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: