January Films

Wow - it's been 2 weeks since I posted anything, other than a space filler... I shall try to make up for that. I have seen some nice films in that time (and all through this month) - not as many as I thought I was going to, but still... so to get back in the swing, here's a kind of round up-new-movies-seen-post, covering most of the month.

I don't know where to start, so start at the top: There Will Be Blood arrives trailing hype and accolades and delivers. It took a couple viewings to completely sell me, but it did sell me. More than just an allegory of the modern republican party - oil men and religious freaks in a poisonous alliance, taking turn abusing each other: god-botherers subjecting the oil men to bizarre ritual humiliations - in exchange for which the oil men rob them and their followers and everybody else blind.... For all the epic scope of the thing, it's almost a chamber drama, fathers and sons and brothers, real, imagined, symbolic - watching it the second time, though, the themes, the parallels, the underlying methods and patternings come forth - details, in the filmmaking, in the story, come out - it delivers on all that PT Anderson has been promising. The Andersons - Paul Thomas and Wes - have, for the last decade or so - been clearly to the champions of this generation of American filmmakers, and this film solidifies that once again.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: why did I skip this when it came out? Was I just so disappointed with 3:10 to Yuma that I figured another artsy western would be a waste of time? was it just the length? were there bad reviews? It was a mistake, whatever it was. Thank goodness it came around again, a recap of some touted films from last year, and I got to see it - it's really good. It's long, not much seems to happen, sure, but it does happen - it makes you wait, as the characters wait - it's structured around the delay of the inevitable: the title lays it out, and you wait for it - the characters wait for it - everyone, it seems, quite aware of what is going to happen, just a matter of how. (Though the how - basically a series of people getting shot in the back of the head.)... A fine, elegant looking film, with some slick performances - Pitt playing off his star power, Affleck weird and squirrelly, and Paul Schneider giving a fascinating supporting bit as someone who's dumb as a board, but a tick smarter than the rest of them... Maybe not quite on par with Zodiac and There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men - but another excellent genre film given an art film twist....

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: a nice adaptation - some interesting choices. Depp can hold the screen with anyone, and here he has Rickman for balance (who makes a better villain?) Bonham Carter and Spall make fine second bananas, and the juvenile and ingenue are cute and bland as one expects. The music is fantastic, of course.... When it came out, I saw a few comments calling it "inert," complaining about the lack of movement... That's not far off - though it shouldn't exactly be criticism. First - because of the way Burton shoots it - he uses static shots - it looks like he's shooting storyboards. He does that a lot - his style, in most of his films, is more like a comic book than a film - the shots seem to have a kind of self-contained quality: they do what they do because of what they look like, rather than what happens in them, or how they link together, exactly... Second - and this is criticism - the "third act" ("development" as Bordwell and Thompson might have it, corresponding, I think, to the first half of the second act of the musical itself) - is inert. The rest (parts 1, 2 and 4 - the "setup", "complication" and "climax") is dramatic - the story is enacted; but this part is not - it is all summary. "Todd became a murderer and Mrs. Lovett baked the bodies into pies." There are three or four songs - but this part of the film does nothing but make an excuse for those songs. It's plot role is summed up in the summary. The film sags, until the boy finds the girl and things start moving again...

Persepolis - handsomely animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical comic. Great looking - beautiful black and white, silhouettes and cutouts that are handled with great subtlety and flexibility - nice to see a full length animated feature that uses the art to expressive effects. The story is about what you would expect - a feisty girl growing up in Iran before during and after the revolution - the themes, of liberal hopes for change dashed by the mullahs, and the continued efforts to civilize the place, to maintain one's dignity and self-respect in the face of various forms of oppression - are fairly common in Iranian films... This being made in France, they are perhaps more explicit than in films by people like Jafar Panahi or Darius Merhjui...

Charlie Wilson's War - amusing, hilip Seymour Hoffman is spectacular - not sure what more to say about it.

Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story - thoroughly silly music movie spoof, probably only a couple jokes, though they stay funny throughout... there are a few outstanding moments - the Beatles bit, say - and all of it is diverting... probably nothing special, but I still find myself quoting it, though no one else seems to have seen it. "It's called Karate!"

I Return, Sort of

Let me try this. It has been a long week. A good friend of mine lost his father (who I also vbery much liked) last week, and that has had all my attention. It certainly changes how one might react to something like Heath Ledger's death - sad and disturbing as it might be, it's too remote to register when you're mourning someone yourself. Still a shame. He was young, he was good, he seemed to be on the way to something like greatness.

Otherwise, there's not a lot going on. I owe Piper a dinner with someone - I'll get back to it, someday, I swear. I had an idea - my dinner with Joe Breen? I could blame him for Eli Roth and American Pie and feed him a ration of crow and lament the taming of Warren William. That might still work, though I missed most of the series, in the end...

Larry Aydlette is gearing up for a whole month of Burt Reynolds - 29 posts in 29 days! woo hoo! [which reminds me of my neighbors, who are raising hell - there's a party going on! way too much thumping and stomping and whooping and hollaring. That's neither here nor there, but it explains the hour of this post, for it would be the acme of folly to try to sleep. Instead I'll type away while I wait for the fun to end, listening to Six Organs of Admittance in anticipation of tomorrow night: looks like the second concert I'll attend in less them three months! it's like it's 1988 all over again!]

So back to the post - don't forget - Edward Copeland is running another poll - best acting Oscar winners. I have to do that, too... I have a lot to do, actually. Hopefully, I'll get some posts up in the next few days...

Val Lewton Notice

Stopping in mid-week to note the ongoing Val Lewton blogathon, being hosted by Michael Guillen at The Evening Class. There is a wealth of material there and throughout the blogosphere, devoted to one of the undersung masters of film.

I have to admit, I came late to Lewton's iflms. People talked about them, they sounded good, but I hadn't seen any of them until the middle of last year, when I found a cheap copy of Cat People - very impressive. And later, I got the I Walked With A Zombie/Body Snatcher DVD, and that really did it. They're the type of films you can live with - stripped down and simple, in some ways, but with ever shot, every detail infused with intellegence and mystery, revealing something new every time you watch them. And thematically sophisticated - with complex patterns of guilt and innocence, interesting, ambiguous, motivations and results. Look at the way culpability is passed along from character to character in the Leopard Man, or the way good comes out of evil (Karloff the Body Snatcher directly leading to the cure of the little girl, etc.) in other films....

Coming at the end of the second contemplative cinema blogathon, it's intriguing how well the Lewton films fit. The stripped down style, the atmospheric style, working through suggestion and indirection, their treatment of plot (shifting protagonists, delaying revelations of characters' or events' significance, and so on), even some of the specific devices - mutism and silence; use of shadows, etc.... The links are pretty straightforward, too - Pedro Costa speaks of remaking I Walked With a Zombie in Casa de Lava; Tropical Malady draws heavily on Cat People. You can see the influence, and certainly, filmmakers are clear about the influence of Lewton and Tourneur (in particular.) They are wonderful films, and it's great fun reading about them.

Notes on Variations, Mostly

As the second contemplative cinema blogathon comes to a close, I want to write up some thoughts on "parametric" explorations in contemplative cinema. I am not sure what this means, if it means anything. I suppose I start from the notion (outlined in my previous post on this) that "contemplative" cinema is a refinement of the "art film" - that it derives its style mostly from that tradition, and shares most of its concerns, and its orientation toward reality, human subjectivity, expressiveness, and so on, with the art film. That is - style and content are, usually, aligned - silence and stillness and ambiguity in contemplative films, like in art films, are meaningful - they express either the subjective experience of their characters, or of the filmmaker. This is one of the points where they differ from the "parametric" film - the "modernist", or maybe "formalist" film. These are films where elements of the style function on their own - the style still conveys the experience of the characters and ideas of the filmmaker, but they take on other functions as well.

So how do these kinds of formal play work in contemplative films? I can't pretend to answer that - but I will offer some observations on a couple films that do play with those kinds of ideas. Particularly Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century...

Syndromes does some parametric things. It is split in half, and the two halves are related in a number of ways: same actors, playing the same (or similar) characters; both set in hospitals; the second one starts in a new, modern hospital but later moves into the basement, which uses the sets from the first half. It's structured as two sides of a love affair (or anticipated love affair) - in the first half we follow a woman doctor, her affairs, or non-affairs; in the second, a man, and the end of an affair, rendered with great subtlety. The plot turns on this continuity - both stories are about one of these characters not falling in love, or falling out of love, with someone else. And the two halves echo images and ideas - repeating or reversing them. The most powerful, probably, the pairing of a solar eclipse in the first half with a long strange shot of a piece of machinery, a hose or lamp or something, which, like the eclipsed sun, fills the screen with a huge black circle....

Repetition and parallelism are common in art films - and contemplative films. Hong Sang-soo, for instance, usually builds his films around repeated scenes and stories. But Weerasethakul seems to be handling this a bit differently, here and in Tropical Malady (the two of his I've seen so far - though with luck, I'll see Blissfully Yours next week). Hong naturalizes the repetitions - he tends to repeat scenes as they are experienced by different characters: so in Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, for example, we see the same story from the two main characters' points of view. Syndromes and a Century may be doing something like that, but not exactly - because it is creating a different story world, where different things happen. It is not the same story seen two different ways, with differences that can be attributed to varying memories and attitudes: it is a different story.

This moves it closer to what Bordwell calls "parametric" films. It highlights the act of telling a story even more than usual for art films. It is not presented as multiple versions of the same story, but of multiple stories with a related purpose. It plays, then, like two passes through the same material, running the changes on the basic stuff of the story. In this, it recalls Ozu's films - the way he kept reusing his actors, his story situations (a daughter marrying, usually), character names, family relationships - but arranged differently, as if trying out all the possible permutations. This begins to suggest a way of considering these films different from Bordwell's. Bordwell focuses on narration, on how the story is told, on the relationship, in a film, between the telling and the story world being created. But while there are stylistic variations in Syndromes and a Century, the main changes are to the story world - the "fabula". This creates a different dynamic - one that calls to mind Brian McHale's characterization of post-modern fiction as being driven by ontological concerns. McHale argues that modernism was driven by epistemological questions - what can be known about the world? how does ones subjective experience of the world shape it? Post-modernism, though, is driven by ontological questions - what is real? The distinction is neatly illustrated by comparing Hong's double narratives to Weerasethakul's. Hong's films show a stable ontology from multiple points of view - his films are about point of view, memory, individual interpretation of events. Syndromes, though, shows two different possible worlds, linked by various elements - characters, actors, situations - but they don't create the same story from two angles. They create different stories.

Bordwell, as it happens, covers something similar to this in his new book. One of the chapters discusses forking path films: Run Lola Run - Too Many Ways to be Number One - Sliding Doors - Blind Chance.... films that explicitly pose varying possible futures. Syndromes and a Century doesn't present itself explicitly as an alternative future film, but it is similar. In some ways, it might be more radical - it doesn't rationalize its style as fantasy or science fiction or explicit options or allegories. It just tells 2 similar, but not identical stories about similar, but not necessarily identical characters, in similar, but not identical worlds, populated by similar, but not identical people. Using similar, but not identical locations, images, conversations and so on. Which if you're a bit of as formalist like me is just endlessly fascinating....

Getting back to the question of contemplative cinema - this sort of formal game play may seem to be at odds with the expectation for muted narrative, blankness, silence and so on, but it's not unknown. Divided stories turn up quite often in films of this sort. Some, possibly most, follow the fairly conventional art film patterns of Hong Sang-soo's films: exploring different points of view, following different characters in turn, etc. is common enough. But this can be linked to some degree and type of parametric storytelling as well. Sometimes safely within the "fabula" - Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry, say, is structured around three variations of one conversation... Sometimes by imposing formal strangeness on a relatively stable story world - as in Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, with its parallel stories, each centered on a different Lee Kang-sheng character.... And sometimes, films push the variations quite far into the realm of style. In Vanda's Room, Pedro Costa alternates between scenes shot with Vanda and her family and friends, and scenes shot with a group of men, living (mostly) in a condemned, abandoned, room. All of them share the basic look - digital camera, natural light, long takes, etc. - but there are significant stylistic differences as well. He has said that he looks at the scenes with Vanda as theater - the men as cinema: he films her in her room, usually on her bed, holding forth, quite often, with her family or friends, fairly vocal, very performative. The bed is a stage - he frames and shoots to emphasize the stage, the frontality of the room. The men, though, are cinema - which emerges in the way he shoots them. While the camera is fixed in any given shot, he shoots from a much greater variety of placements; the room has much more of a sense of 360 degree space. There is a stronger sense of offscreen space as well, with sounds coming from the street, with visible doors, people coming and going, and so on. Vanda's room tends to be closed in: it is what you see (though not always what you can hear.) I'd even say that the variation extends to the type of drugs they use: the women smoke heroin - the men shoot it. I don't know what that means - but in the film, it serves to create a kind of structural, formal pattern. Its meaninglessness, in fact, emphasizes its formal functionality - it slides toward being a purely formal device. Which, again, pushes the film toward "parametric" filmmaking....

Vampira

I see the news is going around that Vampira, the great horror movie hostess and sometimes star, has died, ae 86. Nice tributes are starting to appear, not all from the film blogging world - this one from PZ Myers at Pharyngula is where I first saw the news. One notices such things - an iconic figure who played a part in an iconic film... I can't say I paid much attention to her otherwise, until I started seeing the tributes to Plan 9 and Ed Wood - where she was invariably the most charismatic and interesting figure to be seen. May she rest in peace...

Contemplative Films as Art Films

The second annual contemplative cinema blogathon is up and running, with some good reading already up. I have to say - I like this idea: I like the chance to go back to something every now and then. Especially big, open ended topics, like this one, or things like the recent film endings or opening credits blogathons - things that are likely to hit you at intervals.... It's nice to swing back a couple times.

But now... there's no lack of things to write about contemplative cinema - the poetics, the history, the individual films - the criticism, which is getting some attention this year. What catches my interest, though, is pretty much the same as last year - the question of what "contemplative cinema" is - where it came from, how it relates to other kinds of films: the questions of style and history that I usually end up with, when I start trying to be serious... I keep coming back to them, because I really don't know the answers. That may be my point - that defining CC may be impossible - it has too many sources and lines of descent, the formal and stylistic devices that mark it are neither exclusive to it nor adequate to define it. Which isn't to say that there aren't identifiable films we can describe this way - it's just that we can't find one line of descent for them, or a completely stable set of features...

The fact that I'm reading David Bordwell's latest, The Poetics of Cinema, certainly encourages those questions. One chapter reprints an essay from the late 70s on the "art film", with new comments, bringing some of the arguments up to date. (He also extends this, with examples, in Narration in the Fiction Film.) I think it's reasonable to consider "contemplative cinema" as a refinement of Bordwell's "art film." These films (per Bordwell) emphasize realism (both external and subjective) and authorial expression: they operate through ambiguity (both in what happens, and how it is presented), psychological exploration; they are usually loosely plotted, deemphasizing causal connections, character motivations - they often have drifting, observing, passive protagonists (lots of journalists and prostitutes) who encounter events and whose story is more their perceptions and experiences than their goals, met and missed. Art films downplay the tight explanations and strings of causality that classical cinema emphasizes, both in what they tell (what a good Russian would call the syuzhet), and what happens (the fabula - the story world).

Contemplative films follow that pattern pretty closely. They are, perhaps, an "intensified" version - the art film's tendencies and structures extended: ambiguity, passive characters, emphasis on mood and tone, etc., lack of obvious story, elision of the plot at the level of the telling, all taken that much further. The new material in Poetics of Cinema discusses developments of the art film since 1980 or so, describing many of the stylistic features of contemplative films: long takes, longer shots, quietness, planimetric compositions (arrangements of people or objects in a row, along a plane parallel to the picture plane, often against a neutral flat background), etc. Bordwell also considers the history of art films: the development of art films out of neo-realism, first in Europe in the 40s and 50s, then, following similar patterns, in several other areas - notably Iran, China and Taiwan, Africa, Turkey, etc. It's still a valid question how to characterize CC's development of the art film: is it an extension? a refinement? a branch of the art film? a departure? I'm inclined to look at it as an extension and refinement - a tendency within art films that has evolved and thrived...

The wild card in this, though, is another type of film Bordwell discusses - the "modernist" film, or the "parametric" film. I'm tempted to call it the "formalist" film - though that might require another post or two to define. (It's got it's own chapter in Narration in the Fiction Film.) This type of film is marked by a split between the style and the storytelling - the style and the meaning. It is a film that gives style, structure, formal elements non-signifying functions - functions that do not mean anything. The classic examples are who you would expect, I suppose - Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Tati - Godard and Eisenstein in some modes - the tradition today is continued most obviously in Wes Anderson (all those frontal compositions and odd cuts and angles, none of which has any obvious meaning - it doesn't convey anyone's perception of the world, it doesn't really comment on the world or the stories - it's an arbitrary, graphic patterning meant to be enjoyed for its own sake). Bordwell contrasts art cinema with both classical, narrative cinema, and "modernist" or parametric cinema - not exactly splitting them into three types of films - more positing them as three modes of films, that might combine in different ways, in given films. (My Life to Live, say, might be read as an art film, if you concentrate on the story, on Nana's passage through life - or as parametric, if you concentrate instead on Godard's methods of staging and shooting and editing scenes, as he passes through a series of possibilities, that are not directly related to the story and its psychological meaning.)

Now: it seems to me, that given this scheme, contemplative cinema is mostly firmly within the tradition of the art film. Firmly enough that most examples of CC are more than adequately described as "art cinema" - as adequately as L'Avventura or Breathless or Shame might be. They might represent a particular type of art film, but they don't depart from the model in any fundamental ways.

Except when they do - or - when elements from CC start to migrate into more classical narrative films, or to parametric films. Or - when what are mostly "art films" incorporate elements of parametric film-making. This is when things get really interesting. But I think this is where I have to start a second post, maybe a third. Because there seem to me to be quite a few interesting examples of both types of film - "classical" films that have incorporated devices from contemplative cinema; contemplative films working with "parametric" devices. The former - take any of several excellent 2007 films: the way No Country for Old Men or There Will be Blood, say, both strip down the dialog, eliminating it, or reducing it to formula (Plainview's repeated sales pitches).... or the way those films, or Zodiac as well, dissipate their plots - moving significant events off screen, leaving things unresolved, and so on. They are, then, art films, in the older sense - but often through devices seen in contemplative films.

On the other side - this definitely will require a further post - but consider the parametric structures of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films - specifically their bifurcations - their repetition of stories, events, etc. in different registers... this seems to me to change the way the films work, somewhat - complicating the idea of what a contemplative film might be...

Moments of 2007

I am getting to the end of my Year in Review Posts. I'll have to start coming up with real content again... Hopefully, the second annual Contemplative Cinema blogathon will inspire - it should... Anyway, in honor of the old Film Comment "moments in time" feature, currently living at MSN movies, here are a few of mine - I'll stick to a simple list of 10 or so...

1. The little kids rolling a tire in the background of the shot of the brothers chasing a train in Darjeeling Limited. Though of course Wes Anderson makes films that come as close to being one long moment of the year....

2. Anton Chigurh flips an ordinary quarter in No Country for Old Men.

3. The Beatles in Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story.

4. The end of Syndromes and a Century - a lamp, then a cut outside, to a city full of people - a kind of inversion of the end of Antonioni's L'Eclisse: the characters gone, but the city alive and well...

5. Anton Ego's flashback in Ratatouille

6. Margot chasing the bus at the end of Margot at the Wedding.

7. Pretty much every minute Philip Seymour Hoffman is on screen in either Before the Devil Knows You're Dead or Charlie Wilson's War. I couldn't work up the courage to see The Savages, but guessing from the trailers, he's just as good in that. If I had to single something out - the way he goes in and out of the room the first time he meets Wilson...

8. "I'm Finished" - There Will Be Blood.

9. Zoe Bell hanging on for dear life in Grindhouse.

10. "why don't you do some of your older stuff?" in I'm Not There.

Meanwhile - great moments don't all come from good films: consider - Peter Dinklage signaling his intention to blackmail in Death at a Funeral; or Jesus Christ, living it up in Mexico in The Ten (bet you all forgot that existed, didn't you? unless you saw it, in which case you probably just wished you could forget it) - Justin Theroux demonstrating his comedic chops. Or John Malcovich making Colour Me Kubrick worth seeing, or Eddie Izzard doing his thing in Across the Universe...

And finally, as a bonus - some particular moments from older films I saw for the first time in 2007. It was a really good year for that - bunches of Bela Tarr films, Rivette, Pedro Costa, etc. I'll try to keep myself to one per filmmaker, so this doesn't turn into a shot by shot description of Satantango or Vanda's Room.

1. Celine and Julie disrupting the old melo and saving the girl in Celine and Julie Go Boating.
2. The Dance in Satantango.
3. Alberto Sordi, paying back his debts to the mafia in Mafioso - meeting Hugh Hurd on the street in New York.
4. The African western, with Danny Glover, in the middle of Bamako.
5. The execution of the Hungarian who was talking with the nurse in The Red and the White - the most intense of the long takes, with their depth of field, multiplane compositions and stagings, people moving between planes, and so on.
6. The not quite dying paterfamilias, getting up from his sick bed to go to the bathroom, trailing farts, in Ozu's End of Summer.
7. "You aren't a man - you aren't even a very good sample!" - Barbara Stanwyck telling off her useless husband in Ten Cents a Dance.
8. In Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow - a particularly magnificent shot after Barbara Stanwyck leaves Fred MacMurray, Fred staring out a rain streaked window while Rex the walking talking robot boy tramps across the frame.
9. Vanda offering medical advice in Vanda's Room.
10. Karloff seduces/murders Lugosi in The Body Snatcher (one of a bunch of Val Lewton films I finally got around to watching this year. In time for next week's blogathon!)

And I suppose I should note one more thing - a long immersion in WC Fields films providing more quotable lines than I know what to do with: from all the names, to the phrases he builds routines around ("stand back and keep your eye on the ball" or "ain't a fit night out for man nor beast!") to the dialogue ("is this a game of chance?" - "Not the way I play it") - right up to the great catch phrases: "You can't cheat an honest man - never give a sucker an even break, never wisen up a chump." I had a good year of movie watching...

Music 2007 records

And tonight, continuing the end/beginning of the year roundup, we turn to music. Music top ten lists are a different matter than films. While I could never see all the films in a given year, even all the films I ought to see - I usually have a pretty good idea what I have missed. My favorites of the year bear some resemblance to what was actually there to see. But music? I can't even begin to crack what's available. And that's assuming I get around to listening to everything I buy... The iPod (for all its benefits) has made that even worse - I put everything on there and hope for the best - I barely play CDs at all anymore. So what it means? this is a really tentative list, and while I'll stand by the quality of what I like, this is very explicitly a list of favorites. Any resemblance to the best of the year is pure coincidence. But will that stop me? will it even slow me down? What do you think?

1. Boris & Kurihara - Rainbow: Boris' usual thundering din, married to songs, and Kurihara, the world's best guitarist right now, in a setting that lets him rip. Probably a contender for the best of the decade.

2. Grinderman - Grinderman: Nick Cave's stripped down outfit - howling and throbbing and thrashing. The older I get the more I like Nick Cave and everything he does.

3. Sigur Rus - Hvarf/Heim: This is one of the main beneficiaries of my project to listen to only 2007 music over the last month or so. Every time one of the songs from this record comes up on the iPod, it surprises and delights me. Beautiful soaring melodies, fine musicianship, and I have grown to love Jonsi's vocals. They've been around a while, I've half accepted them over the years, but not quite. This record, for some reason, has convinced me.

4. White Stripes - Icky Thump: What can you say? For all the hype and rock nonsense around them, they never seem to disappoint. This is another great record - probably their best since White Blood Cells (which is a contender for best of the decade.) This may not be a contender for best of the decade, but it's first rate anyway. Never gets old. If records you plan to listen to in the future are a criteria of value - this is a given.

5. Six Organs of Admittance - Shelter from the Ash: Just got this, so I'm not sure how well it will really turn out to be - but so far, it seems to be a fine piece of work by one of my favorite artists. Coming soon to a club near me! I might see my second concert in less than 3 months (instead of the usual 3 years.)

6. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are you the Destroyer?: This came out early, and I have been listening to it almost all year. At first, trying to figure out how much I liked it, but now, I think I know - the more I hear it, the more impressed I have been, by more of the songs on it than I imagined at first. I don't know if featuring a 12 minute song that name drops Bataille is a recommendation or not, but it's damned impressive.

7. Son Volt - The Search: Another major beneficiary of the all 2007 program on the iPod. I didn't listen to it much at all before that - lately I have, and have been impressed. Jay Farrar makes an odd comparison with Jeff Tweedy: Tweedy has continuously changed, styles, sounds, personnel - while Farrar has basically worked the same style for the last 18, 20 years. Yet everything Tweedy does sounds old and worn out - been there, done that - while everything Farrar does sounds fresh. Originality is overrated sometimes - better to do something right than to do a bunch of things less than right.

8. M.I.A. - Kala: I don't know if I like the whole record or just a handful of songs from it - but some of the songs from it (Bamboo Banga, Paper Planes, Mango Pickle Down the River) I can't get enough of. Maybe not as much as from her first record (a near classic) but still, really good.

9. PJ Harvey - White Chalk: This one will grow on you - ethereal songs, vocals and pianos, stripped down and haunting, PJ's voice strange and keening. I suspect, though, this will suffer a bit from the iPod - if I were ever to get back to listening to whole records, I think this might be served better. You need to immerse yourself into records like this, to really get them.

10. Ghost - In Stormy Nights: I am always happy to have a new Ghost record to listen to. This one has a couple really great rave ups - Caledonia, notably - and some long form freakouts. Not as good as their previous record, but still working at a high level.

And - using, Will I ever listen to this again, as a criteria: most records have a song or two, promoted in iTunes (3, 4 5 stars) - the following (plus the ones above) are records I'm likely to listen to whole, down through the years...

Devendra Banhart - Smokey Rolls Down the Thunder Canyon [hit or miss, but great when it's on]
Bishop Allen - Broken String [the 2007 shuffle has sold me on this, even if Atrios keeps promoting it]
Dungen - Tio Batar [not far off the top 10]
Earth - Hibernaculum [very reliable at what they do]
The Fall - Reformation Post TLC [still quite fine - I haven't followed them regularly through the years, but maybe I should]
Iron and Wine - the Shepherd's Dog
New Pornographers - Challengers [pretty close tot he top 10, probably]
Interpol - Our Love to Admire [I still haven't done this justice, though when songs come up I like them...]
Boris & Merzbow - Rock Dreams [fulfilling the noise requirements for the year]
Wilco - Sky Blue Sky [though I'll probably fast forward to the guitar solos]
Linda Thompson - Versatile Heart [still in marvelous voice]
Damon & Naomi - Within These Walls [that's three Kurihara records in the top 20 - no accident...]
Spoon - Ga ga ga ga ga [I can't entirely buy them, but they are pretty reliably interesting]

That's not all - I like the Thurston Moore record, Einsturzende Neubauten - the only thing wrong with the Liars, Melt Banana, Deerhoof, Richard Thompson records is that their other stuff is better, and I have plenty of it...

Anyway - there's no point denying the power of the iPod and its effects: songs make more impression than albums these days - so here are 10 songs, one per artist, that I will keep in rotation in the coming years...

1. Rainbow - Boris & Kurihara
2. Bamboo Banga - MIA
3. Grinderman - Grinderman
4. Hafsol - Sigur Ros
5. Caledonia - Ghost
6. Prickly Thorn but Sweetly Worn - White Stripes (it's not all guitar wanking on this list - sometimes, it's bagpipe wanking)
7. Mon Amour - Dungen (but there is a lot of guitar wanking)
8. Systematic Abuse - The Fall
9. Parting of the Sensory - Modest Mouse (about the only thing worth repeating - not a bad record, but a huge disappointment - what's the point?)
10. Tonado Yanomaninista - Devendra Banhart

Leaving out Mutiny, I promised You (New Pornographers), A Plague of Angels (Earth), Dad's Gonna Kill me (Richard Thompson), The Past is a Grotesque Animal (of Montreal), Keep the Car Running (Arcade Fire), Coming to Get You (6 Organs), Circadian Rhythm (Son Volt), Impossible Germany (Wilco), Mexican Guy (the Stooges), This Song (Meat Puppets), and quite a few more... But that's enough for now.

The video choice is obvious: Rainbow, live:

Blogathon List - 2008 Onward

As we move into the new year, it is time to start a new list of blogathons. Maybe I will start breaking these out by year. Added as I find them. This is mostly for my own use, to keep track of them (even if after the fact), but I hope this is useful to people...

October 26: 1984 Blogathon - in honor of the 25th anniversary of the release of Terminator. Entries collected here.

OCtober 19-31: Italian Horror blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies. Contributions collected here.

October 5-9: Double Bill Blogathon at Broken Projector.

September 7-16: Brian De Palma blogathon, at Cinema Viewfinder.

July 6-12: Sprit of Ed Wood blogathon at Cinema Styles. In action, here.

June 28-July 4: Michael Mann week at Radiator Heaven.

June 21-30: Claude Chabrol blogathon, hosted by Flickhead. Main page here.

June 15-21: Wildgrounds hosts a Japanese Cinema Blogathon. Main page.

June 15-19: Pauline Kael week, at The Cooler. Index here.

January 12-23, 2009: Early Hawks, hosted by Ed Howard at Only the Cinema. I suppose that's a 2009 blogathon, but there you go.

Dec 28-31: second annual Endings Blogathon, at JD's Valley Dreaming.

November 4-9: Politics and Movies blogathon, at The Cooler.

November 5-7: James Bond blogathon at Piper's.

October 24-November 16: Another James Bond blogathon at Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-scope. Bonds everywhere!

October 3-6: Tension and Suspense, examined, at Mystery Man on Film.

August 22-24: Goatdogblog hosts a Movies about Movies blogathon. Home Page here. And my contribution, on King Kong (mostly).

July 20-26: X-Files blogathon at South Dakota Dark.

July 25-August 1: Kiyoshi Kurosawa honored at The Evening Class. Starting here, and continuing. My (premature contribution is here.

July 14: Celebrate Bastille Day at Vinyl Is Heavy!

July 9-13: Self-involvement blogathon from Culture Snob.

July 7-14 (approximately): outside the film world - John Holbo at the Valve hosts a discussion of Douglas Wolk's excellent Reading Comics.

June 29-July 3: a New York Films blogathon, at 12 Grand In Checking. And here it is.

June 23-25: I don't know why I even link to this idiocy, but here's another Bizarro World Blogathon from Lazy Eye Theater - bound to be dull, humorless and mean to great and significant Artists like Michael Bay and Rob Schneider. Somewhere, Doug Piranha is smiling.

June 12-15: RC hosts a Dads in Media blogathon at Strange Culture. Main page.

June 12: though not precisely a blogathon, this is Brian Darr's date for beginning this month's Film of the Month Club discussion, on Cecil B. DeMille's 1915 film, The Golden Chance. Collected here.

May 16-23: How did I miss this exactly? Ali Arikan hosts an Indiana Jones Blogathon. Already underway!

May 19-25: Production Design Blogathon at Jeremy Bushnell's Too Many Projects Film Club.

May 19: the starting date for the Film of the Month Club discussion of The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On.

May 4-10: Ferdy on Films hosts a Dance Movie Blogathon. It's Here!

April 14: Film at 11 Hosts a blogathon devoted to Andrew Sarris and The American Cinema. Here is the Home Page for this blogathon.

February 1-8: Celebrate the bright lights and shiny colors, at the Deeply Superficial Blogathon at South Dakota Dark. And here's the blogathon proper.

February is also Black History month, being celebrated by Odienator at Big Media Vanadalism with Black History Mumf.

February is Burt Reynolds month, at Welcome to LA.

January 14, 2008: Michael Guillen at the Evening Class hosts a blogathon dedicated to the great Val Lewton. It begins on the 14th, and runs all week to match TCM's Lewton programming and new documentary from Kent Jones and Martin Scorsese. The festivities are underway - with a wrap up post here.

January 6-13: At Unspoken Cinema, the blogathon that never really went away returns - another go at considering Contemplative Cinema - the continued consideration of the plotless, minimalist branch of art cinema. Opening announcement is up.

January 1-5, 2008: Start the year with the Opening Credits Blogathon, at Evan Burchfield's Continuity. Already in progress!

For previous blogathons - here my list; there's also a fine compilation at Unspoken Cinema. A lot of other people keep track of these tings - I will link to them as I find them. This is one of those constantly updated posts...

My 2008 Movie Posts

Index of film posts at this blog for the year. This allows a bit more classification and commentary than tags.

Essays and Long form:

Two for the Contemplative cinema blogathon: contemplative cinema as art films; and parametric variations in contemplative films
Jose Luis Guerin retrospective notes.
3/25: Manoel De Oliveira retrospective.
5/14: Comments on Blogs and Criticism.
5/20: Production design blogathon post - Princess Raccoon screen shots.
5/24: More production design - a number of favorites: The Pornographers, The Apartment, a couple Ed Wood films (Ed Wood?), and Inland Empire.
5/25: in association with the Film of the Month Club, discussion of some of the themes and devices in Kazuo Hara's films.
5/28: And authorship in Hara's films. (Cross posted to Film of the Month Club.)
6/15: Make Way For Tomorrow and Tokyo Story essay.
7/19: Essay on Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Retribution. A week early for the blogathon - another link.
8/7: Double Bills.
8/24: For movies about movies blogathon - King Kong (mostly) - and spectacle...
8/30: Dr. Smith's Back to School Quiz. (Original quiz here.)
9/8: Holy Grail Meme. (Original, and continuing commentary at The Dancing Image.)
10/4: Ozu's camera movements - geometry, the Crane shot.
11/7: Alphabetical list meme.
11/16: Poetry as film, featuring Ozymandias.
11/22: Things I love about Old Movies photo-post.
12/30: Professor Kingsfield quiz, from SLIFR.

Occasional Posts:

Best of 2007.
Blogathons of 2008.
Moments of 2007.
Vampira obituaries
Val Lewton Blogathon notice.
Kon Ichikawa obit.
Oscar picks and guesses.
Funny Games controversy.
4/6: Charlton Heston obit.
4/14: Sarris blogathon begins.
4/14: Links and so on - Cannes, etc
5/4: Links, blogathons (dance movies, production design), etc.
5/6: 2007 Retrospective top 25. 5/7: Top Tens by decade (revised from last year); 2000s Top Tens by year.
5/10: More in a similar vein - the 1990s, by year, and overall.
5/11: West Side Story clip.
5/17: Links - blogathons, Film of the Month Club notes, Speed Racer.
6/9: Spring Quiz, from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.
7/16: Links, a mid-year list, etc.
7/24: Chahine Obit.
8/5: Parallel Universe Film Guide link.
9/27: Paul Newman in the Hudsucker Proxy.
10/27: Minelli announcement.
10/30: Links, Ebert's 8 minute review, Bordwell on political narratives, and more Minelli.
12/9: Oshima series note.
12/11: Oliveira turns 100.
12/18: Lots of notes and links - Oshima teasers, Alison Bechdel's film rule; Absolute Beginners, Cairns n Brazil, etc.

Reviews:

1/31 - Roundup for January: There Will be Blood, Assassination of Jesse James, Sweeney Todd, Persepolis, Charlie Wilson's War, Walk Hard
3/11 - DVD review of Adventures of Robin Hood.
3/24: Big Roundup - 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days; Michael Clayton; Diary of the Dead; Witnesses; Be Kind Rewind; Band's Visit; Taxi to the Dark Side; Still Life; Paranoid Park; CJ7.
4/2: another roundup of reviews: Don't Touch the Axe; Abraham's Valley; Princess Raccoon; The Black Pirate.
4/9: More mini-reviews: Married Life; Leatherheads; Monkey Warfare,; The Bank Job; Sea Hawk.
4/14: Short reviews: Contempt, All For Free & Fairbanks X 2: Mark of Zorro and Don Q.
4/29: 3 Reviews: Flight of the Red Balloon, My Blueberry Nights and The Visitor
7/19: Retribution on DVD.
9/3: Vicky Cristina Barcelona disappoints.
9/16: Edward Yang/Wu Nien-jen comments, part 1.
9/28: Yang/Wu Part 2.
10/12: Ohayo at the Brattle.
12/1: Synecdoche, NY review.
12/11: Rachel Getting Marries and A Christmas Tale, reviewed.

Best of 2007 (Films)

Happy New Year! Time to post a list! I'm not one to post a best of the year list in the middle of December - it's barely soon enough now. Certainly too soon to do justice to films made in 2007 - just in the next week or so, There Will be Blood and Persepolis and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days will be coming out - I'm too dependent on commercial releases, I'm afraid, to get any head start on those lists... so for now, stick to what got released, in a commercial theater, for the first time (as far as I know) in Boston in 2007, whether I'd seen it before or not. Which is why the #1 film is 30 years old, and has been a fixture on my all time lists since I saw it, 8-10 years ago at some art house or other.... Without further ceremony:

1. Killer of Sheep - Charles Burnett - not that it got a very good release - but it did appear in theaters, finally, and I am going to put it where it belongs. A masterpiece.
2. Syndromes and a Century - Apichatpong Weerasethakul - this didn't get the best release either, but did play here and there - haunting and beautiful, telling stories with the subtlest of indications.
3. No country for Old Men - Coen Brothers - a fine return to form; a genre picture that in some ways might be as radical and strange as the two films ahead of it on this list - the way everything at the end is indicated and not shown, though it's clear enough what is happening. How people decide to face death...
4. Zodiac - David Fincher - Somehow, this has been forgotten already - how can that be? as inventive and surprising and great looking as No Country for Old Men, working, like the Coens' film, completely within an established, mainstream genre.
5. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Julian Schnabel - what threatened to be uplifting schlock (an inspirational story of a paralyzed man triumphing over the odds to write a book), turns out to be something genuinely wonderful - Schnabel finds a really amazing formal means of telling the story; and shows complete control over the medium, using it to tell the story, to communicate Bauby's point of view and first person narration, and to inflect the story with emotional detail: like the way the camera moves outside his body, moves to integrate him into the environment as his ability to communicate integrates him into the environment and his imagination comes to encompass the world around him.
6. Brand Upon the Brain - Guy Maddin - somehow managing to get weirder than the usual Maddin fare, with terrible family secrets, polymorphous perversity, distressed film and all manner of montage tricks, voiceover narration by Isabella Rossellini, a symphonic score, orphan choirs and a boy soprano... that's the distributed version - the original version, with the music and narration done live, might be too much...
7. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone - Tsai Ming Liang - Lee Kang-sheng turns up in Malaysia, playing two people, a homeless guy and a paralyzed guy, attended by a Malaysian worker and a girl;all suffer terribly - this might be Tsai's most depressing film - until the end, when the homeless guy, the girl and the worker end up floating together on a mattress, in their own little utopia.
8. Triad Election - Johnny To - Louis Koo and Simon Yam compete for head of the triad societies in the usual ways - murder, torture, kidnapping and the like. Rather elegant and restrained for To, underplaying even the nastiness (which is extremely nasty).
9. Into Great Silence - Philip Groning - contemplative cinema in the most literal sense, a long slow meditative film about meditation and the flow of time.
10. Darjeeling Limited - Wes Anderson - Armand White said in a world with Wes Anderson, Sidney Lumet should be put in jail - the problem is, if that's your standard, most directors should be doing time. Even a lot of films that might actually be better films than Darjeeling Ltd seem infinitely smaller than anything Anderson does. He is distinctive, has a sensibility, and even the criticism of his films is aimed so much higher than anything anyone to the mainstream side of him is doing (except maybe the Coens and, this year - finally - David Fincher) that it just proves the point, again - that he is one of the great directors. If this is the worst he's likely to do, and maybe it is - he's competing with David Lynch and Tsai Ming-liang and Claire Denis and Kiyoshi Kurosawa - he's up with the big boys. Even more than the Coens. Overall, I suppose this is a modest, rather generic film, pleasant enough, but nothing all that new, in the story - but it is made with such assurance and skill, even as a story, but especially as a work of filmmaking, that it utterly transcends the great mass of films made - knowing that it exists in the world makes watching films like Juno or Lars and the Real Girl or 3:10 to Yuma - perfectly well made, entertaining pictures - almost painful. Why do they bother? can't they give me something to look at? You will note the films ahead of it on this list are, in fact, all extraordinary looking - in different ways, to different purposes, but they all do something with the form.

And now , that out of the way - here's another, say, 15 films, to give us 25: all very good films - this won't exhaust the decent films released this year. I don't know what order these are in; it's not important.

Tears of a Black Tiger - Wisit Sasanatieng
Offsides - Jafar Panahi
Bamako - Abderrahmane Sissako
The Wind that Shakes the Barley - Ken Loach
12:08 East of Bucharest - Corneliu Porumboiu
Eastern Promises - David Cronenberg
Election - Johnny To
The Host - Bong Joon-ho
Away From Her - Sarah Polley
The Case of the Grinning Cat - Chris Marker
Grindhouse - Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
Red Road - Andrea Arnold
Climates - Nuri Blige Ceylan
Margot at the Wedding - Noah Baumbach
Vanaja - Rajnesh Domalpalli

As for performances and such - keeping the list short:

Actor - Christian Bale, Rescue Dawn
Actress - Nicole Kidman, Margot at the Wedding (though a close run from Amy Adams in Enchanted)
Supporting Actor - Javier Bardem, I suppose, is the default winner, though that's a kind of 1A role... Jeremy Davis and Steve Zahn in Rescue Dawn have more conventional supporting parts, and keep up with Bale, no easy task. And James Marsden ought to be a dark horse for Enchanted.
Supporting Actress - Cate Blanchett, again, is the obvious choice, getting Dylan down pat - Alison Janney in Juno is the more conventional supporting choice...
Ensemble - Darjeeling Limited
Script - Guy Maddin and George Toles, Brand Upon the Brain - why not? stranger is sometimes better. Though Charles Burnett probably deserves it more...
DP - while mildly tempted to pick the "automavision" nonsense Lars von Trier was touting for Boss of it All - I'll go for Harris Savides for his DV work on Zodiac
Director - I have to say that it was a director heavy year - all the high films are director's films: there aren't all that many films that sneak in on their scripts or performances... making singling out the best direction harder than usual. I think I'll take the Coen brothers, though, since they brought in everything to make No Country for Old Men the success it is - they are auteurs in the fullest sense (even if it is an adaptation), creating the script, directing the film, getting the outstanding performances they got, making it look the way it did - a first rate effort, so why deny it?

And now - an early cut at the best films made this year. This will be greatly eroded as early as the end of this month, so we will have to revisit it over time. But now:

1. California Dreamin' (Endless) - Christian Remescu - I've heard rumors of a regular release for this film, an unfinished posthumous Romanian effort - if so, look for it again in 2008.
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Zodiac
4. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
5. Darjeeling Limited
6. Eastern Promises
7. Away From Her
8. Grindhouse
9. Margot at the Wedding
10. Vanaja - in a year full of unwanted pregnancy films - this and Waitress were far and away the best. They should have gotten the attention that Knocked Up and Juno get....

A decent crop, even for now. And finally - what was the worst film of the year? Well, I'm sure there were quite a few worse, but for my money - 2 films stood out: Southland Tales was a long silly boring mess, though there were some fine moments - I won't give up on Richard Kelly quite yet. But the real stinker was Across the Universe - again, it had moments, and even in its bad moments, you could glimpse something thrilling hiding behind it - but that thrilling film isn't on the screen, except during the second half of the trailer.... I'm a bit more likely to give up on Julie Taymor, though I don't want to...

[if anyone notices: I've come back and corrected the more egregious spelling and typo problems - never hurts to proof-read.]

It's All Over - Go To Work!

As usual, I've waited to the last possible moment to come up with something for a blogathon - in this case, the Endings blogathon, being hosted by Joseph Judge - in fact, looking a bit closer, it's worse than that: he ended it on December 30, not 31 - I missed it. Well - not to be helped, without a working time machine. Since this is also an opportunity to finally say something about the big Imamura series that played at Harvard last month, I am going to post it anyway.

I want to write something about his 60s films - Pigs and Battleships, Insect Woman, Intentions of Murder, especially - which have truly remarkable endings. Of course, most of his endings are damned good, though it took him a while to figure out how to do it. The early films tend to take somewhat minor key endings - little codas: the college boy and younger sister heading off to Tokyo in Stolen Desire; the local kid and his girl commenting on the story in Endless Desire - Pigs and Battleships is the first to really step it up. And it does so in style, and in a way that really brings out his overarching philosophy. The climax - a huge gun battle, traffic jam and pig stampede that ends with the hero expiring with his head in a toilet - is strong enough: but it's followed by shots of the heroine walking through the train station, headed to Kawasaki, to take a job in a factory. This ending - a young woman going to work (instead of going to fuck an American, like the women she passes on her way into the station), is given a thunderously heroic treatment - musical crescendo, a soaring crane shot, telephoto shots of the girl crossing the station like Mifune.... And not a trace of irony in it: this is what it means to stop waiting for someone else to save you, to stop trying to weasel a living out of the Americans - she is heroic, and basically carries the fate of her country with her.

It's interesting that Imamura's great theme, those tough, unsentimental films about tough, nearly indestructible women, is really only on full display in three or four films he made in the 60s. In Pigs and Battleships, she's the second lead (though she gets out alive) - in Insect Woman and Intentions of Murder (and in the documentaries) she's the main character (or characters, since both mother and daughter have it in The Insect Woman). After those films, his attention usually turns to men, surrounded by tough women, but still... Insect Woman has two endings, in a way: it's the story of a woman from the country, who came of age during the war, and fights her way through life after the war, rising and falling over time. She has a daughter, whose life follows a similar pattern - though she (the daughter) bails out of the cycle as soon as she gets the money, and goes to work on a farm. The ending? it's complex, covering both women - first, we see the girl driving a bulldozer, then talking with her lover - she is pregnant, but he's worried it's not his - she insists it is, though we probably know better. And then her mother comes plowing up the hill, coming to visit, hoping to lure the girl back to Tokyo... both of them plowing on, doing what they do - though again, it's the girl who's more heroic, taking what she can, and stepping out of the cycle of dependence - looking to make her own life on her own terms, through hard work. A figure, maybe, of moving on - in the post-war period, maybe, Japan simply had to survive, and staying alive was heroic in itself, no matter what you had to do to do it. But in the 60s, it's time, maybe, for something more - it's not enough to survive, it's time to get to work.

Anyway - Intentions of Murder is a bit of a change from this. The heroine, Sadako, is less of an agent than any of the women in the other two films: though the story is, in fact, the story of how she becomes an agent of her own fate. The story is - she is the miserable mistress of a librarian, who has somehow never gotten around to marrying her, and whose parents somehow accidentally (cough) registered her son as their own... While her husband is out of town, a thief breaks in to rob and ends up raping her - he becomes infatuated, and keeps coming back. She can't tell anyone; she can't get rid of him; she can't kill herself. Things are terrible. But as the film continues - she starts acting: she tries to buy him off, she tries to run away with him, she tries to kill him, never quite managing it. But she does manage to file suit to be registered as the librarian's wife, and the mother of her child - she does manage to get around to learning to use a knitting machine, and later to start giving lessons on the machine. And all this builds to what has to be the happiest ending in any Imamura film: she gets the registrations changed, the family moves to the family farm, where she starts raising silkworms, giving knitting lessons and making things, making money - she beats them all. It allows, too, for a lovely joke.Everyone else in the film think she's a stupid, weak, lazy fool - her husband constantly calls her stupid, useless, and lords it over her with his education and erudition. But she runs rings around them - even early in the film, when we see that she's been making almost as much money as he does from her knitting, or when she corrects his math when he does the finances... though the best scene is at the end, when he receives the notice that she has filed suit against him and his parents to be registered as her son's mother. He and his mother whine and complain - she says she's sorry, if they want she could try to stop the suit - she never thought it would ever get to trial, she says. Never mind, says the husband, it's too late now - you can be so stupid sometimes.... comeuppance is seldom so sweet...

And so it goes. He kept ending films right after that - Shoichi Ozawa floating out to sea to end the Pornographers; the swarm of witnesses, cameramen, clappers ending A Man Vanishes; Ken Ogata's bones freezing in midair in Vengeance in Mine; The Bomb in Dr. Akagi; the snake-man in his section of September 11 (11'09'01) - "is being a human being so disgusting?" - but those 60s endings get it all.

Review of Juno

It's been an interesting month for films (December that is). Not all that deep a month, for new releases - I've seen 6 new films, including the David Lynch documentary, and only one is really extraordinary - but even the less successful films have been very interesting. I've been sitting on a couple of these reviews for a while, and it might be time to get them posted, whether I have run out of things to say about them or not. With luck I might get a couple more of these out before the year (at least the week) is up... for now -

Juno - Every year, there seem to be two of three films like this. (Lately - say, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Little Miss Sunshine, maybe Half-Nelson, Knocked Up, Lars and the Real Girl (in a very minor sense) - a partial sampling.) They seem to come out of nowhere (a few months before they are released) - they play Sundance or Toronto or something and people gush. And the moving chattering classes (pro and am) start to shiver in anticipation. The hype builds - and then they arrive... And the reviews are - call it mixed. Call them normal, like this was just another film.* You'll see some good notices - some bad - and then you start to see a backlash: the haters come out. And the anti-haters come out. Maybe a think piece or two appears (like this one, after Katherin Heigl took some shots at Knocked Up [richly deserved shots, one has to say.]) And so - even if you see the film opening weekend, you have seen it go through about 5 stages of critical reaction. And what might have seemed like a sure thing 3 months before, and a disaster the week before, now - could be anything on the planet. So you go, and you hope for the best, or for something surprising and then -

Some of them work (I think Little Miss Sunshine is a pretty good movie, or 2/3 of a pretty good movie, despite all the hating) - but Juno, not so much. My main reaction is one of deflation. It's enjoyable enough, but even watching it, I felt it getting away. Hoping it could turn around but fearing the worst. And thinking about it for a couple weeks now, the disappointment has just grown more convincing. The problem is simple: I don't believe a word of it, from beginning to end. Juno herself comes off like a reasonably convincing human being - but I don't believe the story. And worse - the filmmakers never convinced me that they believed a word of it, and don't do a thing with the unbelievability of it. It's not a parable or fable or any of those things (like the infinitely better Waitress is.) The filmmakers are conventional mainstream Indie filmmakers, and can’t imagine anything outside conventional mainstream indie realism. Everything is contrived: they have no obstacles in the way of the kid having an abortion, so they have to make like the Phantom in Inland Empire, and hypnotize you - they chant some mumbo jumbo and she runs away. Then they set up the adoption family and again - contrive a story out of it. People defend these films where characters who should (and would) have abortions don't by saying things like "there's no story if she has an abortion” - no kidding, but here - there's no story if she doesn't have an abortion either. So they have to manufacture one: if the adoptive couple weren’t fuckups, you wouldn’t have any jokes, you wouldn’t have a plot - she’d go 9 months, have the kid, maybe get back together with the boy, end of story. Instead they gin up a plot - a plot that is obvious the minute Juno walks in their house, and gets drilled in all over again when she talks to the husband - and play it out by the numbers. They don't do a thing you can't see coming from the beginning. Now - if Vanessa got cold feet, or Juno got creeped out by Vanessa's stalkerish behavior in the mall - it would at least be interesting. But this is stupid, predictable, and as false as the non-abortion. And it's frustrating, because the performances are good, and a lot of the moment to moment writing and characterization is solid, and it does try to take the POV of the girl. The plot fakery stands out.

And so.... there's still plenty to like - it's funny most of the way through, quite a few of the characters are charming enough. There are complaints about Juno being too pop culture savvy, though I don't quite see it - nothing ever goes away anymore, with DVDs and the internet, so 16 year old Mott the Hoople fans should be no surprise. The problem with the pop culture name dropping is how transparent it is - they name check the Stooges and the Melvins and Patti Smith and Mott the Hoople like wearing buttons. And none of that musical taste is reflected in the film - the characters may claim to love the Stooges and the Melvins, but we hear the Moldy Peaches... I guess Ellen Page suggested using them, but I don't know if that excuses it; they make for bad soundtrack music, turning the mood "cute" every time they play, and using them (instead of the Melvins or Nirvana or the Stooges) underlines how music is used as a label to signify characterization. It isn't quite true that these characters should be defined by their musical tastes - this isn't High Fidelity. But their tastes, in this film, carry no weight: they are labels. The musical conversations are just name dropping - I can believe a 16 year old Iggy Pop fan; I can't believe a Melvins fan who doesn't love the Stooges.

I suppose I'm overstating this a bit. Or, having let this post cook for 2 weeks, I'm having second thoughts about my second thoughts... because I admit: this isn't necessarily unconvincing - that is how people talk about music - they compare tastes by naming names; they make rash and excessive judgments - "Sonic Youth is just noise!"; they try to surprise and impress the other person... I've been there, done that - conversations about music, especially with people younger or older than yourself, tend to look like those pokemon card games - "you've played your Stoogemon, but that's no match for my Blue Cheeronator!" That's especially believable in Juno herself - I can believe her tastes,** and how she uses them to try to impress the husband. Playing "All the Young Dudes" as though you didn't think he'd have heard it before.... So I must temper my abuse - though it still plays like shortcuts to character in the film, and the talk doesn't match what we hear on the soundtrack...

* I should add - this particular process seems most common with indie crowdpleasers. There might be plenty of hype for art films (There Will Be Blood, say) or blockbusters, but when they arrive, the reactions are different. Blockbusters sink or swim at the box office - the rest is pretty much irrelevant. And with art films, the arguments are much more substantive, moving away from the hype. This is perhaps because art films actually try to look like something - indie comedies all look alike. There's nothing to talk about except the story, so if the story doesn't shine...

** With the internet and DVDs and CDs and oldies radio and VH-1 classic documentaries and god knows what else, pretty much all pop culture for the last 100 years is out there to be found - I know too many 10, 12, 15 year old Beatles and Elvis and Ramones and Judas Priest and Feelies fans, too many Disney experts, anime nerds, Three Stooges fans, comics readers, to say otherwise - I could cite the two kids sitting in front of me at the Blade Runner show yesterday, discussing, in minute detail the entire frigging run of Star Trek, Pike to Voyager.

Endings Begin

Welcome back! or,wait, how should it go? Anyway - here I am, back from another festivus celebration. Were grievances aired? were there feats of strength? did Rudolph save christmas? did I eat too much chocolate? yes, yes, yes, and god, yes... Anyway, as we move into the last weekend of the year, I can start working my way up to the Making of Lists - just in time for a bunch of films I've been desperately waiting for to appear...

In the meanwhile, of course, I remind you all that Joe's Movie Corner has a Movie Endings Blog-a-thon going: a fine way to ring out the year. And don't forget the Opening Credits blogathon at Continuity, to open the new year...

And me? all those end of the year lists are coming - and I hope some movie reviews. And now, to fill the space - here's another 2007 Random Ten list, cause - you know...

1. Devendra Banhart - Lover [it's the disco song...]
2. Liars - The Dumb in the Rain
3. Thurston Moore - Frozen GTR
4. Melt Banana - Blank Page of the Blind
5. MIA - $20
6. The Fall - Scenario
7. PJ Harvey - Dear Darkness
8. Linda Thompson - Blue & Gold [what a voice]
9. Iron & Wine - Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog) - [another nice record I haven't done justice to yet]
10. Deerhoof - Matchbox Seeks Maniac [this one two - I like them, but this seemsa bit less inspired than some of their other records - I don't know if I have judged it too quickly or not... it's good anyway]

Video? Here's a nice performance by Mr. Beam and company, on Letterman...

Midwinter Random Songs

Happy Solstice! I don't know how much more we'll see here for a while - the holiday season is in full gear, as we make offerings to the gods of retail... I should at least try to come up with some christmas jokes, but you know how it goes. I'm off to the mall! But I think I can toss off another go through the Songs of 2007, randomly arrayed...

1. New Pornographers - The Mutiny I Promised You
2. Arcade Fire - Keep the Car Running - go Canada!
3. Devendra Banhart - Saved - fake gospel, a neat little song, for all that.
4. PH Harvey - The mountain - a gorgeous, soaring tune, she’s singing at the edge of her ability, and beyond - “since you betrayed me so”.
5. Thurston Moore - silver>blue: here’s a question - why have I only heard this song from this record - and heard it twice now? Strange stuff. But this is a nice song - pretty - sounding more like the New Pornographers or PJ, acoustic, strings - great stuff. Longer and more adventurous than anything any of those bands try: interesting point there.
6. Dino Jr - We're Not Alone - J goes C&W - this is the best song on this record so far - though has that irritating drum sound, that I like, but not that much. A sloppy cool guitar solo comes in. Neil Young would be proud.
7. White Stripes - A Martyr For My Love For You - much better than almost all these other bands: Jack writes first rate lyrics - interesting songs: he’s absorbed the old zep style, blues/pop/rock style, mashed together, with strong riffs, strong melodies, interesting dynamics. He’s the most convincing rock star in the world, when you get down to it.
8. Wilco - Leave me (like you found me) - it's the eagles, without the singing talents.
9. Interpol - Who Do You Think - good lord, it’s like old new pornographers!
10. Boris - You Laughed like a Watermark - yes. And wait for Kurihara to weigh in. There it is - those little flicks and fades, halftones and slides, that tone. Oh. The second solo is even better, smearing those notes all over the place, twisting around and around - melodic and abrasive at the same time - amazing.

Video? I don't have time to dig, so let's give a shout out to our neighbors in the great white north (who know what winter really is!) with a single off the New Pornographers record:

A Film about Living in the World

I almost forgot this: a blogathon, for It's a Wonderful Life. More like, almost forgot it was set for today... we are talking, after all, about the greatest movie of all time. An opinion I've held firmly for a decade or more - though I admit to having doubts lately. Mostly under the pressure of a steady diet of Ozu films, which cover much the same ground, but without the need to end happily every single time. (That is a vital point, to understanding Ozu or Capra - that things can go either way. Ozu got to retell stories with different endings and configurations - Capra did the same thing, but felt he had to always end them well. This makes some of his endings feel very strange - they are very arbitrary. Sometimes, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, naming one, the "happy" ending is almost pure rhetoric - what really happens is far more complex... which is one reason that film remains a serious contender for the top slot....) But this is time to praise It's a Wonderful Life: and praise we shall.

There is much to praise: Capra was among the 2-3 best filmmakers ever (stories aside) - this is no exception. Cinematography, acting, handling of actors, staging, sound, story telling, is all utterly masterful. He gets short shift these days, on purely technical matters - that is criminal. His peers are Hitchcock, Godard, maybe Kurosawa, Imamura - directors who used everything cinema had to offer at the very highest level (as opposed to equally masterful filmmakers who chose more limited palettes - Ozu and Mizoguchi, Renoir or Bresson, maybe) - and he got there first.... Or taking more specific felicities - his manipulation of time, say - the "real time" of the film is about what - 20 minutes? we start with people praying for George - flashback to tell his whole life up to that point, then an extended dream sequence, then one last reel in the present. And the flashbacks are expertly paced: Capra lingers over every episode, taking his time, then shooting off like an express train. Look at the way he plays out George and Mary's courtship - all the hesitations, false starts, false turns, the comings and goings and shifts of tone and emotion in their love story, then - once love is declared, cutting straight to the wedding. It's like that throughout - episodes played out in detail, but strung together at a breakneck pace. (This is something TV totally ruins: commercials cutting up long sequences and taking the shock out of the ellipses.)... Or take it's literary references and lineage: obvious stuff like Dickens, a comparison it earns, for its willingness to show the harshness alongside the melodrama, for its handling of characters - the deeper, rounder characters at the center, surrounded by types... Though this is also, if not an allusion to the Confidence Man, an excellent example of Melville's notion of the "original character" - the way a central character can reveal everyone around him. Though too - they reveal him - representing the ways he could choose to live, by becoming (like them) adequate to his role. They represent options, some quite attractive, but all of them limitations: Mary's stability and her will to transform their small scale life into a kind of fairy tale; Potter's rapaciousness; Sam Wainwright's goofball selfishness and enthusiasm; Violet's easy hedonism, etc. Good or bad, all of those characters have settled - they are what they are, and George is not. (Though it's worth remembering that we see George from outside too, at least a couple times: the scene with the schoolteacher's husband, particularly - he takes a crack at George, and rails at him, and everything he says makes sense - he's right, and George knows it...)

It's that, I guess, that in the end, makes this film what it is. It's that doubleness, to everything - how every good thing is, in some ways, a limitation. How you have to live within the limits of thw world you are in, the choices you make, the person you are - but you don't have to be happy about it, and the minute you get too happy about it, you are stuck with it. And George's world is a bitterly ironic world (bittersweet, of course): everything cuts both ways. What is this film about? The way a community (a town, a family, any community) sustains and traps its members. About the necessity of both self-determination and fulfilling ones obligations to the community. It is about the ways no one is ever alone, and how one is always alone. It is about how our strengths trap us, how our best instincts lead us to do things that hurt us. It is about how we can never break out of the systems we live in, and how we can never simply accept those systems. About the necessity of constant self-invention. It's a film about contradictions, that can't be resolved. Yes - the ending fudges the issue a bit, but not enough to obscure it: anything George did, assuming he was as decent about it as he is in the film, would have made something in the world a better place and something else would have suffered. To be true to himself he would have to sacrifice something of himself - that would have been as true if he had gone away and become Robert Moses as it is if he stayed in Bedford Falls.

Everything in the film is double-edged. Everything that happens has at least two meanings. Everything is built on sudden reversals. Everything is built on the ways George's intelligence and ambition forces him into a position that (seems to?) thwart his ambition and intelligence. There are times (the courtship scenes, say, or the wedding night) when the contradiction becomes almost unbearable. He loves her - of course he loves her, why shouldn't he? But he knows that marrying her will trap him there; but he knows he's trapped whether he marries her or not. And their honeymoon: Mary's whimsy and imagination, turning their troubles into a dream, is coupled with the frustration of comparing the reality of their poverty, their responsibilities, to their dreams of travel. The scene is a tribute to their strength, their resourcefulness, their ambition and decency - but it's also a parody of his dreams, and it's a lie to pretend it's not cruel.

It's that constant pressure that links Capra to Ozu - they both pose individuals against communities (families, social obligations), and both refuse to resolve the conflict. They never let their protagonists off the hook - American films usually find a way for the hero to couple up and still be free - Japanese films all too often insist that happiness (and self-fulfillment) requires serving the group. Capra and Ozu, though, don't make it so easy: true individuality almost always involves social obligations - which almost always choke our individuality. Love, friendship, families - fulfill us and frustrate us.... Ozu was more free to explore this - so that one film can end badly, another less so - while Capra felt obliged to end happily throughout his career. (Or convince us that the end was happy, whatever it looks like.) Though those bell ringing, auld lang syne singing tear jerker triumphs Capra kept putting on screen are a bit more than just unconvincing. Because, first - they aren't really unconvincing. For all the pissing and moaning people do about the way It's a Wonderful Life ends, it's a pretty believable ending. If a popular and well respected man is in trouble, his friends probably will take up a collection for him - if he has rich friends, they will probably raise enough to buy what he needs. What's arbitrary about it is not the happiness of the ending, it's the idea that it's an ending at all. It's worth remembering that the ending of It's a Wonderful Life is a direct steal from a scene in the middle of You Can't Take it With You. The only thing different at the end of It's A Wonderful Life is that George sees himself a bit more clearly.... His life? he won't go to jail, but he's still not rich, he's still going to have to go to work on boxing day, with the same problems he had before. Will he understand things a bit better, having seen himself through Frank Capra's eyes? What more can we ask for?