I was a bit trepidatious going into this one, because the trailer makes it look like the kind of thing that can go badly wrong and leave itself no hope for course correction before the end comes round. Carey Mulligan gets a breakout role as Jenny, a sixteen-year-old Londoner who is bound for Oxford - she hopes, before she dies on the vine under the thumb of her cautious father (Alfred Molina) - when she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), the man who seems to be everything her father is not (boiled down to one word, that word would be interesting) and everything she hopes to be once she gets out of the house and out into the real world.
In this country, people would raise holy hell about a mysterious thirtysomething man taking a shine to a sixteen-year-old girl - never mind what the girl thinks about it, nor what her choice in the matter would be; but across the pond, it would seem that no one bats an eye - at least not in this picture’s world. David seduces Carey’s mum and dad as well as he seduces Carey, and Carey seems to be the only one who can be bothered to be interested in finding out what it is this chap does for a living. (I’ll leave you to find out what that is for yourself, because the scene is very good - one of the film’s high points, in fact.)
It’s just a story, though, right? Well, yeah...but it’s based on a memoir, so bits of it are probably closer to true than usual. (I haven’t read the memoir - and if it’s anything like the last British movie I saw that was based on a book, The Damned United, finding a copy of the source material could be tricky.) What keeps it from being creepy is, most importantly, the lack of a sexual element - at least at first; eventually, sex does come into play, but far enough along that you cannot possibly consider that it might be coercion. But beyond that, David and Jenny seem to share a love of life, and a respect for certain boundaries, that lends the relationship an air of legitimacy.
David has seen the world, and Jenny longs to see beyond her house and her school, which is pretty much the extent of her experience before David appears in her life. The screenplay by Nick Hornby - yes, that one - sails along quite dreamily for the first two acts, as Jenny wines and dines on David’s dime, seeing and doing many of things she’s always dreamed of doing but never been allowed to do; but even in a relatively short film (100 minutes or so), a solid hour of seemingly consequence-free quasi-hedonistic excess can start to wear thin.
You could argue that Jenny is innocent and naïve, that she has been sheltered for so long that she cannot possibly see that no good can come from schlepping around Britain and Europe with a man twice her age. That part is probably true; but its caveat, at least for most of acts one and two, is that Jenny doesn’t care about being innocent or naïve, as long as she gets to go out and do something fun. Even when things start to go wrong, they barely start to go wrong; and Jenny accepts the wrongness with a moral relativism that is more alarming in someone her age than is the tryst with the older man in the first place.
Indeed, Jenny never has a crisis of conscience at all. When the story - which is largely free of conflict, a basic and essential element in every story - finally does hit a snag that her fervent wish to be free cannot put right, Jenny simply retreats to the trappings of the life from which she sought to escape in the first place. There are consequences to her actions, but everything she has done is just rebellious enough to be interesting and fun without quite being illegal or terribly dangerous - and at any rate, she never gets carded for anything, so it’s not as though anyone really seems to care. There is mild irony in the idea that, while Jenny wants nothing more than to be an adult so that she can get out from under her parents, the filmmakers treat the story (and by extension, Jenny) with kid gloves. I’d like to get my hands on a copy of the memoir, to get an idea of how much of the story was glossed over to make the film so easy to swallow - but I’m not going to lose any sleep if that doesn’t happen.
And yet...I liked the movie. Mostly I think this is because Nick Hornby did a really first rate job adapting the material and putting his peculiar brand of awkward humor on much of what takes place. The film overall was much lighter than I was given to believe it would be from having seen the trailer over and over and over again, and Hornby deserves the credit for that. Mulligan and Sarsgaard brought off the parts very well, but anyone familiar with Hornby’s writing will pick up the flavor of his work almost from the beginning; and while it is the softness of the writing that ultimately works against the picture, it is also the zippy dialogues and stage directions that propel the narrative forward in the first place. Molina does a fine job as Jenny’s uptight father, displaying range and careful attention to what he says. Sarsgaard plays David as smooth and debonair, with a healthy dollop of oily malevolence lurking behind his smile.
But it is Carey Mulligan who takes this film and runs away with it, delivering speeches and facial expressions and one-liners with a world-weariness that belies both her age in real life and her age in the picture. (She plays a sixteen-year-old, and was twenty-three when the film was made.) It’s this shift in age that makes the character believable, as much as it is Mulligan’s considerable acting chops, though; or it helps her along, at any rate. I was never entirely convinced that she was confident, or capable of feeling fear. Her character should be expressing both feelings eventually, but I don’t know that Mulligan finally takes her there. That’s a minor quibble, though - she does everything else awfully well, especially the frustrated, deadened feeling that pervades Jenny’s soul early in the film and then occasionally again throughout.
I think that the story might be a little dodgy, but it’s awfully well executed by a splendid cast that includes fine cameo roles for Olivia Williams and Emma Thompson and a very brief one-off for Sally Hawkins. For those interested in the written works that led up to this movie, Lynn Barber’s memoir was originally published as an essay in the literary journal Granta; and a follow-up article was published by the same journal this past summer. The book version of Barber’s memoir was published in June 2009 - six months after the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where the film version was in competition.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
It Might Get Loud
On first hearing the idea - of putting guitar players from three different generations of rock into a room together to talk about the electric guitar - you might scratch your head in wonder that The Edge and Jack White were chosen to join Jimmy Page in the discussion; but after you watch the movie, you’ll come away with one of two thoughts: either director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) could have made the movie work with any two guitar players to go along with Page - because let’s face it, any movie about rock guitar would have to include Page - or The Edge and Jack White might just have been perfect choices. What I don’t think it’s possible to come away with is that somehow this idea for a movie was anything but a great success.
There are two veins to the movie: one is the meeting of the three guitar players in a soundstage dressed up to look vaguely like someone’s study at the same time that it’s abundantly clear that a movie is being made there; and the other has the filmmakers following the three musicians around the stomping grounds where each man grew up and fell in love with playing the guitar. If there is a weakness to the film, it might be in the way that the stomping grounds portions tend to meander and drift sort of aimlessly from thing to thing, like all Guggenheim wanted the fellows to do was free associate their own recollections of growing up to be guitar players.
The bits on the soundstage are close to perfection, though - especially if you’re into rock music and even more especially if you’re into guitar at all. (I don’t think that you necessarily have to be into electric guitar to be swept away by what takes place on that little soundstage.) Then again...I might be wrong on that. I’m fascinated by the guitar, in part because I’ve always wanted to learn how to play it. Unfortunately, after buying a guitar a few years ago, I came to the conclusion that I don’t really have guitar player hands; but I still like to pick it up and noodle around on it from time to time, and I love to hear it played well in rock and roll songs. So watching three guys talk about the different things they do to make different kinds of sounds - and then seeing them do those things - is fascinating to me. Seeing Jimmy Page play the guitar in something other than stock footage from old Zep concerts is also fascinating.
The Edge talks about his meticulous process for creating the perfect guitar sound for every song - a process that sometimes necessitates that he use a different guitar on every song; and he talks about how the guitar sounds at the beginning of “Beautiful Day” came to be - a sort of happy accident that resulted in a recording of both the chords he was playing and the reverb effects from his amp, which made it sound like he was playing about ten times more sounds than he was actually playing. He then plays the actual chords that he was playing when he discovered that particular reverb effect - and it sounds almost nothing at all like what wound up on the album cut of the song.
And that’s all well and good. I have no problem with U2, but I never really got into them - and I have pretty much no opinion about either the White Stripes or the Raconteurs (although based purely on the music I heard in the film, it seems to me like the Raconteurs was the better band); but I love Led Zeppelin, even if Q95 does play the same handful of Zep songs over and over and over again. Hearing Jimmy Page talk about guitar and seeing him play on the soundstage for The Edge and Jack White (and all of the filmmakers) was really cool. Listening to him rip off the opening riff of “Whole Lotta Love” is a lot of fun. That song gets played too much, but if you can listen to it objectively and try to forget the fact that Q95 can sort of make you hate bands you love by playing too many of the same songs too often, then you really have to admit that, aurally, it’s one of the band’s most impressive compositions. It’s maybe a little easier for me to cop to that because that song happens to be on my favorite Zep record, II.
The most fun, though, might have been listening to Jimmy Page talk about how the writing of “Stairway to Heaven” resulted in his having to come up with a completely new way to play guitar on stage - so that he could play both the twelve-string acoustic part at the beginning and the six-string electric solo. His answer was to use a double-necked guitar with twelve strings on the top neck and six strings on the bottom, and they show some stock footage of Page playing the song in concert. “Stairway to Heaven” is another of those Zep songs that you hear too much, but it’s also one of those songs that is so good that you sometimes forget just how good it is because you hear it so much; but like most things, it opens up when you learn a little bit about its history - and when you can get that history from a primary source like Page, well...so much the better.
There’s more to the film than just these few bits - but they are the ones that stood out most for me. I wasn’t as enraptured by the bits about Jack White, but I did come away from the movie with more respect for him as a guitar player specifically and musician generally. Much of his shtick seems to be an affectation, and more of the serious musician comes across here than you would think possible given his Mad Hatter-style persona. I don’t know that he’s innovative in the same way that Page and Edge have been over the years - but he’s certainly enough of a character to make up for any lack of novelty and presents an interesting modern (or maybe more like postmodern) counterpoint to the legendary Page and Edge.
There are two veins to the movie: one is the meeting of the three guitar players in a soundstage dressed up to look vaguely like someone’s study at the same time that it’s abundantly clear that a movie is being made there; and the other has the filmmakers following the three musicians around the stomping grounds where each man grew up and fell in love with playing the guitar. If there is a weakness to the film, it might be in the way that the stomping grounds portions tend to meander and drift sort of aimlessly from thing to thing, like all Guggenheim wanted the fellows to do was free associate their own recollections of growing up to be guitar players.
The bits on the soundstage are close to perfection, though - especially if you’re into rock music and even more especially if you’re into guitar at all. (I don’t think that you necessarily have to be into electric guitar to be swept away by what takes place on that little soundstage.) Then again...I might be wrong on that. I’m fascinated by the guitar, in part because I’ve always wanted to learn how to play it. Unfortunately, after buying a guitar a few years ago, I came to the conclusion that I don’t really have guitar player hands; but I still like to pick it up and noodle around on it from time to time, and I love to hear it played well in rock and roll songs. So watching three guys talk about the different things they do to make different kinds of sounds - and then seeing them do those things - is fascinating to me. Seeing Jimmy Page play the guitar in something other than stock footage from old Zep concerts is also fascinating.
The Edge talks about his meticulous process for creating the perfect guitar sound for every song - a process that sometimes necessitates that he use a different guitar on every song; and he talks about how the guitar sounds at the beginning of “Beautiful Day” came to be - a sort of happy accident that resulted in a recording of both the chords he was playing and the reverb effects from his amp, which made it sound like he was playing about ten times more sounds than he was actually playing. He then plays the actual chords that he was playing when he discovered that particular reverb effect - and it sounds almost nothing at all like what wound up on the album cut of the song.
And that’s all well and good. I have no problem with U2, but I never really got into them - and I have pretty much no opinion about either the White Stripes or the Raconteurs (although based purely on the music I heard in the film, it seems to me like the Raconteurs was the better band); but I love Led Zeppelin, even if Q95 does play the same handful of Zep songs over and over and over again. Hearing Jimmy Page talk about guitar and seeing him play on the soundstage for The Edge and Jack White (and all of the filmmakers) was really cool. Listening to him rip off the opening riff of “Whole Lotta Love” is a lot of fun. That song gets played too much, but if you can listen to it objectively and try to forget the fact that Q95 can sort of make you hate bands you love by playing too many of the same songs too often, then you really have to admit that, aurally, it’s one of the band’s most impressive compositions. It’s maybe a little easier for me to cop to that because that song happens to be on my favorite Zep record, II.
The most fun, though, might have been listening to Jimmy Page talk about how the writing of “Stairway to Heaven” resulted in his having to come up with a completely new way to play guitar on stage - so that he could play both the twelve-string acoustic part at the beginning and the six-string electric solo. His answer was to use a double-necked guitar with twelve strings on the top neck and six strings on the bottom, and they show some stock footage of Page playing the song in concert. “Stairway to Heaven” is another of those Zep songs that you hear too much, but it’s also one of those songs that is so good that you sometimes forget just how good it is because you hear it so much; but like most things, it opens up when you learn a little bit about its history - and when you can get that history from a primary source like Page, well...so much the better.
There’s more to the film than just these few bits - but they are the ones that stood out most for me. I wasn’t as enraptured by the bits about Jack White, but I did come away from the movie with more respect for him as a guitar player specifically and musician generally. Much of his shtick seems to be an affectation, and more of the serious musician comes across here than you would think possible given his Mad Hatter-style persona. I don’t know that he’s innovative in the same way that Page and Edge have been over the years - but he’s certainly enough of a character to make up for any lack of novelty and presents an interesting modern (or maybe more like postmodern) counterpoint to the legendary Page and Edge.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Book Wars
I read on the worldwide Internets the other day that there’s a book war going on. Even in a recession, online retailers (sometimes known as e-tailers) like Target and Amazon - among others - are at each other’s throats trying to see who can take the biggest loss on each copy sold of new novels by a handful of the big names in popular fiction. One of these authors is Stephen King, whose 1000+ page doorstop, Under the Dome, bows on November 10th; and I’d be interested in this subject even if there weren’t a new Stephen King book coming out, but since there is, I’m even more interested - because I’m going to buy the book the day it comes out.
The only question is how much money I’m going to spend on it; a secondary consideration is which seller of books is going to benefit from my purchase; and I’m going to leave off with whether or not certain places that peddle books actually deserve the quasi-romantic appellation bookseller, and focus instead on why I should or should not support any of these places where I might obtain the new Stephen King book. (There are other authors with new books out this fall that will be sold online at deep discounts - namely, for $9 or less - by Target and Amazon and others; but Stephen King is the only one of those authors who interests me. Others with new novels that you can get online for cheap include John Grisham, Michael Crichton, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, and Barbara Kingsolver.)
And if you know me at all, then you’re probably thinking that I’m going to say that you should go out and support the local guy - right? Head down to that neighborhood bookstore and put some bread in the pocket of the small businessman who lives in your community and shares your love of a good book. Well...kinda. If you live in Seattle, or are within thirty or so minutes of the Elliott Bay Book Company, then yes - you absolutely should get out and support the local guy; and the same goes for anyone who lives in New York City and can get to the Strand. You people have viable local options that give you the full bookstore experience, complete with newsstand and new releases.
We don’t have that at non-chain places here in Indianapolis. I’d probably have to order the new Stephen King from a place like Bookmamas. On the other hand, I could walk right into Borders and get a copy for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty percent off the list price. And yes...Borders is a chain; but it’s one that is struggling to stay on its feet - due in part to the recession, but also in part to flagging CD and DVD sales, and to other factors including disastrous mismanagement when it was (briefly) owned by KMart and to an online partnership with Amazon that just never really worked for Borders.
And quite frankly, it’s the best we’ve got in Indianapolis, as far as bookstores go. Some people prefer Barnes & Noble, but I just don’t understand this. Those stores are horribly laid out and way too crowded - even when there are no people in them - and their selection, particularly of literature, leaves much to be desired. (A couple of notable exceptions include their selections of books by Virginia Woolf and Charles Bukowski. I admire both writers, but will always check Borders first; and really, when I say that Barnes has a better selection, what I really mean is that Barnes carries both the first and second Common Reader by Woolf and a larger selection of Bukowski’s poetry. All of his prose, and all of the other books by Woolf, can be found at Borders.) This criticism applies both to their shelves of books and to their newsstand section.
After all, part of the charm of a bookstore is in browsing new items to see what's new and what might be interesting. Little mom and pop places don't give you that, and neither does a place like Barnes & Noble that does not feel cozy and at least a little bookish. (To be fair, the new Borders at Castleton Square doesn’t feel this way, either - it feels like browsing for books under the Friday night lights at a football stadium.) On the other hand, I almost never go into Borders and come out with a book; usually it's a magazine or nothing. When I do buy books, it's usually at Half Price Books, where the books are used - as they are at Bookmamas. But Half Price is entrenched, and has corporate backing; and because of those two factors, they have both a greater supply of incoming books to consider for purchase and more latitude to purchase books in quantities sufficient to keep their selection both fresh and robust.
So I’m torn as to where to spend my money on this new book. Part of me really does want to support the little guy in just about every way that I can and that is financially reasonable; but as long as we don’t have a major indie bookstore here in town, I don’t want to see Borders go away, either. What I am sure about is that I’m not going to go with the ultra-cheap online option - that undercuts the entire concept of bookstores in every way, and I don’t support that at all. (Maybe, as penance for having bought books for 45% off at Best Buy in the past, I’ll just suck it up and order a copy at full price from Bookmamas.)
And no...I don’t own a Kindle.
The only question is how much money I’m going to spend on it; a secondary consideration is which seller of books is going to benefit from my purchase; and I’m going to leave off with whether or not certain places that peddle books actually deserve the quasi-romantic appellation bookseller, and focus instead on why I should or should not support any of these places where I might obtain the new Stephen King book. (There are other authors with new books out this fall that will be sold online at deep discounts - namely, for $9 or less - by Target and Amazon and others; but Stephen King is the only one of those authors who interests me. Others with new novels that you can get online for cheap include John Grisham, Michael Crichton, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, and Barbara Kingsolver.)
And if you know me at all, then you’re probably thinking that I’m going to say that you should go out and support the local guy - right? Head down to that neighborhood bookstore and put some bread in the pocket of the small businessman who lives in your community and shares your love of a good book. Well...kinda. If you live in Seattle, or are within thirty or so minutes of the Elliott Bay Book Company, then yes - you absolutely should get out and support the local guy; and the same goes for anyone who lives in New York City and can get to the Strand. You people have viable local options that give you the full bookstore experience, complete with newsstand and new releases.
We don’t have that at non-chain places here in Indianapolis. I’d probably have to order the new Stephen King from a place like Bookmamas. On the other hand, I could walk right into Borders and get a copy for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty percent off the list price. And yes...Borders is a chain; but it’s one that is struggling to stay on its feet - due in part to the recession, but also in part to flagging CD and DVD sales, and to other factors including disastrous mismanagement when it was (briefly) owned by KMart and to an online partnership with Amazon that just never really worked for Borders.
And quite frankly, it’s the best we’ve got in Indianapolis, as far as bookstores go. Some people prefer Barnes & Noble, but I just don’t understand this. Those stores are horribly laid out and way too crowded - even when there are no people in them - and their selection, particularly of literature, leaves much to be desired. (A couple of notable exceptions include their selections of books by Virginia Woolf and Charles Bukowski. I admire both writers, but will always check Borders first; and really, when I say that Barnes has a better selection, what I really mean is that Barnes carries both the first and second Common Reader by Woolf and a larger selection of Bukowski’s poetry. All of his prose, and all of the other books by Woolf, can be found at Borders.) This criticism applies both to their shelves of books and to their newsstand section.
After all, part of the charm of a bookstore is in browsing new items to see what's new and what might be interesting. Little mom and pop places don't give you that, and neither does a place like Barnes & Noble that does not feel cozy and at least a little bookish. (To be fair, the new Borders at Castleton Square doesn’t feel this way, either - it feels like browsing for books under the Friday night lights at a football stadium.) On the other hand, I almost never go into Borders and come out with a book; usually it's a magazine or nothing. When I do buy books, it's usually at Half Price Books, where the books are used - as they are at Bookmamas. But Half Price is entrenched, and has corporate backing; and because of those two factors, they have both a greater supply of incoming books to consider for purchase and more latitude to purchase books in quantities sufficient to keep their selection both fresh and robust.
So I’m torn as to where to spend my money on this new book. Part of me really does want to support the little guy in just about every way that I can and that is financially reasonable; but as long as we don’t have a major indie bookstore here in town, I don’t want to see Borders go away, either. What I am sure about is that I’m not going to go with the ultra-cheap online option - that undercuts the entire concept of bookstores in every way, and I don’t support that at all. (Maybe, as penance for having bought books for 45% off at Best Buy in the past, I’ll just suck it up and order a copy at full price from Bookmamas.)
And no...I don’t own a Kindle.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
National Novel Writing Month
It is inauspicious, for me anyway, that National Novel Writing Month starts today. (Technically, for me, it starts tomorrow, since I ain’t done with Saturday the 31st yet.) I have to work tomorrow night, and then open on Monday - which means that I won’t have much time to write tomorrow night when I get home from work. I almost always have Sundays off; and on the rare occasions when I do work on Sunday, it’s usually the opening shift. You could probably count on one hand the number of Sunday closing shifts I have had in the last year. Tomorrow is one of them, though.
The goal of National Novel Writing Month is for writers to hammer out a novel of 50,000 words in the span of one month. That’s 1667 words a day, which is a pretty good clip - even for folks who make a living at it; and it would be 140-150 pages (depending on a number of factors), which is on the low side for a novel in terms of page count. It would actually be more accurate to call it National Novella Writing Month, although even among writers, novella is a word you don’t hear much anymore - like strategery, except that it’s actually a word.
I’ve been thinking about putting aside the novel I’ve been working on and trying to do this thing, and since there seem to me to be several compelling reasons not to do it, I’m trying very hard to convince myself that I actually want to do it. I could blog about the process, at the end of every week and every tenth day - and use that as part of the motivation to keep going even when it feels daunting. (I could also just blog the novel as I’m working on it, day to day, but I’m definitely not that brave yet. If I can do it this year, though, I might think about it for next year’s National Novel Writing Month.)
So that’s pretty much that. I just wanted to throw out what the idea was and post some links about it. Oddly enough, Macworld magazine is always where I am reminded of National Novel Writing Month. I don’t recall ever reading about it in Poets & Writers, although I did let my subscription to that magazine lapse. The links, all from Macworld, are here and here and here.
The goal of National Novel Writing Month is for writers to hammer out a novel of 50,000 words in the span of one month. That’s 1667 words a day, which is a pretty good clip - even for folks who make a living at it; and it would be 140-150 pages (depending on a number of factors), which is on the low side for a novel in terms of page count. It would actually be more accurate to call it National Novella Writing Month, although even among writers, novella is a word you don’t hear much anymore - like strategery, except that it’s actually a word.
I’ve been thinking about putting aside the novel I’ve been working on and trying to do this thing, and since there seem to me to be several compelling reasons not to do it, I’m trying very hard to convince myself that I actually want to do it. I could blog about the process, at the end of every week and every tenth day - and use that as part of the motivation to keep going even when it feels daunting. (I could also just blog the novel as I’m working on it, day to day, but I’m definitely not that brave yet. If I can do it this year, though, I might think about it for next year’s National Novel Writing Month.)
So that’s pretty much that. I just wanted to throw out what the idea was and post some links about it. Oddly enough, Macworld magazine is always where I am reminded of National Novel Writing Month. I don’t recall ever reading about it in Poets & Writers, although I did let my subscription to that magazine lapse. The links, all from Macworld, are here and here and here.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Ichabod's Sketchbook #2
The inaugural edition of Ichabod’s Sketchbook, a literary journal publishing out of Bookmamas here in Irvington, is now available, at Bookmamas, for $14.95 (plus tax). Deadline for submissions for the next issue is still December 18, 2009. Reading fee is $15 for three poems (up to 30 lines each) or two short stories (up to 1000 words each). Additional information at: ichabodsscketchbook (at) gmail (dot) com
A Serious Man
Despite what are really quite excellent production aspects - and what might well be a backhanded smack at the god of the Bible’s Old Testament - I did not get the overarching feeling that this was a particuarly likable movie. It is very well made - there can be little doubt that Joel and Ethan Coen are among the finest filmmakers working today - but the main problem is that it’s almost impossible to form any kind of emotional attachment to any of the characters. The writers of the Bible (especially of the Old Testament), whomever they might have been, were not encumbered by the need to reach their audience; they were penning a cautionary tale, almost as a parent admonishes a child without offering a sufficient explanation for some proscribed behavior or required task: “It’s not for you to like. It’s for you to do.”
Well...okay. But the Bible is not offered as an entertainment; it’s an instruction book of sorts - for those who seek admittance to the clubhouse - and it stands on a foundation of blind faith. It pretty much has to be blind, right? It is difficult to imagine anyone who could read the Old Testament and think, “Man, I like where God is going with this.” Indeed, if the Old Testament were stripped of its religious overtones and presented as a secular document - a political platform, say - the candidate would have no chance. “It’s not for you to like. It’s for you to do.”
On the other hand, no one - other than maybe Frances McDormand - is going to be thrown into the fiery furnace if they don’t go out and see this movie. Joel and Ethan Coen have reached that rarified place in American cinema where they can make pretty much whatever movie they want, in whatever way they want, and have that movie rushed into production and released by any one of half a dozen or so (surviving) indie arms of the major studios; and people will go to see these movies because past experience dictates that, by and large, films by the Coens range anywhere from very good (Burn After Reading, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) to exceptional (No Country for Old Men). There are exceptions, of course (rumor has it that Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were nigh on unwatchable - especially if you believe all of the little old ladies who wanted refunds on the latter because of all the F-bombs) - but the exceptions here only prove the rule, that Joel and Ethan Coen are filmmakers of the highest order.
Which makes A Serious Man not a little frustrating. It’s an excellent film - but I’m pretty sure that I don’t ever want to watch it again. The art direction fuses 1950s cultural sensibilities with late-1960s kitsch so well that it’s almost like a new decade has been born; and if not for the repeating pulsations of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” you might well think you’ve slipped into some kind of Seuss-ian fantasy land beyond Thunderdome. Cinematographer Roger Deakins is in a complete comfort zone with the Coens, and his compositions really let a lot of scenes breathe and take on a life of their own - even if some of those compositions are a little too angular and fancy. And the actors, as is so often the case in films by the Coens, fully inhabit their roles; as a bonus, they also disappear into those roles here, as there are no name actors in the film. Leaving aside No Country for Old Men, the name actors in Coen brothers movies almost never disappear into their roles; instead, they inhabit those roles, and rather than seeing a combination of actor and character that creates something new, you see a known face creating a caricature of a ridiculous person who would not be at all interesting if not juxtaposed to a famous face.
That might have something to do with why I couldn’t get behind Larry Gopnik, the protagonist (uh, kinda) in A Serious Man. Michael Stuhlbarg, whose previous work includes a lot of things I have not seen and one picture I’m interested in seeing when it works its way onto video (Cold Souls), plays Gopnik; and he both inhabits and disappears into the role - a guy who has been oblivious to the little things in his marriage that have added up to his wife’s (seemingly) sudden request for a divorce - and in a way he manages to come off like a Coen character we’re used to seeing, but there is much about the character that is forced, including Stuhlbarg’s delivery and his situation in many of the scenes. I haven’t seen Stuhlbarg in anything else, though, so I can’t say for sure that it’s his performance that causes the sort of herky-jerky progression - but it would not surprise me if this were the case.
Gopnik is criticized by his wife’s new lover as not being a serious man, which seems to be a way of saying that Gopnik has not done enough with his life. He continuously protests - particularly to his wife, concerning her reasons for wanting a divorce - that he hasn’t done anything; and what he’s saying in the empty space of that statement is that he hasn’t done anything except what has been expected of him in his life. He’s a modern day Job, persecuted constantly for reasons of which he cannot conceive; but Job is comforted, to an extent, by his faith in his god. Gopnik, though Jewish - and the picture as a whole is not so much steeped in Judaism as it is positively drowning in it - pays only lip service to faith; and his attempts to receive counsel from the religious leaders in his life are rebuffed at every turn, which echoes the way God seems to ignore Job in the Bible.
But there is no sense of hope here, none of the reassurance readers of the Bible get that Job will one day find peace though he suffers constantly throughout his life. I’m sure the film's dearth of hope is by design; and as an overall criticism of religion - particularly of the god of the Old Testament - it’s effective. The suffering that Gopnik endures - being cuckolded, having redneck neighbors on one side and a wily temptress on the other, being strung along about getting tenure at work, boarding a brother who can’t seem to catch a break - is shown as ridiculous, as are his rabbis, a series of whom are recommended to him for counsel; and though all the roles are pulled off pretty well, especially Fred Melamed as Gopnik’s wife’s new lover, there’s not really a single character in the movie that you find yourself wanting to root for. And that’s too bad, because the space these characters inhabit is so well-constructed and expertly presented that it fairly begs to be lived in by people whose fates demand to be cared about.
I’m sure there’s probably some Big Theme here that I’m just missing - and that would make the picture open itself up to me way more than it did; and maybe a second viewing would bring more of that theme to the front of my mind, but I don’t know how long it might be before I ever watch this one again. I’ll tell you, though - there’s a scene toward the end where the cops come to arrets Gopnik’s brother; and if one of those cops had been John C. Reilly reprising his role as police office Jim Kurring, it might have made the movie a whole lot more interesting.
Well...okay. But the Bible is not offered as an entertainment; it’s an instruction book of sorts - for those who seek admittance to the clubhouse - and it stands on a foundation of blind faith. It pretty much has to be blind, right? It is difficult to imagine anyone who could read the Old Testament and think, “Man, I like where God is going with this.” Indeed, if the Old Testament were stripped of its religious overtones and presented as a secular document - a political platform, say - the candidate would have no chance. “It’s not for you to like. It’s for you to do.”
On the other hand, no one - other than maybe Frances McDormand - is going to be thrown into the fiery furnace if they don’t go out and see this movie. Joel and Ethan Coen have reached that rarified place in American cinema where they can make pretty much whatever movie they want, in whatever way they want, and have that movie rushed into production and released by any one of half a dozen or so (surviving) indie arms of the major studios; and people will go to see these movies because past experience dictates that, by and large, films by the Coens range anywhere from very good (Burn After Reading, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) to exceptional (No Country for Old Men). There are exceptions, of course (rumor has it that Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were nigh on unwatchable - especially if you believe all of the little old ladies who wanted refunds on the latter because of all the F-bombs) - but the exceptions here only prove the rule, that Joel and Ethan Coen are filmmakers of the highest order.
Which makes A Serious Man not a little frustrating. It’s an excellent film - but I’m pretty sure that I don’t ever want to watch it again. The art direction fuses 1950s cultural sensibilities with late-1960s kitsch so well that it’s almost like a new decade has been born; and if not for the repeating pulsations of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” you might well think you’ve slipped into some kind of Seuss-ian fantasy land beyond Thunderdome. Cinematographer Roger Deakins is in a complete comfort zone with the Coens, and his compositions really let a lot of scenes breathe and take on a life of their own - even if some of those compositions are a little too angular and fancy. And the actors, as is so often the case in films by the Coens, fully inhabit their roles; as a bonus, they also disappear into those roles here, as there are no name actors in the film. Leaving aside No Country for Old Men, the name actors in Coen brothers movies almost never disappear into their roles; instead, they inhabit those roles, and rather than seeing a combination of actor and character that creates something new, you see a known face creating a caricature of a ridiculous person who would not be at all interesting if not juxtaposed to a famous face.
That might have something to do with why I couldn’t get behind Larry Gopnik, the protagonist (uh, kinda) in A Serious Man. Michael Stuhlbarg, whose previous work includes a lot of things I have not seen and one picture I’m interested in seeing when it works its way onto video (Cold Souls), plays Gopnik; and he both inhabits and disappears into the role - a guy who has been oblivious to the little things in his marriage that have added up to his wife’s (seemingly) sudden request for a divorce - and in a way he manages to come off like a Coen character we’re used to seeing, but there is much about the character that is forced, including Stuhlbarg’s delivery and his situation in many of the scenes. I haven’t seen Stuhlbarg in anything else, though, so I can’t say for sure that it’s his performance that causes the sort of herky-jerky progression - but it would not surprise me if this were the case.
Gopnik is criticized by his wife’s new lover as not being a serious man, which seems to be a way of saying that Gopnik has not done enough with his life. He continuously protests - particularly to his wife, concerning her reasons for wanting a divorce - that he hasn’t done anything; and what he’s saying in the empty space of that statement is that he hasn’t done anything except what has been expected of him in his life. He’s a modern day Job, persecuted constantly for reasons of which he cannot conceive; but Job is comforted, to an extent, by his faith in his god. Gopnik, though Jewish - and the picture as a whole is not so much steeped in Judaism as it is positively drowning in it - pays only lip service to faith; and his attempts to receive counsel from the religious leaders in his life are rebuffed at every turn, which echoes the way God seems to ignore Job in the Bible.
But there is no sense of hope here, none of the reassurance readers of the Bible get that Job will one day find peace though he suffers constantly throughout his life. I’m sure the film's dearth of hope is by design; and as an overall criticism of religion - particularly of the god of the Old Testament - it’s effective. The suffering that Gopnik endures - being cuckolded, having redneck neighbors on one side and a wily temptress on the other, being strung along about getting tenure at work, boarding a brother who can’t seem to catch a break - is shown as ridiculous, as are his rabbis, a series of whom are recommended to him for counsel; and though all the roles are pulled off pretty well, especially Fred Melamed as Gopnik’s wife’s new lover, there’s not really a single character in the movie that you find yourself wanting to root for. And that’s too bad, because the space these characters inhabit is so well-constructed and expertly presented that it fairly begs to be lived in by people whose fates demand to be cared about.
I’m sure there’s probably some Big Theme here that I’m just missing - and that would make the picture open itself up to me way more than it did; and maybe a second viewing would bring more of that theme to the front of my mind, but I don’t know how long it might be before I ever watch this one again. I’ll tell you, though - there’s a scene toward the end where the cops come to arrets Gopnik’s brother; and if one of those cops had been John C. Reilly reprising his role as police office Jim Kurring, it might have made the movie a whole lot more interesting.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Left-Wing Movie Report
• Capitalism: A Love Story
Believe it or not, I had never seen a Michael Moore movie before I saw this one. I don’t know that I’m missing all that much. With the rare exception (James Toback’s Tyson, for one), documentary film basically exists to inform rather than entertain - so for me, the mark of a successful doc is how well it sheds light on things I did not already know. Having said that, this film is hit and miss. What Moore tells us about the financial meltdown is not news; anyone who has paid even slight attention to the news in the last year or so knows most of these details. The interesting parts are when he goes out into the field and talks to people who have been affected by the financial crisis; there should be way more of this. Oh, and his thesis - that capitalism is the source of the trouble - is inaccurate. The cause of the trouble was greed. Capitalism does not work unless it is regulated. Period. End of report. Next case. Unfettered free market capitalism is no more viable than communism or Glenn Beck. The financial mess the world is in is proof of that statement, an enduring legacy of Ronald Reagan, one of the worst Presidents in American history other than his veep’s progeny.
• Earth Days
This one was way better than I thought it was going to be. For whatever reason, I was expecting self-righteous hippie environmentalists decrying as a right-wing Nazi anyone who doesn’t live in a tree and who refuses to shower or to groom him- or herself. Instead, what I got was just a bunch of people who think it’s a really good thing to protect the environment and take care of our finite natural resources - and who wanted to share that concern with the audience. It’s hard to argue with this positiion when it’s presented in such an apolitical way. It even manages to give credit where it’s due to Richard Nixon, who was mostly a disaster, of course* - but who also created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the Clean Water Act and an expansion of the Clean Air Act.
• The U.S. vs. John Lennon
Actually, there’s one other thing about documentary that’s really good - when it gives you footage of awesome people who died before you had the chance to become interested in them. I was five when John Lennon bled out on the steps in front and lobby of the Dakota Hotel in New York City, and twenty-something before I got (mildly) interested in the Beatles; and it was several years after that before I realized that I was really, truly a bleeding-heart left-wing liberal (this is also called coming to one’s senses, for those who still think that Rush Limbaugh and a whoopee cushion are substantially different things). Up until I saw this movie, I basically only knew anecdotal things about John Lennon; and there was quite a lot of good information in the movie to help expand that knowledge. The movie also opened up a lot of his songs, both solo stuff and stuff that he did with the Beatles.
* Has anyone else noticed that the last three consecutive, two-term Republican Presidents have been remarkable disasters? You’d think people would learn to vote better; but then again, the learning curve in this fading republic is flat like Kansas.
The Big List #16
• Atheists Unite!
Richard Dawkins and his new book - and yet another link-heavy Cosmic Log blog. I’ve only read articles about and by Dawkins, but none of his books. I’m terribly fascinated, though. I got The God Delusion from the library, but had to take it back before I got around to reading it. Perhaps once I get some of my own books read and disposed (see below), I’ll get around to Dawkins.
• Joe Biden Under the Radar
Excellent article on Joe Biden and what he contributes to the Obama administration. Everyone knew Obama would be an improvement over Bush; and while it makes sense that Biden would be an improvement over Cheney, Biden has his own idiosyncracies that are...well, not quite as criminal as Cheney’s - but potentially irksome, nonetheless. Nice to know that, so far, he has not taken up the mantle of the Sith that might have been passed down to him over at OEOB.
• Needful Things
Most excellent post by Roger Ebert on how books can fill up the spaces in one’s life - and take on a life of their own. I freely admit to a love-hate relatioship with my books. On the one hand, I’m never at a loss for something to read. On the other hand, they take up a hell of a lot of space. Every year I tell myself I’m going to pare it down - and yet, every year, the stack of books I accumulate is bigger than the stack that I read and set aside to sell.
• I Smell Sex and Candy
Esquire article on how surges in vampire popularity coincide with surges in “carnal crisis,” and also about how the current surge has to do with young straight women wanting to have sex with gay men - or so the author says. The first part of the theory is more interesting, and the only downside here is that the article is only about 1000 words. A much longer treatment of this idea would be terribly interesting.
• And Just To Be Fair...
HOPE artist Shepard Fairey was disingenuous about which AP photo he used to create that Obama poster. Surely you’ve seen it, right? Liberals and Democrats are never going to come anywhere near the level of total suckage that the conservatives and GOP have achieved since Herr Reagan was sworn in - but that doesn’t automatically make all of them good, either. I could probably do a better job pointing out gaffes on the left, but honestly - who picks on their own side as much as they pick on the other side? Exactly. The problem with the right is that they have both the ideology and the methodology wrong; the left, when they err, usually only errs on the methodology.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Deep Thoughts #16
To see how retarded Twitter users, or maybe just Republicans, are, Google Meghan McCain, Twitter, and tank top and see what, ahem, comes up.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Deep Thoughts #15
Are we really supposed to take seriously those people whose comments make it clear that in their eyes Obama can do no right, no matter what?
Deep Thoughts #14
Complaining about Obama doesn’t make new racists out of people whose parents did such a bad job raising them that they already were racists.
Deep Thoughts #13
It’s very impressive how so many Republicans who were stupid enough to vote for Sarah Palin have become Nobel Peace Prize experts overnight.
Deep Thoughts #12
I like how President Obama gets slammed for an award he didn’t even campaign for. Do you birther Republican morons think he’s Norwegian now?
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Jiallo's African-Caribbean Cuisine
Jiallo’s is a restaurant out on the northwest side (roughly 56th and Guion) that offers what they call African-Caribbean cuisine in what is certainly the most stripped-down and minimalist dining room I think that I have ever eaten in. I don’t know the west side all that well, and someone who does might be able to refute this next point, I don’t know - but this seems like a terrible location for a restaurant. There’s not much of anything in the area, no chance of attracting any foot traffic, and Guion Road is bloody annoying to drive.
I read about this place in the Star’s weekend section a couple of weeks ago, and mentioned it to Amy - the dish pictured in the review, jerk chicken with red beans and rice and fried plantains, looked appealing; and both of us like to try new things to eat and to support the independent place whenever we can. By an unusual scheduling fluke, I had today (technically yesterday) off, so we roped my mom into watching Jackson, and off we went.
By minimalist dining room, I mean one big open space with tables and chairs and a handful of booths; stark white walls; and a bar where no alcohol was being served and a handful of people were hanging out and not drinking. There were four other people at tables when we got there, so we took an open booth and sat down. The owner, Jiallo himself, brought menus and took our drink order, and we ordered dinner when he came back with the drinks. Amy had the jerk chicken ($11.99) we saw in the picture in the paper, and I chose the curried chicken ($9.99 - pictured). The menu said that each came with either red beans and rice or mixed vegetables, and we both chose the red beans and rice. The jerk chicken also came with fried plantains.
And then the waiting began. And continued. And continued some more. And then out came two plates of fried plantains, which were quite nice - though we were only expecting one side of plantains, the ones with Amy’s jerk chicken. They were crispy outside and tender inside - sweet, but not overly so, and not especially greasy, though there was a bit of a sheen left on the plate when they were gone. Next came more waiting and then - surprise! - some fried rice that Jiallo had just whipped up in the back. The review in the paper said that he often prepares things that are not listed on the menu, and then brings them out for people to sample. He’s got an interesting take on fried rice. It had a dusky, smoky sort of flavor and clumped together like it was sticky rice. Most fried rice I’ve encountered is made up of mostly rice, with bits of other things - usually vegetables and sometimes a bit of egg; this was pretty much rice, though Amy reckons she forked a wayward green bean along the way. I believe I saw a sliver of onion in there somewhere. Either way, both little plates of rice were gone in no time - and I think we’d both have a go at it again if it ever shows up on the menu.
Then more waiting. Later on, we learned that it had been especially slow that day because of the rain, and that they had run out of most of the prepared food around six o’clock or so. When the entrées finally did arrive, I could tell why they had taken so long. The chicken on both plates was literally falling off the bone, and that takes time. Mine was awash in brilliant yellow curry sauce that was flavorful without masking the flavor of the chicken - and it was very mild curry, so those who don’t dig on spicy food can order this dish with confidence. Amy’s jerk chicken was slightly spicier, though still pretty mild, and had a good sweet and smoky flavor that also did not get in the way of the flavor of the chicken.
The red beans and rice, as they were, left a bit to be desired, though; they were not bursting with flavor, but were instead dry and a little on the cold side. This was remedied, however, when Jiallo came back around and asked if we wanted some more "gravy" for the red beans and rice. We both said yes, and he brought out two little bowls of the sauce, which was full of ox-tail and great big white beans and had a very earthy, buttery taste that was easily the best thing I tasted during the meal. I poured it over the red beans and rice on my plate and then, magically, the red beans and rice vanished almost instantly.
And then he brought out two little plates of mixed vegetables, which neither of us had ordered and which were probably offered to make up for the long wait, which he acknowledged was out of the ordinary and for which he apologized. And the veggies were lovely - tender but firm, and very simply seasoned with pepper and just a hint of salt. Also to make up for the wait, he knocked off the drinks and sides from the bill, though we did not ask that he do that.
The food was a long time coming, but it was well worth the wait - and based on conversations we had with Jiallo and others which we overheard, the slow service seems to have been an anomaly. It’s also apparently anomalous for the place to be as empty as it was - just a handful of diners - when we got there at seven o’clock; and that’s encouraging, because it’s the kind of place you have to make an effort to get to. I’m cautiously optimistic that a return visit will be just as enjoyable from a service standpoint as tonight’s visit was from the culinary end of things.
4202 West 56th Street
492-1603
Mon-Sat 11-930
Sun 2-8
I read about this place in the Star’s weekend section a couple of weeks ago, and mentioned it to Amy - the dish pictured in the review, jerk chicken with red beans and rice and fried plantains, looked appealing; and both of us like to try new things to eat and to support the independent place whenever we can. By an unusual scheduling fluke, I had today (technically yesterday) off, so we roped my mom into watching Jackson, and off we went.
By minimalist dining room, I mean one big open space with tables and chairs and a handful of booths; stark white walls; and a bar where no alcohol was being served and a handful of people were hanging out and not drinking. There were four other people at tables when we got there, so we took an open booth and sat down. The owner, Jiallo himself, brought menus and took our drink order, and we ordered dinner when he came back with the drinks. Amy had the jerk chicken ($11.99) we saw in the picture in the paper, and I chose the curried chicken ($9.99 - pictured). The menu said that each came with either red beans and rice or mixed vegetables, and we both chose the red beans and rice. The jerk chicken also came with fried plantains.
And then the waiting began. And continued. And continued some more. And then out came two plates of fried plantains, which were quite nice - though we were only expecting one side of plantains, the ones with Amy’s jerk chicken. They were crispy outside and tender inside - sweet, but not overly so, and not especially greasy, though there was a bit of a sheen left on the plate when they were gone. Next came more waiting and then - surprise! - some fried rice that Jiallo had just whipped up in the back. The review in the paper said that he often prepares things that are not listed on the menu, and then brings them out for people to sample. He’s got an interesting take on fried rice. It had a dusky, smoky sort of flavor and clumped together like it was sticky rice. Most fried rice I’ve encountered is made up of mostly rice, with bits of other things - usually vegetables and sometimes a bit of egg; this was pretty much rice, though Amy reckons she forked a wayward green bean along the way. I believe I saw a sliver of onion in there somewhere. Either way, both little plates of rice were gone in no time - and I think we’d both have a go at it again if it ever shows up on the menu.
Then more waiting. Later on, we learned that it had been especially slow that day because of the rain, and that they had run out of most of the prepared food around six o’clock or so. When the entrées finally did arrive, I could tell why they had taken so long. The chicken on both plates was literally falling off the bone, and that takes time. Mine was awash in brilliant yellow curry sauce that was flavorful without masking the flavor of the chicken - and it was very mild curry, so those who don’t dig on spicy food can order this dish with confidence. Amy’s jerk chicken was slightly spicier, though still pretty mild, and had a good sweet and smoky flavor that also did not get in the way of the flavor of the chicken.
The red beans and rice, as they were, left a bit to be desired, though; they were not bursting with flavor, but were instead dry and a little on the cold side. This was remedied, however, when Jiallo came back around and asked if we wanted some more "gravy" for the red beans and rice. We both said yes, and he brought out two little bowls of the sauce, which was full of ox-tail and great big white beans and had a very earthy, buttery taste that was easily the best thing I tasted during the meal. I poured it over the red beans and rice on my plate and then, magically, the red beans and rice vanished almost instantly.
And then he brought out two little plates of mixed vegetables, which neither of us had ordered and which were probably offered to make up for the long wait, which he acknowledged was out of the ordinary and for which he apologized. And the veggies were lovely - tender but firm, and very simply seasoned with pepper and just a hint of salt. Also to make up for the wait, he knocked off the drinks and sides from the bill, though we did not ask that he do that.
The food was a long time coming, but it was well worth the wait - and based on conversations we had with Jiallo and others which we overheard, the slow service seems to have been an anomaly. It’s also apparently anomalous for the place to be as empty as it was - just a handful of diners - when we got there at seven o’clock; and that’s encouraging, because it’s the kind of place you have to make an effort to get to. I’m cautiously optimistic that a return visit will be just as enjoyable from a service standpoint as tonight’s visit was from the culinary end of things.
4202 West 56th Street
492-1603
Mon-Sat 11-930
Sun 2-8
Friday, October 09, 2009
Earth Days (#1)
Go see this movie. It's one week only, and there's pretty much no way you're going to have to worry that it might sell out. You might be surprised to learn that this isn't so much an activist movie about the envronment as it is a straight history of how the environmental movement formed, beginning with the publication of the book SIlent Spring, by Rachel Carson - and told by many of the people who were there at the beginning and to whom the environmental movement meant - and still means - very much. Almost entirely stripped of politics, the film tells the story of how people gradually woke up to the fact that what humans were putting into the environment, in terms of pesticides and pollutants from factories and cars, was eventually going to kill us - and what they started to do about it. Lots of stock footage, as you would expect in a documentary - but lots of nice sweeping shots of modern-day city skylines, too.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
The Boys Are Back
I imagine there is a segment of the movie-going population in the world that will not only want to see this picture (as opposed to being compelled to watch it in the course of doing one’s job), but that will also enjoy the movie once they have seen it. I reckon most of those are going to be women - at least as much because the male lead is the very, very pretty Clive Owen as because the weepy family story appeals to people who like to have everything work out in the end.
Of course, everything works out in the end - and no, that doesn’t take anything away from the enjoyment of the movie for those who are going to enjoy it. This is the kind of movie that has to work out in the end - there’s not some question of what’s going to happen because it is not at all a challenging film. (Most of the people who are going to think that this is a movie they would like to see are people who are not going to be interested in being challenged by the movies they see.)
And yes, I’m pretty much just going to trash this movie - so if that doesn’t interest you for whatever reason, you’ll probably want to move on after this paragraph. The movie is about sports writer Joe Warr (Owen), who quite suddenly loses his second wife to cancer. This forces him to start participating in the upbringing of his young son Artie (I’m pretty sure that, at one point early in the movie, someone called this kid Danny - but I could be wrong), something he has not done much of in the almost seven years of Artie’s life. Joe brings home the bacon, and his wife Katie raises the kids and keeps the house in order. The fun quirk? Joe has another son by a previous wife (whom he left when he got Katie pregnant), and it’s time for that kid to come round for a visit, just at the moment when all of this other stuff starts to go to hell. Doesn’t it just figure?
Like I said, everything works out in the end. Don’t even worry about it. There are a couple of loose ends - including Joe’s fate at his job and the status of the relationship between Joe and his new friend Laura, who has a little girl who is Artie’s age - that director Scott Hicks leaves hanging; but most of the plot points are neatly resolved, as they are supposed to be. Does it matter that the main conflict in the movie, apart from Katie’s sudden death, turns on a couple of improbable incidents - losing a cell phone in an unlikely (and brief) bar fight, say - that make you wonder how much of the story screenwriter Allan Cubitt had to fabricate from Simon Carr’s memoir? Not really. Does it matter that there are seemingly interminable shots of the vast Pacific Ocean that seem meant to indicate how lost Joe fears he’s going to be if he actually has to try to be as good a father as his wife was a good mother? Not really.
It’s all just fluff and too many close-up shots that are either hastily or simply poorly composed, too many lines uttered in measured melodramatic cadence, and not nearly enough gnats and flies in a kitchen that Joe never makes much - correction, any - effort to clean up. “The place looked better when Artie’s mother was alive,” he says. There are a handful of genuinely moving emotional moments, about half of which occur in the surprisingly effective opening that kills off Joe’s wife; but most of the emotional punch is overwrought, and by the time we get around to an ending that is so cloyingly sweet and completely inorganic, you may have to be reminded that this film was based on a true story - because most of what you have seen smacks of bad fiction. Really bad fiction.
Of course, everything works out in the end - and no, that doesn’t take anything away from the enjoyment of the movie for those who are going to enjoy it. This is the kind of movie that has to work out in the end - there’s not some question of what’s going to happen because it is not at all a challenging film. (Most of the people who are going to think that this is a movie they would like to see are people who are not going to be interested in being challenged by the movies they see.)
And yes, I’m pretty much just going to trash this movie - so if that doesn’t interest you for whatever reason, you’ll probably want to move on after this paragraph. The movie is about sports writer Joe Warr (Owen), who quite suddenly loses his second wife to cancer. This forces him to start participating in the upbringing of his young son Artie (I’m pretty sure that, at one point early in the movie, someone called this kid Danny - but I could be wrong), something he has not done much of in the almost seven years of Artie’s life. Joe brings home the bacon, and his wife Katie raises the kids and keeps the house in order. The fun quirk? Joe has another son by a previous wife (whom he left when he got Katie pregnant), and it’s time for that kid to come round for a visit, just at the moment when all of this other stuff starts to go to hell. Doesn’t it just figure?
Like I said, everything works out in the end. Don’t even worry about it. There are a couple of loose ends - including Joe’s fate at his job and the status of the relationship between Joe and his new friend Laura, who has a little girl who is Artie’s age - that director Scott Hicks leaves hanging; but most of the plot points are neatly resolved, as they are supposed to be. Does it matter that the main conflict in the movie, apart from Katie’s sudden death, turns on a couple of improbable incidents - losing a cell phone in an unlikely (and brief) bar fight, say - that make you wonder how much of the story screenwriter Allan Cubitt had to fabricate from Simon Carr’s memoir? Not really. Does it matter that there are seemingly interminable shots of the vast Pacific Ocean that seem meant to indicate how lost Joe fears he’s going to be if he actually has to try to be as good a father as his wife was a good mother? Not really.
It’s all just fluff and too many close-up shots that are either hastily or simply poorly composed, too many lines uttered in measured melodramatic cadence, and not nearly enough gnats and flies in a kitchen that Joe never makes much - correction, any - effort to clean up. “The place looked better when Artie’s mother was alive,” he says. There are a handful of genuinely moving emotional moments, about half of which occur in the surprisingly effective opening that kills off Joe’s wife; but most of the emotional punch is overwrought, and by the time we get around to an ending that is so cloyingly sweet and completely inorganic, you may have to be reminded that this film was based on a true story - because most of what you have seen smacks of bad fiction. Really bad fiction.
Friday, October 02, 2009
I'm Speechless. I Am Without Speech.
Tonight at work, I was reading an article about the scandal involving the guy at CBS who tried to extort money from David Letterman, and the text quoted below was posted as one of the comments to the article. If we could figure out a way to increase - and here I’m thinking something like an order of magnitude - the number of religious people on this planet who are as well-reasoned as the person who posted this comment (identity listed only at “walt2,” with no link to a profile or anything like that), homo sapiens as a species would be in so much better shape.
"To the other Christians out there; why should Christians expect non-believers to live up to, or be remotely interested in living up to the 'Christian' moral code? Honestly, that code, in and of itself, seems like foolishness to most non-believers. It's ridiculous to expect someone without the indwelling spirit of God to be interested in sin, holiness, etc. The only reason Christians are different is because of the new life (God's Spirit) residing in us. We aren't inately better in some way than everyone else. The main difference is that we have experienced regeneration which has opened our eyes to spiritual things in ways the non-believer can't see. But we are no 'better' than any one else. It is God's presence in us alone that allows us to consider as valid - and hopefully to live by - a different moral code. Why should we expect anyone who is not a believer to be interested in that same standard? Where were we anyway, before the presence of God entered us? Our life in Christ now is not accomplished by our own efforts, no matter how 'mature' we may be - it's all because of his presence. We aren't holy, he has become our holiness, our goodness. Dave is no hypocrite. He doesn't claim to be something he is not. I like Dave and think he is an incredibly gifted guy. He has undoubtedly hurt one or more people in his life by his actions. But infidelity is not the unforgivable sin. If we Christians claim to be something we are not - somehow 'better' than everyone else, we become hypocrites. The only difference is that we have had our guilt before God taken away by the work of Christ. 'We are saved by Faith through Grace, and that not of ourselves; it is the gift of God.'"
"To the other Christians out there; why should Christians expect non-believers to live up to, or be remotely interested in living up to the 'Christian' moral code? Honestly, that code, in and of itself, seems like foolishness to most non-believers. It's ridiculous to expect someone without the indwelling spirit of God to be interested in sin, holiness, etc. The only reason Christians are different is because of the new life (God's Spirit) residing in us. We aren't inately better in some way than everyone else. The main difference is that we have experienced regeneration which has opened our eyes to spiritual things in ways the non-believer can't see. But we are no 'better' than any one else. It is God's presence in us alone that allows us to consider as valid - and hopefully to live by - a different moral code. Why should we expect anyone who is not a believer to be interested in that same standard? Where were we anyway, before the presence of God entered us? Our life in Christ now is not accomplished by our own efforts, no matter how 'mature' we may be - it's all because of his presence. We aren't holy, he has become our holiness, our goodness. Dave is no hypocrite. He doesn't claim to be something he is not. I like Dave and think he is an incredibly gifted guy. He has undoubtedly hurt one or more people in his life by his actions. But infidelity is not the unforgivable sin. If we Christians claim to be something we are not - somehow 'better' than everyone else, we become hypocrites. The only difference is that we have had our guilt before God taken away by the work of Christ. 'We are saved by Faith through Grace, and that not of ourselves; it is the gift of God.'"
Monday, September 28, 2009
Lorna's Silence
I had never seen a Dardennes brothers movie before this one, and I’m not sure if that gave me an advantage or disadvantage going into Lorna’s Silence. I’ve said before that I like hard movies, but I maybe should have modified that to say that I like hard movies that are interesting; but it’s not really that this is one isn’t interesting...I think it’s more along the lines that it tries a little bit too hard and makes some stylistic choices that are aimed more squarely at esthetics than they are aimed at the practical concerns of telling the story. I also don’t think it’s an especially hard movie - but I do think that it wants to be, and that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne had it in the backs of their minds that they were making a hard movie.
We’re dropped into the story already in progress, with Lorna coming back to her apartment and getting ready for bed, fending off an offer from Claudy to play cards. The tension between the two is obvious, although its origins are not. In due course, all becomes clear; but in the early stages you sort of have to tease out for yourself what’s happening and why it’s happening. Jérémie Renier plays Claudy, a Belgian junkie who agreed to marry Albanian Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) for money, so that she could gain Belgian citizenship. Lorna’s part of the quid pro quo is to turn around and marry a Russian so that he can become Belgian.
This is not, however, Utah; so Claudy has to go, first. The Russian brokering the deal, a guy called Fabio, plans to have Claudy offed and to make it look like an overdose. Claudy is trying to quit cold turkey on his own, and junkies are known for their recidivism (paging Scott Weiland) - so Fabio figures it will be no big trick to rig an OD. Lorna, on the other hand, would prefer to go the way of divorce, on the grounds that Claudy beats her. Claudy does not beat her, however - so they have to pretend to have arguments and Claudy has to pretend to hit her, but he’s so strung out and codependent that Lorna can’t manage to get him to hit her. She winds up having to hit herself; and even though this is a little pathetic, there’s a scene where she hits her against the corner of a wall, and it’s incredibly funny - although it’s probably not supposed to be. It just sort of happens, and the humor is in the spontaneity of it, more so than in the actual injury she inflicts upon herself.
Some would argue that a person trying to gain citizenship under false pretenses is not a particularly moral person, and to a certain extent that’s true; but there is a morality to Lorna in spite of that, a sense of attention to right and wrong. It would be easy for her to manipulate Claudy because of his addiciton, but she doesn’t do this; in fact, she makes a reasonable effort to help him get off the drugs, and their relationship evolves to the point that a love scene that would have seemed unlikely early in the picture actually turns out to be entirely organic and extremely poignant when it happens. Unfortunately, this scene - along with most of the natural progression of both the storyline and the character development - is waylaid by a massive temporal cut, around halfway into the picture or so, that is so jarring in terms of continuity that I actually thought the person who had built up the film had gotten the reels mixed up.
That did not turn out to be the case, however. The reels were in the right places, and the story pretty much picked up where it seemed to have left off so abruptly - just a bit further down the line; but it took a hugely melodramatic turn that seemed to shift the tone of all of the characters who had appeared to that point. Lorna, whose morality had been so finely tuned in her relations with Claudy, suddenly became too moral, too eager to tell the truth - to the point that she puts her own life in danger. I don’t want to give anything away, even though I know nobody reading this is going to see this movie (it ain’t in American); and there’s not much more I can tell you about the story without getting into the major plot point on which, a little more than halfway through, the film turns.
The Dardennes seem to be delighted with their minimalism in this film; but the economy of spoken lines combined with their apparenty affinity for hard jump cuts keeps the movie from flowing at a good pace. And the minimalism, wed initially to a kind of gritty realism that spins an effective - if somewhat lethargic - story, jettisons that realism after the monster time cut (and its attendant shifts in plot and tone) and lurches toward the end in the hands of new mistress melodrama. It’s an unwelcome shift, and it undermines a film that initially had some solid promise.
I read a couple of articles about this movie in Film Comment and Cineaste, before I saw the movie, and that may have been a bad thing because I had a pretty good idea of the story going into the picture. The progression of the story and the way the details were filled in during the first act didn’t really get to work on me the way it would have worked on someone who didn’t know anything about the picture ahead of time. I thought Arta Dobroshi did very well playing Lorna, and Jérémie Renier was even better as Claudy, though he wasn’t on screen for very long. But even taking all of that into account, I think the major shift in plot and tone would have turned me off no matter how much I knew or did not know about the movie going into it. That could well change on a second viewing, however. I just don’t know that that would ever happen, especially if I really mean to keep up with catching up on every movie we have ever played.
One week only. (Probably.)
We’re dropped into the story already in progress, with Lorna coming back to her apartment and getting ready for bed, fending off an offer from Claudy to play cards. The tension between the two is obvious, although its origins are not. In due course, all becomes clear; but in the early stages you sort of have to tease out for yourself what’s happening and why it’s happening. Jérémie Renier plays Claudy, a Belgian junkie who agreed to marry Albanian Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) for money, so that she could gain Belgian citizenship. Lorna’s part of the quid pro quo is to turn around and marry a Russian so that he can become Belgian.
This is not, however, Utah; so Claudy has to go, first. The Russian brokering the deal, a guy called Fabio, plans to have Claudy offed and to make it look like an overdose. Claudy is trying to quit cold turkey on his own, and junkies are known for their recidivism (paging Scott Weiland) - so Fabio figures it will be no big trick to rig an OD. Lorna, on the other hand, would prefer to go the way of divorce, on the grounds that Claudy beats her. Claudy does not beat her, however - so they have to pretend to have arguments and Claudy has to pretend to hit her, but he’s so strung out and codependent that Lorna can’t manage to get him to hit her. She winds up having to hit herself; and even though this is a little pathetic, there’s a scene where she hits her against the corner of a wall, and it’s incredibly funny - although it’s probably not supposed to be. It just sort of happens, and the humor is in the spontaneity of it, more so than in the actual injury she inflicts upon herself.
Some would argue that a person trying to gain citizenship under false pretenses is not a particularly moral person, and to a certain extent that’s true; but there is a morality to Lorna in spite of that, a sense of attention to right and wrong. It would be easy for her to manipulate Claudy because of his addiciton, but she doesn’t do this; in fact, she makes a reasonable effort to help him get off the drugs, and their relationship evolves to the point that a love scene that would have seemed unlikely early in the picture actually turns out to be entirely organic and extremely poignant when it happens. Unfortunately, this scene - along with most of the natural progression of both the storyline and the character development - is waylaid by a massive temporal cut, around halfway into the picture or so, that is so jarring in terms of continuity that I actually thought the person who had built up the film had gotten the reels mixed up.
That did not turn out to be the case, however. The reels were in the right places, and the story pretty much picked up where it seemed to have left off so abruptly - just a bit further down the line; but it took a hugely melodramatic turn that seemed to shift the tone of all of the characters who had appeared to that point. Lorna, whose morality had been so finely tuned in her relations with Claudy, suddenly became too moral, too eager to tell the truth - to the point that she puts her own life in danger. I don’t want to give anything away, even though I know nobody reading this is going to see this movie (it ain’t in American); and there’s not much more I can tell you about the story without getting into the major plot point on which, a little more than halfway through, the film turns.
The Dardennes seem to be delighted with their minimalism in this film; but the economy of spoken lines combined with their apparenty affinity for hard jump cuts keeps the movie from flowing at a good pace. And the minimalism, wed initially to a kind of gritty realism that spins an effective - if somewhat lethargic - story, jettisons that realism after the monster time cut (and its attendant shifts in plot and tone) and lurches toward the end in the hands of new mistress melodrama. It’s an unwelcome shift, and it undermines a film that initially had some solid promise.
I read a couple of articles about this movie in Film Comment and Cineaste, before I saw the movie, and that may have been a bad thing because I had a pretty good idea of the story going into the picture. The progression of the story and the way the details were filled in during the first act didn’t really get to work on me the way it would have worked on someone who didn’t know anything about the picture ahead of time. I thought Arta Dobroshi did very well playing Lorna, and Jérémie Renier was even better as Claudy, though he wasn’t on screen for very long. But even taking all of that into account, I think the major shift in plot and tone would have turned me off no matter how much I knew or did not know about the movie going into it. That could well change on a second viewing, however. I just don’t know that that would ever happen, especially if I really mean to keep up with catching up on every movie we have ever played.
One week only. (Probably.)
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Deep Thoughts #11
Ken Burns screened part of his national parks doc for President Obama. THAT MEANS PBS IS NOW PUSHING OBAMA’S AGENDA! Somebody call Breitman!
Friday, September 25, 2009
The September Issue
This film will do nothing to disabuse those, who already believe it, of the notion that people who live and work in the fashion industry are pretentious twits. Nor will anyone much doubt that Anna Wintour, who is referred to early in the film either as the “ice queen” or an “ice woman” (I don’t recall which, and I wasn’t taking notes), lives up to either moniker. She is the editor of Vogue (the American one), and the film is the hastily assembled story of the production of that venerable magazine’s annual September issue, which is apparently a big deal in the fashion world. Filmed during the summer of 2007, as Vogue was readying its biggest issue ever - a whopping 840+ page doorstop with Sienna Miller on the cover - the film is an attempt to get inside Vogue and show the audience the non-fiction side of what more people than will see this film saw in The Devil Wears Prada (which was based on a novel written by a former personal assistant to Wintour - although Meryl Streep’s version of Wintour hewed closer to Cruella De Vil than to Charles Montgomery Burns, which is how Wintour comes off in the doc).
Director R.J. Cutler wisely focuses on the magazine more than on Wintour - dealing with her efficiently rather than indulgently (at least in the final cut) - and this is wise because Wintour clearly doesn’t want much of anything to do with this documentary, as evidenced by the economy of her speech and the way she is almost always trying very hard not to look at the camera out of the corner of her eye, particularly when the scene at hand involves anything other than a sycophantic adoration of her. For someone who is referred to (again, early in the film) as the most powerful woman in America, she is terribly uncomfortable being seen - never mind photographed - in anything but the most flattering light. There is precious little information about her background and there are no real confrontations between her and any of her staff or any of the freelance designers who bring work to her; in fact, most of the damning-with-faint-praise bits are done by the magazine’s creative director, Grace Coddington, who would appear to be Wintour’s right-hand woman and one of the few people in the magazine’s Times Square offices who would be permitted to speak candidly to Wintour.
Too bad she never does - or that when she does, she does so meekly and doesn’t press the point. She does a lot of complaining about the bits she has done for the issue, but which Wintour has “killed.” By the end of the film, Grace’s contribution to the issue has been reduced to practically nothing, and we’ve heard her snipe and whine behind the scenes while only occasionally talking about how much she loves fashion and working in the industry - more damning with faint praise. The overarching feeling you get is that no one much likes working at Vogue under Wintour - but that nearly all of them consider it an honor and do it because it means they are the best at what they do.
Okay, I guess. If that’s your thing, who the hell am I to argue? Most documentaries are not going to appeal to a wide audience, and this one is no exception; but to the extent that it upholds Vogue as a good place to be despite the presence of its Führer, the film feels a little more like the Pevensie children defending Narnia from the White Witch - except that in this case, the White Witch has already won the war and has, pretty much to a person, subjugated everyone in her domain. By showing Vogue in this light - and shunting Wintour off to the side, at least a little bit - the film works, even if it isn’t going to reel in very many non-fashionistas and even though it doesn’t (or, more likely, wasn’t permitted to) explain Wintour well enough to pique the interest of the non-fashionistas.
I’ll give it this, though - it sort of made me want to buy an issue of Vogue. I didn’t - but I thought about it, and I could not possibly care less about fashion. Whether I liked the film or not (I didn’t), that it stirred in me at least that much interest means that, for the most part, it works.
Director R.J. Cutler wisely focuses on the magazine more than on Wintour - dealing with her efficiently rather than indulgently (at least in the final cut) - and this is wise because Wintour clearly doesn’t want much of anything to do with this documentary, as evidenced by the economy of her speech and the way she is almost always trying very hard not to look at the camera out of the corner of her eye, particularly when the scene at hand involves anything other than a sycophantic adoration of her. For someone who is referred to (again, early in the film) as the most powerful woman in America, she is terribly uncomfortable being seen - never mind photographed - in anything but the most flattering light. There is precious little information about her background and there are no real confrontations between her and any of her staff or any of the freelance designers who bring work to her; in fact, most of the damning-with-faint-praise bits are done by the magazine’s creative director, Grace Coddington, who would appear to be Wintour’s right-hand woman and one of the few people in the magazine’s Times Square offices who would be permitted to speak candidly to Wintour.
Too bad she never does - or that when she does, she does so meekly and doesn’t press the point. She does a lot of complaining about the bits she has done for the issue, but which Wintour has “killed.” By the end of the film, Grace’s contribution to the issue has been reduced to practically nothing, and we’ve heard her snipe and whine behind the scenes while only occasionally talking about how much she loves fashion and working in the industry - more damning with faint praise. The overarching feeling you get is that no one much likes working at Vogue under Wintour - but that nearly all of them consider it an honor and do it because it means they are the best at what they do.
Okay, I guess. If that’s your thing, who the hell am I to argue? Most documentaries are not going to appeal to a wide audience, and this one is no exception; but to the extent that it upholds Vogue as a good place to be despite the presence of its Führer, the film feels a little more like the Pevensie children defending Narnia from the White Witch - except that in this case, the White Witch has already won the war and has, pretty much to a person, subjugated everyone in her domain. By showing Vogue in this light - and shunting Wintour off to the side, at least a little bit - the film works, even if it isn’t going to reel in very many non-fashionistas and even though it doesn’t (or, more likely, wasn’t permitted to) explain Wintour well enough to pique the interest of the non-fashionistas.
I’ll give it this, though - it sort of made me want to buy an issue of Vogue. I didn’t - but I thought about it, and I could not possibly care less about fashion. Whether I liked the film or not (I didn’t), that it stirred in me at least that much interest means that, for the most part, it works.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Deep Thoughts #10
Anyone know why Wil Wolford has work? Because he’s kinda country, and Colts games are on cowboy radio? It sure isn’t color commentary skill.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
The Informant!
Electing to watch The Informant!, a corporate crime caper, one day after watching Syriana, a corporate crime thriller (plus international intrigue), was maybe not the best idea I’ve ever had. Neither film really knocked me down, but neither was really bad, either. Both are overly complicated - real life often is, don’tcha know - and both feature Matt Damon; but only The Informant! is a Matt Damon Movie. He plays an executive at Archer Daniels Midland who finds himself caught up in corporate corruption and FBI investigations; and by the end of the film, so many truths and lies have turned backward on themselves that you’re almost sure that the story had to be made up.
But it wasn’t. It actually happened, to Mark Whitacre, back in the 1990s. Steven Soderbergh has crafted a film based on a fictionalized version of events, and he’s mostly done a good job with it. He gets a terrific performance from Damon, who flings himself into the role of hapless corporate stooge with reckless abandon. He has an internal monologue that moves from one thing to another so quickly that you almost can’t keep track of it; and most of what he’s thinking to himself has nothing to do with what’s happening in the picture. Soderbergh uses this personality quirk both to play up the humor - it’s an exceptional bit of screenwriting - and to give the viewer a better sense of who this character is; and by the time we get around to the end, a lot of the events that take place in the picture, and which seem utterly implausible when they are happening, end up feeling reasonably believable when you filter them through the lens of Mark’s inner monologue. Damon probably gets a Golden Globe nomination for his work here - but only because the Globes nominate in the lead acting category for both comedies/musicals and dramas.
The problems with the film are not with the acting or the story, but rather with the techincal aspects. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that Steven Soderbergh was a director with an enormous amount of indie cred. I don’t know how this decision got made, nor who made it. I was not consulted. I don’t know if I would go as far as to call him a hack, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t call him a hack, either. The whole “indie” film thing may well have started with sex, lies, and videotape, but that cinematic capital has got a shelf life.
The first problem is the lighting. You can’t always blame the director for this one, even if the director should be telling the cinematographer how to light the scene and then signing off on it before they roll film; but here you do get to blame the director, because Soderbergh also shot the picture. I’m not a photography person, so I don’t know the technical way to explain this; but Soderbergh did not do a very good job of reducing or eliminating the glare coming from ambient light sources - particularly the sun shining in through windows. The hazy glare occasionally dominated the frame and was exceedingly distracting; and if that haze was supposed to be symbolic of anything, I don’t think it worked. If it was supposed to add anything to what we get of Mark’s mental state, it’s nowhere near as effective as the internal monologue.
Second problem is close-up shots. These are hazy too, which means that the haze probably comes in part from the film stock or maybe a setting on the shutter that altered the exposure (again, not a photography guy, so just guessing here); and they’re not especially contextual, either - often it’s just the head of the character, usually Matt Damon, without a lot of contrast to create any kind of an interesting composition. I would think, though, that those are going to be minor quibbles for most people, if they even notice them at all.
Some technical positives include the score by Marvin Hamlisch, which was kitschy and vaguely nostalgic - along with the colorful titles indicating place and time throughout the picture (the one indicating that the story has moved to Tokyo is drawn vertically, a nod to how Japanese is read), it evoked a sort of post-modern 1970s feel in a 1990s setting. The music was light and airy and almost had an old school video game feel to it - I half expected to hear “Soul Bossa Nova” by Quincy Jones come pouring out of the speakers at various points in the film; and it would not at all have surprised me to have seen a dance number at some point - one that would have fit here in an odd kind of way, the complete opposite of the one at the end of Slumdog Millionaire, which utterly failed. I was also surprised by how much I noticed the way that CRT computer monitors looked anachronistic. They’ve only just gone the way of the dodo in the last five or six years, but seeing them on all those desks gave me the feeling that the picture was set much longer ago than the early-mid 1990s.
This sounds way more negative than my actual impression of the film, and I think that’s mainly because this is a very good comic performance, by Matt Damon, that is situated inside of a film that just isn’t very interesting. I have a hard time making an emotional connection with lying corporate executives who have more money than they could ever spend and yet think they need to keep making more and more of it - at the expense of their customers. Like Jerry Maguire, this film says something ugly about our culture, without any of the anti-heroic romantic overtones of movies like The Godfather. And we’re just supposed to sit back and laugh at it? Give me Al Gore or Michael Moore any day, I think - at least they’re opening eyes and provoking debate by speaking the truth, however exaggerated it may be. This movie just passively makes light of what we the people have allowed this fading republic to become - an oblivious, anachronistic joke.
But it wasn’t. It actually happened, to Mark Whitacre, back in the 1990s. Steven Soderbergh has crafted a film based on a fictionalized version of events, and he’s mostly done a good job with it. He gets a terrific performance from Damon, who flings himself into the role of hapless corporate stooge with reckless abandon. He has an internal monologue that moves from one thing to another so quickly that you almost can’t keep track of it; and most of what he’s thinking to himself has nothing to do with what’s happening in the picture. Soderbergh uses this personality quirk both to play up the humor - it’s an exceptional bit of screenwriting - and to give the viewer a better sense of who this character is; and by the time we get around to the end, a lot of the events that take place in the picture, and which seem utterly implausible when they are happening, end up feeling reasonably believable when you filter them through the lens of Mark’s inner monologue. Damon probably gets a Golden Globe nomination for his work here - but only because the Globes nominate in the lead acting category for both comedies/musicals and dramas.
The problems with the film are not with the acting or the story, but rather with the techincal aspects. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that Steven Soderbergh was a director with an enormous amount of indie cred. I don’t know how this decision got made, nor who made it. I was not consulted. I don’t know if I would go as far as to call him a hack, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t call him a hack, either. The whole “indie” film thing may well have started with sex, lies, and videotape, but that cinematic capital has got a shelf life.
The first problem is the lighting. You can’t always blame the director for this one, even if the director should be telling the cinematographer how to light the scene and then signing off on it before they roll film; but here you do get to blame the director, because Soderbergh also shot the picture. I’m not a photography person, so I don’t know the technical way to explain this; but Soderbergh did not do a very good job of reducing or eliminating the glare coming from ambient light sources - particularly the sun shining in through windows. The hazy glare occasionally dominated the frame and was exceedingly distracting; and if that haze was supposed to be symbolic of anything, I don’t think it worked. If it was supposed to add anything to what we get of Mark’s mental state, it’s nowhere near as effective as the internal monologue.
Second problem is close-up shots. These are hazy too, which means that the haze probably comes in part from the film stock or maybe a setting on the shutter that altered the exposure (again, not a photography guy, so just guessing here); and they’re not especially contextual, either - often it’s just the head of the character, usually Matt Damon, without a lot of contrast to create any kind of an interesting composition. I would think, though, that those are going to be minor quibbles for most people, if they even notice them at all.
Some technical positives include the score by Marvin Hamlisch, which was kitschy and vaguely nostalgic - along with the colorful titles indicating place and time throughout the picture (the one indicating that the story has moved to Tokyo is drawn vertically, a nod to how Japanese is read), it evoked a sort of post-modern 1970s feel in a 1990s setting. The music was light and airy and almost had an old school video game feel to it - I half expected to hear “Soul Bossa Nova” by Quincy Jones come pouring out of the speakers at various points in the film; and it would not at all have surprised me to have seen a dance number at some point - one that would have fit here in an odd kind of way, the complete opposite of the one at the end of Slumdog Millionaire, which utterly failed. I was also surprised by how much I noticed the way that CRT computer monitors looked anachronistic. They’ve only just gone the way of the dodo in the last five or six years, but seeing them on all those desks gave me the feeling that the picture was set much longer ago than the early-mid 1990s.
This sounds way more negative than my actual impression of the film, and I think that’s mainly because this is a very good comic performance, by Matt Damon, that is situated inside of a film that just isn’t very interesting. I have a hard time making an emotional connection with lying corporate executives who have more money than they could ever spend and yet think they need to keep making more and more of it - at the expense of their customers. Like Jerry Maguire, this film says something ugly about our culture, without any of the anti-heroic romantic overtones of movies like The Godfather. And we’re just supposed to sit back and laugh at it? Give me Al Gore or Michael Moore any day, I think - at least they’re opening eyes and provoking debate by speaking the truth, however exaggerated it may be. This movie just passively makes light of what we the people have allowed this fading republic to become - an oblivious, anachronistic joke.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Deep Thoughts #9
All the donkeys braying for Obama’s birth certificate are also braying for the release of the unedited ACORN videos - right?? Sure they are.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Deep Thoughts #8
Maybe that should be the Kanye West Finishing School for Young Gentlemen, not Robert Montgomery Knight Finishing School for Young Gentlemen.
Monday, September 14, 2009
I'm Not There
I’m curious about anyone’s opinion in general, of course, but I’m especially interested in the opinions of those who have seen this movie and who have no real interest in or identification with the mystique of Bob Dylan - although I don’t imagine there are all that many people out there who land in the space where those two circles converge. The film trades heavily on that mystique, and though the music is there, too, it’s largely in the background, almost an afterthought. (I could be way wrong about this, because there is plenty of music in the film, but that’s the sense I got - that director Todd Haynes, while acknowledging the music through extensive inclusion in the film, put the focus of the film more on the person that the music helped to create and meant, quite specifically, for the music to ride shotgun.) I have the strong impression that this film will not appeal all that much to people who are not, to some degree, fascinated with Bob Dylan.
I count myself among that number, and was interested in the film in that respect; but the cast was also quite strong, and people whose faces I had not expected to see, for whatever reason, kept showing up. It’s possible that I knew they were in the film when we played it, but have since filed that information away somewhere in the back of my head - so it surprised me when, early in the film, Julianne Moore showed up, playing Alice Fabian (Joan Baez). It was also a pleasant surprise to see Charlotte Gainsbourg as Claire (Sara Lownds).
Unfortunately, due to the film’s long running time (two hours and fifteen minutes), I did not have a chance to sit down and watch it from beginning to end; in fact, I watched parts of it on three non-consecutive days over the course of the last week, and I am afraid that my appreciation - not to mention comprehension - of the movie suffered beacuse of that. I still liked it - there’s much to like for Dylan geeks - but it never really grabbed me as a totally coherent project. Of course, that could well be a statement about the not particularly coherent life of Bob Dylan - or the early part of that life, at any rate. The film is a stylistic interpretation of Dylan’s life from early adulthood to around the time of the motorcycle accident, and features six different actors playing various “versions” of Dylan. (Four of the six are white men - the other two are a white woman and a young black boy.)
And when I say “stylistic,” what I mostly mean is that film editor Jay Rabinowitz was apparently just let loose to cut and paste as he saw fit. I didn’t get a good sense of the overall tone that Haynes was trying to convey - some of the Dylans were seated firmly in the gritty realism camp, and others were in a more ethereal, otherworldly, totally fictionalized kind of place - and I don’t think that the editing helped all that much, even though Rabinowitz is a talented and accomplished editor. He’s worked extensively with indie stalwarts Darren Aronofsky and Jim Jarmusch, and his work on Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is some of the best film editing I’ve ever seen. There may have been too many threads to try to fit together here. The film is coherent, but its sense of chronology is muddled; and the editing overall comes off as affected, rather than effective.
Anyway...is there anyone out there who saw this film and doesn’t count him- or herself a Dylan geek? I’m interested to know how this film worked (or didn’t work) on objective viewers.
I count myself among that number, and was interested in the film in that respect; but the cast was also quite strong, and people whose faces I had not expected to see, for whatever reason, kept showing up. It’s possible that I knew they were in the film when we played it, but have since filed that information away somewhere in the back of my head - so it surprised me when, early in the film, Julianne Moore showed up, playing Alice Fabian (Joan Baez). It was also a pleasant surprise to see Charlotte Gainsbourg as Claire (Sara Lownds).
Unfortunately, due to the film’s long running time (two hours and fifteen minutes), I did not have a chance to sit down and watch it from beginning to end; in fact, I watched parts of it on three non-consecutive days over the course of the last week, and I am afraid that my appreciation - not to mention comprehension - of the movie suffered beacuse of that. I still liked it - there’s much to like for Dylan geeks - but it never really grabbed me as a totally coherent project. Of course, that could well be a statement about the not particularly coherent life of Bob Dylan - or the early part of that life, at any rate. The film is a stylistic interpretation of Dylan’s life from early adulthood to around the time of the motorcycle accident, and features six different actors playing various “versions” of Dylan. (Four of the six are white men - the other two are a white woman and a young black boy.)
And when I say “stylistic,” what I mostly mean is that film editor Jay Rabinowitz was apparently just let loose to cut and paste as he saw fit. I didn’t get a good sense of the overall tone that Haynes was trying to convey - some of the Dylans were seated firmly in the gritty realism camp, and others were in a more ethereal, otherworldly, totally fictionalized kind of place - and I don’t think that the editing helped all that much, even though Rabinowitz is a talented and accomplished editor. He’s worked extensively with indie stalwarts Darren Aronofsky and Jim Jarmusch, and his work on Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is some of the best film editing I’ve ever seen. There may have been too many threads to try to fit together here. The film is coherent, but its sense of chronology is muddled; and the editing overall comes off as affected, rather than effective.
Anyway...is there anyone out there who saw this film and doesn’t count him- or herself a Dylan geek? I’m interested to know how this film worked (or didn’t work) on objective viewers.
Friday, September 11, 2009
The Mike Tyson Women's Studies Institute
Okay, let me see if I understand this...no, let’s not start like that. One can’t attempt to see if one understands something if the thing in question is beyond all bounds of reasonable comprehension. Let me see if I’ve got this right...or correct, at any rate. Let me see if I’ve got these facts straight.
The University of Wyoming just opened an international center that they named after former Führer Dick Cheney? An international center? A place where people will go to learn how to work and play well with people in other countries, right? That’s what this place is. And they named it after Dick Cheney, so complete a disaster of a human being and politician that his own disaster of a party doesn’t even want much to do with him anymore - and he gets an international center named after him.
Surprise...some folks are less than thrilled with the idea.
That’s like naming an institute of humility for Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Seinfeld. A nutrition council for Ray Kroc. An anti-exploitation task force for Ty Pennington. A linguistics center for George Bush. It would make more sense to start a songwriting blog and name it after anyone in Collective Soul. Anybody want to get together and open a restaurant called Lecter’s? How about the Robert Montgomery Knight Finishing School for Young Gentlemen? Or, let’s get back to international centers. Can the next one be named for Lou Dobbs? What about the Sarah Palin Political Relevance Temple? (Actually, it would be more on the scale of a bungalow than a temple, and if a realtor were trying to move it, they would write it up as “cozy," with, ahem..."nice curb appeal.") Is anyone in Laramie currently thinking of starting a campaign to change Ann Coulter’s name to Glinda?
The Cheneys donated a little over three million dollars to the university, and no college is going to turn down a donation like that - hell, you could shave a few zeros off of that and still have a lot of trustees willing to traffic in boat people if it means getting your check; but there has to be some cognitive dissonance going on behind closed doors out there in the great wide open...right? Man...how do you top that? Seriously. Name José Canseco the new drug czar? Why don’t we start a new band called Original Software Ideas and get Bill Gates to sing lead?
You can be so cosmically awful at your job that you get your name on a place that concentrates on the thing you were worst at. I can almost hear the space-time continuum tearing open. Anything is possible now. I fully expect to hear on the news that James Brady met Ted Nugent at a Fuddrucker’s and shook his hand. Ralph Nader is going to go to the store for a gallon of milk and a pound of olive loaf, and he’s not going to wear his seat belt. The entire NFL season will go by without a New England Patriot faking an injury to get a legal Chris Webber timeout. The Indiana Hoosiers football team will be buying tickets to Pasadena. Geddy Lee’s gonna cut his hair. The Colts will blitz. Steve Jobs will put on a suit. If Kurt Cobain were still alive, he’d learn how to sing. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will say something that makes sense. Oh, the humanity.
The only thing more tasteless and retarded for the University of Wyoming to have done would have been to have the ribbon-cutting ceremony today, at 8:46am, with some douche from the university wearing an FDNY cap.
The University of Wyoming just opened an international center that they named after former Führer Dick Cheney? An international center? A place where people will go to learn how to work and play well with people in other countries, right? That’s what this place is. And they named it after Dick Cheney, so complete a disaster of a human being and politician that his own disaster of a party doesn’t even want much to do with him anymore - and he gets an international center named after him.
Surprise...some folks are less than thrilled with the idea.
That’s like naming an institute of humility for Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Seinfeld. A nutrition council for Ray Kroc. An anti-exploitation task force for Ty Pennington. A linguistics center for George Bush. It would make more sense to start a songwriting blog and name it after anyone in Collective Soul. Anybody want to get together and open a restaurant called Lecter’s? How about the Robert Montgomery Knight Finishing School for Young Gentlemen? Or, let’s get back to international centers. Can the next one be named for Lou Dobbs? What about the Sarah Palin Political Relevance Temple? (Actually, it would be more on the scale of a bungalow than a temple, and if a realtor were trying to move it, they would write it up as “cozy," with, ahem..."nice curb appeal.") Is anyone in Laramie currently thinking of starting a campaign to change Ann Coulter’s name to Glinda?
The Cheneys donated a little over three million dollars to the university, and no college is going to turn down a donation like that - hell, you could shave a few zeros off of that and still have a lot of trustees willing to traffic in boat people if it means getting your check; but there has to be some cognitive dissonance going on behind closed doors out there in the great wide open...right? Man...how do you top that? Seriously. Name José Canseco the new drug czar? Why don’t we start a new band called Original Software Ideas and get Bill Gates to sing lead?
You can be so cosmically awful at your job that you get your name on a place that concentrates on the thing you were worst at. I can almost hear the space-time continuum tearing open. Anything is possible now. I fully expect to hear on the news that James Brady met Ted Nugent at a Fuddrucker’s and shook his hand. Ralph Nader is going to go to the store for a gallon of milk and a pound of olive loaf, and he’s not going to wear his seat belt. The entire NFL season will go by without a New England Patriot faking an injury to get a legal Chris Webber timeout. The Indiana Hoosiers football team will be buying tickets to Pasadena. Geddy Lee’s gonna cut his hair. The Colts will blitz. Steve Jobs will put on a suit. If Kurt Cobain were still alive, he’d learn how to sing. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will say something that makes sense. Oh, the humanity.
The only thing more tasteless and retarded for the University of Wyoming to have done would have been to have the ribbon-cutting ceremony today, at 8:46am, with some douche from the university wearing an FDNY cap.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
O' Horten
I’ll tell you, at the rate I’m going with catching up on the movies we’ve played that I haven’t seen, I could almost start to develop an animosity toward English-language films. Looking down that list of films I’ve watched recently, there’s a lot of disappointing stuff in American - and a lot of really good stuff in languages other than American. (And yes, I know that American isn’t a langauge. I’m making fun of the jackoffs who think that there’s something wrong with you if your skin ain’t white and you don’t talk American.) The two best movies in that long list are both in English (Inglourious Basterds and The Hurt Locker) - but the remainder of the top five would be foreign language films, and I have a feeling that most of the top ten would be filled out by films that ain’t in American.
O’Horten would be one of those, even if it does slip into standard convention at the very end, and even if its first little vignette is stronger than all of the rest that follow. It’s a Norwegian picture by Bent Hamer about a man called Odd Horten who has just retired as a locomotive engineer after forty years of service. He is fêted by his colleagues, but gets locked out of the building where the party is going to be and then climbs some scaffolding to try to get into the building. Instead, he winds up in some other family’s apartment and wakes their little boy, who wants to show Horten his car and then insists that Horten sit in a chair next to his bunk bed until he falls asleep. Of course, Horten falls asleep too, and then sneaks out of the house the next morning while the family is having breakfast. It’s an absurd little vignette, but it’s awfully funny, and even a little bit touching, trading on a classical innocence that doesn’t quite become naïvete.
The rest of the film is a rolling series of similar vignettes, ticked off in episodic fashion, though none of them are either as absurd or as funny as that first one. Horten pays a visit to his extremely elderly, nearly catatonic mother (who was once a ski jumper) and gives her some grapes, but she never speaks. There’s a story there, of course, but it’s not revealed until the end of the picture, and it is to Hamer’s credit (he also wrote the script) that he does not overdo it. The import of the story is poignant, and we get that - but he doesn’t rub our noses in it and make us wish that he had left it out. Later, Horten takes a sauna and falls asleep (again) and then goes skinny dipping when he wakes up, only to be interrupted by a couple with designs on a bit more than skinny dipping when they jump into the pool naked. Like in the scene when he stays overnight at the boy’s apartment, he manages to escape the pool unbeknownst to the others in attendance.
You could certainly argue that it is at least unlikely, and maybe even impossible, that he could make such an escape once - never mind more than once. You would probably be right, on a certain level; but that would be leaving out what Hamer might be trying to say about Horten and his place in the world, and what some of his really excellent compositions are trying to show. In a number of scenes (the sauna, and twice at a local pub), Horten is shown to be sitting off to the side, away from others. In the pub, he’s sitting in a seat tucked behind the front door. If you look at the door from inside the pub, you see Horten sitting immediately to the right of the door; but if you were to come into the pub and look around, you would miss him altogether. He is similarly situated in the sauna, all the way in the top corner, placed in such a way that he cannot physically be further removed from any other person in the room. The compositions make it clear that Horten, whether consciously or unconsciously, has distanced himself from everyone else. It’s a fish out of water story, but with a paucity of overt emotional intrigue and none of the self-importance of, say, a film like Forrest Gump.
It has some things in common with the 1994 Best Picture “winner,” but although Horten meets a lot of people under unlikely circumstances he’s not a walking tour of American (nor even of Norwegian) history - he’s just doing things he would not ordinarily have done due to having to be at work every day; and while the film certainly requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, it has a ring of authenticity to it that makes you feel like you’re having a yarn spun at you by someone who is awfully good at spinning yarns - and it doesn’t hurt that Baard Owe, as Horten, delivers such an understated, efficient performance. I thought bits of it were a little slow in the middle, but it works so well overall that I can’t really gripe about the middle bits.
Holds for one more week, on a limited schedule - so get out and see this one while you still can.
O’Horten would be one of those, even if it does slip into standard convention at the very end, and even if its first little vignette is stronger than all of the rest that follow. It’s a Norwegian picture by Bent Hamer about a man called Odd Horten who has just retired as a locomotive engineer after forty years of service. He is fêted by his colleagues, but gets locked out of the building where the party is going to be and then climbs some scaffolding to try to get into the building. Instead, he winds up in some other family’s apartment and wakes their little boy, who wants to show Horten his car and then insists that Horten sit in a chair next to his bunk bed until he falls asleep. Of course, Horten falls asleep too, and then sneaks out of the house the next morning while the family is having breakfast. It’s an absurd little vignette, but it’s awfully funny, and even a little bit touching, trading on a classical innocence that doesn’t quite become naïvete.
The rest of the film is a rolling series of similar vignettes, ticked off in episodic fashion, though none of them are either as absurd or as funny as that first one. Horten pays a visit to his extremely elderly, nearly catatonic mother (who was once a ski jumper) and gives her some grapes, but she never speaks. There’s a story there, of course, but it’s not revealed until the end of the picture, and it is to Hamer’s credit (he also wrote the script) that he does not overdo it. The import of the story is poignant, and we get that - but he doesn’t rub our noses in it and make us wish that he had left it out. Later, Horten takes a sauna and falls asleep (again) and then goes skinny dipping when he wakes up, only to be interrupted by a couple with designs on a bit more than skinny dipping when they jump into the pool naked. Like in the scene when he stays overnight at the boy’s apartment, he manages to escape the pool unbeknownst to the others in attendance.
You could certainly argue that it is at least unlikely, and maybe even impossible, that he could make such an escape once - never mind more than once. You would probably be right, on a certain level; but that would be leaving out what Hamer might be trying to say about Horten and his place in the world, and what some of his really excellent compositions are trying to show. In a number of scenes (the sauna, and twice at a local pub), Horten is shown to be sitting off to the side, away from others. In the pub, he’s sitting in a seat tucked behind the front door. If you look at the door from inside the pub, you see Horten sitting immediately to the right of the door; but if you were to come into the pub and look around, you would miss him altogether. He is similarly situated in the sauna, all the way in the top corner, placed in such a way that he cannot physically be further removed from any other person in the room. The compositions make it clear that Horten, whether consciously or unconsciously, has distanced himself from everyone else. It’s a fish out of water story, but with a paucity of overt emotional intrigue and none of the self-importance of, say, a film like Forrest Gump.
It has some things in common with the 1994 Best Picture “winner,” but although Horten meets a lot of people under unlikely circumstances he’s not a walking tour of American (nor even of Norwegian) history - he’s just doing things he would not ordinarily have done due to having to be at work every day; and while the film certainly requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, it has a ring of authenticity to it that makes you feel like you’re having a yarn spun at you by someone who is awfully good at spinning yarns - and it doesn’t hurt that Baard Owe, as Horten, delivers such an understated, efficient performance. I thought bits of it were a little slow in the middle, but it works so well overall that I can’t really gripe about the middle bits.
Holds for one more week, on a limited schedule - so get out and see this one while you still can.
Deep Thoughts #7
Are there really people who think that “public option” equals “socialized medicine?” Are they eligible for refunds on their college tuition?
Monday, September 07, 2009
Tetro
I feel bad just tossing out a scathing review of this film, mostly because of how sincere Francis Ford Coppola comes across when you read practically anything he has said or written about making this film - which he counts among the most enjoyable experiences he has had making a movie over the entirety of his career; and yet I can’t help thinking, “Man, if you had followed The Conversation with this picture (Tetro), you might not be working today. Or else you’d be lighting scenes for Martin Scorsese, something along those lines.”
It’s not that Tetro is a bad movie; there are elements of technical filmmaking in the picture that are actually quite good, and I’m sure that the many, many allusions and homages make the film considerably richer for serious students of film (the only one that I picked up was to Charles Foster Kane, and I haven’t even seen that movie) - but what the film has to recommend it in terms of style and technical merit doesn’t really outweigh the weaknesses in the story and the acting that detract most from the film. As the director, Coppola is partly to blame, too, because the film just goes on way too long; there should be a rule that a director is limited to a certain amount of running time, if that director is planning to cast Vincent Gallo in a role containing anything other than incidental speaking parts.
Gallo is Tetro, a going-on-middle-aged guy who is estranged, it would seem, from all of humanity - but particularly from anyone to whom he is directly related. He lives in present day Buenos Aires with his live-in lover, and he’s something of a hapless gadabout, if you can get your head around a Bizarro, negative version of the traditional gadabout. He occasionally runs the lights at the local playhouse, but most of the time he just hangs around and looks angry and defeated and grizzled. His back story starts to come out when his brother Bennie turns up on his doorstep one day, and the rest of the film is basically two parts - the brothers catching up on their ten year estrangement, and then some natural progression of their relationship now that their lives have intersected once again.
Coppola describes the things that take place in the film in this way (the quote may not be verbatim, but the gist is there): “Nothing in the film actually happened, but it’s all true.” The domineering father in the film doesn’t quite match up to what is known about Coppola’s own father, but there are similarities; and you can pretty easily see Talia Shire in Miranda (Tetro’s lover)'s eyes; but though there are shades of autobiography in the story, the film clearly plays like Coppola is trying to make a grand movie from the old studio days, an über-melodramatic chronicle of what might have happened in his own life if things had not gone so well for him. It might even be the kind of melodrama that could have worked under other circumstances, one of which would be if Coppola had not chosen to stack even more melodrama at the end on top of the already shaky melodrama on which the story is built. Unfortunately, the story does, in fact, go in that direction, and it largely falls apart by the end; but that’s not the biggest problem with the movie.
That would be Gallo. I haven’t seen him in anything else. He might actually be a genius, I don’t know. Based on Tetro, however, I would seriously doubt it. He does angry and brooding awfully well; but like George Gervin and the finger roll, that would appear to be all that he can do. Well, no wait...he can smoke cigarettes, too. I don’t think he smokes quite as many as John Mellencamp does in real life, or as many as Billy Bob Thornton did in The Man Who Wasn’t There - but it’s a lot. Beyond that, though, Tetro the character is pretty much the same at the end of picture as he was at the beginning. There’s a reveal, and an obligatory reconciliation sequence; but the reveal is unnecessary, and because the reconciliation is dependent upon the reveal, that also feels out of place and ineffectual. Tetro - both the character and the film - fail to develop sufficiently to the point that the ending is believable. Tetro the character is the key to Tetro the film, but he lacks the essential humanity that would allow the audience to invest any kind of emotion or interest in the character. I just didn’t find Tetro authentic as a person, and when the character can’t connect with the audience in any meaningful kind of way, it’s awfully hard for the story to gain any traction.
Stylistically, though, the film is sort of nice to look at. Coppola shot in digital, and parts of that were in high definition. You can pick up some of that high definition, even in a 35mm print projected non-digitally, largely because of how well lit and shot the film is. There is so much contrast in so many of the black and white shots that some of the scenes and images approach the point of chiaroscuro. On the other hand, color flashback sequences, shot on grainy home-video stock, are a little bit distracting - and they do a disservice to Tetro the character by letting us see into his memory rather than forcing him to talk about those memories and thereby reveal his deeply barricaded humanity.
I was talking to Heather at work the other day, about the novels of Chuck Palahniuk and what might be the reason that I don’t get how those novels have achieved the level of cult appeal that they have achieved. Heather’s opinion was that I am too old, and that may well be true. I get that they’re funny, and I laugh at the jokes; but the translation to film is awkward (especially for something like Choke), and for all of Palahniuk’s considerable skill at breathing perverse life into a cast of characters, his ability to tell a story with those characters is not nearly so polished. The reason that I didn’t fully appreciate Tetro, in the spirit in which it was intended to be appreciated, might run to the opposite extreme - I might be too young. It’s certainly true that I could have done a much better job of studying film to this point in my life than I have done (the last two months of writing about the movies I have watched - 34 films in July and August - notwithstanding); but it is not possible for me to have been able to study the films and filmmakers Coppola references here when those films were current - and at the end of the day, I get the feeling that Coppola, who says he wishes he could have been making this kind of movie all along, has made this film less for the modern audience in toto than for his own contemporaries specifically.
It’s not that Tetro is a bad movie; there are elements of technical filmmaking in the picture that are actually quite good, and I’m sure that the many, many allusions and homages make the film considerably richer for serious students of film (the only one that I picked up was to Charles Foster Kane, and I haven’t even seen that movie) - but what the film has to recommend it in terms of style and technical merit doesn’t really outweigh the weaknesses in the story and the acting that detract most from the film. As the director, Coppola is partly to blame, too, because the film just goes on way too long; there should be a rule that a director is limited to a certain amount of running time, if that director is planning to cast Vincent Gallo in a role containing anything other than incidental speaking parts.
Gallo is Tetro, a going-on-middle-aged guy who is estranged, it would seem, from all of humanity - but particularly from anyone to whom he is directly related. He lives in present day Buenos Aires with his live-in lover, and he’s something of a hapless gadabout, if you can get your head around a Bizarro, negative version of the traditional gadabout. He occasionally runs the lights at the local playhouse, but most of the time he just hangs around and looks angry and defeated and grizzled. His back story starts to come out when his brother Bennie turns up on his doorstep one day, and the rest of the film is basically two parts - the brothers catching up on their ten year estrangement, and then some natural progression of their relationship now that their lives have intersected once again.
Coppola describes the things that take place in the film in this way (the quote may not be verbatim, but the gist is there): “Nothing in the film actually happened, but it’s all true.” The domineering father in the film doesn’t quite match up to what is known about Coppola’s own father, but there are similarities; and you can pretty easily see Talia Shire in Miranda (Tetro’s lover)'s eyes; but though there are shades of autobiography in the story, the film clearly plays like Coppola is trying to make a grand movie from the old studio days, an über-melodramatic chronicle of what might have happened in his own life if things had not gone so well for him. It might even be the kind of melodrama that could have worked under other circumstances, one of which would be if Coppola had not chosen to stack even more melodrama at the end on top of the already shaky melodrama on which the story is built. Unfortunately, the story does, in fact, go in that direction, and it largely falls apart by the end; but that’s not the biggest problem with the movie.
That would be Gallo. I haven’t seen him in anything else. He might actually be a genius, I don’t know. Based on Tetro, however, I would seriously doubt it. He does angry and brooding awfully well; but like George Gervin and the finger roll, that would appear to be all that he can do. Well, no wait...he can smoke cigarettes, too. I don’t think he smokes quite as many as John Mellencamp does in real life, or as many as Billy Bob Thornton did in The Man Who Wasn’t There - but it’s a lot. Beyond that, though, Tetro the character is pretty much the same at the end of picture as he was at the beginning. There’s a reveal, and an obligatory reconciliation sequence; but the reveal is unnecessary, and because the reconciliation is dependent upon the reveal, that also feels out of place and ineffectual. Tetro - both the character and the film - fail to develop sufficiently to the point that the ending is believable. Tetro the character is the key to Tetro the film, but he lacks the essential humanity that would allow the audience to invest any kind of emotion or interest in the character. I just didn’t find Tetro authentic as a person, and when the character can’t connect with the audience in any meaningful kind of way, it’s awfully hard for the story to gain any traction.
Stylistically, though, the film is sort of nice to look at. Coppola shot in digital, and parts of that were in high definition. You can pick up some of that high definition, even in a 35mm print projected non-digitally, largely because of how well lit and shot the film is. There is so much contrast in so many of the black and white shots that some of the scenes and images approach the point of chiaroscuro. On the other hand, color flashback sequences, shot on grainy home-video stock, are a little bit distracting - and they do a disservice to Tetro the character by letting us see into his memory rather than forcing him to talk about those memories and thereby reveal his deeply barricaded humanity.
I was talking to Heather at work the other day, about the novels of Chuck Palahniuk and what might be the reason that I don’t get how those novels have achieved the level of cult appeal that they have achieved. Heather’s opinion was that I am too old, and that may well be true. I get that they’re funny, and I laugh at the jokes; but the translation to film is awkward (especially for something like Choke), and for all of Palahniuk’s considerable skill at breathing perverse life into a cast of characters, his ability to tell a story with those characters is not nearly so polished. The reason that I didn’t fully appreciate Tetro, in the spirit in which it was intended to be appreciated, might run to the opposite extreme - I might be too young. It’s certainly true that I could have done a much better job of studying film to this point in my life than I have done (the last two months of writing about the movies I have watched - 34 films in July and August - notwithstanding); but it is not possible for me to have been able to study the films and filmmakers Coppola references here when those films were current - and at the end of the day, I get the feeling that Coppola, who says he wishes he could have been making this kind of movie all along, has made this film less for the modern audience in toto than for his own contemporaries specifically.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Taking Woodstock
Every now and then, I find myself thinking that I was born at the wrong time, and I usually find myself thinking this when I read about the 1960s or see a movie that gets into the hippie excesses of the 1960s - especially the latter half of the decade, after we put troops on the ground in Vietnam and had the Summer of Love. Taking Woodstock, obviously, is such a picture. It’s also an Ang Lee picture, so I had a bit of trepidation going in, as I’ve begun to notice that most of the Ang Lee pictures I have seen start out so slowly as to be ponderous - even the otherwise brilliant Brokeback Mountain - and only manage to ramp up to a sort of geriatric crawl, even during the most important scenes.
Adapted from the memoirs of Elliot Tiber - apparently Ang Lee is also averse to working with original screenplays - this is the story of how the Woodstock concert came to be, more so than it is about the actual concert and the music that was played and the musicians who were there (and who were not there). It’s forty years now since the concert, and there is certainly no shortage of commemorative music to be found to celebrate the anniversary; this is the other side of the story - everything that was going on at Woodstock besides the concert: hundreds of thousands of kids getting high, getting laid, getting muddy, and camping out on a section of rural New York highway that the state police had to close due to the congestion created by people arriving for the festival. It’s the story of how a group of people co-opted the fields of a local dairy farmer called Max Yasgur and basically cut off a small section of rural New York from the rest of the world so that they could hold a festival that they had no idea would turn into the monstrous event that actually took place during those three days of peace and music.
Tiber’s parents were running a roadside motel in the summer of 1969 when Elliot read in the newspaper about the banning of a music festival to be put on by Woodstock Ventures in the nearby town of Wallkill, New York; Elliot was at an awkward time in his life, having just moved back in with his parents - after living in Manhattan for a number of years - in order to help them get the mortgage on the motel out of arrears; and the time, of course, was ripe for the bright young Elliot to do something big with his life. The time also seems ripe to begin railing against the melodramatic use of the standard coming-of-age story by an overly sentimental director. Happily, though, we don’t have to do that. We can still rail against Ang Lee for starting his movies slowly (although this may have more to do with his being Taiwanese than with his being an overrated director - apparently it’s standard operating procedure for films from Taiwan to open slowly), but he manages mostly to avoid the melodrama. In fact, he makes a pointed decision to move away from the very intense drama he’s worked with in recent films (Lust, Caution and Brokeback Mountain) and toward an actual comedy. I’m not sure, however, that he quite gets there. There are funny moments, but there are at least as many awkward moments that feel like they were supposed to be funny as there are genuinely funny moments - almost as though Lee isn’t really sure how to direct comedy and like his actors aren’t really sure what to do when he tries.
The choice to the show the things going on behind the scenes, rather than the concert itself, is an interesting one - and one that works, I think - because Woodstock, at least in the popular culture, has always been at least as much about the spectacle of the gathering as it has been about the music - some of which was postponed or cancelled due to rain, and some acts didn’t end up going on stage until the very wee hours of the morning, when most of the festival-goers were asleep (or passed out). Before I saw the trailer for this film, I don’t know that it had ever really occurred to me that Woodstock, at some point anyway, had to have gone through a stage when it was just in the planning, when there were still logistics of permits and financing and security and accommodations to figure out; and I had not known that the venue had changed so close to the date of the festival, to the point that actually putting together an event in Bethel, New York, wasn’t so much about getting everything right as it was getting the absolute essentials - namely, a stage - ready to go so that the tens of thousands of expected attendees (there were around 100,000 tickets already sold at the time of the venue change) would have something to see when they got there.
The climax of the film comes when Elliot finally goes to Max’s fields to see the concert, which has been his goal all along - but which is hard to do when you’re in charge of so many things back at the base camp. There is some discrepancy in the historical record regarding who called whom at the outset of changing the venue from Wallkill to Bethel and regarding how well Elliot knew Max Yasgur (if at all, though they seem quite chummy in the film); but the film is not a documentary (that film has already been made), and it’s not a concert film (I don’t know if that one got made or not) - it’s a fictionalized account of Elliot’s involvement with the biggest concert of all time, and the point is doing the thing itself. In this case, it means putting on the festival - which is a microcosmic rebellion that also works as an allegory to the macrocosmic rebellion that took place generally in the 1960s.
Elliot never makes it to the concert. Instead, he spends the night in a van with two hippies from California (I may be wrong on the state they came from, but it doesn’t matter), played by Paul Dano and Kelli Garner. Elliot drops acid for the first time and experiences a mind-bending change in his perceptions that is also - like so much else in this film - indicative of the larger themes of the 1960s; but there’s something else going on here, something that goes back to Elliot’s unwillingness to let his parents go when they get behind on their mortgage - even though it is suggested to him by his sister that he do so. It’s never explicitly stated - and since it’s the sixties, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the lines are drawn anyway - but Elliot is gay, and it’s clear by his mannerisms and his demeanor that he feels trapped by his life, both literally and figuratively. His first acid trip allows him to get to a place where he can be okay leaving mom and dad behind and setting out on his own.
Dropping a tab of Pluto is no longer the socially accepted method for getting right with one’s personal demons, of course. A generation ago, though, drugs were very much a way of dealing with pressure - a pressure that was generated largely by the Great American Patriot in the aftermath of the second World War and the attendant post-war prosperity in America. The lovely decade of the 1950s, the first with television, so that all Americans could, for the first time, see exactly the image of American life that a handful of power brokers wanted them to see and thought was the proper kind, cemented into the popular consciousness the fake idea of “traditional marriage” and the patently misogynistic idea of the male breadwinner household. Though both ideas are obviously incorrect and outmoded, they have lived on thanks to conservative people who are afraid of change. These are the ones in the diner at the beginning of the film, after it breaks in the local paper that the festival that was killed by Wallkill is now coming to Bethel - the ones who say they are going to boycott Yasgur’s milk and that all the Jews ought to leave town. This is narrow-minded conservative thinking, but all conservative thinking really is, at the bottom, is fear - fear of change and of the unknown. When people are finally smart enough to face their fears and stop thinking conservatively, then we can finally really talk about the land of the free and the home of the brave.
That’s a lot of pressure to let off, and it should not really have come as a surprise that something like “The Sixties” had to happen in order for that pressure to equalize. So much misguided thinking had to come to a head at some point. The children of the fifties became the young adults of the sixties, and they realized that most of what their parents had taught them was either wrong or dangerous or both. Those young adults didn’t always know what they were doing, and they didn’t get everything right; but the heart of their argument - which culminated with Woodstock - was absolutely correct. They knew that something was wrong, and they knew that they had to get out. Those themes are all still relevant forty years later, and the need to break away from conservative thinking is greater than ever. Taking Woodstock does a really good job of showing us how much was really going on in that tiny little New York town, of showing us how important it is to be truly free - and of reminding us how far we still have to go to get there.
Adapted from the memoirs of Elliot Tiber - apparently Ang Lee is also averse to working with original screenplays - this is the story of how the Woodstock concert came to be, more so than it is about the actual concert and the music that was played and the musicians who were there (and who were not there). It’s forty years now since the concert, and there is certainly no shortage of commemorative music to be found to celebrate the anniversary; this is the other side of the story - everything that was going on at Woodstock besides the concert: hundreds of thousands of kids getting high, getting laid, getting muddy, and camping out on a section of rural New York highway that the state police had to close due to the congestion created by people arriving for the festival. It’s the story of how a group of people co-opted the fields of a local dairy farmer called Max Yasgur and basically cut off a small section of rural New York from the rest of the world so that they could hold a festival that they had no idea would turn into the monstrous event that actually took place during those three days of peace and music.
Tiber’s parents were running a roadside motel in the summer of 1969 when Elliot read in the newspaper about the banning of a music festival to be put on by Woodstock Ventures in the nearby town of Wallkill, New York; Elliot was at an awkward time in his life, having just moved back in with his parents - after living in Manhattan for a number of years - in order to help them get the mortgage on the motel out of arrears; and the time, of course, was ripe for the bright young Elliot to do something big with his life. The time also seems ripe to begin railing against the melodramatic use of the standard coming-of-age story by an overly sentimental director. Happily, though, we don’t have to do that. We can still rail against Ang Lee for starting his movies slowly (although this may have more to do with his being Taiwanese than with his being an overrated director - apparently it’s standard operating procedure for films from Taiwan to open slowly), but he manages mostly to avoid the melodrama. In fact, he makes a pointed decision to move away from the very intense drama he’s worked with in recent films (Lust, Caution and Brokeback Mountain) and toward an actual comedy. I’m not sure, however, that he quite gets there. There are funny moments, but there are at least as many awkward moments that feel like they were supposed to be funny as there are genuinely funny moments - almost as though Lee isn’t really sure how to direct comedy and like his actors aren’t really sure what to do when he tries.
The choice to the show the things going on behind the scenes, rather than the concert itself, is an interesting one - and one that works, I think - because Woodstock, at least in the popular culture, has always been at least as much about the spectacle of the gathering as it has been about the music - some of which was postponed or cancelled due to rain, and some acts didn’t end up going on stage until the very wee hours of the morning, when most of the festival-goers were asleep (or passed out). Before I saw the trailer for this film, I don’t know that it had ever really occurred to me that Woodstock, at some point anyway, had to have gone through a stage when it was just in the planning, when there were still logistics of permits and financing and security and accommodations to figure out; and I had not known that the venue had changed so close to the date of the festival, to the point that actually putting together an event in Bethel, New York, wasn’t so much about getting everything right as it was getting the absolute essentials - namely, a stage - ready to go so that the tens of thousands of expected attendees (there were around 100,000 tickets already sold at the time of the venue change) would have something to see when they got there.
The climax of the film comes when Elliot finally goes to Max’s fields to see the concert, which has been his goal all along - but which is hard to do when you’re in charge of so many things back at the base camp. There is some discrepancy in the historical record regarding who called whom at the outset of changing the venue from Wallkill to Bethel and regarding how well Elliot knew Max Yasgur (if at all, though they seem quite chummy in the film); but the film is not a documentary (that film has already been made), and it’s not a concert film (I don’t know if that one got made or not) - it’s a fictionalized account of Elliot’s involvement with the biggest concert of all time, and the point is doing the thing itself. In this case, it means putting on the festival - which is a microcosmic rebellion that also works as an allegory to the macrocosmic rebellion that took place generally in the 1960s.
Elliot never makes it to the concert. Instead, he spends the night in a van with two hippies from California (I may be wrong on the state they came from, but it doesn’t matter), played by Paul Dano and Kelli Garner. Elliot drops acid for the first time and experiences a mind-bending change in his perceptions that is also - like so much else in this film - indicative of the larger themes of the 1960s; but there’s something else going on here, something that goes back to Elliot’s unwillingness to let his parents go when they get behind on their mortgage - even though it is suggested to him by his sister that he do so. It’s never explicitly stated - and since it’s the sixties, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the lines are drawn anyway - but Elliot is gay, and it’s clear by his mannerisms and his demeanor that he feels trapped by his life, both literally and figuratively. His first acid trip allows him to get to a place where he can be okay leaving mom and dad behind and setting out on his own.
Dropping a tab of Pluto is no longer the socially accepted method for getting right with one’s personal demons, of course. A generation ago, though, drugs were very much a way of dealing with pressure - a pressure that was generated largely by the Great American Patriot in the aftermath of the second World War and the attendant post-war prosperity in America. The lovely decade of the 1950s, the first with television, so that all Americans could, for the first time, see exactly the image of American life that a handful of power brokers wanted them to see and thought was the proper kind, cemented into the popular consciousness the fake idea of “traditional marriage” and the patently misogynistic idea of the male breadwinner household. Though both ideas are obviously incorrect and outmoded, they have lived on thanks to conservative people who are afraid of change. These are the ones in the diner at the beginning of the film, after it breaks in the local paper that the festival that was killed by Wallkill is now coming to Bethel - the ones who say they are going to boycott Yasgur’s milk and that all the Jews ought to leave town. This is narrow-minded conservative thinking, but all conservative thinking really is, at the bottom, is fear - fear of change and of the unknown. When people are finally smart enough to face their fears and stop thinking conservatively, then we can finally really talk about the land of the free and the home of the brave.
That’s a lot of pressure to let off, and it should not really have come as a surprise that something like “The Sixties” had to happen in order for that pressure to equalize. So much misguided thinking had to come to a head at some point. The children of the fifties became the young adults of the sixties, and they realized that most of what their parents had taught them was either wrong or dangerous or both. Those young adults didn’t always know what they were doing, and they didn’t get everything right; but the heart of their argument - which culminated with Woodstock - was absolutely correct. They knew that something was wrong, and they knew that they had to get out. Those themes are all still relevant forty years later, and the need to break away from conservative thinking is greater than ever. Taking Woodstock does a really good job of showing us how much was really going on in that tiny little New York town, of showing us how important it is to be truly free - and of reminding us how far we still have to go to get there.
The Full Quote
Blogger apparently only lets you have 500 characters with which to express yourself in the space below the title of your blog in the header. The quote I tried to put up there just now was closer to 600 characters, and I got a snooty little error message when I tried to save it. The full quote looks like this:
"[Paolo] Sorrentino seems to be essentially conceding that the days when there was a commercially viable audience for a cinema of civic conscience...are long gone, and that, in a new, highly competitive media and entertainment environment, today's primarily younger moviegoers will have to be enticed to see films dealing with their own political history or contemporary affairs by packaging them in a more compelling, tricked-out visual style, complemented by a generous helping of popular music." -Gary Crowdus, introduction to an interview with Paolo Sorrentino (Cineaste, vol. XXXIV, No.3)
Crowdus is the editor-in-chief of Cineaste magazine, a quarterly that deals with the politics involved in cinema nearly as much as it deals with cinema itself. I've lately discovered the joy of reading Film Comment, but that one only comes out every other month, so after I finished the latest issue, I started looking for other serious indie film magazines, and found Cineaste. Unfortunately, there is no link on their website to the interview with Sorrentino - and it looks like a new issue is out, so you might be out of luck at the newsstand, too. Maybe you can get a back issue! The issue with the Sorrentino interview also has two really good articles on the state of Palestinian cinema.
"[Paolo] Sorrentino seems to be essentially conceding that the days when there was a commercially viable audience for a cinema of civic conscience...are long gone, and that, in a new, highly competitive media and entertainment environment, today's primarily younger moviegoers will have to be enticed to see films dealing with their own political history or contemporary affairs by packaging them in a more compelling, tricked-out visual style, complemented by a generous helping of popular music." -Gary Crowdus, introduction to an interview with Paolo Sorrentino (Cineaste, vol. XXXIV, No.3)
Crowdus is the editor-in-chief of Cineaste magazine, a quarterly that deals with the politics involved in cinema nearly as much as it deals with cinema itself. I've lately discovered the joy of reading Film Comment, but that one only comes out every other month, so after I finished the latest issue, I started looking for other serious indie film magazines, and found Cineaste. Unfortunately, there is no link on their website to the interview with Sorrentino - and it looks like a new issue is out, so you might be out of luck at the newsstand, too. Maybe you can get a back issue! The issue with the Sorrentino interview also has two really good articles on the state of Palestinian cinema.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
New Photos #7
Some of these go all the way back to the middle of July (which actually isn't all that long ago, now I think about it - just seems to have been awhile back). Just a whole bunch of random stuff, all in one convenient place, which is here.
Anyway...got some shots of Jackson playing with a blow-up George Bush weeble I got at Half Price Books, one of those Battling Bush things where you can pretend to be boxing against an artist's fairly generic rendering of the 44th best president in the history of all these great united states that are just so great and united and liberty here in this average American country of ordinaries. Hopefully this will be the first step in teaching Jackson the important lesson that you should never vote for Republicans.
We've also got some shots of Jackson spinning around in my desk chair upstairs. The early indications seem to be that he's going to enjoy roller coasters like his dad does. He didn't like going way up in the air when he was very, very small - but he seems to have shaken that off, and it's pretty hard to upset his equilibrium these days.
There are a few pictures of Jackson going up and down a small bridge in Ellenberger Park (one of the few good things about my house is that it's situated so close to Ellenberger that you can walk to the park in about two minutes). He discovered that he likes to grab a rock from the gravel path, then walk up the bridge and chuck the rock into the creek, for the satisfying splashing sound that it makes.
The day after that, we went to the Middle Eastern Festival, which is going to replace the Greek Festival for us - now that the Greek Festival has left its soulful environs at 40th and Pennsylvania and moved to Carmel (mayor Jim Brainard's motto: "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!"). LIke all good-hearted people, I try to avoid Hamilton County as much as possible. The pictures of the Middle Eastern Festival are only of Jackson eating, but he does still like to mug for the camera (and I think he ate some pita and hummus that day). If you dig on Middle Eastern/Mediterranean food, what you get at the Middle Eastern festival is way better than what they have at the Greek Festival - and the prices are comparable.
Anyway...got some shots of Jackson playing with a blow-up George Bush weeble I got at Half Price Books, one of those Battling Bush things where you can pretend to be boxing against an artist's fairly generic rendering of the 44th best president in the history of all these great united states that are just so great and united and liberty here in this average American country of ordinaries. Hopefully this will be the first step in teaching Jackson the important lesson that you should never vote for Republicans.
We've also got some shots of Jackson spinning around in my desk chair upstairs. The early indications seem to be that he's going to enjoy roller coasters like his dad does. He didn't like going way up in the air when he was very, very small - but he seems to have shaken that off, and it's pretty hard to upset his equilibrium these days.
There are a few pictures of Jackson going up and down a small bridge in Ellenberger Park (one of the few good things about my house is that it's situated so close to Ellenberger that you can walk to the park in about two minutes). He discovered that he likes to grab a rock from the gravel path, then walk up the bridge and chuck the rock into the creek, for the satisfying splashing sound that it makes.
The day after that, we went to the Middle Eastern Festival, which is going to replace the Greek Festival for us - now that the Greek Festival has left its soulful environs at 40th and Pennsylvania and moved to Carmel (mayor Jim Brainard's motto: "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!"). LIke all good-hearted people, I try to avoid Hamilton County as much as possible. The pictures of the Middle Eastern Festival are only of Jackson eating, but he does still like to mug for the camera (and I think he ate some pita and hummus that day). If you dig on Middle Eastern/Mediterranean food, what you get at the Middle Eastern festival is way better than what they have at the Greek Festival - and the prices are comparable.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Inglourious Basterds
A lot of reviewers are using the word “audacious” to describe this film (sort of like how the synopsis on the back of a Kurt Vonnegut novel disproportionately contains the word “apocalypse,” or some derivative thereof). In keeping with that spirit, I’m going to begin my comments audaciously:
This film is perfect.
Say what you will about Tarantino and his subject matter, his style, and how unapologetically brash he is - this film, at least as far as the technical aspects are concerned, is a masterpiece. His touch with slow motion isn’t as spot-on as it was in his earlier films, but his revolving pans - including one, the first, which is actually a revolving helix pan - are simply a joy to behold. The film is more linear than his first two (Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction), but the storyline is considerably more complex and does not lend itself to a non-linear construction. There are digressions, but they are brief - unlike the extended digressions that filled in the back story in Reservoir Dogs; and they are done with hard jump cuts that make the digressions work more like exclamation points than wordy Faulknerian appositives. And then, of course, there is the acting.
Christoph Waltz, a heretofore relatively unknown Austrian who plays Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, gives the kind of performance that makes you wonder where he’s been all your life and how many of his previous movies you’ll be able to find on Netflix. He dominates the film’s first extended scene, during which he conducts a very polite interrogation of a French dairy farmer whom Landa suspects of harboring Jews on his property. Landa is courteous and polite, practically to a fault, and all eyes and smiles until he gets around to asking the farmer directly whether or not he is hiding Jews. At that point, the smile has slipped completely off of Landa’s face, which has become a stone mask; and yet all of the courtesy and respect he has shown up to that point practically guilts the farmer into confessing that he is, in fact, hiding the Jews Landa is looking for. Once the confession is effected, Landa is back to eyes and smiles, even as he orders the Jews killed - and he switches from English back to French, which was how the conversation started. Throughout the film, Waltz switches effortlessly between four different languages - German, French, English, and even a little Italian toward the end. You’d almost want to give him a prize just for being able to do that so well; but it’s the way he delivers his lines that really makes the role. This is a guy whose job it is to round up Jews for execution in the worst ethnic cleansing in human history - and yet Waltz crafts a character who is oddly likable.
Brad Pitt is U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine, a gruff American roughneck with “a little bit of Injun” in him, who recruits a group of Jewish-American soldiers to be dropped into Germany and France with him, for the express purpose of hunting Nazis. Tarantino’s knack for making even the most gruesome dialogue sound extremely funny is concentrated almost wholly on this particular character - and Pitt delivers the goods with considerable aplomb, clearly relishing the license to go over the top in order to achieve the absurdity that this character has to have in order to shoot well past any possible political statement, drifting toward the magical land of parody.
And yet the film itself is not a parody, despite the fact that so much of its style and characterization is so over the top as to be almost cartoonish; nor is it a straight action picture, or a comedy, or even a drama. It might actually be closer to a fantasy. (And now you definitely think I’m round the bend, if you have not already come to that conclusion earlier in this piece.) See, the conceit here is that cinema - the concept - is such a powerful thing that it could have, in the right hands (say, those of a Jewish woman who lives in exile in Paris after her family is massacred by a milk-drinking Nazi colonel nicknamed “The Hunter”), ended World War II a couple of years before it actually ended.
The idea, of course, is ridiculous; and if taken too seriously, it might make one think that all this film is really doing is making light of a horrible time in human history and exploiting that horror for monetary gain - never mind the coy role reversal when Raine’s Basterds start hunting down Nazis to scalp them (or beat them to death with baseball bats). And there’s the rub - you simply can’t take this movie too seriously, even though it is, in its way (like all of Tarantino’s movies), a serious movie.
More importantly, the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, either. Any melodrama it generates (and I didn’t get a lot of that) is more than tempered by the elements of parody that range from the totality of the Aldo Raine character to the way that Landa eats his dessert in the French restaurant to the way that the character of Hitler bangs his fist on the table while wrapped in the swastika and screaming “No! No! No! No! No! No! No!” Tarantino understands the weight of the material he’s working with - Hitler and the Holocaust - and I think that this is most clearly illustrated in the character of Landa who, as I mentioned before, is drawn as oddly likable. It’s patently absurd that a Jew-hunting Nazi could be likable, of course; but that’s the way he’s drawn, and what Tarantino paints as ridiculous here, he paints with broad strokes. The Holocaust cannot be minimized or laughed off (except by retards like Mel Gibson and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who both share the trait of being addled by religion - which is surely not a coincidence), but its seeds - racism and the delusion of religious superiority - are ridiculous; and it is altogether appropriate to show how dangerous those two things can be. In the real world that we live in, can cinema defeat racism? Of course not. But what if it could?
Not on the level of locking the racists and religious zealots in a room and barbecuing them with ultra-flammable nitrate film. No, you have to move up a level and think of the idea metaphorically - what if the power of movies, as an expression of ideas and of art, could help to end the long-held (by some), manufactured fear that those who are different from you are in some way bad? Is that what Quentin Tarantino meant to say with this film? I don’t know; but I think that the seeds of that idea are in this movie - and that that, combined with all of the ways that Tarantino has matured over the years as a director and a storyteller, make this film an absolutely colossal achievement.
This film is perfect.
Say what you will about Tarantino and his subject matter, his style, and how unapologetically brash he is - this film, at least as far as the technical aspects are concerned, is a masterpiece. His touch with slow motion isn’t as spot-on as it was in his earlier films, but his revolving pans - including one, the first, which is actually a revolving helix pan - are simply a joy to behold. The film is more linear than his first two (Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction), but the storyline is considerably more complex and does not lend itself to a non-linear construction. There are digressions, but they are brief - unlike the extended digressions that filled in the back story in Reservoir Dogs; and they are done with hard jump cuts that make the digressions work more like exclamation points than wordy Faulknerian appositives. And then, of course, there is the acting.
Christoph Waltz, a heretofore relatively unknown Austrian who plays Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, gives the kind of performance that makes you wonder where he’s been all your life and how many of his previous movies you’ll be able to find on Netflix. He dominates the film’s first extended scene, during which he conducts a very polite interrogation of a French dairy farmer whom Landa suspects of harboring Jews on his property. Landa is courteous and polite, practically to a fault, and all eyes and smiles until he gets around to asking the farmer directly whether or not he is hiding Jews. At that point, the smile has slipped completely off of Landa’s face, which has become a stone mask; and yet all of the courtesy and respect he has shown up to that point practically guilts the farmer into confessing that he is, in fact, hiding the Jews Landa is looking for. Once the confession is effected, Landa is back to eyes and smiles, even as he orders the Jews killed - and he switches from English back to French, which was how the conversation started. Throughout the film, Waltz switches effortlessly between four different languages - German, French, English, and even a little Italian toward the end. You’d almost want to give him a prize just for being able to do that so well; but it’s the way he delivers his lines that really makes the role. This is a guy whose job it is to round up Jews for execution in the worst ethnic cleansing in human history - and yet Waltz crafts a character who is oddly likable.
Brad Pitt is U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine, a gruff American roughneck with “a little bit of Injun” in him, who recruits a group of Jewish-American soldiers to be dropped into Germany and France with him, for the express purpose of hunting Nazis. Tarantino’s knack for making even the most gruesome dialogue sound extremely funny is concentrated almost wholly on this particular character - and Pitt delivers the goods with considerable aplomb, clearly relishing the license to go over the top in order to achieve the absurdity that this character has to have in order to shoot well past any possible political statement, drifting toward the magical land of parody.
And yet the film itself is not a parody, despite the fact that so much of its style and characterization is so over the top as to be almost cartoonish; nor is it a straight action picture, or a comedy, or even a drama. It might actually be closer to a fantasy. (And now you definitely think I’m round the bend, if you have not already come to that conclusion earlier in this piece.) See, the conceit here is that cinema - the concept - is such a powerful thing that it could have, in the right hands (say, those of a Jewish woman who lives in exile in Paris after her family is massacred by a milk-drinking Nazi colonel nicknamed “The Hunter”), ended World War II a couple of years before it actually ended.
The idea, of course, is ridiculous; and if taken too seriously, it might make one think that all this film is really doing is making light of a horrible time in human history and exploiting that horror for monetary gain - never mind the coy role reversal when Raine’s Basterds start hunting down Nazis to scalp them (or beat them to death with baseball bats). And there’s the rub - you simply can’t take this movie too seriously, even though it is, in its way (like all of Tarantino’s movies), a serious movie.
More importantly, the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, either. Any melodrama it generates (and I didn’t get a lot of that) is more than tempered by the elements of parody that range from the totality of the Aldo Raine character to the way that Landa eats his dessert in the French restaurant to the way that the character of Hitler bangs his fist on the table while wrapped in the swastika and screaming “No! No! No! No! No! No! No!” Tarantino understands the weight of the material he’s working with - Hitler and the Holocaust - and I think that this is most clearly illustrated in the character of Landa who, as I mentioned before, is drawn as oddly likable. It’s patently absurd that a Jew-hunting Nazi could be likable, of course; but that’s the way he’s drawn, and what Tarantino paints as ridiculous here, he paints with broad strokes. The Holocaust cannot be minimized or laughed off (except by retards like Mel Gibson and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who both share the trait of being addled by religion - which is surely not a coincidence), but its seeds - racism and the delusion of religious superiority - are ridiculous; and it is altogether appropriate to show how dangerous those two things can be. In the real world that we live in, can cinema defeat racism? Of course not. But what if it could?
Not on the level of locking the racists and religious zealots in a room and barbecuing them with ultra-flammable nitrate film. No, you have to move up a level and think of the idea metaphorically - what if the power of movies, as an expression of ideas and of art, could help to end the long-held (by some), manufactured fear that those who are different from you are in some way bad? Is that what Quentin Tarantino meant to say with this film? I don’t know; but I think that the seeds of that idea are in this movie - and that that, combined with all of the ways that Tarantino has matured over the years as a director and a storyteller, make this film an absolutely colossal achievement.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Ichabod's Sketchbook
While at Lazy Daze a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a flyer calling for submissions for a literary journal called Ichabod's Sketchbook, which will publish out of Irvington. The deadline for submissions is December 18, 2009, and the reading fee is $15 for three poems up to thirty lines each or two pieces of short prose up to 1000 words each. The journal will launch at Bookmama's (date and time yet to be determined), and each writer who pays the reading fee gets one copy of the journal at the launch party. More information (including complete submission guidelines) by e-mail at ichabodssketchbook@gmail.com
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Deep Thoughts #6
Rest in peace Robert Novak...the covert agents at CIA will sleep much more soundly tonight knowing there’s less chance of their being outed.
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