tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32111122299828294192024-03-05T08:38:22.629-05:00The Man From PorlockDistracting you with movies, TV, books and other shiny objects.Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.comBlogger348125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-50714903059825929562015-01-03T15:43:00.003-05:002015-01-04T11:22:40.954-05:00The Porlock Awards<br />
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Best 2013 Release I Saw In 2014: <i>Blue is the Warmest Color</i>.<br />
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Best 2014 Release I Saw In 2014: <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel</i>.<br />
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Best Movie from a Director Whose Previous Film I Disliked (tie): <i>Under the Skin </i>and <i>The Immigrant</i>.<br />
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Reportedly Best 2014 Release I'll Have to Wait to See in 2015: <i>Selma</i>.<br />
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Highly Praised Movie I Suspect I'll Hate Though I Could Be Wrong: <i>Foxcatcher</i>.<br />
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Your Guess Is As Good As Mine: <i>Inherent Vice</i>.<br />
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Brings Back Fond Memories Award: <i>Life Itself</i>.<br />
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Best Moviegoing Experience: <i>A Hard Day's Night</i> at the IU Cinema in 4K. A burst of pure joy.<br />
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Best Fight: The elevator rumble in <i>Captain America: The Winter Soldier</i>.<br />
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Best Dog: "Boy" in <i>Closed Curtain</i>.<br />
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<i>American Hustle</i> Award for Most Harmlessly Entertaining Movie That Pisses Some People Off For Some Reason: <i>Birdman</i>.<br />
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Clint Eastwood/<i>Mystic River/Million Dollar Baby </i>It's Probably a Bad Movie But For Now I Like It Award: <i>Jersey Boys</i>.<br />
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Movie I Like Better The More I Think About It Award: <i>Edge of Tomorrow</i>.<br />
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Best "B": <i>Non-Stop</i>.<br />
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Worst "B": <i>Godzilla</i>.<br />
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Best Condemnation of Marriage Some of My Married Friends Probably Mistake for an Endorsement: <i>Gone Girl</i>.<br />
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Michael Haneke Award For Montonously Smacking a Character Around Like a Pinata: <i>Force Majeure</i>. <br />
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Most Inspired Casting: Eve Plumb in <i>Blue Ruin</i>.<br />
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Most Unfortunate Dialogue: "Babies taste best" - Chris Evans in <i>Snowpiercer</i>.<br />
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Most Tedious Assemblage of Indie Film Tropes: <i>The Skeleton Twins</i>.<br />
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Best Performances: Ralph Fiennes<i> </i>in<i> The Grand Budapest Hotel</i>; Michael Keaton and Edward Norton in <i>Birdman</i>; Philip Seymour Hoffman in <i>A Most Wanted Man; </i>Elisabeth Moss in <i>The One I Love</i>; Tyler Perry in <i>Gone Girl</i>; Charlotte Gainsbourg in <i>Nymphomaniac</i>; Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix in <i>The Immigrant</i>. <br />
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Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson Award for Most Promising Actor From the WWF: Dave Bautista in <i>Guardians of the Galaxy</i>.<i> </i><br />
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You Know It's a Slow Year For Actresses Award: Jennifer Aniston, who, God help us, may be nominated for Best Actress for something called <i>Cake</i>.<i> </i>Somewhere Annette Bening is screaming into a pillow.<i> </i> <br />
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Best Wardrobe: Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst in <i>The Two Faces of January</i>.<br />
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Best Criticism (tie): Mike D'Angelo's <i>Scenic Routes</i>. D'Angelo doesn't push any one theory, nor is he out to parade how high-minded his political values are. For him, it's all about the writing; and his bimonthly column, where he analyzes one scene from a movie, is a consistent example of film criticism at its finest - the personal and the analytical in perfect harmony.<br />
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Best Criticism (tie): We all knew Matt Zoller Seitz was the rightful successor to Roger Ebert. But his folding of Ebert's personal style into his own reached extraordinary heights in 2014, particularly a late-summer run than included remarkable, intimate reviews of <i>Boyhood</i> and <i>Life Itself</i>.<br />
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Best Intentions: MZS's "Please, Talk About the Filmmaking," while a worthy cause, seemed only to reach those already inclined toward penning unreadable gobbledygook. ("Godard's camera in both endotext and exotext of the shitting-on-the-toilet sequence in <i>Goodbye to Language 3-D</i> reaches an apex of formalistic mise-en-scene that deliberately echoes the tactile Trotskyist symbolism embedded within Pasolini's <i>Appunti per un romanzo dell'immondezi </i>and the Farrelly brothers' <i>Me, Myself & Irene.</i>"<i>)</i> Let's add a caveat: "Talk About the Filmmaking...If You Know What You're Talking About." <br />
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Most Tiresome Trend: Word Policing "Overrated." My understanding of the reasoning behind the attempted purge - led by no less than two significant think-pieces devoted to this subject, along with endless "Harumph Harumphs" on social media - is that critics who call a movie overrated A) have a lot of gall (insert ironic pause here), and B) are causing hurty feelings for the majority who liked the film. My knee-jerk response: Tough shit. Reflective follow-up: It's always striking how the ranks of those who call for limits to what writers can write are filled with many who can't write very well in the first place.<br />
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Most Overrated: <i>Only Lovers Left Alive</i>. Runner-up: <i>Boyhood</i>, which I emphasize I like, because what's not to like about Linklater; but geez.<br />
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<i>Ishtar </i>Award for Most Likely Terrible 90s Releases to be Rediscovered Now That Every Shitty 80s Movie Has Been Deemed a Masterwork: I nominate to the Stirring Defense Registry: <i>Mad Dog Time</i>, <i>The Adventures of Ford Fairlane</i>, <i>Batman & Robin</i>, <i>The Avengers</i>, <i>North</i>, <i>Super Mario Bros.</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Destiny Turns on the Radio</i>.<br />
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Funniest Scene Award: Too many from <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel </i>to choose just one, so by default, Coogan and Brydon's priceless Bane imitations in <i>The Trip to Italy</i>.<br />
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Funniest Screencap Award:<br />
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Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-3763311588264708562014-10-03T17:57:00.000-04:002014-10-15T20:28:16.801-04:00An Orson Welles Symposium<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>I'm back! </i>Usually to either plug something, or because I'm tired of looking at the lead image. In this case it's mostly the former, and a little the latter. I'm here to hype a project I've spent a lot of time on already - because I believe in it, and because it's fun. Orson Welles turns 100 years old in the spring of 2015, and Indiana University will be hosting <a href="http://www.cinema.indiana.edu/?post_type=series&p=7603">"A Celebration and Symposium"</a> to honor the occasion. More details when you follow the link, but to summarize there will be panel discussions, guest speakers, screenings of his films, and an exhibition. The key thing right now is the "Call For Papers." We are asking for proposals (again, details at the link), so please send them. It'll be a great party, with IU a wonderful place to wish Welles a happy birthday.<br />
<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-61270328725309835552013-12-28T15:11:00.001-05:002014-01-01T22:53:58.901-05:00Movies 2013: A View From a Tiny Corner<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The first "Top 10 Movies" list I ever wrote was for my high school newspaper, with Peter Weir's <i>Witness</i> heading the class of 1985. Probably I was asked to write a Ten-Best because I had seen more new releases than anybody in my school -- all of eight. Three decades later and things haven't changed: I saw 17 new releases in 2013, a sizable number among my archival/library circles but a pittance compared to my film-critic and -scholar friends. (I did catch an additional 30 or so restored classics and other films at the Indiana University Cinema.) Sometimes I wonder if seeing 200 movies a year would broaden my horizons or dull my senses. Would I think less of the current David O. Russell, or more of the latest Terry Malick? Would I get down with this thing called "formalism"? Would I be a contrarian, or a counter-contrarian? Would I put on my Word Police badge every time I see "overrated" used in a sentence, while deeming "underrated" acceptable parlance? Would I feel compelled to call out chest-thumping colleagues on specious claims, like the guy who wrote the thing where he said hmm-hah about the hullabaloo? Would I be an unabashed auteurist, even a vulgar one?<br />
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Whatever, the point is that less than twenty movies isn't a broad enough sample to authoritatively draw a best-of-ten. What I will do, instead, is offer a run-down, in order, of all the movies I saw this year, from my favorites to the middling to the barrel's bottom.<b> </b><br />
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<b>1) (tie) <i>The Wolf of Wall Street </i></b>and <b><i>Before Midnight</i></b>. A pair of films that make an irresistible study in contrasts. <i>Wolf</i> is Martin Scorsese's big, sprawling, messy and messed-up American epic that tells a familiar story of corruption from a seemingly infinite number of angles. It's like a compendium of "Tall Tales of Wall Street," with one whopper after another from the vantage point of a despicable heel (a wild career-high Leonardo DiCaprio) who groomed a rogues gallery of scoundrels only to sell them out to save his own skin. Scorsese deftly weaves in and out of Belfort's perspective as he did Henry Hill in <i>Goodfellas</i> and Travis Bickle in <i>Taxi Driver</i>: one of my favorite moments is a tear-jerking farewell speech where a female colleague movingly recounts the time Belfort generously offered a single mother like her a job; later, we see her handcuffed, yelling at the Feds not to wrinkle her expensive suit. A Christmas Day Molotov-cocktail from a 71-year-old director some of us feared was going soft, <i>Wolf</i> is the year's most galvanizing experience. At the other end of the spectrum, Richard Linklater's <i>Before Midnight</i> is a case of self-contained perfection, yet it's far from modest or unambitious. The third film in the series (or fourth, counting a scene from Linklater's <i>Waking Life</i>), <i>Midnight</i> opens up the hermetically-sealed relationship between Jesse and Celine, occupying them with children and offering a glimpse of their past, present, and possible future with three other couples at a dinner table. If "Time is a lie," as Jesse claimed at the start of the last film,<i> Before Sunset</i>, time catches up with a vengeance here: the issues
now, as the characters enter their 40s, being the confines of space
and unreliability of perception. The emotionally epic climactic argument is a major risk with a beautiful payoff -- a final line worthy of Billy Wilder.<br />
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<b>3) <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i></b>. With <i>The Big Lebowski</i>, <i>O' Brother Where Art Thou? </i>and other films, Joel and Ethan Coen have already permeated our culture in numerous unexpected ways. Now add 1961 New York City to their inexhaustibly rich tours of America at distinctive times and places. Here the Coens depart from riffs on film noir and screwball comedy and enter Hal Ashby territory with this lovely folk tale that unfolds with a memorable ballad's haunting refrains and subtle variations.<br />
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<b>4) <i>American Hustle</i>. </b>Yet another textbook case of a movie praised by mainstream reviews that gets a beat-down by the second wave (many of whom, I can't help but notice, are Film Studies students and scholars). The movie, we've been informed from some quarters, is a "con" and a "phoney" (sic), proving some critics really know how to stretch their metaphors away from a film's subject matter. For me, <i>American Hustle</i> is another grand entertainment in David O. Russell's growing body of work (or "oeuvre," if you prefer), filled with high spirits, terrific high-wire performances (the best being Amy Adams' quick-thinking chiseler), and the director's recurring obsessions: screwball farce, familial dysfunction, the role of women as power-brokers, the tension between peaceful objectives and violent impulses.<br />
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<b>5) <i>Upstream Color</i>. </b>Shane Carruth's latest mind-blower manages to be both narratively inscrutable yet emotionally direct. I don't know if I've ever been more deeply moved by a film I scarcely understood.<br />
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I think I initially overrated <b>6) <i>12 Years a Slave</i></b> and <b>7) <i>Gravity</i></b>. While both are still good films, in hindsight the former is a little too locked into its own claustrophobic, contraption-like design in depicting a part of history which -- the specificity of its story notwithstanding -- demands a bit more of a broader perspective; while the latter opens up visually to so much impressive vastness it leaves its brains behind.<b> 8) <i>All is Lost</i></b>, Robert Redford's solo lost-at-sea experiment, is his <i>Gran Torino</i>: an acting challenge, a summation of his career, and a benediction. The movie could have been named after his character's beloved boat: <i>Virginia Jean</i>. <b>9) <i>Frances Ha</i></b><i>,<b> </b></i>Noah Baumbach's blithe charmer, is the best vehicle yet for Greta
Gerwig's beguiling awkwardness (far more effective than the dead air that
entrapped her in Whit Stillman's "Damsels in Distress").<b> 10) </b>Sundance favorite <i><b>Escape from Tomorrow</b></i><b> </b>has received some predictable backlash as well. I found its satire about the hell of perpetual happiness a piquant mix of rough and serrated edges.<br />
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<b>11) (tie) </b>I can't choose between <b><i>Much Ado About Nothing</i></b>, <b><i>The Spectacular Now</i></b>, and <b><i>Room 237</i></b>, a trio of highly watchable if somewhat overpraised films. Joss Whedon's Shakespeare-update is an agreeable palette-cleanser between blockbusters. <i>The Spectacular Now </i>is, as a disguised parable of alcoholism, the <i>Flight</i> of teen romance movies, only with a prom instead of a plane crash. <i>Room 237 </i>is surprisingly playful and entertaining for a film that contains many of
the tropes I despise about current documentaries (PowerPoint animations
and graphics, jokey inserts, facile tone). Its cacophony of voices start to blur together after a while: after the film, I overheard another moviegoer say, "I kept getting Crazy Holocaust Guy confused with Crazy Moonlanding Guy."<br />
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Disappointments: <b>14) <i>Side Effects </i></b>plays like the result of a bet from someone who claimed Steven Soderbergh could make a thriller in his sleep, and the director set out to prove him right. <b>15) <i>Prince Avalanche</i></b> is a two-character play set in Malickian Wood. Despite fine work from Paul Rudd as a wounded man trying to maintain his dignity, the film wends through some familiar buddy-movie paces amid thick, heavy-handed symbolism. As a fan of <i>Hot Fuzz </i>and <i>Shaun of the Dead</i>, I'm afraid I found the beloved <b>16) <i>The World's End</i></b> to be a crushing bore. Edgar Wright's love of pop-culture would be more infectious if I got the sense he had other interests outside of it. And last and definitely least: <b>17) </b>Terrence Malick's<b> <i>To the Wonder</i></b>. One man's spiritually transcendent experience is another's load of woozy metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. I say that reluctantly, considering some of the nastiest comments I've ever received have come from the Malick Faithful, imbued with the love his films offer them. (A modern-day St. Paul was ranting on Twitter that all the director's critics could talk about was all the twirling in the movie...Dude, <i>Malick </i>brought it up!) It doesn't matter that I picked <i>The Tree of Life </i>my favorite film of 2011? Count me then a happy apostate.<br />
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<b> </b> Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-22900881105134951212013-05-19T18:57:00.003-04:002013-05-19T19:02:54.402-04:00Not Leaving, Just Moving<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Hi. It likely hasn't escaped the attention of those of you kind enough to keep reading that the posts at this here blog have gradually dwindled over the weeks, months, years. My apologies. Professional commitments have been piling up, and while I still love writing about movies - indeed, I find I <i>have</i> to - the time and effort required to invest in a long-form essay has become increasingly daunting. Let me be clear: I'm <b>NOT</b> ending the blog. And I'm not a fan of ceremonial announcements from those who choose to end theirs (or, worse, the narcissists who publicly put their finger on the button and threaten to blow the place to Shitsville until all their online pals rally around and reassure them how much their views on <i>Anchorman 2</i> are needed). I'll still write something here if and when the mood strikes me. In the meantime, I plan to post capsule reviews over at Letterboxd (my<a href="http://letterboxd.com/craigsimpson/"> first</a>: <i>Room 237</i>), which will enable me to keep a more regular log of what I've seen. Please stop by if you're interested, and as always feel free to comment if you agree or disagree.<br />
Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-50069748960444130632013-04-28T15:50:00.002-04:002013-04-28T19:39:28.397-04:00Our Everything: Ebertfest 2013<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There was no shipwreck, and the audience came willingly, to the Isle of Champaign-Urbana, IL, for a celebration with the master of ceremonies conspicuously absent.<i> </i>Yet I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought of Shakespeare's <i>Tempest</i>, and not just because of the impact of the weather. We weren't going anywhere for a few days - the 24-plus-hour rainstorm actually kept some folks <i>away, </i>or delayed their arrival - but the 15th annual Ebertfest carried more than a tinge of Prospero's benediction as Roger's posthumous farewell.<br />
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I have no idea if Roger in his final months, weeks or days knew his time was short. Nevertheless, his selections for this year's festival suggest that the end of things was very much on his mind. (Even the funniest film was about a mortician.) His wife, Chaz Ebert, who once again emceed wonderfully, led off by asking us, at Roger's request, to stand and sing a version of "Those Were the Days, My Friend," with lyrics slightly altered by Ebert himself while he was in the hospital, shortly before his death. The melancholy vibe persisted through the opening films: Grace Wang's short <b><i>I Remember</i></b>, about a young woman who finds a note from her ex in her shirt pocket (afterward, Chaz said that she had just opened her eyeglasses case and discovered an old note from Roger); and Terrence Malick's <b><i>Days of Heaven</i></b>, a film imbued with a sense of faded memory. The appearance of cinematographer Haskell Wexler, to whom this year's Ebertfest was dedicated (and who supplied "additional photography" to <i>Days</i>), livened things up somewhat. A spry 91-years-old, Wexler still moves with the gait of a gazelle and remains as pugnacious as ever. At a panel discussion the following morning about breaking into filmmaking, after hearing a young director mention that he lost 50 pounds during the making of his first movie, Wexler replied to the audience, "Don't confuse having a career with having a life."<br />
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Thursday's screenings kicked off with another short, Sophie Kohn and Feike Santbergen's <b><i>To Music</i></b>, which had thematic similarities before the early-afternoon main attraction: <i><b>Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh</b>. To Music</i> included a supporting role by Paul Cox, who directed <i>Vincent</i>. I wish I liked the Van Gogh movie more. A documentary of sorts, Cox's film features non-stop voiceover from John Hurt, reading Vincent Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo. I knew we were in for it when, after ten minutes of hearing Hurt's narration set to images of the artist's paintings, along with at-times unintentionally hilarious subjective camerawork (a few scenes reminded me of Sam Raimi's original <i>Evil Dead</i> movies), I realized, with mounting horror, that <i>the entire movie</i> was going to be like this, and that there was more than an hour-and-a-half to go. I didn't hate <i>Vincent</i> like I did <i>My Dog Tulip</i>, the hideous animated film (with voice-work by Christopher Plummer) from the 2011 Ebertfest. (In a tweet that got me blackballed by the @Ebertfest twitterfeed two years ago - this year I got reinstated, on apparent probation - I quoted the <i>Tulip </i>director's professed belief that "Dogs are nothing more than piss and shit, and I wanted to make a movie that reflected this," with my own added sentiment, "Mission accomplished.") But Cox's movie wore me out so much that I unwisely skipped the next film, Patrick Wang's three-hour domestic drama <i><b>In the Family</b>, </i>hands-down the audience favorite of the festival. I have vowed to catch up with it the first chance I get.<br />
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The day concluded, amid a torrent of rain, with Richard Linklater's <b><i>Bernie</i></b>, starring Jack Black in the true-story-based black comedy about a mortician's hairpin-turning friendship with a wealthy, mean-spirited widow (played by Shirley MacLaine) in Carthage, Texas. I called <i>Bernie</i> a little overrated in my 2012 wrap-up, but now I think I underrated the movie. It's another terrific addition to Linklater's unpredictable body of work, one that deftly weaves farce with pathos, real documentary with the fake kind, and even becomes something of a musical, drawing an analogy between Bernie's spell over the citizens of Carthage with the con-artistry of Henry Higgins in <i>The Music Man</i>. The festival audience, however, had a curious reaction to Jack Black, laughing uproariously during the opening scene where Bernie instructs a group of students how to prepare a corpse, as if the actor were indulging in wacky shtick. It's a serious performance, by far Black's best.<br />
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On Friday the rain turned to sleet and a few flurries, and the tenor of the films went from grim to grimmer. <b><i>Oslo, August 31st </i></b>was a patently cheery Scandinavian import about the harrowing day in the life of a drug addict. The movie was well-made, especially the sound design in a scene where Anders, the main character (played by Anders Danielsen Lie)l, quietly overhears various conversations in a coffee shop, and I admired the film's refusal to set up the surrounding characters as easy bad guys (or gals) to blame for the protagonist's troubles. During a confrontation between Anders and a man who slept with his ex-girlfriend, I thought, "If they have a fistfight, then this is a bad movie." They didn't. It's a good movie. But not one I particularly enjoyed or ever want to see again. Nor am I eager to revisit <b><i>The Ballad of Narayama</i></b>, a 1958 Japanese film in what David Bordwell described as the "Dumping Granny" genre, based on a legend where old people, upon turning the age of 70 (Ebert's age when he passed away), are taken up to the ancient equivalent of a retirement community - a cold, lonely, skeleton-littered mountain, where they stay to die. Purposefully artificial, <i>Narayama</i> has the look and feel of a Kabuki play, with transitions so astounding that at one point, when a painted backdrop was suddenly pulled down like a clothesline to reveal a new setting, my friend Andy Hunsucker, who was sitting with me, and I simultaneously gasped. It's a striking film, but as John Simon would say, it bummed me out, man. I passed on <i>Julia, </i>starring Tilda Swinton,<i> </i>and called it a day.<br />
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Yet Tilda, as it turned out, didn't pass on us. On Saturday the sun came out, and the mood brightened. That morning's panel on video essays, deftly moderated by Omer Mozaffar and featuring a few familiar names and faces - David Bordwell, Steven Boone, Sheila O'Malley, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Kevin B. Lee - was the best panel I've attended in the three years I've been to Ebertfest, and not just because David Poland wasn't around to start arguments with everyone. All of the aforementioned have done great work pioneering this still new form of film criticism, and I look forward to seeing what they do next. (It was nice to finally meet Sheila, a wonderful writer and critic - nobody writes better about actors - and supporter of <a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2008/04/5-for-the-day-peter-weir/">one of my first film pieces</a> on Matt's former website. Another highlight occurred when the esteemed scholar Bordwell, whom I met last year, introduced me to Omer as a "film freak." There is no higher compliment.)<br />
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Four movies were on the docket for the day, and I caught three of them. <b><i>Blancanieves</i></b>, a modern silent film and update of the Snow White myth, directed with deep affection by Pablo Berger, is, much more than <i>The Artist</i>, a true attempt to recreate the style of silent-era cinema while also gently undermining our expectations. <b><i>Escape from Tomorrow</i></b>, my favorite movie of the festival, is the Sundance-buzzed Disney World satire, filmed surreptitiously at the theme park and almost certainly doomed to a non-release. Directed by Randy Moore, who captured what I admired about the film at the post-Q&A ("I knew I didn't want to make another 'found-footage' movie" - amen, brother: several of your film's startling images are still lodged in my brain), <i>Escape </i>follows the beleaguered patriarch of a family down a jauntily sinister rabbit hole into a surrealist take on the consequences behind the American obsession of being happy all the time. The complaint from Sundance was the film's length, but the Ebertfest version - trimmed from 104 minutes down to 90 - felt just right to me. (If and when <i>Escape from Tomorrow</i> goes wide, the <i>Cahiers</i>-wannabees on Twitter will inevitably torpedo the film in response to its hype. I'm glad I got to see it before they ruined it.)<br />
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My final screening, <b><i>The Spectacular Now</i> </b>(not the last movie of the Festival - noon Sunday's <i>Not Yet Begun to Fight</i>), almost made me bolt in its opening five minutes, one of those grating prologues from teen movies where a wisecracking protagonist (here played by Miles Teller) narrates an implausible college-application essay. Then I realized the movie was subverting the stock implausible college-application essay scene, as it proceeded to do so with one John Hughes-type cliche after another: the popular-kid meeting a bookish girl (Shailene Woodley from <i>The Descendants</i>), who's beautiful but nobody knows it; the pop-kid using the book-girl to help with his studies, then slowly falling for her; and so on. By the time we meet the hero's ne'er-do-well father (well-played, in an unexpected bit of casting, by Kyle Chandler), <i>The Spectacular Now</i> reveals itself to be a parable about alcoholism. Like <i>Flight</i>, only with a prom instead of a plane crash. I didn't love the movie - writer-director James Ponsoldt is better with actors than with staging (the party scenes show a bunch of actors standing around, rather than a bunch of <i>characters</i> standing around, if you understand my meaning). But the actors are enough. It's a good movie, one that tied into Ebert's customary response toward films about alcohol addiction (which dogged him early in his life), yet one that ended the festival on a note of hope.<br />
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I haven't forgotten Tilda. After the video-essay panel, Sheila told me that Tilda Swinton had been there, sitting quietly the entire time. Then, immediately following <i>Blancanieves</i>, I ran into her in the coffee area of the Virginia Theater, shook her hand and told her I admired her work. "Thank you, "she said brusquely, and started to bolt. Then, she seemed to realize I didn't want anything (I <i>never</i> ask for autographs or photographs), and she turned and said, more sincerely, <i>"Thank you very much."</i><br />
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But the highlight of Ebertfest occurred right before <i>Blancanieves</i>, when Tilda led the audience in a spirited <a href="http://vimeo.com/64683468">dance-along</a> to Barry White's "The First, the Last, My Everything." I don't know if she or Chaz or someone else planned it this way, but the moment was so joyous, following a few days of dreary weather and the unfolding Boston Marathon insanity and Roger's recent death, it felt like a firm push-back against the darkness of the week. (I have to note how superbly directed and edited that video of the dance is. I love the pan down from the balcony to Tilda's bobbing blonde head at around the 3:50 mark.) It's hard to envision what the future of Ebertfest will be, other than Chaz gave every indication that it's planned to continue. "It's strange without Roger around," Matt said to me at one point in the lobby.<i> </i>I agreed but added that, in a way, his spirit felt more pervasive than ever. At the <a href="http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=tempest&Act=5&Scene=1&Scope=scene&LineHighlight=2404#2404">conclusion</a> of <i>The Tempest</i>, Prospero's calls on the audience's applause to set him free. Ebertfest achieves the opposite task - by bringing all of us together, we bring back what Roger means to us still. A man whose charms will never be "all o'erthrown." Whose strength was always, fully his own.<br />
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<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-63116540702130640862013-04-14T14:11:00.002-04:002013-04-14T19:06:48.211-04:00Paris, Oklahoma (To the Wonder)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For a man accused of having his head in the clouds, Terrence Malick has maintained an earthbound understanding of how human beings think and behave. I didn't hammer <i>The Tree of Life </i>for its creation-epic extravaganza the way some did, because I thought the sequence worked in the context of Malick's aims. But I sympathized with the sense from the film's detractors that it threatened to overshadow the vividly-realized heart of the story -- a boy's life in 1950s small-town Texas.<br />
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With considerable help from his actors, Malick penetrated deeply into adolescent Jack's growing infatuation with his mother, a love borne of conflicting platonic ideals and carnal desires. (Those who insist it's only the former need to revisit the scenes where Jack becomes acutely aware of her physicality, leading to his sexual panic upon stealing a neighbor woman's dress.) Hunter McCracken's intuitive acting (undoubtedly guided by his director) kept young Jack's emotions achingly on the surface in every scene (as the older Jack, Sean Penn floundered a bit), while Jessica Chastain managed the near-impossible by suggesting that a real person existed beneath her son's idolatry. Best of all was Brad Pitt, whose physical performance, Tom Carson <a href="http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201109/tom-carson-toronto-film-festival-moneyball-brad-pitt-jonah-hill">observed</a>, came through "in his duck-to-water understanding that acting in a Terrence Malick movie is all about conveying personality via demeanor, not Malick's evanescent dialogue." For all the awardage bestowed on actors who play historical figures and the physically challenged, there is nothing more difficult for a movie star than portraying an ordinary human being. I mean it as the highest compliment to Pitt that when I watched his festering resentment toward his wealthy neighbors, or his memorable explosion at the dinner table (climaxed by grabbing a corner and moving the entire table closer to him), or the way he put a meaty paw on his son's shoulder in an awkward display of affection, I thought: <i>I know this man</i>.<br />
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Everything in <i>The Tree of Life</i> - even the cryptic parts - felt lived-in and real, so it's a bummer to report that Malick's surprisingly quick follow-up, <b><i>To the Wonder</i>, </b>is a ludicrous, aimless dud. It's the kind of folly I can't hate, though: I can respect a director trying new things (or tweaking old things), even though almost none of them work. <i>The Tree of Life's </i>psychological nuance has transformed into this film's opaqueness, Brad Pitt's sturdiness replaced by Ben Affleck's puzzlement. As far as I can gather from the five shots of his face and three lines of dialogue, Affleck is supposed to be playing a studly ladies-man, a character which, Lord knows, should be right down his wheelhouse. Yet not since his J-Lo heyday has Affleck looked anything less than a hostage with an eye cast furtively toward the exits. His character - whose name is "Neil," we learn from the closing credits, but let's call him "Ben," it's as good a name as any - threatens to spring to life during a resplendent middle section where he canoodles with a local rancher played by Rachel McAdams. She isn't given much to do either, but McAdams has always been an actress with a flair for <i>interacting</i>. She often brings out the best in her co-stars, no easy feat here amid scenes among patented Malickian distractions like buffalo herds and wheat-fields. (As always, Malick's camera functions like the dog in <i>Up </i>whose own attention is diverted constantly by squirrels.) Her blonde hair glistening in the sun, his broad back in handsome repose, Rachel and Ben cook up a pleasing rapport.<br />
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As Richard Brody <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/04/the-cinematic-miracle-of-to-the-wonder.html">reminds</a> us, however, this is not a film for "viewers with expectations, or rather, prejudices for what constitutes a movie," a more eloquent way of saying that for Malick a stock cinematic element like chemistry simply won't do. Rachel gets jettisoned in order to herald the return of Ben's original love, whom we meet at the beginning of <i>To the Wonder</i>, a Gallic Pixie Dream Girl* played by Olga Kurylenko, who becomes the most tiresome character in recent movies. She's the type of flighty free-spirit Jack Donaghy warned against on <i>30 Rock</i> ("Never follow a hippie to a second location"), with a lust for life so monomaniacally insistent it's easy to understand why Ben might harbor misgivings. Yet Malick lavishes attention on her in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of Matthew Weiner's propping up of Jessica Pare's limited charms on <i>Mad Men</i>. Along the margins of the onscreen abstraction in <i>To the Wonder</i> is the whiff of a familiar offscreen subtext: a male authority figure playing Charles Foster Kane to an ingenue's Suzan Alexander. (At least Kane offered Suzan an actual opera. Malick gives Kurylenko nothing to work with. She cavorts like a band-camp refugee who lost her baton.)<br />
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In <i>Paris, Texas</i>, Wim Wenders, no doubt drawing from personal experience, depicted the clash and collusion of Euro-American culture in oddly resonant ways: Aurore Clement and Bernhard Wicki looked appropriately out of place (and Nastassja Kinski, in a stunning example of counter-intuitive casting, remarkably <i>in</i> place) in a movie about the dislocation of Americans in their own homeland. Malick's real-world experience, undoubtedly enhanced by his shunning of Hollywood lifestyle, somehow fails to register in <i>To the Wonder</i>. His Gay Paree in the early passages possesses neither an insider's knowledge nor a foreigner's wonderment. While it's refreshing to see an avoidance of the usual landmarks, the dazzling architecture on display in <i>The Tree of Life's </i>contemporary Austin is sadly missing in Malick's Paris, with its drab concrete statues and amusement parks.<br />
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Where Malick fares surprisingly little better is in what should be his natural habitat - rural Oklahoma, where Ben takes soil samples (or something) as part of his job, Olga plays hopscotch, and Javier Bardem's despondent priest (the third main sort-of character) half-heartedly visits the poor and the imprisoned and questions his faith. (Whereas <i>Tree of Life</i> features a memorable scene where young Jack silently encounters black people for the first time, <i>To the Wonder </i>shows Malick taking a stab at creating an actual African-American character - the jarring stereotype he comes up with making you long for his previous respectful distance.) Oh, how Javier questions. Only his character isn't interesting and the questions aren't compelling. This is unfortunately true of the whole film. Besides McAdams, the only person who makes an impression is Tatiana Chiline as Kurylenko's daughter, whose dislocation in the Heartland is nicely rendered. Chiline holds the screen as naturally as Linda Manz in <i>Days of Heaven. </i>And then Malick shoos her out of the movie, too. All that's left in <i>To the Wonder </i>is a God-sized hole.<br />
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<b>(*Because "Malick Pixie Dream Girl" was already <a href="http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/review/a455854/to-the-wonder-review-olga-kurylenko-is-malick-pixie-dream-girl.html">taken</a>.)</b><br />
<b> </b> Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-17785177858006347932013-04-05T13:20:00.003-04:002013-04-13T23:32:20.066-04:00Roger & Remembrance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A couple of years ago, on Twitter, Roger Ebert (known to his legions of followers in the Twitterverse as @ebertchicago) was expounding 140 characters at a time on arguably his favorite topic other than movies: evolution. More precisely he was targeting its opposite, creationism, a subject he bashed as he always did, with merry matter-of-factness, a scoff that stopped short of a sneer. I don't remember exactly what he wrote but I think it had something to do with an article he'd just read claiming that creationists were filling their ranks with more intellectuals. Unsurprisingly the public intellectual in Roger scoffed, at once appalled yet amused. I don't know what prompted me to respond - for a moment, I hesitated - but reflexively I tweeted back: "90% of creationism is half-mental."<br />
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It was a nebulous joke I'd tried out before, unsuccessfully, with professional Darwinists possessing a more evolved sense of humor. For Roger, though, who decades ago cut his teeth as a sportswriter before finding his true calling, my appropriation of a famous Yogi Berra-ism hit the sweet spot. He retweeted it. Then he started rummaging through my blog, linking first to a <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2010/04/terrible-judgment-and-excellent-taste.html">review</a> I wrote on a new oral biography about Robert Altman (a filmmaker he championed dating way back to <i>M*A*S*H</i>), then to a silly-fun March Madness-related <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2010/03/altman-tournament-of-champions.html">"tournament"</a> I put together that pitted Altman's movies against each other. Getting his attention, garnering his praise was a thrill: as a blogger, on the very rare days when your Sitemeter hits skyrocketed, you knew Ebert had everything to do with it. But as I sit here typing these sentences, reflecting on Roger's life and death, what makes me happiest is the thought that, on at least one occasion, I told a dumb joke that made him laugh.<br />
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Needless to say, over the last few years, whenever Roger "laughed" it was internalized, like all his other thoughts and feelings. Yet partly because of his well-known persona and partly because, after losing his voice, he came to express himself on the page, and in the virtual world, more vividly than ever, there was never doubt what he thought and felt about anything. While this was an essential and enviable asset for Roger during his life, it presents a conundrum, in the wake of his death, if you were to ask me if I knew the man. "I hate those 'In Memoriam' pieces in which the writers overstate their closeness to the deceased," Jim Emerson writes in his <a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2013/04/thinking_of_roger.html">tribute</a>. So do I. That's why yesterday, I half-regretted posting on Facebook and Twitter, "Hero, mentor, friend, inspiration," knowing that the middle two of those descriptive terms are shaky at best. With Roger, I suspect that's similar for many of us. I could say, "Yes, I knew him," or "No, I didn't," and both answers would be true.<br />
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I knew Roger the longest, of course, on the printed page and on the TV screen. Most certainly I caught him and Siskel first on the tube in the late 1970s or early 1980s, before seeking out their written criticism. They were together as they were (I would later learn) separate: clever, funny, passionate, stimulating. I quickly became obsessed, following their show as it jumped from public broadcasting to national syndication enjoying it with my parents when it usually aired on Saturday afternoons. (Once, the indignant eleven-or-twelve year old that I was at the time, outraged that an overlong sporting event had preempted my regular viewing schedule, called the local Phoenix station and shouted, "What the hell are you taking Siskel and Ebert off for?!" and slammed down the phone.) When <i>At the Movies</i> - or whatever it was called by then - became a Disney production, cynics
predicted that the show would become a shill for the Mouse. (An editorial cartoon
depicted Gene and Roger wearing Mickey ears.) Yet in what would become a recurring pattern for Ebert over the course of his life and career, his partnership with Siskel kept evolving without changing the essence of what made it special. <br />
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On one of their many lively talk show appearances during that era, Gene paused in between trading playful barbs to confess that what he envied most about Roger was his writing ability. Gene was right: Ebert was better. And whether he was reviewing <i>Cries and Whispers</i> for the <i>Sun-Times</i> or jousting with cinephiles on CompuServe, the agility of his prose was the same. Many writers have linked Roger's loss of his voice with his use of the Internet, probably because Roger made the connection many times himself. But he had created his own virtual forum at least as early as 1995 or 1996, a pioneer in online criticism and communication. I joined CompuServe briefly around then. Sparring directly with Ebert was fun. With the proto-trolls who prowled the forum spouting venom and lunacy, not so much. After a few months I wrote Roger an email, politely telling him that I was leaving. Unexpectedly he replied: "I'll miss you!" He added that there was "a lot of silliness" online, but that he also found enough value in the virtual realm to stick around.<br />
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Stick around Roger did, putting a face to the maxim, "Life is a series of narrow escapes." In what became an intermittent 19-year correspondence, I wrote occasional questions (or assertions) to his Movie Answer Man column (one was a snarky jibe about Leonardo DiCaprio in <i>Titanic</i>), and he would occasionally reply, either directly or in published form. (To my delight, a couple of them were compiled in the appendices of his annual <i>Movie Handbook</i>.) More recently, when Roger took to social media - most of our communiques the examples mentioned above - he became a regular presence I cherished. It wasn't because I always agreed with what he thought about movies. As always, he was overly generous with his four-star ratings; although, also as always, he could be surprisingly tough on a critically revered film (see <i>Blue Velvet,</i> <i>The Usual Suspects, The Godfather: Part II, Raising Arizona</i>, or last year's penetrating analysis of <i>The Master</i>). Nuances like these invariably escaped the notice of Ebert's own critics. I unfollowed one last year on Twitter after he made sport of Roger's review of <i>The Tree of Life</i>. (This very same individual sang Ebert's praises only yesterday, which suggests that either he was previously unaware of Roger's health struggles or he forgot what he initially wrote.) In the last few years of his life I came to feel that Roger, ironically, was <i>above</i> criticism. Which is not to say that he was faultless. It just means that criticism of the man became irrelevant.<br />
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I tried not to bother Roger during his lifetime. Part of me wishes I'd bothered him more, that I'd had the closeness with him that others had. Still, I know I'm lucky to have had the interaction I did. (I met him <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2011/04/ebertfest-day-1-metropolis-and-natural.html">in person</a> once, at the 2011 Ebertfest. I can still feel his vise-like grip as we shook hands.) I now have colleagues who knew Roger as well: Dave Frasier, a friend and biographer of Russ Meyer; and Jon Vickers, now director of the IU Cinema, whose Vickers Theatre in Michigan is mentioned admiringly in Roger's memoirs. When people ask, "What is Roger Ebert's legacy?" the answer is: <i>We</i> are. All the connections that he forged, in the real world and the virtual one. He was guiding us to each other all along. Leading us to what first brought him and Gene together. To shared enthusiasms. And, in turn, back to ourselves.<br />
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I'm not sure if Roger ever put together that the guy who frequented his internet forum and wrote innumerable Answer Man contributions and blogged about Altman and cracked a joke about creationism and gave him an IU Cinema hat and shook his hand were all the same person. But in a way it's fitting, since every time we connected <i>he</i>, while always the same person, was also in important ways (sportswriter, film critic, Russ Meyer acolyte, screenwriter, Paulette, recovering alcoholic, Pulitzer Prize winner, TV personality, husband, family man, cancer survivor, social media aficionado, internet pioneer), a very different man from who he was before.<br />
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My last exchange with Roger - maybe a year ago, maybe longer - concerned a direct message I sent him on Twitter, trying to explain that all the Craig Simpsons of the past and present were me. "You probably don't remember, but I was on your CompuServe forum," I told him.<br />
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He wrote back immediately: "Many moons ago. :)"<br />
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Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-77603237730534035052013-03-17T15:24:00.000-04:002013-03-17T18:37:51.334-04:00Cozzalio'd!<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">For the first time ever, my blog pal Dennis Cozzalio has cooked up a<a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2013/03/miss-jean-brodies-modestly-magnificent.html"> movie quiz </a>that I can answer (for the most part), meaning either my cinematic knowledge is improving or he's kindly taken something off his curveball - the latter, more likely. In either case, here are his questions followed by my responses:</span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The classic movie moment everyone loves
except me is: </b><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">"Show Me the Money!" from <i>Jerry Maguire</i>. It always makes me cringe. I usually take the opposite stance on this issue, however: I'm frequently surprised by the number of people who pooh-pooh the most memorable scenes from movies or TV shows. I always want to ask how they think the film or episode would play without them.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 2)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Favorite line of dialogue from a film noir: </b>"You were born to be murdered." - Trevor Howard to Joseph Cotten in <i>The Third Man.</i> It's a line that perfectly encapsulates the entire genre (even though, of course, he isn't killed).</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 3)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Second favorite Hal Ashby film: </b><i>The Last Detail</i>.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></i></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4)</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Describe
the moment when you first realized movies were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">directed</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> as opposed to simply pieced together anonymously</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. * </i></b>Around the time I started watching Siskel & Ebert, 10-11 years old. Spielberg was likely the first director I was conscious of<i> - </i>so <i>Raiders </i>or <i>E.T.</i>, I would guess. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 5)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Favorite film book. </b>Mark Harris's phenomenal <i>Pictures at a Revolution</i>.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 6)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Diana Sands or Vonetta Mc</b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Gee? </b>Who?</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 7)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Most egregious gap in your viewing of films
made in the past 10 years. </b>I've avoided Harmony Korine like the plague so far, but <i>Spring Breakers</i> may finally change that.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 8)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Favorite line of dialogue from a comedy. </b>"You slut." - Bill Murray, <i>Tootsie</i>.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 9)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Second favorite Lloyd Bacon film. </b>Who?</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 10)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Richard Burton or Roger Livesey? </b>Burton easily over Whatshisface.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 11)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Is there a movie you staunchly refuse to
consider seeing? If so, why? </b>Anything by Vincent Gallo. Others will undoubtedly tell me I'm missing out. I say there's more than enough narcissistic bullshit in real life, and much more adeptly staged and focused.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 12)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Favorite filmmaker collaboration. </b>Kurosawa and Mifune.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 13)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Most recently viewed movie on DVD/Blu-ray/theatrical? </b>DVD: <i>Lockout. </i>Blu-Ray: <i>Paris, Texas</i>. Theatrical: <i>Thief of Bagdad</i> (the one with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr). </div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 14)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Favorite line of dialogue from a horror
movie: </b>"Take me!" - Father Karras's ultimate sacrifice in <i>The Exorcist</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 15)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Second favorite Oliver Stone film: </b><i>W.</i>, believe it or not. I think it's a brilliant black comedy.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 16)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Eva Mendes or Raquel Welch?</b> The "sexy duds" category. I'll pick Raquel.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 17)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Favorite religious satire: </b><i>Life of Brian</i> by default. Slim pickings.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 18)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Best Internet movie argument? </b><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">(question contributed
by Tom Block) Matthias Stork's "Chaos Cinema." He went on to confuse his own ideas the more he tried to explain them (and became needlessly apologetic to his straw-man critics), but his original video essay is still a game-changer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 19)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Most pointless Internet movie argument? </b><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">(question contributed
by Tom Block)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Anything concocted by the Neo-Auteurists, such as insisting the reliably shitty Paul W.S. Anderson is a major filmmaker or, worse, a <i>better </i>filmmaker than Paul Thomas Anderson. (hat-tip Steven Santos) </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 20)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Charles McGraw or Robert Ryan? </b>I don't need to know who McGraw is to say Ryan.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 21)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Favorite line of dialogue from a west</b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ern: </b>"Trust you? Why should I trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? You don't even trust your own pants." - Henry Fonda in <i>Once Upon a Time in the West</i> (although the line was partly co-opted from <i>Ace in the Hole</i>).<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 22)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Second favorite Roy Del Ruth film: </b>Dunno.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 23)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Relatively unknown film or filmmaker you’d
most eagerly proselytize for: </b>I've already proselytized for <i>The Big Year</i>, an uncommonly gentle comedy that finds truth and beauty in conventionality.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 24)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Ewan McGregor or Gerard Butler? </b>McGregor, a good actor, in a walk.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 25)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Is there such a thing as a perfect movie? </b>Not often, but yes. I do grow weary of critics proclaiming every movie they see from their favorite director as a masterpiece. After a while the word starts losing its meaning.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 26)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Favorite movie location you’ve most
recently had the occasion to actually visit * </b>The Hotel Coronado in San Diego, the setting for the second half of <i>Some Like It Hot.</i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 27)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Second favorite Delmer Daves film: </b>?</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 28)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Name the one DVD commentary you wish you
could hear that, for whatever reason, doesn't actually exist *</b> The riotous James Ellroy and Eddie Muller (<i>Crime Wave</i>) should do commentaries for every classic film noir ever made.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 29)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Gloria Grahame or Marie Windsor? </b>GG.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 30)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Name a filmmaker who never really lived up
to the potential suggested by their early acclaim or success: </b>Kevin Smith, who decided a long time ago he'd rather be a slacker poseur than build on the success of <i>Clerks</i> and the creative promise of <i>Chasing Amy</i>.</div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><b> 31)</b><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Is there
a movie-based disagreement serious enough that it might cause you to reevaluate
the basis of a romantic relationship or a friendship? * </b>Both <a href="http://coolercinema.blogspot.com/2009/08/falling-out-of-love-at-movies.html">Jason Bellamy</a> and<a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2009/08/the-conversations-michael-mann/"> I </a>have recounted my anecdote about <i>Last of the Mohicans</i>.</div>
Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-82153391946251673892013-03-10T15:30:00.000-04:002013-03-10T18:56:19.251-04:00House Arrests (This Is Not a Film and Killer Joe)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Over the last few weeks have come two articles of note - <i>Complex Pop Culture's</i> <a href="http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/02/best-movie-critics-of-all-time/#galleryS">"25 Best Movie Critics of All Time," </a>followed by <i>Cineaste Magazine's </i>profile of a handful of the 35-and-youngers, <a href="http://www.cineaste.com/articles/film-criticism-the-next-generation">"Film Criticism: The Next Generation."</a> For all the usual fallacies associated with list-making (Dana Stevens on, Kent Jones off - <i>riiiiiight</i>), the former is a surprisingly decent overview, if typically Americentric and short-term-memoried. The latter is a commendable attempt to advance the notion that the future of movie criticism is bright, a thesis disputed by at least a couple of the "best." For our purposes here, I'm less interested in what the established Eeyores think about the whippersnappers than in what it would take for an up-and-comer to make his or her way into the canon. <br />
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To paint in broad strokes, I think that many twentysomething critics are gifted with strong voices without having a whole lot to say. Oftentimes, on sites that employ them, they blend together as the same voice, bereft of any individual distinctions; their prose isn't instantly recognizable the way Fernando Croce's is, for example. Far from tentative, their biggest flaw is supreme confidence masking insecurity: They come across like grad students straining to come up with an "original" point-of-view on topics that have been thoroughly excavated. Consequently, I find hard to take seriously any<i> </i>"bold" statement they make.<i> </i>(That every movie is regarded as either a towering masterpiece or a crime against humanity doesn't help.)<i> </i>You <i>really</i> think <i>O.C. and Stiggs</i> is better than <i>Nashville</i>? Then show your readership something beyond a string of haughty declarative sentences. Show that you are <i>searching</i> and <i>grappling</i> with the film, with yourself, with the connection between the two. <i>These</i> are the qualities that have made many of the greatest critics: look at the Top-25 list again.<br />
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These are the qualities of all great artists, as Jafar Panahi demonstrates in <i><b>This is Not a Film</b></i><b> (2011)</b>. I'm going to bypass what everybody already knows about Panahi's house-arrest iPhone documentary (cake-smuggling, a pet iguana named Igi) and sidestep what I don't know about his body of work (i.e., everything) and instead focus on what resonated with me the most - the film's concluding movement. After approximately an hour of Panahi and his co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's detailing of the tension between Panahi's physical confinement and intellectual freedom, the pair are interrupted, as Mirtahmasb is about to leave, by a garbage collector, who takes note of Mirtahmasb's sophisticated digital camera left on Panahi's kitchen table. Panahi takes the camera and follows out of his apartment and onto the elevator the garbage collector as he makes his rounds through the building. Collector and filmmaker chat for several minutes as the elevator goes down, culminating with Panahi following him outside while the banned "Fireworks Wednesday" celebration explodes in the sky around them.<br />
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What I love about this sequence is not merely not knowing whether it's spontaneous or staged or both, but that Panahi shows it doesn't matter. While other documentary filmmakers - from Errol Morris to Alex Gibney to Michael Moore to Werner Herzog - may at times questionably mix fact with fiction, Panahi makes the creative impulse <i>This Is Not a Film's</i> true subject. By finally finding a compelling "character" (other than himself), even introducing him via what is essentially a Meet-Cute, does the director become briefly yet exhilaratingly free.<br />
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If they haven't already, the Neo-Auteurists - i.e., the aforementioned upstart critics who concur with the pantheon of Great Filmmakers while claiming that their justifiably forgotten works are better than the highly regarded ones (John Ford's <i>Cheyenne Autumn </i>is greater than <i>The Searchers</i>, Orson Welles's wine commercial is superior to <i>Citizen Kane</i>) - will sooner or later burst forth to declare that William Friedkin's <i><b>Killer Joe</b></i> <b>(2012)</b> is a more significant achievement than his 1970s watersheds <i>The French Connection </i>and <i>The Exorcist</i>. It isn't, not by a long shot. But it's a buoyantly sleazy noir-comedy made by a filmmaker arguably more resourceful now than he was then. Give the 77-year-old Friedkin credit for staying power: working again from a script by playwright Tracy Letts, this director, often reprimanded by Pauline Kael for blunt docudrama brutalism, has reimagined his style without going soft. He doesn't "open up" <i>Killer Joe</i> so much as supply it with a vibrant atmosphere. The movie <i>breathes</i>, even as it's exhaling toxic fumes.<br />
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A thoroughly disreputable film that made me laugh a lot (Kael may have laughed, too: What she wrote about <i>Repo Man</i> - "Sometimes a movie without any redeeming social value can make you feel good" - applies equally here), <i>Killer Joe</i> shows perverse affection toward its venal Texas lowlifes: they're alive in a way the zombies of Soderbergh's <i>Bubble</i> or the woebegones of Kelly Reichardt's movies are not. (How else could Emile Hirsch give his most vivid and weirdly likeable performance ever?) It's also more deeply entrenched in classic noir than other movies that make no more than feints and nods toward the genre. The title character's murderous predilections are in tandem with kinky sexual fetishes from which neither Friedkin nor Letts nor Matthew McConaughey (another of his recent career-redefining performances) shy away. Meticulous in planning the details of a homicide (in this case the mother/wife of, respectively, Hirsch and Thomas Haden Church), yet impulsive in his lust (in this case their jailbait sister/daughter, who becomes his "retainer" for the killing), Joe is a control freak who loses control of the situation only to take extreme measures to gain it back. His cool desperation culminates in a dinner-table set-piece that's like the demented mirror-image of the breakfast-table climax in <i>Moonstruck</i>. <i>Killer Joe</i> turns into a bloody comedy-of-marriage - imagine the climax of <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i> crossed with <i>Julius Caesar</i> - a revelation perhaps obscured by the appearance of a chicken drumstick. This key prop, and what it is used for, has become understandably controversial. Yet it's like Chekhov said: If you introduce a drumstick by the third act, sooner or later it's gotta go off.<br />
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<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-69184327592921352822013-02-23T15:32:00.003-05:002013-02-23T15:34:04.066-05:00The Most Exceptionally Groovy Oscars Podcast Playlist<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For the second consecutive year, I was invited onto the Indiana University Cinema Podcast, along with the venerable James Paasche, to talk about the Oscar nominations with hosts Andy Hunsucker and Jason Thompson. Andy has kindly created a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNNd4aTQeqNNC4DbO_6LpGn7IyPUJBp6S">video playlist</a>, so if you're dying to know what I think about, say, costume design, now's your chance to go directly to the source.<br />
<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-32284230148506133472013-02-17T16:27:00.000-05:002013-02-18T06:35:40.231-05:00Contenders (Life of Pi, Lincoln, Flight, Silver Linings Playbook, Skyfall, Beasts of the Southern Wild)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm surprised by how much I've enjoyed catching up with some of this year's Oscar contenders, and not just because of my above-it-all hipsterish indifference to awards' bait. While all of these films have received generally good reviews, I've realized that I've been putting too much stock in contradictory opinions based on rather specious or trivial issues. While Ben Affleck's boneheaded <i>Argo</i> draws praise for being "like a decent TV movie of the week," as though that were something worth paying even matinee prices for, the Realism Argument that has taken <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> to task in the political arena has been trotted out - oftentimes as its close cousin, the Insider-Knowledge Argument - to pan other movies on socio-cultural grounds. At least one critic has slammed <i>Silver Linings Playbook</i> because he once dated somebody who was bipolar and their experience did not include Eagles games and dance contests; someone who was from the same part of India as the protagonist in <i>Life of Pi </i>helpfully informed us that they don't really talk like that there, a crucial element missing from Ang Lee's documentary approach to the material.<br />
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Also being woven into many reviews with seeming frequency are quotes from the filmmakers themselves, the underlying assumption being that arbitrary soundbites from random interviews by creative artists with vested interests (personal, political, commercial) should automatically be trusted. Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, is <a href="http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=33199">correct</a> that Kathryn Bigelow's "naive contention that (<i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>) 'doesn't have an agenda, and it doesn't judge' has only helped to confuse matters," but that confusion only exists by letting an external comment interfere with what's on screen in the first place. <br />
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That's my general rule for evaluating movies: the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the film itself. Unlike <i>Argo</i>, whose cliches grate as loudly as a stalled clutch at Tehran International Airport, <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> lets nothing incongruous inside of its own reality. (Well, almost nothing: Mark Boal's script gives Jessica Chastain a couple of grandstanding moments, but at least they're entertaining grandstands.) Similarly, while I know little about Indian culture or alcoholism or what it takes to ratify an amendment (I did, however, once spend considerable time with a bipolar person, but I don't assume that qualifies me to a higher level of experience), I was absorbed by the worlds of the following films; in varying degrees, they made me believe.<br />
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<b><i>Life of Pi. </i></b>Ang Lee's beautiful, harrowing fable about a pair of mismatched shipwreck survivors - an Indian boy and a Bengal tiger - is the greatest boy-meets-animal story since Carroll Ballard's <i>The Black Stallion</i>, featuring 3-D used for maximum creative effect and CGI that looks shockingly substantial. I think some folks are taking too literally as a mission statement the claim by the adult Pi (played by Irrfan Khan, who tells the tale to an unnamed Canadian author) that his story "will make you believe in God." With the kind of tough-minded sentimentality often mistaken for exclusively treacly sentiment, <i>Life of Pi</i> undercuts the stereotype of Indian mystical wisdom for a more double-edged belief-by-necessity in order to survive both our ordeals and our memories. <br />
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<b><i>Lincoln. </i></b>The first Spielberg movie I've liked since the last time he filmed a script by Tony Kushner, <i>Lincoln</i>, like <i>Munich</i>, provides the director with intellectual rigor that meshes beautifully with his emotional clarity. Both qualities embody the personality of the main character himself, played with effortless authenticity by Daniel Day-Lewis, who transforms the abolition of slavery from an emotional appeal into a legal argument in order to get the 13th Amendment passed. Among its other achievements, <i>Lincoln</i> does something exceedingly difficult by depicting <i>internal</i> conflict among the key players on both sides of the issue, as when an admittedly racist Representative, whose brother died in the Civil War, votes no as expected, only to hold his head in moral anguish.<br />
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<b><i>Flight. </i></b>Denzel Washington must have sensed that his estimable acting skills were in recent years calcifying into shtick (or maybe he caught Jay Pharaoh's unerring parody on SNL), because he throws timidity to the winds as a drink-and-drug-addicted pilot whose life-saving actions during a plane crash forces him to confront a personal tailspin of his own doing. Robert Zemeckis's return to reality from twelve years of motion-capture brings his controversial strain of conservatism back to Hollywood movies, but you don't have to be religious to appreciate the sincerity with which he approaches spirituality.<i> Flight</i> is in a sense a disease-of-the-week movie in disguise, but whereas most actors playing drunks oversell weakness, Washington emphasizes his character's strength, making the demons that bring him down all the more formidable. <br />
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<b><i>Silver Linings Playbook. </i></b>A romcom in disguise, David O. Russell's latest comedy-of-rage is the weakest of all of his movies that I've liked (though better than <i>I Heart Huckabees</i>), but as with <i>The Fighter</i> I still enjoyed the dexterity with which Russell tries to conceal the film's narrative trappings. I have to laugh at the accusations that Russell "sold out," since nearly all his movies - nearly all nervy, unhinged attempts to reconcile his thuggish and pacifist instincts - feature happy or hopeful endings. Russell may be a thug, but there's nothing cynical about his art. Like Bradley Cooper's mentally fractured antihero, he believes.<br />
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<b><i><b><i>Skyfall. </i></b></i></b>The latest Bond movie and the first Sam Mendes film I haven't found appalling (his staging of Javier Bardem's rock-and-roll helicopter raid gave me a tingle of laughter), <i>Skyfall</i> follows the personal storyline of the superb <i>Casino Royale</i> and hideous <i>Quantum of Solace</i> to somewhere in between. Roger Deakins' Oscar-nominated cinematography enhances a mixed-bag script, C+ dialogue offset by an A+ structure leading to an emotionally satisfying conclusion.<br />
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Oh, yeah, I almost forgot....<br />
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<b><i><b><i>Beasts of the Southern Wild. </i></b></i></b>The hatred for this (knee-jerk charges of racism, etc.) has been as overblown as the praise. I liked my friend James Paasche's defense on our recent podcast that the film is one of very few child-related movies that doesn't condescend to its protagonist. My problem with the movie is visually it's amateur-hour, the year's biggest eyesore this side of <i>The Hunger Games</i>. An admirable debut, a decent effort. I just wished, while watching it, that I could actually <i>see</i> it.<br />
<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-66555934106712542952013-01-12T16:33:00.001-05:002013-01-14T20:55:57.070-05:00The Devil Inside (Zero Dark Thirty)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Shortly before <i><b>Zero Dark Thirty</b></i><b> </b>came out, I flippantly remarked that I'd give the movie "bonus points if it spares us a Mission Control Applause scene." As you know, Mission Control Applause is nearly obligatory in dramatic thrillers depicting real-life, high-risk scenarios pulled off successfully while Ed Harris or Bryan Cranston barks orders at a team of men staring at computer screens with their shirt-sleeves rolled up and cigarette butts dropping to the floor. It's no surprise, at the end of Kathryn Bigelow's film, that the grand plan to kill Osama bin Laden succeeds; what is surprising is the absence of celebration. Instead of a hearty round of hand-clapping, Bigelow holds instead on the pensive expression of Maya (Jessica Chastain), the young, female intelligence operative who brought the ten-year pursuit of bin Laden to its end. Actually, her face is more than pensive. She looks haunted, as if the ghosts of 9/11 can never be fully excised.<br />
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Ghosts are haunting, indeed clouding the reception of the movie as well, namely the specter of Abu Ghraib that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal - to either their credit or detriment - revive. As everybody knows by now, <i>Zero Dark Thirty </i>contains scenes at a CIA "black site" where an American agent named Dan (played by Jason Clarke) strips, dog-collars, hot-boxes, and waterboards a captured al-Qaeda member named Ammar (played by Reda Kateb). Maya, who is introduced during these passages as a troubled yet complicit bystander, eventually learns from Ammar the name of a courier ("Ahmed from Kuwait") whom she comes to believe is in the employ of bin Laden. Some critics - an odd, unwieldy mix of admirers of the film (Owen Gleiberman, David Edelstein), politicos with insider info (Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, John McCain), and left-wing crusaders who either have or haven't seen the movie (Glenn Greenwald, Ed Asner, Martin Sheen), it isn't always clear - have traced the steps from the black site to bin Laden as evidence that <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> is saying "torture works."<br />
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While it appears that Boal and Bigelow have, in raising this topic, opened a Pandora's Box more incendiary than their methods (or interview statements) can quite get a handle on, I think that their stance is more complicated than these connect-the-dots reviews suggest. This is evinced not only in what Glenn Kenny perceptively <a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2012/12/anti-torture-anti-art.html">defines</a> as Bigelow's "film grammar," which conveys sympathy for Ammar in the early scenes (as a suffering and degraded human being, even though the movie never lets us forget he is also a terrorist with ties to 9/11), but in the narrative itself. Mark Bowden (author of <i>The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden</i>, which I haven't read) is one of only a few discerning viewers who have<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/zero-dark-thirty-is-not-pro-torture/266759/"> pointed out</a> that the initial torturing of Ammar does <i>not</i>, in fact, accomplish Dan's objective - the prevention of an attack in Saudi Arabia - and that the discovery of the courier is obtained through Maya's subsequent kinder, gentler act of subterfuge. Others, like Jeff Reichert at <i>Reverse Shot</i>, have <a href="http://www.reverseshot.com/article/zero_dark_thirty">referred</a> to a later scene, where Maya's friend and colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) shakes her head dismissively during a broadcast of newly elected President Obama's condemnation of the treatment of detainees, ostensibly in response to the man's naivete. Yet this overlooks what ultimately happens to Jessica, involving a lead in Afghanistan that turns deadly, and could be inferred as payback (direct or karmic) for the detainee program.<br />
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The controversy over <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> has become convoluted to the point where smart and stupid things are being written by the same people in the same pieces. Bowden interrupts his otherwise sound reasoning with an silly anecdote that suggests we know Kathryn Bigelow isn't pro-torture because he heard she's a nice person. Conversely, Reichert makes amid some inaccurate interpretations the most valid criticism I've read about the movie: that <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>'s journalistic realism is, like all "reality-based" cinema and television, just another fictional construction. "When Olivier Assayas...mounted <i>Carlos</i>, a similarly scaled production dealing with global terrorism, his opening card noted the necessary fictionalization of events," Reichert notes. He goes on: "Bigelow and Boal stick to their personality-free 'just the facts' approach as obsessively as their heroine sticks to her dogged pursuit of bin Laden, but what happens to a film like <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> when the filmmakers' facts are hotly disputed, especially by people who are in a far better position to know?"<br />
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What happens, unfortunately, is we're left with one of those movies shanghaied by the agenda-mongerers, a film whose veracity and artistry can't be viewed entirely clearly in the present day. This will likely mean a shutout at the Oscars (<i>oh-deary-dear!</i>), among other irksome side-effects. Yet while I can't speak for the movie's veracity, I do believe, once the dust settles, its artistry is going to hold up well over time.<br />
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As a longtime non-fan of the "reality approach" (jittery cameras, etc.), I have to give Bigelow her due as its reigning expert. Less obtrusively than Paul Greengrass, she has, in her two collaborations with Boal, developed a style that looks "journalistic" (read: objective) yet embeds within that style a subjective perspective toward the events it's documenting. This leads us back to the issue of film grammar, and the notion that whereas a picture used to be worth a thousand words, now, it seems, a word is worth a thousand pictures. Just as some viewers cannot discern Bigelow's position on torture via her visual language, both fans and foes of <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> have been praising or condemning the movie entire for "not taking a stand" and "letting you draw your own conclusions." It's true that Bigelow doesn't overtly push an agenda, nor do she crowd us, as Pauline Kael once complained about Oliver Stone. Her approach is visceral, not intellectual. And I think, in purely visceral terms, she has a pretty clear viewpoint about what she's depicting.<br />
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<i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>, like David Fincher's <i>Zodiac, </i>is a procedural about an obsessive manhunt that shows the effects of the hunt on the obsessives. Some of this is explicit: Black-Site Dan, for example, tells Maya that he's returning to Washington for less stressful work (and, not incidentally, because he tips her off that oversight committees are forming, and "you don't want to be the one caught holding the leash"); there are also a telling couple of scenes where Dan enjoys playing with monkeys in a cage (one, to his delight, steals his ice-cream cone), then gets upset that they were killed out of concern that they'd escape. Yet much of what happens is implicit, not just the look on Maya's face as she watches hours of video of tortured prisoners, but the way Bigelow's camera glides by a computer monitor for a fleeting glimpse of a digital image of Maya and Jessica on the desktop. It's in the completely unremarked-upon international gallery of light- and dark-skinned players who help Maya link the elusive Ahmed to bin Laden, among them none other than Edgar Ramirez (Carlos the Jackal himself), as well as the expressive Lebanese actor Fares Fares. (I do wish American movies, even well-intentioned ones like <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>, would give foreign actors like Fares more to do besides stare suggestively.) It's in the opening prologue, similar to a scene in Michael Moore's <i>Fahrenheit 9/11</i> in depicting the events of September 11 via audio on a black screen, except Bigelow and Boal focus on one phone call from a victim trapped in the Towers and a 911 responder - both women, which subconsciously prepares us for the female protagonist we are about to encounter.<br />
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Most powerfully, the clarity is there at the end, a stunning thirty-minute recreation of the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. I'd be lying if I didn't admit looking forward to this sequence, to obtain some kind of visual "closure" in something we've all only heard or read about (most notably in Nicholas Smidle's <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle">superb</a> August 2011 <i>New Yorker</i> account). Bigelow is uncannily good at casting familiar faces in small yet crucial parts (remember the doomed Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes in <i>The Hurt Locker</i>?), and among the Navy SEALS who led the assault are Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, and other actors capable of simultaneously embodying courage and lack of virtue. It's precisely this multifaceted approach that makes closure anticlimactic, unreachable. The details of the raid are vivid and unfussed-over (like the <a href="http://www.akc.org/breeds/belgian_malinois/index.cfm">Belgian Malinois</a> - similar to a German Shepherd - brought along, Smidle informs us, to sniff out false walls or hidden doors). Yet we miss nothing: a woman is killed; children wail; an extra bullet is put in each body unceremoniously. The killing of Osama bin Laden happens in the corner of the frame and is over in the blink of an eye.<br />
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If I were the type of critic who always feels the need to "balance" a positive review by pointing out a few flaws (<i>"That thing in the corner, I don't like that thing"</i>), I would mention that Boal's script includes a few cliches that clang (Maya telling off her superiors, etc.), and that Bigelow's staging of a long set-piece involving Jennifer Ehle could use a tad more imagination for leading to such a predictable outcome (ditto Alexandre Desplat's ominous "Middle Eastern" music). Boal is an odd talent, fumbling between occasionally overcooked zingers with lines of terrific precision and insight. (When told that Maya is smart, James Gandolfini's CIA Director deadpans, "We're <i>all</i> smart.") Yet he sidesteps many of the cliches Ben Affleck wades into in <i>Argo</i>: Maya's singlehood is brought up briefly and dropped quickly, without any couched family-values implications of disapproval.<br />
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Moreover, Boal has brought out the best in Bigelow. Their collaboration on <i>The Hurt Locker</i>, however impressive, has been eclipsed by their achievement here. As Tom Carson <a href="http://prospect.org/article/zero-dark-thirtys-morality-brigade">explicates</a>, "the movie is about the moral, psychological, and even spiritual price we paid" to bring down bin Laden. It's there in the words, and most of all the images; and it's in the latter quality that the movie ultimately departs from David Fincher's aforementioned great film about the Zodiac killer. The main characters in that film see their lives destroyed by the case. With Dan, whom we see startlingly fresh-faced later in <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>, and Maya, shedding tears at her mission's end, we can only imagine the damage that has been done to their souls. Yet a lingering shadow across their eyes - as well as the victorious SEALs, on the helicopter ride home, looking silently upon the corpse of the evildoer who so feverishly occupied the American imagination - is clearly, unambiguously there. It isn't hard to see why. In <i>Zodiac,</i> the monster is never found. In <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>, the monster is killed at last. And it's a decrepit old man in a body bag.<br />
Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-26116927641480124552012-12-29T15:26:00.000-05:002012-12-30T22:24:56.605-05:00Best Favorite Films of 2012: A Big Year For Small Gems<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I can't on good conscience do "Best" lists, seeing probably less than 10% of the new releases over the year. I'm very selective of what I go to see and not infrequently disappointed by what I do, so I wonder if having to view the truly bad films would make me go easier on the merely mediocre. Whatever the case, this year I found the heavily hyped "big" movies often underwhelming (two of my favorite filmmakers, Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, whiffed big-time), yet several small gems impressed and delighted. Consider then the following a sample survey of the Year In Film.<br />
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<b>Favorite Film:</b> Friends and family scared me away from seeing <b><i>The Grey </i></b>(they hated it), until I halfheartedly caught up with it near the end of the year on DVD. For a while into the picture it seemed they were right. Even though I admired the craft of the movie (the plane crash is a model of economy), I thought the early wolf attacks, while terrifying and upsetting, were staged for nothing more than cheap thrills. Then somewhere along the way, the film stopped looking like a survivalist docudrama and turned into something more mysterious and substantial. Richard Bellamy on Twitter perceptively cited Jack London ("To Build a Fire" comes vividly to mind), and I also recalled what one critic said about Sam Peckinpah's <i>The Ballad of Cable Hogue </i>(reportedly a far gentler movie): It's<i> </i>a poetic allegory about a dying man coming to terms with his own mortality. I disliked Joe Carnahan's ballyhooed 2002 debut <i>Narc</i> and avoided all of his <i>A-Team</i>, <i>Smokin' Aces</i> Hollywood product since, but now he has my attention: His work in <i>The Grey, </i>anchored by Liam Neeson's stirring performance, has the diamond-hard integrity of Peckinpah at his peak. <br />
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<b>Other Faves</b>: <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/07/into-woods-moonrise-kingdom.html"><i><b>Moonrise Kingdom</b></i></a> turned out to be a fragile classic, more beautiful and delicate than any of Wes Anderson's previous films while miraculously avoiding their pitfalls. Leos Carax's <i><b><a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/11/off-road-all-terrain-holy-motors.html">Holy Motors</a> </b></i>was the year's best movie about movies, a self-reflexive subject that's growing tiresome, but which Carax navigated with thrilling unpredictability. David Cronenberg's <b><i>Cosmopolis</i></b> was a sleek, masterful satire about an unfeeling robot (Robert Pattinson's billionaire limo-rider) who yearns to be a real boy. 2012's most impressive debut goes to Kleber Mendonca Filho's <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/10/town-and-country-neighboring-sounds-and.html"><i><b>Neighboring Sounds</b></i></a>, an Altmanesque survey of economic stratification in urban Brazil; while the nimble action-thriller<i><b> Haywire </b></i>was Steven Soderbergh's most entertaining, unfussiest work in over a decade. Forget the perfunctory plot: the <i>real</i> story was about a pointy-headed nerd-director falling in love with Gina Carano's physical prowess and staging her action scenes with verve and alacrity.<br />
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<b>Also:</b> Mia Hansen-Love's<i><b> Goodbye First Love </b></i>was a touching, observant film about the pain and joy of young romance, and<i><b> </b></i>Terrence Davies' <b><i>The Deep Blue Sea </i></b>the same - yet even better - about a middle-aged affair (with Rachel Weisz winning the year's Kirsten Dunst<i>-</i>in<i>-Melancholia </i>Award for most unexpected great performance). Last and possibly least, Josh Radnor's<i><b> <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/10/town-and-country-neighboring-sounds-and.html">Liberal Arts</a> </b></i>was the wisest and most generous of the year's obligatory naval-gazing American indies. It's also the kind of movie a lot of other people don't like, and has the kind of setting (college campus) and theme (the precipice of middle-age) that together may make a blind spot for me. So be it.<br />
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<b>Favorites of 2011 I saw in 2012:</b> I was very glad to see Asghar Farhadi's superb <i><b><a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/04/away-from-things-of-man-ebertfest-2012.html">A Separation</a> </b></i>at Ebertfest, a docudrama-thriller whose gradual revelation of its central event keeps expanding your understanding of what happened (and of Iranian culture in general) and shifting your loyalties even as it expertly tightens the screws.<i><b> <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/01/le-carre-leone-and-labyrinths-tinker.html">Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy</a> </b></i>was, for me, an immeasurably superior adaptation to the slow-as-molasses BBC miniseries, whittling down its visual syntax to a fine blade.<i><b> </b></i>Finally,<i><b> <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/11/flocked-together-big-year.html">The Big Year</a>, </b></i>David Frankel's uncommonly gentle comedy, makes some keen observations about the loneliness of obsessives and the bonding and competitiveness that derive from shared obsessions (rather topical, I thought). Among numerous lovely touches, Steve Martin's acceptance of facing "the abyss" is his most moving moment ever on screen.<br />
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<b>Favorite Revivals: </b>For the second full year, the Indiana University Cinema was the place to be (if you don't live in New York, Chicago, or L.A.) for revivals of classic films. Things peaked early, with a January screening of <i><b><a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/01/le-carre-leone-and-labyrinths-tinker.html">Once Upon a Time in the West</a>, </b></i>a 35mm presentation introduced by the supervisor of the restoration, retired film preservationist Barry Allen. Other delights were seeing <i><b>The Treasure of the Sierra Madre </b></i>(2K DCP) with my dad, followed by<i><b> Casablanca </b></i>(2K) and<i><b> The Third Man </b></i>(35mm) with both my mom and dad. 2012 also ended on a high note, with a ravishing 2K digital restoration of <i><b>The Leopard</b></i><b>. </b>As the laments over digital grow increasingly tiresome (as do the "See, I told you so!" reports of technical foul-ups at screenings, from folks forgetting all the occasions where film reels have broken or unspooled), the quality of both film and digital at the IU Cinema reinforces that it's the skill and experience of the projectionist that matters most. <br />
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<b>I'm Probably Overrating:</b> <b><i>The Avengers</i></b>. Admittedly, it's a bit messy, with too many superheroes to keep track of, some more interesting (e.g., Mark Ruffalo's Hulk) than others. But it's still a rare comic-book movie that possesses a genuine's artist's worldview, and Joss Whedon's light touch with so much character and incident was a balm following more heavy-handed affairs (see below).<b> </b><br />
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<b>Everyone Else is Overrating (But I Still Liked It):</b> I might have enjoyed Richard Linklater's <i><b>Bernie</b></i> more had I not read so much about the plot in advance. Nevertheless, Jack Black's finely-tuned performance as a kind-hearted self-aggrandizer and murderer (on the heels of his fine work as a completely different character in <i>The Big Year</i>) is a showcase for his unappreciated depth and range.<br />
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<b>It's Not That Bad: <i>John Carter</i></b>. Can a motion picture cost $250 million and still qualify as a "B"-movie? I'm somewhat skeptical, yet Andrew Stanton's old-school sci-fi epic feels lively rather than bloated, silly instead of self-important. That's a compliment.<br />
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And there were disappointments:<br />
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<b>Biggest Load of Hot-Air:</b> <i><b><a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/09/to-those-who-serve-master.html">The Master</a>. </b></i>Paul Thomas Anderson's loud, posturing postwar/Scientology/male-bonding character study huffs and puffs on a whole bevy of topics without saying anything remotely insightful about any of them. It's never a good sign when scenes from the trailer not in the final cut looked more intriguing than what remains onscreen. <br />
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<b>Biggest Load of Hot-Air (Comic-Book Version):</b> <i><b>The Dark Knight Rises</b></i><b>. </b>Christopher Nolan stumblebummed his way through another grim portrait of the Caped Crusader, only this time with greatly diminished returns, trotting out a half-assed allegory of the financial crisis and Occupy Movement (see <i>Cosmopolis </i>for a superior take) so we never forget, as always, that he means Serious Business. It's been a long time since I've seen a movie repeatedly blow one potentially stirring moment after another.<br />
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<b>Most Inexplicable Comparison to Alan J. Pakula: </b><i><b><a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/10/you-oughta-be-in-pictures-argo.html">Argo</a>. </b></i>Ben Affleck's lame Iranian hostage-crisis thriller reduces a fascinating real-life incident to a stockpile of Hollywood cliches. Brilliant!<br />
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<b>Betrayed By Its Own Ending:</b> <b><i>Friends with Kids. </i></b>For the majority of its running-time, Jennifer Westfeldt's anti-romantic comedy challenges cultural assumptions of marital superiority, only to validate them with a deeply phony cop-out climax. <br />
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<b>Good Will vs. Wretched Excess: </b>Peter Jackson's <b><i>The Hobbit</i></b> returns to Middle-Earth without the heart and emotion of the original trilogy. Turning a feather of a story into a sledgehammer, it plays like a padded DVD Extended Edition released theatrically. Quentin Tarantino's <i><b>Django Unchain</b></i><i><b>ed </b></i>starts strong before getting uncharacteristically bogged down in its own unconvincing plot developments (some convoluted nonsense about an offscreen character named Eskimo Joe), rather than following through on the freedom-vs.-power, working-outside-the-system vs. manipulating-from-within friction between Jamie Foxx's bounty hunter Django and Samuel L. Jackson's plantation servant Stephen. It's the kind of glib, shoddy work Tarantino's critics have always accused him of delivering, but hadn't until now.<br />
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<b>A Good Movie with One Unfortunate Distraction: </b>the Dardenne brothers'<b> </b><i><b>The Kid with a Bike </b></i>is a lovely, touching, well-acted film. And the entire drama hinges on a recurring plot device so irritating that more than once I blurted out: "Geez, kid, get a <i>lock</i>!"<br />
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<b>Other Bummers or Near-Misses:</b><i><b> </b></i>Gary "Mr. Literal" Ross's visually incoherent<i><b> The Hunger Games </b></i>is the year's most breathtaking demonstration of directorial ineptitude. Whit Stillman's <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/10/you-oughta-be-in-pictures-argo.html"><b><i>Damsels in Distress</i></b><i><b> </b></i></a>has some witty early moments yet repeats itself and bottoms out by the end. Walter Salles's <i><b>On the Road </b></i>is a well-made adaptation of material that no longer speaks to me. Oliver Stone's silly<i><b> <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/07/coming-in-threes-savages-and-design-for.html">Savages</a> </b></i>makes a lot of noise without going anywhere.<i><b> </b></i>The low-budget indie sci-fi comedy<i><b> Safety Not Guaranteed </b></i>has a few nice offbeat touches and won over some admirers, but for me Mark Duplass's dealbreaker performance is the definition of anti-charisma.<br />
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<b>Have Yet to See: <i>Zero Dark Thirty </i></b>and <b><i>Tabu</i></b>. Both coming soon to Bloomington. And Soderbergh's <b><i>Magic Mike</i></b><i>, </i>which I missed in theaters, is up next in my Netflix queue.<br />
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<b>Can't Bring Myself to See: <i>Les Miserables</i></b>, which many have despised and a few defenders went in ready to love in advance and have told everyone else to shut up and so there. Maybe Tom Hooper will prove me wrong when I finally catch up to it, but I doubt it. I'm more interested in <b><i>Lincoln</i></b>, due to the participation of Daniel Day-Lewis and Tony Kushner, but something keeps holding me back. I may finally give in before the year is up, but right now the thought of Spielberg and speeches is too much to bear. <i><b> </b></i><br />
<b> </b><i><b> </b></i><b> </b><i><b> </b></i>Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-13691947559441979802012-12-16T13:30:00.000-05:002012-12-16T22:17:59.129-05:00More on The Big Year, with notes on the Extended Edition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've become a little obsessed with <i><b>The Big Year</b></i>, the birding comedy I <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/11/flocked-together-big-year.html">reviewed</a> just three weeks ago and have seen a couple more times since. The movie isn't a towering masterwork, but it has the ability to shake the bad thoughts out of your head, a quality some of us could use these days, and which you're not going to get out of something like <i>Au Hasard Balthazar</i>. I'm not a birder - or even, really, much of an obsessive - but whatever granular inaccuracies the movie may have, it seems to get the essence of birding right. Although the film pokes some gentle fun at its subject, it's surprisingly respectful, even reverential on the whole. A cast that features Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson may promise the kind of big yuks (or, given their recent collective track record, unfunny ones) that <i>The Big Year</i> has no intention of delivering, yet David Frankel, who directed, offers something more: a sustained, sublime bliss.<br />
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The Blu-Ray (recently purchased, as a Christmas present for myself) of <i>The Big Year</i> contains both the Theatrical Release and an Extended Edition, and the two offer a vivid comparison of the choices filmmakers make in post-production. The theatrical version runs 100 minutes, the extended 103 - either one still about 40 minutes shorter than the average Judd Apatow joint. The additional three minutes don't provide any more laughs; they're mainly superfluous character development scenes that the movie is better for having cut (e.g., a phone call from Black's ex-wife). Frankel, who did fine directorial work on HBO for a number of years (most famously on <i>Sex and the City</i>, but also two of the best episodes of <i>Band of Brothers</i>: "The Breaking Point" and "Why We Fight"), as well as the brisk, entertaining feature film <i>The Devil Wears Prada, </i>is a modern-day comedy director who obviously understands the value of editing. Fashion and birding aren't exactly topics that lend themselves to the term "fast-paced," yet both <i>The Devil Wears Prada</i> and <i>The Big Year</i> move swiftly, not as wild knockabout farce, but through character beats that cumulatively build narrative momentum. (Frankel's editor on both films is Mark Livolsi, who does a stellar job; yet watching Livolsi's work on Cameron Crowe's plodding <i>We Bought a Zoo</i> or <i>Vanilla Sky</i> suggests that Frankel is the prime mover for how nimbly his own films move.)<br />
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With a plot involving a trio of protagonists, a timeframe that covers 365 days, and a milieu expanding across the country, <i>The Big Year</i> offers some enormous editorial challenges; yet the most significant difference between the extended and theatrical version isn't anything we see but what we <i>hear</i>. The theatrical, which I saw first, features extensive narration from Jack Black, who plays the blue-collar birder Brad Harris, and an early in-and-out voice-cameo from John Cleese, whom Brad cheekily introduces as "this English guy" who briefly and loftily explains what a "big year" means in the world of birding. The theatrical release's narration foregrounds Brad as the main character, yet it also offers some occasionally incongruous phrasing and moments where Brad tells us about his principal competitors, retiring billionaire Stu Preissler (Martin), and big-year record-holder Kenny Bostick (Wilson), even though he couldn't have known what they were up to when he wasn't present.<br />
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The Extended Edition explains these oddities: Brad wasn't the original narrator. It was <i>John Cleese</i>, whom I am calling "John Cleese" because he never appears as a character onscreen. He plays, in fact, an omniscient narrator, whose voiceover in the extended version provides a kind of ironic counterpoint to what we see onscreen. Cleese's supercilious tone appears designed to resemble a ornithologist giving a presentation at an academic conference, the idea seeming to be that we should regard birders as possessing the attributes of a particular "species." I encourage you to see the extended version, but only <i>after</i> viewing the theatrical release, because the former - however clever the original narration may have sounded on the pages of Howard Franklin's script - is instructively disastrous on the screen.<br />
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While the J.C.V.O. levels the playing field between Brad, Stu, and Kenny - viewing each of them equally, objectively - the ironic detachment severs the movie's emotional connection, which Brad, as the most sympathetic character, provides. Consequently, even though Martin and Wilson come across as slightly more secondary in the theatrical release, they make <i>stronger</i> impressions there than in the extended edition. (This is Steve Martin's most committed performance in two decades, and possibly - particularly in his scenes with Black - his warmest ever; and the prickly qualities of Owen Wilson's Bostick, when viewed through Brad's eyes, come across as the temperament of an uncompromising artist devoted to his craft.) Cleese's inflections, while amusing for the "history of the big year" segment, intrude on the genuine passion and affection that <i>The Big Year</i> has for its subject. So while some of Cleese's scientific jargon sounds a little strange coming out of Black's mouth - much of it is rephrased or eliminated, but bits and pieces sometimes slip through - Black gets the emotions right, and that's what counts.<br />
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I don't know if the changes were the decision of the filmmakers or the studio, but they enhance the impact of the movie considerably. Even if nobody saw it. It's easy to denounce a studio's lack of imagination in the release of a movie that's a tad unconventional - a movie about birds that features no scenes where characters are crapped on from on-high is undeniably a tough sell - and I certainly did, but I'll give Fox 2000 Pictures and its financial partners a token of credit for being at least adventurous enough to green-light the picture in the first place. <i>The Big Year</i> didn't give them a hit; but it is a movie that deserves to be seen. It has my favorite line of dialogue from any movie all year. ("Fallout.") And it contains my favorite montage since the one where Anne Hathaway goes to work in an array of outfits in Frankel's <i>Devil Wears Prada</i>. In <i>The Big Year</i>, it comes during the middle portion of the movie on Attu Island (actually the Yukon), a remote hinterland that offers some of the best birding in the world. As the birders collectively set out, the names of the species they find are captioned on the tundra; and Frankel's scoring of this sequence to Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" becomes the most elating use of a major pop hit since U2's "With or Without You" in <i>Tell No One</i>. Like much of <i>The Big Year</i>, the words of the song aren't important to the scene; it's the feeling that's transcendent.<br />
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<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-62996360590470539202012-11-24T16:05:00.000-05:002012-11-24T22:12:54.176-05:00Flocked Together (The Big Year)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You may faintly recall the previews for <i><b>The Big Year </b></i><b>(2011)</b>, the Steve Martin/Jack Black/Owen Wilson birding flick that came out about a year ago - "dumped" is more like it - on American theater screens. With more than a whiff of desperation, the trailers emphasized the comic stylings of the stars and featured a couple of scenes (fake-looking birds mock-attacking a shrieking woman, Martin and Black doing a jig) that made the movie look like a strenuously wacky farce. (It may have included James Brown's "I Feel Good," I can't remember.) Like everyone else I gave <i>The Big Year </i>a wide berth, finally catching it recently as a what-the-hell Netflix pick, and I'm here to report it's a real find. It's a lyrically paced, beautifully shot, meditative comedy about three lonely men who become friends or, at least, respected rivals over a shared obsession. No wonder Hollywood didn't know what to do with it.<br />
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What Hollywood did do right (before the movie's release) was give $40 million to a talented director to shoot a thoughtful script about an unconventional subject with a familiar-faced cast on one gorgeous location after another. (Canada doubles convincingly - sometimes for U.S. locales, sometimes for itself - for many of the trans-American regions.) Directed by David Frankel (<i>The Devil Wears Prada</i>, <i>Hope Springs</i>) and written by Bill Murray's <i>Quick Change</i> co-writer and -director Howard Franklin (adapting the 2004 book by Mark Obmascik), <i>The Big Year</i> chronicles an annual competition among devoted birders to see and identify the most species of birds. The rules are...none. The winner gets...nothing. It's all done on an honor system (photographs are often taken, but unnecessary), with prestige accorded among only the inner circle.<br />
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While duos are a staple of most screenplays, from buddy movies to romantic comedies, I often find more interesting rare films that feature a lead trio. (I know romcoms often feature "romantic triangles" - and, who can forget, <i>Harry Potter</i> - but the deck is usually stacked against one of the characters.) Something about triangulation lends itself unexpectedly well to narratives ranging from <i>L.A. Confidential</i> to <i>The Big Year</i>: we get to see the characters as individuals and in pairs; the scenes stay fresh and varied and inform one another. In <i>The Big Year</i>, Brad Harris (Black) is the underdog birder, a low-level nuclear power-plant employee who pulls together his meager savings for a shot at the world record. Stu Preissler (Martin) is a wealthy entrepreneur whose efforts to retire (and have a "big year") are thwarted by turmoil within the company he founded. Kenny Bostick (Wilson) is the defending record-holder who thrives on competition, to the chagrin of his wife back home. As Brad, Stu, and Bostick (referred to with derisive irritation by his last name, a la "Newman" on <i>Seinfeld</i>) trek from one end of the country to the other - a middle passage on frigid Attu Island is a highlight - we meet their fellow birders (including Rashida Jones, Jim Parsons, Anjelica Huston, Tim Blake Nelson, and TV weatherman Al Roker) amid pauses with their families (Dianne Wiest and Brian Dennehy as Brad's parents, JoBeth Williams and Rosamund Pike as, respectively, Stu's and Bostick's wives).<i> </i><br />
<i><br />The Big Year</i> does a nice job grounding the principals in their disparate worlds. (Dennehy, in particular, puts an expert spin on the so-very-tired disapproving father routine that eluded good actors like Chris Cooper in <i>October Sky</i> and Robert Patrick in <i>Walk the Line</i>.) It's tough to make integrity and decency appealing onscreen - or at least that's what Hollywood tells us, as an excuse to never try it - yet <i>The Big Year</i> is most compelling when it envelopes us in the (mostly) world of birding and the silence and patience it demands and accords. Brad and Stu's friendship is touchingly developed, and brings out Steve Martin's best work in eons. (Martin has always been more of a soloist than a team player, yet he connects with Black, even when the latter a few times oversells the wide-eyed self-pity.) As Bostick, Wilson reminds us of his ability to play unlikeable and yet remain engaging in spite of it. The movie teases us with suggestions that Bostick is a cheater, yet when it's revealed that he plays by the rules, the character becomes more interesting and earns a grudging respect.<br />
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Even tougher to pull off, <i>The Big Year </i>makes the world that the trio share look - for all its obstacles - alluring. The problem with obsessives is they frequently mistake telling you all about themselves for actually sharing <i>why</i> they love what they love, and in convincing you why you should too. (To put it another way, their emotions about a particular subject seem to matter more to them than the subject itself.) <i>The Big Year</i> isn't a great film, but it's precisely the kind of good one that recalls enough of the pleasures of what used to be known as conventional narrative filmmaking to seem almost quaint. (It also continues the curious, time-honored tradition of experts <a href="http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/2011/10/18/birds-birders-and-birding-in-the-big-year-what-we-noticed/">enjoying a movie</a> about their specialty that critics and mainstream audiences ignore -- see also medieval historians on <i>The Thirteenth Warrior</i>.) Frankel and Franklin keep the narcissistic yammering to a minimum. Wisely, instead, they <i>invite</i> us into their movie, teach us the terrain and the lingo ("fallout" is given an amusing connotation), show how different people can forge a common bond (what else besides birding could bring James Wolcott and Jonathan Franzen together?), and give us reason to stay.<br />
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<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-57752076099982934862012-11-11T15:48:00.000-05:002012-11-11T18:54:22.148-05:00Off-Road, All-Terrain (Holy Motors)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here we go again: Leos Carax's <i><b>Holy Motors (2012)</b></i>, like <i>The Artist</i>, <i>Hugo</i>, and <i>Argo</i> over the past year, is<b> </b>a <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/10/16/162781324/holy-motors-an-odd-lovely-love-letter-to-cinema">"love letter to movies." </a>It's about the power of cinema, you see, a dominion the medium's most dogmatic (read: insecure) supporters grow ever more insistent is indomitable and all-encompassing, a claim nearly as tedious and tunnel-visioned as the rash of <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/a-brief-history-of-the-death-of-cinema-100112">preliminary obits</a> they're quick to lash out against. They seem to not consider that some of their most revered auteurs made films that skeptically deconstructed movies (Welles, Altman, De Palma), or the possibility that Carax has crafted an epitaph as well.<br />
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The plot of<i> Holy Motors</i> is already famously indescribable - the closest approximation being it's about a day in the life of a mysterious individual, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), who assumes the identity of various characters (father, beggar, hit-man, dwarf, etc.), as he's driven around Paris in a white stretch-limo. Yet if the story is hard to classify the film's mood-trajectory feels familiar, largely comic for the first half before veering into melancholy and tragedy in the second. Oscar has nine "appointments" throughout the day (I assume he accomplishes all of them, I lost count), and those that draw the biggest laughs and provide the most energy occur in the opening hour: a dwarf kidnaps a model (Eva Mendes) during a fashion shoot; a motion-capture sex scene, with Oscar donning an Andy Serkis-like suit; an enthralling "Entr'acte featuring Oscar leading a group of accordion players around in an Aaron Sorkin-like circle. The tone shifts, however, during a quiet passage where Oscar portrays a father disappointed that he captures his daughter in a lie; then progressively darkens, without really deepening, through a string of scenes where Oscar is "killed," as well as a wistful musical interlude featuring Kylie Minogue.<br />
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While I think Carax's film is too insular and calculatedly bizarre to earn emotional resonance (although Lavant's scenes with Edith Scob, as his devoted chauffeur, come close), it's fair to interpret - via the later passages, the physical weariness of his lead actor, the expressions of longing for a past where the cameras weren't small - that he sees cinema less as a vital, indestructible force than in the throes of a death-grip. Or, perhaps, like Paul Schrader, he sees cinema as not dying but changing - like Oscar, morphing into a different form. (<i>Holy Motors </i>was shot entirely on digital; and, sorry again, film purists, but the 2K DCP version I saw looked gorgeous.) The climax - or, rather, one of them - where Oscar plays papa to a house of chimps, could be seen to symbolize the medium in an evolutionary state.<br />
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What saves <i>Holy Motors</i> for me isn't any semblance of depth but that its best parts embody mischief. The film has an ornery spirit and a sense of a nutty fun, most notably in that dwarf sequence, when Lavant runs through a cemetery where the tombstones feature website URLs, and the director/photographer of the fashion shoot seems to be there for a pointed jab at David Lynch's worldview. "Beauty! Beauty! Beauty! Beauty!" he shouts excitedly while photographing Mendes; then, when he spots Lavant's demented leprechaun: "Weird! Weird! Weird! Weird!" As with all of Lynch's films, critics are showing off their collective imagination by calling Carax's "dreamlike" (described as such in at least 14 of 26 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2076220/criticreviews">reviews</a> linked by Metacritic). But <i>Holy Motors</i> is nothing like a dream. It feels utterly, completely a movie, in all its glories and limitations.<br />
<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-56183357875863194502012-10-28T14:24:00.000-04:002012-10-28T17:00:48.392-04:00You Oughta Be in Pictures (Argo)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The most haunting moment I've ever seen Ben Affleck deliver as an actor comes at the end of<i> Chasing Amy</i>: his back to the camera, having parted ways with Joey Lauren Adams, there's something about his hunched-over, defeated body language in that moment that's surprisingly moving. It has since occurred to me that most of Affleck's best moments in front of the camera have been with women, and his near-deferential air with actresses (and not just J-Lo, who has always demanded deference) has become his best quality behind it.<br />
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With Amy Ryan and Michelle Monaghan in <i>Gone Baby Gone</i>, then Rebecca Hall and Blake Lively in <i>The Town</i>, Affleck is the rare male director attuned to the nuances of his female performers without a hint of sadism or masochism. <i><b>Argo </b></i>doesn't have quite the same level of memorable female characters - it's more of a guy's picture, with Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman and Alan Arkin heading the cast - yet it still offers the best role for Clea Duvall in eons. She plays one of six Americans who in 1979 managed to flee the takeover of the embassy in Tehran and eventually escaped the country. I haven't seen Duvall in a movie since her memorable bit part as the prison witness who offers a key lead near the end of <i>Zodiac</i>, yet as always, she plays her character with total conviction. There's also an impressively tremulous performance from the strawberry-blonde Kerry Bishe as another of the escapees, and a good scene with the poker-faced Sheila Vand as an Iranian servant who may or may not reveal to the authorities that her employer, the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber), is harboring the six. Even with extras, like the terrified woman who is captured at the embassy, Affleck never lingers on the moment with anything resembling the Male Gaze. He attempts to treat everybody with respect.<br />
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I wish I could say the rest of the movie was as refreshing. Looking back at <a href="http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2010/09/feeling-heat-town.html">my review</a> of <i>The Town, </i>I see that I praised the film in spite of its being "a compendium of cliches,"so why am I panning <i>Argo</i> for offering more of the same? Maybe it's because a true-to-life story brings out my bullshit detector, makes me less inclined to grade on a curve. Although I am not overly literal with historical facts, and I understand that movies need drama, conflict and tension to hold our interest, there is still a difference between a film that develops these elements plausibly and organically and a film that blatantly tacks them on. The preposterous third-act of <i>Argo </i>begins with CIA operative Tony Mendez (Senor Affleck) having a Dark Night of the Soul, because the weenie bureaucrats back home in the States have pulled the plug on his crackpot plan to whisk the American Six out of Iran under the guise of being a Canadian film crew. Following a long, drunken evening where Mendez tours the city to the stirring tune "Freedom Isn't Free," and an awkward rendition of "Pearl Harbor Sucked, and I Miss You," Gentle Ben in the morning calls his boss (Bryan Cranston) and tells him that by golly they're going for it anyway. On the way to the airport, he explains to the Six that the Tehran Airport will be just like a Ron Howard movie, a hackneyed situation at every turn: no reservations for their flight the first time they're checked, then suddenly they're in the system the second; the obstacles placed in front of Hollywood movie-people John Chambers (Goodman) and Lester Siegel (Arkin) on the way to a ringing telephone; the wimpiest hostage who comes through with a convincing description of the movie to the Revolutionary Guard at the final checkpoint; the stalled clutch on the airport shuttle on the way to the plane; and a climactic chase on the runway so madcap it lacks only the army of monkeys from <i>Crystal Skull</i>.<br />
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That movie buffs are familiar with these cliches only adds to their admiration, however, the more reality-based, practical-minded of them comparing <i>Argo</i> to 1970s thrillers like <i>The Parallax View</i> and <i>Three Days of the Condor</i>. While Affleck is clearly fond of those films, he, unlike Pollack and Pakula, is gun-shy about truly hurting his characters or troubling the audience. <i>Argo</i> is comparably fair-minded about the Middle East to other contemporary movies, blaming the U.S. for its handling of the Shah, yet nests this perspective in a chase narrative so textbook an exec like Griffin Mill would approve. ("Political doesn't scare me. Radical political scares me. Political political scares me.") <i><i>Argo </i></i>co-opts Alan Rudolph's pitch <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0epB5Z6ijpk">at the beginning</a> of <i>The Player</i> down
to a 'T': Affleck has made a movie that is "politely politically radical,
but it's funny...and it has a heart in the right spot. It's a funny
political thing. And it's a thriller too, all at once." <i>Argo </i>also departs from 70s cinema by emphasizing American ineffectualism and self-interest over conspiracy. I do believe that that view is closer to how it all went down; but it's also why I part ways with the comparison. <br />
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Ever since <i>Adaptation</i>, the more extreme cinephiles have eagerly plunged down the rabbit-hole with "meta" readings of movies like <i>Argo</i> that are, even peripherally, about movies. For them, <i>Argo </i>resorts to cliches because Affleck deliberately aims to turn an important historical event into a B-thriller - a more charitable way of saying that he made the movie "bad on purpose." (The question that's always left dangling: Wouldn't that intent be a tad <i>reductive</i>?) Spike Jonze, of course, did make the third act of <i>Adaptation</i> intentionally terrible; pumping up the melodrama was Charlie Kaufman's way out of his own dilemma (the real Kaufman's and Cage's version) of adapting an "unfilmmable" book. We're talking about Iran here, not orchids, of course; so what's Affleck's excuse? Probably the fact that the real escape somehow made it through the airport without incident. I get that an easy flight home wouldn't be too compelling onscreen. But Affleck strikes me as far too earnest a klutz to be fully conscious of his own effects, much less that he's presenting them as any kind of wily ironic commentary.<br />
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Although I enjoyed <i>Hugo</i> and <i>Inglourious Basterds</i>, I would like to humbly suggest a lengthy moratorium on movies that are "Love Letters to Movies," or ringing endorsements of "The Power of Cinema." Both qualities have been somewhat mystifyingly attributed to <i>Argo</i> because, I guess, it weaves a bad <i>Star Wars</i> ripoff into its plot - nostalgic satire being rather toothless, yet still wish-fulfillment for fans of Affleck's buddy Kevin Smith who appreciate that Affleck, unlike Smith, can operate a camera. Yet because it has come to our attention - <i>ad nauseum </i>on Twitter and elsewhere - that the term "overrated" offends the <a href="http://www.uproxx.com/tv/2012/08/only-a-terrific-giant-sized-douche-snozzle-would-call-breaking-bad-the-most-overrated-show-on-television/">delicate sensibilities</a> of the Word Police, I will instead offer <i>Argo</i> the backhanded compliment that in its own boneheaded way I think it's kind of brilliant. Mainstream audiences don't give a damn about love letters to movies; they understandably want the hearts and flowers delivered solely to themselves. <i>Argo</i> provides this and more to casual moviegoers. It conjures a memory in a way that is relevant to the present, yet with a greeting-card-like sentiment that goes down easy for liberals and conservatives alike. It's a movie that knows how to push our buttons. I'm not a fan of the practice, but I have to half-respect a filmmaker who is aware that they're there, waiting to be pushed.<br />
Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-1615854457330801392012-10-20T15:51:00.002-04:002012-10-20T15:55:00.435-04:00Town and Country (Neighboring Sounds and Liberal Arts)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Kleber Mendonca Filho, the director of<i><b> Neighboring Sounds</b></i> (2012), is intensely quiet in person, with a manner that suggests he isn't sizing you up so much as taking you in, like a refracting telescope. I met him a few weeks ago on a research visit where I work, which I mention not to name-drop (because we all know of no critics who do that), but to convey how the pleasures of his debut film capture the essence of the filmmaker behind it. <i>Neighboring Sounds</i> covers a few days in a neighborhood of Recife, Brazil, and it's the kind of ensemble picture that shines light on a particular character or group of characters before focusing on the next. A respectable businessman named Joao (Gustavo Jahn) negotiates with his thief cousin Dinho (Yuri Holanda) for a CD-player pinched from the car of his new girlfriend, Sofia (Irma Brown), only to get another stolen player back instead. Both are related to a powerful patriarch (W. J. Solha) whose casual sovereignty over the neighborhood must be entreated by Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos), head of a security team that begins patrolling the area for shady customers. Mendonca Filho is interested in all of these people as well as the hangers-on around them, like the group of tenants at a meeting voting whether or not to can a security guard sleeping on duty. He has a good ear for idle talk and a keen eye for authenticity, as when a housewife down the block (Maeve Jinkings) lies down on the couch, exhausted from a howling dog keeping her up all night, as her children give her a vigorous massage.<br />
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There aren't as many characters in <i>Neighboring Sounds</i> as there are in films like <i>Nashville </i>or <i>Short Cuts</i>, yet the movie sustains a sophisticated visual and aural technique (plenty of panning zooms, or zooming pans) that envelopes you the way Altman's films often did. It doesn't resonate as much as those movies - or films like Inarritu's <i>Amores Perros </i>and Haneke's <i>Cache, </i>both of which Mendonca Filho also appears to reference - but <i>Neighboring Sounds</i> still offers a fascinating glimpse of a foreign culture filled with a few sparks of recognition.<br />
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<i><b>Liberal Arts</b></i> (2012), the deeply likeable new comedy from writer-director-star Josh Radnor, showed me a slice of life I know all too well. (I caught it - as you may - on On Demand.) Jesse Fisher (Radnor) is a 35-year-old admissions officer at a university in New York who returns to his alma mater in rural Ohio to commemorate the retirement of his mentor (played by Richard Jenkins). The Ohio institution is never named but take my word for it that it is Kenyon College, located in Gambier, about an hour into cow country northeast of Columbus. I taught there for a couple of summers and recognized every square inch (all twenty-seven of them) of that tiny, beguiling campus; (I also have reason to suspect that the Jenkins character is based on a recently retired former colleague, but I need to confirm that.) Radnor knows it even better. He went to school there, and both his his camera and his script are lovingly attenuated to the details of campus life: the way you can feel lonely at a party yet comfortable by yourself at a bookstore or neighborhood bar.<br />
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Jesse strikes up a friendship - and, later, when he returns to New York, an epistolary correspondence - with Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), a 19-year-old theater major whose name suggests the kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl that the character, as written and played, thankfully belies. She's a real person, not a fantasy; and Radnor navigates all the traps deftly, aware of the obstacles in such a relationship but also not automatically nullifying the possibility of its working. <i>Liberal Arts</i> could have been a <i>Doc Hollywood</i> kind of comedy, where the protagonist finds happiness in a utopia far away from the big city. But if New York bewilders Jesse at times, he sees beauty and potential there too.Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-85099073323846003492012-10-06T17:38:00.001-04:002012-10-09T15:07:06.023-04:00Best of Both Worlds (Paris, Texas)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i>Paris, Texas</i></b>: It took me an embarrassingly long time to catch the double-meaning of the title. An actual town in an actual state, certainly - somewhere that means something to the vagabond main character throughout all his wanderings. But the comma can also be read as <i>Paris AND</i> <i>Texas, </i>specifically the international/psychological space that the movie inhabits. Palme d'Or winner of the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, the film is a resplendent journey through the American southwest. Written by a buckaroo yet directed by a Teuton, <i>Paris, Texas</i> depicts this country, at a simultaneously particular yet universal time and place, with an insider's voice and an outsider's view. <br />
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In his (mixed) review of <i>Taxi Driver</i>, Jonathan Rosenbaum called that landmark work the product of "four auteurs": director Martin Scorsese; screenwriter Paul Schrader; actor Robert De Niro; and composer Bernard Herrmann. If they don't register quite the same sex appeal, a distinctive quartet of talent and personality comes together nevertheless similarly in <i>Paris, Texas</i>. Director Wim Wenders earned his "German New Wave" credentials via films like <i>Kings of the Road</i> (1976) and <i>The American Friend</i> (1977), the latter a crossover thriller starring Dennis Hopper and adapted from Tom Ripley novelist Patricia Highsmith. (Wenders peaked in the 1980s with <i>Paris, Texas</i> and <i>Wings of Desire</i> [1987], then appeared to lose his creative mojo before semi-reinventing himself as a Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker with 1999's <i>Buena Vista Social Club</i> and last year's <i>Pina</i>.) Writer Sam Shepard was, at the time, best known for screen performances such as the ostensibly ill yet incongruously virile farmer in <i>Days of Heaven</i> and especially cowboy-pilot Chuck Yeager in <i>The Right Stuff</i>; on the New York stage, he earned acclaim as the playwright of <i>Buried Child</i> (1978), <i>True West</i> (1980), and <i>Fool for Love </i>(1983).<br />
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Actor Harry Dean Stanton, possessing "one of those faces" audiences recognized without knowing, had established an active career in movies and TV shows that were as varied (B-movies and Oscar-winners) as the characters were not: like Dennis Hopper, he specialized in nefarious types, before Shepard and Wenders offered him the role of Travis in <i>Paris, Texas, </i>"a name that still had sinister resonance" eight years after <i>Taxi Driver</i>'<i>s </i>Bickle (as reminded by Nick Roddick in his <a href="http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1359-paris-texas-on-the-road-again">wonderful Criterion essay</a>), but a character that this time proved a showcase for Stanton's range. (That same year, of course, Stanton played what remains his most indelible scumbag, car-repossessor Bud in Alex Cox's <i>Repo Man</i>). Composer Ry Cooder was a virtuoso slide guitarist already with one memorable score to his name (Walter Hill's <i>The Long Riders</i>) before contributing to <i>Paris, Texas</i> an equally evocative sound. (As a screen presence, in Wenders' <i>Buena Vista Social Club</i>, Cooder comes across as an irksome narcissist; as a contributor of music, he is sublime.) Add a notable trio from behind the scenes - assistant director Claire Denis, production assistant Alison Anders, and "adapter"/script-refiner L.M. Kit Carson - and it's even easier to see why <i>Paris, Texas</i> is a remarkable achievement, each scene like lightning in a bottle that keeps on striking.<br />
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The movie begins with a potentially groan-inducing element - a man (Stanton's Travis) who can't or won't talk, and can't or won't remember who he is or what has happened to him - and keeps walking the tightrope of pretension without stumbling all the way to the end. The sad fact that much of Wenders' body of work since the 80s conveys a degree of ostentatious irrelevance suggests that in <i>Paris, Texas </i>he was in full command of his craft or else his craft found the perfect balance with the naturalism of his collaborators. Filtered through what is, in my opinion, some of the most amazing cinematography ever to reach the screen (by Robby Muller, favorite DP of filmmakers as diverse as Jim Jarmusch and Lars Von Trier, as well as the man behind the camera for <i>Repo Man</i>), the movie's opening aerial shot of the Mojave Desert, followed by tight close-up of a face as ragged and haunted as the mountains looming behind it, paints the kind of portrait of America a European connoisseur of Americana like Milos Forman could paint if Forman had anything approaching Wenders' ecstatic eye. (With amusing accuracy, Charles Taylor once described the <i>Larry Flynt</i> director's movies as looking like dirty dishwater.)<br />
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<i>Paris, Texas</i> also leavens its narrative with subtle humor: after Travis faints with a mouth full of ice in a nearly barren cantina, a mercenary physician (German actor-director Bernhard Wicki, looking appropriately out-of-place) restores him to health before pawning him off to Travis's younger brother Walt (Dean Stockwell, exuding touching reserves of decency and patience). As Walt drives Travis from south Texas to L.A., the movie, for a while, looks like it's going to be a road-picture along the lines of late-80s films like <i>Rain Man </i>and <i>Midnight Run</i>, even sharing with those films what is, in retrospect, a stereotypical scene where a character freaks out on an airplane. (The version of this scene here, at least, transpires offscreen, as Travis and Walt are allowed off the plane with a tongue-lashing from the stewardess but no reprisals, a reminder of air travel's quainter days.) Travis also insists that he and Walt drive back in the exact same rental-car, a rather unnecessary character trait that never comes up again (and which <i>Rain Man</i> would also seem to crib a few years later in the conception of Raymond Babbitt), except as a plot device to forge the relationship between the brothers. For this, it succeeds beautifully. By the time they hit L.A., the movie has established its unhurried rhythms, and Travis's memory returns.<br />
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In an interview on the Criterion disc, Claire Denis reports that <i>Paris, Texas </i>was shot chronologically, with an unfinished screenplay. I'm unclear if the script's incompleteness occurred before the second act, at Walt's home in Los Angeles, where Travis bonds with his French sister-in-law Anne (Aurore Clement) and the eight-year-old child he abandoned that Walt and Anne have come to raise as their own (Hunter Carson, son of L.M Kit); or the final act, in Houston, where Travis reunites his son with his estranged wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski, rounding out the remarkable Euro-American cast). Regardless, Denis implies that production delays - the result of everything from depleted funds to uncooperative Teamsters - gave Wenders & Co. time to think the story through. In so doing, they avoided the melodramatic trappings of their own worst impulses (e.g., aborting a planned violent climax between Travis and Anne) and attained something different, something true.<br />
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While the L.A. interlude has an array of lovely moments - Travis encountering a hollering homeless man along an interstate (the kind of man he was perilously close to becoming), Travis donning his brother's fancy suit to impress his son after school (an understated display of physical comedy for Stanton) - it is in Houston where the film flirts with cringeworthiness only to reach transcendence. Travis and Hunter track down Jane at a peep-show-for-the-soul, where she and other women act out scenarios for lonely men behind a one-way mirror. Has there ever been a more unexpected great performance in all of cinema than Kinski's? (Is that hyperbole? So be it.) Previously window dressing for a Roman Polanski period piece (<i>Tess</i>), with a more recent string of fiascos to her credit (<i>The Moon in the Gutter</i> and <i>The Hotel New Hampshire, </i>ill-advised remakes of <i>Cat People</i> and<i> Unfaithfully Yours</i>), Kinski, sporting a convincingly unfussy southern accent, shares two crucial scenes with Stanton in the concluding section of <i>Paris, Texas</i>. During the first, which at the time seems fairly long (five minutes or so), Travis, speaking to Jane via telephone, establishes a tenuous connection with her behind the mirror. ("I don't mind listening, I do it all the time," Kinski tells him touchingly, looking straight into the camera, a visual motif straight out of the Jonathan Demme/Tak Fujimoto playbook.) But it's in their second scene, an astonishing twenty-minute sequence, where Travis lays his cards on the table. Stanton monologues, Kinski monologues, in between they dialogue, and the authenticity of the emotions overcome what could have been stagey schematics in lesser hands.<br />
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As <i>Paris, Texas</i> comes to its extraordinary close (and I defy you to name a more unsentimental movie that earns so many tears), the palette for the film undergoes a change. In south Texas and L.A., Travis is associated primarily with the color green; in Houston, Jane drives a red sports car, nearly always wears red. In the last act, Travis and Hunter wear red as well. Then, in the final scene, Jane and her son reunite, each wearing vernal colors; while Travis drives away, the darkened highway tinted crimson. Visually this could mean anything or nothing - had things ended bloody, as originally planned, the symbolism would have been obvious. As it stands, I like to think that the switch of colors are meant to show the lingering effect that the characters, separated once more, now have on each other. A mother and child are back together. A man comes out of the desert only to return to the unknown, yet thirsts no more.<br />
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Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-57660432264499052182012-09-29T14:03:00.000-04:002012-10-02T20:22:31.976-04:00To Those Who Serve (The Master)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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At the end of <b><i>The Master</i></b>, I felt something like Ralphie in <i>A Christmas Story</i> when he discovers that the secret message unscrambled by his decoder ring contains a mundane if shameless plug: "Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine." Clearly my own code-cracker is on the fritz. Countless others, even those unsure if they liked Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterwork, have taken on the diligence of Biblical scholars analyzing the Dead Sea Scrolls, uncovering an endless array of beguiling themes, hidden subtexts, and deep meanings. Many have seen the movie more than once, scrutinizing each frame far more seriously than Ralphie took his own comparably simple task. (What <i>kind</i> of Ovaltine? he failed to consider. Why the word <i>"Sure"</i> instead of "Certain?" <i>How</i> should it be drunk? With a spoon? Table or tea? In a cup? Paper or glass?) We will never know the true agenda of <i>A Christmas Story</i>. Conversely, I think too much is being made of <i>The Master</i>, a movie that is complicated, yes, without being particularly interesting or illuminating. I don't think it's a case of a filmmaker employing flash to conceal the emptiness of his story. It's the work of one unnecessarily getting in the way of a story that could -- and should -- be more involving than it is.<br />
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For me, at least, Anderson has toed this line before without quite stumbling over it. <i>Boogie Nights</i>, <i>Magnolia</i>, <i>Punch-Drunk Love</i>, and <i>There Will Be Blood</i> all won my admiration after trying my patience. (The general mainstream audience reaction has been less favorable: I felt palpable hostility and witnessed walkouts in the theater at all four of those films, especially irate Sandler fans on opening-day for <i>Punch-Drunk</i>.) Anderson likes the kind of Big Acting that features a lotta hootin' and hollerin', and his directorial style - hyped-up even when it's pared down - accentuates the histrionics of the performances and vice-versa. "(T)he courting of danger is what makes his films so exciting," Kent Jones has <a href="http://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-master-paul-thomas-anderson-review">noted</a>, and he's right. <i>The Master</i> shows the director as fearless as ever, and every inch as bizarre. Fleeing a pack of angry migrant workers, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) runs with the same loose-limbed huffing and puffing as Barry Egan in <i>Punch-Drunk Love</i>. Later, Freddie is awakened in a movie theater by an usher with a telephone: it's a call from Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) urging Freddie to come to England, saying he can't wait to see him; in the very next scene, Freddie travels across the pond to see Dodd, who greets him with, in essence, "What are you doing here? I don't want to see you." Then Dodd serenades Freddie with a stirring rendition of "Slow Boat to China," because that's how they in England say goodbye. (To paraphrase Indiana Jones, I preferred the Austrian version.) At this point in his career it is glaringly apparent that Paul Thomas Anderson is an immensely talented filmmaker. He also is one strange fucker.<br />
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<i>The Master</i>, however, is the first time I've found his talent and his strangeness at cross-purposes. The aforementioned phone call scene, for example, could very well be a dream, or the subsequent scene in England could be one, or both. Somewhere a team of specialists is hard at work on the answer. But in this instance and plenty of others in the movie, I'm not convinced it matters. A <i>Mulholland Dr.-</i>type dream logic works for <i>Mulholland Dr.</i>, and it might have worked for a film about a religious cult that genuinely wanted to examine the effects of cultism. Anderson showed empathy toward John C. Reilly's gently devout police officer in <i>Magnolia</i> but he's been overtly cynical about spirituality ever since, first with Paul Dano's jackleg preacher in <i>There Will Be Blood</i> and now Hoffman's more polished, imposing Lancaster Dodd. Plainview towered over Eli in the previous film - their conflict, although compelling, was never a fair fight - but Dodd and Freddie tangle on a more level playing field. Or at least they should be, except that the characters, even within the same scenes, don't seem to be in the same movie. Hoffman and Phoenix certainly aren't acting in the same one.<br />
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But then Joaquin Phoenix has never worked for me, other than as Johnny Cash, where he had to walk the line (heh) and couldn't veer too far astray in the portrait of an American icon. I've often griped that actors receive too much praise when they play famous people, that it's harder to create an original character out of thin air (even if you base that character to an extent on an actual person, e.g., Daniel Day-Lewis channeling John Huston in <i>There Will Be Blood</i>). Why then can I not stand Phoenix's performance in <i>The Master?</i> As with Nicolas Cage nowadays, I'm admittedly predisposed to disliking him going into a movie, a still photo from a film enough to make me itch.<br />
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Yet I'd hoped that Anderson, like Robert Altman, could transform a familiar face, coax him into showing us something new. (Even when his actors go overboard, there are usually quieter moments - Reilly kissing Melora Waters in <i>Magnolia</i>, the orphaned baby tugging at Plainview's mustache in <i>There Will Be Blood</i> - to offset the melodrama.) As Freddie, Phoenix certainly shows us something <i>more</i>, every physical tic registering like a high-richter 'Frisco quake. Even non-fans of the movie have been wowed by this more-ness, enough to make me wonder: <i>Why</i>? More precisely, what is it about this performance that believably conveys an emotionally scarred war veteran who falls in with a fringe religion? After an initial, informal "processing" session that leaves a blissful smile on his face (one of the movie's best scenes), Freddie exhibits only a jaded attitude toward Dodd's faith. That he's also quick to pounce on anybody else who professes their own skepticism is the kind of contradiction that happens in real life all the time, and would have been fascinating for the movie to explore. Anderson, though, is content to leave it unanswered. Pure hypocrisy may be a satisfying interpretation for some, but I think it's a missed opportunity.<br />
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Even with Dodd - a more realized character, played by a better actor - there is either an inability or a lack of curiosity to go deeper into the character's core beliefs. A key scene where a guest questions Dodd's flim-flammery (and is subsequently beaten to a pulp by Freddie) devolves into an Actorly Moment where Hoffman sweats and hollers and calls the poor guy a pig fuck. Another scene features a follower calling Dodd's new book terrible (he too gets pummeled for his sins). Why then, other than intimidation, and an appealing openness to laughter (as long as it's not directed at him), do people follow this man? Unlike Robert Duvall's <i>The Apostle</i>, Anderson misses the point of authentic religious extremism, which is not that leaders and followers are hypocritical about their faith but that they're <i>not</i>. The myriad contradictions of their belief system - peace and violence, love and hate - all derive from the same place. It's well within Anderson's right to offer his own interpretation, but I think it's at the expense of his own narrative. As Pauline Kael once opined, real fanatics are much scarier.<br />
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It's entirely possible that I'm focusing on the wrong things. "With a movie," a dogmatic auteurist tweeted several months ago, "you could talk about the plot, or the characters, or whether the performances are believable or not. Or you can talk about The Film." Until then I never realized that you could approach a film without noticing anything that's actually in it - a viewpoint, as others have observed, with mysto-spiritual undertones. Only up to a point, however. As opposed to claims for Xenu, we have independent evidence that there exist entities called movie directors, and that one of them is Paul Thomas Anderson. Whether or not <i>The Master </i>is a great film invites a more qualitative response, but I'm skeptical of a line of argument that the movie is not aimless but rather, in sum, "<i>about</i> aimlessness." I used to find this sort of reasoning seductive myself (e.g., <i>There Will Be Blood</i> unravels in its final third to parallel the unraveling of its main character), but lately I'm finding it too easy, too convenient to say that a movie is reflecting its substance deliberately through its style. So I'm afraid a heretic is in your midst. I need more proof. I don't have enough faith.<br />
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<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-37368511488968266402012-08-12T16:49:00.000-04:002012-08-12T16:49:08.781-04:00The Blogger Who Came in from the Cold<div style="text-align: center;">
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My first piece in a few years for <i>The House Next Door</i>, the official blog of <i>Slant</i>, is up: <a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2012/08/if-i-had-a-sight-sound-film-ballot-craig-simpsons-top-10-films-of-all-time/">my all-time ten-best movies list</a>. To coincide with the release of <i>Sight and Sound</i>'s every-ten-year poll -- <i>Vertigo</i>, you may have heard, finally toppled <i>Citizen Kane</i> -- the editors at <i>Slant</i> asked their writers (those not asked to submit an <i>S&S</i> ballot) to contribute their own top-10s. Compiling my own list was agonizing and fun, and I could submit a new top-10 today with seven or eight different titles.<br />
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In particular, I'm already regretting not including <i>Local Hero</i>.<br />
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<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-87806762907945879902012-07-14T14:35:00.001-04:002012-07-14T21:22:57.642-04:00Coming in Threes (Savages and Design for Living)<br />
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The funniest moment at last week's screening of <b><i>Savages </i></b>came during the preview for the absurd-looking thriller <i>Alex Cross</i>, when Tyler Perry's wife asks sincerely, "Why would you want to leave Detroit?", and my friend's wife let out a belly-laugh that reverberated in the theater. Still, I disagree with the rap on Oliver Stone that he has no sense of humor: I chuckled all throughout his new movie; it's just often unclear what it is that he means to be funny. Are we supposed to snicker at Blake Lively's voiceover during the intro sex scene, where her character, "O," says of Taylor Kitsch's study war vet Chon, "I had orgasms; he had wargasms"? (James Wolcott tweeted: "That line was better when Norman Mailer said it.") Or that the characters are named O (short for Ophelia) and Chon? (I know, it's out of the book.) I'm pretty sure Benicio del Toro's pompadour is meant for laughs. It's the kind of eccentric touch that the actor is famous for, as is a scene with John Travolta's corrupt DEA agent, where del Toro, playing a drug-cartel henchman, removes the tomatoes from Travolta's sandwich before taking a bite out of it, adding a humorous edge to a murderous character.<br />
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A lot of <i>Savages </i>plays like Stone finally discovered <i>Breaking Bad</i> but started shooting before the seminal fourth season, where the thrillingly dense narrative of Vince Gilligan's series had far more impact and nuance than Stone and novelist/co-writer Don Winslow's take on Caucasian wannabe drug lords taking on the Hispanic real deals. The third member of Chon and O's trinity, the Buddhist do-gooder Ben (Aaron Johnson), experiences the movie's harshest tests - on the naive worldview that he and his friends can profit from their product without consequences. An even sharper counterpoint to this than del Toro's Lado is the latter's boss, Elena (Salma Hayek), a rare instance of a woman running the drug trade. The misogyny rap on Stone lost its validity years ago, and Elena is another example of a strong Stone (anti-)heroine: Hayek's mercurial shifts between professional ruthlessness and personal emotion, particularly after her maternal feelings stirred by O, whom she kidnaps and holds hostage, is her finest acting since <i>Frida</i>.<br />
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The complex yet knuckleheaded plot - threats, double-crosses, bullets to the head, torture, explosions, the usual - would render <i>Savages </i>utterly forgettable were it not for Stone's playfulness. His style, which turned deliberately deadpan in the underrated black comedy <i>W.</i>, is back in revved-up, overheated mode; yet the cinematography by Daniel Mindel, a veteran of the JJ Abrams/Tony Scott School of Ugly Visuals, features a vibrantly orange palette, never garish, with lens flares used sparingly for effect. Stone's politics are indeed on display again here, but his views on drugs are far more banal than his epicurean/bisexual side - which, as in <i>Alexander</i>, critics seem eager to ignore (or, at most, make quips about and move quickly on). Chon, Ben, and O are depicted as a loving, trusting threesome that astonishingly doesn't break down by the end. Stone isn't out to teach his young characters (and the audience) a lesson; he's with them completely, invested in their fates. "They must love each other," Elena tells O about her friends, "or else how could they share you?" It's the movie's most insightful moment, suggestive of the real revolution if it ever comes.<br />
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The cleverest quip about <i>Savages </i>came from somebody who tweeted, in effect, "Finally, Oliver Stone's remake of <b><i>Design of Living</i></b>." I laughed knowingly at this zinger, then promptly tracked down the Ernst Lubitsch film to know what I was laughing about. The movie was both what I expected and much more - a 1933 comedy so light and frothy it doesn't really sink in until afterward just how radical it is. Released the year before the Production Code started cracking down, <i>Design</i> stars the usually solemn Gary Cooper and Fredric March as a pair of American expatriates in Paris who fall for fellow yankee Miriam Hopkins, who finds herself equally in love with the two studs and decides to keep them both. Agreeing to keep things platonic, George (Cooper) and Tom (March) invite Gilda (Hopkins) to live with them in their low-rent bohemian studio, where she functions as a kind of counterintuitive muse to George's painting and Tom's playwriting. ("<i>Rotten!</i>" is her standard opinion.) Initial professional struggles lead to eventual success, but not before the three-way "gentleman's agreement" is put to the test.</div>
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With all due respect to Nora Ephron, the recipient of glowing epitaphs in the wake of her recent passing, a fundamental truth needs acknowledging: Her movies stink. Ephron's biggest successes, like <i>Sleepless in Seattle </i>and <i>You've Got Mail </i>(a remake of Lubitsch's <i>The Shop Around the Corner</i>) have a dismaying toothlessness completely antithetical to the acid wit in her literary essays; and they helped kill the screwball comedy - a genre in which a pair of crazies are stuck with each other because they realize normal life isn't for them - by ushering in the modern romcom - a genre in which a pair of drips get together because, by golly, it's Destiny! In <i>Design for Living</i>, it's a sign of Lubitsch's subversiveness - as well as screenwriter Ben Hecht's and original playwright Noel Coward's - that "normalcy" comes in the ludicrous shape of Max Plunkett (the marvelous Edward Everett Horton), Gilda's affluent, asexual boss with designs on marrying her. Making Ralph Bellamy's characters from the same era look virile, Plunkett isn't portrayed as a villain; he just represents the kind of life that Gilda can't fit into, no matter how hard she tries (even her name is pronounced differently from what you'd expect, with a "J" sound instead of a hard "G").<br />
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Everything about <i>Design for Living </i>is delightfully funny, from Hopkins' terrific performance (worthy of the best of Stanwyck, Hepburn, Dunne, and Lombard) to Cooper's charming awkwardness at playing light comedy. Yet Lubitsch finds room to slip in some truth and poignancy, sometimes on the fly, as when the impoverished George tells Plunkett, "I survive on miracles." It feels miraculous indeed that Lubitsch and Hecht's adaptation ever reached the screen and looks eighty years later more daring and groundbreaking than ever, compared to our bland, stunted Ephronic notions of what love can be.<br />
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Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-27389951125657974682012-07-01T14:10:00.001-04:002012-07-01T17:04:01.305-04:00Into the Woods (Moonrise Kingdom)<div style="text-align: center;">
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Wes Anderson's 1965-set <i><b>Moonrise Kingdom</b></i> may seem like the director's quaint head-in-the-sand approach to a tumultuous historical period, yet all the elements of the era are there. The prepubescent sweethearts who run away together - Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) - from the New England isle they call home into Thoreauvian Nature are like characters out of a melancholy Hal Ashby comedy - outcasts and troublemakers poised to enter the counterculture. The generation gap is touchingly evoked by Suzy's parents, Walt and Laura Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), well-meaning yet troubled and plainly at a loss with how to deal with a child less equipped to deal with troubles of her own. (The depiction of Sam's foster parents is much harsher.) Authority comes in a few shadings: a decent if slightly ineffectual policeman, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis); the reactionary social services representative, who helpfully goes by the name Social Services (Tilda Swinton); and the regimented ethos of the Khaki Scouts, as Sam flees the troop headed by the kindly Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton) only to eventually stumble upon a much larger camp, run by the hard-nosed Commander Pierce (Harvey Kietel), that's like a middle-school spin on the Paris Island base in <i>Full Metal Jacket</i>.<br />
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All of this could be interpreted as allegorical, certainly, but I don't want to give the impression that that's Anderson's only objective, or even his primary one. <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> creates a world too rich to be just that; it's the filmmaker's most fully realized universe since his parallel New York in <i>The Royal Tenenbaums. </i>On the commentary track for that movie, during the early scene where Pagoda tells Royal about his estranged wife's new suitor, Anderson said that he deliberately positioned Kumar Pallana so that he blocked the Statue of Liberty in the distance, wanting to avoid any recognizable landmarks in his version of the city (which for some reason pissed off Gene Hackman, when the actor realized what he was doing). The New England of <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> is completely fictional (though hilariously detailed by Bob Balaban's exposition-loaded Narrator) the actual turmoil of the decade far away, yet it's his most emotionally connective movie since <i>Tenenbaums</i>, the last film Anderson wrote with his original screenwriting partner Owen Wilson (who has, of course, continued to act in most of his movies since). After Wilson came collaborations with Noah Baumbach, whose own films I've admired yet who seemed to bring out in Anderson an airless, inert quality and sourness of spirit in <i>The Life Aquatic </i>and parts of <i>The Darjeeling Limited</i>. If Baumbach and Anderson appeared a bad match, Roman Coppola, who co-wrote <i>Moonrise Kingdom </i>(and formed part of the trio for <i>Darjeeling</i>), looks like a better one, leavening the darker themes - or perhaps synthesizing them - with sweetness and humor.<br />
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Auteur that he is, Anderson has received the usual round of stirring defenses from his most fervent admirers, even when it's clear that this time he doesn't need them. The most tedious have taken umbrage with those who don't like the movie "the right way"; others, responding to the criticism that the director needs to do something different, have trotted out the "What did you expect?" argument - specious, among other reasons, for suggesting that for a filmmaker, predictability is a virtue. While it's true that all the recurring methods and obsessions are all in place - deadpan dialogue, startling bursts of violence amid comic-strip paneling, the importance of bric-a-brac, the dichotomy of childhood dreams with adult disappointment - I think that Anderson is using them differently than he has before. (I almost wrote "testing them," but that would imply a strain that's nowhere evident in this seemingly effortless movie.) His films have treated kids and grown-ups with equal respect, all part of the same cultural framework. Here, more than any of his previous works, the spheres of each are blended together - sometimes comically (the sight of Keitel in khaki shorts), sometimes movingly (a bedside heart-to-heart between McDormand and Murray), always in perfect harmony.<br />
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So buoyant and delicate is <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> that watching it reminded me of Michael Sragow's <a href="http://www.salon.com/2000/02/24/kloves/">description</a> of <i>Wonder Boys</i>: "(I)n its free spirit and avalanche of blending tones, it feels more organic than virtuosic... The oddball precision of the moviemaking makes you feel as if you're laughing in a dream - and you don't want to wake up." By now "dreamlike" has been applied to so many movies that the word has lost nearly all meaning. Yet Robert Yeoman's misty, soft-focused, green-brown palette - easily the finest work of his career - recalled for me another film: of all things, that "beautiful pipe dream," Robert Altman's western <i>McCabe & Mrs. Miller</i>. "I try to clutch the images to me even as they seem to evaporate like smoke," Charles Taylor <a href="http://www.salon.com/1997/03/21/taylor970321/">said</a> of <i>McCabe. </i><i>Moonrise Kingdom </i>had the same effect - conjuring experiences I've never had, memories I never knew I wanted or needed.<br />
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<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-16648638302537412152012-05-28T14:58:00.000-04:002012-05-28T23:06:43.387-04:00Further Investigation: Kurosawa, Hitchcock, and High and Low<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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From the Dept. of Coincidences: About two weeks ago I had just exchanged correspondence with a friend about my favorite Akira Kurosawa film, the staggering <b><i>High and Low</i> </b>(1963), when along came Peter Labuza's "Dial K for Kurosawa," a <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-essay-dial-k-for-kurosawa">video essay</a> on the very movie at Press Play. Labuza posits that the legendary Japanese filmmaker's approach to the subject - which may be loosely described as a kidnapping thriller - is similar in style to the director of <i>Vertigo</i>, <i>North by Northwest, </i>and <i>Rear Window</i>. The video segment of Labuza's piece deftly emphasizes visual echoes between <i>High and Low</i> and Hitchcock's body of work while the written portion expands on these notions: "Like Hitchcock, Kurosawa explores the roles of duality, ubiquitous guilt, and the incapacity to understand evil in a frightening and ultimately despairing fashion." At another point Labuza adds, "Kurosawa never mentioned the influence of Hitchcock in any of his
interviews, but I can’t imagine watching this modern day crime story and
not think of the master of suspense."<br />
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That I've seen <i>High and Low </i>five or six times without thinking of Hitchcock once may simply be a failure of my own imagination. But I want to be clear that I find "Dial K for Kurosawa" a lively, thoughtful work of criticism: free of insecure haughtiness or aggressive irrelevance, Labuza refreshingly puts his topic at the center (instead of himself) and considers every angle with depth and focus. If I ultimately don't buy the premise, it's still the kind of piece that allows you enough headspace to formulate and challenge your own ideas. For example, the coup de grace of Labuza's essay reveals that Ed McBain, the author of the novel <i>King's Ransom</i>, on which <i>High and Low </i>is based, was the nom de plume of Evan Hunter, who also wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's <i>The Birds</i>. Yet this ending actually reads like a possible starting point for the entire essay - <i>Kurosawa and Hitchcock each adapted a movie from the same author; I wonder what they have in common? </i>- hence the citing of "Doubles" (<i>Strangers on a Train</i>), "Staircases" (<i>Psycho</i>), "MacGuffins" (<i>Notorious</i>), and "Voyeurism" (<i>Rear Window</i>). Entertainingly as these parallels are conveyed, I can't help but wonder if <i>any</i> director (James Mangold, off the top of my head) could be used to draw a comparable analogy. For me, the real question between Hitchcock and Kurosawa has nothing to do with common denominators. It's rather: <i>How do two great filmmakers use similar genre conventions in entirely different ways?</i><br />
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For those who haven't seen it (and, succinctly, for those who have), <i>High and Low</i> stars Toshiro Mifune as Kingo Gondo, a high-ranking shoe company executive whose corporate takeover scheme is thwarted from an unlikely source - the abduction of his chauffeur's son. That Gondo's progeny was the intended target doesn't faze the as yet unseen kidnapper, who shakes down Gondo for a couple million anyway. Following a bullet-train rendezvous where child and money are exchanged - albeit not in the manner you would expect - the film turns from Gondo to the team of investigators assigned to the case and to the criminal himself, a disgruntled medical intern named Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki). Although there are strong suggestions of duality between Gondo and Takeuchi, particularly a striking image in the final scene (highlighted by Labuza) where their reflections are layered atop each other's faces, the link isn't nearly as explicit as the one between Guy and Bruno in <i>Strangers on a Train</i> (or, for that matter, between cop and crook in Kurosawa's <i>Stray Dog</i>). Stephen Prince, in his patently superb DVD commentary, believes that Kurosawa isn't equivocating Gondo's "crimes" with Takeuchi's, but rather illustrating Dostoevsky's belief (I'm paraphrasing) that the road to goodness lies in recognizing yourself in another person - even when that "other" is separated by prison bars.<br />
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Another of Prince's key observations underlines what strikes me as the film's true dichotomy - the individual vs. the collective. Kurosawa explores this theme via a radical transition in the narrative: the first half of the film focuses on Gondo in his swanky high-rise apartment; the second half follows a teeming ensemble of Yokohama investigators as they cover what feels like every square inch of the city in tracking down the kidnapper. In the apartment, Gondo's strength and stature is gradually undermined by the increasingly untenable position he finds himself in, which Kurosawa illustrates by surrounding him in the frame with as many other characters as possible. (Prince mentions not Hitchcock's <i>Rope</i> but Sidney Lumet's <i>Twelve Angry Men</i> as the primary influence here.) In the city, <i>High and Low</i> leaves Gondo offscreen for long stretches while the police force puts together the disparate pieces of evidence that eventually lead them to Takeuchi. Although the movie features many familiar faces from Kurosawa's body of work (including Tatsuya Nakadai, Isao Kimura, Takeshi Kato, and Takashi Shimura), it's astonishing how their formidable personalities are suppressed into a collectively functioning unit (as opposed to <i>Seven Samurai</i>, where each member of the group retains his distinct individuality). Prince notes that while Kurosawa was no longer the practicing Marxist of his youth, <i>High and Low </i>shows "that he never abandoned (Marxism) entirely."<br />
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It's fun to speculate what Hitchcock would have made of <i>High and Low</i> - microfilm hidden in a pair of high-heeled shoes? - yet any speculations serve to reveal more differences than similarities with Kurosawa. Hitchcock glided over the details of his plots quickly (perhaps because they often had holes in them); Kurosawa lingers on them in <i>High and Low</i>, to where the process of the investigation itself (more than the actual chase, which Hitchcock was inclined to cut to) is what becomes thrilling. Moreover, Hitchcock <i>fetishized</i> the visuals in his movies; Kurosawa - at least in <i>High and Low</i> - does not. Hitchcock's physical landscapes were frequently manifestations of his characters' psychological states. Kurosawa made films that did that too (most obviously <i>Dreams</i>), but what I love about <i>High and Low, </i>for all its style (e.g., the pink smoke that appears suddenly out of the black-and-white imagery),<i> </i>is how strongly tethered it is to the real world. You don't have to hear Stephen Prince point out Kurosawa's concerns with the economic disparity (following the 1950s postwar boom) in Japan, or lax punishments for kidnapping in his country, to see the director's preoccupation with then-contemporary issues. Nor would Hitchcock have likely used something as mundane as <i>air-conditioning</i> (unless it were a A/C unit containing microfilm) to indicate the festering class distinctions between Yokohoma's "Heaven and Hell" - <i>High and Low</i>'s original title in Japan. I'm not suggesting Hitchcock wasn't interested in social issues or class differences, just that he was good at keeping his feelings about such things offscreen and to himself.<br />
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Kurosawa's wide-ranging style, near-cinema-verite one moment, expressionist the next - becoming most surreal in the famous "Dope Alley" sequence (and his intermittent, <i>strategic</i> use of shakycam and lens flares ought to shame proponents of nonstop "Chaos Cinema") - serves as a visual document for early-1960s Japan in ways similar to how <i>Taxi Driver </i>would capture New York City in the mid-1970s. The style of "Movie Brats" of the latter era - Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, et al - today seems almost as quaint as that of Kurosawa and Hitchcock were then. The time where filmmakers made movies about the real world, even while incorporating cinematic homages to their predecessors, seems to have been supplanted by filmmakers who make movies only about other movies. Perhaps as a conditioned response to this, much current film criticism seems uninterested in the relationship between cinema and the everyday - or even other fields of creativity, like painting or theater (at the most the occasional book, preferably comic), the way Farber or Agee or Kael did - and instead tries to forge connections between one filmmaker and another. "Dial K for Kurosawa" is one of the better examples of this - again, let me emphasize, I enjoyed the piece. And it's entirely possible that Kurosawa was influenced by Hitchcock; who wasn't? I just see more fitting subjects for this kind of pure-celluloid comparison than a film as resolutely earthbound as <i>High and Low</i>.<br />
<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3211112229982829419.post-63606563916657091522012-04-29T16:11:00.000-04:002012-05-01T16:38:47.618-04:00'Away From the Things of Man': Ebertfest 2012<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For the second consecutive spring, the <a href="http://www.ebertfest.com/fourteen/schedule.html">Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival </a>wins the Good Timing Award: just as I'm feeling run down by the real world and alienated by the virtual one, along come a few days of moviegoing in the last week of April to replenish my spirits. It's a short three-hour drive from Bloomington, IN to Champaign-Urbana, IL, Ebert's hometown and where both his alma mater and the Virginia Theater reside. Panels on various aspects of filmmaking and film-watching are held in the mornings on the University of Illinois campus, while movies of Roger's choosing are screened at the 1200-seat Virginia during the afternoons and evenings.<br />
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Ebertfest is known for being a casual film festival: if anybody is selling anything (and there are inevitably one or two obnoxious examples), it's usually himself. Last year's Fest, with the "Roger Ebert Presents" TV troupe out in force, felt admittedly somewhat more businesslike than this year's, which was relaxed to my liking. Although on paper the 2012 program seemed slightly underwhelming (I changed my schedule and stayed for three days rather than the full five), I was pleasantly surprised by the movies I saw and met everybody I had hoped to meet.<br />
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The best place to meet people at Ebertfest (excluding the legendary annual "Karaoke Night," which I've yet to attend) are <a href="http://www.ebertfest.com/fourteen/events.html">the panels</a>, which are often given general titles like "The Personal and Political in Film" and "Far-Flung Correspondents: What's New Around the World" with no extra information or who the members of each panel are. (The festival's program and webpage lists <a href="http://www.ebertfest.com/fourteen/guests.html">panelists</a> alphabetically.) The "Far-Flung Correspondents" panel, nimbly moderated by Omer Mozaffar, was an exciting, wide-ranging discussion of the state of film on an international scope. Highlights included Pablo Villaca's description of disruptive moviegoers in Brazil (i.e., an elderly audience member narrating <i>Cast Away</i> for another: "Look, Na-Na, he's making friends with the volleyball") and Scott Jordan Harris explaining a trend in the U.K. to show singalong musicals, and how during a screening of <i>Grease</i> one moviegoer sang along only to the shoo-bop-bop background vocals. ("I'm not sure what it says about this individual that his wildest fantasy was casting himself as the <i>chorus</i> in the movie.") My friend Andy Hunsucker, co-host of the <a href="http://indianapublicmedia.org/arts/place-film-spring-2012-3d-event/">IU Cinema Podcast</a>, interviewed Harris after the panel, and I introduced myself immediately afterwards. In addition to film criticism, Harris has also<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/30/me-emily-collingridge-chronic-fatigue-syndrome"> written powerful and important pieces about ME</a> (myalgic encephalomyelitis), an illness he himself has. I was very glad to meet him and that he was able to attend.<br />
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Following that panel I was also lucky to meet Steven Boone, the great film critic and sociopolitical writer for <i>Capital New York</i>. (His pieces on the homeless in New York are <a href="http://www.capitalnewyork.com/users/steven-boone">essential reading</a>.) I already knew Boone from his provocative columns and comments at <i>The House Next Door </i>(lots of Christopher Nolan-bashing that has endeared himself to the nerd legions), and from a shared anecdote by Jason Bellamy and Sheila O'Malley about <a href="http://coolercinema.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-movie.html">their experience</a> with him at a party hosted by Keith Uhlich last year. Aptly described by Jason as a "Jedi master," Steven in person is quietly formidable, soft-spoken yet highly articulate and eager to connect with others: he puts you in a better mood without seeming to do anything. I also met Jim Emerson for the first time and Odie Henderson for the second. After another panel the next morning, I had a lively discussion with Odie and Steven about the films of John Ford.<br />
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Their panel, "ON DEMAND: Movies without Theaters," moderated by Emerson, was more free-associative in its topics and featured a bit too much David Poland, who talks a good game but kept stepping on other people's lines. The main bone of contention was whether or not the theater-going experience is dead. Poland argued that the "numbers" suggest otherwise, that we're in the infancy of a new phase of moviegoing with the "on demand" experience as another dimension of it, not a replacement. This uncovered a secondary topic: Is the experience of viewing movies in our homes leading to the apparent deterioration of audience behavior in public? Nell Minow (a.k.a. "The Movie Mom") and another panelist whose name escapes me talked excitedly about movie theaters allowing the use of cell phones for calls and texting, a tactic Steven found to be "cute experiments" detouring from the real issue: as I understood it, his contention that moviegoers aren't interested in watching movies because Hollywood is making bad ones. "I refuse to blame the audience," he said, and while I don't completely agree, I do think there's enough of a change in marketing policy since the "Golden Age" of the studios - telling us what we want, rather than asking us - to take his point halfway.<br />
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The average audience member at Ebertfest is considerably older than Hollywood's target demographic, friendly and eager to chat following panels or between screenings. A retired woman named Jean asked me to nudge her if she fell asleep during <i>A Separation </i>(no chance for that, as it happened), and also inquired if I'd ever heard of Steak n' Shake, one of the Fest's sponsors, a central Illinois institution, and the subject of a chapter in Ebert's memoirs. (My dad hailing from Peoria, all I could do was laugh.) Occasionally the senior moviegoers validated my growing belief that their constant talking during screenings is just as toxic, if not worse, than the young'uns and their texting; both groups can't seem to help themselves. (I also opted to switch seats before one film, when a drunk middle-aged woman behind me bragged about her farting prowess to her younger cohort and offered to drape her feet over my shoulders.) Additionally, I'm not sure they're always up for the more challenging fare that Roger shows them. Ebert's <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110720/REVIEWS/110729996">review</a> of <i>Terri</i>, reprinted in the festival program, prompted two different sets of attendees to decipher the meaning of the closing sentence as it were a cryptic riddle from <i>The Da Vinci Code</i>. Jacob Wysocki, he wrote, is "more of a John Candy than a Chris Farley, if you get what I mean." "What <i>does</i> that mean?" one puzzled gentleman in the theater asked loudly. The next morning, at the hotel I was staying, a woman thought she cracked it. "John Candy died of a heart attack, Chris Farley died of a drug overdose - he's saying (Wysocki) has a good head on his shoulders!" she beamed triumphantly. I think Roger (who so strongly identified with Candy he suggested in his review of <i>Splash</i> that he and Hanks should have switched roles) was suggesting that the young actor's melancholy was in a similar vein with the star of <i>Planes, Trains and Automobiles</i>. It's certainly possible that Jacob Wysocki is a level-headed fellow, however - he was in attendance and stayed for several of the screenings.<br />
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I saw five movies at Ebertfest this year, a more selective, less punishing schedule than what I set for myself the previous year. The opening-night selection, <b><i>Joe Versus the Volcano</i> </b>(1990), was the only film I had seen before, and that was twenty years ago. John Patrick Shanley's directorial debut (on the heels of his Oscar-winning screenplay for <i>Moonstruck</i>) is frequently lumped in with the string of bombs made by Tom Hanks (<i>The Bonfire of the Vanities, The 'Burbs, Turner & Hooch</i>) after his first Oscar nomination for <i>Big </i>and before he became an American Institution with <i>Sleepless in Seattle, Philadelphia </i>and <i>Forrest Gump</i>. I was surprised to learn that the movie did not-bad box-office ($40 million) and unsurprised that it's held up beautifully, even more striking visually on the wide Virginia Theater screen. Andy called it "a Preston Sturges movie," a befitting description of a screwball comedy about a man diagnosed with an incurable "brain cloud" who quits his soul-crushing job and flees to a remote island to jump in a volcano. Shanley's script blends the silly with the profound, giving Hanks some of the most literate, stage-like dialogue of his career (his affecting monologue to the moon, thanking God for his life, being a high point) while also giving the actor room to showcase his gift for improvisatory physical shtick. Shanley's generosity also extends to Meg Ryan, remarkably versatile in three radically different roles ("Haven't I seen you before?"), as well as to an impeccably sketched Sturgeian gallery of supporting nutballs, including a noteworthy Barry McGovern as a highly dedicated luggage salesman. ("Sounds fascinating..." he responds to news of Joe's pending journey, "...as a <i>luggage problem</i>.")<br />
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<b><i>Big Fan </i></b>(2009), a dark comedy starring Patton Oswalt, was undercut somewhat by Oswalt's last-minute no-show (he was scheduled to appear for a Q&A following the film and introduce the 1949 Ealing comedy <i>Kind Hearts & Coronets</i> on the U of I campus later that evening). It's a good film though, another study in male-loner pathology with antecedents ranging from <i>Taxi Driver </i>to <i>Observe & Report</i>. <i>Big Fan </i>isn't quite as dark as those movies - it toes up to the abyss before pulling slightly back - and seems to almost willfully ignore its own ramifications, namely the homoerotic fixation Oswalt's Paul has for his idol, New York Giants quarterback Quantrell Bishop. But if a few plot points aren't explored or left hanging (Kevin Corrigan is wasted as Paul's sidekick, the police investigation that develops in the movie strangely unaware of his existence), it's still a movie where scene-by-scene I had no idea what was going to happen next. As he did in <i>Young Adult</i>, Oswalt proves he's a good actor too, all the way to his glorious climactic line.<br />
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John Candy or no, Jacob Wysocki's performance as the titular <i><b>Terri </b></i>(2011), a pajama-clad, socially maladjusted teenager, is a well-drawn part of a larger duet with John C. Reilly's lightfooted turn as the high school administrator who tries to help him. As a character study, <i>Terri </i>is rather patchy: I can understand the developments of the movie's third-act while still wishing it had eliminated the most tiresome of its principals (you'll find out who) and gone in another direction. But it's ultimately a gentle little comedy, one that I'll no longer confuse with that John C. Reilly/Jonah Hill flick directed by the Duplass brothers.<br />
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<b><i>Wild AND Weird</i> </b>was the general title given to ten short silent films screened in unison with musical accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra. I was underwhelmed by the Alloy at last year's <i>Metropolis</i>, which paled in comparison to a new classical score performed by the Indiana University Orchestra I'd experienced only two months earlier. (During the post-<i>Metropolis</i> Q&A, the members of the Alloy expressed annoyance that their arrangement wasn't featured on the movie's DVD, arguing "Ours is better." No, it isn't.) But their Foley-style was much more suited to the silent shorts, including <i>The Red Spectre</i> (1907), which looked like a Meilies film but was actually directed by contemporaries Ferdinand Zecca and Segundo de Chomon. Many in the Ebertfest audience disliked the films and thought the screening went on too long (not good for only 80 minutes). I enjoyed it until the end, where the last two or three surreal shorts played too much like something out of David Lynch's private library.<br />
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The thunderously-acclaimed, Oscar-winning Best Foreign Film <b><i>A Separation</i></b> (2011) concluded my Ebertfest experience, a rare example of a creative work that is as monumental as advertised. (Lena Dunham's <i>Girls</i>, I'm <i>not </i>looking at you.) I've read descriptions of Asghar Farhadi's film as a documentary of Iranian life, when to me it plays like a legal thriller (one without lawyers, which leaves us with no filter to fall back on) that reveals aspects of a culture through genre conventions. For the most part, those conventions are ingeniously hidden from view, absorbing us entirely in a world that is largely alien through characters whose motives are conflicted and completely identifiable. It's a film about well-meaning yet intractable men (one played, with one layer skillfully on top of another, by Peyman Moadi), and different types of women: one attempting to live by the traditional patriarchal theocracy (the haunted Sareh Bayat), another looking westward and functioning as the film's conscience (Leila Hatami, who resembles a Persian Isabella Rossellini), and a third, an educated adolescent daughter (Sarina Farhadi) who functions as hope for the future. (Her climactic decision is, I think, less open-ended that it seems, but I'd be willing to discuss it in the comments, along with anything else to do with this remarkable film.) As <i>A Separation</i> unfolded, the woman next to me who'd worried about falling asleep sat in rapt attention, along with the rest of the hushed sell-out audience, with her body leaning toward the screen, lending credence to Boone's theory that a truly good movie will prompt a good audience response, just as bad movies are more likely to create a bad one.<br />
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Steven Boone himself, and Scott Jordan Harris, and Pablo Villaca, and so many others serve as fine examples of Roger Ebert's generosity of spirit over the years. Listen to them at Ebertfest, talk with them in person, watch Roger's film selections and watch Roger himself, for all his physical challenges, attend as much of the festivities as he can, and it's pretty clear that something special is going on and that it's an honor to be a part of it. It also makes perfectly clear how irrelevant the criticism directed at Ebert online is - the snarky tweeters ridiculing his errors and dismissing his abilities and taste fail to account for the fact that on an average day Roger, despite being heavily medicated and facing an assortment of other obstacles, writes more interesting pieces than any of them at their best could ever achieve. Roger Ebert is the increasingly rare film critic who is attentive to the finer details - the small films worth rooting for and so forth - without losing himself in them. He keeps his eye on the big picture: that it's in the sharing of those films and accompanying experiences that enables us to connect with each other. I'm grateful for my occasional contacts with him over the years, and that he's created a film festival that provides a happy respite - in Tom Hanks's stirring final words to Meg Ryan, a refrain that cements the link between <i>Joe Versus the Volcano </i>with <i>The Lady Eve</i> - "away from the things of man, my love; away from the things of man."<br />
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<br />Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01450775188328918558noreply@blogger.com3