Looking at the list of films coming out this fall, it recently dawned on me that we could be looking at one of the best end-of-year film release slates of all time. We've got the directors I love, like the Coens, both Andersons, Baumbach, Cronenberg, as well as guys that are highly regarded, but who generally leave me cold, like Gus Van Sant and Ang Lee. Most of the directors with films coming out this fall are new jack whipersnappers. The '70s "young hollywood" directors mostly don't have anything coming out, except for Brian DePalma (who's got a digital thing about Iraq coming out), and Francis Ford Coppola, who is threatening to inflict more of his late-career horseshit upon the unsuspecting public.
I've been thinking about this particular crop of filmmakers and what their ascencion to prominence in American film says about the medium and the culture at large. The one point that jumps out immediately when pondering these here directors compared to other generations of directors or directors from other parts of the world is the overwhelming, suffocating sense of irony that suffuses their work. The Coens and Wes Anderson are the most obvious offenders on this score, but it's almost impossible to think of a prominent American director from the past twenty years who hasn't blunted the emotional impact of their films with some kind of postmodern wink. It's understandable, and it actually doesn't diminish my enjoyment of many of these films, but it can get old, and it does establish some unnecessary boundaries on the work. That's what makes the Coens film and the P.T. Anderson film the two fall releases I'm most excited about seeing. The Coens are some of the most flagrant abusers of irony in American film history, but I can't hate on them for it because they are such singularly brilliant film stylists. It's going to be really interesting to see how the emotional detachment of the Coens gels with the stark immediacy of Cormac McCarthy. As for P.T. Anderson, his decision to adapt a novel by Upton Sinclair, whose complete lack of irony makes Cormac McCarthy look like Johnathan Lethem, is very intriguing. P.T.A. has always had the most 70s-esque sensibility of the current younger directors: much more willing to express raw emotions without the protective irony layer (well, he's no Darren Aronosfky, but who is?). I'm looking to see how Anderson assimilates Sinclair's bleedingly earnest political agenda with his own heart-on-the-sleeve approach to emotional content.
All I know for sure is that I'm going to watch a hell of a lot of movies in the next four months, and at the end of the year I hope to put together some sort of "state of American cinema"-type post based on my reaction to this bumper crop of potentially-awesome movies.
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2 comments:
yas yas. what else? what about baumbach's bougie-ness? do you think that rolls over into these other directors as well?
Baumbach's bougie-ness is not unique. In fact, I would argue that pretty much every American director is bougie as hell. There really isn't any American equivalent to earnest British working-class chroniclers like Ken Loach or Mike Leigh. American movies either ignore class, or use working class people as grotesques and walking punchlines.
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