Yesterday, I finally saw Michael Mann's new gangster movie, Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the G-Man on his trail. I've been an admirer of Mann's for years, if not precisely a fan (or fanatic), and the qualities for which I've most admired him are well displayed here: restless, creative risk-taking to the limits of big-budget studio filmmaking, technological experimentation and almost casually virtuosic direction of action set pieces.
From the general audience standpoint, only the latter quality really matters. Most viewers will have no idea that they just watched a film that was not shot on film at all, but in high definition video, let alone that Mann changed frame rates a couple of times in the film to deliberately make it look like video as we're used to seeing it on TV, rather than video aping the frame rate of standard film projection (24 frames per second). This is not to say that these techniques do not affect the audience, necessarily. Most people just don't notice them and don't care about them.
In my book, this is how it should be. Technology - yes, even spectacular FX - ought not be noticed as such. An audience should be too busy engaging with the film on some human level, like emotionally or intellectually, to notice how well the technology works. For people like me, this is sometimes difficult, because we are too steeped in filmmaking itself to fail to notice the man behind the curtain, as it were. Though a small group over all, there are plenty of film fans who fall into this category. We can talk about Mann's color palette, which HD camera he used, why he shot this period film in an almost documentary style and what was behind his decision to sometimes shoot at a higher frame rate, thereby making scenes inspired by 30s newsreels appear to have been filmed by present-day cable news crews. Is this aesthetic choice a sly commentary on John Dillinger's celebrity, suggesting that things haven't changed all that much in America? Maybe, but why make such a commentary in a way guaranteed to sail over the heads of most viewers? Will they simply sense this aspect, without quite being able to put their fingers on it? (Or perhaps his critique is too commonplace, made many times before in superior films like Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands, to name two in a similar vein, as well as in many films of various quality, to have much impact.)
Whether the audience can sense the subtler changes that digital cinema can bring to the moviegoing experience is a pretty interesting question, for some, and it's questions like that that make Public Enemies an interesting film, for some. But this kind of experience is awfully cerebral, disappointingly so for a film packed with superb actors and based on such terrific characters and fascinating history. Barely anything human in the film registered with me - the only character I was really interested in was Billy Crudup's winking, bow-legged, feral J. Edgar Hoover. I applaud Mann for understanding we did not to see an elaborate backstory for Dillinger or his nemesis, for trusting his audience enough to drop us right into the action, but this does not mean every character should be a cipher. We all like Johnny Depp, but we still need a character. Christian Bale registers even less - practically anyone could have played the role to equal or greater effect. Marion Cotillard serves only a vague (and elsewhere wholly disregarded) historicity as Dillinger's girlfriend, Billie Frechette, but the affair delivers no chemistry, no romance, and only meager story- and plot-related value. Why is she even here?
Some of Mann's story choices, as friends have pointed out to me, are bold. There is no "final confrontation" scene between Depp and Bale, for example; instead, Dillinger's last words after he's gunned down are delivered to a supporting character, who tells them to Frechette in the final scene. This is one of many small ways Mann rejects conventional Hollywood storytelling - the almost complete lack of expository detail is another - and these are smart, interesting choices. I believe that this can be done, though, while still finding room for the kind of genuine, specific, shocking, documentary humanity that is required for truly engaging, full-throated storytelling.
As a postscript, I would add that it's truly weird to watch a film set in the early 1930s in which, perhaps, two cigarettes are seen. A key moment at the end of the film has Bale lighting a cigar to signal the other Feds that Dillinger has left the building - only, unless I blinked and missed it, we don't even see him light the cigar. We see the cigar, we see the matches, we see him raising a lit match out of frame, then on to something else. As an artistic choice, this smoking ban is fine, albeit weirdly and totally inaccurate, if that's really what was wanted. Except, that's not the story - this is just corporate self-censorship to spare us the shock of seeing Johnny Depp and Christian Bale smoke. The movie is already rated R. So what gives?
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Polymeric Thin Films
That would be a good name for a film company, by which I mean a motion picture company. I often write about that kind of film, but the Google Advertising Bot advertised about the polymeric thin kind.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Whatever Works
According to the IMDb, Whatever Works is Woody Allen's 44th film as a director, if we include a couple of TV movies and segments from TV specials. His first such credit was What's Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966. By any reckoning this is a stunning achievement, and Allen as compulsively prolific an American filmmaker as any who has ever lived, save only the earliest Hollywood filmmakers, who churned out dozens of films a year in the silent era (though these were shorts) and managed multiple features each year under the studio system. These days, the most respected filmmakers in the world are lucky to put out a film ever three years or so - and if they manage that, they will probably spend the next couple years resting.
This is strikingly true of the younger generation of established American independents, like Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson and their ilk, who have taken years and years between films. A newer crop of filmmakers has come along in the meantime, among them Kelly Reichardt and Ramin Bahrani, who seem to need less time, thankfully. Still no one (in America) approaches Woody Allen in terms of speed and efficiency of production, not even Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg who have both, on occasion, managed to release two films in one year (last year saw Eastwood's Changeling and Gran Torino) but have not kept up the one-movie-per-year pace for over 40 years like Allen.
I have seen every one of Woody Allen's theatrical films, most of them more than once, some of them many, many times. I have read mulitple books about Allen and by Allen. I am a fan, in the true sense of the word: I am fanatic about this filmmaker. He is one my idols, and I know more about him than any other artist. I see his films in the theater, each year, on the first day of their release.
I am not an apologist for Woody Allen. I have a particular view of him and his work - I tend to think that he peaked, not in his conventional-wisdom 1970s heyday, nor in the midst of his extraordinary artistic exploration and expansion in the 1980s (1985's The Purple Rose of Cairo is his oft-stated personal favorite and it's easy to see why), but at the end of that period with 1992's acid and hilarious Husbands and Wives. I am, on the contrary, a tough critic of his work and certainly will not deny that late period Woody, for the most part, stinks.
Of course, lately, hopeful critics and fans have talked about a renaissance for the Woodman, beginning with 2005's London-lensed Match Point, a sexy thriller in a Claude Chabrol mode, of all things. Certainly, MP was an entertaining film but, for long time fans, it was also an obvious Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) remix, transplanted to London, with hot young stars, a bit of tennis and much less moral seriousness. That MP came after a decade of dispiriting decline, which included several contenders for Worst Woody Allen Film (Anything Else, anyone?), certainly helped its reception and it does seem to be an instance of Woody Allen, suddenly, caring about filmmaking again.
Last year, he released Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for my money his funniest and most charming film in at least a decade or more. It demonstrated that he can still be fresh and vibrant, if wholly unaware of what decade it is. Now we get Whatever Works, as stale, unfunny and sloppy a film as he has made.
Originally written for Zero Mostel, then moth-balled when Mostel died in September, 1977, Woody recently told Terry Gross on Fresh Air that he dusted off the script in a big hurry when he thought SAG might strike last year. (By the way, it was a fascinating interview, catnip for any critical fan, especially in how skillfully and disingenuously he dodged most of the more interesting questions about his art imitating his life.) The film feels exactly like this, as if he literally pulled the script out of an old filing cabinet and sent it with his assistant to Kinkos while he was driven to the set to begin shooting. Apart from one or two nods to 2009 (a Taliban reference here, an Obama reference there), the film feels decades out of touch.
Watching Larry David helplessly mugging, grinning and flailing in the Woody Allen role as one of the crankiest assholes ever to appear in a Woody Allen film, I kept imagining Zero Mostel in the part. Whatever Works might have worked in the 70s, with tighter, more imaginative direction, Mostel's sublime misanthropy, a half dozen rewrites, a daffy Diane Keaton in the role of the country bumpkin come to the big city, snappy editing, and somewhere to go storywise. In the version we have, Evan Rachel Wood is leggy, adorable and drowning, hopelessly undirected, as an insultingly stereotypical, but unbelievably, "stupid" southern girl. David, a comic whose one note rings perfectly on Curb Your Enthusiasm is an unlikable, unlikely "genius" whose broken-record hatred for humanity and existential gloom become instantly tiresome.
Naturally, these two, separated in age by forty years, get married after David rescues Wood from being the hottest homeless girl in New York, takes her in and half-heartedly does a Pygmalion on her (a perennial theme in Woody-world, done much better in Mighty Aphrodite). Wood can be a good actress, but I suspect she needs the firm hand of an involved director, not Woody's famously hands-off approach with actors. For seasoned actors, however, that approach almost always yields strong performances, and Patrica Clarkson makes the absolute most out of her ridiculously stereotypical Southern Baptist Blanche DuBois character, Wood's mother, who comes to New York to find her runaway daughter, only to be seduced by the city's art scene when her family album is mistaken for outsider art.
Other actors, like the normally wonderful Michael McKean are wasted in empty supporting roles and some, like Ed Begley, Jr., just seem miscast. Harris Savides, one of my favorite cinematographers, manages to bring some panache and some nice movement to Allen's otherwise lazy, distracted mise-en-scene - which feature of his films used to be among the more interesting in contemporary cinema. All in all, a disappointment, and a bigger one than usual. Let's hope his next film - another London-set number - swings him back the other way.
This is strikingly true of the younger generation of established American independents, like Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson and their ilk, who have taken years and years between films. A newer crop of filmmakers has come along in the meantime, among them Kelly Reichardt and Ramin Bahrani, who seem to need less time, thankfully. Still no one (in America) approaches Woody Allen in terms of speed and efficiency of production, not even Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg who have both, on occasion, managed to release two films in one year (last year saw Eastwood's Changeling and Gran Torino) but have not kept up the one-movie-per-year pace for over 40 years like Allen.
I have seen every one of Woody Allen's theatrical films, most of them more than once, some of them many, many times. I have read mulitple books about Allen and by Allen. I am a fan, in the true sense of the word: I am fanatic about this filmmaker. He is one my idols, and I know more about him than any other artist. I see his films in the theater, each year, on the first day of their release.
I am not an apologist for Woody Allen. I have a particular view of him and his work - I tend to think that he peaked, not in his conventional-wisdom 1970s heyday, nor in the midst of his extraordinary artistic exploration and expansion in the 1980s (1985's The Purple Rose of Cairo is his oft-stated personal favorite and it's easy to see why), but at the end of that period with 1992's acid and hilarious Husbands and Wives. I am, on the contrary, a tough critic of his work and certainly will not deny that late period Woody, for the most part, stinks.
Of course, lately, hopeful critics and fans have talked about a renaissance for the Woodman, beginning with 2005's London-lensed Match Point, a sexy thriller in a Claude Chabrol mode, of all things. Certainly, MP was an entertaining film but, for long time fans, it was also an obvious Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) remix, transplanted to London, with hot young stars, a bit of tennis and much less moral seriousness. That MP came after a decade of dispiriting decline, which included several contenders for Worst Woody Allen Film (Anything Else, anyone?), certainly helped its reception and it does seem to be an instance of Woody Allen, suddenly, caring about filmmaking again.
Last year, he released Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for my money his funniest and most charming film in at least a decade or more. It demonstrated that he can still be fresh and vibrant, if wholly unaware of what decade it is. Now we get Whatever Works, as stale, unfunny and sloppy a film as he has made.
Originally written for Zero Mostel, then moth-balled when Mostel died in September, 1977, Woody recently told Terry Gross on Fresh Air that he dusted off the script in a big hurry when he thought SAG might strike last year. (By the way, it was a fascinating interview, catnip for any critical fan, especially in how skillfully and disingenuously he dodged most of the more interesting questions about his art imitating his life.) The film feels exactly like this, as if he literally pulled the script out of an old filing cabinet and sent it with his assistant to Kinkos while he was driven to the set to begin shooting. Apart from one or two nods to 2009 (a Taliban reference here, an Obama reference there), the film feels decades out of touch.
Watching Larry David helplessly mugging, grinning and flailing in the Woody Allen role as one of the crankiest assholes ever to appear in a Woody Allen film, I kept imagining Zero Mostel in the part. Whatever Works might have worked in the 70s, with tighter, more imaginative direction, Mostel's sublime misanthropy, a half dozen rewrites, a daffy Diane Keaton in the role of the country bumpkin come to the big city, snappy editing, and somewhere to go storywise. In the version we have, Evan Rachel Wood is leggy, adorable and drowning, hopelessly undirected, as an insultingly stereotypical, but unbelievably, "stupid" southern girl. David, a comic whose one note rings perfectly on Curb Your Enthusiasm is an unlikable, unlikely "genius" whose broken-record hatred for humanity and existential gloom become instantly tiresome.
Naturally, these two, separated in age by forty years, get married after David rescues Wood from being the hottest homeless girl in New York, takes her in and half-heartedly does a Pygmalion on her (a perennial theme in Woody-world, done much better in Mighty Aphrodite). Wood can be a good actress, but I suspect she needs the firm hand of an involved director, not Woody's famously hands-off approach with actors. For seasoned actors, however, that approach almost always yields strong performances, and Patrica Clarkson makes the absolute most out of her ridiculously stereotypical Southern Baptist Blanche DuBois character, Wood's mother, who comes to New York to find her runaway daughter, only to be seduced by the city's art scene when her family album is mistaken for outsider art.
Other actors, like the normally wonderful Michael McKean are wasted in empty supporting roles and some, like Ed Begley, Jr., just seem miscast. Harris Savides, one of my favorite cinematographers, manages to bring some panache and some nice movement to Allen's otherwise lazy, distracted mise-en-scene - which feature of his films used to be among the more interesting in contemporary cinema. All in all, a disappointment, and a bigger one than usual. Let's hope his next film - another London-set number - swings him back the other way.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Wunderkammer
This film is by a CalArts classmate, Andrea Pallaoro. Nice work, Andrea! It is, I'd have to say, highly in character.
Vacation movies
While we were on vacation in Texas, Kim and I took advantage of the grandparents by slipping out a couple of times to go to the movies.
First, we saw Pixar's Up, in 3D, in San Antonio. I thought it was a lovely film, certainly worthy of the Pixar name, and a charming, unusual, original story until the final act. The first ten minutes of Up is probably the best storytelling we'll get at the movies this year, compact, funny and heartbreaking. Flawless, really. What comes after is truly entertaining and only at the end does the film become louder and rougher and a bit less imaginative, and more like all non-Pixar American animation.
Plus, they had these funky 3D glasses that you could keep if you like to collect junk. Which I do.
Backing up a step, in case anyone is curious about why Pixar just keeps making one good movie after another (with the arguable exception of Cars), I revealed the key a moment ago. They tell original stories. Look around at the studio animation scene: is anyone else doing that? Their films also somehow manage to feel auteur-driven, in spite of the thousands that work on them, rather than made by committee. It's hard to understand how they have such balls, but god bless 'em!
Up is currently on track to be the biggest grossing film of the year, after Wall Street analysts initally thought it might do poorly because the story and characters are a little unusual (the star is a grumpy old man) and there isn't the merchandizing potential of, say, Cars or Toy Story. As Bill the Cat would say, THPTH!
Secondly, we saw Sam Raimi's deliriously entertaining horror film, Drag Me to Hell. I suppose I should say, deliriously entertaining for a horror film. Occasionally I have participated in marketing surveys that ask which types of movies I like best, with the option to select from a big list of genres. This always baffles me, because I like any film as long as it's good. (In an earlier post, I describe what I mean by "good.") I see very few horror films because my perception is that almost every single one is a piece of shit. I need to be told to see one, like when my friends recommended the movie, The Descent, a solid example of the form on its better end.
Raimi, of course, has already made a couple of deliriously entertaining horror films and, no, DMTH is no Evil Dead. But it couldn't have been because he had way more money this time and Raimi's humor and perfect timing are intact from those days of yore, so it was great fun to see him cut loose. He's also just a terrific B-movie filmmaker, no matter the budget - I mean, if the Spiderman films are not B-movies, what is these days? The theater where we saw the movie, unfortunately, had the volume up to 11 which is hurting my ears even now, so that was a shame. But the movie was propulsive, disgusting, hilarious, timely, creaky and scary in all the right places, and it ended with a bang.
I admit to some mild disappointment, along with my wife, who pointed out that the heroine of the film, played by the hot but somewhat uninteresting Alison Lohman (whose blandness, nevertheless, works really well here), has very little agency throughout the film. She never actually does anything, until the very end, which one could not say about, say, Ash. She merely reacts to events and allows herself to be pushed and pulled around by every man she knows. A pretty, passive heroine, which, for me is a mixed bag. One does not much like her character or care very much about what happens to her, a bold and interesting choice. In other words, you almost root for the evil gypsy spirit to win which, I think, is really how these films ought to work.
In looking up a couple of things on IMDb for this post, I noticed that one of Raimi's next films is The Evil Dead! Apparently, Ghost House Pictures is trying to remake the original film for some reason. Raimi seems to be into it, for some reason. There's going to be a new director. It's not going to be Evil Dead 4. Whatever. Raimi already remade Evil Dead, calling it Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. The whole ED saga is already completely self-referential and meta. So this remake idea is pretty darn stupid. Oh, well.
First, we saw Pixar's Up, in 3D, in San Antonio. I thought it was a lovely film, certainly worthy of the Pixar name, and a charming, unusual, original story until the final act. The first ten minutes of Up is probably the best storytelling we'll get at the movies this year, compact, funny and heartbreaking. Flawless, really. What comes after is truly entertaining and only at the end does the film become louder and rougher and a bit less imaginative, and more like all non-Pixar American animation.
Plus, they had these funky 3D glasses that you could keep if you like to collect junk. Which I do.
Backing up a step, in case anyone is curious about why Pixar just keeps making one good movie after another (with the arguable exception of Cars), I revealed the key a moment ago. They tell original stories. Look around at the studio animation scene: is anyone else doing that? Their films also somehow manage to feel auteur-driven, in spite of the thousands that work on them, rather than made by committee. It's hard to understand how they have such balls, but god bless 'em!Up is currently on track to be the biggest grossing film of the year, after Wall Street analysts initally thought it might do poorly because the story and characters are a little unusual (the star is a grumpy old man) and there isn't the merchandizing potential of, say, Cars or Toy Story. As Bill the Cat would say, THPTH!
Secondly, we saw Sam Raimi's deliriously entertaining horror film, Drag Me to Hell. I suppose I should say, deliriously entertaining for a horror film. Occasionally I have participated in marketing surveys that ask which types of movies I like best, with the option to select from a big list of genres. This always baffles me, because I like any film as long as it's good. (In an earlier post, I describe what I mean by "good.") I see very few horror films because my perception is that almost every single one is a piece of shit. I need to be told to see one, like when my friends recommended the movie, The Descent, a solid example of the form on its better end.
Raimi, of course, has already made a couple of deliriously entertaining horror films and, no, DMTH is no Evil Dead. But it couldn't have been because he had way more money this time and Raimi's humor and perfect timing are intact from those days of yore, so it was great fun to see him cut loose. He's also just a terrific B-movie filmmaker, no matter the budget - I mean, if the Spiderman films are not B-movies, what is these days? The theater where we saw the movie, unfortunately, had the volume up to 11 which is hurting my ears even now, so that was a shame. But the movie was propulsive, disgusting, hilarious, timely, creaky and scary in all the right places, and it ended with a bang.
I admit to some mild disappointment, along with my wife, who pointed out that the heroine of the film, played by the hot but somewhat uninteresting Alison Lohman (whose blandness, nevertheless, works really well here), has very little agency throughout the film. She never actually does anything, until the very end, which one could not say about, say, Ash. She merely reacts to events and allows herself to be pushed and pulled around by every man she knows. A pretty, passive heroine, which, for me is a mixed bag. One does not much like her character or care very much about what happens to her, a bold and interesting choice. In other words, you almost root for the evil gypsy spirit to win which, I think, is really how these films ought to work.
In looking up a couple of things on IMDb for this post, I noticed that one of Raimi's next films is The Evil Dead! Apparently, Ghost House Pictures is trying to remake the original film for some reason. Raimi seems to be into it, for some reason. There's going to be a new director. It's not going to be Evil Dead 4. Whatever. Raimi already remade Evil Dead, calling it Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. The whole ED saga is already completely self-referential and meta. So this remake idea is pretty darn stupid. Oh, well.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Who watches Watchmen?
The long-awaited comic book adaptation, Watchmen, finally hit screens this weekend. I don't remember when I first read the graphic novel, but that is an experience no one should miss for its density, brilliance and humanity. The book is often cited as the greatest comic of all time; I'm not enough of a buff to dispute or validate this, but if there is a better one, I'd sure love to read it.
Watchmen has a long, troubled history in Hollywood; its own author, Alan Moore, along with many readers, claimed it could not be filmed (and Moore famously removed his name from this version). Zack Snyder has proved them wrong, in the literal sense at least. I was never one of those readers who thought it could not be filmed, but I have long thought it somewhat redundant to do so. After all, there is no rule that says every single comic must become a movie. Watchmen, in particular, was perfectly conceived as a comic book - some comics, just like some popular novels, seem to be written almost in anticipation of the eventual film adaptation, but not this one. The greatest aspects of the book are those that would also make it most difficult to adapt: its dense, multi-threaded storyline, its long list of characters both in the 1985 "present" of the story and in its rich historical digressions, its philosophical musings, its cynicism and melancholy.
Nevertheless, I was pleased to lower my expectations and disregard the predictable critical onslaught of the last few days as the reviews began to appear, because I just wanted to see this great story on the big screen. For awhile, that was more than enough to satisfy me, right through the second act. A great story that you love, no matter how flawed the adaptation might turn out to be, can often be great fun to watch just to see the filmmakers' take on it. In this case, Snyder gets quite a bit right - for a fan of the graphic novel like myself, here it is, come to life.
I don't think the film could possibly make a lick of sense, though, to anyone who has not read the book - which ought to be enough to classify the enterprise as an expensive failure. This was a foregone conclusion, however; unless it had been made as a mini-series, there's no way the adaptation could have been both faithful and comprehensible to the uninitiated. I think that most of the critics who slammed the film have not read the book, which is not unreasonable, though I believe it contributed heavily to the level of snark (sounds like some people didn't get invited to join the club).
In my viewing, last night at 10:30 in the historic theater at the Alameda, I thought the biggest problem for the film was perhaps one that could never have been reconciled. The story is set in an alternate-universe 1985 in which Nixon is still president and the U.S. won the Vietnam war, thanks to the unstoppable powers of the giant, blue, atomic god-man, Dr. Manhattan. All of this is not nearly as difficult to swallow as our own knowledge of the radical changes the American perspective has undergone since the mid-1980s, when the comic was written. A couple of years later the Berlin Wall would fall, along with Soviet communism, leaving the U.S. as the world's lone superpower in a world where the notion of a superpower was already passe, robbing the story of its true backdrop, the spectre of nuclear annihilation in a quick and dirty World War III. Add in the optimistic boom of the 1990s and the further erosion of the nation-state as the seat of supreme power, borne out in the chaos of 9/11 and the Bush years, and you get a social, political, technological and psychological context almost unrecognizable to anyone under 30, and only a subject of misty nostalgia to anyone under 40. It's too late for Watchmen.
The narrative backdrop, therefore, acts as a kind of distancing mechanism, that is, the audience must make a number of intellectual steps prior to reaching a point of engagement with the film. We must accept the strange datedness of the material as a time capsule from the past that might yet have some relevance to our world today just as we must strive to avoid being distracted by the typically naked Dr. Manhattan's penis (and blue balls). There are also some missteps in the musical choices in the film and a generally on-the-nose literalism with those choices that takes us right out of the stream of things. These distractions mean Watchmen sometimes seems more like a museum piece than a movie, difficult to get swept up in.
A number of critics have mentioned the brutal, graphic violence as a serious flaw - but here's where they've got things really wrong. I think it might be a generational thing, or a problem for people without exposure to the comic book, but the violent action, especially around the Rorshach character, is one of the best elements here, often suddenly yanking the viewer back into an emotional engagement with the story after we've been allowed to drift away. Why we have come to accept the bloodless, inconsequential PG13 violence so common in our popular films I don't know, but the shocking brutality of man's inhumanity to man is very much a theme of the book and the film, even when both glory in it. This is one of the things Snyder does best.
Like I said, I was engaged enough with watching the great comic book unspool onscreen (not a glowing endorsement, mind you, but an acknowledgment of very low expectations somewhat exceeded) through the second act, but the final quarter of the film was interminable, muddled, cluttered and confusing. The truly unfilmable comic book ending (because it would have required too much explanation and might very well have looked super-ridiculous) was changed into drab monologuing, more slow-mo chopsocky, massive genocide and dumb rationalizing. Up to that point, though, there were some moments of real beauty, making me nostalgic for the real deal, the masterpiece that started all of this.
Watchmen has a long, troubled history in Hollywood; its own author, Alan Moore, along with many readers, claimed it could not be filmed (and Moore famously removed his name from this version). Zack Snyder has proved them wrong, in the literal sense at least. I was never one of those readers who thought it could not be filmed, but I have long thought it somewhat redundant to do so. After all, there is no rule that says every single comic must become a movie. Watchmen, in particular, was perfectly conceived as a comic book - some comics, just like some popular novels, seem to be written almost in anticipation of the eventual film adaptation, but not this one. The greatest aspects of the book are those that would also make it most difficult to adapt: its dense, multi-threaded storyline, its long list of characters both in the 1985 "present" of the story and in its rich historical digressions, its philosophical musings, its cynicism and melancholy.
Nevertheless, I was pleased to lower my expectations and disregard the predictable critical onslaught of the last few days as the reviews began to appear, because I just wanted to see this great story on the big screen. For awhile, that was more than enough to satisfy me, right through the second act. A great story that you love, no matter how flawed the adaptation might turn out to be, can often be great fun to watch just to see the filmmakers' take on it. In this case, Snyder gets quite a bit right - for a fan of the graphic novel like myself, here it is, come to life.
I don't think the film could possibly make a lick of sense, though, to anyone who has not read the book - which ought to be enough to classify the enterprise as an expensive failure. This was a foregone conclusion, however; unless it had been made as a mini-series, there's no way the adaptation could have been both faithful and comprehensible to the uninitiated. I think that most of the critics who slammed the film have not read the book, which is not unreasonable, though I believe it contributed heavily to the level of snark (sounds like some people didn't get invited to join the club).
In my viewing, last night at 10:30 in the historic theater at the Alameda, I thought the biggest problem for the film was perhaps one that could never have been reconciled. The story is set in an alternate-universe 1985 in which Nixon is still president and the U.S. won the Vietnam war, thanks to the unstoppable powers of the giant, blue, atomic god-man, Dr. Manhattan. All of this is not nearly as difficult to swallow as our own knowledge of the radical changes the American perspective has undergone since the mid-1980s, when the comic was written. A couple of years later the Berlin Wall would fall, along with Soviet communism, leaving the U.S. as the world's lone superpower in a world where the notion of a superpower was already passe, robbing the story of its true backdrop, the spectre of nuclear annihilation in a quick and dirty World War III. Add in the optimistic boom of the 1990s and the further erosion of the nation-state as the seat of supreme power, borne out in the chaos of 9/11 and the Bush years, and you get a social, political, technological and psychological context almost unrecognizable to anyone under 30, and only a subject of misty nostalgia to anyone under 40. It's too late for Watchmen.
The narrative backdrop, therefore, acts as a kind of distancing mechanism, that is, the audience must make a number of intellectual steps prior to reaching a point of engagement with the film. We must accept the strange datedness of the material as a time capsule from the past that might yet have some relevance to our world today just as we must strive to avoid being distracted by the typically naked Dr. Manhattan's penis (and blue balls). There are also some missteps in the musical choices in the film and a generally on-the-nose literalism with those choices that takes us right out of the stream of things. These distractions mean Watchmen sometimes seems more like a museum piece than a movie, difficult to get swept up in.
A number of critics have mentioned the brutal, graphic violence as a serious flaw - but here's where they've got things really wrong. I think it might be a generational thing, or a problem for people without exposure to the comic book, but the violent action, especially around the Rorshach character, is one of the best elements here, often suddenly yanking the viewer back into an emotional engagement with the story after we've been allowed to drift away. Why we have come to accept the bloodless, inconsequential PG13 violence so common in our popular films I don't know, but the shocking brutality of man's inhumanity to man is very much a theme of the book and the film, even when both glory in it. This is one of the things Snyder does best.
Like I said, I was engaged enough with watching the great comic book unspool onscreen (not a glowing endorsement, mind you, but an acknowledgment of very low expectations somewhat exceeded) through the second act, but the final quarter of the film was interminable, muddled, cluttered and confusing. The truly unfilmable comic book ending (because it would have required too much explanation and might very well have looked super-ridiculous) was changed into drab monologuing, more slow-mo chopsocky, massive genocide and dumb rationalizing. Up to that point, though, there were some moments of real beauty, making me nostalgic for the real deal, the masterpiece that started all of this.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Matt Zoller Seitz on Kevin B. Lee
Came upon a fine essay by critic and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz on The House Next Door blog, about more YouTube takedowns. This time, YouTube has apparently taken down critic Kevin B. Lee's entire archive of video essays because they make use of copyrighted film clips for the purpose of scholarly commentary. Rather than drone on about this myself, I'll just encourage anyone interested to read Seitz's essay.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Cigarettes and Movies
Just read an NYT article about the ongoing campaign by the AMA to ban cigarettes from movies. Apparently, the PG13-rated film, He's Just Not That Into You, has some cigarettes in it but no smoking. There's also a sort of anti-smoking storyline in the film.
In the past couple of years, the AMA has been fighting to get Hollywood studios to eliminate any acknowledgment of the existence of cigarettes, or their use, from films, saying that smoking in films causes 200,000 teenagers to start smoking each year. The organization wants any film with smoking in it to get an R rating.
As someone who has recently quite smoking after 15 years of the habit, I recognize how dangerous smoking can be and how difficult it is to stop. It's a pretty stupid thing to do that, I admit, I probably saw as cool or fun or grown-up in part because of depictions of smoking in popular culture. When I smoked, seeing someone smoke in a film would often trigger a desire to have a cigarette myself - of course, this was once I was already a dedicated smoker.
But fuck the AMA. It offends me deeply when some organization or another works to ban something in pop culture as a means of social engineering. And evidently, as in this latest skirmish, you don't even have to have smoking in the film to warrant a rebuke, just cigarette packaging. In the article, Melissa Wathers of the AMA Alliance (apparently a domestic spying organization in which volunteers are asked to police films for violations) says, "There is absolutely zero artistic justification for this." And you are...who, exactly?
I haven't seen the film, but I would hazard a guess that there is little "artistic justification" for its entire existence. But that's the filmmakers business, as is whether or not they find a contextual need for cigarettes in the film. Quite possibly the AMA could find some better things to do with its time.
In the past couple of years, the AMA has been fighting to get Hollywood studios to eliminate any acknowledgment of the existence of cigarettes, or their use, from films, saying that smoking in films causes 200,000 teenagers to start smoking each year. The organization wants any film with smoking in it to get an R rating.
As someone who has recently quite smoking after 15 years of the habit, I recognize how dangerous smoking can be and how difficult it is to stop. It's a pretty stupid thing to do that, I admit, I probably saw as cool or fun or grown-up in part because of depictions of smoking in popular culture. When I smoked, seeing someone smoke in a film would often trigger a desire to have a cigarette myself - of course, this was once I was already a dedicated smoker.
But fuck the AMA. It offends me deeply when some organization or another works to ban something in pop culture as a means of social engineering. And evidently, as in this latest skirmish, you don't even have to have smoking in the film to warrant a rebuke, just cigarette packaging. In the article, Melissa Wathers of the AMA Alliance (apparently a domestic spying organization in which volunteers are asked to police films for violations) says, "There is absolutely zero artistic justification for this." And you are...who, exactly?
I haven't seen the film, but I would hazard a guess that there is little "artistic justification" for its entire existence. But that's the filmmakers business, as is whether or not they find a contextual need for cigarettes in the film. Quite possibly the AMA could find some better things to do with its time.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
This is one of the best films of the year. It's quite an artifact or, rather, it's full of artifacts from a case so bizarre I expect a musical version is coming soon. Roman Polanski is a fascinating figure; he's one of the unluckiest human beings of the past hundred years, at least, as well as one of the best film directors. Whatever your impression of him, this documentary has a thing or two to teach you. At times, it feels more like a fiction film.
I think RP got a raw deal, personally. The shit he's gone through - really, it's plenty. He's suffered enough. Cut the poor bastard a break.
I think RP got a raw deal, personally. The shit he's gone through - really, it's plenty. He's suffered enough. Cut the poor bastard a break.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Catching up with the films of 2008
One of the (few) disadvantages of life in the San Francisco Bay Area affects movie-lovers like myself. Whereas nearly every film released in the United States will play in New York or Los Angeles, immediately, some of those will never play here and the rest will either play in one or two San Francisco theaters (as opposed to East Bay theaters) and then close, or open at an annoyingly slow pace weeks or months after that initial release. This situation is much better than that of most areas of the country, of course, where some of these films will simply never play at all - so, I should be thankful, I suppose, that I don't still live in Iowa. And I am.
The films I'm talking about are not the multiplex fodder that most Americans think of when they think of "the movies" (myself frequently included); I mean the smaller films that barely have a chance to find an audience before getting yanked from the few art house chains and independent theaters that remain and that never play in the sticks. I should confess, though, that I am not a very good cinephile. I will rarely travel far to see a good film - these days, it's tough to get me to leave the island, though I will do it for a special film that I won't get to see in a theater otherwise or that I feel I MUST see as soon as possible.
For instance, as a die-hard Woody Allen fan, I will always see his latest film immediately upon release. Most of them vanish shortly thereafter, although this year's effort, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, became popular enough to get a wider release and even won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy. So, good for Woody. This week, too, I plan to go to San Francisco to see the "roadtrip" version of Steven Soderbergh's Che, in which the whole film is shown rather than broken up into two parts. Four hours long? Shot on the Red One? Soderbergh and Del Toro? Violently mixed reviews? Cinephile catnip!
Last week, Scott and I traveled to Berkeley to see The Wrestler. We had heard all the buzz, so we had to catch it. I found the film to be very moving and satisfying, with minimal schmaltz and a quietly extraordinary performance from Mickey Rourke. Marisa Tomei, who has always seemed to me to be working hard (and impressively) to actually earn that Oscar she got way back in 1992, is also great here. I had been thinking about The Wrestler for a few days until I spoke to my film school buddy, Andy, who pointed out how terrible the script is - and he's right. The script for The Wrestler is a paint-by-numbers quickie sports-movie formula piece, with an embarrassingly awful subplot involving Rourke's estranged daughter. It could easily be that "Wallace Beery wrestling picture" Barton Fink finds himself unable to write.
But his argument left me strangely unmoved and failed to change my impression much. It's true that Andy and I have often disagreed about movies in the past - he has frequently said that I "like everything," an untrue statement on its face, but indicative of my ability to be swept away - but here it's not that we disagreed, exactly. It's that, at a certain point, the film went somewhere for me that I found quite interesting. Early on, the Tomei character quotes the passage in Isaiah that predicts the suffering of the Messiah and the redemption of believers - "by his stripes, we are healed" - which she unironically attributes to the film The Passion of the Christ. She's suggesting that the way Rourke's washed-up professional wrestler abuses his own body for our entertainment is not unlike what that Jesus character in the Passion undergoes. After I heard this, I felt I understood something essential about the character and about the filmmakers' purpose - it's a film about a man who believes he's nothing more than a piece of meat, good for nothing but a beating, and about his messy, faltering, daily search for redemption.
As an allegory, in its moving story and in its the performances, The Wrestler far transcends its script; I think it's Darren Aronofsky's best work to date. Fans of the Dardennes will note with interest some of the camerawork in the film, too - the Belgian brothers have developed a distinctive style for their super-realist dramas, two of which have won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in the last decade, in which they frequently hover their hand-held camera just over their subject's shoulder. Aronofsky co-opts this style frequently in his film in a way that, for me at least, immediately recalled The Son or Rosetta, among other films. I suppose if the Dardennes are, perhaps, the most-celebrated neo-realists working today (for lack of a better term), it makes sense that this kind of camera work (hardly unique to them, but somewhat unusual in narrative film) has become a kind of shorthand for "authenticity." A bit of a cheap trick, really, that Aronofsky uses only occasionally - but it's nice to see him trying new things.
Another film that makes much better use of Dardenne-style camerawork, less obtrusively and more rigorously fused with an objectively framed, devastatingly omissive mise-en-scene, is the 2007 Cannes winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, by Romanian writer/director, Cristian Mungiu. I only saw this recently, on DVD, and it's an example of the kind of film that I am sometimes too lazy to see. Another is the likewise highly-praised, The Edge of Heaven, which I have had from Netflix for several weeks now. 4 Months I had for about four months. Okay, not that long; as the film is about an illegal abortion in Ceausescu's Romania, my very-pregnant wife opted out, and I assumed I was in for a big downer and it took me a little while (and her being out of town) to pop it into the DVD player.
I am very glad I did. It's an extraordinary film, powerful, clear-eyed and straightforward - it takes place in nearly real time and makes no political statements about abortion, apart from simply depicting the harrowing, horrifying ordeal of such a procedure under a dictatorship in which it's illegal. Most striking for me - because from early on I could see I would not be spared much, though the worst moment takes place off-screen - were the relationships. Otilia and her pregnant friend, Gabita, reminded me very strongly of some of the young women I knew in college. These women had extremely intense, emotional friendships of the kind that appear quite strange to young men, for whom things might be simpler or more straightforward, relationships that are sometimes strengthened by awful behavior rather than kindness, as if that awfulness itself is an assurance of intimacy: I would never dare to treat anyone else so horribly and with such selfishness; it is only because we are like sisters that I am willing to do so. It is not worth citing specifics because - if anyone were to actually read this post - I would hope not to ruin one minute of this film, which must be the best of the year.
I want to move now, quickly, through a few other films that I have seen recently, as I try to catch up with 2008:
Gran Torino, is a funny, satisfying bit of hokum, starring and directed by Clint Eastwood. The trailer sold the film as some kind of geriatric Dirty Harry film; in reality, it's another of Eastwood's sly revisionist takes on his violent persona, like Unforgiven, though not nearly as fine a work as that film. If sentimental and a bit hokey at times, this story of a ridiculously cranky, racist old-timer who loves his vintage Gran Torino and little else has enough specific and unique details of time, place and character to help the film work pretty well. Eastwood's character helped build the titular muscle car as a Ford mechanic in better times, and Eastwood-the-director clearly felt a resonance in this story of an old, muscular American archetype who finds the world changing all around him, even as he tries to cling to what he knows. It's a terrific performance, both gentle and foaming at the mouth, wise and reckless, stern and hilarious. (Seeing this film made me want to go back and watch the Dirty Harry films, the first two of which I screened over the weekend. They're a lot of silly fun, of course, but it's also interesting to see the San Francisco of the 70s as well as the filmmaking style of that time. And Clint Eastwood in the first Dirty Harry film must certainly have the Best Haircut in Cinema.)
Doubt is an example of the oft-tested rule that prize-winning plays rarely translate to the screen. Kim and I saw the film while we were up in Red Bluff, with a very well-behaved crowd, which I appreciated. And I think the blue-hairs in the audience had a nice time discussing the film afterwards; Kim and I actually had a long conversation about it as well. Any film that generates productive argument after leaving the theater has gotta be worth something, I'll give it that. For me, I guess I simply did not have any of the "doubt" about what happened that supposedly drives the film. The story, set in the 1950s, is about whether or not a priest at a Catholic school had some kind of inappropriate relationship with a young male student. Absolutely nothing in the film made me suspect that the priest had acted inappropriately. Nothing. Not the fact that he was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who always plays total schlubs and creepy losers, not the fact that he had longer-than-usual fingernails, not the fact that Meryl Streep demolished him and all available scenery in every scene she "shared" with him (which made it a pretty fun performance to watch, don't get me wrong - but I was certainly watching a performance, not any kind of recognizable human being). However, it became clear after leaving the theater that many other viewers thought the film was much more ambiguous than did I. Well, fine. Glad they enjoyed it.
Finally, a film I recently saw on DVD that many people probably also missed this year: In Bruges. Written and directed by the talented playwright, Martin McDonagh, it's one of those rare films that manages to balance beautifully between pitch-black comedy, poignant drama and violent action. Tonal shifts like that are very tough to pull off; on top of that, theater writers don't often make great screenwriters, let alone directors. McDonagh makes it all look easy here, making the tired hitmen-out-of-water genre fresh again with clever dialogue, rich characters, and genuinely heart-stopping twists and turns. Colin Farrell gives the best performance of his that I've seen - he's wonderfully oafish, idiotic, hilarious and moving, all at once - with terrific work from Brendan Gleason and Ralph Fiennes. Farrell pulled off an upset at the Golden Globes by winning in the comedic acting category - a richly deserved and unexpected win.
The films I'm talking about are not the multiplex fodder that most Americans think of when they think of "the movies" (myself frequently included); I mean the smaller films that barely have a chance to find an audience before getting yanked from the few art house chains and independent theaters that remain and that never play in the sticks. I should confess, though, that I am not a very good cinephile. I will rarely travel far to see a good film - these days, it's tough to get me to leave the island, though I will do it for a special film that I won't get to see in a theater otherwise or that I feel I MUST see as soon as possible.
For instance, as a die-hard Woody Allen fan, I will always see his latest film immediately upon release. Most of them vanish shortly thereafter, although this year's effort, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, became popular enough to get a wider release and even won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy. So, good for Woody. This week, too, I plan to go to San Francisco to see the "roadtrip" version of Steven Soderbergh's Che, in which the whole film is shown rather than broken up into two parts. Four hours long? Shot on the Red One? Soderbergh and Del Toro? Violently mixed reviews? Cinephile catnip!
Last week, Scott and I traveled to Berkeley to see The Wrestler. We had heard all the buzz, so we had to catch it. I found the film to be very moving and satisfying, with minimal schmaltz and a quietly extraordinary performance from Mickey Rourke. Marisa Tomei, who has always seemed to me to be working hard (and impressively) to actually earn that Oscar she got way back in 1992, is also great here. I had been thinking about The Wrestler for a few days until I spoke to my film school buddy, Andy, who pointed out how terrible the script is - and he's right. The script for The Wrestler is a paint-by-numbers quickie sports-movie formula piece, with an embarrassingly awful subplot involving Rourke's estranged daughter. It could easily be that "Wallace Beery wrestling picture" Barton Fink finds himself unable to write.
But his argument left me strangely unmoved and failed to change my impression much. It's true that Andy and I have often disagreed about movies in the past - he has frequently said that I "like everything," an untrue statement on its face, but indicative of my ability to be swept away - but here it's not that we disagreed, exactly. It's that, at a certain point, the film went somewhere for me that I found quite interesting. Early on, the Tomei character quotes the passage in Isaiah that predicts the suffering of the Messiah and the redemption of believers - "by his stripes, we are healed" - which she unironically attributes to the film The Passion of the Christ. She's suggesting that the way Rourke's washed-up professional wrestler abuses his own body for our entertainment is not unlike what that Jesus character in the Passion undergoes. After I heard this, I felt I understood something essential about the character and about the filmmakers' purpose - it's a film about a man who believes he's nothing more than a piece of meat, good for nothing but a beating, and about his messy, faltering, daily search for redemption.
As an allegory, in its moving story and in its the performances, The Wrestler far transcends its script; I think it's Darren Aronofsky's best work to date. Fans of the Dardennes will note with interest some of the camerawork in the film, too - the Belgian brothers have developed a distinctive style for their super-realist dramas, two of which have won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in the last decade, in which they frequently hover their hand-held camera just over their subject's shoulder. Aronofsky co-opts this style frequently in his film in a way that, for me at least, immediately recalled The Son or Rosetta, among other films. I suppose if the Dardennes are, perhaps, the most-celebrated neo-realists working today (for lack of a better term), it makes sense that this kind of camera work (hardly unique to them, but somewhat unusual in narrative film) has become a kind of shorthand for "authenticity." A bit of a cheap trick, really, that Aronofsky uses only occasionally - but it's nice to see him trying new things.
Another film that makes much better use of Dardenne-style camerawork, less obtrusively and more rigorously fused with an objectively framed, devastatingly omissive mise-en-scene, is the 2007 Cannes winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, by Romanian writer/director, Cristian Mungiu. I only saw this recently, on DVD, and it's an example of the kind of film that I am sometimes too lazy to see. Another is the likewise highly-praised, The Edge of Heaven, which I have had from Netflix for several weeks now. 4 Months I had for about four months. Okay, not that long; as the film is about an illegal abortion in Ceausescu's Romania, my very-pregnant wife opted out, and I assumed I was in for a big downer and it took me a little while (and her being out of town) to pop it into the DVD player.
I am very glad I did. It's an extraordinary film, powerful, clear-eyed and straightforward - it takes place in nearly real time and makes no political statements about abortion, apart from simply depicting the harrowing, horrifying ordeal of such a procedure under a dictatorship in which it's illegal. Most striking for me - because from early on I could see I would not be spared much, though the worst moment takes place off-screen - were the relationships. Otilia and her pregnant friend, Gabita, reminded me very strongly of some of the young women I knew in college. These women had extremely intense, emotional friendships of the kind that appear quite strange to young men, for whom things might be simpler or more straightforward, relationships that are sometimes strengthened by awful behavior rather than kindness, as if that awfulness itself is an assurance of intimacy: I would never dare to treat anyone else so horribly and with such selfishness; it is only because we are like sisters that I am willing to do so. It is not worth citing specifics because - if anyone were to actually read this post - I would hope not to ruin one minute of this film, which must be the best of the year.
I want to move now, quickly, through a few other films that I have seen recently, as I try to catch up with 2008:
Gran Torino, is a funny, satisfying bit of hokum, starring and directed by Clint Eastwood. The trailer sold the film as some kind of geriatric Dirty Harry film; in reality, it's another of Eastwood's sly revisionist takes on his violent persona, like Unforgiven, though not nearly as fine a work as that film. If sentimental and a bit hokey at times, this story of a ridiculously cranky, racist old-timer who loves his vintage Gran Torino and little else has enough specific and unique details of time, place and character to help the film work pretty well. Eastwood's character helped build the titular muscle car as a Ford mechanic in better times, and Eastwood-the-director clearly felt a resonance in this story of an old, muscular American archetype who finds the world changing all around him, even as he tries to cling to what he knows. It's a terrific performance, both gentle and foaming at the mouth, wise and reckless, stern and hilarious. (Seeing this film made me want to go back and watch the Dirty Harry films, the first two of which I screened over the weekend. They're a lot of silly fun, of course, but it's also interesting to see the San Francisco of the 70s as well as the filmmaking style of that time. And Clint Eastwood in the first Dirty Harry film must certainly have the Best Haircut in Cinema.)
Doubt is an example of the oft-tested rule that prize-winning plays rarely translate to the screen. Kim and I saw the film while we were up in Red Bluff, with a very well-behaved crowd, which I appreciated. And I think the blue-hairs in the audience had a nice time discussing the film afterwards; Kim and I actually had a long conversation about it as well. Any film that generates productive argument after leaving the theater has gotta be worth something, I'll give it that. For me, I guess I simply did not have any of the "doubt" about what happened that supposedly drives the film. The story, set in the 1950s, is about whether or not a priest at a Catholic school had some kind of inappropriate relationship with a young male student. Absolutely nothing in the film made me suspect that the priest had acted inappropriately. Nothing. Not the fact that he was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who always plays total schlubs and creepy losers, not the fact that he had longer-than-usual fingernails, not the fact that Meryl Streep demolished him and all available scenery in every scene she "shared" with him (which made it a pretty fun performance to watch, don't get me wrong - but I was certainly watching a performance, not any kind of recognizable human being). However, it became clear after leaving the theater that many other viewers thought the film was much more ambiguous than did I. Well, fine. Glad they enjoyed it.Finally, a film I recently saw on DVD that many people probably also missed this year: In Bruges. Written and directed by the talented playwright, Martin McDonagh, it's one of those rare films that manages to balance beautifully between pitch-black comedy, poignant drama and violent action. Tonal shifts like that are very tough to pull off; on top of that, theater writers don't often make great screenwriters, let alone directors. McDonagh makes it all look easy here, making the tired hitmen-out-of-water genre fresh again with clever dialogue, rich characters, and genuinely heart-stopping twists and turns. Colin Farrell gives the best performance of his that I've seen - he's wonderfully oafish, idiotic, hilarious and moving, all at once - with terrific work from Brendan Gleason and Ralph Fiennes. Farrell pulled off an upset at the Golden Globes by winning in the comedic acting category - a richly deserved and unexpected win.
Classics at The Alameda, week two
Last week, Young and I attended a matinee of Vertigo, the first film in the Alameda's classic film series. This week is North by Northwest. It was great to see Vertigo on the big screen again. It's always an absorbing, mysterious and deeply rewarding film. The print was from the restoration done about a decade ago and was not in the greatest shape, but that's to be expected.
What cannot be tolerated are the persistent projection problems in the Alameda's historic theater. Unfortunately, I don't think I have attended a film in this theater that has not been out-of-focus at least once or twice during the show, or poorly-framed (as it was when I saw Milk). I have been a defender of this theater to some who have been up-in-arms about the projection problems; after all, it's been operating less than a year and still must work out the kinks. At this point, though, these problems are unacceptable.
What's worse is that the theater was controversial from the beginning for refusing to hire union projectionists - there was a small group of picketers during the grand opening last year - an issue that I have reluctantly overlooked out of self-interest (that is, I want to go to my local theater even if I don't really want to cross a picket line, actual or symbolic). Now, with the projection problems continuing, it looks like the theater owner has made a a pretty boneheaded mistake.
I have sent a comment to the theater management via their website, and I encourage other disgruntled customers to do the same. This is a beautifully renovated theater, and the kind of repertory programming they are reviving with this classics series (which theater sources say is only the beginning) deserves to be praised to the skies, but quality projection has got to be a top priority.
What cannot be tolerated are the persistent projection problems in the Alameda's historic theater. Unfortunately, I don't think I have attended a film in this theater that has not been out-of-focus at least once or twice during the show, or poorly-framed (as it was when I saw Milk). I have been a defender of this theater to some who have been up-in-arms about the projection problems; after all, it's been operating less than a year and still must work out the kinks. At this point, though, these problems are unacceptable.
What's worse is that the theater was controversial from the beginning for refusing to hire union projectionists - there was a small group of picketers during the grand opening last year - an issue that I have reluctantly overlooked out of self-interest (that is, I want to go to my local theater even if I don't really want to cross a picket line, actual or symbolic). Now, with the projection problems continuing, it looks like the theater owner has made a a pretty boneheaded mistake.
I have sent a comment to the theater management via their website, and I encourage other disgruntled customers to do the same. This is a beautifully renovated theater, and the kind of repertory programming they are reviving with this classics series (which theater sources say is only the beginning) deserves to be praised to the skies, but quality projection has got to be a top priority.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Classics at The Alameda!
Kudos to the Alameda Theatre and Cineplex which, beginning next week, will be running a classic film series on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I am very excited about this, even though I have seen this particular slate of films many, many times:January 14-15: Vertigo
January 21-22: North by Northwest
January 28-29: The Maltese Falcon
February 4-5: Rear Window
It's interesting that's it's basically a Hitchcock series, with a Huston thrown in - but they'll get no complaints from me. I hope this continues on throughout the year. I have longed for such a series since the fabulously renovated theater re-opened in May, but had not dared to hope there was room yet for repertory film programming in this world of ours. I will be attending every one of these films - and hopefully will be able to twist some nearby arms to attend with me.
I believe I have only seen Vertigo on the big screen in the past - though possibly Rear Window, too. The opportunity is simply not there often enough. I hope folks come out for these screenings so they will continue. The theater has changed the website announcement a couple of times since I first saw it; at one point the films were labeled as being on AFI's list of the 100 Best American Films, which suggests they might explore more of that list in the future. Yay! I hope they show Citizen Kane (which actually happens to be one of my favorite films, absolutely thrilling every time I see it, and I've seen it A LOT). I get the feeling that few people have actually watched the "greatest film of all time."
Which, about that - I brought up this series last night at the Lucky 13, where I successfully warded off the urge to smoke as my friends were doing, and there was some general argument about the relative weakness of AFI's list. I'd have to agree that lists that rank films (or whatever) in order of greatness are usually pretty stupid. Or perhaps the word is boring, or pointless. Whether the "greatest film" is Kane or The Rules of the Game or Ants in Your Pants of 1939 is really not a very interesting question. How the estimation of a film changes over time is rather interesting, though, which is why I think the Sight & Sound poll is valuable - this is a critics poll, taken every ten years since 1952 (with a separate director's poll, since 1992) by the British Film Institute, that asks for a list of the ten greatest films. Kane has topped the list since 1962, but what has come next has changed dramatically over time. The first film in The Alameda's series is now regarded as the #2 film of all time, for instance, though it didn't appear in the list until '82.
The best response to AFI's list, now a decade old (though it has been updated since), is that of my favorite film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum. He rips AFI's list to shreds, for all the right reasons, and proposes an alternative list, unranked, that is vastly more idiosyncratic and worthwhile. Check it out here!
Whereas, this time in L.A., it was like this
Same zone, different girl. Any kind of life lesson in that, buddy?
I was there this time to help Andy with the reshoots for his long-awaited feature, Frogtown, for which I am one of the producers. Here, Jason hangs some diffusion while Andy talks to his actors, OS.
Every time I go to LA, there's a new brunch spot to try. This one was pretty fuckin' good. It's on Sunset near the Arclight.
Had fun with Ben in Venice prior to shooting.
Here we are shooting on the boardwalk after hours.
Here's Andy, that soulful fellow, with the rig. Frogtown has great potential, more than he realizes. It's hard to find perspective when you're in the trenches.I'm playing catch-up now: this all happened nearly a month ago. December happened, the holidays intervened, and there was just too much to do. This week, the first of the new year, in which I will turn 35 and in which my son will be born, I am ramping back up slowly to life-speed. There is so very much I need to do - one foot in front of the other.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
S.O.P.
I think Errol Morris is one of our great filmmakers. I've been watching his latest, Standard Operating Procedure, about the war crimes at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Not a movie it's easy to get anyone else to watch with you. It's not Morris' best, but still fascinating, penetrating, as always - and, apparently, it has made it past the first round of cuts for Oscar consideration.
After speaking with a former solider who spent a year in prison because of his presence in some of the photographs taken at the prison, although he committed no acts of abuse, this exchange takes place:
Investigator: If you were in the pictures while this stuff was going on, you were going to be in trouble.
Morris: Big trouble.
Investigator: If you make our president apologize to the world, I would say so, yeah.
That sort of says it all in terms of the actions taken after the scandal broke. It was much less of a problem that the torture occurred than that it was made public and embarrassed George Bush. Now, writing in the Washington Post, a former interrogator with Special Forces in Iraq points this out:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.
There are many voices calling for a reckoning, saying that the officials responsible for America's war crimes, specifically torture, must be held accountable.
Scott Horton's is one such voice, in his piece for this month's Harper's, "Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration." He makes a number of useful suggestions for how such a prosecution might be carried out and offers South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a possible model.
I believe that the Bush administration ought not be above the law. I believe that some of its members (I'm looking at you, Rummy) ought to be prosecuted for war crimes. If you agree with my first statement, then you will be hard-pressed not to arrive at my second statement, assuming you have the capacity for reason.
But it ain't gonna happen. This is the sad place we are today, as a nation. The fog is lifting and we find ourselves broke, out of work, exhausted, morally bankrupt, deeply depressed international criminals, with all of us to blame. We can't face it and we won't face it.
President Obama will simply not be willing to spend any political capital on pushing for the truth and reconciliation we crave but haven't the strength to seek for ourselves. So we will merely try to slough off this disastrous presidency and these terrible years and go on and, hopefully, never speak of it all again. It's a family shame, hidden away for another generation to bring to light, after we're gone.
After speaking with a former solider who spent a year in prison because of his presence in some of the photographs taken at the prison, although he committed no acts of abuse, this exchange takes place:
Investigator: If you were in the pictures while this stuff was going on, you were going to be in trouble.
Morris: Big trouble.
Investigator: If you make our president apologize to the world, I would say so, yeah.
That sort of says it all in terms of the actions taken after the scandal broke. It was much less of a problem that the torture occurred than that it was made public and embarrassed George Bush. Now, writing in the Washington Post, a former interrogator with Special Forces in Iraq points this out:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.
There are many voices calling for a reckoning, saying that the officials responsible for America's war crimes, specifically torture, must be held accountable.
Scott Horton's is one such voice, in his piece for this month's Harper's, "Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration." He makes a number of useful suggestions for how such a prosecution might be carried out and offers South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a possible model.I believe that the Bush administration ought not be above the law. I believe that some of its members (I'm looking at you, Rummy) ought to be prosecuted for war crimes. If you agree with my first statement, then you will be hard-pressed not to arrive at my second statement, assuming you have the capacity for reason.
But it ain't gonna happen. This is the sad place we are today, as a nation. The fog is lifting and we find ourselves broke, out of work, exhausted, morally bankrupt, deeply depressed international criminals, with all of us to blame. We can't face it and we won't face it.
President Obama will simply not be willing to spend any political capital on pushing for the truth and reconciliation we crave but haven't the strength to seek for ourselves. So we will merely try to slough off this disastrous presidency and these terrible years and go on and, hopefully, never speak of it all again. It's a family shame, hidden away for another generation to bring to light, after we're gone.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
The inspiration for Coulee
One of the writing projects on my list is a screenplay I have been working on for some time. It's called Coulee, and it's about a haunted dam.
A haunted dam? Here's how this came about: some years ago, back when I lived with my friends, Hope and Allison, in a three bedroom house near Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, which we called Old Tony, Hope and I were hanging out one day discussing ideas for movies. In fact, we were trying to come up with the dumbest movie idea we could think of, something I could write without concerning myself about things like authenticity, reason, sense - you know, a typical MOVIE.
One of my favorite silly horror movie tropes is the "old Indian burial ground." It serves as a kind of basic rationale for everything that goes on in films from Poltergeist to The Shining. It also describes, ya know, America.
So, a few days later, while we were still trying to come up with "the dumbest movie ever," I was watching a PBS documentary on the building of the Grand Coulee Dam. Guess what it was built on? Yep, an Indian burial ground. Eureka! Haunted dam!
The idea seemed to me to have just what I was looking for: a completely silly, seemingly ridiculous and even boring premise, yet one that was original, and with plenty of socio-historical aspects that I could invent out of whole cloth. That was the other aspect of the project, that I wanted to write a movie with no research at all - so that everything about it would feel vaguely familiar, but have no real basis in fact.
That was several years ago. Since then, now that I am finally actually working on it, I have gotten fairly far in outlining my story, but the "no research" thing has gone out the window.
Perhaps I should interject here and explain a bit more about why I didn't want to do any research. Movies, to me, fall into basically three categories: Great, Good and Idiotic. Great movies are extremely rare and most people do not even know what a great movie is - I do not mean what people mean when they say, "Gee, the new Batman movie was really great!" I'm talking about masterpieces, like Grand Illusion, Citizen Kane and The Godfather. Most moviegoers cannot identify the difference, but that's fine. It's hard to quantify, but mostly it has to do with singularity of vision, uncompromising commitment and artistry. Not all great films are equal, but they are all on a different level than the merely good.
Good movies are much more plentiful. Most Best Picture winners fall into this category. They are crowd-pleasing, well-executed examples of solid, even virtuoso, craftsmanship. Back to the Future, one of my all-time favorites, is a good movie. It could easily have been an idiotic movie (like BttF2 and 3), though, if all of its parts had not functioned so flawlessly together. On the high end, No Country for Old Men is a very good movie, the apogee of its makers' art to this point; and one of the fun aspects of being a movie fan is arguing about which movies deserve to be called great and which ones are merely good. Personally, I don't think we've had a great Best Picture Oscar since 1974 when GF2 won. There's little question in the minds of cinephiles who care about such things that The Godfather, Part 2, is one of the greatest films ever made. Many of the rest of the films to win since have been good, some of them very good, but some of them have been idiotic (viz., Crash, A Beautiful Mind).
Idiotic movies are failures of imagination and authenticity that insult the intelligence to the point where they are no longer even fun. I'm not talking about, say, Airplane! That's a movie about idiots, but it's not an idiotic movie. It's a good movie because it does what it does, on its on terms, with consistency and panache. I'm talking about most multiplex movies, many sequels and remakes and self-important "serious pictures" that lack chemistry, insight and charm, in spite of often obscene costs.
Anyway, to wind this back to the original point, it's important to note that B movies, exploitation flicks and classic "bad" movies are in no way necessarily idiotic. Many of them are actually good. My favorite example is Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven's howlingly awful big budget Vegas strippers (sorry, I mean dancers) exploitation flick. This cannot be an idiotic film, by definition, because it is so much fun to watch. That may be due to its trainwreck quality, but it's such a consistent trainwreck that it becomes utterly fascinating, to the point that it begins to feel like satire. That has been Verhoeven's defense in the years since, that he always intended the film as a satire of a certain Vegas subculture, or American consumerism, or whatever.
I don't think that flies, exactly, but the film can nevertheless be thoroughly and repeatedly enjoyed as satire, even a self-satire, whereas a truly idiotic film cannot be enjoyed even once.
With Coulee, my original intent was to write an idiotic movie that was secretly a good movie. My fantasy was that the movie would be made as a B movie, with second-rate everything, but would also function (perhaps for the kind of viewer who can appreciate Showgirls) as a good movie if you had the right attitude when you watched it. Now I'm more focused on writing a good, thoroughly silly and funny, but also scary, movie.
I thought that by doing no research I could create something that would function on those two different levels, while being essentially and completely artificial. A lot of movies that were heavily researched feel this way, too, and that was the point. The underlying idea had something to do with basic questions about the relationship between art and authenticity.
What I mean is that, given the artificiality of all movies, why do some feel more authentic than others? Is it a function of the degree of literal truth-telling on the part of the filmmakers (i.e., a movie about a historical subject that is shot in the actual castle where the events took place)? Or is authenticity more about emotional or human truth, irrespective of technical accuracy? I'm inclined to believe the latter, which suggests that even the most outrageous, only-in-the-movies situations and behaviors do not matter nearly as much as execution, emotion and imagination. Think about the experience of seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, for example.
But I do not have quite the imagination and knowledge to do what I need to do with no research. I need information to inspire me.
I've set Coulee to the side, briefly, as I've hit a wall with the story momentarily, but it's one of my chief writing projects right now and I will soon resume. I think I am about at the point where I can begin writing the script itself and see where that takes me.
A haunted dam? Here's how this came about: some years ago, back when I lived with my friends, Hope and Allison, in a three bedroom house near Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, which we called Old Tony, Hope and I were hanging out one day discussing ideas for movies. In fact, we were trying to come up with the dumbest movie idea we could think of, something I could write without concerning myself about things like authenticity, reason, sense - you know, a typical MOVIE.
One of my favorite silly horror movie tropes is the "old Indian burial ground." It serves as a kind of basic rationale for everything that goes on in films from Poltergeist to The Shining. It also describes, ya know, America.
So, a few days later, while we were still trying to come up with "the dumbest movie ever," I was watching a PBS documentary on the building of the Grand Coulee Dam. Guess what it was built on? Yep, an Indian burial ground. Eureka! Haunted dam!
The idea seemed to me to have just what I was looking for: a completely silly, seemingly ridiculous and even boring premise, yet one that was original, and with plenty of socio-historical aspects that I could invent out of whole cloth. That was the other aspect of the project, that I wanted to write a movie with no research at all - so that everything about it would feel vaguely familiar, but have no real basis in fact.
That was several years ago. Since then, now that I am finally actually working on it, I have gotten fairly far in outlining my story, but the "no research" thing has gone out the window.
Perhaps I should interject here and explain a bit more about why I didn't want to do any research. Movies, to me, fall into basically three categories: Great, Good and Idiotic. Great movies are extremely rare and most people do not even know what a great movie is - I do not mean what people mean when they say, "Gee, the new Batman movie was really great!" I'm talking about masterpieces, like Grand Illusion, Citizen Kane and The Godfather. Most moviegoers cannot identify the difference, but that's fine. It's hard to quantify, but mostly it has to do with singularity of vision, uncompromising commitment and artistry. Not all great films are equal, but they are all on a different level than the merely good.
Good movies are much more plentiful. Most Best Picture winners fall into this category. They are crowd-pleasing, well-executed examples of solid, even virtuoso, craftsmanship. Back to the Future, one of my all-time favorites, is a good movie. It could easily have been an idiotic movie (like BttF2 and 3), though, if all of its parts had not functioned so flawlessly together. On the high end, No Country for Old Men is a very good movie, the apogee of its makers' art to this point; and one of the fun aspects of being a movie fan is arguing about which movies deserve to be called great and which ones are merely good. Personally, I don't think we've had a great Best Picture Oscar since 1974 when GF2 won. There's little question in the minds of cinephiles who care about such things that The Godfather, Part 2, is one of the greatest films ever made. Many of the rest of the films to win since have been good, some of them very good, but some of them have been idiotic (viz., Crash, A Beautiful Mind).
Idiotic movies are failures of imagination and authenticity that insult the intelligence to the point where they are no longer even fun. I'm not talking about, say, Airplane! That's a movie about idiots, but it's not an idiotic movie. It's a good movie because it does what it does, on its on terms, with consistency and panache. I'm talking about most multiplex movies, many sequels and remakes and self-important "serious pictures" that lack chemistry, insight and charm, in spite of often obscene costs.
Anyway, to wind this back to the original point, it's important to note that B movies, exploitation flicks and classic "bad" movies are in no way necessarily idiotic. Many of them are actually good. My favorite example is Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven's howlingly awful big budget Vegas strippers (sorry, I mean dancers) exploitation flick. This cannot be an idiotic film, by definition, because it is so much fun to watch. That may be due to its trainwreck quality, but it's such a consistent trainwreck that it becomes utterly fascinating, to the point that it begins to feel like satire. That has been Verhoeven's defense in the years since, that he always intended the film as a satire of a certain Vegas subculture, or American consumerism, or whatever.
I don't think that flies, exactly, but the film can nevertheless be thoroughly and repeatedly enjoyed as satire, even a self-satire, whereas a truly idiotic film cannot be enjoyed even once.
With Coulee, my original intent was to write an idiotic movie that was secretly a good movie. My fantasy was that the movie would be made as a B movie, with second-rate everything, but would also function (perhaps for the kind of viewer who can appreciate Showgirls) as a good movie if you had the right attitude when you watched it. Now I'm more focused on writing a good, thoroughly silly and funny, but also scary, movie.
I thought that by doing no research I could create something that would function on those two different levels, while being essentially and completely artificial. A lot of movies that were heavily researched feel this way, too, and that was the point. The underlying idea had something to do with basic questions about the relationship between art and authenticity.
What I mean is that, given the artificiality of all movies, why do some feel more authentic than others? Is it a function of the degree of literal truth-telling on the part of the filmmakers (i.e., a movie about a historical subject that is shot in the actual castle where the events took place)? Or is authenticity more about emotional or human truth, irrespective of technical accuracy? I'm inclined to believe the latter, which suggests that even the most outrageous, only-in-the-movies situations and behaviors do not matter nearly as much as execution, emotion and imagination. Think about the experience of seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, for example.
But I do not have quite the imagination and knowledge to do what I need to do with no research. I need information to inspire me.
I've set Coulee to the side, briefly, as I've hit a wall with the story momentarily, but it's one of my chief writing projects right now and I will soon resume. I think I am about at the point where I can begin writing the script itself and see where that takes me.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Quantum of Solace
Saw the new Bond film with Scott and Charlise last night. Here's what I kept thinking:
This video is much better than the film, in spite of how there are better actors in Bond films these days. We sat way in the back, which was a great place to sit (apart from the young children nearby that should not have been there who kept talking throughout) but our vista did not make it any easier to understand the action. As for the story, well, I gave up on that very early. It involved a French dude with stained teeth (a very good actor, the one who looks like a young Roman Polanski), a seriously hot girl and someone from Bond's past named Vespa, which Charlise informed me is Italian for "wasp." She was also able to tell me that the opera featured in the film (at which a group of bad guy conspirators chose to hold a meeting via bluetooth - like, during the opera from their seats) was Puccini's Tosca, and that it was an actual production but without the usual cast.
(About the young children ... I like kids and will soon be a father, but you can't take kids who are under, say, 8 to PG-13 movies that aren't "Mommy and Me" screenings. It's rated that way for a reason, parents! If kids are not involved with what they're seeing - and even if they are, sometimes - they'll just talk, talk, talk. At that point, it is your responsibility to shut them up or leave. For. Christ's. Sake.)
This video is much better than the film, in spite of how there are better actors in Bond films these days. We sat way in the back, which was a great place to sit (apart from the young children nearby that should not have been there who kept talking throughout) but our vista did not make it any easier to understand the action. As for the story, well, I gave up on that very early. It involved a French dude with stained teeth (a very good actor, the one who looks like a young Roman Polanski), a seriously hot girl and someone from Bond's past named Vespa, which Charlise informed me is Italian for "wasp." She was also able to tell me that the opera featured in the film (at which a group of bad guy conspirators chose to hold a meeting via bluetooth - like, during the opera from their seats) was Puccini's Tosca, and that it was an actual production but without the usual cast.
(About the young children ... I like kids and will soon be a father, but you can't take kids who are under, say, 8 to PG-13 movies that aren't "Mommy and Me" screenings. It's rated that way for a reason, parents! If kids are not involved with what they're seeing - and even if they are, sometimes - they'll just talk, talk, talk. At that point, it is your responsibility to shut them up or leave. For. Christ's. Sake.)
Saturday, October 18, 2008
W.
Weak tea from Oliver Stone, broad strokes and little insight, a shallow biopic of a shallow man. Richard Dreyfuss and Josh Brolin turn in finely-tuned caricatures; the other performers, less finely-tuned. I've been looking forward to this film, though I still had low expectations. My biggest question, having just seen it, is why make it? Bush is neither lionized nor demonized, and he's only vaguely humanized; I can't figure out what the point was.
W. is an interesting cultural artifact, however. Have any other sitting presidents been the subject of a film? As divisive and ruinous a president as W has been, is this film simply a symptom of our exhaustion? Is it too much to ask the filmmakers to find an angle and play it to the hilt, assuming they're not interested in real subtlety and nuance? Maybe even Stone just doesn't have the heart, as surely the American people do not, to really press this subject. One day, perhaps, someone will make the George Bush film that George Bush deserves.
I think, given some distance from these terrible times, someone might have the balls to really sharpen the knives and make the brutal, pitch-black comedy this might have been. Or even, the great tragedy as we've seen it unfold these last eight years. But, for the moment, we long to forget...
W. is an interesting cultural artifact, however. Have any other sitting presidents been the subject of a film? As divisive and ruinous a president as W has been, is this film simply a symptom of our exhaustion? Is it too much to ask the filmmakers to find an angle and play it to the hilt, assuming they're not interested in real subtlety and nuance? Maybe even Stone just doesn't have the heart, as surely the American people do not, to really press this subject. One day, perhaps, someone will make the George Bush film that George Bush deserves.
I think, given some distance from these terrible times, someone might have the balls to really sharpen the knives and make the brutal, pitch-black comedy this might have been. Or even, the great tragedy as we've seen it unfold these last eight years. But, for the moment, we long to forget...
Friday, September 5, 2008
Hamlet 2
In a summer with more than the usual number of smart comedies, Hamlet 2 is the best of them. It's a clever parody of the Inspirational Teacher Movie, at it's best zany, filthy and sharp. One can complain about an underused cast - Elizabeth Shue and Catherine Keener are both great actors who barely register here, for starters - or the sheer ridiculousness of the enterprise, but why bother when you have Steve Coogan's best film performance to date, a case of a great comic actor slipping completely into the skin of his character.
Or when you have co-writer Pam Brady, who co-wrote also South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and is a producer of the TV show, most certainly putting the phrase, "Those Bible-humpers can suck a bag of dicks," in Amy Poehler's mouth, or helping to pen the glorious "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus" musical number that is Coogan's apotheosis.
If it doesn't work at all times, I am inclined to forgive. Director Andrew Fleming also directed Threesome, a 1994 Harlequin Romance in which Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin and Josh Charles have a kind of drawn-out, repressed ménage à trois. I remember watching this film with two female friends of mine in, perhaps, 1995. It was a fun evening.
So, again, Fleming gives us a movie that is an enjoyably bad farce; here, there's also something brilliantly subversive about it. It celebrates free expression with a fuck you attitude, a foul mouth and its "heartsoul" in the right place.
Or when you have co-writer Pam Brady, who co-wrote also South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and is a producer of the TV show, most certainly putting the phrase, "Those Bible-humpers can suck a bag of dicks," in Amy Poehler's mouth, or helping to pen the glorious "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus" musical number that is Coogan's apotheosis.
If it doesn't work at all times, I am inclined to forgive. Director Andrew Fleming also directed Threesome, a 1994 Harlequin Romance in which Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin and Josh Charles have a kind of drawn-out, repressed ménage à trois. I remember watching this film with two female friends of mine in, perhaps, 1995. It was a fun evening.
So, again, Fleming gives us a movie that is an enjoyably bad farce; here, there's also something brilliantly subversive about it. It celebrates free expression with a fuck you attitude, a foul mouth and its "heartsoul" in the right place.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Woody Allen is my idol; I love his work and I know more about him than any other filmmaker, though there are plenty of directors I think are better. His 43rd film as a director is Vicky Cristina Barcelona; we saw it yesterday at Bay Street, where they had some difficulty projecting it correctly but eventually figured it out. It should not have been such a challenge to frame it up, but anyway.
I am pleased to report that it's his best work in ten years, surpassing Match Point, and certainly blowing away everything (and Anything) else he's done since at least Sweet and Lowdown. Apart from that film's brilliant performances and lush design, I find its structure lacking; VCB is probably better overall, in its breezy, romantic good humor and consistency. Not that this kind of ranking is particularly meaningful except for Woodyphiles like myself but, knowing his work as I do, I automatically try to fit each new film into the oeuvre.
Even his low points, and there have been many in the last couple decades (in my opinion, his last great film was Husbands and Wives in 1992), have some interest for me as I see him shuffling and reshuffling his deck of conceits, jokes, characters, tics, locations, traits, situations, themes and conversations with each film. In VCB he pulls a pretty good hand, with fine, sexy performances, consistent humor throughout, light, deft direction and the inspiration of a luminous new setting.
And I enjoyed this piece, from the New York Times, very much. Classic stuff.
I am pleased to report that it's his best work in ten years, surpassing Match Point, and certainly blowing away everything (and Anything) else he's done since at least Sweet and Lowdown. Apart from that film's brilliant performances and lush design, I find its structure lacking; VCB is probably better overall, in its breezy, romantic good humor and consistency. Not that this kind of ranking is particularly meaningful except for Woodyphiles like myself but, knowing his work as I do, I automatically try to fit each new film into the oeuvre.
Even his low points, and there have been many in the last couple decades (in my opinion, his last great film was Husbands and Wives in 1992), have some interest for me as I see him shuffling and reshuffling his deck of conceits, jokes, characters, tics, locations, traits, situations, themes and conversations with each film. In VCB he pulls a pretty good hand, with fine, sexy performances, consistent humor throughout, light, deft direction and the inspiration of a luminous new setting.
And I enjoyed this piece, from the New York Times, very much. Classic stuff.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
DIY Days
Last Sunday I attended DIY Days at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. My friend Maria, a classmate from CalArts, suggested that we go, so I have her to thank for getting me off my ass. It was an inspiring day of panels and case studies about very independent filmmaking, alternative distribution and self-promotion for your film projects. We heard from Tiffany Shlain, Arin Crumley, Caveh Zahedi and Lance Weiler among many others.
Here Maria is arguing with her friend, Ben, about whether it makes sense to buy people you're trying to network with, or pitch to, or from whom you want something, a cup of coffee:
My favorite talk of the day happened in the later afternoon, when the schedule was starting to bunch up, so it was not given quite as much time as I would have liked. It was called "Cinema and the Singularity," which title intrigued me enough to encourage me to stay when I had been contemplating leaving earlier.
The question the speakers were asking was rather mind-blowing to me. They asked, "What would singularity cinema look like?" A different way of putting that might be, "What happens when the stories start writing themselves?"
This was meaningful to me because, in a sense, it was a subject of my thesis film, Nervous, but I was only scratching the surface of those issues. The idea, though, of avatars in virtual worlds becoming self-aware and spinning narratives of their own is pretty interesting, if difficult to imagine and technologically unlikely (for now). It's a much more interesting topic philosophically than as some kind of prediction. I have thought about working out a feature-length version of the film, in which case I would certainly come back to these ideas.
As it turns out, though, the panels were not the best parts of my day. The second best part was learning about a crazy, amazing super-pen. I'm an avid note-taker, so this pen was one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my life. The kid who showed it to me was a little nervous at first - apparently he had just been trained by the company and had chosen me as one of his first marks to try his pitch on, so I could have easily rejected his advances. But it was a home run for him because I thought the pen was super-awesome.
The best part of the day was totally unexpected. Faye Dunaway was at DIY Days and I got to meet her for a quick moment, just as she was preparing to leave. Apparently, she is really into DIY cinema and fascinated with new technology, which is pretty cool for a woman in her late sixties. She was very nice and pretty low-key and was cool about me introducing myself as a fan and talking with her for a moment. It was thrilling, because I absolutely love her and several of her films are among my favorites, including Chinatown and Network. I gave her directions to Market Street.
Here she is, on her way out:
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