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.
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Wendy and Lucy
Kelly Reichardt's third film is Wendy and Lucy, in which Michelle Williams' down-and-out hipster, Wendy, searches for the director's dog, Lucy. In KR's previous film, Old Joy--not to be confused with Oldboy--I thought Lucy's performance edged out that film's leads, but here Williams holds her own.
And more so. This is a superb film and it's built around Williams like a little cabin in the redwoods. It seems somehow cozy and expansive, though there's nothing cozy about the futility, the darkness, knawing at the edges of this simple story. I'm not the first to be struck by its similarity to Carver, though it's actually based on a story by Jonathan Raymond.
I was impressed with the rigor and beauty of Old Joy, but ultimately didn't have enough curiousity about the characters to sustain the narrative minimalism. Here it was different. In Carver's best work, his effects come across in how the reader constructs the spaces between what he's given us and tries to resolve what he's denied us. Reichardt, too, allows us to know very little for sure about our heroine (that is to say, Wendy). She's "passing through," she's estranged from her family, she's counting her last hundreds in her drive across country, hoping to make it to the canneries of Alaska. Her golden retriever mix, Lucy, is pretty much all she has.
But we don't get cheap clues or clumsy exposition or voice-over or flashbacks or really anything more to help us fill in any other facts of Wendy's life. Rail-thin, she's largely desexualized in her hipster boy-clothes and cropped haircut, unless you like that sort of thing. She's still rather stunning, of course, because it's a movie and she's Michelle Williams. For that reason and because she's so down-and-out, she has our sympathy from the beginning.
And she continues to have it, for the most part, but throughout the film--and days later, it seems--many questions spin out from her circumstances, even as they deteroriate. It's a wonder to be watching a film that depends on you to help construct what you're seeing and doesn't simply spoon feed you. Wendy and Lucy, in its still, quiet way, constantly asks you to respond. What would you do in her shoes? Would you help her? How did she get here? What's the right move? How did she screw her life up like this? How far away from this am I? Your sympathies shift moment to moment as you scrutinize her more and more closely.
The film encourages--demands, really--a deep, close reading. Like Gus Van Sant's best work, Wendy and Lucy cannot merely be watched. To do so, frankly, is to risk boredom--it would be like watching someone else play a game. These films are meant to be engaged with, stepped into, like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Lucy the dog, by the way, is a remarkable screen performer. She was such a good doggie in Old Joy that she upstaged pretty much that whole movie by her very...well, joy, actually. Hmm, I think I've just realized something. Anyway, her long absence in the new film lends the story its dread, touching on, in its neo-realist way, the Northwest Gothic dread of Twin Peaks, the dark whistling pines at the forest's edge a metaphor for the unspeakable state of nature beyond.
We fear for Wendy that, though things look bad now, they may get much worse just down the road.
And more so. This is a superb film and it's built around Williams like a little cabin in the redwoods. It seems somehow cozy and expansive, though there's nothing cozy about the futility, the darkness, knawing at the edges of this simple story. I'm not the first to be struck by its similarity to Carver, though it's actually based on a story by Jonathan Raymond.
I was impressed with the rigor and beauty of Old Joy, but ultimately didn't have enough curiousity about the characters to sustain the narrative minimalism. Here it was different. In Carver's best work, his effects come across in how the reader constructs the spaces between what he's given us and tries to resolve what he's denied us. Reichardt, too, allows us to know very little for sure about our heroine (that is to say, Wendy). She's "passing through," she's estranged from her family, she's counting her last hundreds in her drive across country, hoping to make it to the canneries of Alaska. Her golden retriever mix, Lucy, is pretty much all she has.
But we don't get cheap clues or clumsy exposition or voice-over or flashbacks or really anything more to help us fill in any other facts of Wendy's life. Rail-thin, she's largely desexualized in her hipster boy-clothes and cropped haircut, unless you like that sort of thing. She's still rather stunning, of course, because it's a movie and she's Michelle Williams. For that reason and because she's so down-and-out, she has our sympathy from the beginning.
And she continues to have it, for the most part, but throughout the film--and days later, it seems--many questions spin out from her circumstances, even as they deteroriate. It's a wonder to be watching a film that depends on you to help construct what you're seeing and doesn't simply spoon feed you. Wendy and Lucy, in its still, quiet way, constantly asks you to respond. What would you do in her shoes? Would you help her? How did she get here? What's the right move? How did she screw her life up like this? How far away from this am I? Your sympathies shift moment to moment as you scrutinize her more and more closely.
The film encourages--demands, really--a deep, close reading. Like Gus Van Sant's best work, Wendy and Lucy cannot merely be watched. To do so, frankly, is to risk boredom--it would be like watching someone else play a game. These films are meant to be engaged with, stepped into, like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Lucy the dog, by the way, is a remarkable screen performer. She was such a good doggie in Old Joy that she upstaged pretty much that whole movie by her very...well, joy, actually. Hmm, I think I've just realized something. Anyway, her long absence in the new film lends the story its dread, touching on, in its neo-realist way, the Northwest Gothic dread of Twin Peaks, the dark whistling pines at the forest's edge a metaphor for the unspeakable state of nature beyond.
We fear for Wendy that, though things look bad now, they may get much worse just down the road.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Eastbound & Down
The meteoric ascension of Danny McBride continues, after The Foot Fist Way, Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express, in HBO's "Eastbound & Down." McBride's redneck comic persona is similar to Will Ferrell's arrogant idiot with more desperation and a harder edge. Surely this affinity is what drew Ferrell and his comedy partner, Adam McKay, to McBride in Foot Fist, which they shepherded to festival slots and distribution and more or less franchised in this new series, which just ended its six-episode first season run.In Foot Fist, McBride was an unlikely children's martial arts instructor, dreaming of the big time; in "Eastbound & Down," he's a washed-up big league pitcher forced to return to his southern hometown and become a P.E. coach at the local middle school. The superficial attraction of the series is watching McBride's Kenny Powers, with his shockingly filthy mouth and stadium-sized ego, contend with the diminishment of his life and prospects back home. If you liked Foot Fist and McBride's memorable character in Pineapple, you'll love "Eastbound & Down."
Not all critics do, nor will all audiences, but there is a lot more to this series, as it turns out, that has made the first season such a pleasure. Not just Will Ferrell's recurring character or the talented supporting cast but an unexpected groundedness in real life makes the series something special. What's more, episodes 2-4 were directed by David Gordon Green, one of the best American filmmakers of his generation. Green directed Pineapple Express, but prior to that he was known for deeply-felt portraits of the decaying south, like George Washington and the heartbreakingly romantic All the Real Girls, a work of stunning naturalism and beauty (McBride has a small part in that one, too).
Green's skill and native southern sensibility, sympathy and rhythm lends his episodes, especially, a poetic lyricism amidst the raw humor, boobies and bad behavior. McBride's characters, notably in his work with Foot Fist director and series co-creator, Jody Hill (along with Ben Best), have hinted all along at a greater soulfulness we don't much get to see, obscured as it is by his super-loser antics. Here it's starting to shine through.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
Slumdog Millionaire might be 2008's most over-praised film, an honor I had thought I would bestow upon The Dark Knight. Audiences and critics seem to love Slumdog. I understand it to a point; it's a feel-good fantasy in an exotic setting about an orphan from a hellish slum who becomes rich and wins the girl of his dreams. I like fantasy, too - but not brutally dishonest fantasy.
Isn't any fantasy dishonest? Or any and every film, for that matter? Okay, but how far do you need to take this? Some films tell you up front that they are fantasies; Slumdog tries to have it both ways. It tries to be grounded in the reality of life in hell and make it flashy and sexy, too. It "corrects" the violence, filth and savage injustices of its characters' lives with coincidence, shallow characterization, all-conquering love and lies upon lies. I am not usually bothered when popular filmmakers use colorful Third World backdrops because they rarely ask us to take their tourism seriously (in The Incredible Hulk, for instance, or the Bourne and Bond films); also, I just don't give a shit about that kind of argument. But, alas, director Danny Boyle seems not to know that he is a tourist here, reminding me of the gullible travelers in his film's Taj Mahal sequence. Yep, it's a film set in India, made by a British director - and it has a Taj Mahal sequence. Of course it does.
To be fair, Boyle's Taj Mahal sequence is not without irony. I've tended to like his work in the past and had some hopes for this film, in spite of what its ad campaign suggested to me. The first half of the film is rather charming, too, when he's following the main character as a child. In spite of the horrors of their lives, children are resilient - to a point. It's just so bleeding unlikely that everything is going to work out so well, fall so neatly into place, for anyone as an adult, let alone someone who reaches adulthood under the circumstances depicted here, that the film just goes off the rails after a certain point.
That is to say, what had been a pleasant fantasy becomes an unpleasant, treacly fantasy that stops making sense even by its own rules. As one absurdity after another piles up, I start checking out.
As for the viewing experience, tonight we sat in the Alameda's balcony for the first time, which was a novel and extremely pleasant vantage. Sadly, in the row behind us was a pair of middle-aged women who seemed to mistake the gigantic, art deco theater for their own living room. They reacted audibly to each twist and turn of the film, including simple sounds and full sentences of advice for the characters, and they occasionally struck up conversation with each other. Perhaps my reaction to the film comes in part from the fact that I was distracted both by their noise and by what I might do about it.
I considered talking to them right in the middle of the film; I also went over several scenarios for talking to them after the film was over. In this situation, if I make it through the film without saying anything, there's about a 50% chance that I will say something afterwards. This time I said, "Ladies, a little too much talking during the movie." They flattened their faces at me and sort of subtly bent back and away. I continued, "This is not your living room."
By now, Kim had practically turned into a gas in her efforts to get out of there. We left.
Look, I don't crave that kind of confrontation. I don't love to embarrass my wife, or be a dick. But if you go to the movies, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Or don't go. Those are your options. If you are too stupid to understand that, you are too stupid to attend the movies.
Isn't any fantasy dishonest? Or any and every film, for that matter? Okay, but how far do you need to take this? Some films tell you up front that they are fantasies; Slumdog tries to have it both ways. It tries to be grounded in the reality of life in hell and make it flashy and sexy, too. It "corrects" the violence, filth and savage injustices of its characters' lives with coincidence, shallow characterization, all-conquering love and lies upon lies. I am not usually bothered when popular filmmakers use colorful Third World backdrops because they rarely ask us to take their tourism seriously (in The Incredible Hulk, for instance, or the Bourne and Bond films); also, I just don't give a shit about that kind of argument. But, alas, director Danny Boyle seems not to know that he is a tourist here, reminding me of the gullible travelers in his film's Taj Mahal sequence. Yep, it's a film set in India, made by a British director - and it has a Taj Mahal sequence. Of course it does.
To be fair, Boyle's Taj Mahal sequence is not without irony. I've tended to like his work in the past and had some hopes for this film, in spite of what its ad campaign suggested to me. The first half of the film is rather charming, too, when he's following the main character as a child. In spite of the horrors of their lives, children are resilient - to a point. It's just so bleeding unlikely that everything is going to work out so well, fall so neatly into place, for anyone as an adult, let alone someone who reaches adulthood under the circumstances depicted here, that the film just goes off the rails after a certain point.
That is to say, what had been a pleasant fantasy becomes an unpleasant, treacly fantasy that stops making sense even by its own rules. As one absurdity after another piles up, I start checking out.
As for the viewing experience, tonight we sat in the Alameda's balcony for the first time, which was a novel and extremely pleasant vantage. Sadly, in the row behind us was a pair of middle-aged women who seemed to mistake the gigantic, art deco theater for their own living room. They reacted audibly to each twist and turn of the film, including simple sounds and full sentences of advice for the characters, and they occasionally struck up conversation with each other. Perhaps my reaction to the film comes in part from the fact that I was distracted both by their noise and by what I might do about it.
I considered talking to them right in the middle of the film; I also went over several scenarios for talking to them after the film was over. In this situation, if I make it through the film without saying anything, there's about a 50% chance that I will say something afterwards. This time I said, "Ladies, a little too much talking during the movie." They flattened their faces at me and sort of subtly bent back and away. I continued, "This is not your living room."
By now, Kim had practically turned into a gas in her efforts to get out of there. We left.
Look, I don't crave that kind of confrontation. I don't love to embarrass my wife, or be a dick. But if you go to the movies, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Or don't go. Those are your options. If you are too stupid to understand that, you are too stupid to attend the movies.
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.
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.
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...
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