talking a lot without ever really saying anything.

Going Rogue

2009-10-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

Hmmm...

Culture Warrior

2009-02-27T14:20:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to announce that I've recently joined the staff of Film School Rejects, where I'm writing a weekly column called "Culture Warrior," an assessment of filmic trends in relation to larger culture similar to what I've done on this blog the past year and a half. Needless to say, the time I usually devote to blogging on such matters is now largely being put towards the column. Of course, "Culture Warrior" is not replacing this blog in any way, and I'll be sure to update with at least one or two posts per month (I realize that I never posted very often beforehand, but I hope the length and content of my posts make up for their rarity), but if you feel you're not getting your fix of hearing me talk a lot and say nothing, check FilmSchoolRejects.com every Saturday for my column.

Cheers!

The Limits of Revolution: My Two Cents

2009-02-05T12:09:00.000-08:00

When a movie about a security guard going above and beyond the line of duty to protect a shopping mall is #1 at the box office two weeks in a row, I say its about time for a Che Guevara biopic.

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara is the rare 20th century icon that seems to mean something wholly different to every single person. The contradictions of his ethos at various points in his life have created a character of unending duality polarized in the collective imaginations of people in all countries of the Americas, complicated by his unfailing devotion (or, some would say, his belligerent, unrealistic, and idealistic unwillingness to compromise) to whatever cause he encountered at different ideological moments in his life. A skilled revolutionary crippled by asthma attacks, a secular humanist and sympathetic practitioner of medicine who executed his own men, a celebrated individual and political leader who enforced a philosophy of the collective good, and finally, an outspoken anti-capitalist whose image has been reappropriated and commodified by a best-selling shirt, Che’s history continues to be rewritten and reimagined.

I don’t think there can ever be a definitive movie about Che Guevara, as there is no definitive history of Che Guevara. Even in its four-and-a-half hour running time, Soderbergh’s Che feels limited in its scope, despite its focus on three very important events in Che’s life: the Cuban revolution, his visit to the UN, and the failed Bolivian “revolution” that ended in his death. Che’s running time is epic—its scope is not.

Divided into two parts, one titled “The Argentine” and the other “Guerilla,” each part has two different approaches to narrative linearity, two different technical approaches to camerawork, and two different aspect ratios, this duality in form is reflective of Che’s duality in character. Soderbergh’s film attempts an objective look at Che, trying to avoid biases on either side regarding who he really was and what he continues to represent. For Soderbergh, Che was neither a cold-blooded killer nor the signature icon of revolution. In “The Argentine,” we get hints of each side of Che, as we in one instance witness the assassination of one of his men and in another see him uncompromisingly wax his philosophy to victory in the takeover of Havana and to applause at the United Nations. This is all, of course, countered by and contrasted with the enduring test of that philosophy in Bolivia, where everything that went right in Cuba goes devastatingly wrong.

Soderbergh’s removed, almost cinéma vérité approach is probably the most responsible approach one could have to such a divisive figure. It can certainly be argued to be more objective than Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), an overall good film which perhaps depicts accurately Ernesto's life-defining discovery of humanism on the roads of South America, but fails to contextualize this with the later, better-known history of the man that arguably holds much greater weight in Latin American culture. In the United States, where 1960s Cuban history is taught from a single perspective and Che is known best as that attractive icon on a t-shirt that really knows how to sport a beret, The Motorcycle Diaries only complicated Che’s limited history and cultural role.

Soderbergh’s Che thankfully focuses on the man rather than the myth. But even stating this is misleading, for despite Benicio’s dedicated performance, Soderbergh’s lens stays only on the outside of Che’s mind. While we hear him proclaim his strong beliefs, we aren’t afforded his inner psychology and aren’t permitted to understand the reasoning behind his astounding degree of conviction. Soderbergh simply asks us to hear him speak and see his actions, then make up our minds ourselves. This extensive attempt at objectivity renders the second part’s ending all the more shocking as Che’s eyes suddenly become our own and we witness his assassination firsthand. This instance is shocking not necessarily because of its effect on the viewer, but rather because of the film’s sudden transformation in form and perspective.

Soderbergh has always been a formalist, avoiding a signature style in favor of a unique visual approach particular to each film. While his directorial decisions in Che are appropriate, responsible, and fascinating—far better than his executive-level film school experiments like Full Frontal (2002)—this sudden formal transition at the end of “Guerilla” complicates and confuses exactly what the filmmaker is trying to achieve. After deliberately avoiding the inner psychology of Che for over four hours, why does Soderbergh suddenly decide to no longer segregate our view of the man to the exterior? This is a most literalized attempt at getting inside a character's head, yet this late in the game it reveals nothing except what it might look like to be shot. For some viewers, this may be Che’s institution of violence finally coming full circle, and we are then forced to confront the unwavering devotion to an ideology in contrast with its consequences. (Had Che learned to compromise, could he have accomplished more? Doubtful. Che was hopeless against the CIA-backed Bolivian counterrevolutionaries, and he probably went into every revolutionary attempt knowing the price he might have to pay.)

Che’s death is not contextualized with his later history, and the camera focuses on his face wrapped in sheets as he is tied to a helicopter and jetted off elsewhere, the sheets showing us, even in death, how impenetrable the real Ernesto Guevara is. He is beyond approach and understanding, even when limiting oneself to his lifetime, as so much since his death has determined who he is perceived to be.

Soderbergh’s approach to Che is perhaps most appropriate because his film isn’t a biopic at all, at least in the sense that it ultimately reveals little about the man himself—favoring a simple examination of his actions from a distance rather than providing simplistic explanations to a complex man, even in such a daunting running time. My friend who endured the movie with me commented that he wished the film(s) showed the charisma of Guevara, and why people were so willing to follow him to the point of overturning the Cuban government. After all, there are few figures in history that we can regard as true philosophers of the battlefield. Though Che was undoubtedly charismatic in reality, I’m glad to see a version of him stripped of that charisma onscreen, for it removes the hip cult surrounding the development of his cultural image since his death. This isn’t a Che that fits easily on a t-shirt.

My two cents.

The Daily Show in an Obama Administration

2009-01-25T16:11:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Moment of Zen - Credits for the Last Eight Years

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Shortly after Obama won the election, Dan Kois of New York Magazine ran an article speculating what The Daily Show would be like in an Obama administration. Now that an Obama administration is actually in place, we can see what the future of the show might entail.

Any skepticism of TDS’s function in a new administration is legitimate, as the show has served throughout Bush’s eight long years in office as a necessary podium for satirical exorcism of many a frustration with the status quo. It provided a site of relief and mutual understanding between a limited demographic of people when such relief could rarely be found elsewhere. However, the show’s representative young, liberal, or otherwise simply disaffected audience (whether expressing anger or disapproval of the Bush admin through informed logic or simple Bush-joke bandwagoneering) can be argued to be the base for which Obama initially rose in popularity, so one can argue then that the show itself now represents the status quo…Okay, maybe not the status quo, but it’s hard to fit in some good ol’ cynical comedy when your audience won’t stop clapping and cheering at each mention of Obama as the president. As goes with many forms of art, comedy is far less inspired when things are good. TDS feels right now like what Kurt Cobain or Elliot Smith’s music would have sounded like if they one day became optimists.

However, things, quite obviously, still aren’t good. Five days into Obama’s presidency, American banks and businesses continue to tank and we still find ourselves in that quagmire of a country known as Iraq. Guantanamo won’t officially close for another year, and our economy likely won’t start bouncing back for at least twice that amount of time. The major difference, however, is the tangibly drastic change in attitude. As evidenced by the content and rhetoric of his Inauguration speech, Obama as president won't necessarily bring to fruition an immediate change in our surroundings, but rather a change in attitude with respect to our current circumstances, the sign of a simultaneous return to the idealized and constantly reinterpreted values and promises of 1776 and a move forward to accommodate with a world that continues to change instead of expecting the world to accommodate us. The cynics have become the hopeful, and the new cynics of today are few, as it seems like Americans (and much of the western world) on any point of the political barometer want some degree of improvement and progress for this country more than anything else. Only the incessant and excessive ideologues emblematized by Rush Limbaugh outspokenly hope for failure, favoring party loyalty over the greater good of the many.

TDS’s first post-Inauguration episode made as much of the last minutes of the Bush presidency as they could, prepping themselves for the inevitable disappearance of Bush and Cheney from the public eye, as the public doesn’t want to see them anymore than they want to be seen. The following two episodes, however, displayed the potential best and worst of what is to come. With the closing of Guantanamo Bay, Jon Stewart brought back Gitmo, an Elmo-like puppet representing either the ethos behind Guantanamo itself or the supposed perspective of its prisoners. The only real humor of the piece was the (seemingly deliberately bad timing and) transparency of Stewart as both voices in the conversation. However, any fresh humor to be found in the piece quickly died as Stewart’s conversation with Gitmo continually reduced itself to shameless proselytizing of the Obama ethos, sounding more than ever like a voice for the new status quo rather than the source of reactionary comedy or even subversive counter-propaganda that TDS was known for in its best days. Thankfully John Oliver added some punch this last week with his segment at the rally itself, where he satirized the crowd’s impossibly high expectations for Obama. Still, this didn’t sound like a biting criticism cutting to its satirical core as much as it was stating the obvious with a light dose of humor—the excitement over a new president simply continues to drown out the inevitable sober realization that not everything will be fixed within the next four years.

From the writers of Saturday Night Live to Chris Rock, much has been made of the fact that, unlike the imitable persona of Bush, there is little humor to be found in Obama himself. This is not because Obama is a humorless person by any means, or even because of an alleged timidity in poking fun at an ethnic minority, be they in power or not (both TDS and SNL made plenty of jokes about Roland Burris during the Blagojevich senate election scandal). It’s simply hard to make fun of Obama because of his careful control of his media persona, as he has continually proved to understand how the media contextualizes and morphs information and, in turn, makes and breaks political careers, extending to his presence on and affirmation of TDS's importance in the national political process (thank goodness we have the endearing gaffe-magnet that is Joe Biden to balance out Obama). So it goes without question that, unlike Bush, decontextualized soundbites of the current president himself will not likely provide a wealth of humor.

However, TDS has proved throughout these last eight years—especially in this past election cycle—that there is no greater source of humor than turning the camera onto the media itself, and it is in this respect that the show remains strong, lampooning the absurdly meticulous coverage of Sasha and Melia’s first day in school to its lambasting of right-wing cynicism on Fox News that will no doubt continue to remain potent throughout the Obama presidency.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Inauguration Media Coverage

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Fox News Fear Imbalance

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

TDS, at its very best, can be a vessel for counter-propaganda when it aims to deconstruct common methodologies for information dissemination not by politicians but by the news media itself, regularly highlighting contradictions or hypocrisies in both information delivery and punditry while enforcing tactics (largely through careful and inventive justaposition of news segments and/or soundbites of politicians and pundits) that arguably help train its audiences to approach news media with an analytic eye. Entertaining Politics author Jeffrey P. Jones argues that TDS “skewers” classical punditry and the partisan, performative spectacle of news media discourse attempting to pass as objectivity, which in itself requires a certain knowledge of news media or news events in order to “get the joke.” While it is certainly arguable that one does not need to actually watch the news to understand the humor in TDS or even “get the joke” (as I’m sure there are many conservative or apolitical viewers of the show who watch it simply because they enjoy comedy), as seen by TDS’s covering of “legitimate” news sources covering the Obama transition to the presidency, TDS’s joke about news is, and often has been, that news rarely features any news at all.

As Jones argues, TDS has functioned best as a court jester: not by rendering reality absurd, but pointing out the absurdity of reality. In this respect, it can be argued that this brand of satire is intrinsic to the public role of the Bush administration and its endless laundry list of absurdities (not to mention overall indifference and dysfunction), and TDS may not find as functional or influential a role in news media within the next four years. Anybody can go back and look at clips from the 2004 election and see a clear difference in the show’s utility as a oh-so necessary counterpunch to an often otherwise devastating political and social reality not so long ago. However, as long as ideologues like Limbaugh continue to persist (and they will, holding desperately onto the remnants of their former status as spokespersons for the political mainstream), and as long as the news media continues its circus act, TDS will continue to be a necessary outlet for the frustrations of a certain demographic. Hopefully Stewart and co. will further embrace the lampooning of news media, like the two segments above, rather than attempting humor through proselytizing or poking holes in Obamathusiasm, as TDS has proved itself to be at its best when it reveals the illegitimacy of legitimate news.

However, despite that its cult seems to have reached its glass ceiling, The Colbert Report may prove to be the better-enabled venue for satire than TDS. Colbert’s carefully constructed persona has represented different aspects of mediated American political society each year since the show’s debut. When his show was first launched in 2005 around the time of Hurricane Katrina, Colbert embodied the absurdity, ignorance, and dysfunction of a then-still powerful ideological base whose grip on power and influence was finally beginning to lessen. In the next few years he seemed only to be a caricature of the pundits of Fox News, etc., a cartoon of an ideology that already seemed cartoonish by that point. But now Colbert has been rendered a minority, representing those frustrated few in conservative news media that scrounge for qualitative disapproval and continue to propagate a xenophobic fear of Obama and, according to Limbaugh, have yet to “drink the punch.” Instead of pretending to like Bush, Colbert only now has to pretend to dislike Obama, and thus lampoon the scrambling criticisms of the far right. After all, as The Daily Show displayed, this brand of comedy seems to work best for the political minority.

Top 10 Albums of 2008

2008-12-30T14:34:00.000-08:00

Unlike my fellow bloggers, who have seen a lot more films this year than I have, I’m refusing to put together a top 10 list of favorite movies this year. I’m doing this for several reasons, 1) I’ve been outside the limited release mecca of NYC for several weeks, and have thus been unable to see any of the movies that are alleged to be the best of the year, 2) I’ve been disappointed by many of the films I’ve seen this year, and would struggle to cobble together ten list-worthy ones, and 3) I went on a tirade against movie lists last spring, so while I realize how fun these lists can be, it would be a bit hypocritical and inconsistent for me to make one. So even though this is a blog that focuses primarily on movies and visual media, I’m instead putting together an end-year list on something I have very little authority on: music. So here are my top 10 albums of the year, according to my very narrow taste. I’ll be back posting on movies soon.

And for an expert analysis on why good music is good, check out Mary Go Round.

THE BEST OF THE YEAR

10. Monkey, Journey to the West

Damon Albarn is a man of prolific innovation. As the guy who headed Blur, Gorillaz, and The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, he’d have to be. So it comes as no surprise that Albarn eventually wrote his own opera, even one as esoteric as Monkey: Journey to the West—billed as a “circus opera” and adapted from a 16th century Chinese novel. While not adapted to album form directly from the opera itself, Journey to the West does feature a condensed version of the music used for Monkey’s run in Manchester. Ranging from astoundingly beautiful collaborations in voice and sound to prolonged and disturbingly odd noises, Journey to the West is never short on inspired creativity, even if it may not always be the most accessible kind. However, while listening to the album, one can’t help but feel like they’re missing out on Gorillaz collaborator Jamie Hewlett’s undoubtedly astounding visuals designed to go in tandem with Albarn’s music when Monkey was originally exhibited in the opera medium. Yet Journey to the West can’t help but manifest illustrious juxtapositions of sound and noise on its own terms, making this an enjoyable album despite the schism from its necessary visual counterpart.

Favorite track: “Heavenly Peace Banquet”

9. Friendly Fires

This is electro-synth pop at its most shameless. Friendly Fires’ lyrics are laughably generic and sophomoric, and frankly, after seeing their videos, the members of the band seem like self-infatuated douchebags. At 23, even I feel to old to be listening to this stuff, but it’s just so uncontrollably, ass-shakingly addictive. The very shamelessness of Friendly Fires’ easily consumable approach to hipster ‘indie’ pop, lacking any pretensions of artistic worth while at the same time being narcissisticly self-involved, is what makes their music so enjoyable without the necessary pious guilt often characteristic of this particular music snob’s pop consumption. Its corniness is almost winking, which makes it that much more endearing. Frankly, this kind of music makes me want to go back 5 years and crash a dorm party. Their debut album is so simple and fun, even a four-eyed white guy like me can dance to it—of course, keeping in the spirit of Friendly Fires, I’d be looking for a mirror all the while.

Favorite track: “Lovesick”

8. School of Language, Sea From Shore

The overlapping, vocals-only, vowel-reciting opening of School of Language’s debut album is unique and experimental while simultaneously being accessible and ever-so pleasant. The four-track movement entitled “Rockist” that frames the album evolves quite nicely through an array of developing and receding sounds and musical styles, making Sea From Shore feel like a far more coherent whole “album” rather than a selection of singles primed for individual downloads via iTunes. Other songs on the album don’t bleed together quite as nicely, and you may find yourself segregating your listening of Sea From Shore to a few brilliant selected tracks, but there’s definitely some gold to be mined here. Just from listening to the album (I literally know nothing about the band, as they haven’t made much of a splash on this side of the Atlantic), it seems like the entire project belongs to the immense creativity of the lead singer, whose vocal tracks seem to have been carefully overlapped in the album’s production (or else he is accompanied by vocalists that sound a great deal like him), and the combined aura of musical instruments seems so coherently in tune with the vocals that it doesn’t seem like a collaborative effort at as much as singular genius. The album can’t be listened to song-by-song—it evolves in a way that no other album this year can compare to.

Favorite track: “This is No Fun”

7. Foals, Antidotes

Produced by the white guy from TV on the Radio, Foals’ debut album is just so…so…so fulfilling. The combination of catchy dance-pop rock rhythms and Yannis Philippakis’ almost obnoxiously Oxford-accented vocals may initially remind one of Bloc Party or a far more matured version of Arctic Monkeys, but these conventions somehow occasionally achieve a surprising transcendence by moving far beyond its initial catchiness and misleading simplicity, which renders Antidotes all the more re-listenable. Foals is the type of band that holds their guitars as close to their chest as possible—so you know they’re more serious about music than their sound may initially seem. Wikipedia calls them “math rock” (a term which I’ve never fully understood), which brings immediate comparisons to American counterparts like Minus the Bear or MuteMath, and while Foals’ music seems calculated in the way the term implies, this calculation is reserved only for the band itself—for the listener, it can very well grab your emotions by the tail and take you somewhere else, while instinctively bobbing your head and tapping your feet to the rhythm along the way.

Favorite track: “Olympic Airways”

6. Gnarls Barkley, The Odd Couple

I never cared for Gnarls Barkley’s first album. I got sick of hearing “Crazy” a thousand times and thought their cover of “Gone Daddy Gone” added nothing to The Violent Femmes’ original—I even thought Danger Mouse was overrated. The Odd Couple has sold only a small fraction of St. Elsewhere’s 3.6 million copies, and has yet to produce a similarly overplayed single, but I think that Danger and Cee-Lo are better probably off for it. Instead of the stick-in-your-head radio friendliness of “Crazy,” The Odd Couple gives Cee-Lo the chance to belt out that powerful voice of his, while Danger employs an overwhelming (if not magnificently chaotic) array of musical styles to back him up. Each track seems to be an ongoing mad experiment, packing as many sounds, pop eras, backing vocals, and hand claps as humanly conceivable into each song until it almost implodes, but thankfully doesn’t. I particularly love Cee-Lo’s urgent, “run, children!” in “Run (I’m a Natural Disaster)” and his desperate screaming in “Open Book.” Each track sounds so epic, it’s hard to believe that The Odd Couple clocks in at under forty minutes.

Check out Gnarls Barkley’s cover of Radiohead’s “Reckoner” from one of their live shows, which isn’t on The Odd Couple, but does further evidence their awesomeness.

Favorite track: “Run (I’m a Natural Disaster)”

5. Girl Talk, Feed the Animals

Mashup DJ and fair use prophet Girl Talk released this album In Rainbows-style early this fall, and I can’t think of a type of music more fitting to this open distribution format, as Girl Talk’s very approach to music makes a good case that all music—even corporate pop and bling-praising hip-hop—belongs to everyone. The reason I love Girl Talk’s music is because it works on so many levels. On one, it’s the perfect dance party mix or live concert experience, a self-contained summer rooftop party whose short attention span to any given style or song makes for an ongoing entertainment experience. Frankly, anybody that can’t dance to Girl Talk should probably visit a mortician. On the other hand, it’s a similarly satisfying solitary experience, as identifying the various layers of songs embedded in each seconds-long musical block of Girl Talk’s tracks can prove and endlessly fascinating test of one’s popular music expertise. Thankfully, however, Girl Talk’s constant song shifting does not ring of somebody who hasn’t outgrown his ADHD, as each track seems like as meticulously assembled concoction of overlapping sounds that any lesser DJ could never have conceived as compatible.
Favorite track: “What It’s All About”

4. Wolf Parade, At Mount Zoomer

The moment this album came out, every critic and fan pronounced its evident inferiority to WP’s debut album, Apologies to the Queen Mary. While At Mount Zoomer certainly lacks some of the iconic, catchy tunes and palpable musical passion that made every track of WP’s first album richer with each listen, it’s pretty hard to follow up expectations on (what I think) will probably prove itself to be the best alternative rock debut of this decade, and made them one of my favorite bands ever. However, WP has never seemed to be co-singer/songwriter/masterminds Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug’s major musical concern, as they have devoted just as much if not more time to their respective “side projects” (Boeckner’s amazing Handsome Furs, Krug’s innovative Sunset Rubdown and lackluster Swan Lake). Having first listened to Apologies to the Queen Mary long before knowing about any of these other projects, WP’s first album sounded like a collective sound of astonishing musical range. But knowing about the extent of their careers since, At Mount Zoomer unfortunately feels not so much like the surprisingly effective collaboration of two very different musical approaches that characterized their first album as much as a track-by-track trade off between the two musicians’ individual efforts, up to and including the 11-minute “Kissing the Beehive” (the only song cowritten by Boeckner and Krug), which ends the album by trading off their respective musical sounds within an individual track. Yet WP still remains an indisputably good band. My taste just so happens to gravitate towards Boeckner, so while I appreciate several of Krug’s contributions (the haunting “Call It a Ritual”) and skip through some of those that seem to lack inspiration (“Animal in Your Case”), all of Boeckner’s rocktastic songs are repeatedly satisfying, and their single-unfriendly approach allow his catchy guitar riffs to continually morph into glorious noise on each of his lengthy tracks.

Favorite track: “Fine Young Cannibals”

3. Fleet Foxes

Like any great new folk band, Fleet Foxes sounds like it came from a time without the modern distractions of television, the Internet, or the Jonas Brothers, as their sound seems to have had to develop from an isolated lifestyle heretofore connected exclusively to nature. So it comes as a surprise that Fleet Foxes, headed by the impossibly talented and young Robin Pecknold, hail from the densely legacied musical metropolis of Seattle. Their debut LP spread like wildfire this summer as they quickly sold out shows at their modest venues, highly underestimating their rapidly growing fanbase. The reason they became so popular so quickly is simple: their music is just that good. At a time when most “indie” “folk” bands interchangeably throw together quiet, introspective albums whose mark of success and credibility is their ability to make you fall asleep, Fleet Foxes treat this stuff quite seriously, tossing off the generic for a fuller, particular, and all the more pleasant sound. Often, music is just so good that its sound is inextricable from the experience of listening to it, and I’ll always remember listening to this album while on a train from Edinburgh to London this summer, peering out the window at the rolling hills and agrarian landscape where Fleet Foxes’ music fits so well (…and yes, even falling asleep to it). They’re hardly just another new band with an animal name.

Favorite track: “Blue Ridge Mountains”

2. School of Seven Bells, Alpinisms

Where Fleet Foxes may be my favorite debut band of 2008, my favorite debut album has to be School of Seven Bells’ Alpinisms. Ben Curtis, former drummer of The Secret Machines, loses the engrossing but redundant heavy beats that established the limited appeal of his former band for this oh-so harmonious electro-charm outfitted nicely by the singing duo of twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, whose haunting melodies forcibly take your mind somewhere else than exactly where you are sitting. Despite the dense and sometimes challenging layering of music, the surprisingly effective fit with the corresponding vocals creates a sound complex in its execution but so pleasurably easy to listen to (“Half Asleep” is probably the best example of this approach). Alpinisms does seem at first listen to tread on darker territory (“White Elephant Coat”), but SVIIB somehow manage to retain a pleasant, inclusive sound even as their music challenges, experiments, and changes mood. The Brooklyn-based band often retains the danceable electro-pop fun of an artist like Ladyhawke, but rejects the current trend of kitchy 80s nostalgia in favor of attempting aural transcendence. Seriously, if you’re open to it, Alpinisms can change time and space. By the end of “Sempiternal/Amaranth,” you won’t even notice that eleven minutes have gone by.

Favorite track: “Connjur”

1. TV on the Radio, Dear Science

It seems too easy to put TV on the Radio on the top of my list. Their Return to Cookie Mountain was undoubtedly my favorite album of 2006, and they continually find themselves at the top of far more reliable top-10 lists than this over and over again. I’ve had endless debates with friends on where Dear Science stacks up to Cookie Mountain, whether or not it is on par with that masterpiece, and the fact that such a debate even occurs shows how incredible this follow-up is. No doubt, it’s a completely different approach. Where the recording of Cookie Mountain was reportedly as tortured a process as the sound of the album itself, Dear Science favors a lighter approach in mood, favoring harmony over their previous acts of meticulous disruption and the almost overwhelming density that characterized Cookie Mountain, but this is not to say that Dear Science is somehow without immense weight. Dear Science can be experienced both as a list of individual tracks, each with their own irresistible hooks and packed evolution of sound to the extent that each track seems to cover enough material to fit an album all its own, and as a fully collective album experience, each track fitting together in perfect sequence and creating an astounding unified whole. It’s hard to pick out the best individual tracks not only because they are each oh-so-good, but because the experience of listening to the album as a whole is just so satisfying. Just when you think you’ve heard the best song on the album, another one follows that is just as brilliant. Every member of the band seems to be working on the same level, creating a sound in each song that could not have been more perfected with change. Like my experience of listening to Cookie Mountain, I enjoyed the first tracks on this album so much that I only stuck to listening to them, until weeks later realizing that the rest of Dear Science was just as brilliant. If Cookie Mountain was TV on the Radio’s brilliant manifestation of torture, Dear Science is an illustrious return to peace.

Favorite track (if I have to choose one): “Love Dog”

THE MOST DISAPPOINTING

Sigur Ros, Meo suo í eyrum vio spilum endalaust

Takk was an amazing album, and would have been the perfect way for Iceland’s favorite minimalist mood band to retire their penchant for deliberately lustrous sounds. Their newest album seems at first to be pointing in a bold new direction with the uncharacteristically peppy opening track, “Gobbledigook,” which sounds almost like an inventive collaboration with Animal Collective, but then it all devolves into the same old sound, ringing of uninspired carbon copies of their tracks from Agaetis Brutin, and the whole thing seems more redundant and tired than ever.

THE WORST

Bloc Party, Intimacy

I love Silent Alarm. My copy is worn out from listening to it so much. But I know very well that it’s not 2005 anymore. Bloc Party didn’t seem to get that message, rehashing identical rhythms that sound like early versions of the far better songs from their debut album (“One Month Off”). I know of no other band I’ve liked so much in recent years whose successive releases have been so exponentially and increasingly inferior to their initial effort. To make matters worse, Bloc Party inexplicably continues to attempt the forced profundity and poignancy of their ballads (“Signs”) that characterized the very worst tracks of A Weekend in the City (“I Still Remember,” “Sunday”) but somehow worked in Silent Alarm (“So Here We Are”). It doesn’t help that their lyrics are paper-thin and that Kele Okereke’s already limited vocals seem to be receding in range. The whole thing falls flat. Intimacy is simply a non-event.

The South Will Rise Again...with dinosaurs?

2008-12-10T17:43:00.000-08:00

No, you’re seeing this correctly, it is indeed a model of a Union soldier being attacked by a dinosaur. It can be seen as a roadside attraction off of highway 11 in Natural Bridge, VA, part of an exhibit developed by “Professor” Mark Cline called Dinosaur Kingdom. If you’re driving on a road trip across Virginia and you see an advertisement for a roadside attraction called Dinosaur Kingdom, you’d probably expect some aging, unimpressive model dinosaurs this side of the La Brea tar pits—they might even be slightly animatronic if you’re lucky. But what you wouldn’t expect is a thoroughly envisioned and charismatically ludicrous still-life narrative that attempts to retell the story of the Civil War and in the meantime make it much more awesomer than your boring high school history textbooks ever made it sound.

Cline’s inspiration follows this narrative: the Union have discovered dinosaurs still living in an isolated area of America and decide to use them as a secret weapon against the Confederacy, training the dinosaurs to attack southern soldiers. But the plan backfires, and the Yankees themselves are attacked and eaten by the ancient reptiles from various geologic periods, thus enabling the South to win and—we can only assume—give rise to the Confederate States of America.

This strange and hilarious exhibit works brilliantly on several levels. For one, it fits well into the strange culture of roadside attractions that inhabit the long stretches of land in the American South, allowing those southerners who celebrate the confederate flag as a sign of “heritage” while ignoring or refusing to articulate the problematic ideological implications of such a statement to pass through and temporarily engage in a ridiculous, humorous form of wish-fulfillment, permitting them to temporarily imagine a Confederate victory...with the help of dinosaurs. It’s a whole new way to rewrite southern history again, like a 21st century Birth of a Nation but not as boring/racist. At the same time, it reads as a criticism of Christian fundamentalism whose strict religious and political beliefs are often reflected in the red hue of the southern states.

Certain schools of fundamentalism are, of course, well known for reading scripture as a document of empirical historical evidence rather than a theological text, and thus seek to uncover, manipulate, or frame historical and scientific evidence affirming that the Earth was created in six days ending with the birth of the first man, and that our planet has since aged just over a few thousand years. Thus, we end up with Creationist museums that argue the coexistence of dinosaurs with human beings, exhibiting often-hilarious historical justifications for such cohabitation like this dinosaur with a saddle for human riding from the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, or the alleged dinosaur fossils in Jerry Falwell’s museum at his Liberty University that are dated as only about 3,000 years old.

Dinosaur Kingdom seems to celebrate southern heritage and the wish-myth of the South’s resurgence while at the same time criticizing the selective re-telling of histories necessary for that celebration (for instance, the South’s frontier myth and agrarian culture are celebrated as signs of honorable heritage while conveniently ignoring the region’s tattered history of racism and slavery). This careful historical framing is realized in its greatest extreme in the ridiculous historical juxtapositions that aim to justify an impossible retelling of all history from the religious right as manifested within Creationist museums. While not all fundamentalists are from the South, not all southerners are fundamentalists or of the religious right (in full disclosure, I’m originally from Texas), and not all religions are fundamentalist, there is certainly a political connection between the retelling of history in the celebration of southern heritage and the retelling of history in Christian fundamentalism that is being playfully parodied here. (Cline’s other exhibits also playfully engage historical icons, like his life-size replica of Stonehenge completely made of styrofoam, aptly called Foamhenge.)

When Cline’s website read that he also resides in Glasgow, it took me a minute to realize that it was referring to a nearby town in Virginia whose occupants exceed barely more than 1,000, rather than the better-known city in Scotland. Yet Cline seems strangely connected to that other Glasgow, as both Glasgows seem to be linked by an odd way of showing appreciation for southern heritage and culture as well as an affinity for bizarre historical juxtapositions.

If you could hear the people speak in the picture above, you would likely be surprised to hear them speaking with Scottish accents rather than southern ones. I took this picture this past July at Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, UK, near the University of Glasgow. The caption above the left corner of this collage describes a love affair had by the citizens of Glasgow with the culture of the American South, from western films to bars like these that feature hoe-downs and line dancing. What struck me most was the presence of the Confederate flag in this Scottish bar, a symbol of dense ideological weight representing America’s long history of institutionalized racism that seemed here to represent nothing more than part of the spectacle of “being southern.”

From the same museum, the picture below is what appears to be a WWII-era fighter plane inexplicably planted above the natural history exhibit, and surrounded (outside the frame) by Scottish aristocratic art.

Either Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum is schizophrenically seeking an eccentric (but more head-scratch-inducing than funny) juxtaposition of history, science, and culture comparable to Cline’s Dinosaur Kingdom, or they were simply making use of limited space.

"Professor" Mark Cline

…And this has officially been my most random and meandering post. Sorry for the dearth of posts this and last month. I promise get back to this in full swing by the end of the month, and the beginning of 2009 should be a more fruitful time for blogging, schedule-wise. Cheers!

46th New York Film Festival

2008-11-05T15:00:00.000-08:00

The wonderful people of cinemattraction were kind enough to ask me to review some films at this year's New York Film Festival, where I saw some pretty good films, some pretty underwhelming films, and a couple of brilliant films. On their website you can find my reviews of Arnuad Desplechin's A Christmas Tale, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, Clint Eastwood's Changeling, Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time Redux, Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan, João Botelho's The Northern Land, Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, Derezhan Omirbaev's Chouga, and Gerardo Naranjo's I'm Gonna Explode, as well as plenty of other reviews. Also, you can hear me talk a lot and say nothing about NYFF from my guest spot on the Screen Junkies podcast (also available for free on iTunes). Having seen ten films in about a week and a half, the experience was both exhilirating and exhausting. Thanks to the people of cinemattraction for giving me a very memorable first-time festival experience.

'W.' and the Bush Legacy

2008-10-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

I was understandably skeptical when I first heard of Oliver Stone’s plans to make a George W. Bush biopic while the man was still in office, at first relieved that Stone had seemingly returned to making incisive movies about controversial political figures after the huge missteps that were World Trade Center (2006) and Alexander (2004), but doubtful that the notoriously left-leaning filmmaker would be able to say anything new and insightful that hasn’t been said elsewhere (however, I should say that I never feel that it’s “too soon” to make a movie about any given subject, and while this may contradict an argument I made on this blog a year ago, I think “too soon” arguments are total crap because they imply some identifiable future date in which a mass of people are collectively, simultaneously prepared to revisit a given subject). But once I saw W.’s inventive advertising campaign, it looked like a dark comedy or satire more in the vein of Dr. Strangelove rather than a continuation of Stone’s dark sagas (marked often by his characteristically overwhelming visual bombast) into the annals of corrupt American history. The film, however, turned out to be neither.

W. is a surprisingly straightforward, unpretentious biopic that operates mostly around a contentious family drama between father and son, and Stone accomplishes here the last thing I ever expected him to—he actually gets into the psyche of a fascinatingly humanized interpretation of George W. Bush.

Having grown up in an area of Texas only twenty minutes away from Bush’s Crawford ranch, I was always under the impression that the cowboy iconography and fake-sounding accent Bush appropriated was more of a means to fool voters into thinking this Ivy League-educated political royalty was an average American simpleton rather than any accurate reflection of his actual life and values. W. argues instead that it is Bush’s presidency that is the façade, and his simple love for the easygoing times of rural Texas culture is where he genuinely feels most at home. Stone and Josh Brolin’s Bush is presented here, unlike Stone’s Nixon, as about as far from evil as one could get. Bush here isn’t depicted as stupid, just in way over his head. The occupational and generational conflict between W. and his father could have been substituted for many other contexts had these characters been fictional and with different last names—Bush here just so happens to have been born into a political family, and with his connections just so happens to become Governor of Texas without having ever held office before, and just so happens to become President of the United States.

Bush’s presidency is depicted as circumstantial and serendipitous—he simply jumped in with the right friends at the right time, but ultimately found himself in one of the last places he’d ever feel comfortable being in. At one point Laura tells him, “One day this war will be over and our lives can go back to normal,” and you can’t help but think that this is exactly what’s going through his mind in the last three months of his miserably long two terms.

Bush is an undeniably unique personality in an absurd situation. Despite his privileged upbringing, he’s a man of simple tastes and pleasures (in one of the film’s funniest moments, Laura reveals that W.’s favorite play is Cats). The film, once again, doesn’t portray Bush as stupid, just the last person anybody (including his own family) would ever expect to become President of the United States—twice. If Stone wanted to portray Bush as an unforgivable ignoramus, he’d have plenty of material to work with. But here we don’t see Bush continuing to read My Pet Goat several minutes after hearing about the attack on the World Trade Center, nor do we see his entrance into the White House paved by a stolen election, his daily flubs that have been fodder for late-night comedy, or his many embarrassing public moments with foreign leaders. Stone knows how easy it is just to ridicule Bush, and furthermore that the “idiot Bush” is how we already know him best. The filmmaker thankfully instead gives us a protagonist we can actually care about. When Bush stumbles at a press conference, we, for the first time, get inside his head rather than laugh at him from the safety of the seats in front of the podium.

This is not to say, of course, that the film forgives a Bush presidency—it’s simply a character study chronicling how his institutionalization of fear, his politicization of the Supreme Court, his pushing forward of dishonest motives for an unjust war, and his culture of paranoia dividing America in two could have happened. And what’s so refreshing about W. is that it allows us to find humor within what has panned out to be one of the darkest chapters in American history. The humor is hardly ironic or cynical—instead it’s surprisingly rather genuine. Stone allows us to see the absurdity of our given situation, and laugh at how incredibly ludicrous—and how undeniably American—it is that such a man could find his destiny in the seat of the most powerful person in the world.

It is the man’s environment that is posited here as what determines his political career, and Bush’s relationship with Karl Rove (played by Toby Jones) takes a straightforward look at these particular circumstances. Bush here is portrayed as authentically “southern” and sincerely religious; it is Rove who sees the character traits already there as political opportunism ripe for his type of propaganda, rather than creating Bush into something he is obviously not (after all, W., as we all know, is not good at faking anything). Bush knows what he wants to say, Rove simply tells him how to say it (even when he’s around his own cabinet).

And the connection between neo- conservatism and religion is presented here as tenuous. The neoconservative domestic and foreign policies characteristic of the Bush administration are depicted as result of the collective political ideologies of Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, played by Richard Dreyfuss as exactly how we perceive him to be—an impenetrable mastermind of government bureaucracy and the real power behind the throne. Yet Bush and Rove are the ones who have utilized religion to support these policies—the real government power meanwhile seem turned off by Bush’s insistence on prayer after meetings (after all, we never think of Cheney, the ultimate neo-con, as a fundamental Christian). The connection between religion and politics so seemingly inherent to neo-conservatism are instead presented here as a coalition between the desires of those members of the cabinet with a hunger for power and the (seemingly) genuine but misguided religious spirit of the Commander-in-Chief, in which he believes it’s God’s will that he be President and invade Iraq (W. at one point tells his religious adviser that he doesn’t even want to be President, but he’s heard the calling and must follow, which could explain quite a bit of Bush’s disassociated behavior at press conferences and such).

Most of the cast approach their characters within varying degrees of basic imitation and actually attempting a three-dimensional embodiment of the given person. Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, Jeffrey Wright, and Rob Cordry seem to present half-impression, half-character interpretations of the real-life counterparts they portray, with varying degrees of success (as W., Laura Bush, Colin Powell, and Ari Fleischer, respectively—and Powell is thankfully presented as the lone voice of dissent in Cheney’s war room, overcome and compromised by the coalition of the willing working against him). Meanwhile, James Cromwell, Ellen Burstyn, Scott Glenn, and Ioan Gruffudd seem to be making no attempt whatsoever to physically resemble George H.W. Bush, Barbara Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair respectively, choosing instead to approach the roles as characters on their own, once again with varying levels of success (you really have to stretch your imagination for Glenn and Gruffudd). However, Thandie Newton’s shockingly spot-on portrayal of Condoleeza Rice seems to suggest a different film entirely, one that could have been completely embedded in biting satire, one with a serious actors articulating perfect impersonations of the many eccentric quirks of those mysterious figures running this country, without approaching the psychology of several of these truly impenetrable figures.

The film feels as hurriedly jumbled together as was, transposing some of the more famous Bushisms into different contexts in an economy of effort and a condensation of time. It is not, by any means, one of Stone’s more carefully envisioned works, nor does it seem to achieve any convincing cohesion regarding the events portrayed with how they panned out in reality. But Brolin’s W. is Brolin’s W., and his face is not so much substituted for the President’s as it is used as a vessel for a character study all its own, thereby forming a jumping-off point with which to attempt approaching the man himself and his confounding place within our nation's history.

I never voted for George W. Bush, and since I started giving a damn about politics around 2003 (I turned eighteen right when we started bombing Baghdad), he’s come to represent the opposite of everything I stand for politically, ideologically, and even spiritually. Yet, three months before he’s left office, I find myself at Union Square on opening night paying $25 for two tickets to see a biopic about him. Even knowing that it’s a film made by a notoriously leftist filmmaker, why should I have cared to spend the money if I despise the man so much? Because W., flaws and all, is without denial a figure of continuing fascination—I believe, left or right, most of the nation feels this way. Even when we’ve got him pegged, even when we can’t fathom him making one more gaffe, he continues to surprise us.

Whether I like it or not, W. the real-life President has defined a very significant part of my life. He took office in an election that brought to light the futility of the electoral process when I was a sophomore in high school, was reelected my sophomore year in college, and will leave office around the time I’ve finished grad school, with his face being inseparable from the destruction of almost every major governmental system that the function of our nation depends on. It’s tough to say quite yet what Bush’s legacy will be like, but I (with a straight face) doubt he’ll go down as one of the most hated men in American history. I think his legacy will be more akin to how he is portrayed in W.: the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, and all the absurdity therein.

Honestly, I’m going to miss Bush when he leaves because, while we do live in undeniably harsh times attributed largely to him, he was such a singularly unique, appallingly odd President during an equally strange political era. I do not doubt his legacy will continue to be reinterpreted long after he leaves office, and W. may not prove to be the definitive work of art preserving the President’s unprecedented place in history, but I think it’s a good place to start.

The Nixons of Cinema

2008-10-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

A lot of people have made comparisons between Bush Jr. and Nixon regarding who the worst president of the modern era is, citing parallel abuses of power between Nixon’s handling of Vietnam and Watergate with Bush’s war on terror and use of executive privilege. With Ron Howard’s adaptation of Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon coming out in December, and with Oliver Stone’s much anticipated biopic of our current president coming out next weekend, I think it’s high time to take a look at how several actors have attempted to embody one of Hollywood’s favorite presidents to put onscreen, Richard Millhouse Nixon.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

Like with many careers of great directors from the seventies, the eighties were not a good time for Robert Altman. Between the fiasco that was Popeye and his early nineties comeback with The Player, Altman’s eighties career was littered with largely forgettable films, save for this underrated one-man show featuring Philip Baker Hall (probably most recognized for his work with P.T. Anderson) as a disgraced, post-presidency Nixon who recalls, with great brooding anger and resentment, the trials of his life and career in what is basically a 90-minute monologue.

Altman is perhaps best known for his overlapping dialogue, and while Secret Honor takes a 180 degree turn from the ensembles that defined Altman’s seventies career, Hall allows Nixon’s solitary dialogue to overlap itself, preventing the finishing of one thought or frustration to suddenly move on to another, as if Nixon’s life and character were so complex that not even he could articulate who he is or what he believes in. Nixon here is armed with a revolver, a tape recorder, and a bottle of scotch, wavering between fond recollection of his humble beginnings gone awry and unmitigated anger at those who he believes sought to destroy him at his every move. While the minimalist restraints in such an approach can be claustrophobic (one man, one room), this intimacy allows us to watch a man fall apart as he purges his many demons.

Nixon’s paranoia while in office extends here to his private, secluded post-presidency career, as his study is littered with surveillance material. Nixon narcissistically continues to record every thing he says and does (despite that such self-surveillance is what got him expelled from office in the first place), presuming that all of his ideas are important enough to be recorded, thereby naïvely refusing to admit he now exists alone in a nation that wants so badly to forget him. When Secret Honor ends, the surveillance cameras turn on Nixon himself, suggesting that the person Nixon fears most is the one staring at him in the mirror.

NIXON (1995)

Released not long after Nixon’s death in 1994, Oliver Stone’s elephantine biopic attempts to cover every possible territory in the man’s life and presidency, positing his rise and fall as Shakespearean tragedy. While the film attempts to humanize Nixon, his lust for power is presented as always stemming from an inherent narcissistic God complex that has driven him tooth-and-nail since birth to prove his own innate superiority over all other men. Nixon constantly refers to himself in the third person, and anytime he and Haldeman (James Woods) discuss the myth of the American Dream in respect to their many abuses of executive privilege, neither Haldeman nor Nixon ever seem to believe any of that crap beyond which of their actions it can justify. Nixon’s constituents act as cheerleaders (especially when his presidency begins to fall apart), constantly massaging the president's inflated sense of self while expressing their very sincere doubts as soon as they step into the hallway of the oval office, reflecting the “community of consent” Nixon developed in the White House which only further divided him from the ideology of the growing population that wanted him out of office.

Nixon’s community of consent:

Stone’s biggest attempts at humanization are his use of flashbacks, but these only present Nixon’s habit of altering the truth as having been constant since childhood, and suggest that his self-destructive lust for power was the result of a disappointing performance as a college football player. Still, Stone makes little connection between the younger Nixons and the one who would become president, never showing how his “humble Quaker upbringing” (often his most potent political tool) led to a soulless state of power. This implausible, nuance-free scene (as only Oliver Stone can do it) portrays how Nixon’s presidency had never attempted to reflect the will or enforce the best interest of the American people, with the shadow of Lincoln forever echoing in the background:

However, Hopkins’ and Stone’s Nixon is undeniably smart, presented as having had the rhetorical ability to squash the voices of dissent by his intimidating sheer force of personality. Nixon’s Nixon is made to be the type of slimy politician who could weasel his way into virtually any place of power, who could manipulate even the loudest of dissenters to vote for him against any aspect of their will, while somehow being able to separate himself from the most radical of the right wing. In other words, Stone sees Nixon as one of the greatest politicians in American history.

DICK (1999)

Although the tone of both Secret Honor and Nixon may refuse to admit it, there’s something funny to be found even in a nation’s most troubling hour. Dick asks what it would be like if a pair of airheaded high school girls had an unknowing, unintended role in the Watergate scandal and Nixon being shoved out of office. This film was a hard sell in 1999, a nostalgic political satire disguised as a teen comedy aimed at an audience far too young to know or care about the political history structuring its narrative. But for anybody willing to appreciate either type of film, Dick cleverly uses its protagonists to fill in every gap of the Watergate scandal, from the missing eighteen minutes on the tape to the identity of Deep Throat.

Dan Hedaya, who played a small role as a Nixon constituent in Nixon, here plays the titular president—and I must say, more so than anybody else who has embodied Tricky Dick, Hedaya actually appears somewhat in tandem with the president’s inimitable, cartoonish physical features with relatively little makeup. But Dick’s best surprise is its take on Woodward and Bernstein, which is about as far as one can get from Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men (1976). Berstein is played by The Kids in the Hall’s Bruce McCulloch and Woodward by a SNL-era Will Ferrell, and they’re hilariously interpreted as egotistical, immature, conceited man-children who seek to implicate Nixon in Watergate not for social justice, but in order to reign victor in a childish pissing contest between themselves.

But perhaps Dick’s smartest move is the very presence of the oblivious high school girls, who are still in the patriotic public school history class mode of treating the President of the United States as an a man of uncontested honor and dignity while being completely unaware of his questionable policies. We first meet these characters on a field trip to the White House, where the students are portrayed as equally ignorant of any protest going on outside as they are of the history on display within (and, in a great jab at the American state of mind, never showing excitement until they take a break at McDonald’s). Nixon’s presidency emboldened a new kind of skepticism amongst American voters, where the men of power are no longer seen as innocent until proven guilty, where America stopped believing that the White House always worked in the best interests of those outside rather than the personal interests of those inside.

Nixon destroyed the myth of the American President—a myth our current President has done nothing to restore—by proving that the righteous, moral, honest, decent, virtuous, noble, trustworthy role the Commander-in-Chief played in the stories learned in our first history classes is never the same as the man himself.

Manufacturing Consent Continued: Gay Marriage

2008-10-11T16:24:00.000-07:00

I’m sure I’m not the only one to say this, so I’ll keep it brief. This was a pretty astounding moment at last week’s Vice Presidential debate. Compared to the droning repetition of economic and foreign policy talking points and sound bites in the first two of three Obama/McCain debates (what exactly was the difference between the first and second debate besides the setting?), we got to hear talking points and sound bites regarding just about every election-deciding issue from Biden and Palin. While this is definitely a result in part of the McCain campaign’s attempt to deliver a gaffe-free Palin by instituting a strict debate format (notice her disdain for "nuance" as articulated in this clip), both Biden and Palin came prepared to talk about all issues briefly and, in terms of political language, thoroughly. These are still televised soundbites, which as I argued before prevents progressive discourse in recorded media. But where the relative freedom offered in the Obama-McCain debate style resulted only in time-wasting compliments to the opponent or thank-yous to the questioner and a clearly flustered Tom Brokaw, Biden and Palin very quickly delivered their stump rhetoric. They even had time to talk about Darfur! (Biden, in one of the debate’s greatest moments, was even able to challenge the dominant opposing rhetoric, calling out McCain’s self-ordained maverick status.)

But the same-sex marriage moment was so revealing, because it really illustrated the emptiness of campaign rhetoric. Each candidate revealed what was ultimately the exact same position on the issue, but with rhetoric characteristic to each of their alleged political viewpoints. Biden delivered a clearly-articulated a common-sense stance on same-sex marriage that certainly appeals to voters who consider themselves progressive, while Palin played to the homophobia of her conservative base while balancing an appeal to voters who might take a more moderate stance (she seems to think that “tolerance” is a more progressive word than it sounds), but their rhetoric lost all its worth as soon as they realized their concurrence on the issue. This illuminates the very important role that rhetoric and spin play in this election (especially with an arguably moderate Democratic ticket), where politicians remain astute in delivering campaign talking points that may sound like a breath of fresh air, but, out of fear of upsetting the status quo (i.e., more voters), are probably not so different from current policies.

Notice how frequently in the debates the candidates have stumbled over their words, almost saying other obvious words. They aren't thinking about the issue when they answer a question, they're thinking about finishing their sentence in the best way possible. Notice how quickly Obama's once-inspiring rhetoric has gotten so tired. This is why the years-long presidential campaign process can hardly contain radical vessels of proposed change (byebye, Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich), because anything signifying drastic change gets normalized and reconstituted into the political mainstream in order for the candidate to have any hope of becoming elected. And this ridiculously long process can't help but cause any unique, elevated language to eventually resonate as empty rhetoric.

The words you have seen so far, and will once again see on Wednesday night, have been thoroughly prepared and cleansed for unthreatening television viewing. So sit back, enjoy, and watch the democratic process at work.

Mad Men as Media Criticism

2008-09-07T15:33:00.000-07:00

If you don’t know me personally or haven’t already gleaned by my writings, in interest of full disclosure I should share that I am currently seeking an academic career in media studies. If you don’t know exactly what that means, you’re not alone. When most people think of film school, they think of actually making movies, not the classroom lectures and seminars that characterize most other academic programs. But myself and many like me believe that studying film/media involves a whole lot more than learning how to set up a C-stand or where to put a key light. Understanding the way media operates in our society is integral to understanding how ordinary people by and large receive visual information and how this shapes not only our ideas, but how we perceive daily life. To implement media studies into university programs implies a general goal of expanding an understanding of the way such media operates and influences not only our own ideas, but the structuring norms of society itself, thus (hopefully) creating a society not so blindly influenced by media.

In the words of a media studies professor delivering a paper on trends in beginning credit music sequences in Hollywood, “it’s not exactly curing cancer.” And that’s a common reaction when students and professors in cinema and media studies explain what it is exactly that they do to people unfamiliar with such programs, after correcting the obligatory confusion over the fact that we don’t actually “make movies” (after six years of university education, much of my family still think I want to be a director). Even other academic humanities programs scoff at the idea of film/media studies under the presumption that cinema is a popular, inferior art, thus unworthy of serious study. In the words of a film studies professor who will go unnamed, “it’s as if they think 14th century French literature is somehow more practically important than studying how contemporary visual media actually affect people's everyday lives.”

I could defend my eventual career choice all day, but instead of using this blog to purge those demons, I see something in contemporary popular media itself that seems paradoxical to the idea that visual media studies has no practical importance.

The world of Madison Avenue ad companies has not been the most respected of career choices, but in many circles it is an envied goal for a lucrative career, and degrees in advertising and public relations seem to be, like business administration, that degree that allowed people you know from undergrad to work 100-hour weeks straight out of school but make more money than you’ll possibly ever see. Unlike academia, it’s a business that will certainly pay off those college loans rather than escalate them.

AMC’s popular drama series Mad Men exhibits this world in all its staged glory. And while these superficial, sleazy, sexist characters are never a dull to watch, they also display a profound understanding of the way media operates in society. And keep in mind, this is 1960, about a decade before media studies had any place at all (respected or not) at the university (and this being the post WWII era, only the youngest characters supposedly have actual degrees in advertising). Don Draper, the show’s uncharismatic but engrossing lead character, exhibits the deepest understanding of how media works, and is thus the most successful salesman. While these are fabricated characters, the show’s depiction of Draper’s successful salesmanship and his understanding of media's operations are not presented as mutually exclusive traits, in the television world or real world of advertising.

Each episode of Mad Men displays how visual media is used to communicate ideas, dissuade opinions, and manipulate emotions in our everyday life (perhaps most powerfully in its depiction of fashion advertising, which preys on giving the spectator a feeling of inferiority, and then a helpless need for the product). One of the last episodes of the first season depicts how a radio commercial is constructed under the direction not of a “director” but an ad agent, thus making a connection between the practices of advertising and PR with filmmaking. In displaying the processes of creating media to influence the consumer/spectator, perhaps a show like Mad Men can be useful in informing the average television spectator as to how contemporary media (almost fifty years later) is used to manipulate them in similar ways.

Mad Men was at one point pitched to, and rejected by, HBO before it transformed AMC into a prestige cable network for original series. Had Mad Men stayed at HBO, it would have aired uninterrupted by commercials, but as it stands on AMC, it reads as a show about the men that create commercials to convince consumers to buy products they don’t need, only to be interrupted by commercials. Coming from a corporate television network, this reads either as a delicately subversive, anti-capitalist, deconstructivist jab against the powers that be, or (more likely) a network continuing to capitalize on a popular show with its advertising revenues, unaware of the conflict in its presentation alongside this show.

Check out one of the most memorable scenes of the first season’s final episode, where Don Draper displays the power of images in full, emotionally manipulative force:

I only wish an HP commercial aired right after this.

Besides the obvious, how does a career in advertising involve a “practical” understanding of the way media works, and media studies does not? As Don Draper’s career argues, advertising only works because people don’t understand how media influences them. His job is to understand how media creates and influences ideas, while constructing more media in a way that continues to make consumers/spectators passively unaware of such influence. According to the Don Draper model, there’s no money in educating people on how media works—the money is in making sure it continues to.

Manufacturing Consent

2008-09-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

Party conventions are a funny thing. Where they used to serve the practical function of actually voting for and nominating their candidate, because of the growing importance of primary elections, the conventions of modern elections have been reduced to a party for the parties. And unlike the primaries or the post-convention debates, the DNC and RNC seem to be the only places where the respective parties can converge to deliver their talking points uncontested (and as Palin’s speech during the RNC displayed, this allows for the delivery of empirically false information and convoluted interpretations of policy without dispute). That protesters at the RNC were silenced, even jailed, so quickly displays the dearth of equitable discourse at these conventions.

The outright lies, partisan interpretations, and exhibitions of uninhibited party devotion at the RNC gives Americans a glimpse of what their nation would be like if they adopted a one-party totalitarian platform. (Not to say that the DNC was less one-sided, but at least they didn’t make chanting “USA” at the first sign of dissent sound like an Orwellian angry mob, and the Republicans have had a history in the last eight years of being the party that thrives on unquestioning support.) The lack of fair grounds for discourse at either debate altogether seems quite antithetical to the idea of a democratic nation. And the media, whose role many would think would be to dissect the content of conventions and provide a healthy ideological counterbalance against each respective platform, seemed too quick to praise the form of the speeches rather than their content, regurgitate the talking points already brought up by the party, or simply comment on the decorations: the pillars during Obama’s speech, or the plethora of balloons after McCain’s. The Daily Show was the only place I saw these past weeks where talking points were challenged rather than regurgitated.

My most recent post discussed a common form of election propaganda, the campaign commercial, but the unabashed, uncontested one-sided rhetoric of both party conventions these last two weeks have displayed the most obvious incarnations of propaganda in the American political system. But now that the candidate love-ins are over, and each party received their expected post-convention boost, I want to focus on a less obvious form of loaded dissemination of partisan ideas that will inevitably take place during the next major election events next month: the debates.

Four weeks ago, Purpose Driven Life author Rick Warren moderated at his Saddleback megachurch in Southern California the closest thing to the first debate between the parties’ expected nominees. For what would seem like such a major political event, the “debate” was overshadowed by coverage of the Beijing Olympics. Warren, an outspoken pro-life “values” Republican, asked Obama a set of pre-written questions, attempting to have, in his words, an honest, nonpartisan conversation about issues deemed at “values voters,” then had McCain, who supposedly was in a “cone of silence” that did not allow him to witness Obama’s answers, subjected to the exact same questions.

Like with the convention, the media commented merely on what the form of Obama and McCain’s answers rather than their content.

Anybody who has followed Obama’s campaign knows that the Obama seen in interviews has quite a different demeanor than the Obama who gives speeches. Both can articulate complex liberal ideas in an undivisive, approachable manner, but the Obama of interviews seems largely more introspective, often pausing to give thoughtful consideration to questions rather than blurting ready-made answers that would inevitably put him in a corner. Obama has been subject this last year to many out-of-context soundbites that have rendered him unfavorable. By now, Obama understands how the media works, which means understanding how it can very easily work against him, so he chooses to think before he speaks.

Now, despite that Warren’s question was astoundingly reductive, erroneous, and too loaded with distressing implications that reflect Warren’s outspoken worldview to come anywhere close to objectivity, Obama’s answer treated the question with both solemnity and due regard, intricately explicating various interpretations of the word “evil” and respectfully outlining that a reductive definition of such a powerful word can have deplorable results, even in the name of “good.” McCain’s answer, by contrast, gives into the simplicity of the question by giving an even simpler answer in merely two words, as if Warren’s questions were a multiple-choice examination rather than an essay, without regard to the implications of his answer (defeating evil is a pretty lofty goal to set out for one's first term).

And as you can hear, the crowd loved it. And the media, rather than analyzing exactly what each candidate was actually saying, instead followed the direction of the crowd, claiming that McCain was “on his game” simply because he was able to give short answers to what were (albeit loaded) admittedly complex questions. (I also find it interesting that the evangelical crowd considered McCain a more favorable candidate because of his briskly worded ideas on abortion and gay marriage, when Obama was the only one who actually quoted scripture—but my problems with religion in politics in general opens up a whole other bag of issues we won’t go into here…but I will say this: a presidential debate held literally inside a church is an insult to both the necessary secularity of government and the sanctity of places of worship.)

Why McCain’s answers seemed favorable relates to a concept that is anything but new when it comes to political media discourse. Noam Chomsky has been theorizing for most of his career about how television has been manufactured to limit discourse on complex, challenging, or unpopular ideas, commercials being the most obvious example since they literally interrupt opportunities for prolonged attention given to any issue.

(While I love the satire of The Daily Show, it is also subject to this rule, as Jon Stewart seems to struggle to keep any substantive discussion going as most of his interviews rarely stretch pass the five-minute mark. Though The Daily Show might be funnier, Real Time with Bill Maher has shown to be a more productive place for humorous political counterpoint; Maher deliberately tries to avoid Chomsky’s trappings by having discussion take place without commercial interruption, live, and on a network free from censorship, thus (in theory) allowing for a prolonged discussion free from private interest. But being on the premium cable channel of HBO, of course, severely limits his viewership.)

Thus, McCain’s short answers look better on television than Obama’s longer ones. And any pretense of objectivity is shattered by the clear agenda of the audience. Obama’s pauses read as dead air rather than introspection necessary to assess a multilayered question, and McCain’s blurting of (pun intended) “Sunday school answers” read on television to some audiences as confident and decisive rather than a frightening quickness to judge.

From June 2007 to the beginning of the primaries, CNN held several debates among the 8-10 people running for President from each party (the “YouTube debates” perhaps being the best-known), and it was very entertaining to see the network correspondents attempt to juggle their questions for so many nominees, while their audience refused to mute their own opinions to the candidates’ ideas. They never even pretended to achieve objectivity. In this chaotic environment, it was impossible to assess any question with care, and it was the candidates who either made the shortest answers or said the craziest things (these were often one in the same...I'm looking at you, Tancredo) that got the most attention.

By the time the official debates happen in October, the farces of the CNN and Rick Warren “debates” will be long gone, replaced by a tightly moderated session and an audience forbidden from disruption. But the circuses of these past debates won’t be forgotten, and because of the strict time constraints of the upcoming debates, short answers will likely still look better than intellectual musings, and smart people will continue to be silenced. How can we ever expect to progress if the format is already rigged?

To Leni Riefenstahl, With Love...

2008-08-24T21:12:00.000-07:00

Former Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn recently praised McCain’s overblown campaign commercials, saying that they will likely be an effective strategy in helping the Republican senator win the presidency. Penn was one of very few media commentators to have positive things to say about the now-infamous Britney/Hilton ad and the sardonic Obama-as-savior ad. While most of the media criticized these ads as vapid, devoid of any substantive political argument, Penn argued that despite their content, such extreme commercials have a tendency to dissuade voters. To “prove” his point, Penn referred to the Hillary Clinton “3am” ad, Walter Mondale’s 1984 “red phone” ad, and Lyndon Johnson’s iconic, fear-mongering “Daisy” ad from 1964.

But what I don’t understand is Penn’s assertion that McCain’s ad successfully “worked” like Clinton’s considering that she lost the nomination. Of course, one can argue that the ad helped scare up votes for Texas and Ohio when it aired there in March, but Obama’s success after Pennsylvania and Super Tuesday would argue that it had no lasting effect. What Penn doesn’t acknowledge is the media scrutiny and criticism those ads came under that hardly had a parallel when the Mondale or Johnson ads were released.

Parodies of the Clinton "3am" ad showed up on YouTube just days after its airing, just like the Paris Hilton “retort” showed up days after McCain’s ad. The mainstream media and online communities dissected these ads to no end. There was even a local television news report detailing the young girl sleeping in Clinton’s ad, who is now of voting age, revealing herself as an Obama supporter. This informed voters who would otherwise not know that such ads are largely made up of stock footage assembled together into the context that the creator pleases.

I believe the growing trend of dissecting political campaign ads by both the online community and the mainstream media (but primarily the former) will prove itself to be helpful towards creating a more objective (or, at least, cynical—and I mean that in the best possible way) political discourse. The fact that young people are showing that they understand that these ads as mere juxtapositions of text, audio, and images that can be arranged to mean any damn thing the author wants exhibits a new understanding of how visual media can manipulate public opinion. Thus, fear-inducing (“3am”) or mudslinging (“Paris/Britney”) can be taken in with their respective grains of salt as anybody with access to the web or iMovie understands that they can create such propaganda themselves with relatively limited materials.

Whether its used for political discourse or just a mind-numbing diversion, YouTube has been critical towards displaying the ease with which images can be manipulated and restructured in ways that alter their meaning. Take this fake trailer for The Shining for example, which uses new music and certain clips taken out of context to give a completely fabricated impression of what the movie really is:

Political ads, just like movies, are mere assemblages of visual and aural information, and their meaning can be reengineered just as easily.

Now, let’s take a look at the evolution of political campaign ads, starting with a famous 1960 John F. Kennedy ad (featured in the first season of Mad Men):

The ad feels just as old as it is, and works no differently than a commercial for cereal or cigarettes from the same era. There’s absolutely no information regarding Kennedy’s policies or why he should be President, simply an annoying jingle that will inevitably make you remember his name as you hear yourself humming along to it the rest of the day.

Now, take a look at LBJ’s aforementioned “Daisy” ad four years later:

This ad demonstrates the basic ideas of juxtaposition used to create meaning that we see in contemporary political advertising, just on a more nascent level. Cutting a shot of a cute girl with several shots of an atomic bomb, all with LBJ’s prophetic voice, pretty much slaps the viewer in the face with the message, “If you don’t want this to happen, vote for this guy.” This practice is not unlike showing an image of Obama juxtaposed with Paris and Britney, but McCain’s ad favors derision rather than LBJ’s blatant fear-mongering. That being said, LBJ’s ad is simultaneously so simplistic and over-the-top that it would never fly today. This was still the early 1960s, a time where middle America at large still believed what politicians and newsmen said—before the healthy dose of cynicism brought by student riots, hippies, and Watergate.

But, in contrasting Kennedy’s ad with Johnson’s, we see a huge difference in the operations of ready-made TV-friendly political discourse in four years. Kennedy’s ad contains the residue of Norman Rockwell’s 1950s, while Johnson’s reflects the era of a nation being divided inside by the Civil Rights movement and inducing fear of the outside through the threat of Communism—not to mention reflecting the fear of a nation that had seen the man whose name was in that catchy jingle die before their very eyes a year before.

Here’s a 1972 George McGovern ad, running against Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign during the worst days of the Vietnam War:

While this documentary-like ad gives the impression of an objectivity or straight-forward attitude lacking from most political campaign ads from then and now, the care and subtlety with which onlookers’ faces and McGovern’s words are juxtaposed suggests a new measure towards complexity in political campaign advertising (but then again, is there anything that feels less constructed than the "town hall meetings" of 1960s and 70s presidential campaigns?). It is also refreshing to see a politician attempt to say something that doesn’t sound like the bullshit rhetoric people simply want to hear. But McGovern lost in one of the biggest landslides in modern election history, so maybe there’s a reason such ads are rarely seen today.

Furthermore, even “non-bullshit rhetoric” can become rhetoric in itself. Notice how McGovern’s campaign used the word “change” as the theme of the ad. And just like with Obama’s campaign, once-inspiring words like these can lose meaning with their overuse, even to the politician himself.

The Candidate, a movie released during the same year of McGovern’s run stars Robert Redford as a no-bullshit politician running for senator in California, and chronicles how the no-bullshit guy becomes just like the rest. After his refreshing, original ideas have started to attract voters, Redford’s character goes on a campaign tour where those ideas turn into stump speeches, and have been repeated so much that they have become totally arbitrary to the politician himself. Check out this scene where the talking points for the politician have completely lost their meaning:

Here’s Ronald Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” ad from his 1984 reelection campaign:

This ad is interesting because it juxtaposes a word with dense ideological weight, “America,” with images that suggest what such a word is supposed to mean. This ad clearly defines what the Reagan idea of America means, totally oblivious to the possibility that it might be shutting out alternative interpretations (for instance, everybody in Reagan’s America seems to be white). “America” is a word that contains different meaning depending on who you are and where you’re from. Here’s a fascinating scene from the film The Parallax View (1974), starring Warren Beatty, that demonstrates how differing meanings can derive from the same word:

Here’s another Reagan campaign ad from ‘84:

I must admit, Reagan’s ads are quite fascinating and effective, much more interesting than most of today’s. What’s most surprising about this ad is that, unlike both the “Morning in America” ad and Reagan’s presidency, it acknowledges the multitude of opposing ideas, ideologies, and interpretations regarding issues that affect all Americans. Yet it suggests that we all conform to one just in case one side is right (and I think I know which side they’re referring to). This ad is indeed one intended to motivate fear, but not the same type of fear that LBJ would have us jump on board with. It’s subtler, calmly asking you to cross the fence, even helping you over, while saying to you, “I understand that you disagree, but I’m still correct.” But the ad, of course, doesn’t allow us to see the bear get shot. Some people say that Karl Rove’s tactics were effective, but even Bush Jr’s very own Goebbels wasn’t this clever.

Now, to conclude this brief history lesson, let’s look at the ads referred to at the beginning of this post:

So intent with meaning, yet so utterly meaningless.

NYC’s Museum of the Moving Image is running a feature on their website containing all the major Presidential campaign commercials since 1952. Definitely worth a look.

The New Musical Biopic

2008-07-21T22:01:00.000-07:00

I wanted to do this post way back in the fall when all these movies were in theaters, but I didn’t complete the triumvirate until just recently, so talking about these movies in the ever-topical blogosphere may sound a bit dated, but bear with me.

I was really not a fan of Ray four years ago. I’ve found that biopics of musicians (and biopics in general) suffer from trying to stuff too much life into one movie, and end up becoming a disjointed, plotless mess. And I didn’t feel that Walk the Line, one year later, was much of an improvement. But three movies released at the end of last fall challenged the clichés and weaknesses of the musical biopic.

WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY

On the surface, this Apatow-produced film by Jake Kasdan seems to be mostly poking fun at Ray and Walk the Line, showing us how two movies about two completely different musicians are almost beat-for-beat the same by calling attention to the contrivances that make up those two films (the defining traumatic event from childhood, leaving the first wife, the drugs, the affairs, rehab, recovery…), but the roots of the genre go much further (as Walk Hard never ceases to point out) as it also parodies The Doors (1991), The Buddy Holly Story (1978), and, perhaps the origin of the contemporary musical biopic clichés (especially the trope of a baby-wrangling, overbearing first wife), Hal Ashby’s Woody Guthrie biopic, Bound for Glory (1976).

I’ve been very tired of recent movies that pretend to be parodies—movies like Date Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans that merely reference recent events in pop culture without attempting to bestow a new breath of criticism upon them. Parodies aren’t supposed to go for the obvious, they’re supposed to reveal clichés and contrivances of pop culture that we never realized were even there. The movies that Epic Movie and the like parody have not spent enough time in the Rube Goldberg contraption of influential pop culture to actually deconstruct that influence. Walk Hard, however, is a welcome return to the good old days of the Leslie Nielsen-style parody. Walk Hard is clever enough to let us feel like we’re in on the joke. And while the whole movie doesn’t necessarily work (it still seems like an odd choice for the Apatow clan—I’m glad they didn’t try to sneak Seth Rogen in it), some moments are very clever: ex., John C. Reilly playing Dewey as a fourteen-year-old, or his smell-blindness, or his introduction to drug culture through marijuana.

Most surprising of all, the music made up for the film is actually good. “Let’s Duet” and Reilly’s Bob Dylan impression (“Royal Jelly”) are remarkably clever, but tracks like “Guilty as Charged” and “Black Sheep” are startlingly catchy, with credit to Reilly’s impressive vocals. It’s no wonder that Reilly actually toured as Cox to promote the movie.

But the finale, which features a ceremony dedicated to Cox’s career (as the narrative is framed via flashback), will either make it or break it for you. As the celebrity cameos continue to pile on, you might realize that Walk Hard has basically sold out with the closing final song/emotional life montage, buying in to the contrivances it was previously lambasting. Or you might give in to loving the music as much as everybody else involved with the movie seems to, and leave the film with a surprising sentimental connection to Cox’s story, one that you wouldn’t normally expect from a silly parody. By the end, Walk Hard, no longer attempts to transcend the clichés, but give into them. Walk Hard argues that clichés exist for a reason—because they usually work.

I’M NOT THERE

The aims of Todd Haynes’ innovative meditation on the elusive nature of the celebrity icon are now pretty obvious. How can any person’s identity, much less Bob Dylan’s, be expressed comprehensively in a film? Haynes’ answer is that it can’t. And as those constraints are broken, Haynes is free to explore and have fun. The transitions between the various Dylans are always interesting, circling roundabout to examine traits around the man, but never allowing itself to get too close. And somehow, we get closer than we’ve ever been.

Haynes acknowledges that celebrity itself, much less the filmic depiction of a celebrity, renders that person a character rather than a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being. I’m Not There acknowledges the distance between a man and his myth and, for the most part (with the exception of Heath Ledger’s character) sticks with the myth. The fatal flaw of Ray and Walk the Line is that they think the icon is the same as the person himself—save for a few melodramatic family moments that pose as an inside look—but in the end, we have learned nothing different from our already mediated perception of the celebrity. I’m Not There, by contrast, seeks to examine the Bob Dylan that pop culture has constructed rather than Dylan himself.

This is why I take issue with the praise that was thrown at Cate Blanchett’s performance. Don’t get me wrong, she did a great job, and is probably the most memorable “character” of the bunch. But the critics said she “morphed” into Bob Dylan, that she was “exactly” like Bob Dylan the same way they gave praise to Jamie Foxx or Joaquin Phoenix. Blanchett plays mid-60s Dylan, one of the most iconic of Dylan’s phases as memorialized through such pop culture moments as his switch to electric guitar and D. A. Pennebaker’s verité documentary Don’t Look Back (1967). His black clothes, blacker sunglasses, and garden of curly hair make this Dylan arguably the most recognizable of all.

That critics lauded Blanchett in such a way is probably to the film’s credit, because for them she did embody Dylan—the Dylan they bought into for years. Her performance didn’t aspire to be “like” Bob Dylan or even to imitate him, but to embody the pop culture construction of who Dylan is and who he should be. Therefore, by her physical appearance alone she is “like” “Bob Dylan” in that she aims to resemble the icon, not the man. I’m Not There is smart enough to know the difference.

CONTROL

Former Joy Division photographer/music video director Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic should have been seen by far more people than it did. Sam Riley’s performance as Curtis was simply astounding. Take a look at the real Ian Curtis versus the fake one.

True, it’s not a flawless imitation (it’s damn close), but Riley makes no attempt to be a Jamie Foxx chameleon. While Joy Division’s music was certainly dear to many people, Riley’s Curtis benefits here from not having a persona on the level of Ray Charles, Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan. The fact that Curtis had such a short life also helps the film not have to cram decades upon decades into two short hours. But the most amazing thing about Control is that, unlike I’m Not There or Walk Hard, this is pretty much a straightforward biopic without any tongues in their respective cheeks.

And what’s relieving about Control is the brutal honesty that comes from this straightforward, unpretentious approach. While the movie is 100% black and white, it makes no attempts to stylistically manipulate the Ian Curtis story (unlike Michael Winterbottom’s fascinating but problematic depiction of Joy Division in 24 Hour Party People (2002)). When Curtis cheats on his wife, we aren’t asked to forgive him because he’s a pop icon; we aren’t instructed to forget about her as he moves onto somebody prettier, somebody better suited for a rock star (both Walk the Line and Ray ask us to jump this hurdle, afraid to condemn the idolatry of their respective figures). The relationship between the audience and Curtis is more complex. We aren’t even expected to accept his flaws, or even empathize with them. We witness his drifting from his wife and his clinical depression through the acknowledgment that Curtis, like everybody, contains many layers.

When Curtis writes a song, there is no “a-ha” moment of inspiration, and no profound event that inspires his next masterpiece. Instead, the songs are carefully juxtaposed with the events in his life, merely giving insightful hints (but no more than a hint) of where these famous lyrics may come from. The band’s best-known song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” takes on new meaning as Curtis sings it in a lonely recording booth, but only because Corbijn juxtaposes the events in such a way as to allow us to infer such a meaning. He doesn’t shove it down our throats. He shows us the man, the band, the music, his life, his death, and leaves us to decide anything in between.

Touch of Evil

2008-07-21T15:16:00.000-07:00

There’s been quite a bit of buzz this weekend surrounding Heath Ledger’s performance as the evil Joker in The Dark Knight, including talk of a posthumous Best Supporting Actor nomination. This seems like a good time to pay tribute to three of the most evil of evil villains in Hollywood history, all of which have received Best Supporting Actor nominations in the past. Villains can often be far more fascinating than their protagonists, and here are a few that I find to be pretty great.

KISS OF DEATH (1947)

Richard Widmark arguably had one of the most astounding screen debuts in film history with his turn as vile gangster Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway’s quintessential film noir. Much has been read into this performance, including Richard Dyer’s assessment of Udo as a repressed homosexual, and Widmark’s very first screen role remains his most canonical more than sixty years later.

Victor Mature stars as Nick Bianco, a former gangster who has done his time and is now on the straight path, but Bianco’s former colleague Tommy Udo forces himself back into Bianco’s life to enact revenge. This plot, however, is merely a rouse for a cat-and-mouse chase involving one of the most disquieting antagonists of the Production Code era.

It is doubtful that a character like Udo would need little more than a generic revenge scenario in order to enact psychological and physical torment onto Bianco and his loved ones. Like Ledger’s Joker, Udo is an ambiguous force of nature with no need for petty human qualities like emotion or sympathy. He simply hurts others for his own pleasure. And unlike many gangsters from this era, he has no code of ethics that prevents him from hurting the most vulnerable of innocents.

How this squeaked by the standards and practices of the Production Code in postwar Hollywood is beyond me. But the effectiveness of Widmark’s fear-inducing performance comes largely from its unique quirks, like his childish laughter, which renders Udo not an ordinary villain, but a bona fide homicidal maniac.

MARATHON MAN (1976)

Laurence Olivier’s disturbing turn as Nazi dentist Dr. Christian Szell in John Schlesinger’s paranoid thriller still has the ability to shock audiences that know Olivier better for reciting Shakespearean monologues rather than forcefully drilling through Dustin Hoffman’s teeth. Aspects of the film have not aged gracefully (Michael Small’s score, William Devane’s performance), but Szell remains as ruthless and terrifying as ever. When he kills a Holocaust survivor on a busy New York street in broad daylight, it becomes abundantly clear that unrepentant evil still has a profound presence no matter how many wars are fought to squelch it.

The famous “is it safe” scene where Szell uses his unique interrogation technique on helpless grad student Dustin Hoffman will make you never want to set foot in a dentist’s office again. The scariest thing about this scene, however, is that Hoffman’s character clearly has no information to give, but Szell proceeds nonetheless. Unlike Udo and the Joker, Szell has a distinct motivation for his actions (he desperately wants to find “it”), yet Szell takes an unmistakable (but stoic…like, Nazi stoic) pride and pleasure in the process.

(sorry about the audio cutting out)

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

I doubt I have to catch anybody up on the plot or context of Javier Bardem’s quietly intimidating performance in the Coen brothers’ thematically heavy thriller, but it’s worth mentioning that recently the Internets have been somewhat abuzz with thematic comparisons between this film and The Dark Knight, with a friend of mine going so far as to quip Christopher Nolan’s film with the alternative title, No Country for (Old) Batman.

Indeed, both the Joker and Anton Chigurh roam their respective filmic landscapes as unstoppable evil forces (rather than human beings) representative of the evil that inevitably pervades no matter (or, in Batman’s case, because of) the efforts of the good forces at work attempting to curb it. By the end of No Country, Sherriff Bell has realized that the evil embodied by Chigurh is hardly any different than the evil that haunted the world before him or will haunt the world for years to come. Just as Bell exists, evil must exist as well.

Likewise, the Joker exists naturally because of moralistic figures like Batman and Harvey Dent. Batman is only able to apprehend the Joker (it can hardly be called a defeat) by compromising his own standards, while the idealist Harvey Dent inevitably becomes a ruthless vigilante once his weaknesses have been exploited (screenwriter Jonathan Nolan said that Dent suffers because he was “too virtuous,” and I found some of Dent's resulting actions more disturbing than the Joker’s). While the Joker may be a vile proponent of anarchy, he sees himself as far less hypocritical than his moral avengers, because he at least has no morals to compromise in order to achieve his goals (and his own twisted ethic makes surprising, frightening sense).

As the Joker evasively explicated his behavior through reciting stories of his past that both overlap and contradict, it reminded me of Peter and Paul rambling off their ludicrous and clichéd motivations for their actions in the Funny Games remake. Both seemed to me an attack on simplistic causal motivations for evil characters in Hollywood, each film arguing that such manifestations of evil need no explanation—they simply exist.

While both the Joker and Chigurh benefit from their ambiguities of both origin and motivation, that the Joker explicates his anarchist philosophy so clearly makes him a far more specific, embodied character than Chigurh, but the parallels between all types of pure evil represented in Hollywood movies continue to make fascinating comparisons.

Photo art courtesy of Jack Price

"Seven Dirty Words" Revisited

2008-06-25T20:42:00.001-07:00

Numerous celebrities, journalists, media figures, and lovers of comedy have mourned the death of one of our great comedians, George Carlin. In news media broadcasts reporting his death and paying tribute to the man, he is often identified as best known for his “Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television” bit which was first introduced on a comedy album he released in 1972. Ironically, thirty-six years later, these news broadcasters still can’t repeat those words on television.

Carlin first faced trouble for performing "Seven Dirty Words" in 1972 at a Milwaukee concert, where he was promptly arrested on obscenity charges (he later jokingly called the bit “The Milwaukee Seven”). But the worst of his troubles came when the bit was broadcast on a New York City radio station the following year. Once a man complained about his son hearing the broadcast, the Federal Communications Commission gave a citation to the radio station. The station appealed, leading to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in the FCC’s favor, thus giving the FCC (who are also, of course, responsible for there being “Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television” in the first place) unprecedented authority over the type of material that can be broadcast.

Carlin is often cited along with Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce as part of the triumvirate that every aspiring American standup venerates, and the immediately obvious similarities between these three comedians are not coincidental. These three never solely intended to make people laugh, but to use language in a way to break down social boundaries and comment upon normative, but absurd, social behavior. Often we laugh not just because it’s funny, but because it’s true. And Carlin was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most cunning of linguists and the most gifted of orators. Carlin knew language like no other, and he observed the arbitrary boundaries language barred between certain people. He often achieved miraculous revelations about American culture and society merely by placing words, “dirty” or not, into unexpected contexts. Carlin’s thorough understanding of the English language was, simply put, Shakespearean. And he was an impeccable performer to boot, never once stuttering or slipping over his words, and never faltering from perfect delivery and comic timing.

Often in America we confuse bad words for bad speech, or objectionable content for artistic inferiority. (Not me, but trust me, many people do.) So to complain about the “Seven Dirty Words” bit is not to object to its content, but merely to object to what it immediately contains. For if the man in New York heard the bit for its content, rather than what was on the surface, he would understand the exercise Carlin was attempting to execute, which was to illustrate that these “dirty” words merely hold weight solely because we as a society allow them to.

Words are inherently meaningless. For example, if I use a made-up word to describe my dog continually over time, eventually it will mean “dog” to me the same way any other word describing a dog means to somebody else. Words, then, have no inherent relationship to what they describe, and have also been seen to drastically change meaning over time. Thus, when certain words offend us, it is only because we allow ourselves to be offended. Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” points out, appropriately through humor, how hilariously absurd it is that we allow ourselves to give such words such weight.

Carlin, when talking about the Supreme Court case in later years, stressed the importance of the on/off and channel-changing dial on radios and televisions. If you object to something being broadcast, Carlin argued, show your objection by moving on to something else. No individual should have the power to have something banned simply because they found one potentially offensive broadcast amongst a multitude of options. The notion that the content of all media should appeal to the values of all people is both absurd and impossible. But if the Janet Jackson 2004 SuperBowl scandal is any indication, we Americans would sooner take the effort to pick up our phones and make a complaint rather than simply changing the channel—and this power of the individual gives power to the FCC.

Carlin can never be described as a vulgar comedian, or one that deliberately sought to shock his audiences. He can, however, be described as “profane,” because of the incorporation of profanity into his act. But he never used dirty words for gross-out comedy—his work and his linguistic aims would only be cheapened by giving into the weight of such language by using it to shock an audience. But that “Seven Dirty Words” was created at a time when words could be seen as a challenge to authority, or as a criticism of mainstream American culture, or as a threat to the status quo (as proven by the Supreme Court case) gives it great temporal significance.

I have witnessed adults who are often shocked by the frank depiction of violence, sex, and language in films of the early 1970s. Giving into the conventional “wisdom” that codes of ethics only worsen as time goes on, many are mistaken in thinking these films are tamer than those of today. But these films were made in an era where free speech was safely guarded and utilized to its fullest extent. But rather than depictions of violence, sex, and even profanity in 1970s cinema, I’m surprised most by the very frankness of speech utilized, which give many of these characters remarkable complexity that has hardly an equivalent today. For example, I can not think of a recent movie in which there has been an overtly racist protagonist who was not 100% demonized, yet Best Picture-winner The French Connection (1971) contained just that—not because the spectator is asked to endorse the (shockingly casual) racism of the cops, but in order to realistically depict the racial conflicts of the time that often involved such prejudiced authority figures (furthermore, even FCC-regulated television had Archie Bunker). So the powerful personality of a Carlin and a Pryor (both indebted to Bruce) were necessary to, if nothing else, start a conversation where one was otherwise not taking place.

Ironically enough, “Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television” was broadcast on television…on HBO in 1978 (and even then was accompanied by a disclaimer). But by the late seventies, the culture war had mostly died down, and a new age of religion-fueled conservatism was about to sweep America, one that still wields enormous power in 2008. And while Carlin may have spent the last several decades of his career mostly without threat of censorship or controversy, the lesson of “Seven Dirty Words” is still valuable. We live in an age where words still hold enormous power. And while the seven “dirty” ones may not have the muscle they did in 1972, there are, without a doubt, facets of language that continue to cause barriers in our social interaction. And, as I said before, words evolve. Like in 1972, words like “criticize” or “disagree” have evolved into “disloyal,” and “patriotism” has evolved into “unquestioning support” or “symbolic decoration.” And political correctness, with all its necessary and well-meaning sensitivity, has created a nation averse to having a frank discussion about any real prejudices going on around us.

With the recent death of George Carlin, we must remember that the most frightening and destructive form of censorship is not the FCC, the MPAA, or the government—it is self-censorship.

Rest in Peace. 1937-2008

Database Narrative and the Case of Southland Tales

2008-03-24T22:04:00.000-07:00

When a cult following began to encircle Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko seven years ago, fans took advantage of the story gaps and vague chain of events to expand their own personal interpretation of the story. Did Donnie travel in time to a new dimension in order to reconcile his relationships with those close to him in a way that his untimely death didn’t allow? Is the rabbit the orchestrator of this warp in time and space? Is the “chut up” girl supposed to be God? (believe it or not, I’ve actually heard that last one) These questions resulted in numerous late-night dorm discussions on the metaphysical nature of time, the universe, rabbits, etc., which led an expansive cult network manifested on the Internet, increased DVD sales, and a theatrically re-released “director’s cut.”

Kelly’s follow-up, Southland Tales, attempts to replicate this fanboy attraction to his work via an epically expansive narrative and equally vague (though much more confounding) ideas regarding the repercussions of brief burps in time and space and, not surprisingly, the all-important subject of the apocalypse. The result, however, attempts to be everything and ends up being nothing. It’s an unapproachable combination of Philip K. Dick, Steven Hawking, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), uninformed leftist politics, the information age, and disposable pop culture.

This is because Southland Tales does not even seek to contain, within the film itself, the entire scope of the story being told. Southland Tales is so packed full of half-executed plot points that it can’t possibly be read on its own—one is required and expected to do their research on the Internet before and after viewing the film in order to fully comprehend its narrative. An expansive multimedia network was developed for Southland Tales before its release (aimed for the media-savvy young audience that appreciated Kelly’s first film) including a three-part comic book series (the film, perhaps nostalgic of Star Wars, encompasses parts 4, 5, and 6 of the overall story—the first three parts are introduced in separate comics) and what was sought to become a complex web experience on the film’s website that never saw fruition because of the film’s infamously bad reception at Cannes and dismal commercial performance at the box office. Thus, most of the potential audience was denied the extrafilmic information needed to fully comprehend its story before Southland Tales was theatrically released.

Southland Tales asks more from its audience than many films do (or should). But Kelly’s film is not the first to create a multimedia narrative to inform a film franchise. The Matrix sequels all but mandated the audience to immerse themselves in the extra information provided on DVDs, the Internet, and video games in order to fully comprehend the series. For example, anybody who did their research by watching The Animatrix before The Matrix Reloaded knew the important origin of the weasely teenager (The Kid) that Neo interacts with at the beginning of the film, but all others were lost in the dark. The recent Cloverfield built such an expansive alternate universe on the Internet that it was difficult for many to discern which websites were intentionally part of the film and which weren’t.

However, the narrative of a single film cannot possibly be expected to contain all the information that an infinite web-based universe can, so the resulting films built with so much multimedia effort and hype could not help but be disappointing in the end. Many were let down to find that, at its core, Cloverfield was simply a typical monster movie with fresh new packaging (unlike the web pages, nobody is returning to the movie itself to gather more knowledge—it made more than half its gross opening weekend). Also, The Matrix Revolutions ended the trilogy with a whimper, not a bang, when the fulfillment of Neo’s prophecy looked relatively simplistic in contrast to the complex theories built by collective fans on the web.

(shameless plug: for further readings on this subject, check out chapter three of Henry Jenkins’ fantastic book, Convergence Culture, or check out his blog)

My experience of Southland Tales oscillated between brief stints of entertained exhilaration at its unapologetically inflated style and narrative, and annoyed bewilderment at its overflowing bombardment of information. Even when ignoring the extra media necessary for experiencing Southland Tales, the film itself is jam-packed with information in each segment of each frame, but virtually nothing signals us as to what is most essential to comprehend. Southland Tales refuses to let the frame capture merely one image at a time, but is itself segmented into many frames: the film’s prologue which introduces the its setting shows several screens and events all at the same time, and most characters inexplicably have their televisions on and laptops open at all times. Audio elements overlap as many voices are heard simultaneously (from characters and media in the scenes); sometimes dialogue seems to come from no particular source, and characters utter befuddling single words that feign significance but ultimately fall short.

Even the tattoos on The Rock—I’m sorry, Dwayne Johnson—present themselves as important symbols (anything from Jesus to Japanese characters) that the audience is assigned to pick up and interpret. In watching this film, I felt like I was sitting in the same chair as Miranda Richardson’s character, watching eight surveillance screens at once and attempting desperately to comprehend them all.

The result is the same as several other films that go to great lengths to expand their narrative to a multimedia universe: what we get is not a film, but a vast series of ideas limited to a typical filmic running time. These ideas are often interesting, but they rarely to come together in a cohesive film. Without attempting to comprehend Southland’s outer universe, the film as it stands alone looks like something that tried to be many things, but couldn’t decide exactly which one it wanted to be. We don’t get a narrative—we get a database with which to pick and choose our own semblance of a narrative.

From the perspective of a film analyst, the result of this task is often disappointing, because the exhausting amount of information accumulated that is necessary to comprehend the overall storyline serves only the film and limited within the film itself. One would think this methodically delivered, seemingly important information would eventually lead to some sort of astounding revelation, but in the end, they only serve a story made up by one or two people who are no smarter than you and me. Just because a movie is expansive does not mean it is complex or significant. In the end, these complicated multimedia exercises say nothing about “real life”—they rarely reveal themselves to be grand allegorical commentaries of society at large. Maybe I’m an idealist or a killjoy, but I can’t help but feel disappointed when all this effort is put into something that, in the end, has no practical significance.

These movies say and do a lot to engage their audience, but rarely do they ultimately “mean” anything. Yet there are numberless movies released each year—that “stand alone” as movies—which have plenty to say about social discourse and the human condition. But database narratives, by contrast, adorn the guise of significance through the importance put on its homework, but the network of various media needed to comprehend the film can’t help but be revealed as merely a new marketing tool. As a result, any semblance of meaning is dumbed down to the immediate needs of the ever-expanding narrative structure. The Matrix was embedded with theological undertones, but these were inevitably revealed as superficial plot devices rather than statements of modern spirituality. Even the overt political landscape of Southland Tales (which seems to think of itself as a postmodern 1984) is merely a setting for science fiction fantasy, not a revealing satire, and its politics are as ill informed as its characters involved with them.

Thus, information that would be essential to the plot of a traditional film is reduced to one superfluous fact among many. In a Q&A with Creative Screenwriting Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Jeff Goldsmith, when asked if the apocalypse inferentially occurs after the film’s closing credits, Richard Kelly forwardly asks Goldsmith, as if it were plainly clear, “Did you see the tidal wave?” Goldsmith: “The what?” Kelly: “There was a tidal wave behind Justin Timberlake’s character while he was dancing.” Goldsmith: “Oh…nope, I didn’t see it.” The tidal wave, which one would think would be essential to understanding the film’s ending, becomes obscured as one detail within in a frame cluttered with details. Thus, the important facts are not delineated from the disposable ones. And obscurity does not equal complexity—just because it’s difficult to understand your movie doesn’t mean it’s smart. I for one did not see the tidal wave, and I probably won’t go back and look for it, because I know the reward for my effort will not make the film any clearer or more enjoyable.

Such database narratives have sometimes been heralded as the future of fiction cinema, a way to complement our culture of increasing transmedia immersion and information overload within our typical modes of entertainment. But, at least at this point, filmmakers must find a way to sustain their films on their own merit while simultaneously expanding their universe elsewhere. These new forms of narrative experience must make the other media outlets both essential and optional (superfluous?) at the same time in order to work. The homework must not be forced upon the spectator, but an outlet for possible rewards for the more determined fan. Kelly and the Wachowskis must remember that Donnie Darko and The Matrix drew audiences in before their narrative expanded into a multimedia universe, not the other way around.

Database narratives seem to work better on television than in the movies. Lost has been incredibly successful in molding its engaging narrative through audience interpretation of the vast amounts of information given on the show (but when this same team used a similar informational network to bring Cloverfield for the big screens, the result was simply not the same). The framework of Lost has required fans both on the Internet and by the watercooler to keep fresh on the task of uncovering the show’s many mysteries among the vast amounts of given information. (Lostpedia is evidence of just how great this following is, and how seriously they take the show.) Lost is the perfect prototype for television in the era of TiVo, TV on DVD, and Internet exhibition—its viewers benefit in attaining a greater understanding of the show’s narrative universe with the rewind and pause button.

Yet even Lost has suffered repercussions from diving headfirst into this new world of storytelling: many fans, annoyed by a consistent lack of resolution to many of the show’s mysteries, have abandoned it, feeling the writers have no great secret to reveal that will reward them for their efforts (one journalist said Lost forces us to “go down a rabbit hole with no rabbit”). As a result of losing about three million viewers since the its first season, ABC has made a habit of airing reruns with captions that serve as filler to update viewers of certain important facts, and even approaching the impossible task of informing brand new viewers the complexities of the story’s vast cobweb of information. Loyal viewers of Lost (such as myself) view this new “pop-up video” format as doing the homework that viewers were originally asked to do, and making clear connections that were originally intended to be interpreted by such fans, thereby dumbing down the task assigned that made Lost so engaging in the first place.

Even in its perfect model, database narrative still has, and will continue to have, its limits.

Haneke's Funny Games

2008-03-24T21:18:00.001-07:00

My emotions and intellect received a shocking jolt the first time I saw Michael haneke's Funny Games (1997). I knew nothing about the film going in, so I was understandably unprepared for the twisted games that were about to be played with my set of expectations. Naturally, I empathized, or at least sided with, the stereotypical bourgeois family, as they were (physically and psychologically) tormented by a pair of relentless young sadists who (as sadists tend to do) take pleasure in the family’s pain (and this very act was their only semblance of motivation). Even when the instigator, Paul, begins breaking the fourth wall—first with a simple look and later with blatant verbal address to the spectator—and the “game” is revealed to be Haneke’s game with us, I still naively desired to see the family overcome this villainous pair. Alas, Haneke’s broad intellectual exercise never faltered or gave in, and the family’s demise was the only clear trajectory for this film to head.

I had known Haneke by this point only by the far subtler Cache (2005), which in itself had one shocking moment that could have easily transposed for a number of moments in Funny Games. However, as I have become more familiar with his work (The Piano Teacher (2001), Code Unknown (2000), Time of the Wolf (2003)), it became evident that ambiguity and endings without closure were a deliberate and essential part to Haneke’s style.

Funny Games, however, stands in stark contrast to these other films because of the comparatively “obvious” way in which the film conveys its meaning. It still contains Haneke’s typically deliberate ambiguity (the boys are given no origin or motivation for their actions) and the ending brings no “satisfying” narrative closure (the boys, after killing the whole family, go onto play further games with other families, thus there is no significance to why this particular family is the one we watch), but Funny Games also seems to have very little subtext compared to his more restrained efforts. It becomes evident by the film’s end that it was not “about” the family or the boys, but was simply the filmmaker’s meta-textual exercise in deliberately subverting the normative audience expectations conditioned by Hollywood cinema (the protagonists do not win; in fact, they are helpless throughout), thereby making the spectator aware of those conditions. It is a commendable exercise—it tries to expand the possibilities of narrative by making us aware of the redundancy and similarity of so many films by breaking the “rules” that those films usually ascribe to. However, because of this deliberate approach, Funny Games is never more than an exercise—never a “film” in any traditional sense. It does not stand on its own within its narrative framework. It only “works” once the spectator understands its true intention.

Hanake has made clear his disdain for the “rules” that Hollywood (or simply “American cinema”) has created. He sees all his films as attempting to usurp these expectations and thus expand narrative filmmaking as an art form (Code Unknown does this by showing us only the scenes of a series of incidents that do not directly relate to the “narrative”—we see everything between the inciting incidents or “main events”). Yet Funny Games is his only film that seems to aim simply to subvert those expectations, and achieve nothing more. The rest of his canon, by contrast, have self-containing narratives, no matter how unconventional or ambiguous they may be.

Ten years later, Haneke has remade Funny Games shot-for-shot in English, with English-speaking movie stars. While many pondered, baffled, over why the hell Haneke would do this, I was ecstatic by the news of this remake. Haneke, after all, is not making a shot-for-shot remake of an American classic (like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998)), but a film most Americans aren’t familiar with. Haneke has defended his most recent film in the context that the original Funny Games (made in the filmmaker’s home country of Austria) was always an “American” film because it sought to subvert those very expectations created by mainstream American filmmaking. Thus, the Funny Games remake seeks to attract a typical American audience and give them a discomfiting shock to their senses (as I experienced with the first film). In this context, it’s not hard to imagine that, had the new Funny Games opened in wide release to packed houses, and all ticketbuyers left the film an infuriated mob, Haneke would be satisfied that his film achieved exactly what it sought to (and whatever exec at Warner Independent thought this was a good idea obviously has a huge respect for real talent, but s/he is a dumb, dumb businessperson).

And what a perfect time to release this in America! Funny Games aims to interrogate the way in which American spectators equate violence with entertainment, and many critics have pointed out the appropriate timing of imposing such an exercise during the tail end of a surge of nihilistic “torture porn” horror films. In fact, a trailer made for MTV.com edits the original trailer to make the film look like a torture porn horror flick (thereby “tricking” the ideal audience into the theaters) Needless to say, I eagerly awaited the release of Funny Games. I felt like I was inside on the joke, with Haneke, regarding the prank he was about to pull on the audiences, and I could be there, separated from the typical spectator who knows not what they are about to get into, and laugh hysterically alongside the filmmaker as angry audiences left the theaters.

But, as a friend of mine noted, Funny Games opened in limited release, thus sought out the “elite” NY/LA audiences that would most likely already be familiar with Haneke’s work. And in seeing the remake, I realized a glaring contradiction in Haneke’s rebooted exercise: if his intention is to subvert audience expectations by making a shot-for-shot remake of a film that subverted audience expectations, isn’t he merely delivering on exactly what audiences expect? Once one succeeds in changing audience expectations, they cannot be subverted by repeating the process in the exact same way.

Knowing exactly what is going to happen takes all the wind out of Haneke’s exercise. The result loses its shock value, as the alternative now becomes the conditioned norm, and process becomes not weighty and engaging, but redundant and even (I hate to say it) boring. I became numb to it all, as if I were an hour into seeing the gratuitous violence and gore of a torture porn: I just didn’t care anymore, and was biding my time until it was all over with.

If you know what you’re getting into, the film is devalued as a cinematic experience, yet it still carries some intellectual meaning, and I made some observations I didn’t realize the first time I saw the original. Here are some things I felt Haneke was trying to say:

1) When the son receives a bag over his head and the mother is forced to strip naked, yet the son has been allowed to witness the brutally violent attacks on his father and mother, the bag over his head works as an analogy of practices in American film censorship: violence is predetermined as more acceptable than simple nudity. Also, the notion that he needs to be censored from seeing his mother naked as not to disturb him, while he has already been exposed to several scarring incidents involving his family, is absurd; likewise, film censorship (the enforced ratings system) cannot successfully shield youth from potentially offensive material that is pervasive in all other forms of media, notably violence (this concept becomes evident when the son’s death results in blood on the television: the unavoidable nature of pervasive media violence). When the father urges the Paul and Peter to keep their language toned down in front of their son, it comes off as ridiculous, even comical, that the father would be worried of his son hearing some bad words after he has been involved with several incidents that would inevitably scar him for life.

2) The use of music in the film is sparse, but important. We are introduced to the family as they drive to their summer home, and the father and mother listen to classical music and categorize it according to year, composer, composition, etc. But this is interrupted with jarring heavy metal music, the type that goes beyond categorization and normal expectations on what “music” is supposed to be. This introduction is analogous to the film itself, as it aims to structure itself beyond the categorization ascribed to and conditioned by typical mainstream narrative filmmaking (I should note that I was not the first one to make this observation—it comes from separate writings by film scholars Brian Price and Christopher Sharrett). But when Peter (for no apparent reason) plays this same heavy metal music on the stereo as he hunts down the son, it is one of many ways in which Haneke shows that these two villains are in full control of where the narrative goes, as this music shapes the exercise they are taking part in (this becomes most evident when Peter takes a remote and rewinds the very film we have been watching).

Okay, observational tangent over.

I don’t speak German, so the language barrier of the Austrian original was essential to my experience of the first incarnation of this exercise. So when the original Peter addressed the audience, it broke the fourth wall, but did not remove me from the film (as it was intended to do), for the direct address was not as direct because I received it through subtitles. I don’t watch foreign films the same way I watch films of my own country. They often don’t abide by American “rules,” so I approach them with a different set of expectations (Haneke’s assertion that Funny Games was always “American” is now understandable). Thus, I was able to be fully engaged with the original Funny Games throughout, and therefore shocked throughout. But, in English, this direct address did take me out of the film. It made Haneke’s exercise all too evident, and thus I was not able to be engaged—and therefore, not able to be shocked—by it, because I suddenly found myself in the same objective position as Haneke himself (I noticed one minor difference between this and the original film is that Peter did not remind us of the film’s running time—no idea why).

It seems that after creating the deliberate schism between audience and screen, Haneke allows us to once again immerse ourselves in the film when the two young villains temporarily leave. In a hardly forgettable (in both versions) ten-minute long take of father and mother attempting to recuperate and escape while they have time, Haneke uses the uninterrupted nature of this shot to immerse us back into the illusion of reality, or suspense of disbelief, with which we experience most of film. Yet, even in the school of long takes, ten minutes seems mighty excessive for a scene in which relatively little “happens.” Thus, Haneke is not drawing us back into the film, but making us aware of the lack of temporal ellipsis that would normally be the form of such a sequence. Haneke refuses to let the cut spare us from the devastating helplessness and (simultaneously, by contrast) banality of the parents’ recuperation. As this sequence unfolds in real time, the mother and father do not plan a daring escape, but waste most of their brief window of freedom trying to blowdry a drowned cellphone back to life. After several minutes of this, father finally says, “We’re wasting time,” and even this takes on self-referential significance, as Haneke seems to deliberately be wasting the spectator’s time. Although this sequence may be a more “realistic” portrayal of this highly improbable situation, its meaninglessness becomes evident as one of Haneke’s less obvious “games.”

At this point, it felt like Haneke (a director I greatly admire) had taken several steps back in the intellectual (though self-righteous and pretentious) movement forward in his career as a filmic artist. As previously stated, his filmography since the original Funny Games has been a diverse, fascinating array of films that reveal engaging, original narratives while simultaneously subverting and expanding traditional rules of narrative. Cache, in particular, addresses some of the same issues of spectatorship as Funny Games (why do we watch? What are the repercussions of watching?), but through the fully realized, engrossing story of an anonymous spectator who sends the family tapes of uninterrupted surveillance of their house. The film works in two ways: 1) as an engaging, though very unconventional thriller, and 2) as an exercise interrogating the nature of watching movies. Why, then, did Haneke decide to remake a film that only achieves the latter goal?

The best way to subvert audience expectations is to not be so overt about it, to contain it within a seemingly traditional narrative structure. Take No Country for Old Men, for example. It’s not near as radically rebellious as Funny Games, and I argue it benefits for it. No Country seems to be a typical action thriller, a cat-and-mouse game of suspense between hunter and hunted. Yet it gives us an ending (one that infuriated many) that only thematically (not pragmatically) resolves everything that came before—the bad guy gets away, the good guys die (unheroically, off-screen) or retire, and there is relatively little closure.

Likewise, Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh is a remarkably similar villain to the young pair of home invaders in Haneke’s film. Chigurh shares with Haneke’s villains a deliberately ambiguous origin, an unclear motivation for the actions that propel the film (or at least a motivation that runs counter to narrative norms and stereotypes—Chigurgh’s “principles” are just as alien as Paul and Peter’s justification for their actions, which makes their lack of clarity clear when they rattle off obviously inapplicable—yet common, even stereotypical—motivations for villains in mainstream films), and, most importantly, an almost superhuman ability to control the events of the narrative. Both these film’s villains leave the narrative similarly as they entered: going about their filmic world with the will and ability to do what they want when they want to, with little obstacle. Chigurh’s casual escape from a devastating car wreck (that, if this were another movie, would have killed him) can be seen as analogous to Paul’s rewinding of Funny Games to revive Peter from a fatal gunshot wound: these villains are not meant to be three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood “characters” in the traditional sense, but symbols executed within the form of character to serve the film’s thematic need and inform the trajectory of the narrative. In a less obvious way, Chigurh is just as responsible for the subversion of narrative expectations in the film’s atypical ending as Paul and Peter are responsible for the same type of subversion throughout Funny Games.

I recently witnessed a close family member watching No Country for the first time, on the edge of his seat with an engagement in the story that I haven’t seen in his character for quite some time. Then he gave a loud, disappointed scoff once the end credits unexpectedly rolled. Another family member asked him, “What happened?” “Nothing!” he exclaimed in disgust. It’s as if this ending prompted him to forget his enjoyment of or engagement with the past two ours—he left the experience as if it never happened.

This is far closer to the reaction Haneke intended to get with the Funny Games remake (and arguably didn’t get): engagement let down by disgust/disappointment at the conclusion, or an angry ticket buyer leaving the theater. While it’s certainly true that many spectators came away from No Country with varying interpretations of/reactions to its controversial ending, these intense reactions have the potential to start a discourse with what we expect from films, thereby potentially expanding our narrative expectations beyond the “rules” dictated by Hollywood, just as much as they have the potential to divide audiences.

So maybe Haneke’s exercise didn’t work because other films are achieving the same end without merely being an “exercise,” including his own.

In an interesting twist, Ron Howard has expressed interest in remaking Haneke’s Cache, and enhancing its generic thriller aspect to appeal to American audiences (and will no doubt have a more conventional ending). I’m sure Haneke reacted to the idea gleefully imagining the Hollywood bastardization of his complex olriginal film that is to come. After all, Haneke wouldn’t have a career in breaking the rules if he didn’t take part in making sure they were still in place.

(Here are a couple of humorous postcards relevant to this post that a friend shared with me—they also take my uber-serious approach to movies down a peg or two.)

On Lists: A Case Against the Oscars

2008-03-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

My stance against the Oscars is not exclusive to this one awards show, but the general way in which film is categorized and appreciated in mainstream culture. Too often do we rate or judge films in terms of lists, and how they stack up against one another therein becomes very problematic. When lists are used for diversion on blogs such as these (like top 10 80s John Cusack Movies), they can be an entertaining time-waster. But when such lists go beyond this triviality and self-awareness into the ways we appreciate films at large, there is little left to be desired. That all major critics are expected to release a “Top 10” list each year, and every major media ceremony chooses a “best” from a category of five or so nominees illuminates this preoccupation with lists when evaluating film. Perhaps the most arbitrary lists are the painful Top 100s AFI expands on each year.

What is fundamentally wrong with lists is that by their nature they will inevitably have to exclude something significant. Very few major lists (top 10 of the year, top 100 ever, a category of nominations) exist without a notable exclusion or sacrifice in order to conform to a preconditioned number of options. Yet numbers divisible by 5 (5, 10, 100) are just as arbitrary a number with which to categorize a list than any other. So why is this practice of conforming to the structure of the list more important than potentially excluding information that deserves to belong on that list? If there were eleven great movies this year, why not list those, and in no particular ranking? If there were four great supporting performances, why “fill out” a category with a fifth?

Another problem with lists is that they force meaningless comparison. The victor of an award, or the more prestigious numbered positions on a list, simply hold significance for their designated place among other options, but this delineation does not necessarily prove any sort of superiority amongst the rest. This year’s Best Picture nominees consisted of a wild array of genres and filmic approaches (narrative, stylistic, etc), yet we are expected to judge one as superior above them all. But how does one go about comparing There Will Be Blood to Juno? No Country For Old Men was deemed the best film of the year—but was it the best comedy of the year, or romance of the year, or most complex portrayal of women of the year? Of course not. This movie was good upon the merits it set out to achieve, so how is it that we compare films that seek to achieve totally different responses, affects, and thematic goals? Yet the term “Best Picture” suggests something all-encompassing. Does this mean the other films are somehow inferior? Of course not. Yet the aura of the award or the no. 1 position suggests this.

This is why young people who see Citizen Kane are so often disappointed, because a film promoted as the “No. 1 Best Film of All Time” implicitly succeeds in all areas a film conceivably could. But Citizen Kane clearly doesn’t do this, and instead simply tells its own specific story the best way it could. I don’t understand how one could simply place it in a ranking that states it is slightly better than Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, and The Godfather. Films should be judged on their own merit, not on the merit of other films.

As this year’s Golden Globe “press conference” showed, once the glitz and glamour and falsely entitled sense of importance is stripped away from these award ceremonies, their total lack of value becomes evident. If the writers’ strike had kept the Oscars from happening, the trivial nature of the whole enterprise could have been revealed. Maybe the descending ratings will eventually destroy the need for such a ridiculous ceremony, and then films can be properly evaluated on their own instead of engaging in a political pissing contest in order to achieve some sort of meaningless ranking.

Nothing I’ve said is new. It’s not like the Academy Awards have had a great track record of recognizing works of film that have truly held significance over time. The awards allotted would be far more accurate if the best film of 2007 was named twenty years from now. Maybe if Martin Scorsese or Al Pacino won awards when they actually deserved them, or if Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, or Cary Grant ever won a significant Oscar in their careers, then this arbitrary categorization would have some symbolic semblance of respectability, possibly even reflecting as close as one could get of an active judgment of artistic merit (after all, this is not a science).

Instead, it mirrors the current Democratic race for the presidency in that it becomes not about the quality of those involved, but whoever has the most votes. But in the race to elect one work of art as superior to another, I’ll stay apathetic.

On "Indies": A Case For the Oscars

2008-03-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

Even though I’m about a month late, I thought it’d be interesting to make two entries back-to-back that I’ve desired to make for a while: one in favor of the Academy Awards, and one against.

I still find the Oscar ceremony incredibly unnecessary; in fact, it’s an overblown, self-righteous, even hypocritically superficial display of the rich, famous, and beautiful patting themselves on the back (case in point: Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio’s announcement at last year’s ceremony that the “Oscars are going green”—but aren’t these award shows some of the most unnecessary and wasteful uses of energy sources?) Furthermore, as most film fans know (and as I will argue in the following entry), the Oscars have a terrible track record. Time shows that they lavish awards on the forgettable and ignore the iconic. That being said, I still get into it, and I haven’t missed a show in ten years.

But perhaps you’ve heard that the 80th Annual Academy Awards was one of the lowest rated ceremonies in recent history. Journalists from Newsweek and Time noted beforehand the increasing trend of the Oscars recognizing independent films more often than high-grossing studio fare—one writer even said the nominees look almost exactly the same as the Independent Spirit Awards. Perhaps you’ve seen this trend in your own home when you’ve watched the broadcast with a friend or family member who exclaimed, “I’ve never heard of any of these movies!” (as if their level of familiarity were some sort of litmus test of legitimization). But the lack of broad awareness of these films outside of middle America has been credited as a large part of the declining popularity of the broadcasts for the past several years—the glitz and glamour can only bring in so many million people.

One journalist argued in an editorial that I read in an airport (and unfortunately couldn’t find online—sorry, guys…it was either in Newsweek or Time) that the Oscars should start a policy of only honoring Hollywood movies (therefore, only the movies most Americans are familiar with) and leave the indies for the other award shows. He harks back to the Oscars of the 80s and 90s, when popular “Hollywood” fare like Chariots of Fire (1981), Terms of Endearment (1983), Out of Africa (1985), Rain Man (1988), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Forrest Gump (1994), and Titanic (1997) took home the gold (I notice he chooses to omit the comparatively “artsy” and “obscure” The Last Emperor (1987)). He viewed this recent history as a time of consensus between audience and the Academy; the “crowd pleasers” were also the “Award winners”.

Yet this model hasn’t changed radically within the last few years, as many recent Best Picture-winners have also been some of the highest-grossing movies of their respective years. With the recent exceptions of No Country for Old Men and Crash, no Best Picture-winner of the 21st century has made less than $100 million. However, this author most likely speaks not exclusively of the winners, but the heightening presence of “indies” among the overall nominees.

This journalist naively writes as if the independent and studio movies were mutually exclusive (and mistakenly lumps foreign-language films into the “indie” category as well). But most highly recognized “independents” are not truly independent, and this journalist fundamentally ignores the new business model of 21st century studio filmmaking that has had this affect the Academy Awards, in which the dividing line between studios and indies are being increasingly blurred.

1) Most of these “indies” are made by the studios themselves. It is well known that the studios use subsidiary companies under their name to finance and purchase works that appeal to a highbrow or niche market. Paramount Vantage, Fox Searchlight, and Focus Features all had Best Picture nominees this year—none of which were financed independently. Thus, “independent” is more a label than an actual business practice. Take two Best Picture nominees from the past two years from Fox Searchlight—Juno and Little Miss Sunshine. Both opened in limited release and generated buzz to become (supposedly) unexpected sleeper hits; both have ensemble casts of recognizable character actors and even bankable stars (Jennifer Garner, Steve Carrell); and both were marketed as “quirky” indie comedies. Yet Little Miss Sunshine was independently financed and purchased at Sundance—Juno, by contrast, was studio-financed from the purchase of the script throughout casting, production, and marketing. Juno is simply an “indie” by the label tacked on it by the advertising and the logo of the subsidiary company.

2) “Indie” movies aren’t, by their nature, mutually exclusive from audience-pleasing box office success stories. The highest-grossing Best Picture nominee this year was Juno, which even outgrossed many of the studios’ promising franchises (Rush Hour 3, Live Free or Die Hard, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ocean’s Thirteen). The only studio movie to be nominated in the Best Picture category this year was Michael Clayton, which was outgrossed by fellow nominees Atonement, No Country, and Juno. Thus, excluding the Oscar nominees to only movies released by a major studio label does not necessarily mean a greater audience familiarity with the films involved.

3) Indie movies that get recognized by the Oscars are usually “legitimized” by something involved that is familiar or bankable to a potentially large audience. As illustrated with Little Miss Sunshine and Juno, many of these movies have familiar stars. Several recent “indie” nominees, like Babel, Brokeback Mountain, and Good Night, and Good Luck have also benefited from significant star power. Others, like There Will Be Blood or No Country, have been made by filmmakers who have had a consistent presence at the Academy Awards in years past. The Academy hardly ever recognizes the truly independent movies made with no stars, first-time filmmakers, and shoestring budgets (can you imagine a mumblecore film ever getting an Oscar nomination?). Oscar-friendly “indies” are remarkably similar to mainstream fare not only in production process, but in style, content, and bigwigs involved.

4) The studios purposefully release their “prestige” movies through these subsidiaries so the major studio arms can focus on franchises and films with huge audience appeal. If you’re looking for “Oscar-worthy” material solely through films released by major studios in the last 25 years, you’ll see a significant decline in “quality” filmmaking (ie. potential Oscar material). If you look at the top 20 highest-grossing movies this year, nine of them are part of franchises, and five are adapted from a famous book/comic book/TV show with a built-in audience. Unless anybody feels that Transformers or Alvin and the Chipmunks didn’t receive enough Oscar recognition, it’s evident that the division between popular taste and “prestige” taste is the result of the studios segregating their movies with award potential to the subsidiary arm, and the movies with a potential mass audience to the major label. In other words, if Out of Africa or Terms of Endearment were released today, they would have been released through a subsidiary studio and put in limited release to gain award buzz rather than set alongside wide releases of popular films.

The studios seem not to trust their prestige movies to mass audiences anymore, and possibly for good reason: as previously stated, the one film released by a studio to gain significant Oscar attention was Michael Clayton (which many credited as a nostalgic hark back to the days when “smart” films for “adult” audiences were made regularly by studios), a movie that hardly made a peep amongst its opening weekend box office competition. The studios have dictated popular taste and have all but completely excluded it to films with sequel/franchise potential.

So how is this a “defense” of the Oscars? Well, the Academy Awards ceremony is (usually) the second most-watched network television event of the year (behind the Super Bowl), so this ceremony provides a major chance for these “indies” (which often play only in large cities, at least initially) to gain a larger audience—and they often do, as receipts usually go up the week following the broadcast. Though these movies aren’t truly “indies,” this annual pat-on-the-back the movie industry gives itself each year is perhaps the last bastion of hope for prestige entertainment to compete with the studios’ usual output. Sometimes this gives several films that have huge obstacles in reaching a significant American audience to do so—like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Persepolis.

So if the networks are complaining that the Oscars aren’t gaining enough viewership because of the increasing marginality of the movies nominated, I have a rational solution: the networks should tell their neighboring studio friends (after all, they are all owned by the same people and operate through the same money flowing between them) to release their prestige fare wide and market them to compete against the typical franchises. Therefore, a) more people will be more familiar with the yearly output movies with award potential, thereby raising the ratings of the next Oscar broadcast, b) studios may see a financial incentive to make “good” films in competition with franchises, and therefore may compete with quality films not just to garner the most awards, but to gain box office receipts as well, and c) if all works out, we all benefit by gaining a better variety of movies indended for a diverse array audiences (niche and mass) at our local multiplex.

Because the idea of the alternative—an Oscar ceremony that only honors major studio work because the “indies” somehow aren’t “worthy” to stand alongside popular entertainment—is simply too much to bear.

And this year’s Best Supporting Actor is…Optimus Prime!

The Offensive Diva Drama Queen, OR: Why Julie Christie Should Not Win the Best Actress Academy Award

2008-02-06T22:32:00.000-08:00

Sarah Polley’s Away From Her is one of the most overlooked films of 2007. This Canadian indie has been heralded as being one of the most honest, sugar-free portrayals of Alzheimer’s disease ever to hit the screen. It chronicles how the illness slowly deteriorates a woman’s mind to the point that she can no longer live at home, and demonstrates how this transition leaves her husband emotionally devastated. It’s basically the anti-Notebook. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve probably at least heard about all the praise being thrown at Julie Christie.

The Academy has had an annoying trend of giving the Best Actress Oscar to beautiful, young movie stars who simply ugly themselves up and mug a little dark emotion in their vanity projects (ie. Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman’s nose). This hasn't been helped by the movie industry's frustrating lack of good leading roles available for women. While the Best Supporting Actress category has consistently recognized a good balance of diverse, even offbeat performances from an interesting variety of women (this year probably more so than most), the Best Actress category seems to most often go to the movie stars (Reese Witherspoon, Julia Roberts). So, when I saw Away From Her several months ago (well before all the awards hype), I thought, finally, a good performance that serves the film instead of the actress, and by an elderly woman well past her height of stardom no less. Julie Christie certainly deserves recognition for this.

Then I saw her acceptance speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.*

(*I should have posted this sooner after the awards show when it was fresher on everyone’s mind. Copy this URL and fast-forward to 2:45 to see a snippet of this egregious display:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=l1gRswQRwJo)

Julie Christie’s speech was such a disgusting display of pomposity that she should be prevented by any means necessary from receiving an Academy Award.

First of all, once she heard her name, without missing a beat, she pulls out her acceptance speech from her purse and strolls up to the podium without an inkling of gratitude (as you can see in the link). She obviously came prepared, knowing she deserved the award as much as the SAG did. You’re an actress, Julie, can’t you at least “act” humble or surprised?

She then proceeds to pay lip service to the SAG and the ongoing WGA strike by declaring how wonderful unions are. It’s a nice thing to say, I guess, but it doesn’t sound the least bit sincere. Her superficial social consciousness seems to exist solely to garner more applause. It’s like when you hear Bono talk about starving children in Africa—you know it needs to be said, but you wish it wasn’t being said by such a douchebag public personality. Also, I’m sorry, but seeing a bunch of wealthy actors and filmmakers cheer for unions just feels unsettling. Unions weren’t made for these types; they were made for blue-collar, below-the-line, “little” people—not Julie Christie.

She then says, “My thanks to Sarah [Polley] for putting the wonderful words in my mouth…with her dialogue.” I can’t believe she wrote her speech down and came up with this gem of a sentence.

Finally, Julie Christie ends her speech by saying, “If I forgot to thank anybody else, let’s just say I’m still in character.” Wow. So you give one of the most subtle, respectful portrayals of a debilitating disease and show your appreciation for an award recognizing your performance by…making a cheap Alzheimer’s joke? She’s managed to completely undercut everything she did to get to this point with one stupid (and, not to mention, incredibly insensitive) quip.

This alone should make any Academy member with an empathetic soul steer clear from giving this ungrateful, nauseatingly superficial diva an Academy Award. She already has one anyway for a film she made over forty years ago (John Schlesinger’s Darling), so it’s not like we’re making up for lost time with an unawarded veteran (like Peter O’Toole, poor guy). And not that shenanigans that happen outside a film or performance should affect that person’s eligibility to win a deserved award (for example, there was certainly an aura of relief when Polanski’s statutory rape charge didn’t prevent him from winning his well-deserved Best Director Award for The Pianist five years ago). But that Julie Christie gave such a despicable, disgusting display of shameless self-aggrandization at one awards ceremony doesn’t mean she won’t do it again.

Please, Academy, give the Oscar to somebody who will truly appreciate it. How about the pregnant girl with the quirky dialogue?

There Will Be Kubrick: Part Deux

2008-02-06T22:15:00.000-08:00

I saw There Will Be Blood a second time, and I must say it was a completely different experience than my first viewing. I saw it on a huge screen in Los Angeles with top quality sound and a respectful, quiet audience—much unlike the smaller screens that are so common here in Manhattan (the absence undergraduate film students who reacted to the film a little too enthusiastically didn’t hurt either).

Anyway, this should go to show that the conditions with which one experiences a film figures greatly in the viewer’s reception of it. For instance, the little screen in New York did not seem to do justice to the wide aspect ratio of There Will Be Blood, and a respectful and quiet audience is vital for a viewer to get lost in a cinematic experience. And while I try to view most films knowing as little plot information as possible, my inevitable set of expectations going into a film are certainly a deciding factor in my reaction when I walk out of the theater. In the case of There Will Be Blood (as I articulated in the previous post), my expectations were high, as the film was being promoted as an extension of Citizen Kane and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. What I got instead was something odd, dark, self-aware, engrossing, but slightly befuddling. On second viewing of course, I knew exactly what to expect.

This time, for some reason, Johnny Greenwood’s score did not foreground the visuals, but complemented them. The narrative seemed not a string of random episodes, but a logical continuation of a narrative cataloguing one man’s insatiable greed. The ending seemed no longer like a punchline, but an appropriate end to the story of how a man set out to achieve his goal while bulldozing over any obstacle with exponentially decreasing business propriety and an absent moral compass (though I still don’t see TWBB as a narrative of “descent” from idealism to corruption a la Citizen Kane). Most importantly, There Will Be Blood actually engrossed me into the cinematic space within the four corners of the rectangular screen—as a film with such meditative atmosphere should—giving me little awareness of formal properties (cinematography, music) or extratextual references (Kubrick) that distracted me before.

This is not to say that I take back what I said in my previous post. I still believe fully that P. T. Anderson utilizes the history of movies past for his own cinematic experiments (though he ultimately creates something original from them); I still believe fully that he makes movies for movie people, and There Will Be Blood in particular benefits from the work of Kubrick, namely 2001. This time, however, like 2001, I was able to engross myself in an a hypnotic audiovisual experience. I could finally “lose” myself in the film.

I watched Boogie Nights the same night of my re-viewing of There Will Be Blood. In regard to critics’ assertions that the latter film is a more “mature” evolution in Anderson’s filmography, they are correct in the most literal sense. The writer/director was only 27 years old when Boogie Nights was released, and the film—as masterful as it is—looks and feels like something made by somebody in their twenties. Anderson, almost too self-aware of his filmmaking skills, seems to be excitedly playing with the utilities of the medium, but has not quite learned the art of restraint. The camera of Boogie Nights zips and zooms freely, freeze-framing and speeding up and slowing down at will. Anderson uses long-take tracking shots liberally, and his overuse of this technique in particular gives the thematic necessity for an uninterrupted reality less meaning and relevance the more often he uses it (consider the film’s very last tracking shot: do we really need a continuous take of Burt Reynolds whistling through his house while having meaningless conversation with every character to get the message that “everything is going to work out”?).

Anderson’s use of these techniques (as well as his use of music) unapologetically channels Scorsese, namely Goodfellas. But while techniques like the tracking shot in the Copacabana and the nonlinear editing to depict Henry Hill’s drug-infused paranoia both had meaning and served the story despite the overwhelming stylistic choices, Anderson’s work seems, well, for the lack of a better word, not as “mature”. (Don’t get me wrong, I find Boogie Nights to be Anderson’s most entertaining film.)

But after the even more extreme (in terms of style and narrative) Magnolia, Anderson himself seemed to feel a need for implementing stylistic restraint on his work (after all, many argue that art can not be art without self-imposed restraint). Thus, he made his own odd little version of the romantic comedy, Punch-Drunk Love. And at barely over ninety minutes, Punch-Drunk Love is half the running time of Magnolia.

With There Will Be Blood, his work has continued to seek an appropriate stylistic balance. Anderson has certainly not restrained himself in terms of narrative scope (the film runs two and a half hours and spans nearly thirty years), but he has certainly “matured” his style, exhibiting a rejection of some stylistic methods he may have used in his younger years. (Of course, knowing the film’s time period and setting, the cinematic trickery of fast and slow motion, or overuse of music, would have certainly distracted the audience from the film and blocked the audience’s ability to lose themselves in any authenticity of the setting.)

However, does this mean that Anderson has muted his style? Not exactly. A matured style does not really mean “less” style, or a lack of self-awareness in style. He has simply learned to use style to more appropriately serve the story, without excess. As we have seen in The Assassination of Jesse James…, and in the works of David Gordon Green, Terrance Malick, Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, and (perhaps most of all) Andrei Tarkovsky, an uninterrupted, meditative, hypnotic style requires just as methodical (if not more so) a technique as Scorsesian rapid-fire editing.

However, I’ve always found that it’s these meditative, deliberately paced (ie. “slow”) films that more easily let the viewer engross themselves in what is happening on the screen. And as this fascinating still (above) from Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) shows, these films very often contain more poetic imagery. Furthermore, such an uninterrupted camera is essential in capturing the performance of a great actor, especially masterful one-man show of Daniel Day-Lewis. The careful control of time and space Anderson exhibits throughout There Will Be Blood requires both calculated restraint and a thorough realization of stylistic vision. And, for the most part, it works.

Does this mean that There Will Be Blood can be experienced as effectively removed from its references to film history, like Kubrick? Does this mean it works “on its own terms”? I don’t know. Everybody experiences movies differently. But it’s been my experience that truly great movies get better over time. Some of my favorite movies I’ve reacted indifferently to on first viewing, only to slowly grow to appreciate them more later on. I certainly liked There Will Be Blood a lot more on second viewing, but it remains to be seen whether or not it will grow richer in the future.

In the meantime, I should probably find something else to blog about.

There Will Be Kubrick

2008-01-08T16:29:00.000-08:00

Paul Thomas Anderson has been able to masterfully combine original storytelling with innovative technique that consistently references cinematic history without dissolving into the film school cliché that similar filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino have been reduced to. There are several possible ways Anderson has accomplished this, but the most obvious to me is that the filmmaker’s references are consistent with the style and tone of the film, thus not taking the viewer “out” of the film (though one could easily argue otherwise with several scenes of Magnolia (1999)). Where a certain knowledge of cinematic history is almost required to appreciate, and even comprehend, a Tarantino flick, one could become thoroughly engrossed in Boogie Nights (1997) or Punch-Drunk Love (2002) without having ever heard of Mike Nichols, Scorsese, Godard, Tati, or I Am Cuba (1964).

P. T. Anderson's work has benefitted from referencing only unqualified masterpieces of the cinematic pantheon throughout his career.

Anderson’s latest, There Will Be Blood, has been hailed as a breakthrough for the director, especially by Variety’s Todd McCarthy, who argues that Anderson has finally removed himself from reliance on cinematic references and finally constructed a film that stands on its own. Other critics either echo McCarthy’s argument or posit the film as continuing a great tradition of (or explicitly referencing) films that depict the “process” of America becoming what it is today—basically the filmic equivalent of the “Great American Novel.” Compared films include Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), George Stevens’ Giant (1956), John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and, most often, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Both Anderson’s directorial style and Daniel Day-Lewis’ (unsurprisingly) mesmerizing performance are credited with channeling Huston. Anderson even claims to have watched Sierra Madre every night while filming There Will Be Blood.

Whether or not Anderson explicitly references any of these four films in There Will Be Blood is up to debate, and would require multiple viewings of the film. But the assertion that this film is Anderson’s first to “stand on its own” without major references to past cinema is simply ludicrous. In regard to Anderson’s use of referential cinematic techniques to tell his story, There Will Be Blood is no different than any of his previous work.

Anderson has been an outspoken fan of Stanley Kubrick (he even visited Kubrick on the notoriously secretive and exclusive set of Eyes Wide Shut (1999)). There are two notable, explicit references to Kubrick in Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and both are references to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In Boogie Nights, Anderson has a close-up shot of the lens of the film camera being used to shoot Dirk Diggler’s first movie—this shot is framed exactly like the “eye” of the HAL computer in Kubrick’s film.

In Magnolia, while Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman) cares for Earl Partidge (Jason Robards), he stands in a wide shot of Partidge’s bed that is framed similarly to the shot of the older Dr. Dave Bowman (Kier Dullea) in bed facing the monolith (after the space pod) at the end of 2001, complete with the infamous theme music that framed the film.

It seems only natural that Anderson would channel Kubrick once again for There Will Be Blood, and the late master’s fingerprints are all over Anderson’s work. The music over the black screen before the film’s title card resembles the sound of an orchestra warming up over a black screen several minutes before the MGM logo appears in 2001. And the opening shot of the West Texas desert looks and feels like the panoramic shots that opened the “Dawn of Man” sequence. The film’s first ten minutes are without dialogue, and dominated mostly by the haunting score and illustrious cinematography, which seems to channel the mood of the first half hour or so of 2001, also containing minimal dialogue.

The unusual but engrossing score by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood often takes the foreground rather than background of the film’s sound design, a device used in many of Kubrick’s films, but most notably in 2001’s use of music to orchestrate the visual nature of the film. Mostly through Anderson’s use of Greenwood’s music, Anderson has created an overall mood and atmosphere modeled after 2001 (thus, his references aren’t always as explicit as in his past films; his style is more or less generally “indebted” to Kubrick’s work writ large).

While I was able to be emotionally engaged with Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and even Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood created a surprising distance through this dense atmosphere. I admired greatly the artistry of all aspects of the film, but the style never allowed me to be engrossed in it. The music and camerawork created a tangible distance between spectator and screen. Day-Lewis’ performance as a emotionally distant (if not completely absent) opportunist only added to such a removed approach. Even the brief moment in which Plainview is forced to show the speck of genuine emotion hidden beneath him—where Eli Sunday entices him to own up to abandoning his son and he screams, “I abandoned my boy!”—is startlingly removed of an emotional punch despite the impressive and believable performance. Put simply, even when I saw genuine emotion on screen, I didn’t feel it.

Critics have credited the film’s story structure as chronicling Plainview’s descent into becoming a corrupt, cold capitalist—and also noted his relationship with Sunday as a timely allegorical connection between big business opportunism and religious evangelism—but Anderson’s style removes us from the psychology of Plainview in such a way that we are able to observe him without really knowing him, motivation and all. Day-Lewis is a joy to watch, but the real source and objective of Plainview’s greed is never revealed or even thoroughly explored—for example, the incredible mansion his efforts attain him at the film's end makes him more uncomfortable and out-of-place than ever. Plainview seems only, as he himself admits, to delight in the failing of others. This delineates Plainview as an unsympathetic villain throughout the narrative rather than a complex character who slowly digs his own soul to hell (as several critics argue). However, as embodied by Day-Lewis, Plainview is still fully realized and a marvel to watch, despite that he is completely impenetrable.

I don’t think Anderson had any intention of making Plainview into a psychologically motivated character, or chronicle his film as a “descent” of the protagonist. And this division of audience from character psychology feels Kubrickian as well. Both Barry Lyndon of Barry Lyndon (1975) and Alex de Large of A Clockwork Orange (1971) are characters who drift distantly through their narrative without the audience truly knowing their motivations and desires, which fits well into the overall atmosphere and style of each film. Likewise, the entire cast of 2001 are incredibly distant, interchangeable pods of characters—so much so that they are never even allowed a closeup.

And that abrupt ending? Straight out of Eyes Wide Shut. There Will Be Blood’s quick cut-to-black after a simple, brief (almost comically understated) phrase, coupled with classical music, is beat-for-beat the ending of Eyes Wide Shut. The use of classical music seems the most startling source of a Kubrickian feel for these final moments, as it marks a significant departure from Greenwood’s moody score. The use of "slide show" credits during the end credit sequence is also emblematic of Kubrick, as the director used "slide show" credits instead scrolling credits in his later career.

The first trailers of There Will Be Blood made it feel reminiscent of several films not made by Kubrick. The traditional comparisons of Anderson to Robert Altman (solidified by Anderson’s presence as “co-director” of Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion (2006) and Anderson’s “In Remembrance” credit of Altman during There Will Be Blood’s end credits) brought to my mind Altman’s westerns, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), notably their panoramic widescreen photography that is similar to There Will Be Blood. Anderson's film also seems to channel Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). The tracking shot of the men running towards the burning oil rig (as first exhibited in the teaser trailer for There Will Be Blood) looked just like the tracking shot of Brooke Adams running towards the train in Malick’s film. Also, the strange image of the oil rig on a mostly flat landscape in There Will Be Blood is reminiscent to the iconic image of the mansion sitting on the mostly flat landscape in Days of Heaven. In this respect, it’s worth note that both Days of Heaven and There Will Be Blood have the same art director, Jack Fisk.

Movie critics have a very short-term memory. Words like “masterpiece” and “genius” are used so liberally by movie reviewers that they have been reduced to clichéd one-word selling points on movie marquees. It’s understandable that many reviewers would want to be the first to call something a “masterpiece” and allow time to prove them right, but contextualizing There Will Be Blood as a natural extension of Citizen Kane—or saying The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or No Country For Old Men have “reinvented cinema”—is an overzealous statement rendered dubious by the absence of the only natural test that could affirm or deny such a statement: time. Masterpieces and modern classics are not created immediately; time is the only judge of truly important pieces of cinema.

Lest we forget, some of today’s classics were hated or ignored during their original release, like 2001: A Space Odyssey or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Others weren’t even seen in the proper form that made them contemporary classics in their original release, like the compromised first theatrical release of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and the butchered original release of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984). On the other hand, several films that were praised by critics and showered with awards during their original release have soured over time, like Crash (2005) or Titanic (1997). Critics have the difficult job of articulating the final judgment of a film shortly after a film’s release, and usually after only one viewing. Thus, such untrustworthy, inflated ultimatums that have accompanied reviews of There Will Be Blood are common practice in the rhetoric of a movie critic. Also, many critics watch every major film released, which means they have to sit through all the schlock that was never meant to have a long shelf life in America’s cinematic collective memory (“see Alien vs. Predator: Requiem this Christmas Day!”)—so after having sat through ALL the bad and ALL the good, it’s easy to see how something like There Will Be Blood can look like Citizen Kane.

After reading snippets of numerous reviews of There Will Be Blood before actually seeing the film, including the repeated allusions to classical cinema and the assertion that the film “stands on its own”, I felt like I would be able to turn the film analyst part of my brain off and simply enjoy the story. Instead, I found myself admiring the film without being enveloped in it. There Will Be Blood displays great filmmaking technique on all fronts, but it is not by any means a film that "stands on its own." Like all of Anderson’s films, There Will Be Blood is a movie made by a movie person for movie people.

While watching it, a film student sitting behind me whispered loudly into his fellow film student’s ear, “Look at that shot. How cool is that shot?” As unforgivably annoying as instances like these are (a good film, of course, is more than a selection of “cool shots”), this student’s superficial admiration for Anderson’s technique is fitting. In There Will Be Blood, it is easy to admire the masterful technique of everything we see and hear, but it is difficult to go beyond anything but admiration. This film, like all of Anderson’s work, in undeniably indebted to cinematic history, and Anderson himself never lets us forget we are watching a movie.

Redacted and the Iraq War Film

2007-11-24T23:06:00.000-08:00

Brian De Palma is one of those filmmakers that has been accredited alongside some of the greats of the 1970s, often being put in the same category as Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, Polanski, Mike Nichols, and the like. Yet De Palma has no grand opus, no film from the period that defines him as a great filmmaking personality that has succeeded across time and emanated through culture—he has no equivalent to Taxi Driver, The Godfather, or Chinatown.

De Palma is most famous for the campiest of campy gangster pics, Scarface; and his 1970s catalogue (with the exception of Carrie) is better known for the references made to them in Tarantino flicks than the original films themselves (ie. the split-screen sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1). As far as his recent filmography, the bad (Femme Fatale) has considerably outweighed the good (Mission: Impossible). And if the incredibly long tracking shots that open both Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars are any indication, De Palma’s technical ingenuity far exceeds his storytelling ability. One should proceed with caution before putting him alongside the masters of the 1970s.

His latest, Redacted, has been one of a recent trend of under- performing films that deal with the Iraq war. Like Rendition and the upcoming Stop-Loss, its title comes from military/foreign relations terminology. “Redacted” refers specifically to the censoring of controversial material for the American media, namely pictures and other information regarding Iraqi civilians harmed or killed by US soldiers. The film itself is a narrative, documentary-style reenactment of the rape and murder of a fifteen year-old Iraqi girl by US soldiers.

Redacted definitely presents a perspective on the war rarely seen by the mainstream media, and the film’s criticism of the war and its troops is unapologetically scathing. The message is disturbingly clear: we cannot, with a clear conscience, simply deem the innocent lives lost in an unjust war as “casualties” and hide behind the statistics therein; the American government must take responsibility for atrocities that happen in a country they try to occupy.

But the film’s attempts at “realism” fall resoundingly short. The entire narrative is mediated through home videos, security cameras, newscasts on various national networks, and YouTube videos (and its middle eastern equivalent)—and, in the most classic attempt at realism, all the roles are played by no-name actors. While this effort makes sense in making a film about a war that is saturated by all types of media, the characters and performances are so obviously scripted and stiff as to automatically eliminate any such realism. De Palma does not let us get to know the psychology of any of these characters, and instead he gives us cardboard cut-outs of bad soldiers, worse soldiers, and morally ambiguous soldiers (another example of De Palma’s favor of technical ingenuity over storytelling ability). Redacted then makes one final, full-on move into melodrama with one soldier’s pathetic, hardly believable lament over witnessing the rape. Then De Palma subjects us to possibly the most powerful and hotly debated moment of the film: pictures of real-life Iraqi “casualties” with their eyes censored by black lines (“redacted”).

At the film’s center is Pvt. Angel “Sally” Salazar, who records his experience in Iraq continuously, hoping that whatever he ends up with will get him into USC film school (poor Sally doesn’t realize that USC doesn’t accept previously made films as part of their application). Sally tells one soldier that he’s recording everything to tell the truth, that a video camera is a device for telling such truth, while another soldier responds, “All that thing does is lie.” De Palma himself openly argues the latter perspective, as he is quoted to have said, “The camera lies all the time; lies 24 times a second” (probably as a reversal of Godard’s iconic quote, “Film is truth at 24 frames a second”). And this message is a timely one: the constant media saturation doesn’t reveal any truth about Iraq, and only confuses any existing version of the “truth”—we can never "truly" know Iraq.

Sally is executed (beheaded) by supposed insurgents because of the rape—but Sally didn’t rape the girl, he only filmed it. This “killing the messenger” could be De Palma’s “execution” by the mainstream media for making such a film, for merely “observing the incident with his camera”. Judging by Bill O’Reilly’s call to boycott Redacted (which he, of course, hasn’t actually seen), De Palma’s symbolic martyr may not be too presumptuous.

While it's difficult to truly believe American soldiers are as immaculate in their moral structure as they are made out to be by both “support the troops, finish the job” Republicans and “support the troops, bring them home” Democrats, the soldiers themselves are indeed victims in this ridiculous war. Many are largely marginalized, lower-class citizens who have had little choice but to join the military while a certain US president relaxes on his ranch four months a year. While atrocities committed by US military should certainly be brought to media attention, De Palma’s portrayal of soldiers as racist, morally bankrupt, two-dimensional automatons feels severely misguided. In a time of such corrupt politics, isn’t it more appropriate to criticize the war from the top, down rather than from the bottom, up? Also, if De Palma’s goal were to make a film about the censoring of information, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to tell the story through the eyes of a journalist or government official, rather than make a fake documentary that poses itself as a piece of investigative journalism?

I was excited earlier this fall to see a slew of Iraq-themed films, for I (and, no doubt, the filmmakers) believe such films could make a positive impact on the war, America’s foreign policy, or even inspire protest and resistance by the American people. But such films, including this one, have proved to be immensely disappointing. As many have somewhat naïvely coined the Iraq war as the "new Vietnam" (but this is not near as naïve as Rumsfeld equating it with WWII’s fight against fascism), filmmakers and studios may have hoped movies would criticize Iraq as they did so well against Vietnam decades ago. Thus, it is not surprising that notoriously nonconformist filmmakers who gained their fame during the Vietnam era are now making films about Iraq, like Robert Redford (Lions for Lambs) and De Palma.

While its narrative bears a strong resemblance to De Palma’s Vietnam film, Casualties of War, Redacted is part and parcel of the Iraq war. As Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen stated in his review, “No other war could have produced a movie like this.” Iraq is not Vietnam, and likewise, Iraq movies are not Vietnam movies, no matter how much we’d like for them to be.

What people forget is that movies about Vietnam weren’t made until after the war. Probably the first Hollywood movie that dealt explicitly with the war was Hal Ashby’s Coming Home in 1978, with Jon Voight in an Oscar-winning performance as a paraplegic veteran. After that was Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and an onslaught of Vietnam films in the 1980s: Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), John Irvin’s Hamburger Hill (1987), De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989), and a curious pattern of conservative Reagan-era Vietnam films: the Rambo series.

These films had the privilege of hindsight. More importantly, many of them had themes that stretched far beyond the war itself, catapulting them into continuous reverence as an inseparable part of the history of American film. Apocalypse Now, in particular, because it was based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (written decades before the war) and adapted to Vietnam, retains themes of the book regarding the troubling nature of colonization, and this transforms Apocalypse Now into something far more complicated than just a “war film”.

The films that liberal, nonconformist filmmakers made during the Vietnam War were far more universal than today’s films about Iraq. Hollywood had no interest in making films about the war itself, so filmmakers used allegory and symbolism to object to the war and the growing American conservatism at large.

Take Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), for example. On the surface, it’s a standard western about an eccentric named John McCabe (Warren Beatty) who develops a modest brothel in a small northwestern town. But, as the narrative develops, the film takes on the larger themes of American big business’ attempts to eradicate the more “authentic” small business. The film uses a traditional genre to explore contemporary issues. But because the film works so well on its own terms, and its themes are so timeless, it isn’t stuck in 1971. It still speaks to audiences more than thirty years later. Even Altman’s previous “war” film, MASH (1970) isn’t “about” the Vietnam war (Fox forced a prologue that said it was about the Korean war), yet MASH is still indisputably of its era, and has aged well because of the universality of its antiestablishment character types.

The Graduate. Bonnie and Clyde. Midnight Cowboy. Harold and Maude. The Godfather. The Conversation. The Last Detail. Taxi Driver. None of these films explicitly address the controversies of the late sixties and early seventies, but they do implicitly deal with such themes, and their politics are certainly indicative of the era they were made. Their lack of explicit address prevents them from being stuck in time. People still, amazingly enough, watch these movies.

As evidenced by the lack of response by both critics and audiences, the current string of films about the Iraq war are too preachy and too concerned with the most recent headlines. Their messages only extend to what their characters explicitly say about the conflict, spoon-feeding their politics to us (as screenwriting continues to lack subtlety in the era of Paul Haggis).

Hollywood needs to take a lesson from the era they’re trying to emulate. They need to seek the depth and allegory of movies from the sixties and seventies. Filmmakers today need to learn that they can deliver their message without showing a character ranting on YouTube. If Redacted is any indication, what these films desperately need is “characters,” not stand-ins and talking heads.

These films of the Iraq War have no universal themes. They are only indicative of the specific day and time they were made and the most current political climate. In a few years years, Rendition, Lions for Lambs and Redacted will be irrelevant, and even more invisible than they are now, no matter how important they try to be today.

Come on, guys. You can do better.

The New Western (?)

2007-11-24T21:38:00.000-08:00

Many things define a Western. The time period, the costumes, the gunfights, the photogenic landscapes; but perhaps the central tenet of the Western is the theme of civilizing (“Americanizing”) the frontier West, molding it into a society of proper law and order. Three films from this fall approach this genre—which has been largely ignored in recent years—in different ways. The Western may not be dead after all.

3:10 TO YUMA

The most traditional Western in a long time, 3:10 to Yuma keeps intact all the genre's conventions. It feels as if it were lifted directly from the fifties with simply a more violent tone and more rapid editing than what could have existed back in those days, obviously in part because it is a remake of a 1950s Western. The widescreen vistas, the eccentric villain, the gunfights—it’s all here. But what is most surprising about the film is the very tradition of its traditional style. The film is astoundingly unaware of its rarity in an era when there is hardly a Western at all. 3:10 to Yuma exercises all the genre conventions with a natural ease of storytelling, as if Westerns like this were just as common today as they were fifty years ago.

Most Westerns made in recent years are overwhelmingly tongue-in-cheek, always trying a little too hard to give the genre a new look and contemporary feel (Wild Wild West is one of the more extreme examples of this). Even movies like Tombstone and Unforgiven seemed to always be shouting at the audience, “Look! Look! I’m a Western!” But 3:10 to Yuma has such a convincing atmosphere, complete with compelling dialogue and straightforward performances by Russell Crowe’s villainous Ben Wade and Christian Bale’s tragically heroic Dan Evans, that allows the audience to be so subsumed into the story as to not realize that they are watching a type of genre film that hasn’t found success in its classic, traditional form since the early 1960s.

The theme of civilizing the West is as classical as ever here: in order for law and order to be established and civilization to evolve, miscreants like Wade must be abolished from the landscape. This scenario can be found in dozens of other Westerns, yet the film thankfully has no Tarantinoesque wink-wink tendencies referencing the classics, allowing the audience to enjoy it on its own terms. The film arguably contradicts the common notion (from studios, audiences and filmmakers) that Westerns cannot exist in their classic form in our era. The Western, 3:10 to Yuma argues, is far from dead.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

The Assassination of Jesse James can be argued as an anti-Western. While the film has the time period, costumes, and photography right, everything from the minimalist score to the lengthy title to the quiet, meditative pace to the omniscient narration that sounds like it came from a MasterCard commercial mold this epic into something far different. The film is a thorough deconstruction of the most mythic of Western myths, the James gang. Jesse James has been portrayed many, many times in film, but never quite like this. The reimagined James is a man who is very aware that his myth and reputation far exceed the flesh and blood of the man himself—and by questioning the myth of Jesse James, the myth of the Western itself is disrupted.

Jesse James is portrayed as a fractured depressive, torn by every innocent man he has killed and robbed. He is far from the 19th century American Robin Hood he is most often thought to be. We see James through the eyes of Robert Ford, a naïve youngster who believes the myth he hears about in stories is the same as the man himself. Ford actually believes in the myth of the West, and he suffers for his dire misconception. The lengthy title explicitly states what the end of their relationship will be, so the film doesn’t rely on a suspenseful narrative trajectory, allowing the audience to become involved with the quiet relationship of James and Ford instead of any normal storyline. And, as the title suggests, Ford hardly has the redeemable qualities of the traditional Western hero.

James’ assassination is the result of a childish rivalry. Unlike the justice brought to Ben Wade, the ridding of James from society is not part of the civilizing process. Ford is a pawn of the government, and is therefore a victim of such a process, suggesting corruption and hypocrisy in American justice. The notion of classical hero and villain are subverted with the ways James and Ford are portrayed. Evidenced by the way the American people react to the assassination, James’ death doesn’t bring any order to society, instead only furthering disorder, suggesting that America was never civilized under such simplistic moral values, and Americans instead prefer the myth of the man who stole and killed for fame rather than the man who supposedly brought justice.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Many will argue that the latest from the Coen brothers is not at all a Western, and in many ways they are right: the film is wrong in terms of the time period, the costuming, the weaponry, and the film doesn’t contain any form of a classic Western narrative. But the landscape is definitely there, as Roger Deakins’ camera manages to capture the Western horizon beautifully. The cowboy hats, West Texas setting, and violence also vaguely remind one of a Western.

Yet No Country for Old Men attacks the notion of the civilizing process in a way that only a Western set in modern day could. While the forward-moving part of its narrative follows a unique cat-and-mouse chase between Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn and Javier Bardem’s Chigurh, Tommy Lee Jones’ almost completely inactive Sheriff Bell has a lucid, contemplative, existential presence throughout the film that hardly does anything to move the narrative forward, but brings the film’s themes to the forefront. Bell laments over a world that he sees to be getting worse and worse, and he exercises his angst through the case of a drug run gone wrong. And as Llewlyn’s situation gets more hopeless, Bell becomes more complacent.

What Bell is upset over could be read as the de-civilization of the West, that all the law and order and clear morality that once existed is quickly falling into chaos and anarchy. Bell lays out at the opening’s voice-over narration that the world is getting progressively worse, and he discusses the decline of morality with each passing generation with another aging sheriff towards the film's end. Yet Bell has a conversation later with a wheelchair-bound old man who has an alternative, less nostalgic philosophy: the world has always been unjust. Either the West is being de-civilized, or it never was in the first place. That the film drops off with no real closure suggests something of a validity in both these notions.

There is no traditional Western hero in either Llewelyn or Bell, but there is an easily identifiable villain of No Country for Old Men. Chigurh claims to have principles, but not in the admirable way that even the vilest of classic Western villains do (ie. Ben Wade). There is no notion of honor or bravery in the new West, just a Darwinian natural selection that gives no mercy to the weak or kind. Cigurh’s principles rely instead on a twisted definition of fate that allows him to kill virtually any person he wants for no reason—he doesn’t even spare women. In contrast to the classical Western villain who is ultimately brought to justice, Chigurh continues to freely roam the landscape. Chigurh’s freedom is the sign of signs that the West is in a state of inevitable de-civilization, delving into a world where justice, like the myth of the West, is dead.

A Response to Criticism of The Darjeeling Limited

2007-10-23T21:57:00.000-07:00

(Warning: Spoilers Ahead)

Mick LaSalle, Rex Reed, Alissa Simon, Kyle Smith, Jan Stuart and Jack Mathews: what do all these people have in common?

Wes Anderson’s critics have often found themselves distanced from his characters’ arrogant, self-important personalities and the director’s overwhelmingly idiosyncratic style. His latest, The Darjeeling Limited, is no exception to such criticisms. And while I feel no responsibility to defend any filmmaker simply because their films coincide with my personal tastes, I feel most critics are lumping Darjeeling Limited too readily into the stock criticism of Anderson’s previous work without examining the film on its own merit.

Many of Wes’ critics feel that they aren’t “in” on the joke of his films, that Wes panders solely towards his reliable twenties hipster fanbase instead of molding and furthering his craft. They find his characters impenetrable and one-note, whose uniform selfishness and self-importance may be beginning to resemble the image-conscious director himself. When examining Wes’ past work, this argument gains ground. After all, aren’t Max Fischer, Royal Tenenbaum and Steve Zissou (and maybe even Bottle Rocket’s Dignan) essentially the same character?

Some argue that the similarity of each of Wes’ films—in their style, characterization and narrative—gives him an authorial touch, making Wes an “auteur”. Maybe. But having a signature style doesn’t necessarily make one a good filmmaker. (In a previous article, I argued that Michael Bay is an auteur.)

But, in Darjeeling, we don’t have one narcissistic protagonist searching vainly to find superficial satisfaction in life…we have three: Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson), Peter Whitman (Adrien Brody) and Jack Whitman (Jason Schwartzman) (yes, they’re brothers). For some, this combination just means the same-old-thing multiplied, but by pitting these exact character types against each other, Wes is finally on to something he’s never explored before.

These wealthy brothers have been taken out of their privileged environment in the big cities (NYC) and fancy hotels (Chevalier) of the Western world, and pitted them in the unknown, unfamiliar East: India. And it is this premise that allows the Wes Anderson archetype to change and grow. It’s as if Max Fischer abandoned Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaum left New York, or Steve Zissou devoted himself to dry land (…sorry, no Dignan analogy here). Their superficiality and selfish desires are immediately apparent to the people of the foreign land—even if the Whitmans are too strung out on narcotics to notice.

Many American college students have had the coveted “study abroad” experience, or at least the summer backpacking trip to Europe before grad school. The Whitman brothers’ journey is reminiscent of such a rite-of-passage. They are looking for an “experience” abroad, namely a “spiritual experience” that will allow them to transcend…well, something; they don’t know quite what. Yet they hardly ever “experience” India—they see India, but they see it mediated through the window of their train while they drink, eat and use too many prescription drugs (after all, what’s an abroad experience for if not getting f*cked up?).

The Whitman brothers explore temples during the trains’ two-hour stops, but they obviously have no knowledge of the region’s religious practices or the temples’ significance. Francis simply orders his brothers to “light some candles and pray to that deity thing over there.” When they sit down to pray, they are quickly subsumed in trivial materialistic matters, as Francis and Peter argue over a belt borrowed without permission. Later in the film, as the characters kneel and pray during a temple service with other Indians, they ask each other, “Is anything happening, yet?” They were clearly misled in thinking India would cater to their needs and answer all their Western wishes. The brothers’ private spiritual mockery involving a feather, and all the ridiculous sounds and motions involved, make fully clear the banality, futility and meaninglessness of their earnestly misdirected spiritual journey.

This is the exact type of arrogant, uneducated perception of foreign countries Americans are so often accused of having. Though the brothers (mainly Francis) seem to be searching for a valuable experience and an education in the culture of foreign lands, they always resort to immediate pleasures and superficial vices, as indicated by the heavy narcotic use. But this point becomes clearest when Jack seduces the train’s stewardess; Jack literally experiences the East every way he can. During their sex act, Jack asks the stewardess what her name is, and Francis simply refers to her as “Sweet Lime”, a drink she serves. Her name is of no concern; she is of no other purpose than to be another artificial component of his abroad experience—she is part of his vacation.

http://thisrecording.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/in-which-jess-ventures-into-the-limited-view-of-the-darjeeling-patriarchy-and-has-a-little-something-for-wes-anderson/

One feminist website has argued this scenario as indicative of the racism and sexism in Wes’ movies. But this argument would infer that we the audience (and Wes) view the Whitman brothers as heroes, that we support their decisions and look up to them as moral and ethical conduits for ourselves—that we see through their eyes. While this is the case in experiencing most American films, it surely doesn’t apply to this one. The distancing style Wes is so criticized for allows us to watch these characters objectively; in other words, we may sympathize with them, but we don’t empathize with them. We don’t feel the repercussions of their bad decisions, but we are allowed to witness them, and thus witness the characters’ inevitable and necessary growth from a moral distance.

Max Fisher, Royal Tenenbaum, and Steve Zissou are all assholes, and it’s hard for us to feel like they deserve what they’re seeking. Yet in the dance scene in Rushmore, the wedding and funeral scenes in Tenenbaums, and the jaguar shark climax in Life Aquatic, the supporting characters suddenly gather around, forgive, and respect each protagonist. And the audience does not always feel the respect and admoration these characters feel (the “placing of hands” in the jaguar shark scene was especially criticized).

However, with Darjeeling, Wes has somehow struck a perfect balance. The style of this film is not quite as overwhelming as in his others, so it distances us just enough so that we are willing to follow these characters, but not be frustrated by their amoral and selfish personalities.

This is what makes the dramatic shift in tone so affecting and effective (unlike in Zissou). With the dropping of their luggage (and the luggage is a frequent, if not redundant, metaphor), the priorities of these characters have suddenly shifted. Saving the children in the river is the first time (we see) the Whitmans act for anybody other than themselves. And rather than resorting to an easy display of Hollywood heroism, the action has its repercussions with the death of one of the children (that it was Peter’s child who died is an excellent way to delve into his character without delving into his character).

Finally, the funeral is a “spiritual experience” and ritual they actually understand. The brothers have unfortunately found the “experience” they’re looking for, and it was not until they were kicked off the train (their Western/privileged belligerence and ignorance catching up with them), not until they can no longer experience the country through a train window, that they can find it. The Whitmans are at last able to confront their reason for escape—the death of their father—in a startling, yet brilliant flashback. Most filmmakers would typically resort to the familiar funeral scene, but Wes opts to show the brothers on the way to the funeral in New York, as they make an emergency stop at an auto shop to pick up a European car. Once again, the brothers’ true emotions are expressed superficially—the mourning of their father is exercised through the fruitless “fixing” of the car.

The brothers have other personal baggage as well that they left outside India, yet they still refuse to acknowledge these troubles outright, only expressing them obliquely through their typical behavior. When the brothers get to the airport, the funeral has had an effect on them, but, just like everything else, they don’t acknowledge it. They resort back to their superficial behavior (Francis orders them to relax with a drink and report back to a small, obscure shrine to give thanks for their trip). Yet, at the last minute, they decide to stay in India and get on another train. Knowing their respective duties elsewhere (Peter is about to be a father), this is not a responsible action. And while the change in their character is not drastic in the convenient (ie. unbelievable) way Hollywood would call for, it is a significant change nonetheless, as these characters have (inadvertently) grown and matured (and spoiled, tortured souls who grow a little bit are far better than heroes in my book).

They literally leave their baggage behind.

The Darjeeling Limited is Wes Anderson’s most mature work to date, as he has finally found the perfect balance between his unique style and subtle characterization. The style, for the first time, does not burden the substance.

Maybe the critics are right. Maybe Wes' films only speak to the twenties hipster crowd (an audience he has supposedly nurtured, according to Christopher Kelly's recent Texas Monthly article [below]). If that's the case, then I think hipsters have a pretty good taste in movies.

...except for Napoleon Dynamite. That was horrible.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/2007-10-01/hollywoodtx.php

Screen It? I'd Rather Not...

2007-10-02T22:26:00.002-07:00

Before Eastern Promises started rolling its beginning credits, I was exposed to the ordinary dose of trailers, which all had the typical green MPAA disclaimer explaining their approval of said trailer along with the film’s rating and a brief description why. But one of the trailers took me, and probably several other audience members, by surprise. The disclaimer described the following about the film advertised: Rated PG-13 “for strong thematic material including the rape of a child, violence, and brief strong language.”

The trailer was for Marc Forster’s new film, The Kite Runner, coming out November 2nd. Now, I haven’t seen the film, nor have I read the book it was based on, but I’m just going to go out on a limb here and guess that the “rape of a child” described is probably a major plot point in the film.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/thekiterunner/

There is nothing in the trailer that alludes to this part of the film, so I’m also going to guess that it’s a plot point that the filmmakers, producers and/or advertisers don’t want audiences to know about until they see The Kite Runner.

I find it extremely problematic, if not downright infuriating, that the MPAA is so concerned with our aversion to mature thematic material that they would reveal such a potentially essential plot point. What exactly were they afraid of? Were they concerned that, if we weren’t aware of the “rape of a child” beforehand, we would find it disturbing or offensive? But isn’t that, most likely, how the filmmakers intend for us to react to it in the context of the film?

The MPAA, and the Americans they represent, are absolutely mortified with the thought of audiences not knowing every detail of a film that could be offensive. But the increasing caution that the MPAA employs (mostly from parents’ often unfounded concerns) have started to take a major toll on the actual experience of watching a movie, especially to those of us who don’t have children.

Studios complain about spoilers of their films all over the internet, script leaks, pirating, and the like (the recent debacle about an extra’s revelation of explicit details from the new Indiana Jones movie is indicative of this), but what about all the spoilers made in the name of protecting child viewers? (I would include adult viewers that act like children in that category as well.)

And not all of it has come from the MPAA. There’s a website, ScreenIt.com, whose homepage says the following:

“In today's world of economic uncertainty, you need Screen It even more than ever before. You certainly don't want to waste your hard-earned dollars on movies or DVDs that might contain material you'd find objectionable for yourself and/or your kids.”

ScreenIt, for a small monthly fee of $24.95, will give you every single potentially objectionable detail to pretty much any film in major release, including (I’m not kidding) the exact number of times each type of curse word is used, and in what context. Did you know that Jarhead has the “f” word 278 times, 38 with the prefix “mother”? Do you care? Can you believe it's somebody's job out there to count curse words in movies? The site also explains, in great detail, any instance or innuendo of sex or violence in a film, ignoring the potential exposure of otherwise irrelevant story details like the death of a major character. Can you imagine going to a movie like The Departed already knowing which characters are going to die?

If parents rely on sources like ScreenIt too much, they eventually get into a trivial mess of what’s appropriate and what’s not. For instance, is 30 “f” words in a film any more harmful to your twelve-year old than 278 “f” words (38 with the prefix “mother”)?

While I definitely have my qualms with the MPAA, they aren’t all to blame for this proliferation of story information in the name of protecting children. Parents' high demand for this type of information has certainly been a factor in the MPAA’s decisions. And I do, to a point, understand. If I were the father of a young child, I would like to have some idea as to whether or not my son or daughter and I would be having a “special conversation” after a PG-13 movie. But I would also prefer not to know every single story detail going in. Movies are supposed to be fun, and how much fun can they be if you know exactly what to expect?

Go see a movie sometime without knowing the rating, or anything at all rather. Whether or not you like it, you certainly won’t leave saying, “That’s exactly what I thought it would be.” And some films, believe it or not, are supposed to have an element of surprise. And some films are supposed to disturb, shock and, yes, even offend. Don’t be afraid of surprise.

The MPAA disclaimers are at their worst when it comes to the “hard R-rated” films. Recent hard R’s include Hostel Part II (“Rated R for sadistic scenes of torture and bloody violence, terror, nudity, sexual content, language and some drug content”), Saw III (“Rated R for strong grisly violence and gore, sequences of terror and torture, nudity and language”), Rob Zombie’s Halloween (“Rated R for strong brutal bloody violence and terror throughout, sexual content, graphic nudity and language”) and Grindhouse (“Rated R for strong graphic bloody violence and gore, pervasive language, some sexuality, nudity and drug use”).

My favorite description of a film’s rating was for Twister: “Rated PG-13 for intense depiction of very bad weather.” I never knew the MPAA had an agenda against bad weather.

The irony is that the MPAA has no “official guidelines” with which to rate films, yet they qualify each rating with similar descriptions. These descriptions try to give the audience some idea of what to expect, but the terms become more and more meaningless with repetition. And when it comes to the aforementioned “extreme” films, whose content should be obvious to everyone by this point, the rhetoric is at its most ludicrous. Have you ever heard a person say, “Oh, I’m fine with ‘strong brutal bloody violence and terror throughout,’ but I surely won’t stand for ‘graphic nudity’”? And what real difference is there between “language” and “pervasive language,” or “sexuality” and “aberrant sexuality”?

The MPAA separates all objectionable material into four basic categories: sexuality/nudity, violence, language, and drug use. Their rating disclaimers have become so prominent that they’ve even used as part of a film’s advertising (“gratuitous nudity in American Pie 6!”). What happens then as frequent moviegoers become more attuned to these disclaimers, an unintended mental checklist enters their head (or at least mine) that can severely interfere with the experience of watching a movie. What I mean is this: I regularly find myself unintentionally noting the moments in question which constituted the described rating; like, “Now here’s the drug use,” or, “Here’s the terror/gore I was promised.” Even the film I saw after the trailer I first mentioned at the top of the blog, Eastern Promises, would have been that much more affecting had I not known about the gore, nudity or sexual content going in.

This classification and separation of offensive elements is what has lead to accusations of the MPAA being harsher on sexual content then violent content, as evidenced in the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated. While I support the MPAA being pressured to own up to their decisions, I think they’re merely reflecting the status quo determined by parents, lobbyists and movie studios. This is, of course, entirely unfair to the rest of the filmgoing community. And it’s not even a smart economic decision, considering that teens and twentysomethings, not children, are the most frequent attendees of movie theaters in America.

So, having said that, I would close this off by politely asking the MPAA to ease off a little bit and not let their priorities interfere with revealing important plot points of films like The Kite Runner, but I think it’s more appropriate to ask parents to ease off, not spoil movies for the rest of us, and not think it’s the end of the world if your son or daughter hears a bad word without you knowing exactly when it was going to happen beforehand.

After all, everyday life isn’t rated. There’s no way for us to predict if we might see or hear something that we disagree with, but that’s no reason for us to live life with our eyes closed and our ears covered.

Pondering Lynch's Digital Empire

2007-09-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

For better or for worse, David Lynch has turned his back on film. After experiencing the creative freedom that only digital filmmaking can allow while making his three-hour, self-distributed behemoth Inland Empire, Lynch vowed never to touch film again. And there’s nothing that you, or anybody else, can do to convince him otherwise.

As a result, the new Lynch aesthetic captures a freewheeling, no-holds-barred style emblematic of the filmmaking process itself. Inland Empire is a 179-minute epic with a collection of interwoven, seemingly unrelated images and ideas strung together by the “story” of Hollywood actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern). Grace attempts to act in a film, which her personal life eventually starts to resemble and even overlaps, and Inland Empire then develops into a surreal, uniquely Lynchian journey that cannot be accurately described in any short form.

Whether you like it or not, Inland Empire is truly an experience like no other.

While my description may bring to mind similar films from Lynch’s canon, especially the Hollywood-set Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire’s structure moves with such an unlimited freedom that it’s almost as if Lynch’s previous films were censored from his true intention by analog film. With Inland Empire, and Lynch’s newfound style, we have a Lynch totally without restraint or apology. Except it never seemed like he was restrained in the first place.

David Lynch is not for the casual observer. He is an acquired taste whose confounding, often inaccessible films force active participation on behalf of the viewer. The consumer of Lynch’s work is often forced to derive his or her own meaning from the material. And Lynch himself is no help: he always refuses to speak about any details of his films or record any commentaries on his DVDs, as he openly prefers—even challenges—the viewer to derive their own personal meaning from the film. I attended a Q&A at my university in which Lynch promoted his form of transcendental meditation. When an audience member asked him if he would describe what Mulholland Drive is “about,” Lynch directly responded, “No.” When another audience member asked if the “house in Lost Highway was inside or outside reality,” Lynch dryly stated, “Sort of,” and said nothing more.

He’s a curious character, but you have to admire his determination to let his films truly belong to the audience, and not succumb to the popular temptation of telling the inherent meaning behind every decision he made behind the camera on DVD commentaries.

But what makes Lynch’s analog films so great is that beyond the confounding structure and imagery, there seems to be a delicate and carefully chosen meaning behind everything we see and hear. While I may adopt my own personal interpretations to some of his films, I take comfort in knowing that Lynch himself makes careful decisions while filming and has a specific idea of what his films mean, even though he chooses not to disclose this. As a result, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive are works of art whose interpretations are vast and infinitely debatable.

Lynch openly states that when he first started making what would become Inland Empire, he didn’t think that it would be a feature-length film, as he was only experimenting with digital technology and later found associations between several of his projects that he would later combine into a feature. With a process like this, it’s easy to see how quickly this can make a very long movie—especially in Lynch’s style, independent of any typical narrative cohesion. Lynch even incorporates one of his previous filmic shorts, Rabbits, into Inland Empire.

This free-association filmmaking style feels drastically different from Lynch’s previous films. The problem is, if Lynch had no set goal for Inland Empire as a cohesive feature, then he probably has no specific personal idea of what the film means. What type of meaning are we supposed to derive from a project that is basically a montage of several of Lynch’s unrelated works? If the film has no inherent meaning in the mind of the filmmaker, it can’t be experienced like the seemingly deliberate Mulholland Drive or Eraserhead. Even the cast has openly stated that they don’t understand the film. Watching Inland Empire feels like the experience of making it: trying to find a film from segments of totally separate projects (ie. Rabbits).

Analog film forces the filmmaker to make better-prepared decisions because of the complexity of the medium, and the “creative freedom” digital video allows keeps Lynch from making the deliberate, informed and inspired decisions that he probably made with his masterpieces created from traditional film.

What we have now is an experimental Lynch who makes decisions on instinct instead of deliberation.

Lynch is still in an excited stage where he’s toying with the medium, and has yet to find his true voice within it. Lynch has to grasp and learn this medium until it molds itself in a way that suits his filmmaking style, and then he can make films with a new, forward-moving aesthetic that also complements his previous work. DV is a totally different aesthetic than film, like switching from oil to acrylic paint, and it must be treated in such a way that acknowledges its own opportunities and weaknesses. Lynch is elated with the freedom digital filmmaking allows, but doesn’t quite have a grasp on its unique possibilities in the way that other filmmakers who truly crafted the technology have (I’ll avoid naming any examples, because it feels ridiculous to compare Lynch to any other specific filmmaker). All great art involves restraint of some sort, even if the medium used provides little option for it.

But on the other hand, filmmaking today is treated in a way that pretends every decision made on set was immaculate and completely intentional. Behind the scenes documentaries and commentaries go on and on praising every major member of the cast and crew, and explain to a sickening degree the intentionality of every minor detail seen on screen. But anybody who has ever been on a film set is aware of the circumstance, collaboration and even accidental nature that leads to a film’s final product (whether made on DV or film). Some of the most inspired parts of a final product can be purely unintentional or serendipitous. Nobody can predict the weather, behavior of the cast and crew, or last minute decisions that affect filmmaking. Just like in writing (or any other art form, rather), there is a plethora of possibilities that affects how you intend something to turn out in your head, and how it actually turns out. There is always some distance between the pen and the brain.

We need more artists like Lynch, those who realize that “inherent meaning” in any art form only extends so far, that art is truly in the eye of the beholder, and that all art is only as good as the interpretation of the person who receives it. Perhaps with Inland Empire, we are even free from the notion that the intent of the artist needs to exist at all, as Lynch allows the art form to take on a life all its own, taking place of the artist in determining the final product. This is truly a democratic way of experiencing film, just as digital technology is a democratic way of making it.

I’m just not sure if I’ve warmed up to it quite yet.

Today's Celebrity: Living La Dolce Vita

2007-07-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

Lindsay Lohan dominated the headlines last week when she was arrested for cocaine possession and driving under the influence after chasing her former personal assistant’s mother around Santa Monica. This happened less than a month after Lohan, barely twenty-one, was released from rehab.

This is certainly not the first of erratic displays from Lohan. Last year, while filming Georgia Rule, producer James G. Robinson threatened to sue her for constantly showing up over an hour late to set, often hung over. Robinson wrote to Lohan:

"You and your representatives have told us that your various late arrivals and absences from the set have been the result of illness; today we were told it was 'heat exhaustion'. We are well aware that your ongoing all night heavy partying is the real reason for your so-called 'exhaustion'."

Also dominating the “news” this week was Britney Spears’ crazed, belligerent behavior at a photo shoot for OK! Magazine that was supposed go with an article declaring her comeback after years of similar (and highly publicized) behavior since her marriage, divorce and pregnancies.

In other news, Nicole Richie was sentenced to four days in jail for driving under the influence after taking her “Mercedez Benz the wrong way down California State Route 134 highway in Burbank. After failing an on-field sobriety test, Richie admitted to having smoked marijuana and taking a vicodin painkiller. (imdb)”. Richie is rumored to currently be pregnant with the child of Good Charlotte’s lead singer, Joel Madden.

All this happened mere weeks after Paris Hilton was released from jail.

And this stuff gets more media attention than the Iraq war.

For years, young girls have admired this quartet of young women who have really done nothing with their clout and fortune but be famous and act famous. Spears hasn’t released any new music since 2005. Lohan hasn’t been in a successful film since Mean Girls in 2004, which wasn’t even that enormous of a hit in terms of box office gross. Hilton and Richie don’t really have jobs—they aren’t singers or actresses, though they’ve tried and failed; they only exist to give OK! Magazine and the like something to write about. (And no, being on a reality TV show doesn’t count as a “job”.) Lohan and Spears are no better. They aren’t artists, they don’t have any work ethic (ie. you’re not an actress if you show up an hour late on set), and they don’t make any real contribution to society.

These four overwhelming media figures play without work. They live a life of privilege without justification. They have no gifts, talents or words to share with the rest of us, no practical purpose in the natural order of the world. They are, quite literally, useless human beings. And yet we lavish them with attention.

If I had a daughter who admired somebody like Paris Hilton, I would shield her from every media outlet I possibly could. That America’s young have come to admire people who are famous for neglecting work, family or any moral responsibility whatsoever in favor of endless nights of partying is frightening. That girls barely in their double digits actually consider a hotel heiress to be a role model—one who is arguably most famous because of her sex video—should be enough to give alarm to us all. Or, at least, one would hope.

With this quartet’s recent string of stints with the law, drugs and outright insanity, I hope, I hope, I hope this is the beginning of the end of this type of media infatuation. I hope Americans who once admired these figures will see how these celebrities' lifestyles have caught up with them, that a life free of responsibility certainly has its consequences.

Then the paparazzo can turn their cameras where they rightfully belong: Brangelina and Tom Cruise.

I saw La Dolce Vita (1960) last week for the first time in years. The film admires a movie star life without consequence or commitment, but then slowly reveals how this lifestyle makes it impossible to make any real connection with a human being. Fellini allows us to admire the beauty of "la dolce vita", but at the same time realize its hollowness. The infamous scene at the Trevi fountain is perfectly indicative of this. Celebrity journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) admires voluptuous movie star Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) as she gracefully meanders in the fountain. But, as soon as Marcello joins her and tries to kiss her, the entire moment sobers: the fountain stops running, the sun comes out, and no connection has been made.

La Dolce Vita is credited for giving the English language the word “paparazzi,” as the journalists who stalk celebrities in the film are referred to as “paparazzo (little birds)”. Fellini makes the audience experience the characters of La Dolce Vita as if we too were paparazzi. We have little knowledge of the aspirations, wants, or needs of these characters. There is no psychological element here, no third dimension. We are simply intrusive observers of the lives of the rich and famous.

It is unclear, for the most part, what types of films the actress Sylvia makes, or why a figure like Maddalena (Anouk Aimee) gets so much media attention. It doesn’t matter what these people are famous for, it only matters that they are celebrities. Their fame is their career.

Such is the status of today’s dominant media figures. It doesn’t matter what Lohan, Spears, Hilton and Richie have done to become famous, for they have ingrained themselves in our national consciousness and vocabulary to such a degree that they don’t need to make films, release albums or appear on television to continue to be famous. Their fame is literally their career.

(There’s one scene where Marcello and Maddalena drive a prostitute around town and, when she enters the car with these two, it becomes evident that even women of the night have a better work ethic than privileged celebrities...)

Fellini predicted how a then-recent cultural phenomenon would grow exponentially. Some saw Fellini’s film as satirizing the celebrity/media relationship when it first became an international sensation almost fifty years ago, but today’s cult(ure) of fame has reached such ridiculous degree that it’s beyond satire. Back in the day, an actor or musician would have had to continue releasing work to continue being in the media spotlight—not today. Our society not only worships mediocre music (Spears) or unprofessional acting (Lohan), but they worship singers that don’t sing and actors that don’t act. When Paris Hilton announced her “retirement” last year, the big question on everyone’s mind was, “retirement from WHAT?”

Princess Diana was killed almost exactly ten years ago. Di was a celebrity beyond celebrity, a figure that actually exceeded the media attention Americans bestow on their celebrities. But unlike today’s headliners, Di—a kindergarten teacher-turned-princess with a humanitarian heart—actually made an effort to do some good in the world. Her unfortunate death is the only celebrity death that immediately comes to mind that was actually caused by paparazzi.

Paparazzi have a frighteningly influential role in our culture. As evidenced by the case of Princess Diana, they aren’t just intrusive observers, but have direct consequence on their subjects. The endless attention they have given to Lohan, Spears, Hilton and Richie only encourages the quartet's irresponsible behavior. Not that these 21-26-year olds aren’t accountable for themselves, of course. Their own accountability is the one thing they’ve all failed to fully realize.

I just really, really want it all to stop.

There's Something About Michael

2007-07-16T20:15:00.000-07:00

I started to appreciate Michael Moore years before I had even learned what the words “liberal” and “conservative” meant. In the late 90s, Moore had a TV show that aired on Bravo called “The Awful Truth”, which was, in essence, a highbrow “Jackass” with the intent of socio-political satire. The show, which I saw on Bravo, basically had Moore pulling outrageous, often hilarious, stunts to either illustrate seemingly obvious political problems or simply to force people into awkward situations of clashing culture. Some of the more memorable segments include: Moore launching a “Sodomobile” across the nation to educate citizens on the fight for gay rights, eventually running into gay-bashing “preacher” Fred Phelps; Moore taking Rage Against the Machine to perform outside Republican and Democratic primaries; and, my personal favorite, Moore gathering a dozen or so nicotine addicts who have been reduced to using voice boxes in order to speak and, right before Christmas, taking them “caroling” outside the Marlboro factory.

These stunts were ludicrous, brave, intentionally shocking and controversial, but never without a sense of humor. In the last five years or so, as Moore has gained enormous success, even infamy, for his feature documentary work, his sense of humor has certainly taken a blow as well.

The name Michael Moore extended to red and blue states alike not because of his work itself, but because of his headline-making speech upon his acceptance of the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award in 2003 for Bowling for Columbine. Not unlike the incendiary reaction to Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, most of the criticism of Moore from the far right stemmed from masses who had never even seen the film they were protesting. Since Moore’s speech—and since his smash-hit, $120 million-grossing and Cannes’ Palme d’Or-winning documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which itself seemed to be a response to the criticism of his speech—he has, like it or not, been an outspoken, relevant media figure, and will probably continue to be.

In fact, the growing success of theatrical documentaries must be at least partially attributed to Moore’s work. Since Bowling and Fahrenheit, documentaries have no longer been just for PBS-ers and struggling intellectuals, but have made for profitable filmmaking, with subjects of interest as far ranging as penguins, global warming and fast food.

I find Moore’s work puzzling. Not his politics or the subjects he chooses, but the way he constructs his films.

Moore’s latest, Sicko, should be a subject that most Americans, left or right, can take an interest in. His thesis is refreshingly simple: while capitalism makes our country work the way a democracy should, American health care would operate with better-vested interest for the people if the profit incentive were removed. Unlike the arguments of many critics of socialized medicine, Moore’s stance hardly makes him, or anybody who agrees, a Communist or Socialist. It makes sense that medical institutions and health insurance providers would operate in better interest of the people if they were employed by the state (as Moore points out, America’s public schools and law enforcement work just fine this way). If we’re the richest country in the world, why can’t we put effort into becoming No. 1 in terms of health care? And, in today’s environment of skyrocketing corporate greed and backstabbery, the response to the idea of socialized medicine reverberates as a sensical, not radical, “why not?”

Moore’s thesis is brief and compact, so his examples throughout that support it quickly become redundant, eventually losing their initial impact. Sicko starts off with example after example of horror stories average Americans have had with insurance and pharmaceutical companies, then Moore examines other developed countries that have socialized medicine: Canada, France, and Great Britain. He talks to a doctor in London who makes a great living despite being employed by the government, for he gets paid in terms of how many patients he cures and how many lives he saves. Moore then gathers several Americans who have had injustice done to them by their healthcare providers (or simply can’t afford healthcare) and takes them to Cuba, where they are given the attention their home country couldn’t provide. Throughout, Moore sticks to the same formula: talk to normal people, and play the dumb guy by asking them simple, obvious leading questions, the answers of which largely speak for themselves (such as when he asks a normal Canadian, who obviously receives the government’s health care, if he has ever been a Communist or Socialist).

While the film and argument are certainly worthwhile, and will hopefully continue a national discourse on the problems with our healthcare, I found myself wishing it was made by a different documentary filmmaker, for Moore’s signature style is the only thing that weakens his stance.

While no documentary can be purely objective, the best documentaries are those where the filmmaker simply lets their subjects speak for themselves without lead or direction, the documentarian simply being a witness and not an active participant. If the style be cinema verite (as it happens) like The War Room (1993) or in the style of retrospective interviews and archive footage, like last year’s VH1-esque The US vs. John Lennon, the subject is best-served if we the audience are focusing on that subject, and not the filmmaker.

But Michael Moore is, in fact, the subject of each of Michael Moore’s films, with health care (or 9/11, or gun control, or GM CEO Roger Smith) coming in at a close second. Moore has a dense presence both in front of and behind the camera; when he’s not in the same frame of the people he’s interviewing, he’s narrating. His editing techniques are especially worth notice, and so is the manner in which he uses bombastic music to incite immediate emotional responses. His interviews and archival materials are often peppered with brief footage from old films or obscure television clips to add some humor to the piece (such as when he incorporates a clip of some Eastern European medical comedy show when he states that Slovenia is right above the US in terms of serving medical need). And his musical cues, ranging from tired Rolling Stones numbers to orchestral scores from other movies (Thomas Newman, Hans Zimmer), are anything but subtle. At one point, he even uses a Star Wars intro parody to show a list of conditions that would keep you from qualifying for medical care, complete with John Williams music. It’s sensational documentary filmmaking at its pop-cultural, postmodern best. With this constant visual and oral blast to the senses, Moore’s documentaries can be pretty damn entertaining, something easily consumable for our decreasing attention spans and far removed from any pre-Michael Moore documentary you’d see on PBS (yawn!).

Unfortunately, this skilled style makes the documentary far less substantive. His filmmaking techniques—sensation-driven and not content-driven—and simplistic interviews (usually devoid of conversations with experts or scholars) hurt the value of the information he’s presenting, and cause his films to lose most of their power upon multiple viewings. It's the documentary equivalent of style over substance. Michael Moore is basically the Guy Ritchie of documentary filmmaking...(okay, that's not entirely accurate, but it's fun to say).

While the facts Moore brings to the table in his films seem to be technically accurate, the information he chooses to omit becomes more and more apparent. Had Moore chosen to show the downsides of universal healthcare in Canada, England, France and Cuba, followed with an argument as to how the positives outweigh the negatives, then Sicko would be that much more powerful and influential in promoting socialized medicine. (Anybody who has taken College Writing 101 knows this.)

Like visiting Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine, like asking Congressmen to sign up their children to fight in Iraq in Fahrenheit 9/11, and like the entire premise of “The Awful Truth,” Moore does an over-the-top stunt in Sicko to make his point. Arguing that political prisoners in Guantanamo Bay get excellent health care (for free, nonetheless), Moore takes some of the victims of unjust American health care to the “American soil” on Cuba to ask for medical assistance. The point is made long before the ridiculous gesture is completed. In Moore’s two previous films, he performed these stunts only at the potential embarrassment of himself (and I thought they were pretty clever), but watching Moore yelling towards Guantanamo Bay prison on a boat with some very sick people did not seem in the least bit funny. Moore knew that they were going to get sent away (just like he knew the Congressmen would ignore him, and that Heston would walk out on him) because it’s his very intent to use these stunts to incite something abrupt that would drive his point home. Why did he waste his time? Why didn’t he just get these people to free medical care in Cuba (which he does right after) first? It’s one of the instances in the film in which it becomes perfectly clear that this movie is about Moore, and not the sick people on the boat. It makes me look at that clip from “The Awful Truth” differently. Is Moore just pulling an outrageous stunt to make his point at the expense of embarrassing the people with voice boxes, or is he actually making a positive impact?

Dr. Gupta of CNN recently went head-to-head with Moore regarding the specific details of Sicko. Moore seems to go through a process like this after each film he releases and, as with each film Moore has been previously criticized for, Gupta didn’t dispute the facts themselves, but the way they were presented as well as the ones he chose to omit.

And in the anti-Michael Moore documentary Manufacturing Dissent (2007), the filmmakers show how Moore’s examination of unlocked doors in Canada in Bowling for Columbine (to show the Canadians’ sense of safety) was inaccurate: only about 40% of the doors he encountered were unlocked, when all of the doors shown in the final cut were unlocked. Moore critics often run into a trivial mess like this; debating how many doors are locked or unlocked in Canada at any given time doesn’t get anybody anywhere. Moore pulls these stunts to make a point, so of course he’s only going to include footage that supports his point. One wouldn’t need a documentary to tell us that, most likely, not every door Moore came up to that day was unlocked, and showing the raw footage of Moore knocking on doors all day certainly wouldn’t make for an entertaining documentary, at least not in the Michael Moore style. To reverse an old phrase, it’s not in the details.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/15/moore.gupta/index.html?iref=newssearch

Michael Moore, not to mention most of the media today, certainly has a very odd definition of “truth”. His television show was called “The Awful Truth” and his website that supports the facts of Sicko is called “The Truth.” When reading Gupta and Moore go back and forth about different facts from different sources, one quickly becomes aware of the fruitlessness of discovering “truth” in the confused, misinformed, often fear-driven and increasingly prevalent media of today (in both news and documentaries). No wonder Steven Colbert’s term “truthiness” was quickly coined as a legitimate word in our culture. And debating the details of Moore’s films still seems to be missing the point entirely. Why is everybody so concerned with overturning facts in such an obviously subjective documentary? What good would it have done Michael Moore to intentionally make a movie full of lies, and what do critics prove by countering everything he says? (I would pose the same question regarding Al Gore and the criticism of An Inconvenient Truth as well.)

One of the best political documentaries in recent years is Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004), about the hardly fair or balanced partisan news reporting at the Fox News Network. Because Outfoxed is criticizing a sensationalist style of news reporting, the film itself is very straightforward in its style, with simple interview techniques, non-manipulative archive footage (ie. no old movies or obscure TV clips), obvious iMovie-style cuts when an edit has been made, and pretty much no music. While the film is in no way amateur, the filmmaking style is simplistic as to not receive any of the same criticism in media technique that they are criticizing Fox News for. They’re trying not to fall in a trap that would undermine their own argument. As a result, however, the film is not entertaining. In the world of the political documentary, entertainment value and substantive argument are, quite unfortunately, mutually exclusive terms.

But there has been an even more powerful style of documentary filmmaking recently. Two films from last year, Jesus Camp and Deliver Us From Evil, criticize the subjects they are presenting not through asking leading questions, fancy editing, or fact omission, but by simply letting their subjects speak for themselves. They leave the opinion up to the audience. And through their professional and seemingly objective style, they drive their point home much more powerfully than any of Moore’s films.

Yet no documentary can be purely objective, and docs that seem purely objective, but in fact may not be at all accurate, can be dangerous (ie. propaganda). While Jesus Camp and Deliver Us From Evil are two of my favorite docs in recent years, and I have outspokenly praised their attempts at objectivity, any subject presented as objectively as these has the capacity to be powerfully manipulative.

That being said, maybe what Michael Moore is doing with his docs is actually good for Americans. Maybe because his technique and style are so obvious, and the details of his content are so criticized as a result, that it unintentionally enables viewers to be just as critical and able to decide for themselves where they fall in respect to Moore’s argument instead of merely being overwhelmed by the sensation of its technique. Maybe he’s creating a critical discourse not just of himself, but the issue at hand, that would otherwise not be so relevant without such a controversial and prevalent figure.

In 1920s Soviet Russia, filmmakers of the country manufactured “propaganda,” but not propaganda in the traditional sense. With films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1928) or Dziga Vertov’s The Man With the Movie Camera (1929), the Soviets used obvious editing and montage techniques (in expense of narrative cohesion) in order to express an idea, but, along the way, intentionally used this to educate audiences on how films express ideas through editing (and even sensational emotional techniques) so that they can view “propaganda” critically and objectively. Realizing the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary potential of this “cinematic education”, the Soviet government quickly censored this practice in the nation’s film schools.

However, had this practice persisted, perhaps the Soviets, and citizens of other nations around the world, would be more educated when viewing media not be “duped” by the subjective media techniques used commonly today.

I’m not saying Michael Moore is the next Eisenstein, and I’m certainly not saying he’s intelligent enough to do this intentionally, but as his filmmaking style continues to keep audiences in critical discourse, maybe we can take this knowledge and criticism to other media outlets, like the news, and use our education to keep ourselves from being duped anymore.

Maybe then we can decide for ourselves what “truth” really is.

(For further reading on Moore's odd obsession with our neighbors to the north, see his only narrative feature (and John Candy's last screen appearance) Canadian Bacon (1995), a surprisingly clever comedy about a cold war between the US and Canada. At one point, two American characters realize that every door in Canada is unlocked. Funny how Moore's narrative fiction eventually became documentary fact...)

(Because I love this nation, I love my right to criticize it.)

Transformers and the iPhone

2007-07-08T22:28:00.000-07:00

Michael Bay has been called a lot of things, but I’m going to try a new word on him: auteur.

If an auteur is a filmmaker with a signature style and worldview that shows up in each of his films, then Bay certainly qualifies, even if said style is synonymous with shit, and said worldview involves a black-and-white, good vs. evil moral compass that isn’t afraid of excesses in the sexual portrayal of women and unintentional hilarity in the ridiculousness of the physics-defying action scenes. But unlike the typical filmmakers that come to mind when the word “auteur” appears (Hitchcock, for instance, was one of the first directors to be tacked with this title), Bay doesn’t examine or criticize any element of the social, cultural or political conditions he is representing in his films—he is instead merely part-and-parcel of American culture.

The nature of Michael Bay’s films is emblematic of the reasons why Islamic fascists want to destroy our country: they’re excessive, loud, arrogant, bloated products that divide the world strictly into easily-comprehendible segments of good and evil with the sole intent of using its content to capitalize on the filmgoing market at the expense of cinema being an art in any shape or form. Indeed, this approach can be an art all its own.

Cinema has always been an economic machine with the intent to sell. Yet financial gain and artistic merit have never been mutually exclusive terms. But, when a film, a product in itself, becomes the catalyst for launching other products (not-so-subliminal advertising), the art loses its value. Yet films with this intent can still retain entertainment value. As evidenced by Casino Royale, audiences are only temporarily distracted by product placement in films.

In the mid-80s, Hasbro invented a line of toys that turn from typical mechanical devices (cars, helicopters, guns) into badass robots. But they needed a TV show to give a storyline and background for the toys and, most importantly, as a device to sell more toys. Thus, Transformers was born. It became a cultural phenomenon in the television, toy and even film market (Transformers: The Movie (1986)) and, along the way, became an inseparable part of the childhood of millions of males born between the late 70s and early 80s. (As I was born in 1985, I wasn’t a part of it. However, another 1980s Saturday morning cartoon series pretty much defined my childhood: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.) Transformers, TMNT, GI Joe, He-Man, Thundercats and the like were all TV shows that basically existed as thirty-minute commercials for toys. But, along the way, they have had an underestimated emotional influence on the lives of the children who adored them. This sometimes had its consequences: Transformers: The Movie killed off many of the series’ characters (including Optimus Prime) solely to sell a new line of characters as toys, disregarding how this may have been shocking to its single-digit viewers.

http://www.slate.com/id/2169619/nav/tap3/

Now, riding the wave of 1980s cultural nostalgia, is Michael Bay’s magnum opus, Transformers (2007). The film has made quite an impact at the box-office, no doubt partly a result of once-admirers, now in their twenties and early-30s, aiming to rekindle a new, nostalgic relationship with the subject. Like the original series and movie, a new line of toys will be released in hope of creating a new generation of fans (not unlike the CG Turtles movie released earlier this year, which I refused to see). And Bay's film is not without its share of product placement (look for the Mountain Dew vending machine that becomes a transformer during the film’s climax). However, things have changed in the American market in the last twenty years, and it seems we as a society have adopted transformers of our own.

Apple’s iPhone was released almost immediately before Transformers entered theaters. And, just as Optimus Prime is hardly just a truck, the iPhone is hardly just a phone. With its easy access to the internet, music, pictures, videos, maps, and probably a dozen other things I forgot, the iPhone contains an extraordinary number of practical uses within a single device. The fact that it’s advertised as a phone can be deceptive. The iPhone, and many other multifunctional products like it, are quickly becoming an inseparable part of American culture, and can very much take on a life all its own.

As Michael Bay’s films certainly do not comment on cultural trends, and are instead a part of them, it is interesting that our society has adopted its own personal transformers at the time of the series’ revival, and that these machines continue to become a larger part of our lives. America certainly didn’t operate to this degree when the original series debuted over twenty years ago, but the ideas it presented may have fed into the very American need for convenience and multitasking through technology.

Michael Bay’s Transformers, being live-action and not animated, requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that the original series did not need. Needless to say, because of Bay’s total lack of skill at creating relationships on screen (human or not), the transformers’ relationship with the humans, and their entire presence in a human landscape, is hardly believable. However, what’s interesting is how easily the human characters accept the fact that the technological devices can embody personality and free will of their own, that something created by humans can itself be like a human. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Matrix (and before and since), the sci-fi genre has obsessed itself with a cosmic battle between humanity and technology. It is possible, as technology has become such an irrevocable part of the American lifestyle, that the battle is no longer between man and machine, but between good machine and bad machine, while man is merely a spectator. Transformers follows the very real American need to trust technology, and let it move forward with bringing on a life of its own, influencing us as an essential part of our cultural makeup.

If you don’t think we as a society are eager to trust technology on a human level, consider this: our military has developed a robot that is designed to rescue injured troops during battle. The robot has the face of a teddy bear to give the likely panicked soldier a feeling of safety and peace.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/06/ap_teddybearrobots_070623/

An emotional connection with a machine during a time of crisis—this is the direction we are heading. And it seems to be a good thing for most people.

There is a scene of the film in which the process of “transforming” is shown. A government military scientist puts a normal Nokia cell phone into a container and puts energy into it from The Cube (even if you see the movie, whatever the hell The Cube is still won’t make sense). The phone then suddenly becomes a mini-transformer, creating—out of nothing—legs, a head, a voice and even a little machine gun.

I couldn’t help but think of the iPhone.

(On another note entirely, Optimus Prime seemed to be a character of strange moral ambiguity for a film like this. He vowed, Terminator 3-style, not to kill any humans in their fight against Megatron. Yet he lets Bumblebee get sacrificed without rescue for fear of human casualties, self-righteously justifying his stubbornness by saying Bumblebee—who literally can not speak for himself—would have wanted it that way. And while Prime doesn’t kill any humans, he does manage to saw another Transformer’s head off medieval-style. He also has an odd, outspoken desire toward the film’s end to sacrifice himself to martyrdom, begging Shia LaBeouf to kill him with The Cube, though Shia doesn’t comply. Optimus Prime by far Michael Bay’s most complex character to date.)

Soderbergh's Schizopolis (1996)

2007-07-03T14:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve had mixed feelings about Steven Soderbergh. I often feel that this prolific filmmaker has been celebrated far too much for many projects that are basically film-school-level experiments in style. I view The Good German (2006), Bubble (2005) and Full Frontal (2002) as interesting in concept, but devoid of any substance in execution, whose good exists merely as an exercise in style. Bubble (an exercise in minimalism) and The Good German (an exercise in recreation of style) infuriate me in particular because the style is so overbearing that it comes at the expense of depth of characterization and narrative. (Good German is misguided even in its own goal, giving elements such as sex & violence and rapid-fire editing that routinely removes itself completely from any illusion of American war-era filmmaking reborn.) Not that I don’t think Soderbergh was well-deserved in receiving the directing Oscar for Traffic (2000), and not that I didn’t enjoy films like The Limey (1999), Out of Sight (1998) and sex, lies and videotape (1989). Soderbergh has talent, no doubt. However, his best films are not his indie experiments, but the ones he makes that have a more traditional narrative while still retaining some originality (and punch) in their style, such Traffic, Out of Sight, sex, lies and the first Ocean’s film.

There are many filmmakers today that straddle the constantly-blurring line between the studios and the indies: Gus Van Sant, Richard Linklater, Paul Greengrass, Alfonso Cuaron, Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, etc. These filmmakers have seen success with mass audiences, while at the same time making more personal, lower-budget pet projects. Yet most of these filmmakers retain a distinctive style no matter what type of film they’re making. Soderbergh, on the other hand, has no discernable style except for an abundance of style itself. Most of his more obscure work has seemed like empty film school exercises in concept from somebody with too much success, fame and money to still be in film school. Not that I disrespect experiment in film—I love what the French New Wave and many other European traditions have done for the medium. But, with Soderbergh, there seems to be something missing beyond character development and narrative thrust, and it is the essential ingredient in artistic filmmaking: a critical element.

Then I saw Schizopolis (1996).

This film accomplishes a major feat that nothing else in Soderbergh’s oeuvre has: it deconstructs the language of cinematic expression. But not only that, it aims to deconstruct language itself—a post-structuralist exercise in a medium of self-imposed rules and regulations. But perhaps the greatest feat in this worthwhile experiment is that it doesn’t treat itself too seriously (or seriously at all), and is in fact absolutely hilarious.

The film bookends with a theater attendant (Soderbergh himself, who plays two other characters in the film as well) telling the audience of the theater (ie. you) how important the filmis that you are about to see. He stresses that he is not relaying this information for financial gain, but because he sincerely believes this to be true, then says, “if you don’t understand this film, it’s your fault, not ours. You must watch it over and over again until you understand everything.” He ends the film with a rather droll Q&A with a silent audience. This is an obvious tongue-in-cheek approach to the distance that art house cinema puts between the screen and the audience through its self-important deviation from mainstream film style. It’s basically what every film geek would like to say to the normal moviegoing audience: “if you don’t understand, it’s your fault.” But by far the most notable aspect of this approach is that it aims to seem as if it’s not taking itself seriously at all within a critical style that is known for its seriousness. This contrasts with Soderbergh’s own work even.

There is a great tradition of inaccessible European and independent art cinema that is celebrated by critics and film buffs alike, many of whom refuse to acknowledge that the films themselves “make no sense” in any practical way (Fellini Satyricon is one of my personal favorites of these types). This takes nothing away from their cultural importance—I’m certainly not knocking these films, and neither is Soderbergh. What Soderbergh accomplishes quite brilliantly is that he takes much delight in his own awareness that his film “makes no sense”. He uses experimentation with dialogue, editing and any recognizable narrative form as sort of a light game, which relaxes the audience (me) enough to enjoy the seemingly anti-intellectual ride. He dares us to treat this seriously. He dares us to make sense of this work. (His commentary on the Criterion DVD is an interview he has with himself that illuminates nothing about the production and meaning of the film. The joke continues…)

But the film’s great irony is that it uses undisciplined meaninglessness as a technique to search for meaning itself (or lack thereof), most notably in its use of language. Characters in some scenes use a variety of random words that seem to describe something (usually a proposition for sex. ex, Woman: Arsenal. Nose army. Man: Nose army. Beef Diaper?), but the words themselves mean nothing at all; they merely suggest meaning in their inflection and the action that follows them. In other scenes, characters communicate with one another using entirely different languages (sans subtitles). And, in some of the funniest and most frustrating scenes, characters interact with one another by merely describing what they’re saying (Husband coming home from work: “Generic greeting!” Wife: “Generic greeting.”). Are these examples a deconstruction of filmic language, and how it sounds familiar even when it means nothing? Or, is it an examination of the meaninglessness of our routine suburban façade of propriety and dialogue that substitutes for real human connection? The similarity between the two is scary. But in the tradition of the film itself, I’ll restrain drawing conclusions.

Whatever is going on, the film is certainly subversive in style and form, on par with Luis Bunuel (although without the same explicit aim). Also, a sequence toward the end of the film, in which several events are re-told from the female's perspective, can't help but hark back to a similar technique used in Bergman's Persona (1966), a film that, like Schizopolis, toyed with the relationship between screen and audience throughout. Therefore, the film certainly has a respect for the art film, even as it tries to convince us not to take artistic filmmaking too seriously. (It is also reminiscent of many literary traditions, and could be deemed the filmic equivalent of the equally subversive works of Kurt Vonnegut or William S. Burroughs.)

Soderbergh’s physical presence throughout (as the two principal characters) is worth note as well. In the great European art film tradition, the director’s presence on screen (through their signature style, not physically) was essential in the experience of watching films that “make no sense”. One would have to come into these films with a knowledge and appreciation of the cinema, if not the specific filmmaker him/herself, in order to really “appreciate” the film. One would need to evaluate an art film in respect to the director’s canon of other films. After all, these serious films are reserved only for an elite audience, one that treats film seriously. Soderbergh, by contrast, is not only a filmmaker seemingly devoid of a signature style, but also one who rarely seems to treat the medium seriously (or at least would like you to think so). Soderbergh’s physical presence in the film is yet another subversion of the art film. A film this experimental in style and critical in purpose should treat itself very seriously, but it doesn’t. Soderbergh moves beyond subverting film techniques, but subverts these subversive techniques as well. And the director’s physical presence on screen (as the director’s presence is supposed to help “make sense” of the nonsensical in the art film) refuses to provide any illumination to the film’s purpose and meaning. His constant presence has us longing for closure, but we get none of it (the DVD commentary is an extension of this as well). The more of him we see, the less we know what to think.

Thank you, Steven, for not telling us what to think.

The Godfather vs. Arrested Development

2007-07-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

First posted on February 22, 2007 on facebook:

Is "Arrested Development" a sitcom version of "The Godfather"? We’ll see…

MICHAEL CORLEONE and MICHAEL BLUTH:

In The Godfather, Michael Corleone wants to leave his family business behind and find a normal life on his own terms. However, he is forced into the family business when an attempt has been made on his father’s life, as he is the only one qualified amongst his brothers and sister to continue the family business. Michael is practically the only one who looks after his father, helping to evade further attempts on Don Vito’s life while he is incapacitated in the hospital. He has a spouse that dies during his stay in Italy, and is unable to sustain a functional relationship with his girlfriend/wife Kay because of his devotion to family affairs.

In the pilot episode of Arrested Development, Michael Bluth wants to leave his family business behind and find a normal life on his own terms. However, he is forced back into the family business when his father is taken to jail, as he is the only one qualified amongst his brothers and sister to continue the family business. Michael is practically the only one who looks after his father, visiting George Sr. frequently in jail. He has a spouse that died at some point in his past, and is unable to sustain functional relationships with various women because of his devotion to family affairs.

DON VITO CORLEONE and GEORGE BLUTH, Sr.:

Don Vito Corleone is the patriarch of an olive oil manufacturing empire that is a guise for an organized crime syndicate that has connections with powerful individuals in America and abroad (Cuba in Part II). An attempt is made on his life and he is incapacitated, but still tries to run the family business and exercise power through his son, Michael.

George Bluth, Sr. is the patriarch of a real estate empire that is a guise for an illegal syndicate organization with a powerful individual abroad, Saddam Hussein. He is arrested and sent to jail, but still tries to run the family business and exercise power through his son, Michael.

SANTINO “SONNY” CORLEONE and GEORGE OSCAR “GOB” BLUTH:

Sonny Corleone is the oldest son of Don Vito Corleone. Though he is the eldest and therefore first in line to run the family business after his father, his eccentric personality and arrogant temper prevent him from being qualified. When he acts on his own decree, he makes dumb, shortsighted decisions that threaten the efforts of the family as a whole. He is a relentless womanizer.

George Oscar Bluth II (“GOB”) is the oldest son of George, Sr. Though he is the eldest and therefore first in line to run the family business after his father, his eccentric personality and arrogant attempts at magic (and other occupations) prevent him from being qualified. When he acts on his own decree, he makes dumb, shortsighted decisions that threaten the efforts of the family as a whole. He is a relentless womanizer.

FREDERICO “FREDO” CORLEONE and BYRON “BUSTER” BLUTH:

Fredo Corleone is the second oldest son of Don Vito Corleone, but is unfit to run the family business. His stupidity, lack of confidence, and otherwise child-like behavior prevent him from being taken seriously by any member of the family. Despite his attempts at success, integration into the family usually comes to no avail. He is often humored by deciding family members (Michael), and given menial business tasks (i.e. casinos, whorehouses) for the family.

Buster Bluth is the youngest son of George, Sr., and is unfit to run the family business. His stupidity, lack of confidence, and otherwise child-like behavior prevent him from being taken seriously by any member of the family. Despite his attempts at success, integration into the family business usually comes to no avail. He is often humored by deciding family members (his mother), and given menial tasks (i.e. learning cartography) to distract him.

CONNIE CORLEONE-RIZZI and LINDSAY BLUTH FUNKE:

Connie is the only daughter of Don Vito. In "Part II": Though she and Michael care for one another very much, she often abuses what little power she has and requests money with spite. She is lazy and unmotivated, treading on the comforts that her familial status gives her. She rebels against the values of the family by remarrying somebody that the rest of the family despises.

Lindsay is the only daughter of George, Sr. Though she and Michael care for one another very much, she often abuses what little power she has and requests money with spite. She is lazy and unmotivated, treading on the comforts that her familial status gives her. She rebels against the values of the family by marrying somebody that the rest of the family despises.

CARLO RIZZI and DR. TOBIAS FUNKE:

In "Part I": Carlo Rizzi is Connie’s first husband. He exploits and abuses the status of the Corleone family for his own personal desires (i.e. giving information that leads to the death of Sonny). He openly does not love Connie, as he beats her and cheats on her regularly. They have one child together.

Dr. Tobias Funke is Lindsay’s husband. He exploits and abuses the status of the Bluth family for his own personal desires (i.e. his acting career). He openly does not love Lindsay, as the nature of his sexuality is frequently in question. They have one child together.

TOM HAGEN and BARRY ZUCKERKORN:

Tom Hagen is an attorney, though not directly related to the Corleone family, works exclusively for them. He is good at his job in a very unfunny way.

Barry Zuckerkorn is an attorney that is not directly related to the Bluth family, but works almost exclusively for them. He is bad at his job in a hilarious way.

MAMA CORLEONE and LUCILLE BLUTH:

There are very few similarities between Mama Corleone and Lucille Bluth. Mama Corleone is an unspoken matriarch who has little knowledge of, or involvement with, the family business. Lucille Bluth, on the other hand, is a drunken bitch who constantly manipulates Michael’s involvement in the family business.

DON VINCENT MANCINI-CORLEONE and GEORGE MICHAEL BLUTH & MARY CORLEONE and MAE “MAEBY” FUNKE:

In Part III, Vincent Mancini, Sonny Corleone’s illegitimate son (and next in line to run the business), falls in love with Mary Corleone, Michael’s daughter, despite the fact that they are direct cousins.

George Michael Bluth, Michael’s son, has an unrequited attraction to Lindsay and Tobias’ daughter, Maeby, despite the fact that they are direct cousins.

Wild Hogs, Ghost Rider, Norbit and Other Works of Art.

2007-07-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

First published 3/4/07:

Ever since eighth grade or so, I have tracked box office figures online nearly every weekend. This activity has taken up maybe ten minutes of a sunday or monday morning during my internet routine first thing I wake up. I usually keep up merely out of habit with no real vested interest, but the trends of the last several weeks have disturbed me. And I knew, when I checked today's weekend estimates to find that "Wild Hogs" had grossed $38 million dollars (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/?yr=2007&wknd=09&p=.htm), that something needed to be said.

"Wild Hogs" marks the latest development in a disturbing trend. Every week, since the first weekend of 2007, a horribly juvenile, stilted, uninspired, also-ran type film has opened to a huge amount of money.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Landon, c'mon, there are more important things than movies. There's a war on terror, genocides all over Africa, and Britney's hair still hasn't grown back, yet."

But when I hear that kind of an attitude, I say, "No, Voice in my Head, you don't understand. This isn't just movies. This is part of a much larger societal problem." That larger problem, I think, is that movie studios are gradually and indefinitely making people stupider.

So, first off, 2007 in review:

The first several months of a new year usually releases the worst films: It's the time of the year that is far away from both the Academy Awards season and the summer blockbuster season, so the fact that "Stomp the Yard" dominated the first two weekends of 2007 ($21mil its first weekend, $12mil the second) didn't bother me. After all, along the lines of "Drumline" and "You Got Served," it's a film made for a specific demographic that I'm simply not part of.

However, the month of January ended it's run with "Epic Movie" taking the top spot with $18mil. The movie scored a horrendous 2% on rotten tomatoes. Dumb comedies don't bother me--I'm a huge fan of "Dumb and Dumber" and Will Ferrell. What bothers me is that this movie wasn't really even a comedy, or a parody per se. Good senseless parodies like "Naked Gun," "Airplane," (or even "Mafia!" and the first "Scary Movie") take films that are already very well known to audiences and turn them on their ear. "Epic Movie", however, is simply takes blips from the movies released the previous year (far too soon to make a funny parody) and meshes them into an amalgamation of stupidity, with no real original humor bred into them at all. It's simply an empty overview of films released recently. Many of the movies they "parody" in this film don't even fall under the given category of epic, like "Borat" and "Nacho Libre" (and what the hell is the point of parodying a comedy?) Yet, for some reason, people showed up in droves to see this film.

The next week, "The Messengers," a run-of-the-mill horror film, opened at no.1 with $14mil. I'm starting to wonder when audiences will get tired of seeing the same uninspired, cardboard-plot-driven horror film over and over again. But the trend only continued with "Norbit" hitting no.1 with $34mil, followed by "Ghost Rider" dominating the next two weekends with $45mil and $20mil, followed by "Wild Hog"'s massive debut this weekend.

Of all the movies that have hit no.1 so far this year, "Ghost Rider" (I kid you not) is the best-reviewed, with 27% on rotten tomatoes. ("Stomp the Yard" has 26%, followed by "Wild Hogs" with 16%, and its all downhill from there.)

Now, I know what you're saying, Voice in my Head: "Landon, movies are supposed to be escapist entertainment, not art. And you're a pretentious film student, your opinion doesn't count."

First of all, art and entertainment are not mutually exclusive. Secondly, I'm a 22-year-old white male with some dispensable income, which makes me part of the target mass market that every major studio is campaigning their films toward. Yet, I have not met a single person that has seen any of these movies. (VimH: "Landon, if you haven't seen them, how do you know they're not good?" Shut up. I don't care if this makes me sound like an ass, but I've seen enough movies to know what's good and what's bad before I watch them.)

Who in their right mind is shelling out $12 dollars at The Grove to see something like "Norbit"? Are all movies now being marketed to 15-year old boys? How is it that I am 22-years old and a frequent moviegoer and I feel like nobody is making movies for me?

The truth is, studios totally underestimate audience intelligence in favor of making films that are already familiar to audiences ("Stomp the Yard," "The Messengers") or have a high concept with big stars ("Wild Hogs"). Movie studios want your money in the door, and pretty much don't care if you're unsatisfied or pissed-off when you come out. Therefore, as studios take less and less risks, the films get dumber and more predictable. And this trend will only continue because audiences are continuing to shell out their hard-earned dollars to see this crap. Simply put, studios are conditioning audiences to accept mediocrity as a standard.

Take the top ten grossing films of 2006 for example:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2006&p=.htm

Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 are films largely marketing to kids and teens (and it doesn't hurt that they are either sequels or computer-animated, or both). This I can't help but forgive, because these movies have a proven, inherent audience and are not marketed towards me (with the exception of "Happy Feet"--that was just terrible. Kids are cute, but dumb, so you can't blame them for dragging their parents to dumb movies. Ever watched a movie you loved as a kid? Chances are, if it wasn't made by Disney, it's pretty bad.) Anyway, it's simply part of the system.

However, sometimes studios depend on this inherent market without regard to quality or entertainment value: ex. "X-Men: The Last Stand," a hastily made sequel far inferior to its predecessors. Yet, because of the built-in audiences, it made money. regardless of whether or not people were happy with it when they left, it got them in the door. No.5, "The Da Vinci Code" is a film geared more towards people my age and older, yet this film still suffered a similar fate as "X-Men": it was a success because of the built-in audience regardless of it's shortcomings--cardboard characters and plot executed as if no high stakes existed (ie. we saw them running, but never felt they were in a hurry). Disappointing considering the involvement of Tom Hanks and Ron Howard. It seems the only film that delivered on its own merit was "The Pursuit of Happyness" (whose success cannot help but be attributed to its star power and black-and-white moral compass). "Casino Royale" is the only film in the top 10 that actually ATTEMPTED to deliver in its entertainment value without simply relying on its guranteed audience, yet this came at the expense of shameless product placement throughout.

Another thing that has made studio movies worse is, yes, independent film. What indie films have done is marginalize films with artistic merit into limited venues in only the highly populated cities around the country. Only when these films overperform in these areas do they get a chance to be seen by middle America ("Little Miss Sunshine," "The Queen"). When these movies open in limited release in a box office that thrives on opening weekend grosses, they're basically giving up before they have a chance, saying, "I know I won't connect with a mass audience, so I won't even try." The fact that most independent films are distributed by studios under a different name (Fox Searclight, Sony Pictures Classics) only makes it worse. Any film that does not have the studio approval of "mass appeal", whether independently financed or not, is automatically designated an "indie" and kept in secret from mass audiences. Therefore, artistic merit and entertainment value have been deemed as mutually exclusive: artistic merit belonging in the big cities, half-assed entertainment belonging everywhere. This has caused studios to only go further into their routines of repitition and underestimating audience intelligence.

What I'm saying is that movies that are being marketing solely as entertainment aren't even delivering at that, but are mediocre and also-ran at best, relying on the attendance of ignorant audiences.

Audiences aren't necessarily unintelligent. This year's success stories of good old-fashioned smart storytelling like "The Departed" or "Inside Man", and the unexpected successes of "Borat" and "Little Miss Sunshine" prove that audiences cannot be underestimated and will show up to a movie if it is good, legitimately entertaining and original.

So, please, stop wasting your money on these shitty pieces of shit. It doesn't benefit you. It will only benefit movie execs in Culver City or Santa Monica who already have more money than they need. And it will only make movies dumber and worse. Shell out your hard-earned dollar for something original and promising, and don't settle for mediocrity.

Hopefully the trend will subside when "300" opens this weekend, for this is a studio-released film that has no star power, barely any built-in audience, that is looking for success only on the merits of its own uniqueness. (It has some of the best reviews of '07, with 100% right now on rotten tomatoes.)

Maybe then the Voice in my Head will shut up.

Over.

Update: 5/4/07: I originally wrote this note in March, and I just wanted to clarify the final detail of my argument: "300" sucked.

Another Update: Let me expand on this. I thought 300's action scenes were entertaining enough, and I give it credit for being extremely successful on much riskier terms than the aforementioned films (and I hope its success will help quiet the studio fear of the R rating). But every scene that wasn't an overedited bombast of action felt like droll, empty filler that I found excruciatingly boring. 300 is like the films I mentioned in that it exists solely for entertainment's sake, but fails to deliver this promise fully, albeit not as horrendously as most of this year's offerings. And I feel my argument is all the more relevant with the release of what is currently 2007's highest-grossing film, Spider-Man 3 (which was great for kids, but disappointing for even the casual fan of the comic). Hollywood needs more Knocked Ups and Ratatouilles, and it's odd to me that the most praised "action" film this year was the Brit parody, Hot Fuzz.