Coleman's Corner in Cinema...

Iron Man 2

2010-07-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

Iron Man 2 is the anti-superhero superhero movie with a genuine antihero (not the Dirty Harry-like ruffian typically associated with the term but the Camusian definition of such), a quarter-lazy, quarter-crazy, quarter-bored and quarter-decent guy in Tony Stark played by a nearly sheepish Robert Downey, Jr. The Iron Man movies have taken a curious, if not entirely surprising course due to their protagonist's singular station (he is naturally the one man who could privatize world peace, as he declares to an overbearing Senator at a committee hearing)—they tend to play out like in-the-moment snapshots at the dull underpinnings of being at the top of the world. Stark's world is that of fast-moving sojourns to the latest cocktail party, decorated by wandering champaign glasses and fetching women who appear to adore him. When confronted by a rival arms manufacturer with the crushingly obvious name of Hammer (a slumming Sam Rockwell who endeavors to craft a personification of obnoxiousness and just about succeeds in his single-minded quest), Downey's Stark verbally slaps him away like a feckless gnat. He undermines Hammer's interview with a pretty young female reporter. He upstages him whenever given the opportunity. Before long the battle of pettiness and no-bid contracts seems to approximate a schoolyard rivalry between a couple of bratty children. The 2008 Iron Man at least attempted to embroider a slightly credulous human relationship between Downey's Stark and the evil father figure honcho played by a cagey Jeff Bridges in lieu of Stark's own long-gone distant father. The sequel, however, lacks the delicate subtlety of narrative that made the first Iron Man accessibly fugacious junk food that tasted well enough in the moment only to be forgotten about momentarily afterwards.

The Iron Man movies represent a franchise-specific coloration that recall the “white telephone” movies of the 1930s. In the mire of financial crisis and an unending recession wedded to a “jobless recovery,” Americans can approach Stark and his band of over-the-top friends, associates and enemies as a quick-fix dose of escapism. And like the “white telephone” pictures that today play in remastered clarity on Turner Classic Movies, the Iron Man movies present the rich and famous (in this franchise largely made up of arms manufacturers and variegated “masters of the universe”) in a way that undercuts the glamor with the creeping sensations of banality and tedium. The way Stark orders up one computerized hologram after another in his spacious, empty workshop only to toss them aside paints a portrait of a man battling the one feature of his life that outlasts the otherwise impermanent day-to-day meet-and-greet deluge of nothingness, sheer listlessness and boredom dragging down a man characterized by almost extreme pococurantism. Like the “white telephone” films of yesteryear that simultaneously glorified and scrupulously scrutinized the rich elite, Iron Man 2 at its most ambitious strives to be some kind of engaging balancing act between offering hagiography and harsh critique of its protagonist.

While it is refreshing to see at least one superhero who is not crippled by angst, nor woefully embarrassed by his superpowers or capabilities, the commendable yields to the wrongheaded as the exasperatingly tired narrative overtakes anything else. To make amends for the lack of moral considerations on the part of the franchise's hero, the film is bogged down in the quicksand that is Tony's great malady that is quickly killing him. He's dying because of his own powers. The core of his chest—symbolically representing the coolly unrevealing Stark's open heart—is poisoning him. And thus the picture spends an interminable period during which Stark conducts one of the most monotonous and boring science projects ever recorded by the cinema. Watching the picture unfurl, it becomes apparent that the average child would rightly be driven to madness by the film's lack of drive and dynamism. What is left is Stark toying around with his gadgets and formulations, his narcissism redeemed by his unerring ability to become better and more fulfilled by his father leaving a reel of film for him telling him that he really did love him after all. And so the symbolic cuteness of the circular “heart” finds replacement in a triangle, probably for no greater motive than to create a new line of Iron Man action figures at Toys R Us.

There is a Russian named Ivan Vanko out for revenge against the Stark name in the franchise's umpteenth enactment of “the sins of the father revisiting the son” played by Mickey Rourke, who just so happens to have the four or so lines of dialogue that are actually sharp from Justin Theroux's rambling screenplay. Rourke is an actor who finds a way to persevere through the most pedestrian material and here he speaks in a gloriously heavy Russian accent while mumbling on about the Starks being a “family of thieves and butchers” who “rewrite [their] own history.” What would possibly be insurmountable for others, Rourke finds merely tant mieux and he keeps running with the ball. It turns out that Cold War sins still haunt a couple decades later as Rourke's malevolent Muscovite seeks simple retribution against the exemplar of American grandiosity and eminence, the Stark family, as one son vows to destroy another for the lives their fathers led.

What honestly lingers, however, is the almost smothering hipness of this sequel. Each of the big three cable news networks is shown at separate times and with each visit, Stark grabs that trustiest of domestic weapons, the remote control, and mutes the motor-mouthed talking heads with the assured ruthlessness of a billionaire eccentric. Stark, in his visit to the Senate, informs the panel of imperious wannabe autocrats that the rogue nations and terrorist groups who threaten civilization are “years away” from acquiring the technology of his own Iron Man suit (with or without gorgeous custom paint job, he does not reveal) in a perspicuous nod to current events involving Iran and critics of a heightened posture against the Tehran regime arguing in identical language. The painting of Stark to mimic the “Hope” picture of Obama is the icing on the cake. The movie is, weakly, anemically and yet somehow relentlessly, pointing to its own relevance as some kind of barely-cloaked political satire.

All other characters seem lost in this movie. Iron Man two years ago told a feminist-leaning tale of an under-appreciated executive assistant Pepper Potts played by Gwyneth Paltrow; took some time out for a buddy portion with Rhodey (an enthusiastic Terrence Howard here replaced by an excessively modulated and sober Don Cheadle); scaled a poor man's Oedipal conflict as the central story arc that at least registered as important to Stark; and most essentially wrapped these threads together around the central character to create the Aristotelian and rewarding spectacle of a faux-solitary man directly affected and altered by his orbit of personages. Compared to this sequel, that film was an accomplished tale of the intimate and the epic. Visually, too, there is nothing that lingers about this effort. When Stark, adorned by a poor man's prototype for the Iron Man suit, a sterling-colored, unwieldy body suit, burned the pan-generational work of the Stark name, father and son alike, it represented a pop-cultural appreciation of the ancient, and gave mainstream voice to concerns older than the Homeric relating of Priam and Hector juxtaposed with Odysseus and Telemachus. This is almost ironically where Iron Man 2 bites off far more than it can possibly chew with its sidestepping into prosaic tangents and general lack of narrative potency. What came off as effortless once, appears impossible now. Something is not right when the consumer tries to piece together what the junk food was supposed to taste like.

Shutter Island (2010)

2010-06-15T16:08:00.000-07:00

Like all Martin Scorsese pictures, his newest, Shutter Island, is chiefly about sin. How it helps to define the human condition, how it affects the protagonist in life and the detrimental value it has to the eternal soul. Catholic filmmakers have varying ways of addressing sin and most pointedly guilt—but Scorsese's pictures are laced with it like a poisonous substance hidden in a cinematic tonic. As he has aged, Scorsese's films have become increasingly somber in tone. No longer is the rabidly gnawing theme allowed to remain a largely unspoken undercurrent beneath the characterizations and their journeys but it has emerged, front and center, as the monstrous entity meriting its own blunt manifestation. Consequently, Scorsese's films have become ostensibly more garish, brassy and intentionally meretricious. Whether it be an aging Scorsese's shift into the darkest underbelly of city life juxtaposed with deeply religious iconography and sacrificial angst (Bringing Out the Dead); his personifications of brutish, unforgiving violence (Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York); or Satanic depravity and unyielding narcissism (Frank Costello in The Departed)—the latter of whom are each allowed to be viewed as seductive demons with Jack Nicholson's gangster explicitly uttering, Non Serviam, a quote directly from James Joyce's own embodiment of Satan; or the despairing madness of Howard Hughes partly viewed through the prism of masculine dominance over the female (The Aviator).

Scorsese characters have tended to mature with him. From the perplexing sexual frustration of Who's That Knocking at My Door? to the feral screaming and yelling of Mean Streets serving as backdrop to prayerful hope to the inchoate, raving ramblings of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Scorsese's principal characters now speak of the decay and rot of civilization (Gangs of New York), are once-in-a-lifetime inventive eccentrics (The Aviator) and judiciously quote Joyce and Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Departed). To take on two of Scorsese's mobster odysseys, Goodfellas and Casino, part of the fun is recognizing the punchline about two hours before the characters do: what they are engaged in cannot last forever, and they will, to quote Scorsese himself concerning the former, “pay and pay and pay.” Goodfellas remains a compelling gangland tale not because any character voices his innermost unease—here Scorsese's characters remain frustratingly standoffish and deeply insecure with themselves, telling (through voice-over) the details of their myriad crimes and underworld schemes but never letting on that they wish they had changed something about themselves rather than the simple, unfortunate details. (This is probably because the characters are sincere. Henry Hill's final address to the audience is unconcerned with forgiveness or genuine remorse. It's actually a pathetic cry of self-pity.) Casino, openly more grand and operatic as early on as its opening credits (again, not coincidentally Bach's "Passion According to St. Matthew") before which the protagonist is engulfed in hellish flame, operates similarly, though the visual and musical motifs are more robustly signposting ruin and damnation. The 1995 picture's tagline, “No one stays at the top forever,” is quite the understatement.

Just as Jewish artists become more concerned with Jewish questions as they age (for two current American examples, the Coen brothers and Steven Spielberg), Scorsese's admitted fixation on religion and his Catholic faith has found itself increasingly naked within his films. The Last Temptation of Christ posited the question of Christ's divinity as a kind of test. And that is most fitting: Scorsese's films are tests, and he is most comfortable in letting his characters fail because Catholic teaching demonstrates that we all fail. That is a most sobering realization, demanding stringent acceptance, and it is unsurprising that Scorsese's films have only become more consumed by this as the consummate filmmaking artist becomes an older man. With Shutter Island, Scorsese approximates the late Catholic, Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the horror “B movies” produced by Val Lewton. Scorsese produced and acted in the 2007 documentary, Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton—The Man in the Shadows and his appreciation for the films shepherded by Lewton and directed by such noted stylists as Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise is heralded by Shutter Island. The film is a kind of melange of eerie horror, suspenseful film noir and psychological drama with Scorsese's own fascinations embedded throughout. Based on a Dennis Lehane novel of the same name, Scorsese stays only too faithful the the original source material (much more on this later), but provides the visual palette with a richly-defined atmospheric dread that seems all his own. Imitating the stark black and white cinematography of such noted directors of photography as Nicholos Musuraca in numerous “grade-B” cult classics, Scorsese and his cinematographer Robert Richardson etch a color scheme that is riddled with sinister shadows, unsettling silhouettes and the disorienting contrast between characters' flesh-colored faces and the gray, nubilous backgrounds. Almost jarringly, this aesthetic is bracingly layered under an epical emulation of the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the skyward fantasias: in particular, a cliff sequence recalls Black Narcissus almost impeccably.

Shutter Island is said to be, at its heart, a genre piece, but that term becomes more of a self-contained statement of compromise than anything else. Scorsese is not so timid as to avoid linking his “genre piece” to Hitchcock, Lewton, Merian C. Cooper (Shutter Island's opening involving a fog-shrouded ship approaching an eerily beckoning island cannot help but remind the viewer of another favorite classic of the director's), Scorsese favorite Samuel Fuller and Robert Aldrich (the picture's specific plot points to Fuller's Shock Corridor and the comments concerning red-baiting and fear of hydrogen bombs from insane patients echoes similar concerns as Fuller and Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly). If films by those and other helmers can be more rigorously appraised than merely labeling them a “genre piece,” surely Scorsese's imitation of same can be surveyed in similar fashion. Scorsese is something of a cinematic extremist, which can yield diverse reactions in an audience when he is approaching an ostensibly more traditional canvas of content (all that has to be read is the basic plot synopsis and suddenly every imaginable suspense/mystery- and horror-tinged Hollywood trope presents itself: spooky island, hurricane, mental asylum, a missing woman, a possible neo-noir conspiracy). Shutter Island's opening is so deliciously old-fashioned—hardly a better term exists for it—with the terse, hardboiled dialogue with deliberate, hair-raising beats (Mark Ruffalo's Chuck: “All I know is it's [the complex on the island they are approaching by ferry] a mental institution...” Leonardo DiCaprio's Teddy lets the words soak in, squints as he wrestles with his cigarette and chimes in for sheer effect: “For the criminally insane....”). This is linked to the most shamelessly ominous, drumming thriller score for a major Hollywood picture made by an A-list filmmaker this side of a Spielberg-John Williams collaboration—here, Scorsese and famed songwriter and singer for The Band, first documented by Scorsese's 1978 rock show documentary The Last Waltz, Robbie Robertson, go all out, complementing the foghorn of the vessel in the opening seconds of the film with ascending French horns adorning Ingram Marshall's marvelously piquant and frightening “Fog Tropes.” The picture is bursting at the seams with ingenius musical inclusions of such noteworthy artists as John Adams, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti, Lou Harrison, Alfred Schnittke, Max Richter, Nam June Paik and Giacinto Scelsi, as well as Brian Eno, Mahler and Dinah Washington (for the end credits). Though scoffed at as being excessively melodramatic, the score and soundtrack of Shutter Island are no more inappropriate or distancing than the Penderecki-influenced Jonny Greenwood score for There Will Be Blood. Some critics have perhaps misjudged the extent to which Scorsese and his collaborators (Robertson, Richardson and longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker) have gone in attempting to not merely imitate but recreate the pounding psychological barrage of sight and sound filmmakers of the era depicted (mid-1950s) sought to create in their time.

Scorsese has long named Orson Welles and John Cassavetes as two directors who inspired him the most. This paradoxical appreciation of the respectively robustly theatrical and the sincerely quotidian means of presentation has long found itself deep within Scorsese's canon. What makes Scorsese's more propulsive pictures rather outstanding is the way in which he celebrates the artifice of filmmaking itself. This most increasingly rare celebration of filmmaking finds itself compactly molded into each sequence and sometimes each frame of a Scorsese picture. This Hitchcockian adulation of artifice and artificial cinema creates an immediately more meta reading of Scorsese's films. The viewer may not be gasping when a police captain falls to his death in The Departed—he may be counting the X's and chuckling at the connection to the Howard Hawks gangster saga Scarface, which, with its sheer animalistic ferocity, can be seen as a clear precursor to Scorsese's own mob chronicles. Likewise, when Shutter Island's psychologically and sensorially wracked protagonist hurriedly ascends a lighthouse's spiral staircase, the viewer may not be entirely wrapped up in the moment of the plot's winding down, but rather note how the lighthouse serves as firstly ominous location, secondly as a tangible goal for the hero's journey narrative, thirdly as a thematic pun, particularly in how the mysteries locked away inside are to shed light on the protagonist's sacred quest and fourthly as the venue in which Scorsese recreates the final climax of Hitchcock's Vertigo, also about a deeply troubled man haunted by guilt and subconscious yearning to spiritually self-immolate while apparently searching for all of the answers of his own entrapping conspiracy; meanwhile, the spiral staircase itself is a reminder of director Robert Siodmak and his atmospherically gothic mystery The Spiral Staircase while creating the same physical and spiritual ascension to answers that Hitchcock engendered for Vertigo's conclusive movement.

Shutter Island's underlying theme resonates as a Scorsese motif unto itself. DiCaprio's Federal Marshall, Teddy Daniels, is, according to one of the more sinisterly-depicted doctors of the institution, Doctor Naehring (Max von Sydow, once again playing a German immigrant), a “m[a]n of violence.” This common Scorsese archetype wedded to the director's obsession with guilt finds itself at the center of Shutter Island, but in the case of the actual plot, serves as a kind of running joke (of the dark-humored variety) tying in with the realities of the picture's climax. Though some of the connections may be overtly artificial, it is not invalid to pursue what certain details mean in Scorsese's oeuvre. Teddy, like Travis Bickle, is a veteran of war. The wartime experiences of Teddy are narratively drawn out by the inclusion of a Mahler record. Scorsese's own flourishes are vivid and reminders for later on when the viewer attempts to appreciate the picture a second time, of how subjective memories truly operate. (For two examinations for how vitally subjective sensorial memory plays out when beautifully rendered through recent cinema, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Tetro are suitable excursions into not entirely dissimilar territory.) What Scorsese recognizes is that the mind thinks and remembers in cinematic fashion (and to accommodate the haphazardness of the mind, Scorsese fractures the backstory flashback narrative, since, unlike film, memory does not unspool from beginning to end in perfect linear fashion). A row of Germans is mowed down at the Dachau concentration camp, and Scorsese's camera follows in one of his usual tracking shots, as each guard is killed in nearly flawless right-to-left order (for the American soldiers). Is this an artistic flurry or commentary on the lack of realism? One of the admittedly enjoyable aspects of Shutter Island is that its plot, characterizations, usage of flashbacks and even the memorable final sequence stir debate and questions as to what is real (in the context of the film, since none of it is actually real, to paraphrase Brian De Palma's editorial on cinema) and most importantly what is intended. How much of the picture's facade is directly tied to the mechanics of the plot—sometimes rewarding (such as a couple of cute cutaways to a character who's “in on it” all along while being spoken of by a mental patient questioned by another character), sometimes dubious at best (the entire premise, without being too liberal in how Lehane's narrative resolves itself, is ultimately a less convincing and vastly more earnest variation on William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration)—and how much of it is simply part and parcel of Scorsese's filmic auto-critique on film?

Lehane's novel is honestly one of his better offerings, and it is not difficult to see why Scorsese would be attracted to the material. The novel is intrinsically cinematic, with many potentially juicy visuals for the big screen, and it more than dabbles in Scorsese's aforementioned concerns of masculine violence and exhausting guilt. Scorsese gifts Lehane's clumsier bits and pieces with a gracefulness, and condenses much of what needs to be condensed: Michelle Williams as DiCaprio's deceased wife haunting him dreams is probably the most pointed example of both improvements, and the way in which Scorsese shoots her, from her demise into ash that blows away in Teddy's longing arms to mimicking the famed Vertigo sequence by panning the camera around DiCaprio and Williams ala James Stewart and Kim Novack. The beautifully-rendered interweaving of Teddy's concentration camp experiences with his long destroyed domestic life to the case he is working on at the institution in an extended dream sequence is disconcertingly jarring and authentic to the way in which the mind constructs epic settings for symbolic chimeras to sometimes run amok. One character has himself created a monster responsible for a most heinous crime. The figure is a grievously scarred, terribly ugly embodiment of all that represents wrongdoing to the character who has created him. The screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis includes cutting comments by at least two inmates whose insanity may make them perversely more sane than others: they are horrified by the reality of the hydrogen bomb. And the unnamed warden of the mental institution, played by Ted Levine, is given a chilling speech about Teddy's violent tendencies and the violence of God (exemplified by a devastating hurricane storm on the island). The warden's comment that he and Teddy have “known each other for centuries” posits the picture's weightier delineation between violent men on possibly opposing sides. The warden's remarks that the only moral order is, “Can my violence overcome your violence?” ties in with Teddy's earlier statement that the warden looked like an “ex-military prick,” reestablishing the correlation between the role of the military in conditioning men of different times in different wars like Teddy and Travis, to countless late '40s and early '50s film noir protagonists, into creatures of violence. (Max von Sydow's Dr. Naehring offers the difference between referring to Teddy and Chuck as “men of violence” and calling them plainly “violent men.”)

Shutter Island is home to numerous solid performances. DiCaprio is a pleasure to watch for most of the film, in part because his patina of innocence serves as a suitable contrast to the picture's generally gloomy mood and environs. Mark Ruffalo is perfectly cast as Chuck, and he is as adapt as any current Hollywood actor at playing roles in a straightforwardly naturalistic way. Here, Ruffalo reminds of an early 1950s Dana Andrews. Perhaps more importantly, in the case of Chuck in Shutter Island, a novel and motion picture leave a character underdeveloped for an important reason. A certain early scene in which DiCaprio eyes Ruffalo's handing of his sidearm provides the groundwork for their chemistry as actors and characters throughout the rest of the picture while touching upon Scorsese's more blunt approximation of the gun as masculine phallic symbol. Ben Kingsley as Doctor Cawley is a case of an actor being almost too well-cast in a certain role. Patricia Clarkson acts up a storm as a red herring character whose primary function is to provide a fairly provocative retelling of Plato's Allegory of the Cave while cranking up the viewer's senses of paranoia. Emily Mortimer has a standout scene that plays out quite differently depending on the context of the quantity of the viewer's acquired information (several performances, including a brief visit by Jackie Earle Haley, fall under this classification in Shutter Island).

Most troublesome is predictably the picture's protracted explanation-laden denouement. The voluminous, tiring expository feels decidedly mechanical, as though Scorsese himself is almost gritting his teeth at the alleged necessity of it. That the film struggles in aping the novel at this juncture comes as no surprise at first, though Scorsese does rebound with reasserting a visually rewarding aftertaste involving the final flashback's staging, and optically rendering the stinging reality of Teddy's identity. Scorsese's most disconsolate films always end on one last, final, excellent statement, and here Scorsese finds his best, most natural and memorable coda since The Age of Innocence saw Daniel Day-Lewis's Newland Archer found himself utterly forceless and feckless, unable to muster the slightest measure of resistance to his fate. Ruffalo initially steals the scene with a powerful head movement that resonates long after the final credits. Yet DiCaprio's best line of the entire picture is saved for last, and its evident duality plays to the ambiguousness of his condition as the film's running time expires. Is he, like Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, beyond all hope, wounding himself as surely over and over as the boxer piteously did in one of Scorsese's most iconic scenes? Or is he following an epiphany and pursuing it through a zealous martyr's conviction?

Whether or not Shutter Island succeeds in its key goals is up for the viewer to decide, as with any film, but at least the Scorsese picture feels like new ground for the filmmaker. The Departed was understandably chided by some as a kind of “leftovers” picture for Scorsese, and his previous two films were deemed by many as vaguely empty lunges at Oscar's approval for decades of great filmmaking (ironically, it was the “leftovers” movie-movie that gifted Scorsese with his long-elusive Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture). All of those films, however well-crafted, did not seem to boast much in the way of artistic progression for their creator. While Shutter Island is itself a contradiction of sorts—a movie-movie on the surface that is actually a formal genre exercise, an outwardly “minor” work that nevertheless recalls some of Scorsese's most personal works such as the ethereal parable Bringing Out the Dead—there is an unmistakable joyfulness to watching it, even if it comes with the knowledge that it is flawed. Whether one wishes to see the institution's various wards as Scorsese's meditations on Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron with its almost bitingly caustic manner in which each level of the asylum's heirarchy is depicted like medieval avatars of the church (which would follow with the film's essaying of science—psychiatric as well as physical, in the overpowering of mind and population with psychopharmacy and hydrogen bombs—as the twentieth century's religion); the fetishization of Scorsese's leading man for the umpteenth time (Scorsese's specifically Catholic linkage between the spirit and the flesh finds expression in both the ritualized disrobing of the male protagonist and also, as in the 1991 remake, Cape Fear, iconic Christian tattoos reappear in one of Shutter Island's more disturbing sequences upon the back of a Ward C “patient”); to Scorsese's establishing of Teddy's images of his deceased wife to correlate with the “Scorsesean” trope of the whitely “virginal” femme prototype (arguably complemented by the wife's pallid, almost ghostly complexion); to simply creating a film his long-ago cinematic shepherd, Roger Corman, would admire and be proud of, Shutter Island is at least indicative of a director taking a step forward and reaching back to his roots, all at once.

5/6/10

2010-05-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

Two reasons to celebrate and remember this day, May 6, 2010: it's the 79th birthday of one of the greatest baseball players of all time, Willie Mays, and it's the two-year anniversary of the creation of this blog.

I'm just about to begin working on a special, significant piece for Coleman's Corner in Cinema very soon.

Once I finish that, I will turn my attention to other items. Some of these will be troubling, unfulfilled matters, such as three of the four films screened for the Mill Valley Film Festival last fall and plenty of other reviews I've either written in my head ages ago or have yet to consider at all.

I apologize for the ludicrous absence of material. There will be an uptick in activity here in the coming days and weeks.

Thank you, dear reader!

What Avatar Proves

2010-03-01T15:44:00.001-08:00

The singular communal experience of partaking in the sights and sounds of the cinema will not merely pass away, as has been predicted by far too many for too long now. The cinema, and the unique role of it in modern society, will endure for as long as we take the enchanting and wondrous odyssey.

Sleepless Soliloquy

2009-10-28T04:24:00.000-07:00

His fists clenched the now recreant blanket, its frigid facade sending merciless tingles of despair and discomfort. Cold, caliginous environ seals him off from the whole world, the voluminous blackness of which could only be surmised from this most desolate posts. As the pitiless night consumes this seemingly forsaken earth, the minutes tick. The incandescent digital lines configurated into numbers tick by, the glowing green splashing against the ponderous gulf of the dark which separates all corners of the clammy, nearly gelid bedroom. Eyes briefly closed, a terrible white flash compels them to reawaken. Troublemakers equipped with flashlights, traveling on the nearby sidewalk, busily exploiting this most dreadful of nights? A most disquieting sensation caresses the forehead; cool air, as though it were breathed from a malevolent, hovering demon, funnels downward. Eyes dart about in directionless frenzy. A finger nervously twitches. The heart begins to race.

Time stands still. Minutes drone on and on, until the barren vastness of this humble room consumes whole hours. Eyes struggle to shut, only to reopen at the slightest peculiar noise. Each aural disquisition of the little, merciless devils who run amok at the unholy witching hour attracts immediate attention. If only the ears could be closed with the effortlessness of the eyes; yet infernal imagery flashes regardless. The unknown of the grimly dismal room is less awful than the sights of the mind. Hands and arms will themselves downward under the covers. The crisp, chilled air resumes its mockery of what should be a plaintively soothing zephyr.

Neck muscles tighten; the skin contracts against the crucial bone structure. Long hair curls back against the tip of the left ear. Or is that what the spirits want him to believe? A crashing boom jars the chronological descent into paralyzing madness. The dryer has bellowed in the middle of an ominous night once more. Gasps provide a pulsating, nerve-wracking agitato to the incongruous proceedings. The window, a sliver of which is visible beyond the frighteningly insouciant white drapes, appears to become opaque, sinister fog and dew smothering it with inexorable, mephitic gleefulness.

Trapped. Retracting and tucking in the legs and feet to rest beneath the covers. The ceiling slowly, ceaselessly, drops downward. Inexhaustibly descending, its gradually increasing proximity to his torso resembling the crushing weight of the specter that taunts and menaces him with utmost jubilance. Eyes rapidly close and reopen. A clanging sound emanates from somewhere in the pivotal hallway that lay beyond the room. Eyes dart in a vain hope of seeing what lurks behind the corner of the door frame.

Resolute rejection of the tormentors and unusually brave determination to close the eyes and disregard the angagic onslaught follow. Prayer remains a most viable option: cast out the malignant sons of Belial. The enveloping spiritual darkness moved about the fallen earth like a forever voracious marauding army. These evil beasts were vulnerable. They had been too clever for their own sake in creating such an outlandish ruckus.

The once-piercing fear dissipated, quickly fading. Eyes open. Close again. Sleep beckons. It must be near.

And, just as security seemed to be at hand, and the battle over, the most horrifying, petrifying visceral, guttural growl. To the right! Just outside the wall adjacent to the bed. The ferocious, monstrous growl lay only a foot or two away from him, just outside his home. The gnawing, rumbling, snarling guttural growl tortuously shifted into the most bloodcurdling, hair-raising, and unnerving howl and roar. He jumped out of his bed and backed away. Backed into the numinous nothingness of the black blanket that was the hallway. Finding himself move about in a parallel course with the beast that lay behind the wall, moving about as it did from one section of the front porch to the next, evidently locked in deadly combat with one of its wretched rivals.

Sleep remains beyond his grasp.

The Horse Boy (2009)

2009-10-03T14:44:00.000-07:00

(The Horse Boy was one of four films screened on Poterero Avenue on the evenings of September 23rd and 24th. Reviews of the other three films will be published here soon.)

The Horse Boy is a ninety-three minute documentary by Austin, Texas-based filmmaker Michel O. Scott which unfortunately feels much longer. Its story is an intriguing one, ostensibly brimming with love and hope. The Horse Boy is produced and narrated by the film's star, Austin journalist, writer and father, Rupert Isaacson, and the tale is based on his book, “The Horse Boy: A Father's Quest to Heal His Son.” The book and now film chronicle Isaacson's journey to Mongolia with his wife and young autistic son Rowan in the effort to find shamans who, the father hopes, may heal him.

The genesis of the trip was the son's usually dyspeptic demeanor, punctuated by seemingly endless tantrums, one day becoming singularly serene whenever he rode a neighbor's horse named Betsy. Whenever the child rode atop Betsy, he seemed remarkably peaceful. Isaacson considered this and coupled his own experience with the Bushmen of Africa, related in his 2004 book, “The Healing Land: The Bushmen and the Kalahari Desert.” Isaacson's research pointed to the Mongolians as having the longest history of using horses, so he coupled the knowledge he gained from his sojourn to see the Bushmen with the Mongolian shamans who, like the Bushmen, spiritually healed those addled by disease. Isaacson convinced his comparatively skeptical wife to take the journey to Mongolia to see the shamans based on these points. The documentary unfortunately does not address why this seemingly radical alternative to the western medication the Isaacsons use on a daily basis must be taken. The correlation between the African Bushmen and the Mongolian shamans remains tenuous. Could, for instance, the child have been escorted to an American Indian tribal medicine man closer to the Isaacsons' home of Austin? Rowan's reaction to the horse, which spurred Isaacson to take this action, may be explainable as simply a child's innate affection for the animal, and for something new. If Rowan's reaction is indeed quite significant, it would be helpful for the documentary to more greatly illuminate, on autism in general and Rowan's case in particular.

The film makes no clear comparisons between Rowan and other autistic children. Autism itself is very briefly covered, with gradations momentarily discussed, but Rowan's case is never directly scientifically scrutinized in relation to other cases of autism. The Horse Boy uses a multi-person panel of apparent experts in the field of autism including Austin psychotherapist Dale Rudin to expound various thoughts and postulations concerning the disease. The soundbites from the rotating doctors often contradict one another. The specifics of autism as a disease, even in relation to Rowan himself, are left frustratingly muddled. This is not entirely unreasonable unto itself yet the myriad comments are often vague or cliché-ridden. Those with a genuine interest in autism, such as beleaguered parents with autistic children of their own, will probably be rather disappointed by The Horse Boy's regrettably shallow pseudo-intellectualism.

The Horse Boy, as a documentary, sadly lacks much in the way of documentation—aside from the trip the Isaacsons take, it documents little. Evidence, examples, basic factual support are all conspicuously missing. This damages the cinematic missive; while it is obvious Rowan has been diagnosed as autistic, what does this truly entail? The lack of answers leaves The Horse Boy appearing woefully incondite at times. The film, through the patriarchal Isaacson, does relate that Rowan suffers from interminable and inconsolable tantrums, an inability to relate to or play with other children, and severe bowel incontinence. (The documentary pushes the audience's patience and embarrassment with at least one too many sequence detailing the latter symptom.) One overwhelming problem with the film, however, is that Rowan's autism is displayed in disparate contexts. In one scene, Isaacson expresses wonderment and happiness when his son throws a tantrum apparently because he was being separated from the shamans. Isaacson notes that this is a good sign; he believed his son would probably throw a tantrum when he was placed near the shamans. Does this comport with average autistic children? Are their symptoms chiefly brought about by emotional reactions?

This gleeful shedding of concrete, rational science as part of the potential equation extends to the Isaacsons readily accepting the shamans' belief, upon examining the family, that a “dark spirit” entered the womb of Isaacson's wife, Kristin Neff. Neff, with an earned Ph.D. in Human Development from Berkeley, rarely receives the focus of The Horse Boy; the picture either occludes or limits all other voices but Isaacson's own. Neff does briefly relate that her deceased, mentally unstable grandmother, the “dark spirit” of whom the shamans speak, suffered from manic depression and this “spirit”/genetic history has directly led to her son's autism. Rowan's parents subject themselves to ritualistic whippings by the shamans, compelled to not scream lest the ceremony be for naught. While the shamans' rituals are displayed visually for the film, the reasoning behind them are left vague. Likewise, Isaacson endeavors to lunge at various other possibilities of healing, including recuperative springs and visiting the “Reindeer People” of Mongolia. Isaacson's open faith may or may not be laudatory, but these developments in the documentary's narrative make the picture rather arduous with only the vistas of beautiful, wondrously open and commodious Mongolian terrain providing steady relief.

Almost humorously, or simply embarrassingly, Isaacson is depicted as hopelessly naïve in his own inexperienced impression of Mongolia, and especially of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, a desolate, chalky city packed with impoverished slums. After landing in the benighted city, Isaacson confesses that this reality is not what he was remotely expecting in his apparent fantasy of Mongolia. In one of the rare piercing comments made by Neff, she confirms this. The Horse Boy, as composed by filmmaker Scott, seems to relish the thoroughly “open-minded” Isaacson's lack of basic prudence—partly as romanticization, but perhaps more calculatedly as celebrating the prime mover of the “plot”—at the expense of greater insights into the more intriguing subject matter that is largely unexplored. While personalizing the film is necessary when dealing with such inherently intimate subject matter, the film never quite becomes more than validation for Isaacson. Consequently, best intentions notwithstanding, it never presents itself with the compelling, involving urgency that best suits the cinema.

San Francisco Today, Mill Valley Tomorrow (and then Naturally the World)

2009-09-21T09:33:00.001-07:00

I haven't been forthcoming with what is afoot here at Coleman's Corner in Cinema for a while now and I thought this would be a fair time to let readers know that this week I will be attending the 32nd Mill Valley Film Festival Press Screenings in San Francisco on Potrero Avenue. These are films to be screened at the prestigious Mill Valley Film Festival in October. Among the films to be screened this week are The Messenger by Oren Moverman, Fish Tank by Ancrea Arnold, The Horse Boy by Michael O. Scott and Precious by Lee Daniels.

The good people at the California Film Institute have informed me that I can only review one of these four films this week (The Horse Boy). However, I will be involved with covering the Mill Valley Film Festival here at Coleman's Corner in Cinema and hope to dutifully record many of the festival's cinematic happenings.

For more information about the Mill Valley Film Festival, please look here. It's the hottest ticket in the Bay Area and I hope anyone who can, will attend.

Meanwhile, I promise to the many commenters in various threads here, and especially the Inglourious Basterds thread, that I will get back to you as soon I can do so comfortably. Thank you for your patience.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

2009-09-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds represents something of a commencement for its maker. Tarantino, now in his mid-forties, has found himself in that nearly mind-boggling predicament every major populist artist endures. Reduced to mere generalities, Tarantino's reign as American film's biggest, brainiest bad boy and correspondent of cinematic delectations has followed a fairly predictable path: amazement and adulation, followed not so slowly by backlash, resentment and cynical incertitude—and, depending on the individuals (each, for argument's sake, belonging to a certain cinematic-consumption stratum: critics, audience members, “cinephiles”), this has been repeated in the past twelve years. For some, Tarantino had definitively lost his way, or was at least adrift—the Kill Bill movies are so obscenely overloaded with richness and deliriousness of the genre-picking sort that they are readily divisive endeavors. Tarantino's partnership with Robert Rodriguez in creating Grindhouse, with Tarantino's Death Proof the picture endlessly argued about, defended and loathed by many who viewed the entire experience, caused a significant portion of film connoisseurs to begin to write him off for good. Here was a man who was, to liberally paraphrase from one noted, dissatisfied film blogger, crawling up his own ass and losing all bearing of reality.

Tarantino, however, knows that reality and film are two radically divergent worlds. Like one of his immediate ancestors, De Palma, he sees cinema as a fundamental lie, but like the noted Hitchcock-devotee, he interprets it as a benign lie, one as necessary as nighttime fairytales. You were either on board with this outlook or not—with Tarantino or not—and this dramatically influenced one's opinion of Tarantino's post-Jackie Brown work. Was he simply playing around or was there more behind the facade? For the critics, however, the mere question necessitated a correction of course; Tarantino, it was said, had to now put or shut up, almost like he was beginning all over again.

Let it be said that with Inglourious Basterds Tarantino puts up. Most immediately resembling his most universally acclaimed film, Pulp Fiction, in its multi-chapter structure with parallel, rotating stories, this cine—superficially World War II men-on-a-mission adventure, naturally it is first and foremost a Tarantino picture and everything that entails—is so headily unaware of its own grandiosity that it manages to be oddly intimate and downright recondite in its shadings of its cornucopia of distinguished gallery of Tarantino characters. That may be viewed as a kind of backhanded compliment, but it is not: Tarantino is so assured and inspired here, whatever quibbles or questions arise are almost instantly discarded. From the first frame to the last, this feels like the film Tarantino wanted to make after Jackie Brown but held off on—and, according to him, it was the screenplay he began working on after Brown, but the work became too massive and sprawling for its own good, and Tarantino redirected his energy behind Kill Bill—an unmistakable new, bold chapter to the Tarantino saga behind Tarantino's filmic journeys.

There is a moment early on in Inglourious Basterds that is in its own way a microcosmic description of the film entire: Colonel Hans Landa, with a honeyed, bright demeanor and grin, is coyly interrogating a Frenchman depicted as a virile, physical worker in the first of many comments on national and ethnic stereotypes Basterds makes. (The French dairy farmer with three daughters hiding a family of refugees may come from Tarantino's much-beloved Tonight We Raid Calais, a noted favorite of the director, from 1943 by John Brahm, about a British intelligence officer plotting to destroy a German munitions plant in France, hiding out with a French farmer and his daughters who—not unreasonably—blame the British for the fall of France.) The Frenchman reaches for his corn pipe and begins to smoke, and Landa quickly reaches for a pipe of his own—naturally, this Colonel known in France as the “Jew-Hunter,” a keen detective who is the distilled personification of a man who loves to play cat-and-mouse, has one that recalls Sherlock Holmes. The absurdly oversized pipe will make many a viewer of the film want to chuckle, but the chuckle is fleeting. As with other Tarantino creations, Landa is stunningly three-dimensional; whatever excesses and peculiarities he may possess are sadly all too human and strangely plausible. That pipe is a signpost: Basterds plays with people the way Tarantino films do, but the writer-director never ceases to insist that his characters are people. What follows is most crucial, for it reveals that Landa, an ostensible non-smoker, already knows that the French farmer smokes, and came prepared. Tarantino cuts away from the sight gag of the pipe to Landa's steely eyes, and the laughter dies down. Landa may be funny but he's no joke. No Tarantino character truly is, even the jokers. And like many a Tarantino character, Landa—like Mr. Pink arguing against automatic tipping in Reservoir Dogs or Bill discussing the subtextual meanings of the character of Superman in Kill Bill 2—patiently, coolly relates why he can think like a Jew by discussing the characteristics of a hawk, a rat, and, circuitously, a squirrel, in an early demonstration that the film has a provocative outlook on the issue of hunters attacking prey, most emphatically embodied by Landa himself.

Tarantino's opening is as rapturously mounted as anything in his oeuvre; he shoots the Frenchman working with his three beautiful daughters, and visions of Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and myriad spaghetti westerns unfurl within the cinematically-trained mind. Tarantino follows suit with repeated excursions into filmic convention: like his seedy crime yarns that play with gangster movie conventions or Death Proof that seemed to exist as a kind of instrumental covering of many of Tarantino's favorite kinds of movie—cheap, tawdry horror movies, exploitation flicks of all kinds, road trip movies of sundry incarnations—Tarantino's multiple chapters in Basterds take on vibrant cinematic attributes found in spaghetti westerns, countless men-on-a-mission war films, romantic spy melodramas, of which there were plenty in the 1930s and '40s, and even a possible melding of horror-tinged religious cinema (a French heroine becomes Tarantino's approximation of Joan of Arc, devoured by flame before her tormentors) which feel at one with giallo and Catholic filmmakers' representations of their fear and guilt. This may mislead many who partake in Basterds' multitudinous delights of sight and sound—Basterds is admittedly enormously informed by Tarantino's love of cinema, including German expressionism, the brilliance of G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl's work and Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau, the latter of which may signify Tarantino's acknowledgment of a “bad boy” of another era, in which one was not rewarded for the sharp attitudinal edge of one's film but rather punished for it as Clouzot was for Le Corbeau—but a pastiche it is not. Tarantino has reached a higher plane insofar as his recollections—part personal (the titular Inglourious Basterds stalk their German victims with knives like the psychopaths who terrified a young Tarantino in The Last House on the Left), part historical (Tarantino affords much banter about popular culture, once again, but it is confined strictly to figures of the time period such as Max Linder and the film character King Kong) but these gropings at cinema are heartfelt and genuine, as well as seamlessly stitched into the fabric of Basterds' very filmic identity.

What Inglourious Basterds proves is that Tarantino is still obsessed with human beings rather than a more accessible instigator of movement—his films are made up of a few, long, extraordinarily detailed scenes, as though they are visual, character-based novels. Those who harshly critique Tarantino's modus operandi appear foolhardy. Do they wish him to no longer invest such passion and care into his characters? Would they be happier if, for instance, Basterds were more cosmetically satisfying? It surely would have been easier to create a knockoff of The Dirty Dozen and leave it at that, but Tarantino's tapestry demands altogether greater scrutiny. Almost ironically, Tarantino's very artistic behavior—to lovingly dwell on the minutest of details, to bathe in the minds and hearts of the people he, like any significant writer, simply follows—is what has helped to make him so durably popular. If he were to abandon it, he would be sacrificing that which makes him a unique voice.

That voice helps to shape the aforementioned Colonel Hans Landa (a sensational Christoph Waltz), whose thrill of the chase and hunt (predominantly cerebral) is fetishistic and unnerving. He asks for a glass of the farmer's milk from his cows. Like Anton Chigurh's grabbing of a bottle of cold milk in No Country for Old Men, the villain's commandeering of the satisfying cream appears shameless and even saturnalian. Landa is an apt avatar for the Third Reich; his rapacity is on open display as he hurriedly swallows an entire glassful of the milk belonging to the French. Landa is undeniably acute and fully commanding but he lacks the patience to savor that which he ingests. A later scene in which he almost mechanically rips apart a piece of strudel with requested cream, taking turns between munching on a bite and asking a probing question, reinforces this amusingly sad characteristic. Waltz is at one moment quite humorous, and in the next downright chilling. Like Samuel L. Jackson's Ordell in Jackie Brown, Landa is self-protective to a fault, with an air of melancholy. Just before he violently snuffs out a fellow German's life—one of Tarantino's most uncomfortable and ugliest scenes, far more devastating than any scalping or baseball bat-beating by the Basterds—he has a look of sadness that reminds of Ordell's final, quiet warning to Max Cherry, before resuming his role as natural predator. The long, opening act establishes Landa's genius, as well as Tarantino's: a request to swap French for English in conversation between German and Frenchman first appears to be a bow to the commercial, so that Americans need not read anymore subtitles for a while. However, Landa's language-switch has a deep, sinister purpose. Late in the film, Landa kisses a handkerchief with a woman's lipstick and signature, and soon thereafter confronts the woman in a revoltingly warped recalling of Cinderella while indulging in Tarantino's much-discussed foot fetish. Basterds' men are, like other Tarantino guys—Vincent Vega, Max Cherry, even Bill—largely astonished and aroused by women because they recognize that they know so little about them. Such is the case with two Germans, Landa and particularly German war hero Fredrick Zoller.

Zoller's crush on a young French woman who runs her own cinema develops Tarantino's incendiary depiction of cinema itself, as a moral reckoning, distorter and demigod. The French woman is Shosanna Dreyfus, renamed Emanuelle Mimieux (Melanie Laurent)—Shosanna was the last surviving member of the Dreyfus family, sheltered by the French farmer before Landa and his men killed all but one. Tarantino's framing of Shosanna against the silhouetted front door frame of her father's farm, running away into the wilderness from the ruthless Nazis, exhibits a borrowing from John Ford's The Searchers. As the leader of the Basterds, Lieutenant Aldo Raine played by Brad Pitt (an obvious homage to American tough-guy actor Aldo Ray, complete with throat scar substituting for fatal throat cancer) informs his men, he is part “Injun,” and the Basterds will conduct themselves in the fashion of Apache warriors, scalping and mutilating Germans wherever they find them. The American Indian theme blossoms: Tarantino is himself part-“Injun,” drawing comparisons between his and Raine's own ancestry and respective raison d'êtres. Raine tells his men that the Germans will come to know this special secret squad of men and fear them—a kind of yearning for fame, or infamy, based on thuggery and shock, perhaps representing either an auto-critique by Tarantino or augmentation of argument that Tarantino's cinema is only at first glance about such mainly unimportant matters. At the beginning of the final chapter, the vengeful Shosanna applies her makeup as though she is meditatively donning warpaint. Never before has Tarantino's fixation on film been more irrepressible, as Shosanna's scheme to exact revenge on the Nazis responsible for murdering her family involves her sacrificing cinema—her own theatre as well as many reels of nitrate film she has in storage. Shosanna's final act of the film—one of both compassion and distraction—prove Tarantino's point, and establish just how frightening the efficacy of the cinema truly is. As with another woman—Dietrich-like German film star Bridget van Hammersmark (an entirely pleasant and surprisingly strong Diane Kruger)—Tarantino brings about the fates of his feminine forces to an anguished height, finally reaching the crushingly realistic conclusion of his long-fascinating depiction of “girl power” in manifold forms.

Bruhl's Zoller exists at once as Tarantino's twist on the American Audie Murphy story, reversing the mirror shot, so to speak, following other such reversals as the American soldiers being depicted as butchers juxtaposed with a decorated German, Sergeant Werner Rachtman—who honorably, judiciously and with great dignity informs his baseball bat-wielding executioner he earned his medal “for bravery,”—and exploring the inner-workings of the Third Reich's film industry through the perspective of Joseph Goebbels as overarching filmic auteur/movie executive. (Winston Churchill, played by Rod Taylor, asks a British expert on German cinema whether Goebbels considers himself the German Louis B. Mayer.) Zoller, however, is generously expanded upon by Tarantino. As a construct, Zoller could have been just a Tarantino meta-comment—the character says Goebbels wants him to become “the German Van Johnson,” terrifically editorializing on the cinematic image of toughness against that of the tangible world (the strapping, 6'2” Van Johnson versus the 5'5”-½ Audie Murphy). Zoller is a German war hero who, all alone, killed literally hundreds of enemy soldiers in Italy and now his story has been told in a propaganda film starring none other than himself. (Zoller excitedly tells one character that he has been hailed as the German “Sergeant York,” another example of people of one country discovering the story of another nation's hero through cinema.) Zoller is an intriguing character, made all the more abundantly arresting by the picture's remarkable climax. Viewing his own “heroics” on the giant screen, Zoller is in actuality disgusted; he cannot continue to watch, and leaves to “annoy” the owner of the cinema. Zoller represents the mature filmgoer who can at least empathize with if not truly live the violence glorified by Goebbels' picture, merging the previously disparate themes of the violence enacted by the Basterds, often cheered by Tarantino's moviegoer. Like Jules in Pulp Fiction, he has seen a terrible, unshakable visage—and it is of himself, in another materialization—and can finally look back on the killing he has committed with a comprehensibly enhanced perspective.

Tarantino indulges himself with British Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender, last seen starving himself in Hunger), expert in German film, writer of two published books and published film critic. Tarantino's anointing of the cinephile as conduit and guiding force of Tarantino's own, phrenic world is here even more robust than in Death Proof, which saw a group of female film buffs and film crew members fight back against Stuntman Mike. Shosanna, Hicox, Zoller, Goebbels, von Hammersmark, the numerous German enlisted men and officers who are bedazzled by von Hammersmark, Shosanna's black film projectionist and clandestine lover, Marcel (Jacky Ido, an African in a cast heavily populated by Europeans and Americans), and others are all either directly or indirectly endowed with a special, durable connection to and appreciation for the art form of the motion picture. Yet while von Hammersmark's presence connotes the renowned fashion, glamor and elan of movie icons (a stereotype to which Tarantino gives plentiful twists); Zoller is, one could contend, the “exploited” person, the individual whose real-life escapades provide fodder for the insatiable beast; and Shosanna is the practically sanctified Tarantino demigoddess who readily sacrifices cinema for her own personal vengeful victory; it is, with disturbing and cutting clarity Lieutenant Hicox whose knowledge of cinema informs his decisions. Confronted by an overbearing Nazi Major Dieter Hellstrom (a superb August Diehl) in a pivotal tavern, Hicox resorts to his encyclopedic knowledge base to throw the inquisitive major off the scent that the undercover Englishman is indeed not a German. Hicox is briefly saved by his fondness for a Leni Riefenstahl film, The White Hell of Pitz Palu. Moments later, however, he gives himself away in a manner that reveals Tarantino finally confronting himself and perhaps his critics who deride him for being so hopelessly stuck in movies. Hicox's fate points to the admission that film, though especially indispensable to a cinephile, ultimately cannot teach one about everything, about every group of people, no matter how well-informed one may be. The brutal irony that Hicox was especially an expert of German cinema makes the point all the sharper and clearer.

Tarantino's World War II epic is conspicuously skewed, both surprisingly and not surprisingly, in almost being a weird, “proto-black man's view” of the war. Samuel L. Jackson lends his voice to two brief narrations. As though this were not enough, the one character who is viewed with wholly uncomplicated sympathy is Shosanna's lover, Marcel, who is obedient to his woman, kind, tender and evidently fearless. This is not alarming coming from Tarantino, whose occasionally ostentatious affinity for and relationship with black-oriented features has flowed into these filmmaking decisions. Most penetrative, however, are a pair of speeches delivered by Nazis—first by Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) and later by Hellstrom—respectively commenting on the unique place blacks have had in America, as athletic competitors and previously as slaves. This threading connects World War II to the black experience in America, and suggests Tarantino's contention that “America,” as an abstraction, or reduced to specific characters (“Basterds”), was not the uncomplicated hero of the war. This is never distracting; only a source of moral bemusement.

Tarantino's essaying of the Basterds themselves will doubtless bring about divergent reactions. One may interpret the American “Basterds” as ridiculous, over-the-top cartoon characters—although Tarantino does not afford most of them much time or weight, beyond Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine, Eli Roth's “Bear Jew” Donny Donowitz and Til Schweiger's Sergeant Hugo Stiglitz—so the cartoon quality of the characters is perhaps actually softened. Pitt is fine in his role and repeatedly quite funny. Pitt's presence lends balance to the film's air of the star-studded international cast, even if he is less obvious for Raine than former Tarantino hombres like Bruce Willis or Michael Madsen. Roth is solid as the “Bear Jew.” The Basterds are in truth defined by their comparative absence from the world of cinema in relation to the film's other characters. As Raine tells a doomed German, watching Donny Donowitz split open German heads with his baseball bat “ is the closest we get to goin' to the movies.” Tarantino's sly comment about the possible, cathartic need for filmic violence as a substitute to real-world bloodletting cannot go unnoticed. Beyond this, in a typically Tarantino-esque, twisted manner, the Basterds may represent some form of pitiless conscience, and more than simply existing as a group of Jewish soldiers slaughtering Nazis about France, the point made by Raine on two highly memorable occasions is worth pondering, particularly for Jews victimized by the Nazi terror. Will these Nazis abandon their uniforms once the war concludes and go about their lives without consequence? Though the Basterds are sadistic and fiendishly violent, the question resonates in the final chapter as Landa himself, who, in the prologue, relished the title given to him—“The Jew Hunter” (early in the film, Landa says he believes Heydrich in Prague should be proud of his nickname, “The Hangman,” perhaps a reference by Tarantino to one of Lang's wartime propaganda pictures, Hangmen Also Die about Heydrich)—feigns recoiled horror at the label when he is negotiating a cunning deal. The Basterds, then, could be sincerely deciphered as unforgiving avenging angels before the fact. This does not, however, remotely excuse the barbaric bloodthirst of the Basterds, nor the hideous oversimplification of viewing every Germanic soldier as a demonic Nazi. This is a thorny extension of Tarantino's obsession with revenge, which has seemingly become more explicit with each release. As with the Kill Bill movies and Death Proof, when the revenge is finally meted out, Tarantino does not glorify or romanticize the violence—this is in fact only truer with Inglourious Basterds, which features violence as a swift reckoning—all too fast, ghastly and terrible, the outbursts explode at the end of long set-pieces of dialogue.

What perhaps makes Inglourious Basterds so intoxicating and enthralling is the opaquely ambagious, unpredictable route it so gleefully travails. Tarantino, for all of his homages and love letters to cinema, has never shied away from happily departing from the trusted formula. Inglourious Basterds actually delivers the usual Tarantino multilayered, two-for-one special: on one basic narrative level, his pictures conclude precisely where they must (Mr. White discovering Mr. Orange's secret in Reservoir Dogs or The Bride confronting Bill in the Kill Bill movies being especially straightforward destinations) and so does Inglourious Basterds (which two male characters do you believe will finally meet before the picture concludes?) but the circumstances, emotions and emphases are always stunningly different in their laminations and most importantly their meanings from what most audience members are anticipating.

Tarantino's characters, it must be said here, are always meeting ends unforeseen by all including themselves (even an important character who has elected a kind of grandiose, operatic martyrdom does not meet the exact fate they had envisioned). Basterds displays once more the circuitous manner in which Tarantino characters finally get what is coming to them. Characters receive tragic ends that have little or nothing directly to do with their past sins. Basterds augments this entrenched trait by playing things firmly “down the middle,” so to speak, like an umpire, Tarantino dispassionately surveys all of the characters, with an impartiality and probity that takes the lackadaisical, conventional triteness that even suffocates supposed “satire” (Starship Troopers and the recent District 9 both suffer inordinately from this laziness) out of the way, throwing the audience's wanton desire for mayhem and death back into their collective lap. Whereas Tarantino's first batch of films were based to one degree or another in a criminal underworld, which usually feature more ambiguously-defined roles of “hero” and “villain,” Inglourious Basterds takes on the static mythology of World War II, with its elephantine and nearly preconceived “heroes and villains.” This is chiefly played with by Tarantino with regards to Zoller, who even explicitly tells the French beauty to whom he is attracted that he is more than a uniform, coupled with a humanizing comment that all German soldiers are “somebody's son.”

Beyond Zoller's plea that he is more than a uniform—a direct thematic rebuttal to the Basterds' campaign—Tarantino's film is bustling with not only textual and subtextual reversals (and even textual reversals during which the subtext remains the same, including a late-inning gambit by one particularly unscrupulous but brilliant figure), but also simple reversals of identity. As with other “men-on-a-mission” pictures, some of the Basterds along with the aforementioned Lieutenant Hicox must pose as Germans. Throughout the long, intentionally languorous visitation of the tavern, the parlor game played serves as a shockingly direct substitution for the very serious game being played; that Tarantino's device runs exactly parallel to his suspense-driven plot situation and very few find it excessive proves he has become only more successful at partially veiling his intentions with a layer of apparent frivolity that is in actuality part and parcel of the critical narrative conditions. The scene itself plays like a combination of Tarantino sequences in which people look like they are letting their proverbial hair down while only masquerading or belatedly revealing their true selves. The tavern exists with a thoroughly detailed environment and, like other Tarantino set-pieces, feels like that from a novel or play with its purposeful limitations (one reason Tarantino is never called “stagy” is because people tend to enjoy the long, winding monologues and repartees he produces)—the intersecting of characters feels as though it belongs to the spirit of such locales as Reservoir Dogs' hood hideout, Pulp Fiction's diner, Jackie Brown's dark bars and Ordell's chief homestead, Kill Bill's several sequences of predator finding prey and the Tarantino character's bar in Death Proof. The playing with identities in Basterds is not unheard of for Tarantino; his first film, borrowing liberally from the original The Taking of Pelham 123, followed criminals with unknown identities with one another beyond their color names, and indeed his subsequent films all tend to fall in that line, to be partly about characters discovering others' true, or truer, identities. Tarantino's playfulness has been known to extend to the brutal, and Basterds is no exception: the last German man standing, weeping and frantically distressed, the most ostensibly “cowardly” of his squadron, is rewarded first by the Basterds for giving information Sergeant Rachtman refused to bequeath and then by Adolf Hitler himself, who makes the (physically and spiritually disgraced) German soldier the veritable hero of the cover story that has now become “official” reality. In one of the film's most piquant visual mirrored reversals, one character strangles another; the character being murdered helplessly grabs a hold of anything, such as the carpeting of the floor, and later the strangler is himself mounted, and, like the character he terminated, can only grip and pull at grass in unspeakable pain.

Inglourious Basterds places Tarantino above one of his closer antecedents, Brian De Palma, and probably places him on roughly equal footing with his most nakedly revered idol from the past, Jean-Luc Godard. Tarantino's much-denied moralistic streak is akin to De Palma's; their inversions of normalcy are startling but very much related to one another. Basterds concludes on a note of female anguish and annihilation—a redux of Carrie and possibly The Fury (with Bruhl's Zoller approximating John Cassavetes in his final, distasteful speech)—that feels completely earned and directly corresponding with Tarantino's long-documented half-guileless, half-goofy relating of “girl power,” which he himself utilizes as fragmentary stand-in for his piqued curiosity of the fairer sex (like most Tarantino male avatars). Tarantino has proven he is no cinematic or cultural revolutionary—he is nearly the anti-Godard in the sense that Godard posited his homages as necessary conditional trappings to create something of a new cinema, while Tarantino's love of anterior cinema overwhelms most other impulses. Countering this, however, is that Tarantino's love of cinema almost circularly takes him into a realm not dissimilar from Godard at all—especially as the young Godard sought a degree in Ethnology at the Sorbonne, Tarantino's undying infatuation with cinema has given him a dramatically different but equivalent studying of disparate cultures and their origins. Comparisons to Hitchcock become perilous, but Basterds is teeming with references to the man who jubilantly placed the moral responsibility of his World War II spy films' carnage on the audience, as in a pivotal movie theatre scene in Saboteur, wherein violence takes place against the backdrop of the silver screen's applauded and cheered violence. Tarantino's sense of morality is persuasive insofar as the filmmaker refuses to confess that it exists; by simply “following” his invented tale, he can live by the conceit that he is not judging the proceedings, gavel in hand, as he crafts his screenplays and films. Pungently, Tarantino openly assaults history, and therefore saves millions of lives in his alternate world by concluding World War II much earlier than it did in fact end (possibly averting the Russian overtaking of Central Europe as well). The film asks a pointed question: if the war's final year could have been averted, would the story's destructive massacring, and furious, merciless climactic conflagration, been seen as justified?

Another inspiration of Tarantino's—Leone—is easily discovered in the relation between a known war and a complete, beautifully unfurled fictive fantasia, as in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The sequence in the tavern likewise recalls spaghetti westerns in its careful attenuation of competing characters. There is even a new father, a German soldier, whose appearance along with several of his compatriots is a classic, painful example of the wrong people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Both like, and more quotidian than, the iconic Confederate soldier being given a “smoke,” Tarantino's Germans are fully flesh-and-blood—something one may not expect in a film so divergent from standard historical fidelity—as well as being endowed with sheer, cunning smarts. Landa, Hellstrom and others are all viewed as intelligent, almost insidiously astute adversaries. (Humorously, Landa is offended late in the picture when a noted enemy does not appear to afford him the kind of respect he believes he demands.) Like other Tarantino film scores, the music recalls Ennio Morricone's larger-than-life melodies in its euphonious depiction of various individuals as archetypes.

Lastly, and possibly most importantly, Inglourious Basterds is a paean to propaganda. For the first time, Tarantino has scaled the mountain of the propaganda film. Tarantino has mentioned in interviews that he reads the propaganda films of the United States, Great Britain and Germany with great, unbridled engrossment. Expectedly, Tarantino pays tribute to the very national stereotypes bolstered by the respective countries' own propaganda—the heedless voracity, brashly indomitable spirit and brutish instincts of the Americans, the stiff upper lip propriety, earnest self-challenging derring-do and remote chilliness of the English, and the shrewd, wily and skillfully manipulative Germans, all double-edged swords—while discussing the correlation between German film exec Goebbels with the American film execs who immediately pushed for propaganda pictures after Pearl Harbor and the morale-boosting English pictures of the same time. Riefenstahl may have a most dubious position in history, but her films shed voluminous light on the character of the people she tirelessly observed through her film work. Tarantino certainly admires the role of the propaganda film—it is, perhaps, the ultimate (and government-sanctioned) exploitation picture, after all—and his treatment of the much-hyped Nazi propaganda film at the heart of Basterds is curiously unaffected, with a definite ambivalence that over the course of his picture covers highly contrasting emotions stemming from pride, affection, passion, mockery, ridicule and disgust.

At a recent Marin Shakespeare Company presentation of “Julius Caesar” in San Rafael, California, this writer overheard one patron discussing Inglourious Basterds with his family and friends. “It's a World War II Pulp Fiction,” he roared. At a presentation of a play written by the Bard a millennium and a half after the events took place, in which a kind of historical, Roman propaganda takes shape on each side of the play's expansive argument—Cassius cajoling and soothing Brutus that his name shares the weight of Caesar, followed by the emotional, powerful demagoguery of Mark Antony—this was a most intriguing venue to consider Inglourious Basterds. The dualistic nature of Basterds suggests Tarantino's meta-contextualizing of the propaganda film, matching his previous forays in digesting all of the properties of his variegated subjects. To compare Tarantino with the Bard in any fashion may be correctly considered disturbing—yet their respective analyses of historical propaganda reveals a commonly sober, balanced reading. That level of maturity is not easily quantified, nor is it usually appropriately appreciated. Perhaps Tarantino, speaking through Pitt's Aldo Raine in the picture's final pre-end credits moment, is indeed correct—Inglourious Basterds “just might be [his] masterpiece.”

Tetro (2009)

2009-07-31T11:44:00.000-07:00

In 1972, a film about a family swept the world by storm. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather was an epic retelling of King Lear in the wardrobe of the Sicilian Mafia in post-war America. The Godfather was a tale of brothers loving one another but chafing under sibling rivalry, partly born from the influence of a wise father. Coppola allowed the firmament to be the limit to his tale, and the picture was an instant classic which helped to alter the face of American cinema in the 1970s. Coppola's endearing, occasionally maddening fixation on the ties between brothers—brimming with trials and tribulations—continued in earnest with The Godfather: Part II as well as his essaying of adolescent brotherhood in The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. And so now it continues with Coppola's latest, Tetro.

Coppola's Tetro is a film that seeps into and out of the viewer like moisture. Iridescent and pellucid, fragmentary and oblique, all at once, it feels like a living organism that is ferociously but quietly seething, like an animal recently injured. Coppola veils this dyspeptic, tempestuous undercurrent with a luscious layer of visual serenity. It is like squeezing and spreading sweet frosting over a rough, nutty and tart apple coffeecake. Most of the film takes place in the ambiguously defined “present,” shot in an exquisitely sharp 2:35:1 with High Definition digital cameras employed by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. to utter perfection. Few films shot in this format have so abundantly showcased the rationale for adopting the technology as Tetro, which creates nearly glittery palettes of richly-textured and -detailed tranquility. Coppola's Youth Without Youth was ponderous but inviting; cinematographically refined and polished, that picture was unfortunately too prepossessed with itself to completely, haphazardly present itself to the viewer the way two people first meet one another. Tetro is formal but with an unruly, brusque side, befitting its protagonist, the titular Tetro (a brooding, sullenly countenanced and erratically arbitrary yet entirely natural Vincent Gallo in one of the great performances of the decade); Coppola has resumed his dream to create bracing, personal art like a young, impulsive filmmaker with both everything and nothing to prove.

Coppola's Tetro is such an incredibly wounded film it could be just as ponderous and remote as Coppola's last film before it, but the director and screenwriter has allowed himself the room to navigate his personable tale of familial heartache and nearly-ensanguined tragedy. Periodically Coppola will intrude upon his own gloriously realized visage with pounding, startling excursions into the past, captured in comparatively grainy (shot on film), hand-held 1:85:1 color photography, looking like bumptious family video-camera shooting. These bubble up to the once-harmonious surface the way troubling, painful memories always do: the figures viewed as harmful, such as an imperious, egomaniacal and corrupt father figure (Klaus Maria Brandauer) are distorted, their faces always belying their spoken words. Vivid and eerily haunting, these episodic color sequences never disrupt Tetro's heedless momentum, and that has to do with Coppola's steady, almost omnipresent command—his Tetro feels like a film which, from the first frame onwards, is overlooked in its progression by its creator but never thwarted nor tripped up by ruinous excessive dabbling. That these episodes are also highly important in uncovering the shrouded truths of Tetro only increase their durability and import without ever diminishing the linear narrative's potency.

Everything about Tetro feels positively naïve in a most exuberantly beautiful way. Coppola has metamorphosed, it seems, and he follows through with the ostensible promise of his last film, which featured the word “Youth” not once but twice. Coppola's vernal sensibility is dazzlingly, deliciously refreshing. As too many truly young filmmakers exercise their craft under the umbrella of rampant, sometimes trendily poseur cynicism, Coppola at seventy years old is rediscovering youthfulness in its myriad sources of energy and genuineness. Tetro establishes that Coppola is not simply a votary—he has been quite truthful in his interviews: he has effectively gone back in time, and the results are exhilarating. Likewise, Coppola's insistence that he would think of Elia Kazan while shooting Tetro rings true as the film lingers within the mind. The performances seem to fit the black-and-white photography with a preternatural precision. Images of A Streetcar Named Desire, another classically-framed black-and-white drama with a nebulously humid and tropical environment (here Buenos Aires doubling for New Orleans), with characters revealing their true selves to the audience, one another and to themselves, flash as Tetro continues onward. Coppola nurtures these performances the way a gardener chaperons his beloved greenery. Coppola, it may be said, plays the sage father to the young performers, particularly the unknown Alden Ehrenreich as Bennie, whose limited on-screen dynamism may be chalked up to an inexperienced actor, or may be one of Coppola's ways to present the questioning character as a figure of comparative blankness. Since Bennie is the audience's surrogate—knowing as little about the enigmatic Tetro as the viewer—Coppola's drama begins with many a viewer perhaps holding onto Bennie the way a tired swimmer may grab a buoy in the ocean.

Quite gradually, however, Coppola and Gallo peel away the outer shell of Tetro, and this complex portrait is presented with an unapologetic, phlegmatic propinquity, displaying a fully formed being as a living, breathing perplexity. As the tale continues, it may be Tetro whose initially bizarre and perhaps outrageous behavior threatens to alienate some viewers, who is the more principled of the two brothers. Bennie's curiosity leads to breaking Tetro's trust—not an uncommon problem between family members, much less one in which the relationships are this strained. Tetro's live-in girlfriend, an angelically beautiful Argentinian named Miranda (a poignant Maribel Verdú), understands the titular figure in a way no other person on the world can. The back-story to their bond is afforded much needed time by Coppola and his legendary editing partner, Walter Murch, and so when that bond is tested by the imposition of Bennie, the breaking of Miranda's remarkable endurance in the face of Tetro's often overwhelming inability to display himself in all honesty to even her, much less to anyone else.

Coppola's indefatigable presence as an authentically Italian-American voice helps to shed light on the meanings of Tetro. Naturally, the picture is not “legitimately” autobiographical, but the truths the tale uncovers are so specific, they must at the very least touch a palpable chord with all who have felt the exhausting, desolating pain of a family compelled to lie to itself, or the ugliness of being hurt by those one loves. Like the adopted Tom Hagen in The Godfather: Part II, Bennie's near-idolization of Tetro only helps to make the bitter, salt-in-the-wounds lashing he receives from him sting all the more. (“Why do you hurt me, Michael?” Tom once asked.) Like a kaleidoscopic trip through Fellini's cinema, Tetro is at once burningly personal to its creator and doubtless deceptive in its myriad details. This mirrors the cryptic, only partially revelatory comments of the man behind the film. “Nothing in it happened, but it's all true,” Coppola has said of his latest opus. As the picture mirrors known aspects of Coppola's life—his father, like Tetro's, was a musical composer, and he has said that he has had a somewhat tumultuous relationship with his brother—Tetro is his most nakedly, vulnerably personal film.

It is parlous to delve too deeply into Tetro's filmic treasures. This is finally the consummation of Coppola's marriage between art and commercial demands, but now Coppola's artistically-minded focus—always operatic, here played out like a composition of Bellini or Verdi meshed with vaudevillian three-ring circuses that emit a rambunctious, anything-can-happen vibe and jubilantly hedonistic sexual discoveries (the latter both extending the kinship with Fellini)—is brighter, his instincts more pleasurably unrestrained. Many critics have failed Tetro because they have not caught on to Coppola's piquantly rediscovered virtuosity. The Godfather staged the death of a man's soul against the Catholic backdrop of baptism. In Tetro, the truths of family (“Every Family Has A Secret,” the film's tag-line promises) are so awful they make one recoil, and gaze, like a pitiful deer into ineffably, brilliantly blinding headlights. Yet Coppola does not relinquish his newfound youthful confidence—Tetro finally concludes on a note of resigned reconciliation. Thirty years ago, Coppola released Apocalypse Now, the film conventionally referred to as his final operatic masterpiece. In 2009, he has gifted filmgoers with another composition, and one of the best films of the year.

The Hurt Locker (2009)

2009-07-30T11:59:00.000-07:00

WARNING: MAJOR “PLOT POINTS” OF THIS FILM ARE DISCUSSED AND ANALYZED

“...[Kathryn] Bigelow is—most fittingly for a female director rightly celebrated for her breathtaking command of action—an expert fabulist of unlikely male bonding.”

So concluded this writer's review of Point Break. As The Hurt Locker opens with an unnecessary, wrongly mollifying quote by Chris Hedges—whose antiwar speech to a graduating class at a university in Rockford, Illinois was booed and heckled in 2003—which emphasizes that “war is a drug,” it became evident that Kathryn Bigelow was not only endeavoring to explore men growing closer to one another through attachment and proximity, but the peculiar hold adrenaline plays on the male psyche. As in her 1991 action thriller, Bigelow's new film finds itself propelled by a man who perhaps does not himself “get off” on the thrill, excitement and adrenaline rush—Patrick Swayze's Bodhi was closer to this mold, though he continually spouted off philosophical and spiritual rationales as reasons for throwing caution to the wind—but is certainly wholly comfortable with the relentless presence of sure death if he fails in his mission. That man is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), whose task it is to diffuse seemingly countless Iraqi “IEDs”(Improvised Explosive Device just for clarification). James is assigned to a company of men after its “EOD” (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) master of bomb- and trap-disarming Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce) is killed. Soon, two of those men—Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and a guilt-ridden Specialist Owen Eldridge played by Brian Geraghty (he believes he should have dropped the insurgent responsible for detonating the device that took out Thompson)—will find themselves wondering whether or not Renner's staff sergeant is uncommonly courageous and unorthodox or simply insane.

If James is like Bodhi or Bill Paxton's Severen from Near Dark or in a frightening way, Tom Sizemore's Max Peltier from Strange Days, then Mackie's Sanborn is the reserved, judicious flip side who, like other Bigelow men of reason, sees the wild man (a CO played by David Morse actually calls James a “wild man” in awesome reverence) as something resembling a monster that has to be put down. In one disconcertingly quiet and unsettling scene, Sanborn talks to Eldridge about killing James. Seeing the wild man as a threat to the unit, Sanborn's initial distaste for James is palpable; as he shaves in the mirror one morning he tells James in no uncertain terms exactly what he thinks of him. In perhaps the film's finest sequence, however, as James attacks a wildly complicated booby-trap set in a car, and Sanborn and Eldridge nervously wait for him to finish, finally almost begging him to give up on the apparatus and vacate the scene—young Iraqi men stand about rooftops looking onward at the Americans and any one of them may be an insurgent—the audience may find itself siding with James, who, like an artisan entirely absorbed in his work, loses track of time, space and location as he assiduously applies himself. James grabs his headset, into which Sanborn has been yelling that there is limited time and they should probably leave, and throws it to the ground the way a writer may finally unplug their telephone after they have received one too many disruptive calls for the fourth consecutive time.

Bigelow's direction and mastery of mise-en-scene has never been fiercer or more appropriately utilized. There is an epical integument to her work; it is difficult to consider any of her pictures remotely “small”—her characters are titans representative of philosophies and dispositions, the confrontations between whom are staged as grand battles of demigods dueling with one another over righteous quarrels. Bigelow's men are wounded—figuratively as well as literally, like Ralph Fiennes' unlikely hero of Strange Days who will not allow himself to recover from a broken love affair. The Hurt Locker's James is a man who has blanketed himself in the adrenaline of “not knowing”: what terrifies the average man exhilarates him because his job is the most immediate and unadulterated metaphor for placing oneself in the tempestuous food blender of fate while defying its whims by being so consummately au courant in all things. At a certain undecipherable point, James' acceptance grows into something more—it is here unfortunate that the opening salvo and, in this context, judgmental, quote appears at all, because The Hurt Locker explains away James' obsessiveness and derring-do as addiction. Whenever the film does take a needed breather from the heart-racing suspense, the screenplay—written by journalist Mark Boal, whose real-life experiences with an EOD squad in Iraq inspired The Hurt Locker—carefully sheds layers of James' distancing, protective tissue (visually represented by his specialized suit that he elects to peel off in the aforementioned rigged-car scene due to wanting to “die comfortable”). It is revealed, not surprisingly, that James' home life is bizarre: he believes he and his wife are divorced but his wife will not leave him. He vocally questions what that means.

Bigelow follows her own instincts in many disparate avenues of the film's mostly unpredictable narrative. The Hurt Locker's tension does not “escalate” in a manner befitting the average “action movie,” but rather it does continuously augment the stakes of the mortal game until, finally, James must choose between literally—and crazily—sacrificing his life for another for whom nothing can be done or preserving himself to continue on. What makes this rewardingly unique is the cinematic convection of import as each scene follows the other. Already similar to Robert Aldrich's Ten Seconds to Hell in its tale of a squad of bomb-disposers, Bigelow's film likewise focuses with greater, intimate and crystalline clarity on the circumference of ethical dilemmas that arise, but does so through the exploration of its own building blocks. The Hurt Locker begins with three men—Thompson, Sanborn and Eldridge—joking around and teasing one another like good chums on guy's night. They might be playing pool or driving to a football game. The casualness underscores the tension and the danger. Bigelow, armed with Boal's screenplay, immediately assaults the testosterone-fueled climate of her war movie, commenting on the masculine domination by overtly addressing the instrument the men are utilizing as a facsimile for their penises. The sudden connection between the men and their phallic symbol voluminously lays a sound foundation for the entire film. This baldly vociferous commentary on the film through characters—and the staging thereof—only continues until The Hurt Locker almost inverts itself wholly as a meta-textual distillation of war film tropes for more seemingly enlightened purposes. By reducing the men as guys playing with their specifically male organs, Bigelow ostentatiously alters the context, and this helps to suggest that if James were not in Iraq defusing and disposing bombs, he would be elsewhere.

Being the first Iraq war film to not bother to question the wisdom or morality of the war itself, Bigelow's picture asserts an environment in which some young men thrive under the sweltering heat and chaos while others simply endure it. By engendering an unblinking, incendiary milieu—never tarnished by the kind of cinematic prolix many of her contemporaries would thrust against the film, nor the whirling, fast-cutting machinations that tend to decrease genuine suspense in favor of the insipid faux suspense that alienates the viewer—Bigelow and her cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, frequently utilizing four rolling cameras, leave an indelible impression without resorting to lecturing. Pace Francois Truffaut, who believed war action carnage always glamorized combat, Bigelow's film presents grisly imagery without desensitization. The intensity of vision lent to the defusing of the bombs says all that must be said—in her usually extraordinary cinematic shorthand, Bigelow has stated a great deal about the American invasion of Iraq, and the ensuing responsibility to bring a country back from the brink of immolation without accidentally setting the bomb off. The Hurt Locker's insistence to remain aloofly apolitical takes the Iraq war's existence for granted, leaving the accurate history lessons of the Athenian Empire for Chris Hedges.

Bigelow's mise-en-scene is gut-wrenching; often simply staging action in long, merciless takes, she allows her characters to drift about like balloons caught by gusts of wind. As the three characters unify, dissipate, and unify once more, Bigelow's camera follows them about, nonchalantly noting how they drift apart only to resume as a complete whole. The Jordanian soil serves as a convincing substitute for Iraq. Ackroyd's compositions aid Bigelow in creating conflicting realities: the three men may as well be all alone in the world, and yet their story is in many ways a microcosmic study. Bigelow's suspense-building maneuvers are downright primal. She exploits the harshness of the sound of a knife cutting through a car seat. The distorted eyes of a man looking like wicked pools of hatred caught in a rear-view mirror. The blurry, mirage-like shapes of rifle-wielding insurgents. The terrifyingly endless narrow walkways between buildings at night. Bigelow once again resorts to her famed point-of-view shots, which help to place the viewer in the cuplable, perverse position of finding the adrenaline rush in the action, as with Keanu Reeves in Point Break or the criminals at the beginning of Strange Days. Bigelow does repeatedly succumb to the “shaky cam” approach to action that has dominated action cinema since she largely moved away from the genre. Perhaps emulating YouTube videos from Iraq, this visual tendency does not distract from her work, though it does mark a change in her style.

The Hurt Locker's performances are galvanic, suitable for the titans Bigelow must survey, but never threaten to break the spell of a plausible reality. Renner, Mackie and Geraghty are all as well-honed in their roles as they must be; the former two pitted as strong rivals, the latter playing a character only sure that death resides nearby, and the farther down the road they go, the less possible it is to retreat from sliding over the precipice. Renner's performance suggests Chris Pine's Captain Kirk halfway burnt-out, still a daredevil hotshot, maybe no longer convinced he is immortal, nevertheless only more cocksure and stubborn than he once was. Mackie has a difficult part because he is in essence Renner's straight man—fortunately for him, Bigelow and Boal's screenplay are less inclined to cheer on James' fearlessness and appetite for adrenaline than merely observe, so when he goes face-to-face with Renner, the deck is not stacked against him. Geraghty is fine in his damaged, scared role; his Eldridge oscillates—he is not actively hostile towards James but he is fairly sure that James has placed a fifty-pound weight on the accelerator to the car headed to ruin.

The Hurt Locker is many things; perfect is not one of them. The picture's denouement is troubled—a return to the United States feels more inauthentic in one minute than anything in “Iraq”—and the screenplay mistakenly becomes a mouthpiece for soldiers who have failed to reinstate themselves in America since “coming home.” The dialogue says too much, and in the wrong way, but once Bigelow commits to it, there is at least some poetry behind the performance. Seeing a connection between his child's jack-in-the-box toy and the devices he has miraculously survived in disposing, James notes that he is a different person than he once was—a revelation which threatens to be absurdly, crushingly vapid—and Bigelow almost immediately gears up a new, closing montage that could be the only conclusion for a film about a war still ongoing.

Point Break, it was written, was about unlikely male bonding. Bigelow has taken another major step in analyzing this phenomenon. With The Hurt Locker, she once again scrutinizes and essays male bonding, but it no longer seems unlikely. Under these conditions, Bigelow seems to ask with each hair-raising scene following the last: How could they not grow closer, how could they not bond?

Star Trek (2009)

2009-07-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

The 2009 reinvention of Star Trek found both its perfect and most obvious filmmaking “captain,” J.J. Abrams, of Felicity, Fringe, Alias and Lost fame, who seems like the natural ambassador for the world—and exponent of the merits—of television in the world of cinema. Abrams' work has that glossy, slick patina of high-budgeted television; he certainly has a mind in which screenwriting class lessons have long marinated, and his grasp of basic storytelling probably means he can maximize his keen talents in television in a way that film cannot afford. Television is a visual experience—compared to the radio—but its primary function has consisted in telling the viewer stories, week and after week, and in the last decade, the serialized drama has dominated. The public has voted: Law and Order and CSI in their sundry manifestations are pleasing in their refusal to hold an audience hostage for over an hour—the story is self-isolated and wholly accessible like an old Perry Mason yarn—but sprawling, expansive “arcs” and multitudinous forms of cliffhangers leading into the next telecast make for the spiciest, most riveting recipe. With that kind of repetitious application of his talent for ornamented-with-sexy-stars-and-puzzling-plot-points storytelling, it is little wonder television is Abrams' natural habitat.

Now that he has broken through to the other side, and worked his streamlining magic in cinema, Abrams allows his undying embrace of his first love to be seen by all. His first directorial work was a sequel to a Tom Cruise franchise of movies based on a 1960s television show. His second, a “relaunching” of a dormant movie franchise inspired by a 1960s television show. Abrams' terminological mastery of televisized potboiler storytelling—every episodes' Act I leads into Act II, at the end of which Act III is afforded greater importance until each hour-long piece leads into the next hour-long piece—both serves him well and arguably diminishes his filmic screenwriting. Mission: Impossible 3 featured a fierce Cruise performance, and it was entertaining in the moment, but the picture was too burdened by its enslavement to formula and genre to stand out, something the film itself seemed to know in its concluding moments, openly making fun of its own plot “set-up” which was naturally the “Macguffin.” Abrams' work behind the camera was never less than acceptable, though some of his choices—a shaky camera to convey chaos being one of the more bluntly perspicuous—were often mundane and appeared outdated.

Visually, Abrams has progressed. His Star Trek may not be a riveting optical specimen, but it is not a slouch in its consistency of leitmotifs, providing an agreeable ocular descant of sorts for much of the action one would expect from such a film. Tony Scott and others love angularly pushing and pulling their camera about in order to stimulate tension; Abrams, however, aided by cinematographer Daniel Mindel and composer Michael Giacchino, appears to have watched several submarine thrillers such as Scott's own Crimson Tide and possibly Das Boot among others. Abrams realizes he is crafting a naval war picture, and the film's visual schema aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise confirms it. Before there was dazzle for dazzle sake; in Star Trek, iterations of submarine tropes are plentiful in their abundance (from a mutinous sequence to naturally the suffocating sensation of feeling as though one is being hunted) and Abrams' handling of such are noteworthy for their effectiveness. As the camera slices downward against James Tiberius Kirk's countenance, the imagery buttresses Abrams' origins tale with resonant credibility as a film which seems to actually be informed by cinema.

Star Trek, 2009 is populated by a cast of young, “hip” actors. The actor who stands out is Chris Pine. As a brash, rebellious Kirk, he is more Harrison Ford's Han Solo than the comparatively timid William Shatner. There is an energy to Pine's performance that simply burns—because it seems like a star is born, which fits Abrams' story like a glove, so the turn has an interesting dual existence all by itself, displaying that a hungry, confident actor is usually best-suited to play a hungry, confident character. Pine's eyes radiate cocksure conceit and insolence. Finally a Star Trek film treats its audience to the young, ill-tempered Kirk who one could certainly picture outmaneuvering the much-vaunted Kobayashi Maru test by “thinking outside the box.”

Kirk's machismo has always played well in Star Trek and the occasional intellectual paralysis of Spock has aided in underscoring the need for a man of action. Yet Spock's mind was extremely sharp and focused on the matters at hand. If President Obama is Spock in the White House, at least with Spock cable news television did not broadcast hour-long, mind-numbing press conferences from the Enterprise. Here Spock is played by Zachary Quinto. Quinto tries his best to emulate Leonard Nimoy, and it is a valiant effort, but Quinto's performance is at times a little forced in its subservience to the past. Quinto, bless him, was simply not gifted with the kind of mellifluous voice of Nimoy's, the kind of voice one would not mind hearing read from a phone book or teleprompter. At least Obama has that. Quinto, however, does rally in several tender scenes, particularly when teamed with Zoe Saldana's Uhura.

Nimoy is given a supporting part in the film, but he is reduced to a loudspeaker for the screenplay's most cumbersome, illogical and far-fetched exposition. This sabotages what could have been the film's dramatic peak. There is a great deal of banter about “red matter” and time travel, and as with other incarnations of Star Trek, the screenplay (by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) seems determined to look as though it is only over-thinking its sci-fi-inspired conundrums, but it is a taxing experience. Some of this must be laid at the doorstep of Abrams, whose plot-driven focus has a way of smothering the very characters being followed throughout the course of said plot. When the focus finally shifts back to the picture's villain, intriguingly named Nero (a one-dimensional Eric Bana), Orci and Kurtzman supply their rapacious Romulan with the motivations of past mass-murdering, butchering lunatics, a feature stemming from Gene Roddenberry's series which began before man truly landed on the moon through the films. The first half of the twentieth century was playtime for the nascent bullies whose existence was born out of legitimate grudges, and Bana's Nero is an extension of that theme. His people were casualties to the failings of the Federation, and most directly Spock himself, and so now he will destroy whole planets to blow off some steam.

Abrams' Star Trek is not what would be classified as “great cinema.” Many “Trekkies” despise it; others adore it. This writer's lack of connection to the charged, aforementioned group neither detracts nor adds to the picture's charms and flaws for him. Abrams has made some fairly impressive strides as a director with only his second picture—his economical manner of unfurling engaging, one-two-three linear tales is sure to make him a permanent feature of television and popular film for as long as he wishes to remain in the fields. Star Trek as a film is appealing because it fits comfortably. Unlike the preposterously bloated Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, Star Trek is just long enough to feel “epic” but not grueling; unlike superhero movies of various merits such as Superman Returns and The Dark Knight, it only takes itself seriously enough to matter to its audience; unlike Iron Man, the film is actually dabbling in some important themes without shirking away, and unlike that and so many other summer extravaganzas, one can remember the film in its entire form over two and a half months after seeing it. It has its problems, and certainly is less for its limitations. Star Trek is like one large slice of chocolate cake; it is sweet, velvety and leaves one feeling strangely empty from lack of nutrition and protein. But it tastes good.

Eternal Sunshine For the Soul

2009-07-25T21:18:00.000-07:00

I'll be back at Film For the Soul, whose sage and magnanimous proprietor, Ric Burke, has invited me to share my piece on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the year 2004.

Originally written as the culmination of a brief series of romantic films for St. Valentine's Day, my review will be posted at Mr. Burke's wonderful website on July 27.

Stay tuned to Film For the Soul as the cinematic years of the "2000s" are examined through one piece after another about films from each year. And I promise to write some new work for Mr. Burke for 2005 and beyond.

Meanwhile, beginning Monday I'll have significantly more time with which to write here for a while , so expect much more activity in the coming days.

Public Enemies (2009)

2009-07-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.”

—Pablo Picasso

Michael Mann's Public Enemies dramatizes the criminal escapades of an individualistic, veteran and expert criminal. This man is a devout loner who lives by his own ethical code, which is heavily informed by the associations and few friendships he has forged throughout his life. Most especially, the man's mindset has been significantly molded by a sage older criminal whose borderline philosophical musings and extrapolations of particular quandaries have left an indelible imprint on the entire being of Mann's protagonist. This protagonist gradually loses his insularly-ensured bearings when he finally falls for a lovely, irresistibly alluring woman. The woman's new presence in the criminal's life threatens to compromise his previously secured moorings. Meanwhile, a dogged man of the law relentlessly tracks the criminal down, either wittingly or inadvertently using the woman as the bait the criminal cannot resist pursuing. Extravagant firefights punctuate the action, with one particularly momentous exchange representing the picture's climax from which everything else hurtles throughout the film's remaining running time.

Unfortunately, Mann has told this same basic story before, and he has done so with a more confident bravado. If the above outline serves as the substratum in which Mann may judiciously service his own thematic obsessions, it is regrettable that Public Enemies comes across as something approximating an artist's “leftovers.” There is a nearly humorous irony to this predicament, as well: in finally creating a sprawling crime drama based on historical figures, and most infamously John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Mann is repeating himself with an historical drama after plying his trade to sheer fiction. (Mann has essayed historical narratives before—with The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider and Ali—but those films did not follow the trademark Mann crime template of such films as Thief, Heat and to far lesser extents Collateral and Miami Vice.) In essence, Mann has already told the story of Dillinger—and in Heat he definitively channeled the 1930s bank-robber's tenacity and wiliness when creating Robert De Niro's adroit criminal. So now, when Public Enemies unspools, moments associated with Heat or even Mann's other cops-and-robbers tales, repeat themselves: Depp's Dillinger coolly but almost lethally assaults a foolish criminal whose actions led to completely unnecessary tragedy in a scene which cannot not recall De Niro's punishment for a roguish thug his crew ill-advisedly picked up; Dillinger is thwarted by the self-serving mob which had provided safe harbor for his gang; Dillinger must choose whether or not to simply walk away from the love of his life, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard); a climactic denouement is afforded the weightiness of Greek tragedy and is apparently even given the same musical theme from Mann's 1995 opus (always stay until the lights come up and watch the credits carefully).

So much of Public Enemies is finely tuned and tautly-mounted. Repeatedly, Mann stages elaborate set-pieces of suspense, movement and action—and then repeats the repetition. For the filmmaker behind the bank-robbery apogee of Heat or the LA Koreatown nightclub sequence in Collateral, several of these scenes must resemble an accomplished bodybuilder exercising with light free weights as warm-ups. When Mann finally closes the picture's Act II with a sprawling, protracted nighttime gun battle—easily the film's most rivetingly commoving stretch—it appears the veteran has begun the more challenging portion of his routine. Finally, Mann's choices such as shooting in digital with a grittier, hand-held camera perspective, seem to pay off. Earlier, these decisions seemed to conjure a dusty, seemingly incongruous 1930s home movie. Camera bumps and shakes contrast sharply with the more traditional crystallized, tinctorial palette Mann had previously employed. Public Enemies strives to be the scabrous Saving Private Ryan alternative to the picturesque gracefulness of its 1930s crime saga antecedents of the modern era such as Bonnie and Clyde, Miller's Crossing and Road to Perdition. By opting for an admittedly more potently sui generis texture in which to tell their story, Mann and his cinematographer Dante Spinotti craft an immediately controversial film. Whether or not the decisions aid Mann and Spinotti in forging a piece both rooted in past excursions into the 1930s crime-laden tales of Americana such as the aforementioned pictures or other efforts to tell the Dillinger story in the 1940s Dillinger or the John Milius action picture of the same title and simultaneously reaching for a kind of abstractly-defined orphism of being remains questionable.

In other areas, Mann's trademark excesses, weaknesses and undeniable dexterity all mix with one another to create a film of frustrating but engaging dynamism. Mann, who collaborated on the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman—based on Bryan Burrough's recent book, “Public Enemies”—is occasionally guilty of mistaking mood for meaning, and shortchanges the characters for whom he perspicuously cares in favor of following the exhilarating swings in momentum between cops and robbers in one gun battle after another. Depp's Dillinger is the picture's most thoroughly detailed and excavated character, yet even he remains mysteriously divorced from much of the film's subtextual focuses. He tells one man to keep his money—like Clyde in the 1967 Arthur Penn picture, Dillinger and his crew are only after the bank's money—but when he tells another criminal that the public matters, it remains unresolved whether Dillinger thinks so because it is simply advantageous or because he has some burning vestiges of principles. At a time in which banks are found liable and in some instances once again blamed for a financial crisis, Mann's film delivers the typical staging of the big banks against the little people with Dillinger and his cohorts representing an approximation of a necessary evil. Dillinger's cohorts, however, almost all remain astoundingly remote—the one exception being Jason Clarke's beautifully rendered John 'Red' Hamilton. On the legal side of things, Christian Bale's Melvin Purvis and Billy Crudup's J. Edgar Hoover are afforded just enough screentime to be presented as full, flesh-and-blood characters, but Bale in particular is—yet again—hamstrung by an underwritten role with which he must work.

Somewhat surprisingly, it is Cotillard who stands out. Her dialogue is uneven at times, but she and Depp create some dazzling chemistry with one another. Mann recycles pieces of previous romances in his films, fitting Dillinger-Frechette into his paradigm. This does not inflict any damage to the couple's verisimilitude; since Mann has fundamentally told Dillinger's story before in Thief and Heat, to obviously varying degrees, this similar rendering of love fits, and would appear to be largely historically correct. It may indeed be an instance in which Mann—as with the rest of the film—has simply found the real-life, historical story that aligns with his passionate interests and obsessions.

There is a limitation to that, and naturally history is massaged by Hollywood once more to bend to Mann's vision. Purvis is presented as a consummate professional so as to stand as a palatable Mann “cop protagonist” to pursue the criminal mastermind. Babyface Nelson is gunned down before history informs he was. Yet Hollywood deserves immense credit in certain venues of personal cognizance, something Mann outright acknowledges in the film's denouement. Depp and Mann finally seem to reach the height to which they were so long before striving earlier in the film. As Dillinger sits in a hot theatre watching W.S. Van Dyke's Manhattan Melodrama (George Cukor worked on the film in an uncredited capacity as well), Depp's slight facial expressions tell the tale. It is a beautiful, superbly realized cinematic moment: cinema commenting on itself, and its virtues and powers. Depp—who here delivers the best part of his performance, and probably the single best stretch of acting in years—quietly, amusedly, watches the picture, and Mann's timing with cutting to Manhattan Melodrama's figures is expert. Dillinger sees himself in Clark Gable's strangely heroic gangster and naturally he, like so many male lovers of film, sees in Myrna Loy's lovely countenance, enshrouded by her gleaming hair, the woman he loves. He also peers into his future and it is a coup de grace of visual storytelling. Public Enemies may not go anywhere Mann has not gone to before, but for that moment, it certainly caught its reflection and tipped its hat to the audience in a manner which speaks volumes about the place of cinema in every moviegoer's life.

Take Woodstock... Please

2009-07-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

I promise that some more substantial output is on its way to Coleman's Corner in Cinema, but for this particular moment, I was just wondering if anyone else grows remarkably tired of seeing the same trailer for the same film over and over, ad infinitum, whenever one travels to the cinema.

I personally feel as though I have sustained a merciless barrage for Ang Lee's upcoming picture, Taking Woodstock. The same trailer... Over and over, and over and over. It is an annoying, cloying, faux-hip piece of work which apparently displays almost every major beat of the film (finally including imagery that would logically come near the film's conclusion). Not to mention, it features Liev Schreiber in drag yet again. Does anyone yell, "ARNOLD! ARNOLD!" at him as in the 1994 Christmas comedy Mixed Nuts? (Perhaps they squeal, "CLINT! CLINT!" to be more apropos to the time setting.)

I happen to not be an Ang Lee fan, and I was not looking forward to this film beforehand, but at this juncture I feel as though I have seen the film.

Natch, this is untrue, and one day I am sure I will sit down and view the film. However, I simply had to vent for a moment. And I am wondering if anyone else has felt this way about a particular trailer or, more likely, have encountered this troublesome scenario on more than one occasion.

Shemariah (May 1990--March 2, 2009)

2009-07-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

The allure of your marbled fur, the way you leaped and stirred
Your demurs were playful but firm, always ill-timed and assured
Contours of your agile frame routinely stroked as you purred
Eyes clear then blurred, but fierce, messages conveyed without words

Through long, empty still nights, you would scamper and saunter
Every path and hall held delights, you were friend, and haunter
Transfixed on your diamantine eyes, they sparkled with eerie iridescence
Two baby blue gems, made glowing lights, a pair of fiery crescents

About the patio, love requited, your contentment was marvelously warm
Predictably with you fresh steak excited, you remained carnivorously in form
We wrestled and amused ourselves, you always emerged victoriously transformed
Himalayan coat shed on the carpet and shelves, a veritable, deliriously unkempt storm

I look past the time of woe, in the bay it will stew for now the revelry is left
That will last long after the pains of sorrow, the way in which you drew every breath
Your feline grace would befit Desdemona at her sweetest, your cunning, Lady Macbeth
Before the tree-line, most dangerous at your discreetest, you fought against the long night of death

Up (2009)

2009-06-26T04:31:00.000-07:00

Pixar singlehandedly embodies the very paradoxes of the flowering of imaginations, a notion which is commonly linked to the steady maturation of children. Simultaneously challenging itself with the stimulating, increasingly hungry idiosyncrasy tied to the best qualities of a budding abecedarian and indulging in the whimsical fantasy-land, storybook logic, and linear narratives, bustling and humming with the fervent determination of a child unwilling to retire for the evening when he or she could continue playing, Pixar is an intriguing macrocosmic extrapolation of children. Since children are the predominant target group for Pixar animation, perpetually yanking on the apparel of mothers and fathers to see the latest animated treat of the cinema, Pixar would be unwise to limit its appeal by pursuing a strictly unconventional course. Yet because Pixar promises parents an enjoyably engaging, often meaningful excursion into the luminous dreamworld of its filmmakers, those mothers and fathers are more inclined to relinquish a little of their money to attend the film than they likely are for other studios' animated fare.

Up is the latest Pixar picture, co-directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, and written by Peterson based on a short story by Peterson and Tom McCarthy, and it too holds its contradictions steadfastly. Firstly, the film is based on a short story, and at ninety-six minutes long, probably wrings and rinses as much material from that yarn as possible. Which, incidentally, helps to expose the film's most obvious flaw. Secondly, the picture is imbalanced in its morphology. The first fifteen minutes or so are sublime and practically flawless. It may almost be rightly desired that a short animated film had been made from this stitched embroidery. The opening passage of Up recalls the recent Academy Award-winning animated short film La Maison des Petits Cubes, a quietly, evocatively stirring account of a man's life, and his innate, palpable connection to his home. Up's montage of image and sound here is breathtaking; Michael Giacchino's melodious score conveys the joyfulness, sweetness and heartache which roam and rotate around one another like cars through the boulevards of life.

This haunting poignancy stalks the remainder of the picture, lurking deceptively about through the more plainly robust, temerarious convolutions of most of the film's plot. Carl Fredericksen (voiced with gusto and curmudgeonly geniality by Ed Asner) is a weary, widowed, seventy-eight year old man by the time the film's proper narrative proceeds. His dignity is stripped away from him by a callous cabal of developers—the kind of largely faceless, unstoppable force of a Madusa-headed hydra villain that usually stands in as Pixar's butter to its bread. As he watches his mailbox—with which he associates memories of his dearly departed wife—be violently pried from the ground and run over by the developers' machinery, Carl loses his composure and strikes out, resulting in his banishment to an “old folks' home,” called “Shady Oaks,” where it is unlikely that the oaks are the only things which are shady. Consequently, Carl finds himself placed in an unenviable predicament, and rather than meekly surrender to the authorities, he launches his home by allowing thousands of balloons tied to his home to take him Up.

Up eases itself into a vastly more comfortable routine at approximately this juncture, however. Tediousness creeps into the film; bland, uninteresting and poorly-motivated characters intrude upon Carl's journey to South America to fulfill a lifelong promise to his wife. Droplets of jejune frivolity would have been not only tolerable but encouraged—Pixar's filmmakers may receive almost unanimous encomiums from professional film critics, but they are probably not to be burdened with delving into Bergmanesque awakenings and reawakenings of the soul, consciousness and yearnings of the metaphysical. Up in the hands of artistic puritans would probably be a failed, 3D re-imagining of Wild Strawberries. Yet Up nearly represents base cynicism in its most forgettable moments, like the staging of an armada of carnivorous, talking dogs approximating the reward for sitting through the comparatively emotionally dire realities of life's shockingly mundane fragility.

Nevertheless, Up succeeds when it is fluently communicating through the crisp, irrefutable language of cinema, placing the viewer amidst its abundant riches with a warmth and wit of uncommon depth. Worth noting: the banal, “adult” perspective of monogamous, wedded bliss would be to linger on the Fredericksens' bed. Up establishes marriage through childlike glee and innocence, connecting the armchairs of the respective seats in which Carl and his wife so interminably sat, speaking to one another, or not speaking at all because it was unnecessary, to the resilience of lasting human relationships. The wife's childhood scrapbook. A picture of the wife. The aforementioned mailbox. An almost worthless soda bottle cap inspires selfless fealty from one spouse to another in an immeasurably beautiful, unspoken form of curiology. It is in the rapid, dazzling concatenation of images that Up periodically rebounds, finally fully lifting again as the consequences and points to the excessively busy plot finally play out.

The 3D is a pleasurable ornamentation, and works fairly well with the brilliantly colorful palette with which the Pixar filmmakers work. Giacchino's score is a standout invention, spinning untold layers of pathos to Carl's fundamentally heartwarming world. And those first fifteen minutes are worth the price of admission, beckoning beyond the final credits as an indelible cinematic montage worthy of a silent era genius. The cuts triggering humor such as child Carl having a broken arm after a dangerous fall, or despondency such as a panning shot from a hospital hallway, or simply the passage of time through a dizzying compilation of ties for adult Carl, are nothing short of exemplary. It may be a reasonable theory that even the most troubled, unattractive films have within them mini-films—moments of genuine greatness, tucked away underneath a comparative blizzard of misshapenness. There need be no exhaustive search for Up's ineffably piercing stretch of filmic harmony. However it is viewed—as a perfect short film which precedes an acceptably diverting family movie or the ideal prologue—Up's great claim to fame is its gorgeous crown jewel and mellifluously beating heart.

Moon (2009)

2009-06-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

The conceptual richness of the lone figure stranded by himself has caught the imaginations of innumerable individuals. This is a particularly post-Enlightenment differentia of the west's general complexion—from Byron's Manfred to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, to the cinematic self-ostracized and stranded creations such as Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Tom Hanks' Chuck Noland in Cast Away—marking a noteworthy separation from antiquity. Greek and Roman societies predominantly viewed the threat of exile as a suitable alternative to capital punishment: the possibility of complete divorcement from civilization and community was an incomprehensibly awful fate. Asian readers of Byron's poetry and Defoe's novel would evidently recoil at the subject matter. The Aristotelian aphorism from his Politics, Book One, “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature and that man is by his nature a social animal,” is tested by these aforementioned works in the most literal manner.

Duncan Jones, son of rock star David Bowie, has set out to mount an eerily similar tale. Like previous science-fiction space opuses like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky's Solaris, the physically infinitesimal human being, or human beings, set against the boundlessly illimitable backdrop of space, is at the forefront of Jones's essaying of the solitary man. How much of an impact Jones' father had on the idea behind his feature debut—Bowie's sci-fi-tinged music and his starring part in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth seem to preternaturally prophesize Moon. Fittingly for this moment, Jones swaps the components of the narrative insofar as he posits not the importance of the earth's properties—Roeg's film sprung from the realization that the earth was singular in its harboring of water—but in its possible deficiencies. Jones, who wrote and directed, begins his picture informing the viewer of a future in which earthlings are searching for sources of energy beyond their planet's atmosphere. Ergo, one man is sent to the moon on a mission whose time is determined by his signing a three-year contract with the energy/space travel company. (Almost humorously, NASA is conspicuous by its absence; apparently, in the future the United States federal government's multiple ongoing wars, and purchasing of car companies, banks and previously-governmentally-chartered mortgage behemoths has made the overseeing of a space program too exorbitant in cost to continue.) Astronaut Sam Bell is tasked with excavating the moon for Helium 3, the light isotope first hypothesized by Australian nuclear physicist Mark Oliphant in 1934. In Jones' lightly sketched future, solar-soaked Helium 3 will become a panacea for mankind, solving the quandaries of finite energy supplies on earth.

Sam Rockwell plays Bell, and contributes to Jones' vision a performance of nearly startling emotional complexity and breadth. The words “nearly startling” should not take away from Rockwell's turn; it is only nearly startling because for those who have experienced Rockwell's performances, his starring tour de force performance in Moon will not be seen as altogether surprising. There is already a doomed existentialism to Rockwell, which at its fiercest is unshakable. Especially desperate moments in films such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Snow Angels are punctuated by Rockwell's fidgety earnestness and convincing verisimilitude. Here is an actor who always possesses an air of doom and attrition. Rockwell's isolated self is an amazing performance, worth seeking out.

The film brushes up against and in actuality embraces many cliches of science-fiction. A resourceful robot named “Gerty” (voiced quite well by Kevin Spacey) aids astronaut Bell. “Gerty” is an intriguing creation. Much of the creepiness of 2001's HAL remains, but “Gerty” is not the boringly hackneyed malicious computer that HAL enormously helped to usher into the genre or from other recent computer-dominated pictures like Eagle Eye. “Gerty” is doctor, chef, friend and almost paternal figure, a multitasking entity which may both beautifully and frighteningly describe the end of the rainbow for human beings increasingly relying on technology for convenience. The blending of sci-fi and religious allegory is posited through the names Bell assigns his robots, rovers and antennas. One is named Luke, and another is Judas. Bell seems to mark time by drawing a simple face on the metallic wall. The faces appear to represent his daily moods—sadness, happiness, ambivalence, imperfectly represented through Bell's little black-marker avatars. The happy-face image is flashed back from machine to man as well, with “Gerty” smiling and frowning depending on the emotional situation for Sam Bell.

Moon's production design is quite dazzling in its chromatic, partially sterilized environment. (Though plant life is lovingly depicted as surviving on Bell's otherwise inorganic base of operations.) The use of models is the film's most lasting and memorable effect, creating a visage of recurring potency. The mobile rover of Bell's moving about the surface of the moon, mining and harvesting the Helium 3 for the “Lunar” company, is a repeated, visual soughing, the philter between man, device and the action of movement. Jones' reliance on the models pays off in a meta-commentary on filmmaking without it being too ostentatious: Bell nervously works on a sprawling model of “Fairfield,” (Fairfield, California?) Bell's hometown at a workstation table.

Unfortunately, Moon, ironically, seems to run out of energy in its sagging denouement. Once Bell has discovered some painful, shattering truths about his own existence, the film seems to lack a cogent philosophical destination—or even a basic narrative one. Rockwell is given less and less to do at this point, but he remains strong. It is the screenplay which slackens. Moon partly tells the tale of Plato's shadows on the cave wall, though through the anomalistic mirroring between self and id. Here, Moon brings about questions of alter-egos and projections of such. Having done this, however—from an eye-catching “flash-forward” of a female specter aboard the base to Sam recognizing himself in one being only to consider the attitudinal and psychological gulf between the two—Moon is almost too reticent for its own good. Raising many questions and points about these matters, Moon finally disintegrates, its conclusion dissatisfying in its uncharacteristic conventionality. A last-second voice-over, doubtless intended to be piquant and acidic in its black humor, seems to help the film merely wrap things up too neatly, avoiding a large number of the issues it had earlier broached. Nevertheless, Moon is too engrossing for much of its existentialist odyssey to dismiss or ignore.

More Tomorrow

2009-06-24T12:43:00.000-07:00

I must be attempting to make up for my recent, unexplained absence, but I just wanted readers of Coleman's Corner in Cinema to know that there will be more reviews written and posted tomorrow.

And a word to Elliot Levine: I'm finally going to post a couple of reviews of films from your wonderfully programmed "noir B's" film festival. The Devil Thumbs a Ride is certainly a must-see for any noir enthusiast, and will be looked at here very soon. Sorry for the delay!

Departures (2008)

2009-06-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

As Asian moviegoers heartily laughed at moments and situations which seemed unhumorous to this frequent denizen of the cinema, the thought crystallized with utmost exactitude, swiftly appearing like a person who had been interminably sitting alongside you for so long that they had gradually dissolved for an inestimable period of time. With exponential fierceness, the voluminous gamut the mind so meticulously runs through was conquered. Departures, directed by Yojiro Takita from a screenplay by Kundo Kayama, is a firmly Nipponese dramatic journal detailing the wistful hope of compromise between a culture's deeply ingrained stigmas of death and its own duteous veneration of those who pass on with euphonious humanism. The picture is at times tonally wandering and disordered, its episodic construct sometimes giving way to ostensible incoherence and overwhelmingly instinctive and facile manipulation. Yet as time passes its greater, more perdurable qualities tend to partly supersede and diminish its blemishes and deviances.

Departures is, intriguingly, however, itself a departure from popular Japanese cinematic perceptions. This disconsonantly diametric stance—antipodal and complementary all at once, steeped in Japanese traditions and simultaneously tottering about in search of a highly significant rapprochement with occidentally treasured modernism—nearly necessitates such drastic modifications and alterations to Departures' inflection. Determining how much of this vacillation is more mundanely tied to the demands of Takita's filmmaking—Departures' morbid subject matter and attendant heartache arguably call for audience-softening badinage, jocoseness and even some limited forays into near-slapstick—remains literally recondite. The story is of Daigo Kobayashi, fledgling cellist, turned encoffinner apprentice. (It should be noted that the film's most robust humor is intrinsically tied to the Japanese fear of uncleanliness, chiefly derived in this picture from the corpses with which the protagonist must routinely deal.) Insofar as Departures evidences social impediments, it does not follow through with the strenuous strictures which laced Akira Kurosawa's own socially conscious explorations of bodily and spiritual decrepitude leading to gradational putrefaction of the noumenal (pace Kant) and rectification of the discarnate. In that it too deals with the moribund certainty that follows infirmity and senectitude, Departures most immediately calls to mind Ikiru, though the catholic mien of the picture shrouds the subtextually grimy and complex sociological realism of Kurosawa's oeuvre—but perhaps more apropos would be Drunken Angel with a paternal older man overlooking the addling progression of a young, unsure man.

It is in this regard where Departures makes its most pointed claim as being a film worth seeking out on Father's Day weekend. The film's hero, Daigo (a fairly sensitive, but occasionally quite overbearing Masahiro Motoki), suffers from continual Oedipal longing and disquietude due to his father abandoning him when he was at a tender age. Daigo's employer, a stereotypically crusty, amusingly soft-spoken old man named Ikuei Sasaki (a warmly tender Tsutomo Yamazaki) oversees Diago's budding maturation as a man. In one memorable scene, Diago, after having been humiliated by those for whom he cares once they have learned what he does, and now wishing to quit his job, goes upstairs from the front office of the encoffining establishment, to where Ikuei lives, only to be unwittingly persuaded to not leave by the old man's tale of how he became an encoffiner and embalmer—his dearly departed wife was the first person for whom he plied his newfound trade.

Daigo's peregrination from cellist to encoffiner finds greater artistic resonance through director Takita's compassionate staging of Daigo's physical manipulation of the corpses which are so stigmatized by the salubriously hygienic parameters of Shinto as unclean. As Daigo and Ikuei enact one ritualized passing after another for the deceased, however, it becomes apparent that they are in their own, loving way, appeasing and honoring Kami. Takita's compositional focus, aided greatly by cinematographer Takeshi Hamada, finds Daigo and Ikuei's respective journeys—one ebbing, the other still rising—as parables, not so much demystifying the “casketeering” process, but impeccably detailing it. Avoiding prosaic linkings between the phenomena and the process, Takita and Hamada conspire to create a honeyed placidness out of colors like Japanese water painting. The oriental-occidental cross-cultural conversation has been ongoing for a long time now: each side has commented on each other's redoubtable attributes, whether they be artistic, political or otherwise. Monet's inspiration from Japanese water prints leading to his creation of the water garden, with weeping willows, water lilies, wisteria and bamboo, which further inspired him to create some of his most gorgeous paintings such as the Japanese Bridge and Water Lilies. Viewing Departures, it may be said that Takita has been inspired by Monet, particularly in the transcendental light that accompanies so many of the rooms in which Daigo works. The pictorial communication between European and Asian artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continues, and cinema has helped to make it only more comprehensive.

The beams of sunlight that slice through rooms and people, the hot, smoking grills and pans on which food is promptly cooked, the golden kerosene lamps, all equally dulcify and anticipate the fiery cremation which awaits those in whom Daigo invests so much time, patience and care. Daigo's musically trained, and expertly dexterous fingers and hands, caress the dead with singular circumspection. The act of beautification is not solely intended to satiate the Kami or the departed, but those who in life held the deceased dear to their heart. Ministerial considerations can only go so far; with a deeply empathizing credulity, one man informs Daigo and his employer that his wife never looked so beautiful in life as she did after they had finished transforming her from a sallow corpse to a ravishing alter-avatar of herself, readying her for the transmigration about which characters repeatedly speak.

Unfortunately, Departures is not satisfied to be a touching tale of acceptance of an ostracized vocation, and excavation of Japan's complicated, tiered social stratas, but by the endmost chapter, Daigo's throes of Oedipal dejection and bitterness are purified in an unnecessary and maudlinly lachrymose denouement. Takita's direction finally slackens in discipline; the score by Joe Hisaishi, often swelling at dramatic points, becomes too distracting for the sake of the imagery it is intended to support. At this point, Departures has departed the track on which it had succeeded, depicting Daigo's debilitating troubles stemming from his father's abandonment as the firing table from which the remainder of the tale emanated. The risk of unwarranted manipulation seems to not deter Takita, however, as he at the very least finds the encircling ardency of feeling to convey something meaningful, if not especially fruitful. Departures is fittingly organic in that way, as it chronicles the nearly agestral-like naturalness of the decomposition of the human body, touched up afterwards. Departures becomes overripe in its concluding passage, but that does not take everything away from its lovelier properties.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

2009-06-19T04:30:00.000-07:00

Tony Scott's corybantic, incendiary approbation of rampant nimiety, The Taking of Pelham 123, is at odds with itself and not only because it purports to be, in the words of its TV-ad-cum-action movie conductor, a “re-imagining” of the 1974 Walter Matthau-starring crime drama. Scott's movie is another familiarly skin-deep excursion into human-inspired chaos: a theme-park ride rather than a tense thriller—a feigned supercharged, restless roller coaster, but in actuality one prolonged exercise in cinematic onanism. Tony Scott is in many ways more frustrating than his brother Ridley; the latter lacks an even inchoate panorama of ethnological comprehension, fumbling about in interviews with nonsensical remarks like morally equating the murderous drug kingpin and outstandingly clean policeman who share the stage of American Gangster. Tony—and this is crucial—is by contrast the aspiring painter who lacks the prerequisite patience and poise to fulfill the promise of the canvas. There is, at least, an urgency of vision to Tony's work, and that nearly satisfies, the way an undercooked brownie or refrigerated slice of cheesecake stave off hunger. The nutrients are lacking, and the fear of eating too much of that impels the hand to reach for the fish and vegetables.

There are moments—shots, actually—which taunt the viewer with the periodic flash of fleeting perspicacity. These, alas, are all too little, too insignificant to finally matter. In the hands of the hyper-kinetic, ridiculously fast-cutting Scott, these worthwhile amendments to the portrait are rendered nearly meaningless. Scott's 2004 revenge action thriller Man on Fire occasionally touched upon the spiritual component which should underlay any such saga. As Denzel Washington's violent American almost literally raises hell in Mexico to save a little girl played by Dakota Fanning, Scott sparsely injects shots of Washington's character slowly, irrevocably drowning in an all-consuming pool of water. It is a startling image—and perhaps the only one which remains over five years after seeing that film. The incongruity of the physical is only an infinitesimally-sized component to the image's power: the deeper congruity of Man on Fire's solely resonant theme is what renders the ocular intriguingly impressive. Scott wants to make an occasional comment on his characters—but the shallowness of the enterprise (for which he is chiefly culpable through his mind-numbing visual techniques, though he does tend to work with either uneven or abominable screenplays) undoes him. Almost humorously, Scott pours only more fuel to the fire of his pictures' corroding emptiness, until whatever dramatic purpose was originally afoot has been replaced by Scott's incessant need to call attention to himself. For every sequence which may actually call for whirling, disorienting editing flourishes—such as Brad Pitt's wooing of a complete stranger in mere seconds to allow his boss (Robert Redford) to evaluate him in Spy Game—there are an unknown number which are given the treatment regardless of genuine need.

The Taking of Pelham 123 in Scott's hands features some insightful visual cues, but they are buried under repetitious waves of excessively busy camera movements—often ostensibly manufactured from tying a diminutive camera to the tail of a kitten, human head or hummingbird depending on Scott's whims—as well as needlessly ostentatious lighting, a droning soundtrack and bursts of laughable dialogue. Many routine and static camera pans highlight Denzel Washington's subway command center, which creates the affect of making over half of the film look and feel like a submarine thriller. (J.J. Abrams utilized a similar technique with Star Trek, albeit with greater discipline, and, since that was a naval war film, it worked. That, however, is for a future review.) The entirety of the film almost crushes the few moments of visual wit to be gleaned from the picture, but those few moments are worth detailing.
John Travolta's subway hijacker, “Ryder,” is a demented, loathsome individual who inveighs against the political corruption of America's largest city. Ryder lets Washington's Garber know that he is a Catholic man, and he admonishes Garber for seeing the hostages as innocent—Ryder's Catholicism informs him that no one of this earth is truly innocent. Scott frames Travolta's countenance through the back panel window of the subway, making the small compartment appear like a confessional. This is wholly appropriate considering this is where Ryder gradually, and most reluctantly, begins to confess his sins to the listening Garber. The Taking of Pelham 123 is briefly made into a richly textured ecclesiastical battle between the fallen Catholic and the modern staple of public service, the practical do-gooder. That has almost nothing to do with Brian Helgeland's fundamentally flawed screenplay—which almost always takes natural conversations and quickly makes them yelling matches, in direct, transparent contrast to the icily attenuated battle of wits between Matthau and Robert Shaw from the original film—and almost everything to do with Scott's temporarily arresting motif coupled with the best portion of Travolta's performance, in which he suggests unmitigated self-loathing and black nihilism.

Scott, however, cannot wait to get to the scenes of mayhem; an impertinent, compendious system of title cards flashes before the viewer nearly like electronically-constituted destinations at a terminal, informing of just how much more time exists for the city to abide by Ryder's deadline. Whether it is a high-concept action blockbuster or the latest Austrian art-house cine, too many filmmakers place process over the quintessential core of their films. In the case of supposed artsy “hyperlink” films, too many filmmakers strain to make the construct matter in the richness of irony and little else, and that may be due to today's excessive devotion to irony for irony's sake. With The Taking of Pelham 123, Scott misses the forest for the trees. His interpretation is predictably noise, noise, noise, all becoming faint—sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Tobias A. Schliessler's almost literally nauseating lighting schema tells the tale; like a Spike Lee film, Scott's picture accentuates the horridness of urban life in New York City. Yet while Lee's pictures personally transfer the worst and best elemental matters of the complicated social organism he dissects, Scott's take is muted by sheer exploitation. This is the filmmaker who, in Man on Fire, made Mexico City look like the eighth circle of hell, only to attach one last title card to thank the city, calling it a “special place.” The milieu may differ but New York City is given a shockingly similar faux-medicinal regimen in The Taking of Pelham 123. Throughout the messy narrative, the city is besmirched and ridiculed, only to be held up by the final moments as a kind of insuperable but benign beacon of clout and culture. The pairing of a taxi cab ad and the mayor played by James Gandolfini (the deliciousness of Tony Soprano moving next door to New York City and becoming mayor all too obvious) sticking up for public servant Garber in the final reel leaves a bitter aftertaste of cheap manipulation to ensure that no unsafe dramatic destination is remotely touched.

And how do the performers fare? The perfection of Matthau as the lanky, plain and unlikely hero has been replaced by utter artifice. The connective tissue bridging the fictive and actual worlds in 1974 brightened Joseph Sargent's solid thriller. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Matthau's public servant was a bold stand-in for the paradoxes which animated American life. When meeting a hotshot police inspector, Matthau's Garber is taken aback because the man is black. Matthau's Garber was imperfect and crude; he scoffs at Japanese men and finds them to be a waste of his time. Matthau's close physical approximation of Richard Nixon subconsciously seals the deal: an evidently inadvertent collision between Sargent's finespun world and that of the pained reality of 1974 creates a lasting and worthy meta-comment. Washington, who seems to have mortgaged a portion of his soul to Scott, by contrast, is a poor reflector; adding a paunch to his midsection with loose-fitting pants always threatening to slide downward is insufficient in its meager conviction. When Washington spills a liquid all over himself, the scene screeches and squeals under the strain imposed by Helgeland's cliched game plan. Washington himself seems in on the joke, as is the entire audience: look, it's Denzel, playing this role. The man is too much of a thespian, crying at just the right moment, frowning with determination at his imperious boss, to be taken seriously here. Travolta dials in another villain: he at least is having fun, but aside from a presumptuousness which is intermittently endearing in that twisted way that makes everyone wish they were so crazed, he brings little to the picture that piquantly stings. Robert Shaw's creation surpassed such pedantic movie thuggery.

Scott's Pelham 123 arrives in the aftermath of more national trauma, war and debilitation of the figure of public service, just as Sargent's did. The differences, however, are noteworthy. Sargent's film sought to deeply examine societal stratas, class and racial tensions—without resorting to absurdly over-the-top maneuvering such as having the villain confirm that an Irishman is Irish and an Italian is Italian as in Scott's picture—through the prism of overqualified criminals against public servants working inside a corrupt system. Scott and Helgeland's public servant is himself corrupt, so Pelham, 2009's message seems to be, what goes around is money, what comes around is payback. That, and something that everyone should follow right about now: invest in gold.

Catch Me at Film For the Soul

2009-06-19T00:05:00.000-07:00

I have enthusiastically offered to join Ric Burke at the fantastic film blog Film For the Soul in his highly ambitious quest to host guest reviews of films cinema blogosphere writers consider among the best of the best of the decade of the 2000s.

My review of Catch Me If You Can, written almost six months ago, will be featured at Ric's place (it sounds a little like Casablanca, doesn't it?), on Saturday, June 20, going up at 9:00 PM London time. For those who never read it, or did and would like to take another look--at a website where there is actually someone competent pulling the levers and pushing the buttons and adorning essays with beautiful production stills and the like--or just want to support Ric in this noblest of enterprises, please visit this weekend. And don't just stop there; Ric is counting through the years of this decade, and cinephiles of all kinds should see what all of the hubbub is about.

Meanwhile, right here in the coming days, more reviews of contemporary films still playing in dark palaces throughout the land, and, yes, after some catching up, back to some classics, including at least a couple of "grade B film noirs" recently celebrated at my local Roxie Theatre and whatever else pops into my crazy, oversized head.

Drag Me to Hell (2009)

2009-06-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

How much better is Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell for having Alison Lohman as its lead actress rather than the early choice, Ellen Page? Lohman—who lent the impersonal Ridley Scott a lovely pathos in the otherwise mediocre Matchstick Men (2003)—was born in 1979 but she looks not a day over twenty-five and imports a vibrant youthfulness and little-girl giddiness and magnetism of a high school student. Page, by contrast, was born in 1987, yet she pollinates her work with an ever so slightly brash cynicism and despondency. Lohman radiates a welcoming patina to the men who share the screen with her; Page's subtle attitudinal negativism would suit a young woman with a worldview tinged by misandry. Page would probably have succeeded in the role of ascendant loan officer Christine Brown but she would have had an uphill climb—for Lohman, however, the role is ostensibly like playing a variation of herself.

Raimi's long absence from the unadulterated horror of his Evil Dead pictures has made the wait for Drag Me to Hell nearly unbearable. The payoff, however, is so grandiose that there is no fear of disappointment or letdown. Drag Me to Hell—as the title itself vociferously declares—is no halfbreed excursion into the mundane passing for direly rampaging terror: it is the real deal. Like Raimi's grin-inducing cult films, Drag Me to Hell is wacky and warped. Reprieves from the assaulting horror—most conspicuously whipped about on the big screen and in the cinema by the exuberantly impressive and Academy Award-worthy sound-editing and -mixing—are short and exist not to banally contrast with the thrills and chills as in all too many films belonging to the loosely-defined genre, but to inform it. Raimi's newest picture is a smashing, exhausting triumph because he and his screenwriting collaborator brother Ivan so consummately embed the everyday quotidian world of Christine's with the oncoming gypsy curse which threatens her at every turn.

Lohman's performance never drives the film, because Christine as a construct is intended to make pivotal choices and continually react. Some critics have perhaps docked Raimi points for this—they may raise their thumb in approval but quibble with some of the particulars. They have it backwards. As a horror film, Drag Me to Hell, while featuring a dazzling facade, is not truly unique. As a complete film, however, it is an enticingly intimate composition. Raimi's art, even when anchored and occasionally buried by cheesiness (The Quick and the Dead) or apathetic bloat (Spider-Man 3), beams through. It is academic to suggest that all of drama comes down to choices made by characters, but Raimi's particular—sometimes feverish—interest in the consequences of choices endows his films with an unusual heft for such a populist-minded filmmaker. Raimi's multifarious interpretations of morality and choice is an articulate, somewhat astral stand against rampant positivism. Raimi's characters are burdened by the inestimable accountability out of which their metaphorical bed is made.

Whether it be Peyton Westlake/Darkman or Peter Parker/Spider-Man, or the poor Mitchells of the melodramatically charged, deathly ashen A Simple Plan, Raimi's characters are in command of their own destinies, subjects to their own administration. They are infused with the culpability and original sin with which Catholics ceaselessly wrestle. Some critics may chide Raimi's “moralistic” approach—they are mistaken. As in the under-appreciated The Gift and the amiable but quite uneven For Love of the Game, Drag Me to Hell echoes beyond its running time because of the repercussions against which Christine, like Raimi protagonists before her, so tirelessly chafes. As rudimentary as Spider-Man's outstanding line of dialogue may in truth be (“With great power comes great responsibility...”) it remains potent—and in a vein deeper than materialistic or paternal noblesse oblige, which were the oversimplified readings of that film's tonal substance—in no small measure because Raimi is not a pedestrian journeyman ensuring the line readings were recorded; he believes the words.

Now opting for more visceral representations of that implication, Raimi allows the conveyed statement to reverberate with action. Christine's position at her bank is uncertain: she is desirous of a promotion but she must overcome the daunting obstacles of a weasely rival and the all too easily discerned air of sexism and buddy-buddy networking which plagues her professional life. On numerous planes, Christine is a symptomatic creature of modern American society. Gradually pushed to the brink of myriad possibilities such as taking shortcuts, fulfilling vengeance-laden gratification and aiming to please her fickle boss, Christine's journey is an enriching etching of feminine vim and dynamism set against the backdrop of a largely insensitive and hard-featured world. Lohman's sweetly angelic and innocent features italicize the Raimi brothers' point: the darkness of the world is always seeking out the beautiful for retribution, whether deserving of its presence or not.

The meshing of the most base elements of the corporeal and the unthinkable devastation of the otherworldly has rarely been this rivetingly staged. In Drag Me to Hell, bodily fluids, insects and varied repulsive creatures and pests ground the presence of inconceivable evil like the “pea soup” of The Exorcist. While the visages of the picture sometimes play out like grotesque freak show acts strung along together, they cumulatively inspire a level of fright that surpasses mere sensorial reaction. Raimi's manipulative tricks taken by themselves are not breathtaking; the final, haunting tableau they engender is. This is a major accomplishment for Raimi, who proves that his prolonged stint with elephantine budgets has not irreversibly diminished his keen cinematic senses.

Everything aforementioned handsomely buttresses Drag Me to Hell's delirious banquet of Raimi's self-proclaimed “spook-a-blast”; and at his best Raimi communicates to the viewer with wordless irony. Many scenes begin with a scare and conclude with a laugh, but there is a sensation of knowing attached to that laugh, which hurts. Pretty girls having nosebleeds has become a periodical staple of horror and science-fiction (any fan of The X-Files will attest to that) but Raimi pushes the accelerator all the way down to the floor (and in doing so proves that PG-13 need not be synonymous with toothless)—partly for the gasps and chuckles the more robustly animated mise-en-scene inspire but also because it is through the excellently explored absurd that reality finds itself most nakedly revealed. In this instance, a nosebleed becomes a Biblical flood, and a sight gag segues into primal, human fear. “Did any get in my mouth?” Christine's boss frantically asks. The fear itself is futile, as Raimi continually evidences: evil is already lodged within us, perpetually fighting to get out.

Terminator: Salvation (2009), aka Contextualizing "The Terminator" Franchise

2009-06-15T18:45:00.000-07:00

When James Cameron made The Terminator (1984), he successfully coupled low-budget gravel with high-concept gravy. Within literally seconds, he established an alternate universe in which an entire (admittedly downbeat) mythology would play itself out. This was slightly unlike any other science-fiction film insofar as it succinctly detailed the players—both present and future—as well as the stakes of its epical tale by transplanting all of the combatants to the contemporary universe the audience readily recognized. Cameron may not be widely considered a high cinematic artist but this was the baptismal instance in which his interests in storytelling, with the aid of prudently utilized practical special effects, proved too excellent and refreshing a commixture to ignore.

The religious undertones to Cameron's first labor of love (Piranha 2 is frequently dismissed as “director-for-hire” work) helped to establish the gravitas of his nascent mythology. The connection between “John Connor” and “Jesus Christ” is obvious (is there a relation of some sort between “James Cameron” and “John Connor” as well?). Then there is Sarah Connor, named after the Biblical Sarah, foremother of the Israelites. The previously barren Sarah was gifted through a divine miracle to conceive and give birth to the providential, foretold son named Isaac. Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor is impregnated through time travel: the man sent by a burnt-out veteran warrior, hero and resistance fighter John Connor proves to be Connor's father. (The less time spent debating the scientific merits of time travel, the better. Also: one may view the conclusion of Terminator 2: Judgment Day as the inversion of the story of Abraham and Issac, as the father figure—future California Governator Ahnuld—lays down his... life?... for the chosen son.)

For the first three Terminator pictures, this mythology was largely held intact in its basic configuration. For three straight films, poor John Connor—first, to be terminated before conception, then as a rebellious adolescent listening to Guns 'N' Roses (a trait he still possesses in the 2009 release) and finally as a nearly nihilistic, disillusioned twenty-something—was the target. With Terminator: Salvation, Connor is propped up as a man of action, finally resembling in the most perspicuous manner the “freedom fighter” the audience has been repeatedly told he will one day become. What Terminator: Salvation promises with its trailer (vastly superior to the film) is to finally delve deeply into the war between the humans and the machines first alluded to in the opening seconds of Cameron's 1984 modern classic. What all of the studio executives seem to have forgotten, however, is that not a single viewer of the original picture considered the idea of seeing the future apocalyptic war as necessary, or entertaining or even a good idea in the least. Cameron allows Kyle Reese and his combat trauma-induced flashbacks to be the portal through which the viewer sees the hellish carnage and destruction of the future: it's not particularly appetizing or pretty, and there is just enough of it to drive the point home.

This is not to even broach the subject of this series' thematic schizophrenia. The Terminator posited that human beings could fight for their ideals, for their humanity, as it were, against seemingly insurmountable odds, in the face of known horror. The film's release in the 1980s suggests latent Cold War paranoia of nuclear annihilation coupled with uncomfortable acceptance, which makes the picture surprisingly relevant and subversive in the post-9/11 era, too. Terminator 2 was far more upbeat—the future may be grim but “Judgment Day” can be averted with the coupling of humanity and machine as one force for good. “No fate but what we make,” was the 1991 picture's enormously appropriate declaration, seeing as the Cold War was melting away like so many ice cubes on a June porch and people of varied nationalities, ethnicities and histories were, in essence, rising up against a long-feared oppressor.

Unfortunately, the allure of money was too potent for the aforementioned studio executives to resist: Terminator 3, released less than two years after 9/11, seemed to consign humanity to the dustbin for good: there is no stopping “Judgment Day”; as the politically ambitious star remarked with mechanic chilliness, “You only postponed [the future nuclear holocaust]. Judgment Day is inevitable.” And with that, studio avarice blatantly rejected the entire pulsing message of the first two films as crafted by Cameron. Terminator 3's tagline should have read, “No fate but what we make—What a joke.” And thus, with the end of the world, and end of that picture, Nick Stahl self-importantly intoned that the future still lay ahead. In other words, prepare to sacrifice more money to see a franchise go in an entirely unnecessary direction and nullify the purpose and meaning of the first two films, which so many today still love and quote as nineteenth century American politicians recited Biblical verses in their speeches.

The basic skeleton of the first three Terminator films remained the same, despite the thematic muddling and inconsistency. Each film presented a dystopian future dictated by merciless machines. Cameron's vision entailed faith in humanity against the encroaching supremacy of a mechanized future. It is no coincidence that the greatest objective of all three earlier films was to leave Los Angeles as soon as possible. In each case, at least one Connor was tormented by an ostensibly unstoppable and unyielding force. The formula was enticing in the relaxed, almost innate way that recalls simple fairytales or traditional professional wrestling “booking”: the villain is seemingly invincible, but the hero is equally determined to triumph and save the day. As the series progressed, the assassin terminators had to be increasingly deadly, until, with the third film, a Scandinavian supermodel Terminatrix could just about literally do anything it set its electronic mind on accomplishing. A viewer may have asked, as JC did with T2, “Why doesn't it just become a bomb or something and get me?” Terminator 3, however, was a film consciously bathed in self-parody—and, in a way, how could it not be, considering how pervasive the first two films became in the realm of popular culture? At least the film was brisk, if not memorable, and its longest car chase was excitingly mounted in a way all too few action sequences are today.

Which takes this look at the Terminator franchise to the newest release. It is difficult to remember a film so wantonly self-destructive and wasteful. The most fertile substance from T3 was the emotional chemistry between Stahl and Claire Danes as Catherine Brewster, John Connor's future wife and mother of his children. So the terminally confused Terminator: Salvation elects to spend approximately three minutes of its running time on the relationship between man and wife, savior and maiden. Christian Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard make the 2003 pairing of Stahl and Danes look like Bogey and Bacall in comparison. Bale is wholly lost in his role, grunting and fuming, screaming and yelling, behaving more like an impotent teenager confronted by his parents than the bravely insubordinate trooper defying catastrophic orders the film apparently wishes to present. Howard is an empty vessel. The only performer who escapes unscathed from the film is Sam Worthington, whose most accomplished episodes almost convince that there is an entirely functioning brain behind this enterprise. As this film's Frankenstein's monster, he literally howls at the moon, his naked body covered in mud evidently symbolizing man's evolutionary emergence from the muck and mire of the earth, with the wet soil representing a mother's amniotic fluid.

Terminator: Salvation is reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s James Bond movies of the frequently lamented “Roger Moore era,” as an old, aging and tired franchise begins to steal from newer, flashier populist cinema entries. The Matrix, Steven Spielberg's 2005 War of the Worlds and Michael Bay's Transformers, to name but three, are liberally borrowed from for action spectacles; Apocalypse Now, first poked in the ribs by Watchmen, is once again trotted out by director McG for yet another parading exercise in film geek pandering. Whereas The Terminator was a concisely paced, tersely eloquent exploration of dread, Terminator 2: Judgment Day a glossy action-packed marathon of mythological peregrination and a work of a man wanting to satisfyingly wrap up every loose end presented by his first opus, Terminator 3 an agile if nearly completely mindless compilation of action genre outbursts and obeisance to the superficialities of the two earlier pictures and simultaneously an utter rejection of their respective theses, Terminator: Salvation is a film adrift, with a character built up for three straight films who proves to be nothing less than boring in the flesh. Cameron had it right; the viewer did not need to see the much-ballyhooed war between the humans and the machines. Subtlety is not even the issue—T3 featured Danes' Brewster squeal, “I hate machines!” as one of her first lines. What Terminator: Salvation needs is the very hope of salvation once embraced, and later discarded, like so many long-forgotten cynical campaign promises.

China Moon (1994)

2009-06-15T18:15:00.000-07:00

The 1991 (finally released theatrically by Orion Pictures in 1994) romantic neo-noir thriller China Moon establishes early its central character's most palpable traits and attributes, which deceptively foretell his eventual unraveling and undoing. Ed Harris plays cagey, intuitive (fictional) Brayton, Florida (filmed in Lakeland, Florida and the surrounding area) detective Kyle Bodine, whose observant attention to detail allows him to read murder scenes like road signs, knowing within minutes who the perpetrator is. Because he is good at his job, he rarely considers why he is doing it; when questioned by his somewhat green, and in Bodine's words, “okay,” partner, Lamar Dickey (Benicio Del Toro) why he is a cop, Bodine replies that he knew there was a reason. He will think about it sometime.

Bodine's intelligence and awareness prove to be indirect vulnerabilities when placed alongside his ostensible lack of greater motivation. When he discovers a beautiful, mysterious woman named Rachel Munro—played with almost vampiric luminescence by Madeleine Stowe—he falls head over heels for her. Unfortunately she happens to be married to an equally powerful and abusive local banking kingpin, Rupert Munro (a one-note Charles Dance). Gradually, the film's tone shifts from the fairly sumptuous tale of passion between Bodine and Rachel to a serpentine murder mystery.

China Moon is longtime cinematographer John Bailey's (whose credits include American Gigolo, The Pope of Greenwich Village and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) directorial debut. The lighting the seasoned director of photography utilizes allows for some mesmerizing visualizations which enhance what is fundamentally a routine potboiler. The screenplay, by Roy Carlson, is sufficiently serviceable when it must be, providing just enough in the way of narrative glue for the picture's subtly dyspeptic yarn to give impetus to the ocular pleasures China Moon offers to the viewer. Bailey and Belgian cinematographer Willy Kurant ably conspire to create a visually rich canvas of coolly colored nighttime vistas and interiors. One particularly memorable setting is the lushly romantic setting of a lake. The reflection of the “china moon”—Bodine tells Rachel that his mother used the term for a full moon, under which people would “do strange things,” he states—is captured against the smooth, seemingly tranquil surface of the body of water in delicately composed shots.

When finding himself in the unenviable position of covering up a murder, Bodine's mercurial gifts are turned against him, and as the cliché goes, the hunter becomes the hunted. Bailey and Kurant's occasionally delicious visages figuratively brighten and literally dim the picture as Harris' detective becomes not only wholly entangled in the mystery but the most suspected figure in the film by his fellow officers, including his partner. Following the time-honored noir template, the protagonist's apparent strengths prove to be strangely debilitating, as Bodine's certainty and sharpness leave hints of hubris. Those seeds are indeed immediately sown in the film's prologue, during which Bodine surveys the scene of a homicide with all of the clinical precision of a genuine expert. “Sooner or later,” he says derisively of murderers, “they all fuck up.” Little does he know his tumultuous future when he makes this comment to his colleagues.

China Moon's most sound component of all, however, is the lead performance by Ed Harris. Harris is dynamic and subtle, forceful and equable all at once. He gives a compelling, convincing performance that keeps the film humming even when too many coincidences and plot holes needlessly distract from the vastly more important emotional through-line with which Harris endows the humble film. Harris' eyes are especially captivating in a film peopled with indelible pools of light as eyes, most notably his costar, Stowe's, which accurately belie her truer nature. Harris makes every little movement of his eyes matter, and it fits wonderfully with his character's chief gift of observation. There is a doom in his eyes, and it is matched, if not with straightforward and engrossing presence, then with a complementary sense of intrigue by Stowe, working off of the guilelessness and fierceness Harris supplies.

Where Stowe comes up short is in the range of her performance; the screenplay and Bailey's uneven handling of his actors contrive to limit her. Whereas many noirs allow for the female presence to display greater shades of character, China Moon is actually the opposite. Stowe's Rachel is if anything too nebulous and murky a figure, and the fact that the very ending hinges on her true motivations leaves a peculiar aftertaste as there has been minimal buttressing of her emotional state beyond common, hoary and hackneyed abused-wife syndrome scenes. As with other conventional neo-noirs that follow similar storylines, the husband, here played by Dance, is completely one-dimensional and totally unsympathetic; if and when such a character meets a violent end, the ramifications of his demise are almost always only of interest insomuch as they relate to the other characters' fates.

Nevertheless, Harris' carefully calibrated turn excellently draws the viewer in with great, meticulous thoughtfulness. When Bodine finally reaches his breaking point and lashes out, the viewer is caught up with him; it's not an entirely different sensation than relishing the confused, furious righteousness of James Stewart's John “Scottie” Ferguson confronting the inscrutable Kim Novak in the closing moments of Vertigo when Harris' Bodine points the finger of indignation at the untrustworthy Rachel. The sophistication that is missing in other parts of the film is evident whenever Harris makes his presence profoundly felt. In a landscape of noir, marked by countless dupes, sometimes what matters is simply trying to get the last word in. Bodine tries his best, and this flawed film is better for it.

Now, Where Was I?

2009-06-15T17:30:00.000-07:00

No, no, not Where was I? as in, where was I physically, or where did I go to? I'm just trying to remember where I was about ten weeks ago when I vanished from the earth. Oh yes, writing reviews for films.

I've seen quite a few films since I last posted at Coleman's Corner. I promise to write reviews for as many as I can.

There are some films for which I was planning to write reviews when I disappeared, and I promise that for the two people out there that remember which films they were, I will get to working on that soon.

I am returning to the world of the Internets, but time constraints will limit the frequency of my visits to other film blogs I greatly enjoy with writers I admire for a good while. I apologize in advance.

I hope those who see that I have returned spread the word to your friends. I am sorry for so abruptly leaving with no warning; naturally, I did not plan the absence. Life became too hectic for a while for me to survey the Internet, much less write for its global consumption. However, I cannot adequately convey how sorry I am to everyone, and how pleased I am to now return.

In May I attended a "B Film" Film Noir Festival at The Roxie in San Francisco, CA (on 16th and Valencia) and I will write reviews of some films I saw there in the near future.

On May 8, a review I wrote for the 1990s neo-noir China Moon was published at Noir of the Week. Here it is--where? Right here. Will I publish it here at Coleman's Corner? Of course. But Noir of the Week is a website you should take a look at, you'll doubtless like what you see.

I will attempt to respond to as many unanswered comments as I can in the upcoming days. I'm busily preparing to write quite a bit in the coming days. I saw a number of films, classic and newly released alike, and I'm anxious to write about many of them.

I sincerely thank those who voiced interest, concern, worriment or simply annoyance at my AWOL stretch. And those who remained silent, thank you for not bothering me or troubling my conscience as much as those others. :-)

This past early May I celebrated the one-year anniversary of beginning Coleman's Corner in Cinema. I had considered writing a thank-you to everyone, or writing something, but as fate would have it, this was right in the middle of my sabbatical from the website and online matters in general. So I just want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has ever visited, read a post, or part of a post, and of course those who have commented here at Coleman's Corner in Cinema. Just because I am not here does not mean I am not thinking of you, or that I take any one of you for granted. As for my favorite memories from the past year (now over thirteen months in actuality), there are plenty, but perhaps my absolute favorite memory is quickly, hurriedly writing a review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on New Year's Eve and posting in the afternoon here in California. I figured that, it being New Year's Eve, few would care to read the posting on that day or evening. As it turned out, the review, and the subsequent comments, inspired one of the most wonderful threads here, and by the time I went to bed late that evening, it had already turned out to be quite a long, healthy discussion between film lovers. And that makes the whole enterprise worthwhile for me.

Murmur of the Heart (1971)

2009-04-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

There is an almost inescapable infectiousness beaming from and residing in Louis Malle's best films. His vibrancy and effervescence, when judiciously meshed with a compelling, mythic anecdote—both of which he himself crafted with singular delicacy—is simply irresistible. It has doubtless often been said that Murmur of the Heart, like other Malle pictures, is a filmic essaying of innocence lost, but that is itself a faux pas. Malle's work, not irregularly maligned by critics who soured on Malle's admittedly tartly acidulous aromatic palette, is best consumed with a suspicion—not of his intentions but of his art, which seems to serve as a rejoinder to the oft-repeated phrase, trust the art, not the artist (which naturally remains true in Malle's case as well). Malle's films are about innocence, period, even when it is politically, sociologically or culturally skewed, benighted and spiritually subjugated to the banalities of polity, as in the mesmeric tarry through callow fascism that is Lacombe, Lucien. Malle's cinema—imbued with an innate plausibility, but purified by a tinting of phantasmagoria—is arrestingly deceptive without resorting to duplicity.

Murmur of the Heart stars Lea Massari and Benoit Ferreux (in his first film) as Clara Chevalier and her adolescent son, Laurent, in 1954 France. As in other Malle pictures, the main pubescent-to-young adult character's insouciance is juxtaposed with the geopolitical tumult that either directly or circuitously informs his peregrination into variegated definitions of manhood, most commonly finding sexual awakening, arousal and action as the definitive fulcrum against which all else pivots. The aforementioned Lacombe, Lucien made Malle's most trenchant points concerning wartime collaboration as seen through ambling indifference—ascetically apolitical in its painterly construction but highly, almost obdurately uncompromising in its most sweeping aspects of efficaciously rendered prevarication (Lacombe's chief imperious/sexual conquest and annexation is of the pulchritudinous girl named France Horn)—but with the earlier Murmur of the Heart, Malle's edifice remained with the entanglements of the familial. As reports stream into the consciousness of Frenchmen from the losing contest in Indochina, Laurent—who, in the film's prologue is found with a friend soliciting random people for aid for wounded veterans of the colonial strife—blossoms in both expected and unexpected ways. This is a most particularly oedipal telling of the nuanced love between a son and mother.

Like Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, the son, here Laurent, catches his mother engaging in extramarital love affairs. The love that once deeply marked the Italian-born mother's marriage to her gynecologist French husband, for whom she produced three sons—Laurent being the youngest—has been replaced by gentle but occasionally uncomfortable silences and arguments recurrently about Laurent's nature, with the nearly overprotective mother protesting that the misbehaving child is sensitive as her husband merely throws up his hands and refers to him as a pain in the neck. “He used to be so jealous,” Clara Chevalier tells her son late in the picture. At this time, however, Clara finds herself searching for excitement and warmth of feeling from other men. Laurent's sexual confusion and deep, abiding affection for his mother collide as he catches glimpses of her running off with other men. Clara will tease him late in the film: “You're my little, jealous French husband!” The relationship between Clara and her son doubtless inspires interest from receptive Freudians.

What partly separates Malle's pictures from many others is their curious, salient repetition of movement and form. Like the heartbroken, lonely solitary figure walking seemingly aimlessly about the arid night in Elevator to the Gallows, Murmur of the Heart's cohesion—seen from Laurent's point-of-view, but legitimately adjoined to his equally cogent and misaligned multi-peopled portraitures orbiting his mother—is made up of confident visual enactments that prop up Malle's thematic touchstones. In Murmur of the Heart, these are repeatedly quite funny. One especially rewarding sequence follows Laurent's delirious older brothers playing “spinach tennis” with one another, flinging globs of spinach to one another's plate from across the dinner table. Much later in the film, the actual sport of tennis will become a metaphorical simile for the battle of the sexes, and how the entire war is a stupendously childish game of a different sort, one of Malle's most propitiously important revisited themes.

What ultimately enriches Murmur of the Heart, however, is its densely literate subtexts. In one subtle scene, a brother of Laurent's hands him reading material: “Proust to entertain you and Tintin to instruct you.” As Laurent chastises a shallow suitor for Clara's affections at a health spa, he points to the intelligence of Proust. “But you don't read Jewish writers,” Laurent notes of the apparently nationalistic, colonialist-leaning young man. “A country is nothing without colonies. Look at the English,” Clara's suitor remarks. The allusions to Proust are important to examine, as they hint at Malle's narrative structure. Murmur of the Heart is fundamentally a retelling of Proust's “Within a Budding Grove, Volume 2” from “In Search of Lost Time.” The connective tissue is myriad in its configurations. Malle's health spa—which Laurent, like the story's narrator, is a sick child, attends for the sake of his heart which suffers from murmurs—appears to be a stand-in for Proust's Balbec; the pretty blonde girl Helene seems to be inspired by Proust's Albertine, who in both the story and Malle's film is suspected to be a lesbian; like the narrator, Laurent seeks to sexualize his relationship with Helene/Albertine—Proust's delineation followed the narrator's quest to kiss Albertine whereas the sexually fixated Laurent attempts to bed Helen; and like the narrator, Laurent professes a consummate love for his mother (which again, in Malle's tale, is more acutely sexualized).

As in Lacombe, Lucien and other Malle films, from the mutedly despairing, futuristic parable of the war between the sexes, Black Moon to another rendering of maladjusted childhood fantasia and tragic malignity, Au revoir les enfants, male dream-manufacturing, like spools from which airy cotton candy are proliferated, finds both reward and dejection, elation and despondence, in the ecstatic reverie of dazed abstraction. Where Murmur of the Heart differentiates itself from both Malle's earlier and later work is that its playfulness is more earnest—and therefore brighter and truer all at once—because the child is truly enraptured with not only a conception but a real-world visage of nearly ineffable familiarity and closeness. Oedipal or not, the relationship—superbly brought to life by the effortlessly charming child actor Ferreux and the window of the mortal divine that the impossibly endearing Massari most palpably represents—somehow resides beyond all of his other explications of humans in all of their confounding complexities. Profundity of a peculiarly alien, ethereal kind presents itself in Malle's exquisite denouement. After everything, all the Chevalier brood can do is laugh together, giggling and chuckling, chortling and cackling, in a fit of sustained cachinnation, surveying not so much the world—which for all of national and intimate changes, in immeasurable and decipherable ways alike, coupling the political with the sexual, has not been irreparably altered after all—but themselves. As with almost anyone with any hint of modesty, self-awareness and humility, they have burst together, as in the most reasonable reaction to a sustained episode of looking into a mirror.

Hunger (2008)

2009-04-02T11:20:00.000-07:00

Steve McQueen's feature film debut, Hunger, is an uneven but viscerally forceful picture. Where it fails in comprehensiveness and even filmic movement—McQueen's vignettes almost all stand apart, disparately creating momentary displeasure and disgust, never quite gelling into a substantive narrative, or at least only belatedly finding one to pursue—it succeeds in sensational conviction befitting its subject matter. Not unlike Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, McQueen's film is fervent and nearly maniacal in its unblinking stare; unlike Gibson's film, McQueen's attempt to chronicle the sixty-six day hunger strike spearheaded by Irish Republican Army leader Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) is secular in its devotionally obsessive focus. Drawing a parallel between both the cruelty visited upon the defiant and disruptive prisoners of the Northern Ireland Maze Prison by the guards and Sands' self-inflicted choice to starve himself to Christ's passion on several occasions, McQueen and collaborator (and playwright) Enda Walsh seem to nevertheless yearn to unfurl their drama with a level of detachment.

That detachment, however, is occasionally made questionable, and McQueen's actual beliefs are ostensibly betrayed by his insistence of layering stylistic flourishes atop the occurrences his film essays. One repetitive touchstone is the usage of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher verbally condemning the Irish Republican Army members as violent terrorists unworthy of the political prisoner status for which they protested. McQueen creates significant sympathy for the Irish prisoners, demonstrating with an unalloyed minimalism, as they communicate through tiny wads of paper passed along through their mouths to one another during mass. However, McQueen and Walsh exhibit empathy for the guards as well; indeed, the film opens with an extended sequence during which the camera follows along a guard who is washing and soothing his scarred-over knuckles in water. In one scene of vicious brutality, one guard appears almost traumatized, weeping as he recognizes the levels of de-humanization to which he and his peers have descended.

While examining Hunger it is advantageous to consider the chiefest qualities of cinema; its immediate fluency, and proficiency when optimally used to convey information. For example, in many of the better unironic, under-appreciated “genre” films, it is almost always the acuity of the filmmaking that enhances the narratively prosaic. It is in these films where the visual craftsmanship and aesthetic stylishness benefits the films' unalloyed machinations. When appropriately meshed, visualization supersedes what is commonly called “plot.” From Taken to Point Break, and many other examples, it is the artful accession of élan that endows the familiar.

So it is with a slightly confounded mien that it is realized that McQueen's Hunger is almost arriving at the opposite spectrum of cinema—the “story” is at the service of his craftsmanship. McQueen is trained as a fine artist, and his debut film is delineated by ostentatiousness and precociousness. The entire ninety-six minute film plays out like an exercise in quaffing precious artfulness. With the proverbial tips of the hat to Robert Bresson (the meticulously detailed manner in which the prisoners communicate with one another cannot not remind of A Man Escaped) and Stanley Kubrick (the entire film accounts de-humanization—of prisoner and guard alike—and a sequence in which a group of jackbooted thugs stand in a long hallway cannot not bring images of Full Metal Jacket to most filmgoers who will actually watch Hunger), McQueen's confidence, at least bordering on arrogance, is doubtless.

Not that there is anything wrong with a stubborn, uncompromising artistic initiative—with Hunger, it is the imagery that stays, long after the final credits have unspooled, after all, but for its second and most impressive act. Nonetheless, McQueen's picture plays like numerous sketches aligned together for the purpose of making a film. Coherence is not an issue—Hunger is rigorously minimalistic and quite slowly paced, which contributes to the pervasive feeling of crushing, listless boredom that is as poisonous to the souls of the prisoners (and guards) as the ordeals to which they are subjected as a price of their disobedience. Ocular recording of the tellurian plays heavily into the visceral potency that is Hunger's most certain attribute. As a guard sedates himself with a quiet sojourn to the yard, smoking a cigarette in the wintry weather, snowflakes fall upon him. McQueen and director of photography Sean Bobbitt capture the subsequent moment on film with fine delicacy. The guard who had earlier soothed his beaten, battered and bloodied knuckles in water finds little snowflakes weep from the sky and landing on his scars and marks of self-inflection against the heads of many prisoners. McQueen's fine artist eye catches many more undisguised flourishes. Prisoners smear their own excrement upon the walls of their cells, and McQueen's camera seems particularly attuned to the spiral patterns one prisoner creates with feces-wall painting.

The best portion of the film, however, is a bravura, unbroken sequence in which McQueen's camera remains still and there are no interruptions of cutting. For over fifteen minutes, two men, Sands, and Father Moran (an extremely stirring and profound Liam Cunningham: his performance alone makes Hunger worth the investment) speak to one another in ostensible “real time,” volleying points to one another. The steadied duration of this puissant portion creates uneasy astriction and tautness, deftly providing an atmospheric contextual support for the final act of the film that details Sands' self-imposed bodily disintegration, wherein the film finally does become soporose in its hazily blurred perspective. When the camera finally does break the hypnotic spell, it is to emphasize Sands' words as he tells an allegorical story from his childhood about doing what was right and accepting the consequences with the peace, dignity and knowledge that he had the courage to do what was right. The conversation between Sands and Father Moran is utterly bewitching and fascinating, and an instance of actors correctly taking over a film and the director allowing them the freedom, space and time with which to tell a story.

It is, then, almost humorously appropriate to consider the inherent artifice of the entire riveting conversation. By all accounts, Sands and Father Moran never spoke to one another, whereas it is clear that such events as IRA members being beaten, refusing to wear certain prison uniforms and going on hunger strikes are part of recorded history. In Hunger's major and outstanding concession to filmic progress and peregrination, it actually extols the virtues of the cinematically schematic derived by storytelling strategies and considerations of scenario. Unlike The Class, which was made intentionally visually unappealing by its director, Hunger is a film with several toes dipped in the waters of vérité filmmaking and mise-en-scene construction but with other toes hanging on to almost wheezing exhalations of exhilaratingly intense abstract artistry. That the most dazzling set-piece of Hunger almost perversely proves the efficacy of what may be loosely defined as “make-believe” is deeply paradoxical.

In the film's foggy, more asomatously focused, denouement, Sands allows his body to waste away. McQueen follows the process with a serviceable melange of the dispassionate and the assertive, engendering a cumulative tableau of a man gradually drifting away. Misty flashbacks to his childhood, the personal history from which he told the emotional story to Father Moran, abut the film's apparent moroseness in its consideration of a young man's life concluding long before it should have. The correlation to Jesus Christ becomes less distancing than it was earlier in the film—a manufactured line of dialogue from Sands in which he says that Christ's disciples were merely jumping on a bandwagon after Christ laid it all on the line himself diminishes their own respectively harsh fates and credentials for martyrdom—as McQueen visualizes Sands' earthly demise. Long, uninterrupted takes with sepia-toned dissolves overlapping atop them punctuates Sands' sixty-six days of deprivation. A flock of birds flying off represents Sands' soul taking flight in a sequence that at least borders on the clichéd, but, like so much of the film, makes itself at least stand apart through sheer force of will.

The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968)

2009-04-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

The Night They Raided Minsky's is an appropriate film to look over on April Fools' Day, as its narrative hinges on one large “trick” to be played on certain characters. William Friedkin's second feature film is an uneven but sweet and charming ode to the 1920s theaters of burlesque. As the film today exists in current form, it routinely cuts away from his own narrative and splices in many apparent pieces of footage from the time period itself, thick with grain and washed-out images. The screenplay, based on a book by Rowland Barber and written by Arnold Schulman, Sidney Michaels and Norman Lear, supplies a dangerously thin storyline, but the film is at its most fun when the mechanics of the picture are almost invisible, and mere gags and burlesque performances take the center stage.

Jason Robards, who plays central figure Raymond Paine, received mixed notices for The Night They Raided Minsky's, but today his performance seems stronger than it may have at the time of the film's release. Robards was never too much of a “leading man movie star” to diminish his own self-effacing and auto-critiquing tendencies; even in the testosterone-laden westerns in which he appeared, he often played characters either physically or psychologically wounded, such as the contemporaneous Once Upon a Time in the West, Hour of the Gun or The Ballad of Cable Hogue. With Minsky's, Robards allows his most winning attributes to mesh with his nearly continual semblance of debilitation—ever so slightly suave, his persona is crushed when confronted with hostility or projected dubiousness by others. It helps that Robards is given many of the film's best lines. When his longtime partner and friend, Chick Williams (an energetic Norman Wisdom), falls for the pulchritudinous Amish ingénue, Rachel Elizabeth Schpitendavel (a wide-eyed Britt Ekland), Robards' roguish huckster comedian undermines Chick's propriety. )(Which ties into their joined rendition of “Perfect Gentleman,” in which Robards' character sings along with Wisdom's about just how much of a gentleman he is. “You suffer from the three D's,” Raymond tells Chick, “you're decent, devoted and dependable. Good qualities in a dog—disastrous in a man.” He goes on: “Women love bastards. I am a BFC: Bastard First Class.” Robards likewise shines in a long scene in which he approaches a woman at the local deli—where a significant portion of the film's events take place—only to be surprised when her husband returns from the restroom. So Raymond smooth-talks the husband and is as smooth as the skin of a newborn. The humor is obvious but Robards is too excellent when at his best in this film to dismiss, balancing his motor-mouthed shtick with the fearfulness behind it.

Ekland is fine as the young runaway Amish woman who is blinded by the dazzling marquee. As Raymond and Chick contest one another over her affections, Ekland's debatable one-note performance never feels particularly calculated, which is key in making it fit with the long line of young ingénues who were transfixed on the idea of becoming a star of show-business. Considered unqualified for burlesque, Ekland's Rachel is manipulated by the scheming Raymond; his bright idea is to have her perform one night after being billed as “Mademoiselle Fifi,” the French starlet and heroine of pornographic literature, who is, it is constantly noted in her billing, “The Girl Who Drove a Thousand Frenchmen Wild.” Raymond figures Rachel will do what she has done in her Pennsylvania Amish community—perform a Biblical dance rather than a bawdy number. Thus, Secretary for the Suppression of Vice Vance Fowler (Denholm Elliott), determined to raid Minsky's in the event of Mademoiselle Fifi's appearance, will have no reason to shut the establishment down and Raymond's job will be safe.

Two other welcome performers are Joseph Wiseman and Elliot Gould as the father and son (Louis and Billy Minsky), who repeatedly enliven the picture. Wiseman and Gould play their parts as Jewish businessmen with significant emphasis on their ethnicity. The Night They Raided Minsky's pokes some fun at religion in general, as Rachel's stern and unforgiving Amish father, Jacob Schpitendavel (Harry Andrews), hunt her down and finally finds himself confronted with Wiseman's Louis Minsky. Louis educating two other religious men about the identities of each finger's meaning in religious terminology evokes laughter. The picture may satirize stoically religious individuals, but at this late point in the film, it does so with a genial warmth.

The Night They Raided Minsky's was released just as Hollywood films had largely been let loose; censorship in American cinema was coming to an end. So it is particularly amusing to view Minsky's as the film examines a different kind of show-biz thriving under the threatening thumb of censorship. As Elliott's Fowler chastises the men who run Minsky's, he is asked what he finds so objectionable. “Well, the women... They jiggle,” he remarks. The film is hilariously accurate in its depiction of the censoring force having to attend every show and write down in explicit detail what is to be considered lewd and improper.

Reportedly, Friedkin's cut of The Night They Raided Minsky's was a considerably different film from the eventually released 1968 picture—Friedkin's first cut was, it was almost universally agreed, a complete disaster. Editor Ralph Rosenblum worked on the film in postproduction for over a year, finding a coherent film through his assiduousness. Some may assume the concept of cutting to old footage was Friedkin's idea—perhaps an homage to Jean-Luc Godard's stylistics—but it was indeed Rosenblum who came up with the idea himself. Rosenblum, in effect, re-directed the film himself and made an alternative version of Minsky's which is today the one actually seen.

Some of the film's finest moments are simply of Robards and Wisdom engaging in song and dance with one another. The soundtrack is stuffed with modern classics as well as some songs by Lee Adams (the score was provided by Charles Strouse). The agreeable combination Robards' wise-guy next to Wisdom's naïve optimist makes The Night They Raided Minsky's seem so effortlessly mounted, though it actually was one of Hollywood's most painful births; likewise, Robards' history as a great stage actor and Wisdom's history as a great British comedian and music-hall star must have paid dividends as they excel at projecting an immediacy that draws in a live audience. Minsky's isn't a grand time at the movies, but it is fast, fun and frank—a valentine to all things just vaguely fulsome.

Point Break (1991)

2009-03-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break has been labeled many things. Frequently dismissed as a crassly commercial big-budgeted actioner, a rather silly, shallow over-the-top, action thriller with generous helpings of comedy, New Age philosophizing and romance, with protracted focus on surfing in the Los Angeles area, starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, many critics seem to have either missed or perhaps scoffed at the contributions of the film's helmer, Kathryn Bigelow. Point Break's screenplay—by Rick King and Peter Iliff—is bursting at the seams with clichés and stereotypes, but Bigelow's direction allows for the characters to be predominantly expressed through cinematic shorthand. Some sections of the script—no, many sections of the script—are too talky, but whenever Bigelow has the opportunity, she cuts down the excess of words by supplying a rich palette of a marvelously packed 2:35 'Scope widescreen frame, ceaselessly offering a supremely confident brand of action-filmmaking. Rarely has an action filmmaker utilized this aspect ratio with as much gusto; Bigelow makes the 'Scope letterbox format a necessity, squeezing in as much geographical information as possible. Today's speed-freak fast-cutting action directors could take many pointers from Bigelow on how to sustain tension through genuinely comprehensible shooting of action sequences, not to mention merely allowing the audience to understand what is occurring and to whom it is occurring. The 'Scope aspect ratio gives her, and director of photography Donald Peterman, free rein. In one early exquisite shot, for instance, Bigelow and Peterman frame a group of bank robbers wearing masks (of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan) as one unified group, separating and dispersing away from one another as they briefly seize a bank. Bigelow utilizes the spatial gulfs between characters to connote geography.

Considered the most famous alum of the San Francisco Art Institute, Bigelow matriculated as a painter. With her motion pictures, she displays the visual adroitness that flaunts her conception of the screen as a canvas. Action for her is not to be used to engender a whirling, disorienting blur for the viewer; in Point Break, for instance, her framing of surfing sequences is perfectly symmetrical, capturing Reeves' FBI agent Johnny Utah's development as a surfer with logical consistency. Shooting the horizon from beaches, Bigelow's painting talents must have helped significantly in mirthfully playing with the amplitude of space, locational margins and the breadth of artistic panels. Whether surfing seems like a fun hobby or not, Bigelow renders it with an air of excitement and awe.

Critics who mistake plot for meaning and theme tirelessly go about thrashing Point Break's borderline mindless lack of logic. Agent Utah, it is said, finished second in his class at Quantico, yet seems like a remarkably ineffective and unintelligent individual. Repeatedly certain events transpire with very little to buttress them with rational motivation and purpose but for the desire to keep moving the story along. A veteran, comically burnt-out agent (Gary Busey, who wisely enjoys himself in his part) behaves quite inappropriately with great regularity in almost every manner conceivable. The film indulges itself in myriad tropes of the crime thriller, with an overbearing FBI boss played by John McGinley periodically chewing out his subordinates' derrieres.

What makes Point Break.... break free from becoming just another derivative action extravaganza is Bigelow's virtuosity. As in the vampire cult film Near Dark, Bigelow laces her action with impressive flurries of technique. The most distinguishing trademark she applies to the dyspeptic proceedings is a bracing, breathless point-of-view perspective—mainly Utah's—as in a frenzied chase on foot through a Los Angeles neighborhood. By placing the viewer in the action, Bigelow emphatically connects the vista (typified by the many surfing scenes of the film's first stretch) to the individual (from which more and more of the film is seen).

The most wondrously exhilarating marrying of these respective elements is a tremendous sky-diving scene, in which Reeves' Utah descends from an airplane, joining the group of bank robbers with whom he has been undercover for some time. It is here where Point Break achieves something approximating sublimeness: like Enoch, the extraordinary mortal elevated to the status of the angelic, Utah joins his newfound friends/technical enemies in heaven, looking down upon the earth. Bigelow shifts perspectives with a fluid ease, once again placing the spectator perfectly into the heart of the action while completely detailing the entire panorama that encompasses the viewpoint (of a painter, an artist, an FBI agent...). This is bravura, accomplished and dazzlingly crafted filmmaking, lent to a deliriously preposterous high concept.

Bigelow's mise-en-scene accentuates the “small scenes” as well. One of the best sequences of Point Break is actually a nighttime beach football game. The camera finds itself arranged amidst the ongoing struggle as one player passes the ball to another. Hurriedly, Bigelow complements the topographic mastery with which she gifts the film with a kaleidoscopic recording of every physical ruction. What finally makes Bigelow's artfully composed helming of human movement come alive is the thematic weight that lurks beneath the superficies of the action. Reeves' FBI agent is drawn to the enigmatic, Zen-like leader of the bank-robbing surfers, Swayze's enigmatically self-named Bodhi. Swayze's charismatic performance is the film's most successful addition to Bigelow's propulsive filmic appliqué, with his surfer looks and steely cerulean eyes, he practically begs both Utah and the audience to join him in his rambunctious daredevil shenanigans. When Utah tackles the running Bodhi in the surf of the ocean, those who love Bodhi express anger with Utah, but Bodhi tells them who he is—a former college football quarterback star. In a confrontation with a group of beach-terrorizing brutes, Utah has to be rescued by Bodhi, who admires the undercover agent's fearlessness. Little by little, scene by the scene, Bigelow manages to sustain a fastidious telling of literally fabulous friendship between men. Bigelow's concerns suggest a woman truly, almost heedlessly, interested in the ties and connections between cosmetically adversarial men. As in Near Dark and Blue Steel, and later in the forgettable K-19: The Widowmaker, Bigelow is—most fittingly for a female director rightly celebrated for her breathtaking command of action—an expert fabulist of unlikely male bonding.

Coraline (2009)

2009-03-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

At a time when too many animated family films needlessly coddle children at the expense of educating them through the mythical art of storytelling, along comes Coraline, which seems to stand athwart so many of the easy, uncomplicated children films routinely pumped out—a kind of cinematic over-medication of immediately attractive sights that are time-tested. A crushingly obvious example would be the recent Monsters vs. Aliens, which does nothing less (and certainly nothing more) than promise every child lots and lots of monsters and aliens on the screen. The story and characters do not matter in all too many instances; the pablum tacked on to make the experience at least nominally cohesive is rarely meaningful. Coraline, however, is a veritable one-film renaissance of family movie-making: Henry Selick's more intense, yet subtly transcribed, treatment of fairytale touches upon something more peculiar and universal all at once, because it seems legitimately childlike.

Selick's film is based on Neil Gaiman's book, and as in Selick's adaptation of the eccentric children's writer Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach (1996), Selick preserves the spirit of the source material by giving it literally moving, cinematic life without robbing it of its quintessence. Coraline is a rather unnervingly eerie story about a pre-teen girl (voiced here by Dakota Fanning) who finds her parents unpalatable to her wishes and desires. Her mother (a terrific Teri Hatcher) ignores her and the food she makes for her is uninspired; her father (John Hodgman) is too busy at his computer for his work to spend much time with her. Coraline sees herself as a child alone, in a gray, downcast world. If only she could escape.

It could be said that Coraline is perfect children's nightmare fodder because Selick makes the film follow nearly flawless nightmare-logic. In an impressive credits sequence that opens the film, a pair of menacing metallic hands hurriedly de-construct a doll, pulling out its button eyes and in an act that may linger in the minds of children, rip the innards of the doll out, after which the doll is re-fashioned, unmistakably looking like the film's heroine. Coraline as a narrative incisively comments on the remaking of children—through sundry forms of medication, for instance—as “happy.” Gaiman's story supersedes the potentially banal conclusion to be reached from his own tale (which can admittedly be useful as the film's tag-line—“Be careful what you wish for”); Coraline is in part about systematic perfecting of the corporeal at the expense of the spirit's obliteration. When little Coraline discovers a secret passageway to an alternate world, she initially believes she has found a panacea; her “Other Mother” (again voiced by Hatcher) cooks lavishly spectacular meals for her, and her “Other Father” (Hodgman, again) helps oversee a breathtaking garden that plays into the worst, most narcissistic impulses of children.

The blue-haired Coraline is put through the emotional wringer that hurts the most. Acceptance may be the story's most pointed “message”: at last, Coraline must begrudgingly accept her parents, as well as the strange and bizarre cast of neighborhood characters (two washed-up, has-been burlesque queens, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible and a hilarious Russian acrobat and trapeze artist named Mr. Bobinsky voiced by Ian McShane) who inhabit her world. The “Other World” characters are more superficially arresting, with more colorful personalities, but the superannuated qualities of the “real world” characters is gradually viewed in a new, radicalized light once Coraline realizes that the “Other World” is one horrifying snare run by the “Other Mother.” Only a talking black cat (perfectly voiced by Keith David) can move about each world along with Coraline, bringing childhood imagery full circle through gentle subversion: that which appears evil, such as a notorious haunter of bad luck like the black cat, proves indispensable to fighting against what looks like a heaven-sent paradise.

Dreadful menace permeates Coraline, and even the way in which Coraline moves about the Narnia- or Secret Garden-like entranceway connotes trepidation and tumult. To make this precisely, cinematically tangible, Selick utilizes stop-motion animation, which was an enriching choice. Like Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation, or perhaps the late Stan Winston's effects work, Selick's undertaking here bridges the human with the inhuman, bringing out an indelible cumulative effect that lends an uncommon verisimilitude to the fantastical. In one of the film's most bravura sequences, Coraline's “Other Father” leads her out to their garden, inviting the flowers to entrance the girl with their dancing. The scene, as well as a long, wonderful sequence in which the two show-business women—made younger and physically beautiful—in the fantasy world enthrall Coraline with a stunning number. Everything about Coraline's fantasy world seems so enticing, but the edifice of the entire facade proves to be one dishonest lure.

Like the merciless metallic hands at the film's opening, Selick brocades a textured, nuanced film. Informed by Gaiman's story, Coraline extrapolates what its imagery suggests: the “Other Mother” and her ilk are not only inhabitants of a child's fantasy world but also those who eagerly blind their progeny and others of the next generation, and therefore themselves. They exist in this world, and the blindness they inflict is just as painful in its many consequences as Hatcher's demonic alter-ego's obsession with replacing Coraline's eyes with buttons. As one ostensibly doomed character tells the blue-haired protagonist, “Find our eyes, and our souls will be free.” Thus, Selick, and Gaiman before him, provides the most elemental property of children's storytelling, wisely transmitting overwhelming concepts into perfectly accessible and understandable visual allegory, without reducing the potency of the amusing skein. The film powerfully stitches the truism that nothing is more pathetic than those who are so determined to enjoy themselves that they either help to create very industries based on such concepts or supply the demand for them. From Doctor Phil to the latest pill, to the “Other Mother,” faux contentment and happiness is not to be cherished or desired. If little Coraline can learn that, perhaps everyone can.

The Class (2008)

2009-03-30T14:15:00.000-07:00

Laurent Cantet's Palme d'Or-winning Entre les murs, or The Class, strives to be a vérité documentarian portrait of the choppy few ups and many downs of a school year for a French high school that hosts as its student body a largely immigrant population. The Class thankfully lacks the platitudinous chicanery of many a film to essay a teacher-classroom dichotomy-turned-symbiosis, resorting not to maudlin sentiment but rather a mostly absorbing day-to-day grind of a young teacher attempting to educate the unruly and rebellious students. The end result is a film that is, at once, both perfectly even in its tone and refusal to ever once be ludic or affected and quite uneven in its asperous machinations not of plot but of its multi-character study. Fortunately, the picture avails itself to give voice to both the avatar of authority and those whose resentment may slowly thaw into something more benign.

Arguably at the film's thematic heart is the Stoic Epictetus's famed comment, “Only the educated are free.” Today Epictetus may be viewed with an accommodating distance and suspicion—he did, after all, contend that a man should mourn a stranger's wife's death with the passion and angst with which he would be racked in the event of his own. Stoic extremism does test one's patience. Nevertheless, his averment on behalf of the import of education does bring The Class into a brighter context. It may be said that the film pivots around the best and worst aspects of Epictetus's numerous insights—for if the French teacher Francois Begaudeau were to view his students as mere vessels of logical, rational growth, would he care so dearly about their respective futures in French society?

The Class is fundamentally a modified documentary featuring a cast of students and the author of the book on which the film's screenplay (also co-written by him, along with Robin Campillo and director Laurent Cantet). Often penetrating, and always cognitively entertaining, one of the finest aspects of The Class is the remarkably organic way in which classroom discussions break out, diverting and darting about in myriad directions—with frequently unfortunate results. Begaudeau has nearly ceaseless difficulty in maintaining comprehensive order, without which the classroom quickly disintegrates into open hostilities between students, and all too often finds itself manifested in insolence and disrespect toward him. The mainly immigrant student population is comprised of a vividly drawn disparate group of individuals, such as Souleymane, a confrontational Malian Muslim, a black girl named Khoumba whose relationship with Begaudeau is quite rocky, Esmeralda, a loud and disruptive girl who enjoys teasing her teacher, Wei, a bright Chinese immigrant who wonders whether many of his peers understand the concept of shame and Carl, a Caribbean who joins the class later in the year after having been expelled from other schools.

The subtlest and most sublime moment of the film is one in which the class is reading aloud from Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. Khoumba has become increasingly unruly and abrasive in her demeanor and language with Begaudeau. When he calls on Khoumba to read from the book, she refuses, making Begaudeau angry and disappointed with her. Telling her to meet him after class, and allowing another student to read in her stead, the verbalized text from Frank's diary underlines what Khoumba is going through herself, as a girl who is seen in ways that obscure the truer image of her. It is an exceptionally rendered scene, punctuated by the after-class encounter in which Khoumba apologizes to Begaudeau only to leave, telling him as she departs that she did not mean it. Begaudeau's irritation and genuine distress are palpable.

The Class's “plot,” as such, is made up of various strands that are pushed along by individual students. Souleymane is considered a poor student by all of his teachers, but Begaudeau speaks up for him, noting that despite his academic deficiencies, he occasionally demonstrates a willingness to engage, and to be engaged. The film's most tender scene is of Begaudeau encouraging Souleymane in the posting of personal photographs of himself and his loved ones, culminating with the teacher telling the other students to take a look at Souleymane's work. Ironically, the film's most intense twist occurs when the two “class reps,” Esmeralda and a pretty French girl named Louise—whose job is to represent the class at faculty meetings—inform the other students what the teachers have said about their academic performances. At the meeting Begaudeau once again defended Souleymane, while admitting that he is “academically limited.” Esmeralda and Louise tell Souleymane about Begaudeau's most disparaging remark, precipitating a moment of havoc from which the final act of the film reels.

In this fraught environment of sociological and cultural conflict, the actions of Esmeralda and Louise seem to suggest that the very idealism and warmth with which Begaudeau views the students—always attempting to see the best in them and defending them to his colleagues—is perhaps misplaced. His efforts to treat the students almost as peers repeatedly appear to backfire, and it may be said that the very concept of “class reps,” for instance, is rebutted as almost senseless by Cantet's film. These, and other matters, are not offered definitive editorializing by the filmmakers, but in this case the film's thematic stimulation gives reason to make plausible assumptions about from which perspective the film is viewing such fixtures of modern schooling. Esmeralda and Louise's behavior impels Begaudeau to momentarily lose his patience and temper, which results in disaster.

The Class has been viewed as an important film; a keenly artful sociopolitical and sociocultural examination of modern French society and its apparent problems. Multiculturalism in France has achieved certain historical laudatory results, but for many of the students of today who do not view themselves as French and contend that the entire educational system is not far removed from the French imperialism of, say, West Africa, in which white Frenchmen were tasked with instructing Africans with the desire of making them into Frenchmen themselves, problems persist. In a way, The Class recalls the 2002 documentary Entre et Avoir in its chronicling of an entire academic school year, but at its absolute darkest there are hints of Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995), which explored the most frightening realities of modern urban French society. Animosity between a social order controlled by liberal French bureaucrats who insist their good intentions can erase matters of tribalism and ethnic and religious conflict and the immigrant population that seethes under what they interpret as cultural aggression has exploded, most notably around the issues of economic opportunity in France's class-based social scheme. At the film's sad end, a girl walks up to Begaudeau and tells him she did not learn anything all year. She hopes she does not have to be absorbed into the systematic directing of students into vocational training. The desperation she feels is but one of many microcosms the film looks at, and ultimately, its most important.

Blood Simple (1984)

2009-03-25T15:30:00.000-07:00

“The world is full of complainers. An' the fact is, nothin' comes with a guarantee. Now I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, the President of the United States or Man of the Year, something can all go wrong. Now go on ahead, ya know, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, 'n watch 'im fly. Now, in Russia, they got it all mapped out so that everybody pulls for everybody else... that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, an' down here... you're on your own.”

The film begins with melancholic, almost rueful, narration, visually matched with shots of a long, barren and desolate Texas road. Later, characters will dwell underneath ominous ceiling fans, which seem to hauntingly view down upon the hapless. The camera, fluid but controlled, focuses on doors, particularly at nighttime, heightening the palpable fear of who or what is lurking behind them. A blade of light slicing through the darkness underneath a door is snuffed out. An emphasis on the patulous Texas outdoors pervades the film, contrasted and juxtaposed with the stifling, closed interiors in which people struggle. Shots of cowboy boots populate much of the picture. Blood is found on the ground with great regularity. Otherwise decent people make highly unfortunate decisions. An otherworldly creature mercilessly stalks his prey. This, however, is not No Country for Old Men but rather Blood Simple, the 1984 film debut for Joel and Ethan Coen.

Blood Simple is a subtly mind-bending neo-noir crime thriller in which communication is hampered by circumstance and refuge is denied by the apparent intervention of fate. The picture, photographed with blue-tinted deliriousness by Barry Sonnenfeld, is laced with an oneiric imperishability of location and personage, which meticulously creates a moony pattern that courses through the picture—and the Coen oeuvre entire. Characters move through the film like stationary objects pushed, as they are compelled to vacate their respective natural habitats. As will be proven true with their later efforts, Blood Simple demonstrably essays the Coens' obsessions and idiosyncrasies, their fixations and concerns. As a debut, the film is as pure and distilled an introductory declaratory statement as any before or since.

After the film's dry, almost supernatural opening narration, Blood Simple brings its perspective, literally, with Ray and Abby (John Getz and Frances McDormand) driving at night. The road is visible again, and “The Road” will remain a recurring Coen motif. Abby's first line informs where the picture's plot is headed: her possessive husband gave her a .38 handgun as a gift, but she fears she would use it on him if she did not leave him. The camera remains behind Ray and Abby, he behind the steering wheel of his car, she in the passenger seat. The windshield is spattered with rain, which is furiously flung off by the windshield wipers. With each passing car's briefly blinding headlights moving past them, the main cast members have their names flash against the black of night in cool blue.

The Coens' penchant for quirky, offbeat humor—here typically slathered atop the film's laconic dialogue—makes Blood Simple less familiar than its superficially derivative story would suggest. Rooted in the work of James M. Cain, Jim Thompson and other authors of stories about lust and murder, Blood Simple takes on a twisted viewpoint characterized by mordant humor and razor-sharp wit. As Abby's husband, owner of the bar at which Ray works, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), confronts Ray in the back of the bar, the Coens use a bug-zapper to simultaneously underline and subvert Marty's dramatic lines. “You think I'm funny, I'm an asshole? No, no, no... what's funny is her... what's funny is, I had you two followed because if it's not you she's sleeping with, it's somebody else... what's funny is when she gives you that look and says, 'I don't know what you're talkin' 'bout, Ray. I ain't done nothin' funny.' But the funniest thing to me is... you think she came back here for you... That's what's fucking funny!” The “bug-zapper” humorously emits its incongruously appropriate and inappropriate noise just as Marty concludes his angry, jealous speech, poking fun at the character, campy films with thunder and lightning emphasizing characters' dramatic lines and the film itself, with its budgetary limitations and ostensible lack of scope.

After having a finger broken by his wife in an ugly front-yard confrontation—masterfully captured with a racing, fevered camera—Marty seeks out the man he hired to follow Ray and Abby, sleazy private investigator Loren Visser (played with villainously cretinous relish by a superb M. Emmett Walsh). Visser is the Coens' first outsider—less so in terms of his geographical and cultural identity and more so in his complete lack of moral boundaries (the theme would become increasingly literalized in the Coen canon, culminating with the angel from hell, or at least some foreign country, Anton Chigurh, in No Country for Old Men). Visser is fat and sweaty with a devilish cackle and scaly, clammy features. Flies buzz around and about his face. Several of the best scenes in the entire Coen filmography are of Marty and Visser conversing, each holding the other in contempt as they go about their unseemly business. A terse, funny exchange buttresses the Coens' sensibility and interest. Marty: “I got a job for you.” Visser: “Well, if it's legal, and the pay's right, I'll do it.” Marty: “It's not strictly legal.” Visser: “Well, if it pays right, I'll do it.”

In its noirish iconography and air of morbidity, Blood Simple foreshadows the Coens' future efforts. Small-town Americana is the frequent home to Coen narratives, with its seemingly limpid innocence and relative tranquility being brutally invaded by outside forces, always unleashed by their bosses who egomaniacally call the shots behind their big desks—a Coen motif, from Nathan Arizona played by Trey Wilson unwittingly unleashing Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona to Jerry Lundegaard played by William H. Macy hiring Carl and Gaear to kidnap his own wife in Fargo to the crooked businessman in No Country for Old Men embodied by Stephen Root letting out the demon. In each case, and others, the man behind the big desk believes he can control his fate, and in every instance, the weapon they let loose proves to be uncontrollable. Often, they are even killed by the very demon they let out of the box. The crushing absence of empathy for others informs the Coens' fiendish rogues gallery. Like those who would follow him in the Coens' art, Visser is a serpentine phantasm, putting about in his Volkswagen Beetle. The exchange between Marty and Visser encapsulates what would be re-imagined in Police Chief Marge Gunderson's famed tabulation in Fargo: counting the victims, she concludes, “And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than money, ya know. Don'tcha know that?”

For Visser, like Peter Stormare's coldblooded sociopath, however, the temptation of money is too great to resist. Which is what, in part, separates the voracious, beastly outsiders from the people who are victimized by their own bad luck and poor choices. Ray and Abby are unable to enjoy one another's company, as Marty successfully plants the seed of distrust in Ray's mind. Everything flows from that; and as Ray finds himself covering up a crime he believes Abby has committed, he becomes the most plaintive character of Coen sagas. Like H.I. McDunnough in Raising Arizona, and Tom Reagan in Miller's Crossing, and Llewellyn Moss in No Country for Old Men, each character loses a piece of their soul in sacrificing for those they love, in one way or another. In this picture, Ray and Abby misconstrue one another's motivations and hearts. Finally, when pressed by Ray, Abby states, “I don't know what you're talking about, Ray. I ain't done anything funny,” just as Marty predicted.

Symbolism and representation is to be found in Blood Simple's thematically rich visual subtext. Acknowledging the influence of Roman Polanski and specifically his The Tenant in crafting the horror of the nearly abandoned hotel in Barton Fink, Blood Simple's use of four rotting fish may be an homage to the Polanski picture Repulsion, in which a decaying rabbit mirrors the psychological state of the protagonist. The fish in Blood Simple fester and spoil with greater alacrity just as the film's storyline spirals out of control for all of the characters. In two perfectly corresponding shots, a flock of birds at a roadside lift off to the air, and, in the next shot, their cumulative shadow splashes against the road's morning daylight. Ceiling fans—one of which hypnotizes Marty, who appears to be dead in his chair as he stares at it—accentuate the film's sense of insularity and loneliness, as the devices connote futility and fatalism in the overpowering face of the oppressive Texas heat. The Coens use windows to communicate the naivete and contrasting innocence of Ray and Abby, whose windows are never curtained or covered as Visser watches them couple and sleep together. The windows of an apartment purchased by Abby appear like two gigantic, watchful eyes. Ray realizes only too late how feckless the two have been (“No curtains on the windows,”) as he stares out into the night through Abby's enormous windows.

Carter Burwell's simple, eerily repetitious score starkly conveys the picture's insidious tension and sense of overarching doom. The Coens' gripping aesthetic control—which was yet another sign of things to come—finds itself expressed in the glide of the camera, such as when it flies through a bar, and hovers upward to avoid a motionless drunk. In the film's most widely noted scene, a man crawls on the unforgiving hard pavement of a road, illuminated by passing headlights. Once again “The Road” becomes paramount as the wounded man continues to struggle, his body convulsing as he spews blood. Isolation, most recently revisited in No Country for Old Men, seems to close off the participants of the tale, so that the whole world in all of its moral and recondite complexity is reduced to a single series of events, which, as always in the Coen universe, seem equally predetermined and manipulated. As in their later work, Blood Simple offers the explanation that seems the most logical: choice results in what is frequently labeled “destiny”; chance and fate are acolytes of cognizant decisions. This makes the Coens more interesting than the behaviorist scientists they are often described as being (which is, as far as it goes, accurate). Ray may believe the worst about Abby but he chose to let Marty into his head; he chose to dispose of Marty on behalf of Abby; he chose to not alter his personality so much as to clearly explain what transpired during one of the film's most eventful evenings. People are who they are, the Coens freely admit—but their choices determine what they are. Javier Bardem's psychotic killer in No Country for Old Men chooses fate to be his idol, his golden calf, so by the end of the story it has chosen him.

Like the somewhat pitiable but whimsically fanciful H.I. in Raising Arizona describing the background of his relationship with Ed, or the corporate mountebank in The Hudsucker Proxy, or Sam Eliot's rambling, forgetful “The Stranger” in The Big Lebowski, or Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn't There—whose titular distinction makes his narration questionable at the outset—or Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, who confesses to Carla Jean Moss that his mind wanders, Blood Simple's narrator, the reptilian Visser is not to be trusted. In each case, their recollection of events or perspective of the same is severely limited. Indeed, each character seems to romanticize and nearly fetishize certain aspects of the events, or people, or places, about which they are speaking. Which, the Coens seem to gently remind the viewer, is only natural.

This narration, however, is predominantly limited in its usage, and is intrinsically a doorway through which the Coens seamlessly articulate the diverging portraitures of the world known, in which evil is inexplicable in almost all ways but its avarice (money is, after all, at the heart of the Coens' stories, the motivating force for the unscrupulous), and the world of the mind. The Coens' characters are endlessly fixated on better places, happier times and idyllic havens. Voiced by Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) in Miller's Crossing, the Coens are, not esoterically, but defiantly, almost contumaciously, fascinated by the “morality and ethics” into which they repeatedly delve. The Coens' comprehensive interest in these themes, however, does not reduce matters to mere abstract philosophical concepts. Finding a more Aristotelian vein in which to survey these considerations and quandaries, the Coens are not interested in presumptuously crafting an artistic equivalent to Descartes' call for a rationalist revolution or Locke's insistence on creating a “moral algebra,” by which all problems of morality would be reduced to calculations of abstract formulas. There is a consistency to the Coens' compilation, but both the consequences and evaluations (judgments, though not incorrect, is probably too loaded a term) are not predestined. Successive good characters either perish or are wretchedly tormented in the Coens' embroidery, and many evil ones seem almost invincible, but for unforeseeable circumstance, or seeming mischance, or possibly plain bad luck. Yet which is which, and who is to say what shapes events on earth? Abby believes it is Marty, or an avenging ghost of Marty, stalking her in the film's final sequence, completely unaware of the truth. H.I. manages to pull a grenade pin, perhaps by accident, as Smalls punches him away. Marge follows through on a hunch because of an old friend's lies, and then stumbles on one of the perpetrators disposing of his accomplice. In The Ladykillers, G.H. Dorr and his colleagues are flicked away as though they are ants annoying God. Chigurh had his eyes off the road at the worst possible time. In each case, the killers and criminals have largely already triumphed or failed in their objective (usually succeeding insofar as their original scheme goes, only to encounter greater asperity and trouble).

In Blood Simple's taut denouement—the final movement between McDormand's Abby and Walsh's Visser—the Coen predisposition becomes evident, and speaks volumes about their cinema. Like the scene in which Smalls kills little, harmless creatures (“He was especially cruel to little things,” H.I. tells the viewer, as he seems to have manufactured Smalls out of a nightmare), and especially the horrifying scene in which Carl and Gaear nonchalantly break into the unsuspecting Mrs. Lundegaard's home, and Anton Chigurh confabulating with Carla Jean in her own home, the chimerical meets the quotidian, the poisonous shadows the obedient and kindhearted. Blood Simple is charged, eccentrically meticulous filmmaking—precise and loose, focused and in disarray all at once. The Coens' affinity for marrying the most apparently antithetical properties to one another—tragedy and quirkiness, fear and amusement, the anagogic and the everyday—may very well stem from the very texture of their cinematic dissertations on the conflicting characters they observe. Like the all-powerful dirty money in No Country for Old Men, which seems to corrupt all who cross its path, the efficacy of the Coens' more mature filmic disquisitions is arrestingly potent, luring the viewer like Marty's little illicit offering to Mr. Visser.

Waltz With Bashir (2008)

2009-03-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

“To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of 'government'; they create desolation and call it peace.”

—Tacitus

There is a single, indelible moment—among many others—in Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir that has lingered ever since the screen finally faded out. An Israeli soldier has run away from Palestinians who have shot down his fellow Israeli soldiers as they ran off toward the Mediterranean Sea from an ambush. This one Israeli soldier has hidden from the group of Palestinians—who successfully scared off an Israeli tank, which retreated from the scene—for hours on the Lebanese beach. Finally, as night descends on the Middle East, the Israeli begins to crawl like an animal to the water. Slipping into the soothingly lush Mediterranean water, the Israeli drifts far out, then turns leftward (southward), hoping to swim back to friendly territory. For what seems like an eternity, the soldier is a lone, solitary figure literally amidst a sea—not of turmoil as in most films (live-action and animated alike), but of refuge, of salvation, of escape. As the now-older man explains the remarkable story of his experience in the 1982 Israeli war in Lebanon, speaking of the sea and how he used it to rescue himself, Folman's animated sea, with the geographically correct shoreline landmass appearing in the distance like a disquietingly ominous sleeping beast, simply overwhelms the screen. It is unlike anything recently seen in a cinema—including the using of Hurricane Katrina for the sake of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's final elegiac shot—and is some of the most tremendously effective suspense in quite some time.

It became apparent, as the scene unfolded, that Folman was, on a comparatively microcosmic level, doing here what he was endeavoring to for the film entire: he was inverting all expectations, all biases, all conventions, all predispositions. This includes the most innately inherent—mere, nebulous beliefs considered in purely ocular compositions. The sea has been and continues to be frequently utilized in literature, poetry, painting, drawing, sculpture and cinema to connote tumult and danger. The open water has been made to look like a horrible place to be, including in works that exploit common fear of the unknown like Jaws. Like many a tantalizing visage, the sea seems to forever obscure its more mysterious and frightening traits, including the many living things which call it home. In Waltz With Bashir, however, after (literally) bringing to the surface a huge, naked and voluptuously beautiful woman who comes to the aid of another Israeli soldier from the depths of the sea, Folman revisits the sea and extrapolates the sea's connection to people, and vice versa. Essaying migration, war and exodus, Folman mercurially pivots his film's myriad themes through the ever-present proximity of the sea to the bloodying of the Middle Eastern soil.

Indeed, the film's protagonist, Ari Folman himself (his 1982 self animated), slowly ascends with two fellow naked Israeli soldiers from the Mediterranean, like three separate forms of life moving to survive, lifting themselves out of the primordial liquid, and finally walking upright to the treacherous land before them. The animation is stark and gorgeous, with an orange-tinged yellow penumbra from the sky lighting the entire imposing (and recurring) scene. This is supremely confident, spare animated filmmaking and almost perceptively obtuse in its singular objective. Many a film has stated as vociferously as possible—“war is awful”—but Folman takes an incisively richer perspective (his own) and allows it to remain, writ small.

In another inversion of cliché, it is Folman himself who cannot remember the specter that must have been so unspeakably horrible he has suppressed it. This is a tortured soldier, yes, but his dreams are not of the actual atrocities and barbarities of “war”; the aforementioned ascension out of the peaceful, serene and tranquil into the most ungodly inferno is what he remembers, all he has allowed himself to retain. As he interviews one Israeli army friend after another, and pieces begin to slowly stick to one another and congeal, the film meticulously bridges the gaps between individuals' respective memories into one massive, oneiric painting. The accounts are all delivered through the voices of the disparate former soldiers, and though music is repeatedly used to great effect, the Hebrew language, with its guttural piquancy and ancient, embedded wisdom, supplies an accomplished auditory soundtrack all by itself.

The visuals are pulsating and powerfully pieced together. The animation is never less than wholly expert in its gradations of color—from the aquamarine blues and greens of the nighttime sojourns to the sea, to the dirty, dusty browns of so many buildings and devastated roads. Buildings and people are in scale, but frequently placed together in surreal panels that accentuate the individual over the setting but never at the expense of the film's haunting verisimilitude. The characters' faces are haunting—often jaundiced and visibly tormented. One character who has an affinity for petuly oil (used by him so that his men could always know where he was) looks like a bald, nearly emotionless gargoyle.

Waltz With Bashir has doubtless been compared to Rashomon and rightly so—the picture's competing memorial visions abundantly endow the proceedings with an intoxicating legerdemain of narrative and documentary filmmaking itself (which Folman has pursued before in Israel). Pregnant pauses in dialogue are unusually discomfiting; former soldiers, who have largely succeeded in moving past the deplorable experience, occasionally struggle to continue their stories, or have selectively edited out certain events too psychologically punishing. (Folman, fascinatingly, has done this more than anyone else.) One soldier's nightmare of twenty-six dogs demanding vengeance for having been killed by an Israeli soldier inaugurates the filmic action. Folman's inquiry into the self, into the mind, and into those with whom he shares an ineffable bond, is one of a consummately Judaic moral imperative. Just as the fear that each particle of memory may be inassimilable and useless to the whole pervades the film's most fiercely unnerved core, Folman manages to continue onward.

What finally bubbles to the surface of that alluring, seductively glistening sea is not an animated figure but a voice birthed from conscience. Not since Steven Spielberg's Munich has the Biblical pursual of Jewish ends at the expense of Jewish ideals been so cinematically palpable. The loss of righteousness for the Jewish State in permitting the 1982 genocide to take place was a heinously personal loss of righteousness for those who were charged with carrying it out. In vanquishing the ambiguously defined “enemy,” the victors in this case—firing flares and controlling the perimeters of the refugee camps for the proxy fighting force of Christian Phalangists—were in many ways the spiritual losers. The massacre of Sabra and Shatila, Folman finally reveals in a denouement of shockingly pained sorrow, may have butchered innocent Palestinians, but it left an eternal wound on the nation of Israel and himself.

Watchmen (2009)

2009-03-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

Watchmen is a long, boring film cranked out by Zach Snyder, based on the comic book by Alan Moore and David Gibbons which has gone unread by this writer. Everything about Watchmen the film seems animated by its determination to be some kind of meta commentary on—what, exactly? Comic book films? Action movies? Vigilantism? Twentieth century American history? Reagan's America? All of that, and none of that; Snyder is, seemingly, the cinematic definition of a dilettante, a fellow whose visuals, for instance, serve little purpose but to amaze and stun, or at least repetitiously wash the audience in the computer-generated imagery as in his adaptation of Frank Miller's 300. Likely fancying himself an enfant terrible, Snyder seems completely oblivious to the themes of the comic books from which he is making his films. Snyder's 300 was reportedly a painstakingly faithful adaptation of Frank Miller's “graphic novel”; Watchmen's fidelity to the source material has instigated much debate about whether or not, or to which degree, Snyder's film has remained faithful to Moore's original work.

It must be reiterated: everything about Snyder's new film is, apparently, aiming to convey a meta annotation, but Snyder's dearth of originality and finesse stifle his Watchmen. This is, after all, a comic book movie in which the villain—whose idols fluctuate between Alexander the Great and Ramses II—says, “I'm not a comic book villain.” The villain looks exactly like a comic book villain and behaves just like one—in appearance and social strata (blonde, handsome, charismatic, rich, brilliant and shot from low angle), he firmly belongs to a long line of villains, and perhaps that is the point. That same question mark lingers over almost everything about Watchmen. Are large swathes of the dialogue deliberately atrocious beyond the outskirts of camp on purpose—making ample fun at the very form in which Snyder and company are indulging? Or is it unintentional? Is all of the dialogue directly from the comic book?

Evidently disbelieving in the conservative thinker Richard Weaver's maxim, “Ideas have consequences,” Snyder darts from an ostensibly neoconservative dream like 300 to what seems like a left-leaning nightmare with Watchmen in which Richard Nixon enjoys a hold on the presidency into the 1980s not unlike Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945, and America won the Vietnam War so, as one especially wretched character feverishly notes, it would not go insane from the loss. This is not unlike Moore's dystopian England-based fantasy, "V for Vendetta," also written in the 1980s, with the heirs to Margaret Thatcher's government creating a fascistic police state that remains in 1997 with the ideal of gestalt serving as its—quite literally—organizing principle. (Moore would complain about the 2006 film adaptation for its cowardice in taking an England-based story and transmitting unmistakable American liberal concerns under George W. Bush to its telling.) Snyder seems to not care about the political undercurrents of his films, so long as he can slam on the brakes with slow-motion as his protagonists literally beat their adversaries to a pulp and tear them limb from limb.

In complete unison, screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse have spun an over-plotted and under-written film, which wearies its audience for little reward and diminishing dividends after an admittedly intriguing prologue. Uncertain of what properties of the Moore creation have been abandoned or carried over, one wonders whether or not a longer running time would have helped the film come together. As is, the only character in the film whose back-story and motivations seem wholly clear is Rorschach, who happens to be performed with an alleviating sharpness by Jackie Earle Haley, but the film goes into exhausting depth, journeying through all of the various Watchmen and their origins (sans poor Patrick Wilson's Nite Owl II, the group's resident milquetoast). Haley, however, has the benefit of playing the saga's one truly juicy part—but at least he brightens the film with his machismo-laden, tough-guy appearances.

In truth, Snyder's self-references are probably the most smugly annoying part of Watchmen. First, in the long opening scene's battle, a digit on a door is knocked off, leaving the number “300,” naturally shot in slow-motion. Later, amidst a panoply of television sets on which various films are visible, the 1962 movie The 300 Spartans is playing. Other keynotes seem to be influenced by Moore's beliefs and realizations—such as an homage to The Outer Limits television show at the film's end, as Moore purportedly realized that his “Watchmen” epic bore many similarities to the famed episode “The Architects of Fear.”

Yet just as frustrating is Snyder's inability to bring anything new to the proverbial table. There are numerous reasons why many view Christopher Nolan's Batman films as truly adult, even if they happen to be under the auspices of a PG-13 rating, and one reason for that is Nolan's adroitness of tying the thematic overtones with the rather crisp pacing demanded by his films' action-packed narrative movements. One imagines that if Snyder made The Dark Knight, Batman and the Joker would have actually met in a diner as the protagonists did in Heat. Indeed, one of the chief differences between the highly talented, borderline excessively deterministic Nolan and the adolescence of Snyder is that Nolan actually understands the themes of the films to which he is paying homage. Snyder's infantile tributes to Dr. Strangelove and Apocalypse Now (deeply, obsessively political films which transcended political platitudes: the anti-Watchmen) are paper thin—placed in Watchmen for no greater reason than to allow others to know that he has seen them. As is apparently the case with the adaptation itself, Snyder is so literal he chokes off any of his own film from breathing in some much-needed oxygen.

Alas, who cares? Render unto the fanboys what is the fanboys'. It is they to whom this film is gifted. So, with that in mind, Rorschach is a truly cool bad-ass; Dr. Manhattan is a sick creation; Carla Gugino is really hot, but kind of ancient (she's approaching forty—long live Jessica Alba or whomever); and Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl II is a decent continuation of the Peter Parker syndrome of nerds ultimately prevailing. Perhaps this would be the best time to seek out Moore's “Watchmen” to see which themes and nuances were lost in translation from page to screen. Humorously, the very alleged fanboys so enamored with the source material seem the least troubled by the film's own confusion. If one must be “in” to “get it,” perhaps getting in may be worth it. Or maybe not.

Gomorrah (2008)

2009-03-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Why is it that some films feel like absolute cheats, whether they are intentionally so or not? And why is it—regularly—true that those which aspire to simply record life in all of its unpleasantness and foulness seem the most insincere? Not that what they are depicting is untrue. Well, at the risk of quoting a certain masked avenger, sometimes the truth isn't good enough. Sometimes people deserve more.

The birthplace of the Renaissance, Italy has bestowed upon the world art and philosophy of voluminous invaluableness. The Renaissance era humanists were extolling the humanism (which it would not be called for several centuries) of the middle ages (or the studia humanitatis), the field of which covered nearly everything beyond theology and the natural sciences. Specifically linking the acclaimed Italian neo-realism of the mid-twentieth century to Renaissance art, it is crucial to keep in mind the Catholic bridging of the mortal and the divine. This is extensively evidenced in Renaissance art by Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Bramante, Titian and Raphael to name but a few titans.

So it cannot come as any great surprise that Italian cinema is intrinsically a deeply humanistic one. Routinely heralded as the precursor to neo-realism, Alessandro Blasetti's 1860 (1934) depicted Garibaldi's conquest of Sicily from the perspective of two peasants played by nonprofessional actors. Neo-realism, however, though manifestly dwelling in the realm of the corporeal, is stanchioned by the transcendence of a culturally pervasive ecumenical fealty. Ladri di biciclette or The Bicycle Thieves for but one example targets the minutia of postwar Italian poverty through the story of a man and his child, yet also reaches an indubitable spiritual elucidation. Marrying an earthly compassion and natural law to the Catholic culture of the world's host for Vatican City through art is perhaps Italy's most singular graceful and (fittingly) thorough characteristic through all of its art, emanating from the Catholic cogitation itself.

Consequently, the recent Italian blockbuster Gomorrah is an even greater disappointment considering its national origin than it would be otherwise. Drab, dull and dire, Gomorrah is another one of those ugly films that look like they were shot on 16 MM (as Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler actually was), but without any kind of counterbalancing incentive to watch the entirety of the picture aside from being fair to it. Italy, like most of Europe's nations (the most outstanding exception being Muslim Albania), is post-religious in its prevalent culture today, and most Italian films have become less and less anagogic as a result. Gomorrah, though ironically taking its title from the damned Biblical city, has no otherworldly pulse or even a hint of such. That may be writer-camera operator-director Matteo Garrone's scheme—to make a film entirely devoid of any hope, both bodily and beyond—but the effect is one of great, uninvolving tedium.

Some critics have evidently championed Gomorrah because this chronicle of the Camorra crime organization of Naples is the anti-Godfather, a bleak and starkly unromantic telling of the true Mafia in all of its depraved manifestations. However, the picture is only moderately worthwhile in one regard, which is its snapshot-like pictograph of a beleaguered city and the criminals who feast on it like scavengers assaulting a carcass. The film strives to make some scathing points about gangster films entire, particularly in its transparent juxtaposition of the fantasy that enthralls two idiotic Tony Montana-worshipers and Camorra gang recruits with the blighted, impoverished and crime-infested hellishness that Garrone's unblinking camera records. The entire affair reeks of gratuitous violence, such as an unnecessary, completely unconnected opening teaser passage in which a bunch of thugs murder a bunch of other thugs in a tanning salon.

Garrone's quasi-vérité stylistic is, theoretically, intended to bring the viewer up close to the events the film languorously tracks, but there is both too much and too little consistency of visualization to make anything look either as interesting or as pedestrian as they are probably meant to look. When a boy walks toward a camera as murder occurs in the background, Garrone finally creates a memorable image. Yet everything possibly interesting is stifled by too many plots (five in all, but they feel like ten) and one senses that Garrone and his large team of fellow screenwriters (Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio, Massimo Gaudioso and Roberto Saviano, the latter providing the book from which the entire enterprise emerged) feel so obligated to cram in as much information as possible that the film cannot support all of its ambitions. This is proven by nothing less than the picture's conclusion, which meekly flashes a series of facts and statistics—presumably straight out of Saviano's book—as though the film's educational arsenal required one last textual barrage atop all of the scenes of insidious corruption, violent mayhem and licentiousness. Indeed, perhaps Garrone recognizes what is sadly evident—his film is at best a dissatisfying compilation of truisms that ultimately lead to nowhere but frustration. Myth is rightly viewed through a skeptical prism here, and Hollywood films which have glorified the gangster lifestyle from the 1930s to the 2000s should not be the only perspective when exploring this subject matter. However, when pain, pointlessness and plight are unwed to anything interesting or merely colorful, the unappealing flatness of simply watching the world continue to destroy itself is far less than arresting.

My Blueberry Nights (2008)

2009-03-13T21:00:00.000-07:00

The art of Wong Kar-Wai, both luminous and numinous, is dauntlessly irrepressible in its romanticism. Like a body of water with a deceptively smooth surface against which a brilliant sheen of light playfully dances—under which a hidden bubbling tumult secretly resides—Wong's pictures are spectacles of bleating, bellowing amour. It is within these excursions into the matters of the heart that Wong's characters caress one another. Wong's characters are all in essence serving prison terms, and the prison constructed for them is one of neon lights reflecting in damp night streets. Time itself, and memory—that most quintessential human tool, gift and burden, which haunts, spoils and entices—are elastically bent until the characters no longer seem capable of steering their own ship. The bedazzling visualizations Wong employs are incisive punctuation marks, such as the skip-frame slow-motion and fast-motion or freeze-frame, with which he chronicles the perturbation and despondency, passion and depression. The tools at Wong's disposal do more than communicate—which is naturally their chiefest raison d'etre—they implement wordless poeticism, both amplifying and moderating moments either too nimble or serene or agonizing to ever be forgotten no matter how his characters, imprisoned by love, try. His most favored tool may be the folding dissolves, which he lays atop one another like a stack of steaming pancakes. It may be said that Wong's most repeated punctuation mark is a visual realization of an ellipses. It is that ellipses that most distinguishes and beckons, and perhaps even frustrates those unacquainted or impatient with the director's marked, seemingly innate form of ever-burgeoning nascence of being. To label it an indulgence is a poor misreading; Wong's cinema glistens like that body of water, in which the characters both struggle and thrive. Mastery of the waves, the ebb and flow, may be temporary (perhaps truly temporal), but the thrill guarantees that the characters slowly unlearn their own histories, and resume their swimming.

My Blueberry Nights, the director's first feature film made in English, shot in America, has been assailed by Wong aficionados and novices, admirers and critics, alike. For a significant portion of the critical establishment, the film was a gangrenous revelation—a fat, easily slain cow of a film, which provided them with sufficient armaments to assault Wong's entire filmography. The lack of subtitles, it was said, pulled the veneer of artfulness away; Wong was the artistic emperor with no clothes, a visual fetishist, perhaps, whose pictures were repetitive, exhaustingly lonely affairs (how simultaneously apropos and lethally invalid a reception, considering that repetition, loneliness and affairs in no small part constitute much of Wong's cinema). To hear the words in English reduced their import, and all connotations and ramifications tied to them were consequently harmed. What the move to English may have demonstrated, however, was that dialogue—scripted by Wong, and in this instance co-written by Lawrence Block—is at best secondary to the optical carnival of sensuous visages that radiate and pulsate with so much electricity. Unfortunately, that My Blueberry Nights is a more minor work than all that which has come before in Wong's oeuvre only seemed to ensure the film's lackluster critical fate.

The uncomplicated story is different for Wong—it's as much an ode to Americana as, say, The Chungking Express celebrates Hong Kong—and probably compelled critics to suspect him of pandering to the American audience. After all, surely Wong must be a cynical exploiter of emotion. Merely glancing through his entire canon, however, Wong is in actuality the world's most vital romantic filmmaker. That the circumstances of My Blueberry Nights seem almost archaically symmetrical—the advertising and most apparently acclaimed and cherished shot of the film (above) speaks to the film's aesthetic and narrative symmetry, which could be mistakenly interpreted as being “too neat,” “too tidy.” Wong's films are riddled with melancholy and anguish, but the swimmers do fleetingly defeat the force of nature, for however long. As the tagline to The Chungking Express noted, “If my memory of her has an expiration date, let it be 10,000 years,” connecting pineapple cans with their dates of expiration to resilient love. That line could be appropriate for all Wong films (sans, perhaps, Happy Together, about a pair of homosexual Chinese living in South America). Like the hidden glass in As Tears Go By, Wong forms his romances around everyday objects. In My Blueberry Nights, he extrapolates deeper meaning out of food, and most directly blueberry pie. Like Cop 663 in The Chungking Express, the viewer is deprived of the scenes of heartbreak that have devastated Elizabeth (Norah Jones) as My Blueberry Nights launches its tale. (As in a number of Wong's memory-induced stories, Cop 223's story is told in part through dreamy flashback.) Elizabeth walks into a vacant diner late at night, and like other love-stricken men whose tales have been told by Wong, Jeremy (Jude Law) becomes quite fond of her almost immediately. Jeremy informs Elizabeth that whereas cheesecake and other desserts have been wholly consumed by closing time, there is always leftover blueberry pie. It is over this blueberry pie that Jeremy and Elizabeth meet-cute, she still stinging from her excruciating break-up, and he recognizing that without missing a proverbial beat.

My Blueberry Nights fittingly opens with languid, oneiric close-ups of delicious blueberry pie being topped with melting ice cream. The music and atmospheric winsomeness make the allusion to semen flowing through a woman's inner cavity while making the pictorial less obvious in its meaning than it logically should be. The viewer is looking at blueberry pie, with melting vanilla ice cream undulating through and about it, but it may just as well be the voluminous ultramarine body of water that opens Happy Together. The shots of the film are lightly embroidered together through the dissolves and faux slow-motion step-printing Wong utilizes in postproduction, taking the process to its limits with The Chungking Express. Limning the film's episodic structure—Elizabeth wanders about the United States from New York City to Memphis and finally to Las Vegas, encountering one triad or pairing or lone figure whose sad stories of regrettable loss does not so much teach as they do asomatously provide her with glimpses of an ache. That mutual heartache finds solace in alcohol (David Strathairn's crushed, nightly-drunken Memphis police officer Arnie Copeland), petty revenge (Rachel Weisz in a dramaturgical interpretation of Arnie's fed-up, unforgiving wife Sue Lynn) and the posturing of ensured command in the form of a daredevil card sharp named Leslie (Natalie Portman) seeking an escape from a place and person she is compelled to revisit. These disparate strangers-cum-doppelgangers are always found in a diner or smoke-filled bar at which Jones' Elizabeth works. The cumulative experience is a mildly emotionally distressing but finally soothingly salving road trip odyssey, after which Elizabeth has wholly convalesced from the hurt of her destroyed relationship.

Cinematographer Darius Khondji, whose affinity for long lenses with which he codifies and composes a vaporous, blurred aesthetic look under which the characters—and especially Jones' Elizabeth, who is featured in plentiful scrupulous facial close-ups—traverse, supplies Wong's film with an obscuring patina as though the viewer is watching the proceedings through a fogged-up window. It is truly as though My Blueberry Nights wishes to forget itself, or look away from its own reflection either out of embarrassment or emotional and psychological paroxysms that arise from confrontations with the unpleasant. (Think of the impetus behind the tracking shot hurtling away from Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle on the telephone in Scorsese's Taxi Driver, here made subtler, more continuous and dreamily celestial rather than nightmarish.) As with Wong's previous pictures, the value of and spasming from memory, through which images, random sights and people are glorified and ripped apart, glossed over and meticulously mentally reconstructed, is at My Blueberry Nights' spirited heart. Elizabeth is like Tony Leung's Chow in In the Mood for Love and 2046 in that she is largely a central unifying beam that connects the disparate, circling characters in her orbit, and unlike Chow in that she is more naïve, more femininely doting and perspicuously alluring in that she transmits a blankness, openness and infectiously spunky fearlessness that seems to be more of a verite capturing of Jones' very qualities than extensive acting. Leung's Chow was doomed to almost precisely know what he was doing and to whom he was doing it; Jones' Elizabeth is unburdened and almost solely receptive, presenting a fulcrum of a precociously innocent wisdom that occasionally comes with youth, distinguished by an emphasis on listening and short, well-meaning bursts of advice.

As per usual with Wong, the film's soundtrack is teeming with tristful, rueful songs such as Cat Power's “Living Proof,” Otis Redding's “Try a Little Tenderness” and the Cassandra Williams cover of Neil Young's “Harvest Moon.” The songs in Wong's films seem to never merely begin or conclude, but rather pick up in almost veritable midstream as music so often does in one's memory. Composer Ry Cooder lays and folds his score and songs atop the soundtrack to which Jones herself contributed with “The Story” in a manner that is seamless—and musically quite similar to Wong's translucent pile of overlapping dissolves. Wong's musical choices are always magnificently accomplished, evoking in the viewer and listener a universalism of sentiment that risks a less challenging mawkishness. That bravery is both a particular quality of Wong's from his earliest Hong Kong days to My Blueberry Nights, and it routinely masks a deeper sociopolitical context, whether it be the anticipated move for Hong Kong to China from Great Britain in The Chungking Express (as Cop 663 fishes for coins to feed the jukebox, remaining perfectly still listening to the music as the rest of the world appears to fly all about him) or Sino-Japanese relations distilled into one ill-fated romance in 2046. My Blueberry Nights is Wong's attempt to explore America, and in so doing he forms compelling links between western and eastern values, customs, mores and personalities. It is not surprising that perhaps the least successful characterization and performance is Weisz's, which at its most histrionic would comfortably remain within Wong's Hong Kong films as played by a beautiful Chinese actress like Maggie Cheung. The most lasting connection between Wong's previous pictures and My Blueberry Nights, however, is in its lushly empyreal keynote image, so fantastically mesmeric, which attains a kind of unmistakable transcendence that Wong brings to his art. Like the passionate kissing between Andy Lau and Maggie Cheung in As Tears Go By set against “Take My Breath Away” and the brilliant blinding white fadeout that transports the two to an entirely different plane—making their stay in Wong's stylized prison of love worth it all—Wong's final shot in My Blueberry Nights unlocks that prison cell, leaving it up to the receiver of the sights and sounds to wonder just how free these two lovelorn people truly are.

Two Lovers (2008)

2009-03-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

Like Martin Scorsese with Mean Streets or Victor Nunez with Ulee's Gold, James Gray makes films about the area he knows. That area is Brighton, which has served as Gray's dramatic stage for Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own the Night. Gray's cinema is influenced by the pulverant pictures of the 1970s, and his first three works seemed to gestate within the womb of genre filmmaking. Within that framework, however, Gray strove to leave an indelible artistic impression on the content. Little Odessa is so equally impressive and precocious, that despite its limitations--Gray's determination to wring the most recondite ramifications from his Bergmanesque familial dichotomy is insatiable to the point of near-suffocation--it leaves an admirable afterglow that cannot be denied. The Yards is a scabrous generational portrait, and it plays like Gray's version of The Godfather (even to the point of James Caan graduating from Sonny Corleone to the Don Vito role). That the film does not quite reach in thematic importance what it maintains in textural and aesthetic consistency and agility--each tragic occurrence marked by an ominous glow into fading out darkness--again buttresses the picture's most visceral peaks such as a brutally realistic fight between Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix. We Own the Night yearns to offer another telling of the Biblical contest of brothers, but Gray's contrasting properties of authorial filmmaking--graced by an objectivism not wholly dissimilar from Otto Preminger or Stanley Kubrick but with a dynamic cylinder of mythical filmic interpretation rooted in bonds of blood like a young Francis Ford Coppola or perhaps Spike Lee--is finally too great a melange at the picture's center for it to wholly succeed.

Two Lovers marks Gray's clean departure from crime dramas. Some have noted the picture as Gray's abandonment of genre filmmaking. However, Two Lovers may be best received as another genre exercise, but Gray has endeavored to craft an incisive romantic drama. Displaying great deference to the American films of the 1970s yet again, Two Lovers is an intensely discomfiting cine that feels like the American arthouse films that were, ironically, influenced by the French New Wave masterpieces that were themselves inspired by Hollywood classics in that exceedingly important decade for American cinema. In truth, Two Lovers is separate from Gray's three excursions into neo-noir neither in atmospherics nor tone--Gray's four pictures put aside one another could play like one long, chilly and autumnal autobiographical fever dream of life in Brighton--but simply in its story, grafted by Gray and Ric Menello's somber screenplay. As a result, the film features all of the disparate components that make Gray's work intriguing, though now with his latest film he may be compared to Hal Ashby, creator of some memorably prickly, vexing and emotionally complicated romances.

Two Lovers stars Joaquin Phoenix, whose performance is his third for Gray and probably his best. Phoenix plays what would appear to be another artistic silhouette belonging to Gray, an unstable, deeply troubled young man named Leonard Kraditor who is living with his parents and working for his father's dry-cleaning shop. Like Gray's previous filmic incarnations, Phoenix's Leonard and his family are Russian-Jewish inhabitants of Brighton, and Gray once again essays the particulars of this ethnic clan and the commodious personalities who populate it. Two Lovers details Leonard's tribal obligations to the patriarchal and matriarchal forces of his Jewish family, who both urge him to establish a serious relationship with Sandra Cohen (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a family friend with whom the Kraditors wish to merge their respective dry-cleaning operations. Meanwhile, he is quickly becoming hopelessly infatuated with the mysterious Michelle Rausch (Gwyneth Paltrow). Two Lovers as a title refers not only to the two respective women in Leonard's life but the duality of Leonard himself, who behaves like two different lovers with them. Basing his story in part on Dostoevsky's "White Nights" and "Notes on the Underground," Gray revisits the idea of the inevitable. That journey, however, is made considerably less archetypal than Gray's more testosterone-fueled underworld sagas.

Viewing the mating process through the delicate personal, ethnic and financial considerations, Gray delineates a painful and powerful film about a man so devastated by past romantic tragedy he has become suicidal. Phoenix, though perhaps on paper too old for the part, is more than up to the challenge posed by his director, displaying a vulnerability and enervation of being that is nothing less than mesmerizing. Shaw's part is small but she enhances her appearances with a sincerity that is deceptively moving. Paltrow has the larger and more opulently emotive part and she works with the screenplay to embody a flaky mirage of an idea as a person from Leonard's love-sick perspective.

As with Gray's previous work, a sense of seeping and creeping foreboding, signposted with stark, caliginous photography by Joaquin Baca-Asay, haunts the film. The environs are shadowy, the climate cold and hibernal. Paltrow is repeatedly shot from disorienting angles, as though to accentuate the off-kilter, enormously affected point-of-view of Leonard's whenever she is around. The actress's flowing blonde hair often shrouds her countenance, and she appears eerie. The visual communication that makes Gray's work peculiarly vivid in its offbeat, low-key gradations of light and dark, is refined in Two Lovers, entrusting the viewer to take note when the director utilizes his protagonist as the portal through which the film's images play, simultaneously experienced by Leonard and the viewer.

With his latest film, nominated for a Cesar for Best Foreign Language Picture in France, Gray has indeed continued to comment on his own singular obsessions and experiences. Two Lovers is a melancholic, unironic and simply-unfurled drama that contuses with scenes of potent, unadorned honesty like Leonard slyly following Michelle at a train terminal so she can finally notice him. This is a film in which the relationships all feel painfully authentic, and the misunderstandings and moments of isolation, bitterness and anger are earned responses to situations that seem beyond rational control. Gray's film is a maturely and finely crafted, composed and detailed account of a man in rebellion against his own existence, and all that existence entails. Such decidedly heartfelt, unmannered art is an increasingly rare delight.

Bad Blogger, Back

2009-03-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

What can I say? I'm a bad blogger, but I am back.

Priority #1: writing a bunch of reviews for Coleman's Corner in Cinema.

Priority #2: once Priority #1 is fulfilled, returning to my favorite blogs, and Internet friends.

Sorry about the absence.

Frozen River (2008)

2009-02-28T23:45:00.000-08:00

Frozen River is a squeakily schematic motion picture. The film has its central character and that central character changes, is purified or at least moderately reshaped by the aching bitterness to which she succumbs, in the way that more pedestrian independent pictures strictly enforce. The most positively intriguing element of Frozen River is probably the central character's name. Melissa Leo gives a raw performance as the masculine-sounding Ray Eddy, which fits because Ray's husband has abandoned her and their two children, leaving her to serve as both mother and father. It is this starring turn that has ostensibly sanctioned considerable acclaim for Frozen River, but it seems to have been an excuse—most critics tend to bow before the ugliness a certain segment of independent cinema peddles, over and over, perhaps because they believe anything ugly is important and worth respecting. Beautiful films, like attractive people, cannot be trusted, after all: they are either dumb or duplicitous. Perhaps many are, but when the dividends of scabrousness for the sake scabrousness are as meager as they are in the case of Frozen River, a night with Cary Grant as crafted by Alfred Hitchcock or a little farcical frolicking with Max Ophuls is the medication for the disease that is overwrought, vague and vacuous grasps at profundity.

Leo is a source of onscreen strength—and, for the viewer, along with the underrated Misty Upham as Mohawk Indian Lila Littlewolf, an incentive to hang on. Leo's countenance is a finely informative canvas for writer-director Courtney Hunt—wearily weathered, desperate but clinging to a lingering sense of dignity and conveying a history of tragic personal paroxysms to her being. Hunt makes the most out of it, in all of its melancholic hurt and, indeed, desire, wringing from Leo moments of sincerity that temporarily salve the film's more grievous errors. (Ray sees as her and her children's panacea a new home, and the film is at its most convincing when it allows Leo to inform the viewer of the import of this goal through pregnant silences.) Hunt's film, for all of its flaws and foibles, is an adequate stage on which Leo and Upham stir and smolder.

Hunt's picture is a defiantly “tough” woman's film, and for that it deserves a measured respect. What ultimately unites and even ties Ray and Lila together is their shared roles as mothers (single mothers at that). Poverty is in some ways the prime mover of Frozen River, but maternity proves to be the enduring guarantor of bonding. Hunt's film may be assailed, then, for being almost anti-feminist—the hoary bromide against male interpretations of motherhood usually insisting that the significance most men see in women bearing children is somehow sexist or at least reduces women. Yet such concerns are more unrealistic than anything Hunt has created.

Frozen River, however, is a sluggishly paced, visually dull film. The slightly surreal setting—a sizable portion of the picture does indeed play out on a frozen river—may enliven cameraman Reed Morano's compositions but the film's tinny sights and sounds tend to undermine the sense of sinking, irrevocable doom in which Hunt is so abundantly interested. More unforgivable, Hunt's widely lauded screenplay (having been in the spotlight after receiving Indie Spirit and Oscar nominations) is as disheveled as Leo's Ray, and more desultory. When Ray and Lila smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States across the from Canada through the Mohawk reservation, and a duffle bag is tossed out of a car by Ray because the two immigrants they are driving across the titular frozen river are “Pakis” (Pakistanis), it is only more manipulative than it is predictable when Ray learns what was in the bag. Her older son's affinity for the family blowtorch (“I told you to not use that when I'm not here!” Ray scolds her son) leaves no question whatsoever as to how a certain event will turn out when he attempts to use it.

Charlie McDermott is less successful in the role of Ray's older son, T.J. His line readings are too affected for a film which is so desperately striving to be an extended verite trip into despondency and despair. McDermott is never distracting, but he contributes little to the proceedings. Hunt continually places T.J. in the role of Ray's oft-inquisitor but the actor is not up to the task—though he fortunately never resorts to a grating pout or embarrassing fits of screaming.

Sifting through the film, it is uncertain what, if any, political perspective Hunt is bringing to her story about a frantic pair of women viewing the deed of smuggling people into the United States as their last hope of scrounging a life for themselves. The depiction of widespread corruption is believable, but Hunt seems unsure whether she wants to delve more deeply into the greater community's fabric—teasing the idea on several occasions, such as a few scenes in which Ray briefly deals with characters for the benefit of the story and little else. The schematic trait never dissipates; it arguably only worsens as the film approaches the final descent—signposted with the two famous last words of any crime story, “...one last...” Everything—including the ending and Ray's final decision—are easily foreseeable and though Leo and Upham mount a reasonably compelling pair of entwined performances, making their characters wholly “authentic,” the film lets them down. Close-up shots of Ray's repulsively rusty shower head and bathtub seem like cynical, pretentiously arty endeavoring to exploit lower-class angst, anxiety and opprobrium. Many of Hunt's cliches are papered over by Leo and Upham's more precise moments of self-recognition and empathetic humanity, but as fine as these performances are, they can only camouflage so much. Onerous lines of dialogue pile up and Hunt's grasps at profundity begin to completely lose all appeal and meaning, until the film quietly but surely finds itself devoid of the very life it so wantonly determined to depict drains out of it like so much seepage from a melting frozen body of water.

Shotgun Stories (2008)

2009-02-26T01:59:00.000-08:00

And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him.

—Genesis, 4:8

In honor of Dionysus, the ancient Greeks performed annual plays of tragedy—or tragōidiā—in an effort to satisfy their god with dances, chants and songs. Phrynichus is often considered the originator of recognizable Greek tragedy, and the most famous tragedians, Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus have left an indelible legacy throughout the centuries. The Roman and finally Christian appreciation of the Hellenistic art form finds itself expressed in myriad ways—with a greater emphasis on “closet drama,” writings to be read rather than performed. Elizabethean England and the French Renaissance held host to revivals of tragedian writings, including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Alexandre Hardy and Jean Mairet.

The notion of tragedy in American independent cinema today often conjures imagery of drably downbeat movies about the hopelessness of violence or drug addiction. Shotgun Stories, however, is a cinematic tragedy that feels as deep, palpable, authentic and ineluctable as nearly any essaying of bloodlines, kin, familial bonds and masculine heartache. The picture is a compendium piece of sorts, a work of measured, almost calcified, excavation of misdirected anger and frustration. Many films traffic in roughly similar veins—violence is self-perpetuating, and people must outgrow their basest instincts if they are to completely mature—but Shotgun Stories makes its case with on a sui generis frequency, with an indelible acuity. Writer-director Jeff Nichols gifts his first feature with an emotional honesty, forged with painstaking patience and dexterous delicacy, that is finally nothing less than walloping in its hushed reticence. Nichols crafts a simple story with an attention to detail that leaves the sorrowful events depicted both cautiously internalized and lividly apparent. The final result is like witnessing a silent explosion.

The Arkansas Delta-set Shotgun Stories stars Michael Shannon (recently stealing some of the conventional thunder in Revolutionary Road) as Son Hayes, whose entire subdued presence seems to mutedly suggest rationality and an almost preternatural wisdom born from past pain. Son, as the tale's central character, is rightly the film's most profoundly tragic figure—that refutation of the hold that reason should have on thinking individuals but all too often loses out to the tumultuous emotions that restlessly animate. Son and his two half-brothers, Boy Hayes (Douglas Ligon) and Kid Hayes (Barlow Jacobs), find themselves invited to their biological father's funeral. Their father abandoned them as children and sired another set of brothers. Nichols makes the funeral—where Son cannot keep himself silent, and his words, like Cordelia in King Lear, precipitate the grave troubles to follow—the one fateful occurrence that creates the conditions for the entire drama to unravel. A mere contretemps invites feuding mayhem. That gradual process—equal parts accretion and attrition—is never less than wholly consuming. It is with an unsettling maturity that Nichols mounts his small town tragedy.

In one steady long shot, Nichols surveys the three brothers, Son, Kid and Boy, sitting on a barren street corner of their empty, dead ghost town. In one of the most accomplished moments of the picture, a brother comments on the town, saying that it is indeed a dead down. Not missing a beat, one of the brothers remarks that this deserted town seems to belong to them. Another points out that if he owned this town he would sell it. The parallels to tragedies involving royalty arise—the Hayes are, in one dynamic visage, the forgotten and the summation all at once. Their town is depicted as a wasteland but within their own world they are something approximating kings. Son in particular has the Machiavellian strain about him that seems to guard against those he suspects of chronic wrongdoing—a willingness to preserve his family as he sees it at almost any cost. This is only one of the attributes that makes Shotgun Stories so different from the independent features vaguely similar in their minimalism—Nichols' picture embraces a mythicism that couples the fact with the fictive, so the final result is one of a heightened, hypnotizing verisimilitude. This is Ballast by way of opera; the quotidian is sanctified, by Lucero Pyramid's haunting original score and Adam Stone's aesthetically ethereal cinematography.

So Nichols' endowment and augmentation of all of the small moments matters. The emotional and psychological heft Nichols lends the suppositiously “small moments” is remarkable—from grabbing and throwing away a deck of playing cards to dismantling a tent, and finally a long silence of disorientation marked by pregnant pauses as Son decides to seek vengeance for a wrong committed because he cannot bear to allow the horrible loss to go unanswered. The early friction between the the purely palpable and mesmerically lyrical is slowly conformed into a strictly complementary relationship as Nichols' tightening of cinematic language waxes with each ascending sequence, each contemplative scene. It is as though Nichols is finding illumination through the process of creating his own art—as exciting an experience to be found.

As in classic Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, a character exists to relate information to the principals, often just enough to ensure their fates of despair. Shotgun Stories has Shampoo (G. Alan Wilkins), who functions as unwitting provocateur in his detailed tales. It is through this character that events spiral out of control. Nichols allows the character ample humanity, but the part is an excellent distillation of how woeful catastrophes organically sprout.

Shotgun Stories also differs from many a violence-laden picture in its depiction of violence. All too often loosely defined revenge yarns and action tales, and even nominally anti-violence films seem to relish any and all opportunity to display violence—as a kind of self-medicating bout with unfortunately wrongly-prescribed antidotes—and most cinematic violence is italicized and underlined, which all too often serves to provide catharsis. While not wholly illegitimate—cinema is a cathartic, sublimating art form—violence as act is usually highlighted, which underplays the consequences and aftermath of violence. Nichols inverts this, and the rewards are manifold: unconventional and dissatisfying, the blood-for-blood violence never takes on a pleasing characteristic, much less dimensional plane. Just as it appears as though a character is about to suffer a traumatic injury, Nichols deprives the viewer of the actual image, the certain act. In one climactic moment, just as the viewer has been offered enough visual information to ascertain precisely what is about to occur, Nichols sagely cuts to black. Francois Truffaut contended that no film which featured war could ever be considered truly antiwar; cinema has a way of making everything about life exhilaratingly delirious, including bloody, ontic violence. For Nichols, he forces the viewer's attention on the frequently forgotten aftermath. This filmmaker is not interested in providing mere catharsis, and certainly seems to be repulsed by the concept of violence being cinematically fetishized. When he finally lingers on the toll, it is with a heavy, disconsolate heart.

Nichols' interpretative reading of his characters and their setting is morose and slightly incensed—at the horrible waste and senselessness which in such unforgiving ways has doomed the Hayes progeny before they had a chance. The stifling humidity accompanies the declaiming disappointment Son has for his father, but more so for the abstraction that his father was. The bloodlines unite and divide in Shotgun Stories, and the ineluctable seething rage that spills forth is as deadly as cascading molten lava. The internecine struggle that plays itself out is allegorical, finding in its sociological context a scathing reading of behavior. Fortunately, Nichols plays with the possibilities, and exquisitely extrapolates a much more meaningful postulation. One which has everything to do with choices, and the existing, sometimes ostensibly buried, choice to escape the futility of an abysmal pathway to self-immolation and death. It is in dramatizing the choices with which his characters are confronted that Nichols finds the most disarming substance of all between these young men. That they have choices, too—and perhaps they can choose to avert the misery tragedies are supposed to have in store for their participants.

This Gun for Hire (1942)

2009-02-23T12:01:00.000-08:00

(In the first weekend of 2009 I was kindly asked by Steve Eifert over at http://www.noiroftheweek.com/ to write a review of the film noir This Gun for Hire. This review is available to be read there. Noir of the Week is a fine website managed quite well by Mr. Eifert, featuring many detailed reviews of classic film noirs. Not to be missed.

Briefly, I would like to inform my readers that the ten-day absence of posts was a time of dealing with many other matters. I love writing for this blog and want to diligently maintain it but at the same time blogging should not be allowed to become one's life. I plan to finish February out strong with several upcoming reviews, starting with at least one or two films from 2008 to be examined as well as much more. Thank you for your patience...)

Frank Tuttle's early film noir, This Gun for Hire, made Alan Ladd a star in the role of Philip Raven, a mentally deranged and psychologically disturbed contract killer. As Raven, Ladd would employ the particular assets that he would continue to bring to his best roles: a laconic mysteriousness and nuanced, cerebral lethality of presence that distinguished him as a rara avis among the quotidian ordinary. Having soujourned for a decade in colorlessly inconsequential parts in approximately forty films, Ladd was finally given an opportunity to demonstrate his captivating talent. Ladd's commanding ubiety in This Gun for Hire is established by Tuttle in the star's first scene, which likewise begins to etch the dour artistry of lighting by Tuttle and cinematographer John Seitz. In a scene to be mimicked by Jean-Pierre Melville for his Le Samourai (1967), the insularly framed lone gunman stays in a slightly unsettlingly empty room. In This Gun For Hire, Ladd's Raven is loving toward only one kind of creature: cats, and when Tuttle's camera captures him smiling, in two of the three cases the predominantly uncharacteristic grin is aroused by the sight of a feline. In Le Samourai, Delon's killer showed love for a pet canary. (Delon would later love cats playing a ruthless spy in the Michael Winner thriller Scorpio.) Le Samourai starred Alain Delon in the role from which Ladd's Raven serves as a template, whose similar first name draws an unintended comparison as well.

Tuttle's mise-en-scene is often rather precise, and is repeatedly marked by dazzlingly expressionist chiaroscuro lighting. As Raven holds his tool of the trade, his handgun, the low-angle camera angle accentuates the man's isolation and power all at once. The shadowy lines that span the wall behind him, and framing square and triangular shapes in the wall and ceiling, connote a subtle gradation of entrapment and doom. As piano playing gently seeps into the room, the killer behaves like a man apart, and when a pushy maid attempts to shoo the kitten away from the room's windowsill, he snaps, spinning the woman around and slapping her. As the film continues, Raven's affinity for cats juxtaposed with his moderately bemused, glassy-eyed distrust of and dislike for people will serve as an important implement of narrative and character indicia. In this instance the episode serves to highlight the character's respectful admiration for the feline as solitary animal fighting for its own survival. Later, as he strokes a cat, he will remark that a cat brings luck—which is one of the only universal things he believes in as a force of aid.

When asked by the effeminate and rotund man who has last hired him to eliminate a chemist how he feels when working, he callously replies, “I feel fine.” Ladd's delivery is flawlessly deadpan, portraying Raven's coldblooded demeanor as a sort of deeply ingrained psychical state rather than mere remoteness of attitude and feeling. Ladd's physical conciseness and verbal succinctness endows the character's most consistent attributes with a naturalness that seamlessly matches the vision of screenwriters Albert Maltz and R.W. Burnett in their fascinating adaptation of Graham Greene's novel, “A Gun for Sale.” Greene's novel was set in Great Britain, but while the Los Angeles setting significantly changes some of the atmospheric qualities of the film from Greene's book, Tuttle conjures a similar percolating quality to the narrative developments. Tuttle does this by utilizing the visual language of cinema that helped to signify the oncoming flurry of aesthetically attractive and visually communicative 1940s Hollywood film noirs.

That man with whom Raven converses after rubbing out the chemist is Willard Gates, played with an effective amalgamation of smarmy unctuousness and bubbly jocoseness by Laird Cregar. Gates is a manager at the Nitro Chemical Corps. who moonlights as manager of the Neptune nightclub, where he finds himself enchanted by an auditioning gorgeous blonde magician Ellen Graham, sensuously brought to life by Veronica Lake. Graham is clandestinely working for United States Senator Burnett (Roger Imhof), who believes the Nitro Chemical Corps. is guilty of selling secrets to America's wartime enemies. Aboard a train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Raven and Graham find themselves linked to one another when they sit next to one another. The noirish emphasis on luckless circumstance and seemingly random misfortune is palpably rendered. When, at the twenty-nine minute mark, Graham attempts to make contact with Raven, he fittingly asks her the future question of Travis Bickle's from Taxi Driver: “You talkin' to me?”

Tuttle's mise-en-scene is especially sharp in the early and late stretches of the film. A midway excursion into an estate with a thunder-and-lightning storm appears like a horror film. When Raven and Graham are on the run together, Tuttle's camera examines them as an impossible pairing—he is a stoic killer for hire, she is the girlfriend of a police detective named Michael Crane (a feckless Robert Preston) trying to solve a robbery from which Gates has paid Raven with marked bills. The compilation of multiple threads tying into one knot is one of the more satisfying, but possibly distracting aspects of This Gun for Hire's narrative. As Raven and Graham are physically adjoined to one another, with Raven on the run from the police as he attempts to exact revenge for Gates' double-crossing, This Gun for Hire slows down and the screenplay endeavors to explain the chief source of Raven's psychological trauma. Visually and thematically dark, the scene is lit with expressionistic intensity. As Raven and Graham look out through the gaps between wooden planks in a filthy warehouse window, the light skips down diagonally on the two. As Raven describes a recurring dream in which a tyrannical woman continually beat him as a child.

“I dreamed about a woman. She used to beat me—to get the bad blood out of me, she said. My old man was hanged. My mother died right after that and I went to live with that woman. My aunt. She beat me from the time I was three to when I was fourteen. One day she caught me reaching for a piece of chocolate... she was saving it for a cake... a crummy piece of chocolate. She hit me—with a red-hot flat-iron! Smashed my wrist with it. I grabbed a knife—I let her have it! In the throat! They stuck a label on me: killer. Shoved me into a reform school and they beat me there, too. But I'm glad I killed her. What's the use? [There is] nothing I can do.”

This legitimate effort to create melodrama out of the hitman's origins of spiritual, mental and physical (the permanent scarring on his left wrist is used by the police to identify him) disrepair and wounds is successful in creating an empathetic attachment to the character when he continues to run away from the police. As the police struggle to locate the elusive Raven, the film takes a pessimistic but almost lightheartedly comic shot at the cops as bungling and ineffective. Raven rather easily escapes the clutches of the cops who know he is aboard when he exits the train. Over the course of the film, policemen make tragicomic mistakes when attempting to capture Raven. In one such especially personal confrontation, a lone policeman tries to handcuff Raven late in the film, only to fatally underestimate the killer, who shoots him to death for his trouble. Quite late in the film, as Raven tries to satisfy his blood lust, he finds himself looking directly at Detective Crane, who he could have effortlessly eliminated—but he knows he is Graham's man (“You're a copper's girl,” he once dismissively sneers)—and consequently spares him. Graham's gentleness and kindness toward Raven endears her to him and when a villain suggests she ought to be killed, Raven furiously comments that she has been “nice to me,” a most sparse—and perhaps, the film seems to subtly suggest, nonexistent—way in which someone has ever treated him. With a plot that veers perilously close to making This Gun for Hire another propaganda picture—in which even the stone-hearted assassin is finally moved to defend his country from despicable traitors—the screenplay and Tuttle's interpretation of it keep the dilemmas and choices personal and almost disconnected from politics. As with other Greene novels, it is the personal that informs the politics of the story, and This Gun for Hire is finally, gratifyingly, no different.

This Gun for Hire's climax would also be borrowed by Jean-Pierre Melville for his Le Samourai as the hunted killer is chased on an ominous rail bridge. As Ladd's Raven once again outmaneuvers the police, Tuttle captures the entire chase sequence in a bravura depiction of action. The memorable long shot of Raven jumping off the rail bridge onto a moving train is exciting, and the interest and care the audience has for Raven makes it genuinely meaningful. This Gun for Hire is an early film noir and its limitations and imperfections—some of the supporting players give uninspired performances and Tuttle's direction is somewhat lax in the film's midsection, as is the screenplay—while not to be overlooked, should be considered with fairness when assessing it. As such, this is a most thoughtful, interesting and important film.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

2009-02-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

Today [Valentine's Day] is a holiday created by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.

So thinks Joel (Jim Carrey) in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If every holiday deserves its own film, and every generation deserves its own cinematic explication of each holiday, then surely the 2004 Charlie Kaufman-penned, Michel Gondry-helmed hip, mind-bending comedy-drama romance, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is this epoch's most articulate annotation on that mid-February fixture of romance, Valentine's Day. As Joel awakens on this ostensibly ordinarily dismal winter day, he laments his doleful station in life. He stands, shivering, on a train platform, and—out of nowhere—decides to run off, and ditch the dismal daily peregrination to his job. For no reason in particular he runs to another train—headed to Montauk. He is not sure why; he is not, as he assures the audience through voice-over, an impulsive person. When he finally arrives in Montauk he waltzes about the beach, glaring into the bracing wintry air. It is freezing, he notes to himself. Brilliant, Joel. Montauk in February.

Where Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind goes from there is as exciting as it is touching, with an exactitude of detail that is especially rewarding of repeated viewings—though Gondry's dexterous direction makes the details appear like a baseball in the eyes of an accomplished hitter seeing his ideal pitch: enormous. Why Joel takes his little trip to Montauk will be explained, quite late, and very movingly, but the gap between action and motive, deed and desire, is where the picture most robustly asserts itself. And that is most charmingly fitting; Eternal Sunshine is fundamentally about gaps, in time, and in space, and doubtless chiefly in the mind. Memory for a character is itself is to be assaulted, as it has so many ugly ornaments of nostalgia for the sweet times, loathing and regret for the bitter episodes. Joel does not know it, but he has slipped through the gauntlet of a passionate relationship wrecked on the reef of apparently irreconcilable differences. No longer embittered, he is merely empty; like a model airplane with only some parts adjoined, he is incomplete.

Lost love, largely of the acrimoniously-severed variety, engenders a spitefulness that exceeds vindictiveness. Resigned to their fate, most men simply scorn their fallen idol; once where the woman incomparably stood on a ponderously tall pedestal, she is viewed through the prism of unyielding revision. Unforgiving, the wake of an untethered bond leaves a sourness mainly mundane in its projection, deep in its currents. Cognitively dwelling on every last irritating shortcoming, annoying habit and asymmetrical peculiarity, the person whose flaws once seemed invisible now is ensconced not in blind adoration or even respect but seething, boiling hate. Popular music consecrates the impulse to turn what was, at a different time, deliriously fawned over into the bete noire. Listening to “Time is on My Side” and “Like A Rolling Stone,” the anonymous women are given identities by the audial recipient; countenances that were so long ago angelic, seen now as warped by the ravages of time and circumstance, flash by in a melancholic mental collage of heartbreaking ids. It is perhaps the most self-deluding, and hollowest of redemptions—to envision the pitiable parallel existence the anterior loves are suffering through, all in a reveling of self-importance as figure of sustenance. Inherently egotistic and jealous, the process supplies an embarrassing counterpoise to the wounded.

Kaufman's screenplay is animated in its substance by the nectarous short cut of erasing all sensitively distressed memories. The concept is an immediate hook—and demands an accomplished level of filmic execution worthy of its incorporation into a narrative. Joel discovers that his beloved girlfriend, Clementine (a sublime Kate Winslet), has, in one of her most impulsive moments, had him completely erased from her memory. Having supplied her with this accommodation is Lacuna, Inc., which has ingeniously taken its innocuous-sounding name from the Latin term for a hollow, cavity or dip—lacunae typically referring to a body of water such as a lake or pond—the aforementioned hollow or dip would be in the lake. In the context of the science-fiction project, however, Lacuna takes on the meaning of the lacunae infarct, referring to a brain-damaging stroke that discriminatingly assaults a specific part of the skull-encased muscle, resulting in the debilitation of specific functions or expunging of particular memories. When Carrey's Joel sensibly voices concern about brain damage being a side effect of the process, Tom Wilkinson's Dr. Howard Mierzwiak replies, “Well, technically, the procedure is brain damage.” Possibly also carrying with it the papryological meaning, Lacuna, Inc. may likewise refer to the lacuna as an aberrant gap in a text (here representative of Joel's brain).

Where Kaufman and Gondry succeed most brilliantly is in the implementation of their fable. Eschewing the comfortable familiarity of species—both comic and romantic—for a skittishly-paced exhuming of a contemporary love story. With the questionable Lacuna, Inc.'s vaunted procedure consuming the great amplitude of the film's narrative, Kaufman and Gondry tell a backwards boy-meets-girl tale. If Joel is crushed by Clementine's hegira from him to unknown pastures, then Eternal Sunshine's greatest conceit is to move past the amaroidal angst of an eroding relationship, back to happier times, culminating with their very first meet-cute—over some chicken at an otherwise forgettable beach party—which plays out romantically as the fearless Clementine tests the limits of the introverted and timid Joel. As he is asked by his married friends about the “pretty girl” he was spending time with at the party, he can only reply that she was “just a girl.”

At a time when most cinematic American love stories are prepackaged, preheated and pedestrian in their creeping confluence of cynicism and naivete—made into suppositiously mass-appealing pats on the back from filmmakers who confuse wholly legitimate sentiment with simplistic gratification—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stands out all the more. Joel and Clementine are as a couple, beyond convincing; in Kaufmanesque shorthand, Joel is another approximation of Kaufman's ineffectualness as a lover, and here the seemingly always weary Joel tirelessly scribbles down notes to himself but is withdrawn and unable to openly communicate, even with his lover. Clementine's recklessness of being could not be more antithetical to Joel's laconic shyness; as he ineptly struggles to say much of anything, she is brash and lacking in self-censorship. Suffering from an alcoholism that is only partly funny because it is so unfortunately true (authentic and believable), Clementine is Joel's counter and it is this apparent attitudinal and psychological gulf that both disturbs each member of the partnership and, bizarrely, makes their relationship work. The very problem is in its least troublesome vein a complementary personable dichotomy; where Clementine lacks introspection—which she chooses to stave off with alcohol—Joel is acutely self-aware to the point of self-destructively tethering himself to all of his idiosyncratic ways of questioning himself. In a plausible contemporary reversal of the action-minded man and the fence-straddling woman, Clementine's impulsive passion finds in Joel a stability that is both warm and in its quotidian application, smothering.

It is in the self-effacing, whirling pool of details, that Gondry and Kaufman wrap the seriocomic sentiment that leaves bruises of its own. In most romantic-comedies or variations of the template, the filmmakers are inclined to have their cake and eat it, too. Flaws of the characters are presented to make them nebulously human, all the while being played strictly for braying laughter. Eternal Sunshine does not expurgate the moments and traits that are all too familiar, yet usually skimmed over or entirely absent in most vaguely like-minded relationship films. Joel and Clementine's personal flaws are made humorous in the way that the flaws of a friend slowly become a source of amusement. Yet there is a deflating sadness to this pair that is uncommon; Joel is such an emotional weakling that sensitive men will find in him shared pangs—of regret, frequently stemming from absurd cowardice, of over-analysis of the self. Clementine is, to an indefinite degree, the young woman Joel at his angriest declares her to be—tempting in her penumbra of multi-colored-hair mysteriousness and affected, flirtatious unattainability, but stunted in her own development. Though the film, respectively written and directed by two men, makes Joel the hero, whose past is the film's focal point, Clementine's childhood and personal history would make for a potentially remarkable film. The fleeting visibility of a long-ago, nearly mortal wound is carried with her throughout, and is occasionally only held down from complete eruption by her dipsomania.

As if the Joel-Clementine heartache and humorously adorned pathos were not enough, Gondry and Kaufman pack in an entire subplot of hopes and hurts. With such an ostensible godsend as memory erasure, abuse is to follow like night after day. Lacuna, Inc. is itself a warped, closed-off tragicomic melodrama with a clandestine love triangle—two of whose members remain blithely unaware of its existence, though there is a knowingness to each beneath their rock 'n' roll, pot-induced haze of underwear bed dancing and sex. Elsewhere, an unethical young man has fallen for Clementine during her memory-pruning procedure and has stolen an unmentionable from her. Not stopping there he has taken all of Joel's items that he has given over to Lacuna, Inc.—items that would remind him of Clementine—for himself, with which he hopes to seduce the unsuspecting Clementine. When an indescribable sense of déjà vu intervenes for Clementine, she runs away from the cynical manipulator—who may serve as a potential stand-in for Hollywood persons who churn out the strikingly overly-familiar pills like briefly soothing narcotics working from prosaically similar frameworks.

One of the attributes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that cannot go unexamined is its pulsating, prevailing romanticism. Beneath all of the foreknowledge and soothsaying an obviously intelligent man like Kaufman brings with him, he allows himself, and Gondry allows the film, to be an avatar for unmitigated optimism. Despite having had their minds erased, Kirsten Dunst's Mary, Joel and Clementine all stumble, through an indefatigable sense of ceaseless yearning, for their (emotionally and cerebrally) lost loves. At a time when it is nauseatingly trendy to peer into complex matters that affect humans and their symbiotic relationships to one another in variegated contexts, Eternal Sunshine—not entirely unlike Being John Malkovich and Adaptation before it, and Synecdoche, New York after it—is serenely self-confident, enabling it to securely land on a jubilant restoration. It is in that reclamation, of memory, of love, of life—what would people be, by which means would they be informed without all of their memories?—that Eternal Sunshine terrifically realizes itself, all the while plaintively recognizing the inevitable potholes in the road along the way.

For the trajectory of hate and abyssal disappointment to be reached, love must have been an occupant for an extended period of time. It is through literally viewing Joel's own memories that he comes to terms with the exorbitant riches Clementine gifted him. It is not mere cliché to achieve, through storytelling, a character “becoming a better person”; comedy, as the flip side of the Grecian coin of tragedy, historically requires characters to learn—it is one of the most unquestioned features of tragedy that characters are doomed to not learn—and Eternal Sunshine allows Joel to learn an invaluable lesson. Alexander Pope's poem referenced is itself a contradictory extolling of the more modernist embrace of ignorance as bliss. In Eternal Sunshine, it is Clementine who, like Eve, first eats from the tree (this tree literally of ignorance), but Joel and Clementine each find themselves by the end and literally say, “Okay,” to their destiny, each other and themselves. If relationships are fundamentally mirrors into which one member sees the best—including the nonexistent best—of themselves in the other, Joel and Clementine at last allow the mirror reflection to not hurt them, and to be resigned to the imperfections they each possess. As his own mental collage of Clementine unspools backwards, Joel is left, like a beggar, pleading to “...keep just this one [memory]...” Down the rabbit hole it goes, and Joel is abandoned in his own mind until Clementine rescues him, and leads him, as she had before, to better times.

A Woman Is a Woman (1961)

2009-02-13T12:24:00.001-08:00

Jean-Luc Godard today conjures inaccessible difficulty, Marxian didactics and Nouevelle Vague enshrinement. Yet he was, at his most playful, a reverential mimic of his favorite Hollywood pictures, a cinematic romantic, a lover of the movies he had absorbed, cherished and in which he had seen greater, more philosophically rich textures than they had perhaps even intended. A Woman Is a Woman, or Une femme est une femme, is as sweet as Godard could become. Before relating the poisoned marriage of Contempt, Godard told a more glisteningly romantic story. His first color picture, A Woman Is a Woman is remarkably airy and ostensibly liberated; gone are the jump-cuts of Breathless as well as that picture's seeping sense of inevitable tragedy, which would resurface in Contempt and the riveting Le Petit Soldat but A Woman Is a Woman is an aching film on its own terms.

Starring Godard's muse, the irrepressible Anna Karina as Angela, a charming, lovely striptease artist who wants to have a baby and settle down. Captured in an ebullient light show that is in its mise-en-scene and construction a piece of commentary on the various emotional states of Karina's Angela, she is as teasing and tempting as she will be for her disagreeable boyfriend Émile Récamier (Jean-Claude Brialy), who does not wish to settle down and have a child with her. The striptease act is made into a comment on cinema itself, with the artist wooing the viewer with a promise. Godard delivers that promise by making his ode to Hollywood musicals succeed, wildly, not in spite of but almost rather because of its unconventional use of music. Viewing cinema as an ideally musical art form, through simple alterations in mise-en-scene Godard makes the arguments between Angela and Émile blossom into vociferous duets.

Godard's conception of the Zodiac club at which Angela works is hilariously tame and refined. The winking awareness of Hollywood distillation of the uncomfortable into more endearing contexts enlivens A Woman Is a Woman in its presentation. As Angela speaks directly into the camera, with an impossibly sweet, smartly sly demeanor, and an intoxicating smile, Godard's camera takes the viewpoint of the men in the audience, doubtless enamored with the young lady. Accentuating the effervescent mise-en-scene of Godard's is the stopping-and-starting scoring of music by Michel Legrand, which functions quite brilliantly as a uniform treatise on the place of music in cinema.

The third acting component is Jean-Paul Belmondo, curiously and humorously named Alfred Lubitsch. Belmondo represents a possible way out for Angela, but when they converse, and listen to a sad song about an unforgiving man surveying the ignominy of a woman, in a particularly long scene, she must confront that she still has deep feelings for Émile. This love triangle is mounted not as a contest, particularly as Émile incredulously subtracts himself from the proceedings, flustered as he is by Angela's uncontrollable willfulness and determination. Godard makes the pair of suitors pleasingly pathetic, but only in that the woman is so remarkably at ease manipulating them... even when she is doing so with such nonchalance that her desires seem shrouded.

As fine as the two men are, the acting star is Karina, while Godard is the star of the picture's ingenuity, vitality and commitment. Rarely has such an intentionally inconsequential souffle been so aesthetically wondrous and overflowing in its cinematic charity. Godard makes hallways and foyers into arenas of romantic battle, not unlike Douglas Sirk wringing melodramatic quintessence from everyday settings. Godard's assured dynamism makes each scene smoke and sizzle, layering a sumptuous patina of light by cinematographer Raoul Coutard, whose work here is awesomely, divinely inspired.

With a narrative functioning as mere coat hanger for the precocious playfulness on display, Godard makes his filmic excavation of Hollywood cinema densely configurated as a meta contextualization of romantic musicals. Echoing Vincente Minnelli in New Wave trappings, Godard whittles the process down, so that, as in his best work, the proper story is truly Godard's incisive critical (as he had been a critic with fellow New Wave founder Francois Truffaut) commentary on cinema itself. When Karina finally addresses the audience at the film's very end, Godard shoots her in such a way as to emphasize the spotlight-like, key-light-like artificiality of movie love filmmaking. Like the funny breaching of the fourth wall in Breathless, A Woman Is a Woman's nimble reworking of standard conventions is lubricated with flourishes that amazingly enhance the entire virginal color palette, visually complementing the illumination Godard lends to the characters' relationships with one another.

Endowed with a delightfully sardonic wit, Godard comments on the titular flirtation with sexism (a woman is a woman, after all, and Angela believes the only thing that can salvage her relationship with her boyfriend is a baby). Angela's glittery ambivalence, however fetching, also speaks to the picture's upending of stereotypes and tropes, all the while essaying them through involved observation. Deciding that her current relationship is hampered by the lack of a child, her approaching of Alfred to accommodate her wish is an effort to ignite jealousy in Émile. Émile is a difficult nut to crack, however, and her test of him eventually becomes his test of her. The gender dynamics and halfhearted suggestion of a triad-structured symbiosis are an avenue on which Godard travels, making comments that would turn more mythical and realistically embittered all at once in Contempt, again playful in his most deliriously fun film, again starring Karina, Bande à part, and the more aggressively sociopolitical cine essay, Masculin féminin.

A Woman Is a Woman, however, still stands out as a harmoniously derived pastiche that is as loving a film as Godard could create. Processing Hollywood's genius for finding the physical and numinous pulchritude in the implausible, Godard's picture is a work of sincere gratitude to a way of making movies that may sadly be extinct. Lars von Trier's more recent attempt with Dancer in the Dark, while intriguing, was never as successful in its complicated melange as Godard's more gracefully crafted 1961 concoction. Godard would turn to more, superficially or not, important subject matter, complete with humorless characters and controversial, politically charged narratives, and as he remained vibrant, so did they, too. Sometimes, however, the irresistably frothy mixtures are more satisfying than the larger, more laborious meals. There is nothing inherently wrong with exploring the insuperable dilemmas of life, but as A Woman Is a Woman demonstrates, sometimes those insuperable dilemmas are everyday matters, challenging artists to make them appetizing.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

2009-02-11T00:13:00.000-08:00

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's cinema is uncommonly sensitive and sumptuous. Nuanced and thoughtful, it is also earnestly emotional and compassionate. Normally Fassbinder's work is concerned with those who fall outside the “norms” of society, and in his case, this society is the West Germany of the very late 1960s to the very early 1980s. As a bisexual, Fassbinder saw himself as existing just outside the framing typicality of his own society. Viewed through this sociologically bountiful prism, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is possibly his most purely beautiful work, concerned as it is with the relationship between a strongly virile foreign Arab worker named Ali (El Hedi ben Salem, who was Fassbinder's partner at the time of the film's production) and an older German cleaning lady named Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira).

The quite loosely-followed basis for Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is the Douglas Sirk melodrama All That Heaven Allows, and it is worth noting how much Sirk's cinema influenced Fassbinder. While Sirkian aesthetics were not the most crucial component for Fassbinder, theoretical command of mise-en-scene and the adroitness with which Sirk weaved powerful social commentary through his exquisite precision. Fassbinder wanted to emulate the ocular symmetry of Sirk's films, and was especially moved by the intelligence that buttressed Sirk's stingingly palpable love stories. Fassbinder's filmic treatises on social ostracism and rejection were often searingly muscular, but with The Merchant of Four Seasons, made in 1971, Fassbinder's admiration of Sirk became visible. The Merchant of Four Seasons was the first film Fassbinder made after meeting Sirk at the Munich Film Museum, and he would continue to extrapolate Sirkian touches in his work. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was the culmination of this strain when it was made.

Decades before Fatih Akin would make films examining German-Arab and German-Turkish relations through narrative, Fassbinder crafted a plausible romance between Emmi and Ali. The film begins with Emmi, as played by the amazing Mira, a slightly stereotypically stout German woman, walking into a bar to escape the rain. Emmi wears clothes with loud colors, and the clothing makes her, as a physical figure, more arresting and interesting, as well as remarking on the unconventional and unorthodox openness of the character that most meticulously comes forth through the narrative. When Emmi walks in, the bar seems strangely motionless; when the plain older lady tells the blonde barmaid that she will have a Coke, a group of customers turn and glare at her. Remarkably, it is Emmi who is perceived as the outsider, and justly so, as her actions create the seemingly irreconcilable firth that becomes a gulf between the central characters and the people who exist in their orbit. As the blonde returns to the bar, she taunts Ali into dancing with the older woman. “Ali dance with old woman?” Ali asks. Yet he decides to move to her table and ask her to dance. As the two dance, the camera focuses with the two in the foreground and the other characters in the background; as Ali and Emmi dance, the rest of the people inhabiting the bar are staring at them.

Ali accompanies Emmi home. As they converse, the dialogue renders the relationship in rigorous terms, while expanding on the characters themselves. Emmi talks about her first husband, who was Polish, as her name suggests. Emmi talks about the importance of wearing colors that make one feel happy. She kindly admonishes Ali about his dark-colored clothes. She says that he should wear bright, colorful clothes. Later he will. The scene is heartwarming, and is mostly shot in a drab apartment complex hallway. The isolation and absence of other characters enhances the separation from all others that most who fall in love experience—while on another plane elucidating the harsher reality of Ali and Emmi's marriage, which carries with it the caveat of (in an expressionistic manner) divorcing the rest of the world.

Ali is limited in his German, and the statements he makes—which always sound and read like maxims—such as “Always work, always drunk,” when describing his days and nights or “German master, Arab dog,” when conveying just how alike he and Emmi are in their social stations (she tells him that many people look down on her when they find out she is a cleaning lady), inform the title itself. The original German title, Angst essen Seele auf, translates as Fear Eat Soul. And Ali indeed tells Emmi that “fear eat soul”; it is, Fassbinder instructs, fear that has pushed Ali and Emmi outside the comfortable ordinariness. Separated by race and age, Ali and Emmi are viewed with contempt; a group of women who live in Emmi's apartment building become incensed that she is living with an Arab. These women are primarily linked together by their shared occupation as cleaning ladies, and so Fassbinder comments on the socio-economic experience that creates bitterness out of despair. One woman says she would rather die than live with a “dog.” Another remarks that “they... only want women” for “one thing.” Most damaging is the fear and loathing Emmi is confronted with from her own immediate family. One son violently kicks in a television set (echoing All That Heaven Allows) upon learning of his mother's lover's identity.

Fassbinder sagaciously utilizes simple devices and creations such as those hallways, windows and doorways, the spaces around tables, and other objects with which to frame Emmi and Ali—and their attendant romantic desperation—which transmit the characters' valiantly heedless acceptance of one another, finally as man and wife, pitted against a large, imposing group of ethnocentric societal guardians of “purity,” a veritable haut monde for the purposes of Fassbinder. In one humorous scene, Emmi is confused by a man to choose between a “rare” and a “medium-rare” dish; she believes rare to mean unusually excellent. In a scene far more disconsolate and tragic scene, Emmi and Ali, sitting at an outdoor table at which they hope to dine, are placed apart from nothing less than all of humanity by a metaphorical forest of empty yellow chairs. As the German and Moroccan quietly converse, she finally succumbing to the shattering realization that she and he are apparently doomed to stand out as the others through their marital bond, director of photography Jurgen Jurges aids Fassbinder in creating a bravura sequence of sight, color and sound in suspended animation.

For Fassbinder, the development of his characters takes on an unrestricted intimacy that is bracing. The act of ablution is made into an experience of cleansing that transcends bodily limitations. Ali is framed, naked, washing himself, and Fassbinder, capturing his naked lover, lends the character and actor portraying him a nearly embarrassing genuine love that surpasses the utilitarian concepts of filmmaking that are as surely used as a man's legs in a brusque gait. Shot in fifteen days on a small budget, between two much larger productions, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a redoubtable case of a writer-director squeezing more distilled pathos and integrity out of a “small” film than many “big” ones. The long, almost intermittent stretches of silence, in which life itself seems paused for Ali Emmi, makes the racial tensions both more invisible and present all at once. Defined by his appearance, Ali is gradually accepted by the very women who had earlier feigned repulsion at the mere thought of him. In an extension of the showering scenes, Fassbinder comments on the fetishism of the exotic, as a small circle of German women beam, each happily caressing and gripping the muscular biceps and triceps he possesses. This fetishism of the other is made purposefully whole, as Emmi herself routinely describes her husband as featuring a “foreign mentality”—which is certainly not untrue.

From approximately 1955 to 1973, Arab workers were immigrating to Germany to fill the vacuum of manual labor in the great postwar German economic recovery and boom. Invited in to work, these foreigners often found themselves marginalized by a society whose leadership had requested their presence. Creating social commentary out of the already ripe tale of volition and romance Sirk had etched less than twenty years earlier, Fassbinder's film remains abundantly relevant. Yet in some ways more importantly, this motion picture remains most incendiary in its discomfited self-contained vicinity—its wonderful insistence to tell a complete, human story about two people with all of their unsentimental flaws. Ali strays from Emmi and resorts to rendezvous with the blonde barmaid who dared him to connect with the older woman. The blonde provides Ali with two things his wife cannot, his favorite dish couscous and sex. Coworkers of Ali's are cruel toward Emmi when she visits him at work, asking Ali, “Is that your grandmother?” Nevertheless, through everything Ali and Emmi sustain their great love. Fassbinder's patient, watchful camera captures every last delicate moment, and takes the frighteningly personal viewpoint, which is always more perilous. It is from here he paints with the colors of those framing objects that create gorgeous portals through which to view Ali and Emmi through their many experiences with one another. Again and again, primary colors are utilized, always, it would seem, to italicize the primary urges, desires and needs these two characters so trenchantly carry with them.

Scandal Sheet (1952)

2009-02-10T12:23:00.000-08:00

(Scandal Sheet was screened at the San Francisco Castro Theatre on Friday, January 23 along with Deadline USA as part of Noir City 7.)

Scandal Sheet is directed with a particularly pungent, uncensored acumen by Phil Karlson, whose fidelity to the screenplay by Ted Sherdeman, Eugene Ling and James Poe, based on the novel “The Dark Page” by Samuel Fuller, enriches the film for its entire eighty-two minute runtime. (The film's title in the United Kingdom was The Dark Page.) Karlson, aided by cinematographer Burnett Guffey—whose lens seems to inescapably capture every last sealed crevice on the gritty sidewalks or clammy characters' faces—creates a verisimilitude out of mise-en-scene that perfectly imparts the scabrousness of the picture's very story. Surveying the relationships in a scandal rag “newsroom” controlled by a bulldog of a man who behaves almost like a centurion guard, managing editor Mark Chapman (a relentless Broderick Crawford), Karlson makes the camera an impartial observer, making casual note of the rampant, anfractuous headline-grabbing (and -making) that is made into a virtue by the avaricious Chapman. Chapman's running of the newspaper, once a respectable publication, The Comet, creating a “scandal rag,” has dramatically increased the circulation of the paper, and he reminds the partnered owners of the institution of that unalterable fact.

Fuller's novel, “The Dark Page,” came about when he decided to write a book about some of the more outstanding experiences of his career as a newspaperman. Fuller had to serve in World War II (with the “Big Red One”) and was notified by his mother while he was away that a publisher was quite interested in purchasing the rights to his first draft. Only a couple of years later, Fuller learned that none other than Howard Hawks was quite interested in adapting the book into a film, and bought the rights for $15,000. Fuller's mother was ecstatic and sent her son $1,000 while he and his unit were fighting in Europe. Sadly, Hawks never made the film, and sold the rights for several times what he paid for them. The buyer was Columbia Pictures, and Karlson would direct it.

The atmospheric component Karlson brings to the picture makes it somehow more compulsively watchable than most films with similar “set-ups.” Crawford's Chapman, like almost all of the best noir protagonists, is a man who has skillfully managed to escape his past, but, as in so much of noir, it is the past that he cannot truly evade. And, as in most noir, the chilling hand of irony finds itself practically slapping Chapman's face—it is through a very idea originated from his greedy mind that his past catches up with him. The newspaper actually hosts a “lonely-hearts ball,” where many companionless people are brought to one venue. Chapman's cynicism is unrestricted, and he guarantees a prize to a couple who marry on the very evening they meet one another: a bed, with a built-in television set.

It is at this “lonely-hearts club” event that Chapman's past runs into him and he is eventually placed in an unenviable position. Suffice it to say he makes a mess out of an already unfortunate situation, and is compelled to cover up a crime he has committed. In pursuing that crime, however, his ace reporter, the young, handsome Steve McCleary (an exceedingly effective motor-mouthing John Derek), digs up just enough dirt to make it into a story—and one so sensationalistic that Chapman is practically forced to run his reporter's story in the newspaper, despite it being highly dangerous to himself. The delicious paradoxical scenario—the potential undoing of Chapman's person due to his own recalcitrant desire to see the most controversial subject matter splash across his front page to ensure wider and wider circulation—is quite the cinematic meal to be engorged.

Fuller is widely attributed the line that the very beginning of a film should give the viewer a “hard-on,” which crudely approximates what his directorial outings would later achieve. (Including the fine newspaper noirish melodrama Park Row from the very same year.) Scandal Sheet almost achieves that standard of criteria—Derek's McCleary behaves like a policeman gleaning gruesome details of a murder, only to be thrown out of the crime scene by a disgusted cop—but unlike Fuller's dyspeptically fast-paced book, it is has less alacrity to its rhythm. Whereas Chapman's irredeemable act occurs right at the beginning of Fuller's novel, Karlson's film is slower to uncover it. Fortunately, Scandal Sheet gains momentum in its aftermath. One highly memorable scene involves a group of woebegone drunkards being questioned by McCleary and his partner Biddle (a well-realized and queasily comical Harry Morgan), as the newspapermen attempt to get to the bottom of the crime at the film's center. Donna Reed as morally upright Julie Allison sometimes veers into didactic, lifeless platitudes, but her relationship with the borderline courting McCleary is well-rendered and believable.

In many ways, however, Scandal Sheet is a film that would not be nearly so sibilating without Crawford's ardent performance. Known for barking like a bulldog, Crawford utilizes his (at this point in his career, especially after winning the Oscar for All the King's Men) on-screen identity, and creates an indelible noir protagonist driven to sheer desperation. As he finds himself committing yet another unspeakable crime against a sympathetic character simply to hide his earlier ones, the audience may find in him, not quite empathy, but responsive connection. It may help that Crawford's Chapman is softened and curiously mollified; in Fuller's novel he is far more incorrigibly awful a person. In Karlson's film noir, however, that aforementioned callous hand of fate entraps Chapman, and makes an already ugly person only far uglier. The very ending of Scandal Sheet may be interpreted as a sight gag of sorts, but it reinforces the smoke-filled verbal lacerations that have come before. (For an example of only one brutal comment to be found throughout the film, McCleary once refers to a dead woman as a wonderment to Reed's Allison—a dame “with her mouth shut.”) The last shot of Scandal Sheet in actuality surpasses its apparent comicality, and comments on the paradoxes that haunt Chapman, driving a man to destroy himself through his own megalomania.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

2009-02-10T11:00:00.000-08:00

Richard Nixon was perhaps the most bizarre figure to ever occupy the presidency of the United States, and especially an aberration in the televized era. That he could lose the presidency once primarily due to that oncoming omnipresent fixture of American life, the television set, speaks to the man's knowledge of what had done him in. He knew he was, almost hilariously, the anti-political animal that a John F. Kennedy was. It was not that he was dumb, or particularly more treacherous than most politicians who attain that most noxiously overused phrase mistakenly reserved for highly ambitious rulers of the world, “greatness.” He was simply all wrong for politics. The moment Nixon endeavored to appear and sound respectable and earnest, many people assumed he was lying to them. Words as innocuous as, “Good evening, my fellow Americans,” spilling forth from his glistening-from-perspiration lips, wreathed in his eerily ominous bass voice, made people grimace and groan. Nixon was actually quite bright, especially for an American president of the latter half of the twentieth century—perhaps another, more underappreciated reason he still sticks out today—and constantly made notes to himself to correct this deficit of charisma and manufactured affinity many successful national hucksters respectively employ and engender. In his first term as president, he would tirelessly scribble such embarrassing instructions in self-help as, “Add element of lift to each appearance. Understanding the young... Lift spirit of people—Pithy, memorable phrases.” Nixon knew how the game was played, especially in the era of television—he had once been its chiefest victim, after all—and he desperately wanted to connect with the people through the art of appealing sloganeering and pandering.

With Frost/Nixon, director Ron Howard has created another monument to ahistorical sophistry, much like his A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man, which both wildly distorted true history to serve artistically meager ends of making one character wholly “heroic” while, in the latter case, libelously casting one figure as a loathsome villain. Howard's movies are so impersonal, so slick and inconsequential, that his repetitious bludgeoning of the audience with his subjects' importance is not only alienating, but at this juncture downright comical. Frost/Nixon is based on a stage play, originating in concept from a series of interviews three years after Nixon resigned from office, with the Englishman David Frost. The film is not interested in truly excavating the putrid ugliness of paycheck journalism at the pathetic story's heart—Nixon was paid $600,000 for the interviews, with a third of that up front, and contractually guaranteed twenty percent of all profits derived from the show's exhibition, the latter point being completely lost by Morgan's condescending screenplay.

That is the strategy Morgan and Howard pursue, from the beginning to the conclusion: obfuscation, dishonest revisionism and mischaracterization. How ironic that they doubtless would see in Nixon the very malfeasance of which they are historically and artistically guilty. Why shy away from the ignominiously venal networking between Morgan and Howard's faux pairing of David (Frost) and Goliath (Tricky Dick)? It would deprive them of ensuring that the audience is assuredly relating to Frost as a vicarious interrogator on behalf of virtue and justice when he attempts to slay the demon in their extended boxing match. And Howard does portray the Frost/Nixon interviews as contests of boxing, with two massive personalities dueling. While Howard petulantly strives to make his uncomplicated documentation of pugnacious pugilism, Morgan's screenplay affords Frank Langella's Nixon with a feasible melancholia that treads dangerously close to sloppily sentimentalizing the thirty-seventh president. Moments of loneliness and paranoia unsurprisingly occupy much of Nixon's lackluster post-presidential routine, and Morgan and Howard delineate his fallen star's trajectory through speaking engagements and most confidently in a boozy phone conversation that is probably the film's most curiously efficacious moment.

The performances of Frost/Nixon have received great attention, but they are not especially impressive. Langella as Nixon has the juicy, more carefully modulated part with which to work, but many of his acting choices are either pedestrian or merely adequate. Anthony Hopkins's searing interpretation surpassed imitation; like the Oliver Stone film in which it appeared, it made an embellishment out of not solely Nixon but the “Nixon era” itself—erecting an epic Shakespearean and Marlovian tragedy out of a time, place and man that is effulgent and glowing in its resonance. Langella's hangdog weariness juxtaposed with his Nixon's fits of hysteric yelling recalls some kind of fleeting, off-kilter confluence of Robert Mitchum, Walter Matthau and Al Pacino. However, the film's most perspicuous vacuum is in Michael Sheen's thoroughly uninteresting and inauthentic performance as Frost. Sheen plays Frost as a breathlessly boyish lightweight—and the turn is a total failure as a result. Lost is Frost's public persona, doubtless exaggerated and affected for consumption, of the professorially languorous, vaguely captious purveyor of the postulations of the intelligentsia.

It is oddly fitting that so many of the easily researched factoids of the Frost/Nixon interviews are wholly disregarded, as the entire conformation of the film, and probably the stage play, are in essence a half-truth. Howard is determined to depict these confrontations as the culmination of the entire time period in large part defined by the former president. They were, however, while slightly interesting, little more than one opportunistic figure cashing in on the opportunism of another. Probably unwittingly, Morgan and Howard have essayed the cynical handling of national disgrace as a form of entertainment.

Unfortunately, the screenwriter and director seem incapable of not twisting the facts of the interviews to service their lusterless agenda. In one pivotal moment of the film, Nixon describes himself as “the last casualty of Vietnam”—which would be an intolerable example of hyperbole and self-aggrandizement if it were true. The actual transcript reads, “Frost: ...[P]erhaps you were the last American casualty of the Vietnam War.” To which Nixon seemingly unthinkingly mumbled, “A case could be made for that, yes.” It may seem like a fairly small detail, but it is microcosmic of the artless efforts of legerdemain that characterizes Frost/Nixon, from the dishonest visual conception of the interviews, with the camera inching closer to the two subjects' countenances, to the trite exploration of the rather unexceptional link between them, which may be best understood as an interdependence.

The Harder They Fall (1956)

2009-02-07T03:20:00.000-08:00

(The Harder They Fall was screened along with Johnny Stool Pidgeon on Tuesday, January 27 at the San Francisco Castro Theatre as part of the film noir festival, Noir City 7.)

The Harder They Fall was Humphrey Bogart's final film, which has forever endowed it with an historic import transcending the content of the film. Bogart had played so many haggard, world-weary characters that perhaps his rather obviously tired comportment and demeanor in The Harder They Fall seemed completely natural to many moviegoers. The movie star would die shortly after completing the film, leaving behind one last wholly solid performance. The Harder They Fall would probably not work as well with anyone else in the part, if for no other reason than Bogart's placement as the picture's star bestows upon it a stipulation: like so many other Bogart avatars, his down-on-his-luck ex-sportswriter Eddie Willis is another archetypal representation of the figure that would partly serve to define the “Bogart mystique,” that of the apparent cynic busily, dispassionately pursuing his own interests, only to finally melt before the sweltering heat of conscience and indignation.

One of the gravest problems with The Harder They Fall, however, is that Bogart's final redemption comes too late, and its impact is too little. The screenplay by Philip Yordan, based on novelist Budd Schulberg's book, miscalculates in its manipulation of the “Bogart mystique”; Willis is, while empathetically drawn and comprehensively rounded, a fairly dirty character. That the selling of his soul is done with Bogart coolly inviting audience sympathy from time to time—looking on in abject horror and disgust at the rampant wrongdoings (always laced with nauseating self-righteousness) of the mobster Nick Benko (Rod Steiger)—does not diminish the fact that Willis has sold his soul. Benko believes he has found the greatest meal-ticket in the world, a giant Argentinean he can shamelessly market as a heretofore unknown boxing powerhouse in America, to be ridden all the way to a championship title bout in New York City. Willis (only barely reluctantly) agrees to be Benko's front-man for the press, issuing statements that always help Benko in achieving his ends.

Mark Robson directed The Harder They Fall; he had directed the noirish boxing saga Champion (1949) starring Kirk Douglas. That film was fearless in its zeroing in on the machinations of media in making the Douglas character—a brutish, unsympathetic raging bull—into something of a hero. The Harder They Fall is likewise interested in media manipulation and the manner in which the fourth estate can be so readily utilized by the crooked. Robson's direction of Champion, which was predominantly confident and visually arresting, is not matched here. An opening sequence of cars racing to a boxing studio is a bravura set-piece, laying the gauntlet down for the rest of the picture, but Robson cannot sustain that kind of nervous energy. Much of the film takes place in close quarters, with hotel rooms, arena locker rooms and home living rooms making up the majority of the various, vaguely monotonous settings. Robson finds a certain sizzle in the boxing bouts, with arenas full of people viewing the spectacle of the giant Argentinean Toro Moreno (Mike Lane), and Bogart and Steiger are up to their respective tasks but the film's lack of visual prowess from Robson makes The Harder They Fall dependent on Yates' screenplay and the actors.

The Harder They Fall, introduced by the always highly knowledgeable Eddie Muller at Noir City 7, is, as Muller recounts, loosely based on the astonishing career of 1930s heavyweight champion Primo Carnera, a gargantuan-sized lumbering Italian titan. Pushed to the top of the boxing world, and attaining the championship, the unscrupulous promoters behind his meteoric rise allowed him to be devastated in the ring. In his title fight with Max Baer, he was knocked down eleven times, losing the championship to Baer. As Muller noted in his introduction, two powerful gangsters on the east coast attempted to take over the game of boxing. Muller assured the audience that he was not manufacturing their names—Paul John “Frankie” Carbo and Frank “Blinky” Palermo. Carnera was their prized selection, and so Steiger's Benko is informed by these shadowy real-life men by Schulberg's fire-breathing, outraged novel.

Where The Harder They Fall succeeds most vociferously is in its almost documentarian examination of boxing; in an ad-libbed, unscripted scene, a physically and economically broken-down ex-boxer named Joe Greb is interviewed. Bogart's Willis is forced to view the scene in all of its pathetic unsightliness. Yates' adaptation of Schulberg's fiery indignation still stings. Bogart makes the shame that periodically swells and rises up in him like indigestion palpable, though the foreordained resolution of his character—based on sportswriter and promoter Harold Conrad—neither diminishes nor validates Willis' unseemly involvement in many of the film's most repugnant moments. One painful episode details a gracious veteran brain-scrambled boxer's efforts to leave the boxing game with one final, losing fight against Toro, only to be served as a veritable lamb led to slaughter. Willis' anger and hurt at this makes him a compelling figure, but the unvarnished truth of the aforementioned boxer's condition makes the final redemptive moments only hollower.

“The fight game is like show business. There are no great fighters anymore. Whoever is the best showman becomes the champ.” So declares Benko (with Steiger giving the dialogue everything he has) to Willis. The scathing cynicism is unleashed by Bogart's Willis, to Toro: “What do you care if a bunch of bloodthirsty, screaming people think of you? Did you ever get a look at their faces? They pay a few bucks hoping to see a man get killed. To hell with them! Think of yourself. Get your money and get out of this rotten business.” When a certain boxer is being wheeled out of an arena, a venomous woman screams at him for losing his match. While Robson's mise-en-scene is awkward and stilted at times, Yates' screenplay knows exactly what its target is, and that surpasses only Benko and his henchmen. This makes for a somewhat schizophrenic film, which simultaneously has designs on being a movie with a message and a story about some crooks cashing in on boxing. As Toro is finally mercilessly beaten to a pulp in the picture's final contest, with onlookers booing and hissing him in his moment of agony, it is prudent to remember Muller's first comment in his introduction to the film at the San Francisco Castro: boxing is noir.

Taken (2008)

2009-02-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

Taken is being widely interpreted as an action film, which is true in its effect but not nearly as much in its implications. Likewise, it has been battered by some acutely politically correct film critics as a reactionary, George W. Bush-era fantasia of fetishistic vengeful torture and bloodletting, inflicted by an American on Albanian and French villains. That misses the point; the ethnic particulars of the characters, while successfully engendering plausible paradigmatic dynamics—immigrant Albanian gangsters are a source of criminality in France, and human trafficking is a major global industry in which such notorious organizations partake—are not crucial to understanding and processing Taken's efficacy. The producer and co-screenwriter (with Robert Mark Kamen) is Luc Besson, whose penchant for action-infused narratives is occasionally matched by a happily received interest in human relationships. This distinguishes Leon—easily Besson's greatest film—which possessed a sentiently delicate growing affinity as its pulsating bloodstream, not the frantic, sensorially overpowering action sequences that complemented it. Taken functions not as mere pyrotechnic showmanship, but as a curiously restrained exercise in genre-renewal, so to speak; Besson and director Pierre Morel strive to enhance an admittedly weary vessel, that of the revenge action thriller. Eagle Eye was an action movie with a stimulative concept, though the film's more formulaic rendering was less than completely noteworthy. Taken is, at times, spiritually not unlike The Limey or the film that inspired the 1999 picture, Point Blank. There is a gradual, simmering intellect operating beneath the incendiary Taken: if it does not merit unconditional accolades, it should at least not go unmentioned.

Taken is an intriguingly paced picture. At ninety-three minutes long, it allows the first act of the narrative to be dedicated to constructing the consanguinity that serves as the cylinder for the film's intangible pilgrimage. That odyssey serves as a microcosmic statement about fathers and daughters—and, like The Limey, illustrates the undying love an absentee father tirelessly possesses for his little princess. This is (almost wordlessly) demonstrated in the near-opening scene, which is of Liam Neeson's retired American master spy Bryan Mills responding to his own knowledge of his daughter—when he was in her life, he gleaned that she wanted to become a singer. The gift he purchases for her birthday represents that memory. He proudly hands her the gift, which he has poured his heart into, and she fleetingly responds, but when her immensely rich stepfather Stuart (Xander Berkeley) gives her a thoroughbred horse one moment later, she is overcome by the astonishing, living present. Bryan's nonplussed countenance speaks volumes about the socio-economic reality, as well as the fecklessness with which he has attempted to reassert himself in his daughter's life. When his ex-colleagues come by for a barbecue, he explains to them (admittedly in too neat and expository a fashion) why he has left his former life behind. He wants to simply reconnect with his daughter. Taken's economy of style is largely slyly coordinated, but its acceptance of a few short cuts may alienate some. Conveniently, Bryan and his friends have taken a one-night moonlighting job providing security for a pop diva in Los Angeles—opening the stage for Bryan to ask the youthful but famed singer for any advice on behalf of his daughter. Too obvious? Perhaps, but the film, behaving in an almost slumberous manner—befitting the faux superannuated demeanor of Neeson's retiree, belied by his razor-sharp senses and eventually unveiled expertise—spends enough proportional time to make such occurrences fairly believable within the picture's framework.

Once the “plot” of the film begins, however, the patience afforded to establishing everything that matters to Bryan is eschewed in favor of purely cinematic, unpretentiously compact storytelling. The end result is a deliriously fast-paced, hectically unsettling olla podrida portrait of kinetically tumid hostilities. Taken's color schema is a washed out, almost bilious canvas. Cinematographer Michel Abramowicz captures leading man Neeson in a recurring haze of gas, smoke, steam, fog and both natural and artificial light. Contributing a deft numinousness to the proceedings, the visually stimulating mise-en-scene seems to continually enshrine Bryan's actions as the consequences of casuist love for one's own blood. Recalling the casuist St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori and his monumental book, Theologia Moralis, when Neeson's Bryan stumbles on one camp of beleaguered, drug-addled sex slaves after another, the film intelligently posits his reactions as legitimate. By systematically penetrating the Albanian traffickers' network, he is cast in a virtuous light; that his motive is limited to finding and rescuing his own daughter is wisely viewed as understandable. Tuning the very foundation of comprehending the nature of ethics is highly difficult, in its myriad contradictions when applied to the various incarnations of humanity, but Taken's casuistry is refreshing. Bryan is not a man of absorbed abstractions and ideologies, but a breathing source of specific correction.

In an undeniable way, however, Taken is a parable and model for absentee fathers. The Limey examined the gash in the lives of its father and daughter's connective emotional fluency, while Taken allows itself to imbibe the cathartic trappings more typically attendant to films broadly defined by their interpretations of vengefulness. Unlike most films of this kind, however, Taken is far more serene and troubled, inclusive and off-putting all at once. Bryan's emotive, unconditional love for his daughter—so commendably conveyed by Neeson (the scene in which he is doomed to listen to his daughter's kidnapping finds resonance in the actor's magnificently indefatigable and transmitting face)—provides an investment of audience emotion lacking in the Bourne franchise, for instance, which, in all of its hyperactive dramatics and pyrotechnics, was fundamentally about a man running to express anger at his employers.

Taken's visual patterns and intelligently mounted singularities make Morel's film more nutritious than the great bulk of films often defined by their instances of gun-play. From the very beginning, Taken gently surprises the viewer. The first surprise is the presentation of the title itself. As Neeson's Bryan walks past a picture of his daughter, the film's title appears—large, and in white text, against a dark background. Yet the filmmakers keep the title planted on the screen as the background changes with the next scene—the uncharacteristically bright glare of daylight, with Neeson's Bryan parking his car. This slight jolt created by the mere retaining of the title on the screen accurately describes the subdued yet effective manner in which Taken nudges one peppered surprise after another throughout the narrative. When Bryan's best friend refers to him as “Rambo,” the film later takes this statement to a meta conclusion, as the film comments on the action film: Bryan actually refers to himself over the phone to his inevitable adversary as his “nightmare.” In one scene of derring-do, the trendily loud sounds of machine gun fire are brilliantly subverted by the filmmakers, as the sound actually drops as the gunfire occurs. This creates an intrinsically more surreal recording of the action sequence unfolding. Happily, there is only one major explosion throughout the entire film, and it is perfectly calibrated as the punctuation of a series of gasoline barrels being knocked down like bowling pins in a rhythmic dance. This is linked to the film's one major car chase sequence, which is largely captured through low shots that make the battling jeeps look like giant carnivorous animals in the mud. The chase scene is capped off by a beauteous shot of large globs of mud spilling downward like melting icicles from a wintry roof, splattering about a villain's windshield at just the musically perfect moment.

Certain ubiquitous moments of the “action” genre remain, and it is always worth wondering why villainous infrastructure is never quite trustworthy. However, Morel simultaneously emphasizes and modifies the tale's most pointedly resonant properties. An exchange between sinister snake and heroic avenging angel like, “It wasn't personal. It was just business,”/“It was all personal to me,” may have initially read as prosaic and formulaic but are gifted by an aesthetic propulsion of sight and sound. As Bryan pitilessly shoots a man to death in an elevator, a cloud of smoke wafts and mushrooms in the small environ. That smoke—representing the hell the slain has to look forward to, and the anagogic endorsement of Bryan's conduct—speaks volumes and bolsters the dialogue as simply the words people have for one another juxtaposed with the commentary of visages afforded by the filmmakers. Taken allows itself to be viewed as a wish fulfillment exercise for missing-in-action fathers—Bryan's daughter's abduction provides him with the condition to prove his heroism and love to her, leaving the horse-giving, rich stepfather in the proverbial dust—as well as the blessing of good mercilessly vanquishing evil, and an ethically casuistic tale of the love a father has for his child.

Forthcoming February Features

2009-02-04T00:15:00.000-08:00

Well, I outlined what was happening here in January, and I almost completely stuck to the plan. A review of Otto Preminger's film noir, Where the Sidewalk Ends, however, is postponed but not forgotten.

As this is February, with the holiday of love, St. Valentine's Day--at least since the time of Chaucer--on the mid-February horizon, I must say, of course, man cannot live on film noir alone. The Noir City 7 film noir festival was tremendous fun, and as I have been kindly encouraged to continue posting reviews and recollections from that ten-day event, I will indeed do so in my own mercurial fashion. (Which is to say, whenever I muster concentration and ambition for short periods while negotiating time to write more here.) Getting to the point, I will be engaging in a brief series of romantic cinema leading up to St. Valentine's Day.

This series will be made up of three films with love stories at their center--and the identities of those three films to be looked at in Coleman's Corner in the coming days are: A Woman is a Woman, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and the film that made me come up with the idea in the first place, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is truly the "St. Valentine's Day movie" of this generation, no? Every holiday deserves its film and St. Valentine's Day now has Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The 2004 comedy-drama will cap the series off just before St. Valentine's Day.

Again, do not fear, noir-lovers and noiristas: I will still write some more reviews of noirs I saw at the San Francisco Castro Theatre. Now that the film festival is in the rearview mirror, however, there is little rush to do so. I'm mercurial (read: disorganized and undisciplined).

What else is occurring in February? Well, the Muriel Awards. I was asked by Muriel awards mastermind Paul Clark to vote and write a couple of blurbs for the awards, and I am honored to do both. So everyone is encouraged to look for that very soon. That reminds me, I need to add Paul to my blogroll.

On Saturday, January 3, I was asked by one Steve Eifert to write for the website of which he is proprietor, Noir of the Week. He currently has a fine review of Jacques Tourneur's Cat People up. I agreed back on that first Saturday of 2009 to write a review of This Gun for Hire, which will be published at both of our websites on February 23. Noir of the Week is a terrific website. That reminds me, I need to add Steve to my blogroll.

Then there are all of those pesky new films, both the overflowing leftovers from 2008 and the first batch of 2009 releases I may dare to experience.

You know what is remarkably annoying? I could have speedily hammered out a review in the time it took me to think about, mull over and write all of this. That is frustrating. Oh well. I just hope everyone reading this is as excited about February as I am. What, you say? You're obsessing over the Oscars? Ha!

So, what I am conveying is that I will be around. This blog is not a class and this post is not a syllabus, but you can look back on this little scribbling as a guide that, let us hope, will prove to be largely accurate in delineating the bulk of this blog's activities for the year's shortest month. However, do not be too certain that I will remain punctiliously faithful to this precarious guideline. I am mercurial.

Shakedown (1950)

2009-01-31T11:46:00.000-08:00

(Shakedown was screened Wednesday evening at the San Francisco Castro Theatre along with While the City Sleeps as part of the film noir festival, Noir City 7.)

Howard Duff plays a homme fatale in Shakedown, a sordidly gritty “B” film noir about an unconscionable newspaper photographer who climbs his way to the top of his profession through shooting the most eventful happenings in San Francisco—with his camera. Creepily insouciant with a glassy, pitiless pair of eyes, Duff, as directed by Joseph Pevney, makes his Jack Early a cipher. This ethical black hole of a man is the film's repellent central character, and Shakedown's narrative incrementalism—Early becomes more pronouncedly brackish and more irrevocably insatiable and insufferable as a person as the film continues—makes the picture more engrossing. Following Duff's Early in his pursuits of photographing major, newsworthy moments in the city, the film takes a methodically masticating viewpoint, developing a sort of partially indifferent stance with regards to Early's actions. This intriguing approach makes the film more meta than it may initially appear to be. Pevney sagaciously mimics his protagonist's all-seeing amorality—the film follows him wherever he goes, just as he follows budding stories and dramatic episodes that seem to be cajoled into existence by the very existence of the urban jungle from which they sprout. This, naturally, befits the environment of film noir, and makes what could have been a merely melodramatic jeremiad into something more nutritious and rewarding.

Working from a story by Nat Dallinger, Martin Goldsmith's screenplay periodically stumbles from bouts of excessive literalism and prosaic formula. Yet there are some solid little touches that buttress the greater vein the narrative delineates. Early's homme fatale status is hinted at early when one pretty woman after another cannot avert their enamored gaze as he confidently marches into what he hopes will be the arena in which he will succeed at all costs, the city newspaper. When Early—quite literally—moves in on the cajoling girlfriend of his employer and intrepid newspaperwoman Ellen Bennett (Peggy Dow), the picture of the employer and timid beau of Ellen's, David Glover (Bruce Bennett) is pushed off of a desk, and falls down, to the ground and off camera range.

As the film gracefully concatenates Early in all of his lurid photography, from snapping sensationalist (and manipulated) shots of drowning men and defenestrating women, the atmospherically pitch-black cynosure of Shakedown becomes more perilously foreboding. Gangsters are introduced, such as Nick Palmer (Brian Donlevy) and Harry Colton (Lawrence Tierney). Ann Vernon plays Palmer's French wife, Nita—who quickly attracts the attention of Early. One of the more ambivalently delectable components of Shakedown is the efficacy with which the picture compels the audience to sympathize with the gangsters routinely exploited, coaxed and finessed by Early. The conflicted emotions provide greater detachment from the characters, a sanctuary from which the viewer can remain neutrally engaged for the entirety of the picture while remaining appalled by Early's outrageous antics.

Duff's performance zeros in on his character's gifts—an effortlessly natural charisma and prepossession that seem like necessities for any solid homme fatale—which manage to disguise his more ravenously ugly personality. Like any plausible seducer, Duff's Early is in no small way a feat of muted chicanery and profound deviousness. Securely ensconced within the more saporous property of his persona that ably lures sexual and professional foe alike, these gradually blossoming fragments of more perspicuous wrongdoing are given greater aromatic potency. Scenes in which Early, confronted by the prospect of making money, nonchalantly agrees to one crooked deal after another, pile up like so many sins to never quite be confessed.

Many films have portrayed the conflicts, turmoils and philosophical underpinnings of the art-form of both cinematic and still photography. From the Buster Keaton-starring Edward Sedgwick-Keaton film, The Cameraman to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up and many other examples, the act of photographing people in one context or another has left an indelible impression on those who partake in these films' cogent inquiries. Perhaps informed by the Platonic visage of concepts represented by the varied objects that populate the lives of people, the photographs made pivotal in the narratives of these pictures may likewise be avatars of effulgence, mayhem or clandestinely captured and unearthed secrecy. These visual representations are endowed by a finely tuned animistic perspective. Pictures, predominantly suspended in idyllic timelessness, are, a fortiori, typically portals into convivial illustrations. It is when this symmetrical concinnity is breached by invasive, world-altering misfortune that the preternaturally established environment finds itself poisoned. As master-manipulator Early massages one tragedy after another to personally gain from it, Shakedown comments on the dual egoisms of the character himself, circuitously, and the art form he exploits.

Photography finally distilled persuasively records Plato's eidos, while remaining neutral in Aristotle's divergent consideration, and rejection, of independently existing forms. Brought to the modernity in which Early's calculatedly emotive photography thrives, Heidegger's teacher, Husserl, finds relevancy in his “eidetic” application of Platonic phenomenology—but, a photograph may in actuality be the most finely sublimated literal snapshot, humorously, of Plato's eikasia, his comprehension and signification of the elusive human imagination, which is invariably focused on temporal imagery and appearance. Powell and Antonioni (and later Francis Coppola, who would adapt Antonioni's sight for sound in The Conversation) exquisitely detailed this. In Shakedown, however, the noirish storyline finds Early feasting on the sociological ailments that plague the urban jungle with his lethal weapon (the poster for the film notes that his camera was more deadly than the gangsters' guns). This media orchestration befits postwar American cynicism in pervasive institutions and even broad societal relationships, such as between the fourth estate and the populace. This bitterness would find scalding expression in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole from the next year. Shakedown places the role of media-sensitive conductor of bewildering machinations in a more achingly personal light, which leaves a different, but no less intriguing mark. Kirk Douglas' reporter in Ace in the Hole was ultimately a self-aggrandizing huckster. As wonderful as Douglas was in that film, his character was not psychologically crippled, and he, though reluctantly, could see the harm he had selfishly administered. Duff's Early is a man with emotional parts simply missing. That barrenness makes this film noxiously arresting; the passive act of watching functions as a recoiling sense of despair. Though Shakedown cannot match the aforementioned films in either ambition or execution, it is a searing documentation of irresponsible turpitude.

Night Editor (1946)

2009-01-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

(Night Editor was screened along with Alias Nick Beal on Monday evening at the San Francisco Castro Theatre as part of the film noir festival, Noir City 7.)

Night Editor is a stalwart “B” film noir that paddles through an appealingly tawdry narrative with characters who are not among the more virtuous committed to celluloid. Based on the radio program of the same name, the film is shackled to a cumbersomely clunky and illogical framing device—a group of newspapermen conversing about old stories to one another late at night (the device utilized for the radio show)—but this matters little. The actual plot is not outstanding, either, but it does provide the habitat in which its bracing characters move about. William Gargan plays Tony Cochrane, a man who grew up poor and became a cop, becoming a homicide lieutenant. His unfaithfulness to his loving wife and child, and compulsive attraction to a wicked sadomasochistic socialite named Jill Merrill, played to hyperbolic delirium by the shapely blonde beauty Janis Carter, seals his fate as the archetypal dupe. Night Editor's dyspeptic narrative is lively and allows these two characters carte blanche to display all of their unsightly traits. Night Editor is a mammoth-sized, slightly viscid cheeseburger that is only scarcely grilled and all the better for it.

Directed by Henry Levin and adapted from Hal Burdick's radio program and Scott Littleton's story, “Inside Story,” by Hal Smith, the film's most pronounced presence is doubtless Carter's Jill. Carter is Night Editor's fire-breathing, coldblooded embodiment of the exteriorly hot but interiorly icy femme fatale. Carter's interpretation of her character, adorned with an eerily itchy, equally playful and disconcerting leering smirk, is what lingers well after the picture has ended. Wracked by neurosis, Jill is sexually excited by violence, and, when she and her illicit lover enjoy one another's company in a parked car, they witness a ferocious murder-by-tire iron. Tony wants to act, and nearly does—but finally heeds Jill's shrill commentary on the situation, which is that scandal will erupt if he intervenes in catching or killing the murderer. Shamed by his inaction, Tony returns to the car, where the aroused Jill maniacally squirms and writhes in her seat, demanding that he show her the battered body.

This set-piece is the springboard for the rest of the tale, and what abides in the viewer's mind days after watching the film is the pulchritudinous but pernicious Jill. Carter's performance is gloriously histrionic but never deleteriously so. She outshines the rest of the cast, most of whom are men. Like many a femme fatale—crafted at a time supposedly more sociologically askew in its male-dominant perspective—the femme figure is, while definitively peccant, also far more charismatically bedecked than all of her male counterparts combined. Carter's performance—underneath all of the immoral maneuvering and aberrant amorousness—is simply nectarous. Her allure is overwhelming, but she is so mentally imbalanced and perverse that Tony knows she is completely wrong for him. Tony's somewhat humorously mousy wife, Martha (Jeff Donnell), serves as the contrast to Jill—upstanding and good, but bland, and lacking the spicy sizzle that the incorrigible Jill brings with her.

Femme fatales in Hollywood film noirs are formed from varied shades, but they do share commonalities. Their origin is particularly historically and culturally rich. As ancient as the Hebrew mythological figure Lilith, from Sumerian wind and storm demons like Lilitu at approximately 4,000 BC, a Judaic night demon and a screech owl in the King James Bible. Eve herself is depicted as an easily tempted creature of sensuality whose misleading of Adam doomed man. Other figures from the Judaic and Christian history include Delilah and Salome, the latter of whom used her physical endowments and wiles to ensure John the Baptist's beheading. Greek mythological goddesses, historical figures and specters like Aphrodite, the Sphinx, the Siren, Helen of Troy and Agamemnon's murderous wife, Clytemnestra set the Hellenistic foundation for modern depictions of unsavory females. Just as noir's femme fatales are noted for their exotic magnetism, Cleopatra's manipulations of Roman men established her as a permanent fixture of Roman antipathy.

Night Editor is arguably a minor noir, but the depiction of the femme fatale makes the film deserving of greater recognition. Other aspects of the film are chronically conventional to the genre, including Burnett Guffey and Philip Tannura's cinematography, but Hal Smith's scorching screenplay, pied with livid, exceptional pieces and dialogue, and Carter's gusting performance recommend it, and in a way pay great homage to the fatales of history and literature. Indeed, Jill is not unlike John Keats's Matilda, whose tempting of the once-incorruptible hero (Keats's The Monk) through the luridly “transgressive” (pace the literary term) and duplicitous means at her disposal entrap him. Night Editor is not nearly a film wholly worth comparisons to such past representations of such dramatic tales, but Jill's irrepressible constitution stands apart from anything that could be termed generic.

The film hits its stride just when it should—its conclusive passage—as the femme fatale once again disarms and enchants her male victim through her beguiling beauty, only to violate his being in the most personal of ways. The sequence is scary, sad, funny and powerful all at once, a flamboyant feat perhaps only a “B” film could achieve. Gargan and director Levin must have known that he (along with his character) was no match for Carter's Jill, and the actor underplays everything, including this most noteworthy moment of the film. Gargan does not cover much range, yet when the screenplay demands that he be shocked and horrified by events encircling him, he does so well. The apathetic, practically suicidal foreknowledge he has—he is insane, stupid or simply so pathetically overcome by Jill and her sex, to even barely trust her—enriches his actions, making him both more and less pathetic all at once. Levin's mise-en-scene is mostly unremarkable, but he paces the action sufficiently well, and occasionally stages his actors in ways that heighten the tension. The film belongs completely to its leading lady, however, whose feigned, wide-eyed innocence seems to ensnare every male viewer with a pulse, despite their being endowed by the verisimilitude-separating knowledge that they are watching a film, and Carter is playing a character of sheer villainy. Jill is perverse in a way that is rare even among the rottenest femme fatales. That feminine nastiness has rarely been so much fun; when Gargan's Tony refuses to basely satisfy Jill's needs, it would not be difficult to find many a fellow watching the film who would gladly volunteer.

Slightly Scarlet (1956)

2009-01-26T17:42:00.000-08:00

Slightly Scarlet is a fascinating, grippingly trimmed, splashily Technicolor film noir starring John Payne, Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl. The film is a consanguineous addition to the broader canon of American film noir but has the lurid intemperance of a 1950s “kitchen sink” melodrama, and has become quite beloved in France in recent years. Payne plays the humorously named Ben Grace, a slithery, unscrupulous mercurial manipulator of the smoke-filled rooms he traverses, which host the likes of thuggish syndicate master Solly Caspar (Ted de Corsia).Fleming and Dahl play redheaded sisters—Fleming as June Lyons, the secretary/girlfriend of fictitious Bay City mayoral candidate Frank Jansen (Ken Taylor), a reform-minded agitator and Dahl as the kleptomaniac and nymphomaniac “bad girl” sister, Dorothy Lyons (often shortened to “Dor”). Directed by Allan Dwan, the film finds its rhythmic surreality by famed cinematographer John Alton, whose work in color enlivens Slightly Scarlet to dimensions that truly, lastingly, distinguish the picture. Alton makes Slightly Scarlet look like a live-action, unspooling 1950s movie poster, with its garish reds, brilliant whites and deliciously, darkly and inky clothes, guns and eyes all converging to create a sumptuous visual experience.

Alton's use of key-lighting is reined in, but he sloshes the frame with opulent oranges, picturesque pinks and gorgeous greens, often sharply contrasting the characters with colors that accentuate whichever complexion and iridescent glow they bring before the camera. Taking an intrinsically black background, befitting noir, Alton shoots in Technicolor with bombastic fervency, creating a palette that is sparkling and alarming in equal measure. The cinematography is an irreplaceable property belonging to Slightly Scarlet—the oneiric chiaroscuro of black-and-white suitably replaced by mid-'50s, bountifully colorful bespattering that is fiery in its luridness.

The performances are all seismically wrought, with Payne playing a character who is never exactly what the audience suspects he is—while occasionally appearing to be far worse. Grace's gangsterism finds itself at the film's epicenter, as he is battered and slapped around by his “boss,” Caspar, only to eventually try to take the mob over himself. Fleming plays her part with a firmness that befits her “straight” character. Her nearly maternal handling of Dahl's “Dor” is at times quite touching without being sentimentalized. Dahl, however, is given the scene- and film-stealing role, and she plays it to the juicy hilt. In the picture's denouement, Dor is depicted as a woman descending into utter madness—perhaps she had been there all along and had been barely able to obscure it from others beforehand—and Dahl makes it believable. Never falling over the precipice of sheer camp, Dahl makes her character firstly a “strong woman,” accursed by a weak mind. Ted de Corsia is brutal and burly as the film's most poisonous malefactor, tossing a dead man out of a building and instructing his underlings, “C'mon, let's see if we can beat him down.”

Dwan and Alton collude to create memorable and sometimes mesmerizing visual spectacles. As Payne's Grace discusses Dor with June, Dahl's Dor is captured by the camera through an open door, laying in the backyard, listening to their conversation. The visualization speaks to the essentially triangular relationship that emerges, with Dor affixing herself between Grace and June whenever she can. As Grace and June continue their dialogue, Dor finally stands upright, and slowly walks through the door, which, it is finally revealed, has been open all along. She introduces herself to Grace by calling herself “Dor”—an “open door,” which carries with it both the sexual innuendo and verbal stroke delineating the space through which she has just listened and finally traveled.Much later, as June and Grace talk, Dor is seen between them once again, descending down stairs, which feature phallic-shaped structures.

The visual components underly the film's deterministic psychopathology, which, rather beautifully, seems to seek to make reason out of varied forms of insanity. This paradoxic dramatic undertaking separates itself in some ways from James M. Cain's novel, Love's Lovely Counterfeiter, from which the film is only nominally based. More daring and breathlessly embroidered than Cain's book, Slightly Scarlet, adapted by screenwriter Robert Blees, is powerfully pulpy. The characters are all motivated by some form of self-interest, even the “good girl,” June, whose efforts to keep her little sister on a leash can be interpreted to be, to one degree or another, driven by her own relationship with the mayoral candidate. Likewise, Grace's romantic pursuing of both June and Dor portrays the desire of a man to have everything the symbiotic siblings have to offer, though when Dor shoots a harpoon near him, he is shaken by the younger woman's instability.

Slightly Scarlet is finally an intriguing melange of noir attributes with more romantic inclinations. The film finally places Grace in the position of the hero, being compelled to save the true love, June, from a fate engineered by his ruthless employer, Solly and the compliantly docile Dor. The climax also brings forth the matter of sacrifice, both literal and figurative, as Grace finally acts in a way that just may make his name rightly descriptive. Alton frames him as he makes his final decision against the blunt, dark background behind him.

Slightly Scarlet's depiction of big-city political corruption is in some ways the picture's “MacGuffin,” which is utilized to propel the bare necessities that drive the narrative early on, leaving the rest of the work of storytelling to be done through the engaging characters. American cinema in the 1950s was becoming increasingly paranoid about the powerful, and took repeated shots at institutions and figures of great clout. Some of this doubtless arose from the Hollywood backlash against McCarthyism, seeing governmental force as a more malevolent force than it had often been interpreted as earlier. Slightly Scarlet is an exemplary case belonging to this vein of 1950s cinema, but, befitting its cotton-candy rainbow bowl of mixed colors, it is a mixture of that, of domestic melodramas and of crime drama noir.

Dispatches from Noir City 7

2009-01-26T14:07:00.001-08:00

Friday night at the San Francisco Castro Theatre was a great deal of fun, as it opened up the ten-day schedule of festivities. After entering the building, I conversed with the "czar of noir," Eddie Muller, and pointed out that he commented on my August 24, 2008 review of The Big Heat when it was posted at http://www.moviezeal.com/. (The review can also be found here, for those who wish to brave eye strain.)

Dark City Dame, I promise I'll tell "EM" you said hello sometime tonight or in the very near future; I'll be sure to run into him some more over the course of the next seven evenings.

Moments later, my dad and I found terrific seats--the center of the front row of the balcony--though those balcony seats are not as comfortable as the downstairs seats. The seats in the balcony seem to have remained the same seats for a long time. Eddie Muller came out on-stage and introduced the evening's two films, Deadline--USA and Scandal Sheet, both "newspaper noirs" from 1952. (Though the former is not, strictly speaking, a noir. It is fun, however.) Broderick Crawford is excellent in the latter film, as an amoral managing editor of a newspaper-turned-scandal sheet. The film is based on Samuel Fuller's novel, The Dark Page, and is very well-directed by Phil Karlson, whose visual keenness is quite exciting. (I recently reviewed his 1959 The Scarface Mob, which kicked off television's crime series, The Untouchables.) One I may review in the near future.

Saturday was a marathon day, as the matinee double feature was comprised of Blind Spot (1947), a fairly "light" mystery about a drunken writer (Chester Morris), mulling a plot for a mystery novel, the details of which seem crucial in a real murder investigation--of which he's the prime suspect. The Castro program notes, "Martin (Detour) Goldsmith’s script is particularly amusing for its backhanded take on crime writing." After that, the Alan Ladd-starring 1949 newspaper noir, Chicago Deadline, was up. I'm strongly considering reviewing this whenever I have an opportunity--underneath the surface of the plot, Chicago Deadline has many thematic similarities to Laura (1944).

Saturday evening, after having dinner at Orphan Andy's restaurant, my father and I returned to the Castro. I met Arlene Dahl upstairs at the mezzanine. I was in line to sit down with her on a comfortable red couch and have a picture I printed out from the Internet autographed. Just as I handed her the picture, some crazy person lost control of their alcoholic drink and splattered poor Arlene Dahl and yours truly--and my picture--with liquor. Unfazed by the occurrence, Arlene Dahl happily signed the picture--which is the one at the top of this post.

Wicked as They Come (1956), starring Dahl as a social-climbing gold-digger, was screened. Sitting in what I consider the best row of the theatre, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Ms. Dahl and five others--including her son, Loranzo Lamas, the offspring of her four-year marriage with actor and two-time costar, Fernando Lamas--sitting to my left, taking up the far-left three seats of my row and the one ahead of it. As the Castro program notes, "Arlene Dahl is a sizzling sensation as Kathleen Allen, a woman who learns early that sex is how she’ll get ahead in the world. Her high heels leave puncture wounds in a trail of saps stretching from America to England. British writer-director Ken Hughes adapts Bill Ballinger’s novel Portrait in Smoke, and the result lives up to its re-titling."

After this film was screened, a tribute reel of some of Ms. Dahl's career highlights, and moments of great passion--often violently kissing men or violently throwing objects at them--and Ms. Dahl took the stage with Mr. Muller. The interview was quite good, and moved along at a brisk pace. Ms. Dahl opened up about how she reached Hollywood, and it sounds like something out of a movie. She had joined a theatre's musical production in New York City and on opening night found herself visited backstage by Jack Warner himself, who asked her to come out to Hollywood for a screen testing. Ms. Dahl said that she believed this was all an enormous practical joke, committed by friends she knew who enjoyed pulling off stunts (though this would have been an awfully elaborate practical joke, she rightly figured). After her screen test, which she believed to be "terrible," she was signed to a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers. She recounted her stories, such as replacing Ann Sheridan in My Wild Irish Rose opposite Dennis Morgan, whose compassion and helpfulness were, she believed, indispensable in aiding her before the camera. As she and Mr. Muller downed glasses of champagne, Ms. Dahl discussed seeing Gary Cooper, her relationship with John F. Kennedy and many other interesting stories. She said she had seen Slightly Scarlet screened in France, where it is revered, and Mr. Muller gave the French credit for "getting" film noir.

After the interview, there was another break and I was amused by the terribly long line at the concession stand for popcorn and candy; as a "passport" holder, I moved my way up to the mezzenine again, and found an assortment of goodies to munch on. My favorite was easily the red potato wedges with the sour cream-horseradish sauce for dipping.

Slightly Scarlet (also 1956) followed. To be reviewed soon here at Coleman's Corner.

Sunday it was a return to the matinee, with the obscure "swamp noir," as it was billed, Cry of the Hunted (1953), shown. Formed by a strange screenplay from Jack Leonard, and helmed by Joseph H. Lewis, director of Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, this film, not surprisingly, also features some strong sexual undercurrents. I may return to this film as well, if I ever have an opportunity! It's a wild, fascinating picture, with a memorable dream sequence by the protagonist, played by William Conrad.

After an intermission, Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951) was screened. Possibly Wilder's most viciously cynical film, starring Kirk Douglas as a manipulative reporter who uses a cave-in to put him back to the top of his profession. As the Castro program boldly states, "On its release, critics called this the most bitter, cynical, mean-spirited movie ever made. It still might hold the honor."

Thus far, it has been a fine festival of film noir. Stay tuned here for more developments, reviews and whatever else strikes my fancy.