The Man From Porlock

IU Cinema Experiences: Pather Panchali

2012-01-22T15:00:00.006-05:00

In the spirit of trying something different to see how it goes, this post begins a semi-recurring column titled "IU Cinema Experiences," in which I reflect on films that I've seen at the Indiana University Cinema here in Bloomington. Those already sick of the breathless coverage of the goings-on with my favorite local movie venue may roll their eyes on cue, but I'm taking this tack as a way to review older, classic films within the context of the overall experience with an audience in a theater. I thought of this after reporting last week on viewing Once Upon a Time in the West, one of the greatest moviegoing experiences in memory. (To my original summary of that masterwork I would add the idle thought of Stringer Bell from The Wire being a successor to Henry Fonda's Frank - a thug yearning for the white-collar respectability he's clearly not cut out for - and the fascination and pleasure in Leone's employment of intricate mechanics - of plot, of railroads, of industry - into his customarily warm-blooded filmmaking.) As one of my easterly readers noted, the revival of vintage film is par for the course in New York, but it's a game-changer here in the Midwest, and the fact that visiting VIPs from both Coasts have been taken by what they've seen here compels me to report on it as it's unfolding.

Yesterday afternoon's screening of Pather Panchali (1955) kicked off the Spring Semester's impressive "City Lights Series," following an overnight ice storm that left more empty seats than there likely would have been otherwise. I'd been looking forward to the movie because I'd seen a couple of Satyajit Ray films last year - after hearing about him long ago from glowing reviews by the likes of Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael - but his famous "Apu Trilogy" remains on Netflix curiously unavailable, so this was my chance to see the first of those films (indeed, the first film Ray made). Even sight unseen I had the idea that the movie was a coming-of-age tale about a boy's impoverished childhood while growing up in rural India. That's more or less true, leaning towards less, because Apu (Subir Bannerjee) is depicted as one part of a familial ensemble rather than the center of the story. The narrative begins - as is frequently seen through the eyes of - Apu's older sister Durga (a wonderfully assured Uma Das Gupta), whose petty larceny, it is implied, is part of the same gene pool as her cunning, opportunistic Auntie (Chunibala Devi). Yet significant parts of Pather Panchali are devoted to Apu's lonely mother (Karuna Bannerjee), who stays at home to care for the kids while their idealistic, playwright-aspiring father (Kanu Bannerjee) travels in search of work to make ends meet. The title of the film - the same as the original novel - means "Song of the Little Road," and Ray's movie casually unfolds as a string of vignettes from a folktale, held together by the calm, steady voice of a gifted orator.

Legend has it Ray had never shot a reel of film prior to the making of this one, and practically every scene in Pather Panchali - if not the meandering pace that connects them together - shows his instinctive movie-sense. One scene featuring Auntie telling a fable to her niece and nephew begins with a close-up of her shadow on the wall, slowly pulling back to reveal her gnarled face. (If I must confess to finding her character often irritating and hard to bear, I also have to admit that she's an unforgettable enough presence that the movie would be considerably less without her.) Another key sequence takes place during an evening monsoon, with Durga ill in bed, and her mother struggling to protect her against the wind and rain breaking through the rickety dwelling. Ray doesn't overdramatize the storm the way a Hollywood production would; it's very naturalness is what's terrifying. Yet his subtle visual touches - a door, a window tarp, a candle - are indicative of a master filmmaker.

Pather Panchali was the first film out of India to capture the attention of John Huston, Akira Kurosawa, and the world press at Cannes (and it's amusing how that sentence reads with authority despite my having only recently read about it). Also worth noting is Charles Burnett, during his visit to campus a couple months ago, said that it was Satyajit Ray - more than Italian neorealists like De Sica, so claimed by many critics - who was the primary influence on Killer of Sheep. (In retrospect, it's head-slappingly clear that Burnett's episodic debut about growing up in a poor African-American household shares many similarities to Ray's.) Of the three Ray films I've seen so far, Mahanagar (The Big City), a funny and bracing depiction of gender politics in 1960s Calcutta, remains my favorite; the third, The Music Room, while also a fine film, suffered from a shoddy DVD transfer and Hooked-On-Phonics subtitles. The 35mm print of Pather Panchali was imperfect, yet I suspect high-quality by what appears to be the dismal standards of Indian film preservation. More than Apu, who has every reason to feel dissatisfied, we should be thankful for what we have.

Le Carre, Leone and Labyrinths (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Once Upon a Time in the West)

2012-01-15T14:50:00.007-05:00

(Warning: Spoilers.)

At last Thursday night's screening of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West - in glorious 35mm at the IU Cinema - retired Executive Director of Film Preservation (at Paramount) Barry Allen described the structure of the film as "like a labyrinth...a series of concentric circles revolving around Claudia Cardinale's character at the center." That's an intriguing way to put it, and it also could apply to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson's raved-about new adaptation of John le Carre's classic espionage novel. The films are similar in complexity and employ the power of suggestion rather than overstatement. Leone's narrative, however, shoots outward from Cardinale Central to convey the expansion of modern America across the Old West; Alfredson follows le Carre's plot inward through a deadly thicket of Cold War treachery to the identity of the traitor responsible.

Commanding the investigation from along the periphery is George Smiley (Gary Oldman), whom we learn early on was forced into early retirement along with his boss, Control (John Hurt), following a botched rendezvous in Budapest leaving their operative Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) wounded. The Budapest debacle is one of at least three key flashback sequences woven into the narrative, the tale of Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) and a drunken Christmas party at "the Circus (MI6) being the other two. Ricki, another low-level "scalp-hunter" on the run from both the Brits and Russians, wants to exchange information about the KGB mole in order to help a Soviet spy (Svetlanda Khodchenkova), with whom he's become romantically entangled, defect. Meanwhile, at the Christmas party (reportedly not in le Carre's novel), we gradually become privy to the consequences of an affair on the pair of cuckolded parties.

All of this is even more complicated than it sounds, to where only an arrogant (read: intellectually insecure) viewer would claim that it's a cinch to follow. The original 1979 BBC Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring the gratingly precise diction of Alec Guinness, packed presumably as much of the book's plot that would fit its 5-plus-hours running time; the granular level of detail left many le Carre fans enthralled, but for me if it moved any slower it would have been going backwards. Alfredson's adaptation poses the opposite problem: building a complicated international thriller around glances, suggestions, and inside-baseball lingo. At times the enterprise comes across as Cliffs Notes le Carre, yet on the whole the movie held me. It's a relief to see an adaptation of a novel (the screenplay is by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan) that respects the source material without genuflecting toward it, and trusts the actors (more than that: depends on them) to get the point across. While Oldman leads a stalwart British ensemble, including Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Benedict Cumberbatch - half of whom appear almost visibly relieved to have finally graduated from Hogwarts - Alfredson, his DP (Hoyte van Hoytema), production designer (Maria Djurkovic) and art director (Tom Brown) envelope their cast in an atmosphere that not only reminds you of an early 1970s film but looks like it could have been made during the era it depicts. It's a movie that spells out nothing, couching its emotions and its violence until they burst in tandem, like a teardrop falling from a bullet.

Last week I mentioned that I rarely review older, classic films, finding little to say about them that hasn't already been said. But I do want to mention briefly that Once Upon a Time in the West, a movie I'd seen before (several times, on DVD), is simply stunning on the type of big screen for which it was clearly made. I'd expected Ennio Morricone's multilayered score to register strongly in a theater hot-wired for sound, but I hadn't counted on the enhancement of the performances (particularly Jason Robards, whom I'd previously considered the weak link, but whose subtleties come into sharper focus; and Gabriele Ferzetti's invalid railroad baron, whose longing to see the Pacific grows unexpectedly poignant) as well as the increased clarity of the labyrinthine narrative, unusually dense for a Western, each turn of the plot clicking satisfyingly into place. Despite lousy winter weather and a concurring IU home basketball game, the Cinema was almost completely full, and hardly a sound was heard during the three-hour running time. Afterwards we floated out of the theater, oblivious to the cold, a colleague telling me the next day that going to the movies "doesn't get any better than this."

The Man From Porlock's Year in Film 2011

2012-01-02T15:00:00.009-05:00

2011 will go down, in my tiny pocket of the universe, as the year of my movie education. Sure, I "knew" movies for many years before, to the amusement of my family and annoyance of my friends. ("You like them innerlectual movies," a high school friend informed me, after I dragged him to a screening of The Big Easy.) But as Jason Bellamy aptly puts it, "I may be a Trekkie, but these people speak Klingon." 'These people,' who may include some of you, are the true hardcore cinephiles I've encountered on Facebook, on Twitter, and in the blogosphere. I assure my circle of friends and family and work colleagues that while I know certain aspects of cinema relatively well - American movies from the 1970s on is my comfort zone - I'm an amateur regarding its history on the whole.

That history, as I've learned in the 4 1/2 years I've been blogging, is a humbling and awe-inspiring thing. I tend to focus on new releases here at Porlock (and the occasional book or TV series), because A) I've seen a mere fraction of what many of the folks with links on the right of this page have seen; and B) for those classic films I have seen, what left is there for me to say? Nevertheless, 2011 was the year of my Netflix queue, the year I made a concerted effort to expand my knowledge base. (This was also the year I came late to the Blu-Ray party, and followed up with a new wider-screen TV at year's end.) I queued movies reviewed or mentioned by other bloggers or tweeters, movies on the "pantheons" of the AFI and Paul Schrader, movies recommended by the Netflix database. I queued fewer new releases (streaming some of those instead) and watched instead films that filled an inch or two of my gaps: Preston Sturges comedies and 30s musicals, Japanese and Italian cinema, Max Ophuls and Satyijat Ray. As a result, I'd guesstimate my knowledge base has expanded from, say, 5% to 8-10%. I'll probably never speak Klingon, but as long as I keep learning and growing, that's more than fine by me.

I saw very few new releases for the first half of the year, catching up somewhat during the second half, totaling approximately 30 overall. Of those 30, less than ten were viewed at regular chains (the two AMC theaters in town). Six were at the Indiana University Cinema, and a couple more I watched at Ebertfest in April 2011. The rest were either on DVD or, more commonly, streaming on Xfinity. Luckily I caught most of the year's highlights, albeit with a few blind spots (e.g, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, A Separation, Margaret). Even luckier, I managed to catch up with 24 classic films through "revivals" at the IU Cinema, which officially opened on campus this year and has quickly become a center for film-viewing here in Bloomington, IN. I had seen most of these films before, but watching the likes of Lawrence of Arabia and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Psycho and Vertigo on the big screen is essentially watching them for the first time. The experience of seeing few key new releases there was also undoubtedly enhanced from what it would have been at the regular chains, with their dismaying rise in boorish audience behavior and technical malfunctions. The Cinema has had its share of growing pains - a few bad prints, an undergrad flipping open his cell phone during Meek's Cutoff, a sixty-something Sherlock Holmes conference attendee at a screening of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution cramming a large Tupperware bowl of homemade popcorn in his mouth - half of it ending up on the floor - after I politely told him it wasn't allowed ("Yeah, I know!" he exclaimed). By and large, though, audiences are attentive and the films look great. If you're ever in the neighborhood, check it out.

Although a Top-10 list from somebody who sees relatively few films would be misguided at best, I've cobbled together some of my favorites, least favorites, and other impressions from the year. I will try to avoid stepping into the territory of the aforementioned Mr. Bellamy, whose annual "Best of" post is a hugely entertaining must-read. I will also add that my opinions follow no model or method of the Right Way to view film, as some of the more tiresome critics insist there is, the more they huff and puff the less they convince. For me, the only "Right Way" is the way that's expressed adeptly and honestly, that engages the reader and encourages thought and discussion. I certainly haven't met these goals with every post, but hopefully I've hit near the mark enough for those of you regular readers to keep on reading, regardless of whether or not you agree with my views.

Best of 2011 (where and when viewed in parentheses):

1. The Tree of Life. (IU Cinema, August 2011.) Hate to be unoriginal, but Terrence Malick's fragmented epic paralleling the growing pains of a Texas youth with that of the Earth engaged my mind, opened my senses, and stirred my soul more than any movie all year.

2. Hugo. (AMC Bloomington 12, December 2011.) Martin Scorsese's elating "children's film" feels, like Malick's movie, an attempt to capture he's ever wanted to say about his own grand obsessions, as well as a vital piece of connective tissue between the uncertain future of cinema and its endangered past.

3. Drive (IU Cinema, September 2011.) A bloody, beautiful piece of mythmaking from Nicolas Winding Refn. Some seemed to think this was nothing more than a string of empty cinematic homages and a celebration of ersatz cool. It seems pretty clear, though, that Refn and Gosling want us to see the disturbing consequences of bullshit machismo as the Driver fulfills his destiny in the shimmering dark of L.A (the amazing Newton Thomas Sigel with my favorite cinematography of the year).

Other Great Films: Certified Copy, Carlos (a 2010 release I didn't see until Spring 2011), Melancholia, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Honorable Mention: The Descendants, Midnight in Paris, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Win Win, Attack the Block, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Captain America: The First Avenger.

You Liked It More Than I Did: Joe Wright's thriller Hanna, which I found tedious, earned some fervent admirers. Kelly Reichardt's acclaimed Meek's Cutoff had some great moments but ultimately fell short for me. Most of all, Moneyball, the year's "I don't like baseball but I really like this movie" movie, seemed to me a textbook example of filmmakers not fully comprehending their subject and trying to slip some disingenuous notions past the audience. How else to explain the dubious depiction of Art Howe as an absentee manager, or why the crucial narrative thread of a player becoming a starter inexplicably climaxes with his coming off the bench to pinch-hit, or the claim that embracing Billy Beane's principles rather than lining their own deep pockets (with at least one of Beane's former superstars) led to the Boston Red Sox becoming World Series champs? Beane's own A's have also floundered considerably in the years since, but the movie doesn't want you to know that either.

Worst of 2011: Friends with Benefits, an energetically inept romantic comedy that embraces the very conventions it pretends to be subverting (and, more unforgivably, wants to convince you that flash-mobs are cool), made me wonder if my rave for Will Gluck's previous film, Easy A, was off the beam. The Help, about which I can only second the chorus of criticisms regarding its shoddy history, naive view of racism, and atrocious script. Finally, at barrel's bottom, the loathsome animated film My Dog Tulip, which nearly made me flee my seat at Ebertfest, fulfills the conviction of its co-director (who admitted to once eating a canine) that dogs "are nothing more than piss and shit, and I wanted to reflect that." Mission accomplished.

Biggest Thrill: The opportunity to introduce Paul Schrader before an IU Cinema screening of Taxi Driver, and lead a Q&A with him afterwards. He was formidable, thoughtful, combative, and funny as hell. Runner-up: Attending Roger Ebert's annual film festival and shaking the man's hand.

Best Audience: Taxi Driver. A younger demographic than the usual Cinema crowd was in attendance and belied the claim that their generation is ruining the communal moviegoing experience. (My worst experiences for the year were overwhelmingly the result of yapping oldsters.) Not a peep was heard during the two-hour running time (nor, it seemed, did anyone move), leading a colleague to surmise, "What they felt for that film was respect."

Best Moviegoing Experience Overall: No surprise, Taxi Driver, in part because I'm biased, but also genuinely because of the tremendous audience reaction and the fact that the movie (in 2K digital resolution) looked amazing. Runner-up: Metropolis, of which I actually saw two versions with live scores, one at the IU Cinema with orchestral accompaniment from the Jacobs School of Music, the other at Ebertfest with the Alloy Orchestra. Again I'm biased, but the Cinema's experience, which debuted a new classical score (compared to the Mickey-Mousing approach of the Alloy), was the best. The IU score underlined the emotions; the Alloy version underlined the movements.

A very happy 2012 to all.

Tears for Fears (War Horse and Melancholia)

2011-12-29T16:22:00.005-05:00

Most of the cinephiles I know really love Steven Spielberg, which surprises me, because the more movies I see (often from their own recommendations), the flimsier his work becomes. Yet even the lot of them are straining to praise War Horse, one of Spielberg's flimsiest films to date, along the bottom middle rung of his oeuvre. A case could be made that it's his John Ford movie: a yarn about a young ~~Irish~~ Englishman (Jeremy Irvine) who trains a horse to plow his father's farm, then follows the steed, named Joey, into the hell of the First World War. Adapted from a children's book by Michael Morpurgo (and previously an acclaimed stage play), War Horse has an episodic narrative that's fairly unconventional and daring and might have developed into something interesting, had the filmmakers realized who their protagonist really is.

Our putative hero - for the front and back halves of the movie, at least - is Albert Narracott. Unformed and untested, yet brave and resilient in the googly-eyed Ethan Hawke manner from Dead Poets Society, Albert gets a crash course in the school of hard knocks after his essentially decent yet stubborn alcoholic father (Peter Mullan) purchases Joey at a village auction, outbidding his villainous landlord (David Thewlis, wasting his talent) with an absurd sum. We know the landlord is a monster because he dresses in fancy clothes, wants to be paid his monthly rent, and scoffs when Albert trains Joey to plow a fallow field. So incredible is this last development that all the villagers, with apparently way too much time on their hands, gather round to gape at the sorry spectacle - until it starts raining and Albert and Joey finally succeed at their task (because nothing says victory like soggy trousers). This is Spielberg at his vintage-worst, piling on the obstacles rather than trusting the inherent drama to suffice. (Lest we think rain is the farmer's friend, a subsequent storm comes soon after to flood their crops.)

Just as things seem to be veering into the miserablist territory of Frank McCourt - with Emily Watson (as Albert's patient, suffering mom) ready to lead the way - good news arrives: It's war! Sadly, Albert is still too young to serve, but Joey isn't, and Papa Narracott gets out of debt by selling him to the Irish cavalry. The horse, I mean, not his son. The narrative picks up a bit as Joey comes under the ownership of kindly Capt. Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston), who played F. Scott Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris, and his Zelda this time out is friend and commanding officer Maj. Stewart (the sonorously voiced Benedict Cumberbatch, from the terrific BBC series Sherlock and on his way to becoming a big star). In the movie's best sequence, Nicholls and Stewart lead a Light-Brigadish charge against a German garrison, and Joey and his equine companion, the beautiful black Topthorn, are captured by the enemy.

I won't recount my year-old post on my issues with Spielberg, except to revise a statement that couldn't have been more wrongheaded. "Spielberg is a unique enough stylist to avoid obvious homages," I wrote. "You don't think of anybody else's movies while watching his." Having invested a fair amount of time this year to furthering my knowledge of the history of cinema I know this to be untrue, and as War Horse began to split into a series of vignettes I thought of not only the works of John Ford but also contemporary westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales. The difference is those films have a clear and consistent point-of-view, whereas Spielberg and his screenwriters (Lee Hall and Richard Curtis), after leaving Albert for nearly the entire middle of the movie, won't commit themselves to their obvious choice of protagonist. What makes Carroll Ballard such a great director of "animal movies" (The Black Stallion, Fly Away Home, Duma) is he never anthropomorphizes them; he takes them on their own thrillingly mysterious terms. Spielberg makes a few feints toward depicting events from Joey's point-of-view (mostly overly expressive closeups of the horse's eyes that look suspiciously like half-assed CGI) but drops the idea every time it's raised, his insecurities as usual getting the better of him.

What's left then? A series of aimless episodes featuring a gallery of barely sketched-in German, French, and English characters. (Ford usually made his supporting players colorful.) Spielberg makes a heartening effort to humanize the Jerries this time - his disinterest in taking sides admirable - but having all the characters speak English gets confusing (not to mention ultimately Anglocentric for all the generous dispersal of empathy), and leads to botching what should be the film's highlight. Joey gets trapped in the barbed-wire mesh of No-Man's-Land, an English soldier leaves his trench to retrieve him, and a German soldier follows from his side of the battlefield to assist. Not trusting the power of the image, Spielberg has the two engage in enough Richard Curtis-y banter to anticipate Hugh Grant popping up through the gaseous mist. ("I-I-I say, th-that's qu-quite a horse you've g-g-got there. Tally-ho. Pip-pip!") By this time Albert has reappeared, serving his country with honor, yet blinded right before a climactic reunion that's a variation on the emotional climax of A Little Princess.

"Climactic" of course is a relative term, because the Fates must conspire yet again to keep Albert and Joey apart for as long as possible. There's another interminable auction, a forgotten character emerges to outbid Albert for the horse, then, after spending a windfall, comes the thrilling denouement: "Never mind." After thanking Mr. Deus ex Machina, and receiving not only his beloved four-legged friend but also his father's sash from the Boer War (which makes its rounds through the narrative like Vin Diesel's unlucky letter in Saving Private Ryan), Albert returns to the Narracott farm with ~~Natalie Wood~~ Joey in tow, a gorgeous sunset in the distance. I didn't care much for War Horse, but I did like the tentative handshake Albert's father offers to welcome him home. It's the kind of simple gesture filled with emotional heft that Spielberg has largely abandoned. Encouraging as it is to see him return to classical filmmaking, following an overlong stretch of brutalist showmanship, he's still stuck creatively between these poles, a remarkable director tangled in mesh.

Lars von Trier's Melancholia suggests that the end of the world is preferable to the values our world holds dear: following that premise to its audacious conclusion, he's become an optimist. I make that claim somewhat facetiously and completely hesitantly, this being the first von Trier film I've watched from start to finish. I've seen parts of Dancer in the Dark and Dogville and found them fascinating, yet to be perfectly honest, they're the work of a filmmaker who scares me a little. Making me afraid is a talent I respect; I still haven't screwed up the courage to see Antichrist, yet Melancholia is a relatively accessible depiction of the apocalypse. Unlike Spielberg during the latter half of his career, von Trier isn't working against his gifts. He's elevating his art into a stark clarity reminiscent of how Kael characterized late-period Luis Bunuel: growing almost fond of his characters' foibles.

Robert Altman also springs to mind, as Melancholia begins with the most scabrous nuptials since A Wedding. It's funnier than Altman's vision too, albeit mordantly so, making random observations of bad behavior on the fly rather than rubbing our noses in it. Kicking off with the perfect image of a stretch limo struggling to navigate the sharp turns of a long road leading to a country estate, von Trier casually introduces a patently eclectic ensemble through the eyes of bride Justine (Kirsten Dunst): her new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), her sister/hostess Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), brother-in-law and estate-owner John (Kiefer Sutherland), young nephew Leo (Cameron Spurr), her unscrupulous boss (Stellan Skarsgard), and her estranged father and mother (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling). I think I surrendered to von Trier's vision the moment I saw Rampling appear at the swanky dinner reception wearing a casual t-shirt, offering a toast where she declares herself vehemently opposed to marriage. The first cracks in Justine's smiling facade begin to emerge - Dunst's sunny screen persona has never been put to more effective use - and gradually she goes out of her way to lose her job and husband over the course of the evening.

This, it turns out, is only the prelude, as the second act switches to Claire's point of view with the dire news of a planet - the titular Melancholia - approaching Earth. A fine actress, Gainsbourg nonetheless seems miscast, and not just because she and Dunst aren't physically convincing as sisters. Claire, we learn during the wedding sequence from her and Justine's mother, "seems bewitched" by her opulent lifestyle, and Gainsbourg doesn't do bewitchment. She's a clear-eyed pessimist - von Trier's stand-in - and her mounting sense of doom about the world's end comes too naturally to her. Dunst, however, is sensationally good as Justine comes to accept her fate more readily than she did her marriage. Melancholia is described as a "friendly" looking planet, and funnily enough it is, its luminousness a reflection of Dunst's own.

I've neglected to mention other pleasures, some significant (the acclaimed overture of not-quite-still surreal tableaux foreshadowing events to come), others incidental (John Hurt teasing a waiter by stealing spoons at the reception), yet all coming together in as impeccably structured a narrative as I've seen all year. Like Michael Tolkin's The Rapture, another modestly-scaled (if conceptually very different) vision of the end times, Von Trier keeps his scope small while managing to pull off startling effects: a rain of hail on Claire and her son, for example, as she attempts a getaway. To where? is the critical question, for it becomes clear that there is nowhere to hide...except there sort of is. Accessibility and friendliness notwithstanding, Melancholia becomes a unnervingly haunting and unsettling experience. As Justine and Claire struggle to hold it together, so too does the movie. Like a number of great films, Melancholia comes very close to being a bad one: watching von Trier navigate that line is part of the thrill.

High and Low (The Descendants, Bridesmaids, and Horrible Bosses)

2011-12-18T14:15:00.005-05:00

(Warning: Spoilers.)

This weekend I saw three 2011 comedies - one a new theatrical release, two recent to DVD - all of which address, with varying degrees of seriousness and success, the effects of our lingering economic recession and/or the consequences of privilege. The summer blockbuster Bridesmaids pivots around a battle royale between Kristen Wiig's financially struggling maid-of-honor and Rose Byrne's obscenely wealthy usurper of the bride-to-be's affections, whereas the surprise hit Horrible Bosses follows a trio of desperate friends (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Andy Sudeikis) in an increasingly convoluted scheme to kill their misery-inflicting employers (Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell). Meanwhile, off the mainland, Alexander Payne's The Descendants spends a few hectic days in the life of a Honolulu attorney (George Clooney) following a tragic accident that leaves his wife in a coma as he's about to lead a contingent of cousins into a lucrative land deal. Clooney's Hawaiian-shirt clad, flipflop-wearing Matt King is untouched by economic woes - in an early voiceover, Matt informs us, as we watch him in business meetings, that "the wealthiest, most powerful people in Hawaii dress like beach bums." Yet as he learns of his soon-to-be-late wife's adultery while trying to help his two young daughters hold it together, we learn that even Matt is far from unscathed.

Our premier satirist of contemporary American life, Payne - as any satirist worth his salt should - continues to receive (amid high praise) brickbats from some quarters accusing him of hating or condescending to his characters. A pair of questions arise immediately in response to this: A) Is this true?; and B) So what if it is? All of his films (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, and the "14e arrondissement" segment of Paris Je T'aime) walk a fine line between snarkiness and sentiment, and The Descendants is no exception. One seemingly minor scene in the film, a monologue by Matt's eldest daughter's spaced-out, semi-callous hipster friend Sid (Nick Krause), may crudely underline Payne's worldview: "Sometimes I watch old people or retarded people crossing the street, and they're so slow, and I get so impatient. And then I feel bad." I'm not suggesting Payne seconds that emotion, rather that he's ballsy enough to articulate its existence.

Complexity of feeling lies at the heart of The Descendants, even as Matt indulges in occasional slapstick shtick in tracking down his wife's lover. Clooney is very amusing while running in flipflops or peering behind bushes, yet he's never a cartoon. A slight crudity of execution was found even in Payne's best previous efforts, but his camera-sense and editing have improved by leaps and bounds in the seven years since his last movie (either that, or he's getting better cameramen and editors). This time there's a richness in Payne's visual palette to match the depth of his content, and the narrative rhythms (with impeccably timed dissolves and fade-outs) are lyrically in tune with the swaying Hawaiian music on the soundtrack. The Descendants doesn't ask us to feel sorry for rich people, but accomplishes something trickier. It's a glowing melancholy comedy about the roots between even the most estranged of family members, between ourselves and our ancestors, and between people and the land they inhabit.

Judd Apatow's apparent answer to those of us asking why the creator of Freaks and Geeks has repeatedly refused to create a female film character with the dimensions of that show's protagonist Lindsay Weir, Bridesmaids (produced by Apatow and directed by F&G co-creator Paul Feig) doesn't exactly take women on their own terms: it suggests that they can be as dirty-minded as men. That's progress of a sort, if not exactly news, I suppose. The movie is foremost a vehicle for Kristen Wiig, who plays Annie Walker, the aforementioned maid-of-honor and best friend to Lillian (Maya Rudolph). Lillian's engagement comes as Annie is still reeling from opening a high-quality yet unsuccessful bakery; unable to pay the rent, much less meet the responsibilities her role in the wedding party require, Annie finds her friendship threatened by Rose Byrne's affluent Helen Harris. Some of the funniest bits involve Helen's attempts to one-up Annie: a mailed invitation to a bridal shower is opened to reveal a fluttering butterfly; the shower itself is held at Helen's estate, with a long driveway interrupted by a butler offering tall glasses of pink lemonade.

Bridesmaids being an Apatow joint, the script (co-written by Wiig and Annie Mumolo) is extended upon to allow for plenty of ad-libbing. This showcases the gifts of comediennes like Wiig and Melissa McCarthy (who garnered the best reviews as Megan, the straight-shooting, libido-led member of the wedding party) but more often than not leads to a lot of dead air: the movie's already infamous pants-shitting, food-poisoning centerpiece was undoubtedly funnier with a packed audience than at home. Raunchy sentiment is by now an Apatovian specialty, and to Wiig's credit she finds a hint of pathos to go with her gift for occupying demented interior spaces. It's heartening to see her working with a full comic ensemble, even connecting semi-romantically with an impossibly likable police officer (Chris O'Dowd), and living in something like the real world. Bridesmaids is a mixed bag, but I have to give points to an underdog comedy that's shrewd enough to set itself in that biggest underdog of all cities (and home of my alma mater) Milwaukee. The interiors are phony (actually shot in California) but the exteriors are largely real - not unlike the emotional life of the movie itself.

Whereas Bridesmaids embodies the occasionally inspired, often deadweight improvisatory feel of contemporary comedy, Horrible Bosses attempts to be a classically intricate machine, and it's more clever and amusing than you might expect. Bateman, Day, and Sudeikis achieve a likeable, believably spontaneous rapport, yet the director (Seth Gordon) and the screenwriters (Michael Markowitz and John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein) keep driving the narrative forward, with unexpected pleasures along the way. For every few jokes that go thud are a couple that are inspired: I laughed hardest at a running gag/deus ex machina featuring an automated GPS voice named Gregory (but really Atmanand) and the sublime explanation for the imprisonment of hit-man/murder-adviser Motherfucker Jones (Jamie Foxx). Unlike most modern comedies, the second half of Horrible Bosses is stronger than the first: the movie doesn't have laughs exactly (other than the aforementioned examples), but rather builds a comic momentum mainly due to the expanding psychotic dimensions of Spacey's corporate sociopath. As a randy dentist going to jaw-dropping lengths to create an uncomfortable work environment, Aniston takes a page from the Sarah Michelle Gellar playbook, which is to say she wants to be seen as "daring" without really doing anything that truly bold actresses do to earn the title. On the other hand, Farrell is delightful (and all too brief) as a ne'er-do-well cokehead son who inherits a family business. Horrible Bosses weaves its disparate plot strands just enough to draw attention to the fact that it could have been a vulgar classic instead of a lively near-miss.

A Dream in the Middle of the Day (Hugo)

2011-11-25T14:40:00.007-05:00

Last week a friend took her two young daughters to the premiere of Happy Feet Two and described their reaction, by the eighth or ninth musical number, as equivalent to Kramer's involuntary seizures whenever he heard Mary Hart's voice on Seinfeld. (She didn't actually put it in those terms; I'm taking creative license with her ordeal.) To the small crowd of parents and children at the screening of Hugo attended by yours truly: I salute you. The best family films -- the ones capable of stirring a child's imagination -- are invariably ignored, so merely showing up for a Martin Scorsese kiddie flick is admirable enough. Yet as the movie unfolded, I became distracted by the fact that nobody was distracting me. No fidgeting, running up and down the aisles, asking loudly if the movie's over yet, or other instances of acting-out when a film ostensibly made for kids fails to hold their attention. Just rows of mesmerized faces gazing up quietly at the screen. Arguably more than any other movie on his resume (and this is saying plenty), Scorsese made Hugo for himself. Yet it's the most generous personal filmmaking imaginable, the kind of open-hearted work that lets everyone in.

His achievement was nowhere near apparent from the trailers, which slapped together unrelated moments from the film in such a haphazard manner that the joke going around (which I shared in) was that Hugo looked like Scorsese's "Chris Columbus movie" (just as The Aviator was his "Ron Howard movie," as Steven Santos would put it). I'm not sure if misplaced expectations are what lured in the audience, and I'm half-expecting an irate moviegoer somewhere across the land to file a lawsuit against the movie for "not being like Harry Potter," just as one great intellect is currently suing Drive for "not being The Fast and the Furious." Among all movie audiences, the "family film" crowd may be the worst, because their unvarying taste for stultifying, milquetoast crap is stunting the next generation's concept of what movies can be. Parents like these are killing movies for the sake of two hours of silence, except that -- they never learn -- children get vocal and restless when they're having a bad time. Whether the Hugo audience are fans of the book (The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick) or if they got suckered in by a film that ended up being something quite other than the bad time the previews promised, they were clearly engaged by a kind of magic considerably less literal than the wizards and Dark Lords and Quidditch matches to which they're accustomed. I enjoyed the last handful of the Potter series, but Hugo offers a very different -- and more substantial -- form of enchantment.

Similarly Scorsese himself once said, "I love Steven's (Spielberg's) movies, but I don't think everyone should have to make them." With Hugo, Scorsese hasn't made a Spielberg movie any more than he's crafted a Chris Columbus joint, but he's learned a few things from his friend and employs a few classic Spielbergian touches. The story is told almost entirely from young orphan Hugo's (Asa Butterfield's) point-of-view, and as he and his new gal-pal Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) jaunt through the 1930s-era train station where the majority of the action takes place, the camera keeps up from behind at eye-level, with most of the grown-ups depicted like many of the adult characters in E.T. -- only as high as their torsos. Visually, Scorsese makes the train-station a potentially threatening place, yet the atmosphere is never oppresive. Between the clocks that Hugo, living secretly within the walls, surreptitiously keeps running to the toy and flower shops to the coming-and-going locomotives themselves, Scorsese makes the real seem magical, rather than trying to persuade us that magic is real.

Much of this is accomplished via 3-D, and while Hugo is only the third movie I've seen to use the extra dimension, it is easily the most effective. Avatar was an entertaining 3-D "experience" that barely disguised a mediocre movie, a mask quickly removed once the movie came to DVD; whereas Cave of Forgotten Dreams found justifiable use for the technology in a documentary that made cave paintings tactile, seemingly touchable. The only problematic moments in that film were when Herzog moved the camera up and down the mountainside, and Scorsese's technique occasionally encounters the same obstacle. Always a purveyor of restless, roving camerawork, Scorsese stumbles a bit whenever Sacha Baron Cohen's station inspector gives chase to Hugo. The image gets fleetingly blurry. In frenetic scenes like these the 3-D can't keep up with Scorsese's energy; it's better at drawing out the details of static framing (which makes me think Kubrick would have been a master at it). For the most part, Scorsese seems to realize this. Whenever Hugo stops running, the imagery opens up around him -- as when pieces of paper with artistic sketches float around a room -- and when he ventures into the snow-dappled Parisian streets (actually a set, but an evocative one) the movie looks breathtaking.

Scorsese has always done unsung work with child actors, and while I wouldn't rate Butterfield and Moretz's performances on par with Jodie Foster's in Taxi Driver, Christopher Serrone's as young Henry Hill in Goodfellas, or Gyurme Tethong's in Kundun, each comes through in crucial roles. I suspect I may even be underrating Butterfield, who has to carry the movie and manages to play an orphaned boy who has lost his parents without a trace of self-pity. Moretz, having already made an impression before turning fourteen in Let Me In and Kick-Ass, seems to be putting a precocious Hermione Granger spin on her lines, but she connects with Butterfield, and has a lovely scene when Hugo takes her to see her first movie. A movie, Hugo explains, quoting his late father, "is like a dream in the middle of the day," and the rapt expression on Moretz's face mirrors the visages on the kids looking up at her in the audience.

John Logan's screenplay has a pleasing symmetry, and Scorsese, demonstrating an imaginative agility he hasn't shown in ages, finds visual rhymes that echo throughout the film. The famous Harold Lloyd clock scene finds its double with Hugo later, as does a recreation of the Lumiere brothers's silent film depicting a train arriving at a station (a sequence that causes members of its initial 1895 audience to jump out of the way). He also attentively brings a few key adult characters into play, a quartet of station employees with parallel thwarted love affairs. In one, Richard Griffiths's shambling advances on Frances de la Tour are impeded by her protective yapping long-haired dauchshund; in the other, Emily Mortimer's flower saleswoman attracts the attention of Cohen's inspector, impeded by his own self-consciousness regarding a leg damaged in the First World War. Sacha Baron Cohen walks a tricky line in Hugo. In the previews, he looked like he auditioning for the next Pink Panther movie, and early on some of his slapstick antics fall flat. Yet the movie needs his energy, and eventually Cohen's mediocre Peter Sellers imitation turns into a good one, the type of Sellers performance that weaves pathos into farcical physical shtick. His train inspector is an adversary but ultimately not a villain, much to our relief. He owns a dog too, an aggressive (and expressive) doberman pinscher. Yes, this is a Scorsese movie with doggie reaction shots, but they're funny doggie reaction shots, namely one that underscores how much Cohen and the doberman resemble one another.

Pauline Kael believed that, unless your name was Luis Bunuel, filmmakers got worse as they grew older. Later she would make exceptions for Robert Altman and John Huston, but Scorsese's work largely fell out of her favor after she was one of his staunchest champions early in his career. "After Taxi Driver," I once heard him say in person, receiving an award, "she never liked anything I ever did afterward -- other than The Last Waltz, Life Lessons, and The Last Temptation of Christ." That's a pretty big "other than," but it's true that for the most part Kael went cold. She missed his collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio over the last decade but that's probably for the best. Of the four to date, I found two of them frustrating (Gangs of New York, Shutter Island), one mediocre (The Aviator), and a fourth watchable (The Departed) only because Leo didn't have to shoulder the load. (Distracting us in that film were a lively performance from Mark Wahlberg and an embarrassing one from Jack Nicholson.) When Ben Kingsley, late in Shutter Island, turns into Exposition Man and breaks the fake gun in half, I groaned at Scorsese's contempt for the material and the audience. He seemed to have given up drawing from anything resembling actual life experience; he was lost in Movieland.

Hugo is even more of an artificial world than Shutter Island -- and Kingsley's performance as Georges Melies, like all of his work, I find, hits the wrong notes -- but Scorsese puts his lifeblood into it so that it feels like everything he's wanted to say about what cinema means to him. The movie is a joyous reconciliation of life and art, a demonstration of how technology can enable us to live -- or, for the neglected and forgotten, to live again. Years ago Terrence Rafferty, in his review of The Player, hailed the then 67-year-old Altman as "the youngest filmmaker in America." Martin Scorsese, who turned 69 last week, has now staked that claim.

The Kael Biography...and Cherry-Picking Pauline

2011-11-13T15:15:00.011-05:00

I don't know why I never thought to send Pauline Kael samples of my work, but it was probably for the best. My initial foray into film criticism was for The Moina, my sophomore-year high school newspaper. To this day I'm still not sure what the hell a "moina" is, I only recall my faculty-editor asking me to cobble together a year-end Top-10 list of movies, the only student on staff to have seen at least seven. Witness, the 1985 Peter Weir/Harrison Ford Amish thriller, I ranked numero uno. I still love that movie, still think it one of Weir's and Ford's best. What makes me wince is the memory of my closing sentence: "Oscars for everyone, the year's best film!"

Kael would have justifiably rolled her eyes at that line even if she had liked the film. A year or two later, in the form of a birthday present, I discovered she hadn't. State of the Art, the latest anthology of her New Yorker reviews from circa. 1983-1985, was given to me by my latest newspaper editor-supervisor (an actual publication this time, my having briefly gone pro). Not having written about movies since my ballyhooed debut didn't keep me from talking incessantly about them, so my boss probably hoped to engage my mind with a different perspective than I had encountered in my adolescent sojourns from the American Southwest to the Midwest to then taking up residence in a not-quite-Deep-South city that would provide the name for one of Kael's favorite movies. In that respect
State of the Art certainly succeeded: Kael was sharp, fearless, and often very funny. (I still crack up at the closing paragraph of her review for Rambo: First Blood Part II, which oddly detours into a mention that the novelization of the movie features an advertisement for ordering the weaponry fetishized in the movie, before offering the kicker: "I can hardly wait for my set to arrive.") On more than a few occasions, though, she came across as a crank. Her
Witness review, for example, made a big fuss out of a understated moment where the Amish family says grace at the dinner table -- a scene clearly meant to emphasize (like every other scene in the movie) the Ford character's isolation, an astute observation of behavior that Kael seemed to bizarrely interpret as endorsement.

That State of the Art
wasn't the best introduction to Kael's stuff may be attributable -- as Brian Kellow suggests in his avidly-discussed new biography: Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark -- to the gradual decline of both author and subject.
I didn't know it at the time but Kael, by then close to seventy and plagued with health problems, was nearing the end of her career. Concurrently the state of American cinema was also on the downswing. A mortified through-your-fingers glance at some of the titles in the collection (Flashdance, Staying Alive, Sudden Impact, Blame It On Rio, Against All Odds, Swing Shift, Unfaithfully Yours, Falling in Love, Stick, A View to a Kill) helps you sympathize with her oft-repeated complaint that reviewing movies in that era "wasn't fun anymore." Oddly, I don't recall Kellow repeating that quote in his bio; he does, however, echo Kael's introductory explanation for the departure from her "usual sexually tinged book title... (Kael wrote) 'I hope that State of the Art will sound ominous and sweeping and just slightly clinical.'" Indeed it did. And while there's always something to be said for accuracy, it didn't foreshadow much fun.

I discovered in my twenties that the euphoria came earlier. Now with instant access to a university library, I backtracked through Kael's previous tomes (I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deeper into Movies, etc.) and delved into the capsules in 5001 Nights at the Movies, taking greater pleasure in her writing even while still thinking some of her assessments were as inexplicable as those in her later work. Reading Roger Ebert had already given me a pretty good introduction to the remarkable run of American films from the 1960s and 1970s. I saw The French Connection and Deliverance before I hit my teens (take the possible traumatizing effects of that for what you will); Dirty Harry, The Exorcist, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter and The Godfather pictures soon after. All rather violent, all heavy weather. Employing a keen balance of logic and feeling that in most instances struck me as consistent and sensible, Ebert praised all of these movies with near-equal enthusiasm. Yet exactly why Kael loved a few of these films while not just disliked, but outright condemned many of the others -- inadvertently making you feel like an asshole for admiring them in the first place -- rested on seemingly arbitrary distinctions that I couldn't fathom, no matter how deeply I pored through her prose.

The greatest accomplishment of A Life in the Dark may well be how the author makes sense of apparent nonsense. Much of this he achieves through depicting the lengthy "opening act" of Kael's life: native Californian; daughter of chicken ranchers; child of the Great Depression; college non-graduate (six credits shy); San Francisco bohemian; secular Jew; frustrated companion (and occasional lover) of gay men; single mother; holder of odd jobs before stumbling into film criticism by lucky accident. Kellow doesn't psychoanalyze Kael, nor does he approach his subject with wide-eyed disingenuousness. He simply shows how Kael arrived in the spotlight fully formed in all the contradictions of her character.

She was a brainiac who scoffed at intellectualism, a survivor of hardships who deplored victimization,
a subversive who distrusted radicalism,
a singularly independent woman who disdained feminism, a fervent admirer of machismo appalled by mindless violence and fascistic thought. Kellow's skillful breakdown of Kael's traits and nuances help bring some of her more controversial pans (Antonioni, Kubrick, Shoah) into focus. Even more impressive may be the underlying explanation for how Kael's upbringing -- which, growing up in Phoenix, I can relate somewhat to my own -- predisposed her against the John Ford/George Stevens' romantic, sentimental depiction of the American West. ("She didn't buy the male fantasy of the mythical past that the Western sold to the public," Kellow writes, "and she hated the treatment of Indians as monsters more appropriate to a horror movie.") That said, I do wish Kellow hadn't presented wholesale the conjecture that Kael's "vilification of Eastwood revealed a certain attraction to him." It smacks of the same gender assumptions found in Gregory Peck's narcissistic speculation for why she didn't like his acting chops ("I know that you were at Berkeley in the late thirties...so was I. Was there something between us that I don't remember?") and demurs from a deeper study of the differences between what Kael regarded as Eastwood's humorless, ham-fisted fascism and Peckinpah's wittier, more artful variety. (Moreover, Kael wasn't shy about her enthusiasms. If she'd had a thing for Clint's squint, it seems likely she would have come out and said so.)

Perhaps like all passions, the loves of Kael's moviegoing life are frequently harder to peg or justify. She liked to be seduced (De Palma) rather than worked over (Friedkin), preferred freewheeling spontaneity (Altman) to steel-traps (Hitchcock). Yet unlike, say, the mind-numbing methodology of her disciple Armond White (Spielberg "better than" Soderbergh, ad naueseam), Kael's likes and dislikes never settled into a predictable or easy paradigm. On the whole, Kael may have "hated" Ford, Kubrick, and Hitchcock, but that didn't keep her from praising Stagecoach, Lolita, and Strangers on a Train. She "loved" De Palma, Peckinpah, and Lynch, yet still panned Body Double, The Getaway, and Wild at Heart.
Like others, I used to regard her skepticism for the auteur theory as hypocritical, seemingly being something of an auteurist herself. Yet if Kellow shows how that skepticism led to the worst ethical lapse of her career (the "Raising Kane" fiasco, in which Kael stole research from UCLA professor Howard Suber, then published the findings as her own without testing their veracity), he also persuades that she genuinely did regard each movie, regardless of the director, as something new.

I have my own issues with auteurism, mainly a personal antipathy toward boring reverence. (That may be a common misunderstanding of the theory, but is that misunderstanding perpetuated by its critics or some of its practitioners?) So it may be only natural that I prefer Kael's sincere compliment to Robert Altman for "batting an astonishing 50 percent" (even if Kellow indicates that for a while, in her view, it was really higher than that). Taking movies one at a time, along with often assessing each movie with more than one opinion of its quality (an unusual approach then or now), has left Kael's reviews vulnerable to cherry-picking. I've read claims that Kael hated Taxi Driver because she took issue with Bernard Herrmann's score and a famous scene where Scorsese's camera does "an Antonioni pirouette," even though she adored the picture overall. Google "Kael," "Spielberg," and "1941" and you'll pull up a quote commonly attributed to Kael stating that 1941 was like "having your head stuck inside a pinball machine for two hours"; only Kael didn't state that, she quoted a friend as saying it (quoting friends becoming over her career an annoying affectation), and went on to herald Spielberg's biggest flop as a great entertainment.

Her excesses can be disparaged with greater accuracy, though even there I've read plenty of instances of misattribution. Both Tom Carson (who is one of my favorite critics) and Richard Brody (who isn't) had a high time recently mocking Kael's comparison of Altman's Nashville with Joyce's Ulysses. What Kellow quotes her as actually stating is a bit more subdued and observant:
"'Altman, from a Catholic background, has what Joyce had: a love of the supreme juices of everyday life. He can put unhappy characters on the screen...and you don't wish you didn't have to watch them; you accept their unhappiness as a piece of the day, as you do in Ulysses.'" Taking issue with Kael's ethics in reviewing a rough cut of Altman's work has more validity, though her critics are always careful not to add that there remain many folks today who agree with her assessment that it's an American classic.

A Life in the Dark offers a startling reminder that for more than a decade the most powerful film critic in America worked only half of each year, alternating with Penelope Gilliatt at The New Yorker in six-month rotations. (Gilliatt, Kellow also reminds us, was a talented author of short stories and screenplays - including the Oscar-nominated Sunday, Bloody Sunday [which Kael admired] - whose problems with alcoholism and accusations of plagiarism led to her ousting from the magazine in 1979.) Working part-time provided Kael with the impetus for reviewing Nashville early (before it fell to Gilliatt), as well as the necessity to find additional funds as a guest lecturer at UCLA and elsewhere. Despite her distaste for higher learning,
Kael would have made a great academic. With her energetic devotion to young people and her cunning establishments of networks and alliances, she would have played the game better than anyone.

Academia, of course, is where I've ended up, following a path littered with obstacles and detours and blind alleys. Kael might have been surprised to learn that behind the fusty stereotypes lies in some quarters a remarkable dynamism. One of my professors, affectionally dubbed "Dr. Z," created quite a cult of personality over three decades of teaching, as Kael did with the Paulettes. (One of Dr. Z's former students, the late Chris Farley, mimicked him during a sketch on Saturday Night Live.) In Kellow's book, my parallel appears to have been Ray Sawhill, "the one in (Kael's) circle who often wouldn't do what she told him to." Occasionally, like the Paulettes, I crossed over into slavish imitation. When Dr. Z heard that I was imitating his teaching style too closely in the classroom, he urged me to find my own. Later, when it became clear that I wouldn't be following in his footsteps as a history professor, he seemed, for a time, as wounded as Kael when Sawhill and Paul Schrader and others went astray. This may have been more my perception than reality: Dr. Z, like Pauline Kael, had a way of cutting people down that stayed with them more than it did with him. And it meant a lot when, a couple years ago, we split a bottle of bourbon out on his lawn, laughed our asses off, and he told me he was proud of me.

Other than a couple of essays for The Chronicle Review in the late 90s, and a few pieces for The House Next Door over the years since, film criticism has remained a side interest of mine -- important to me, but along the periphery nonetheless. Although, like Kael in her 40s, I feel increasingly, as Kellow puts it, "a driving urgency to make (my) entrance and get on with the best part of the play," I feel lucky to now work in an environment where I can fold my passions into my vocation.

(This is where I was going to offer the disclaimer that while the Lilly Library houses Pauline Kael's papers, as Kellow has graciously noted, I have never had personal contact with the author. It was a surprise, then, to see my name listed in the "Acknowledgments" at the end of his book. Rattling around in my brainpan is a vague yet nagging memory of possibly assisting an off-site researcher, who may have mentioned working on a Kael biography, with the James Broughton papers during the years when I worked at Kent State [Broughton being the father of Kael's daughter]. Unless Kellow is acknowledging a different Craig entirely. So I find myself in an awkward position: I may have assisted with some research for this book, but I'm not sure.)

Kael's passion for her work is clearly what sustained her for so long, and even when it stopped being fun she never stopped watching movies, talking about movies, asking everyone she met if they'd seen anything good lately. She isn't the most important film critic in my life; Roger Ebert, whom I have met and exchanged a fitful correspondence with, still occupies that position. She fulfills a key role along the periphery -- questioning me, challenging me, enlightening me, infuriating me, nagging me with enough patter to have gotten her booted out of the Alamo Drafthouse. At the least giving her reader something to think about, at the most attaining something like grace.

Absolute Dour (Boss)

2011-10-29T15:00:00.012-04:00

"Kelsey Grammer makes you forget all about Frasier Crane!" invariably declare the breathless reviews for his new drama series, Boss, now airing on Starz. Funny, I couldn't stop thinking about him. Last week's premiere, which introduced us to the intersecting public and private lives of a fictional Chicago mayor, was as overcooked as any windbag soliloquy from TV's favorite therapist; only whereas Cheers and Frasier eked two decades of comic mileage out of gently lampooning their character, Boss expects us to genuflect in admiration at its hardcore depiction of contemporary American politics. That the first episode has inspired critics like David Wiegand to marvel at how a series with a protagonist named "Kane" evokes -- of all things -- Citizen Kane suggests the extent of its creative imagination (though, in fairness to Wiegand's own faculties, I don't recall a character named "Lear," so apparently he thought of Shakespeare all by himself).

On a fundamental level, Grammer's Tom Kane carefully follows the Breaking Bad template. In an initially disorienting opening scene that transpires in an abandoned building, an African-American physician informs Hizzoner that the poor bastard has a degenerative brain disorder giving him -- Nielsen ratings pending -- approximately 3-5 years to live. Although it's still early in the game, Kane's narrative trajectory looks to be sort of the inverse of Walter White: Rather than a prognosis that compels a protagonist to discover his manhood (and I write that with more than a hint of irony), Kane's disease, along with the hallucination-inducing meds designed to slow down its effects, has the potential to send a powerful man into a long dark spiral. Or perhaps losing control will liberate him, make him unpredictable, even render his policies soft and sentimental--at least more so than the pivotal sequence involving a botched O'Hare extension plan leading to a pair of severed ears as penance.

Even if Boss proves me wrong with the direction it will take, I'm skeptical that its lead is up to the challenge. Grammer can be a marvelous comic actor, the demons accumulating in his personal life over the years adding unique undercurrents of pathos and autocritique. Boss may have seemed like a natural expansion on Grammer's typecast persona (not to mention, given his political leanings, a crafty and cynical send-up of the Chicago machine that has spawned the likes of Daley and Obama). Strange, then, how i
n rare dramatic roles he comes across as puzzlingly limited. His depiction of Kane's physical and mental malfunctions -- finger drumming, talking to himself -- lacks the spontaneity James Gandolfini offered Tony Soprano's scary freakouts and sublime epiphanies. Inevitably, he overcompensates by screaming.

Needless to say, both Gandolfini and Bryan Cranston had/have memorable supporting casts to take the burden off their still-considerable shoulders. "Listen," the title of the Boss premiere, showed little promise for a mostly blank ensemble; and the faces that do register, like Connie Nielsen as Kane's estranged wife and Chicago's first lady, are alloted little to do beyond clenched smiles and cliched speeches about the need to "keep up appearances." (Gus Van Sant directs the episode with mostly anonymous touches as well, other than a ludicrous stairwell sex scene between
Kane's honey-bunny aide Kitty O'Neill [played by young Meg Ryan lookalike Kathleen Robertson]
and implausibly boyish gubernatorial candidate Alex Zajac [Jeff Hephner]). Watching Boss made me pine, once again, for a glimpse of what Hunter Thompson called "politics junkies," a sense of the adrenaline high that lures animals like Kane into the public arena in the first place. Like all heavy-handed dramatizations of political corruption, Boss blows a lot of hot air in purporting to rip the lid off what everyone already knows. It may be true, but that doesn't make it interesting.

Off the Field (Moneyball)

2011-09-25T20:40:00.006-04:00

Several years ago, a member of the Oakland A's front-office revolutionized baseball by applying statistical analysis in game scenarios. But enough about Tony LaRussa. Moneyball, the new sports flick directed by Bennett Miller, stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the A's general manager who, a decade after LaRussa's tenure, whisked away computer wiz Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) from the hapless Cleveland Indians and took the concept a step further: The Athletics hired players based on a combination of their underpaid salaries and overlooked potential -- bringing in three utility men, for example, to replace the departing high-priced free agent Jason Giambi. Brand's argument -- based on his computer algorithm -- is that you don't need stars to win, you just need runs; and you get runs, Brand explains, by getting players who can get on base.

Moneyball makes it clear from the start that, for Beane, necessity is the mother of invention. Losing to the Yankees in the playoffs, followed by the Giambi/Damon exodus during the offseason, opens his eyes to the reality that his team won't win by playing the same game of other teams with higher payrolls. Yet Pitt's performance hints at reserves of stubbornness and wounded pride. Flashbacks reveal that Billy Beane was once a promising baseball prospect himself, and rejected a scholarship at Stanford for a disappointing pro career. Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin's script very cleverly makes Beane an underdog, no small feat for a character who is essentially a suit. Over the decades, sports movies have gone from athlete protagonists to coaches and now finally GMs; I'm not sure what it says about our era, but at some point, a film with an owner as hero seems inevitable.

Yet part of the problem I had with Moneyball is how it plays fast and loose with its own convictions in exchange for our sympathies. Early on, Brand claims (and Jonah Hill's softspokenness sells it) that his system, far from being impersonal, recognizes the value of players who aren't being given any. Then the movie goes on to suggest that managers, like the A's own Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), bring nothing to the table except their own egos and old school misconceptions on how the game should be played. The movie is grotesquely unfair to Howe, emphasizing that Beane used to be a player -- and is therefore different from standard front-office types -- yet careful not to mention that Howe used to play too. But even if you only focus on what's onscreen, Moneyball doesn't track. In his first scene, the Howe in the movie argues (persuasively) that he deserves a better contract for his accomplishments the previous season. Beane promises to look into it, and then other than a passing mention that Howe didn't get a new deal, the subject is dropped. We don't learn the reason behind Beane's decision, or whether he might have been unfair, because Zaillian and Sorkin's script is eager to paint Howe as the bad guy in the piece, and in their world being a bad guy is synonymous with being a bad manager.

Or, worse, an irrelevant one. Moneyball has to have the first ever go-for-it sports-movie montage where the GM trains the players how to win. Howe is depicted as an obstacle in their path to success, refusing to start new first baseman Scott Hatteberg (a charming Chris Pratt from Parks & Recreation) until Beane trades away all of Howe's other options. But the most dubious scene is one where Howe is shown walking away from the locker room, where the A's, following another loss, are partying with loud music. (Well, really just one player: Jeremy Giambi, Jason's kid brother.) Beane enters the locker room and breaks up the celebration by yelling at everyone and throwing a baseball bat. No doubt some will wonder why Beane didn't hit an innocent person with that bat, and kill that individual, and how he has never seen a scene like that in a sports movie, and how a scene like that would be really interesting -- whereas I was merely left not buying the implication that the GM was doing the manager's job for him.

There are other problems at the script level. A key subplot involving Hatteberg's struggle to play first-base (having spent his career as a catcher) leads to a dead end; we never learn if he masters the position. And a scene where Howe, in a belated pique of good will, brings in Hatteberg to pinch-hit at a crucial moment, makes no sense: Isn't he a starter and already in the lineup? Arguably there are even bigger problems at the direction level, with Miller taking a story that should have a sunny disposition and screwball-comedy tempo and applying the same bleak gray color scheme and molasses pacing that he did with Capote. It's amazing that despite these things Moneyball remains moderately entertaining. Credit Pitt for continuing to come into his own as a movie star (and for a light touch that takes some of the heaviness off the inexplicably portentous music), and Hill, whom I have previously despised, for taking a page from his character's philosophy and discovering his potential within his own limited range. As a movie, with tough-to-dramatize material, Moneyball works reasonably well enough within the current Hollywood system. But it's no game-changer.

Revved Up (Drive)

2011-09-15T00:01:00.032-04:00

(Warning: Spoilers.)

Out of the many startling elements in Drive -- the new Nicolas Winding Refn action-thriller about to startle audiences everywhere -- the most astonishing may be the movie's utterly invested effort to turn its leading man into a star. There are no real movie stars anymore, we've been told, only blockbuster spectacles that sell themselves, so it's elating to watch what Ryan Gosling does in this picture through the filter of Refn's awestruck lens. Gosling's coiled, laconic, unnamed "Driver" has antecedents stretching back to Sergio Leone spaghetti landscapes and wending through the urban thoroughfares of Walter Hill and Michael Mann: it's a hilariously pared-down performance, the funniest interpretation of macho-bullshit mystique I've ever seen, and the perfect antidote to every arm-flapping, brow-furrowing Leonardo DiCaprio performance of the last ten years. It's an extravagant joke, a magnetic man of few words in an age where everyone can't stop talking, and both Gosling and his director are in on it. All the same, there's something mythic and magical about this performance, this movie too.

Pauline Kael once compared the acting styles of Anthony Quinn and Cary Grant thusly: If you asked Quinn if he knew how to dance, he'd immediately jump up and prance around until you were sorry you asked; if you asked Grant, he'd merely smile and playfully drum his fingers on the table. That's similar to the economy of movement that Gosling achieves here -- whether he's courting his next-door-neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) or threatening local mob heavies Nino and Bernie (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks) -- with nothing more than a toothpick for a prop. (Okay, once a hammer.) A slightly more socially adjusted Travis Bickle, Driver's anger is roused only after a heist -- in which he is in the getaway car behind the wheel -- goes horribly wrong, Irene's paroled husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) ends up dead, and the new widow and her young son Benicio are next on the hit list. The two sides of the main character, lover and killer, are never convincingly reconciled; yet Refn achieves this union visually in one breathtaking scene in an elevator, where Gosling tenderly plants one on Mulligan in one moment and kicks an assassin to death in the next. Kiss, Kiss, Stomp, Stomp: Kael might have appreciated the duality.

The split personality of the movie itself -- from sweet character study to shocking bloodbath -- is problematic in a larger sense, by turns absorbing and alienating. From the quietly gripping prologue where Driver shows his knowledge of L.A. geography, Refn makes it clear that he knows how to stage an action scene; later on, he makes it more than clear that he knows how to stage a killing scene, and while the tonal shift is deliberate (like his protagonist, Refn never loses control) I'm not convinced that straight-razors, heads ripped off by shotgun blasts, and forks to the eye are playing to his strengths. Far more effective is a murder framed at a distance from the ocean surf, as well as a knife fight between a pair of shadows cast on concrete. The violence will be one of the selling points of Drive, and while I wouldn't say it's staged by a filmmaker who takes it lightly, it does come uncomfortably close to Tarantino's worst instincts to lure yahoos into the theater to get off on something they don't fully comprehend.

What other moviegoers will appreciate (other than Newton Thomas Sigel's stunning cinematography, the most shimmeringly beautiful depiction of Los Angeles since the Mann trifecta of Thief, Heat, and Collateral) is the movie's expansive regard for a stable of wonderful character actors. Besides Gosling's star-power and Mulligan's aching vulnerability, there is a deft comic turn from Bryan Cranston as Driver's shambling gimp mechanic and a diabolical one from Albert Brooks about which I'll say no more. I also liked how Oscar Isaac's ex-con hubby is initially set up as a hotheaded rival of Driver's, only to be revealed as a decent guy genuinely trying to go straight. Drive is at its best in scenes like the one where Standard tells the story of how he and Irene met, and at its worst in its shameful waste of Christina Hendricks as a blue-jeansed moll named Blanche. Anyone who's seen Hendricks on Mad Men knows that she's game for anything, so it's disappointing that her role is miniscule (however memorable her exit).

This is, as you may have ascertained, a polarizing movie, and it will be interesting to see whether the commercial, inviting aspects of the film draw a larger audience than the arty, off-putting elements repel. I'm sensing enough of the ground shifting beneath my feet to predict that Drive is going to make a profound impact on movie culture, be argued over into perpetuity, and start a fad for scorpion jackets. (I can't wait for scholars to dissect the outlandish, unsettling sequence where Gosling stalks a bad guy like a 1980s slasher in a stunt man's facial prosthetic to Riz Ortolani's florid "Oh My Love.") I'm not without reservations myself, yet a film with this much affection for actors and cinematic lore is hard to resist. And I was won over by the ending, as ambiguous as the fate of Travis Bickle, with a wounded Driver back in his car, seemingly disinterested in seeking medical attention, or perhaps already dead, destined to cruise the streets for infinity, his own gleaming Valhalla.

Love Conquers All (Tabloid and Jane Eyre)

2011-09-04T18:29:00.003-04:00

In Tabloid, the new documentary from the greatest of contemporary documentary filmmakers, Errol Morris reveals that celebrity culture has infested itself in our society, making stars out of unremarkable individuals, handing out microphones instead of meds to the mentally unstable. Stop the presses. Since, approximately, A Face in the Crowd (1957), there have been a plethora of examinations on this topic in the realms of fiction and nonfiction alike: Quiz Show, Robert Redford's brilliant 1994 drama on the "21" game show scandal, remaining for me the most incisive. Tabloid offers nothing new beyond a story that many of us may not know or remember -- a story which, after 80-some-odd minutes, I couldn't fathom why Morris wasted his time telling.

On second thought, it's pretty clear: After pet cemeteries (Gates of Heaven), the criminal justice system (The Thin Blue Line), Holocaust denial (Dr. Death), Vietnam (The Fog of War), and Abu Ghraib (Standard Operating Procedure), Morris wanted to tackle something more frivolous. He found frivolity du jour in Joyce McKinney, a beauty pageant queen who, in the 1970s, fell in love with a Mormon missionary, who fled to England with McKinney and a band of accomplices in hot pursuit. It was in the U.K. where she tracked down her would-be paramour, kidnapped him at gunpoint, then held him hostage for (in her words) "three days of fun, food, and sex" before he escaped again and she was arrested, tried and imprisoned. Juicy stuff, at least for a half-hour or so, when Morris's clever visuals (scandal sheet headlines blaring across the screen as his interviewee's reminisce) and breakneck editing keep things lively. McKinney herself is the primary subject, and for a while her loopy conviction stares down the unnerving gaze of Morris's notorious Interrotron to a draw.

Soon enough, though, it becomes apparent that we are listening to a madwoman, and as McKinney prattles on endlessly, watching the movie starts to feel like being trapped at the edge of a dinner table with a companion whose clutches you can't escape. For squirm humor to work, it helps to have a normalizing presence to balance things out, and the surprisingly few accompanying interviewees that Morris offers -- a pair of sleazy British tabloid reporters, a Korean scientist out of The Manchurian Candidate -- provide no respite. Everyone (i.e., six interviewees total) is a loon in Tabloid, which may be Morris's idea of a universal indictment but instead magnifies his subject's own instability. "The man has to be dragged from the spotlight with his teeth marks still on it," one of the most memorable lines from Paul Attanasio's highly memorable Quiz Show script, applies to Joyce McKinney as well. Making a movie about her life is the kind of help she doesn't need.

It may just be that I'm the wrong audience for tales of obsessive love. Years of rejection and restraining orders tend to dull one's emotional responses, to where the novels of Jane Austen always drove me a little nuts, and I veered widely around the Bronte sisters, including Jane Eyre and all of its cinematic adaptations til now. (Their American counterpart, Edith Wharton, explored similar themes with a coiled anger and sharp thrust that was always more my speed.) As a non-reader of the book I found Cary Fukunaga's film mildly engaging, though after only a few weeks I can barely remember a single scene. His previous film, the overpraised Sin Nombre (2009), had a similar effect, illustrating the fine line between craftsmanship that's invisible and the kind that's forgettable.

What I recall most from Jane Eyre are the expressions of Mia Wasikowska, who has four or five more things going on across her face than Fukanaga manages for the entire movie. Faithful readers of this blog already know that I think Wasikowska is one of the best young actresses around, something that's been obvious since she burst out of the TV screen in season one of HBO's In Treatment. She makes a perfectly capable Jane, yet her more natural presence in In Treatment and The Kids Are All Right suggests that her strengths lie in contemporary portraits. She's as modern an actress as Keira Knightley and shows more range, yet Knightley's star turn in Pride & Prejudice had more impact because she had a director, Joe Wright, who developed his entire modernized approach to the material around her performance (to mostly successful results).

Wasikowska blends in to Jane Eyre when she should be standing out, and she has disappointingly little chemistry with Michael Fassbender, whose brooding, haunted Rochester -- while passable -- hasn't even half the magnetism that this terrific actor is capable of. Fassbender fared better with the prickly newcomer Katie Jarvis in Fish Tank, whereas Wasikowska's best (if Platonic) pairing to date has been Gabriel Byrne in In Treatment, who couldn't get anything going with Winona Ryder way back in Little Women, who bewitched Daniel Day-Lewis in The Crucible, who had previously, unsuccessfully rejected her for Michelle Pfeiffer in Scorsese's Wharton adaptation The Age of Innocence. Matchmaking in movies may be even more unpredictable than in real life.

Where God Lives (The Tree of Life)

2011-08-06T17:00:00.010-04:00

Anyone who has ever prayed to God and/or cursed His name (i.e., almost everyone) may find themselves as overwhelmed as I was during the "creation" sequence of The Tree of Life. Then again, you might hate it. This twenty-minute passage -- a lavish CGI set-piece documenting the origins of the universe -- has received several conflicting interpretations, the most dismissive from the peevish Barnes & Noble clerk who informed me that Terrence Malick had stopped the narrative cold for a "NOVA episode." That initial prologue, however, is what separates Malick's digression from a nature special: the patriarch and matriarch of the O'Brien family (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain), living in Texas circa. 1950s, receive news that one of their three sons has died. Overcome first with grief, followed by the inevitable Malickian interior monologues, the voices of the bereaved O'Briens rise on the soundtrack and continue skyward to the stars. We don't know how their son was killed, much less "Why?", but as we watch the cosmos, the oceans, the volcanoes, the Earth and its early inhabitants come into being, a thought springs to mind: God may be too busy to listen.

I have no idea if that's what Malick wants us to think. Indeed, a rough outline may make The Tree of Life sound like the kind of "Christian movie" evangelicals would long to release. (Baptisms, sayings-of-grace at dinner, the oft-cited example of Mother O'Brien holding one of her children, pointing to the sky and cheerfully exclaiming "That's where God lives!") The overall tone, though -- as the movie shifts from a creation epic back to the story of the O'Brien household years before their family tragedy -- is non-denominationally spiritualist, transcendentalist, Deistic. If there is a God in The Tree of Life He doesn't intervene, yet Malick intimates over and over again that Something is out there, visualized in the opening and closing images as a portal of light that's as awe-inspiring and unsettling as the monoliths in 2001.

If Malick is conversing with Kubrick in the heavens he seems to be speaking to Spielberg on the ground. His work with his preteen actors -- especially Hunter McCracken, who portrays the central character, eldest brother Jack (Sean Penn plays the grownup version of the character, forgettably) -- rivals the thrilling spontaneity of the youthful cast of E.T. The trio of O'Brien sons are raised by their dreary Father (Brad Pitt) to be dutiful and disciplined; naturally, they respond by going on the prowl with other neighborhood kids I recognized only too well. They hit each other and wrestle, shoot BB guns and throw rocks through an abandoned house's windows, blow up bird eggs and tie frogs to bottle rockets. Spielberg captured how the world is experienced by a child while I was growing up; Malick reminds me of how it felt then, now.

Did childhood feel as fragmented as The Tree of Life depicts it, though? In a superb piece deserving of more attention, Matt S(chneider?) of the fine blog Catecinem argues that the revered Terrence Malick and the reviled Michael Bay actually have a "shared sensibility." Matt explains that the constant jump-cuts in The Tree of Life gave him a headache, undermining his admiration for the film's artistic ambitions; whereas he sort of enjoyed Bay's equally choppy technique in the latest Transformers movie. Matt isn't claiming that Transformers 3 is a "better" movie than The Tree of Life; what he's suggesting is a double-standard by critics and other moviegoers. "The way Bay shoots an action scene is stylistically akin to the way Malick shoots a pair of boys wandering through a neighborhood," he writes. "Yet the former is incoherent hackery, whereas the latter is stylistically ambitious....Again I ask: why?"

That's a good question, albeit one that I think answers itself. The best action movies -- The Road Warrior, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Terminator, Casino Royale, et al. -- show an intrinsic understanding of the holy trinity of space, time and movement. Despite having immeasurably bigger budgets and special-effects to play with (or possibly because of them), Michael Bay is oblivious or indifferent to these things. He's forged a signature style of arrogant ineptitude that gives hackery a bad name. (The original hacks of Hollywood actually knew what they were doing.) Malick's method is trickier to ascertain. Would The Tree of Life be more effective if it actually had standard scenes, rather than a series of fragments of scenes? Could the film's central narrative stand without the avant-garde passages that surround it?

That version of The Tree of Life might have made a good movie too. It wouldn't have been a Terrence Malick movie, however. I realize that runs counter to how I usually roll -- making fun of auteur worshippers -- but so be it. Malick's film has plenty of other qualities that normally make me retch: the aforementioned spiritual overtones, Freudian psychology, a mother-figure who is Pure and True, lots of oohing and ahhing over babies. The reason they didn't, I think, is because I love to see an artist caught up in his own grand passions; oftentimes they catch me up in them too. "This is Malick's big one," wrote David Edelstein, "his long-gestating answer to 2001 and Paradise Lost...." Yet what's astonishing is Malick seems to have grown less cynical as he's gotten older, a virtue that informs his responses to Kubrick, of course, but also to the all-grown-up Spielberg, who can no longer make the movies he once made better than anyone else nor the adult fare that real adult filmmakers still make better than he does. Malick's dinosaurs don't act like actual dinosaurs did; the compassion one shows another seems to be a riposte aimed at the jaded mechanics in parts of Jurassic Park and the entirety of The Lost World.

It's also a credit to a director when a dinosaur set-piece isn't even the nuttiest scene in his movie. Behind the narrative innovation, Malick usually comes across as relatively square, so it's a thrill to see him release his energies into confounding images: I still can't get out of my mind the giddy sight of Mother at one point inexplicably floating through the air, like Wendy without help from Peter Pan. Nor will I forget young Jack stealing a woman's dress, only to throw it in a river as a result of sexual panic. Or contemplate killing his father by dropping a car on his head. Malick isn't blind to the darker impulses of human nature, which is what makes his lingering sense of wonder all the more wonderful. On Facebook, Ryan Kelly noted that Malick celebrates "the birth of our planet as much as the birth of an infant child." And he hears the voices of his characters, talking constantly to themselves, leaving you with the suggestion that the universe, however preoccupied with its own concerns, is in its own way listening too.

What Would H. L. Mencken Have Thought of Michael Bay?

2011-07-10T15:21:00.006-04:00

"What afflicts the movies is not an unpalatable ideational content so much as an idiotic and irritating technic. The first moving-pictures... presented more or less continuous scenes... But the modern movie is no such organic whole; it is simply a maddening chaos of discrete fragments. The average scene, if the two shows I attempted were typical, cannot run for more than six or seven seconds. Many are far shorter, and very few are appreciably longer. The result is confusion horribly confounded. How can one work up any rational interest in a fable that changes its locale and its characters ten times a minute? Worse, this dizzying jumping about is plainly unnecessary: all it shows is the professional incompetence of the gilded pants-pressers, decayed actors and other such half-wits to whom the making of movies seems to be entrusted. Unable to imagine a sequence of coherent scenes, and unprovided with a sufficiency of performers capable of playing them if they were imagined, these preposterous mountebanks are reduced to the childish device of avoiding action altogether. Instead of it they present what is at bottom nothing but a poorly articulated series of meaningless postures and grimaces... These mummers cannot be said, in any true sense, to act at all. They merely strike attitudes -- and then are whisked off. If, at the first attempt upon a scene, the right attitude is not struck, then all they have to do is keep on trying until they strike it. On those terms a chimpanzee could play Hamlet, or even Juliet."

-- H. L. Mencken, "Appendix from Moronia: Notes on Technic," 1927 (excerpted in American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, ed. Phillip Lopate, 2006)

Color Lines (One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress)

2011-07-03T15:07:00.002-04:00

"Franklin had a mystical control in his first two movies, One False Move (1991) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995); he knew when to draw the moment out and when to compact it mercilessly. (The climax of One False Move -- one of the most intense I've ever seen -- lasts all of thirty seconds and reverberates for hours.)" -- David Edelstein

***

Carl Franklin, a fine director, has had a hard go of it following a relatively celebrated debut twenty years ago. In a recent IU Cinema podcast on film criticism, I mentioned One False Move as perhaps the finest example of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's advocacy for below-radar films. Franklin's first movie certainly qualified: Without Siskel and Ebert's support, it likely would have been lost forever in straight-to-video limbo. As it happened, One False Move put its star, Bill Paxton, and co-star/co-screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton on the map, and garnered its director the prize of adapting to the screen Devil in a Blue Dress, the first novel of Walter Mosley's celebrated mystery series featuring post-WWII African-American detective Easy Rawlins. Despite good reviews, Devil was a box-office bust, and Franklin has worked along the margins ever since: the mediocre One True Thing and High Crimes; the breezy yet inconsequential Out of Time; and a string of TV credits (including "Peleliu Landing," one of the better episodes of HBO's disappointing The Pacific) all to his credit. Not a bad filmmaking career in all, especially considering how scant the opportunities are for African-American directors in Hollywood, yet nonetheless somehow unfulfilling of his early promise.

One False Move opens with a pair of violent thugs, Ray and Pluto (Thornton and Michael Beach) aided by Ray's girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams), stealing a pile of cocaine and cash from some drug-dealing friends in Los Angeles. The sequence is initially disarming, then horrifying: the dealers, all African-American, live in a nice apartment rather than a stereotypically scuzzy bottom-dwelling, and are first seen videotaping their own buoyant party; after their uninvited guests tie them up and find the money and drugs, Pluto, a quiet, bespectacled, college-educated black man whose weapon of choice is a knife, casually stabs each of them to death. Franklin shows not a single drop of blood, and lets the videotape of the party -- with its participants dancing happily only minutes earlier -- play on the television in the background of the murder scene. Viewers of One False Move never forget this opening movement, yet it's astonishing how unexploitive it is. Franklin is unusually sensitive in depicting the loss of life, and his respect carries over through the rest of the movie.

As Ray, Pluto and Fantasia hit the road, a pair of hardened LAPD detectives, Dud Cole and John McFeely (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings) crack grim jokes about killers with Disney names and quickly learn from the tape that the trio are headed for Star City, Arkansas, where Fantasia's family and infant son live. Cole and McFeely contact Star City chief of police Dale Dixon (Paxton), an excitable go-getter who goes by the name "Hurricane" and leaps at the chance to work on a big case. The LAPDers size up Dale as a yahoo and blowhard, yet Thornton and Tom Epperson's layered script never settles for surfaces. At a family cookout, Dale thoughtlessly utters a racial epithet and is kicked under the table by his wife. (McFeely, who is black, lets out a knowing smile.) Yet we also see him deftly handle a domestic dispute involving an irate husband wielding an axe. Later, in a poignant scene, Dale struggles to keep his dignity when he overhears the urban pair mocking his dream to join the force in Los Angeles. Paxton is an actor I've often been on the fence about; at times, in other performances, I think he overplays. Here, though, as the killers (and a very big secret) come closer to Star City, it's clear that the Hurricane's bluster is partly an act. There's a frailty and fear to the character, yet a core of strength reveals itself too.

One False Move is not the type of thriller that tightens like a vise. The further the characters head South, the more leisurely (though never sluggish) Franklin's pacing becomes. Thornton and Epperson open up their narrative in unexpected ways: as with their scripts for A Family Thing and The Gift, (and Thornton's script for Sling Blade), One False Move is fascinated by Southern cultural mores and the unspoken blurring of color lines. Interracial romance (Ray and Fantasia) and interracial partnership (Ray and Pluto, Cole and McFeely) are never just devices in their framework; they couch sociopolitical concerns that harken back to the great noirs of the 1940s and 50s (and anticipated the Clinton presidency). The movie feels so loose for the majority of its running time that its climax becomes even more stunning. As David Edelstein suggests, the close of One False Move sets off seismic tremors that few films can rival.

Racial blurring is also entwined thematically in Devil in a Blue Dress, a movie whose arrival to the screen was in itself miraculous. A period piece set in 1948 Los Angeles and populated by a predominantly African-American cast, the movie is a Chinatown-style thriller starring Denzel Washington as Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, an unemployed black man struggling to pay the mortgage on the house he owns and loves, who takes up a missing-persons case offered by a pencil-mustached hood (Tom Sizemore) that leads him into a treacherous political labyrinth involving the titular mystery woman (Jennifer Beals) and an imminent mayoral election between the conservative incumbent Todd Carter (Terry Kinney) and self-proclaimed "friend of the Negro" challenger Matthew Terell (Maury Chaykin). As Easy discovers that his case is more complicated than it appears, he calls in a wildcard: his childhood Texas friend Mouse (Don Cheadle), a loyal yet trigger-happy thug with a glittering gold tooth, a gun the size of a crossbow, and a penchant for ignoring moral niceties.

In his review of Carl Franklin's High Crimes, Charles Taylor wrote that "the commercial failure (of Devil in a Blue Dress) robbed us of what might have been an adult franchise of mysteries starring Denzel Washington." Indeed, early last week, in an exchange of emails with Steven Santos, I recalled this movie fondly and couldn't wait to see it again. On second viewing, however, I have to admit that its dismal box-office was somewhat deserved. In addition to directing, Franklin wrote the script (adapting Mosely's novel), and while I'm ordinarily an admirer of any filmmaker who can streamline his own narrative (Devil clocks in at a swift 100 minutes), this is a rare instance of a movie with a richness of theme and character that needed to be longer to do them justice (at least 20-30 minutes). Beals strikes a vivid pose but isn't given enough time to register; her relationship with Washington, which should be crucial, dissipates. Even the real love story, the tense friendship between Easy and Mouse, is blunted by keeping the latter character offscreen until two-thirds into the movie. (This may have also kept Cheadle's breakout performance from contending for awards that year.)

Unlike One False Move, the first half of Devil in a Blue Dress wades through some sluggish patches (and features a line uttered by Washington --"Where are all the white women at?" -- that unwisely recalls Blazing Saddles). Yet the movie hits its stride when Cheadle appears, and once again Franklin sticks the landing: the climax, another explosion of violence that builds on everything that comes beforehand, is vividly staged. It's a shame that the movie's failure prevented Franklin from taking another crack at the material (not least of which it may have kept Denzel Washington out of the clutches of Tony Scott). Yet he's also partly to blame.

Past Imperfect (Midnight in Paris)

2011-06-12T14:38:00.013-04:00

(Warning: Spoilers.)

Remember, in Annie Hall, the scene at a Hollywood party, when one of the guests says about a studio exec: "He gives good meeting"? Owen Wilson gives good double-take. His abashed likability as an actor rests partly in his lazy drawl of a delivery, slightly in his busted nose, and largely in reaction shots that range from touching ("Please stop belittling me," his insecure, depressed writer tells Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums) to sublime (a genuine sense of joy and wonder at Jackie Chan's fleet footwork in Shanghai Noon). Wilson plays another writer, named Gil Pender, in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, a successful Hollywood hack on vacation in Paris with his materialistic fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her well-off, freedom-fries loving parents (Mimi Kennedy and Kurt Fuller). Wilson's double-takes get a workout when Gil, alone on a midnight stroll, is magically transported back to 1920s Gay Paree, where he meets the luminaries of the "The Lost Generation" -- among others, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein -- a fitting happenstance for our hero, being a lost soul himself.

"The best Woody Allen movie in years!" seems to be the response to every other Woody Allen movie these days. But the critics seemed to mean it this time, following a successful premiere at Cannes. (Not always a sure thing for Franco-centric movies -- see Inglourious Basterds.) Midnight in Paris is the first Allen film I've seen in a movie theater since Hannah and Her Sisters, and only one of a handful that I've bothered watching over the last couple decades. I liked the sunnily cynical Vicky Cristina Barcelona and admired the grim Match Point, but Midnight in Paris goes deeper than those films, and in a disarmingly casual manner. You would expect Gil, who hopes to break from screenwriting by penning a serious literary novel (which we learn is about the owner of a "nostalgia shop" that sells old clocks and other pieces of antique ephemera), to be wowed by his fantastical encounters with his heroes, and he is. What makes the premise work, however, is that Gil's bug-eyed wonder gradually gives way to the realization that these icons were once people too.

You come to see Allen's intentions through the fact that nearly every actor underplays: Tom Hiddleston makes a suave Fitz; Corey Stoll, as Hemingway, achieves an effect best described as subtle machismo; Kathy Bates is effectively low-key as Stein, who offers Gil useful advice on his book. (Getting Kathy Bates to downplay anything is quite an accomplishment.) Occasionally a broad caricature -- such as Alison Pill's twangy Zelda Fitzgerald or Adrien Brody's delightfully daffy Salvadore Dali -- pops up to provide a dash of color, but the context of every scene takes Gil's magical visitations at face-value. In one of the film's most buoyant moments, Dali is joined by his friends, the young Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel (Adrien de Ven) and the American artist Man Ray (Tom Cordier), and the trio of Surrealists are intrigued by yet completely unskeptical of Gil's story.

Separated by a few generations, Gil is nevertheless ID'd as a kindred spirit to these artists of yore (who also include Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Josephine Baker, and T.S. Eliot), and he feels an incontrovertible itch to leave his fiance and her overbearing family and settle in Paris. It's unclear whether Gil has it in him to be great, and the movie could have used a few scenes with him at a laptop (or typewriter) applying his craft, but it's refreshing that a passage from his book that we do hear (recited by Stein) sounds truly promising. (Few things are depicted by Hollywood as unconvincingly as talent.) Gil's prose also captures the attention of one of Stein's guests, Adriana (Marion Cotillard) -- mistress first to Picasso, then Hemingway -- with whom Gil falls in love.

Midnight in Paris really starts to hit a groove once Wilson and Cotillard are together onscreen: the former, whose dialogue sounds initially like it's written for Woody's vocal inflections, finds his character's center; the latter, who is in danger of getting typecast as an otherwordly presence, "the Magic Frenchwoman" (being the most beautiful actress currently in movies will do that to you), becomes flesh. Adriana, unlike Gil, sees nothing special about the time she lives in; at one point, she and Gil hitch a carriage ride back to an even earlier historical era, the Belle Epoque, where she is awed by the likes of Degas and Gauguin -- who, tellingly, are as disappointed by their generation as she is hers and Gil his.

Allen takes his central idea so much further than cutesy-poo "What famous person would you like to have dinner with?" gimmickry that the opportunities he misses become more glaring. He wastes a gifted comedienne in Rachel McAdams, and blows a potential comic goldmine by not having Inez go back with Gil and interact with his idols. Better still would have been sending her family back: the always-priceless Kurt Fuller -- no slouch at reaction shots himself -- would have been more than game. Instead, Allen falls back on a few easy Tea Party jabs, without realizing that contextualizing their worldviews within the world might offer something more revealing. (To put it another way, the only thing funnier than Sarah Palin lecturing about Paul Revere is imagining her actually meeting Revere himself.) Faring marginally better, despite the relative thanklessness of his role, is Michael Sheen, unrecognizable as a buff, bearded know-it-all whose vanity Inez finds irresistibly attractive. It might have been fun sending him back in time too, so he could quarrel with historical figures about the facts of their own lives.

Happily, Midnight in Paris follows Allen's main throughline and becomes, quite by accident, very much a movie of the moment. Our cultural nostalgia blender continues to be on puree -- the Spielberg self-homage Super 8 only the latest in what strikes many of us who endured the 1980s as a return to a past not worth revisiting. Yet I have to admit that Allen's movie has given me pause: Were those of us who grew up experiencing Spielberg's (and other filmmakers') early movies more fortunate than we realized then or now? I've also been pondering the message of the equally timely, most recent South Park episode: Does begrudging contemporary moviegoers the pleasures of even a pale imitation of our 80s cinematic experience -- or refusing to recognize that that imitation may even have its own value -- make me, to use medical parlance, "a cynical asshole"?

I think that blog-pal Sheila O'Malley's affectionate yet not uncritical attitude toward nostalgia, best exemplified in her semi-regular "Diary Friday" pieces, is akin to what Woody Allen is getting at in Midnight in Paris. Cynics have accused Allen in recent years of casting younger actors, whether appropriate to their roles or not, as a means of getting his movies made, and they're not wrong. (Ditto his move to European settings, where it's evidently cheaper than shooting in New York.) Watching Owen Wilson, though -- as I did with Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona -- I realized that there's nothing jaundiced about Allen's attitude toward the young generation of actors: he feels genuine affection for them. Yet it's easy to forget that Wilson, while certainly spry compared to the 75-year-old director of his movie, is now in his early-40s, on the cusp of middle-age and, as we all know, a battler of some personal demons. He looks in better shape than when he appeared in The Darjeeling Limited a few years ago, but the quiet despair of his character feels so authentic that when Gil finally finds relief it carries over to the other side of the screen.

After seeing Midnight in Paris, I reentered the real world in an unusually sanguine state of mind, a sense of calm and patience staying with me for the remainder of the day. In this lucid state, my mind drifted to Wilson's funniest line in The Royal Tenenbaums. "We all know Custer died at Little Big Horn," his Eli Cash, author of American historical fiction, says. He continues, "What my book presupposes is...." and then caps it with a wonderfully goofy flourish: "...maybe he didn't?" Eli is a lost boy and a tortured soul, reshaping history without really understanding it. Gil, more wisely, comes to terms between recognizing the past and living in the present, and learns that the middle-ground between those poles may be found on a long boulevard in a lovely walk through the rain.

Lost Causes (Carlos and Duck, You Sucker)

2011-06-05T16:04:00.005-04:00

Carlos (2010) may be the least glamorizing biopic -- and/or portrait of a revolutionary -- I've ever seen. Oftentimes this sort of film employs a subjective point-of-view: the director will depict the destructiveness of the character, yet filter it through a sheen meant to suggest how the character sees himself. Because the subject of a biopic is usually self-destructive as well, this also tends to dilute the harm done to others. Not so with Olivier Assayas's approach. He's crafted what looks like a straightforward gritty docudrama with the tale of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the Venezuelan Marxist who became known as Carlos the Jackal, arguably the most notorious world terrorist prior to Osama Bin Laden. Whereas Bin Laden's ideological primitivism was vividly clear, Carlos (inhabited flawlessly by Edgar Ramirez), as depicted in the movie, adopts Palestine, socialism, anti-imperialism, and any other cause du jour on the table at any given moment. He leads a ragtag, surprisingly polyglot network of Arabs, Germans, and Japanese, and the sharpest critique of the movie is how implicitly it shows terrorists using legitimate social injustices as a means to channel their own violent frustrations and self-aggrandizement: Carlos and his team don't always seem to fully comprehend the issues they're fighting for, but they feel very strongly about them.

Like Das Boot, Carlos was released initially overseas as a TV miniseries (in Assayas's France) before a considerably cut-down version appeared in American theaters last year. I haven't seen Carlos Lite (reportedly 160 minutes), but the full three-part, five-plus-hour version (presently streaming on Xfinity) covers the 1973-1994 period of the Jackal's life, from his first, botched assassination attempt of a Zionist official to his ultimate capture by French authorities, and it never feels bloated. Assayas and his editors Luc Banier and Marion Monnier dash through several years at the beginning and end of the narrative, yet ingeniously slow things down in the middle to depict the central event of Carlos's career: his taking of hostages at the 1975 OPEC summit in Vienna. This fateful day, covered in over an hour of screen time, demonstrates both the audacity and foolishness of Carlos's methods. He threatens the Iranian and Saudi ministers with death, signs autographs, saves the life of a wounded German cohort (a sensitive performance by Alexander Scheer), and impulsively shoots an emissary in a physical struggle to show that he means business. The emissary, alas, turns out to be from Libya, transforming Qaddafi's previous sympathies instantly sour as his government refuses to grant permission to the Jackal's team to land their negotiated DC-9 on Libyan soil. The escapade veers into farce as the plane jaunts back and forth between Algiers and Tripoli, all the while wanting to go to Baghdad (where Saddam Hussein's friendly regime awaits) but not having enough fuel to get there. Carlos ends up revising his assassination plans, cutting the Saudi and Iranian ministers loose in exchange for $20 million -- a not inconsiderable sum, but a compromise that alienates him from his idealistic underlings and earns him a pink slip from a cold pragmatist boss (Ahmad Kaabour) fed up with Carlos's cultivated celebrity image.

Carlos is another example of Assayas's versatility, an eclectic resume that includes the meta-movie-about-moviemaking Irma Vep (with his then-wife Maggie Cheung), the skeezy Euro-thriller Boarding Gate (with Asia Argento), and the family-estate drama Summer Hours (with Juliette Binoche). Truth be told, I've always been an Assayas agnostic. His Summer Hours, heralded as a masterpiece by many, struck me as a nice nap; all of his films, in fact, have an overly thought-out quality that belies the director's efforts to appear freewheeling. (Summer Hours ends with a lengthy tracking shot past a "spontaneous" dance by a group of teenagers that could have been choreographed by Paula Abdul.) Some of these schematics come up in Carlos: When a detective tells his partner that he wants to follow up on a lead before a weekend with his family -- and, please, don't bring your gun -- you know he's a goner. (Ditto later with a woman whose pregnant belly is lingered on right before she answers the doorbell.) The refusal to romanticize Carlos, while on the whole admirable, also has a dramatic downside: the movie (scripted by Assayas, Dan Franck and Daniel Leconte) often has a skimming-on-the-surface feel. Carlos is a bit wanting on a psychological level; we never really get inside anyone's head.

The trade-off, however, is a compellingly broad depiction of how heads-of-state use a wildcard like Carlos, then dispose of him once he wears out his welcome. It's a tribute to Ramirez (a familiar face who has had supporting roles in Che and The Bourne Ultimatum) that he holds our attention without our sympathies for the complete running time. Carlos may be a bonehead but he's also a dangerous one; we comprehend the magnetic pull he has over his subordinates, particularly his wife and mistresses. His narcissism must have rubbed off a bit on me: Here I thought I had clever parallels all mapped out between this movie and Che and Munich, only to see Fernando Croce going typically deeper in calling the film an extension of Jean-Luc Godard's themes in his late-1960s La Chinoise and Sympathy for the Devil. Carlos captures the tragically misplaced ideology that those movies anticipated then, and the fatigue that we feel looking back now.

Known more for his artistically groundbreaking films than any semblance of political radicalism, Sergio Leone directed, around the same time as Carlos the Jackal's emergence, a movie that confounded critics and audiences in the immediate post-Bonnie and Clyde/Easy Rider era with both its retrograde classical style and mixed messages about "the revolutionary spirit." First, though, let's start with the title: When it comes to creating false impressions and turning off moviegoers, ~~Suck, You Ducker~~ Duck, You Sucker (1971) is about as bad as it gets. Leone had also suggested an alternative title, the only marginally better A Fistful of Dynamite, but preferred Once Upon a Time...the Revolution, which captures the true essence of the movie as the crucial go-between of a second trilogy that began with his masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and culminated over a decade later with his final film, the gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Whereas Leone's "Man with No Name" triptych (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) added a progressively darker, spiritual dimension to the American Western genre -- loved by audiences; hated, initially, by critics -- his "Once Upon a Time" trilogy forges the link between the decline of the frontier and the dawn of urbanity.

Once Upon a Time in the Revolution (yes, let's replace the ellipses with an "in") was a game-changer for Leone in more ways than one. The narratives of his previous films gradually evolved from focusing on a solo character (Eastwood) to a duo (Eastwood and Van Cleef) to a trio (Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach) to a foursome (Bronson, Fonda, Robards and Cardinale). Revolution wipes the slate clean. We're back to two protagonists this time: Mexican mercenary Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger), and IRA terrorist John Mallory (James Coburn). Juan and John team up after the former's successful heist of a stagecoach in rural Mexico, and the latter happens by on a motorcycle. (One of Leone's many signals that modernity is fast approaching.) After Juan shoots out John's tire, the latter responds by casually unveiling a jacket filled with explosives (another cue). Following some patented Leone macho posturing -- Coburn shouts "Duck, you sucker" right before every dynamite blast; the director insisted that this non-catchphrase was common American slang -- Juan concocts a scheme to use John to rob a bank in the town of Mesa Verde. John agrees to the plan, only to reveal, once they get there, that he's enlisted an unwitting Juan as part of the Mexican Revolution.

I wasn't going to mention that Once Upon a Time in the Revolution reminds me of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom -- because, yes, it's a stupid analogy, but let me explain what I mean. Revolution is shot in a mannered classical style similar to that of West (a letdown to audiences after the break-the-rules "Dollars" films), yet it's also the most playfully free-associative of Leone's movies. Like Spielberg's maligned middle-film of the Indiana Jones series (we'll pretend Crystal Skull didn't happen), parts of Revolution seem to pop out of the director's unconscious. At times it even seems disinterested in its own story, preferring to indulge visual flourishes -- such as a priceless sight-gag of Steiger cutting a slit through an image of a political leader to reveal his own eyes -- that remind you that you're watching a movie. (Leone was actually going to hand the directorial reins of the film to someone else before a furious Steiger made him stick around.)

Once Upon a Time in the Revolution is so mischievous it's not difficult to see why some thought it wasn't taking its own ideas seriously. (More troubling, in actuality, is an early scene treating Leone's recurring preoccupation with rape in a bizarrely cavalier manner. Whereas Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West created the first and last three-dimensional female character in Leone's body of work, we're back in Cro-Magnon territory here.) Yet a streak of melancholy runs through the film, a grim awareness of the tragic sacrifices individuals make for their causes. The British film scholar Christopher Frayling, who provides terrific DVD commentaries for all but one of Leone's spaghetti westerns (replaced, for some reason, by Eastwood hagiographer Richard Schickel on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), explains on the Revolution track that the end of this movie anticipates the even darker atmosphere of Once Upon a Time in America -- a pair of films separated by thirteen years that thematically don't skip a beat. Once Upon a Time in the Revolution isn't flawless -- gauzy flashbacks to John's menage a trois relationship back in Ireland are guaranteed to provoke snickers -- yet it manages to enhance the overall trilogy while not being all of a piece itself. It's a grand epic, a forgotten yet essential film.

Going in Circles (Somewhere, Dogtooth, and Meek's Cutoff)

2011-05-29T15:22:00.015-04:00

Picking a fight over a movie has its kicks, but part of the fun depends on the adversary. For example, Ali Arikan's recent Pirates of the Caribbean piece, which boldly upbraids a blockbuster predestined to suck, baits fans too inept to formulate a cogent argument, and has received a hearty round of Hurrah-for-Karamazovs from fellow blogger/critics who have all written immeasurably better things, strikes this reader as no more than a boring provocation. (There's a point to be made against the masses lining up like lemmings for the latest Hollywood refuse, but Ali's facile broadside doesn't come close to making it.) In contrast Eileen Jones, who occasionally plays the "moron" card as cheaply as Mr. Arikan rails about "cunts," nevertheless explains quite wittily and elegantly why Rob Marshall's movie fails (and how Gore Verbinski's maligned immediate predecessors succeeded far more than they were given credit for). Even better was Jones's challenge to critics of the Coen brothers' True Grit (and admirers of Hathaway's), which forges a fascinating link between the film, Portis's book, and Laughton's Night of the Hunter, and mounts a convincing defense that the Coens's body of work -- contrary to its critics and even a few admirers -- has been anything but cold.

Part of what makes an argument effective is the worthiness of its opponents; it's those same opponents, however, that can make crafting such an argument daunting. High-profile pictures -- The Dark Knight, The Tree of Life -- breed a religious fanaticism in their devotees that can be difficult (and tiresome) to deal with, but Nolanoids and Malickheads typically have a mass facelessness -- like the torch-and-pitchfork crowd at the end of Night of the Hunter -- that give their onslaughts a welcome dash of the ridiculous. Find yourself disliking a smaller film like Meek's Cutoff, Somewhere, or Dogtooth, however, and you may find yourself up against formidable admirers of one, two or all three of those movies, often critics you respect. Movies like these are invariably described by their fans as "challenging": they make the viewer work a little to understand them. I'm all for a little audience effort (Certified Copy being a recent example), but my litmus test ultimately boils down to this: Are you working harder than the movie is to express itself? Kubrick and Malick, Kiarostami and the Coens can all be difficult, but I always have the impression that they know what their movies are about. I'm never left with the sense that they're giving anything less than their all.

The least offensive of the aforementioned threesome, Somewhere is Sofia Coppola's latest non-movie about characters stuck in mind-numbing stasis. As in Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, Coppola traces celebrity and affluence as the causes of this condition, and I do feel that some critics of her work are off-base by begrudging her for writing what she knows. The problem with her films isn't their insularity, but what she puts into them -- dying stars inside of black holes. Lost in Translation overcome many of its flaws because Bill Murray, as a movie star adrift in a strange land, so beautifully rendered charm out of ennui. (Scarlett Johansson, not so much.) Somewhere casts an inexpressive B-list actor (Stephen Dorff) as a fame-fatigued A-lister, and fails to make his estrangement -- from his daughter (Elle Fanning), from himself -- even remotely as persuasive. (Imagine what Murray would have done with the scene where Dorff's face becomes frozen under layers of movie makeup and you have a semblance of what's missing.) The movie has some affecting moments that evolve from long silences: an ice-skating practice; an older gentleman's guitar solo that captivates the hero more than an assembly of pole-dancers ever could. Inevitably, though, I have qualms about a filmmaker who believes that the best way to convey inertia is via an inert approach.

Somewhere looks downright admirable compared to Dogtooth, the acclaimed Greek black comedy about a father (Christos Stergioglou) who raises his three grown-up children on an isolated family estate that they are forbidden to leave. The kids, all maladjusted blanks with misbegotten vocabularies, are "protected" from the outside world -- represented by the patrarch's place of business, a dreary factory -- yet chaos emerges via a young woman (Anna Kalaitzidou) hired to prostitute herself to the older adolescent son (Hristos Passalis) and, more importantly, contraband videocassettes of Rocky and Flashdance that inspire the eldest daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia) to flailing rebellion. Steven Boone has taught me more about visual syntax than any film critic around, but I must respectfully disagree with his assertion that the lead-pipe directorial style of Giorgos Lanthimos adds up to anything other than a thudding hollowness at the narrative's core. More than one admirer has compared Dogtooth to the best of Luis Bunuel (puh-leeze!), but the surrealist master always posited his malicious contraptions within a larger sociopolitical framework and made his targets worthy of their punishments. The cheap, empty cruelty of Dogtooth is closer in spirit to the early work of Michael Haneke and is every bit as despicable.

Which brings us to Meek's Cutoff, the most recent widely-praised film by my least favorite current filmmaker. The previous efforts of Kelly Reichardt, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, approach modern malaise from the opposite end of Sofia Coppola's economic spectrum: For Reichardt, it's poverty that's the cause of society's ills, a perfectly valid worldview negated by the filmmaker's insistence that the lower-class live out every interaction of their lives in staggering torpor. The sun not only never shines in her monotonous Pacific Northwest milieu, the characters never laugh, never crack a joke or a smile, never express or act out a subversive thought. When a character makes a rare act of selflessness, like the security guard who gives Michelle Williams money in Wendy and Lucy, he's made to look like a dunce.

I had braced myself for more of the same with Meek's Cutoff, her period-piece foray into 19th-century pioneering, so it was seductive to be confronted by sunlit vistas of an expansive Oregon desert, as ravishing as they are treacherous. (The peerless cinematography is by Chris Blauvelt, a relative newcomer with camera-operating credits for David Fincher and Gus Van Sant.) Although Reichardt's sub-laconic, micro-minimalist style works far better coming out of the mouths and registering on the faces of 1845 settlers, her ensemble is more varied this time out. (There's even, my God, a joke or two, albeit the biggest laugh is derived from an opening title card that reads "A Primitive Nerd Production.") Michelle Williams provides a stronger moral center than she was allowed in Wendy and Lucy; Paul Dano's precise enunciation is as hypnotic as it was in There Will Be Blood (hard to believe his breakout role, in Little Miss Sunshine, was a character who refused to speak); Shirley Henderson's dreamy British diction is a constant source of amusement. The most colorful character is the titular Stephen Meek (a bearded Bruce Greenwood), a posturing, self-aggrandizing guide who has persuaded (perhaps disingenuously) this handful of pioneer men and women to abandon the larger wagon train and follow him to a suitable terrain to call home.

The opening third of Meek's Cutoff casts such a spell I had nearly convinced myself that Reichardt had wrecked my thesis for this post. Eventually, however, her dunderheaded storytelling instincts kick in. The lost pioneers capture a solitary Native American (Ron Rondeaux), and much argumentation ensues over whether the man should be killed (Meek's preference) or used as a guide to a desperately-needed water source (the Williams/Patton option). I've read reviews describing Meek's Cutoff as an allegory for Bush's failed leadership in the Iraq War; if that was the intent, it's muddled by the fact that we never see Meek persuade anyone to do anything. His con -- if that's what it is -- occurs before the narrative opens. The movie is more about the perils of following: yet that too is hampered because the decision to follow the Cayuse Indian has no consequences one way or another. His motives are depicted as ambiguously as Meek's, no matter how much blind faith Williams puts into him. (Stabs at fragmented communication between the settlers and the Cayuse are about as convincing as similar scenes in The Ewok Adventure.)

I know, not every movie needs a payoff. To make the whole Waiting for Godot thing work, though, an artist has to captivate by other means, and Reichardt's ideas are too half-baked to warrant such high regard. She sets up a potentially riveting narrative -- growing suspicion that Meek is all bluster, mounting hysteria that the Cayuse is leading them into a trap -- and abandons it not due to the demands of the story, but because, I suspect, she feels above such niceties. Too bad. Despite succumbing to her worst impulses, Kelly Reichardt has come dangerously close to making a good movie. Maybe next time.

Too Many Secrets (Farewell and The Tourist)

2011-05-15T14:25:00.016-04:00

Farewell (2010) tells a great story from the ground up: In the early 1980s, during the last pinnacle of the Cold War, a high-level Russian intelligence agent passes state secrets to a low-level French operative, leading ultimately to the downfall of the Soviet Union. The Russian, Sergei Gregoriev (Emir Kusturica), is a fortysomething epicurean, gregarious and reckless, in possession of a fed-up, middle-aged wife, an obsessed mistress, and a teenage son with an appreciation for "decadent Western music." The Frenchman, Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet), is a thirtyish intellectual, whose ambition and timidity pull him in opposite directions and threaten to estrange him from his own young wife and infant children. The movie begins in media res (finally, an excuse to use that phrase!), with Sergei waiting for Pierre while ensconced in the back-seat shadows of the latter's car. It's an opening reminiscent of Alan Pakula's work with Gordon Willis, yet where Farewell departs from its forbearers in the genre is Sergei and Pierre choose to conspire not at a loading dock or in a underground garage but rather directly outside a public event (a circus performance featuring one of Pierre's daughters). The hiding-in-plain-sight joke turns into a running gag, as the pair continue (at Sergei's behest) to rendezvous in one public area after another, exchanging government records during the harsh light of day. Sergei's scheme is so counterintuitive that his colleagues in the Russian intelligentsia overlook it entirely; it's so mundane that it takes a while for the French and American presidents -- Mitterrand (Phillippe Magnan) and Reagan (Fred Ward) -- to realize the gold mine of information that's landed in their laps.

This has all the makings of a terrific thriller, a human-scaled epic out of le Carre, so it's puzzling that Farewell never quite grips as a satisfying whole. The director, Christian Carion, works with an ambitiousness that exceeds both his budget and skill. Individual sequences, like a white-knuckler at a border crossing, are deftly staged. But there's a lack of momentum from one scene into the next; even a montage late in the movie featuring the international rounding-up of covert KGB agents (one of them played in a wordless cameo by Diane Kruger) lacks a sense of how this humdrum operation affects the bigger picture. Inconsistency also plagues the performances. Kusturica (who is a Serbian film director) plays Sergei like a Russkie Brendan Gleeson, expansive, flawed and soulful, whose commitment toward giving his son a brighter future is the catalyst for his actions. Canet (perhaps also better known as a director, namely of the superb French thriller Tell No One) renders Pierre an effective everyman, less goal-driven than Sergei to "change the world" than he is at bucking for promotion, yet increasingly terrified of getting caught, getting killed, or losing his family. On the downside, Fred Ward's turn as a bizarrely engaged Ronald Reagan is a constant source of distraction, and reminded me of Phil Hartman's priceless countermythical impression on Saturday Night Live: "I've got to do everything by myself!"

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck makes up for the cunning of his surveillance experts in his last film, The Lives of Others, with a vengeance in the first five minutes of The Tourist (2010), opening with a laughably conspicuous black panel van tailing Angelina Jolie from about ten feet behind. Jolie plays an English mystery woman (a secret agent, or femme fatale, or something) named Elise Clifton-Ward, who shows her knack for undercover work by appearing in magazine-cover attire and burning a surreptitious note dropped at her table in an outdoor Parisian cafe. A head of British intelligence (Paul Bettany, spending the movie glaring at computer screens and barking orders into microphones) commands his team to Get That Note!, and they tail their leisurely-paced high-heeled target down the street before losing her in a subway tunnel. I was hoping to see Jolie give her pursuers the slip through a gaggle of nuns, but von Donnersmarck sadly lacks a flair for the ridiculous.

Rather, The Tourist doesn't seem to know it's ridiculous. Or perhaps the movie senses this quality (there is a lingering whiff of desperation) but won't embrace it. Obviously von Donnersmarck wanted to make a lighthearted Hitchcockian travelogue -- To Catch a Thief, et al. -- and that kind of movie would have been more than welcome, but what he came up with instead can only be described as laboriously breezy. (Come to think of it, To Catch a Thief wasn't that great in the first place.) On a train for Venice, Elise meets Frank Tupelo (good sport Johnny Depp), a mild-mannered American tourist who becomes her dupe as she plots to evade both the clueless Brits and a ham-fisted gangster in order to rendezvous with her white-collar thief-lover. The leads have zilch chemistry, the chase scenes move at half-speed, and the director appears to have advised every male actor in the cast to react to Jolie's entrances like a cartoon wolf clubbing his own head with a mallet. No question she's still a looker (though the botox is starting to get in the way), but it's a weird case of overselling from a filmmaker whose debut was breathtakingly calibrated. The Tourist is a comatose non-starter.

Ebertfest Day 3: 45365, Me and Orson Welles, Only You

2011-04-30T20:00:00.006-04:00

"I don't think people read film criticism. I think people read film critics." - Matt Z. Seitz

This day, the Third of Ebertfest, is my last in Champaign-Urbana for the week, though the festivities will continue through Saturday and early Sunday. Saturday's screenings include a couple of documentaries I'm not that interested in (A Small Act and Life, Above All) and a pair of fictional films that I've already seen (Leaves of Grass and I Am Love). I have no major regrets about bolting a day early, apart from missing Tilda Swinton's appearance on Saturday evening. I'll see her at our wedding, though. And it would have been nice to catch the closing film, Louder Than a Bomb, co-directed by Jon Siskel, nephew of the great Gene. I'll extend my visit next year.

Additionally, I will plan on booking my lodgings early enough to stay at the Illini Union, albeit my lateness in doing so this year may have caught me an unintended break. For reasons many C-U denizens have trouble comprehending, the annual Illini Marathon is being held on Saturday, overlapping with Ebertfest and adding another 20,000 visitors to the 14K that the Festival already provides. Traffic will reportedly be closed through much of campus, where the marathon passes through, but because the Hamptom lies just north of the race, it looks like I may be able to get home.

I've neglected to mention the panels here at Ebertfest, which have been quite enjoyable despite the punishing early morning start times. The Thursday 9 a.m. panel, titled "Personal Stories in Film," featured some interesting discussion -- particularly from Michael Phillips and Kristin Thompson -- on the tension between personal and commercial product in cinema and served as a prelude to a few of the Festival's offerings. After the panel I spoke with Thompson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, along with her husband David Bordwell (who was unfortunately ill and unable to attend), co-proprietor of the brilliant blog Observations on Film Art, and told her the high regard that readers (myself included) have for her and Bordwell's stimulating online discourses. She said that that was good to hear, that at times she and David felt like they were writing in a void. Yet when I suggested that opening the comments on their site might remedy that feeling, Thompson recoiled like I'd offered her a snake. "Oh, no no no no..." she said. It never ceases to amaze me how smart people consistently fail to take advantage of opportunities of their own creation.

The first Friday morning panel, "Ebert Presents: Reinventing the TV Show in the Digital Age," was quite good considering how hungover most of the panelists appeared. Moderated by Chaz Ebert, with Roger in attendance, the folks at the table featured the stars of the new "At the Movies," the very tall Ignatiy Vishnevestsky and the very short Christy Lemire, along with a rogue's gallery of contributors that included David Poland (whose laptop appeared to be attached by umbilical cord), Dann Gire, and Matt Zoller Seitz. However, the topic became more about the state of film criticism itself when Gire (whose name rhymes with either "fear" or "dire") went off on an apocalyptic tangent about the Evils of Rotten Tomatoes, and Matt responded with the quote that kicks off this post. After Christy-L and Iggy-V offered some climactic banter, I joined the congregation at the microphone and eventually asked the panel if they ever feel pressure to conform to the general consensus about a movie. I was pleased that Chaz liked my question so much that she asked it to every panelists down the table, though it ran time over enough for one of the Ebertfest people to warn Chaz that "Norman Jewison is waiting" for the next discussion to start.

Finally, the movies themselves began with 45365 (2009), a lovely documentary from brothers Bill and Turner Ross about a year in their hometown of Sidney, Ohio. I don't know if it was intended, but the film has an Altmanesque quality, from the large ensemble to the overlapping dialogue to frequent use of the pan-and-zoom. (I was also reminded of Do The Right Thing, in the central figure of a white DJ equivalent to Mister Senor Love Daddy.) Outside afterwards, an attendee complained that the movie didn't show enough economic hardship. I would counter that the Ross Bros are not miserabilists but impressionists; I'm not sure what other impression one could take from the quietly affecting sequence of a man's prison sentence beginning by being cuffed and chained by a polite court officer, but I definitely have mine.

The day concluded with a pair of minor films from major filmmakers, both of whom were in attendance. Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (2008), starring Zac Efron as an eager teenager who partakes in Welles's 1937 production of Julius Caesar, is one of those movies that thinks the most authentic way to depict "The 30s" is by goosing us with nonstop Big Band music and encouraging its cast to talk archly out of the sides of their mouths like a high school production of Give My Regards To Broadway. Linklater's movie is a harmless trifle (strictly Newton Boys territory); Christian McKnight's terrific performance as Welles, more than that.

Norman Jewison's Only You (1994), also an inoffensive time-waster, stars Marisa Tomei as a true-love free-spirit nonsensically about to marry a boring podiatrist until she encounters Robert Downey, Jr. in Italy and believes him to be The One. Jewison's foray into Nora Ephron territory adds to this rough outline a couple of decent twists that I won't spoil for anyone, and whenever the plot starts to flatline Bonnie Hunt, as Tomei's unhappily married sister-in-law, pops in to ad-lib a nifty zinger. Tomei's comic timing, though, is a half-beat too slow for Downey (and a full beat too slow for Hunt), and the two never really connect. Needless to say, the director of In the Heat of the Night and Moonstruck has done better things, but it was worth watching the movie just to see Jewison in person (both at the earlier panel and the post-screening Q&A), his memory slipping a little but otherwise looking pretty damned fit for 84 years old.

Ebert's own health sort of became the elephant in the room, one which I want to briefly address. Sitting next to me at one screening was a young woman named Jenny, who confessed that she decided to come to Ebertfest all the way from Washington, D.C. because she didn't know how much time he might have left. She apologized if that sounded badly, and I apologize if it comes across as morbid on the page, but I told her that I understood what she meant. Roger may well outlive all of us, clearly the last thing he wants is to be sentimentalized or pitied, and he won't be getting either from me. Having said that, I think it's good that people feel compelled to celebrate him now -- to celebrate movies with him, to let him know how much he means to them, has meant to them for a long time.

Plenty of articles lately have attributed the loss of Ebert's speaking voice with his "finding a voice" online, but what's never recognized is that Roger has always had an online presence. He created his own online film forum on CompuServe in the late 90s (I know, I was there [briefly]), when nearly every other print critic was pooh-poohing the Internet. As Richard Linklater reminded us, Roger has always been fascinated by technology as well: he said he met Ebert 25 years ago at a college in Hawaii, watched him use a laser-disc copy of Citizen Kane to analyze the film with students frame-by-frame. Linklater called it "my equivalent of film school."

What has made Roger Ebert so vital to film criticism for more than 40 years is his ability to employ new technology (television, laser-disc, the Internet, CereProc voice software) in such a way that he makes his real-world presence even more essential. Yet many film critics and film scholars still don't get it. They think it's an either-or scenario -- choose tradition or choose the future -- and so they become Little Dutch Boys with their fingers in the dyke. Having just seen eight movies over an exhausting three days, I can truly say that I respect what film critics do more than ever, and I'll be more understanding the next time one of them makes a mistake. But I also believe that film critics continue to be their own worst enemies, that if they would stop whining about Rotten Tomatoes and circling the wagons every time a gaggle of immature prepubescents takes umbrage at something they've written -- that if they'd stop embracing martyrdom and start connecting with a potential audience, then Yes, Virginia, some of them just may find their voices too.

Ebertfest Day 2: Umberto D., My Dog Tulip, and Tiny Furniture

2011-04-30T01:20:00.008-04:00

At the end of Day One at Ebertfest, I left you stranded with Loud Laughing Guy up in the Virginia Theatre's balcony, having successfully given him the slip. Or so I thought. On the second day, alas, he tracked me down, from the balcony to the downstairs right corner for the evening screening of Tiny Furniture. Remember Night Court? Remember the really obnoxious solo male guffawer that penetrated through the more canned audience laughter? I swear it's the same guy: HAW HAW HAW HAW! In principle there was nothing odd about the laughing -- Tiny Furniture is a very funny movie. It was the fact that he was often laughing during the intervals between the jokes that gave those of us around him pause.

But I digress. Most of the attendees have been wonderful (even if a few middle-aged and elderly moviegoers continue to counter the myth that teenagers are the only ones ruining movies by talking and texting). My own IU Cinema hat -- the same kind as the one I gave Roger -- attracted the attention of a few visiting Hoosiers at the first morning panel discussion: "Personal Stories in Film." I also met for the first time a few fellow online bloggers: Kenji Fujishima, Odie Henderson, and a bleary-eyed Matt Zoller Seitz. Matt was getting coffee right before the Thursday afternoon screening of My Dog Tulip. "I'm leading the Q&A with the directors after the film," he explained. "Oh," I said, "have you seen it before?" "No," he admitted. "So I'll be watching very closely."

I have little to say about the day's first movie, Umberto D., because there's nothing possibly new that's left to say about it (De Sica, Neorealism, cute dog tricks). And I have unfortunately little to say that's nice about My Dog Tulip, which essentially stretches out a poop joke over 83 interminable minutes. Actually, that's not fair: piss, vomit, and doggie fornicating also figure prominently -- over and over and over and over again -- in this R-rated canine cartoon. I haven't read J. R. Ackerley's novel on which Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's animated film is based, but what may have been charming on the page is deeply tedious onscreen, even when narrated by Christopher Plummer. I feel badly writing that, since the Fierlingers came across in the Q&A as committed artists who made the movie they wanted to make. It's just not the movie I wanted to see.

Easily the best new film I've seen at Ebertfest so far is the one I dreaded the most: Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture, which has enjoyed national festival success and experienced an intense backlash with a rapid speed appropriate to its YouTube Generation milieu. Dunham wrote, directed, and stars in the picture as Aura, a recent graduate of an Ohio college who returns to live at her mother's swanky New York apartment (a key character played by her real mother, Grace Dunham). As a screenwriter, Dunham has a wonderful ear: one character, a relentless social climber, is described as the kind of person "who would attend the opening of a fucking envelope." What amazed me, however, was her eye: Rather than shake the camera around to create the illusion of reality, Dunham nails it to a tripod and demonstrates what the best filmmakers all possess -- an intuitive sense of physical space. Tiny Furniture is really about the relationship between one's physical and mental spaces: the feeling of being too big to stay in your room, yet too small to venture out in the world. It hooked me right away, but several folks around me hated the movie with the kind of hostility that invites a dimestore psychological interpretation. Something about Lena Dunham -- her gender, her privilege, and perhaps most of all, her plain-Jane looks -- seems to get to some people, as though thinking, How dare she? I say talent is talent, in whomever and wherever it arises. Tiny Furniture isn't a great movie. But it is a great first movie, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Next: Day 3, with 45635, Me and Orson Welles, and Only You.

Ebertfest Day 1: Metropolis and Natural Selection

2011-04-28T23:20:00.007-04:00

"When we started out (with our first film project), we went in with the idea that everybody has a story to tell. And by the end, we learned, not everybody does."

-Sandra Fierlinger, co-director of My Dog Tulip,

with the funniest quote from Ebertfest so far

Also known as the Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival, this year marks the 13th annual Ebertfest held in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and my first foray to both the festival (hell, to any film festival) and to Roger's hometown. Venues are held in two locations: screenings at The Virginia Theatre on Park Avenue in downtown Champaign; panel discussions at the Illini Union on the University of Illinois campus. For future attendees it should be advised that the Union Hotel is also the prime place for lodgings; I was too late in making reservations, however, and am staying instead at the Hampton in Urbana on the northern tip of campus -- which lacked hot water in this morning's shower and possesses a certain hard-edged charm. (When I asked the front-desk person if there were any shuttles to the Theatre, she replied with a curt, "No." Not any alternative suggestions for bus transport, nor offers to call a cab. Just "No.") But the hotel does have the benefit of being within a ten-minute walk of the Union and an equally short drive to a downtown parking garage only a couple blocks from the Virginia. Parking was one of my biggest concerns coming in, but it's surprisingly cheap and easy.

Opening night proved to be a very enjoyable (if very late) evening that deviated from the regular program, Chaz Ebert explained in her introductory remarks, in that two films were shown instead of the traditional one 70mm event: Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis; and last month's SXSW festival winner Natural Selection. This was actually the second time in two months that I'd seen the newly restored Metropolis, the first being in February at Indiana University with music from a 17-piece Jacobs School student orchestra. The Ebertfest version was scored by the Alloy Orchestra, a three-person unit renowned for their silent-film music that's heavy on percussion and electronica and banging pots and pans. This seems to be a minority opinion here, but I found their approach a little grating, while obviously passionate and ambitious. I'm not sure, though, that sound effects are needed for every single action and gesture in the movie. I thought that the more traditionally classical performance by the Jake, the first use of the "new" sheet music (based on the formerly lost original score by Gottfried Huppertz), was more effective. Either way, Metropolis is still a stunning experience. An indestructible classic, if the movie could survive Giorgio Moroder, it can survive anything.

The Ebert-led jury in Austin slathered Natural Selection with prizes, and it's easy to see why a good Darwinist like Roger flipped over it. Robbie Pickering's road comedy about a fundamentalist housewife's search for her sperm-donating husband's son spends its first half scoring easy points on the Christian right and its second half doubling back for some hasty deepening. (The Ebertfest audience ate it up, especially Loud Laughing Guy sitting behind me in the balcony: "HAW HAW HAW HAW!") It's always tricky with a target like this, not because I think it's an undeserving topic for satire, but I guess I want a filmmaker to challenge his own assumptions, to explore where these characters are coming from, and depicting a minister who swears and says "goddamn" a lot seems less than that. Yet, somehow, my dislike for the movie transformed almost imperceptibly into delight: Pickering has a knack for tightening screwball comic logic, so that the movie becomes a sort of Preston Sturges film about evangelicals; and he's doubly blessed having Rachael Harris as his lead. The Ebertfest program notes assure us that "we'll be hearing a lot about Robbie Pickering" this year, but rest assured instead that it's Harris (who has been in attendance this week, along with Pickering) who's going to be the topic of conversation. She's phenomenal, and it was an honor to shake her hand and tell her so.

Speaking of handshakes, Roger Ebert, as reported, has a grip like a vise. After thirty years of reading his books and watching the guy on television, plus approximately fifteen years of occasional correspondence (I never expect him to remember who I am, but he at least takes the trouble to pretend he does), this was the first time I'd met him face-to-face. I'd also been asked by the IU Cinema's director to present him with a gift: a Cinema cap. Opportunity knocked in the Theatre lobby immediately following the Metropolis screening: the witty bon-mot I'd had planned, something about accepting a gift from a Big 10 rival (HAW HAW HAW HAW!), promptly dissipated, and I babbled something semi-intelligible instead. No matter. He shook my hand again, then placed his hand over his heart.

Coming Next: Day 2, Umberto D., My Dog Tulip, and Tiny Furniture.

Parental Discretion (The Fighter, Never Let Me Go, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps)

2011-04-23T16:30:00.004-04:00

Catching up to the Winter (2010) releases, as I do inevitably every Spring (2011), always yields belated Christmas gifts of confirmations and surprises. In the case of the latter, I had avoided The Fighter because the idea of a go-for-it Oscar-bait true-story boxing movie shot with epileptic camerawork and performed by a hollering Boston-accented cast seemed almost as appealing as a nail drilled through my head -- indeed, the director, David O. Russell, took up the project only after his latest unbankable black comedy on that very subject (Nailed, starring Jessica Alba), was aborted by the studio. I should have had more faith, though. Beantown stepbrothers Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) are indeed followed by a camera crew filming an HBO documentary, but Russell keeps the integrity of his own superb framing, maintains his own humorously-askanced yet emotionally-invested point-of-view.

Russell's approach is beautifully in-synch with his star, Wahlberg, who occupies the still center of a familial storm that includes drug-addled Dicky, emasculated father George (Jack McGee), seven scary sisters and an even more terrifying matriarch Alice (Melissa Leo). Dicky, a former welterweight who once gave Sugar Ray Leonard a run for his money, is the central figure of the HBO doc, and for a while this conceals the predictability of Micky's sports-triumph arc, adds a layer of comedy and complication to what becomes ultimately Micky's story. At 31, Micky, a plowhorse junior welterweight, knows that his days as a contender are nearing an end, and is forced to consider whether his loyalty to what his advising barmaid girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) and encroaching boxing professionals call "the circus" -- his brother-trainer and mother-manager -- is keeping him from fulfilling his potential.

The Fighter is Russell's most commercial movie since Three Kings (1999), and just as that film made compromises to the war genre (including an upbeat ending that the director himself has expressed misgivings about), so too does this one embrace sports movie cliches. The boxing matches, filmed in the same ESPN style in which they were originally telecast, offer little strategy beyond the dubious Rocky notion that getting beaten to a pulp makes you stronger. Fortunately, The Fighter also marks a return to the comedies of family suffocation with which Russell launched his career. Both Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting with Disaster (1996) are about characters trapped in families they are desperate to escape; The Fighter extends this theme into the effect of parents and siblings on one's vocation, with Alice and Dicky depicted as hyper-supportive, well-meaning individuals who don't know when to back off. The histrionics of Bale and Leo in their respective roles have come under some criticism, and while I found the latter's Oscar campaign particularly odious, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed their performances. They play their characters as constantly circling, negatively-charged electrons, no doubt precisely what their director had in mind. David O. Russell may be a thug, a bully, and a maniac, but The Fighter shows, once again, that he's also enough of an artist to examine how he got there.

If nothing else, the over-the-top dynamism of The Fighter makes a refreshing tonic to Never Let Me Go, a drizzly, plinky thing about a trio of nearly-human clones who accept a cruel fate as organ-donors the jolly-old-English way: because to revolt would be rude. Adapting a reportedly hugely popular 2005 novel (I have to take that at its word more and more these days) by Kazuo Ishiguro, Danny Boyle's favorite screenwriter Alex Garland fashions a common love triangle whose uncommon elements are barely emphasized or explored. At the telegraphically-named Hailsham boarding school, young ~~Harry, Ron and Hermione~~ Kathy, Tommy and Ruth become, at various turns, friends, love interests, and romantic rivals; yet not even growing up to be played by well-bred twentysomething movie stars like Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley is enough to deter their destinies as "donors." True love may, possibly, be grounds for a "deferral," a rumored pardon to be granted by the enigmatic school headmaster (an underused Charlotte Rampling). But, alas, Kathy and Tommy are kept apart by Ruth's machinations, until a reunion years later gives them One Last Chance.

Ishiguro also wrote The Remains of the Day, adapted into a fine 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The Merchant/Ivory imprimatur was often misinterpreted as mannered: their best work (including Remains) conveyed the tension between stoic appearances and emotions roiling beneath the surface. Never Let Me Go is too refined to roil. The director, Mark Romanek, has had a long career with the likes of Madonna and The Red Hot Chili Peppers(not to mention a foray into feature films with the terrible Robin Williams stalker-picture One Hour Photo); I never thought I'd use this as a criticism, but he brings nothing that he's learned from directing music videos to the table. Scenes are static; the editing is uninspired; the score, by Rachel Portman, is the same piano-based tuneage she always delivers (Emma, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, et al.). Mulligan and Garfield are pleasant as star-crossed Kathy and Tommy, Knightley effectively unpleasant as the scheming Ruth. Although she could have easily played the lead, Knightley was shrewd to take a smaller part that pays bigger dividends -- a jealous, insecure young woman whose motives are so ambiguous that her final act of manipulation could be taken either way as an act of penance or vengeance. It's the kind of unsympathetic performance in a drearily tasteful movie that would have made Pauline Kael pull her finger out of her throat in admiration.

Kael once quipped that she retired because "The thought of sitting through another Oliver Stone movie was too much to bear." That was during Stone's early-90s age of agitprop, with JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon sending film critics running from early screenings to the nearest CNN panel discussion. Yet modern American cinema's most controversial director has been accused more recently of toothlessness, which Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps does sadly little to dispel. It's a deeply strange movie, with an odd piggy-back structure that keeps Gordon Gekko, its ostensible uber-villain and sole reason for existence, on the sidelines before suddenly vaulting him to the top of the pyramid. (The easily distracted screenplay was co-written, ironically, by former critic and Kael apostle Stephen Schiff.) With Michael Douglas appearing only incrementally to spit his lines and waggle his eyebrows, Shia LaBeouf, as Gekko's latest young pawn and prospective son-in-law, engaged to his lefty-pixie daughter (Carey Mulligan again), is required to hold our interest for the majority of the running-time, an inadvisable strategy no matter how many Hollywood pictures continue to use it.

The original Wall Street (1987) is minor Oliver Stone, but it made for entertaining melodrama and served as a warmup for the full-bore multimedia assaults he would come to helm a few years later. Money Never Sleeps features even more intricate split-screen sequences (complete with Stone cameo) and is amazingly smooth on a visual level for a story that narratively makes no sense. Stone's father, of course, was a stockbroker, and this might explain the weird sentimentality of the movie, which transforms Gordon Gekko from the kind of shark who devoured old-school financiers like Stone Senior into, essentially, the patriarch himself. Is Greed Good? is the title of Gekko's fresh-out-of-prison bestseller, an apparently rhetorical question, given our economic climate, belied by an unexpected answer: Yes, when tempered with a pregnancy ultrasound photo.

Grimm Tidings (Hanna and Cutter's Way)

2011-04-17T16:33:00.006-04:00

Joe Wright, the director of Hanna, is a couple of tweaks away from being a good filmmaker. From adaptations of Jane Austen (Pride & Prejudice) and Ian McEwan (Atonement) to disease-of-the-week actor showcases (The Soloist) and now an arty Euro-thriller, Wright shows he's attuned to both the human elements and technical aspects of cinema. He's eager to prove he's not a hack, and that's precisely his problem: an efficient craftsman would have a keener understanding of how narrative and physical space go together, offer the audience the pleasures inherent in their intersection.

Consider the opening movement of Hanna: in an undisclosed wintry location, an adolescent girl (Saoirse Ronan) shoots a deer with a bow-and-arrow; is ambushed from behind by an older man named Erik (Eric Bana) who appears to be either her father or her mentor or both; expresses a desire to see the world; presses a red button on a device dug out of the snow by Erik that effectively sets the plot in motion. For about fifteen minutes, Wright (working with a script by Seth Lochhead and David Farr) builds things gradually, organically, without fretting over pacing or spelling things out. Then, as though checking his watch and exclaiming, "Oh, shit!", the director shifts into overdrive. His first mistake comes after Hanna hits the button, with an immediate cut to the girl's soon-to-be archnemesis Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) and a subsequent scene featuring the latter's bevy of intelligence operatives staring at their computer screens, zeroing in on Hanna and Erik's location. It would have been more effective to stick with Hanna's limited point-of-view for a few minutes longer, more terrifying when a team of Wiegler's agents storm the cabin at nightfall. Instead of thinking about where he's cutting and why, Wright forges ahead with the Chemical Brothers blasting on the soundtrack, substituting artificial momentum for the real thing.

Other than cheap effect, this choice of music -- which pounds on the soundtrack over and over again -- means nothing, makes no underlying connection with the main character even though she says, early on, that she's curious about what music sounds like. Hanna's alien-like responses to everyday human behavior and modern technology would seem like easy laughs, but other than a blunt explanation to the question of how her mother died ("With three bullets"), Wright isn't interested in humor. He seems to think that the absurdity of the premise warrants a dreadfully serious approach, rather than pausing to consider that embracing the absurdity might draw the audience into the story.

With overt nods to the Brothers Grimm, Hanna lurches toward myth; but its characters are too banal to engage our emotions on an operatic level. Now seventeen, the feral young Ronan continues to be a strangely affecting screen presence; here, as a teenage assassin, she's plausibly out-of-control of her own physicality. But the filmmakers isolate her too long from Bana and Blanchett, when their dysfunctional "family" (of a sort) should be the connective tissue that holds the movie together. Not that Eric Bana has ever been effective at conveying feeling, and appears to be reprising his character from Munich. As for Blanchett, it should be said that I've always liked her more for who she appears to be off-screen than her performances on-. (Her sheepish "I'm sorry" grimace to the camera following an Oscar clip of her histrionic performance in Elizabeth: The Golden Age was particularly winning.) For Wiegler, she chews on a Texas drawl and, unlike her villain in the last Indiana Jones picture, actually gets to kill a few people. Yet the character, either from Blanchett's choices or problems within the script, is confused, her maternal fixation on Hanna too muted. Following Hanna's bloody escape from a holding cell (which Wiegler witnesses), one would think Wiegler's interest would be piqued. Why, then, does she redirect her energies into tracking down Bana's Erik, leaving Hanna to her fey sidekick Isaacs (Tom Hollander, a Wright favorite, giving the film a few glimmers of comic spark)? Isaacs, toting a crowbar and wearing short-shorts, leads a trio of German killers who resemble The Nihilists from The Big Lebowski, so it's puzzling that Hanna is unable to dispatch them as quickly as she did earlier with fully armored guards. More fatal than lack of internal consistency, however, is the lack of connection between Hanna and Wiegler: without any, their final confrontation means nothing.

Hanna is the latest in a line of mediocre action flicks to receive good reviews, and to be fair, if, like most critics, I had to see all the truly terrible ones, I too might fail to notice how Wright overcrafts each scene, oblivious to their overall impact. He employs his patented Steadicam tracking shot -- the same one he used in Atonement and Pride & Prejudice -- for a scene where Erik is ambushed by some baddies, and while it's nice to see an action sequence play out without cutting, it fails to register with any significance. Additionally, for the entire middle portion of the movie, Wright holds the audience hostage with an annoying British family (led by a wasted Olivia Williams), then doesn't even have the decency to finish them off. A compromise for a PG-13 rating, I suppose, yet one that denies the audience some basic viewing pleasure, a takeaway that serves as Wright's M.O. "I just missed your heart," Hanna says -- as Ed Gonzalez points out -- at the beginning and end of the film. By a mile, sweetie.

Cutter's Way, the moody 1981 neo-noir starring Jeff Bridges and John Heard, has had remarkable staying power for a movie left for dead on more than one occasion. No doubt its reappraisal has mainly to do with the steady ascendency of Bridges's career, so those who know the actor solely from his post-Dude period or his early Last Picture Show/Thunderbolt & Lightfoot era ought to check out one of his best performances from the long stretch of years in-between, when his handsomeness as a movie star clashed with his versatility as a character actor. As Richard Bone, a lazy drifter who one night witnesses (or thinks he witnesses) the body of a young woman deposited in a garbage can, Bridges is at his most engagingly self-effacing, seducing women so effortlessly he's almost apologetic about it. Yet he also reveals how Bone's hesitancy becomes a liability, so unreliable as an eyewitness that the police initially finger him as a suspect. Bone is a coward too, a trait that I was going to say didn't jibe with Reagan Era heroics, but which I have to admit is an unusual quality for an actor of any era to portray. Bridges unreluctantly plays reluctance, heroically plays lack of heroics, and it's a key to a large part of his appeal.

He also plays Richard Bone with concentrated attention toward his co-star who, as Alex Cutter, gets the showier role. Anyone familiar with John Heard, the fade-into-the-scenery character actor with an endless stream of film and TV credits (Big, After Hours, The Sopranos, Entourage), may be shocked by his balls-out flamboyance here. A Vietnam veteran with a no-longer-functioning eye, arm and leg down the left side of his body, Cutter spends his days drinking booze and insulting the world around him with bebop, stream-of-consciousness prose. (Gary Sinise clearly based his post-Vietnam version of Lt. Dan in Forrest Gump on Heard's performance.) It's fascinating to watch intelligent characters in milieus far beneath them, revealing themselves to be not as clever as they think they are. Cutter -- possibly out of boredom, possibly something more -- develops a fixation with his friend Bone's case, particularly when the prime suspect takes the shadowy form of local oil baron J. J. Cord (Stephen Elliott, who made a career out of playing rich bastards, which were never in short supply in 1980s).

Cutter's Way was directed by the Czech filmmaker Ivan Passer, who wrote the screenplays to Milos Foreman's 1960s-era The Fireman's Ball and Loves of a Blonde; like so many European directors (including Foreman himself), Passer shows an endless fascination with American culture. From bars to back alleys to beaches, his camera is always alive, ever inquisitive, conjuring an atmosphere that could be called jauntily cynical. (No wonder his career in Hollywood was cut short.) Based on a novel by Newton Thornburg (called Cutter and Bone, the original title of the movie and the title I prefer), the screenplay by Jeffery Alan Fiskin is elegant and literate, with a structure so organic it's practically invisible. At first, a lengthy sequence involving Bone's attempt to seduce Cutter's despondent, alcoholic wife, Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), seems to be keeping us away from the "important action" occurring offscreen (Cutter's attempt, with the murder victim's sister, to blackmail Cord), until it dawns on you that this is the important action. Regrettably, Fiskin and Passer stage, in the closing minutes, a headsmackingly dumb scene with a horse that plays like inexperienced filmmakers using the only means they can think of to move a character from Point A to Point B. But it doesn't shake the power of the climax, or the totality of this extremely fine film.

Writing on the Wall (The Killing and Cave of Forgotten Dreams)

2011-04-06T18:30:00.021-04:00

After pondering, since last Sunday, how in blazes the premiere of AMC's The Killing ended up being more pleasurable than a grim TV series about the brutal murder of a teenage girl in rainy-day Seattle has any reason to be, it finally hit me that the show is assuaging our frustrations toward a prior hit series of yore. No, I don't mean Twin Peaks: despite the superficial similarities in plot and setting, David Lynch's sideshow struck me as a fraud from the start, contemptuous of its audience, not even remotely interested in solving the mysteries it dangled before us, thereby leaving my emotions happily uninvested. It's The X-Files that comes to mind. That show was a crock too, yet Gillian Anderson's Scully offered some recognizably human behavior that held our attention in the face of some patented absurdities, even if Chris Carter's M.O. was to make her rational worldview look foolish at the end of every hour. Mireille Enos, the star of The Killing, has, with her red hair and unnervingly level gaze, a remarked-upon resemblance to Anderson; and the fact that the opening episode went of its way to make her homicide detective Sarah Lindsen perceptive, intelligent and right felt like a retroactive means of smacking Mulder upside the head.

The Killing was satisfying in and of itself too, its ominous prologue setting the tone: Rosie Larsen (Katie Findlay) running desperately ahead of an encroaching flashlight through darkened woods, intercut with a tracking shot of Sarah Lindsen going for a morning jog across a bridge, a murder victim and her subsequent investigator connected across parallel narrative tracks. (There's more than a passing nod in Sarah's introduction to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.) Twin Peaks began famously with the discovery of Laura Palmer's plasti-wrapped body; nobody remembers Lynch undercutting the pathos by fixing his lens on a young detective wailing uncontrollably by the riverbank. In other words, the moment wasn't about Laura's death; it was about pushing her out of the frame and putting this marginal character and his weird behavior at the center of it. The Killing shows a little more respect for its characters, including Rosie's parents (the wholly believable pairing of Michelle Forbes and Brendon Sexton), with whom we spend much of the first two hours. The premiere takes its time between revealing Rosie first reported missing to the discovery of the car in a lake with her body in the trunk, and Forbes and Sexton expertly take us through the difficult task of feeling what they're feeling -- initial worry, dismissal of fears, relief at false good news, then lacerating shock and guilt.

It's still early in the game, but so far The Killing has a nice mix of comforting cliches and breaking of original ground. For every hoary plot device (Sarah Linden is The Detective About To Leave Before One Last Case), there's a completely unique character like Linden's partner, the goofball gadabout Det. Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman). Holder looks like a scrawny ferret and talks with an ostensibly regional accent that more closely resembles a Cajun with a mouth full of gumbo. (The actor --fittingly for a series adapted from a Scandinavian original -- is Swedish.) Linden and Holder become mismatched partners, to put it mildly; yet there are no overblown disagreements or misunderstandings between them. They circle each other wearily, pulled into a case against their communal will, then pool their respective skill-sets together to crack it.

This pays off for Holder (and the viewers) in the closing minutes of the premiere, as he suckers a pair of Rosie's gal-pals to reveal the location of "the cage," a basement dwelling in their high school where Rosie may have been last spotted on the evening of a Halloween dance. Effective as the payoff was -- images of (menstrual?) blood on the bed and a bloody handprint on the wall -- it makes me uneasy to think that The Killing is going to be another moralistic example of punishing an adolescent girl for her burgeoning sexuality. Nor am I as yet terribly fond of the subplot pertaining to a local politician (TV vet Bill Campbell) and his undetermined role (if any) in Rosie's death. Combining these elements would be very Veronica Mars, and while it worked fine on that show I'm hoping the creators of The Killing try a different tack, one that hasn't been done to death.

Werner Herzog's unwieldy mix of visual grandeur and German existentialism gets a major workout in his 3-D extravaganza Cave of Forgotten Dreams. And while I've often found his personality and approach irksome in efforts like Grizzly Man, here I finally happened on a point-of-entry onto Herzog's wavelength: he's a comedian at heart. How else to explain the sublime comic timing of moments such as Herr Werner interviewing a learned scientist only so he can ask the befuddled poindexter questions like: "Do zee paintings dream at night? Do zay cry?" Even funnier is when the same man confesses that his original job was a circus performer, and Herzog's voice trembles with excitement. "Ver you a lion-tamer?" he asks hopefully.

Sadly not. But the caves of Chauvet in southern France offer the next best thing: ancient paintings of lions, horses, rhinos, and other wildlife; handprints from an anonymous Cro-Magnon whose journey through the cave, another scientist explains, can be traced by his crooked finger; deep, dark internal passageways whose womb-like splendor does not escape Herzog's attention; gorgeous external surroundings threatened (a bizarre postscript tells us) by a nuclear plant altering the habitat enough to render it suitable for albino crocodiles. Herzog likes to condemn modern technology while exploiting it to its fullest capabilities; curiously, James Cameron in Avatar, the last 3-D movie I've seen, took a similar approach. The difference between them is Cameron is disappearing ever further down the CGI rabbit hole, whereas Herzog keeps himself rooted in the real world, even as his ideas drift into the ether.

What is the point of Cave of Forgotten Dreams? On one level, it's a standard Herzogian lyric poem about the ineffable, represented here (like all his other films) as a State Of Nature. He's not out to educate us, quite the opposite in fact: he wants to leave us in a state of awestruck rapture. The use of 3-D, his second agenda, achieves the first fairly well. The tactile detail of the paintings, the contours of the cave formations, the depth of field would simply not be attained by standard filmmaking. Even with his fancy new toy, though, Herzog retains a sense of mischief. When he asks an anthropologist to demonstrate prehistoric spear-chucking, and the pointy edge thrusts out of the frame, it's a nod to the original 1950s-era 3-D films. A good gag. Less successful are the let's-shake-the-camera-while-we-walk scenes, an eyestrain compounded by the extra dimension. (Blair Witch 3-D -- a horrifying thought.)

While I remain a 3-D agnostic, a critic on Facebook recently made a persuasive case that a positive byproduct of the fad could be that it forces directors to hold the image of whatever it is they're shooting -- a futuristic means of returning to classical filmmaking. So far we've had very few major filmmakers take a crack at three-dimensional movies -- only opportunists and hacks. (I want to see what an artist like Scorsese can do with the form in his Hugo Cabret before rushing to judgment.) That Werner Herzog has tried it in a documentary, with mostly success, is laudable. The visuals alone make Cave of Forgotten Dreams well worth seeing, yet the fact that I walked out of it in a surprisingly upbeat mood had less to do with the images themselves than of Herzog's inimitable comedy stylings. At one point, he points to two pairs of ancient footprints on the floor of the cave, one belonging to a wolf, the other to a child. "Vas zee boy chased into zee cave by zee volf?" he wonders aloud. "Or did zay come into zee cave together as friends?" Priceless as that spoof of Herzog reading Curious George is, he may be the ideal filmmaker for the subject after all.

Choo-Choo Choose Me (Certified Copy and Unstoppable)

2011-04-02T23:20:00.028-04:00

(Warning: Spoilers.)

Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami's delicately ambiguous fantasy about what Jonathan Rosenbaum might call "the psychological accommodations of marriage," has prompted some predictably unequivocal interpretations about the nature of the film's central relationship. Do Elle (Juliette Binoche) and James (William Shimell) know each other or not? Are they married? To each other? Or are they engaging in some elaborate role-playing, transforming from strangers to a 15-year married couple over the span of one day? I've read compelling arguments in favor of all of these interpretations and others. Yet the more certain the argument comes across, the less I trust it. Perhaps appropriately, this is how I've come to regard most real-life couples when they talk about themselves.

Certified Copy is something along the lines of Before Sunrise/Sunset: The Whole Bloody Affair, a flowering romance and an attempted rekindling occurring simultaneously onscreen, flowing seamlessly from one to the other. James, like Ethan Hawke's character in Before Sunset, is a semi-celebrated writer touring a book across continental Europe, only here it's Tuscany instead of Paris, only here he's Anglo instead of American. Elle, the owner of an antiques shop, bears a middle-aged resemblance to Julie Delpy's cerebral, insecure young Frenchwoman. The two meet during a slyly staged opening sequence at a book-signing, which starts late -- thanks to the tardy author -- and is subsequently interrupted by an impatient child and a ringing cellphone. The book that James is promoting (titled Certified Copy) posits that replicas of original works of art have their own value. Later (the next day, in the movie's timeframe, which occupies the rest of the film), Elle chauffeurs James to a nearby Italian village to either court him, interview him, or challenge him, possibly all at once. He agrees to go with the caveat that he must return for a train with a 9:00 p.m. departure time.

The 70-year-old Kiarostami has entered an Altman-esque phase of his career that makes the burned-out mutterings of an early retiree like Steven Soderbergh seem foolish. While the latter has become (as quoted by Matt Damon) bored with story and interested only in form, the legendary Iranian filmmaker nimbly brings story and form together. There is plenty of deadpan visual wit in Certified Copy, not least of which the implication that the chasm between men and women is as wide as the commingling of ancient Roman art with 21st-century social media. Like Richard Linklater, Kiarostami plays with our concepts of time; yet he goes even further by undermining our notions of reality. Midway through the movie, a coffee-house barista mistakes Elle and James for being married. Elle encourages the assumption, then James appears to play along. By film's end, after encountering several couples at every conceivable stage of a union (newlyweds, middle-aged, elderly), their shared fantasy has become an apparent reality. The Englishman's remedial French and Italian language skills turn suddenly fluent. The Frenchwoman shares with him a son. Together they arrive at the hotel where they celebrated their honeymoon fifteen years ago. Yet James still has to catch that train.

Nothing brings out the drearily literal-minded faster than a dash of mystery, especially when that mystery delves into a topic everybody thinks he or she knows with absolute certainty. Close-Up (1990), one of Kiarostami's most famous films, chronicled the elaborate fraud of an unemployed Iranian man pretending to be a celebrated director: the actual participants reenacted their own roles in the drama, yet Kiarostami depicted them with such respect and empathy (not least of which the troubled con-artist himself) that the movie registers far above the facile is-it-real-or-isn't-it trickery that passes for documentary filmmaking today. Similarly, in Certified Copy, I don't get the impression that the director is out to play games with us; I think he's suggesting just how thoroughly romantic couples play games with themselves. (Steven Santos has similar thoughts about this.) Taken in this light, Kiarostami's film becomes a critique of Rosenbaum's subjective view of shared reality, albeit a critique filled with compassion for individuals like Elle and James, when external forces inevitability intrude on their internal designs. "Time is a lie," Ethan Hawke says near the start of Before Sunset. Certified Copy takes that wondrous, troubling evocation even further: Time is a lie agreed upon.

Sometimes a hack reaches a point in his career -- mainly due to the fact that he still has one -- where critical contempt melts away, replaced by a sudden rise in esteem. Occasionally this about-face is warranted: Samuel Fuller is one example; John Carpenter another. And then there's Tony Scott, whose runaway train opus Unstoppable has been hailed as "an action symphony," not to mention "a hymn to stylish, unpretentious competence," one made with "old-school professionalism." I'm not sure which notion is funnier -- that the director of Days of Thunder and The Fan is mounting symphonies and hymnals, or that the man every bit as responsible as Michael Bay for bringing eyesore lighting and incoherent staging to contemporary action cinema is now kicking it old school.

There are a couple of reasons for this laughable turn of events. First, Tony the Younger's long-standing and wholly earned rep as the less-talented of two filmmaking brothers has gradually dissipated with Ridley the Elder's disappearance into Hollywood's wilderness. (Last stop: Sherwood Forest.) Second, there's something quaintly appealing and faux-topical about making a movie about a locomotive wreaking havoc through the crucial swing-state corridor of rural PA, to the point where critics are tea-leaving bold statements about the decline of the American middle class. (I eagerly await the scholarly revisionism on Scott's body of work -- The Duality of Domino, et al.) All of this rather seems to be blinding folks to the fact that Scott shoots Unstoppable with the same cheapjack gimmickry with which he's made every other movie: zero flair for narrative momentum; utter indifference to establishing rhythm through editing; random jump-cuts, speed-ups and slow-downs; enough harsh exposure to make you wonder if the reels were turned on a shish-kabob.

Unstoppable is Tony Scott's fourth collaboration with Denzel Washington, and it may be the worst of a competitive bunch. In other movies, Spike Lee has sussed out Washington's star-power charisma (Malcolm X, Mo' Better Blues, He Got Game, Inside Man), Carl Franklin his debonair sex appeal (Devil in a Blue Dress, Out of Time), Jonathan Demme his coiled anxiety (The Manchurian Candidate), Norman Jewison and Edward Zwick his wounded dignity (The Hurricane, Glory), Antoine Fuqua his explosive rage (Training Day). Tony Scott takes one of the most beautiful people in show business, frames him in the same unflattering light every time, puts him through the same predictable motions -- and inexplicably Denzel keeps coming back for more. (Scorsese and De Niro they ain't.) In Unstoppable, Denzel is paired with the younger, whiter Chris Pine, who played Kirk in J.J. Abrams' even uglier Star Trek, so while his acting range is questionable, perhaps Hollywood is giving Pine bonus points for managing to appear even remotely handsome against heavy odds. Unstoppable is the young thespian's Train~~ing~~ Day; he's even given a half-assed backstory with a renowned father and an estranged wife. Yet his total lack of charm or technique or interest may make one ~~pine~~ long for the bland eccentricity of Ethan Hawke.

Between Pine's ineptitude and Washington's laziness, there's not much by way of human qualities for the viewer to latch onto. Out of desperation, one may look to the toxic-chemical-carrying train (who goes by the ominous moniker "Triple-Seven") for anthropomorphic villainy. Somehow Scott screws this up too, unable to rouse himself for even the most elemental killer instinct that exploitation filmmakers once had down pat. (There's only one major fatality in the film, and while for Washington it's supposed to be Personal, the tragedy fizzles instantly.) As Unstoppable wends on, Scott cuts increasingly away from the action on the track to television newscasts that helpfully bring the audience up to speed (They're trying to stop the train), in case Rosario Dawson's exposition as the least-plausible railroad controller in America wasn't enough. And in case we needed prompting, all the supporting characters (Pine's wife, Washington's Hooters-employed daughters), stop what they're doing and glue their eyes to the nearest TV screens as though gawking at a Charlie Sheen special, pumping their fists and whooping it up while our heroes try to prevent a trainwreck of only slightly more significance. Christopher Nolan got rightly ridiculed for the unwieldy exposition in Inception; why does Tony Scott get a pass? No, wait: Scott is now an elder statesman, a classicist, an auteur; surely he's got something more profound up his sleeve. Could Unstoppable be entirely Chris Pine's dream? Or has Pine entered Denzel Washington's dream? Maybe they've both entered Rosario Dawson's dream, or -- even better -- she's entered theirs: Chugga chugga woot woot!

Schraderfest 2011: Taxi Driver at the IU Cinema

2011-03-26T15:42:00.007-04:00

Many moons ago, when Roger Ebert's review of Taxi Driver first came to my impressionable attention (in one of his earliest anthologies, possibly the 1984 or 1985 edition), little did I imagine that one day I'd have the opportunity to speak in person with one of that movie's key creators. Two nights ago, I had the honor of leading a Question-and-Answer session with Paul Schrader following a screening of the newly restored 35th-anniversary Taxi Driver that's been making the rounds, from Berlin to New York to Bloomington, IN. I'm not employed at the IU Cinema (I work nearby), but Jon Vickers, the Cinema's intrepid director, kindly offered me the opportunity to introduce Schrader before the film and do the Q&A after. It was an exhilarating experience that's left my brain abuzz. Here, in an attempt at reflection, were some of the highlights:

1. During a reception before the introduction before the movie before the Q&A, I told Schrader that my research for possible questions to ask him led me to conclude that there probably are no questions about this movie that he's never answered. He laughed and said, "That's okay. I often make up a question in my head and answer that one instead."

2. Paul Schrader is relatively short (though not as short as Scorsese) and stocky, highly verbose and articulate. From interviews I'd seen on YouTube, I was under the impression that he was a mellow, low-key guy. That's sort of true, if one goes in preconceptions about the man who created Travis Bickle. In an academic way, though, he has major backbone, bridles at questions he doesn't like and likes to argue. I can imagine that experiences with cultural lightning-rods like Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ would tend to rid one of fear, if one had any to begin with.

3. I wrote my own introduction of Schrader, calling him "a unique and significant voice in American cinema for more than 40 years." I meant that, too. How many people have contributed important work in film criticism, screenwriting, and directing? I also gently kidded him about having to choose between becoming a Calvinist minister and becoming a film critic, with his mentor Pauline Kael steering him in the direction you can guess.

4. I was nervous about introducing him (especially when the podium, which was on wheels, suddenly lurched forward when I started talking), and deeply relieved that he seemed moved by what I said. He came up to the stage with his head bowed, shook my hand, held it for a second, then spoke for a couple of minutes about how the idea for Taxi Driver came into being. Veteran movie fans have probably heard parts of that story before: Schrader lost his wife, lost his job, checked into the hospital with a bleeding ulcer, was lonely, depressed, and squatting at his ex-girlfriend's apartment in Los Angeles when a vision of the homicidal New York cabbie first appeared to him. I suspect, though, that for much of the sell-out audience (which leaned toward a younger demographic than other movies I've attended there), they had never heard the background of the story before, and that may have helped their understanding of the movie.

5. The restoration looks great, by the way. My first encounter with Taxi Driver was on shitty VHS tape shortly after reading Ebert's review. (I was only a toddler in 1976, when it was originally released.) More recently, I saw an edited-for-TV version on AMC and a decent 25th or 30th anniversary DVD. Needless to say, none of these experiences compare to finally seeing in on the big screen. The damn thing envelopes you.

6. Paul Schrader went to dinner during the showing and came back for the Q&A. Amazingly, he hasn't viewed Taxi Driver in its entirety in 35 years; neither has Scorsese. But he knows the movie by heart and was up to speed on all the issues involved in the new restoration, though not involved in them directly.

7. Surprisingly, I didn't feel nervous at all onstage during the Q&A. The only glitch was that my microphone had been attached to the left lapel of my sport jacket while I was facing Schrader on my right. During our preliminary remarks, my voice faded in and out with every turn of my head, like Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain. Quickly I switched the mike to my right lapel; things went smoothly after that.

8. For my first question (which I had struggled with all week), I quoted Jonathan Rosenbaum's review that Taxi Driver was "the work of four auteurs: Schrader, Scorsese, De Niro, and Bernard Herrmann," and asked Paul to talk about how they each came to collaborate on the film. "I don't care much for Jonathan Rosenbaum," he growled amusingly, which got the first of many laughs from the audience. "We're off to a good start, then," I replied.

9. Schrader spent more time than I expected talking about Herrmann. Perhaps he'd talked about Scorsese and De Niro so often that he was happy to talk about something else; it's also significant that the last two movies that Herrmann scored (Taxi Driver and Brian De Palma's Obsession) were both scripted by Schrader. Later on, I mentioned that Herrmann's score was the only thing Pauline Kael didn't like about the movie. "She was wrong about that," he said.

10. When the discussion turned to De Niro, I asked Schrader if he felt that the actor's presence "subtly altered the concept of the character" from a fish-out-of-water Midwesterner shocked by what he sees to a born and bred New Yorker who's been living with "filth and scum" all his life and finally snaps. I don't recall his answer (beyond "Bob tried to do a Midwestern accent"), but it seemed like he'd never been asked before. That may have been my best question.

11. My worst question was a long-winded comparison between Taxi Driver and Nashville -- the latter of which, we immediately learned, is a film for which Schrader has nothing but contempt. "Why would somebody who hates country music want to make a movie about country music?" he asked. Actually, I wasn't implying that the films were similar in form or content; I was trying a different tack to bring in the John Hinckley, Jr./Jodie Foster/President Reagan issue that he's had to endure a million times, and that Taxi Driver -- like Nashville only three months earlier, when John Lennon was killed -- had been accused in some quarters of influencing the assassin. I could have asked the question more succinctly, though.

(11a. This is pure conjecture, but I wonder if Schrader's aborted 70s-era project on Hank Williams, Jr. - whom he has hilariously called a "Travis Bickle who can sing" -- colors his opinion of Altman and Nashville?)

12. That said, Schrader did come around to addressing the topic. He recounted the story (which he's told before) that when he heard on the radio that Reagan had been shot, his first thought was, "It was one of those Taxi Driver kids." He also admitted again that he'd initially told the FBI that he'd never heard from Hinckley, when actually he'd been bombarded with requests for Foster's contact info.

13. Questions from the audience were far-ranging and excellent. I'd held off on the race issue in the movie and was glad that a perceptive student broached the subject. For time's sake, I also hadn't asked a question I'd written about Taxi Driver's relationship to film noir, and Schrader seemed happy to answer that one from the audience too. (In sum, he believes there isn't one.) It was also an endearing moment when another student raised his hand to tell Schrader how much he liked the scene in the porno theater when Travis, spurned by the black cashier (played by De Niro's at-the-time real-life special-lady-friend Diahnne Abbott), "asks for Chuckles." I know what he means; I like the Chuckles scene too.

14. Paul Schrader is more technologically-savvy than one might expect. He's a connoisseur of social media, loves i-Phone, and eagerly downloads movies (like his own Rolling Thunder) from BitTorrent. My question about whether he'd be willing to shoot a movie on digital prompted an unqualified "Absolutely."

15. Schrader is also grim about contemporary cinema and what it bodes for the medium's future. "How many good movies came out of Hollywood this year?" he asked. (Answering his own question, he named one: The Social Network.) "There was time when a good movie came out every week." While I'm getting tired of apocalyptic pronouncements (everything is always dying, in a sense), it's hard to dispute his point. Especially when he supported it by dryly referring to a trio of projects he's currently working on not by their titles but rather "Mexican money, Indian money, and Colombian money." What Schrader meant was that Hollywood no longer finances the kind of movies he's interested in making; he (and other filmmakers) have to find other sources of revenue.

16. Funniest Q&A moment: Schrader describing Pauline Kael's reaction the first time she read his script (which we had discussed earlier at the reception). So disturbed was Kael by what she had read that she tossed the screenplay into her closet, threw clothes over it and shut the door. Runner-up funniest moment: At the end of the Q&A, a cute perky blonde girl in the back excitedly raised her hand for the final question, prompting Schrader to address her as "Reese Witherspoon!"

(16a. Actually, he called her "Renee Witherspoon." He'd knocked back a few that evening.)

17. My favorite moment may have been the revelation about how much Schrader dreaded Scorsese's casting of himself (filling in for another actor who had dropped out) as the jealous husband in that crucial scene where the seed is planted in Travis's head that he should take up a colleague's offer to buy a gun. "I know that I'd hate seeing myself act onscreen," Schrader said, adding that he told Scorsese that he would hate his own performance and would want to cut the scene. Turns out, "He loved himself!"

Thus concluded my experience with Paul Schrader. It's a thrill to be able to talk with someone whose work you have genuinely admired over the years.

The Chameleon Kid (Rango)

2011-03-19T13:55:00.005-04:00

Why, you ask, would a self-promoted animation agnostic opt to see Rango? Needing a light-hearted and colorful palette-cleanser between Netflix viewings of Taxi Driver and The Warriors compels a man to resort to desperate measures, though in truth Gore Verbinski's foray into Pixar territory has more in common with that kind of adult fare than one might expect. An oddball Polanski-Leone mashup, Rango chronicles a journey of self-actualization for a day-dreaming lizard protagonist (voiced by Johnny Depp, but you already knew that) who becomes the sheriff of a Western town occupied by assorted creepy-crawlies in the midst of a deadly drought. It's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly meets Chinatown, with a menagerie of desert critters (possums, bats, armadillos) less engagingly repulsive than the likes of Tuco or Noah Cross, yet generally amusing enough to hold your attention.

Or, at least, the attention-span of adults. Rango is a good illustration of how disaster-proof Hollywood fare has become: the last time an alleged kiddie movie ended up being so kid-unfriendly, it went by the name of Babe: Pig in the City and was a megaton bomb. Movie marketing is too savvy to allow that sort of thing to happen anymore. Rango's been hyped as a "Johnny Depp movie" (to the point where reviewers are giving the impression that he's actually in the film), with trailers suggesting quite the bouncy entertainment. The bounce is there, all right, but it just barely propels the narrative over a surprising amount of visual grotesqueries (talking road-kill) and out-of-place scatological humor (a mammogram joke in an animated movie is, I think, a first). A disgusted mother taking her young son out of the theater afterward said, "Thank God we didn't pay full price for that!" Still, they'd been enticed enough to come.

The second-half of the movie was more involving than the first -- maybe because its free-associative spirit settles into something more substantial, or maybe because I finally moved a few rows down from the teenage couple necking in the disabled section directly behind me. (From the looks of it, they were fully mobile.) Rango doesn't have the dizzying highs of Babe: Pig in the City; Verbinski's not a crackpot visionary like George Miller. At his best, he's an able showman with a flair for viual slapstick: the action set-piece halfway into the picture echoes Apocalypse Now (with a banjo cover of Ride of the Valkyries), the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the climactic pursuit from Miller's The Road Warrior. Verbinski also brings in a dash of emotional heft when Rango encounters The Spirit of the West, a.k.a. Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name (well-voiced by Timothy Olyphant). The scene is a standard movie trope -- the hero's encounter with a sage during a point of crisis -- yet The Spirit's suggestion that we are what we do is fairly profound. So is his alluring description of heaven, which apparently has something to do with Kim Novak and Pop-Tarts.

Rango occupies a welcome middle-ground between Pixar's manic blandness and David Lynch's strenuous eccentricity. If you're going to reference pop-culture, the references in Rango are just unexpected enough to work. (The only missed opportunity was a Polanski-voiced cameo for a knife-wielding midget: "You're a nosy fella, ain't ya?" could have been easily included without breaking the mood.) All the same, I am growing weary of movies that flatter our knowledge of other movies; it's moved to the opposite extreme of American cinema from a generation ago, where film characters usually spoke about films they'd seen in vague generalities. ("I liked that character." "Well, I liked the other character"....) I'm not asking for a return to hermetically-sealed cinema. An original idea or two, though, might be a nice change of pace.

Write It Again, Sam (Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart)

2011-03-13T16:08:00.005-04:00

A few notes on Stefan Kanfer's Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart (2011):

1. I've no reason to doubt Kanfer's assertion that Bogie's straight-shooter persona cloaked bottomless contradictions. Yet his biography made me wish -- just once, for the sake of variety -- to read about an individual whose complex facade disguises a deep, profound simplicity.

2. Kanfer is a good writer with a prose style so clean it's practically ironed. If that's not exactly compelling or sexy, it's enough of a rarity to keep you turning the page.

3. Tough Without a Gun raises an intriguing question: How has Humphrey Bogart, an actor very much of his time, managed to stay relevant for more than fifty years after his death? The book's mistake is delaying the answer until the final thirty pages, rather than giving the "Afterlife" portion of the title more weight.

4. Without that, Tough Without a Gun becomes a by-the-numbers biography, rehashing colorful anecdotes that have been written and told before. Kanfer peaks early, pointing out that contemporary actors, while "well-trained, skilled in their craft, buff, (and) manipulated by powerhouse publicists," are devoid of distinctive personalities. "Impersonators don't 'do' Tobey Maguire or Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio or Christian Bale et al. because these actors don't have imitable voices or faces," he notes, whereas 'Golden Age' actors "like Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart" were fodder for comedians and impressionists.

5. The above statement isn't entirely true. For years, director Tom DeCillo was dogged by the accusation that James LeGros's performance in DeCillo's 1995 comedy Living in Oblivion was a devastating parody of Brad Pitt (with whom the director had previously worked). (Recently, DeCillo revealed that LeGros was mimicking Patrick Swayze.) And both Bale's husky-voiced Batman and his notorious on-set tirade were prominently spoofed across the late-night airwaves. But, yes, any stand-up comic doing impressions of Leo DiCaprio or Josh Hartnett or Channing Tatum won't get very far.

6. I've always heard the comparison that Humphrey Bogart, who specialized in low-lifes, was actually an Ivy League sophisticate; whereas Cary Grant, who played blue-bloods, was the son of a coal-miner. Bogart's case, at least, is a little more complicated: His family had money, but his father (a physician and graduate of Columbia University and Yale medical school) would lose much of it over time in unsound investments. His parents' marriage was also falling apart. Unsurprisingly, Bogart was a troublemaker, involved in gangs, disinterested in school, sports and everything else other than the vaudeville stage, silent-movie houses, and playing chess. Enlisting in the Navy during World War I, while offering an opportunity to see the world, did not instill discipline: he was tossed in the brig for drunkenness and insubordination many times.

7. After the war, Bogart tried various behind-the-scenes jobs in show business before making his stage debut in the 1922 melodrama Swifty. Bogart's portrayal of a "young sprig of the aristocracy" typecast him into playing rich twits for years to come.

8. His (first) big break came in 1935, when theater director Arthur Hopkins cast him as the gangster Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood's play The Petrified Forest. The distinguished stage and screen veteran Leslie Howard had the lead role, but Bogart stole the show. His entrance drew "audible gasps (from the audience), in part because he was so dark and menacing, in part because John Dillinger...had recently escaped from jail. Thanks to Bogart's diction, gait, attitude, and prison pallor, Kanfer writes, "the real-life gangster seemed...to have materialized onstage." Both Bogie and the play won rave reviews.

9. This didn't stop Warner Brothers from casting Edward G. Robinson as Duke Mantee in the movie adaptation, along with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. Bogart, who had appeared in random screen parts before with no distinction (such as 1931's The Bad Sister, also featuring Davis), was devastated. Fortunately for him, Robinson was pressing for equal billing with Howard and Davis, and the ever-magnanimous Jack Warner, eager to put Edward G. in his place, replaced him with the less-expensive Bogie. "In the film version, Humphrey conveyed the same weary authority that had been so effective on Broadway," Kanfer states. "But the close-ups gave him something more...His unshaven face was a map of distress." Bogart was thirty-seven years old.

10. One of the book's strongest sections is a brief yet revealing description of the old studio system: "MGM specialized in elegance and high production values, as in Gone with the Wind...Paramount concentrated on sophisticated comedies, RKO on the sparkling Astaire-Rogers musicals...Columbia showcased Frank Capra's directorial touch, and Twentieth Century Fox made a mint with Shirley Temple vehicles." Warners, on the other hand, portrayed the sordid underbelly of American society: Scarface, with Paul Muni; The Public Enemy with James Cagney; and Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson among the most prominent examples. Kanfer makes a good case that the brothers' hardscrabble roots (from the Polish ghetto) had much to do with their creative output and nothing to do with how they treated their employees. "Actors chafed under restrictive, long-term contracts; writers, in Jack's view, were 'schmucks with Underwoods" (i.e., typists). This is the environment Bogart entered following the success of The Petrified Forest.

11. The weakest sections in Tough Without a Gun deal with Bogart's personal life -- his three failed marriages and, finally, his fourth, successful one with Lauren Bacall. We should count ourselves lucky that we were spared the drooling, gossipy Peter Biskind writing about the 44-year-old actor's love affair with a 19-year-old actress. Kanfer's heart isn't really in it, and that's part of the problem. All the romantic interludes throughout the book reek of creative compromise -- of editorial insistence that the author include something "for the lay-dees." Ditto the weird anecdote about Bacall's crush on Adlai Stevenson, and the vague allusion to her possible affair with Frank Sinatra either shortly before or shortly after Bogie's death...too depressing to be coy.

12. Kanfer compounds the problem, however, by confusing the role of author with enabler. He's always quick to justify his subject's less-than-glamorous behavior with wives or colleagues (the gist being, Well, you see, what Humphrey really meant to say was....) or file it under either rough childhood or macho bonhomie. (I know I'm supposed to slap my knee and giggle like Kate Hepburn whenever there's an anecdote about Bogie or John Huston or some other hunk-a-man behaving falling-down drunk and cruel to friends or colleagues, but all I envision is a bunch of towel-snapping frat-boy assholes with too much time on their hands.) I've also been reading Simon Callow's superb two-part biography on Orson Welles (part one right before the Bogie bio, part two right after), and Callow shows it's possible to convey a person's failings without denigration. (For example, how Welles's decision to handle post-production by remote-control allowed RKO's hatchet-job on The Magnificent Ambersons.)

13. Anyway, the Golden Age studio system seemed to demand that an actor marry three or four times per lifetime and make three or four movies per year. While the latter would today help get Nicolas Cage out of hock, back then it threatened to stymie Bogart's growth as an actor. It would be another five years and nearly thirty movies (many of them stock bad-guy supporting parts) before his next major step up the latter: Roy Earle in High Sierra (1941). Another gangster part, yes, but one sympathetic enough to rile the Production Code censors. Ida Lupino got top-billing, but Bogart got the accolades and attention.

14. Bogart continued to make a couple of pictures each year, with at least one of them each year a hit. Later in 1941, John Huston, who co-wrote the screenplay for Raoul Walsh's High Sierra, cast Bogie as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and we all know what happened there. Ditto 1942, when an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick's became adapted as Casablanca. Kanfer quotes the appraisal of the play by a low-level underling at Warners (named Stephen Karnot): "Excellent melodrama. Colorful, timely background., tense mood, suspense, psychological and physical conflict, tight plotting, sophisticated hokum. A box office natural, for Bogart, or Cagney, or Raft..."

15. Kanfer does some welcome appraising of his own regarding The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. He challenges Louisa Brooks' opinion that Bogart ruined Sam Spade's climactic exposition scene. "Just the opposite is true. There was no other actor in the Warners studio...who could have so effectively brought off the finale, with its crowded words and thoughts." (Additionally, Bogart thought up the final line, a spin on Shakespeare's The Tempest: We are such stuff/as dreams are made on...") He also argues that Casablanca transcends its standard plot outline through a mix of distinctive elements (compelling subplots, witty dialogue, fresh locale) and happy accidents (Joseph Breen's insistence that a key confrontation scene between Rick and Ilsa end with a dissolve, making it more sexually suggestive, not less). Auteurists may turn up their noses at Casablanca, but for me no auteur has ever made a more perfect film.

16. Through the years, Bogart alternated between forgettable films and huge hits. 1944: Passage to Marseille and To Have and Have Not. 1946: Two Guys from Milwaukee and The Big Sleep. 1948 was a high-watermark year for Bogie: a popular success (Key Largo) and a towering artistic achievement (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with, in my opinion Bogart's greatest, ballsiest performance). Still, what should be the heart of the book -- Humphrey's experience filming 1951's The African Queen, ultimately winning the Best Actor Oscar -- ends up being rather rote. (Hepburn liked manly men, Huston was obsessed with shooting an elephant, blah blah).

17. The waning years of Bogart's life and career are depicted as a sad slog, with one bizarre, lively exception: the homophobic Bogie's admiration for flamboyant screenwriter Truman Capote during the otherwise miserable shoot of 1954's Beat the Devil.

18. That same year, Bogart was miscast in Billy Wilder's Sabrina. He was also evidently ostracized: Wilder, Audrey Hepburn, and William Holden forming a nudgy inner circle. (As an aside, Bogart's fine 1950 film noir In a Lonely Place was overshadowed by Wilder's thematically similar yet far slicker Sunset Boulevard, which, of course, starred Holden). He finished his career with good roles in The Caine Mutiny (also 1954) and The Harder They Fall (his final film, 1956), but even before his health failed him, Bogart was already lamenting the dearth of good roles for an aging actor. It's difficult to imagine where he would have fit in in 60s cinema.

19. Nevertheless, his iconography has endured. It's here that Kanfer's book becomes particularly disappointing, an overlong buildup to what amounts to a laundry list: Godard includes a scene in Breathless where Jean-Paul Belmondo spies a photograph of Bogart; college students admired Bogie's no-bullshit honesty; his name became a verb for refusing to share a marijuana joint. Woody Allen conjured him as a dispenser of romantic wisdom in Play It Again, Sam; Bogart-themed film festivals, bars, and even furniture stores popped up across the country. But, wait: Umberto Eco, Kenneth Tynan, and John Berryman all made references to Bogart or Bogart's movies, so he appealed to high-culture as well!

20. Well, great. And so what? Before concluding with the kind of swoony romanticism he thinks he's taking pains to avoid (the hat in the author photo is also a mistake), Kanfer comes closest with "the larger theme of American masculinity," taking issue with the claim made by others that Bogart stands out due to the emasculation of the American male (via gay rights, women's rights, etc.) "The male ego...that has been fragile for generations," Kanfer notes, an astute observation. But his subsequent claim that Bogart actually stands out due to the infantalization of cinema seems self-contradictory: Okay, there may never be another Bogart onscreen; but that doesn't explain the innumerable attempts to emulate his style. (Asserting that "the Bogart style" may now be found offscreen "in the principled action of individuals uncomfortable with compromise and conformity" is even more overreaching.)

21. Tough Without a Gun ends by claiming "sociologists and historians" frequently cite "Humphrey's rough-hewn persona and barroom misbehavior as early signs of the disintegration to follow." (Really? Who?) Kanfer counters this by pointing out Bogart's nobler aspects: "He helped Fatty Arbuckle and Peter Lorre when they were in extreme need, defiantly hired people on the studio blacklist, aided Joan Bennett and Gene Tierney when they were in distress, and quietly donated to a long list of charities. He was courteous to women and straightforward to men, and when he made a promise he kept it." He also liked puppy dogs, apple pie, and long walks on the beach, though Kanfer doesn't mention that.

22. More persuasive, to me, is a near-throwaway passage halfway through the book, recounting that during the making of 1997's L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson screened the period-relevant In a Lonely Place for Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. "'I wanted them to see the reality of that period and to see that emotion,'" Hanson is quoted. "'When I first saw In a Lonely Place as a teenager, it frightened me and yet attracted me with an almost hypnotic power.'" However deeply Humphrey Bogart may have entered the cultural fabric, the lexicon, or the finer virtues of Man, it's the work onscreen that is the reason for why he has endured.

Unmanned (James Ellroy's The Hilliker Curse)

2011-02-27T17:00:00.008-05:00

Leave it to James Ellroy to challenge the centuries-proven axiom that writers don't score with chicks. His new memoir, The Hilliker Curse (2010), is nutso even by the "Demon Dog"'s fairly liberal standards: subtitled My Pursuit of Women, it's Ellroy's return to his self-admitted "Dead Mother Act," and strong evidence that after more than fifty years the well has finally run dry. "The Curse," as he calls it, emanated from the time he wished his mother, Jean Hilliker, dead when he was nine years old (his parents had recently divorced), an entirely blameless act that has understandably influenced not only Ellroy's fiction but his real-life relationships with women. The Hilliker Curse makes the fatal error of assuming that the latter is as fascinating as the former.

Authenticity is always hard to tell with Ellroy, who vacillates between his private and public personas so smoothly it's possible that by now not even he knows the difference. There are times when The Hilliker Curse reads like an attempt to come clean about some less-than-wholesome thoughts and actions (e.g., his previous life as a peeping-tom, his pill-popping, his panic attacks), and other times when the author's braggadocio obnoxiously traces his pickup artistry. Much of the latter transpires at book readings, Ellroy's amusing go-to seduction method. (A typical passage: "I was boffo. I read from pitch-perfect memory and laid down even eye contact. I had a pulpit and an eons-deep Protestant bloodline. I was the predatory preacher prowling for prey. The woman was my pivot point.") The author's famous prose style works like gangbusters in his fiction; as autobiography, it's laughable.

Over a thankfully brisk 200 pages, Ellroy quickly introduces and abruptly jettisons one lover after another. The standout, Wife No. 2 Helen Knode, is a fellow crime writer who offers a perceptive take on her husband's The Cold Six Thousand: "She said it was jittery and frayed and approximated my spiritual state." For the book's sequel, she "urged me to create a less rigorous style and shape it with greater emotion." Ellroy ultimately leaves Helen but takes her advice, as we meet, in succession, the Joan and Karen who influenced identically-named characters in Blood's A Rover. Finally, we're left with Erika, a married-with-two-children woman who ends up divorcing her husband for Ellroy. "The bulk of Erika's many friends have censured her," he writes. "You left that sweet man for him?"

One can greatly admire an author's collective work, defend it as being most definitely not misogynistic (or any other charge leveled against it), and appreciate the factual catalysts for fictional characters and themes while still finding his latest foray a pointless waste of time. Similarly, one can be happy for the man while still feeling skeptical that a self-proclaimed opportunist has, at 60+ years of age, learned his lessons and won't repeat his mistakes. "For a right-wing religious nut, you've always seemed to lack faith," one of his Special Lady Friends observes. Ellroy attempts to counter this near the end of The Hilliker Curse, recounting a time when, as a young man, he was wandering aimlessly in a snowstorm, coughing up blood, only to find sanctuary in an office building with an unlocked doorknob beckoning him with an ethereal glow. "God left that door open for me," he writes. "I have no doubt about that." Perhaps. But even his most devoted readership may be left wondering why a writer as monumental as James Ellroy would want to become the next Mitch Albom.

Spurs, Freaks, and Guns: From Lit Noir to Film Noir

2011-02-14T06:00:00.018-05:00

This essay is for the For the Love of Film (Noir) Film Preservation Blogathon, hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand and the Self-Styled Siren. The blogathon calls on donations (from readers, like you) to help preserve and restore classic films -- this year's bounty going to the Film Noir Foundation. To make a contribution, please follow the link. (Should work this time!)

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"You're not a person, you're more like a vibe." So says Amelie Heinle to Peter Fonda in The Limey, Steven Soderbergh's 1999 neo-noir, never a more dead-on description of an intangible persona. Born in 1940, Fonda went almost sixty years of his eventful life successfully eluding definition. Arriving in American cinemas only a year later, film noir as we know it has evaded capture even longer. None of the earliest noir filmmakers knew that their films would one day be identified with a major cinematic movement. Still today, more than a few movies in the canon have fallen under scrutiny, with numerous persons, factions and schisms arguing in favor of some films and vehemently against others. (Are Hitchcock's suspense thrillers noir? Anthony Mann's westerns?
On the Waterfront?
The Manchurian Candidate?) Because noir is devoid of sacred cows (or should be), it's fitting that neither it would be above reproach. This healthy, if confusing, lack of complete respect targets even some widely-hailed films from the "golden age" of noir -- never mind the neo.

By now, Paul Schrader's Notes on Film Noir (1971) is quite an old-hat, go-to resource, yet the reason for its durability and appeal is because the author arguably comes closer than anyone since the late-1940s French critics to accurately defining the topic. Yes, Schrader cites familiar tropes (antiheroes and femme fatales, sewers and shadows, crime and grime). First and foremost, though, he posits that noir is not a genre, but a style determined by mood and tone. Evolving out of "four catalytic elements" -- postwar disillusionment, postwar realism, German expressionism, and hard-boiled (pulp) fiction -- the classic noir era as Schrader defines it took root during the Second World War and flourished until the deep end of the Cold War. The years 1941-1958 -- from The Maltese Falcon to Touch of Evil -- is considered the general timeframe.

A recent stab at revisionism -- by way of literary noir -- comes from the dauntingly voluminous anthology The Best American Noir of the Century (2010). Thirty-nine stories covering 84 years (1923-2007) selected by co-editors James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, Best American Noir challenges Schrader's claim that true noir is confined to a narrow window of history. In the book's Foreword, Penzler makes some persuasive points against this. (Whereas Ellroy, in his subsequent Introduction, is as always amusingly content to float in the ether: "The short stories in this volume are a groove.") However, in my review, I took issue with Penzler's increasingly convoluted description, which shifts from declaring that noir "is virtually impossible to define, but everyone thinks they know it when they see it," to characterizing the subject in no uncertain terms (emphasis mine):

"Allowing for the differences of the two mediums, I also believe that most film and literary critics are entirely wrong about their definition of noir, a genre which famously -- but erroneously -- has its roots in the American hard-boiled private eye novel. In fact, the two subcategories of the mystery genre, private detective stories and noir fiction, are diametrically opposed, with mutually exclusive philosophical premises."

In American fiction, Penzler argues, the private dick "retains his sense of honor in the face of.... adversity and duplicity," while noir protagonists are always motivated by "greed, lust, jealousy, and alienation (leading) them into a downward spiral as their plans and schemes inevitably go awry." Expanding and pigeonholing his premise at the same time, Penzler claims that film noir confuses the genres by employing the same visual techniques for each. No matter, though: "the discerning viewer will easily recognize the opposing life-views of a moral, even heroic, often romantic detective, and the lost characters in noir who are caught in the inescapable prisons of their own destruction...." In other words: Sorry, Bogie and Mexican Charlton Heston, but since you're both so damned honorable, your movies aren't really noir.

I'm reflexively skeptical of the idea that virtue and vice are automatically confined to mutually exclusive genres (especially when a few of the anthology's own selections contradict it). On the other hand, Penzler does pry noir from the clutches of Hammett and Chandler to broader interpretations of theme, content, and period. Best American Noir not only contemporizes the subject, it chooses a handful of examples that predate Schrader's catalytic elements. Additionally, the collection features an fascinating array of authors who wrote across a wide spectrum of genres, who cross-pollenated their characters and themes from novels to screenplays and back again.

Let's test these conflicting definitions (and intriguing overlap) with a pair of examples from Penzler and Ellroy's tome: each a short story that went on to become an initially dismissed B-movie; each movie regarded now as a significant American film. In my opinion, one of these, while not quite a lit noir, is one of the finest examples of film noir; the other qualifies as a lit noir yet is anything but a film noir.

1. "One of us": How "Spurs" became Freaks.

"Spurs," a sordid 1923 tale by Tod Robbins, and the lead-off hitter in Best American Noir of the Century, focuses for fifteen pages on the ill-advised courtship between a French circus dwarf, named Jacques, and a "tall, blond woman of the amazon type," bareback rider Jeanne Marie. Right away, the author's characterization of his protagonist is vividly in line with our editor's definition of the genre:

"The dwarf had no friends among the other freaks in Copo's Circus. They considered him ill-tempered and egotistical, and he loathed them for their acceptance of things as they were. Imagination was the armor that protected him from the curious glances of a cruel, gaping world, from the stinging lash of ridicule, from the bombardments of banana skins and orange peel. Without it, he must have shriveled up and died."

Imagination, Robbins implies, is how Jacques comes to see himself as an ideal suitor for Jeanne Marie. Riding into the arena on a "gallant charger" -- his large dog, St. Eustache -- the dwarf perceives himself as "a doughty knight of old about to do battle for his lady," a delusion that amuses Jeanne Marie ("bending down, with the smile of an ogress") until she learns that he has inherited considerable wealth and a vast estate. With her riding partner and clandestine lover, "Romeo of the circus" Simon Lafleur, Jeanne Marie conspires to marry Jacques and make off with his money.

A subsequent wedding party shows a bevy of circus performers scarcely more appealing than the principals of the story:

"There can be no genial companionship among great egotists who have drunk too much. Each one of these human oddities thought that he or she was responsible for the crowds that daily gathered at Copo's Circus; so now, heated with the good Burgundy, they were not slow in asserting themselves. Their separate egos rattled angrily together, like so many pebbles in a bag. Here was gunpowder which needed only a spark."

The spark comes when an inebriated Jeanne Marie hoists an angry and humiliated Jacques on her shoulders and gleefully rides him away. Robbins then advances a year later to Jacques's estate. Simon arrives to find a shockingly cowed and terrified Jeanne Marie, his attempt to rescue her ending in impalement at the end of Jacques' sword. The story ends with the dwarf dismounting his steed (St. Eustache, the dog) and climbing atop Jeanne Marie, urging her into the village with a pair of sharp spurs.

Approximately ten years after its publication, another Tod with one "d," last name Browning, took "Spurs" to the screen. At the time, the name Tod Browning was associated with the successful 1925 silent film The Unholy Three featuring Lon Chaney and the instantly iconic 1931 Dracula starring Bela Legosi. Adapting Robbins, however, proved to be more personal than adapting Stoker: as a teenager, Browning had fallen in love with a circus dancer and run off with the troupe, eventually meeting D.W. Griffith and turning to acting and filmmaking. Robbins had written the novel that became Browning's The Unholy Three, so turning to another of his friend's tales-o'-the-sideshow was for the director a natural impulse.

Yet Freaks (as became the movie's title, beating out the too-darkly-romantic Forbidden Love and too-Darwinian Nature's Mistakes) departs radically from the original story's grim worldview. Its central thread -- the efforts of the dwarf Hans (previously Jacques) to woo trapeze-artist Cleopatra (formerly rider Jeanne Marie) -- remains essentially the same; only this time our sympathies are vested firmly with the former, still woefully misguided (and unthinkingly cold to a new character, the kind-hearted dwarf woman Frieda), yet fundamentally decent. The other performers -- Siamese twins and bearded ladies, "living torsos" and "pinheads," sword-swallowers and "bird girls" -- are also depicted with unflinching empathy, and figure much more prominently than they do in "Spurs."

The humanistic, ensemble approach to the material (clearly admired by Robert Altman, who offered an inspired shout-out via contemporary oddball Lyle Lovett in The Player) culminates in the famous wedding banquet scene. Unlike Robbins' take, Browning's version is filled to the brim with "genial companionship," as the titular performers each sip wine from a goblet finally offered to Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) while chanting in unison, "One of us, one of us...." Repulsed by their offer to join the collective, Cleopatra humiliates Hans (Harry Earles) the same way the character does in "Spurs," riding him around the table while her trapeze-partner and paramour Hercules (formerly Simon) eggs her on.

While Cleopatra's drunken demeaning of Hans tips her hand (the latter's feelings conveyed onscreen as more justified than they are on the page), her attempt to poison him serves as the impetus for the film's unforgettable climax. Disposing of the dog, the spurs, and the equal-opportunity ugliness in "Spurs," Freaks ends with a brilliantly subversive set-piece in which our loyalties are allied with the killers instead of the victims. So appalled were preview audiences about the assault of the circus folk on the trapeze artists (and about the film's unflinchingness in general) that the studio chopped the film's running time from ninety minutes to barely over an hour, and tacked on an upbeat coda in which Hans is reunited with his one true love, Frieda (played, incidentally, by Daisy Earles, real-life sister of Harry). Tod Browning's career came to an abrupt end. It's unlikely that his original ending, revealing the fate of Hercules (who can suddenly hit those high notes), would have helped matters.

Needless to say, Freaks, with its influential, groundbreaking mix of melodrama, biopic, and horror, is considered now an essential American film. Yet despite the source material and Otto Penzler's insistence, I would argue that the film is not noir. This is not because the movie was released in 1932 (Fritz Lang's proto-noir, M, came out a year earlier), but rather due to the crucial change in attitude toward the material that occurred between Tod Robbins and Tod Browning. While a few noirish elements remain in place (an attempted crime, a potential femme fatale), Browning opts to emphasize humanity over depravity, regarding the setting as more than just a skeezy sideshow. For dabblers in the demimonde, though, the circus would remain an irresistible attraction.

2. "'Dot any duns?'": Gun Crazy.

Any author with The Best Years of Our Lives and Andersonville to his credit already earns the attribute of versatility; to be also a prominent writer of crime fiction transcends the definition of "range." Before MacKinlay Kantor became linked to a 1946 Oscar-winning postwar drama (adapted from his narrative poem published the year prior, titled Glory for Me) and an epic Civil War novel that earned the 1955 Pulitzer Prize, he was indeed a purveyor (perhaps for too long to be a "dabbler") of gangster novels, police procedurals, and literary noir.

"Gun Crazy," Kantor's oft out-of-print 1940 short story which, like Robbins' "Spurs," appears in Best American Noir of the Century, is deemed by Ellroy and/or Penzler as a classic example of the last. It's a seventeen-page first-person account that begins when the narrator (whose name is Dave) encounters another little boy around the age of five (named Nelson, or Nelly), who immediately fixates on the narrator's collection of firearms. "'Dot any duns?'" Nelly asks Dave: Got any guns? Dave shows off his own favorite, a cap gun:

"Nelson Tare's eyes pushed out a little when he saw it. He made a grab, and belted it on before I had time to protest and tell him that I wanted to play with the cap gun and he could play with the glass pistol or the broken pop rifle. He went swaggering around with the gun on, and it kind of scared me the way he did it -- all of a sudden he'd snatch the revolver out of its holster and aim it at me."

Kantor leaps forward from one episode to the next: Nelly, as an adolescent, goes hunting with Dave and their buddy Clyde and can't bring himself to shoot a jackrabbit; Nelly pulls a gun on a sadistic teacher, commits a robbery, and gets sent to reform school; Nelly, now a young man, returns from military service and hooks up with a carnival sharp-shooter named Antoinette McReady; Nelly and Antoinette hit the road, rob a bank, get captured and sent to separate prisons; Nelly escapes, returns home, and is finally apprehended for good. "When he was taken back into prison, he wore an expression of tragic perplexity," narrator Dave concludes. "It must have been hideous for him to know that he, who had loved guns his whole life long, should at last be betrayed by them."

An outline makes this tale sound rather lurid, but "Gun Crazy" is really a lovely story -- too lovely, I would suggest, to be lit noir. Nearly all the aforementioned action happens off the page as events that Dave reads or hears about. Antoinette, the sharp-shooter, gets no more than a cursory mention and vanishes. Justice is meted out to those who deserve it. Nelly is a volatile, tragic figure, but he's filtered through the perspective of the passive, stable Dave recalling the faraway past. The author creates a safe distance between the reader and Nelly; we feel sympathy for the character, but at no point are we asked to identify with him.

A filmmaker following Kantor to the letter might have made a movie bathed in sad, affectionate nostalgia -- the way Stephen King's "The Body" became Rob Reiner's Stand By Me. (That's not a putdown.) As it happened, B-director Joseph H. Lewis (nicknamed "Wagon Wheel Joe" for his cheapo westerns) and blacklisted "Hollywood Ten" screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (under the alias Millard Kaufman) had other ideas. Gun Crazy, the 1950 movie, inverts Kantor's story: Bart (formerly Nelly) becomes the main character, while Dave is pushed to the sidelines. We meet both during a moralistic prologue where a judge sentences a teenage Bart to reform school after a botched attempt to steal a gun from a shop. Oddly, while the original story renders the sentencing more than justified, here it seems a tad harsh. At the court hearing, his obsession is recounted via flashbacks by family and friends: a young Bart shoots a baby chick with a BB gun and bursts into tears when it dies; instead of threatening to shoot a teacher, Bart is caught showing off the gun to his classmates. When Dave and Clyde testify, they tell (and we see) the story of the hunt, only this time it's a mountain lion instead of a rabbit that Bart is unable to kill.

While the Nelly of the story grows understandably hard-edged following reform school and military service, the Bart of the movie retains a goofy, affable charm (conveyed by the actor John Dall). Yet the most dramatic departure taken by Lewis and Trumbo is to flesh out the carnival sharp-shooter Antoinette McReady, named Annie Laurie Starr in the film (and played by Peggy Cummins). Bart and Laurie's dangerous meet-cute during a shooting contest drives the plot forward. An alternate title to Gun Crazy was Deadly is the Female, and it isn't long before Laurie goads Bart into a life of crime. "I'll try to be good," she tells him early on, but deep-down she knows she's bad. (Very, very baaaaad.) They begin with petty stick-ups, graduate to bank robbery, then pull an ambitious heist of the payroll office of an Armour meatpacking plant. With the law hot on their trail, Bart takes Annie back home, hiding out at his sister's before fleeing together into the woods. Whereas the short story concluded with Nelly's arrest, the movie climaxes with an increasingly desperate Bart and Laurie surrounded by police in a mist-filled marsh. They kiss passionately (being cornered is such a turn-on!), then Bart shoots Laurie just as she threatens to kill Dave and Clyde as they close in. After committing the only murder of his life, of the love of his life, Bart gets shot to death as well.

How did a mournful coming-of-age story transform into a kinky, violent film noir? Paul Schrader would likely emphasize the difference in the prewar and postwar national mood. Kantor's 1940 "Gun Crazy" pines for an earlier, rural America; there's genuine anxiety in the story, a fear of the outside world, which is why we stay close to the sedentary Dave and not the vagabond Nelly. In Lewis's Gun Crazy, the anxiety is brought to the foreground; there's equal parts terror and exhilaration as Bart dashes off with Laurie, and as we become their accomplices. (It's also worth noting that Nelly is a World War I veteran in the short story -- one who never sees action -- and Bart a World War II vet in the film.) By 1950, the studio sets of early noirs like The Maltese Falcon were abandoned increasingly in favor of on-location shooting, and Lewis makes the most of the great outdoors in ingeniously unfussy ways (most famously in the long unbroken shot that puts the audience in the back-seat of Bart and Laurie's getaway car). His direction lacks the expressionistic flair that Carol Reed, Orson Welles, and other directors would bring to film noir. Nevertheless, Gun Crazy remains a prime example of the genre.

Ah, but there you have it: Is noir a genre, as Otto Penzler, the Internet Movie Database, and so many others assert? For the sake of convenience I'm willing to go with it. Yet the fact that I often disagree with about half the titles on any random list -- along with the additional fact that I often can't explain why -- suggests that whatever noir is, it's not unlike that aging hippie villain from The Limey, too intangible to be contained or defined. Of course I could be wrong. But I think Schrader is right: You're not a genre, noir; you're more like a vibe.

Sometimes a Shark is Just a Shark

2011-01-22T14:57:00.004-05:00

"For instance, patriarchal power in Jaws clearly is meaningful only inasmuch as it excludes and subordinates woman. She means something which must be external to patriarchy, if it is to mean what it pretends to mean. The idealizing patriarchal meaning deconstructs at those moments when literal material connections back to woman emerge. This is especially clear during the metaphoric quest for the shark, a quintessentially male, public adventure severed entirely from female-dominated life. Yet that quest cannot do without certain literal motifs of sexual power and potency. Brody's literal glance into his pants in search of the missing phallus establishes a metonymic connection which both enables and disables the sexual metaphor of the quest. For the quest doesn't make sense except as a confirmation of manhood, that is, as the ability to perform with women. Woman is always there, in other words, as threatening perhaps as the shark."

--from Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of

Contemporary Hollywood Film, by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner (1988)

Hoo boy. First of all, in the famous scar-sharing scene, Brody does not look into his pants, at least not in the way the authors are suggesting; he pulls up his shirt to reveal an appendectomy scar, then tucks it down because it pales compared to Quint and Hooper's wounds. It's also a bit of a stretch to claim, as Ryan and Kellner do a few pages earlier, that a boy is killed by the shark because an attempted seduction by Brody's wife "distracts him from his duties." Said seduction is nothing more than a tame back rub to assuage Brody's nerves; in any case, he's distracted not by her but by a man who appears in front of him and obstructs his field of vision.

I'll admit that my frontal lobes can get buzzed by this kind of subtextual analysis. Too much film criticism takes the filmmakers' interpretations at face value, when those are often the least reliable (and most monosyllabic) accounts. When an eggheaded approach turns me off (right around, say, page 64), I can always stop reading and return to my Netflix queue. But I'd hate to be a young film studies major forced to scarf down a semester's worth of Camera Politica, the very sort of intellectual cholesterol that killed my enjoyment of literature for years after graduation. (If Jaws is as much a glorification of male machismo as the authors contend, why is the salty war veteran Quint devoured while the pensive Brody and the bookish Hooper survive?) It's great to consider movies worthy of serious scholarship; it should happen more often. But if you're going to be scholarly you should still write clearly. And if you're not going to write clearly, at least get your facts straight.