… up and away

UP (Pete Docter, USA, 2009) — 10

I think UP may be the first Disney(-ish) animated feature that actually has more for adults than children. Even at their best in THE INCREDIBLES, the TOY STORY movies, and CARS (shut up, everybody), the Pixar folks have made children’s fantasy movies; though, like the greatest of fantasies and fairy tales, the works are wise beyond their apparent years and appeal to adults too. Obviously, UP is not adults-only stuff like FRITZ THE CAT or HEAVY METAL. But its primary themes are adult matters (or at least issues that adults are likely to have first-hand knowledge of) and its central protagonist is an old man, named Carl Fredricksen. UP’s already most-famous scene is a several-minute wordless montage I hereby dub “Scenes from a Marriage,” which covers nearly Carl’s whole lifetime (for economy, eloquence and relevance in the tiniest details, it deserves comparison with the breakfast montage in CITIZEN KANE). But it concerns such adult matters as losing a child and having one’s youthful dreams, in this case to go to South America, not work out. For one reason and/or another, and not all nefarious or poor excuses.

This is a universal theme: One of my idols as a boy was Muhammad Ali, and I wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world and be as brash and funny as he was. That didn’t happen, for multiple reasons, but it’s fundamentally a realization most of us have in our 30s and 40s.¹ Things work themselves through in UP — it’s about leaving behind even disappointment itself, and accepting your “thrownness” as the grounding for new possibility. But even plugging into the problem in the first place requires an adult sensibility — the sky is not the limit, you can’t do whatever you want, believing in yourself is not enough, etc.

But … and this is the true measure of the Pixar genius here, even this very adult material doesn’t exclude children, one way or another. I’ll give two examples.

First, right at the start we get a newsreel detailing the great feats of explorer Charles Muntz, and it’s clearly a parody of “The March of Time” newsreels of the 30s and 40s, with the melodramatic narrator’s voice, the deliberately clever alliterations like Muntz “conceived the craft for canine comfort,” and tics like having the narrator say word-for-word what Muntz says right afterward. Students of 30s journalism can pat themselves on the back, but the tics Pixar is borrowing are still funny in themselves — indeed, funny because of the very anachronism if you don’t know this was once the normal style in American journalism. Similarly there’s a moment in the newsreel where Muntz unveils an enormous skeleton on a public stage for scientific review. Again, it pays homage to a famous 30s work (KING KONG), but it works on its own terms and eventually undergirds much of the to-do once the protagonists wind up in South America, rather than something just dropped in so the film-makers let us know that they’ve seen the same stuff we have. But more importantly, and unlike in “The March of Time” parody at the start of CITIZEN KANE,² UP cuts away from the newsreel repeatedly to show us the actual concern of the scene — Carl as a little boy watching the newsreel. We see him reciting its lines to himself as he walks home; “Muntz crosses the Grand Canyon,” he says as he leaps over a crack in the sidewalk. A shared love for Muntz brings Carl a new friend and a secret club — this is all prime kid-movie territory, even though it come surrounded by material children won’t “get.”

The other scene I wanna mention as an example of how Pixar gets all the details right, is really just a quick shot; if you blink, you miss it. But that’s kinda why it’s great. Late in the movie, after it’s been established that the villain has a team of trained dogs, Carl, son-figure Russell, and some animals are trying to sneak up and surprise the villain. We get a quick shot of the bad dogs keeping watch that I can’t reproduce, though I assure you it looks very VERY much like the still attached to this paragraph. That image is one of a series of about a dozen oil paintings collectively known as “Dogs Playing Poker” — a masterpiece of early 20th-century commercial American kitsch (they were commissioned for a cigar ad campaign) and immediately recognizable as such. The shot in UP is a funny homage if you recognize it; it’s also funny that, rather than poker chips in the paintings, the canine card-sharks in UP are playing for dog biscuits. But here’s what’s best — the scene in no way depends on your getting the art reference (most kids won’t, in fact), it hardly lasts more than a second, and it’s not emphasized or pushed on you. “Dogs Playing Poker” doesn’t *stop* the movie, in other words. It’s a wink and a nudge to those who get it that doesn’t baffle those who don’t. Pixar has in spades what used to be called “tact” and “touch” — the ability to give a joke the right amount of space and explanation, relative to its importance: in this case, very little. Too often in self-conscious pomo cartoons (think SHREK or some other Dreamworks titles), the humor relies on, or just IS, movie or pop-culture in-jokes.

But wait. Hold on. I’m describing details of UP without mentioning the most important point about it — its fawesomeness. By now, that hardly needs saying about the latest Pixar. I expect UP to be the best commercial American film of the year and hopefully, the expansion of the Best Picture field to 10 films will grab that first Oscar nod for the best American studio now working.³ Every easy characterization pitfall, Pixar manages to avoid — the precocious kid is not the fount of all wisdom, the elderly man isn’t pushed into Grampa Simpson or Clint Eastwood yelling “get off my lawn,” etc. UP is also thrilling and unending fun — the dogs are among the convincing animal personifications thanks to a comic device that both explains how they can talk and sets up two of the best jokes in the movie (one involving a single word, the other involving the variable voices). For Pixar’s first movie that is basically set in a world of humans, it allows speech-personification without turning the dogs into four-legged hairy men. Indeed wonder if the writers were familiar with Jonah Goldberg’s writings about his pet, Cosmo the Wonder Dog (here interviewing the Prime Minister of Pakistan).
———————
¹ I was unusual in knowing at 10 that my dream wasn’t even possible (one reason I kept it to myself even then).
² Admittedly, in a 1941 movie, the audience would be familiar with the thing being parodied and so wouldn’t need an explanation. Pixar folks know their audience isn’t, and does. Indeed, I saw the CITIZEN KANE “News on the March” parody before I saw an actual “Time Marches On” newsreel, as I suspect is the case for most people not drawing Social Security.
³ Really though, Pixar is the only current American studio, in the sense of having a distinct corporate identity and an identifiable product style, like you can meaningfully talk about Universal in the 50s, MGM in the 40s, Warner Brothers in the 30s, etc.).

Believe it or not

(I’m walkin’ on air …)

No … believe it or not, I added a lot of new material over the weekend, though mostly for list queens. I updated my screening log to the current day from early August last year (it’s a lot of tedious work, but it’s easier than it looks if you keep all your theater tickets as I do), put up my new Top 10 for the year, updated my old top 10s to reflect old movies recently seen, posted my last two Skandies ballots … in other words, I’ve updated all the ancillary pages, which are actually more intimidating than a blog itself.

Also … contrary to appearances here, I actually have been writing a LOT of film criticism lately … just on my Twitter feed. I seem to violate the rules of Twitter by having no compunction against writing several Tweets in a row to make a detailed point, and they have to be read in consecutive order (because sentences don’t break conveniently at the 140th character). So my Twitter feed is now a part of the site, available to the right. (WARNING: A lot of my Tweets are dry jokes or sarcasm-bait aimed at the people I follow, and I also Tweet a lot about sports.)

But as an example of what I’ve been doing recently on Twitter, I spent a weekend at DC’s SilverDocs festival, and what follows are based on the Insta-reviews of the films I saw there, spread over several Tweets each. There are a couple of differences here from what’s on my Twitter feed … I didn’t include the “am now standing in last-minute-ticket line for Film X” or “I saw Person Y” Tweets. I also corrected some mistakes and avoided the abbreviations designed to produce a reasonable break near 140 characters.

Also, in several places I elaborate here on points I left implicit or vague there, and everywhere I add a few words about the movie’s premise. (Only once do I actually make a brand-spanking new point.) All adds are noted in italics. Obviously, the event is past, but these are films that could be breakout hits (by doc standards) in the next year or so. The #1 movie on my 2009 Top 10 list to-date, e.g., is a film I saw at SilverDocs 2008. Here is what I saw, after the jump:

Speaking of critics with day jobs

OK … my day job is not as glamorous as leading the whole united Korean people in their glorious socialist struggle to crush their imperialist foes and build an eternally shining future of Juche and frustrate the wicked designs … (stop it, Victor … stop it)

But nevertheless, I can still be interviewed as if I were a paid critic, as I was recently by Craig Lindsey of the Raleigh News-Observer for his Uncle Crizzle’s Critical Condition, a regular Podcast feature of his blog. Craig introduces me as “the coolest Republican alive!” and here’s a link to the first part of what become an hour-long discussion (we planned on 30 mins., but when Craig realized we were at 34, I deliberately egged on the conversation, because if you’re gonna cut in two anyway, you may as well have 55 minutes as 35).

Let’s just say I think I have a voice for newspapers.

New Korean film-criticism star

I recently got the hands on the work of a great critic, destined to ranks among the Kaels, the Kauffmanns, the Sarrises. Only, this man also has a day job (making him perhaps the next Graham Greene). He also is the first major critic to come out of Korea, which makes him even more pertinent since that nation has spawned some of the world’s most interesting directors over the past decade — Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, Hong Sang-soo, Lee Myung-se, Lee Chang-dong and others. And I’m hoping now to introduce this important new critical voice to the increasingly diverse discourse on international cinema.

Oscars predix

These are my predictions for who will win the Oscars later tonight, in the major categories:

Film: SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (blech!!)
Director: Danny Boyle, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (blech!!)
Lead actor: Sean Penn, MILK (blech!!)
Lead actress: Kate Winslet, THE READER (blech!!, though her career deserves one)
Supporting actor: Heath Ledger, THE DARK KNIGHT (worthy)
Supporting actress: Viola Davis, DOUBT (worthy)
Adapted script: John Patrick Shanley, DOUBT (worthy)
Original script: Dustin Lance Black, MILK (blech!!)
Animated film: WALL-E (worthy)
Foreign film: Israel, WALTZ WITH BASHIR (blech!!)
Song: “Down to Earth,” WALL-E (worthy)

These are my opinions of who should win the Oscars later tonight, given these nominees in the major categories:

Film: FROST/NIXON (ehhhh)
Director: Danny Boyle, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (double blech!!)
Lead actor: Frank Langella, FROST/NIXON (though Mickey Rourke also would be more than worthy and is a more realistic upset pick)
Lead actress: Anne Hathaway, RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (no chance)
Supporting actor: Heath Ledger, THE DARK KNIGHT
Supporting actress: Marisa Tomei, THE WRESTLER (the most wide-open category, so it could happen, but her earlier Oscar for MY COUSIN VINNY hurts)
Adapted script: John Patrick Shanley, DOUBT
Original script: Mike Leigh, HAPPY GO-LUCKY (as if…)
Animated film: WALL-E
Foreign film: Austria, REVANCHE (though France’s THE CLASS also would be more than worthy and is a more realistic upset pick)
Song: “Down to Earth,” WALL-E

These are my fantasies of who would be winning the Oscars later tonight, restricting myself to English-language work in the major categories:

Film: RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
Director: Guy Maddin, MY WINNIPEG
Lead actor: Frank Langella, FROST/NIXON
Lead actress: Sally Hawkins, HAPPY GO-LUCKY
Supporting actor: Robert Downey Jr., TROPIC THUNDER (though even unsentimental moi would find the pressure for a posthumous Ledger win hard to resist)
Supporting actress: Ann Savage, MY WINNIPEG
Adapted script: Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, THE DARK KNIGHT
Original script: Joel and Ethan Coen, BURN AFTER READING
Animated film: CHICAGO 10
Foreign film: Romania, 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS (or Austria’s REVANCHE given what got submitted this year under these rules; Romania submitted 4 MONTHS last year and naturally didn’t even get a nomination)
Song: “The Wrestler,” THE WRESTLER (though I’d pick “Gran Torino” on the guarantee that Clint would sing it)

These are my unbridled fantasies of who would be winning the Oscars later tonight:

Film: 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS
Director: Carlos Reygadas, SILENT LIGHT
Lead actor: Francois Begaudeau, THE CLASS
Lead actress: Anamaria Marinca, 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS
Supporting actor: Robert Downey Jr., TROPIC THUNDER (I’d still find the pressure for a posthumous Ledger win hard to resist)
Supporting actress: Ann Savage, MY WINNIPEG
Adapted script: Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, THE DARK KNIGHT
Original script: Joel and Ethan Coen, BURN AFTER READING
Animated film: CHICAGO 10
Foreign film: Category does not exist
Song: “Pappu Can’t Dance,” JAANE TU YA JAANE YA (and here is the scene of that A.R. Rahman song)

Doris Day, pornographer

PILLOW TALK (Mark Gordon, USA, 1959, 8)
LOVER COME BACK (Delbert Mann, USA, 1961, 7)

I am officially becoming a prude in my old age. My days of loving EYES WIDE SHUT, LAST TANGO IN PARIS, THE ARISTOCRATS and Chris Rock standup are coming to an end. Twice within the last couple of weeks, Doris Day movies have given me the subject-matter willies. (If I’m making any of this up, may God … etc.)

First of all, a couple of weeks ago, a coworker (born 1958) told me that he is able to get his 10- and 12-year-old daughters to watch and enjoy the Ross Hunter-style, widescreen color films of the 50s and early 60s that he loved as a boy. So I loaned him my DVD of MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and Douglas Sirk directing. A few days later, I planned to bring into work ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (Wyman and Hudson again in Sirk’s greatest melodramatic weepie) and PILLOW TALK (the first and best-regarded of the Hudson/Doris Day comedies).

But when I was checking my DVD of PILLOW TALK (a regular check to make sure it was successful “burn” off the TCM broadcast), I watched the intro material with host Ben Mankiewicz. And he reminds me that there is a couple-of-scenes thread where Hudson pretends to bat from the other side, just to mess with Doris’s head. Rock plays two roles in the film. In the first of the two scenes cut into this clip here, he’s a greasy, unseen neighbor whom Doris detests; in the second, he’s plays a good country boy who suavely gets Day to fall in love with him.

As you can see, there’s nothing terribly explicit …. this being a 1959 Doris Day film and all … a couple of double entendres and stereotype-mannerism jokes. But still I felt obliged to say “I would not be bothering you with this, Dean, except that I’m loaning you PILLOW TALK on the assumption that you think your girls will like it — which I think they will, but I forgot about this one scene …”

Then a few days later, I’m watching for the first time LOVER COME BACK, the second of the Day-Hudson films and the last to be seen by me. I must honestly say that my reaction was “ick,” though I hasten to add that all three films (SEND ME NO FLOWERS being the third, but it’s not a courtship comedy like the other two) are expertly done entertainments, comparable to all but the very summit of the 30s and 40s screwball comedies. But still I couldn’t shake the feeling of being debased by what I was watching. Here’s a couple more clips from LOVER COME BACK to illustrate what I’m getting at. The first clip is an early scene starting with Day showing up at a CEO’s penthouse for an ad-campaign appointment, only Hudson had gotten to him the previous night, the second is a fake advertising campaign Hudson cooks up to buy a “party girl’s” silence about that night.

Again, this is a 1961 Doris Day film, so there is nothing that could be considered objectively pornographic or even really explicit per-se to any but the most Puritanical. But what was bothering me was that the film had so much innuendo and it seemed so intent on skating right up to the line as asymptotically close as it could manage, that the overall effect was “ick.”

In the second clip, notice how the costumes and setting advance through the stages of courtship, and when you listen to the dialogue, substitute the word “sex” in your head for every mention of “vip” and the dialogue makes just as much sense, if not more. (Yes, I understand that the point is advertising satire and how “sex can sell anything” … it is genuine double-entendre humor, not simple crudity.) In addition, notice how in the first clip the jokes are mostly on Doris’s virginal puritanism at what she’s coming across (e.g., see that “Doris Day ’shocked, shocked’ reaction” shot at the 50-second mark, and look at the stiff gestures, clipped high-throated diction and sensible clothes that put one in mind of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady) and how she doesn’t get how boys will be boys. Then she goes to complain to her boss, demanding to know if anything can be done with the advertising standards board, and his reaction includes a wistful “yeeeeeees” at the thought of “what else went on there.” Then there’s Doris’s walk-off line, which is quite funny, but so obviously so that your reaction is “doesn’t she realize what she said.”

There’s a lot more in this vein throughout LOVER COME BACK (and PILLOW TALK) — a visit to the Playboy Club, concentrating on Doris’s reaction shots; an early editing-cut punch line involving the phrase “the most attractive can” (of wax, or …); and a set of narrative contrivances at the end so absurd they had to be deliberate so that Doris can be married both on the night of conception and the date of birth 9 months later.

It was as if this 1961 movie was chomping at the bit, waiting for “the 60s” and the end of restraint and morality, in the name of authenticity and “truth.” Watching LOVER COME BACK was seeing the result of non-belief in the studio-era content-codes, while (1) being formally still bound by them, and (2) not having the ability to take that lack-of-belief to its logical conclusion. Viewed from the vantage point of 2009, the film was like a high-school senior eager to go exactly as far as he can in the time before adulthood officially arrives and the parental authority evaporates. Time and again, you see the edges of the envelope being pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed — and while they never exactly break, the became weak enough for the next round of sex comedies to … ahem … go all the way and rip the envelope to shreds. When LOVER COME BACK is at a Playboy Club show but concentrates on a woman’s appalled reaction without ever showing what that is, the unconventional cutting (or lack of cutting, mostly) actually makes what it is NOT showing you (let’s just say the word: “boobs”) more present than a less-ostentatious actual showing might have.

Skandies season

We’re now in film-geek awards season. Paul has started going through the awards categories in the Muriels (next year, I fearlessly predict a knockdown drag-out in the 50th anniversary category — NORTH BY NORTHWEST vs. SOME LIKE IT HOT). And in the Skandies poll in which I vote, and which I went to considerable time and expense to see a single eligible film right at deadline, Mike already has reached #12 in the daily countdown.

In deference to Mike’s oft-expressed wishes, I will not reveal my ballot until after the end of the countdown, when it becomes public anyway.

But this is what got left on the cutting-room floor — i.e., the performances, scenes, etc. that I short-listed as I put the ballot together and went over my “film seen” list, but got shucked away as I whittled the list in each category down to 10. So these are all thing I *did not* vote for, but was of a mind to at one point. The asterisks indicate the entry was the last one to get eliminated — the #11, as it were.

Lamest. Oscar. Noms. Ever.

Here they are … read em and weep.

I acknowledge having no personal experience of filmgoing in the Studio Era (my seen-lists from that era are heavy on the established classics), but I’m still confident that, for the most part, the Oscars honored the best films of the 30s and 40s, because the Hollywood studios MADE the best films of the 30s and 40s — the indie movement didn’t exist yet, the distribution of foreign films in the US was spottier than now, the “art house” concept wasn’t really mature, the market and nonmarket barriers to entry were far higher than now, etc.

But I can pretty definitively say that these are collectively the worst batch of films ever to get the five Best Picture slots. I have seen all five already, and I can’t give a “thumbs up” to any of them. Not a one. On my 10-point scale, their combined grades are 18 (out of a possible 50), and a 6-grade or higher = a Siskel & Ebert “thumbs up” or a Variety Crix Pix “pro.” Not a one.

FROST/NIXON 5
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE 4
THE READER 4
BENJAMIN BUTTON 3
MILK 2

Yes … FROST/NIXON is best of the Best Pic nominees: in one phrase, it’s a well-made lie (and the lie is central to the movie’s raison d’etre, not a peripheral thing or a matter of emphasis) featuring a for-the-ages performance by Frank Langella and first-rate in every other way bar Opie’s usual merely-functional direction. And that functionality is the right choice for a movie like this; certainly better than DOUBT’s John Patrick Shanley trying to tart up his stage play with every eccentric angle he could think of).

But I decided to see if it was true … are 2008’s nominees the worst collective batch ever? Here is a list of all the nominated films, broken down by year. Going all the way back to 1944, when the Academy began limiting the Best Pic race to five films, and counting only the years in which I’ve seen at least two nominated films (most years I see 3 or 4, and 1 is simply too small a sample size) … this is in fact the first year since 1961 in which I can’t recommend any of the five nominated films. More damningly, this is the first time I’ve seen all five nominated films and the films went 0-for-5 (to pick on 1961, it was just 0-for-3 — WEST SIDE STORY, GUNS OF NAVARONE and JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG).

I’m not under any illusions about what the Oscars are about: commercial A-list English-language movies. All eligibility issues aside, I still would have been stunned had the Academy picked 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS or SILENT LIGHT, although they are the two best films of the year in a walk. But what about WALL-E, RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, DOUBT, THE DARK KNIGHT and THE WRESTLER — five commercial American A-list movies that were better than any of the five that got nominated. While that entire precise lineup would be unrealistic (MILK and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE were locks and remain the frontrunners), all of them would be reasonable choices on the nonartistic things that matter to the Academy — box-office success, token indie, December prestige releases, etc. And I’m not just parroting my own taste — only 3 of that 5 makes my Top 10.

Not that there aren’t plenty of headscratchers in the other categories –

• in what universe was St. Angelina of the Millinery’s beatific posing for the whole last hour better than Sally Hawkins’ HAPPY GO-LUCKY Poppy (and how on earth does that film get a script nomination without Hawkins getting an Actress nod)?;
• did Kate Winslet get nominated for THE READER (which she will almost certainly win) rather than REVOLUTIONARY ROAD because playing a Nazi counts for more than playing a bohemia-wannabe or because in the former film she’s naked for much of the first act and (I think) never is in the latter?;
• is reading Hallmark-card dialog and having your face made up and pasted onto others’ bodies in an “important” film like oh … BENJAMIN BUTTON … better “acting” than creating one of the most memorable screwballs in the Coens brothers entire ouevre, as Brad Pitt did in BURN AFTER READING (the Academy obviously thinks so)?;
• was it a surprise that Michael Shannon picks up this year’s Going Full Retard Award for his unspeakable performance in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (he’s even up against Robert Downey Jr., who had that brilliant monolog about “Fell Retard”; there is no other category in which I will be rooting so hard).

So that names one of the good and correct choices the Academy made — Robert Downey Jr. for the comedy (yay!!) TROPIC THUNDER. Any others besides the no-brainers even the Academy couldn’t blow (Heath Ledger for supporting actor; Mickey Rourke and the aforementioned Frank Langella for lead actor; Anne Hathaway for lead actress; WALL-E for animated film, etc.) Just really a couple … I was relieved by the snub of the vile REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, gratified to see Melissa Leo get a nod for the indie FROZEN RIVER, happy to see Austria’s REVANCHE get a foreign-film nomination (neither of these last two have a chance of winning). And though I don’t consider ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (best doc) or SLUMDOG MILLIONARE (best score/songs) to be either man’s best work, the possibility of hearing “Academy Award Winner Werner Herzog” or “Academy Award Winner A.R. Rahman” is something I wouldn’t miss. And c’mon … a Werner Herzog acceptance speech? Tell me you can resist that possibility.

And that’s why unlike Jeffrey Overstreet, I’m not gonna boycott the show over the lameness of these picks. There are still some things to root for or hope for. The spectacle of these liberal glitterati either trying to hold back on the O-gasms or letting their libidos run free for the Lightworker’s Message Of Hope And Change has just too much potential car-wreck value.

Father Neuhaus

I hope to finish up some lengthy movie-related content later tonight.

But here’s what I spent much of yesterday working on — an obituary for Father Richard John Neuhaus, which Times religion editor Julia Duin polished and updated in my absence this morning when, as expected, Father died. (He had received the last rites of the Church the night before.)

Dour, unromantic Scots

I’ve been meaning to blog this item for a couple of weeks, so forgive the delay.

But leave it to scholars at Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh to trash Romantic Comedies as bad for real-life romances, because they promote notions of romance that are unrealistic. Or as the BBC headline-writers put it — “Rom-coms ’spoil your love life’.”

Rom-coms have been blamed by relationship experts at Heriot Watt University for promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love.
They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner.
Many held the view if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them.
…
The university’s Dr Bjarne Holmes said: “Marriage counsellors often see couples who believe that sex should always be perfect, and if someone is meant to be with you then they will know what you want without you needing to communicate it.
“We now have some emerging evidence that suggests popular media play a role in perpetuating these ideas in people’s minds.”

While I’ve never had a marriage breakup over a Julia Roberts movie (though frankly no man should touch a woman who likes a movie called “Runaway Bride” — something about that title), the story put the finger on why I don’t like most happy-happy-joy-joy romantic comedies. They promote a view of life and love that is both false and fundamentally unhealthy, or at a minimum, one I absolutely cannot tap into or sympathize with. (It hasn’t failed to occur to me that I generally prefer dark, grim movies; tragedies or extremely astringent dramas.) I don’t mean to go all John Gray, Mars and Venus, but at least with respect to the expectations of the rom-com, I’d say this is typical of why guys don’t generally like “chick flicks” — that we’re too hard-headed to believe in romantic destiny. Here is one of the juxtapositions:

As part of the project, 100 student volunteers were asked to watch the 2001 romantic comedy Serendipity, while a further 100 watched a David Lynch drama.
Students watching the romantic film were later found to be more likely to believe in fate and destiny. A further study found that fans of romantic comedies had a stronger belief in predestined love.

I hold no brief for David Lynch, but the plot of SERENDIPITY is one of the stupidest in movie history (which might have been OK had there been any chemistry between John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale on their first date, but there wasn’t). Couple has the date of their lives and Beckinsale leaves her address and phone number in a book that she knows Cusack will find if they were meant to be together. Years later, they’re both set to be married, but Cusack is unsure and makes one last effort to retrace their steps, find the book and find his destined love (not his fiancee??). Re anybody who could find all that inspiring, four words: Stay. The. Hell. Away.

I’m aware that these movies are all played as fantasies, and that everyone realizes that at a certain level. But what this research confirms is that movies don’t mostly affect us at the level of conscious thought, where we sort movies into “real/unreal,” “moral/immoral,” “laudatory/condemnatory” and the rest of that. And even calling a movie a fantasy is still to set it up as some sort of ideal — “sure, it couldn’t be true, but wouldn’t it be good if it could” — which is just as bad in some ways. But more importantly, the mere fact of having seen Movie X automatically and necessarily makes Movie X part of your experience of life, and automatically and necessarily turns you into “a person who has seen Movie X.” Indeed, Pauline Kael wrote in “I Lost At the Movies” that one of the glories of movies was this very capacity — “new films are judged in terms of how they extend our experience and give us pleasure.” But every extension of experience affects your implicit worldview and range of understanding — what is, what can be, what should be (three different things; all equally relevant).

Camp is not dead

GRAN TORINO (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2008, 6)

I don’t have for Clint Eastwood the boundless contempt that I do for Jean-Luc Godard, but I have the same rating problem with GRAN TORINO that I had with SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL last year, namely how does one rate a movie that is terrible by every possible objective standard, but which you yourself had a high ol’ time laughing at.

In fact, I enjoyed GRAN TORINO so much that I nearly did a Mike D’Angelo last night and retitled my blog in its honor. I was told by Craig Lindsey of the Raleigh News-Observer via Twitter that I wasn’t “a part of the crew” until I contributed an alternative title for the film based on its jaw-droppingly awful dialog (plenty of samples coming). I eventually decided on “OVEREDUCATED 27-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN” and decided I’ll renominate my sight that, at least for the temporariliness. But alas, the font size on the WordPress template’s header was too big to make it work.

The problem with GRAN TORINO is very basic. The acting is appallingly bad, from top to bottom; the script is worse. We’re not talking weak — we’re talking jaw-dropping, head-grabbing, “I can’t believe I’m seeing this” bad. It’s the story of a very grumpy old man Walt Kowalski, played by Eastwood. A Korean War veteran and retired Ford factory worker, he can barely tolerate his family (the film begins with his wife’s funeral) and he sees his working-class neighborhood being “taken over” by “Hamung” immigrants, whom he calls by every ethnic slur in the book. Not that he discriminates, mind you; he refers to everybody by such lingo.

Don’t judge the book by the auteur

I intend to see GRAN TORINO later tonight, after having prepared myself to take advantage of Mike D’Angelo’s suggestion that this movie, which he has dubbed LISTEN, EGGROLL, might be the funniest movie ever if you watched it drunk. Many are called, few are chosen …

But anyhoo, recently Clint went off in “Grumpy Old Man” mode (HT: Steve Skojec) that he’s apparently playing in GRAN TORINO, saying that America has gone to hell in a welter of psychologizing and sensitivity.

Tough guy Clint Eastwood believes America is getting soft around the middle – and the iconic Oscar winner thinks he knows when the problem began.
“Maybe when people started asking about the meaning of life,” Eastwood, 78, growls in the January issue of Esquire.
The actor/director recalls the deeper questions were rarely posed during his Depression-era California childhood – and says that wasn’t a bad thing.
“People barely got by,” Eastwood recounts. “People were tougher then.”
…
That mentality is gone, he laments.
“Everyone’s become used to saying, ‘Well, how do we handle it psychologically?’” Eastwood says. “In those days, you punched the bully back and duked it out.”

Now, I agree heartily with what Clint says … US foreign policy in particular, especially under liberal administration but also somewhat under conservative ones too, has become indistinguishable from therapy. (Or as Sicinski put it in his review of STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE: “But there is something to be said for Robert Frost’s old joke about liberals being too broad-minded to take their own side in an argument.” As if we think Hamas just needs to be understood and have its legitimate concerns addressed.)

But most of Eastwood’s last several movies, at least the ones I’ve seen, are exactly what Dirty Harry and The Man With No Name preaches against (at least in part; several are more complicated obviously).

What is UNFORGIVEN but a movie about the psychological burden of killing? What is FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS if not a film about how war and having to kill people screws people up in the head (oh … the strawberry sauce) … especially if you’re from an Official Oppressed Ethnicity? What is LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA but an attempt at psychological understanding of The Enemy, and a painting of Japan’s wartime army as Modern Asian-Americans? What is MILLION DOLLAR BABY but an apologia for euthanizing people who don’t think their lives have any more meaning? How is MYSTIC RIVER a tragedy, or indeed anything but a meaningless tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing, unless its audience is the introspective sort that frets over the meaning of life?

Seen at Borders

Three of these movies are documentaries featuring geriatric people of retirement age singing pop and rock songs from the past 40 years. Another one is called YOUNG AT HEART.

Honestly, I couldn’t stop laughing at this display when I ran into it yesterday, and so I pulled out my trusty iPhone. Let’s say this probably was not the marketing juxtaposition ZZ Top, the Rolling Stones or Willie Nelson wanted. (And also an indication of why the premise of YOUNG AT HEART didn’t excite me enough to go see it. Old people singing rock songs is not a novelty.)

Doubt makes a liar of me

DOUBT (John Patrick Shanley, USA, 2008, 7)

I said going in that this would either be awesome or vile; as the grade indicates, it’s not close to either.

I think the title DOUBT is somewhat misleading. Or rather, that some people are taking its meaning wrong, assuming that what actually happens in the movie is what is in doubt, or is indeterminable or left ambiguous. Or to be concrete, whether Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) actually interfered with an altar boy named Donald or whether the suspicions of Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) were false. There is no  cathartic Hercule Poirot scene of solving the crime or the guilty party saying “and I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids.”

To which I can only shrug my shoulders. I don’t think either the film or the play of DOUBT (I prefer the latter) is even slightly ambiguous in terms of what happens. But where I think the title makes more sense is about the question “what to make of what clearly does happen.” Elsewhere, I’ve essentially defined this as the difference between “good ambiguity” and “bad ambiguity”; what happens needs to be clear, what it means need not. What makes DOUBT a great work about knowledge, judgment and yes, doubt, and yes, Catholicism, is that it isn’t overdetermined. (No, A.O. Scott in the New York Times got DOUBT completely wrong.)

As I said, I was suspicious of the movie going in, partly because I didn’t think the filmmakers would keep the film’s more discomforting (to the Oscar-bait audience) ideas intact. Well, the filmmakers did (Shanley directed and adapted his own play, which probably was key), and I’ll elaborate later.

I think the play much the better work of art, though I’ve never seen it performed. Perhaps reading a play lets you build the performances and nuances in your head, particularly when dealing with a play that’s to a large extent an allegory of ideas. A written play exists as a Platonic Form, in a way a theatrical performance doesn’t, much less a film. Any actual instanciation inevitably corrupts. As Giotto, Pasolini ended THE DECAMERON looking at one of his own frescoes and saying “it’s so much better to dream it.” Hitchcock famously said he didn’t actually like shooting his movies because all his creative work had been done before he walked onto the set, and the only things that could happen during the shoot would be blemish upon the film he had made in his head.

Needless to conclude therefore, I found DOUBT much less successful as cinema on the screen than cinema in my head. But regardless of any understanding of adaptation, there are some severe problems. Meryl Streep, as I feared from the trailer, overdoes the Tyrant Nun act, though Mike D’Angelo is right that this is more true early on. And her finest moments come later — talking about her husband, the whole scene with Viola Davis as the boy’s mother, the final confrontation. Hoffman’s performance has the opposite trajectory — he embodies the role so well with his Easy Every(young)man persona for so long, but then when the confrontations tighten, he starts yelling and he just can only come across as more affected than effective.

As for Shanley’s direction, it is simply weak on every level. J. Robert Parks describes them in a review with which I mostly agree in the details,¹ though I simply like the play so much not to care in the big picture. Tilting the camera at key moments, strategically-placed thunder, the (not in the play) scene involving the cat and the mouse, Streep’s too-on-the-nose John XXIII quote about “who keeps opening my windows” (also not in the play IIRC), the up-and-out shot dissipating the final, shattering line. Virtually every time I felt Shanley’s presence as a film director or adapter, I thought it was a mistake.

Which bring me back to the text of the play, and why DOUBT had held such a fascination over me since I devoured it during a single subway ride. The spoilers commence. You have been warned.

I was loving it for so long

I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG (Philippe Claudel, France, 2008, 6)

That grade is misleading. This was nine-tenths of a terrific movie, comfortable 8-grade territory, until the last plot point completely took back and actively undercut what the first nine-tenths of the movie had been about. If you walk out … when Kristin Scott Thomas is making a bed, you’ll think you walked out of a year’s best contender.

Scott Thomas deserves the awards buzz that’s already netted her a Golden Globe nod, though obviously it helps if you’re gonna be in a French movie to be a well-known Anglophone actress as well.¹ But what makes her performance great is that she’s obviously in “deglamorizing” mode, but she does this without coming across as simply trying to look intentionally ugly (think, Charlize Theron in MONSTER). It’s how this character Juliette looks, a thoroughgoing plainness, the result of 15 years in jail and getting used to not being made-up. KST also simply and completely *inhabited* a newly-freed inmate in a score of ways — her standoffish body language and her conversation style. She answers questions, but little small talk and not speaking unless spoken to, and keeping her own counsel: all prison survival norms of keep-your-head-down and don’t-lag-to-the-screws.

Similarly, there’s a scene where Juliette picks up a man at a bar, goes to bed with him, and he asks “was it good?” “No, not at all, but it doesn’t matter,” she says, without acting “Glum,” just sorta slightly tickled but not really ecstatic. It’s the preciseness of the playing and how it matches the sensibility of the character and the film that is so drably magical, if that makes any sense. Like how Bogart held his arms in THE PETRIFIED FOREST, only much subtler, KST’s performance deserves to be anthologized for its mastery of the body language of a prisoner.

But also very good in a much-less-showy role (that will of course be ignored) is Elsa Zylberstein, as the sister Lea to whom Juliette is released, whom she hardly knew but is the only family she has. She’s conventionally happier, almost Poppy-like compared to Juliette, curious to expand her knowledge of the crime which leads her to push while consciously knowing when not to push. There’s also a two-scene character, hardly significant dramatically, of a post-release job-placement officer. What struck me is that the actress in question must weigh more than 300 pounds, perhaps 400. But she won the role and plays it competently and professionally, without her freakish physical appearance coming off as a stunt or even as much as an onscreen word.

Prayer request

Now … for a big part of the reason I haven’t felt much like posting since the start of the month (those lengthy posts on DOUBT and LOLA MONTES have been sitting in my Draft folder for a week, pretty much in their current form). And it has nothing to do with Post-Obama Please-Slit-My-Wrists-NOW!!! Syndrome or anything like that. Something far more serious.

Later today, my father has triple heart-bypass surgery, to remedy 70 percent blockage in the main heart artery. This is not as risky a procedure as it would have been when he was … say, my age. Particularly since his health is otherwise good. But major surgery on a 65-year-old man is major surgery on a 65-year-old man.

I’d appreciate all y’all praying for him.

UPDATE: Things could not possibly have gone better for my father. There were no complications or snafus on the actual table. Within 24 hours, he could sit up for a time and even carry a conversation, though he was obviously very tired and on painkillers. As I type this Sunday late-night (MOVIE CONTENT: with one eye on TCM’s showing of DIABOLIQUE), all the tubes have been removed except a saline drip, and dad was able to eat a small amount of solid food Sunday afternoon, barely two days after having his chest sliced open.

Thanks for all the good wishes and prayers in recent days.

This week’s openings

In the shameless self-promotion category: Three films that I saw at the most-recent Toronto festival are either premiering commercially this weekend or are starting to spread out wider after opening in New York. Here are my reviews from then:

A CHRISTMAS TALE (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2008) — 8 (2nd capsule)

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (Danny Boyle, Britain/India, 2008) — 4 (3rd capsule)

JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, France, 2008) — 6 (3rd capsule)

Obviously I most highly recommend the Desplechin, which I’ll try to see a second time, Ophuls permitting. But Michael Sicinski made a point in personal conversation about JCVD that at least defused my largest objection to the film, the 4th-wall-breaking scene. And my opinion of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE has actually declined with every positive review I read (91 percent at Rotten Tomatoes as I type this in???? … c’mon people).

I doubt it

I recently saw that trailer, for the upcoming DOUBT, before seeing HAPPY GO-LUCKY a second time. I whispered to the church friend I brought along, who is a recent convert … “this will either be the awesomest movie ever or the most-evil movie ever.”

After the film, I dashed over to the B&N bookstore across the street to buy the play DOUBT. A floor manager told me they had it, and she was probably amused when she called downstairs to the clerk in the Theater section to say ”a man in a Notre Dame sweater is on his way down” for DOUBT. I read it straight through on the subway ride home and almost missed my stop so absorbed was I in the final scenes.

The dialog is more in the Mamet or Labute ping-pong style than the Shakespeare or O’Neill soliloquy style, so it is entirely performance-dependent. Hoffman is a terrific actor, but a relatively naturalistic actor who thrives in Everyman roles, not this sort of work. Meryl can do anything — even not totally suck in MAMMA MIA. But she looks from the trailer like she’s overplaying the “stick up her ass” act. The play has only four characters — the priest, the two nuns and the pupil’s mother — and the trailer makes it clear they’ve done quite a bit of opening up. If you’re gonna make a movie of DOUBT you have no real choice; the play is just too short to stage more or less as written. In the play, the boy Father is suspected of abusing remains offstage and of course we never see the action in the rectory itself – the trailer makes it clear that those two choices Shanley did not repeat for the movie.

As a result I’m pretty confident the movie DOUBT be far less ambiguous and thus less conflicted than the play. And … I will be vague … the ending would be VERY easy to change, and I doubt that one element in the mother’s character (I’ll avoid for spoilage’s sake) will survive for the film. And if one were to change those two things … a really emotionally-baffling work evaporates into Maria Monk or “bitter Hollywood boomers” territory.

So I’m leaning toward … film probably sucks. Though I should add that I know nothing about the film *other* than the trailer, the play and author John Patrick Shanley’s written intro to the play (which I so wish I hadn’t read … kinda removes all the … ahem … doubt).

C’est moi, c’est Lola

LOLA MONTES (Max Ophuls, France, 1955, 9)

I rented a VHS tape of LOLA MONTES from Blockbuster almost 20 years ago, and it was the first time I ever saw a video in the Letterbox (or Widescreen) format. The picture at the top of this piece is of LOLA MONTES’ first post-credits image (1); it practically popped my eyes out and sold me instantly and forever on letterboxing. I already well understood the geometry of the TV-screen shape and the widescreen shape but to have THAT be the first image was one of the unforgettable, seminal moments of my filmgoing life. How could I even think of looking at this film with one of those two chandeliers cropped out (or maybe both chopped in half). Or any other similar film. And since that dynamic first shot goes on for 3 or 4 minutes in a single track while a veritable circus of events goes on in the background, LOLA MONTES couldn’t have been better Providentially planned to tell me — “here’s what you miss if you don’t letterbox.”

I looked again at LOLA MONTES last week on a 20-year-old second-generation VHS tape over a period of several days, treating the film as the equivalent of bedside reading — watching as much as I could when I was tired, and stopping when I could no longer keep my eyes open. Not the ideal way to see the film, of course, but it underlined the film’s dreamy, episodic quality, and its status as a memory piece about discourse. But next week (and believe me, I’m counting the days), myself and other Washington filmgoers will get a chance to see LOLA MONTES the right way, as Rialto Pictures is giving the film a theatrical release (no doubt to gather publicity for an imminent DVD release, but I’ll take em any way they’ll give em). Here’s the trailer.

Several things about LOLA MONTES are obvious from the trailer even to someone who hasn’t seen the film (and since I have, there’s no “trailer fooling” me). First of all, that the film is a marvel of art and set decoration, of sumptuous excess, which the film gobbles up, thanks to director Max Ophuls’s near-constantly moving camera. Second, that Ophuls repeatedly uses multiple-level buildings, which in the film become social-climbing metaphors (e.g., action taking place on sets with multiple floors or a narrated trapeze act; you see the former in the trailer, not the latter, my favorite scene in the film). Third, that lead actress Martine Carol is rather wooden in the noncircus scenes and trying rather too hard to “Act” in the circus ones. Her role is to serve as a doll or model at best, surrounded by a gaggle of supporting paraphernalia, carefully arranged and framed and layered, as here.

LOLA MONTES is a sort-of-biopic, one structured rather like CITIZEN KANE, in that both films start with a framing device, occurring at the end of the titular character’s life — a “present tense” that purports to tell about that person’s life. These present-tense scenes weaves themselves around and through a series of flashbacks to episodes from that life — with much tension between the present-tense discourse and the past-tense flashbacks. Unlike KANE’s newspaperman quest for “Rosebud,” LOLA’s “present tense” takes place at a single circus performance; it’s also more prominent in the overall film (I didn’t measure, but I’d estimate about 1/3 of LOLA’s running time take place at that performance). The formerly-famous and scandalous 19th-century courtesan Lola Montes once had at her feet the men of Europe from kings to students, but she’s been reduced to being the sort of circus act that people come to stare at and hear about. The flashbacks are her memories.

The curse on the film’s reputation has always been the performance of Martine Carol as Lola. As I said is clear above from the trailer, it is problematic to say the least (though Ty Burr of the Boston Globe dissents well here). Andrew Sarris famously called LOLA MONTES “the greatest film of all time,” though he backed off that later, saying, though not in a place I can find online that Carol’s performance is simply too weak.(2) Andrew O’Hehir of Salon also measured his praise, though on different grounds, saying:

Lola Montes comes off in 2008 as an enormous and creaky artifice, tough for modern viewers to “get” without a laborious set of CliffsNotes. What was once original and confrontational about it has been swamped by later movies, and what remains seems grand and old-fashioned without being especially absorbing. …

Ophüls’ forward-looking technique is married to his perplexing fascination with the social rituals of 19th century Europe, and because of his total lack of interest in anything we would consider psychological realism.

I understand what O’Hehir is getting at, even stipulating that I have no problem per se with out-of-time irrelevance (and indeed, vastly prefer it, all else equal, to stabs at relevance in period movies).(3) I still think he misses why I think the film remained fresh and vital to me last week, even in the very unideal manner in which I saw it and stipulating Carol’s bad performance, which I think holds the key to how the film works. (Still … to think of what this film could have been if Ophuls could have coaxed Greta Garbo out of retirement, as he tried to a couple of years previously, to appear in a proposed version of THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS … vjm weeps.)

My “gut” reaction was that the circus scenes were magnificent and worth the price of admission by themselves because of Peter Ustinov’s sheer virtuosity as the ringmaster and the spectacle he was mastering, while the flashback scenes, the ones depending most on Carol to deliver as an actress, were often rather flat. And the scenes among them that worked best were the ones most like the circus scenes, i.e., those that had an air of public performance about them. This gap is exactly what LOLA MONTES is about — the transformation through art of banal life material into a virtuoso spectacle.

Lola Montes lived a scandalous life as a courtesan, which the judgmental among us might call a glorified and perfumed whore. Her scandal won her fame and riches, but by the end all she’s got left is being a circus freak, turning her life into discourse, accepting an offer she rejected with contempt earlier. And yet that discourse about her life, the circus act with tales of sleeping around turned into acts of being grabbed by successive men on horses, is actually more gripping than the life itself, “printing the legend” and all of that. There are shots in the trailer from the film’s flashbacks of people in “verandas,” in multiple “floors” looking out on a central “courtyard” and applauding, i.e., public performance. Is there a more-relevant and more-contemporary story in a world where “any publicity is good publicity” and where celebrity comes in layers and ranks, to the point where people make jokes about washed-up celebrities cannibalizing on their past stardom by playing themselves on reality-TV shows and the like? And yet the circus, the reality TV, where thousands line up and pay a dollar to kiss Lola’s aged hand through a cage, is what’s most gripping about the life of Lola Montes as represented in the film LOLA MONTES.

Which brings us to relationship between Ophuls and the material. He knew he was dealing with an actress he needed for box office, for name, for an attraction, but who couldn’t even act her way INTO the proverbial wet paper bag. In a review the trailer amusingly takes out of context, Stanley Kauffmann called Carol “a celebrity in today’s most-synthetic sense” and compared her to Zsa Zsa Gabor: she “never could act, and here she isn’t even pretty.” There are moments where the circus act shows us Lola’s limitations as a performer. One such moment is in the trailer — Lola dealing with the bars, set at a height that makes neither going under them or kicking up to them very impressive. The audience loves it because of the interest the ringmaster put into the circus act — in what he choreographs, in what he surrounds Lola with, in his narration, in his cinematic style.
————————————–
1 Though here it’s a screen-capture, so it’s blurrier and darker even than a good tape.
2 MADAME DE…, certainly a great film, and certainly one that doesn’t have the “Carol” problem, instead boasting three near-perfect ensemble leads.
3 To paraphrase one of Salon’s commenters, a great film needn’t make itself relevant to you, but rather make you relevant to it.

Another excuse to use the word ‘porn’ in the headline

Particularly since you apparently can’t use the word “porno” in a movie title.

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO is released today and the very title and the fact it’s a Kevin Smith comedy that had trouble with the ratings board tells you it’s not something to take grandma to. But this detail down in the guts of this Yahoo Movies post is completely bizarre. Quite a few newspapers, TV stations and billboard owners are demanding that the film just be called ZACK AND MIRI.

Aside from Larry Miller’s theater chain, fifteen newspapers along with several TV stations and billboard owners have been refusing to promote the flick across the country because of that word. As Philadelphia deputy mayor Rina Cutler said in a phone interview with The Wall Street Journal, “If they want to call the movie ‘Zack and Miri,’ that’s fine, but Zack and Miri cannot make a porno on my bus shelters.”

Amazingly the film’s marketers are responding. See the photo attached to this post. And here’s Mark Caro at the Chicago Tribune on some of the TV ads:

this past weekend on “Saturday Night Live” — a late-night comedy show famous for sketches such as the one about the “Schweddy Balls”— an ad truncated the title to “Zack and Miri.”
Yet on a commercial during Sunday night’s final Rays-Red Sox playoff game, the title once again was “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.”
I asked Smith what the deal was, and here’s his account via e-mail:

A “Make a Porno”-less ad was prepared for “Monday Night Football” (they wouldn’t take the “Make a Porno” version, as football is a ‘family-friendly entertainment’ … which is why you can see all manner of erectile dysfunction ads during the game). Weinstein Co. accidentally serviced that ad to “SNL” as well — arguably the only network show that would’ve been okay with the unedited “Make a Porno” title. (Indeed, we’ve run the unchanged “Make a Porno” ads on “SNL” for two weeks prior now).
“People [deleted] baffle me, sir….”

Now, I can understand refusing to book the film, as one theater chain is doing, or refusing ads for it, as publishers have the right to do. But what is the logic of accepting an ad for the film with a different title?

Is it supposed to raise the community’s moral fiber by actually changing the content of the let-us-stipulate-immoral movie?

Or is it supposed to raise the community’s moral fiber by making sure that someone who might not be interested in ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO would go to ZACK AND MIRI and thereby see the let-us-stipulate-immoral movie that they would have avoided otherwise?

I would be for censorship if censors just weren’t so [deleted] stupid.

Nolan’s BATMAN

THE DARK KNIGHT (Christopher Nolan, USA, 2008, 9)

Before going into THE DARK KNIGHT for the first time, I texted Michael Gerardi and referred to the film we were both going in to see, Thursday-Midnight show on opening-weekend, as “Christopher Nolan Makes a Lot of Money.” I wasn’t terribly impressed with BATMAN BEGINS and think Nolan’s MEMENTO and THE PRESTIGE among the decade’s very best films. So I went into THE DARK KNIGHT knowing the buzz was high but seeing it as a money-spinning project that would allow one of the best writer-directors working in English the cred to make more of *his* films. And my high grade mystified Mike, prompting him to belatedly prompt me about it last night.

And my answer is that I was wrong in my expectations. THE DARK KNIGHT *is* a Christopher Nolan film down to the very bottom and thus probably my favorite comic-book movie ever. Nolan is a moralist, but one pitilessly without illusion. His three great movies are all, in different ways, critiques of truth and the relationship of truth and vocation. To speak somewhat vaguely about the earlier two films: MEMENTO is about a man who chooses a lie that gives his life meaning over a truth that doesn’t set him free; and THE PRESTIGE is about two men who take their relationship to truth to the graves — one man accepts a recurring nightly death in pursuit of scientific truth, another man accepts death rather than publicly admit the lie he has built his life around;

In THE DARK KNIGHT, Nolan makes it explicit, indeed impossible to miss via the last scene, both (1) that Batman accedes to a Socratic noble lie a la MEMENTO about Harvey Dent (and it’s not the only one in the movie — consider the burning of a letter, a public assassination, Batman turning himself in — and contrast it with an explicitly demanded lie: the “it’ll be all right, son” scene) and (2) that Batman’s vocation — like Leonard’s crime investigation, like Borden’s magic act, like Angier’s scientific investigation — will ultimately destroy him, or at a minimum cast him as the eternal despised outsider. He even has to give up his position as Bruce Wayne and destroy stately Wayne Manor.

Indeed, the best analogy I can think to the Batman character is from “The St. Petersburg Diaries,” a work by Count Joseph De Maistre — an anti-Revolution French philosopher hardly known (unjustly so) outside the circle of right-Catholic reaction. In that work, among the lather of ironies and paradoxes De Maistre has endless fun with, he describes the executioner as the man on whom society’s order relies but whom society despises. In this day and age, we’re so squeamish about the death penalty that we try to make as euphemize it as much as possible in our method and go to elaborate measures to remove the responsibility away from any given man — multiple switches on the drug machine, blanks in some firing squad guns, etc. As the man who gets his hands dirty, Batman has to be an outsider for the sake of the rest of our self-images.

After years of refusal

HUSBANDS AND WIVES (Woody Allen, USA, 1992, 8)

Written July 2001 at Super-Secret Movie Nerd Group at Andrew Johnston’s prompting, after seeing the film following a nine-year boycott because it seemed based on the Soon-Yi affair, which Mia Farrow discovered while the film was shooting.

I had some of the reaction I expected, but quite a lot that I didn’t. It’s easily one of Woody’s best films of the 90s. I found myself even hungrier for a good, “new” Woody Allen film than I thought I was.

There’s obviously many more real-life parallels in the setup than the way it plays out, but (Here stand I stand, I cannot do other) I still felt like I was watching something pornographic in the three or so significant “state of our marriage” scenes between Woody and Mia — particularly the first, the movie’s second dramatic scene, right after Sydney Pollack and July Davis announce their divorce. I felt really protective toward Mia (the person, not the character she was playing) when she asks “would ever leave me for another woman?” As I hypothesized back then, with different actors or acting in another director’s film, I wouldn’t have felt so dirty.

Everyone else was right that Davis and Pollack are nothing less than marvelous (which I suspected would be the case). Has Judy Davis ever given a bad performance? Aside: anti-TV snobs should see her work earlier this year in the Judy Garland biopic; she makes the movie. Is there anyone else who thinks Sydney Pollack as good an actor as a director? Lysette Anthony, who played Sam (Pollack’s vegan-aerobicist-astrologer girlfriend), had the funniest scene in the movie — at the intellectuals’ party. Even Benno Schmidt easily overcame my “shock of recognition.” The only bad performance is by Juliette Lewis … or rather she has one horrible scene where she was obviously “acting,” the scene in the cab where she starts to criticize the novel. There was something excruciatingly mannered about her facial expression in some of those closeups, as though she was very proud of getting right her lit-crit lines.

But the real surprise came for me in Woody’s character. Not only is this by far Allen’s best performance as a (non-clown) actor, but in terms of self-apologia, HUSBANDS AND WIVES is no DECONSTRUCTING HARRY. The Juliette Lewis affair never becomes a source of tension in the marriage as such (I don’t recall Mia ever finding out about it) nor does it end like the “dirty old man” fantasy I had expected it to. Indeed, Woody’s character is the one left alone at the end, although not as a specific George Amberson
“comeuppance,” as more like odd chance. There’s a brilliant throwaway part from the reading of Allen’s novel about two men — a man with five children who envies the freedom of the bachelor down the hall, who in his turn envies the security of the married man. It’s kinda cliche (’the grass is always greener …’), but I really found it affecting partly because it was so unexpected given how dislikable I have found Allen’s persona in recent years. Nor do I think I’ll ever forget Woody getting the film’s last line “are we done, now?” or the look on his face in that final shot and the way the camera freezes on it for like two seconds. This is a deeply unhappy man whose great cross to bear is the full knowledge of how deeply unhappy he is.

Andrew Johnston, 1968-2008

My film-critic friends and I got some bad news Sunday overnight. Andrew Johnston died, at the age of 40. His death Sunday night was a real surprise and shock. He had been battling cancer for several years, but the last I heard from him on this subject was about a year ago, when he was brimming with optimism that he’d licked it, and the last time I saw him in person, whenever it was, he looked reasonably hail and had good weight on him.

Andrew was one of the circle of Internet pro-critic friends I have. He was most recently an editor at Time Out New York and had been previously been a critic for TONY, Us Weekly and other magazines, and served for a time as chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle. I won’t pretend to be closer to him than I was. Because he was based in New York, I only saw him in person the five or so years we were both at the Toronto Film Festival. But before we’d ever met in person, when I mentioned summer 2001 in our Super-Secret Discussion Board that I’d be coming to the next TIFF, he e-mailed me with the words “Thank God — that means there’ll be at least one [guy] I can drink with!” since most of the rest of our circle was one-or-none types.

The note kinda typified what defined Andrew — a combination of menschness and enthusiasm. And that was him both personally and in his writing. In fact, the thing I remember best about Andrew was the enthusiasm he projected as a writer. He had more of a fan’s sensibility and a populist taste than many of us. (The year he was chairman, LORD OF THE RINGS 3 won the New York Critics top honor — which helped it build the momentum that ended with a historic Oscar sweep.) Andrew was the kind of guy who loved gushing to you about what he loved, rather than ranting to you about what he didn’t. That sort of personality was a welcome and sometimes needed antidote to the worldwise sang-froid that some of us are prone to, myself definitely not excluded.

Andrew was one among several pro critics who accepted me (and several other non-pros; the group was about 50-50 pros/nonpros) into their circle and the Super-Secret Group based on my postings in the late-90s on Usenet. And the thing I prized most about that was that never was I talked down to or ever treated as an inferior, an amateur interloper, etc. — not by Andrew or any of the others. Without their everyday-implicit approval I certainly would never have started this site and/or would have packed it in several times.

If Andrew thought I wrote something brilliant or brilliantly (first thing to come to mind was a post about the ending of CASABLANCA), he’d say so. If he thought I wrote something retarded, he’d say so. He took me to task once for attacking ROAD TO PERDITION as telegraphing everything (”what’s wrong with being clear and accessible to ordinary viewers”), and on another occasion for refusing on principle to watch Woody Allen’s HUSBANDS AND WIVES over the Soon-Yi affair (”You’re really cheating yourself by not seeing HUSBANDS AND WIVES … If you’re such a fan of his, why on Earth would you deny yourself this film?”). I relented on the Allen film and I’ll post the resulting review of HUSBANDS AND WIVES immediately after completing this post. On another occasion, I mentioned loading my Sicilian confessor my DVD of Visconti’s LA TERRA TREMA, which he called ridiculous since Father didn’t even like BICYCLE THIEF. At my request, that priest said a Mass for Andrew and the repose of his soul in the last day or so.

In our limited e-mail and personal interaction, Andrew and I hit it off well too. Via e-mail, we bonded over the surprising commonalities and few differences about the pop-culture and music exposure of our very different boyhoods just two years apart. I promised him once, when he posted some advance info about TROY that struck me as bad news: “please be wrong; I’ll put a Ralph Nader logo on my site if you say you made this up.” At one TIFF, we discussed a favorite director of both of ours — Stanley Kubrick, most especially A CLOCKWORK ORANGE — for a whole meal by ourselves at one end of the table and ignoring everyone else. That first year, I saw FROM HELL with Andrew, Mike and Theo, and we’re milling about at the Varsity lobby afterwards. As an amateur Ripperologist, I’m ranting (imagine Wallace Shawn in THE PRINCESS BRIDE) about how the Hughes Brothers’ theory was implausible and in any event decisively refuted by workhouse records of Annie Crook and the child’s birth certificate, etc. Mike and Theo also are holding their metaphorical noses at the film too. Theo then looks at Andrew’s face and says “lemme guess … you kinda liked it.” At that, Andrew says something like “I have to like something about this” and then pulled up his sleeve to show a tattoo of the Freemasons or some Masonic symbol on his deltoid.

Those of us who could see Andrew’s work unencumbered by space, formatting and audience-targeting considerations knew how good a critic he was. I unfortunately didn’t read much of his work the last couple of years mostly because he began writing more about television, which I gave up a couple of years ago and so couldn’t even follow. Everyone I know says this was when he best found his public voice. According to this piece at The House Next Door, even on his deathbed, he was watching and writing about MAD MEN, for which he was beating the drum very early (as I say, Andrew was an enthusiast first and last). “Mad Men Mondays” was a regular feature there. I think I owe it to him to pick up and start watching MAD MEN from the start after the election to see what was Andrew’s final love.

But probably my favorite Andrew post on The Group, which I’ll take the liberty of pasting in after the jump, was over APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX, which Andrew and I were virtually alone in thinking was an improvement on the original (the vote was 5 better / 19 worse). I wrote the following then in lieu of defending the changes myself.

When I saw the film last week, I thought it was even better than before. … [But] I didn’t say anything because I found that almost everything I wanted to say had been said, quite worthily, by Mr. Andrew Johnston in post 10626. We should all bow down before his brilliance. Dude, you da explosion.

Yes, he was. RIP and thanksbud.

Presidential endorsement

There really is only one possible choice in this election, and one matter puts it beyond reasonable dispute. At the end of the day, after the Born Alive Infants act, partial-birth abortion, “spreading the wealth,” Rev. Wright, Bill Ayres, the New Party, the “get in their face” thuggery, Tony Rezko, meeting Ahmedinejad and Chavez, surrender in Iraq, and all the rest, one thing overrides everything …

Victor getting gobsmacked

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme, 2008, USA) — 9

At the New Republic, Christopher Orr says RACHEL GETTING MARRIED features

the most elaborately multi-culti Bobo wedding ever committed to celluloid, a festival of singing and dancing and costumery featuring Robyn Hitchcock, Sister Carol East, and a groom (TV on the Radio vocalist Tunde Adebimpe) who sings Neil Young’s ‘Unknown Legend’ to his bride at the altar.

Not only is he correct, but he really understates the point. Even if it were no good as a family-relationship drama, though it is, it REALLY is … RACHEL GETTING MARRIED works as a completely-unintentional parody of Connecticut Upper-Crust Secular Multicultural Awareness. I began mentally ticking things off: there are four “parents” on Rachel’s side of the family (the side the film focuses on); the marriage is inter-racial and this is never even alluded to in any form; every ethnic group is represented in this World’s Fair by Benneton wedding guest list (I had to stifle a giggle at the entry of the Latin America Booth in the form of samba-dancers dressed for Rio Carnival week and a short dumpy woman in Andean Indian garb); the bride announces she is pregnant during the weekend, and this results in unmitigated celebration; their religion is “Religion”: the wedding cake was decorated by Hindu elephants, the wedding outfits are Indian-style, the walls are decorated by Christian-looking icons but done in the Hindu style, and Kym (the film’s central character, played by Anne Hathaway) toasts “L’Chaim”; the marriage is not in a church or by any sort of minister and the couple wrote their own vows; they live in Stamford in a multi-storey home on a lot big enough to pitch a wedding tent in the yard; Kym drives an old-model Mercedes; rehab, psychology PhD’s, smoking-Nazism and fucking someone the day you meet him are all considered unremarkable.

A fellow film geek “twittered” me “why do I have a feeling RGM is gonna piss you off just because of the wedding alone?” He was correct in guessing that I detest these people in the abstract and I’d consider attending this wedding in real-life to be a purgatorial experience. But as for the film I didn’t mind all this stuff at all. Why should a portrayal of a slice of society you dislike not have signifiers of “Dislikability”? It’s not that any of these Bobo Signifiers is unbelievable or remarkable; few are morally significant per se. But the sheer amount of them makes displayed Boboism almost a structuring principle (a thing you notice and react to), and it starts to become funny — how much more Aware and Tolerant can they portray themselves. “Oh … there’s Rigoberta Menchu … Must. Not. Giggle.”

The music, not the words

I’ll only take a slight excuse to put up a Bollywood clip. But I was inspired by a couple of recent things: I got a comment from a young Indian cinephile that “Indian cinema … produces gems that have the power of creating a frenzy”; and saying myself that Depeche Mode’s “People Are People” would be my all-time favorite song if I didn’t understand a word of English.

Even though I did not like the film at all, one of the most important movies I’ve seen this decade was GHOST WORLD because the opening credits and the trailer both made extensive use of the song “Jaan Pahechaan Ho.” This song was so memorable that, combined with a couple of other events in 2001-02, it quickly got me interested in the Hindi pop cinema of “Bollywood,” which is the biggest film industry in the world by some measures, and it’s been a minor interest of mine ever since.

The “Jaan Pahechan Ho” song-and-dance number is from the 1965 film GUMNAAM and is without question the greatest musical number ever to open up a serial killer movie. (I finally found a VHS tape of the film, loosely based on Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, in a mom-and-pop shop in the tourist section of St. Maarten while on a Caribbean cruise. The scene is from a nightclub dance contest at the start of the movie.)

If you can resist that, you are hereby forbidden from reading this site. I really do think the “Jaan Pahechan Ho” scene deserves mentioning in the same breath as “Singin’ In The Rain,” “Cabaret,” “The Trolley Song,” “That’s Entertainment!” “Make Em Laugh,” and the rest of the legendary Hollywood musical numbers. The voice is the legendary playback singer Mohammed Rafi (and I’ve been told it’s him onscreen) he gets to sink his high, smooth voice around a melody that is the Platonic form “Catchiness,” a singular mixture of hyperactive jazz, American beach music and early pop-rock.

The lead-dancing woman is Glomesh Ganesh whose gold lame dress deserves a spot alongside Rita Hayworth’s black getup in GILDA for sheer … sheerness, and Ganesh puts a lot more mileage on her dress than Hayworth does (one wonders how many Advil she had to take between takes). She’s no Ginger Rogers as a pure dancer, but she handles a whole line of male dancers like Monroe in “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” More than anything else though, Ganesh just exudes sheer brassiness and “joy of performance,” simply illustrating the catchy melody by sharing in its pure infectious fun, with all the shots cut perfectly to rhythm and repeating and riffing movements when the song repeats lines.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about “Jaan Pahechan Ho” is that we Westerners may be able to enjoy it better than Indians can because it is, at its heart, a light-as-a-feather song. One Indian co-worker told me that the words of most of the best and best-known Bollywood songs are really rather simple in terms of ideas, but it’s all a “poetic-sound” tradition, going back to classic Urdu poetry. Here are the lyrics of “Jaan Pahechan Ho” in Hindi and opposite them what the words mean in English, according to another Indian co-worker (I just asked Ashish for the literal meaning, without any consideration of what would be usable English lyrics for this melody).

I dunno about you, but singing lyrics like that with a straight face requires real conviction.

Victor trashes “Citizen Kane”

OK, not really, but that’s how this post is inevitably gonna come across. Reader James in a comment below says among a list of questions, “nor do I get the greater love for Welles sophomore work than his freshman one.”¹

Now … I would, if a gun were held to my head, pick THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS over CITIZEN KANE. But how does James know this? I don’t recall saying that here, and I’ve only mentioned AMBERSONS once in detail in this post here, where I lament upon 23rd viewing the fact I can never see it again for the first time but didn’t compare it explicitly to KANE. Telepathy?

But anyhoo … that is the case, and I explained myself a few years ago in Movie-Nerd Discussion Group in the context of a thread about Orson Welles (which I reproduce here with only a few details added). If your favorite Welles film is anything other than CITIZEN KANE, the consensus “greatest film of all time,” you kinda feel compelled to provide a reason. And understand that CITIZEN KANE is still #1 on my 1941 list, though I sometimes DO get tempted to displace it with THE LITTLE FOXES. Anyway, here are my reasons for preferring AMBERSONS:

1) KANE’s structure makes it a bit of a stumper on first viewing,² certainly when compared to AMBERSONS. Philistine that I am … I persist in believing this is at least somewhat of a flaw.

2) Charles Foster Kane is an enigma in some ways that George Amberson Minafer is not, especially since Rosebud pretty much turns out to be a psychological red herring, compared to George’s comeuppance. Plus George’s comeuppance gets brilliantly, gradually forgotten over the course of the film, until it’s yanked back in the most shocking “remember this?” voiceover-narration line ever (in contrast Rosebud weaves itself throughout the film a bit much for a red herring).

3) Agnes Moorhead has more than one scene in AMBERSONS, and Welles even manages to make good actors out of Tim Holt and Ann Baxter. I also treasure Welles’ radio-trained voice more than his physical presence as an actor,³ so making him the narrator is a mo-fo genius move.

4) The last scene of AMBERSONS, which is always held against it, is not bad at all despite the “hearts and flowers” reputation it’s picked up. Eugene’s dialog and the plot points are rather the same as Welles’ original cut (George has been reconciled to both the Morgans, thanks to Isabel’s intercession). Though I shudder to think of hearing this in a poorhouse with a senile Fanny half-listening.

And to repeat … I’m comparing masterpieces here, and it’s like saying MACBETH was “only” Shakespeare’s fifth-best play. But I wouldn’t blame a KANE-lover from reacting as though I’ve “trashed” his favorite to elevate mine.
——————————-
¹ Actually, I would guess that a very significant share of my readers, if not a majority, don’t share my political or religious beliefs. Particularly since I prefer to write about snooty art films, the audience for which is overwhelmingly secular-liberal.
² Though again, Welles is a brilliant visual storyteller and no film structured like KANE is could possibly have been more of a pleasure and an ease to follow.
³ Again, not that his movement and presence are bad or nothing — just that the voice was the best part of him.

New York openings

Abel Ferrara’s MARY, which I saw … gulp … back in 2005, is opening today in New York. It’s a meta-film about the problems making of a Jesus movie in which Matthew Modine was the director and Star, and Juliette Binoche played Mary Magdelene. Forrest Whitaker plays a New York talk-show host who wants Binoche on his program. I didn’t care for the film at the time and I’ve hardly thought about it since I posted the following quick inadequate thoughts at Amy Welborn’s combox (slightly changed here) a couple of years ago:

As for MARY, the less said, the better. I have no doubt that the prize it won at Venice was an f-you to Mel Gibson. It is not worthy of a prize at the world second-most-prestigious juried festival (and there’s lots of films I don’t like that I realize are aesthetically distinguished and “prize-worthy”. MARY is not. It is lazy, padded, unfocused and just felt unfinished and phoned-in.

For example, if you know anything about movie editing techniques (I don’t mean by that you have to be able to write about them — I mean **know anything**), you realize that apart from a brief opening scene, Juliette Binoche, probably the picture’s biggest “name” thespian plays her entire role alone. Never sharing a frame with any other name actor — her role consists mostly of phone conversations and phone messages. Some shots of her are by herself. But basically she is like something stitched in, only you can still see all the seams and the grafts that didn’t quite take. Having your lead actors almost never in the same world tends to underline a stitch job.

And then there’s huge chunks — and I mean several minutes at a time, which feels much longer than it is — of the film literally given over to monologs of talking-head theologians spouting on this and that in re their views on Christianity, straight from the “a minister, priest and a rabbi” school of religious diversity. Except for their views. Elaine Pagels was among them, there were no representatives of religious orthodoxy I recognized, and the one obvious Catholic set off some of my alarm bells.

When director Abel Ferrara gave his post-film Q-and-A when I saw MARY at the Toronto Film Festival (he insisted on doing it sitting on the stage and not using a microphone), he said he had been to Catholic schools but never heard of Mary Magdelene. I’m thinking … whaaaaaa….?????

On a happier and better note, here’s a link to my Toronto review of Mike Leigh’s HAPPY GO-LUCKY, an excellent film which opened last week in the Big Apple and is starting to make its way around the country today, including Washington.

Porn!!!!

AN AMERICAN CAROL (David Zucker, USA, 2008) — 5

AN AMERICAN CAROL is basically conservative pornography — it is enjoyable, effective in making us (laugh) hard, but primarily does so by appealing to our lowest natures. And in the end has left us with not much more than the slightly guilt-tinged feelings associated with having gratified ourselves but done so in the cheapest, easiest, most-narcissistic way possible.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mind my sneak at Playboy and the semi-voluntary bodily reactions happened. But I also know there’s more to satire, to moviemaking, to sex, to conservative movie-thought, to love and to comedy than the AMERICAN CAROL centerfold. In fact, shortly afterward, I watched a DVD of the incendiary-titled but more-serious MICHAEL MOORE HATES AMERICA, recently picked up at a Borders bargain bin, and thought it was easily a better film because in part it’s about that very point — the ease of the admittedly-gratifying cheap shot.

Directed by “9/11 Conservative” David Zucker of Naked Gun and Airplane fame, AN AMERICAN CAROL, though vastly inferior to those films, is still often very funny from the simple pleasure of seeing the piss taken out of ideas and people that jolly well ought to have the piss taken out of them. Sometimes Zucker makes funny things that just aren’t funny, and is able to do so precisely because they aren’t funny. (Cue reactions: “Huh?”)

Here’s pat

FIREPROOF (Alex Kendrick, USA, 2008) — 4

I couldn’t even bring myself to see the Kendrick brothers’ previous film FACING THE GIANTS,¹ which I was reliably told had the football-coach main character get on his knees and accept Jesus Christ as his Savior in a field. After which, his football team becomes champions and he gets a new red truck, which is not only risible but pernicious — religion as a means to worldly success.² Methodism and Buddhism, e.g., are incomplete or mistaken; but the Prosperity Gospel Heresy is wicked.

FIREPROOF avoids the Prosperity Gospel Heresy because it centers on a dying marriage, which saved by a mid-movie religious conversion. Unlike high-school football, marriage is a Godly institution, the success of which matters and has something to do with one’s religious/moral qualities. FIREPROOF has its heart in the right place, has entertaining parts, and is clearly better than (my received notion of) FACING THE GIANTS. It isn’t an awful movie, and it doesn’t deserve the F-grades or the sort of toxic hatred that you can see in the comment fields (or anywhere else secular liberals are gathered).³ I also acknowledge it had the value of being in the small Georgia city, Albany, where I lived for two years, which gives you a certain level of interest in spotting locations and details (e.g., I am 90 percent sure I know what restaurant that lead art is from). Still, it is more earnest, pat and “messagey” than Cynical Gen-X Catholic Moi likes. Maybe it would look better if it had been shown on the Hallmark or Lifetime channels as a movie-of-the-week. And its fundamental dramatic weakness suggests something about contemporary Christian works of art that lies in the very theology of Protestantism. (I swear … the one Amy Grant song I have just popped up on iTunes.)