Schizophrenic Double Features

This week, I watched both Wanted and In Bruges, two films about the world of hired killers that take radically different approaches to the subject. Wanted is practically a recruiting film for an assassination squad (or maybe the Army), with its whizz-bang action setpieces, sultry, gun-toting Angelina Jolie, and a general message that killing people is the surest way to raise your self-esteem and overall quality of life. It's a gas, man. In Bruges, on the other hand, deals with the aspect of killing people for hire that is almost completely absent in the vast majority of films about hitmen, especially Wanted: the guilt. In fact, the entire film is about Colin Ferrell coming into awareness of his own conscience after a botched hit. It's a wrenching character arc that it's hard to imagine would ever occur to Wanted's James McAvoy, who leaves a life of office drudgery for the fun and excitement of whacking bad guys. He never has to worry about guilt, because his targets are chosen by a secret code written into fabric weaved by a Loom of Fate! It occurred to me that watching Wanted and In Bruges back-to-back could induce thematic and stylistic whiplash. That made me think: are there any other potential double features of films that make dramatically divergent interpretations of similar material?


Glory and God's and Generals

The American Civil War: a crusade to abolish the wicked institution of slavery and assert to equality of all men, or a noble stand by god fearing Southern patriots intent on seeing their precious folkways unsullied by foreign interlopers? It's a debate that has defined the terms of discussion of the Civil War era, and you can play along at home by sitting down to watch these two films one after the other. Ed Zwick's Glory tells the story of the all-black 54th Massachusetts volunteers, who distinguished themselves in battle during the struggle for Charleston. The centrality of slavery to the cause of the war is never questioned as the soldiers work their way from being a ragtag collection of ex-slaves to a lethal fighting force intent on destroying the institution that largely defined their destinies. By the time the 54th sees action, the Confederate soldiers may as well have horns for all the hatred and violence they represent. Ronald Maxwell's Gods and Generals, on the other hand, gives the viewer four and a half hours of footage of pious, honorable Southern generals, including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, as they assert their righteous duty to defend their homeland. The only black folk in the film are Jackson's loyal servants, who of course, love him like a father and sho don't cotton to none of that "freedom" foolishness. Now, I'm hugely biases against the Confederacy in all things, but if you watch these films back-to-back and aren't fully convinced of the awfulness of the southern cause, then you, my friend, must be a huge fan of horrible, horrible movies and incredibly fruity musical interludes.


Signs and Independence Day

Things these two movies have in common: they're both about alien invasions, and they're both movies. That's about it. Independence Day is an epic action film that jumps across the country and the world, documenting the impact of a massive alien attack that leaves most of Earth's major cities destroyed. Signs is an intimate thriller about one families reaction to a mysterious, slowly escalating series of alien encounters, culminating in an alien attack on their home. The aliens in Independence Day use moon-sized death ships and lazer canons. The aliens in Signs use their bare hands and the poison gas that their hands emit. Independence Day seeks to capture the global sweep of such a crisis, while Signs wants to show how a small group of people, cut off from that bigger picture, make sense of the terrifying changes around them and seek to cope. There's even a subtle but significant difference in the two film's political visions. Independence Day makes a Franklin Roosevelt-style case for a robust government response to the catastrophic. Whether it's a Depression, a world war, or a genocidal alien invasion, there's nothing folks can't overcome if they work together under the inspiration of a charismatic leader. Signs displays a more Reagan-esque take on the efficacy of collective action: when the shit hits the fan, the government won't be there to help, not even your neighbors. It'll just be your family and your faith to get you through the night.


Kelly's Heroes and Three Kings

These two films take the same premise: soldiers in the waning days of a war sneak behind enemy lines to steal a bunch of gold, and spin subversive, seriocomic tales out of them. What's interesting is the different ways the two films are subversive. Three Kings, one would think, should be the more cynical of the two. It's directed by indie stalwart and crazy-person David O. Russell, makes a biting critique of American cynicism and self-righteousness during the first Gulf War and features some dazzling cinematography and use of unconventional film stock. Yet, the character arcs of the protagonists in Three Kings is utterly conventional: they set out to steal some gold, and after witnessing the horrors of Saddam's post-war suppression of the Shi'ite rebels, they discover their consciences and learn to fight for something bigger than themselves. Kelly's Heroes, made in 1970, featuring Clint Eastwood, and helmed by a dude whose last directing job was an episode of the show Archer before quitting Hollywood to become a plumber, manages to blow the doors off of a whose slew of war movie cliches. When Kelly and his band of misfits rush ahead of the Allied forces during the German collapse in WWII, they are wholly focused on nabbing a bunch of Nazi gold from a bank in France. And, as the film progresses, they stay completely focused on nabbing a bunch of Nazi gold from a bank in France. There is no soul searching, no devotion to country or a burning need to rid the world of Fascism. In fact, you get the distinct impression that if these guys knew about a stash of gold in a British bank, they wouldn't hesitate to try and steal it. These guys are the GREATEST GENERATION, the citizen soldiers who saved the world, and in Kelly's Heroes, they may as well be the James gang. Plus, the tank commander, played by Donald Sutherland, is a hippie...a hippie in World War Two! That'll rescrew your carburetor.


The Blob and The Blob

The original Blob from 1958 features a giant red Jell-o mold from outer space that devours everything in a small mountain town. It's a classic piece of cold war sci-fi, in which the threat of an external, homogenizing force is symbolized by a destructive alien. The 1988 remake, on the other hand, is a angst-riddled scream from alienated liberals trapped in Reagan's America. Here, the creature, much more viscous and prone to dissolving the flesh off of people's bones, is created as a result of covert military experiments in space, and government scientists want to capture it for use as a weapon. The other villain in the piece is a crazed millennial preacher who sees the blob as man's just punishment for his wickedness, and seeks to save it so that it can fulfill its divine purpose.

Wanted

All action movies are, on some level, wish-fullfilment for frustrated young men who really wish they could take a machine gun to work and blow away their boss or chase a bad guy down Mount Everest on rocket-propelled skis. Every man with testosterone flowing in his veins has some sort of desire to see his enemies lay prostrate before him, a busty young wench clinging to his leg...you know, caveman shit. And for the average domesticated American male, the only place to see their fantasies of violent domination come to life is the multiplex. It's usually a harmless form of catharsis, but Wanted takes the notion of action film-as-expression-of-latent-desire to ludicrious, possibly immoral extremes.

Wanted begins with bored office drone James McAvoy going through the soul-crushing routine of his life in a series of sequences that play like clips from Office Space remade by Oliver Stone. In case the viewer has missed all the sledge-hammer subtle hints that McAvoy is an ordinary, regular guy unhappy with his lack of significance, there is some helpful voice over from McAvoy TELLING the viewer how unhappy he is with his regular, ordinariness. Man, it sucks to be a 9 to 5 drone! If only a cat-eyed beauty would show up and whisk him away into a world of highly trained international assassins! Thankfully for our put-upon hero, Angelina Jolie, whose character is paper thin and seems to exist in the film soully as window dressing...grossly thin, heavily tattooed window dressing, shows up, hands him a gun, leads him through a training montage, and sets him loose to blow away the evildoers of Chicago with bending bullets. Now, McAvoy sheds the hangdog look and self-negation of his pathetic cube-dwelling existence. Shooting people from moving cars gives him a drive, purpose and joy for the first time. But there is no need to feel guilty about getting all of this satisfaction from killing: all of his victims have been chosen by the elite "fraternity" of assassins because of their threat to global order. How does the shadowy assassination team pick their targets? In what might be the single stupidest conceit in an action film since the flying bus in Swordfish, only less hilarious.

That's a running theme in Wanted: intensely stupid and ridiculous, but never quite stupid and ridiculous enough to be fun. The action sequences, helmed by Night/Daywatch director Timur Bekmambetov, are competently executed, and feature a few jaw-dropping stunts, but the heavy use of slow-motion and "bullet time" are beyond stale at this point, and the elliptical plot structure constantly blunts the film's momentum.

When the credits roll, the action scenes have failed to make an impression, leaving you only with a sour aftertaste. Not only does Wanted give the audience a delirious taste of vicarious violence, it also sells killing people with stealth and bad-assitude as a guaranteed path to personal satisfaction and validation. By the end of the film, McAvoy's increasingly smug voice-over is practically mocking the audience for not being assassins. It's enough to make you want to take a shower afterwards, and not just because you just spent money to watch a movie featuring a loom that tells the future. I'll repeat that last bit: there's a loom that tells the future in this movie.

Score: 5.6

Masters of Horror: Screwfly Solution

A couple of years ago, I watched Joe Dante's Homecoming, an entry from Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series. It was a blistering piece of anti-Iraq war agitprop with zombies. Not scary by any means, and lacking Dante's usual smart-ass wit, but interesting viewing. Now that I'm no longer watching a foreign film a week, I thought I'd watch all of the Master of Horror episodes currently available on DVD. It's a murderer's row of genre directors: Dante, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Takashi Miike, John Landis.... and none of the entries longer than an hour. Sounds like fun to me. The first episode I watched was Dante's second entry in the series, The Screwfly Solution, which concerns a virus that turns men's sexual urges into homicidal urges. As with Homecoming, the episode suffers from a glaringly low budget, a heavy thematic hand, and generally pedestrian direction, but the concept pays off in unnerving ways. Mostly, watching this makes me curious to see what other horror aces do with the limitations and structures of the series.

The Incredile Hulk

It seems that one's opinion of the rebooted Incredible Hulk is inexorably linked to one's opinion of Ang Lee's Hulk of 2003, of which the new version is a sort of quasi-sequel. Folks who thought that Lee's version, with its somber tone and Freudian themes, was a bold, visionary attempt to make a comic book movie into something substantive seem to find this new hulk to a be a much dumber, sadder, less interesting beast. Those who found Lee's version to be a load of ponderous horseshit, on the other hand, welcome a Hulk movie that glories in the spectacle of Hulk smashing things.


For the record, I think Ang Lee's Hulk is a goddamn disaster. Yes! I know that he was trying to add symbolic and emotional resonance to a comic book film, but moviemaking isn't the Special Olympics: you don't get credit for trying. Lee's Hulk, like Bryan Singer's Superman Returns failed because the creator failed to appreciate the genre. The Superhero icon is an expansive trope that can accomodate all sorts of musings on culture and psychology, but it's also extremely fragile. If you graft your personal cinematic obsessions onto a comic book character, you'll likely end up crushing it under the weight of your intellectual pretensions. Ang Lee's entire film ouvre is a meditation on repression, and so he turned Bruce Banner into a man struggling with a gamma-radiated Oedipus Complex. Now, that's a bold move, but it's bound to fail if you shoot a film in which the main character periodically turns into a giant green CGI monster with all of the joyless brooding of Brokeback Mountain.


Marvel Studios learned their lesson from that, so they got the dude who directed The Transporter to make a more smash-centric Hulk. But this new Hulk underscores another potential pitfall of the comic book genre: bland proficiency. The new Hulk possesses none of the faults of the Ang Lee version, but neither does it boast any sort of discernable point of view. Maybe effective ass-kicking and artistic vision are mutually exclusive in the comic book film genre, and if so, I guess if I had to have one, it would be effective ass-kicking. Yes, Virginia, I am a Philistine. But I'm going to watch a movie featuring a giant green monster, I'd rather watch him rip a police car in half and use the pieces as boxing gloves than watch Eric Bana look angst-riddled for two hours. Most of this new Hulk film is servicable if not great: Ed Norton is charismatic as the harried Bruce Banner, his inhibited romance with Liv Tyler's Betty Ross carries a bit of heft and the special effects are convincing. A big showdown between the Hulk and Gen. Ross's army unit is marred a bit by some clumsy editing, but the film really earns its keep in the last reel, when the Hulk goes toe to toe in the streets of Harlem with supersoldier Emil Blonsky's mutated Abomination. It's the kind of climax that is too rare in the comic movie universe: an action set piece that highlights everything that is awesome about the iconic
character the film is based around. Hulk smashes, he crashes, he claps his hands and creates a sonic boom, he punches the ground and creates a mini-earthquake, it's all enough to give a guy a nerdgasm. For all the movie snob posturing about the merits of a "cerebral" (read: boring) approach to comic material, there's something to be said for revelling in the mindless but thrilling vulgarity of pulp spectacle.

Score: 7.2

The Happening

Strike Three, M. Night, you're out.

The Happening is easily the worst film of Shyamalan's career. For all of it's jaw-dropping awfulness, Lady in the Water possesses a Herzogian obsession that's gripping to behold. Shyamalan created that film as a monument to his own ego, with a commitment so bold it's impossible not to admire a little. Lady in the Water is Shyamalan's cre de cour to every critic or studio exec with the temerity to doubt his genius. It says: "I WILL cast myself as a writer whose work will save the world! I AM so gifted a storyteller that I can devote half the film's running time to expository dialogue screeched in a Korean accent! I CAN base an entire film around a mythology that I completely made up, and expect the audience to immediately accept it!" The movie is a creation that bespeaks a will to power on the behalf of its maker that's awe inspiring, like the Pyramids or Auschwitz.

The Happening shows none of that lunatic vision: it's just inept. Literally every halfway effective visual in the film is in the commerical, from the chick sticking a hairpin in her neck to all the dudes jumping off of the roof to the guy laying in front of the lawnmower. And most of it's over in the first ten minutes. What's left is an hour and a half of Mark Wahlberg making like Fred Rogers on Methadone, leading his wife Zooey Deschanel and a little girl as they skulk around the Pennsylvania countryside, meeting wildly overacting rural characters and trying to outrun gusts of wind (really). The premise of a mysterious chemical causing people to spontaneously kill themselves is potentially interesting, but Shyamalan fails utterly to do anything interesting with it. Wahlberg and company don't know what's causing the attacks, and neither does the audience, but we do know that if it gets to the main characters, they'll die pretty much instantly, and the movie will be over. Since that can't happen, Shyamalan pads the middle part of the film with pseudo-suspense courtesy of the aforementioned overacting rural characters. Their presence is so transparently one dimensional (provide some sense of dread during part of the movie when here is no real chance that the deadly chemical will reach the protagonists), and their behavior so arbitrary, that they leave no impression at all.

One scene in particular fails miserably in its attempt at creating suspense, while at the same time highlighting Shyamalan's complete collapse as a film artist. In a direct reference to Shyamalan's most perfectly rendered piece of suspense filmmaking (the "Brazilian Birthday Party" video from Signs), a woman shows a crowd of onlookers a video someone e-mailed to her iphone (timely!). It's a dude committing suicide by walking into the lion enclosure at the Philadelphia zoo. The fact that this scene completely lacks every single element that made the original sequence from Signs compelling, and that Shyamalan seems to have no clue that it fails to meet these vital criteria, is the most eloquent evidence available that the man needs to find a new career. I suggest Subway sandwich artist.

Score: 1.8

More Blogging! You Know You Crave It!

For a while now I've been thinking about reviving my political blog "Handjobs for Third Stringers," then I decide that I'm too lazy to blog (which is really, really fucking lazy). But the new cover of Newsweek has blown my brain out of my ass with outrage, so I'm bringing 'er back. Stop over and check it out.

2008 DVD Review: The Signal

The Signal is a low budget indie horror film that enjoyed a brief theatrical run earlier this year. It's too bad it didn't receive a wider distribution, because The Signal is easily scarier, wittier, and more heartfelt that about 90% of theatrically released horror films. In the forebodingly named city of Terminus, a mysterious electrical signal suddenly appears on all bands of communication: television, cell phones, land lines, radio. All those exposed to it eventually turn into homicidal maniacs. There's a superficial similarity to a recent Stephen King novel, Cell, but the film's conceit is actually much more rich and interesting. Rather than becoming slathering murder-beasts instantly, as in King's novel, the "crazies" in The Signal slowly become detached from reality, with the nature of their insanity determined by the underlying resentments and jealousies hiding dormant in their psyches. The viewer is never sure if what they're seeing is real, or simply the delusion of the character. The uncertainty is amplified by the fact that the "crazies" reveal themselves slowly: a character who seems at first glance to have avoided crazification, will, over time, reveal themselves to be shithouse nuts.

What makes the film really pop is the fact, while the it features three main characters throughout (a cheating wife, her cuckold husband, and her lover), it's split into three distinct "transmissions" focusing on the point of view of each one. The three segments are helmed by different directors, and have different moods. Transmission one, in which the cheating wife returns home to find her entire apartment building full of murderous crazies, including her husband, is an adrenalized shot of anarchic terror. Transmission two, which finds the cuckold husband, on a quest to find his wife, attending an extremely bizarre new years party, hits a sweet note of lurid violence and deadpan comedy. Transmission three finds the lover questing after the wife, and shifts the mood to hysterical romance in the last-reel-of-28 Days Later tradition. As with most anthology films, the different pieces are a bit uneven in quality (transmission 2 was my favorite, hands down), but the singular plot and group of characters keep it from seeming disjointed. Most impressively, the film squeezes every drop of value from its miniscule budget, although there aren't enough moments of apocalyptic mayhem.(god, I love my apocalyptic mayhem!) I really wish someone would throw 60 or 70 million bucks at these guys so that they could make a sort of sequel/remake, like Robert Rodriquez did with Desperado.

Score: 8.0

MYOFNF...remix!

After two failed attempts to watch a couple of MYOFNF candidates, I've come to the conclusion that my method here, pretty much randomly Netflixing foreign films from the 70s or earlier that I've heard of, is the definition of retarded. I end up watching movies I don't like, the rich veins of films by specific directors get ignored. So, instead of watching any old movie with subtitles once a week, I'm going to go deep into the oeuvre of specific foreign directors who intrigue me. Then, after I've drunk deep of the creative cup of said director, I'll post a detailed overview of their output. Expect updates maybe once a month or so, featuring directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, and Akira Kurosawa. Stay tuned.

The Strangers

Michael Hanekes two versions of Funny Games are both great films, but they both completely fail in their goal. Haneke wanted to make audiences reevaluate their relationship to film violence and, hopefully, never go to a movie looking to be entertained by the suffering of others. I've seen both the German language original AND the English remake in the past six months, and still, there I was, sitting in a theater watching Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler being tormented by home invaders.

The Strangers writer/director Bryan Bertino has a few tricks up his sleeve and at first, they're deeply effective. The use of sound design, for example, with dead-of-night knocks coming against heavy wooden doors, records skipping and ominious footfalls all setting a mood of dread and unease. Also, the strangers themselves, wearing creepy blank masks, seep in and out of the corners of frames, usually while one of the protagonists is looking the other way, their horrible presence a secret between the interloper and the audience. These moves raise gooseflesh the first few times they're used, but they steadily lose power with repetition. Onc the novelty of these gags wears off, you're left with an all-to-familiar catalogue of scares and would-be scares as two young lovers tryto fend off three masked psychos dressed like Decembrists concerte-goers. Too often, Bertino undercuts his most powerful moments with an intrusive, blandly atonal score or has his main characters do insanely counterintuitive things just to keep the action moving forward. Funny Games might fail as a vehicle for shaming people out of enjoying film violence, but it's a smashing success at creating terror by maintaining an oppressive air of reality through long, unbroken takes and a total lack of music. If Bertino could marry some of his more winning stylistic tics to a more auster, Hanekeian approach, he might make a truly disturbing, super-fun horror film. Wouldn't it be a gas if Haneke's efforts to banish sadism from the silver screen ended up perfecting the genre?

Score: 7.5

2007 DVD Review: Charlie Wilson's War

There's a scene in Tim Burton's great film Ed Wood in which Johnny Depp, playing the eponymous filmmaker, sorts through bits of stock footage for use in his masterpiece, Plan 9 From Outer Space. Looking at images of buffalo herds, atomic blasts and army maneuvers, Wood muses that he could make an entire movie out of stock footage if he arranged it in the right order. Ed Wood never did make that found footage masterpiece, but Mike Nichols has picked up the idea in his execrable film Charlie Wilson's War. It seems like at least half of Wilson's running time is taken up by news camera shots of helicopters, mujahideen fighters and refugee columns. The parts of the film that aren't twenty-five year old clips from Nightline are staged with a Woodsian lack of artistry. In particular, the film's only "action" scene, in which Afghan insurgents shoot down a Soviet Hind helicopter with a Stinger missile, could have come straight from Glen or Glenda. Three dudes stand on a hill that's probably somewhere in Griffin Park, fire a rocket launcher, then jump around and celebrate, all intercut with shots from inside the cockpit of the helicopter, and images of the helicopter in flight that seem to be stolen from a different, equally shitty film. Having read part of the book the film is based on, I was all set to slam the movie for glorifying a criminal enterprise; namely, the covert arming and funding of Islamic fundamentalists by the CIA. The film is such a stunningly inept work of moviemaking, though, that the sheer crappiness sucked up all of my outrage. It's not even really a film at all in any recognizable sense. It's not funny, there's no dramatic tension or character development, and nothing approaching a rising action or climax (except for that awful Stinger attack). It's just a collection of woodenly acted, stagey conversations between a never-worse Tom Hanks, a never-worse Julia Roberts (how in the world can a woman from Georgia NOT be able to approximate a Southern accent?), and an awesome-as-always Philip Seymour Hoffman. I'm baffled how this movie got even mixed reviews (not to mention a slew of Golden Globe nominations). Is the combined star power in front of and behind the camera (in addition to Hanks and Robert, Mike Nichols directed from an Aaron Sorkin script) so blinding that most critics didn't notice the absolutely slack, lifeless, witless, uninspired dreck up on the screen?

Score: 2.0

MYOFNF #20: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (dir. R.W. Fassbinder, 1974)

Before Todd Haynes remixed Douglas Sirk's melodrama All That Heaven Allows, German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder transplanted the tale of forbidden love to Germany, in a story about an elderly German woman who marries a much younger Morroccan immigrant. Fassbinder's movie centers on the toll that social ostricism takes on their relationship. What struck me about Fassbinder's approach is how studiously he utilizes film grammar to emphasize the alienation and angst caused by drawing abhorrent stares wherever you go. His main characters are frequently framed within the frame of the shot: by doorways, windows, or railings, to enhance the sense that these people are restrained. The repeated tableau effect creates a Brechtian distance that makes the characters seem to be specimens on display, like butterflys pinned to a cork board for the viewer's persual. It's that very sense of constantly being watched, and judged that makes being a social pariah so painful: it creates a hyper-self consciousness, and a sneaking suspicion that your status as an outsider must stem from some essential otherness. These of course are well trode themes for film, but I've rarely seen them evoked so skillfully.

2008 DVD Review: Rambo

John Rambo is back and he...looks like he's been stung by sixty or seventy bees. Yes, Sly Stallone continues his never ending battle to regain his cinematic relevance by exploiting the success of his earlier franchise, even though he now seems to be wider than he is tall, and looks like someone went upside his head with a two by four. The film compensates for Sly's onrushing senescence by keeping him immobile for most of the run time. He spends the first hour or so glumly piloting a skiff down a river in Burma. In the climactic battle scene, Rambo (who, for the first time in the history of the franchise, keeps his shirt on the whole time) simply stands in the back of a flatbed truck, turning Burmese soldiers into hamburger with a machine gun without breaking a sweat. No hanging from helicopter skids or dangling from trees for this action hero for the AARP set.

To make up for the grindly mopey hero's lack of dynamism, Stallone (who co-wrote and directed!) throws the gore knob to eleven. The evil Burmese troops don't just get shot, they explode like meat pinatas, spraying chunks of appendage and ropes of intestines with each inexplicably gigantic bullet hit. I'll admit that one of my big weaknesses when it comes to action films is outrageously over-the-top bullet hits. Give me a Barret fifty caliber sniper rifle evaporating heads, legs getting chopped off with bullets, and mortar rounds sending cartwheeling spleens into the air, and I'm in grindhouse nirvana. Rambo served up all of the above with gusto. However, this dedication to delivering blood-and-guts makes the film ethically problematic. In addition to making himself viable at the box office again, Stallone's other clear agenda with this movie is to bring attention to the outrages of the Burmese military junta and their campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Karen minority. It's an important topic, but when you stage the massacre of a village full of Karen peasants with the unrestrained hyperviolence of Planet Terror, it ends up trivializing the plight of real people. This is sort of the same problem that Spielberg had with the Krakow ghetto liquidation scene in Schindler's List, but much worse. There's a giddy bloodlust in the sequence that is especially unsettling, especially considering that the military oppression of the Karen people in Burma is something that is happening right now. Who would ever have guessed that noted human rights theorist and auteur Sly Stallone fails at addressing a real humanitarian issue with sensitivity or insight. Still: when Rambo shoots a dude with a heavy maching gun at point blank range and he turns into a geyser of red goo? Awesome!

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones was originally conceived by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as a throwback to the pulp heroes of the 1950s that boomers grew up watching in serials and on early television. Funnily enough, Raiders of the Lost Ark became such a cultural touchstone of the 1980s that Harrison Ford's bullwhip and fedora are more likely nowadays to put people in mind of Cabbage Patch Kids and crispy bangs, rather than hula hoops and duck's asses. It's fitting, then, that the new Indiana Jones film Kingdom of the Crystal Skull create a theme park version of fifties America that feels like its been lifted from another 80s staple: Back to the Future.

Familiarity is the name of the game in the new Indy movie, and that's by design. Lucas and company are betting on a rich iconography and 27 years of audience good will to sell this thing to the public. It just wouldn't do not to trot out the series' greatest hits. This approach pays off in some moments: the first time Indy cracks his whip or throws one of those patented wild haymakers of his, it delivers old school Indiana Jones thrills. More often, though, it fails miserably. The dreariest attempt at bringing back the spirit of the original films is Karen Allen's return as Marion Ravenwood, Indy's on-again, off-again girlfriend from Raiders. Allen does what she can with the meager role she's stuck with, but the sparkling interplay and lively chemistry that marked Marion's relationship with Indy in Raiders is here rendered shrill, flat and overdetermined by the script. In George Lucas terms, the dynamic in the two films is the difference between the Princess Leia/Han Solo relationship in the original Star Wars trilogy, and the Queen Amidala/Anakin Skywalker relationship in the new one. The lameness of the two characters scenes together can partially be explained by their awkward brevity. Indy's reunion with Marion is one underdeveloped element in a plot stuffed beyond the breaking point with new characters. You've got a Russian dominatrix (Cate Blanchett), a British treasure hunter (Ray Winstone), a mad professor (John Hurt), and a central casting, Wild Ones rebel (Shia Labeouf). It's a classic case of too much not being nearly enough. None of these new characters (including a classic Indy gal pal) get enough screen time to register as more than fonts of expository dialogue.

Of course, none of the character shenanigans carry much weight if Kingdom delivers the bravura action setpieces for which the series is known. Here again, familiarity breeds contempt. Some of the action scenes have bits of the old crispness, ingenious complexity and deft blend of suspense and humor. Even in the most cracking scenes, though, the ghost of ass-kickings past haunt the proceedings. In particular, a truck chase through the Amazon rain forest between Indy and his pals and a half track full of Soviet troops is genuinely rousing, but it recalls the tanks and horses chase from Last Crusade so strongly that it just ends up making you wish you were watching that movie instead (that was a good one, it had Sean Connery!)

One theme that has been featured in all the Indiana Jones films is a sense of awe at the mysteries of the world. Kids growing up in 80s, an era of closed frontiers, were given a glimpse of inconcievable wonders waiting to be discovered in ancient temples and even government warehouses. This spirit of adventure is tempered by a stern warning that there are mysteries and powers too vast and terrible for human understanding. Attempts to master them will always come to face-melting grief. In this respect, Kingdom fits comfortably in the Indy pantheon. The film is bracketed by two similar and similarly jaw-dropping shots of Indiana Jones, miniscule in the foreground, beholding a tremendous cataclysm. The first shot is of an A-bomb test in Nevada. The second, which takes place in the Peruvian jungle, is...something else entirely. These great and terrible displays of power, coupled with Harrion Ford's increasingly weathered, rickety countenance and a plot that sees Indy coerced into service by both sides of the Cold War, suggest a poignant subtext to the movie. They point towards a hero whose time has passed, who is vulnerable in ways he's never been before, tossed about by new, inscrutable forces beyond his ability to control or understand. With a bit of development, it might have made for a commentary on post-war American life, reminiscent of another 50s genre beloved of boomers: film noir. Unfortunately, Spielberg and Lucas take no time to flesh these ideas out in their headlong gallup from chase scene to musty, repurposed chase scene.

Score: 6.0

MYOFNF #19: The Spirit of the Beehive (dir. Victor Erice, 1973)

This is the kind of movie people that love call "hypnotic," and people that hate call "boring." While there are certainly some striking visuals in this film (especially the final shot), for the most part, put me in the "boring" camp. I know: a philistine like me should just stick with Michael Bay if I can't appreciate artistic, plotless meandering with an allegorical subtext. I'm sorry! I like a story in my narrative film! Sue me! All of that said, there is something special in this film. Unlike most films that operate from a kid's point of view, Beehive doesn't sentimentalize childhood or treat it as a parade of traumatic experiences. Instead, the viewer is treated to a singularly haunting and realistic portrayal of the way that children assimilate the concept of death into their imaginations.

MYOFNF #18: The Rules of the Game (dir. Jean Renoir, 1939)

Ah, the comedy of manners! A genre I usually have absolutely no use for. Whenever I see be-spatted gentry making eyes at a fair maiden from across the dining room table while the help looks on with bemusement, I reach for my revolver. But this film is notable for the frankness of its sexual politics and its kinetic visual style, both of which seem far ahead of their time.

2007 DVD Review: I'm Not There

Biopics are inherently lame. Not only are their plots hidebound by the known facts of the life of the subject, the time frame of the subject's life insures that the film will be choppy and episodic, with no real momentum built between scenes. Then, there's the crippling inability of the biopic format to answer the question that such films are always asking by their very existence: who is (famous person's name here). This inherent lameness is especially pronounced in biopics about musicians. Visually demonstrating the source of a great musical artist's inspiration, of illustrating the artist's creative process, of showing how the artist's music interacted with the culture around it...the biopic, with its pre-set plot arcs and elliptical structure is singularly incapable of tackling any of these herculean tasks.

So, mad props indeed to filmmaker Todd Haynes, who takes a chainsaw to the very concept of the musical biopic in I'm Not There. His response to the question: "Who is Bob Dylan," would probably be "how can I answer that question if you've got the nerve to ask me?" Haynes' film elides all questions about the quintessence of Bob Dylan the man, or any commitment to a traditional biographical portrait. Instead, Haynes takes as his subject the many artistic persona that Dylan has projected to the world over the years. Hayne's doesn't wan to gain insight into Dylan's psyche or give the viewer a crash course in Dylan's life and influences. Instead, what Haynes is after is something much more unique and interesting: he's using the artistic medium of film in order to represent, in sound and moving image, what it means to experience another artistic medium. The different periods in Dylan's musical career are embodied by different actors, with musical interludes, hallucinations and phantasmagoria that attempt to put the viewer inside a Dylan song, and inside the moment of time when the song was released. A couple of setpieces stand out as particularly sharp: Cate Blanchett's Don't Look Back Dylan emptying an Uzi into the earnest folkies at the Newport Festival, and a white-faced Jim James belting out a mournful rendition of "Going to Acapulco" in a band shell before a crowd of bedraggled Western refugees. The latter scene in particular is a vivid immersion in the apocalyptic paranoia, melancholy, and olde timey theatricality of Dylan's Pat Garret and Billy the Kid era. There might be an inscrutable, grand message here, but the best part of the movie is that there doesn't have to be one for it to be a singular achievement. It's enough to make you forget that Richard Gere is in it.

The film is not always successful: some of the performances verge on parody (and not in a good way...I'm looking at you, Christian Bale) and not every evocation is equally gripping, but the undertaking as a whole is breathtakingly visionary. I'm Not There points the way to a new cinematic approach towards presenting the lives and works of artists, which is a singularly welcome development.

MYOFNF #17: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920)

This is the first, and probably only, silent film of MYOFNF. It's a foundational work of German Expressionism, a profoundly influential filmic style that I don't know nearly enough about. The most striking aspect of this film is the set design, which avoids realistic, or even theatrical renderings of the character's environment. Instead, the interiors and exteriors of buildings are canted at mad angles, chairs and table are vertiginously high, mountain passes appear to be melting. In short, it's the scale and proportion of a dream (or nightmare). Even in a silent film, which suffers from the constraints of the technology available, this approach provokes unease and deepens the horror of a plot that deals with psychic repression and madness.

Iron Man

Robert Downey Jr. is a great actor. It's important to begin any discussion of John Favreau's Iron Man with this fact because the smashing success of the film rests almost entirely on his shoulders. Downey's greatness is tied to the sense of reality that he brings to all of his roles; he may specialize in playing cads, but the cads he plays are invariably smart, engaging, fun to watch, most importantly, they have a whiff of melancholy about them that gives their witticisms and debauched hijinx poignancy. Downey's charisma, humor and pathos have given us Tony Stark, the billionaire playboy inventor/industrialist who becomes Iron Man, and who is something almost entirely unheard of in superhero films: a great character. Other recent screen incarnations of comic book heroes are memorable for their iconic costumes, their superpowers, and if they're lucky, maybe one defining character trait (think Peter Parker's teen angst or Bruce Wayne's brooding obsession). Tony Stark is right in Downey's wheelhouse of smart-ass hedonists, but as the plot unfolds, Downey unveils layers of emotion and conflict that make Iron Man the rare comic book film where the quiet moments are as enthralling as the action setpieces, if not moreso.

Since Iron Man is the first installment of a likely franchise for Marvel's new film production arm, the film is mostly focused on detailing the origin of the Iron Man character. As in the original comic book, genius engineer and arms merchant Tony Stark is captured by a warlord and forced to make a superweapon. Instead, he constructs a metal exoskeleton in order to escape captivity. Once free, he refines the design into the sleek, rocket-boostered suit we know and love. This tale is updated by moving the warlord from Vietnam to Afghanistan, a twist that suggests a layer of political allegory that the film unfortunately never develops. In fact, the actual meat of Iron Man is fairly undercooked, with a few big fight scenes doled out sparingly between muddled plot points, with villains who fail to register. The best that can be said about the action is that it aspires to coherence, unlike the aggressively edited abstract work of Tony Scott or Michael Bay. That Iron Man easily ranks in the top tier of superhero films is a testament to the work of Downey, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark's fiesty assistant/love interest Pepper Potts, Terrance Howard as his military running buddy, and Jeff Bridges as his glowering mentor, not to mention a script that treats character interaction as more than just a set up for the next explosion.

Score 8.0

MYOFNF #16: Hiroshima, Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)

It's fitting that the first shot of this film is of the entwined bare flesh of two lovers. First of the Holy Trinity of the French New Wave (along with Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless), Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour signaled a shift of emphasis in the film world towards earthy sensuality and personal intimacy. Resnais' film helped usher in an era of naturalistic characters, expressive camera movements, and a "subjective" editing style that reflects the preceptions and memories of the characters. Instead of the traditional role of "building a scene" through editing, the film uses editing to break up continuity, to take the viewer into the mind of the protagonist by cutting abruptly between scenes, jumping back and forth through time, from stock footage to historical reenactments to images from the character's distant past. These sort of tricks are old hat by now, but it's striking to see them used in a film from the fifties, and it serves to highlight the role of the second world war in creating the artistic and psychic headspace of the past sixty years.

2007 DVD Review: The Savages

Tamara Jenkins' film deals point blank with a question that is going to become more and more pressing as the Baby Boom generation makes its relentless march towards senescence: what do adult children do when their parents are no longer able to take care of themselves? Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play a couple of theater people in arrested development trying to deal with the very grown-up task of dealing with their demented, aged father, a man who abandoned them and who they feel little affection towards. Jenkins depicts the grim, desperate situation with a deadpan realism, sort of Alexander Payne minus the whimsy. Hoffman's character is a drama professor writing a book on Bertoldt Brecht, and Brechtian alienation is at the center of both Jenkins' directorial style and Hoffman's method of coping with life. Hoffman's character is a disengaged intellectual, distanced from his own pain and very life, and the experience of dealing with his more emotionally-open, but still stunted, sister, brings up long suppressed feelings, giving the lie to his self-consciously alienated outlook. The film has a similar effect on the viewer: by creating such vivid dipictions of universal family agonies, the audience is forced to reckon with long dormant feelings and memories.

Score: 8.0

MYOFNF #15: Repulsion (dir. Roman Polanski, 1965)

This is the first MYOFNF entry that's in English, but the director is Polish, the lead actress is French, and it takes place in London, so it definitely counts as foreign. It's the story of a fragile young woman living with her sister, slowly going mad over the course of a solitary week. Polanski immerses the viewer in the mindset of his heroine, and the disorienting deluge of hallucinations and crack-ups that the difference between reality, dream and delusion melts away. Interestingly, the creeping sense of madness makes the film less traditionally scarry than it might otherwise be. The first time Catherine Denuve sees a man standing in the corner of her room, it makes your hair stand on end. As you realize that pretty much everything you're seeing exists only in her head, the sense of fear goes away. What doesn't go away is the anxiety provoked by such close and prolonged proximity to madness, culminating in a chilling final image that stays with the viewer long after the screen goes black.

2007 DVD Review: Lars and the Real Girl

I've seen my fair share of Indie Quirkfests, but this is my first encounter with an Indie Serious Dissociative Disorderfest. For a good portion of this movie, I was thinking "gimmeafuckinbreak," what with the whimsical notion of a whole town full of people cheerfully humoring a clinically insane loner played by Ryan Gosling by pretending his life-sized sex doll is a real person. But as the conceit grew comically over the top (the townspeople elect the sex doll to the school board! they drive her to the hospital in an ambulance when Gosling says she's 'sick!'), it dawned on my that, while the Nerf-coated magical community of the film is ludicrious, it's supposed to be ludicrious. By making the town comically accomodating, the filmmakers are tipping their hand that the film is a parable about the pain, fear, joy and transcendence inherent in a lone person reaching out to the world to make a connection. Sure, no real town would give an obvious nutjob that kind of latitude, and there sure as hell wouldn't be an understanding young woman just waiting for said nutjob to dump his plastic girfriend and take her out to dance, but these moments are still poignant. Lars' delusions, the understanding of the townsfolk, these things are oversized representations of relatable phenomena. Who hasn't felt a kernal of Lar's discomfort and fear in trying to forge relationships? And who hasn't been encouraged in their journey towards those relationships by the disarming kindness of our friends, family, and occasional stranger?

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Jason Segel occupies a specific niche in the Judd Apatow comedy universe. Paul Rudd is all loopy, ironic charm. Seth Rogen is the group's stoner Fallstaff. Segel specializes in playing lovelorn obsessives, the kind of characters who immerse themselves in relationships with an unnerving fervency. As Nick Andopolis in the brilliant, Apatow-produced series Freaks and Geeks, he belted out a painfully earnest rendition of Styx's Lady for a mortified would-be girlfriend. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which he also wrote, his character is the sort of fellow who spends years writing a rock opera based on Dracula featuring handpuppets and not realize for moment that its a comedy.


Forgetting Sarah Marshall is about Segel dealing with a break up with his long time girlfriend, a television star played by Kristen Bell. Attempting to get over his persistent heartsick, he takes a trip to Hawaii, only to discover tha his ex and her new British rocker boyfriend are staying at the same resort. Pitching in to help Segel in his healing process are a stable of colorful resort staff members including the always-funny Apatow regulars Paul Rudd and Jonah Hill, and potential love interest Mila Kunis.


Present in this film are many of the traits that define Apatow-gang products like Knocked Up: ecstatically raunchy sex jokes, a cast jam-packed with comedy ringers, emotional beats that ring true, a schmendrick man-child slowly groping towards maturity, and female characters that are inexplicably attracted to said schmendrick man children. What separates Forgetting Sarah Marshall from other films in the Apatow stable is a sense of narrative economy. Sure, there's time taken for some of the patented Apatow aimless but hilarious horsing around, including a delightfully dirty subplot featuring 30 Rock stand-out Jack McBrayer as a sexually inept honeymooner. Yet Segel's intensity of emotion gives the film surprising focus.


Segel uses this film as a showcase not only for his hangdog persona, but also for a lifetime of romantic angst. As in previous performances, Segel walks a fine line between endearing sensitivity and creepy mania. He bares all in this film, including his genitals in an opening scene that is both painful and painfully funny. It's hard not to see the movie as a sort of personal catharsis, especially towards the end, when Segel's interactions with Bell seem to be more venegeful wish fullfilment than organic developments between the characters. This isn't necessarily a problem; it actually makes the film more interesting. Rare is the opportunity in an era when "comedy" and "ironic detachment" are often synonymous to see a performer this willing to put their heart, and their junk, up on the screen for all to see in the name of a getting a laugh.

MYOFNF #14: Army of Shadows (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)

Melville made his name directing Frenchified versions of American film noir and his masterpiece, Army of Shadows, uses many of the same motifs and themes in dealing with the French Resistance during World War Two. The melding works well because, on a quotidian level, being a member of the resistance was pretty much identical to operating in the criminal underworld, and the same questions of loyalty and fear are paramount. The film concentrates entirely on the mental landscapes of its protagnoists, eschewing any conventional action or much in the way of traditional suspense. This restrained approach not only makes the characters vivid, but also makes a simple voiceover or title intersistial emotionally wrenching.

Movie Mix-Tape: Moments of Dread

The Neverending Story: "We don't even care...whether or not we care..."


28 Days Later: A rage-infected chimp banging its head against the side of its cage. Harder. And Harder.


Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: "Mr. President, we cannot allow a mine shaft gap!"


Audition: A man in a burlap sack, rolling across the floor.


Songs from the Second Floor: The assembled luminaries of a small town stand at the edge of a cliff, waiting patiently for a young girl in her Sunday best to walk over the edge as a sacrifice.


The Seventh Seal: A procession of chained, damned souls slouching across the crest of a distant hill.


Ghost World: A slack-jawed, portly young man in a Starter jacket stands in a video store, staring up at a television screen, slurping away at an inhumanly large cup of soda.


Videodrome: "Death to Videodrome, long live the new flesh."


Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Kevin McCarthy standing in the middle of a busy street, screaming his warning to the sky, while cars pass on obliviously.


Rosemary's Baby: The jolliest bunch of middle-aged Satan worshipers you've ever seen celebrating at a baby shower for their new messiah.

Street Kings

David Ayer is running the best scam in Hollywood. Over the past decade, he has been paid to make the same movie three times. He wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Training Day, and Dark Blue, and directs the new film Street Kings. In all of these films, a crooked but conscience-ridden decent LA cop confronts an evil superior officer who embodies the corruption of the entire department. Ayer collaborates with neo-noir madman James Ellroy in both Dark Blue and Street Kings. Both films contain many of Ellroy's trademark obsessions, but little of his memorably pungent dialogue.

There's not much at all memorable about Street Kings, which feels like a warmed-over remix of not only all of Ayer's previous films, but pretty much every cop movie made in the past 30 years. There's even a speech ripped off from A Few Good Men in there somewhere.

Keanu Reeves is his usual blockedheaded self in the role of a violent, haunted LAPD detective and member of an elite Vice unit headed by Forest Whitaker, whose ferocious scenery chewing and fantastically cheesy cop moustache make for rare bright spots. When his former partner is killed in a botched liquor store robbery, Reeves' takes to the streets to find the killers. Along the way, he employs the two-fisted, smack-first-ask-questions-later investigatory techniques common to the genre on his way to uncovering secrets that will upend his world, and which the audience has figured out before the end of the first reel.

Steet Kings is crushingly generic in almost every detail. The only points of interest are Whitaker's aforemetioned facial hair (Jay Mohr, playing another member of the Vice unit, sports an impressive porn-stache himself), an the bone-deep cyncism displayed by the filmmakers towards the LAPD at all levels. Every cop in the film is motivated by some combination of mindless aggression, greed and desire for status. The characters snarl at, shoot at and extort each other in pursuit of personal ends, culminating in a final sequence that indicts the entire civic and political structure of the city of Los Angeles. This approach would be much more provocative and interesting if it didn't come swaddled in 90 minutes of retreaded cop movie tropes. If Ayer had slowed down the relentless, vacuous plot machinations in order to soak up some of the atmosphere and culture of the city and its police force, his points might resonate as more than white noise. As it stands, the question that Street Kings poses most acutely is: why watch this thing when the stellar police procedural shows The Wire and The Shield are readily available on DVD?

Straight to DVD Disaster: Day of the Dead

Holy shit. I knew this thing was going to be bad, but I had no idea just how bad.

Day of the Dead, an in-name-only remake of George Romero's original, had been put into production after the successs of Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. It was completed a few years ago, and has been sitting on a shelf since then, until its uncerimonous dumping onto DVD rental shelves this month. I'm surprised they didn't just set fire to the celluloid for the insurance money.

Sporting CGI effects last seen in the first Resident Evil game for Playstation and a script seemingly hammered out by precocious chimps, Day of the Dead is jawdroppingly awful, and not even in an entertaining way. Just sad. No matter what the title says, this isnt't a remake of Day of the Dead, but a remake of Planet Terror done by special ed middle schoolers.

My favorite bit of supergenius thinking on the part of the "filmmakers" was this nugget: since fast moving zombies were awesome in the Dawn of the Dead remake, then SUPERFAST MOVING zombies should be SUPER awesome! For the record, it is decidedly not super awesome. In order to make the zombies appear to move superfast, they speed up the film Benny Hill-style, which doesn't really add to the scare factor so much as cry out for the addition of Yakety Sax to the soundtrack. Someone must have put that together on youtube by now.

2007 Movie Mix Tape Part One:

Grindhouse: zombies exploding against the front fender of a souped up auto wrecker.



There Will Be Blood: Danie Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) gnawing on a hunk of cold steak, staring at Eli Sunday and plotting his vengeance.



Zodiac: the point of view of a moving vehicle, rows of flag-draped suburban homes, 4th of July fireworks crackling in the sky.



Superbad: a cavaclade of cartoon dicks.



Southland Tales: I've got soul, but I'm not a solider...



The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: a locomotive slowing to a halt in front of a barricade manned by Jesse James (Brad Pitt), wreaths of smoke wafting up his legs.



Before the Devil Knows You're Dead: Charles Hanson (Albert Finney) staggering out of his son's hospital room and into a white light that slowly envelopes him.


Hot Fuzz: A minature church steeple meets a human jawbone in...slow..motion!


The Darjeeling Limited: "Champs Elysee," a rolling train, and the green Indian countryside.


No Country For Old Men: A blank morning sky, an empty, stoney field, and tucked into the corner of the screen, a single row of impotent barbed wire.

2007 DVD Review: The Hunting Party

This film is based on an Esquire piece by journalist Scott Anderson called What I Did on my Summer Vacation. It's the true story of a bunch of western journalists who, while hanging out in post-war Sarajevo decided on a lark to try and capture fugutive war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and came surprisingly close to succeeding. There's even a little epilogue at the end of the movie pointing out what sections of the film are based in fact. Those are also the sections of the film that don't suck like a Hoover.

The Hunting Party is an indictment of the entire studio filmmaking process. The source material practically screams out for a film adaptation. But it doesn't have the sort of "arc" and the characters don't fit the models that conventional screenwriting demands. Instead of a bunch of friends getting in over their heads, writer/director Richard Shepard creates protagonists that are recognizable to anyone who has watched more than ten movies in their lives. Richard Gere plays a former TV war correspondent fallen on hard times who reunites with Terrance Howard, his former cameraman who has gone on to better things, but still yearns for the excitement of his war zone days with Gere. They are joined on their quest to capture a fictionalized Karadzic by a green kid fresh from journalism school played by Jesse Eisenberg. Instead of going after Karadzic for the valid reasons of splitting a five million dollar reward and helping bring a war criminal to justice, Shepard invents a ridiculous backstory in order to up the dramatic stakes. You see, during the war Gere fell in love with a Bosnian muslim woman who was murdered by the Karadzic character's militia, WHILE SHE WAS PREGNANT WITH GERE'S CHILD! Seriously, the bad guy is a fucking Bosnian Serb war criminal: you know, rape camps, mortar attacks on village markets, Srebrenica? Are those not enough bad acts to make a film villian hatable? It's the Titanic priniciple in action: no matter how many extras get killed by a given war/natural disaster, the audience is only going to care if one of the victims is in love with the main character. All of these elements, the friend dynamic between the two lead characters, the tortured backstory, the ginned-up action sequences, they are all there because Hollywood dogma has determined that you can't have a movie without them. But since pretty much every movie that comes down the pike has these elements, they end up feeling generic and make it harder to appreciate the parts of the film that actually happened. It doesn't take long for the cliches to pile so high that any sense of reality is buried underneath them.

Score: 5.0

MYOFNF #13: The Conformist (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

You know that scene in a lot of art-house type movies where a man meets a woman for the first time, they say maybe three words to each other, and then they're instantly making out? I don't get that.

Anyway, this is a film about a young Fascist in 30s Italy who wants to prove his bona fides to the government by killing his radical college mentor. There's some striking shot composition and a challenging flashback structure, but it left me mostly cold, although I think that may have been the point. The main character is essentially forcing himself to destroy his emotional life as a sacrafice to the state. The problem is that the motivation of his mania for conformity is never really made clear. Then again, I'm the type of dunce who doesn't get it when people who just met start fucking immediately in a non-porn context, so don't go by me.

MYOFNF #12: I am Cuba (dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)

Ya'll know I'm a big fan of long tracking shots, and this Soviet-Cuban co-production from the early days of the Castro regime is made up almost entirely of long tracking shots, and hypnotically powerful ones at that. What's interesting about this film is that it is a piece of pro-Castro propaganda, but at the same time the vignettes meant to illustrate the injustice of the Batista years are genuinely emotionally involving. Even though Kalatozov's vision is political, he focuses intently on his human subjects. I'm amazed that a movie made by the bloody Soviet Union ten years after the death of Stalin can grasp of how to make a film with a political agenda while still creating moments between people that feel genuine. Yet, every chuckleheaded Hollywood knob who has tackled the Iraq war has ended up creating a bloodless, didactic mess. Hopefully Kimberly Pierce's Stop-Loss will break that trend.

2007 DVD Review: Southland Tales

This movie pissed me off. Yeah, I understand that the proper reaction to Richard Kelly's colossal fiasco is supposed to be either bemused admiration for the director's mad vision or unabashed admiration for a misunderstood classic. Fuck that. Richard Kelly doesn't get a free pass to waste millions of dollars and thousands of feet of film just because he's got such a goddamn baroque vision that he can't be bothered to make something coherent or vital. Given the resources and concept at hand, Kelly could have easily made a compelling, provocative film that pointedly confronts the pathologies of American war culture. Instead, we get two and a half hours of muddled turgidity because if it made any sense, it wouldn't be deep, man. Hell, I could even forgive the incoherence if the whole thing weren't so damned leaden. Kelly claims that you've got to watch this thing a bunch of times (and presumably read the massive graphic novel prequel) in order to "get" it, but who would want to slog through most of this stuff again? For a movie that attempts to immerse the viewer in a slightly tweaked reality where nuclear attacks on American soil have turned the country into a sex-crazed, decaying police state, the proceedings are notably joyless. The pacing is slack and disjointed, the actors all seem to be whacked out on thorazine, and even the action scenes limp along like sick dogs. It's a wonder that these zombies can even find the strength to lift a gun, let alone fire one.

This problem is due to the fact that there are two movies here having a subtextual battle royale for the soul of Kelly and the viewer. One movie is a knowingly ridiculous sci-fi parody/satire, sort of a politically-charged Buckeroo Bonzai (when the Rock starts talking about sending monkeys through a tear in the fourth dimension, I was on the lookout for John Lithgow to pop up, yelling about the Overthruster). The other movie is a mopey, abstract metaphysical rumination in the vein of Kelly's first film, Donnie Darko. The two visions clash like Shiites and Sunnis. The intentionally goofy science fiction twists make it impossible to take the existential mutterings seriously, and the lethargic pace and solemn tone drain all of the fun out of the zany fourth dimensional monkey shenangians. Either film could have worked, and that is why watching Southland Tales pissed me off so much: there's a whole lot of potential squandered here. Kelly is attuned to America's cultural sickness like few directors are, and there are frustratingly brief glimpses of the masterpiece that could have been that pop up once a reel or so. Most notably, there's the oft-referenced musical number where Justin Timberlake, as a disfigured Iraq war vet, lip synchs to a Killers song while surrounded by dancing pin-up girls. Most reviews point the scene, either condeming it for being a pointless non sequitur, or praising it for being so unexpected and memorable. It is, indeed, a memorable non sequirtur, but it's also one of the most poignant dramatizations of the mind-space of a damaged Iraq war veteran I've seen since that imperial horrorshow began. Timberlake moves confidently across an arcade, in a sea of shimmying sex kittens, his posture full of bravado and laciviousness, undercut by the blood on his shirt, the lyrics to All These Things That I've Done blaring on the soundtrack, and the haunted look behind his eyes. This moment captures the aggressive drive to assert masculinity that propels young men to prove themselves on the fields of battle, as well as the regret and self-loathing that comes after seeing what really happens there. Kelly seems to think that if he can hit a sweet note every half hour or so, he'll keep the audience from walking out and they'll leave the theater at the very least giving him props for his vision. We can't hold the hamfisted voiceover, the failed thefts from David Lynch, or the deadend plot lines against him: that's the price you pay for basking in the challenging genuis of Richard Kelly. Well, I do hold all the dumb stuff in the movie against him. In fact, I hold the transcendently great moments against him, too: with more disicipline and focus, Kelly could have put together a powerful zeitgeist-channelling classic. Instead, Kelly just threw everything he had against the celluloid and filmed what stuck.

MYOFNF #11: The Wages of Fear (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

Watching this intense existential suspense film about vagbond ex-patriates in a South American backwater driving highly unstable nitroglycerine through dangerous mountain passes, one thing that jumps out is the brilliant use of sound. While most films made during this period (and most made nowadays, actually) tend to punch up moments of tension with a bombastic or manipulative score, The Wages of Fear creates unbearable tension with no external soundtrack whatsoever. It's amazing that so few filmmakers have figured out what Henri-George Clouzot knew in the early fifties: silence, or the rhythmic beats of nature, heightens tension far more than an artificial musical accompanyment. This film is chock full of rivetting sequences and its definitely one of the most purely entertaining film I've watched for this project, but its also filled with clear-eyed commentary on capitalism, masculinity, and death.

Doomsday

According to the bible, "ye know neither the day nor the hour" when the end shall come. Civilization could perish in the rising sea levels of global warming, the explosion of a supervolcano under Yellowstone park, a bird flu pandemic, and, maybe, just maybe, a zombie uprising. One thing is for certain: if Hollywood is to be believed, whoever survives the apocalypse will be wearing a mohawk an assless chaps. Neil Marshall's Doomsday takes its visual cues from a bevy of earlier, better films about the end of the world. The mascara-wearing biker punks seem to have stepped directly off of the set of a Mad Max sequel, maybe after a stop off with the folks from Escape from New York.

The recycling don't stop with the costumes and set direction. The plot, characters and action set pieces are all lifted wholesale from previous entries in the End Times cinema pantheon. For ease of use, the all cliches have been highlighted. In the near future, Scotland has been quarantined for a generation to prevent the spread of a deadly, highly contagious virus. When the same virus breaks out in London, a hotshot loner cop who plays by her own rules (Rohna Mitra) is ordered by corrupt and untrustworthy government officials to lead a ragtag crew of military misfits into Scotland in search of a cure. Once there, she is captured and tortured by a gang of Sex Pistols concertgoers, and is eventually forced to fight to the death before a crowd of cheering spectators.

Beyond the distractingly derivative formula, there's some annoyingly good stuff in Doomsday: annoying because it makes it impossible to write the movie off completely. Marshall, who directed The Descent, one of the best horror films of the past twenty years, knows how to put together an action sequence that is faced paced while still being coherent. (Michael Bay, take notes) There are moments of deadpan humor and cheekily irreverent gore that stay with you. One scene in particular; a combination barbeque pit/mosh pit celebration put on by the aforementioned Sex Pistols concertgoers, reaches delirious heights of tastlessness and hysteria. The themes of plague, urban overcrowding and government indifference are all off-the-moment, but the movie doesn't stay in one place for long enough for any of these things to really sink in. Instead, the film skips from one uninspired scene to another before ending with an arbritary car chase climax straight out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Doomsday shows a few flashes of the visual deftness that made The Descent an instant classic, but most of the running time wishing Lord Humungus or Master Blaster would show up and kill everybody.

Funny Games

The question that arises while watching Michael Haneke's thriller Funny Games is: why? Not, 'why make a movie about sadistic young home invaders tormenting an upper class family that indicts the audience for watching it and seeks to make the proceedings as repellent as possible?' That's the question that arises while watching Haneke's original German-language version of Funny Games from 1997. This time, the question is: 'why make your English-language film debut with a shot-for-shot remake of your most controversial film?' By way of an answer, I offer two words: George Sluizer.

In 1988, George Sluizer directed a thriller in his native Netherlands called Spoorloos. It's a chilling tale of sociopathology and free will that features one of the most haunting finales in genre film history. It made such an impression on the film community that Hollywood producers threw a bunch of money at Sluizer to make an American remake, 1994's The Vanishing. This film, unlike the original, has an ending that is haunting only for its insulting stupidity. Everything that made the original a memorable experience was obliterated in the name of delivering a "happy" conclusion that would leave audiences mollified. Haneke's remake is a ringing declaration to American film producers and film goers: he ain't going out like that.

Beneath the conventional thriller trappings, Funny Games is about the nature of film representations of violence and the ceaseless demand for it in movies. It was a relevant theme for European audiences in the mid-90s, and its even more pertinent for American film viewers who have made the Saw franchise a cultural phenomenon. Haneke makes his point in the most direct way possible: the vile tormentors turn at several points to face the camera and address the audience, making the viewer an accomplice in the on-screen horrors. The technique is preachy and self-righteous, but it's hard to criticize Haneke too much because of the rigor of his approach and the indelible power of his restrained, elegant shot compositions. Most filmmakers seeking to criticize film violence end up wallowing in hypocrisy by filling the screen with the same bloody images the director decries. Haneke mostly keeps the violence and nudity, you know, the "good stuff," that we as an audience have paid to see, off screen. What he leaves in front of the camera is all of the personal pain, terror and anguish that inevitably accompanies violence in real life, but which is usually left out of film depictions of it. These scenes are hard to watch, but Haneke's refusal to cut away from such moments of distress make them hypnotizing, and shamefully compelling. The viewer finds, to their great unease, that even the nasty aftermath of bloodshed holds its own dark allure. Haneke's strength as a filmmaker is not so much his worldview as his Kubrickian mastery of spaces and framing, which make even his most heavyhanded intellectual experiments, of which Funny Games is surely one, sickly fascinating. Haneke might be a prude, or he might be a visionary, but one way or another his films pack a wallop, and he's here to stay.

2007 DVD Review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has all the hallmarks of a 70s-style revisionist western: a langorous pace, moral ambiguity, an emphasis on anti-heroes, and hyper-awareness of the natural world. Also, like most revisionist westerns, it takes as its subject the death of the frontier, but does so in an ingenious fashion. While movies like Heaven's Gate trace the decline of American freedom to the capitalist commodification of western spaces, director Andrew Dominik, working from Ron Hansen's novel, focus on the culture of the West: according to these filmmakers, the West began to die when it started to become self-aware. This point is illustrated by the two main characters. Jesse James (Brad Pitt), the aging folk hero trapped by the expectations of his own legandary exploits, and Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), James' proto-stalker who is obsessed with James while also yearning to take his place. In both cases, the mythology of the western outlaw has overpowered either character's ability to really claim the freedom offered by the expanses of the frontier.

Even though Affleck was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor, the movie truly belongs to him. Pitt is excellent as James; he coaxes layers of melancholy, playfulness and savagery out of the part, but when the screen goes black it's Robert Ford who resonates. His pathological need for validation and acknowledgment is a harbinger of our modern sickness of celebrity worship. Afflec fawns and stammers over James whenever they interact, but he also loathes James for occupying the exhalted position he himself craves more than air. It's a powerful performance, and it actually contributes to one of the film's chief weaknesses. The film spends two hours dramatizing the push-pull of adoration and revulsion between the two men before the titular murder occurs. That leaves little more than half an hour to rush through the rest of Robert Ford's life. The coda feels hurried, with intriguing notions of growth, regret and the birth of celebrity culture gestured towards, but mostly left unexplored. It also undercuts the power of an otherwise intensely poignant final scene. Nevertheless, the raw humanity of the performances coupled with a vibrantly lyrical visual pallette makes The Assassination of Jesse James one of the most well crafted and memorable studio films of the last few years.

Score: 8.5

MYOFNF #10: El Topo (dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)

This film isn't so much a part of the world cinema canon of greatness, but it is one of the very first "cult" movies, and it's in Spanish, and it's crazy as hell, so I thougt I'd check it out. I'm glad I did. It's the story of a wandering gunslinger in a mystical Old West whose search for meaning leads him to gunfights with shamen and cohabitation with underground mutants.The phrase "they don't make up like they used to" seems intensely appropriate. Every frame pulses with the revolutionary thrust of the late-sixties counterculture. The only person making movies this defiantly abstract is David Lynch, but El Topo has a nakedly earnest philosophical agenda that Lynch, with his willful obscurism, would never display. I don't think anyone could make a film like El Topo today without being mocked into oblivion. Writer-director-star Alejandro Jodorowsky takes notions of spiritual corruption and rebirth, social injustice and redemption, far too seriously for the current climate of ironic detachtment and gentle ennui. Movies nowadays start from the premise that grand cosmic enlightenment is beyond our understanding, and all an artist can do is record the sad foibles of us terminally blinkered humaniods. The only exception that comes to mind is Darron Aronosfsky, whose Jadorowsky-reminiscent 2006 film The Fountain was, in fact, mocked into oblivion. I haven't seen that one yet, or Jadorowsky's follow up to El Topo, The Holy Mountain, but the startingly visual power, potent allegory and, most of all, the sheer uninhibited audacity of the thing has made me eager to check them out. There's something exhilerating about watching a director open his heart and let out a primal scream of existential yearning, with no regard at all for the snickering of the hipsters at the cool kids table.

Diary of the Dead

It's a certifiable tragedy that George A. Romero, creator of the modern zombie genre, can't get a decent budget greenlit in Hollywood. While Michael Bay is given two hundred million dollars to shoot digital robots fighting, then edits the action so aggressively that you can't even tell what's happening, one of the finest horror directors of all time is forced to scrounge for nickels in order to fund his vital, provocative tales of the living dead. More than any other director, George Romero is the man who made horror films relevant. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and his new film, Diary of the Dead are remarkable for their social insight and thunderous gut-level power. Yet, if there is one problem with his films, especially his last two, it's a claustraphobic lack of scope. For this, Romero is much less to blame than the nearsighted bean counters who won't give him the proper finacial backing. His films always hint at a vastly ambitious vision that is constrained by a paltry budget.

Romero's new film ignores the timeline of his earlier zombie films, which posit a chronology of apocalypse in which zombies slowly, from movie to movie, gain control of the earth's surface. Diary of the Dead reboots, with the first corpses rising from the dead in the present day, recorded by the vast array of digital technology of the present day. All of Romero's zombie films have used the living dead as a metaphor to critique contemporary society. For Diary, Romero's target is the age of viral media and the American compulsion to record our every action. In the film, a group of University of Pittsburgh film students find themselves smack in the middle of a zombie rising that threatens to destroy civilization as they know it. While they trek across Pennsylvania in search of safe haven, they also record everything they experience, for upload onto the internet. Like this year's hit Cloverfield, all of the action is shown from the perspective of the protagonist's camera.

As Dawn of the Dead is a commentary on the pathologies of consumer society, and 2004's underrated Land of the Dead deals with issues of political fearmongering and the exploitation of the global south, Diary of the Dead has it's satirical sights set squarely on the Youtube digital media world we inhabit. The film student heroes are far more interested in recording the horrors of zombie armageddon than helping their fellow men, or even each other, survive. Some have criticized the film for its heavy handed approach to the subject matter, with the action periodically interrupted by ponderous voice overs from one of the film students commenting on the anethestizing nature of media and the sick need to witness suffering. Taken in the context of the film, these segments make sense. After all, the whole idea is that the audience is watching a film made by the characters, and one of Romero's many targets of critique is the pretensious narcissism of self-styled artistes like the subjects. Of course they would feel compelled to beat the audience over the head with their shimmering insights into human nature. It's not as though Romero doesn't have a track record of subtle but powerful satire. Almost all of the subversiveness of Dawn of the Dead, for example, comes from shot selection and the ironic juxtaposition of walking corpses shambling through a shopping mall. There's not a leaden speech to be found.

The first-person point of view camera offers another advantage: Diary of the Dead is much scarier than any Romero zombie film since Night. There's a sense of dread and identification with the perspective of the camera operator that makes every blood-thirsty ghoul seem that much more terrifying. For this same reason, Romero's trademark dry humor has a stronger impact as well, and Diary is also his funniest film in years. Because the camera operators are film students wielding expensive equiptment, there's a fluidity and grace to the shots that other movies using a similar approach, like the abovementioned Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project, lack. This film is a lot less likely to make someone watching it feel seasick.

As enjoyable as Diary of the Dead is to watch, and as incisive as Romero's insight remains, there are still moments during the film where an audience member can't help but wonder what the man might have done with more money and time. The special effects are mostly convincing, but the canvas Romero paints on is frustratingly small. Won't someone cut this man a check already?

Score: 8.3

MYOFNF #9: Z (dir. Costa-Gavras, 1968)

This film is based on the true story of a 1963 political assassination in Greece that served as sort of a practice run for the right-wing military that eventually overthrew the elected government in 1967. There are a few notable things about this movie, which I dug a great deal. For one, it's a penetrating examination of the psychology and sociology of bureaucracy. Watching the corrupt military officers cover up their involvement in the killing of a pacifist politician with subtle social pressure and straight-forward indoctrination, you get a vivid idea of how these same officers were able to brush aside the civilian government and rule directly. Also, for a film primarily concerned with politics, there is a wounded beating hear in the middle of it. A few poignant scenes with the grieving wife of the slain politician go a long way towards humanizing the proceedings. In these moments, New Wave-inspired flash cutting does a great job of illustrating how memory works; fragments, images, moments from the past flash across our minds prompted by random sights, sounds and smells. For a political thriller, there's an intense attention to human detail going on here. In that respect, Z is a more complete film than a lot of politically-conscious movies from the same era that are less grounded in real events.

In Bruges

Watching the trailer for In Bruges for the first time a few months ago, I was taken back to the halcyon days of the mid-nineties, when every independent filmmaker with a Panaflex and a squib pack was ripping off Quentin Tarantino. It was a time when cinemas and video shelves where chock-a-block with films featuring wise-cracking criminals killing each other to ironically counterpointed pop songs. At the time, I was in my early teens, and like a lot of knuckle-headed violence junkies at that time, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were my cinematic lodestars, so even though these knockoffs were almost universally terrible, I made it my mission to watch them all. These films tended to have ridiculously long titles, like Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (Kiefer Sutherland's only trip behind the camera) and Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead. These films aped Tarantino's irony-soaked affect and casual violence while failing to reproduce his wit or visual ingenuity. Watching these films was punishing, but in the long run, it was good for me and for the independent film business. It was such overkill that the audience and filmmakers got sick of the whole quip-spewing hitman genre. Of course, it helped that Quentin Tarantino himself went into Stanley Kubrick's one-movie-every-five-years semi seclusion.

When I actually sat down to watch In Bruges, though, the mid-nineties Quentin rip offs were the last thing on my mind. Writer-director Martin McDonagh, an Irish playwright whose short film Six Shooter won an Oscar in 2006, has crafted an antidote to the breezy, cynical treatment of violence that the Tarantino era helped usher in to cinema. Yes, the film is about garralous, funny hitmen, but its approach toward the bruising reality of violence is serious and powerful. McDongagh is sort of the anti-Tarantino: the gangsters in his film don't kill people with a quip and a fast food reference. They have blood on their hands and they can't get it off.

That isn't to say that In Bruges isn't funny: it's often hilarious. Colin Farrell plays a rookie killer hiding out with partner Brendad Gleeson in the eponymous medieval Belgian town after a botched assassination in London. The first reel of the film largely consists of Ferrell chaffing against the constraints of his provincal setting in amusing fashion; he plays the cocky, Tarantino-style smart-arse with convincing aplomb. As the film progresses, Farrell's character begins to deepen as the truth about his London screw up is revealed and guilt begins to gnaw away at his soul. Within a single scene, Farrell swings from charming rogue to angst-wracked basket case. As Farrell slowly loses it amidst the gothic carnivalesque of Bruges, it dawned on me that this was a different type of hitman comedy: one about the psychic toll of violence. The film's power also comes from richly-detailed characters and the nearly surreal setting. All of those spires and flying buttresses and crenellated towers harken back to a pre-modern time in which sin and its repercussions permeated the European worldview. It's a fitting environment for a guilt-plagued killer to come to terms with his actions, his character, and his capacity for change.

Score: 8.0

2007 DVD Review: Margot at the Wedding

Noah Baumbach continues his dogged commitment to being the bracing, realist yin to friend and collaborator Wes Anderson's gentle, whimsical yang. Rushmore is a recreation of adolescence from the perspective of adulthood. Moments of pain and growth are ordered and executed with the affection and meticulousness of a Max Fischer production. Nothing stings too bad because Anderson and his audience surrogates are looking backward, and the pain of that time has been softened by time and the knowledge that things turned out alright in the end. Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, on the other hand, is a representation of adolescence in the present tense. All of the powerlessness and confusion and this-problem-is-the-end-of-the-world angst that gets blurred over time is painfully, brutally present. Anderson's carefully staged theatrical shots are replaced by the jogs and pans of a handheld camera. His teenaged protagonists experience desire not in a capital-r Romantic fashion, but with the squirmy, flushed eroticism of burgeoning testosterone levels.

Wes Anderson's next film, The Royal Tenenbaums, deals in a his patented magical, nostalgia-drenched way with the topic of upper class New York family dysfunction. Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding responds with a similar tale, but laces every frame with barbed wire.

When Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her son Claude vist her estranged siste Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to attend her wedding to moustachioed slacker Malcolm (Jack Black), a lifetime of resentment, hurt, and mistrust bubble to the surface. Actually, bubble is the wrong word: more like come to a rolling boil. What's remarkable about the film is just how fraught practically every line of dialogue is. Every exchange of wordsreveals facets of the relationship between the characters and unspoken personal history. More painful to watch is the way that language is used as a weapon by all parties, with each interaction a zero-sum battle in which there will always be a winner and a loser. The whole film practically vibrates with versimilitude. It's so real, and the relationships depicted are so poisonous, that the viewer can't help but bring their own memories of familial angst to the proceedings. You're left feeling nauseous, especially since there is so little hope of healing or true reconciliation between these people; their wounds are too deep and picked-over, their character flaws are too intractable. Margot, in particular, is so trapped in a morass of solipism and self-pity that she can't reach out of herself to connect with anyone around her on equal terms. She's sort of a female version of Daniel Plainview: people essentially repulse her, and are only useful to her if she can be certain of her absolute control over them. If her sister, or her husband, or her son attempt to exert any autonomy or to call her out on her terminal narcissism, she wields cutting remarks like Plainview swings a bowling pin.

This film was largely ignored by critics and audiences upon its release last winter, but is not because it isn't great: the level of realism, the vividness of the characters and the richness of the dialogue all place it in the top tier of 2007 releases. I think Margot largely failed to draw raves because it's just too uncomfortable and dark to watch for most people. In some ways, it's darker than Oscar winners and certified downers like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Those films revel in philosophical bleakness and unflinching examination of evil, but their period trappings and genre plot mechanisms serve to comfort the viewer. As awful as it is to watch Anton Chigurh press his captured bolt gun to someone's forehead, it's not something that most people can relate to their daily lives. Margot at the Wedding, on the other hand, is a portrait of misanthropy and emotional trauma that feels queasily real to anyone who has ever experienced a disasterous family get together. It cuts too close to the bone.

Score: 9.2

MYOFNF #8: 8 1/2 (dir. Frederico Fellini, 1963)

Fellini's hallucinatory semi-autobiographical film is ostensibly about movie making, but it's really about a dude (modeled on Fellini) who can't stay faithful to his wife, and his struggles to find out why and what will make him happy. The backdrop of the film industry offers some rich symbolism and imagery. It certainly illustrates why Fellini was so keen on the carnivalesque: its a pretty close metaphor for a film set. The film contains some of the most gorgeous black and white cinematography I've ever seen, and some of the imaginary set pieces are striking and memorable. I'm still not a huge fan of this style of head-buried-six-feet-up-your-own-ass filmmaking, though.

David Luhrssen: Champion of the Middlebrow

Let's get something straight from the jump: the Oscars are a joke, a ridiculous parade of self-important meat-puppets stroking each other off in a frenzy of ego and delusional granduer. The Academy Awards have as much to do with recognizing excellence in American film as the invasion of Iraq did with creating democracy in the Middle East. Nevertheless, I always find myself getting invested in the nomination process and I inevitably watch the whole turgid mess on Sunday. Partly, I enjoy handicapping the winners in the same way I like fantasy baseball and political prognostication, but I'll admit that I root for my favorite films when they're nominated and am usually somewhat annoyed when they fail to win. Much as I find myself secretly dreaming that a Barack Obama presidency might (just might) lead to a mass political movement for social democratic reform at home and abroad, the hidden, starry-eyed idealist in me hopes that Oscars being awarded to excellent films will result in more people demanding excellence in film. Unlikely? No doubt. But goddamn it, a motherfucker can dream, can't he?

That's why shit like Shepherd Express film critic David Luhrssen's article Embracing the Dark Side: Have the Oscars Left the Public Behind? chaps my ass. In the piece, Luhrssen shits all over what is without a doubt the strongest slate of Best Picture nominees in decades for being too dark and challenging. Instead of downers like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, Luhrssen suggests that the Academy should have nominated American Gangster and Charlie Wilson's War, which he calls "engaging films on important subects, dramatizing reality through memorable storytelling and brought to life by stars that light the screen with charisma." Besides sounding like an Us Weekly review, this article is notable for just how incredibly wrong it is about everything. From the premise to the most basic facts, there's nothing but dumb all the way down to the bedrock here.

To start with, Luhrssen's essential premise: that movies like American Gangster are superior to ones like No Country because they are just as "serious" in their content but are more engaging to a popular audience, is astoundingly wrong. On the merits, No Country is a vastly better film than American Gangster. Luhrssen claims that Gangster has "something to say about the challenges and ambiguities of politics and society while packaging (its) message entertaingly." On the "entertainment" tip, American Gangster has its moments, but the film as a whole is unfocused and riddled with crime film cliche. As for the claims of being a relevant commentary on the contemporary world, the only real stab the film makes for social context is a repeated and insanely lazy trope. Whenever the filmmakers want to illustrate the realities exisiting outside of the world of the film, they show one of the main characters watching television news reports on exactly what they want the audicence to have in mind. It's cheap, easy, and fails to weave the social context into the lives of the characters. Luhrssen also makes the bizarre claim that No Country and Blood are "not entertaining in any normal sense." This kind of shit should be grounds for impeachment. Does this mean that Luhrssen watched Javier Barden and Josh Brolin play cat and mouse in the deserted streets of a Texas border town or Daniel Day-Lewis navigate the thunderous majesty of the Little Boston oil derrick fire and wasn't entertained? If that's true, I honestly don't know what to say to the man. If he did find those scenes entertaining but ended up forgetting about it because the rest of the films bummed him out, I do know what to say to him: you're lame.

My central objection to Luhrssen's premise is his apparently belief that the role of the Academy Awards should be to celebrate the joys of big budget, star-studded period pieces that are embraced by audiences. This has certainly been the MO of the Oscars until recently, and what has it resulted in? A parade of "Academy Award Winning" films that will be forgotten within a decade. Does anyone really think that A Beautiful Mind or Forrest Gump or Crash or Gladiator will live on in the minds of anyone a generation from now who isn't watching them on basic cable at that very second? If we're going to go to the trouble of staging a grindly-long Hollywood circle jerk every year, I say we might as well use the opportunity to expand the horizons of what constitutes a "great" movie. It isn't just production value, star charisma and "grand scope" (whatever the hell that means). It's courage and vision that make films "great", and that's just what this year's "dark" nominees have and what pedestrian shit like American Gangster sorely lacks. Yes, film is a profit-maximizing engine and a popular source of entertainment. But it's also an art form, and art is at its most vital when it challenges the viewer. Challenging films don't tend to win huge audiences, but they do stand the test of time. People remember the films that stick with them, that haunt them like that shot of Tommy Lee Jones' eyes as the screen goes black at the end of No Country. People also remember Oscar winners, if only because it gives them an edge playing Trivial Pursuit. When you look back at those winners in years to come, wouldn't you rather think "damn, that's a great movie, I need to see that again" than "wow, that fucking thing won an Oscar?" Yes, it's meaningless, but in a culture that is obsessed with convienence at all costs, including the destructon of the planet, any current that moves us as a people in the direction of embracing the difficult and the thought-provoking is to be encouraged.

MYOFNF #7: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (dir. Werner Herzog, 1972)

Werner Herzog is considered the foremost auteur of obsessive personalities and Aguirre, is considered the centerpiece of his cinematic vision. Watching the film, I was surprised to notice how little Klaus Kinski's title character registers. This isn't a tightly focuses study of monomania like There Will Be Blood. Herzog's camera spends much less time zooming in on Kinski's rebellious conquistador than it does covering the hostile, wild tangle of Amazonian jungle surrounding him and his band of adventurers. Herzog is conveying to the audience the terrifying vulnerability and giddy freedom that comes with struggling through an untrammeled wilderness. Aguirre's individual psychology is less interesting than the universal reaction to such an environment. It's sort of like what No Country For Old Men would look like if Llewllyn Moss never made it back to the trailer park with his loot, but rather spent the film running around the scrub brush of West Texas.

MYOFNF #6: The Seventh Seal (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

This movie hits me right where I live in terms of subject matter: the inevitable horror of death and the essential unknowability of god, and some of the imagery, like the train of flagellates, especially that closing shot of the train of shackled, doomed pilgrims being led by to their demise, is striking and memorably. Unfortunately, the arch style and overtly symbolic trappings (Max Von Sydow really does play a chess match against Death, who does, indeed, wear a big-ass black cloak) mute some of the horror. The whole business is a little more buttoned down than I tend to like: most of the sequences felt more like theatrical set-pieces than immersive realities. I understand that this is a general condition of most films made before the mid-60s, and that the Swedes aren't known for their free-wheeling ways, but the austerity undercut the terror of death. How can you fear for the loss of life when life itself seems to consist of a parade of stiff, somber interactions? The real power of the film lies in its refusal to offer the audience, who is just as thirsty as their surrogate, Von Sydow, for absolute knowledge of their fates, any sort of relief from their maddening ignorance.

MYOFNF #5: The 400 Blows (dir. Francois Truffaut, 1959)

I normally don't like movies that feature child protagonists: they're either really precocious and hyper-verbal and therefore unrealistic, or they're realitically monosyllabic and therefore boring. The teen protagonist of Truffaut's first film, Antoine Doinel, strikes just the right mixture of sullen stoicism and bright-eyed youthful enthusiasm. Watching this film, it's easy to see how Truffaut almost single-handley jumpstarted the French New Wave with it: the subject matter and especially the strong directorial vision behind the camera radically break from the conventions of filmmaking until that point. Not only was it revolutionary to film a movie entirely from the point of view of a child, but Truffaut's camera work fully embraces that point of view. This film ushered in the era of the auteur with restless camera movement and nakedly autobiographical content that strongly announces the director's point of view. It's hard to imagine many of the films of the past forty years that have dealt with the pain and confusion of growing up being made the same way without the powerful example of The 400 Blows.

2007 DVD Review: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Your first reaction while watching this movie is, "wow, what a bunch of dorks." That sentiment doesn't totally go away by the end of the film, but it is tempered by the knowledge that Donkey Kong scores may be inconsequential in the big picture, but we don't live our lives in the big picture. People find day-to-day meaning by finding something they can do, no matter how objectively meaningless it is, and focusing on doing that thing well. By the end of the movie, you're totally rooting for hapless nerd (and failed baseball player/musician) Steve Weibe to get the highest ever score in Donkey Kong. And you're rooting for reigning champ and giant douchenozzle Bill Mitchell to get herpes or something.

Score: 8.0