Now It's Dark

Sadly, Dennis Hopper died yesterday. He has been ill for some time - this is not a surprise. Still... he had a long and fascinating career, a crucial career, in a lot of ways. Though a strange one - defined, maybe over defined, by a handful of films - Easy Rider and Blue Velvet more than any. It's probably unfair to always talk about him in those terms, but I can't help it either - Frank Booth is one of the great monsters of film history, and Blue Velvet one of the transformative films of my life.



He comes in - "Where's my bourbon?" - and everything shifts. It isn't that the film isn't strange or disturbing before Frank appears, I mean, he comes in right after Dorothy catches Jeffery in the closet - but he turns it into something altogether new. I wish I could find some record of my initial reaction - I know most of the attention, at the time, was toward Hopper's performance. The film as a whole is, and was, an overwhelming experience - it was, I am pretty sure, the most completely absorbing film I had ever seen. I'd say it was the first time a film had seemed completely satisfying, but I'd seen films like Brazil and Dr. Strangelove by then that had a lot of the same effect - but I think it was a good deal more overwhelming than they were. The way it looked, sounded - and Dennis Hopper.



He explodes. A lot of it is the character, Frank Booth is somewhere off the charts of madness - but the intense strangeness of the character is only worth so much. Hopper completely commits to it, pushes it where it goes - the character is over the top - he is over the top - he does not give you anything to hang on to. He forces you to take the film seriously (even as a big part of its power comes from how funny it is) - that horror/disgust/comedy is part of the secret - you have no way out. You have to accept the film's world, its people and stories, and go with it. It's riveting.



Now the film - makes sense. As usual with Lynch, the logic is dream logic - here given an explicit Oedipal turn ("Daddy wants to fuck!" - "Is that your mom?"), linked back to the real world (Mr. Beaumont's breathing apparatus and Frank's gas mask, say.)





But sense is not all. And shock and horror is not all - Hopper doesn't just give you menace, he gives you - something. His need, or whatever you call it - his reaction to the music, particularly, to Ben - is more than just threat, more than just pulling faces.



What is he looking for? What does he want? Part of what makes this film so great is the way the Oedipal significance is complicated - Frank is as much child as father, as lost, in a sense, as Jeffery is. They are doubles. And for that to work - Frank has to be more than just horrifying - he has to be seductive, and he has to be - lost, somehow; longing. Jeffery has to see himself in Frank, and Hopper has to show us what he sees.... and Hopper does it.





This was the film that convinced me that film was capable of art as good as any art form. It's as stunning today as it ever way, and Hopper still as magnificent. So - for that - I think him.

The Doctor

Well - this is a bit less surprising than the last perfect game - Roy Halladay has been one of the premier pitchers in the game for quite a while, and when he's on, doesn't give you anything. Still - 2 perfect games in 3 weeks? Amazing. Three no-hitters this year too - just one of those things.

Jafar Panahi

Very happy to read that Jafar Panahi, the Iranian film director recently arrested, has been released. On bail, but as noted in the article, it could be that the government will not take it to trial - a trial would create more international attention, and (again, as noted in the article), if they had any evidence, the odds are they would have released it. So - guarded optimism seems in order, as well as relief that he has been released.

Film Roundup Time

A couple weeks worth - haven't been killing myself to see a lot of films, which I suppose is a bad habit. But since we're less than a month from the World Cup, which is going to consume all my free time in June - 2-3 films a week might be all I manage for a while...

No One Knows about Persian Cats: 12/15 - Wonderful fictionalized documentary about Tehran's underground music scene - a young man gets out of prison and meets his girlfriend (who may also have been in prison) - they are musicians, they are trying to get a band together to either go to London and play a concert or play a show and make a record in Iran. An underground music producer introduces them to a fixer and the film takes off - the fixer (Nedar by name) rides them around town on his motobike talking a mile a minute and setting everything up - the passports, the permits - introducing them to all the musicians - a heavy metal group (nu division) playing in a cow shed; jazz acts, acoustic guitar singers, traditional folk singers, a bluesy chanteuse, and a couple indie bands (one with a very Stone Roses looking drummer, and a Stone roses sound - the other - a dronier version of the same, more Interpol, less Strokes maybe.) The leads sing a sweet poppy style - Bishop Allen in Farsi, almost... Overall, the film has some of the feel of the great Beijing Bastards - less completely fictionalized, less accomplished (filmically or musically), though it may be because working underground in Iran is tougher than it was in 90s Red China... But like Beijing Bastards, it gives you a sense of the lives being led, and is very generous with the music, which gains a sense of complete exhilaration. Several nearly complete musical performances are included, usually accompanied by documentary shots of the city - it plays like a love letter to something being lost - I believe the principals left the country after shooting the film and did not go back - I suspect those pieces were put together from that footage with much that intention.... It is heartbreaking, though - the 90s were a thrilling time to watch Iranian films, and seeing them over a run of years, you could see things changing in Iran. Every year it seemed, the films took more chances, showed more, and showed their world changing, becoming, slowly, a better place. But that is gone, and the story of Iranian films in the 00s has been a story of filmmakers leaving while the country becomes more politically retrograde - now, with Panahi in jail and most of the other major talent in exile (Ghobadi, the Makhmalbafs, Kiarostami), Iranian film as a national entity is damn near dead. This film offers a pretty nice eulogy...

Bluebeard: 10/15 - The latest from Catherine Breillat - a filming of the classic fairty tale - a man dies, leaving two impoverished daughters whose only chance to marry is to old Barbe Bleue, an ugly man whose earlier wives have all disappeared - the younger daughter agrees to marry him, out of desire to free herself from her sister and mother, as well as a degree of greed and curiosity. This couple proves - well - something close to happy, for all the weirdness of it.... BUt there are rules of course - she insists on sleeping in her own room until she is of age, and he agrees; but he prohibits her from entering that one room at the end of the hall... I hope you have all read the story somewhere along the line and know what happens - not that it is any real mystery. Rules like that have only one possible outcome. Of course she goes in and of course the other wives are there and of course he has to kill her and of course she begs for time to say her prayers, to put on her wedding dress - etc... All this is intercut with two little girls reading the story - the younger one is brash and enthusiastic, the older one is scared... the double narration, the cheap simple sets and costumes, give it an air of both unreality, told-ness, and a kind of naturalism - it comes off as a lesser version of late Rohmer, or even Rivette - very stylized, simplified, and clever and engaging - one of the more enjoyable, and satisfying Breillat films. It lacks Breillat's usual explicit sexuality, but it is quite plainly about sex - about sexual desire, the girl's, especially. The forbidden room is made an explicit symbol not just for her sexual desire, but for her sexual maturity, maybe mixed with the idea of losing her virginity - all that blood... It's an interesting film - Breillat's treatment of female sexuality is nearly unique...

Hot Tub Time Machine: 9/15 - I don't know what kind of double feature this would make with Bluebeard, though I saw them the same day.... This proved to be a silly buddy movie with some nice undercurrents. John Cusack, Rob Corddry and Craig Robinson as three buddies in the throes of midlife angst - when Corddry's Lou nearly kills himself in his garage, they head off (with Clark Duke, playing Cusack's nephew) to a ski resort where they wasted the 80s - it's a dump now - but there's a time machine and some Russian Red Bull, so anything can happen. They wake up in 1986 - and decide (for some reason) they have to exactly reproduce what they did in 1986 to get back to the present. It's not clear why they want to go back to the present - though it might have something to do with the non-existence of the nephew in 1986 - but they try... for a while... but not only don't they have much to go back to, but what happened to them in 1986 was mostly bad, so repeating it seems awfully dumb. It's all very funny and a bit grim, as they prove to have been a pretty awful crew in 1986, and just as bad now - but they manage, I suppose, in a backhanded way, to get something like redemption. A big part of the fun is the shameless self-referentiality - lots of Better off Dead and Say Anything jokes, and Back to the Future (Crispin Glover is also on hand), plenty of 80s mockery... though I fear it has a couple details that are so wrong as to almost ruin the experience. I don't know, but I find it hard to believe there would be a lot of girls around in 1986 who would get Dr. Who jokes - 2009, yeah - 86? But there's a bigger mistake, a bit of detailing that totally ruins the illusion that they've gone back to 1986 - they hang around in restaurants, bars, a pool hall and through it all - No One Is Smoking! This clearly indicates to me that this whole time travel thing has to be seen as Someone Having a Bad Dream. I remember what 1986 smelled like...

Please Give: 10/15 - New film from Nicole Holofcener, a slice of life in upper New York City. Catherine Keener is married to Oliver Platt, they sell used furniture they buy from dead people, they own the apartment next to theirs and are waiting for the old woman who lives there to die, and they have a 15 year old daughter with problems... The old lady has two granddaughters played by Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet - one is a nice, mopey technician at a clinic, the other is a mean, depressive drunk who works at a spa. The two families intersect; there is a disastrous birthday party full of booze and passive aggressive "honesty" that leads to an extremely unwise relationship - while Keener and Hall look for a bit of improvement in their lives.... It's a bit strange, off-kilter, understated - the plot turning, really, on two events, an affair and the inevitable housing change, that splits these two families, without quite resolving anything. It is hard to pin down, but it is still utterly convincing. It has that odd tone you get from some films, some French films, of simultaneously satirizing and sympathizing with its characters - here - they act foolishly for good reasons - it almost makes fun of them, for their inept gestures at generosity, their thinking they can buy off guilt, even their guilt (I mean, that's how used furniture shops work - you buy low, you sell high...) It's a fine film. My only real complaint is this - that like way too many American films that try to do this (tell smallish, domestic stories carefully, elliptically), there is nothing to look at. Why is it like that? The French and Japanese have long been masters of films like this, and they all look fantastic - why do American indies look so boring? American quietism - the worst thing about American films. A problem that goes across the board, actually - I can say the same thing about Hot Tub Time Machine, or Kick-Ass - they're all competent, but there's nothing really to look at except the story being told.

Kick-Ass And Superheroes

So I ventured into the mainstream this weekend, taking in a show of Kick-Ass - and came out surprisingly happy. It's an awfully clever movie that pulls enough from the right sources to almost do justice to them - a post-incredibles superhero movie, a post-Kill Bill John Woo homage, probably a lot of other post-'s I'm missing for ignoring comics and TV for the last decade - none of it up to the sources, but none of it insulting... Ya got a normal guy who reads too many comics and thinks, why not dress up and fight crime? So he does it, with disastrous consequences - but he keeps doing it, and probably would end up dead except a real superhero turns up, in the form of an 11 year old girl (and her father, Nicholas Cage in a home made Batsuit and handlebar mustache channeling Adam West...) So - this makes him famous, and draws the ire of a local gangster, who has a son who also reads comics and so dresses up as his own superhero, to lure the others in... it all ends in blood (fire, explosions, brutal beatdowns and Joker quotes...) In the end, Hit Girl goes to school (woe to the bullies) - sequels are promised....

I've seen a certain amount of angst about the premise - the little kid making like Chow Yun-fat, the little kid getting the shit kicked out of her (which she does), the little kid calling people cunts - but I can't get too worked up about any of that. Movies are make believe, and this is particularly obviously make believe - and enough about the process of making believe to make something thematic of it. And kids - even 11 year olds - make believe things like this - blood and guts and fake violence and extravagant horrible fears and dangers overcome in the most hyperbolic ways possible - who didn't make up stuff like this? I did, and I was as tame a lad as you can find... It's tempting to get woo woo about it, about how it's a fairy tale (complete with absent mothers and monsters to defeat and dark night journeys and all the rest) and all - so I might as well. I think, as far as superhero movies go, it does a better job than almost any at getting at something Walter Chaw says in his review - "this superhero game makes perfect sense for kids feeling their way around a budding moral sextant, navigating their twisted, confused straits--but not so much adults, who need to find a better way through." I think he's hit it on the head there - this one plays its adolescent material straight - the underlying themes are acted out in the film. It's not as good a film as The Incredibles (to name one), but it has the same kind of sneaky seriousness...

The question of comic book movie seriousness has become something of an internet meme this week, thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz' subtly titled article at Salon - Superheroes Suck! Responses abound - Jim Emerson, The Telegraph, Pandagon (going outside the movie world) - with plenty of comments hashing it all out... I'm not sure how much I can add, but some things have been running through my head... I can't say I disagree with Seitz - most superhero films do suck - or, maybe better, are drab, formulaic crowd-pleasers, disposable and harmless... I disagree with him on a couple specifics - I liked Kick-Ass quite a bit, as you might be able to guess - and I still love the two Burton Batman films, especially the first one - though that's partly down to the experience of seeing it (twice the first two nights - a great urban showing, packed house, everyone cheering everything - Jack, Prince, Burton, the Batman, the Joker, Vicky Vail - absolutely wonderful... and the next night in a suburban theater with a crowd sharply divided between black kids cheering for the Joker and Prince and white kids cheering for Batman and, for some reason, booing Prince; complete with a fist fight before the show and a stabbing in the parking lot during the show... Exhibit A in why I'll take cities over suburbs any day of the week....)

Where was I? Oh yes - one of the problems with Seitz' article, I think, is that it looks like he's saying - Superhero movies can't be great films... when what he really presents is, No Superhero movies have been great films. He does not make an argument (not a convincing one anyway) for why superhero films can't be great films - maybe he doesn't mean to, but given the sweeping terms of his complaints - it looks like that's what he has in mind....

A second problem is - he doesn't quite define his terms. What is he talking about? You can, I think, parse out what he means, looking at his examples, at what he leaves out (The Incredibles?) He seems to mean - Mainstream American films adapted from mainstream American Superhero (or masked hero) comic books. It's an interesting definition though - because it seems to me to rather conveniently define around the superhero films that have the best claim for being "great" films - or at least, substantially interesting, individualized, imaginative films - films with the ambition and substance of the zombie films he praises. Let me name names - take these four: The Incredibles; Kill Bill; A History of Violence; Ichi the Killer - make it five - Big Man Japan. None of them fit - 2 Japanese films; an original story; a manga adaptation, and a fairly mainstream, non-superhero comic adaptation. That seems important to me - first, that to exclude films that don't suck, you have to do quite a bit of definitional shuffling - but also, that you can construct a pretty well defined type of superhero film that - to some extent - sucks... But I think what makes those films suck is that they are, in fact, mainstream adaptations of mainstream superhero comics. They are adaptations of long established characters and stories - that are guarded rather heavily by their owners and fans. It is difficult to make films out of them that go against the desires of their owners and fans - they have become very beholden to whatever the current vogue is for superhero comics.

The truth (as I've written about in the past) is that I have a soft spot for the more ridiculous kinds of superhero stories - Burton's Batman films, and even more, the 60's Batman. Even the Schumacher Batmans (which really puts me in a minority.) Camp, surrealism, ultraviolence (all coming together in Takashi Miike's films) - these things have been drained a bit from the superhero genre, but they have been there in the past, and can be again. (See Chris Stangl's comment on Seitz' article.) It's harder to do at the center - the big budget, high prestige properties - easier to do at the margins - smaller comics, smaller budgets. That might be why Kick-Ass is better than most of the other recent superhero films - its striving to be part of the mainstream might be why it still doesn't measure up to those 5 exceptions I named.

I Guess the Mound is His

Dallas Braden threw a perfect game, today, against the best team in the majors. Not bad. Though what struck me is the fact that 12,000 people saw it, on a Sunday afternoon in Oakland - that doesn't say anything good about the team...

National Train Day

Via Jacqueline Lynch I learn that today is, in fact, National Train Day. That's a holiday I can get behind! Happy National Train Day, then, from -

Buster Keaton -











Wes Anderson -





And the Coen Brothers -

William Lubtchansky

William Lubtchansky has died. Perhaps not a household name, except for French movie fans. I'm mostly familiar with his work with Rivette - beautiful, elegant, understated and witty, as I think these shots, all from Va Savoir (a film that seems a little overlooked, even by Rivette's standards), should show...

Jeanne Balibar makes her escape...





...and one of the great drunk sequences in all film:











May he rest in peace...

April Movies Basically

Latest movie roundup: a long stretch of time, as this covers a mini-vacation...

Exit Through the Gift Shop: 12/15 - A Banksy film, whatever that means - and an absolutely wonderful documentary about - something. Street art? Contemporary art? itself? Something... Starts with a man named Thierry Guetta, a strange frenchman who runs a vintage clothing store (where he buys junk in bulk and marks it up as "designer" clothes - a hint of things to come) - and obsessively films everything he can. Well - Guetta has a cousin, who happens to be a street artists called "invader" - putting up space invader mosaics in various places. He films Invader - and this leads him to other artists, in Paris, LA, who Guetta films as well - most notably, Shepherd Fairey. And after a few years of this, Guetta meets Banksy himself (maybe)... though not much is coming of any of this. Guetta films, and puts the tapes in boxes - lots and lots of boxes.... But as Banksy starts making money, he tells Guetta to make the film he's been promising - which (according to the story) goes very badly... so Bansky starts editing the film, and Guetta invents a character for himself (Mr. Brainwash) and puts on a hell of a big art show (called "Life is Beautiful") - that consists of some of the most inanely derivative pop and street art knockoffs ever. But despite its complete paucity of ideas and the fact that it is all put together on the fly at the last possible second - it is a huge success, and makes a mint.

All this seems a bit too good to be true, and critics (Roger Ebert for example) are given to speculate on its veracity... Apparently, Mr. Brainwash exists, and makes art and sells it - and it is as silly as it looks in this film... and that Wikipedia article isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of authenticity... Though exactly what "authenticity" might refer to there is anyone's guess. And as for the art - is it Guetta seeing a chance to market art like fake designer clothes? is it Banksy taking the piss? something else? Whatever it is, it is hilarious - the art almost as funny as the movie. As an artist, Mr. Brainwash isn't doing much more than a million LOLcatters with photoshop are doing - it's all just altered art - but it is relarkably funny, both in itself and conceptually - the idea of passing this stuff off as art is hilarious. And it even looks good (though that's probably because it's all swiped from real art...)

But the film - is something special. The best film about contemporary art I can think of. It takes the art seriously, while taking the piss - the documentary footage in particular is wonderful, exhilarating, liberating... And that art (the street art) often looks great - especially Banksy's art, which really is on another level from the rest of the artists here. And the film itself is quite well made - well structured, thoughtful, smart about it - about the way things like this are jokes and deadly serious, hard work and a form of play, all at once. Details like the way Guetta's clothing store anticipates his art show - show how well put together it is. It's great stuff.

Vincere: 10/15 - Marco Bellochio's latest, about Mussolini's rise - or really, a love affair - he meets a woman, in either 1907, 1914 or both, and starts an affair. In 1914 he supports the war, which causes the socialists to throw him out - by then the woman is his, body and soul, and she sells all to buy him a newspaper, and bears him a son. They are happy, but it can't last - he has another woman, more children, and when he goes to war he married #2 and abandons #1. After the war, he continues to shun her, but she won't let go - and this leads to her doom, madness, or at least madhouses, and the misery and eventual doom of her son... The performances are spectacular - Giovanna Mezzogiorno plays Ida magnificently, Filippo Timi plays Mussolini, father and son, and is superb as both. It's also a directorial tour de force - jumping around in time, integrating reality and fantasy, films, etc. - making great use of cinemas, the crowds interacting with the movies, brawling, kids jumping up and down along with what's on screen, Ida integrated into Chaplin's The Kid - a very fine film.

House: 11/15 - Not exactly new, I know, but getting a kind of release at last... Great fun - very strange haunted house film, with a bunch of schoolgirls going to visit one of the girl's aunt. There's a bit of backstory there - the girl ("Gorgeous") has a rich father who has a villa, but he has also acquired a fiancee (whose part seems to have been spliced in from a perfume commercial), and Gorgeous is jealous - thus, off to see mom's sister. SHe and her pals arrive at the aunt's house - an isolated old fashioned house on a hill, guarded (you could say) by a goofy guy selling watermelons) - at the house they meet the aunt, a sweet old lady in a wheelchair, with a white cat (who seems more or less omnipresent) - everything seems nice enough, but you know how it goes. The fat girl disappears - the high strung girl finds her head in the well - or does she? The girls start to worry - the aunt starts walking - then things get strange. Futons attack one girl, a piano eats another - Gorgeous, puts on her aunt's makeup and becomes a kind of monster bride - and then it gets stranger still. In the end, the girl's teacher arrives in his dune buggy, but turns into a bunch of bananas; then the finacee and her perfume commercial arrive, and Gorgeous greets her, but you can see the cat is still hungry... I can't do justice to it all - it is so far over the top it comes up from below - really cool stuff.

The Good, The Bad and the Weird: 9/15 -A certain kind of high ambition, that doesn't come off - a Leone knock off sort of, with buried treasure, a vicious crook, a mostly amoral bounty hunter, a goofy thief, swirling factions with political overtones around them. The thief steals a treasure map from some Japanese, that the Bad was supposed to have retrieved - the Good is hanging around - they all set off on a long chase across Manchuria, the three of them plus a couple gangs of bandits (with an inexhaustible supply of thugs) and the Japanese army. Lots of action, some comedy, but not much logic follows, and truth is, even the action is a bit flat - there are some nice set pieces, but they don't quite come off... It's watchable, I suppose, though a bit of a slog, never quite delivering on its premise - all that genre mashup ought to be more fun. The great Song Kang-so has the Wallach part and makes a meal of it, almost saving the thing... But overall, it's a film that made a spectacular trailer, but not much of a movie.

DVD:

Kingdom of Heaven: 8/15 - Orlando Bloom stars as a blacksmith plucked from his forge by a wandering crusader (we are set in the 1180s) who proves to be dear old dad. Young Balian the blacksmith does not wish to go, but he is mocked by a priest and promptly dispatches him, and finds it best to scarper for the holy land. Dad dies en route and our man washes up on the shores of Palestine a baron. He goes to Jeruselem and the film sets up its central conflict - the idealistic leper king Baldwin and his supporters (Balian, Jeremy Irons with a fake scar) vs. mad templars and Frenchmen. The latter provoke Saladin and his armies, but as long as Baldwin lives, he maintains the peace - but when he dies, it's war! All this has the makings of something awful, but actually isn't half bad. It's a long movie, 2 1/2 hours (and there's an even longer director's cut that I haven't seen), but moves along fairly briskly. There's not much point to it, I suppose, but it's distracting enough. Ridley Scott mostly maintains a modernized classicism, if that makes any sense - it feels like an old fashioned Hollywood epic, though without the conventional racism - Saladin and company are noble and heroic and victorious... Still - it's morality is extremely simplistic - there are good guys, there are bad guys, and there is no overlap between them. The bad guys are the templars, looking for WAR! - everyone else is a good guy, trying to keep peace, but forced to fight one another thanks to the folly of the warmongers. It is fascinating to compare this to Warlords - the Chinese film is infinitely more complex, morally. The three main heroes are forced constantly to choose - to do evil things to accomplish greater ideals, or prevent worse evils - they have to compromise, and their compromises not only lead them to do bad things, but undermine the ideals they claim to support. They have no way to win, really - act honorably and lose to the villains; act harshly and become the villains. Kingdom of Heaven has almost nothing of this - there is one moment, where poor Balian is offered the kingdom of Jerusalem (and the woman he loves) if he will agree to have her husband (the presumptive heir) murdered - he refuses - and no one really presses the issue. Here - villains lose, honorable and decent people win - or at least get out alive. It's very heartwarming but notably childish.

All that doesn't quite address the film itself. As I said - it is surprisingly watchable, even at its excessive length. It could do with a better hero - Orlando Bloom is not useless, but he is mostly pretty - and pretty much disappears among the Easter dinner's worth of hams around him. Fortunately, the leading lady, Eva Green, is as pretty and boring as he is, so you aren't really led to wonder why she wouldn't run off with Jeremy Irons instead...

Mysterious Object at Noon: 12/15 - I will need to digest this some before saying much - though as always, Apitchapong Weerasethakul delivers a beautiful, amusing, clever, challenging work...

May Day Celebration

Happy May Day, folks! I want to say - I rather wish the teabaggers were right, and Obama was a secret socialist, planning to establish a reign of terror of single payer health care, strong regulation of financial institutions and corporations, end of undue deference to religious organizations, strengthened unions, better safety and environmental regulations - and oh, so much more. One can dream, no? The dirty fucking hippy in me wishes he might get us out of a war or two, end the worst offenses against human rights stemming from those wars (treat prisoners as either prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva convention, or as criminals, protected by the American constitution and international law), maybe even reduce the war on drugs, and stop destabilizing our neighbors and filling our prisons in a vain attempt to keep hippies and football players from enjoying their weed... Not likely. The only comfort - and it's thin comfort indeed - is that the right seems determined to marginalize itself completely - Arizona's immigration law seems designed to keep any non-whites from voting Republican - they might have already succeeded in losing Florida to the Democrats by alienating the Cuban vote... though divisive, xenophobic, racist, authoritarian politics are always dangerous...

Enough of that. Let's celebrate the day with some music - the anger of the downtrodden (at least in the film version of the play): Lotte Lenya singing "Pirate Jenny" from Red Pabst's Threepenny Opera movie.

I Blame Television

Well - this is becoming ridiculous. It has been 2 weeks since I have gotten anything written for this blog. Granted, I did take a long (longer) weekend last week, visiting ye olde homestead - but I've been back a week from that, and ought to have found something to say in that time. It is starting to be a problem.... I suppose every blogger has to write a few Whither Blogging? posts, and this appears to be one for me - I've been doing this thing for nearly 6 years, and after the first year, have managed to post less often every single year - and so far this year looks right on schedule. It's frustrating. I can usually find excuses - a class, moving, the weather - and they are usually honest enough - moving has certainly distracted me from doing this.... Not so much the time and effort of moving, though there has been plenty of that, but more the anxiety, distraction, disruption of it all. (Not helped by the fact that I did a lot of it in the middle of a biblical tempest - necessitating a lot of dragging things up and down stairs, even before I actually moved...) It's an excuse - it's an honest reason for not writing anything - but - then it starts to drift, you learn bad habits, you drift....

This is a better excuse - I have started watching TV shows. I have not watched first run television in years - I think the last TV show I watched new was the first season of South Park. Before that - The Larry Sanders Show and Dream On... before that - shoot, I don't know... Twin Peaks? Square Pegs? I use the TV to watch movies, sports, Jeopardy, old TV (Have Gun Will Travel lately...) and things like the History Channel or Mythbusters. I've been doing plenty of that lately, I have to admit - especially since I got the Fox Soccer Channel - I've become addicted to soccer... But I don't watch TV series - in fact, I deliberately avoid them. I'll go back and watch them later sometimes - but for a long time I have not been willing to devote the time to watching television at a given time or place. That has left me out of a lot of the visual culture of the last decade - no Sopranos; no The Wire; no Madmen, etc. (Deadwood, I watched on DVD.) I read critics saying that these shows are better than any movies being made - I think - right or wrong, they must be worth seeing. But the time, effort, etc. to see them is not worth it - it would cut into my movie watching, my baseball watching, something - it is a sacrifice, but I will make it....

But suddenly I find that I have watched the first 2-3 episodes of not one but 2 first run TV shows! How did that happen? Well - actually, it goes back to moving - when I switched by cable to this place, I upgraded the service a bit - added HD, and the new box came with DVR. (Nothing like discovering 10 year old technology today!) But - the HD was having problems - half the channels did not come in - Comcast had to come out and dick around with the wires for an hour to get them to come in properly. So - the technician comped me three months of HBO.

And so I find myself in position to watch Treme every week. And - thanks to the magic of DVR - I can watch it when I want to! Oh, this 21st century is so exciting! And the HBO thing is a very convenient (and welcome) bit of timing.... The other show I've actually caught a couple episodes of is a bit more accidental - I was visiting my brother last week - he is a huge Dr. Who fan so we watched the new Doctor's debut - and last Saturday, I was flipping through channels just time time to catch episode 2. Hard to say if that will last - I certainly haven't bothered to DVR it. BUt right now - I have been keeping up with 2 television series at once - amazing....

So now comes the question: are TV's advocates speaking true? Is television better than the movies these days? I'm hardly in a position to answer that of course, what with 3 episodes of Treme, 2 of Dr. Who (and a whole bunch of random Dr. Who episodes from the last couple years), a bunch of Family Guy and Phineas and Ferb reruns, and the Deadwood DVD set to my credit.... But - whatever. TV is TV after all -Treme and Deadwood aren't doing anything that significantly different from Hill Street Blues did 30 years ago. Better or worse, maybe, but here is the thing - television may be the same medium as film (moving pictures), but it is a completely different art form. At least, series television is. It is a different form - organized differently, and weighting its aesthetic and formal elements differently. None of these TV shows have anything of the visual power of a great film - but they have the ability to draw out and intertwine large stories, whole worlds, they can explore at depth. It is as if TV shows are novels - certainly, Deadwood, and Treme (going on these three episodes) are like novels - big, sprawling, intricate novels - Bleak House or Dostoevsky... Movies are like poetry. At least the good ones - foregrounding the material, making the most of visual and aural patternings, even before the story or content... I was thinking about how something like Treme compares to something like Dodeskaden - the Kurosawa film is a network narrative, like the TV show - but he has 2 hours to work with. Films - especially that kind of film (Nashville, Magnolia, etc.) have to be much more precise, and more "poetic" - to pack more into fewer images. Dodeskaden does that - has to cover whole lives in a scene or two, as the opening scene does (the "tralley mad" boy praying with and for his mother) - it demands a different approach, that makes it very difficult to compare the two...

Though I have to say - the different approach means that films (at least the good films) almost inevitably look almost infinitely better than TV can. Treme - like Deadwood - is very well made, well directed and shot and all the rest - but it is completely conventional looking. There's nothing special being done in the shooting and editing - and elite films almost invariably make sure the shooting and editing are memorable. Just a simple example - Treme might give me characters to think about and stories and teach me things about New Orleans I would not otherwise have known... but there are no Iguanas...

A Whole Bunch of Films

I seem to be reduced to review posts, but I suppose if I can keep those up, that will constitute a victory. So then:

I've actually had a decent couple weeks on the movie going front, almost back to normal - though only one of those films turns out to be a new release - Peter Chan's Warlords. (7/15) - which as the number tells you was on the bland side, though watchable. The plot is your basic Chinese war film - 3 men form a blood brotherhood, which is eventually betrayed for various reasons... here, this is tied to an actual historical setting, the Taiping rebellion in the mid-19th century. (A setting that seems to be something of a novelty - I haven't seen too many films set then, at least not acknowledging it.) Jet Li plays a general who has survived the slaughter of his men by less than honorable means; Andy Lau and Takeshi Kinoshiro play bandits he joins and then convinces to join the Imperial army. They fight - they win - they turn on one another, sort of. There appear to be 8 people listed as screenwriters - that must be for numerological significance, because what's on screen looks like it could have been written in a napkin in a restaurant. (IMDB notes that the battle scenes received most of the attention - that I can believe.) It does have a nice gritty look, and the three leads bring their usual charms and competence (though they seem a bit distracted... or maybe I was distracted...) - and it pays closer attention to the ways most of Chinese history is a complete disaster from any perspective - but overall it is still a bit of a drag. The fight scenes are perhaps shot a bit too grittily, somewhat obscuring the choreography, which is by Ching Siu-tung, who is one of my favorite artisans in the entire film business, a genius in his field.

Everything else I've seen, in theaters as well as video, have been older films:

The Sun: 11/15 - Alexander Sukorov's third dictator film, after Molokh and Taurus - this is about Hirohito, becoming a man. Starts in the waning days of the war - he is attended by servants in a bunker; he goes above ground to play at marine biology; he meets his generals. Then he takes a nap, has a vision of hell (his country on fire) - then the Americans arrive (skipping the middle, the end of the war, etc.) He meets MacArthur, who is imperious in his way - the people around him are shocked that he interacts with the Americans - but he is strangely flattered, bragging of his education, happy to be compared to Chaplin, etc. And then - he begins to act human, opening his own doors, making decisions. He is freed - though the rest of the country seems half stuck in the past. Ends neatly - he hears that the engineer who recorded his speech killed himself - he and his wife stare at the chamberlain, then turn and walk away, as if leaving him, and his world, behind. It's a quiet, understated film, elliptical and dreamlike - skipping the middle part is, in fact, a pretty radical move. It jumps over what is, in fact, the defining moment of Hirohito's descent from divinity, his speech calling on Japan to stop fighting. It is a crucial speech - the emperor's voice coming over the radio... it is given prominent play in a great many films, not just Japanese films. (It plays during the opening scene of Hou Hsiao Hsien's City of Sadness, for example.) Here - though it is the moment he becomes human, in a symbolic sense - Sukorov skips it, playing everything around it... A lovely, fascinating film.

The Brattle theater has been showing Kurosawa films, in honor of his centenary - I have been going to the ones I have seen the least - including one I had never seen. Red Beard: 12/15 - A young arrogant samurai doctor finds himself posted to a clinic for the poor - he hates it - but after a bout with a madwoman and her knife, starts to thaw - a variety of educational experiences follow - an old man dies, his daughter tells a tale of woe; one of the patients, a saint, dies, and tells his backstory (love, lost, death, etc...) - all this wins the samurai over, and he becomes a disciple of Red Beard. There are further adventures - Red beard and the samurai rescue a 12 year old girl from a whorehouse - he nurses her, then she nurses him; later, she starts caring for a poor boy who steals food for his family.... And along about here, the samurai's plot kicks in - a woman had jilted him, her father got him posted here (at Red Beard's request) - though she has a sister.... All told, this is Kurosawa at his most sentimental and portentous, though it's still all handled with great strength. Kurosawa lays it on thick - the music cues, the significant staging, things like the girl sitting up into a spotlight that catches her eyes just so... It's a tear jerker all right, but Kurosawa plays it like he means it and he's good enough to make it work.

This played with Throne of Blood: 13/15 - which I have seen. MacBeth on Mr. Fuji - Mifune in full cry, Noh stylings, odd blend of abstraction (those bare sets and broad, gestural performances) and naturalism - the trees and horses and black sand. Odd blend? brilliant blend - Shakespeare purified, stripped down to the plot points and enacted around a series of strange set pieces - Mifune and best friend Miki riding in circles in the fog - 2 meetings with a spirit - his Lady urging him on motionlessly - the ghost at the banquet - the final confrontation...

This week brought a couple of Kurosawa's more downscale dramas - The Lower Depths and Dodesukaden - two films set in slums, a century of so apart. They made a good double bill, covering similar material, in ways that illustrate the changes in Japanese film between the 50s and 70s. Dodesukaden is an interesting project - his comeback after a few years off in the late 60s, which coincided with something like the collapse of the film industry. This was an auteurist attempt to deal with the new economies - 4 major directors (Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Kobayashi and Kinoshita) collaborated, supposedly (if I remember the story right) on 4 different films they would develop together and each direct - I think a total of 2 made it to the screen, this and Ichikawa's Dore-Heita some 30 years later. This is also, I think, a fairly direct attempt by these older filmmakers to address and incorporate the Japanese new wave - the setting, look, performances, and use of more artificial, experimental style, links it to filmmakers like Imamura, Shinoda, Oshima, Teshigahara. This is particularly noticeable in this double bill - the films' similar settings tend to highlight their stylistic differences. The Lower Depths is the old fashioned kind of film - a prestigious, foreign adaptation (Gorky), shot in Kurosawa's customary style. Naturalistic sets and costumes, unity of space, strong use of deep space, staging and framing in depth; it uses longer, more unified speeches, ensemble acting, very fluid, and continuous scenes. Dodeskaden's style is post-new wave: shallower space, telephoto lenses (though Kurosawa still exploits depth when useful), flattening effects; more disruptive editing, more fragmentary speeches, a different kind of stylization in the acting - chorus scenes, for all intents and purposes, with the women around the well... and some extremely artificial moments - painted backdrops, extreme lighting effects, and so on (especially for the beggar and his son.) It looks and feels like the work of the new wave directors - it's not always a perfect match, though the fact is, Kurosawa was good enough to absorb anything, and make it work. The truth is - on balance, I don't think this is his forte - either of these films. For me, he is at his best in the action films and thrillers - not necessarily the samurai pictures, but the "Langian" pictures, call it - I think Kurosawa at his best (Seven Samurai, High and Low, Stray Dog, notably) comes as close to being the true heir of Fritz Lang's German films as anyone. Still - even lesser Kurosawa is thrilling, and these two are better than that...

And finally, DVD brought Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharoahs: 9/15 - a bloated cinemascope epic with gorgeous colors and striking sets, in the service of a silly melodrama with some neat twists. Cheops wants to build the greatest pyramid ever - gets a slave to do it - 20 years later - marries a young ambitious princess who plots to kill him, killing the queen first, then the Pharoah... but the priest has a surprise for her - bringing her into the tomb, where she thinks she will get the king's treasure once he is committed to the ground - but wait! how will she get out? for all that, it's a handsome film, a bit off from Hawks' style, though with plenty of decent moments.

And The Sheik: 10/15 - actually, shown in the Orientalism class I am taking - and a notable example of orientalism it is. Valentino plays an Arab sheik - he spots a lively english girl, who sneaks into his casino when she gets annoyed that he bans westerners - he shows her the door, but he likes her, and soon arranges to kidnap her. He thinks she will melt - she resists him (sort of) - he seems a bit surprised, and turns a bit noble, and decides to wait her out rather than simply ravish her. She hangs around his camp, moping, but making the best of it, until a Frenchman arrives - that is too terrible a humiliation, she thinks, and she tries to run away and is almost kidnapped again, by a far less noble bandit. But she is saved, for the moment - she mopes some more, but befriends the Frenchman, and meanwhile, falls genuinely in love with the Sheik - but oh Noes! here comes the bandit Omair again! will Valentino save her in time? In the end - even the Hays code gets a happy ending, as it is revealed that the sheik is actually a foundling, not an Arab at all! Allah be praised! All this is standard fare, but not half bad - Valentino is, after all, gorgeous, and charming, and more than able to carry the film - the lady, Agnes Ayres, nearly holds her own with him - she's a lively presence in the film. There are some nice details - she is a lively character, and doesn't quite get punished for it - amusing that the sign of the Sheik's real love for her is when he gives her back her pistol... she may need to be rescued, but it's not for lack of trying - she empties the pistol into her attackers before they get her... There's no lack of cliches and stereotypes, but they are held fairly lightly, and it's almost believable that these two people are drawn to each other not only by their respective beauty, but because they are both thoroughbreds.

And finally, Sleeper: 13/15 - I'm not, I'm afraid, a big Woody Allen fan - I was once, in college, and he was, in fact, one of the first filmmakers I paid attention to, as a filmmaker. But he lost me somewhere in there - I stopped seeing all his films for a couple years, and when I went back, I found him underwhelming - even to the point of finding films I once loved bland and dull... But Sleeper never lost me. It's as funny now as ever, and may even seem cleverer - and even looks good! It might be a cliche, a joke, to like his early, funny stuff more than the later stuff - but what can I say? I admit that a lot of the early, funny, films are very crudely made - I watched Take the Money and Run (for the first time in a couple decades) a few weeks ago, and though I could imagine he meant some of the crudeness to be funny - it didn't quite cut it. Sleeper is still cheap and slap-dash looking - but now, he has gotten to the point that the cheap sets and special effects are very funny in their own right - those cars; the tin foil cryogenic wrapping - it's fun to watch. I wish he had stayed with this style - it seems to me that when he started making "serious" films, he tried to make them look like serious films - and they come off looking like Bergman impersonations. Flat, drab Bergman at that. Sleeper (and the films he made around it) have the loose, irreverent tone of the new wave (though the French knew how to make films that were loose and casual, but also gorgeous looking - Woody Allen never comes close to the pure cinematic chops of Godard or Rivette or even Luc Moullet) - he's celebrating film history, sending up film conventions, having fun with the process of making films - as well as telling jokes and staging ridiculous bits of physical comedy. This is a damned great film...

Baseball Preview, 2010

Ah me.... Spring is here - and today is that glorious day - Sox and Yankees, kick off the 2010 season.... And that means, it is time for my annual Baseball Prediction post - a great source of comedy come October, usually. It's turning into a source of - maybe not comedy - something - now - as this will be the third attempt to write it. Started yesterday, finished half of it, then broke for supper (rice and beans! simple, nutritious, tasty!) and a Howard Hawks movie, and when I returned, found Comcast extremely uncooperative... So I finished it this morning - and then, in the process of trying to spell check the thing in word, somehow manamed to delete half of it. (No idea how - command-A, cut, paste, command-A, cut, paste - I can see how I could have lost it all, but how did I just lose half of it? weird, man!) So third time a charm, I hope.... though I imagine this will cut down on the prosification, at least of the AL half of the post.

AL East:

NY Yankees - not that I want the Yanks to win, but they are the defenders and, I suppose, the default pick. They shouldn't be much different - Granderson should be a nice addition, though switching out Matsui and Damon for Nick Johnson and - Randy Winn is it? - doesn't seem like a step up. And they are old, and - there is hope! Though in the end, I suspect it will be just a question of who wins the division and who gets the wild card...

Red Sox - they have what should be a superb pitching staff - even with the kinds of niggling injured Lackey and Beckett always seem to end up with, they are dominant - if those two are 100% all year, they will be formidable. They have shored up the defense, possibly at the expense of the offense (lots of room for failure from Beltre and Cameron), though they should still score enough. Again - odds are the Yanks and Sox will be 1-2 in the division, and the teams to beat in the post-season...

Tampa Bay - every bit the equal of the first two on the field, maybe a tick down in the pitching, though with plenty of upside. Thinner, though, and less likely to pick up a superstar at the trade deadline. BUt perfectly capable of winning the division or taking the wild card, even if the first two don't collapse.

Baltimore - seem to be inching back toward respectability - especially on the field. The pitching, not so much - it is tempting to scoff at Kevin Millwood's presence, but he has been a nice stabilizing source of innings on a couple developing teams lately, so he might serve the same function here. Not yet, though - they have a couple years to go before even thinking about contending in this division.

Toronto - they've finally given up on their attempts to compete without the resources of the teams ahead of them and started rebuilding. Probably not going to do much this year, though they have some nice young players up there.

AL Central:

Twins - given the lousy division they are in, they have a pretty easy path tot he post-season I think. They did it last year with some significant injury problems (missing Morneau down the stretch, notably.) They could use some improved pitching - they will have to find something to replace Nathan - but they should be okay. They usually are.

Chicago - they have another pitching staff that oculd be dominant - only Peavy is in the same range as Boston's top 3, but behind him, they have some nice reliably innings fillers, and a decent bullpen - I don't know about the team on the field - they have Juan Pierre, don't they? they might bunt themselves out of the playoffs...

Detroit - retooling on the fly - with Cabrera and Verlander still on hand, they might manage to hang around the pennant race. Valverde will help - Johnny Damon has been washed up for years, though he doesn't seem to have noticed - he might catch on this year, but if not, he should provide a lot of helpful line drives around the kids they have... hard to say where they will land, but they could be decent.

Cleveland - do they have any pitchers? they have some nice players, but probably not enough to bother anyone.

Kansas City - it was madness to pick them to surprise last year - at least this year they have done nothing to give anyone delusions of their competence. Greinke, Soria and Butler are good players - the rest, not so much.

AL West:

Angels - this is a default pick - I don't know if I believe it. Losing Lackey and Figgens (not to mention Vlad) might be too much... I think they will continue to be a solid team, though, and thus the target for the rest of the division - a target the division might be able to hit, though.

Seattle - great pitching, iffy offense - though they might have enough to get into the race.

Texas - last year, they had their breakthrough - will they maintain it? will they improve? If Harden could stay healthy - maybe; if last year's kids develop, maybe - it's a pretty good bet, really - though I'm a bit more inclined to think they will slip a bit, and make their move next year (if they are willing to spend some money.) BUt they are close enough that, given the Angels regression, they could be there.

Oakland - have some nice young pitchers - I think they need a couple years, though, to get into any kind of contention.

NL East:

Phillies - I don't see them going anywhere - Halladay is a force; Hamels is a good bet to come back (I think) - the offense is still loaded - they are the cream of the crop in the NL, and not far off the Boston/NY/Tampa standard of the AL.

Atlanta - a very good rotation, some offense - they need Chipper to hit and Heyward to be the real deal - but it's a pretty good looking team, over all. They are in a position to get back in the playoffs, at least.

Florida - over the Mets? I think so. They are always close - if they actually kept their players around long enough, they could be a major threat every year.

NY Mets - lots of talent on the team, but it isn't very often on the field. Beltran and Reyes are already out - who knows what the non-Santana pitchers will do - or even how healthy Santana is. So - I expect the worst...

Washington - one of these years they might not suck - but this year, I expect they will still suck. They might score more runs, though. Maybe.

NL Central:

St. Louis - again - no reason for them not to repeat. Same rotation, more or less, Holliday is back to compliment Pujols - the rest of their team is pretty decent - they should be fine. They are beatable, especially if Carpenter gets hurt again - but hard to see who will do the beating...

Milwaukee - someone has to finish second - why not the Brew Crew? I like them more than the rest, so there you go.

Chicago - I don't like the Cubs, but have to admit they have the makings of a good team. Or another full on collapse. Or boring mediocrity.

Cincinnati - I'd like to see them do better - it's not impossible. They have pitchers who have had some good runs; they have interesting talent on the field; they have a couple very good players (Votto, Phillips) - it's quite possible. They have lots if ways to fail though, from the inconsistency of their pitching to the unproven youth of their talent - so who can say?

Houston - a theme emerges - a few strokes of luck, and they could be in the thick of something - or not. Berkman's out - that can't help. Whither Roy Oswalt? Etc. I don't expect much, though - which means they probably win the division...

Pittsburgh - who can they trade this year? do they have anybody left? will they have to trade McCutcheon in just his second year? why not? he will be arbitration eligible soon, far too soon!

NL West:

Dodgers - it pains me, but they probably do have the best and deepest team. Don't their rivals all have holes? they may not have the means to respond to trouble (with the financial confusion caused by the McCourt divorce) - but I think they have the best team coming in to the season.

Colorado - this is probably risky, thinking the Rockies could be good 2 years in a row. They do have some talent (some of it young and getting better) - they have pitching (Jimenez etc.) - so maybe... I'm not sure I believe it though.

San Francisco - their pitching is ace; their offense - Sandoval is certainly a real hitter - the rest, though - would not seem to be enough to really compete. Like Seattle last year - or the Giants themselves. I suspect this will be a repeat of that.

Arizona - I'd say, if Webb is healthy, this could be a dark horse - though right now, it looks like Webb is nowhere near ready... They still could surprise - they have some real talent (Haren, plus Upton and Reynolds, maybe LaRoche and Montero) and some guys who have done enough in the past to make you hope they could do it again (Drew, Young, notably) - but it's probably not worth betting on.

San Diego - they didn't finish last last year! that actually surprised me when I looked it up. They have some talent - Gonzalez particularly, and a couple younger guys - Cabrera, Headley maybe - but I don't see much room for a good team to emerge. Maybe in a year or so, since they do have some nice pitching prospects, I am led to believe (I have Mat Latos on my fantasy team, so I hope that is true!), but this looks like a very Pirates west kind of year, complete with the July trade of their best hitter to the Red Sox. (I hope.)

And so? The playoffs? AL - wait, who did I pick to win the east? Sox? No - Yankees (a hazard of rewriting the thing 3 times) - hardly matters - both should be in the playoffs.... So this version says - Yankees, Twins, Angels (I guess) - plus Boston for the wild card.... Tampa should be close enough to get in easily; Rangers and Mariners look like strong dark horse contenders. Sox or Yankees to emerge and win it all.... NL: Phils, Cards, Dodgers (ho hum) - Braves for the Wild card. Giants and Marlins being the most likely other teams to get in. The Phillies look like a good bet to make a third trip to the World Series - to lose to the Red Sox this year!

Individual awards? AL MVP - Mauer again, I suppose - he had a good case for the award 2 years ago, as well as last - with Langoria and the usual subjects (A Rod, Pedroia/Youkilis, etc.) lurking in the weeds. Cy Young? actually a pretty good race - all those Red Sox, Sabathia, Greinke again, King Felix - and don't forget Jake Peavy, who healthy might be the best of the bunch. Rookie? um - not sure; let's say - Feliz in Texas? though he needs a clear job...

NL: MVP - it's Pujols' to lose - if he does, it will probably be to a Phillie, or Ryan Braun, or maybe Matt Kemp or someone like that. Cy Young - Lincecum's to lose, though if Santana is healthy, it might be closer - Roy Halladay will make things more complicated, and Haren, the Cards and so on (Tommy Hanson?) should be in the running... Rookie? there are a few of them floating around - Jason Heyward sounds like the most interesting choice.

So off we go! Happy Easter and go Sox! I'm off to see a Kurosawa double bill... I'd better post before blogger crashes...

Films Seen Recently

Last weekend I began, tentatively, to return to the wide world, after a couple weeks devoted to moving. Managed to see a couple new films, after not seeing anything the previous week - a rather drastic layoff for me...

Greenberg: 11/15 - Ben Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a depressive ex-musician, turning 41, house sitting for his rich brother in LA. He lurks about the house, not quite able to go outside and talk to people - stalking around LA in his NY regalia, sometimes annoying his old friends... He meets his brother's PA, Florence, played by Greta Gerwig (actually, we meet her first, driving around running errands for the brother - Roger is introduced slowly and off camera), and after some rather awkward attempts at conversation, he seduces her. In a somewhat loose sense of the word "seduce". It is a character study, mostly of Greenberg, though Florence - and indeed several other characters - are neatly limned at the edges of his world - he's a miserable son of a bitch, lonely, passive, paralyzed with a kind of agoraphobia that he hides, partly by joking about it. (A paralysis that always seems about to become literal - and has, in the past... he seems to have had a stint in a mental hospital when his legs stopped working...) He's odd - he seems to know these things, knows what affect he has on people, but can't quite stop himself - he's selfish but too self aware not to hate himself for it - he draws people in then rejects them, almost as if he were trying to save them from getting involved with him. All this is very nicely shot and put together - Stiller is superb, and is surrounded by an ace cast, especially Gerwig, though also Rhys Ifans and Jennifer Jason Leigh in smaller, but sharp, roles. It slots into the current state of cinema in some odd ways - picking up some of the looseness and mannerisms of "mumblecore" (as well as Gerwig) - and at times, resembling the story and characters you might find in one of Arnaud Desplechins' films. Stiller comes off as the passive version of the manic madmen Matthieu Amalric has been playing for Desplechins - the relationship between Greenberg and Florence is a bit like the one between Amalric and "La Chinoise" in Kings and Queens. It's a much more modest film than Desplechins' multi-generational, multi-character, stylistically extravagant 21st century monsters, but works well in its way.

The Secret of the Kells: 10/15 - it's Ireland in the dark ages, the Vikings are raising hell, and Abbott Cellach at Kells is building a great wall that he thinks might keep them out. His nephew Brendan, though, is more interested in the books the monks are illuminating, and more curious about the outside world, which he has been forbidden to enter. Then another monk, Brother Aidan, a master illuminator, arrives from Iona, the only survivor of the Vikings raid - carrying a magnificent book, that he continues working on, with Brendan's help. Conflict ensues! as the abbott lays down the law, and Aiden warns that the Vikings will destroy all etc... Brendan has adventures in the forest with the help of a fairy, and things go more or less as expected. The Vikings arrive, with predictable results... But the book is completed (not exactly a spoiler, since this is a story about the Book of Kells)... All told, I suppose it's pretty typical children's film fare - you can see the plot coming a mile away - but it is ravishing to look at, drawn in a style derived from the book of Kells, as well as, maybe, woodcuts and such - all angles and curves and light ands dark. (Reminded me at times of Virginia Lee Burton - all swirls and angles and lines, strongly two-dimensional, very stylized - especially Calico the Wonder Horse, a perfectly gorgeous book, one of the foundational texts for this humble correspondent...) The style alone, avoiding the current vogue for digitized animation and three-dimensionality, makes it a joy to watch...

I did manage to catch a couple other films over the last month - goes back some... saw The Red Shoes (13/15) - Powell and Pressberger, filmmakers I have not seen near enough of (I think this might be the first of their collaborations in color I have seen) - another ravishing film, with an interesting vision of art and collaboration, that raises some intriguing questions about art and gender as well... I have to admit, though, that I saw it in the middle of the first of the 2-3 Biblical Tempests we've recently suffered here in Beantown, and half drowned myself getting to the theater, and spent the film shivering and wishing I could be in Monte Carlo...

The Ghost Writer: 10/15 - I guess I managed to see this since my last post too. Polanski's latest - a fine little thriller, though probably a total fantasy (one of the architects of the Iraq war brought up on war crimes charges? heavens...) Ewan McGregor as a ghost writer hired to replace another writer who fell off a ferry boat in the rain - this new ghost soon finds plenty of information to indicate foul play, and acts on it, generating suspense and folly... It's virtually a Hitchcock cover, North By Northwest specifically, and done with aplomb. Nonsense or no, it's a gripping experience. It helps to have a juicy cast, and it does - Pierce Brosnan as a disgraced ex-PM, Olivia Williams as his wife (both character and actress being maybe the high point fo the film - why is she in so few films?), and McGregor managing a wormy innocence at the center of it all. Fine film.

And finally - on DVD - Byron, the BBC show with Jonny Lee Miller as England's greatest sinner.... I might as well admit to my rating - 6/15 - not good... It has its moments - Byron's life and misbehavior would seem well suited to potboiling film or TV... and there's scandal aplenty... it follows the Lord from Greece to Greece - first he saves a girl from being drowned by the Turks, then heads home to England to mope and write and then become famous and proceed to tup half of London, including Caroline Lamb, a madwoman with a weird haircut that no one seems to notice. Scandal! he leaves London, bangs his sister, then marries a prim schoolgirl who adores him. But he treats her bad and Caroline puts word around that he sodomized his wife and screwed his sister and off to Italy he goes, where he chases whores and talks to Shelley and then goes to Greece and is bled to death. It's all handsome enough, and hard to imagine, really, how you can make all that into dull repetitive cliches, but they somehow pull it off. Most of it plays as a rather standard, if elliptical, biopic, that falls into very dull patterns after a while. The dialogue is particularly annoying, as it seems to consist of the cast taking turns coming on to recite a set of standard lines - Shelly declaims about revolution and hope; the wife mews about god, sin, and mathematics; the sister is earthy and sweet, Caroline Lamb is crazy, etc. etc. - this is particularly notable in the second half - the first half at least has Byron romancing a variety of women, with some stakes in the various relationships. The second half starts with the end of the marriage and never bothers to treat what came after as worthy on its own. Some halfway decent performances are squandered, and a whole host of great writers aren't quoted very often, and given whiny repetitive lines to read. Too bad!

From My New Undisclosed Location

Well, that's done. I have moved house, into a smaller, but perhaps nicer place. Now I have to unpack - this is an accurate representation of the place:



The world has been busy, meanwhile - Health Care Reform passes, finally - a huge relief. I can't get too excited about the results - it still seems to me that the system is designed to provide a kind of endless preemptive bailout of the Insurance Industry - but it does good things, moves the system in the right direction. We're better off with this reform than without it - we will be better off still if we can build on it. I see the right wing is up in arms - and sometimes almost literally - about this; I am hard pressed to see why. The raving and ranting about it is utterly bizarre - where is this awful "usurpation" people talk about? People are carrying on as if they had found out that the government was running torture chambers in an offshore concentration camp and -

- What? what was that?

Enough. As with most political issues these days, the only real debate is on the left. The Republicans and their tea-bagger friends* have basically stepped out of the political conversation - they rave, they posture, but they believe in nothing, they support nothing - they are nihilists. Thankfully, they are weak and stupid nihilists, but that doesn't mean they can't inadvertently cause good people to collapse in a parking lot from a bad heart... But in this process, in the end, the real debate and work was between the left and the center. The right has stopped trying.

*Tea-baggers... I am not going to refer to these people as "tea party" anything. The tea party was a rebellion against a tax imposed on a colony from England - it represented a real power struggle between absentee government and self-determination. Taxation without representation - really. This stuff? is stealing the good name of Sam Adams (brewer and patriot) for a front group for a corporate lobbying firm. Rounding up nitwits who know about as much about politics as a parrot that's been watching Glenn Beck to stand around and should mad slogans - keep the government out of medicare - or whatever the fuck they're on about... Christ! The whole thing plays like something straight out of The Idiots - a flash mob for morons...

Oh! And happy birthday, Akira Kurosawa (a day or so late) - thanks for summing up how I feel!

RIP Alex Chilton

Alex Chilton has died... how awful.



Still in great voice, too...

A Weather Report

Still in the middle of moving, so not much time (or enthusiasm) for blogging... Meanwhile, Sister Rosetta Thorpe can tell you how the weather has been...

Content and its Discontents

My weekly post... this is going to be a thin month, even by my standards, with moving - I hope I don't completely disappear... I have a place, and should be able to start moving in soon - but times and efforts are still to be determined.

But, after a week of thinking about nothing but apartments and money and moving and such, I am dying to do or think or write about anything else. So - first - this can serve as my weekly/biweekly, whatever it is, movie post - I've only seen one movie in the last week, but it was a doozy - Bong Joon-ho's Mother. A 13/15, per my little rating scheme... Story is - a girl is killed; the cops arrest a guy with mental problems - he happened to be out and about that night, drinking, flirting with girls - he can't remember anything, and he's easy to intimidate, so off to jail he goes. But his mother has none of it - she sets out to clear him, dogging the cops, hiring a lawyer, investigating herself (with the mercenary encouragement and aid of his thuggish friend) - what she finds.... It's a very tightly plotted and constructed films - everything is very neatly wrapped up - almost too neatly - I mean, too neatly for strict realism. That tight detailing plays as a kind of madness itself, and plays against the hints of swirling darkness in their lives and the town and so on.... Like Bong's other films, this is a masterful mix of tension and wit - everything plays out kind of askew. High melodramatic moments are undercut with odd absurdity, sometimes straight farce. It has, at times, an almost Imamura-like feel - strange flashbacks and flash- something, forward, sort of... lots of imagery of water, sex, plus a retarded kid who sleeps with his mother... and a few giddy shots - directly overhead, that sort of thing - that look like Imamura. Bong shoots a lot of the film is tight closeups - or big close shots with out of focus (but often very visible) backgrounds - especially when the mother is on screen. It's disorienting and unsettling throughout - a beautiful, haunting movie.

So in lieu of movies to write about, let's write about blogs. Film Criticism has died again - Jim Emerson provides probably the best overview. First, there's Richard Schickel acting the fool again; and (a bit) more substantively, Thomas Doherty proclaiming The Death of Film Criticism itself. That one lured in Jonathan Rosenbaum to comment - identifying many signs of cinephilic life... Emerson too seems to have logged onto the computer sometime in the last 10 years - I like this paragraph enough to quote it:

I look at film criticism the same way. Not that one should only write about movies one likes, but that the goal of criticism has nothing to do with box-office or influencing consumer behavior or changing minds. Movies are about seeing things through others' eyes. So is movie criticism. My only hope is that you'll find whatever I wrote about a particular movie worth reading and thinking about, even if you ultimately reject my point of view or have no intention of seeing the movie in question.

I don;t know if I quite managed to say this in my last reaction to a Decline of Criticism post, but to me, the internet is still more like a conversation, or letters to the editor page, than a publication - or mass of publications. I don't really need to have complete, formally structured essays online - for all that I do favor more formalist, academic, poetics oriented writing, I am comfortable reading what amount to drafts, notes, half-completed thoughts. The blogs (and message boards before them, and maybe twitter/facebook, etc. after them) at their best have the tone of something halfway between a seminar class, and a bunch of grad students or bookstore workers arguing philosophy over Sam Adams' in the pub... I think that leaves a gap in the critical world - that for the moment is filled by journals, and books - though I worry about journals and books in the future.. But what's on the blogs is good...

And that brings me to a similar topic: The Ebert Club. For $4.99 a year, you get - something... a bunch of stuff - though mostly, I think, the satisfaction of paying for something worth having. It raises a point though - leaving aside the idea of paying for this as a kind of donation - would I pay for any web content? Would I pay for Ebert, if I had to? or David Bordwell's blog? or Glenn Kenny's? Truth is - probably not. I pay to get on the internet - pay quite a bit for it, maybe... once on - I am not sure how enthusiastic I am about paying for content.

Though it is directly relevant that I buy any and all Bordwell or Thompson books when they appear. And would probably buy a collection of Ebert's essays/columns. (As a critic, I always found him very useful, a good writer and solid guide - but hardly indispensible. As a columnist, he is as good as any I have read in as long as I remember.) And I think a big part of it is - you pay for the delivery system, not the content. (Even if it is the content that is the source of value. Value is not exactly a monetary thing. You pay for content with your time and attention; you pay for the book with cash.) That and the fact that books are still a far better delivery system for really dense data than the web. (Though this too - Ebert, great as he is as a straight columnist, is even better as a blogger - he uses pictures and video and links to great effect... as do Bordwell and Thompson - their blog is a blog....) I am, myself, an odd mix of luddite and anarchist in this - I hate paying for online content; I don't think copying data (or programs or anything like that) is theft; I don't think there are any sustainable ways to make people pay for digital content - anything that can be reproduced and distributed without costs will be... But at the same time - I buy books, and a fair amount of magazines; buy 95% of the music I have on CD; buy and rent DVDs, though I much prefer to attend movie screenings - and have no reluctance to pay for any of these things. I think paper and bits are different things, and have to develop different systems for being economically viable.

Though again - one reason I could do without Ebert (if he went behind a paywall for real) is that the internet provides far more quality material than I can even pretend to read. I mean look - you have:

A Godard interview...

A very old Alice in Wonderland clip, with accompanying essay.

Bernardo Bertolucci on Rules of the Game.

An essay on Andre Wajda's Tatarak.

That's all today. It's too easy to put things on the web - too many people are doing it. It is not going to encourage a direct pay for content system. It is going to require - something else. Possibly, to be honest, semi-subscription systems, like Ebert's club, or even Netflix. Something....

Finally - to loop back to the beginning, and my moving woes, which actually inspired a lot of this: whatever happens on the web, it is in better shape than newspapers. Film criticism may not be dead, but the daily paper newspaper is certainly on the roof. How do I know? I bought a couple papers, looking for apartment ads - and found? on at least 2 days - none at all. And worse - this Tuesday - I couldn't even find a classified ads section - newspapers will not survive without ads. They don't make money selling papers - they make money selling readers to advertisers. That is how it had been for at least a century - if that is gone, the paper is gone.