. But the fact is, I have seen History of Violence twice (and The Squid and the Whale, but I loved that without reservation) - and with some reservations, probably want to see The New World again. In fact - I'd rather see any of those films again than see any of the best picture nominations again, even if most of the best picture nominees are, maybe, better than the Malick film. It's just that The New World, whatever it's flaws, is interesting - I wish people would talk about that instead of Crash and Brokeback Mountain. Good bad or indifferent - it's alive.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
On McCabe and Mrs. Miller, at Length
McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a film with three endings*. In one, the town puts out the fire in the church and celebrates. In another, McCabe dies alone, while the snow drifts over him. In the third, Mrs. Miller lies stoned in Chinatown, staring at a marble egg. Altman doesn’t really resolve these endings, they play out in parallel, they don't cohere. They represent three incompatible interpretations of the story, none of which Altman favors over the others. Is McCabe a tragic hero, a small timer up against a heartless vicious corporation, a man who makes a mistake and pays for it with his life? That is how he sees himself. The way Altman shows his death - from his surprising, and heroic, killing of Butler, to his end, disappearing under the drifting snow - supports this feeling. Or is he a fool? A man who badly miscalculated his situation, and then insisted on playing the martyr instead of heading for the hills? This seems to be how Mrs. Miller sees him - more or less admirable for that heroism, but still a fool. Or is he simply irrelevant? As far as the town is concerned, his troubles pose a much less immediate threat than the fire in the church. They put the fire out, acting together, as a community, and celebrate, oblivious to McCabe’s death or Mrs. Miller’s absence.
Altman does not force us to choose an ending, or an interpretation. He might lean toward Mrs. Miller's point of view (the films ends with her literal point of view, after all), but that doesn't cancel the other endings. He undermines all three. The town may have come together to put out the fire, and the celebration reflects that, but after all, McCabe or Mrs. Miller are not there - nor are any of the Chinese (who have no part in any of this), and the last shot of the celebration is of the Washington’s (the black barber and his wife) walking away, alone again. We can believe that the town has been brought together by the crisis of the fire - but not long enough for the embers to cool. McCabe’s ending is tragic on the face of it - he dies, heroically, in a sense, but completely alone, forgotten by everyone, and the last we see of him he is being buried by the snow. Even Mrs. Miller’s ending is a barren one. She is stoned, after all - mindlessly absorbed in the blankness of the egg. The same wind that blows over McCabe’s ending blows in hers. Altman’s last shots of both McCabe and Mrs. Miller are long slow zoom-ins, and they are similarly unresponsive - she is as good as dead.
The whole film is like that. Altman consistently presents multiple perspectives on the story, showing the story (the world of the film) as it is experienced by different people, as they interpret it. He sticks mostly to McCabe's story, but the life of the town around him, and of other people, are always present.
Some years back, I wrote a paper** about this film for a class - the only requirement for the paper was to bring in the writings of one of the filmmakers covered in the class. I applied a bit from Godard's writings (an outline of his approach to making Two or Three Things I Know About Her) to the Altman film. Godard's comments on that film seemed quite applicable to many of his films - and to those of other filmmakers, such as Altman. Godard's four movements:
1) He will describe things and people from outside - as objects.
2) He will describe things and people from inside - as subjects. With people, this means showing their thoughts and feelings - “scenes more or less well written or acted.” Objects can be shown from inside, especially inside looking out.
3) He will describe “structures” - not, Godard writes, “a generalized overall truth” but “laws one must discover and apply in order to live in society.” He also notes (an important concept for understanding Altman) that there is no harmonious society. Godard speaks of consumer values; Altman, similarly refers to capitalist values in general.
4) Through these first three, Godard hopes to arrive at “life” - that is, a sense of how an individual experiences living in the world.
Those comments were written specifically about Two or Three Things I Know About Her, but I think they are generally applicable to Godard’s work, and might be even more generally applicable to Altman’s. Altman returns throughout his career to stories involving large numbers of people interacting within a specific milieu - a place, an industry, a charged moment, in which he does try to do justice to the “world” of that milieu, to individuals in the “world,” and the ways they interact with each other and the “world.” He does so in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, showing us people, telling us their stories, probing their ideas and feelings - while placing them in a society and showing us how that society functions, where they fit (or more commonly, don’t fit.)
He emphasizes the physical world around the characters - the town, the mountains and trees and rivers, the snow that falls on them. He moves back and forth between showing the world (and people) objectively, and showing the characters' perception of the world, as well as investing objects and places with his own meanings. This often takes the form of quite literally moving the camera in and out of spaces - shooting the outdoors from inside and indoors from outside. He places a great stress on transitional spaces - bridges, stairways, doors, he shoots through doors and windows and railings, as well as trees, through clouds of smoke or snow or rain and light and dark, all ways to hide people from one another. We see the town from outside, we see it being built, we see it filling up - we see the objects brought in, furniture, machinery, food, bottles, cards, lamps. Altman's documentary experience must be relevant here - objects are emphasized, the color of the unpainted wood, the way people wear their hair, their clothes, the type of guns people carry. At the same time, we understand these things "subjectively" - we see these things as physical objects, but also for the meanings they are given, both by the characters themselves, and by Altman. Guns and lamps say - are invested with significance. Guns carry fairly conventional, phallic significance (as in the over-the-top contrast between McCabe's derringer and Butler's blunderbuss), but it's undercut - size is no guarantee of victory, and indeed, reliance on the gun is usually disastrous. Or lamps - throughout the film, Altman contrasts golden lamp light with cold exterior light. Lamplight often seems to promise warmth and shelter, but this can be deceptive - the preacher’s lamp starts the fire at the church, and lamps are associated with Mrs. Miller's opium smoking. Locations are important - the church, the bathhouse, the bridge, Sheehan's saloon. We see them from outside, we see them from inside.
This is true of the people as well - we see them from inside and outside, and in relation to the whole. Much of the film takes place in public places: Sheehan’s saloon, McCabe’s saloon, the ante-room of the whorehouse, the street, where people come and go, interact,. but usually only superficially. Altman observes people, takes time with marginal characters (a conversation between Smalley and Sheehan’s bartender; the interplay between Mrs. Miller’s women and their customers; the women and customers spying on each other) without explaining what is going on. Altman also shows people subjectively. He shows them when they are alone, especially McCabe. He shows them as they are seen by others, sometimes with literal point of view shots, sometimes by showing people looking at others (Lil watching the Seattle women bathing, for instance.) He frequently picks out the people on the margins of the film and the town - the preacher, the town drunk, the man with the braids. These people seldom, if ever, speak - but they are present at significant moments, at the edge of the scene, observing, being observed - and sometimes oblivious, lost. The drunk appears first in Sheehan’s, when McCabe gives him a drink to finish - he appears a few times later - standing alone in front of the fire while the other men work on the bathhouse; standing at the bar in McCabe’s place when Smalley tells Robby about Bart’s injury and McCabe that the men from the mining company have left. The preacher is visible in a few scenes, usually whenever anyone comes in or out of the town (the church, after all, is the gateway to the town), and he passes through the shot during the fight that kills Bart. In some scenes - that fight for example - other townspeople are shown watching the scene, without getting involved, or without being able to do anything about it.
Altman brings all of this together, but in a way that mirrors what Godard called the "complex" - the ways people try to live together. He tends to do this through discourse - through the ways people talk to one another. Or, usually, fail to talk effectively. Altman’s films are famous for their murky dialogue, the ambient noise that makes it hard to hear, the overlapping conversations interfering with each other, the low recording levels - that is a factor here. But even when they can hear each other, they can't understand each other. People speak differently. People don’t listen. McCabe gets along well among the men of the town with his gnomic style, his jokes and riddles and bluster, but when he comes up against others he gets in trouble. He can’t get a word in edgewise with Mrs. Miller, who sweeps him away with her practical plans, her competence, her plain speaking. McCabe’s meeting with the lawyer goes the same way - the lawyer postures away, spouting political slogans, and McCabe sits like a schoolboy, hat in hand, utterly taken in.
The most important instances of this are the talks between McCabe and the men from the mining company. McCabe starts out with his characteristic patter, telling jokes, reciting riddles, and so on. It doesn’t help that he is stinking drunk, but the alcohol is less a factor than his style - he acted the same way sober with Sheehan at the beginning of the film. Sears and Hollander are not impressed, though Sears, at least, tries. He laughs at his frog and eagle joke, he offers to buy McCabe a drink, while Hollander just glowers in the background. Sears drops hints that there is violence behind their offer - McCabe doesn’t catch any of it. Their next meeting goes a little better, but still they talk past each other. The mining men don't take McCabe's gifts. McCabe barely listens to Hollander’s smooth, patently insincere pitch (“I have a son named John”), and doesn’t register his implied threats (even though by this time he had been warned by Mrs. Miller.) They think his demands - $14, 15,000 - are ridiculous, but he doesn’t give them time to try to talk him down. Through it all, McCabe thinks they are negotiating and he can talk them up; Sears, for that matter, thinks that McCabe is negotiating, and he can talk him down. They come close to talking the same language for a while - but Hollander doesn't care. He thinks that McCabe is too much of a fool to come down - or, more likely, he does not care one way or another and just wants to get back to civilization as soon as possible. And that is that.
The limits of what we know of other people is one of the strongest themes in the film. It's part of the difficulty of communicating - we don't understand other people, we don't try. McCabe is repeatedly shown paying no attention to a conversation he is having. He gets away with not listening to Berg ramble on about paperwork, but when it's Hollander threatening him, it matters. Even when he listens, he doesn't hear what he should. He misses the threats in Sears’ and Hollander’s words; later, when Mrs. Miller begs him to leave, he hears nothing but the subtext. He hears her concern for him, but not her words, her warning. Not that anyone else is better at it - Mrs. Miller, for all her practicality, does not understand how to deal with McCabe except by bullying him. When he thinks he hears love in her words, she promptly puts up her best materialistic defenses. There is also the notable example of Butler, who makes the same mistake about McCabe that McCabe makes about others. McCabe stutters and stammers and squirms when they meet, and Butler thinks he knows him. "That man never shot anyone in his life," says he - but in the end, he gets what Bill Roundtree got. We can't even dismiss McCabe, you know.
What we have, then, is this - a film about a town, about the people in the town - especially about 2 of those people. We see the town, from outside - we see its land and houses and streets, we see these things as objects, in some detail, and see them as they are used by the people in the town. We see the people - interacting, trying to connect to one another and usually doing it badly. And we see McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in particular - we see them as they see themselves, but also, as they see each other, and as others see them - and as we see them, from outside the story. We see things as they are, and as they are seen; we see the meanings given to things and places and people by the people in the story - and we see meanings given to things and places and people from Altman's perspective. We see these meanings overlap, change, contradict each other. We see communities forming and dissolving at the same time. We see a world and the people in it, never quite in synch.
* Obviously, with a beginning like that, you shouldn't need spoiler warnings.
** The source of most of this post, in fact. There's no end of things to write about this film - which stands as one of the short list of all time greats. Shorter than that even. An almost infinitely dense and complex film - I could write all day about it, cutting down to something manageable is not easy.
Altman does not force us to choose an ending, or an interpretation. He might lean toward Mrs. Miller's point of view (the films ends with her literal point of view, after all), but that doesn't cancel the other endings. He undermines all three. The town may have come together to put out the fire, and the celebration reflects that, but after all, McCabe or Mrs. Miller are not there - nor are any of the Chinese (who have no part in any of this), and the last shot of the celebration is of the Washington’s (the black barber and his wife) walking away, alone again. We can believe that the town has been brought together by the crisis of the fire - but not long enough for the embers to cool. McCabe’s ending is tragic on the face of it - he dies, heroically, in a sense, but completely alone, forgotten by everyone, and the last we see of him he is being buried by the snow. Even Mrs. Miller’s ending is a barren one. She is stoned, after all - mindlessly absorbed in the blankness of the egg. The same wind that blows over McCabe’s ending blows in hers. Altman’s last shots of both McCabe and Mrs. Miller are long slow zoom-ins, and they are similarly unresponsive - she is as good as dead.
The whole film is like that. Altman consistently presents multiple perspectives on the story, showing the story (the world of the film) as it is experienced by different people, as they interpret it. He sticks mostly to McCabe's story, but the life of the town around him, and of other people, are always present.
Some years back, I wrote a paper** about this film for a class - the only requirement for the paper was to bring in the writings of one of the filmmakers covered in the class. I applied a bit from Godard's writings (an outline of his approach to making Two or Three Things I Know About Her) to the Altman film. Godard's comments on that film seemed quite applicable to many of his films - and to those of other filmmakers, such as Altman. Godard's four movements:
1) He will describe things and people from outside - as objects.
2) He will describe things and people from inside - as subjects. With people, this means showing their thoughts and feelings - “scenes more or less well written or acted.” Objects can be shown from inside, especially inside looking out.
3) He will describe “structures” - not, Godard writes, “a generalized overall truth” but “laws one must discover and apply in order to live in society.” He also notes (an important concept for understanding Altman) that there is no harmonious society. Godard speaks of consumer values; Altman, similarly refers to capitalist values in general.
4) Through these first three, Godard hopes to arrive at “life” - that is, a sense of how an individual experiences living in the world.
Those comments were written specifically about Two or Three Things I Know About Her, but I think they are generally applicable to Godard’s work, and might be even more generally applicable to Altman’s. Altman returns throughout his career to stories involving large numbers of people interacting within a specific milieu - a place, an industry, a charged moment, in which he does try to do justice to the “world” of that milieu, to individuals in the “world,” and the ways they interact with each other and the “world.” He does so in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, showing us people, telling us their stories, probing their ideas and feelings - while placing them in a society and showing us how that society functions, where they fit (or more commonly, don’t fit.)
He emphasizes the physical world around the characters - the town, the mountains and trees and rivers, the snow that falls on them. He moves back and forth between showing the world (and people) objectively, and showing the characters' perception of the world, as well as investing objects and places with his own meanings. This often takes the form of quite literally moving the camera in and out of spaces - shooting the outdoors from inside and indoors from outside. He places a great stress on transitional spaces - bridges, stairways, doors, he shoots through doors and windows and railings, as well as trees, through clouds of smoke or snow or rain and light and dark, all ways to hide people from one another. We see the town from outside, we see it being built, we see it filling up - we see the objects brought in, furniture, machinery, food, bottles, cards, lamps. Altman's documentary experience must be relevant here - objects are emphasized, the color of the unpainted wood, the way people wear their hair, their clothes, the type of guns people carry. At the same time, we understand these things "subjectively" - we see these things as physical objects, but also for the meanings they are given, both by the characters themselves, and by Altman. Guns and lamps say - are invested with significance. Guns carry fairly conventional, phallic significance (as in the over-the-top contrast between McCabe's derringer and Butler's blunderbuss), but it's undercut - size is no guarantee of victory, and indeed, reliance on the gun is usually disastrous. Or lamps - throughout the film, Altman contrasts golden lamp light with cold exterior light. Lamplight often seems to promise warmth and shelter, but this can be deceptive - the preacher’s lamp starts the fire at the church, and lamps are associated with Mrs. Miller's opium smoking. Locations are important - the church, the bathhouse, the bridge, Sheehan's saloon. We see them from outside, we see them from inside.
This is true of the people as well - we see them from inside and outside, and in relation to the whole. Much of the film takes place in public places: Sheehan’s saloon, McCabe’s saloon, the ante-room of the whorehouse, the street, where people come and go, interact,. but usually only superficially. Altman observes people, takes time with marginal characters (a conversation between Smalley and Sheehan’s bartender; the interplay between Mrs. Miller’s women and their customers; the women and customers spying on each other) without explaining what is going on. Altman also shows people subjectively. He shows them when they are alone, especially McCabe. He shows them as they are seen by others, sometimes with literal point of view shots, sometimes by showing people looking at others (Lil watching the Seattle women bathing, for instance.) He frequently picks out the people on the margins of the film and the town - the preacher, the town drunk, the man with the braids. These people seldom, if ever, speak - but they are present at significant moments, at the edge of the scene, observing, being observed - and sometimes oblivious, lost. The drunk appears first in Sheehan’s, when McCabe gives him a drink to finish - he appears a few times later - standing alone in front of the fire while the other men work on the bathhouse; standing at the bar in McCabe’s place when Smalley tells Robby about Bart’s injury and McCabe that the men from the mining company have left. The preacher is visible in a few scenes, usually whenever anyone comes in or out of the town (the church, after all, is the gateway to the town), and he passes through the shot during the fight that kills Bart. In some scenes - that fight for example - other townspeople are shown watching the scene, without getting involved, or without being able to do anything about it.
Altman brings all of this together, but in a way that mirrors what Godard called the "complex" - the ways people try to live together. He tends to do this through discourse - through the ways people talk to one another. Or, usually, fail to talk effectively. Altman’s films are famous for their murky dialogue, the ambient noise that makes it hard to hear, the overlapping conversations interfering with each other, the low recording levels - that is a factor here. But even when they can hear each other, they can't understand each other. People speak differently. People don’t listen. McCabe gets along well among the men of the town with his gnomic style, his jokes and riddles and bluster, but when he comes up against others he gets in trouble. He can’t get a word in edgewise with Mrs. Miller, who sweeps him away with her practical plans, her competence, her plain speaking. McCabe’s meeting with the lawyer goes the same way - the lawyer postures away, spouting political slogans, and McCabe sits like a schoolboy, hat in hand, utterly taken in.
The most important instances of this are the talks between McCabe and the men from the mining company. McCabe starts out with his characteristic patter, telling jokes, reciting riddles, and so on. It doesn’t help that he is stinking drunk, but the alcohol is less a factor than his style - he acted the same way sober with Sheehan at the beginning of the film. Sears and Hollander are not impressed, though Sears, at least, tries. He laughs at his frog and eagle joke, he offers to buy McCabe a drink, while Hollander just glowers in the background. Sears drops hints that there is violence behind their offer - McCabe doesn’t catch any of it. Their next meeting goes a little better, but still they talk past each other. The mining men don't take McCabe's gifts. McCabe barely listens to Hollander’s smooth, patently insincere pitch (“I have a son named John”), and doesn’t register his implied threats (even though by this time he had been warned by Mrs. Miller.) They think his demands - $14, 15,000 - are ridiculous, but he doesn’t give them time to try to talk him down. Through it all, McCabe thinks they are negotiating and he can talk them up; Sears, for that matter, thinks that McCabe is negotiating, and he can talk him down. They come close to talking the same language for a while - but Hollander doesn't care. He thinks that McCabe is too much of a fool to come down - or, more likely, he does not care one way or another and just wants to get back to civilization as soon as possible. And that is that.
The limits of what we know of other people is one of the strongest themes in the film. It's part of the difficulty of communicating - we don't understand other people, we don't try. McCabe is repeatedly shown paying no attention to a conversation he is having. He gets away with not listening to Berg ramble on about paperwork, but when it's Hollander threatening him, it matters. Even when he listens, he doesn't hear what he should. He misses the threats in Sears’ and Hollander’s words; later, when Mrs. Miller begs him to leave, he hears nothing but the subtext. He hears her concern for him, but not her words, her warning. Not that anyone else is better at it - Mrs. Miller, for all her practicality, does not understand how to deal with McCabe except by bullying him. When he thinks he hears love in her words, she promptly puts up her best materialistic defenses. There is also the notable example of Butler, who makes the same mistake about McCabe that McCabe makes about others. McCabe stutters and stammers and squirms when they meet, and Butler thinks he knows him. "That man never shot anyone in his life," says he - but in the end, he gets what Bill Roundtree got. We can't even dismiss McCabe, you know.
What we have, then, is this - a film about a town, about the people in the town - especially about 2 of those people. We see the town, from outside - we see its land and houses and streets, we see these things as objects, in some detail, and see them as they are used by the people in the town. We see the people - interacting, trying to connect to one another and usually doing it badly. And we see McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in particular - we see them as they see themselves, but also, as they see each other, and as others see them - and as we see them, from outside the story. We see things as they are, and as they are seen; we see the meanings given to things and places and people by the people in the story - and we see meanings given to things and places and people from Altman's perspective. We see these meanings overlap, change, contradict each other. We see communities forming and dissolving at the same time. We see a world and the people in it, never quite in synch.
* Obviously, with a beginning like that, you shouldn't need spoiler warnings.
** The source of most of this post, in fact. There's no end of things to write about this film - which stands as one of the short list of all time greats. Shorter than that even. An almost infinitely dense and complex film - I could write all day about it, cutting down to something manageable is not easy.
Friday, March 03, 2006
Altman and Me
The great moment has arrived - the Robert Altman blogathon, in honor of his receiving an honorary Oscar from the Academy. See Matt Zoller Seitz for a round up... On this humble blog, I shall aim for 2 or 3 posts - starting with autobiography, later, moving on to analysis, I hope. Here goes.
Robert Altman made me a movie geek. That’s basically true. In 1992, the Brattle Theater ran a series of his films, probably inspired by the release of The Player, and I went to most of them. It was the first film series I ever attended, at least the first time I'd seen more than one or two films in a series. It changed me. The simplest change, I suppose, was that it got me in the habit of going to films - going to series’ of films, new films, old films and so on. It’s a habit that took a while to develop, but it started there. When the Altman series ended, I didn't just start going to the next series at the Brattle - but I kept thinking about it. I read their schedules - I kicked myself for missing stuff. And eventually went to another one, and more after that, and so on. It took a couple years, but eventually it was a real habit.
The second change was intellectual. Seeing all those Altman films changed how I saw movies. It changed the specific movies I liked, made me suspicious of the Eisenstein and Kubrick and Scorsese and Lynch films I'd have sworn by before. The reason that happened, I think, is that Altman's films fit very well with the books I was reading at the time. It is probably not pure coincidence that I was reading Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge during that Altman series. Altman clicked with those kinds of books - McElroy, Gaddis, Faulkner, Henry Miller - dense, complex novels, that required a good deal of interpretive work to grasp. Altman's films had the same qualities, the same multivalence, moral complexity, and many of the same devices - multiple perspectives, stories told through dialogue, itself fragmented and overlapping. (Films like Nashville struck me as being very similar to William Gaddis' later books, JR especially). It's odd, and hard to explain, but this affinity with literature (specific types of literature) made me more sensitive to the films as films - at least, to films as narrative art. Maybe because those books were already making me think about narrative and structure, I thought about Altman in terms of narrative and structure - how to tell stories, how to convey meaning. At the time, I still thought about this mostly in literary terms (how he told stories, how he revealed his themes and ideas, the ways he structured information in his films), but once I'd started thinking about form, it was only a matter of working through it to the more cinematic aspects of the films. Starting with the obvious things - the way his films looked like someone had just left a camera running in a room, and come back later to pick out what was interesting; the way scenes relate to the plot - the way he decentered the plot, the way he used plot as a device driving the selection of what you see, rather than a motivation for what you see; the way people talk, and its relationship to the meanings of the films. Once I started thinking about how films worked, I didn't stop.
It also changed the types of movies I liked. I started to paying more attention to different kinds of films - in place of the macho angst of the Scorseses and Kubricks of the world, I turned to melodramas and comedies, to old Hollywood films, to genre pictures (kung-fu movies, westerns, noir). I became something of a conventional auteurist, post-Altman - looking at old Hollywood films and seeing the signs of the director. This was probably driven more by the books than by Altman himself - but he was the first filmmaker who embodied the values I saw in those books. His films taught me to look at films like novels.
There is an important distinction here that is a bit hard to get at. It is important that I was never an "innocent" filmgoer. I didn't go to films at all until college (for reasons I share with Paul Schrader and Mohsen Makhlabaf), though I watched films on TV. When I did start seeing films in theaters, I looked at them as glorified television, at least until grad school. That’s when I saw other films that made me take films seriously. I saw Ivan The Terrible on PBS, saw Blue Velvet and Full Metal Jacket in the theaters, saw a couple old films, like Alexander Nevsky, M, Alphaville. I was very inspired - I started reading about films, thinking about films, writing a lot about films. But - looking at what I wrote back then - there's almost nothing about the films as films - nothing about form. Everything is about what themes, meanings, about things like whether Full Metal Jacket is a "humanist" myth or not. I can probably blame that on grad school, and being steeped in Foucault and Barthes and Freud and Nietzsche at the time (all of it applied to history, nominally at least) - but there it is. I looked at those films as illustrations of their ideas - and, rather pointedly, I valued films that illustrated the ideas I thought were important.
It didn’t last. At the end of the 80s, my reading and interests took a major swerve - I stopped reading philosophy and started reading novels, basically. When that happened, some of my interest in films waned. I think this is related to the way I was looking at films. Reading novels (especially reading novels through Bakhtin) instead of philosophy made me interested in form - because novels do whatever they do, say whatever they say, in a very concrete way. Fiction undoes the hierarchy of ideas and expression - the words and stories do not simply point to the themes - they embody the themes. But I still looked at films as if they were means of illustrating ideas - I tended to like films than fit my ideas. I couldn't reconcile that approach to my new interest in fiction - I could reconcile Altman to my interest in fiction.
And from there - I passed on to classic films, to noir and screwballs and silent comedies and melodramas, and most of all films that (rather like Altman's films) combined these modes - Frank Capra, Godard, Cassavetes. Especially films that made the form apparent, made the means of telling the story crucial to the ideas. Eventually, I got back to the films I liked in the 80s - Lynch, especially - but seeing them in a more complete way. I could write a very similar essay about Blue Velvet - the film that did as much as anything to make me notice what films could do. But it was Robert Altman that provided the real epiphany, the real understanding of how form and content relate in films.
Robert Altman made me a movie geek. That’s basically true. In 1992, the Brattle Theater ran a series of his films, probably inspired by the release of The Player, and I went to most of them. It was the first film series I ever attended, at least the first time I'd seen more than one or two films in a series. It changed me. The simplest change, I suppose, was that it got me in the habit of going to films - going to series’ of films, new films, old films and so on. It’s a habit that took a while to develop, but it started there. When the Altman series ended, I didn't just start going to the next series at the Brattle - but I kept thinking about it. I read their schedules - I kicked myself for missing stuff. And eventually went to another one, and more after that, and so on. It took a couple years, but eventually it was a real habit.
The second change was intellectual. Seeing all those Altman films changed how I saw movies. It changed the specific movies I liked, made me suspicious of the Eisenstein and Kubrick and Scorsese and Lynch films I'd have sworn by before. The reason that happened, I think, is that Altman's films fit very well with the books I was reading at the time. It is probably not pure coincidence that I was reading Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge during that Altman series. Altman clicked with those kinds of books - McElroy, Gaddis, Faulkner, Henry Miller - dense, complex novels, that required a good deal of interpretive work to grasp. Altman's films had the same qualities, the same multivalence, moral complexity, and many of the same devices - multiple perspectives, stories told through dialogue, itself fragmented and overlapping. (Films like Nashville struck me as being very similar to William Gaddis' later books, JR especially). It's odd, and hard to explain, but this affinity with literature (specific types of literature) made me more sensitive to the films as films - at least, to films as narrative art. Maybe because those books were already making me think about narrative and structure, I thought about Altman in terms of narrative and structure - how to tell stories, how to convey meaning. At the time, I still thought about this mostly in literary terms (how he told stories, how he revealed his themes and ideas, the ways he structured information in his films), but once I'd started thinking about form, it was only a matter of working through it to the more cinematic aspects of the films. Starting with the obvious things - the way his films looked like someone had just left a camera running in a room, and come back later to pick out what was interesting; the way scenes relate to the plot - the way he decentered the plot, the way he used plot as a device driving the selection of what you see, rather than a motivation for what you see; the way people talk, and its relationship to the meanings of the films. Once I started thinking about how films worked, I didn't stop.
It also changed the types of movies I liked. I started to paying more attention to different kinds of films - in place of the macho angst of the Scorseses and Kubricks of the world, I turned to melodramas and comedies, to old Hollywood films, to genre pictures (kung-fu movies, westerns, noir). I became something of a conventional auteurist, post-Altman - looking at old Hollywood films and seeing the signs of the director. This was probably driven more by the books than by Altman himself - but he was the first filmmaker who embodied the values I saw in those books. His films taught me to look at films like novels.
There is an important distinction here that is a bit hard to get at. It is important that I was never an "innocent" filmgoer. I didn't go to films at all until college (for reasons I share with Paul Schrader and Mohsen Makhlabaf), though I watched films on TV. When I did start seeing films in theaters, I looked at them as glorified television, at least until grad school. That’s when I saw other films that made me take films seriously. I saw Ivan The Terrible on PBS, saw Blue Velvet and Full Metal Jacket in the theaters, saw a couple old films, like Alexander Nevsky, M, Alphaville. I was very inspired - I started reading about films, thinking about films, writing a lot about films. But - looking at what I wrote back then - there's almost nothing about the films as films - nothing about form. Everything is about what themes, meanings, about things like whether Full Metal Jacket is a "humanist" myth or not. I can probably blame that on grad school, and being steeped in Foucault and Barthes and Freud and Nietzsche at the time (all of it applied to history, nominally at least) - but there it is. I looked at those films as illustrations of their ideas - and, rather pointedly, I valued films that illustrated the ideas I thought were important.
It didn’t last. At the end of the 80s, my reading and interests took a major swerve - I stopped reading philosophy and started reading novels, basically. When that happened, some of my interest in films waned. I think this is related to the way I was looking at films. Reading novels (especially reading novels through Bakhtin) instead of philosophy made me interested in form - because novels do whatever they do, say whatever they say, in a very concrete way. Fiction undoes the hierarchy of ideas and expression - the words and stories do not simply point to the themes - they embody the themes. But I still looked at films as if they were means of illustrating ideas - I tended to like films than fit my ideas. I couldn't reconcile that approach to my new interest in fiction - I could reconcile Altman to my interest in fiction.
And from there - I passed on to classic films, to noir and screwballs and silent comedies and melodramas, and most of all films that (rather like Altman's films) combined these modes - Frank Capra, Godard, Cassavetes. Especially films that made the form apparent, made the means of telling the story crucial to the ideas. Eventually, I got back to the films I liked in the 80s - Lynch, especially - but seeing them in a more complete way. I could write a very similar essay about Blue Velvet - the film that did as much as anything to make me notice what films could do. But it was Robert Altman that provided the real epiphany, the real understanding of how form and content relate in films.
The Blogosphere Trembles...
I tremble anyway. I have come across a couple stories lately, in the Phoenix for example, suggesting that there is a groundswell of support for Crash for the best picture Oscar. How could such a thing be? Something about the more conservative members of the academy having vapors about the kissing cowboys movie. Quel horreur! This can't be good. Can the academy really end up rewarding the one really bad film in the 5 they nominated? One fears...
Here is Matt Zoller Seitz, from a couple days ago, in a high dudgeon on this subject. I myself would have loved to see it on Mystery Science Theater 3000 - it is a science fiction film, as far as I can tell (if I'm not mistaken, the city of LA has only 20-30 residents, per this film), and would be greatly improved by the added commentary...
Here is Matt Zoller Seitz, from a couple days ago, in a high dudgeon on this subject. I myself would have loved to see it on Mystery Science Theater 3000 - it is a science fiction film, as far as I can tell (if I'm not mistaken, the city of LA has only 20-30 residents, per this film), and would be greatly improved by the added commentary...
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Self-congratulation and Very Bad News
Nice to see one's theories, formed in the vacuum of one's head [um - is that the image I wish to convey? - ed.], repeated in the World at Large. In this case, my notion about the evolution of "Oscar films" seems also to be held by Dave Kehr:
Back in the 1980s, the Weinsteins were among the first distributors to recognize and exploit the shortage of middle-brow movies created by the studios’ decision to concentrate on mass-release popcorn pictures at the expense of adult dramas. By the mid-’90s, Miramax had grown into the contemporary equivalent of the Samuel Goldwyn Studio, turning out the prestige pictures — with Anthony Minghella standing in for William Wyler — that the majors were no longer interested in producing.
That was what I was referring to.
The more serious point of the post is the end of Wellspring as an independent film distributor. The Weinsteins have bought it and gutted it and appear to be hanging it on a wall. This is a very grim development - especially since they're keeping Wellspring's film library (as far as I can tell). Given the Weinstein's track record, that might be the last we see of any of those films anytime soon. That's very depressing.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
New Reviews
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse - ***1/2 - I saw previews for this last summer, getting my hopes up for a proper release - oh! folly! Lately, I have been seeing previews for the American remake. I despair. But happily, I despair too soon - for here it is! For a grand total of 6 shows, I should note. And having sampled 33% of those 6 shows - rather sparsely attended 6 shows. It might be time to gin up another post about the Death of Cinephilia.
The movie itself - is a horror film, more generically so than most of Kurosawa's films. (That I've seen.) It's got ghosts in the machines, from the internet - Ur@Nus Online, it seems - who haunt 2 groups of kids. The first thread follows a group of kids working at a greenhouse - one of them comes to grief, the others see strange images in his computer disks, and start getting mysterious phone calls... The second thread follows a student who tries to go online, but instead, the internet comes to him - asking if he wants to meet a ghost. He takes this to a pretty computer science student, who tries to help him - she in turn introduces him to a grad student who made a model of human relationships - ghostly dots floating around, avoiding each other but drawn to each other. This grad student offers some theories about ghosts spilling into the world of the living - and sure enough, ghosts start appearing, and people start disappearing. Then it gets strange. It's apocalypse in slow motion, but as much about trying to connect and failing to connect, and about death itself, then about ghosts or horror. No one ever exactly answers the question posed by the pretty computer scientist - how are we any different from ghosts? Stylistically, Kurosawa does not go for the big shock - he doesn't use shock cuts or reveals very often. He is more likely to slide things into the back of the frame - a figure appearing in the background, walking through the frame without any sense of urgency. We aren't surprised - the characters sometimes are. The effect is to create a sense of inevitability and dread, and to give us time to think about the poignancy of the ghosts' situation... It's a fine film - maybe less masterful than his best films (Cure, Charisma, Doppelganger), mostly because it is less glorious looking than they are, and there's not enough Koji Yakusho... But it is a powerful work, about mortality and solitude and the internet (all those ghosts sitting in front of their computer screens), how technology keeps us apart... about the necessity of other people, and the difficulty of connection...
C.S.A.: Confederate States of America - *** - written and directed by Kevin Wilmott, an alternative history of the US, in which the south won the civil war - told as a British documentary, interrupted with contemporary ads from this imaginary CSA. It's not a pretty picture, what with the CSA invading South America and staying out of the European half of WWII, and with Canada getting all the decent artists and musicians (not to mention dominating the Olympics). That stuff is very funny, but what really bites is the way Wilmott uses this alternative reality to critique real history, from the fake ads for real products (the gold dust twins, niggerhair cigarettes, black sambo axle grease and so on), to the white-washing of the reasons for the Civil War war. The film talks about how history and art soft-pedaled the north's position on slavery, and the role of slavery in the war - in exactly the terms that real literature and history and art soft-pedaled the south's position on slavery (and the north's, really), and the role of slavery in the war. As a film, it's rather crude, but it is very funny, and it is a first rate essay. The clips from imaginary films made in this CSA are probably the weakest point of the film - they look truly awful - though Wilmott gets around some of that rather cleverly, with the suggestion that art in the CSA would develop into straight propaganda. (The fake movies also get off one of the best jokes of the film, in a scene showing Jefferson Davis' slave telling him him to reintriduce slavery in the north - the slave is played by a Shakespearean actor in blackface, of course, and he does a perfect Stephen Fry as Jeeves bit to solve the problem. A capital joke.) This idea - the rotten art of the CSA - also illustrates another of the film's devices. There's nothing in the film about communists - the USSR disappears completely - and the cold war is replaced by a cold war (complete with a wall) with Canada and the abolitionists. The CSA, meanwhile, comes to be a lot like Soviet Russia - the socialist realist art, the repression and paranoia, the political violence...
Nightwatch - ** - Speaking of Russia, specifically, post cold war Russia - here's an apocalyptic fantasy from Moscow... the first in a three parter - the idea is this: there are "others" living among us, light and dark, who have been battling throughout history over the - over something. They were at the point of massacring one another in 1342, but called a truce - doomed to last until a virgin is cursed and a Great One is born. In 1992, a schlep tries to curse his estranged wife and her unborn child, but changes his mind at the last moment - and in come the cops! 10 years later he's a cop... He's trying to save a kid from some vampires - then he's trying to do something with the virgin before a vortex of damnation opens up and sucks something.... it isn't awful. Moscow does look pretty ghastly - the light and dark Others seem like some kind of allegory for the government and gangsters in russia (that's how they act anyway) - there are some neat images among the mayhem, and some nice character turns. Unfortunately - it sort of lurches around, flitting between bits of Blade Runner, a gloomy version of Ghostbusters (from which it steals about 70% of the plot, actually), and, I don't know, Highlander maybe... and whatever other filsm the director has seen. It's got enough going for it that it's kind of a shame it's so tiresome.
Springtime in a Small Town - *** - Tian Zhuangzhuang's return to filmmaking, 10 years after Blue Kite. This is a remake of a Chinese classic - set at the end of WWII in a house in an almost abandoned town. A young man with a cough, his wife, his lively little sister, and one old servant live there - then an old friend arrives, who happens to not only be the man's old pal, but the wife's old flame. Melodrama ensues, but very politely, until the wine starts to flow, and they start singing to one another. All of this is done quietly and slowly, with simmering passions. Tian keeps distance - telling the story from a neutral point - not getting too close to any of the characters, etc. Shot by Mark Li Ping-bin, Hou Hsiao Hsien's regular DP, and one of the best - this looks a lot like Flowers of Shanghai, with the constantly circling camera, though without the penetration of the space Hou used. Here, the camera stays behind the line, as it were - which theatricalizes the material a bit, which in turn tends to (very subtly) defamiliarize it. The characters are flattened out a bit. It is an astonishing looking film, even on DVD, and the material rewards the approach.
The movie itself - is a horror film, more generically so than most of Kurosawa's films. (That I've seen.) It's got ghosts in the machines, from the internet - Ur@Nus Online, it seems - who haunt 2 groups of kids. The first thread follows a group of kids working at a greenhouse - one of them comes to grief, the others see strange images in his computer disks, and start getting mysterious phone calls... The second thread follows a student who tries to go online, but instead, the internet comes to him - asking if he wants to meet a ghost. He takes this to a pretty computer science student, who tries to help him - she in turn introduces him to a grad student who made a model of human relationships - ghostly dots floating around, avoiding each other but drawn to each other. This grad student offers some theories about ghosts spilling into the world of the living - and sure enough, ghosts start appearing, and people start disappearing. Then it gets strange. It's apocalypse in slow motion, but as much about trying to connect and failing to connect, and about death itself, then about ghosts or horror. No one ever exactly answers the question posed by the pretty computer scientist - how are we any different from ghosts? Stylistically, Kurosawa does not go for the big shock - he doesn't use shock cuts or reveals very often. He is more likely to slide things into the back of the frame - a figure appearing in the background, walking through the frame without any sense of urgency. We aren't surprised - the characters sometimes are. The effect is to create a sense of inevitability and dread, and to give us time to think about the poignancy of the ghosts' situation... It's a fine film - maybe less masterful than his best films (Cure, Charisma, Doppelganger), mostly because it is less glorious looking than they are, and there's not enough Koji Yakusho... But it is a powerful work, about mortality and solitude and the internet (all those ghosts sitting in front of their computer screens), how technology keeps us apart... about the necessity of other people, and the difficulty of connection...
C.S.A.: Confederate States of America - *** - written and directed by Kevin Wilmott, an alternative history of the US, in which the south won the civil war - told as a British documentary, interrupted with contemporary ads from this imaginary CSA. It's not a pretty picture, what with the CSA invading South America and staying out of the European half of WWII, and with Canada getting all the decent artists and musicians (not to mention dominating the Olympics). That stuff is very funny, but what really bites is the way Wilmott uses this alternative reality to critique real history, from the fake ads for real products (the gold dust twins, niggerhair cigarettes, black sambo axle grease and so on), to the white-washing of the reasons for the Civil War war. The film talks about how history and art soft-pedaled the north's position on slavery, and the role of slavery in the war - in exactly the terms that real literature and history and art soft-pedaled the south's position on slavery (and the north's, really), and the role of slavery in the war. As a film, it's rather crude, but it is very funny, and it is a first rate essay. The clips from imaginary films made in this CSA are probably the weakest point of the film - they look truly awful - though Wilmott gets around some of that rather cleverly, with the suggestion that art in the CSA would develop into straight propaganda. (The fake movies also get off one of the best jokes of the film, in a scene showing Jefferson Davis' slave telling him him to reintriduce slavery in the north - the slave is played by a Shakespearean actor in blackface, of course, and he does a perfect Stephen Fry as Jeeves bit to solve the problem. A capital joke.) This idea - the rotten art of the CSA - also illustrates another of the film's devices. There's nothing in the film about communists - the USSR disappears completely - and the cold war is replaced by a cold war (complete with a wall) with Canada and the abolitionists. The CSA, meanwhile, comes to be a lot like Soviet Russia - the socialist realist art, the repression and paranoia, the political violence...
Nightwatch - ** - Speaking of Russia, specifically, post cold war Russia - here's an apocalyptic fantasy from Moscow... the first in a three parter - the idea is this: there are "others" living among us, light and dark, who have been battling throughout history over the - over something. They were at the point of massacring one another in 1342, but called a truce - doomed to last until a virgin is cursed and a Great One is born. In 1992, a schlep tries to curse his estranged wife and her unborn child, but changes his mind at the last moment - and in come the cops! 10 years later he's a cop... He's trying to save a kid from some vampires - then he's trying to do something with the virgin before a vortex of damnation opens up and sucks something.... it isn't awful. Moscow does look pretty ghastly - the light and dark Others seem like some kind of allegory for the government and gangsters in russia (that's how they act anyway) - there are some neat images among the mayhem, and some nice character turns. Unfortunately - it sort of lurches around, flitting between bits of Blade Runner, a gloomy version of Ghostbusters (from which it steals about 70% of the plot, actually), and, I don't know, Highlander maybe... and whatever other filsm the director has seen. It's got enough going for it that it's kind of a shame it's so tiresome.
Springtime in a Small Town - *** - Tian Zhuangzhuang's return to filmmaking, 10 years after Blue Kite. This is a remake of a Chinese classic - set at the end of WWII in a house in an almost abandoned town. A young man with a cough, his wife, his lively little sister, and one old servant live there - then an old friend arrives, who happens to not only be the man's old pal, but the wife's old flame. Melodrama ensues, but very politely, until the wine starts to flow, and they start singing to one another. All of this is done quietly and slowly, with simmering passions. Tian keeps distance - telling the story from a neutral point - not getting too close to any of the characters, etc. Shot by Mark Li Ping-bin, Hou Hsiao Hsien's regular DP, and one of the best - this looks a lot like Flowers of Shanghai, with the constantly circling camera, though without the penetration of the space Hou used. Here, the camera stays behind the line, as it were - which theatricalizes the material a bit, which in turn tends to (very subtly) defamiliarize it. The characters are flattened out a bit. It is an astonishing looking film, even on DVD, and the material rewards the approach.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Don Knotts Has Died
I just saw this news. What a shame. Barney Fife is indelibly implanted in my mind.
I'll leave you with a reminder of this wonderful piece of editing: Dubya The Movie. A film that should have been, and now, alas, will never be. (That's going to take a while to load - I imagine it's getting some traffic tonight.)
I'll be waiting for Steve Buscemi in John Waters' Don Knotts biopic... Now they'll have to do it!
I'll leave you with a reminder of this wonderful piece of editing: Dubya The Movie. A film that should have been, and now, alas, will never be. (That's going to take a while to load - I imagine it's getting some traffic tonight.)
I'll be waiting for Steve Buscemi in John Waters' Don Knotts biopic... Now they'll have to do it!
Late Late Late, but
It's not Friday anymore, is it? Hasn't been for a while. So why bother with a Friday Random Ten then? Because it's Saturday! That's a good enough reason, I should think.
This isn't exactly random either, as I went back to the not-recently-played list....
1. Preston School of Industry - Encyclopedic Knowledge of
2. Kings of Leon - Joe's Head (kind of a murder ballad, isn't it?)
3. Wipers - D-7 (hey - why is this off some Mojo collection? I have a perfectly good Wipers' CD on there! I'd have more if I had more luck finding them; a fine, mostly forgotten band.)
4. Big Boi - D-Boi (interlude)
5. Beck - Novacane (which, as it happens, flows absolutely perfectly out of the previous piece)
6. PJ Hervey - The Wind
7. Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
8. The Flaming Lips - God Walks Among Us Now (I like this record (priest driven ambulance); I don't know why but I don't particularly like the Flaming Lips, these days. Strange, huh?)
9. REM - Man on the Moon (of all the REM I have, why this song? it's dull, mediocre... I don't know. Why not Life and How to Live it? damned computer!)
10. Cibo Matto - Le Pain Perdu
This isn't exactly random either, as I went back to the not-recently-played list....
1. Preston School of Industry - Encyclopedic Knowledge of
2. Kings of Leon - Joe's Head (kind of a murder ballad, isn't it?)
3. Wipers - D-7 (hey - why is this off some Mojo collection? I have a perfectly good Wipers' CD on there! I'd have more if I had more luck finding them; a fine, mostly forgotten band.)
4. Big Boi - D-Boi (interlude)
5. Beck - Novacane (which, as it happens, flows absolutely perfectly out of the previous piece)
6. PJ Hervey - The Wind
7. Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
8. The Flaming Lips - God Walks Among Us Now (I like this record (priest driven ambulance); I don't know why but I don't particularly like the Flaming Lips, these days. Strange, huh?)
9. REM - Man on the Moon (of all the REM I have, why this song? it's dull, mediocre... I don't know. Why not Life and How to Live it? damned computer!)
10. Cibo Matto - Le Pain Perdu
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Altman Weekend (March 3-5)
In honor of the man's lifetime achievement Oscar, Matt Zoller Seitz has announced a weekend long blogathon for Robert Altman. All very loose and impromptu, but somehow that seems appropriate. (Seems, I say...) I suspect something on this score is likely to appear in this space....
Sunday, February 19, 2006
A Week of Films
Let's see if we can get this rebooted, shall we?
Tristram Shandy: or, A Cock and a Bull (***1/2) - one of the local critics referred to the novel, Tristram Shandy, as being of interest only to graduate students. If that is true, I should say, it more than justifies the expense of taking an MFA. Sure, at this point in history, it probably requires some Work to figure out what is going on, and why, in the book - but the rewards, the rewards!*... In the meanwhile, there is now this film to tide you over until you can find a suitable grad school, and it does the job pretty well. They have followed the logical course in adapting a book that is emphatically written, emphatically an object made of words on paper, and made it emphatically filmed. So we get the actors arguing about teeth, talking about the film, the book, their shoes, and Steve Coogan's child and ego. It may not be quite so innovative as it might seem**, but it is very well done. The metafiction is used to good effect - using the relationship between Coogan and Brydon to echo that of Walter and Toby, (who are, in the end, the real stars of the book); making Coogan's relationship to the Shandies analogous to that of Tristram to his father (and the book). It is all about birth, says Cinemascope. Clever too in how it handles characters - some get dropped from the adaptation (though they are as likely as not to show up anyway), while others - namely Jenny (a significant character in the book, who never actually appears in it) - are added (more than once, actually.) And finally - all this formal juggling never detracts from the comedy - which, as in the book, runs the gamut from straight on slapstick through elaborate word play (and words on paper - or pictures on film) to subtle and often moving character driven comedy. The film is very funny, sometimes uproariously so, and always satisfying.
Neil Young: Heart of Gold - *** - it's hard to rate concert films. They depend on the music, and then - if the music is good enough (or bad enough) it can trump the filmmaking. About all the filmmakers can do is get in the way. Jonathon Demme does not get in the way - he films songs in their completion, he shoots in a plain, straightforward way, he cuts unobtrusively, to knit together the musicians on stage, or to focus on the person taking a lead... It's hard to improve on it. This is Neil Young at his most country, acoustic, quiet (though he can get worked up when he wants) - this was shot right after his brain aneurysm, about the time of the release of Prairie Wind, and contains that record, plus a greatest hits. It would be edifying, I think, to see it in a double bill with Year of the Horse. It is amazing how well Neil stays in character - he never slips, he plays these songs straight, plain - the contrast with the sprawling blare of the Crazy Horse material is fascinating. It's not just the different style - it's the whole performance attitude. These songs are played straight - not much variation from the instrumentation and sound of the records, nothing flashy, nothing really improvisational. The Crazy Horse stuff - he can't seem to find the end - this material, this performance, everything is pretty well defined. There's not much to say - it's a superb performance, Neil's acoustic side done to perfection. It's a reminder of just what a body of work the man has - that he can do this, play like this, leaving half his career untouched. I admit I have a soft spot for the wankier, Like a Hurricane, Cortez the Killer Neil Young, but I can't complain about this side of old Neil. What I do think is that he's at his best when the two sides come together - the Live Rust model is unbeatable...
Charisma (on DVD) - **** - this might be Kiyoshi Kurosawa's masterpiece. Koji Yakusho plays a cop who after screwing up a negotiation is sent on vacation - he hitchhikes into the woods, then sets out on foot - things start to get weird. There is a tree, that is dieing, but also might be killing the forest. There is a kid protecting the tree - a scientist and her sister trying to destroy the tree - a variety of comical environmentalists trying to study the tree or kill it or sell it - hard to say what. It isn't necessarily important. Like the rest of Kurosawa's films, this is spooky and strange, funny, quiet but with bursts of deadpan violence. It is full of ideas - doubles, parallels, metaphors, allegories, that come in and out of phase with each other. They are engrossing and beautiful movies that haunt you... They are also very hard to part with - when I get his films from Netflix, I watch them - and then keep rewatching them. I had Doppelganger for a month or more, and ended up watching it three times... I suppose I should just buy them, if I can find them...
Footnotes:
*A fact anticipated by Mr. Sterne, of course:
***Which is, for once, not really an affectation but a fair description of the way it examines the process of writing, the formal properties of writing and books, and, actually, living, thinking, etc.
Tristram Shandy: or, A Cock and a Bull (***1/2) - one of the local critics referred to the novel, Tristram Shandy, as being of interest only to graduate students. If that is true, I should say, it more than justifies the expense of taking an MFA. Sure, at this point in history, it probably requires some Work to figure out what is going on, and why, in the book - but the rewards, the rewards!*... In the meanwhile, there is now this film to tide you over until you can find a suitable grad school, and it does the job pretty well. They have followed the logical course in adapting a book that is emphatically written, emphatically an object made of words on paper, and made it emphatically filmed. So we get the actors arguing about teeth, talking about the film, the book, their shoes, and Steve Coogan's child and ego. It may not be quite so innovative as it might seem**, but it is very well done. The metafiction is used to good effect - using the relationship between Coogan and Brydon to echo that of Walter and Toby, (who are, in the end, the real stars of the book); making Coogan's relationship to the Shandies analogous to that of Tristram to his father (and the book). It is all about birth, says Cinemascope. Clever too in how it handles characters - some get dropped from the adaptation (though they are as likely as not to show up anyway), while others - namely Jenny (a significant character in the book, who never actually appears in it) - are added (more than once, actually.) And finally - all this formal juggling never detracts from the comedy - which, as in the book, runs the gamut from straight on slapstick through elaborate word play (and words on paper - or pictures on film) to subtle and often moving character driven comedy. The film is very funny, sometimes uproariously so, and always satisfying.
Neil Young: Heart of Gold - *** - it's hard to rate concert films. They depend on the music, and then - if the music is good enough (or bad enough) it can trump the filmmaking. About all the filmmakers can do is get in the way. Jonathon Demme does not get in the way - he films songs in their completion, he shoots in a plain, straightforward way, he cuts unobtrusively, to knit together the musicians on stage, or to focus on the person taking a lead... It's hard to improve on it. This is Neil Young at his most country, acoustic, quiet (though he can get worked up when he wants) - this was shot right after his brain aneurysm, about the time of the release of Prairie Wind, and contains that record, plus a greatest hits. It would be edifying, I think, to see it in a double bill with Year of the Horse. It is amazing how well Neil stays in character - he never slips, he plays these songs straight, plain - the contrast with the sprawling blare of the Crazy Horse material is fascinating. It's not just the different style - it's the whole performance attitude. These songs are played straight - not much variation from the instrumentation and sound of the records, nothing flashy, nothing really improvisational. The Crazy Horse stuff - he can't seem to find the end - this material, this performance, everything is pretty well defined. There's not much to say - it's a superb performance, Neil's acoustic side done to perfection. It's a reminder of just what a body of work the man has - that he can do this, play like this, leaving half his career untouched. I admit I have a soft spot for the wankier, Like a Hurricane, Cortez the Killer Neil Young, but I can't complain about this side of old Neil. What I do think is that he's at his best when the two sides come together - the Live Rust model is unbeatable...
Charisma (on DVD) - **** - this might be Kiyoshi Kurosawa's masterpiece. Koji Yakusho plays a cop who after screwing up a negotiation is sent on vacation - he hitchhikes into the woods, then sets out on foot - things start to get weird. There is a tree, that is dieing, but also might be killing the forest. There is a kid protecting the tree - a scientist and her sister trying to destroy the tree - a variety of comical environmentalists trying to study the tree or kill it or sell it - hard to say what. It isn't necessarily important. Like the rest of Kurosawa's films, this is spooky and strange, funny, quiet but with bursts of deadpan violence. It is full of ideas - doubles, parallels, metaphors, allegories, that come in and out of phase with each other. They are engrossing and beautiful movies that haunt you... They are also very hard to part with - when I get his films from Netflix, I watch them - and then keep rewatching them. I had Doppelganger for a month or more, and ended up watching it three times... I suppose I should just buy them, if I can find them...
Footnotes:
*A fact anticipated by Mr. Sterne, of course:
Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader ! read, -- or by the knowledge of the great saint Paraleipomenon -- I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading, by which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work !) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.**Or as the book was, and is, even now - even without the 18th century language and sensibilities, it's a more radical deconstruction*** than all but a few 20th century works.
***Which is, for once, not really an affectation but a fair description of the way it examines the process of writing, the formal properties of writing and books, and, actually, living, thinking, etc.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Friday Comes on Saturday...
... so here then is your random 10, or so....
1. System of a Down - Lost in Hollywood (oh the shame, to be exposed as owning a System of a Down record. I'm not sure why I own them, but - I find myself almost liking them... the shame!)
2. Neil Young - Are You Ready for the Country (speaking of whom - tomorrow, I think, I shall see the new concert film. Today is Tristram Shandy of course.)
3. Gary Strivent - Something (oh yeah. I believe I downloaded this from James Allenspach's fine blog, Empty Handed. This is a fine piece of bad music - the singer wrestling with the notes and trying to channel Sinatra, but never finding the beat, never quite getting the concept of phrasing - and I love the little handclaps that come up toward the middle!)
4. Modest Mouse - Might
5. Pavement - Mercy Snack: the Laundromat
6. Shonen Knife - Insect Collector (live)
7. Big Country - One Great Thing
8. The Wipers - Messenger
9. John Cale - Wall (bonus track on Vintage Violence) (a drone - and a good one, actually)
10. Bill Frisell - Billy The Kid (Mexican Dance and Finale)
11. James Brown - Think (live at the Apollo) (I mean - who would stop at 10 when 11 is James Brown?)
12. REM - Auctioneer (and why stop at 11 when you can add some train whistle guitar?)
1. System of a Down - Lost in Hollywood (oh the shame, to be exposed as owning a System of a Down record. I'm not sure why I own them, but - I find myself almost liking them... the shame!)
2. Neil Young - Are You Ready for the Country (speaking of whom - tomorrow, I think, I shall see the new concert film. Today is Tristram Shandy of course.)
3. Gary Strivent - Something (oh yeah. I believe I downloaded this from James Allenspach's fine blog, Empty Handed. This is a fine piece of bad music - the singer wrestling with the notes and trying to channel Sinatra, but never finding the beat, never quite getting the concept of phrasing - and I love the little handclaps that come up toward the middle!)
4. Modest Mouse - Might
5. Pavement - Mercy Snack: the Laundromat
6. Shonen Knife - Insect Collector (live)
7. Big Country - One Great Thing
8. The Wipers - Messenger
9. John Cale - Wall (bonus track on Vintage Violence) (a drone - and a good one, actually)
10. Bill Frisell - Billy The Kid (Mexican Dance and Finale)
11. James Brown - Think (live at the Apollo) (I mean - who would stop at 10 when 11 is James Brown?)
12. REM - Auctioneer (and why stop at 11 when you can add some train whistle guitar?)
Accidents will happen
I have been generally avoiding the whole Dick Cheney shot a man in the face topic. (Of course no one would know I was avoiding it on purpose, given my recent lack of posts... but hey.) Still: this headline, shown at Talking Points Memo, deserves a link: Shooting Victim Apologizes to Vice President. That says so much....
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Code Inconnu Blog-a-Thon Notice
I should have posted something about this yesterday - a carnival of bloggers, devoted to commenting on Machael Haneke's Code Inconnu. A fine film - I wish I were up to saying something about it, but... anyway - check them out. Girish Shambu has the links, along with his own contribution.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Listen the Snow is Falling...
I'm here to admit - I have almost nothing. Boston gets a foot or more of snow - that's nice. But between that and nothing new in the theaters to see, I barely left the house... I did watch 9 Songs on DVD - I don't quite know what to make of it. It is admirable for trying to make a sex film that's not only not pornography, but isn't the kind of politicized provocation that the usual high-brow smut films are - not that there's anything wrong with politicized provocation (I'm thinking of Last Tango in Paris, In the Rhealm of the Senses, Catherine Breillat's films, even things like The Brown Bunny), but it's nice to see an attempt to make a movie with explicit sex, that isn't a moralizing lecture.... 9 Songs is a bit of a strange film, though - it has a story - characters - but these things are elided. It is quick and minimalist - sex and music - though quite a bit of other stuff creeps in. Actually, the problem might be that more stuff creeps into the sex parts than the music parts. Nothing happens at the concerts - we see band footage, we sometimes see quick shots of the lovers - nothing else - no dancing, waiting in line to get into the pisser, no contact with other people, good bad or indifferent... Still - it does linger in the mind. It's cool the way the sex scenes work - the way they get the mix of routine, habit, and occasional moments of revelation that sex is really like... It's also kind of cool for telling this story, a fairly common, undramatic seeming one, and not insisting on finding some big ending for it. 2 people meet, fuck, fall in love kinda, but not so much, and then part. And then...
I did see Why We Fight in the theaters. It's okay. About the military industrial complex. It was okay, but nothing revelatory. So - that's all there is tonight. That and Yoko, by way of Galaxie 500.
It's that time of year - nothing going on in the movie world. Next week, though - Tristram Shandy opens (speaking of Michael Winterbottom - who's kind of the English version of Steven Soderburgh, isn't he? skipping around from style to style?) - Manderlay opens - the Neil Young movie opens... things should get better.
I did see Why We Fight in the theaters. It's okay. About the military industrial complex. It was okay, but nothing revelatory. So - that's all there is tonight. That and Yoko, by way of Galaxie 500.
It's that time of year - nothing going on in the movie world. Next week, though - Tristram Shandy opens (speaking of Michael Winterbottom - who's kind of the English version of Steven Soderburgh, isn't he? skipping around from style to style?) - Manderlay opens - the Neil Young movie opens... things should get better.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Five Star Friday
The Friday Random Ten is a fine tradition, but it's nice to mix it up now and then. So today's selection was drawn from my 5-star playlist - making for a very happy commute....
1. U2 - All I Want is You - the edge at his jangliest
2. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Tracks of My Tears - if there's a step beyond 5 stars, this is it. This might be the best song of the last 50 years, when you get right down to it.
3. The Stooges - 1970 - ooh, it's a Detroit thing! Why didn't they get the stooges to play the superbowl?
4. Rocket From the Tombs - Ain't it Fun - hey, it's a midwestern thing!
5. Captain Beefheart - Moonlight on Vermont - cubism in rock, those guitar lines coming in from different angles, different pieces of the melody overlapping... it's very cool
6. Charlie Parker - Koko - nice change of pace, sort of - about as aggressive as classic jazz gets, though...
7. Mercury Rev - Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp - somethign fairly new!
8. John Lennon - Working Class Hero
9. Beatles - Norwegian Wood - couple tunes from Mr. Lennon...
10. X-Ray Spex - Germ Free Adolescents - an a nice wrap up... of course, everything is going to be a nice fit here - that's the point! on Five Star Friday!
1. U2 - All I Want is You - the edge at his jangliest
2. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Tracks of My Tears - if there's a step beyond 5 stars, this is it. This might be the best song of the last 50 years, when you get right down to it.
3. The Stooges - 1970 - ooh, it's a Detroit thing! Why didn't they get the stooges to play the superbowl?
4. Rocket From the Tombs - Ain't it Fun - hey, it's a midwestern thing!
5. Captain Beefheart - Moonlight on Vermont - cubism in rock, those guitar lines coming in from different angles, different pieces of the melody overlapping... it's very cool
6. Charlie Parker - Koko - nice change of pace, sort of - about as aggressive as classic jazz gets, though...
7. Mercury Rev - Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp - somethign fairly new!
8. John Lennon - Working Class Hero
9. Beatles - Norwegian Wood - couple tunes from Mr. Lennon...
10. X-Ray Spex - Germ Free Adolescents - an a nice wrap up... of course, everything is going to be a nice fit here - that's the point! on Five Star Friday!
Little Bit of This, Little Bit of That
[I have been trying to publish this for the last 2 days without luck - if it comes out 15 times - blame Blogger!]
Here I sit, consumed with guilt, since I have not blogged in a whole week! I missed my weekly movie week date - not from lack of movies (I should be commenting on Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada [a very interesting movie, though one that I find it hard to write about without starting at the end; the reason is that it starts out looking like one kind of movie, and then somewhere in the middle becomes a different kind of movie - the real story of the film bercomes something different than you thought it was going to be. That should not be a surprise - it was written by Guillermo Arriaga, who also wrote Alejandro Inarritu's first two films (3 actually, since he's written Babel as well), which also shift meaning midstream, as well as - other things in common with this one. In fact, these three films could make a fine exhibit for the Schreiber theory - if not that the writer is more important than the director (since Jones and Inarritu have their own identities), certainly that writers have personalities that can be as strong as any director.] - or adding to my comments on L'Intrus, which I saw again [you can change "appears to be a masterpiece" to "is a masterpiece" - it didn't so much hold up to a second viewing as demand a third... but I think it is gone now.]... I also saw the new Harry Potter film, which was a reasonable diversion, but one in which the absurdity of the plotting in this book (in all the books) is particularly exposed to the light), but from sheer distraction and indolence. (You probably had forgotten that that was a parenthesis! ha! fooled you!)
I did not choose to blog my plumbing issues - clogged drains and all that. Because frankly those things would shatter the illusion that I live in a world of pure Thought and Contemplation of the Good and the Beautiful, placing me in the terrible mundane world of backed up pipes and soap scum. We wouldn't want that. We'll skip a discussion of what I ate for supper for the same reason.
So what is left? Danish Cartoons? (So very last week.) What is there to say? 1) the original stunt looks like a shameless provocation, worthy of the college republicans. 2) The protests are an excuse for various factions to rile up support for themselves and distract religious-minded dissidents from domestic politics. (See Juan Cole's piece in Salon.) It's something of a going trick - to direct Islamic anger away from the tyranny and corruption of Islamic governments by raving against Israel or the evil westerners. It comes of rather like an update ofMarx - religion is less the opiate of the masses than the crystal meth of the masses.
What else? Vanity Fair maybe? We got naked girls! We got a guy in a suit! We got Hollywood in a nutshell - girls to be looked at, men to look. The Guardian's blog rather neatly skewers the awful thing:
Here I sit, consumed with guilt, since I have not blogged in a whole week! I missed my weekly movie week date - not from lack of movies (I should be commenting on Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada [a very interesting movie, though one that I find it hard to write about without starting at the end; the reason is that it starts out looking like one kind of movie, and then somewhere in the middle becomes a different kind of movie - the real story of the film bercomes something different than you thought it was going to be. That should not be a surprise - it was written by Guillermo Arriaga, who also wrote Alejandro Inarritu's first two films (3 actually, since he's written Babel as well), which also shift meaning midstream, as well as - other things in common with this one. In fact, these three films could make a fine exhibit for the Schreiber theory - if not that the writer is more important than the director (since Jones and Inarritu have their own identities), certainly that writers have personalities that can be as strong as any director.] - or adding to my comments on L'Intrus, which I saw again [you can change "appears to be a masterpiece" to "is a masterpiece" - it didn't so much hold up to a second viewing as demand a third... but I think it is gone now.]... I also saw the new Harry Potter film, which was a reasonable diversion, but one in which the absurdity of the plotting in this book (in all the books) is particularly exposed to the light), but from sheer distraction and indolence. (You probably had forgotten that that was a parenthesis! ha! fooled you!)
I did not choose to blog my plumbing issues - clogged drains and all that. Because frankly those things would shatter the illusion that I live in a world of pure Thought and Contemplation of the Good and the Beautiful, placing me in the terrible mundane world of backed up pipes and soap scum. We wouldn't want that. We'll skip a discussion of what I ate for supper for the same reason.
So what is left? Danish Cartoons? (So very last week.) What is there to say? 1) the original stunt looks like a shameless provocation, worthy of the college republicans. 2) The protests are an excuse for various factions to rile up support for themselves and distract religious-minded dissidents from domestic politics. (See Juan Cole's piece in Salon.) It's something of a going trick - to direct Islamic anger away from the tyranny and corruption of Islamic governments by raving against Israel or the evil westerners. It comes of rather like an update ofMarx - religion is less the opiate of the masses than the crystal meth of the masses.
What else? Vanity Fair maybe? We got naked girls! We got a guy in a suit! We got Hollywood in a nutshell - girls to be looked at, men to look. The Guardian's blog rather neatly skewers the awful thing:
We can debate the semiotics of soft-core titillation until the cows come home. That doesn't alter the immediate, unedifying spectacle of a pair of chalky, corpse-like creatures being mauled by their "artistic director". Apparently there is still more of this necrophilia-chic inside the magazine, with one photo showing Angelina Jolie in a bath-tub. Perhaps she will be depicted as bloated, bedraggled and as white as a fish's belly, like that ghost-woman in The Shining.
There's actually not much to debate about the semiotics of that shot: a clothed man leering over 2 naked women who appear to have been coated in flour - who sit and lay there motionless, nude, subservient, staring at the camaera, while he leans over them, looking at them.... Has the principal of the male gaze - women as the object of the look, men as the bearer of the look - women as objects (looking very statue or doll-like here), men as subjects - ever been so clearly portrayed? And lest anyone miss the point - the big title attached to this bit of cheesy cheesecake is, "Tom For'd Hollywood." They belong to him! God.
Friday, February 03, 2006
Music Random Friday List
No need for much intro - here it is - the Friday Random Ten!
1. Waterboys - And a Bang on the Ear
2. Norman Blake - You Are My Sunshine
3. fIREHOSE - Too Long
4.The Feelies - Decide
5. Madvillain Featuring Lord Quas - Shadows of Tomorrow
6. Grateful Dead - High Time
7. fIREHOSE - Anti-Misogyny Maneuver
8. King Crimson - Easy Money
9. Runaways - Cherry Bomb
10. Blondie - Sunday Girl
1. Waterboys - And a Bang on the Ear
2. Norman Blake - You Are My Sunshine
3. fIREHOSE - Too Long
4.The Feelies - Decide
5. Madvillain Featuring Lord Quas - Shadows of Tomorrow
6. Grateful Dead - High Time
7. fIREHOSE - Anti-Misogyny Maneuver
8. King Crimson - Easy Money
9. Runaways - Cherry Bomb
10. Blondie - Sunday Girl
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Oscars Etc.
I am usually not a big fan of the Academy Awards. There's usually not much overlap between films I think are important and films that win at the Oscars - whether it's because I'm a snob, or the Oscars have gotten stupid I don't know, though I have opinions. There are plenty of Oscar winners (and losers) in the 70s (and before) that I like - it seems to me that the market changed, and the academy changed, about 1980.... But leave that.
Sort of. I wanted to comment on a couple things. (Rather late to the party, since these are both a couple days old - hey, what can I say?) First, an enjoyable thread - Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns and Money asks: "if Brokeback Mountain wins, will it be the best film to win Best Picture since Annie Hall in 1977?" Lemieux says yes. My answer? No. Why? well first - I don't really think Brokeback Mountain is the best film nominated (I'd probably vote for Good Night, and Good Luck). Beyond that, while this year's nominations are all pretty good (except Crash - that's embarrassing; I haven't seen Munich, but will eventually, and it sounds reasonably deserving), they aren't that good. It doesn't seem much better than last year's slate - another pretty decent, if a bit dull, list of nominees. None of this year's nominees are any better than Million Dollar Baby or Sideways, or maybe The Aviator (depending on who you ask.) The truth is, being inoffensive is a bit of a triumph - the Academy Awards have not covered themselves in glory since Annie Hall, if you ask me. The nominees (let alone the winners) have almost never been the best films available in any given year (even sticking to fairly mainstream American films) - but there have been a few pretty good winners, for all that. Lemieux anticipates Unforgiven, Schindler's List and LOTR 3 being named - he says Brokeback Mountain is better - me, I think at least the first 2 are better than BBM. (The LOTR films don't do it for me. I don't dislike them - just find them long and completely pointless - the books serve the purpose perfectly well.) But beyond that - Silence of the Lambs got some play from his commenters, and I agree with that. I'd also say Platoon and American Beauty are better than any of this year's nominees. Now - none of these winners would make the best five nominations since Annie Hall - the 90s and 00s alone prove Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Fargo, The Pianist - all better than any winner since the 70s. Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, The Elephant Man, Raging Bull and Atlantic City, Apocalypse Now - same deal. All better than anything that has won in that interval....
Meanwhile - comedy! or something. A couple days ago, TBogg linked to another of Townhall's "film" commentaries, this one from Jason Apuzzo. Since then, Apuzzo's column has made the rounds - gotten the attention it deserves while I've been worrying over this post. I can't add much (not to the Kung Fu Monkey's evisceration certainly), but I wouldn't be much of a blogger if I let that stop me. So on we go.
Unlike the Virgin Ben, Apuzzo actually makes some pretense of knowing something about films - his home site is Liberty Film Festival, which purports to look at films from a conservative perspective. He tries, but this is not a very encouraging effort. The gist of the piece is the usual natter about liberal Hollywood, combined with sniffing about indie films, adding up to this rather bizarre thesis:
Sort of. I wanted to comment on a couple things. (Rather late to the party, since these are both a couple days old - hey, what can I say?) First, an enjoyable thread - Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns and Money asks: "if Brokeback Mountain wins, will it be the best film to win Best Picture since Annie Hall in 1977?" Lemieux says yes. My answer? No. Why? well first - I don't really think Brokeback Mountain is the best film nominated (I'd probably vote for Good Night, and Good Luck). Beyond that, while this year's nominations are all pretty good (except Crash - that's embarrassing; I haven't seen Munich, but will eventually, and it sounds reasonably deserving), they aren't that good. It doesn't seem much better than last year's slate - another pretty decent, if a bit dull, list of nominees. None of this year's nominees are any better than Million Dollar Baby or Sideways, or maybe The Aviator (depending on who you ask.) The truth is, being inoffensive is a bit of a triumph - the Academy Awards have not covered themselves in glory since Annie Hall, if you ask me. The nominees (let alone the winners) have almost never been the best films available in any given year (even sticking to fairly mainstream American films) - but there have been a few pretty good winners, for all that. Lemieux anticipates Unforgiven, Schindler's List and LOTR 3 being named - he says Brokeback Mountain is better - me, I think at least the first 2 are better than BBM. (The LOTR films don't do it for me. I don't dislike them - just find them long and completely pointless - the books serve the purpose perfectly well.) But beyond that - Silence of the Lambs got some play from his commenters, and I agree with that. I'd also say Platoon and American Beauty are better than any of this year's nominees. Now - none of these winners would make the best five nominations since Annie Hall - the 90s and 00s alone prove Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Fargo, The Pianist - all better than any winner since the 70s. Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, The Elephant Man, Raging Bull and Atlantic City, Apocalypse Now - same deal. All better than anything that has won in that interval....
Meanwhile - comedy! or something. A couple days ago, TBogg linked to another of Townhall's "film" commentaries, this one from Jason Apuzzo. Since then, Apuzzo's column has made the rounds - gotten the attention it deserves while I've been worrying over this post. I can't add much (not to the Kung Fu Monkey's evisceration certainly), but I wouldn't be much of a blogger if I let that stop me. So on we go.
Unlike the Virgin Ben, Apuzzo actually makes some pretense of knowing something about films - his home site is Liberty Film Festival, which purports to look at films from a conservative perspective. He tries, but this is not a very encouraging effort. The gist of the piece is the usual natter about liberal Hollywood, combined with sniffing about indie films, adding up to this rather bizarre thesis:
Nonetheless, a new trend is developing in what ‘indie’ films the Academy honors. This year the Academy is hot for left-leaning, ’social issue’ films: “North Country” (sexual harassment), “The Constant Gardener” (evil pharmaceutical companies), “Good Night, and Good Luck” (evil Republican Senators), “Syriana” (’it’s all about oil’), “Brokeback Mountain” (gay cowboys), “Munich” (the ‘cycle of violence’), “Transamerica” (sex change operations), etc.
Taken together these films embody an important new Hollywood trend I’d like to call: The New Triviality.
Yes - he claims socially conscious, political films are trivial.
In fact, he doesn't claim much of anything. It's kind of tied to the Oscars, but he doesn't linger over the big awards, or the awards that might illustrate something like a political slant if there was one. Best picture, the screenplay awards - the categories that reward films for their stories, themes, that kind of thing. He spends most of his time whining about acting awards, since that's where he can find films that he can call "partisan" and sort of make a case for it. Syriana - North Country - that kind of film. Though he doesn't so much make a case and make a bunch of jokes, pretending that acting awards are voted by constituency groups. It's very silly.
Nor is it worth pursuing. The simpler point is - when did the Oscars ever not reward socially conscious, political films? Take a couple years plucked without too much calculation from the past: 1967: In The Heat of the Night won - Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner lost. Plenty of social consciousness there, left leaning if it's leaning anywhere.... Here's another: 1985 - Out of Africa beating The Color Purple, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Prizzi's Honor, Witness; or 84 - Amadeus over The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Places in the Heart, A Soldier's Story; or 82 - Gandhi over E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Missing, Tootsie, The Verdict. Plenty of politics, plenty of social issues, some broad, some relatively narrow, some more personal, some more political... I'm not really cherry picking years - my point is that you'll find social consciousness almost everywhere....
Now - I have a theory about this. I think the Oscars have come back to about where they were in the mid-80s. The 80s is when my idea of the "Oscar picture" was formed. To me, films like Gandhi and Missing and The Color Purple and Out of Africa were perfect Oscar pictures - films on historical subjects, biopics, social problem films, serious book adaptations, movies about artists. It meant a certain style - handsomely shot, conventional, well put together, focused on star turns. That describes most of those mid-80s films, it describes this year's nominees (last year's as well). They're socially conscious, but not exactly political (contra Apuzzo and company). (Though Good Night and Good Luck is political.) They are well written (except Crash, which is really awful, when you get down to it), well directed (even Crash has this), handsome looking (even extraordinary looking, for Good Night and Good Luck and Brokeback Mountain), though conventionally looking. This year's nominees are also (the 4 that I've seen) essentially actor driven films - they are all star turns (Crash for an ensemble), as much as any of those 80s films were. They are, in short, very good middlebrow films. Reassuring, not terribly inventive, classic prestige pictures.
Those were the films getting nominated in the 80s - the genre flicks (comedies, action films, science fiction and fantasy, blockbusters, and obviously Art Films) were on the outside. (No nominations for, say - Blade Runner, Brazil, This is Spinal Tap, Better off Dead, The Sure Thing, Say Anything, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Terminator, Die Hard, Evil Dead or any other horror film, Blue Velvet, Full Metal Jacket, Something Wild, anything by Scorsese from Raging Bull to Goodfellas, any Jim Jarmusch film, Do the Right Thing, etc. - a list that might very well be better than anything other than Platoon that was even nominated from 1982 (say) to 1990.) In the 80s those prestige films were being made in the studios - by the 90s, that was less the case. Hollywood slowly shed that part of the industry - leaving the blockbusters and the worst kind of bloated crap, like Forest Gump or Dances With Wolves in the studios. So they got the nominations, though in the late 90s, the Academy seemed to catch up again - they started nominating indie films, or auteur films made in odd corners of the studio system (like Million Dollar Baby or The Aviator.) But not before embarrassing themselves with some of those 90s nominations, and a few last flings with some genre pics in the 00s.
So does this all mean anything? It means, I think, that Oscar nominees will be easier to predict again - look for middle of the road dramas with serious social themes, maybe a hint of politics. Probably fewer blockbuster nominations - but not a return to the 70s, when the oddball stuff had a chance. Just more safe, polite, "serious" films. I suppose it's better than seeing Titanic winning, but think about 1974: Godfather II won, over Chinatown, The Conversation, Lenny and the Towering Inferno. Or 75: One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest beating Nashville, Barry Lyndon, Jaws and Dog Day Afternoon. Things were different then - it's not so much that there were better movies being made - there are still good, fascinating films being made. It's that the interesting films were getting nominated, one or two a year.
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