A Passion for Films

I recently finished reading Richard Roud's A Passion for Films: Henry Langlois and the Cinematheque Francaise and Jacques Richards' Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque
is also on the my Netlfix queue. Although I'm not prepared to join the cult of Langlois, just yet, I am astonished by the sheer voluminousness of the Cinematheque's screening schedule. In the 1950s, the Cinematheque showed three films a night (at 6:30, 8:30 and 10:30) almost every night of the year. When the Cinematheque added a new auditorium at the Palais de Chaillot in 1963, Langlois found himself with two theaters to fill and rather than split the programming between them, he played three films a night in the Palais as well meaning Parisians had a choice of six revival films a day, over 1,000 films a year (give or take repeat screenings). It's a staggering figure, especially looking back from the age of the flat panel TV and high definition DVD when a traditional cinematheque is doing heroic work if it shows 1 film a night! As I become more intimately familiar myself with the logistics and economics of programming at a cinematheque, even in a center of movie culture like Los Angeles, Langlois' achievement becomes all the more remarkable. Those were, of course, different times.

The Cinematheque Francaise was the theatrical equivalent of a one man Netflix queue that could be viewed by an entire city. The sheer number of films that Langlois threw up on screen is made all the more impressive by the fact that more often than not, the schedule of films was announced each week and more often than not, the announced film was not the film that ended up being shown. These days, revival houses have to be careful to lock programs months in advance and start advertising them well before the first screening. It's the only way to ensure that at least a minimum number of people will remember to make the time to actually leave their homes to see this or that film -- whether it's old or new.

There are obviously a lot of reasons why this is so. Langlois ran the Cinematheque on a shoe string but as near as I can, he didn't have to worry much about paying rentals or licensing fees to copyright holders on the films in its collection. Roud doesn't get into the specifics of the arrangements that Langlois had with studios and collectors. So even if, as was mostly likely the case, a lot of the Cinematheque's films screened to small audiences, low turnout didn't have a huge impact on the Cinematheque's bottom line. These days, that would simply be impossible. Studios and archives simply won't release prints without paid licenses and/or rentals. Given the costs and challenges of distributing a lot of contemporary cinema in traditional theaters (so much for the megaplex boon to indie and foreign films!), some smaller distributors are starting to charge cash-strapped cinematheques much higher rentals to screen new works. As much as most cinematheques have struggled to set themselves apart from the marketplace, the marketplace has come calling nevertheless looking for its cut.

Of course, the main reason why Langlois could screen as many movies as he screened was because there was simply no other way for people to see them at the time. He had a guaranteed, even if small, audience for every film. This was true even after the advent of television, which remained a poor substitute for the theatrical experience for decades. I believe it still is, despite all the latest advances in home theater technology and the almost paralyzing accessibility of so much classic and international cinema available on DVD. The real problem is that the accessibility of films on DVD actually reduces the chances you are ever going to see it on the big screen, the way it was originally intended to be seen.

While we hardcore cinephiles might like to distance ourselves from the "vulgarities" of contemporary, mainstream culture, in taking an elitist stance, for instance, towards those who still prefer "full screen" DVD versions to "widescreen" presentations, the bottom line is that we have still opted for convenience over experience. I don't want to open an endless debate about what actually constitutes an "authentic experience" of a film, but it should go without saying that even the best home theater experience of Murnau's Sunrise is still only a shadow of the experience of seeing it on the big screen on, oh joy of joys, a nitrate print! I think programmers and cinematheques need to remind their audiences that whether they are coming to see an old or a new film, they are also coming to share an experience that is rapidly fading. And by that, I don't only mean seeing a film on the big screen, I mean seeing a film on the big screen with an audience that really gives a shit about movies, with an audience that less likely to pull out their iphone and start scrolling through their calendar items in the middle of a film, which recently happened near me at screenings of both Let There Be Blood There Will Be Blood [I don't know why I keep screwing this title up] and The Savages, arguably two of the best films of the year. It was encouraging to see that the latest Los Angeles programming institution, Cinefamily, made the act of actually going to a movie, central to its philosophy:

The Cinefamily’s goal is to foster a spirit of community and a sense of discovery, while reinvigorating the movie-going experience.

I hope anyone who attends an Archive screening at the Billy Wilder Theater comes away with the same feeling. Certainly, that's what we aim to do as well.

Before ending this rant, I should be clear that I'm still all for making masterpieces old and new available on deserved DVD editions. I would only add that we should also start calling again for these films to return to the big screen as well -- and then actually show up when they do!

A World Without Writers

Is this thing still on?

Anyone interested in trying to revive this thing? Yet again?

Exiled etc.

Rob may be our resident Johnny To expert here but I highly recommend Exiled which has been selected by Hong Kong to represent it as a foreign language film for the Oscars.

I don't think I've ever seen a more meticulously and expressively photographed action film. Each set piece seems begins like a tableau and then just blows apart into furious movement. It's beautiful stuff.

Which reminds me of something else i was going to blog about.

I saw four of the six films in the Redcat's Pedro Costa retrospective this weekend and was totally blown away. (For all you Foundas haters out there, I would direct you to his piece in the Weekly on Costa which I thought was a pretty good intro to his films.)

Anyway, during the Q&A after Colossal Youth (Juventude em marcha) an obvious film student asked Costa about his pacing and editing style which, with its long takes and fixed camera positions, reminded the student of painting. Oh man did that set Costa off. As soon as the kid said painting Costa cut him off: "No, no, no, these are not paintings, this is cinema, it isn't painting at all ..." And proceeded into a rant against critics who have consistently referenced painting in discussing his works. I guess the age old antagonism continues ...

Film ... Huh ... What is it Good For?

I came across a striking quote while reading about the line up for this year's Venice Film Festival.

Here's the news that colored the piece:

[Festival]Director Marco Mueller has assembled a Hollywood-heavy line up for this year's festival, which opens on Wednesday with "Atonement," the screen adaptation of Ian McEwan's acclaimed novel starring Keira Knightley.

Two competition films are about Iraq, part of a spate of movies on the topic due to hit theatres over the coming months.

Then we get a quote from Mueller:

"For me cinema is now the best answer to war," Mueller said in a recent interview with an Italian magazine.

Maybe I'm getting a little too cynical in my old age - I'd love to still believe in the transformative power of art - but who in their right mind could look around at the fucked up state of the world today and still suggest that cinema is the best answer to anything?

I get that a movie can open up a pathway to understanding different peoples and different cultures. I've actively sought out films about Islam and the Muslim world the last few years -- I recommend The Clay Bird and Time and Winds -- and I think I have a more complex, nuanced grasp on the issues of Islamic terrorism as a result. Just to pick one example. But it's more than a little naive to think that watching a couple of movies is going to change anything. Viewing without action is meaningless and the cinema, for all it's potent efficacy at conveying a political message or exposing corruption is a medium that encourages passivity in its patrons, is it not?

Just throwing out there to RDs resident cynics: Does anyone here agree that cinema is the best answer to war?

Dawn (Note: Spoilers for Sunshine)

Not to make a theme of bagging on the Weekly but Ella Taylor's review of Sunshine is a fairly good example of how bad the film criticism has become there, in my opinion. She either exaggerates some points for effect -- Cillian Murphy does not spend most of the film peering through one confining contraption or another, he spends about 20 minutes (out of 115) in a space suit; no golden-suited figure is dragged into the gravity of the sun, although one does become incinerated upon becoming exposed to its unadulterated rays -- or simply misunderstood others -- the sun's premature weakening has nothing to do with humans and little about the occasional bursts of violence could be considered sadistic. In short, her review seems rather lazy to me; she appreciated some of its surface but couldn't be bothered to think about its themes.

I would place the film in the company of Children of Men. Both films use apocalyptic events in the near future -- the sudden infertility of humanity; the sudden weakening of the sun's power -- as the springboards for meditations on the role of faith and hope in human existence. The crew of the Icarus II are all well aware that their mission may be pointless and it taxes them, popping up in petty fights. However, at some level they all accept that the potential to do good outweighs the risks or pointlessness; Capa's fractured monologue to his sister and nieces tells them that if they wake up one morning and the day seems even a bit brighter, the mission will have been worth it. This hopefulness also informs the crew's fateful decision to alter their course in an attempt to rendezvous with Icarus I -- Capa, the crew's physicist, reckons that two last chances are better than one, and illustrates his point with a computer model that refuses to calculate the likelihood that their mission will succeed.

The sun itself becomes the symbol of this hope and of an utter lack of hope -- or perhaps a different kind of hope, a fatalistic desire to leave the material world behind. Searle, the Icarus II's psychologist, begins the film by experiencing the sun as directly as he can, giving himself a very bad case of sunburn in the process. His experience is transcendental; he describes it as the sun overtaking one's body and soul. Capa describes what will happen upon the detonation of the Stellar Bomb they hope will jump start the fading sun as a "small Big Bang" -- the creation of a new star within the old one -- and adds that he is not at all frightened about what will happen. On the other hand, the villain of the film has experienced the same transcendental experience as Searle and has come to a different conclusion, one that would doom earth to death. For the villain, the sun doesn't infuse him, it remains outside of him and "speaks" to him as it poisons his body. Unable to embrace the hope that the sun represents, the villain aligns it with "God," an abstraction of life and death -- it becomes a symbol of a symbol, a perversion of its relationship with the humans and planets it nurtures. The showdown inside the Stellar Bomb between Capa, Cassie and the villain is a battle between the complete faith in science to renew the transcendental symbol (Capa), an agnosticism that both fears and believes in the future (Cassie) and a fatalistic religious attitude that assumes that natural disasters are the just deserts for sinful humanity (the villain).

The film's "lead," Robert Capa, shares a name with the famous World War II photographer. The connection might be a bit opaque, but one possible link would be the Capas as witnesses to pivotal battles in human history between more-or-less clearly defined good and evil. Just as the Allies committed what must be considered war crimes during WWII, the crew of the Icarus II sacrifice themselves and others for what is clearly a greater good. In this case, Cillian Murphy's famous blue eyes are the lens through which this epic moral struggle occurs.

The Auteur is Dead, Long Live the Fauxteur

Well, it took me a week, but I did read Scott Foundas's mash note to Brett Ratner that Paul so kindly posted about. It was about what one would expect from the Weekly in general these days and from Foundas in particular, a kind of incoherent populism that wants to elevate a lack of any meaningful critical perspective into a serious riposte to Film Criticism. In defense of Ratner, Foundas dismisses Ratner's critics as snoots who want their films to be Art, and even invokes the doyenne of movie reviewing, Pauline Kael, to defend his position that the best movies are the merely entertaining ones.

This, of course, is folderol. I've never been a fan of Pauline Kael or any of the major critics of that generation (although Richard Schickel's recent eulogy to 60s European art cinema was quietly heartfelt, a nice counterpart to his usually smug thoughts); she has always struck me as someone more concerned with being right about a film than offering any insight into it -- narcissism was her guiding critical principle. She was certainly prolific and insistent, which has helped her become influential. However, her insistence (echoed in Foundas and many others) that a good film is one that we simply "enjoy" -- that is, that it somehow addresses our emotions -- overlooks the possibility that enjoyment might arise from intellectual stimulation as much as emotional. It's the obverse of what Linda Williams and others have noted about the tendency of cinephiles (academic or otherwise) to favor intellectually challenging films over "body genres," those that make us laugh, cry, feel patriotic, orgasm, etc. As Williams and others' work in this field suggests, intellectual stimulation can be just as meaningful or enjoyable as emotional stimulation -- or more to the point, one can cry or laugh while also realizing the intellectual questions raised.

Foundas's defense of Ratner doesn't recognize that possibility. I don't need a film to be High Art, whatever that would be, but a measure of competence isn't so much to ask, is it? Ratner might be a nice mensch and he might even have some vague personal sense of aesthetics (oddly enough, I agree that many modern comedies ruin the joke by moving in too close; a case in point is the overrated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which blows a quite funny line delivered by Tom Wilkinson with a close-up of Jim Carrey), but his films are sloppy and deliberately puerile. Defamer prints every little detail about his public shenanigans because his films are at about that intellectual and emotional level.

That the Weekly published its fan piece in the same week that icons of the 60s European art movement died is quite telling. Although challenging directors continue to produce challenging work -- Wong Kar Wai, Michael Haneke, Alejandro Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro, probably some American director -- few in the media are interested in giving them the kind of critical attention that was bestowed on Antonioni, Bergman, Godard or even Woody Allen in his heyday. Instead, we have a lot of ink devoted to Quentin Tarantino and his latest riff on some obscure action or kung fu film from the 1970s or to M. Night Shyamalan or whoever is to be the Next Spielberg or to the studiously pedestrian Ron Howard's attempts to make something that could at least pass for thoughtful... or to Brett Ratner and his frat boy aesthetic. The at least surface meaning of these directors and their films is their referentiality, their ability to evoke directors and films that have already traveled the same paths, hit the same beats, tugged the same heart strings.

Auteurism is a dicey theory at its best; it all too easily permits reduction to "Stanley Kubrick is a singular genius responsible for everything in his films!" But it offered a certain comfort, a legibility and legitimacy that made analyzing films easier and more noble. Like most everything, however, its become a way of marketing a film -- a grasp at attracting some other audience that accepts that Robert Rodriguez's attention deficit disorder constitutes style or that Michael Bay's shameless pandering represents a personal vision.

If it ever did, does auteurism still have any critical value, any analytical meaning? Or is the fauxteur its necessary and irreducible mode for the postmodern/post-capitalist era?

Brett Ratner -- The Orson Welles of Our Time

I think Rob left Los Angeles just in time. The week that Bergman and Antonioni died, the LA Weekly had Brett Ratner on its cover:

Which brings me to the other reason I’ve wanted to write about Ratner. It is an idea that may initially strike you as radical or preposterous, and which could jeopardize my standing in the film-criticism community. And yet, here goes: Brett Ratner is a talented filmmaker who deserves to be taken seriously ...What I am proposing is simply that Ratner excels at a kind of highly enjoyable, wholly unpretentious entertainment that isn’t nearly as easy to manufacture as it seems; that he is a singular personality; and that, unlike many Hollywood flavors-of-the-month, he is most definitely here to stay. In fact, he’s just getting started.

He adds:

And what of Rush Hour 3? I’m happy to report that it is everything one could hope a movie with that title would be.

Weren't were talking about the death of film criticism earlier?

Notes to a Project on Citizen Kane

Oh what the hell, I'm just going to post it (this in response to Michele's comments in the last post):



Comments and feedback appreciated.

(I'm working on another one about movie kissing. Kissing. Bleh.)

Where Does Film Studies ... oops ... Media Studies fit into this?

I don't even know if that's a relevant question but i think it's an interesting video especially as I used the very technology highlighted in the video to bring it to you guys ...

UPDATE: It is truly the age of the mash-up ... well, if not the "age of ..." the kids seem to be doing a lot of it these days. Hilari-ass case in point:

Antonioni R.I.P.

They're dropping like ...

UPDATE: No disrespect meant BTW! And is it just me or was Antonioni -- who I love -- a master of endings? L'Eclisse, Blow Up and Zabriskie Point come to mind.

(This is Paul, BTW, logged in as admin)

The end of L'Eclisse(someone added a soundtrack, mute it if you want the original effect):



The end of Zabriskie Point:



Okay, you Antonioni heads want to compare and contrast the endings here?

Ingmar Bergman R.I.P

Feel free to post other Bergman scenes you like -- and can find on You Tube!

(Of course, there also this!)

UPDATE: I feel compelled to note that I am not well versed in Bergman's films. Maybe only seen two or three and not the big ones that he's most known for. Did something happen to Bergman's reputation among younger cinephiles in the 70s, 80s and 90s that I've never felt particularly compelled to correct this oversight? Maybe now ...

Signatures: Hitchcock

You could probably pick any Hitchcock movie and come up with something interesting from his title card, or whatever it's called (credit card?), but this one from Vertigo seems particularly evocative and significant for obvious reasons:


Hmmm, what could Saul Bass and Hitchcock be trying to tell us about the director and the film to come? For some reason the word "voyeur" comes to mind. Another, broader question as we continue on with this series of posts, might be how far can we/should we go in taking the title card from a director's credit as both literal signature and sign of authorship to be read for its meaning? As usual, Hitchock provides a paradigmatic example of the kind of image that I think is ripe for auteurist investigation but which has rarely been examined by auteur critics. Or does anyone know of an essay or article that has taken a director's title card into serious account?

Okay. So have at it in the comments and post your own significant example of a director's title card. (Retinal Damage back on the air -- and a big shout out to Mookie for keeping the faith better than any of us!)

It's a SICKO world

Goodness gracious, two months and counting since the last Retinal Damage post... let's see if we can't be a little more on the ball in the next few weeks!

It's actually been a pretty slow summer for me, movie-wise. To celebrate the 4th of July, Lori and I went to see Sicko. It's probably Moore's best documentary -- even though he's as prominently featured as in any of his other docs, he's developed a knack for not being the center of attention. He's managed to return to the Everyman persona that made Roger and Me so fresh. In fact, Moore's trek through an English hospital in hopes of finding the cashier is reminiscent of his attempts to find Roger Smith: He at least gives the illusion that he's the Average American befuddled that how he thought the world worked isn't turning out to be true.

Of course, Moore's detractors say his films are all illusion, nothing but a tissue of doctored news articles, biased interviews and emotional grandstanding masking the director's hatred for America. Such arguments are usually motivated by their propounders' own ideological concerns and/or a dismal misunderstanding of the documentary format. Moore is biased and given to emotional grandstanding but neither is necessarily a bad quality. For that matter, all documentaries are based on illusion, the notion that something "real" has been directly represented without any interference from the filmmaker.

But one of the more interesting thing about Sicko is how Moore makes the illusion obvious. Much has been made about Dr. Sanjay Gupta's report about the various "flaws" in Sicko. Moore's summary of Gupta's claims and his own retorts are here. By and large, each gentlemen dances around the other's claims; each rightly points out that the other somewhat cherrypicks data to support his claims. But the critique that Gupta makes that sticks is one that I noticed when I saw the film: Moore takes 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba for free medical treatment and presents the island as a bastion of happy citizens and socialized medicine. But earlier in the film, Moore included a graphic that demonstrated that Cuba's health care system ranks two spots lower than does that of the United States, according to the World Health Organization.

Moore responded to Gupta's claim by in effect admitting the flaw then denying it was a flaw. "[Sicko] clearly shows the WHO list, with the United States at number #37, and Cuba at #39. Right up on the screen in big five-foot letters.... The movie isn't hiding from this fact. Just the opposite...." This is dodging the larger point: Moore presents Cuba's medical system as superior to America's, yet his own data demonstrates that it probably isn't. (The obviously well worn hospital rooms and equipment further indicate that Cuba's system may not be as strong as Moore claims it to be.)

Moore probably is more interested in the irony in his Cuban jaunt, that 90 miles to the nation's south is an island nation that our government demonizes but that is willing to take better care of our national heroes than our own government has been. But the sequence also shows, if you ask me, the sloppy genius of Moore's documentary style, and why, to an extent, Moore's documentaries are criticism-proof. Moore's documentaries all appeal to a leftist or populist common sense. If Cuba, which ranks lower than the US in the WHO scale, gives better health care to our heroes than we do, well that proves that how screwed up our system is. Several critics likened Bowling for Columbine to cinematic buckshot, but the concept could be applied to any Moore documentary. Any argument or fact or apparent fact or emotion is thrown out in hopes that at least one of them will resonate and prove whatever point Moore hopes to make. Moore is less interested in doing the right thing for the right reason than he is in doing whatever thing seems right to him. He's more interested in results than in a coherent method.

And that's why he's probably the nation's best documentarian. He isn't interested in the form of documentary that can make Errol Morris's films too cold or academic for mainstream audiences, and he isn't at all interested in maintaining the facade of objectivity that marks direct cinema filmmakers like Drew and the Maysles brothers. He's an American Jean Rouche, taking a cinema of confrontation and blending it with the narcissism that we Americans do so well. Perhaps the most fitting irony, then, of Sicko is its concluding complaint about American narcissism, about ending the "me" culture to establish a "we" culture. Without that "me" culture, would we have Michael Moore?

Late thoughts about a failed movie

Good heavens, no posts or comments on Retinal Damage in two weeks!

I suppose the following has some spoilers, so be forewarned.

As has been speculated would happen since Grindhouse's underwhelming box office performance here in the States, The Weinstein Company has split the film in two and added footage to Tarantino's segment for overseas markets. Kurt Russell has gone on record saying he disapproves, but everyone else seems to think Death Proof is better for the split and addition. However, some reports indicated that audiences didn't realize that they would get to see two films for one admission price and left after the Rodriguez movie.

Are people really that stupid? The film had been heavily marketed as a double feature by Rodriguez and Tarantino, and the lights never went up after Planet Terror ended -- it was immediately followed by more faux trailers. I think that a more likely reason for the film's failure was that it had no audience. Grindhouses were marginal theatres playing marginal movies; they weren't movies that mass audiences wanted to see (at least in public). Tarantino and Rodriguez have made their careers on recasting exploitation films in big(ger) budget contexts, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a mass audience wants to see these kind of genre films in a quasi-grindhouse format.

Furthermore, only Rodriguez really went after the feel of a cheap exploitation film (though his use of expensive prosthetics and digital effects limited the ultimate effect). The narrative leaps of logic, the fascination with carnality and horror -- these Planet Terror has in spades. Death Proof on the other hand is nothing other than a typical Tarantino film, in which characters spout "perfect" dialog referencing obscure movies, television shows and musical acts while committing or otherwise experiencing acts of violence. Aside from its deliberately anticlimactic ending -- or rather, its structure that ends at the climax with no denouement -- Death Proof is generic in the wrong sense: It references the tropes of a particular "kind" of film (here, the Tarantino movie, itself already almost fatally self-referential and fatally referenced by hundreds of other "independent" directors like Guy Ritchie) without embracing or building on them. Tarantino's films have always struck me as nothing more than a tissue of other film references held together by his admittedly funny dialog. Beyond the fact that a group of women exact diegetically deserved revenge on Stuntman Mike (a fact somewhat hamstrung by the enjoyment Tarantino wrings in building up to and then graphically showing Mike's murder of the first quartet of women), Death Proof isn't about much more than being a Tarantino film. One doesn't need to have a hard-on for Vanishing Point to follow the narrative. As such, it's a rather flat film, even if it is probably the better made and in some ways more exciting of the two -- Mike's failed attempt to kill Zoe is gripping action. But once Tarantino has had his fun, the movie ends with no payoff. I've always felt that his films were rather masturbatory, and this is perhaps the best example yet of that feeling.

I'd pay top dollar to see Machete, though.

Some have speculated that Grindhouse's length -- 190 minutes -- deterred viewers, that they didn't want to sit through three hours of action and exploitation. Perhaps -- although viewers have not let length keep them from turning out in droves for the Pirates of the Carribbean or Spider-Man sequels, or any of the Lord of the Rings films. In fact, three of the top-ten grossing films of all time are about three hours long. Adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind is the top-grossing film in history, and it's four hours long.

Last thought, largely unexplored: I am kind of depressed that one of the more interesting things to talk about in cinema these days is the failure of Grindhouse. A marketing ploy masquerading as a coherent film is a fitting but sad testament to the current state of American film as an industry and art form.

Long Take List

Here's an interesting film blog (conceptually at least i haven't really read through it yet) that recently posted a list of famous long take shots. It's a pretty long list with clips.

Long takes are always fascinating for what they can reveal about the relationship between story and style. There's always that moment after the start of the shot when one suddenly becomes aware that the shot is, indeed, a long take. This moment of recognition that draws us out of the narrative to focus on the bravura technique unfolding before us ... but then, if the take goes on long enough, we always succumb again to the pull of the story, slipping back into the narrative and the flow of the scene which is typically the point when we must recall the beginning of the shot to remember how we got where we are ... long takes activate spectator memory like few other devices .. flashbacks don't activate memory so much as represent it, showing us what we're supposed to remember but long takes actually activate spectator memory of what just came before .. i think all this back and forth is why long takes so often feel "edited" even while we in the midst of experiencing them ...

The Future of Film Critics Take II

These are the bastards that let me go at the Weekly for the same reason:

Consolidation trend is sweeping the realm of alt weeklies, with the New Times chain’s pooling of reviewers and its syndication of their reviews. Freelance reviewers whose bylines have been regularly seen in film sections and are expected and respected by local readers, are receiving few or no assignments from New York-based New Times management.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

(Also, I did not know this org existed)

Analyze This!

So here's a new feature for all us RDers if anyone's interested. I've posted a clip from Sam Fuller's Forty Guns that I found on You Tube for your analytic pleasure, a little sharpening of the skills, a chance to display your critical footwork. Dig in and share your thoughts on the clip and what's at work in the shot/scene. When we've exhausted it (as if that's possible -- it's Sam Effing Fuller for goddsakes) someone find another clip and post it and we'll do it all again! Okay. Who's game?

Are Film Critics Really Needed Anymore?

Variety asks the question. Four people answer it. What d'ya think?

As a recovering film critic myself I'd have to say that I often avoid reading reviews by other critics, especially the ones I respect, until after I've seen a film. Which is why, ultimately, I read very few critics these days because only a handful of them -- Dargis, Hoberman, Rosenbaum et al -- are every really worth reading after one has already seen the film. Most people who write about film for the major dailies and an increasing number of weeklies aren't critics with a serious knowledge of film history or aeshtetics. They're just journalists on the film review beat. They could be reassigned to writing about power tools without missing a beat. And why would I want to read a plot synopsis, dully written at that, after I've seen the film?

I tend to agree, then, that the kind of journalist who's cranking out quickie, yay or nay, write ups week-in-week out is a dying breed what with so many other ways for people to get the word on this or that film from their actual peers. That said, two minutes browsing You Tube or any of the movie download sites, always leaves me longing for the return of the cultural Gatekeeper who sifts through all the dross and applies a discerning, historically informed sense of taste to what's out there.

All of which leads me to ask you guys who your favorite critics going (or not going) are. Of critics past, no one beats Manny Farber in my opinion. Does anyone read Andrew Sarris anymore?

An Important Message

I haven't had as much time to post of late, either. But I did want to inform you that this movie is hella funny. I am probably 150,000 brain cells lighter for the experience, but the Mooninites made me laugh as hard as they scared the poo out of Boston.

Critical Media Film Festival This Thursday!

Okay, okay. After not posting anything in a while, the first thing I do is plug myslef. Bad blogger, bad blogger.

Anyway, some of you probably got this in your inboxes but a short critical video essay I made about Citizen Kane, inspired by Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, will be playing at a student run film festival in the Bridges Theater this Thursday night. Here's a trailer for the event showing snippets from mine and the other films that will be screening. It should be interesting and maybe we can all go out for drinks or whatever afterward. The fun starts at 7:30 at Bridges with some kind of reception proceeding.

(I promise to return to regular posting/commenting this week -- I know you missed me -- although you guys have been totally rocking it. Lot's of great stuff below!)

Tarantino and the Woman's Film

(SOME SPOILERS)
(NOTE: "first half" and "second half" in the following refer to the first and second half of Tarantino's DEATH PROOF. I do not discuss PLANET TERROR.)

The title of this post refers initially - perhaps only - to the fact that most Tarantino features have women as their central protagonists.

Still, many of the iconic images of Tarantino's films are of men. Further, Tarantino'searly career was largely built on (a) violent spectacle between MEN and (b) dialogue scenes in which MEN TALK (about Madonna, about hamburgers and foot rubs).

Since Jackie Brown, however, Tarantino's representations of women develop along two vectors:
* to reconcile the female protagonist with the spectacle of violence (KILL BILL); and
* to reconcile the female protagonist with the scenes of dialogue (DEATH PROOF).
Thus it is the fact that WOMEN TALK in DEATH PROOF that brings his career full circle; completing the wholesale REGENDERING of the auteur persona first announced in the all-male world of RESERVOIR DOGS.

A key issue here is SOCIABILITY which, for Tarantino, is always verbal. Prior to DEATH PROOF the issue of female sociability has not been raised: Jackie Brown and Kill Bill involve solitary female protagonists. DEATH PROOF, by contrast, focuses on a group of women (again, a regendering of RESERVOIR DOGS).

Make that two groups. Because what is striking about DEATH PROOF is its doubled narrative. The first half of the film focuses on one group of women: they meet Stuntman Mike and are killed. The second half, we are introduced to a wholly new group, unrelated to the first: they meet Stuntman Mike and kill him. In effect, the same story, twice, only with different endings and characters. (Structurally, this has parallels to PSYCHO.) Each half of the film is formally different; these formal differences, moreover, correspond to two different conceptions of female sociability, as follows:

1. Female interaction as conveyed through montage of individualizing closeups and medium shots (the first group). I would note here that Tarantino's approach to editing is more discontinuous than in any other of his films. Rather than cut between repeat camera setups (e.g., shot-reverse shot), each setup feels discrete - a chain of single images that do not repeat. (This needs another viewing to be verified.) The discontinuity of the film's first half is also seen in the "missing reel" gag, edits that mimic a "bad" reel change, etc.

2. Female interaction as conveyed through camera movement (the second group). This is first evident in the lengthy dialogue sequence that introduces the group, comprised of extremely long single takes, in which the camera is constantly encircling the women. The film's second half, it can also be noted, lacks the pastiche of low-grade exhibition evident in the first (and evident throughout Rodriguez's Planet Terror). Finally, the stylistic trope of encirclement, through camera movement, recurs in the film's final sequence in which the women beat Stuntman Mike to death.

To wrap up here. Approach (1) seems to me definitive of representations of male dialogue in Tarantino's earlier films: witness the opening of RESERVOIR DOGS. Approach (2) is new. The question then would be: to what extent can this stylistic departure be related to the process of regendering that has defined Tarantino's work? To put it in the crudest terms: if approach (1) is to be matched with male interaction (in DOGS), should approach (2) be matched with female interaction (in DEATH PROOF)?

Top 50 Pre-1975 Movies

Okay, I recognize that it may have something to do with my gender that I seem to instigate the explicitly collaborative posts here (see the anti-Valentine’s Day movies post) but I need some assistance with a student request. (Okay, I don’t really “need” the assistance…I could do this on my own, but I thought it would be interesting and decidedly more fun to get your insight and see what discussions/debates ensue).

This student is a film major and asked me to give him a list of the top “must-see” pre-1975 films. Now I don't necessarily subscribe to the AFI school of film history hierarchies but I am not one to turn down a student request or ignore a challenge when I see one. He prefers mostly American films but is not picky, and he didn’t specify a number but I will make things interesting by limiting it to 50.

If you feel bold enough to add your picks as RD, bring it on, and put your initials in parentheses…see how the others respond to your choices. If you want a debate, add it to the comments. We can add and delete things based on consensus. I will get us started… (BTW, these are in no particular order).

Citizen Kane (MS)
Vertigo (MS)
Psycho (MS)
Double Indemnity (MS)
All About Eve (LW)
The Sound of Music (LW)
A Streetcar Named Desire (LW)
Blazing Saddles (LW)
The Godfather, Parts One and Two (MO)
La Dolce Vita (MO)
Il Vangelo secondo Mateo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) (MO)
2001: A Space Odyssey (MO)
La Grande Illusion (MO)
Rashomon (MO)
The Searchers (MO)
Easy Rider (MO)
Don't Look Now (BC)
Crisis (MO)
Shadows (MS)
The Conversation (MS)
A bout de souffle (Breathless) (MS)
Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (MO)
Ali: Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) (MO)
Umberto D. (MO)
Roma: Citta aperta (Rome, Open City)(MO)
Nanook of the North (MO)
Hearts and Minds (MO)
Gone With the Wind (MS)
The Best Years of Our Lives (MS)
Sunset Boulevard (MS)
All That Heaven Allows (MS)
Casablanca (MO)
Peeping Tom (MO)
If (MO)
City Lights (MO)
Birth of a Nation (MO)
Sunrise (MO)
Duck Soup (PM)
Il Conformista (The Conformist) (PM)
M (PM)
Persona (MO)
Cleo from 5 to 7 (MO)
Battleship Potemkin (MO)
Lawrence of Arabia (MS)
Pather Panchali (MO)
Meshes of the Afternoon (MS)
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (MO)
Xala (MO)
Dance, Girl, Dance (MS)
Within Our Gates (MS)

THAT'S IT! WE'RE DONE!

They almost made it...but not quite...
Der Junge Torless (Young Torless) (MO)
8 ½ (MS)
Metropolis (PM)
I ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) (MO)
Pierrot le fou (MO)
It's a Wonderful Life (MS)
Nosferatu (MO)
Primary (MS)
From Here to Eternity (MS)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (LW)
Traffic in Souls (PM)
The Barefoot Contessa (BC)
La Jetée (MS)

Comic Societies

1. Blades of Glory is a very funny film; John Heder, in particular, is good. In this respect, the picture culminates a trajectory in Will Ferrell movies, toward giving more and more time to comic co-stars. Compare one of his earlier starring films, Elf - where, outside of the North Pole scenes, Ferrell was really the only "comedian" in the picture - to the trilogy of Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Blades of Glory - all full of supporting comics (Steve Carrell, David Koechner in Anchorman; John C. REilly, Sacha Baron Cohen in Talladega Nights; Heder, Poehler, Arnett, and others in Blades of Glory).
2. Why so many comedians? Not, I think, because Ferrel can't carry a film, but because of a significant shift here in the structure of comedian comedy. In the "classic" structure of comedian comedy - evident in Elf, and virtually omnipresent in the genre - a comedian, qua misfit, is pitted against society, and must either (i) set aside/compromise upon his/her oddities (settling down to a "regular" life as Ferrell does in Elf) or (ii) leave the society that s/he cannot assimilate to (think of Chaplin waddling off down the road at the end of Modern Times).
3. This is not true of post-Elf Ferrell films. In place of the comedian/misfit vs. "normal" society structure, each of his films presents an ENTIRE SOCIETY OF MISFIT COMEDIANS - the oddballs in the San Diego newsroom, the dimwit macho men of racing, and the schizoid sexuality of ice skaters - all social groups presented as objects of laughter for the audience. As such, the relevant structure would seem to be not "misfit comedian vs. society" (the "classic" structure) but "audience vs. comic society" (which we could call a "post-social" structure). Put another way, the binary that structures a Ferrell movie is not the misfit's comic relation to the society in which s/he attempts to function, but the audience's ironic relation to the misfit society represented on the screen. (In this respect, the difference between a Will Ferrell movie and a Christopher Guest film is less than might first appear.)
4. What, then, about our ability to imagine what it means to be a community? Can western audiences only imagine community in a mode of irony? Is Will Ferrell symptom or cause of the end of democracy?

Comic books and comic book movies

In response to Michele's question in my summer-movie geek post, Lori posited that superheros appeal to an audience (mostly male) that desires to be the powerful superhero, a desire that stems from a desire to return to a childhood fantasy of omnipotence. I think Lori is right -- though I wouldn't phrase it as she does.

A good superhero comic book and/or movie allows the audience to feel like a superhero for the duration of the film, to know that, for once, one fights on the side of good against evil, with more abilities than one would possess in the real world. It might be a fantasy we are learn at an early age, but I don't know that it's infantile, as Lori suggests. It's a desire for a less complicated world, and in a sense is narcissistic, no doubt; the superhero/audience is always in the right, and will prevail by the end of the film.

That said, I would also argue that a good comic book film isn't simplistic -- that it presents a complicated (emotionally and logically) thematic structure. In effect, the story's structure is something that the superhero must fight through/with for the narcissistic identification with good to be realized. In Spiderman and Spiderman 2, the villains are born of their own narcissism -- the desire to be special, to receive fame and wealth, to have the good forcibly aligned with them. Peter Parker/Spiderman must learn to align himself with good. His troubled relationships with his Uncle Ben, Aunt May and girlfriend, Mary Jane, lead him away from a desire to do what is right (to behave selfishly) until the bad-narcissist villain appears to force him to battle. In other words, Spiderman is good because he accepts that his values must align with an exterior good, one that does not rely on him for validation, although it does rely on him for protection. Thus, the narcissistic identification with Spiderman is always conditioned by his relationship t his power. Spiderman is on our side/is us, and always wins no matter what -- so we always win, no matter what.

The Hulk is another character that can be seen as a childhood or infantile fantasy, and both the comic book and movie make this clear. Bruce Banner was an abused child, and in the comic book actually developed dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder, as a young boy. The Hulk is one of his alter personae, given enormous power by gamma radiation. In the film, he doesn't have DID, but he is emotionally reserved as a result of his childhood trauma, and pushes those who love him away while allowing those he dislikes to bully him. The film Hulk character is based on one of the comic book Hulks (Banner has different Hulk personalities in the comic book) known as the Savage Hulk, who is childlike, expresses a desire to be left alone (though he frequently puts himself in situations where he has to encounter other people, and develops attachments to special people), and has the ability to grow stronger than any of his nemeses. In short, Hulk is a case of arrested development, stuck at a pre-adolescent emotional age, the embodiment of the conflicted desire to be loved and to be strong enough to survive alone because people are untrustworthy. Thus, Hulk's earliest foes in the comic book and in the movie are society (the military and defense contractors) and ultimately his abusive father.

Partially thanks to the growth of computer generated imagery, comic books have become prime fodder for movies -- their spectacular feats are difficult to render with traditional special effects, and Lou Ferrigno in a green fright wig was never a particularly good adaptation of the gargantuan comic book Hulk. But I think comic books also make good films because of the narcissistic themes outlined above. Much ink has been spilled theorizing how cinema encourages narcissism in viewers -- or at least, how the classical Hollywood system does, with its emphasis on clear narratives, action-oriented heroes with obvious psychological goals, Oedipal narratives, and editing patterns that suture audience members into identification with a film's protagonist. What better examples of this than superhero films, with their almost transparently narcissistic heroes and villains?

Summer is just around the corner, y'know.

This is the one summer movie I very badly want to see. Because I am a geek.








But not so much of a geek that I want to see this piece of poop.

300 Glistening, Not-at-All-Homoerotic Proto-Fascists Defending the Western World from Swarthy, Monstrous, Faggy Persians

In honor of finishing my dissertation, I went to see 300 earlier this week, and found myself alternately repulsed and fascinated by the film's glorification of fascism and its really quite stunning visuals. The film's washed-out colors help the buff actors pop out from the digitally built backgrounds, and I enjoyed the action sequences themselves, including what Paul not unwisely described as an inclination towards slowing the action down almost to the point of the film being a slide show. I think the film reflects its graphic-novel origins much better than Sin City did, which did little more than make each scene look like a comic book. Snyder did a much better job of conveying the kineticism in well designed sequential art.

That said, this has to be one of the most reactionary films since Chuck Norris stomped around Vietnam in the early 80s, retroactively defeating the Viet Cong and defeatist liberals. 300 doesn't gloss over Sparta's policy of killing newborns it considered unfit to live, or its practice of training young boys to be brutal warriors, it places them as the linchpins on which Sparta and its heroic defense of Thermopylae rested. Indeed, the policy of destroying the unfit is reaffirmed by transforming Ephialtes into a monstrously misshapen hunchback who is seduced into betraying the Spartans with a lapdance. Xerxes looks like he got lost on the way to West Hollywood for Halloween -- a bronzed, megalomaniacal drag queen who likes to sidle up behind men and whisper sweet nothings into their ear about how nice he'll be if they just get on their knees. Several of his agents are African, and one shot fades to black so only the black man's eyes and teeth loom out of the darkness. Xerxes's armies are repeatedly referred to as representing all of Asia, and if the 300 Spartans (and, the film begrudgingly admits, about a hundred other nervous Thespians and Arcadians) don't stop them, these perverted Asians will overrun Greece and take away Our Precious Freedoms.

The only thing stopping this assault is a group of warriors who have been trained to identify themselves with their home of Sparta, who are willing to ignore the laws they are sworn to uphold while cowards and traitors at home try to stab them in the back, while the king's good wife tries to remind them that "freedom isn't free." I was almost surprised not to see the Greek equivalent of arbeit macht frei written over the gates of Sparta at the beginning.

The director and others have tried to defend the film with "it's just a movie," a spectacle to be enjoyed, as though it has no cultural context or that any similarity to fascist iconography and ideology is just a coincidence. Folderol. This film is steeped in fascism, from the emphasis on physical perfection and soldiering as an art form and duty, to the identification of Leonidas as the embodiment of Spartan honor and superiority, to the representation of democracy as weak and corrupt, to the rhetorical sleight of hand that says a group fights for freedom but only for those who are deserving of it (Snyder forgets to mention that Spartans had slaves). Thermopylae is presented as a battle of suspiciously Western European manly men defending Eastern Europe from Asiatic deviants. It would make Goebbels proud.

Back to its aesthetics, though, as a concluding note. In the mid 1960s, Pasolini wrote an essay about the screenplay, analyzing it as a form that wanted to be something else. In other words, a screenplay had to be able to be read as a text in its own right, but as one that would not be fulfilled until it became a different, visual text. Sin City and 300 are the apotheosisi (?) of the recent push for films to be as much like comic books as possible. Are we in effect seeing a reversal of Pasolini's analysis -- that these films must be coherent as films, but are not fulfilled unless the audience recognizes them as non-films, as graphic novels that blend printed word and image?

Family Values v. Giant Scary Fish

Paul and I went to check out The Host tonight. I've got a soft spot for horror as a genre, and of late have found myself particularly enjoying foreign horror movies. They're far more inventive -- pushing the envelope of acceptability in ways that seem more nightmarish than incoherent (compare Miike's Audition to Roth's Hostel), or bending genres in audacious directions (cf. the prolific Miike's Happiness of the Katakuris).

The Host falls in this latter category. Though the Minneapolis Star Tribune is not widely known as the home of insightful film criticism, its reviewer sums up The Host nicely as a cross between and Jaws and Little Miss Sunshine. Although it does have its share of shocks and ooky monsters jumping out of nowhere, director Bong Joon Ho seems less interested in the creature than in the struggle for redemption of a family that totters between self-destructive and indolent. In fact, the monster is quite clearly seen in its first appearance, and is never hidden from the audience. The film also contains political themes (the US army inadvertently births the creature through petty behavior, then makes the situation worse when they come to solve it) and it doesn't quite come together, but hell, I don't care. It was as much fun as I've had at the movies in a long time -- scary, funny, touching, with enough underbaked subplots to add up to two or three well-baked ones.

But as Paul and I were talking about it later, it occurred to me that I'm quite willing to forgive foreign films for much more than I'm willing to forgive American horror films. With Hostel, Eli Roth allegedly wanted to use the slasher genre to critique American cultural imperialism, but his clear enjoyment in the torture sequences undercut this critique, and I find the film to be dull -- a better overall film than Cabin Fever, but not a success. But Dario Argento clearly loves his gory set pieces, and his films are about as coherent as a bowl of soggy AlphaBits, and I love the hell out of them. Same goes for The Ring and a quite interesting Korean horror film, Phone: quite a few scenes that make no sense internally or within the context of the film, but fascinating all the same.

So, am I anti-American? Do I fetishize foreign horror films -- or perhaps find their foreignness part of the reason why they are creepy; not so much that those foreigners are scary, but the fact that they occur in a culture that I am not familiar with already adds an element of the unusual/alien?

Stars not quite aligned

Lori and I went to see Zodiac this afternoon, and here are my thoughts....

I was a bit underwhelmed. The performances are excellent across the board, particularly Mark Ruffalo and John Carroll Lynch. As a police procedural, it was an enjoyably taut (albeit 170 minutes long) thriller.

That said... I'm not sure what this film is about. Or more to the point, I don't really know what the film has to say about the killings, about San Francisco in the late 1960s/early 1970s, about why Graysmith was so obsessed with identifying the murderer, or why I should care about who Zodiac was nearly 40 years later. At two points in the film, characters ask Graysmith why he needs to solve the case, and he stammers for an answer. Beyond that character's obsession, and the officers' drive to solve these crimes, nothing motivates the continued hunt for the killer after the trail goes cold. But Graysmith is never a compelling enough character to warrant following him in his obsessive pursuits for so long. Even as a character study the film is weak, because no motivation for Graysmith's mania is ever suggested (beyond his being an Eagle Scout).

The film never really establishes that, with the exception of the school-bus scare, San Francisco was all that traumatized or frightened by the Zodiac killings. For that matter, the film never really establishes that the murders and investigations took place in the late 1960s to mid 1970s, with the exception of a keen soundtrack and Ruffalo's fly slacks. Put different clothes on him and different songs on the soundtrack, and the film could take place at any point in history. In this regard, Zodiac doesn't compare well with Son of Sam by Spike Lee. Lee's film isn't better than Fincher's, but it's a lot more interesting, because it addresses the Son of Sam murders as part of the social fabric of New York at that time, of a city that seemed to be spilling over from venality and narcissism into nihilism.

So, while I enjoyed watching Zodiac, after 3 hours, I don't know that I'm any wiser or richer in my understanding of the human condition, of San Francisco of forty years ago, of anything really. I'm going to side with RK on this one, and keep Fight Club at the top of Fincher's oeuvre.

Speaking of Digital Allegories: 300

Anyone seen 300 yet? Has there ever been a movie so obsessed about the physicality of the body even as the performers float through an entirely immaterial digital world? Talk about paranoid overdetermination.

At the same time, almost every other shot was like a tableau filmed in slow motion, as if we were supposed to admire every meticulously burnished and fussed over pixel. I don't think I've ever seen a movie so resistant to actual movement. Every image seemed to slow towards stillness, like the whole thing just wanted to be a series of gorgeous slides.

The Prestige as Digital Allegory

PRESTIGE SPOILING

I’m no Star Trek fan. Yet I recall an episode in which a malfunction occurs when Captain Kirk is teleported back to ship, creating two Jims: one is the normal Jim (the “real” Jim), one is his “evil other.” Philosophically speaking, this is not an interesting situation: the evil Jim is spawned from a malfunction, his elimination thus justified. But what if – and this was a question I was asked in an undergrad philosophy tutorial – what if the teleporter had created two “normal” Jims? Which one then would be the “real” Jim? The problem here, of course, is that the distinction between the real and the copy has been taken away. In this (imagined) scenario, the “original” Jim has simply been doubled: there is no “real” versus “copy” (or “evil other”) anymore. They are either BOTH originals or BOTH copies, or, rather, they are neither: they are simply TWO JIMS.

What put me in mind of this was some recent reading on new media (old hat for some of you, I’m sure, but exciting and new for a silent film historian). This is Timothy Binkley, in Hayward and Wollen’s “Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen”: “The vulnerability of analogue media is apparent in their very dissemination where ‘generation loss’ corrupts the quality of an image as it is repeatedly copied. It is difficult to maintain all the details of an image or sound when it is transcribed over and over again from one material object to another. … But there is a sense in which digital media deal only with ‘originals’ and hence neither propagate generation loss nor corrupt the source through repeated copying.” OK, so analogue transcription functions within an ontology of the original and the copy, where the copy is INFERIOR in detail to the original. Digital inscription, by contrast, suspends the ontological distinction between original and copy, such that my version of, say, a file-shared photo is perfectly EQUAL to the image stored in the digital camera that took the photo (it is, numerically, the SAME IMAGE).

All of which is a VERY long way round to a simple comparison of the Star Trek episode with Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, as follows:
• Star Trek is set in the future yet made in the past. The situation of the “evil twin” Captain Kirk presumes a fundamentally analogue imaginary (e.g., the transported Jim is subject to degradation in the process of being “copied” from one place to another: hence the creation of his “evil other”).
• The Prestige is set in the past yet made in the present. The situation of the “perfectly reduplicated” magician (Hugh Jackman) presumes a fundamentally digital imaginary (suspending the distinction between real and copy to a point where one no longer knows whether Hugh Jackman is the “original” himself or not: all of the Hugh Jackmans are THE SAME).
Or, in other words, Star Trek projects analogue ontologies into a future of “final frontiers,” while The Prestige projects digital properties into a nineteenth-century era of magic and mystery.

(As for Multiplicity, isn't this also an analogue universe in which the act of copying Michael Keatons introduces "lossy" variations, to the point at which one of the Keaton "clones" appears to be literally retarded?)

Inflight penguin movie

Did anybody see this year's Best Animated Feature, Happy Feet? It was the inflight movie on my return trip from SCMS. It's kind of like a cross between Dumbo and Bambi: part self-esteem melodrama, part ecological fantasy. It also adds a healthy dollop of exaggerated multiculturalism: the emperor penguins have to "find their songs" with which to attract mates, and these songs range from Elvis Presley to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (I fairly boggled at the image of a pudgy penguin rapping "Don't push me/'Cuz I'm close to the edge"), the stodgy older emperors all speak with thick Scottish brogues, and the adelie penguins are all Latin American (the leader of whom is portrayed by that well-known Buenos Aires native, Robin Williams). All of the human characters are played by live actors. And has anyone had an odder career path than George Miller, who began his career with the violent apocalyptic revenge Mad Max films, before moving to Hollywood for Witches of Eastwick and Lorenzo's Oil before becoming a children's film director with Babe?

I don't know if I'd say I liked it, but it's definitely worth pointing out.

Samuel L. Jackson chaining Christina Ricci to a radiator is not as offensive as you'd think

I've already packed for the conference tomorrow, and Lost doesn't begin for another 70 minutes, and I need an excuse to procrastinate from work on the dissertation. So here are some disconnected thoughts about Black Snake Moan.

As the title of this post states, its not as offensive -- at least in terms of half-naked women tied to radiators -- as the lurid promotional material would lead one to believe. Ricci spends maybe 40 minutes of screen time (about 2 days of diegetic time) chained up, and Jackson fairly quickly realizes the error of his ways. And any potential sadomasochism or misogyny is, potentially at least, undercut by the humor with which the scene is presented.

The film is more interesting, though not necessarily laudable, for how it portrays Jackson's character. Lazarus embodies both the minstrelsy that Craig Brewer reactivated in Hustle and Flow, and Chris Rock's "Magical Negro" who through selflessness and common sense helps white people achieve their dreams. Lazarus is, like Djay in Hustle, a means for the white audience to enjoy or perform vicariously an "earthier," more "realistic" (i.e. sexualized) mode of existence, simultaneously enjoying his take-no-prisoners rise to the top (the American story of fighting for one's dream of riches) while also assigning the socially unacceptable aspects of that rise (pimping and prostitution both as actual occupations and as metaphors for the sacrifices one makes to succeed) to the racial Other. The minstrel performance, traditionally a white man in blackface, allowed white performers and audiences to act out, to behave in socially unacceptable manners and "blame" it on black culture. Hence the exaggerated and sexualized characteristics of minstrelsy.

Lazarus is a blues musician, and his younger wife has done him wrong, leaving him in a bad funk. To emphasize how righteous Laz's bitterness is, Brewer occasionally splices in an interview with Son House about how real blues is about not being loved by the one you love. Laz also allows Brewer to fetishize blues and Southern black culture (earthy, real, a little violent, sexual). But Laz himself is not sexualized or otherwise exaggerated; Jackson actually gives a rather restrained performance. Instead of being the repository of white culture's vision of unrestrained black culture, Laz is the guarantor of the moralism that white culture hypocritically champions via minstrelsy. Rae, the chained woman, is the site of unrestrained sexuality and boisterousness that needs to be expressed and then contained by the minstrel's performance.

This probably counts as a spoiler, so be warned if you read further. Rae is cured of her nymphomania and drug abuse by Laz, but not by having been chained by him. It's his steady paternalism and soulful blues guitar playing that does the trick. Brewer does imply she needs to be chained (instead of a wedding ring, she wears a small gold chain around her waist and clutches it in a moment of need).

So anyway, what to make of this film. Like Hustle and Flow, it is rather well made: funny, confidently directed, smartly acted. But, like Hustle and Flow, one leaves the theatre feeling rather unsettled, and not in a good way. Brewer reactivates a lot of old stereotypes and invests them with a great deal of sentiment -- not necessarily a negative investment, either. But he seems unaware of any kind of history in these images; he doesn't seem to want to recuperate the sexuality and violence that he presents as important to Southern black culture, as much as shine it up and present it as that shiny all along. I suppose he's to be lauded for not being judgmental of his characters, but maybe I'd feel better about his films if I got the impression he was a little more discerning.

The public is an ass

Those great souls who David Thomsen, et al., want to say have better taste in films than do we in the academies, have made Wild Hogs the number one movie in America.

SOMEONE IS SPYING ON ME

SPOILERS

A trilogy of movies about surveillance, as follows:

1. Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997): Somebody is spying on Bill Pulman and Patricia Arquette and leaving videos. We share the perspective of the intruding gaze (we "are" the surveillance camera). We do not know whose gaze it is. We are given no reason for the surveillance. Finally, it is the surveilled that is transformed (quite literally, when Bill Pulman murders his wife, becomes a traumatic kernel of himself, and emerges as somebody else).

2. Cache (Haneke, 2005): Somebody is spying on Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche and leaving videos. We share the perspective of the intruding gaze (we "are" the surveillance camera). We do not know whose gaze it is. (Or do we? The film's final shot provides an ambiguous answer to the question of the first - whose gaze? - by including the two sons WITHIN the field of the concluding frame, an inclusion which "makes no sense," i.e., it functions as a kind of distorting point or disequilibrium within the frame.) We are given a reason for the surveillance (Auteuil's racist guilt). Finally, it is the surveilled that is transformed (by Auteuil's acknowledgment of his racist guilt).

3. The Lives of Others (von Donnersmark, 2006): Somebody is spying on Georg Dreyman. We share the perspective, not of the surveilling gaze, but of the surveilled; in fact, in the film's penultimate scene, we gaze with Dreyman (we share his point of view) on his erstwhile surveiller (now a humble postman). We know whose gaze it is: it is the Stasi's, specifically Hauptmann's. We are given a reason for the surveillance (Stasi suspicion of Dreyman's subversion). Finally, it is the surveiller that is transformed, not the surveilled (Hauptmann, initially a kind of automaton, a machine for drawing out secrets, becomes humanized by the "lives of others," resulting in an act that saves Dreyman's career, if not his lover's life.)

Phrased that way, it becomes quite clear that The Lives of Others is the OPPOSITE MOVIE of Lost Highway. (And the Oscar goes to ...) In fact, I would locate the difference between these three movies precisely in their different handling of a basic cinematic trope: shot/reverse shot. Thus: Lost Highway provides us only with the shot; no countershot (no answer to the question: who looks?). The Lives of Others, meanwhile, is a "classical" text because it cannot conceive of shot without countershot; it obsessively provides answers to our anxious question - who looks? - by showing us the surveiller. More than that, it assures us that our surveillers can be changed and that one shouldn't complain anyway, because our surveillers are also our guardian angels. Cache, meanwhile, is somewhere in the middle: Haneke doesn't give us the countershot we want, but he doesn't NOT give it; in fact, the final shot seems to reassure us that if we "look hard enough, the truth will be revealed."

In the light of all the above, it also becomes clear that a reading of Lost Highway which saw in it an allegory of political surveillance would be topsy-turvy. Rather, political surveillance movies (and I include Cache with Lives of Others on this point) are the ideologically more reassuring allegories of the more disturbing vision (literally) in Lost Highway. The more fundamental anxiety, then, is that the gaze is not mine but somebody else's and that "I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not see" (Lacan, taken from Zizek) – that the intervention of a traumatic gaze that cannot be located in reality is the real fear, not that our civil liberties are being compromised.

Hey, Oswald was cool with it ...

Riffing on the Astronaut Farmer post below, I've never had a problem going to see movies by myself although I always feel sort of weird walking into a theater full of kids and their parents, all eyes on the lone male with popcorn and coke, especially when neither side seems expects the other to be there.

Some people, on the other hand, seem to have a big problem with going to the movies by themselves. It is like a personal admission of social failure or something but what exactly happens when you go to the movies? You sit quietly in a dark room for two hours. What's so social about that?

I've always thought that movies were great for first dates because you only have to sweat through dinner then it's two hours of quiet time to gather your thoughts and you automatically have something to talk about, the movie, on the ride home. But it's the two hours in the dark that count.

I'll admit that I try to avoid going to the movies by myself at multiplexes and malls during prime date night hours which is when it seems the most obvious that no matter what I tell myself going to a movie alone is to flout vast networks of entrenched social convention and practice.

I wrote about this a while back on a solo blog of mine:

A movie is what unfolds on screen but the movies includes everything going on around the space of the theater and within it. Perfumed skin, hard plastic, harder stares, the smell of butter and salt -- territories mapped and remapped a hundred times in the concession line.

The movies teem with social, cultural and technological currents that stay in flux right up to when the lights dim and beyond. In the dark they transform, cease to seethe and go all slippery and silvery. Merging themselves with our fantasies and change course, again, forever. A movie is what we go see, the movies are what we live ...I [wonder]: Why do reviews only ever talk about what happens on screen?

ASTRONAUT FARMER

I didn't think of the Polish brothers (Twin Falls Idaho, Northfork)as aspiring children's filmmakers so I wasn't expecting anything quite as normal as what The Astronaut Farmer turned out to be. I suspect I felt a little like a David Lynch fan walking into The Straight Story cold.

Still, I enjoyed it. If you're in need of a straight shot of Follow Your Dreams inspiration, this is it.

Incredibly Depressing

I agree with this.

ZODIAC

*SOME SPOILERS*

There's a shot deep into David Fincher's latest -- his best film to date and an easy candidate for best film of the year -- that begins with the camera positioned at the peak of one of the stanchions of the Golden Gate Bridge looking out over the city. The camera pans down to reveal the bay and bridge shrouded in a soupy fog.

It's a strikingly oneiric moment in a film that draws heavily on the tropes of the police procedural but it also marks the transition from when, a decade or so after the first Zodiac killings, the active pursuit of a killer has devolved, for the men consumed by the investigation, into a slow burning obsession with chasing ghosts. That Fincher should turn to the dreamy expanse of the Golden Gate Bridge to signal this shift in energy and mood is not surprising as it recalls that other great San Francisco-set masterpiece of personal obsession, Vertigo. Similar to James Stewart's Scotty, there's comes a point when the cops and journalists of Zodiac are no longer seeking practical answers to questions in the present but rather struggle to reconstruct the past in an effort to understand who they were and who they've become. "It was important," insists Jake Gyllenhaal's cartoonist-cum-amateur-Zodiac-sleuth Robert Graysmith years after the crimes and letters to the editors have ceased as his own life falls to pieces in the present.

One assumes that Fincher thinks it was important too, important enough to bring it to the screen with a running time of almost three hours, and there's much to be mined from the film as a critique of the media, spectacle and the movies. No sooner does it become clear that the Zodiac case may never be solved than SFPD Inspector David Toschi (a stellar performance by Mark Ruffalo) finds himself in a theatre watching Clint Eastwood take down the Zodiac-inspired "Scorpio" in Dirty Harry (1971). When we can't find closure in real life, leave it to the movies to settle all scores. Nevermind, grumbles Toschi in the lobby, due process.

The movies are ever present in Zodiac as cultural and personal artifacts. Graysmith connects a line from the killer's first letter to the SF Chron to The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and later we see the movie posters, mostly noirs and thrillers, that cover the walls of his own apartment. Interestingly, the movies end up being one of the film's many tantalizing dead ends (the killer was inspired by the novel!). Still, movie love or obsession, runs just beneath the obsession with
the real life thriller that envelopes all of the characters' lives. Indeed, one obsession feeds the other as the search for resolution in life seems, in part, motivated by a desire for the satisfying closure that fictions feed us on a regular basis. None of this, mind you, is explicitly or even implicitly stated by Fincher but it's there in the art direction, the composition and the shifts in tone. In the linkage to Vertigo through a hallucinatory vision of the Golden Gate Bridge Fincher ties his film to a fiction that runs counter to the norm in which the search for resolution or closure itself becomes a form of madness.

Is democracy bad for cinema? (Late at night and long-winded again)

Several recent LA Times articles, one a front-page news story, one opinion piece, and a feature suggest that Hollywood is out of touch with its audience -- not because of a lack of "family values," but because the Oscars bestow awards on overhyped, pretentious, underseen prestige pictures and not on the popular/populist films that really matter to most audiences. The news story quotes one Long Beach-area moviegoer who believes that Eddie Murphy has deserved Oscars for his comedic turns in other films, and producer Dean Devlin suggests that the Oscars add a best-of award for more popular films; Neal Gabler argues that cinema is no longer the cultural-soul-revelation medium of choice because younger audiences are more interested in the social lives of celebrities and expect more interactive entertainment; and the badly written feature piece suggests that the best movies are almost always genre films, as evidenced by The Departed (though the writer does try to sneak in Citizen Kane as an example of a now-loved film overshadowed by some other film). The common thread uniting the three articles is the idea that the Oscars represent an outmoded elitism and might be better served by recognizing that the audiences who choose E.T. over Gandhi or Raiders of the Lost Ark over Chariots of Fire might be on to something -- or should at least be heard and have their voices recognized as valid and somehow reflected in the awards.

Call me an outmoded elitist, but fuck a buncha that shit. Just because more people paid to see The Dukes of Hazzard or Saw doesn't make either of those films any more award-worthy than the fact that few(er) people went to see Babel or Half Nelson make them award-worthy. That a film fits within a genre doesn't make it any better than a film that defies easy categorization. The Departed isn't a better film than any of the other five nominees; it was easily my least favorite of the four, but not because it was a genre film. Letters from Iwo Jima is also a genre film (war picture), but it tweaks the formula enough (whether or not you consider the Americans or Japanese the enemy, it portrays said enemy as ambiguous) to make it more than just a generic offering. Departed might have elements to recommend it, but at the end of the day, it's not that much different than the riffs on gangster films Scorsese did in the 1970s or Tarantino tarted up in the 1990s.

Pulp Fiction was a box office hit and a lot of fun, but beyond its semi-novel time structure and snappy dialogue, it ain't about very much. It's like a game of Trivial Pursuit -- a great way to spend two hours and show off how much you know, and you might want to go back to the game again and again because you enjoy playing it so much, but what larger themes does it address? Other than showing that a certain adaptation of postmodernism could draw throngs to a multiplex, what did it do to advance cinema as an art form? I'd wager not much, other than inspire Guy Ritchie an n other wannabes. The film it lost to that year, Forrest Gump, is a similar movie -- once you get past the surface, it ain't all that much, though it at least offers some kind of historical perspective, however convenient. In my mind the best film of that year's five nominees was Quiz Show, Robert Redford's meditation on the American desire to be famous. Measured where PF is frenetic, thoughtful where PF is shallow, it offered much more to me as a viewer and someone who cares about cinema as an art and about American society and culture. (I will say PF is more interesting and probably better than the other two noms that year, Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Shawshank Redemption.)

This brings us to the title of the post: All of this talk about popularizing Hollywood, of having it recognize the films that make audiences happiest as the best (rather than honoring those that challenge it, or at least don't settle for rewarding expectations), seems to me to miss the point of democracy. In the U.S., at least, we have a tendency to describe anything that allows for multiple points of view or for the "average person" to speak his/her piece as inherently "democratic." Setting aside the question of whether or not this is a good definition of democracy, should everything be so democratized? Should the standards by which we judge cultural expression (i.e., art in a loose sense) be based in audience-friendliness, either in terms of "giving the consumer what s/he wants" or in terms of allowing greater audience interaction?

Perhaps its an issue of how the audience interacts; I'm all for a certain level of play between the artist and audience, and I certainly don't believe that meaning is fixed in authorial intent (whatever that is) or even in a consensus interpretation of a film's meaning. But I do worry about the notion, gaining some popularity, it seems, that popularity is a better guide to worth than putatively elitist notions of human enrichment, artistic innovation, etc.

In other words, if it came down to Babel vs. The Departed, I'd take the former every time.

What the hell...

Occasionally live blogging the Oscars....

Guaranteed Contender for Best Film of 2007

I'll post more on it later after it opens, as I'm sure everyone who sees it will have something to say about it, but I was able to catch a press screening of Zodiac Thursday. It was fantastic. Fincher's best film to date and easy candidate for best film of 2007. See it when you can.

Bumping it up

I'm starting a new thread about an old subject, to add some comments to the "Inspiration" thread, which is starting to slip off the page.

First, I need to say that everything Eric said regarding 2001 was true -- he did like the monkey parts, and I did tell him it was going to be like Star Wars.

Zac's comments and Paul's response to them have touched something in me as well. I don't know that I think of cinema as providing me a deeper understanding of myself, but when I see a film that I consider a masterpiece, it seems an expression of something I knew I felt or believed, but either didn't know I knew/felt it, or didn't know how to express it. An example of this would be Pasolini's Notes for an African Orestes, which is a documentary about his abandoned attempt to make a film of the Greek cycle, transplanted to post-colonial Africa. Some of Pasolini's ideas of how to visualize the spiritual or abstract -- for example, a dying lioness to represent the defeated Fury, for example -- moved me so much that I hugged a friend who happened to come by as the film was ending; I was that caught up in a moment of vicarious artistic joy. As Maurizio Viano has written in A Certain Realism, Pasolini was ahead of his time in this project, addressing themes that would become important to post-colonialist studies, feminism and even environmentalism in the 1970s.

Lest this become too academic, let me also emphasize that giddy moment of needing to embrace somebody. Great films (masterpieces and near misses) inspire some emotional response in me, even bringing me close to tears. Few shots are more beautiful than the Star Child turning its gaze upon the viewer at the end of 2001; few are as perfectly sad as the door closing at the end of The Searchers; few as quietly hopeful as the crane shot at the end of Simple Men. I just finished watching a movie that has its faults but is, methinks, unfairly maligned -- Peter Jackson's King Kong. Some of the moments at the end -- Kong tapping his chest to communicate "beautiful" to Ann, his recognition that he is about to die, the last of his kind, Ann's anguish as she watches him slip away from her -- hit this movie geek where it hurts/counts.

I don't know what any of this means, but there it is.

Y'know... I kinda have to agree....

According to this article at Salon, some Academy voters have had a hard time deciding on which film to select as Best Picture -- not because the five nominees are all so deserving, but because they're all so mediocre. I've seen only four of the five nominees -- The Queen is the lone miss -- but I actually have to agree with the sentiments expressed in the article. I liked Letters from Iwo Jima and Little Miss Sunshine, but neither will be remembered as a high point in American film even five years from now. Babel is the most complex (or at least complicated) film of the five, but it's thematic reach, though impressive, exceeds its cinematic grasp. And I am of the (currently) minority opinion that The Departed is a turkey, with a distractingly silly performance by Jack Nicholson and plot machinations that rely on all parties behaving like morons (dualistic personalities or otherwise). It's not that I don't find any films worthy of being nominated -- Children of Men will be remembered as a high point in film five years from now, Babel isn't unworthy of nomination -- but this five... it feels like a list of "impressive films" drawn up by the uninspired.

And since we won't be meeting for the yearly party this Sunday, here's where I would have put my $10:

Best Picture: The Departed
Best Actress: Helen Mirren
Best Actor: Forest Whitaker
Best Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin
Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson
Best Director: Martin Scorsese
Best Original Screenplay: Little Miss Sunshine
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Departed
Best Cinematography: Children of Men