Bill Roundtree

A Few (But By No Means All) Of The Reasons Reasons Why X-Men 3 Is Such A Bad Movie

2006-06-23T20:35:00.000-07:00

1. What Bryan Singer understands, and what stunningly few other directors of Hollywood action films have yet gotten wise to, is that onscreen carnage is not, in and of itself, exciting. The fact of an explosion is not what's exciting about an explosion. The best scene in Singer's X-2, as most people who like the movie will agree, is Magneto's escape from his plastic prison, which begins with him sucking the iron out of his guard's body (the force of his magnetism lifting and arcing the guard's body upwards as the iron bursts through his skin), and continues with his choreographing swirling metal discs as he flies out of his chamber. It had the excitement of rising action (helped by the editing, patient for the genre) and the kick of visual grandeur (Singer's crane shots were, if anything, an appropriate reflection of the triumph of his character's ego), despite the fact that only one person died and nothing blew up. Brett Ratner's X-3, like almost every other recent summer blockbuster I can recall, goes about its business in the apparent belief that cinematic excitement is directly proportionate to body count. Action scenes are editing hecticly, the too-fast-to-follow cuts creating the illusion of kineticism, and covering up for Ratner's inability to stage a sustained moment of visual engagement. Action scenes need to convey to the viewer a sense of accomplishment—that the mayhem onscreen is building to a moment of consequence. Singer, who has an adult's eye for composition and set of timing, knows how to do this: action scenes in X-2 were thrilling because each shot seemed to promise a direct relation to the climax of the sequence. This is shockingly rare in movies like this; they mostly try to overwhelm the audience. And so in X-3's myriad action scenes, particularly the clusterfuck climax, there's CGI fireballs, extras getting trampled everywhere, and it's all happening so damn fast... the only thing I remember seeing with any clarity is the pale, sagging flesh of the emperor's ass.

2. Somebody apparently compiled a list of every pseudo-heroic bit of inane clunker dialogue any actor has ever unwilling tried to sell in the service of an insufficiently doctored blockbuster script. And then the screenwriters tried to see how many of the lines on that list they could find ways of giving Halle Berry.

3. There is a scene in which Vinnie Jones, playing Juggernaut, a mutant whose apparent power is his ability to build up an enormous head of steam (as if this movie didn't have enough characters already), has his progress momentarily halted when Kiyy Pryde, who can move through walls, drags his lower body down into the floor and leaves him there. And then he bursts out of the floor, and shouts, "I'm Juggernaut, bitch!" When I saw this movie in a theater after work this week, that line got the biggest laugh. Which I found appalling, because it was obviously so nakedly misogynistic and what kind of person finds it amusing when a big burly man overpowers a little girl and calls her a bitch? It occurred to me a few hours later that it was actually a Chapelle's Show reference. Should this reassure me? I don't think it should. Because apparently this movie was written by people who a) think that simply making reference to a currently popular catchphrase counts as humor, and b) are either unaware of or unconcerned with the corruption of meaning that occurs when a boast originally made by one man (in silly 80s dress-up) to another is crowed by a roided-up Guy Ritchie cast-off to a quavering teenage girl. And apparently this movie was enjoyed by an audience that agreed with them on both counts. It's possible I'm getting too worked up over this, but I hope that someday, in a few years, when "I'm Rick James, bitch!" has gone the way of "Where's the beef?", somebody sits down, cringes at this scene, and realizes that maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all. (A man can dream.)

4. The gay thing. Specifically, that Singer's first two X-Men movies had a gay subtext that was pretty much, uh, text, very clearly treating the social abnormality of mutancy with the same language used for homosexuality. The mutant characters' difference was met with debates about choice vs. innate nature, and the dueling solutions of repressive "cures" vs. acceptance from society at large. And X-3 continues under that assumption, with the development of a vaccine for mutancy. (Its well-meaning developer is blandly handsome, Ivy League wishy-washy baby boomer Michael Murphy, who's made a career out of embodying everything people hate about Democrats the way Chris Cooper has made a career out of embodying everything people hate about Republicans.) And so we get all the talk about mutancy being natural and them fighting for acceptance from the rest of the country and forming their own supportive, sometimes exclusive subcultures. And then, when Jean Grey returns as Phoenix, it turns out that mutancy is dangerous, and aspects of it, in fact, do need to be suppressed. And so all the "good" mutants join up with the government to help contain the "bad" mutants, even going so far as to forcibly cure some of them. (I. Cannot. Fucking. Believe. That Ian McKellen agreed to do a movie that treats the unwilling stripping-away of his difference as an unambiguous victory.) We even get Rogue having her powers removed because they were getting in the way of her relationship with her boyfriend.

Which is not, remotely, the worst of it. Because somewhere in there, the dominant metaphor becomes terrorism, with all of Magneto's rebels undertaking a violent insurgency against the government, committing acts of domestic disruption. (He even destroys a national monument, the Golden Gate Bridge.) And so it falls to the good mutants to turn on the bad ones, and help the government end the reign of terror. The President says things like "God help us" while flanked by American flags. And Magneto, played by McKellen as the queenly advocate for unashamed enjoyment of his socially marginally deviance, is seen via a (Fox) news broadcast publicly delivering a threatening video message to the administration, a message apparently recorded in a hideout that looked (to me at least) not unlike a cave.

After Long Silence: The Undercover Man (Joseph H. Lewis) and The Brothers Rico (Phil Karlson)

2006-06-15T17:17:00.000-07:00

So, no, I haven't exactly been blogging much these past few months. Suffice to say that blogging and writing about movies in a semi-professional capacity really drains one of the desire to see movies in one's spare time, let alone write about them. Yeah, boo hoo. Anyway, today marks the start of a renewed effort to at least jot something down (mostly notes, rather than full reviews; I don't have the discipline necessary to bother with plot summary or organization in my spare time) on every movie I see, starting with Monday's B Noir double feature at Film Forum...

The Undercover Man (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)

Unmissable shades of Capone, with the unseen racket-running Big Fellow taken down for undeclared info. The lead T-Man's Glenn Ford, who has a healthy sense of humor about the whole thing, maintaining a lightly ironic off-the-cuff delivery even when he and wife Nina Foch sit down in the shade of an oak tree for the obligatory is-it-all-worth-it? talk. (As for the bucolic interlude: I'll piggyback on what others have said about urban and rural spaces in film noir—most notably On Dangerous Ground—and note that in Undercover Man, the city is overheated, cluttered, violent; the countryside is spread-out, peaceful, and a place of mental clarity. Is it a coincidence that the peace Ford finds in wide open spaces, or that Ryan finds in Dangerous Ground, is also associated with the stabilizing influence of femininity?) Lewis is far less at home with the material: he shoots from low angles with a lot of ceiling over the characters' heads, like he's waiting for them to walk into his trademark looming, juicy closeups, but they rarely do. He doesn't quite connect with the script, which takes a morally uninquisitive procedural route, and doesn't provide him with a chance for any Freudian money shots a la Gun Crazy or Big Combo. When something does happen, he overreaches: Ford's primary adversary is the Big Fellow's mercenary accountant (his opposite), and when he slips an ominous "how's your wife" in at the end of a conversation, Lewis repeats in on the soundtrack, synced with a racing train engine, until the moment is run completely dry. Then there's the part where Ford is convinced to stay the course of his investigation by an Italian grandma's impossibly lengthy "I believe in America" speech, translated by her big-eyed granddaughter for extra sap. There are few things as uncinematic as watching somebody speak through an interpreter; that it's the single worst scene in the movie getting the start-stop treatment doesn't make it go down any easier. At least Lewis's assistants (I'm guessing) did some terrific work on the Little Italy exteriors: the sets are built up with an unusual amount of texture, and the deployment of the extras, in establishing shots and especially in a foot chase, is full-scale and impressively fluid.

The Brothers Rico (Phil Karlson, 1957)

Soft-spoken, eerily smooth-faced Richard Conte is wasted as the good guy, a former gangster (he was only the accountant when he was in the racket, so delicate audience sympathies aren't in danger of being compromised) enlisted by his old connections to track down his younger brother, who the Syndicate fears may be about to go straight. It's your standard two-kinds-of-family thing, with Conte's loyalty to the syndicate expressed in terms of kinship—his old boss is "Uncle Sid," and his mother once took a bullet for him—and the morally pure bonds at the polar opposite, to his blood relations, are expressed through domesticity. The younger brother ran out on the syndicate because he wanted his virtuous bride to have their baby away from the sullying taint of the mob life (they run away from New York and set up on a farm in SoCal, I note in light of an observation made above); Conte buys his grandmother a TV and his mother a fridge; he even runs a laundry business that cleans diapers. Conte, meanwhile, is called away from his wife on the day they were to adopt a baby; as written (and as played, with rather off-putting aggressiveness, by Dianne Foster), his wife represents one of the more grating reminders of both his domestic obligation, and the wife's need to stay out of the way while the husband does what needs to be done.

That said, The Brothers Rico at least does something interesting with the standard domestic morality of its genre (cf. Undercover Man in addition to every other movie that posits wifely submission and masculine reliability as the gateway to a worthy existence): it twists it into an almost parodic demonstration of marriage as a dom/sub power dynamic. I knew something was up early, when the husband slips out of bed to answer a secret phone call, the wife comes into the room, is assured that the call is none of her concern, and then drops down to both knees in front of her husband, head at optimal b.j. level, to slip his shoes onto his feet for him. Then there's the part where he jokingly calls her "peasant" and she mock-resists him as she yanks him into the shower with him, ot the way she bites his shoulder (in keeping with Foster's overly voracious performance, perhaps), giggles mischievously, and awaits retribution. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the standard subservience, but it's definitely something.

It's the first Karlson I've seen, and there's definitely something to him. The location exteriors ("semi-documentary" is a term that's often thrown around with him), picked up in unremarkable corners of the country, are sparse in a way that keeps the material appealingly unpretty. And wow, must it have been done for cheap. Most of the one-on-one dialogue scenes are shot in one take, presumably because Karlson didn't have the time to use multiple camera set-ups. From the looks of it, he didn't even have the wherewithal to do multiple takes: Conte trucks through the line flubs and slipping accents of a series of scene partners (his "ethnic" mother and former boss/father figure—who bears, it should be noted, a distracting resemblance to Bob Hope— are the worst offenders), and the flow of the dialogue misses far too many beats on the way to its emotional highs. But when the timing clicks (especially in the scenes with Harry Bellaver as the small-town bigwig running the show from Conte's hotel room), Karlson has an almost claustrophobia-inducing control over the inexorable plot twists. That this tawdry low-budget number isn't afraid to kill sympathetic characters off also helps.

Yesterday Was a Pretty Good Day

2006-05-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

This is going to come off a little like gloating, but I spent most of yesterday out at the Museum of the Moving Image, taking in three genre subversion-by-immersion movies from Robert Altman's most fertile period. Without further ado:

Thieves Like Us I'd seen this once before, in high school, but only remembered it in bits and pieces. It's from Edward Anderson's 1937 novel of the same title (also the basis of Nick Ray's They Live By Night, although Altman's film, or so I gather, is the more faithful). Altman's anti-romantic tendencies are on full display here: he brings down a very Bonnie and Clyde-type Depression piece with a determinedly inarticulate cast, Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall's toothy, pipe cleaner-skinny chemistry, and ironic juxtapositions with period radio broadcasts. (Even at his best, Altman has a tendency to traffic in reductive, funny-ha-ha ironies and character-cheapening gags, and there are a couple of times in the first hour when I worried that the movie was going to go sour.) But eventually, his dedication to restoring the plot to naivete becomes a kind of romanticism, too. It's a very plaintive strain of romanticism, one that fits with the pearly, washed-out colors of the movie, and by the time the last two scenes come around (Carrdine's death in a one-sided shootout, left mostly to the imagination in favor of Duvall's excruciating- in the good way- reaction shots; and Duvall's departure on a train to Fort Worth, the camera stopping at the bottom of a staircase as she and the other passengers walk, backs to the camera, up and away), he's managed a nostalgic gut punch that lingers a little while longer than you were expecting it too.

The Long Goodbye I'd never seen it before, though I'd heard a lot about it, especially in the context of the mid-70's neo-noir cycle (c.f. Chinatown, Night Moves). And, surprise surprise, it's great. Starts early with the tongue-halfway-in-cheek transposition: Chandler's hard-boiled narration turns into Elliot Gould's running commentary, mumbled out of the side of his mouth. The plot is, inevitably, much simplified from the book; the changes that were made seem pretty pointed, especially in the engineering of the ending. Having Gould (who's great, and really oddly charismatic) finally say "Nobody cares except me" was crucial, obviously, but also works (as others have noted) to make the movie resemble The Third Man as much as possible: basically, everybody but Marlow is willing to believe that Lennox is dead, and nobody else cares to track him down; in the course of his investigation Marlow discovers such profoundly unpleasant truths about his friend that when he does find him, he shoots him. And then the last shot, on the long, straight road lined by trees, with him walking away from the potential love interest who was really in with his friend all along, puts Gould into the Valli role.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller I was a little nervous for this one, actually, because it'd been a little while since I'd seen it, and returning to a beloved work of art after a long time away is always fairly nerve-wracking. And it wasn't quite the movie I remember it being: every time I watch it, the tone seems more comic and the narrative more structured. (Probably an inevitable result of increased familiarity with the narrative; I also watched it for the first time on an old VHS with terrible picture and sound quality, which probably helped create the sense of elusiveness I value so much about the movie.) But being more concrete doesn't hurt the movie; it locates the film's relationship to the Western more firmly in the interrogatory camp, and makes the last reel (and the isolated moments of fleeting beauty before then) all the more treasurable.

Hey, all these movies end pretty depressingly, don't they? These endings are Altman's most definitive statements on the genres he chose to revisit: he's restoring the sense of melancholy to the love-on-the-run crime movie's live fast, die young ethos of instability, to the private eye's iconoclasm, and the Western hero's outlaw individuality. If anything, despite his reputation as a subversive, Altman's genre movies try and strip away convention for the sake of achieving a greater, more resigned sense of romanticism. Just a thought.

A Response to Rich Brooks of White Alert

2006-04-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

A year and a day ago, the L Magazine's Film Issue came out, featuring a Critique piece I wrote dealing with the film reviews published on the "White Nationalist" websites the Vanguard News Network and White Alert. It was my first long piece and first cover credit, I worked pretty hard to say some things that I had wanted to say, and I was very excited when it came out. Looking at it now, there are some things I would change about it, but all in all I'm still pretty happy with it.

And this morning, I received an email from Rich Brooks, the man behind White Alert, telling me he had read my piece with interest and written a response to it on his site. He addresses my article in his Daily Alert section (there doesn't appear to be a separate url to link to, but it's accessible through the front page; scroll down for the mention of my article), and in a longer piece here, which features his "Between the Lines" commentary interspersed with my piece.

As Mr. Brooks has responded to my article publicly and line-by-line, and since this seems to be the most open and free-flowing way of doing it, I'd like to offer my response to him here, in the same Between the Lines fashion. The original texts are in the regular font; Brooks's comments are in blue, and mine are in red. First, the Daily Alert Item:

April 27, 2006

White Alert Draws Scorn of JYC Film Critic

It seems my movie reviews have caught the attention of a NYC film critic who writes for something called "The L Magazine," a hip and trendy online rag with an insularly Noo Yawk outlook. [At least somebody believes our press kit. I don't suppose you'd like to buy an ad? And the L is actually a print magazine; the reviews and features published online are all the print edition, which is our primary medium. A minor point, but it will come up later.] Author Mark Asch, presumably a jew, titles his rather condescending piece about White Nationalist movie reviewers "MeinKampf.com." Here are some quotes:

"Reading a recent review of The Notebook on VNN-affiliate Rich Brooks’s “White Alert” website, it’s difficult to avoid feeling superior to Brooks on intellectual and aesthetic grounds as well as moral . . . But condescension, even putting aside the potential danger of dismissing the movement so glibly, is a response that doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of the approach employed by the reviewers on VNN and White Alert. In fact, they represent a specific part of the discourse of film criticism even as they pervert almost all of its specific values."

"One might, of course, question the feasibility of sustained dialogue with anyone whose website states, as White Alert does, that the world would be a better place if Germany had won either of the world wars, and indeed, that’s the major shortcoming of Brooks’s rigorous reliance on his own point of view. Implicit in the notion that one’s response is dictated by individual context is the idea that anyone else would have to respond any other way, and so the real failure of the VNN and White Alert reviews is their disinterest in any divergent opinions. It’s not a matter of clumsily didactic recommendations (“So run, don’t walk, to your nearest (preferably non-jewish [sic] owned) video store and rent a copy of [Jackie Brown]”, for instance) so much as their obvious belief in the superiority of their own opinions and the irrelevance of anyone else’s . . . Ultimately, for all their extremism, the reviews on VNN and White Alert fail for pretty conventional reasons. But that’s how I feel about their film criticism. I wonder what they have to say about mine?"

Fair enough, jewboy. [Here's as good a time as any to mention it: I thank you for offering to change the headlines on your website, if in fact I'm not Jewish. Although I was raised Jewish, I think more and more that I don't have a particular connection to any religious faith. That said, there's nothing like a "jewboy" taunt to get you back in touch with your cultural heritage. The headline can stay.] Send me some of your reviews and I'll tell you what I think of them. I'm not a professional film critic but I'm somewhat flattered that you treat me as such. I just wish you had given your readers the link to White Alert so that they could judge for themselves. [Like I said, it's a print magazine; the online content is just a reprint of what's in the magazine, which I hope is a satisfactory explanation for why none of our online reviews or features contain links. And I'd like to think that anyone interested would take the initiative and google your site for the whole picture.] I may respond further to his points at some point, but in the meantime readers can email Mr. Asch at mark@thelmagazine.com.

Before continuing on to the longer essay, I wanted to take issue with how you refer to me, here and in the next piece, as a "professional film critic." Technically, at the time I wrote the piece I was an unpaid editorial assistant (though I've since come aboard at the L in a more full-time, paid capacity, mostly for responsibilities other than film writing). More importantly, though, I don't consider what I do to be any different from you do: there isn't, I don't think, any dichotomy between the professional and the amateur. Especially not now, when there's so much vital film criticism being self-published on the internet (take a look at any of the blogs linked to on the right). An increasing number of employed film critics also maintain their own websites. I don't really see this as an insider/outsider issue; we all write about movies, strive to understand them better, and take our efforts fairly seriously.

That said, here is the longer essay:

Between the Lines with a NYC Movie Critic

April 27, 2006

The following review, rendered below in italics, appeared recently in “The L. Magazine,” a website billing itself as “New York’s Event Guide.” My between-the-lines comments appear in blue.

MeinKampf.com

At the Movies with Online Nazis

By Mark Asch
mark@thelmagazine.com

By Rich Brooks
rich@whitealert.com

Unpleasant biographical revelations have long disrupted our appreciation of beloved artists. Ezra Pound was likely a fascist and T.S. Eliot an anti-Semite; James Brown beat women and Chuck Berry videotaped them peeing — so it goes. Holding Semitically Incorrect political views is equated with sexual perversion and wifebeating! Never heard T.S. Eliot called an anti-Semite, but if true, he rises in my estimation. We rationalize this by saying that, after all, the works we admire are created by human beings, with human flaws, and that the shortcomings of the artist do not detract from the art. Still, separating the two is difficult work, so it’s not all that surprising that Vanguard News Network correspondent Mark Rivers has a difficult time No he doesn’t; he’s just giving the jew his due, which I would think you’d applaud. justifying his admiration of The Man Who Wasn’t There:

“Naturally, I’m not going to write them off just because they’re Jews… [T]he Coens are fine storytellers. In this age of Lowest-Common-Denominator crap coming from Hollywood, it’s nice to see a thought-provoking comedy once in a while, even if it is brought to us by more of those filthy Yids.”

[It's evident that Rivers had to reckon with the apparent contradiction of hating Jews and liking a movie made by Jews. He even felt it necessary to offer his readers his rationale for making the decision he came to. Hence, "difficult." It's really just a matter of semantics, but he's basically expressing the same kind of ambivalence I feel while reading this, which deals with Eliot's anti-semitic leanings.]

The Vanguard News Network, a self-described confederation of “disgusted and disaffected writers driven out of academia and journalism by the Semitical correctness that has denatured our culture” operating under the banner “No Jews. Just Right.” and apparently based out of Kirksville, Missouri, is a website of political and social commentary promoting a “White Nationalist” agenda. Recent content includes a wishful address by President Bush, admitting that he was duped into invading Iraq by “the entire Jewish community in America, which so vigorously pushed the idea of waging war against Iraq via their newspapers, magazines and TV shows.”

As the review excerpted above might indicate, the movie reviews on VNN are similarly bound to the supremacist agenda. In a not unrepresentative passage from his review of AI: Artificial Intelligence, Rivers jokes: “The articulate negress in a power suit at the head of the table points out that the real ‘conundrum’ (I wonder how many bananas it took the dialogue coach to get her to pronounce it correctly?) is whether…” etc., etc. Obviously, the first and most sensible reaction to a statement such as this is outrage. My first reaction was laughter. Blacks are constantly being depicted in power positions by Hollywood far out of proportion to such occurrences in real life, and this is Rivers’ clever way of telling us this. But, given time, one’s righteous vigilance gives way to a certain morbid fascination. So you grudgingly admit it’s funny too? [Not grudgingly. It is funny, the way anything so unexpected and uncomfortable inspires laughter.]

The VNN and the movement it represents are, after all, a mustache-twirling, Snidely Whiplash embodiment of evil so far removed from one’s understanding as to be a curiosity. That’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that phrase. [Thank you. That's what I was talking about above, when I was explaining why I found what Rivers said funny.] They’re self-made straw men: no one could invent an enemy so easy to despise, or, for that matter, to dismiss. Much of their fuming seems as motivated by a vague suspicion of their own impotence as by anything else; at the conclusion of Rivers’ review to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, he works himself into a fury culminating in what appears to be a fantasy of violence exacted by himself upon two fictional characters. We’ve gone from burning crosses to a Burn Book.

It’s also oddly (and perhaps naively?) satisfying to browse through an archive of White Nationalist movie reviews. Thanks, it’s oddly (and perhaps naively?) satisfying to read your condescending remarks about me. Reading a recent review of The Notebook on VNN-affiliate [sic – I can play that game, too. White Alert is not an “affiliate” of anything.] [My mistake. I found White Alert through VNN, where you're credited with a number of movie reviews. I assumed the relationship between the two sites was more formal than it is, and I apologize for the misleading choice of words.] Rich Brooks’s “White Alert” website, it’s difficult to avoid feeling superior to Brooks on intellectual and aesthetic grounds as well as moral. Amid praise for the film’s marginalizing of black performers It isn’t just racists like me who are tired of seeing black performers shoved down their throats (by the jews who run Hollywood and the ad agencies) every time they turn on the TV or watch a movie. All of White America is getting sick of it. [That's a vast demographic. Anecdotally, not a single white person I know—and I know many, many white people—would say that you represent his or her views. So I think that claiming to speak for "all of white America" is a bit of a stretch.], eminently [sic]-able references to actresses Gena “Rolands” and Rachel “McBride,” OK, so I got a couple actors’ names spelled wrong. I’m not a professional movie critic or Hollywood insider nor do I read People Magazine or watch the E! Channel. I try to ignore pop culture as much as possible [I don't buy that "I'm above caring about pop culture" line as an excuse for messing up the names of two lead actresses whose names were in the opening and closing credits. And besides, when was the last time Gena Rowlands was in People? It's just lazy, which is why I mentioned it, and the fact that you don't get paid to write about movies doesn't excuse you from caring about the quality of your work.]. and a description of James Garner as having “matured and ripened like a fine wine or aged cheese,” What’s wrong with that metaphor? [Nothing. It's a perfectly apt metaphor. That's why it's been used so often.] Brooks admits that The Notebook (The Notebook!) made him cry, and concludes: “’Sweet and very tender but not saccharine’ is how I’d sum it up in seven words,” in an apparent sop to those readers that pass along his judgments by telegram and don’t wish to paraphrase.

But condescension, even putting aside the potential danger of dismissing the movement so glibly, is a response that doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of the approach employed by the reviewers on VNN and White Alert. In fact, they represent a specific part of the discourse of film criticism even as they pervert almost all of its specific values. Huh? What “specific values” do we pervert? You’ve lost me here. Please try to rephrase that in plain English.]

This January, in Slate.com’s Movie Club, an annual year-in-review critical roundtable, Salon.com critic Stephanie Zacharek offered a description of the critical process very useful for our purposes: “OK, obviously, we all apply an aesthetic, if that means we have a range of sources — of people and experiences, of other movies we’ve seen or books we’ve read or music we’ve heard — that effect how we look at what’s in front of us.” Any attempt to respond to a film is bound to be largely informed by the personal, subjective context a viewer uses to relate to the film, and a piece of film criticism is the product of a negotiation between the filmmaker, the film, and the audience. The way the reviews on VNN and White Alert engage with films is an extreme example of a subjective approach, positioning them as far out on the critical spectrum as they are on the political spectrum. But radical as it is, though, their approach does warrant discussion as a part of that spectrum. Isn’t all movie criticism subjective? No matter how many esoteric "roundtable" terms you want to toss around, it still boils down to whether or not one likes the film and how it affects him personally. I also choose the films I review with an eye on their relevance to White Nationalism, and of course I talk about them from that perspective, a perspective totally lacking in elite media film criticism. I don’t pretend to be neutral or unbiased. Yes, all movie criticism is necessarily subjective, and I guess this means we sort of agree on this last paragraph? [We absolutely do. I wrote this piece because, once I get past from the initial novelty of movie-reviewing White Supremacists, I think that your reviews demonstrate something absolutely essential about the way people respond to art. I believe it's inherently subjective. Which is why, after first introducing the reader to you and work, and running through the list of initial responses, I try to establish your status as extreme practitioners of the same thing everybody else does when they're thinking about movies. Or anything else, for that matter.]

The reviewers on VNN and White Alert are certainly more transparent about the link between their ideology and their response to a film, as any discussion of a film’s aesthetics is secondary to a parsing of its racial message. Exactly. That’s what White Alert is about, discussing things from a White racial point of view. [Of course: a White Nationalist is going to write movie reviews refracted through that ideological lens. It couldn't be otherwise, any more than a secular humanist, or a neo-Marxist, or a radical feminist, or a devout Christian could watch a movie without interpreting it, however invisibly, through their own particular perspective. This is something I very much believe; really, it's the central premise of the essay and I'm using you to prove it.] The point that the highly politicized nature of their viewpoint obscures is that any reaction to a film’s aesthetic qualities is no less subjective. A consideration of a film’s aesthetic accomplishments is as bound to the artistic sensibility of a viewer as a response to its political content is bound to the viewer’s political context. Some people are predisposed to be suspicious of tear-jerkers while others willingly surrender to them — judging from his response to The Notebook, incidentally, it would appear that Brooks falls squarely into the latter camp. Wrong! I mentioned the tears because it is highly unusual, as I’ve said elsewhere, for me to shed tears about anything. I also mentioned that I don’t normally like tear-jerkers and that I was prepared for a mushy chick flick when I first watched it. Obviously we share a difference of opinion about this film. [I'm just using it an example of a predisposition. Maybe the response was completely out of character. But it still reveals something about the person who responded that particular way to that particular movie, which was the central point.]

An exploration of the film as it relates to one’s own, subjective context is the unavoidable nature of critical expression. A review that lauds the masculine, warlike nationalism the reviewer saw as the dominant thematic element in Troy (as Brooks does) is more similar to a review bemoaning its perceived “meathead’s understanding of sexuality” (as Zacharek does) than would initially appear. Both reactions represent the fusion of the film’s content and the reviewer’s ideological make-up. Laughable or contemptible (or, likely, both) as White Supremacist film criticism may be, it does warrant consideration as film criticism. Thanks. As laughable and contemptible as I find Fatso and his equally fat negress wife, Roger Ebert’s opinions do warrant consideration as film criticism.

In another Movie Club dispatch, Zacharek asks rhetorically, “But mostly isn’t it how a critic thinks, and not necessarily what, that makes you want to read?” The primary value of the reviews on White Alert is as a demonstration of the very personal “how” of the reviewers. On the other hand, the charge most often and most accurately leveled against Roger Ebert is that he willingly and profitably reduces all the nuance of his reaction to a film down to a “what.” Whichever the direction he jerks his thumb, it’s a vulgar and insulting gesture, and represents the assumption that what people want from a critic is didacticism rather than dialogue. Agreed. I said one time that he should take his two thumbs and shove them up his ass.

One might, of course, question the feasibility of sustained dialogue with anyone whose website states, as White Alert does, that the world would be a better place if Germany had won either of the world wars That opinion with regard to WWI is quite mainstream now, and I am always willing to engage in "sustained dialogue" with anyone who wishes to seriously engage me. [You can't possibly believe that. Not about Germany, I mean—you apparently can and obviously do. But as far as your opinion being a "mainstream" one, you're once again overstating your case. I don't know the extent to which you've insulated yourself from what actually constitutes mainstream beliefs, but I refuse to accept that you don't recognize the unpopularity and extremism of your own position. I defy you to offer "mainstream" viewpoints congruent with your feelings about Germany and the wars. And as for why living under a regime that practiced ethnic cleansing, suppressed freedom of expression and religion, and practiced a policy of aggressive military over-expansion wouldn't, in fact, be preferable to the current state of affairs, I suppose I find it fairly self-evident and you don't, and after all that build-up I'm not particularly optimistic about this argument going anywhere. Better to stick to the subject at hand.] and indeed, that’s the major shortcoming of Brooks’s rigorous reliance on his own point of view. Implicit in the notion that one’s response is dictated by individual context is the idea that anyone else would have to respond any other way, and so the real failure of the VNN and White Alert reviews is their disinterest in any divergent opinions. It’s not a matter of clumsily didactic recommendations (“So run, don’t walk, to your nearest (preferably non-jewish [sic] owned) video store and rent a copy of [Jackie Brown]”, for instance), Give me a break, for Chrissakes; I was only trying to close the review with a catchy one-liner. As to your [sic], in White Alert’s style sheet “jew” is never capitalized to subtly denote contempt. [To the first point: I know that's what you're doing; I just found the juxtaposition of canned critical jargon and bile-spewing anti-semitism to be amusing and revealing, and assumed my readers would as well. To the second point: in the L, the word "Jew" is capitalized, as are all other religious and ethnic denotations. Hence the [sic].] so much as their obvious belief in the superiority of their own opinions and the irrelevance of anyone else’s. The truth shall set you free, even from tangled verbiage. [Yeah, this last part isn't exactly a model of clarity. If you'll permit me to give it another try: If I say that I'm is bound to respond subjectively to a movie, I also have to grant that you're going to respond subjectively, too, and that aside from variables like cinematic knowledge and willingness to work with the film's project, both viewpoints are equally valid. And so my objection to your reviews is what I perceive as a dismissal of divergent points of view. First you say that you accept Roger Ebert as a valid critical voice, despite his being overweight and married to a black woman, and then a paragraph later you repeated a wish that he'd just shut up. That kind of stuff, and the general tone of your critical and political writings, makes me suspicious of the extent to which you view anybody else's opinion as valid. Because if we're going to agree that movie criticism is all subjective, we're going to accept that Ebert belongs. That in fact, his opinions might carry more weight than ours, since he's seen so many more movies and has honed his critical abilities over several decades. Perhaps I've underestimated your open-mindedness. Then again, you think my grandmother should have died in the gas chambers.]

Race based upon the number of Jews involved in its production is bizarre, certainly, and morally abhorrent, but mostly it’s damningly unambiguous, convinced of its own unimpeachable finality. What’s that again? [I think you missed a line; this paragraph break is formatted weird on the L website. That sentence should read: "A review bashing Rat Race based upon the number of Jews involved in its production is bizarre, certainly, and morally abhorrent, but mostly it’s damningly unambiguous, convinced of its own unimpeachable finality." Basically, one thing I find distasteful is when a critic declares that he wishes a film that isn't up to his standards had never been made. Armond White, for instance, and the below-mentioned Rex Reed do this quite frequently; so do you, based upon different subjective criteria.] Worse still, the condemnation of the film, in spite of its obvious subjectivity, is less a negative response to the film than a denial of its right to exist, a judgment typically cast by our more arrogant mainstream critics (if Rex Reed is still considered relevant, that’s a list he deserves to head). Ultimately, for all their extremism, the reviews on VNN and White Alert fail for pretty conventional reasons. But that’s how I feel about their film criticism. I wonder what they have to say about mine? I briefly glanced at a couple your reviews online, and can’t really say much about them since they were only a paragraph or two long and didn’t seem to say much of anything. Perhaps you would like to steer me toward one or two that you’re proud of. Clever title, "MeinKampf.com, At the Movies with Online Nazis," though.

[Yeah, word counts are a bitch. Don't rub it in. Anyway, here are links to my contributions to the current L—coincidentally, this year's Film Issue—with which I'm more or less satisfied, I suppose. This blog, incidentally, is home to longer, more informal writings on film, if you'd care to browse it. As for the title, my editors came up with that. I wanted to call it "Triumph of the URL." I'm fairly certain that this doesn't change anything, but I think it scans better and I didn't have cause to mention it at the time.]

Anyway, I’m flattered that a professional New York movie critic would read my reviews and find it worthy of his time to comment on them as extensively as Mr. Asch has done. I only wish that he had given his readers the links to both VNN and White Alert so that they could read our movie reviews and judge for themselves.

[Just to reiterate, because these are important points, to me at least: First, I don't consider what I do to be categorically different from what you do, and setting us up as New York Media Insider and Voice of Unadorned Reason from the Heart of White America, or however you'd quantify it, is to me disingenuous. And second, that our online content is republished from the print magazine and doesn't contain any links as a rule, so I hope you don't feel that the lack of any links was an intentional slight.]

And that, for Mr. Brooks, and anybody else who might have slogged all the way through this red, white and blue behemoth of a post, is my response to your response. Thank you very much for your courtesy in emailing me; I have tried to make my comments even-handed and hope that you find them to be so. (If not, I promise to do better in the future.) Either way, you've forced me to clarify my views, to you and myself, for which I thank you. I welcome any further response from you.

What Kept Me From Liking Brick As Much As I Wanted/Expected To

2006-03-16T18:35:00.002-08:00

I caught up with one of the last press screenings of Rian Johnson's debut high-school-Hammett excercise Brick in advance of its opening on 3/31. And for the most part, I really liked it. Admired the plotting; loved the meta-noir dialogue. Liked its wide-open, California overcast spaces. Enjoyed the fact that I could clearly see elements of its forebearers in its structure. (Making Marlow into a high school loner who eats his lunch by himself is particularly genius.) I could have done without the occasional glitchy jump-cut, flash-cut dream sequence with allegedly portentous soundtrack runbling- that MTV Generation stuff won't date well- but that's a minor complaint. My problem, and this is a particular talking point of mine, has to do with something that Johnson says in the press-kit interview:

Q: Since there's no caricaturing in the movie, the teenaged charaters are very suitable for the elements of crime and passion. There's an emotional intensity; so much seems at stake for them.

RJ: You know, Hammett was once asked if Sam Spade was based on any particular detective. He answered no, it's based on what every detective would like to imagine himself to be. That's sort of analagous to our movie's relationship to real high school; it's not the way high school is, but it's the way high school feels.

When you're in high school, things don't feel- they didn't, for me- flippant and silly. A lot of high school shows and movies seem to me to have a very adult perspective on high school, the perspective of someone who is out of that world and is now seeing it in a slightly condescending manner. Once you get beyond it, it's easy to forget how you once were completely encased in its logic. Whereas when you're actually in it, and your head is completely encased in this microcosm, it's your world and it's a world you have to survive. And things seem, if not life-or-death, very important and mythical. The people you know and the dynamics of your relationships seem hyper-real. We tried to summon that here. The level of intensity that's in Brick equates to the level of intensity that I think a lot of us felt in high school.

I probably didn't need to put in that quote, but I just love it so much. I recently critiqued a story in my fiction workshop about a high school superhero, and wrote in the margins something like, "of course, when you're in high school, you think everything that might go wrong with your life is the end of the world; what I like about this story (and Buffy, for that matter) is that, if something does go wrong for these high school kids, it really is the end of the world."

I'm also writing my thesis on Battle Royale, which I think is pretty clearly (intentionally or otherwise; it's really none of my concern) an allegory for high school graduation. My line of argument is, basically, that it phrases high school in terms of a what's in all respects (contrived circumstances, kids acting like adults, emotionally heightened, ultraviolent) an especially cinematic narrative, and that phrasing it in that way suggests that cinematic narrative forms function in ways really similar to Jung's ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious.

[What's great, too, is that elsewhere in the production notes Johnson mentions how Miller's Crossing was a key influence on this project in its interaction with classic genre tropes. (He also mentions Man Who Wasn't There, a movie which I find vastly inferior and far more tongue-in-cheek.) That's a great example, I think, because I've always felt that Miller's Crossing was an especially Jungian work, in how it attempts to make an entire cohesive movie out of fragments of cinematic memory.]

All of which is to say, that the idea of a movie which attempts to convey the (at the time) profound emotional content of high school through the device of a classical cinematic narrative form was really, really appealing to me.

Except that: Brick barely has any high school in it at all. It almost seems at times that Johnson goes out of his way to avoid showing his characters interacting in a high school environment. It's a barely visible framework, but there's no interaction between the plot and the day-to-day lives of the characters. By reducing the high school content to a couple scenes involving lockers, a scene in the library and a couple in the parking lot, and a couple moments backstage at the drama club (I' m deliberately leaving out the principle's office scene; we'll get back to that), Johnson cuts off the characters from their surroundings. (Yeah, I know, a lot of the exterior scenes, especially between Brendan and Brain, and all the scenes on the football field, are at school. But they could be anywhere. They aren't tied to any actual high school activity.) In the library, at least, there's some banter about "zero period" and bus routes, but it's not nearly enough. These kids can come and go as they please (and Johnson doesn't concern himself with the particulars of cutting); this isn't a life that kids are leading along with their high school existence, it's a life that they're leading instead of it. (One of my favorite throwaway moments in Buffy is at the beginning of the third season- "Faith, Hope, and Trick," specifically, when the characters eat a picnic off campus because they're seniors and they can do that now; things like that anchored the to its setting. The real reason Buffy never got over leaving high school was that it never found real lives for their characters to lead afterwards.) So, that's what specifically disappointed me about Brick: the high school noir I was salivating in anticipation of turned out to have at best a passing interest in high school.

As for the scenes with the Pin's "comically" oblivious mother, pouring apple juice like her son isn't a drug lord: again, don't make a joke about how little these characters have to do with the lives they're living.

And then there's the music. Maybe this is a licensing thing, but can anyone explain to me why, out of an entire cast of high-school age kids, only one of them ever listens to pop music for any length of time? It just gets back to the major problem with the movie: Johnson being so (justifiably) in love with his plot and dialouge that they become the entire movie. And I wouldn't have minded at all, if he had been making a straight noir. Maybe next time he should.

Johnny To: Consumer's Guide

2006-03-13T22:26:00.000-08:00

By way of explanation: I had planned to churn through as much of Johnnie/Johnny (I've seen it spelled both ways; from here on out I'll use the imdb-approved "y" spelling) To's body of work as I could in preparation for a career-spanning post coinciding with the brief pre-DVD theatrical release of Breaking News. This, obviously, did not happen. What I did happen, eventually, was a gradual Netflixing of the movies that pop up most often in discussions of To's work and now, at long last, a series of capsule reviews. The original intent was to cap all this off by tracking down a DVD of Election, and considering it, and To's work, in light of the opinions voiced here, here, and elsewhere, about him as purveyor of brittle flash. A bit of that angle remains, in the decision to structure this post as a "Consumer's Guide," but what inevitably ends up happening when you set out to evaluate a series of supposedly assembly-line products is that the variances within all of them end up thrown into stark relief. Anyway, enough of my blathering; on to the films (in chronological order, as per imdb)...

The Heroic Trio (1993) Weird hybridazation of the classic martial arts film with 90's-era action film technology; the only comparison I can make is Benny Chan's The Magic Crane, but even that was a period piece (and didn't attempt an extended riff on Hard Boiled's rescue-a-baby-from-a-burning-building set piece). The three heroines, incidentally, are Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, and Maggie Cheung- and for those of us who have been fed a steady diet of Maggie Cheung, ethereal object of repressed longing (cf. Wong Kar-wai, and every other movie she's ever been in not directed by Olivier Assayas), her performance comes as a bit of a shock. By which I mean: she makes her entrance on a motorcycle, carrying a sawed-off shotgun, and wearing knee-high fishnets, a black leather bustier, and leather duster (all of which she continues to sport for the rest of the movie), and no matter how prepared you think you are for that sight, you're going to have to pause the movie for at least 45 seconds before you start to believe it.

Running Out of Time (1999) Andy Lau as lone-wolf criminal with terminal illness (some lovely shots of blood-spattered hankerchiefs) playing cat-and-mouse with police officer; he also wears a dress at one point, I seem to recall, which is milked about as much as you'd expect it to be. The whole thing- action sequences, character development, production design, plot- is constructed entirely from gloss; the movie's a Platonic ideal of shallowness, which is a kind of transcendence, I suppose, if you squint hard enough. Most notable stylistic trope, especially here but used extensively elsewhere in To's films (to say nothing of John Woo, from whom he probably stole it): the swooping crane shot from an extreme low or high angle to catch ample chunks of skyline, shot with a super-wide angle lens so that the ultramodern skyscrapers fairly bulge off the screen. Very few directors love their city as much as Hong Kong actioneers.

The Mission (1999) Inexplicably emblematic bodyguard-bonding piece; mismatched team, all with different specialties and from disparate backgrounds, etc. etc. One excellent shopping mall shootout (actually tense, as supposed to outre, which is a change), but otherwise entirely uninspiring. I wonder if this movie is recommended as a key To film simply because it's built on a fairly conventional genre structure; this strikes me as a mistake, since To is invariably so flimsy in his handling of genre conventions. There's no connecting tissue, and while that doesn't spoil a more ludicrous, spit-shined offering like Running Out of Time, it means that a familiar excercise like The Mission comes off as pretty sloppy.

Full Time Killer (2001) Andy Lau is in a video store, wearing a rubber Bill Clinton mask that covers his entire face. A Point Break poster is clearly visible in the background. The video store clerk, in voice-over: "He always wore a mask. It reminded me of a Hollywood movie I once saw." Cut to Point Break poster; pan all the way down. Just in case you didn't get it, you know. (Also, click on the link, if you haven't.)

Running Out of Time 2 (2001) So, the terminally ill criminal played by Andy Lau in the first movie is set up to die at the end; although we never technically see him kick off, it's established that it's a matter of days. And I suppose that if the sequel had brought him back, we'd all be crying foul, and write the whole thing off as ludicrous. Which, when you think about it, makes no sense: versimiltude should be the last demand we ever make of a movie like this, especially since a great deal of the pleasure here comes from the depths of contrivance to which To will gladly sink in the name of brainless fun. Also, we want our Andy Lau back. Lau Ching Wan, repeating his role as the cop, has his subtle shades of charisma, but Ekin Cheng as a carbon copy of Andy Lau's role is insufferably vacuous; at one point I thought I detected a hint of impishness in his performance, but it turned out to just be the wind running through his goatee.

My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (2002) Movies whose titles function as hilariously succinct and spot-on synopses? Excellent. Movies whose titles function as hilariously succinct and spot-on synopses, and are uttered (shrieked, in this case) by the main character about 20 minutes in? Priceless. So, the title-speaker here is Sammi Cheng (entirely charismatic, with a wardrobe of siezure-inducing vibrancy), wealthy and perhaps not entirely un-merry widow, who is gifted with a half-measure of second sight after a car accident. After a frantically hilarious first half, though, the religious (Buddhist, sort of) implications of the plot migrate to the forefront; it's a film progressively more concerned with cycles, redemption, and destiny, and comes to an interestingly compromised acceptance of the natural order of things. Also of note are some rather weirdly inspired P.O.V. shots: the opening funeral scene makes judicious use of what appears to be a fish-eye Headstone Cam (TM) for a couple of shots looking up at mourners placing flowers onto it; there's a also a later scene in which Sammi Cheng maces the camera three times in fifteen seconds. It's that kind of movie.

PTU (2003) See above re: projects requiring a certain level of structural discipline. It's his Stray Dog riff, only with more converging plot threads and set within a single night; unsurprisingly, the subplots reek of empty gesturing and forced connections. Also, somebody should probably tell Lam Suet that he needn't work so hard to play up his vulgarity: until he gets rid of the hair growing from out of his mole, nobody is likely to mistake him for Mr. Suave. On the plus side, the urban nocturne, as shot by his regular DP Cheng Siu-keung, is his best-looking movie to date.

Running on Karma (2003) Okay, this one's really interesting. Andy Lau is a male stripper named Big outfitted in an enormous rubber Hulk suit. He's also, we soon learn, a martial arts expert and lapsed Buddhist monk. And, after some outlandish action sequences (many involving a shaggy-bearded, pipe-cleaner-thin, CGI-enhanced Indian contortionist), Big's ability to see visions of people's past lives (and looming karmic payback) leads to another completely genuine, and even momentarily startlingly, interrogation of Buddhist principles. Along with My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (another deceptively ridiculous parable of toubled religious inquiry), it's my favorite of these movies. There's also a fine performance by Cecilia Cheung, whose upbeat, occasionally quavering resolve is a primer for How to Be a Waifish, Fashionable, Chirpy Pop Star in Your Early Twenties and Play a Convincing Policewoman. (This is no small accomplishment, as we shall see when we discuss Breaking News.)

Breaking News (2004) Oh, here we are. Actually, I said most of what I wanted to say in my review, so I'll reiterate a couple key points, specifically a) that the opening shoot-out sequence, in a continuous seven-minute crane take that's the first shot of the movie, is frankly miraculous; b) that the balancing of the simultaneous siege set-ups in the sealed-off building is wildly disappointing, and that not nearly enough is done with the "Breaking News" element- as Ed Halter observes, To just seems content to introduce ideas and coast on them; and c) Kelly Chen is really, really bad in this movie. You get, in alternate scenes, either the sense that she's playing dress-up in a cop uniform, or that she knows how far out of her depth she is and is flailing mightily to hold the screen. And Hui Shiu Hung's comic relief, here as in the Running Out of Time movies, is exceptionally grating.

Throwdown (2004) A much more succesful Kurosawa homage, mostly because Sanshito Sugata is a pretty agreeable little mess, too. It's one of the first To's I saw and I wish I remembered it better than I do; I seem to recall it being slightly more low-key than the others, probably as a result of it being about judo, and pretty unapologetic in regards to its sappiness. Neither of which is so bad, really.

And that's it, for now. I'm still interested in seeing more of his pre-Milky Way films, the aforementioned Election, the Andy Lau/Sammi Cheng rom-coms Needing You (2000) and Yesterday Once More (2004) (both of those are near the top of the Netflix cue) and, embarrasingly enough, Shopaholics, because I don't think I'm going to have the willpower to resist.

Why You Should See Woman Is the Future of Man (Hong Sang-soo, 2004)

2006-03-08T17:58:00.000-08:00

(The first of Hong's films to receive a U.S. theatrical run is playing at Cinema Village for at least another week. Michael Atkinson and Manohla Dargis have written a couple of quite favorable (and perceptive) reviews of it; girish has talked a little about Hong's formal qualities. So, I'm going to use this post to convince my friends, and any other NY-based readers who might accidentally stumble across this page, to see the movie.)

"What really stings about Woman Is the Future of Man, even more than the movie itself, is that this movie isn't going to get nearly the audience it deserves. This is really the kind of movie people our age would love if they only knew about it.

"For one thing, the pension-pulling audience I saw this movie with over the weekend isn't going to respond as emotionally to the movie as we are- we're uniquely equipped to find resonance in a movie about characters too drunk and bloated on munchies to recognize that they're caught up in one of life's key moments.

"It's also a movie about being completely unprepared for a situation. In one scene, too characters are sitting up in bed after sex. 'Your legs are hairy,' the guy tells the girl. She responds that she hasn't shaved in a while. 'I didn't know women shaved their legs,' he says. And I think the movie is full of scenes like this one, presenting as anti-epiphanies the kinds of youthful moments that most movies romanticize.

"I think we're at a time right now when we're ready to instead romanticize disappointment, to find solace in a movie that speaks eloquently on the subject. The movie's eloquent, I mean, not the characters: the characters aren't even aware of how paralyzed they are by nostalgia (another circumstance to which we might be able to relate). But in their rationalizations of their increasingly meager artistic ambitions, we can recognize the disappointment which is, we fear, looming right ahead of us. And in the movie's final scene, when a character stands silently in the snow, finally realizing that he's been standing in the same place for far too long, a piano strikes up, and we can sit through the opening credits, relishing the tenderness with which Hong treats his new understanding. His evocation of two overgrown boys oblivious to the fact that they're getting too old for this shit is painfully dispassionate; the ending is a moment of utter resignation. That fact that this is for the best doesn't mean it cuts any less deep.

"Anyway, that's why I think you'd love this movie. And this movie should be seen, loved, talked up and seen again by a bunch of young people (like us), who both really love the movie and are energetic enough in their love to make it a movie to be reckoned with. It deserves to be one, and won't become one without us. Anyway, that's why you should see Woman Is the Future of Man. If you're around next week, I'll go with you."

Something I Noticed for the First Time While Watching Blue Velvet at Film Forum Tonight

2006-03-07T19:38:00.000-08:00

So, Frank Booth is... married?

This is the third time I've seen the movie and the first time I've noticed it. (I picked up on it in his first scene; it's easy to spot against Dorothy's carpet. And of course I'm not sure we're meant to think that it is a wedding ring- but hey, a band on the second finger of the left hand is what it is.) Am I coming late to the party here? Or have I unearthed a heretofore unnoticed layer of fucked-up-itude?

"He used to be call 'Pudgy' McCabe... Anyway, he's the man that shot Bill Roundtree."

2006-03-02T18:04:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz and his enablers for calling the Altman blog-a-thon, first of all, and to everyone else who's chiming in with an appreciation of the old bastard. Anyway, much as I'd like to mark out my own territory in the overlapping chorus going up this weekend, I never really had much of a choice in terms of my topic. Robert Altman made McCabe and Mrs. Miller; McCabe & Mrs. Miller is my favorite movie; I'll be writing about McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Couldn't be helped, really.

Thing is, it's hard to write about your favorite movie- that is, to convey what it means to you, what it did to you the first time and what it's done to you since, without walling yourself and your subjectivity off from everyone else. Of course McCabe & Mrs. Miller is my movie in a way that it isn't yours or anybody else's, but simply saying "I love this movie" is a private act no matter how loudly I declaim it, or from how high a mountaintop.

And McCabe & Mrs. Miller is, I flatter myself to think, a uniquely impossible experience to relate to anyone else, even anyone who loves it. That's partly the gift of Altman in general, who's the filmmaking equivalent of Spinoza's God: the creator as noninterventionist. Improvisatory, organic constructions leave too much room for variance to ever pin down entirely. But it's specifically true of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a movie that seeks (calculatedly, to an extent, which makes its success all the more unlikely) to settle in the shadows of a world at the moment of its disappearance.

Because certainly the beauty of McCabe & Mrs. Miller has quite a bit to do with its elusiveness. Already you see me resorting to abstractions as a way of projecting my response to the movie outwards. So maybe if I talk, specifically, about my experience with this movie, something more concrete will come through.

I first saw it in the fall of my junior year of high school. I had taken over the running of the Film Club that fall, upon the graduation of its founder. After an ill-advised decision to organize the year chronologically (Battleship Potemkin and Metropolis, surprisingly, didn't go over well), I moved into the supposedly more user-friendly genre of Westerns, selecting McCabe & Mrs. Miller as the "revisionist" selection, probably after reading about it in one of the ten books my school's library had about film, Robert Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness. And on the day we watched it, we were about a half-hour in before the last remaining member walked out. And then I went home after school and watched the rest of it. I just remember sitting in the guest room of my house, where the VCR was, in a rocking armchair with a blanket on my lap, getting to the end of the movie with Warren Beatty expiring in the snow, and even though I knew how it was going to end going in, all I could think, then or since, was that I wanted my death to be just like that.

There's something about a movie like this that requires that level of intimacy, in watching it and in talking about it. (My favorite pieces on the movie is Charles Taylor's appreciation, for this and other reasons.) It's the snow, I think: to survive within it, you have to draw inwards on yourself, like McCabe pulls his coat around him in his dying moments, or how the world for Mrs. Miller ceases to exist outside of her opium pipe. Vilmos Zsigmond finds the barest blue hues for the outdoor scenes, and bathes the interiors in gold.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a movie about two people trying to keep warm.

The great tragedy, and the thing the movie expresses most eloquently, is that they aren't able to find warmth in anybody else. The film's crucial moments all play as failures of communication- I'm thinking of the scene with Keith Carradine's toothy Cowboy, unable to tell the teenage gunslinger wannabe that he just wants to cross the bridge, and ending up dead on the ice below. But mostly it's Warren Beatty (perhaps the actor in the world who most relishes playing a character who can't find the right words), blustering around his fear in the scenes with the lawyer and the guman who's come to town to kill him. And, of course, in his scenes with Julie Christie. His key line, the one most frequently quoted in discussions of the movie, is, "I got poetry in me." He's saying it to her, but he's the only one in the room. The deep and abiding sadness of McCabe & Mrs. Miller is that he does have poetry in him, and that it stays there. And so if I can't quite offer an adequate explanation for why this is my favorite movie, maybe it's only appropriate.

Japanese Cinema Wednesdays: The Bad Sleep Well

2006-03-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa, 1960) At the end of the justifiably famous opening sequence, one of the reporters hovering vulturelike outside a wedding banquet to report on the arrests of some of the guests refers to the even as "the best one-act I've ever seen." To which another reporter replies, "this is just the prelude." The first guy was right. The 150 minutes lay out a vast, emotionally expansive cast of characters (and with Mifine and Shimura supported by the likes of Masayuki Mori, Takeshi Kato, Kunie Tanaka, even Chisu Ryu- to along with a host of other familiar faces) in an ambitious muckraking revenger's drama, complete with electric close-ups (I've never seen a movie make more striking use of the interior of a car as a frame for the actors) and a pulpy East-West noir-pomp score, but... damn. Dave Kehr's right. Five credited screewriters apparently equals five times the exposition. Far too much of the drama comes through proclamations of retroactive character revelations, and neither the uncovering of corruption or the disclosure of family secrets has the sinister abruptness that the movie's going for. I get really frustrated when movies like this topple over themselves.

Six Stations on the Way Towards (Mostly) Loving Terrence Malick's The New World, Which I Finally Got Around to Seeing This Weekend

2006-02-27T16:42:00.000-08:00

1. I'm slightly uncomfortable with the use of indigenous tribes- "naturals," in the film- as a metaphor for some kind of idealized prelapsarian state; however pure Malick's intentions (or Sam Peckinpah's vis a vis Mexico, and so on), it's still a problematic, and faintly reductive statement to make about race. The first preview at the screening I saw was for Mel Gibson's Apocalypto; I rather wish that this didn't bear mentioning.

2. Talking about the purity of Malick's intentions raises a pressing question: So, um, do John Smith and Pocahontas fuck, or do they just nuzzle? Inquiring minds want to know, since the coy cuddling and grass-tickling of their intimate scenes suggests that Malick is finessing his way around something that could potentially complicate his whole enterprise. Both here and in Badlands, Malick has taken an ahistorical approach in making the real-life relationship between an adult male and a barely adolescent girl into a metaphor for a fleetingly achieved perpetual innocence. Is the man trying to return to an Edenic state through his relationship with the girl, only to see desire get in the way and mess things up? In that case, why not show him deflowering her? Except, I suppose, to spare audiences the site of Colin Farrell doing a love scene with a 14-year-old.

3. About Farrell, though. Watching Colin Farrell fall in love with a teenager is far less squicky than one might imagine. His fully committed performance has a lot to do with it, of course, but there's something to be said for the way that Malick's amorphous poetics envelop his actors, and let us forget whatever associations they might normally carry.

4. But good as Farrell is, Christian Bale is frankly amazing. When he's watching Kilcher (and what am I doing heaping praise on Colin Farrell and Christian Bale for their work in a movie that features a performance as revelatory as Q'Orianka Kilcher's?), his expression is one of reverent bliss, but he can't quite hold it in place. Everytime Bale looks at her, his face wears the (well-founded) anxiety that she isn't seeing the same thing in him as he is in her. It's a typical romantic set-up- there will always be a part of her that's somewhere else, that he'll never know, you know the drill- that's particularly resonant to the movie that's inspired the highest-ever number of reviews titled "Paradise Lost." (Unverified, but really now.)

5. In keeping with this notion of the not-quite-graspable ideal (I should probably have mentioned before now how indebted my understanding of this movie is to Scott Foundas's "every Terrence Malick movie is about the despoiling of Eden" formula, if that wasn't already obvious)- that is, with Pocahontas and America as the harmony that Smith and later Rolfe can only briefly (re?)discover- I wonder whether a useful frame for The New World might be Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? That the act of observing alters the observed, or, in the context of the movie, that the act of discovery involves a tainting imposition of the explorer upon his discovery?

6. And, finally, it's a beautiful movie (though the contrast with the squalid Jamestown- and the stubbly, mouth-frothing Jamestonians- is too obvious to make Virginia more beautiful by comparison). I didn't even mind the fluffy voice-over abstractions after a while, at least not while I was watching them. Really, it's a movie that demands full immersion from its audience: it's a nice place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there.

On Watching Princess Raccoon Without Benefit of Subtitles

2006-02-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

Mondo Kim's recently acquired a foreign region DVD (the official Japanese release, I believe) of Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon. I'm not going to say much about the movie itself, because I don't feel up to describing it, except to say that I'd been anticipating the chance to see it for some time, and it was even more bizarre, even more incomprehensible, and even more intoxicating to look at than I had imagined. No amount of foreknowledge will have prepared you in any way for the actual experience of Princess Raccoon.

The translation of the English subtitles on the disc, though, was abysmal, pretty much incomprehensible. And actually, getting to watch Princess Raccoon without anything but the most rudimentary understanding of what the characters were saying was a pretty liberating experience. For as pleasurable as Suzuki is, I usually can't help but feel frustrated with his purposeful incomprehensibility , but without subtitles, which, for me at least, would have suggested the expectation of a traceable narrative logic, I found him much more accessible. It's not just that it was easier for me to enjoy his surfaces; knowing that I wasn't going to understand what was going on somehow meant that I could finally see the anarchy so essential to Suzuki- the complete and utter nonsensicality- as one of his chief pleasures.

Plus, I don't think I watch movies without subtitles (or without sound, if they're in English) nearly enough. I still worry that I'm too focused on the "what" (the narrative information conveyed in a film) rather than the "how" (the cinematic methods by which that information is conveyed), and- to make a not particularly original point here- watching a movie without dialogue is obviously a pretty good way of training oneself to recognize the cues that filmmakers use. (I'm starting to think about what movies would be most instructive in this regard; probably the Classical Hollywoods, no?)

As for Princess Raccoon, though: watching it without subtitles, so that I was completely dependent upon the audio-visual conveyance of narrative information, really underscores just how much Suzuki eschews cinematic logic. To bring back the Soviet montage arguments, his cuts don't collide into each other, they don't build on each other, they don't create association or juxtaposition: every cut, every camera movement, is an attempt to distance itself from whatever has come before. His movies accumulate, as any progression of images does, but they function by deconstructing the whole. He's seemingly determined to peel off a completely different strip of the movie in every seen, and Princess Raccoon does what it does because each strip is as vibrantly bizarre, and as bizarre different, as it could possibly be. And I guess it took an awful English subtitle track to make me appreciate it.

Briefly: A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971) and The Heartbreak Kid (May, 1972)

2006-02-23T17:49:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post some thoughts on Elaine May that I couldn't fit into a recent piece on her (it ended up being 400 words on Ishtar); now, on the eve of her spotlight at Film Comment Selects (with a push from Hoberman), I guess I had finally spit them out, brief and disorganized as they may be.

So, remember Small Time Crooks? How Elaine May, blundering blissfully unaware through her punchlines, rescued Woody Allen's tepid script from complete ignominy? It's that kind offhand flightiness (which is precisely what Ishtar lacked) that she brings to A New Leaf as the oblivious irritant to Walter Matthau. When she casts her own daughter, Jeanne Berlin, in the same role in The Heartbreak Kid, she's more actively annoying, but when she's not written too broadly she's the best part of the movie. Her slide into pathos once hubby Charles Grodin has fallen for WASP ice queen Cybill Shepherd- on their honeymoon- is one of the few parts of the movie that isn't completely ruined by Neil Simon's smarmily broad script and Grodin's supremely grating, arm-waving mugging. It's such a waste- at its low ebb, particularly at the very beginning and very end, it's a quite effective depiction of the life-derailing things we do because we think they'll make us happier. It's not that it couldn't have worked as a comedy; it just doesn't work as a comedy this frantically pushy. Hoberman isn't hopeful about the forthcoming Farrelly Brothers remake (with Jason Bateman and Amy Poehler, which gets rid of the Jewish angle, unfortunately); I'm actually kind of looking forward to it.

Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

2006-02-20T17:19:00.000-08:00

(Believe it or not, I've never seen Seven Samurai before. And given how much has already been written about it, I'll try and confine myself to one observation.)

So: Seven Samurai, it's often suggested, is the progenitor and epitome of the modern action film. (The latter is more easily agreed upon, perhaps, than the former). And of the many accompanying tropes embodied in the film, one is certainly the conservative streak that's defined so many of its followers. With its emphasis on the values of domesticity (the life of the homesteader vs. the life of the gunslinger, to borrow the idiom of Sturges's remake, which revives the "we always lose" ending, and is even more explicit about its exaltation of home-and-family values), and in pulling the villagers inside their fences against the marauding outsiders, Seven Samurai is defining a very righteous, defensive notion of the action hero. It even divorces the violence committed in the name of self-defense from the community itself, by making its heros mercenaries whose lives the film clearly wishes to establish as less whole than that of the farmers.

But in a year when moviemuch discussion has centered around how successfully movies like Munich and History of Violence problematize the notion of reluctant self-defense so often prevalent in the action film, it's worth noting that complications were there all along. At several points in the film, Kuroswawa stages the death of a bandit as pathetic and maybe even sympathetic, as the villagers' spears fall hungrily on a bandit as he crawls through the mud to try and find safety. (Or, when the samurai kill two advance scouts and capture a third, and the townsfolk kill the bound captive in a fury of vengeance, Kurosawa's camera following the samurai as they reluctantly turn their backs.) In these moments, Kurosawa seems to be suggesting the potential abuses of self-defensive violence, by showing how eagerly the mantle is taken up. This vague unease boils over in the scene when Manzo beats his daughter Shino is punishment for sleeping with a samurai; it's abundantly clear in that scene that the fury with which we take up arms against outsiders ends up broadening our definitions of justification, with disastrous results.

The point I'm trying to make, if another Western metaphor is permitted, is that it didn't take George W. Bush to get filmmakers worried about what "circling the wagons" actually entails.

Because the Prospect of a Cool Runnings Blog-a-Thon Seems, at This Writing, Somewhat Unlikely...

2006-02-18T21:28:00.000-08:00

The Winter Olympics are very nearly coinciding with NYU's Cinema Studies Department's annual student conference. Since this, obviously, cannot be mere coincidence, a panel discussion on the Turin Games seems to be the only logical solution. Descriptions of the topics on this panel might very well read:

"Throughout the games, mainstream media coverage of U.S. figure skater Johnny Weir has used words such as "outspoken", "outrageous", and most especially "flamboyant" to describe the athlete, in an ongoing, not-so-subtle winking towards his obvious homosexuality. For the sake of what hopeless naifs is this coy facade being maintained? And does the perfunctory nature of Weir's homosexual coding signal a shift, or perhaps even an endgame, in the manner in which cultural outlets have glossed over non-hetero sexual orientations?"

"In recent games, additions to the spate of Winter Olympic games have been largely newer, 'extreme' sports, with this year's addition of snowboard cross only the most recent example. In what ways do these events, which have originated in the U.S., appeal to U.S. audiences, and are especially in these early stages of competition dominated by Americans, reflect the hegemony of American consumer culture and aggressive foreign policy, even on such a theoretically pan-national stage as the Olympics?"

"Is 'Olympic Fanfare' the best piece of music ever composed by John Williams? A consideration."

"This discussion of NBC's Olympics coverage will address such issues as: Bob Costas and Jim Lampley- the comparative values of erudtion and avuncularity in a 'cool medium'; Jimmy Roberts' 'Olympic Moments' as expressions of a dominant conservative moral ideology; and the political reprecussions of not checking news websites all day because you don't want to have the outcome of tonight's broadcast ruined for you."

Extra Special Dept. of Self-Promotion

2006-02-18T13:30:00.000-08:00

Bill Roundtree's increasingly sporadic posting schedule hasn't been (entirely) due to laziness, I promise: After a couple weeks in development, the spiffy new thelmagazine.com is up, with its expecially organic and dynamic events blog front page, as edited by Zachary Palmer and yours truly. It's actually a potentially pretty cool new site and you should read it religiously.

The reviews page features most of the film content for the latest (2/15) issue, including my review of inexplicable Oscar nominee Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. The Cinephile's Notebook, which does not appear to be up online, consists of 390 glorious words on Ishtar, which is part of the Elaine May sidebar at Film Comment selects. I didn't have the space to talk about A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, so those of you eagerly awaiting my thoughts on those films can expect a post in the next day or two.

Japanese Cinema Wednesdays: The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano, 2003)

2006-02-15T19:39:00.000-08:00

Actually reminded me (and Ted) of Fukasaku's Fall Guy quite a bit, in the way that it's played with a sort of heightened self-consciousness. Kitano's trying to put everything that might conceivably go into a movie into his movie: here's a childhood trauma, here's some slapstick, here's a sword fight, here's a shocking twist. It doesn't work nearly as well, though: between an overreliance on flashbacks and a narrative that doesn't keep pace with all its spinning gears, the movie is too busy to inspire the kind of engagement that his multifaceted spectacle requires.

I did like certain elements of how the movie's movie-ness played out. Theoretically, between the costumes the characters wear and the handgun one of them eventually draws, the movie is set in the mid-19th Century; watching it, though, it doesn't feel like it's set in any time, period. Best is the Stomp-style dance troupe that periodically shows up to do manual labor to non-diegetic techno music. And then they lead the way in a final, cast-encompassing dance number that actually goes a long way towards underscoring what Kitano has been after all along: yes, it was just a movie and a spectacle all along and now it's over. (Fall Guy does something like this; so, in a different way, does Coppola's The Cotton Club.)

Also, Tadanobu Asano is a really great actor. He's starting to remind me of Daniel Day-Lewis, actually, in the way that he takes what he doing with his body really seriously at moments when almost no other actor would be capable of keeping a straight face. His whole performance here could be an extension of the opening deer-hunting scene in Last of the Mohicans. I can't think of a better choice for the "terrific actor who randomly shows up in every movie made in Asia" title previously held by Tony Leung.

Happy Valentine's Day...

2006-02-14T02:16:00.000-08:00

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, 2005)

2006-02-10T16:10:00.000-08:00

I occasinally describe Winterbottom's The Claim as "the best pan-and-scan movie I've ever seen"; much of the pleasure of that movie (and of Winterbottom's films in general) is in the textures picked up, in snatches, from the margins, and the slightly harried incompleteness of a full-screen VHS accentuates the sense that the story is being told through its un-smoothed-out offshoots and fragments. And it's that aspect of his filmmaking, more than his self-referential cheekiness (Steve Coogan informing us in direct address that he's being postmodern before it was fashionable), that carries his adaptation of Laurence Sterne's 18th century pre-postmodern novel. (Only the first volume of which I've read.)

The major conceit of the endlessly digressive book is that it's narrated by someone who's trying to tell his autobiography but can't ever manage to start it, what with everything else he has to mention first, and all the other things he has to mention related to them. And so the approach taken by Winterbottom (and screenwriter "Martin Hardy") to a book that so constantly acknowledges the process of its own construction is to make a movie that is similarly "open" about the process of movie-making, by being both an adaptation of selected fragments of the novel and a narrative about the production of the movie to which these fragments supposedly belong. Tristram Shandy in the adaptation-within-the-movie is played by movie star "Steve Coogan", who's played by movie star Steve Coogan. (The difference between the two is very important; Sterne was perfectly in control of his narrator's meanderings, and the people making "Tristram Shandy" are obviously creations of the people who made Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.)

It's a perfectly natural evolution of the material, one that's very in keeping with the tricked-out spirit of the book. The major flaw of the film, then, is that it devolves into a fairly stale Hollywood satire, jabbing at "Coogan's" leading-man insecurities and shallowness, and moving his character through a (24-hour) arc about overcoming his selfishness and learning to be a devoted boyfriend and father. It's disappointing to see a movie that's so structurally interesting resort to lazy jokes about about a leading man who hits on his assisstant and wants lifts in his shoes so that he can be taller than his co-star.

But here's where we get back to Winterbottom's offhandedness, his greatest virtue as a filmmaker. Most directors would shape their film around this primary storyline, but with Winterbottom it's just another sideshow, and "Coogan's" transformation plays out almost as briskly as the story of, say, costume designer Debbie, whose travails in dealing with the demands of period-accurate garb are dealt with via a few cutaways in scenes where everybody else is pursuing their own arc, too. (Winterbottom's camera chases after every one of them, if only for a little while before moving on to someone else.) It's the casualness of the movie that tickles, not the jokes. (Except for Coogan's delivery of "You are incredibly attractive, and your knowledge of German cinema is second to none", which is fairly hilarious.) There's always something going on that's more interesting than what's supposed to be happening- a distinction equally applicable to Sterne's book and Winterbottom's movie.

Japanese Cinema Wednesdays: Sanshiro Sugata (Kurosawa, 1943)

2006-02-08T16:58:00.000-08:00

Even at the peak of his career, there's always something disjunctive about Kurosawa's films- the wipes, the willfully eccentric angles- and in his first film, a piecemel lesson in responsibility in the form of a judo student's development, the director's storytelling eccentricities are handled with neither the assurance nor the moral seriousness that he would later develop. It comes off a little sloppy, but likeably so (Johnnie To's homage feels, for once, about right). It's a vervy little cinematic spaghetti test; Kurosawa seems to be auditioning camera movements and framings for future use. Most notable: a climactic showdown on a deserted mountainside plain, wind whipping through the flossy glass. It works so well, Masaki Kobayashi would borrow it for both of his socially conscious samurai movies.

The Best imdb.com News Item Probably Ever

2006-02-03T18:38:00.000-08:00

I really have nothing to add to this.

Dept. of Self-Promotion

2006-02-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

It's the middle of the week, which means that the alt-weekly writers in the movie blogosphere get to take it easy for a day and link to their shiny new reviews.

So: the film section for issue 4.2 of the L is up, featuring yours truly on the DVD for The World (in which I repeat many points I'd previously made here), and on Film Forum's Karloff retro (ditto). No new releases this issue, but given the slate of openings, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.

Related: Elliot Stein has a much less compacted take on Karloff for the Voice (sorry, word-count-envy), and makes some of the same points, with a bonus lesson on How to Name-Drop Without Being An Asshole. (On a related note, Rex Reed has been absent from the Observer for about a month- anybody know what's going on there?)

Japanese Cinema Wednesdays: Ikiru & Battle Royale

2006-02-01T22:35:00.000-08:00

Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

-Nagisa Oshima's Night and Fog in Japan clearly takes its structure from the final section of Ikiru. In Kurosawa's film, the ceremony anchoring the flashbacks that cause the gathered bureaucrats to grapple- with increasingly false-ringing histrionics- to lament their misplaced idealism is Watanabe's wake; in Oshima's film, a bunch of former student radicals rub salt into old wounds at a wedding.

-Probably not a particularly original observation here, but I appreciated the way the film uses childhood as an expression of both irony and the hope of rebirth: Watanabe tells Toyo about his illness and resolves to build the playground to the accompaniment of a group of adjacent revelers singing "Happy Birthday" (in one startling low-angle shot, they appear to be serenading him), marking the beginning of a new purposeful phase of his life that's limited by his impending demise; the playground itself, once completed (especially the swings) serves a similar purpose.

Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)

Which made a relatively large splash a couple years ago for pairing the two ultimate fanboy gratifications of excessive and creative violence and Japanese schoolgirls; and which I actually kind of think I loved, for its joining of two particular weaknesses/fascinations of mine.

I've talked before about how I really like certain movies that turn everyday ecosystems into hermetic battlegrounds. To put it another way, when I was a really little kid, one of my favorite pastimes was considering the space- backyard, elementary school, etc.- where I found myself, and imaging, "what would it be like if there was a battle here?" I have no idea whether this is a bizarre or immediately recognizable impulse; I imagine, though, that the excitement of carving out the most heightened narrative you could conceive of is a pretty basic urge within us as kids, and I'm not sure it ever goes away. (Oh, wait: earlier this month, I spent a weekend up in Westchester, where my roommates are from; we were hanging out at someone's house, a Nerf gun came out of the woodwork, and before too long, one of my roommates- old enough to drink, but not rent a car- was ducking down behind a mattress in the basement, finger on the trigger, shouting "I'm not gonna go back to jail! Not for you, not for anybody!" It never goes away.) The particular genius of Battle Royale is that it concocts its perfect scenario, invents a transparently flimsy justification for it (15% unemployment constitutes a dystopia? don't tell France—although "the not-to-distant future" is a pretty standby excuse for this sort of exercise ), and sets its kids loose in it.

Because: could a movie that feeds our childhood narrative urges (especially the urge to think of oneself as an adult, which the battlers are immediately forced to do) so brazenly feature anyone other than adolescents? Which brings us to my other favorite thing about Battle Royale. It appeals to another particularly youthful but still lingering state of mind; like a few other movies I like much more than I should, it's a movie that tells us that high school really is the most important time of your life. Life really does end after graduation for these kids, and the parallels Battle Royale offers between the behavior of kids facing death and kids facing graduation (these kids have just celebrated the end of 9th grade) are kind of hilarious: long-bubbling rivalries boil over, cliques dissolve in fractious infighting, one kid impulsively travel all over the place just to see everybody one more time before they all have to go, and another is so desperate to get laid before it's over that he does something incredibly stupid. But all this really does affirm the impulse to view adolescence with as much romanticism as possible. The ending credits, after all, play over a sepia-tinted class photo while a strummy alt-rock song plays.

Which is why, for all the outre bloodshed and creative dispatches of secondary characters, the movie seems to wallow in sentimentality far more than in violence; it revives the romantic despair of all the best death scenes to an almost pornographic degree. And just as the movie validates our emotional investment in youth, it validates our youthful investment in narrative: playing every death scene for maximum pathos, Fukasaku isn't catering to a desire to see violence as much as a desire to be told, that, yes, everything we're watching really, really matters as much as it possibly can.

Last Life in the Universe (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, 2003)

2006-01-29T14:00:00.000-08:00

Well, it makes for a great trailer. And the "eloquent ennui drift of the new Asian youth" thing is catnip to me, especially if Chris Doyle shoots it. But none of the other movies I've loved this vibe in have coasted on that vibe alone, which is exactly what Last Life in the Universe does for the first hour or so. It's also a disappointingly lazy about the tropes it employs- the respective sterile and messy apartments/emotional lives of the characters; the jealous, brutish boyfriend who accuses his girlfriend of cheating while receiving a blowjob; etc. etc. Past the halfway point- once loose papers start swirling around, the spatial/temporal bonds begin to loosen, and the yakuza element introduces some retroactive development of the Asano character- we get to the movie that we should have been watching all along, one that takes the unexpected flights its narcotic atmosphere allows. And while that atmosphere is something to soak up, I can get it just as easily from the trailer.

Friday quickies

2006-01-27T14:31:00.000-08:00

-This is, like, really good news that makes me feel better about things. Actually, although I'm not in any way qualified to voice an informed opinion on the subject, it may even be better than a straight theatrical- if it plays on TV (even on IFC), it'll reach people in locations in which "the new Hou" would never, ever play theatrically.

-In light of the discussion below on House of Bamboo, and since I recently watched The Mask of Fu Manchu (a movie that's almost too racist to be so racist it's funny) in advance of its appearance in Film Forum's Karloff series, here's The Orientalization of Myrna Loy. Keep in mind while reading: Myrna Loy was born Myrna Adele Williams, in Helena, Montana.

-Bryan Curtis (in a surprisingly geographically specific piece for a national thing like Slate) on the overrated art house experience; the grievances aired may sound familiar.

-I was trying to figure out something to say about Chris Penn's death, but I don't think I could say it as well as Matt Zoller Seitz does here, so I'll just second everything he says, especially the part about "Stop pointing that gun at my dad", which probably deserves a tribute all its own.

House of Bamboo (Sam Fuller, 1955)

2006-01-26T18:34:00.000-08:00

It's pretty well established by now that Sam Fuller's virtues as a filmmaker are inseparable from his flaws- what's so singular about his films is their cigar-jabbing vitality, and it's not as if he can just turn his bluntness on and off. So, we overlook (except when it's really not possible) the building block construction and appreciate the edifice as a whole. And there's plenty to appreciate about House of Bamboo, especially a knockout of an ending shootout at a rooftop amusement park, a final feather in the cap for cinematographer Joe MacDonald, whose color, 'Scope lensing of the film's Tokyo locations is the most textured element of the film.

Or, one of the most. The heavy in House of Bamboo, in the Sadistic Insecure Bad Guy role that put his kids through college, is Robert Ryan (who is, yes, my favorite actor). As the head of an American gang (I don't recall the word "yakuza" being used in the film) in Tokyo, he's casually brutal, increasingly fond of his top lieutenant, whom he calls "ichiban" (he calls the lieutenant's girlfriend that, too), plays favorites, and does more sulking than revenging when it turns out that ichiban- Robert Stack- is an undercover M.P. Speaking softly when in control and seething (one of the things he does best) when he's not, Ryan may be the only actor who could have pulled off a macho, self-loathing repressed homosexual mobster while speaking Sam Fuller's dialogue.

That the hero, villain, and most of the supporting cast of a movie set in Tokyo are American, playing out an essentially American genre film plot, would at first glance indicate another Hollywood movie that takes place in a foreign country but is really about white people. But Fuller's fixation on Asian culture is entirely genuine- the several of his films that are set in the Far East take, or at least attempt to take, their locations seriously. Fuller is aware that his characters are interlopers: Ryan's malevolent gang is made up of dishonorably discharged vets, and its robberies are organized like military operations, and the Americans are constantly struggling with the unsubtitled Japanese (only hero Stack attempts to learn the language).

It's just that he doesn't seem to realize he's an interloper, too. Whatever condescension there is in House of Bamboo is probably the result of Fuller taking his affinity for Japanese culture too seriously: Stack's Japanese lover telling him that "in Japan, girls are instructed from a very young age in the art of pleasing men"- probably not a verbatim quote- is obviously miscalculated, but it's in the service of an affectionate and, in Fuller's mind, equal-footing love scene. What is somewhat problematic is Fuller's treatment of racial suspicion, Stack's love interest having to deal with ostracism from other Japanese because of her white boyfriend is taken very seriously, while Ryan's gang members (including Stack) call their molls "kimonos" without any sense of irony. But that's the thing with Fuller: you take the good, you take the bad...

Japanese Cinema Wednesdays: Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

2006-01-25T19:53:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the inactivity this week; my viewing habits of late have been pretty wrapped up with movies I'll be writing about in future episodes of the L. And also episodes of Entourage. But now, as promised last week, a bit of a further discussion upon a second viewing of Stray Dog. (House of Bamboo tomorrow.)

Yusa is, quite obviously, Murakami's double in the film, the opposite side of the postwar coin (similar in biography, in appearance, etc). And while the film speaks, through Detective Sato, about the clear dichotomy between the two, the ambivalence of "good" Murakami's close link to "bad" Yusa isn't resolved through the film's "guns don't kill people, people kill people" resolution. (As is usually the case in which films close with a socially mandated moral, the final lesson doesn't overshadow the whole of the preceding text.) In class today, some people argued (if I'm reading them right) that the film makes too clear a separation between Yusa's destructive actions and Murakami's constructive actions (permit the oversimplified descriptors). I disagree: I think the potential for Yusa's anti-social behavior is present within the forces that he defies. Or, to put it another way, the crimes that Yusa carries out are committed with the Murakami's gun, the very thing that gives Murakami his legitimacy as a defender of society.

As I alluded to last week, I think that the destructive potential of the gun-dependent social order can be dealt with in gender terms. The phallic implications of Murakami's stolen gun are pretty obvious- aside from how basic a metaphor the gun/phallus thing is, take the shooting gallery gun/hooker confusion, or Murakami's impotence as a police officer without it and Yusa's impotence as a criminal once he runs out of bullets- and their joint post-coital panting after the end of their climactic fight, when all the bullets have been fired. (Additionally Yusa, variously referred to as a "stray" or "mad" dog, describes killing a cat in his diary; if you, like me, reflexively think of all dogs all male and all cats as female, this is a pretty clear parallel.) It can also be talked about simply in terms of a society founded on institutional violence. After all, the economic system Yusa circumvents throught theft (resulting, as a classmate observed, in the purchase of a Western-style dress for his girlfriend) was largely imposed and enforced by a military occupation. Here, as with Sato walking us through the moral, we have to consider what Kurosawa might not have been allowed to say by the American censors; as I see it, though, Stray Dog does all it can to express its doubts about Murakami, and what he represents, through his double Yusa.

This Book Is a Movie: Double Indemnity

2006-01-20T17:20:00.000-08:00

(Note: this post contains numerous links to Vintage Crime/Black Lizard's portion of the Random House webpage, and I'd be remiss not pointing out a) what a remarkable catalogue they have and b) how fucking beautiful all those paperbacks are. Holy shit, it's better than porn.)

From about Tuesday morning to about Thursday night this past week, I was reading James M. Cain's Double Indemnity. Cain's narration over the book's 115 pages is remarkably swift (I wish I could say that I was slowing down purposefully so as not to miss the subtleties of his prose, but really I read it as fast as it allows, but in fits and starts), less hard-boiled than skeletal. He doesn't go in for the pretty-cynical turns-of-phrase or the soulless ruminations that pepper most noir stories; it's all plot, laid out as matter-of-fact efficiently as possible by a narrator, Walter Huff (as supposed to the movie's Neff), who can only dimly recognize the greater implications of what he's dealing with. Huff's not a paranoid schizophrenic a la Jim Thompson's feats of subjective narratorial pyrotechnics, but even so, Huff's miscalculations of planning and character judgment, and his recounting of his occasional emotions (described but insufficiently understood via grasped-for similes) provide ample psychological depth all the more effective for their submersion underneath the flinty, eloquent storytelling.

One thing the movie (directed by Billy Wilder in 1944, from a script by himself and that much more panoramically ambitious crime scribe Raymond Chandler) misses is Huff and Cain's monumental attention to detail: a large part of the book's appeal is in the extensiveness of Huff's planning (and, by extension, Cain's plotting), in which everything is accounted for. But, since, as mentioned before, Huff's outward actions are all he describes but a fraction of what he reveals about himself, the increasingly elaborate lengths he goes through to set up alibis become both amusing and suggestive of a greater paranoia. (Really, the iceberg principle applies to this book more so than almost any other book, even other noirs. Thompson charts the slow dissolution of Doc and Carol's marriage- the book is much more pessimistic about their trust issues than the Walter Hill-penned movie is about Steve and Ali's- and in The Getaway, but makes it into the central rather than subtextual theme of the piece. Cain is even more minimal- that Walter and Phyllis are driven apart by a necessity-driven lack of intimacy is an element of his book, too, but you have to squint to see it under the gears of the plot. There's almost nothing actually in Double Indemnity, but it's all there.) It's not that the movie is incapable of the kind of unreliable narration that the book provides- shades of it do remain in MacMurray's voice-over; it's more a matter, I imagine, of the movie deciding that the ironic disconnect between description and objective event wouldn't play as well for them as it did for Cain, and that the story itself would be a better fit.

This decision also enables the distinct advantage the movie has over its source. The book's subjectivity means that we only see Phyllis Nirdlinger (I imagine that Wilder changing her name to Dietrichson was done solely for the absurd pleasure of replacing one bizarre, arbitrary name with another bizarre, arbitrary name for no reason whatsoever) through Huff's eyes, and while his attempts to figure her out make for a fascinating window into his own state, the movie lets us see her through our own eyes instead, and, lo and behold, turns out she's Barbara Stanwyck. And her legendary performance slutty, predatory, vulnerable, enigmatic Phyllis elevates the character, despite the movie's deferment to Neff's narration, to being essentially a co-protagonist. The book isn't about Phyllis (and in fact reveals her, ultimately, to be a less complex character than she ought to be); the movie is.

I leave any possible what-literature-can-do-versus-what-cinema-can-do ramifications of the novel and film's respective advantages to the more adventurous out there.

Dept. of Self-promotion

2006-01-19T13:21:00.000-08:00

The L Magazine, volume 4, issue 1, is now online and in attractive orange boxes on New York street corners everywhere. The film section contains, among other things, my reviews of Joe Angio's How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy it) and Johnnie To's Breaking News, Michael Rowin on Eugene Green, and Steve Gartland on Spirit of the Beehive. I also have a review of a two-disc DVD set featuring Eraserhead and the Short Films of David Lynch, and what I can only assume is an uncomfortably personal Cinephile's Notebook entry on Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes.

I don't have very much to add to my reviews, although if I had longer word counts to work with the Breaking News review might have at least taken up an underdeveloped pet theory of mine about Hong Kong being the most tech-savvy cinema in the world- SIM cards, webcams, and digital editing programs play fairly integral parts in the plot of Breaking News, and their treatment is very matter-of-fact, as it is with, say, the cell-phone switches in Infernal Affairs. (Whereas American films still rely on hackers-ex-machina, as in the Italian Job remake.) Anyway, it's just a thought.
The one thing I didn't get to in the review of the Van Peebles doc (a skeptical mention of his performance of "Achy Breaky Heart" was cut for space) was the unmistakable scent of the locker room during the segment in the film dealing with Van Peebles's womanizing: it just came off as untentionally distasteful (the backslapping more than the actual fact of, really), and is unintentionally undercut when Van Peebles's daughter Megan sighs, "That's my dad." (The only one of his many vaunted conquests to appear is a Parisian girlfriend from the 60's, and while all three of his children are interviewed, his ex-wife earns nary a mention.)

And, since today is a light linking-to-reviews day, allow me to point you in the direction of Charles Taylor's review of the Cafe Lumiere DVD, the best review of that movie that I've read, one that takes a very practical look at the "how" of Hou's method, and makes efforts to unpack some of the emotional depth of the film rather than simply wax rhapsodic about it. The hardest review to write, at least in my experience, is one that manages to engage with a movie that you've loved and responded to on such a deep emotional level; reading Taylor try and quantify his affection for Cafe Lumiere helps me to love that movie even more than I already did.
(And, as this piece on a movie of particular interest to this blog also suggests, Taylor has a knack for this sort of thing.)

Japanese Cinema Wednesdays

2006-01-18T18:28:00.000-08:00

My Wednesday class schedule this semester features "Kurosawa" and "Japanese Cinema in the International Context", so for the next several months this will theoretically be a regular feature (although the latter class will alternate between Japanese and related non-Japanese films). At any rate...

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and Stray Dog (Kurosawa, 1949)

This was my third time seeing Rashomon, and the first time I remember feeling as if I was responding to the film, and not fulfilling an idea of how I was expecting to respond to it. I think a large part of it has to do with how I was watching it: the past couple times, I had gone in expecting that I would be confronted with the inherent unknowability of truth, and, indeed, the truth proved to be unknowable. This time, specifically setting out to track the complex relationship between subjective and objective narration that the movie relies upon, I was much more impressed an ambiguity far more dynamic than I had previously realized. (This will probably be nothing new for most of you, I realize.) The most obvious place to start is with the courtyard interrogation scenes: shot (for the bandit and the wife) with a static camera positioned where the unseen, unheard interviewer would presumably be. This places us, literally and metaphorically, in the position of the investigator, noting the ways in which the stories might not jell with the telling- Kyo's overtly seductive body language at one point makes an obvious contradiction to her account. (The camera takes up a number of new, fevered positions for the medium's account of the story; I tend to think that this is an attempt to impress us with the supernatural so that we're more prepared to take this narrative necessity as seriously as the other accounts.) All the accounts are, though unreliable, narrated in an objective (and stylistically consistent) style which we as an audience wouldn't question without the presence of other, equally omniscient accounts.

There are also a few points which seem to serve primarily a practical purpose. For one thing, the luring of the husband to the grove occurs only in the bandit's account and is neither repeated nor contradicted- presumably to avoid repitition, but perhaps because it's true? (The only account of the rape, too, is the bandit's: in it, the wife struggles initially and then embraces him. This is a more clearly subjective moment than the entrapment- isn't it?- and the weight given to its non-repitition and non-contradiciton may be a matter of eliding all sexual explicitness, but it's hard to tell narrative expediency and thematic purpose apart in this movie, if we should even try.) There's also the moment when the wife loses her hat in the bandit's flashback: it doesn't hapen within his vision, nor is it any of his concern. Such objective moments are a bit of a tease, suggesting that there is an actual truth to be uncovered within all the self-interest.

And until the woodsman's account, there would be. That flashback is there to underscore the fact that all three narrators have been casting themselves in the best possible light, and to make farce out of the social codes they claim to embody. It's also there to confound our attempts to double-source our way to the heart of the matter: so that the husband has been killed by a sword in a duel and a stab from a dagger an equal amount of times, for instance, or that the bandit and wife untie him twice each. But what is, for me, a flaw in the film, is that Rashomon doesn't go far enough in discrediting the woodsman, to the point where a handful of my quite intelligent classmates felt that his account was truthful. (This is discussed here.) I think Kurosawa does mean to question that account: why else have the woodsman be lying about the dagger? The problem is that the dagger doesn't really call into question the account itself the way that the prior three accounts contradicting each other does. Of course the woodsman, if he is lying (and, though my attempts to guess at Kurosawa's intentions aren't worth the paper they're not printed on should be taken for what they're worth, I do think we're meant to assume he is), is motivated out of self-interest too, painting this crime as an act of flawed people, for one thing, and creating a true account that resolves the contradictions of the other three.

Moving on... the conflict in Rashomon is less a conflict between individuals than a conflict between the individual and nature. The bandit is always slapping flies, and is caught after the stream he drank from has made him sick (and he even attributes his role in the event to a sudden breeze); the characters are either sweating profusely in the sun, or huddling up against a torrential rain (that lets up at the final moment of resolution). Throughout, the characters are engaged in an elemental struggle for definition. This is also very vividly true in Stray Dog, in which it's possible to track the emotional arc of every character based upon their comfort with the weather. There's a great scene early on, when Mifune is panting like the dog under the opening credits and an older, calming colleague turns his fan and gives the young hothead a few cooling strokes. The entire movie- sweat stains, fans running frantically or surely, popsicles at the ball game, mud on the villain- goes that way.

And, in a reading that I admit was probably influenced by the extensive feminist interpretation a classmate of mine gave of Rashomon: Stray Dog is really about the patriarchal social order's inability to control the destructive potential of its own phallus, isn't it? I've gone on too long already, but I'll return to this idea next week, when we watch Stray Dog for my Kurosawa class (this will, thankfully, be the only overlap), and House of Bamboo for International Context.
I'm really excited for House of Bamboo, by the way, as it's the only collaboration between one of my favorite directors and The Greatest Actor in the History of Cinema.) (I'm dead serious about that, by the way.)

Round-Up

2006-01-17T18:26:00.000-08:00

(Quick thoughts on recent viewings...)

Satisfaction (Joan Freeman, 1988) Thank you, M.C., because without your (rather adamant) intervention I'm fairly certain I would have lived my entire life in ignorance of this movie. I wonder if Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips ever talk about the fact that their respective creative peaks in the year 1988 were Today, and singing backup to "Knock on Wood" along with a bass-miming pre-Mystic Pizza Julia Roberts in a Justine Bateman vehicle?

Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005) "Disconcertingly honest"? (Scroll down about two thirds for the mention.) I can't quite get behind either of those two descriptors for a movie that undertakes all its tentative expeditions into the uncertain with at least one hand gripping its security blanket... I didn't find it grating, exactly, and July is fresh and inventive enough to bear watching, but I have a really hard time with anything so pleased with its own preciousness.

The Interpreter (Sydney Pollack, 2005) It's not quite as bad as I was expecting: it hits its thriller marks with assurance, moves very well, and is acted with appealing dryness. It's pretty humorless, obviously, especially if you thought Faye "spy-fucker" Dunaway was the best thing about Three Days of the Condor (which otherwise takes itself at least as seriously). And instead of Condor's paranoia, we get post-9/11 Munich-style handwringing over violence breeding more violence, only established through pseudo-tribal fabulatory fatuousness, all leading up to the soaked, idiotically drawn-out anticlimax in which a couple of white movie stars decide the fate of Africa.
More important than all that, though, is that Nicole Kidman's character appears to live in my favorite building in New York, 122 East 10th St, right across from the St. Mark's church at the edge of the Abe Lebewhol Triangle, where Stuyvesant and 10th meet.

The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges, 1940) Yeah, I didn't find it that funny except for Tamiroff, either. For a satire, it spends a rather unfortunate amount of time expressing its righteous indignation (its graft-overseeing-party-functionary-turning-reformer morality might actually be inspired by Chester Arthur's Presidency). While the depiction of the political process's seedy underbelly is sufficiently brazen, it's a broad target (although discussions of the needless projects and contracts undertaken by McGinty as mayor might be taken as a jab at the New Deal; this article is open to that possibility, too), and Sturges's script appears content to depict graft rather than make anything particularly comic out of it. It must have seemed much bolder at the time (if last generation's Rex Reed can be trusted as an accurate barometer), but I wasn't particularly fond of it today. Anybody feel differently?

Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1991)

2006-01-15T16:07:00.000-08:00

The Goddess (Wu Yonggang, 1934; one of the headlining films at recent MoMA and Lincoln Center Chinese film centennial series, both of which salute the period in which Centre Stage takes place) is the only full-scale starring role I've seen Chinese silent film legend Ruan Lingyu in so far. In it, she acts in a daze, drifting across the screen as if underwater and playing even her most emotional scenes with a part of her mind seemingly elsewhere. Kwan's biopic casts Maggie Cheung, who's probably the Chinese actress with a presence most reminiscent of Ruan's ethereal glamour (and, especially in her roles for Wong Kar-wai, Ruan's aching romantic martyrdom); even so, Cheung is a far more grounded performer, and much more so than Ruan she seems conscious of what she's holding in reserve. It's Kwan and his collaborators who come closest to approximating Ruan's translucency: designers Pan Lai and Lau Sai-wan's rendering of early 30's Shanghai style is gorgeous and improbably untarnished; cinematographer Poon Hang-sang bestows upon Cheung an adoring warmth that suggests (as do her succession of cheongsams) a direct link between Centre Stage and In the Mood for Love. Kwan's involvement in Ruan's meteorically successful career, turbulent love life, and still-legendary suicide in 1935- she was 24- seems to operate at a lavish, numbed remove (my own incomplete knowledge of the period and a very poorly subtitled and possibly shortened DVD may very well have contributed to the impression of distance), hitting the major points of the subject's bio out of a sense of obligation to the historical record more than out of an organically developed narrative. In most biopics this is a problem, but given the nature of its subject, Centre Stage's episodic ebb and flow actually works pretty well.

Centre Stage is also noteworthy for a bit of casting which, as I was watching some of the films at MoMA's series and anticipating this one, struck me as rather astonishingly perfect: the other biggest Chinese actress of the day, Li Lili- the vivacious slightly vulgar pop-glamour counterpoint to Ruan's piercing tragedienne- is played by the eternally less-than-timeless Carina Lau, the most underrated of Hong Kong actresses (after a while, I stopped keeping track of how many 2046 reviews left her name conspicuously absent from Wong's parade of radiance) and at least as natural a fit for Lili as Cheung is for Ruan. It's a thoroughly fitting meta-second-banana-ing.

Cheung and Lau play out their respective reflective and giggly personae in their appearances, along with Kwan and others, in periodically interspersed scenes depicting interviews with the performers of the film and some of the real figures portrayed in it (including Li, who died last August). Kwan also inserts clips from Ruan's surviving films (memorably matching his and Cheung's restaging of a scene from The Goddess against the genuine article), and at one point pulls out of his depiction of the shooting of Ruan's death scene in New Woman to show himself directing Cheung. It's Kwan's attempt to link his film to the Chinese film industry of the 30's (many of the directors prominently feautured in the recent retros are significant characters in the film), but it's done too infrequently to provide any particular insight. Then again Centre Stage is, in its casting and aesthetic choices, so indebted to Ruan and her time that the extra push towards reflexivity isn't really necessary anyway.

Shelley Winters, 1920-2006

2006-01-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

Fugitive from the Past (Repertory Screening)

2006-01-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

Fugitive from the Past (Tomu Uchida, 1965) had its sole screening at MoMA's Early Autumn series on Thursday, January 12th.

It's a remarkably vital film, shot to shot- even Uchida's composition of characters within the widescreen frame feels infused with the moment's moral and narrative stakes to a really heightened degree. (It's kind of hard to explain: it's not a rigorously geometric tension a la Kobayashi; more of a pulpy charge aided by Uchida's fondness for Fuller-esque close-ups and occasionally switching between developed image and negative.) Structurally, though, the movie's a mess. Going roughly off of real incidents (as they did for Tasaka's A House in the Quarter, another Early Spring screening) Novelist Tsutomu Minakami and scenarist Naoyuki Suzuki set up what ought to be a great plot: in Hokkaido in 1947, the night of a typhoon that sinks a ferryboat and kills hundreds, three men, including two ex-convicts, rob and kill a pawnbroker and his family. As the authorities are assessing the carnage caused by the storm, it's discovered that there were two more corpses recovered from the water than there were accounted-for deaths from the shipwreck. Eventually, it's discovered that these two unidentified corpses are the bodies of the two ex-cons; Inukai, their accomplice has made it away with the loot. Ten years and three hours of running time later, Inukai (now going by the name Tarumi) is found.

And so, working off of such a potent premise (and title, for that matter), the filmmakers do the unthinkable, following the third man's escape and its aftermath for the first part of the film, and then jumping ahead ten years for the events leading to his apprehension in the second half. It completely severs the movie (which, given this fatal lack of accumulative sweep, can't justify its epic length), as does the shift in narrative attention onto the prostitute Yae (Sachiko Hidari) who aids Inukai's escape, and is the focus of the film on either side of its temporal rupture. As Inukai/Tarumi, Rentaro Mikuni's forceful, varied performance almost provides the movie with the kind of shape it lacks, but he's absent too long. The detectives investigating him on either end of the narrative (Junzaburo Ban and Ken Takakura) are equally dogged, but the very fact that there's two of them (Ban returns toward the end, but his momentum is gone) is another scope-botching mistake. Nor does it help that the murder investigation that eventually nets Inukai/Tarumi (clinging precariously on, I shit you not, a ten-year old fingernail clipping) is sufficiently poorly thought-out to completely undermine the gravity of the resolution.

It's possible that I'm being too harsh (expectations were quite high going in), and the terrific final scene does restore some sense of consequence to the whole ordeal; in any case, Uchida salvages some fine, dynamic moments out of this missed opportunity. His legacy is apparently inching towards rediscovery, and there's enough of value in Fugitive from the Past that I still hope we get the chance to see more of him.

Spirit of the Beehive (Repertory Release)

2006-01-12T11:31:00.000-08:00

Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973) has an upcoming run at Film Forum. (This will be our last Film Forum-related post for a while, I think.)

Spirit of the Beehive, which apparently has a much better reputation in Europe than here (this excellent Derek Malcolm piece was written on the occasion in The Guardian's 100 best films of the 10th Century), gets childhood right in a lot of important ways, which is something relatively rare and exciting for a movie to do. For one thing, its nostalgia is largely implied rather than laid on. The opening sequence, for instance, of a print of Frankenstein being delivered to a village, and the public screening in a town building (it takes place in rural Spain in 1940), is nicely underplayed—the process of the ritual is laid out, and Erice's faith in the authenticity of his material works much better than the soppy romanticism of, say, the excruciating Electric Shadows (to name a recent cinematic take on public screenings in rural outposts). Neither are the kids in the movie particularly precocious or savvy, in relieving contrast to the preternaturally savvy moppets that dominate most movies about childhood.
And although the young sisters Ana and Isabel are the primary focus of the film and points of identification for the audience, Erice also grants his audience the privilege of insight into the secret lives of their parents. Father's beekeeping and mother's romantic life are vital elements of the movie, not just because the fill out the emotional life of the family but because the knowledge of what children don't know is vital to the movie's simultaneously romantic and reflective look at the past. (There's one great moment when Ana is looking silently at her father's glass beehive, a moment that beautifully sums up what she can and can't grasp about her dad's inner life.)
Spirit of the Beehive, like Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence and much of Miyazaki's work, is interested in the strangeness of childhood, of the potential for both fright and wonder at the world's as-yet-undiscovered corners. Erice and cinematographer Luis Cuadrad create some lovely moments—most strikingly, Ana watching Isabel and friends playing around a fire in the yard at dusk, jumping through it again and again. It's a beautiful shot, and exemplifies yet another of the kid-movie traps that Spirit of the Beehive avoids—looking back at childhood, it doesn't pretend to understand or explain it.

2005 in review: Retrospective Retrospective

2006-01-11T17:07:00.000-08:00

The really great thing about my compiling gig at the L is, of course, that I know in advance and can plan around the schedules for the invariably fascinating series and retrospectives going on perpetually in the city. On the other hand, since I also write a column about said upcoming series, the gaps that I end up filling in my in still unbelievably spotty cinematic education end up being dictated by those schedules (granted, I have my pick of what to write about), and my exposure to the repertory scene is limited, with the exception of the occasional advance screening or screener, to what's readily available on video or at school (granted, I probably still see more movies because I have to write about them than I would otherwise).
In any case, this post will be about the most memorable repertory movies I did make public screenings of, and that aren't, to the best of my knowledge, readily available for home viewing. This is, as we shall soon see, a fucking travesty.

Out of a repertory calendar for the second half of this year that was basically a crash ourse in the entire history of Japanese cinema- Film Forum had their Summer Samurai festival and terrific Naruse retrospective; Mizoguchi had a brief run at BAM, the Japan Society ran a couple of interesting programs, and the two biggest at Walter Reade and MoMA (along with an increasing number of Japanese films put out by the Criterion Collection)- the two movies that you should write your congressman about getting DVD's of are:

Shonen (Boy) (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)

Based on true incident of a family that made their living from staging minor traffic accidents and extorting money from the drivers; the most frequent hit-and-run victim was the 10-year-old son. (Since this particular tabloid incident casts the Japanese family in the most unflattering light imaginable, it's not particularly surprising that Oshima was attracted to the material.) Rarely have characters been so mistreated by their director: Oshima mucks about with tinting, elides key incidents, and, most significantly, pushes them to the edge of his widescreen compositions, dwarfing them with their surroundings—even the movie of their lives is a struggle for definition against marginalization.
It's a furious piece of work, with much of the fury directed at the father, Oshima regular Fumio Watanabe. I tend to assume that Oshima liked working with Watanabe because he's an average-looking, blandly handsome guy; in all his roles for Oshima, his sleek everyman face is twisted into masks of waste, corruption, and here, a raging nightmare of fatherhood no less frightening for his impotence.
(By the way, in what's sort of an interesting year for this sort of thing, the 1970 Kinema Jumpo Awards honored Shonen for Best Screenplay, while the other major awards went to Shinoda's Double Suicide. The only other movie to pick up laurels was the first installment of the Tora-san series, Kiyoshi Atsumi inexplicably taking Best Actor over Watanabe. I may be the only person in the world who's upset about this.

Kuroi kawa (Black River) (Masaki Kobayashi, 1957)

Early, almost entirely forgotten effort from Kobayashi that snuck its way into Walter Reade's Shochiku series by virtue of it being one of the very first lead roles for Tatsuya Nakadai, as the purring, parasol twirling "Killer Joe" who runs a shanty town next to an American military base. (His adversary is Watanabe, himself at the beginning of his career, offering a kind of lockjawed virtue that probably would have defined his screen presence if Oshima had never got hold of him, and giving Nakadai plenty to play against.)
One of the things that defines Kobayashi's fimmaking is an incredible tension within the spaces of his films, a sort of teetering, dynamic equilibrium between fore-and background, both in the same frame and shot to shot. It's most evident in Harakiri and (its remake in all but name) Samurai Rebellion, augmented as it is by the panels on the screens of the interiors, the slow build-up to bloodshed, and Toru Takemitsu's music; it's present, too, in Black River, despite its ramshackle milieu.
Anyway, I really wish I was doing this last fall; I could have blogged by immersion course in the history of Japanese film as it happened. (Although, looking at my Netflix queue, I may still have the chance.)

And, one impossible-to-see-otherwise retro screening to mention in passing: Louis Malle's The Lovers (1958), which I enjoyed tremendously for its spry, one-shot asides on class difference and plot contrivance, and wanted to bring up for the overtly sexualized river journey (during Jeanne Moreau's then-scandalous nocturnal sensuous adventure), sort of a sexualized counterpoint to another natural/spiritual boat trip—Night of the Hunter. When people talk about the way Ozon quotes Night of the Hunter in Criminal Lovers, they're getting it half right: he's really linking Laughton's song of innocence to Malle's song of experience. Just a thought, anyway.

Special Bonus Links:

-Chuck Stephens, for the Criterion Collection website, in an appreciation of Nakadai that comes, for Stephens, uncharacteristically close to being played straight.
(Why stop at Nakdai, by the way? Let's see some 3,000-word appreciations for Watanabe, for Tetsuro Tamba ("the George Kennedy of Japan", according to Stephens, which doesn't seem quite right), Go Kato, Daisuke Kato, Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyo, Haruko Sugimura, Setsuko Hara, Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka...? Sorry, but another side affect of the past fall was learning all these names and, yep, I plan on spreading them around a little.)

-And this rather interesting tidbit.

Frankenstein & Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (upcoming repertory screenings)

2006-01-10T23:20:00.000-08:00

(Note: Frankenstein will be playing as part of Film Forum's Karloff series in February, and is referenced in Spirit of the Beehive, also forthcoming there; Sweetback will play as part of their Van Peebles week. I know it's been awfully Film Forum-centric around here lately; these things tend to move in cycles.)

Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971)

As this article sort-of suggests, it's a movie more influential for the very fact of its production- by blacks and for blacks, outside of the conventional apparatus- than for what's actually onscreen. Which is not to say it's entirely without distinction— put together, especially in the second half, as more collage than anything else- all jumpy camerawork, Earth Wind and Fire groove, and narration-by-montage- it has a pretty distinctive urbanindie feel to it. (Although this makes the ending's famous statement of defiance somewhat anticlimactic; and Van Peebles's editing is rhythmic but mostly arbitrary—the inclusion of some shots baffles.)
Ideologically, it's once again the circumstances of its existence rather than its content that define the movie—it's hard to tell whether Van Peebles means to indict black institutions- especially organized religion- along with the white hierarchy. Then there's the astonishingly regressive sexual politics. From the opening credits, Van Peebles positions himself as some sort of supercock (it's really the only character trait Sweetback has), fervently pursued by black and white pussy alike (I'd call them women, if the movie would). It's an act of blatant self-aggrandizement, and plays right into the idea of Sweetback as a primitive sexual object that causes the white men in the movie to rally their wagons around their women.
But while that white reaction to black sexuality is at least a trenchant bit of commentary (one of the few observations that come across with any clarity in the film), it's worth noting that Van Peebles recoils from homosexuality almost the exact same way. In an early scene, the lights go out at a lesbian sex show, and once they come back on, Sweetback has replaced one of the girls. See, dykes are great to watch, but we know what they really want is the cock—it's arm's-length exoticism, homophobic to the same degree that other characters are racist.
But, say it with me now: he broke down barriers. Well, congratulations, I guess. And it was an important movie for the development of a black cinema. Again, and more sincerely this time, congratulations. But still...

Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)

For a movie that's only 71 minutes long, Frankenstein drags in places (and moves too quickly past others). There's also not nearly enough of Boris Karloff (whose monster is indeed, to parrot a popular observation, far and away the most sympathetic character in the film). And, weirdly, the movie feels like it's leading up to some kind of class conflict: the scientist's father, Baron von Frankenstein (played by Frederick Kerr as, for some reason, a blustery, half-senile Englishman) keeps muttering derogatorily about the servants and townfolk- and mayor-, and makes some comment about the beer that's keeping them all rowdy and festive at the celebration for his son's wedding; when a woodsman shows up, carrying the daughter killed by the monster that the son created, one expects the peasantry's beer-and-circus-fed energy to turn to anger at the gentry. Instead, they and Frankenstein end up going after the monster together, which feels like an abrupt veering away from complications.
Whale goes about his business very fluidly, getting great gothic (even in the laboratory) set design from Charles D. Hall and Herman Rosse, and satisfyingly larger-than-life shadows from cinematographer Arthur Edeson. It's probably worth checking out if you've never seen it (I hadn't), if only to see all these things- "It's alive" and "I've created a monster"; the plot and look of it; the fascination with and sensitivity to the monster- that have since seeped so deep into the popular culture that we forget what they looked like originally.

This Book Is a Movie: Blow-Up

2006-01-09T13:41:00.000-08:00

(This the first installment of a hopefully semi-regular series on adaptations and their relationship to their literary sources, to be blessed with new installments as frequently as my reading habits allow.)

Today, we'll consider "Blow-Up," by Julio Cortazar, included in "Blow-Up" and Other Stories, an English-language collection of three shorter volumes originally titled "End of the Game" and Other Stories, and renamed, sensibly enough, after the most famous title. I've been reading, and marveling at, Cortazar's stories the past couple weeks, impressed equally by the contortions time and identity are put through and the manner in which they are. For one thing, it's the voice- sort of a congenial, snifter-swirling ruminating- that drapes the stories in familiar intellectual parlor game tones that disguise their incisiveness. Additionally, if there is a supernatural agent at work in Cortazar's stories, it's as likely to be empathy as anything else. Especially in "Axolotl", "The Distances", and the three-page metafiction "Continuity of Parks", the unnatural occurs when, and quite possibly because, the person it's happening to can conceive of it. In the former two, a character becomes someone else, someone whose thoughts they've been, or have presumed to be, sharing; in the latter a reader's immersion in a book either brings the book to life or transforms himself into fiction. In either case, Cortazar is there and elsewhere writing about the expansion of the actual world into what had previously been the realm of the merely conceivable.

In "Blow-Up" (originally titled "Las Babas del Diablo," or, roughly, "Devil-spit"), the narrator's tense shifts, first/third person mutations, and temporal confusion reveal a deep anxiety over his ability to arrange a story that conveys an approximation of actual events (or, really, the very possibility of such an arrangement), just as his photographic intrusion into a potentially sinister pick-up is, in his mind, an insufficient representation of and involvement in the moment. The ending of the story, at least as I read it, the narrator's despair at being able to do nothing with reality but reduce it down to his own size. (This is an at least limited, and quite possibly completely off-base, reading of it; at any rate it's element I think I detect that's most relevant here.)

Which brings us to Antonioni's film, which appropriates the story's central (very slender) thread of plot, its concerns about the nature of representations of reality, and not much else. (A caveat: I haven't seen Blow-Up in years, and when I did see it I was pretty heavily under the thrall of "Tourist in the City of Youth," Pauline Kael's savaging of it.) Looking at the two side-by-side, it feels like Antonioni is doing the opposite of what Cortazar's fiction accomplishes: if his stories strive to expand reality into what can be imagined, then the film is contracting the imaginable into concrete reality. Both stories are very distrustful of representation (as created both by their photographer protagonists and their author/director selves), but I don't feel like there's anything in the film to match the story's fevered attempts to circumvent his own limitations. Of course, the clinical diagnosis of the void that the film gives us instead is of a piece with what's probably Antonioni's most significant contribution to film, and Blow-Up is probably his most self-indicting work, but compared to the story (and especially in light of both Cortazar and Antonioni's other works), I find the film to be more closed-off, and somewhat less satisfying.

Although, as my friend M.C. will attest, the movie has a much better soundtrack.

Eugene Green (New/Repertory Releases)

2006-01-07T17:01:00.000-08:00

From January 20-29, Anthology Film Archives will feature the "premiere theatrical runs" of two of the French (and apparently, though he now vehemently denies it, U.S. born) director Eugene Green's three feature films (his debut feature, Night After Night, will also see some weekend screenings).

Apparently shot in a part of rural France untouched by development but for a few medieval ruins (or at least shot in some accessible woods and matched to long shots of wilderness and abandoned castles lensed elsewhere), The Living World does something I'm always really happy to see accomplished in movies, putting faith in the potential for fantastical narratives present within the quotidian. It's that characteristic that I find most appealing about Walter Hill's The Warriors and Southern Comfort (a very similar work that's been completely overshadowed by its hipper, less direly ambitious urban counterpart), which seal off, respectively, the New York streets and the Louisiana bayou to make them into their staging grounds. The violence of Hill's vision aside, it's really a pretty childlike proposition to imagine the alternate reality possible under the same physical conditions as the actual, and it's the child's viewpoint that Green takes, introducing a couple of children early on in his story. We've already been introduced to the character of the "Lion Knight", Green regular Alexis Loret dressed in contempo-casual clothes (as the whole cast is), carrying a prop sword, and accompanied by a shaggy labrador. He shows up in a clearing where two children are playing- the older and larger one playing the part of the giant- and they immediately recognize him as the Lion Knight, without prompting and with absolute credulity. And then, a few scenes later, as they are still playing, they're abducted by an ogre.
The fact that the ogre is represented through the sound of grunts emitted offscreen and a pair of fur-clad human arms hasn't changed the fact that the children have been snatched by it. All these people who appear to have been acting out a child's fantasy of myth turn out to actually be participating in one, and so the Lion Knight and another knight (Green's regular leading man Adrien Michaux) set out to fight the ogre and free both his wife Penelope(!) (Christelle Prot) and the lady (Laurene Cheilan) he's been keeping imprisoned.
It's formally very impressive what Green does, staging this fairy tale in a style as deliberately unreal as possible. His direct-address framings, or the coyly obvious way he shoots around his self-imposed limitations- especially in the way the villainous ogre is only ever seen as those dressed-up arms or legs- bring out the studied unreality that he transcends. And aside from simply playing the plot straight (having, of course, set up the impossible conditions under which it's to be played), Green becomes a gradually more mystical director, creating some suggestively evocative effects out of, for instance, candle-lit faces in an otherwise unilluminated frame, or the (human, green-painted and moss-studded) arms of an enchanted tree caressing Michaux in the fading twilight.
In a pretty broad hint at his intentions, Green has one of his characters mention a "Lacanian witch" (yes, this is the kind of movie in which a reference to Lacan counts as a broad hint). To consider it from that perspective, The Living World is constructed from elements which are obviously signifiers- the make-up bruise of a "fatal wound" on one character's otherwise unblemished forehead, or the canned roars the soundtrack provides for the "lion"- which carry the full reality of the signified. Additionally, the power of words is a crucial element of the plot, as the characters talk of their intersecting entanglements as being "bound to [each other] by words", and mean it in the literal sense, becoming unbound when new words arise.
The Living World plays with Green's short The Word for Fire, starring Loret and Prot in a doctor-patient shaggy werewolf story informed by transformative wonder and frankly parodic disconnect between that intention and its cutely deadpan affectedness. It's not nearly as involving, but watching it first is an effective preparation for the unexpected flights taken by The Living World.

In Les Pont Des Arts, a character defines baroque (the style with which Green, also a respected theater director in France, is most identified) as the simultaneous truth of two mutually exclusive propositions— a definition expressed far more eloquently and surprisingly in The Living World than here. The artifice that was so effective there is in Pont Des Arts pretty suffocating, and the risks Green takes here, with multiple intersecting character threads in a specifically contemporary setting, and diversionary interludes into academia, theater and pop and classical music, remained stagily boxed off from one another, and the experience is a mostly frustrating one. Still, I'd love to see this extended run bring Green some attention. He's already been the focus of a BAM retro, a sidebar of the Village Voice's Best of 2004 series this past summer, so he appears to be picking up some momentum; I guess we'll see in a couple weeks.

Marnie (Repertory Screening)

2006-01-06T14:58:00.000-08:00

(Note: Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) was playing as part of Film Forum's Essential Hitchcock series; it, like almost all of Hitchcock's other work, is readily available on DVD.)

I'm still working through Marnie, and will need to take a look at Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films Revisited, less to defer to than to use as a jumping-off point, but my first impression is that a lot of the things that make it a particularly complex movie also make it a somewhat awkward one. For one thing, as was demonstrated pretty clearly with, say, Spellbound, dialogue compressions of Freud, flashback triggers (in Marnie, the color red; in Spellbound, vertical lines) and dramatic recoveries of surpressed memories are not necessarily conducive to smooth filmmaking (although the trauma in Marnie is uncovered more darkly, and with far less abruptness, than Gregory Peck's revelation in Spellbound).
This is, of course, a movie explicitly about psychology and sexual politics. And since Hitchcock- of all people- dealt with these issues at impressive depth even underneath the most genre-bound set-ups, Marnie is fascinating at least in part because there appears to be a fair amount of disconnect between the narrative and the storytelling strategies. For one thing, the re-conditioning of Marnie, though it's the ultimate happy resolution of the narrative, comes off as pretty cruel—there's a fair amount of tension between the fact that the reconditioning is a precondition for a satisfying ending (even for Marnie herself) and the very fact that she is entrapped and then trained (words used in the movie to align with the sustained animal metaphor) by Rutland. Often, the way she's buffeted about and shaped by the man she loves(?) is reminiscent of Vertigo, only from Judy's point of view. We can't help notice how callously she's being treated, even as we root for the treatment to be successful. The casting is crucial in this regard: Connery is more conspicuously charming than Stewart, and already with a cinematic repuation (as Bond) for conquest. As charming as he his (and he's very charming, and very conflicted, and really very good), there's a predatory (more animal words) edge to him. (Hedren, when she's not asked to do the impossible, is similarly at her peak.)
Additionally, the dialogue is treated with the period-appropriate, or even archaic, level of arch double-entendre, but it's not really disguising anything at all; all the sexual power struggle is played as close to surface as possible. That this traditional, safe delivery is coated over such overtly sordid material is, for me at least, pretty interesting.
To return to Vertigo, though (and I can't possibly be the first person to use the above analogy, can I?), I don't think Marnie is quite as devastating as that movie is; the casting of Connery, while right for the perspective of the film, doesn't implicate the audience the way Stewart (and, really, the entire narrative structure of Vertigo) does. I suppose it's the difference between empathizing with someone and realizing, with an unpleasant start, that I should have been empathizing with someone else.

And another thing, I'd like to add that the Film Forum audience at this screening ought to be another addition to the litany of complaints in this quite heated reverseblog discussion. I personally was sitting one (empty, for obvious reasons) seat away from the occasionally snorting overweight gentleman who slept through the first half of the movie (snoring: moderate volume, maddening consistency), and then proceeded to breath through his apparently direly clogged sinuses for the remainder, while also moving around quite a bit and at one point donning an old nylon winter coat removed from the crinkly Barnes & Noble bag on the seat next to his (this at a full screening). The laughter- and talking, Christ!- was pretty bad until people got into it; I can't imagine how much worse the guffaws at the subjectively rendered Freudian triggers and recalled memories would have been at the clumsier Spellbound. (Any reports?) Still worse, if last winter's Essential Noir screenings are any guide, must have been Shadow of a Doubt (and what was that doing in a noir series, by the way? Film Forum must have an irrational hard-on for that particular overrated piece of work), with all its proto hick humor (and not just at the parts that are, you know, supposed to be funny).
But the most ludicrous audience I've ever been part of was the opening weekend sold-out show of Brokeback Mountain. Comedy of the year apparently, especially when Michelle Williams finds out she's married a queer. Awkward! There's some pretty obvious psychoanalysis I could perform here if I hadn't already overdrawn on my sense of superiority.
(The length of this diatribe, by the way, was why I didn't just post in the comments section at reverseblog.)

One, Two, Three (Repertory Release)

2006-01-04T12:27:00.000-08:00

Coming to Film Forum for a week beginning on Friday the 13th, after the conclusion of their "Essential Hitchcock" series, is Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961). James Cagney's last role before his 20-year retirement is as an American Coca-Cola executive in Berlin just before the days of the Wall (it was actually in construction during the making of the film); he apparently didn't enjoy making the movie, for reasons that are pretty obvious onscreen. His normally impeccable- and plenty quick already- timing, pushing out words with his entire jittery body, is constrained and sped-up; he's made to stand still, wave his hands around, and bark out lines to Wilder's noisily insistent double-time "hup, two, three" (probably where the title came from). All rhythm and repitition, One Two, Three''s much ballyhooed "breakneck tempo" is paced by finger-snapping Cagney and his heel-clicking assistant, and scored to an Andre Previn arrangement of the "Sabre Dance" and a "Yankee Doodle Dandy" cuckoo clock (a particularly audience-flatteringly-obvious inside joke); laughing is an act of submission.
In the happily nasty first part of the movie, compliance comes easily enough. The best, loopiest lines out of the quick-witted torrent go to Arlene Francis and Pamela Tiffin, as Cagney's wife and his boss's daughter. Being the daughter of a Coke executive, Tiffin is naturally from Atlanta and naturally named Scarlett, and being the boss's kid she's naturally a harebrained 17-year-old nympho, so Wilder gets to work in a dinner-theater southern accent on top of the clownish German and Russian ones, and spray dischord in all directions. But then, Scarlett's impulse marriage to commie zealot pinup Otto (Horst Buchholz, overplaying wildly) occasions a plot to have Otto arrested by the East German police, and then another plot to rescue him, through a combination of those two great western virtues, blondes and cars. (The blonde is Cagney's pneumatic secretary Lilo Pulver; she does a striptease to entice some Russian bigwigs in a particularly brazen bit of "isn't it funny how those guys are slobbering over that girl while she dances on the table- hey, check out her ass.") Unsurprisingly after this not so subtle display of breathtaking capitalist prowess, the scenes of Otto's lickety-split capitalist reeducation, overt jingoism replaces implicit cultural imperialism as the operating principle (when Coke is selling the ideology it's one thing; when the ideology is selling the Coke it's quite another), and what had been the rarest of Cold War pieces- the equal opportunity offender, taking lightly venomous potshots at ugly Americans, nervous Teutons, and buffoonish commies- freezes up.
More to the point: that second half, for as it fast as its played, is really running in place. The frantic preparations for the unsuspecting in-law's visit, in which comrade Otto gets a shake, a haircut, and a crash course in the joys of consumption, are overburdened with business and a couple of underdeveloped, quickly dismissed subplots. And since farces, like sharks and relationships, have to keep moving forward or die, all of One, Two, Three's anarchic, amoral momentum dissipates by the final button: Cagney staring into the camera not in freeze frame, but an uneasy grimace, waiting for Wilder to go on and say "Cut" already.

2005 in review: Korean Cinema

2006-01-02T19:49:00.000-08:00

(Note: this post contains the first instance of what I can only anticipate will be one of Bill Roundtree's most frequently undertaken endeavors, namely, making fun of Rex Reed.)

Aside from his accessible (but still pretty singular) Buddhist parable Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, Kim Ki-duk's movies have received lukewarm (or, in the case of a now-infamous Tony Raynes takedown in Film Comment last winter, outright hostile) reception; I think he's one of the more distinctive talents recently produced by the very recently (either in terms of its development or our interest in it) ascendent South Korean cinema. So, of course the first movie of his to open here this year was his earlier, self-derivative Bad Guy, a pimp/unwilling-prostitute romance that force-feeds its audience antifeminist cliches puffed up with an air of portentousness, and featuring Kim's least inspired use of his trademark nonspeaking protagonist.
None of which really prepared me for the quietly quirky 3-Iron, the only one of Kim's movies I've seen that I would recommend without reservations. Its apparent thesis- that the closest connection its two disaffected main characters can share is in their mutual anonymity- is a simultaneously comforting and distressing response to the ultramodern suburban milieu- all golf clubs, McMansions, and easy-listening CDs- that 3-Iron inhabits.
(Kim's Samaritan Girl, which precedes 3-Iron on his C.V., played at the New York Asian Film Festival but didn't receive any theatrical release here; it's now out on DVD. Be warned: it's another story of a prostitute. The Bow, his most recent film, played at Cannes this spring. If it has since picked up U.S. distribution I haven't heard about it; expect some cameo specialty festival appearances, at minimum.)

I'll dispense with the most currently visible Korean director quickly, mostly because I really don't have anything to say about Park Chan-wook. And while a lot of people whose opinions I greatly respect made better cases for liking Oldboy than I could make for not liking Oldboy, any chance there was of my rewatching it to see if I was wrong about it went up in smoke about a third of the way into Cut, his actively malignant contribution to Three... Extremes. Nevertheless, Park's most significant contribution to the year in movies, though a tad indirect, is not to be lightly dismissed: now, any time I don't like a Korean movie I simply shrug it off, all Rex Reed-style: "What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi?" Indeed, Rex. Indeed.

Jang Jun-hwan's Save the Green Planet! and Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, both of which saw bona fide theatrical releases in New York this year, are among the most accomplished examples of high-wired gonzo-comic pop weirdness and mainstream genre-fulfilling, respectively, that the country has turned out in recent years. As for the less visible efforts, this fall's New York Korean Film Festival had a program of the kind of mainstream fare that's less likely to get much notice here (unless it's a box-office-record-shattering success in its homeland, a la Memories of Murder or Park Chan-wook's JSA), except among devotees and expats. The two that I saw: Spider Forest (Song Il-Gon), a gorily well-composed subjective-memory murder puzzle (available on DVD from Tartan, who'll snap up any Asian movie that lingers over a corpse); and My Mother, the Mermaid (Park Heung-Sik), in which a girl travels to the village where her parents grew up and, in a quite resonantly nostalgic act of supernatural metaphor, arrives in the village's halcyon past and witnesses the budding romance between her teenage parents. (It's such an obviously promising set-up that the mistake Park makes, losing track of the daughter for chunks of scenes at a time, so that she barely interacts with her future parents at all, is pretty unbelievable.)

One of the three Korean films to play at the New York Festival this fall (Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Hong Sang-soo's Tale of Cinema- regrettably, I haven't yet seen any of Hong's work- were the other two), Im Sang-soo's The President's Last Bang is a satisfyingly pottymouthed sullying of the official record of the 1979 assassination of Korean President Park Chun-gee; its presumed significance comes from the idea that its caustic demystification represents an important humanization of history.
Which it probably does. But, despite that, the best Korean movie that I've ever seen (out of admittedly too few), Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy, takes exactly that reverent view of history, tracking backward through the socioeconomic ascendency and emotional plummet of a businessman, set against Korea's growing pains of the past quarter-century. And while history is the impersonal wave by which the characters can only be tossed around, it's precisely this unalterability (that old curse, "may you live in interesting times", come to life) that makes Peppermint Candy a much more vital, lasting consideration of the relationship of the individual to history than Im's behind-the-curtain revisionism.

Hopefully some fresher content in the next few days.

That was also the year that was: 2005 in review

2006-01-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

More belated two-cent contributions to the year in movies...

Steven Spielberg deserves a fair amount of credit for Munich, I suppose. Politically, it's very responsible, even if the periodic bursts of rhetoric that lay out its position of moral ambivalence are essentially verbal compressions of the subtext present in all the action set pieces. But even if Munich is, ideologically, a very grown-up movie, I'm more impressed with its psychological maturation, as it presents a much more multifaceted treatment of Spielberg's Daddy issues (and I'm leaping once again onto a favorite hobby-horse of mine right now). On the one hand, Eric Bana is the typical moral pillar and family man, doing everything he can to protect his wife and child; on the other hand, he's acting under the presumed shadow of an influential yet absent father (and two insufficient surrogates, in Geoffrey Rush and Michael Lonsdale), trying to make decisions without Dad there to guide him. It's Spielberg's two major poses- "Don't worry, Daddy will take care of it", and "What if our parents don't know how to protect us?"- combined in one figure. Even if this still represents a pretty childlike awe of parental responsibility (to say nothing of the gender dynamic: where's the strain this puts on the "hero's wife" while her husband is on another continent doing God-knows-what?), it's at least noteworthy that Spielberg has discovered new shadings.
Munich also contains at least two of the year's most stunning, eloquent, economical moments: the early shot of the hooded Black September member on the hotel balcony, filmed from inside the hotel room with the famous image of him playing "live" on the TV in the room has more to say about history and the collective memory, the media and the cinema, and public and private lives than most movies put together; Bana being shown the black-and-white picture of himself to go along with the pictures of the men he's been hunting is a perfect linkage of thriller plotting and moral repositioning. But, it also contains quite possibly the single worst scene of the year- yes, that "sweaty flailing orgasm/massacre of Israeli athletes" montage, which I'd probably find painful to watch even if I had any idea what Spielberg was going for with it, a mystery that has proved similarly elusive to everyone who has taken up discussion of it (although no review that I've read has mentioned that Spielberg at least sets it up- every flashback Bana has to the massacre is preceded by an interaction with his wife- not that this makes it any better). And I'm pretty sure that anyone coming up with an entirely satisfactory explanation for why the hell Spielberg thought it would be a good idea would make the scene any more palatable.

On to a much less troubled consideration of the baser impulses: Frank Miller's Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller), which proved that Robert Rodriguez, reverent fanboy, is infinitely preferable to Robert Rodriguez, D.I.Y. digital auteur. His devotion to the source material seemed to curb the tone-surfing indulgences that sank Desperado, which was an enormous relief. (It has been argued, and rather successfully, that the movie is masturbatory enough already, thankyouverymuch, even as a straight translation; to which I can only respond that I don't really mind, as long as the self-gratification takes the form of post-archetypal noir stylization and an embarrassment of movie-star riches.)

And now, to make a slightly more than token effort to run against the grain of this post... I just watched, on DVD, the Argentinian director Lucretia Martel's deeply rewarding (if not entirely gratifying) second feature, The Holy Girl, an oblique skewering of those two great human follies, sex and religion. Martel's dryly ironic God's-eye-view plotting welcomes such a reading; moment to moment, though, her elliptical, charged images and re-mystified character interactions are more concerned with offering entirely new configurations of intimacy.

That was the year that was: 2005 in review

2006-01-02T02:58:00.000-08:00

My list of (drumroll...) the Top Ten Films of 2005, done for the L Magazine's year-in-review issue, is here, if you're interested and haven't seen the magazine. To continue with the discussion of the year in film- and to jump-start this blog with some relatively readymade content- this post will consider more of the year's notable movies; I'll do a couple more batches of these over the next couple days, and probably add more year-in-review posts as the clot of 2005 releases I missed works its way up my Netflix queue. Anyway, let the fun begin...

The World (Jia Zhangke) had the best opening shot of the year ("Does anybody have a Band-Aid?"), and the first hour or so is terrific, but the strain of working with such an enormous, oeuvre-defining metaphor as World Park- "see the world without leaving Beijing"- weighs down Jia, who was never a particularly subtle filmmaker to begin with. Although it's interesting that while the settings for his four films have gotten progressively more urban, his primary, provincial concern- stasis leading to stagnation, on the personal and national level- has remained largely the same. The characters in Xiao Wu were dreaming of Beijing; by The World, they've arrived there, but Jia isn't any more optimistic about the possibilities open to them. Anyway, it's a fascinating movie, and the most visually distinctive thing Jia's done so far- I really wish it played as well as it sounds.

Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee) was actually on my Top Ten at one point, partly because the ending fools you into thinking it's a better movie than it actually is (as most movies with depressing endings do, really). What mostly got it stuck in my head for a couple of days after, though, was the way Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, et al, were neglected by Lee almost as much as by their husbands: the movie plays out as a feature-length version of the jolting speed-through of Newland Archer's life towards the end of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, which dispenses with almost all of the elements of his official biography in a quick montage and a few lines of narration. Brokeback does kind of the same thing, pushing Ennis and Jack's "real lives" as husbands, fathers, children, friends, neighbors, etc., to the side in order to define them by the part of their selves most hidden. (And, to a much greater degree than The Age of Innocence, believes in the primacy of its version of events.) I'm not sure that my being most emotionally invested in the stuff that's not part of the movie speaks particularly well for it, but, then again, I'm still thinking about it.

I actually kind of liked Jarhead (Sam Mendes). It's a mess, and Mendes aestheticizes it into oblivion, but I saw it right after I saw Paths of Glory, and so I was pretty receptive to the idea that the true horror of war is what it forces people to become in order to survive (I'm quoting my own review of Paths of Glory there), an idea that the last five minutes of Kubrick's otherwise pretty insufferable macho anti-war screed seems to embody, and which I think Jarhead would have, if it had had any idea what it was actually about.

David Cronenberg made the cover of the Village Voice for winning their annual critics poll with History of Violence, which is a pretty respectable choice, I guess. I'm just still kind of cold on that movie, and maybe for the wrong reasons, namely, that it's too well constructed. Every single element of the movie has a very thought-out, very evident relation to its thesis, and while it's impossible not to admire Cronenberg's execution (and, as has been noted, Josh Olson's model screenplay), is it too much to ask for a little bit of asymmetry to chew over?
(But, as an aside, was anybody else really disproportionately pleased to see William Hurt show up looking and sounding exactly like Albert Brooks? I guess we're going to have to, um, reevaluate Broadcast News now...)

All right, that's more than enough for now. The dead horse of 2005 will be flogged yet more in the coming days.

Theoretical FAQ

2006-01-01T23:53:00.000-08:00

Who are you?

Hi. I'm Mark Asch. I'm a senior at NYU, majoring in cinema studies. I work at the L Magazine (see the links section if you're curious, or pick one up- it's free), reviewing movies, compiling the "classics, indie, etc." portion of the film listings, and writing the "Cinephile's Notebook" feature on a currently ongoing series/revival/retrospective/what have you.

What is this blog?

This blog will consist almost entirely, I imagine, of me writing about the movies I see. The writing here will be for the most part different from reviews: I imagine I'll use the first person a lot more, for one thing, and write-ups will be less formal, more conversational, and, most importantly from my perspective, not bound to any specific word count. I'll try to write about every movie I see, or at least every movie about which I presume to have something of interest to say.

Why do I care?

There's no earthly reason why you should.

Happy New Year, everyone.