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"But I do want to say something about imagination purely as a tool in the art and science of scaring the crap out of people... You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall."
-- Stephen King, "Danse Macabre" (1987)
Peter Weir's 1975 "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is masterpiece of horror, but not in the way you might think. There are no monstrous bugs of any sort -- except for the usual (tiny) ants that plague just about any picnic. "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is a perfect thriller because (like "Twin Peaks," another symphony of anguish over Not Knowing) it's about effect of Mystery on the human imagination -- not just the ache of the Unknown, but the terror, and torture, of the Unknowable. Is there anything more horrible for the mind to contemplate than a mystery with no satisfactory solution? It's more than the psyche can bear...
And it's all set up right here, in what is undoubtedly a series of nearly imperceptible dissolves (perhaps combined with optical work): A rock in the outback remote wilderness (premonitions of Ayers' Rock and Fred Schepisi's "A Cry in the Dark"?) that stays utterly still, yet shifts and changes. First, we see the black trees in the red foreground. Then the rock appears, hovering over the landscape. Next, fog obscures the foreground and the rock appears to be floating (hanging?) on a cushion of mist. How much time has elapsed between each of these views? Minutes? Hours? Days? Just when you think you know what you're seeing, it becomes something slightly different. You can't quite pin it down. It's ... unsettling, disorienting...
Zamfir's primitive-sounding pan flute reverberates in the air. It's an ominous beginning and we're tempted to feel, like Roy Neary would about another rock formation in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" a few years later, that this means something. But what if it doesn't?
 This pretty much says it all. Edvard Munch's purloined "The Scream" has been recovered in Norway, more than two years after it was stolen. One of the signature images of our time (I always think of the ending of Roman Polanski's "The Tenant," or Phillip Kaufman's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" -- or, naturally, "Home Alone"), the painting expresses.... well, you can see how it speaks to the era in which we live. Reuters reports:
By Marianne Fronsdal
OSLO (Reuters) - "The Scream" and another stolen masterpiece by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch were recovered by police on Thursday, two years and nine days after gunmen seized the paintings from an Oslo museum.
"'The Scream' and 'Madonna' are now in police possession," police chief Iver Stensrud told a news conference. "The damage is much less than we could have feared."
He said the pictures were recovered on Thursday afternoon in "a successful police operation" but dodged questions about how it was done. He said no ransom had been paid "as of today."
"The Scream," Munch's most famous work, is an icon of existential angst showing a terrified figure against a blood-red sky. "Madonna" shows a bare-breasted woman with long black hair.
Two masked gunmen walked into the Munch Museum in Oslo in broad daylight in August 2004 and yanked the two works from the walls in front of dozens of terrified tourists. They escaped in a car driven by another man.
The paintings are both from 1893. Three men were convicted in May of taking part in the theft and were sentenced to up to eight years in jail.
Two of them were ordered to pay $122 million in damages. Three other men were acquitted.
Police said no new arrests or charges had been made in connection with the recovery of the paintings.
Experts at the Munch Museum had examined the pictures and judged them authentic, a museum official said. A scientific examination will also be carried out to verify the works.
A spokeswoman for a City of Oslo foundation that owns the Munch Museum collection said she hoped the paintings could be put back on display soon.
TWO SCREAMS STOLEN, RECOVERED
Munch painted two famous versions of "The Scream," including the one recovered on Thursday.
The other was stolen in 1994 from Oslo's National Gallery by thieves who broke a window and climbed in with a ladder. It was recovered after several months by police posing as buyers.
After the August 22, 2004, robbery, the Munch Museum underwent a $6.4 million security upgrade.
Stensrud declined to answer questions about media reports last week that a jailed bank robber, David Toska, had promised information about the paintings if he won a reduced sentence.
Toska was sentenced to 19 years in prison for his part in a 2004 bank robbery in which a policeman was shot dead. Last week an appeals court suspended a three-year sentence he had received for another 2001 robbery and said it could reconsider the case, which caused Norwegian media to speculate he had cut a deal.
"Out of consideration of police working methods, it will be hard to give details about how the operation was carried out," the police said in a statement.
In the foreground of "The Scream," on a bridge with railings, is a human figure, hands to its head, eyes staring, mouth agape. Further back are two men in top hats and a landscape of fjord and hills against a red sky.
The painting is regarded as an evocative depiction of angst in a world of man-made horrors such as genocide. It and "Madonna" were bequeathed with a large body of Munch's work to the City of Oslo in the painter's will.
Munch, who lived from 1863 to 1944, was a pioneer of modern expressionism.
 He's baaaaack. And he's miserable. Michael Tolkin, who wrote the novel and screenplay on which Robert Altman's "The Player" was based, has published a sequel in which studio executive Griffin Mill, now 52, is trying to get out of Hollywood. Tolkin has this to say about the state of movies, in a New York Times interview: “The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t,� he said. “Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what they were will never return.�
The source of all this creative- industrial- complex angst is the death of what he both eulogizes and parodies: the classic journey-of-the-hero story structure, analyzed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940’s, popularized a generation ago by George Lucas through “Star Wars,� spouted and shorthanded by studio executives ever since, and all but trampled to death, Mr. Tolkin said, by nearly every subsequent action movie and thriller that Hollywood has turned out.
Or as Griffin puts it: “Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome and Hollywood cracked the story.� What he's talking about, of course, is the ubiquity of screenwriting guru Robert McKee's story structure techniques, satirized in "Adaptation." with Brian Cox playing McKee.
Tolkin (not Tolkien) says he got the idea for Griffin Mill from watching Elliott Abrams at the Iran-Contra hearings. Abrams was indicted, pled guilty to withholding information from Congress, and was later pardoned by George H.W. Bush, only to serve in W's National Security Council. Tolkin says: “I was obsessed with the question of how could he sleep at night, because it was obvious that he was lying. I guess I was interested in the modern sociopath: the political sociopath, the bureaucratic sociopath.� The way Tolkin sees it, America's "national myth" is formed and expressed by its movies, and that's why both are ailing: That heroic story structure also happened, as Mr. Tolkin points out ominously, to suffice for an American national myth — witness Horatio Alger, James Stewart or “just the myth of the American little guy� — the myth of a hero with a sense of duty, honor, courage, righteousness and justice. But that too, he fears, is dead, and he pinpoints its demise on a spring day in 2004 when pictures of United States soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners circulated the globe.
“I don’t think America’s had a good movie made since Abu Ghraib,� Mr. Tolkin said, before clarifying that he’s talking about big movies, not the minuscule ones that have met the industry’s quotas for unembarrassing award nominees. “I think it showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don’t think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way.� How depressing. But then, Tolkin ("The Rapture," "The New Age") has never been an uplifting guy. I'm still traumatized by his 1993 airliner-crash novel, " Among the Dead."
 Oh, just pretend there's a Joe Lieberman head Photoshopped onto the snake or something. Or let the MSM do it for you... When the conversation turns, as it so often does these days, to blogs (or "the Internets" as Stephen Colbert is fond of calling the online realm), you'll find an astonishing number of people who, even in 2006, have absolutely no idea of what they're talking about. Like Bruce Kluger in USA Today, who writes: "If ever America needed a wake-up call about the mythology of blogging, we got it this month.... "
Kluger, who also contributes to Parenting magazine and Huffington Post (god help 'em), proceeds to destroy the "mythology" that, well, didn't exist until it was created by the mainstream media (like USA Today)... because they don't know what they're talking about. Kluger cites the defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary (then increasing Joementum in recent polls) and the disappointing box office receipts for "Snakes on a Plane" as evidence of "the capriciousness of the blog culture": Lieberman's boomerang reminds us that voters represent a meager percentage of the total populace — and that bloggers are an even tinier subset of that group. Consequently, what appears to be a coast-to-coast juggernaut on a 17-inch monitor is, in the real world, simply an elaborate PC-to-PC chain letter — enthusiastic, but not necessarily the national mindset. O, capricious bloggers! How dare you fool the MSM into thinking you were all-knowing and all-powerful! Shame upon thee! This is a great example of what I was writing about the other day -- another Straw Man piece that sets out to strike down its own assumptions, none of which apply to the exterior universe. It's the JonBenet Ramsay "murder suspect" hysteria/drivel all over again.
Now "bloggers" may or may not have been influential in defeating Lieberman and championing "Snakes on a Plane" -- but how in the world did the enthusiasms of these "PC-to-PC chain letter" senders, sitting quietly behind their 17-inch monitors, get magnified and broadcast to the unaware folks in the "real world"? Through the MSM, of course -- who were terrified they'd miss a story and so made the Internet itself the focus of their reporting. Otherwise, real regular folks'd be blissfully ignorant of those nasty, misleading-but-impotent bloggers! (Let's be clear about this for the MSM dunderheads who keep using "bloggers" or "blogosphere" and "Internet" interchangeably: They're not the same thing. Everything that's on the Internet is not a blog.)
I wonder what would have happened if the MSM hadn't, all by itself, made predictions based on their interpretation of the "chatter" they noticed online. Perhaps they wouldn't be backpeddling in such an embarrassing fashion now. It's the MSM who were wrong, not the activist/enthusiast "bloggers," who were never doing anything more than expressing their opinions before the MSM gave them a stature, and an influence, they never pretended to hold in the first place. People organized on the web to defeat Lieberman because they didn't like his positions; they influenced the title and re-shoots for "Snakes on a Plane" because they loved the idea. So, if Lieberman lost and rebounded, or "Snakes on a Plane" didn't gross as much as the studio and non-web analysts predicted, how, exactly were those Internetters "wrong"?
"On the other hand," Kluger writes, "as August 2006 clearly demonstrates, bloggers can just as easily get it wrong. That's worth remembering." Will do. Sound advice. Now, just show me the place at, uh, Blogger Central where those "wrong" predictions were made on behalf of everybody on the Internets -- you know, about Lieberman's fall election chances and the box-office mega-triumph of "Snakes on a Plane" -- which were then dutifully reported as decisive by newspapers, magazines and television outlets. Because I only recall (overblown) pieces about the significance of the Internet buzz appearing in the MSM...
 View image A bus crosses the frame from left to right and we follow a woman in red walking from right to left, who stops to get a magazine. Notice the curves and circles that establish a pattern for the shot -- the curb, the kiosk, the fountain.  View image The bus re-enters in the background, driving around the circle and now moving in the same direction as the lady in red and the camera -- an indication that the shot (and the movie) will loop back upon itself. From Kathleen Carroll, co-founder and artistic director of the Lake Placid Film Forum (and "non-practicing film critic"):
I still smile at the very thought of Francois Truffaut's opening shot in "Day For Night," the amazingly long tracking shot that gradually reveals the film-within-the-film. I interviewed Truffaut at the time that "Day for Night" was first released in this country. This is how he explained his purpose for making the film. "I wanted to show a film to the public about the making of a film, a film that would give the most information and from which one could learn the technical aspects of movie making. The film will help those who are thinking about making films. And, as far as the ordinary public is concerned, the film doesn't spoil anything."
 View image Still following the woman in red, a pair of figures in black appear in the background, moving forward on the diagonal, on a trajectory that just might intersect with the camera's. Will the shot turn out to be about them instead of the lady in red? Or are they somehow connected with the lady in red?  View image The pair in black split up. The woman heads down the subway entrance -- and so does the lady in red. The man in black continues toward the camera. Are we going to meet up with this guy? During the same interview Truffaut told a funny story about "Jules and Jim" which, as he explained, he deliberately tried to make "like an MGM film." There were those who did not see "Jules and Jim" as just another MGM movie. When the film was first released here, the then all-powerful Legion of Decency (which later became known as The National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures) threatened to give it a condemned rating. Truffaut was asked to speak to a group of priests on behalf of the film. He went reluctantly, feeling "like a little juvenile delinquent."
 View image Nope. The man in black falls out of the frame and the lady in red descends into the subway, casting a (fond?) look back as she leaves us. We fix upon another lady, one we saw back at the magazine vendor, walking a dachshund. "Do you realize the girl in the film is behaving like Elizabeth Taylor?" asked one of the priests. "It was the time of 'Cleopatra,'" and the Taylor-Burton affair was all over the newspapers," recalled Truffaut. "I pretended that I didn't know what he was talking about." "It's in the newspapers," insisted the priest. "I only read film reviews," said Truffaut.
 View image Jean-Pierre Leaud comes out of the subway, and turns in the direction the camera is already moving. OK, we're abandoning the lady with the dog. This is who we're going to watch -- he's the star of the movie! (Yes, casting will often tell you how to watch a shot.) JE: Oh, Kathleen -- joy is right! This really may be the Ultimate Opening Shot in many ways, because we actually get to go back into it and critique it in the movie itself. The whole thing looks perfectly random and natural (I don't want to know how many takes it really took), as if the eye (camera) were just alighting upon one thing and then another as its interest is piqued. But we soon see how carefully and precisely it's all choreographed. Day for night. Illusion for reality. Artifice in the service of art. Notice, too the use of strong colors like red (dress, car, little girl, etc.) and white (car, overcoat, etc.) -- the alternating colors of the awning in the background -- and black (suits, car roof, etc.) to focus our attention. Doesn't this just make you want to go out and make a movie?
(Shot continues after the jump)
 View image Leaud walks methodically, apparently focused on a destination that we don't know about yet -- perhaps somewhere in the space-time future ahead, beyond frame-left. (Note the reprise of the lady in red -- different lady, same red.  View image Where is Jean-Pierre? We've been tricked! The camera moves forward without him, leaving him behind, off-frame right, while the lady with the dachshund pauses at a tree. Now we pick up on the motion of the red sports car. Does that car have something to do with Leaud?  View image The red car now passes through and exits frame left, but has brought us to a stairway, which now becomes the entry point for motion coming into the frame, like a little spillway pouring energy into the shot. We've reached the far end of the roundabout, and now the "current" reverses and begin to flow from left to right (like the first image of the bus). The most prominent newly introduced figure descending the stairway into the frame is a well-dressed man with a light overcoat on his arm.  View image Sure enough, we pick up on the well-dressed man and follow him, reversing the direction we've been traveling up to this point, back toward the center of the roundabout. He pauses to check out some short skirts -- a humanizing moment that distinguishes him from the crowd and encourages us to fix on him.  View image We close in on the well-dressed man (combination of zoom and camera movement) and -- whoa! There's Jean-Pierre heading him off at the pass!  View image The fluid motion of the shot comes to an abrupt halt -- as do the two men. Vertical lines block and separate them, and split the screen into darker (man in suit) and lighter (Leaud, in gray) sections. Pause. Slap! And...  View image "CUT!" says the director of the film, and of the film within the film, played by Francois Truffaut. This quick close-up is perfect punctuation -- a proper period at the end of the long sentence that's come before.  View image The opening shot is over, but now we get the First Assistant Director's notes and see how it was blocked and photographed.  View image AD with bullhorn: "What happened coming out of the subway? Last time it was better. The bus was two seconds late. The background activity was late, too. By the beauty parlor, a lady was supposed to come out. I never saw the cyclist go by, either. We'll do it again. What went wrong was the beginning, coming out of the subway. Everyone came out together and then there was no one.... "  View image Take 4. This time we hear the AD on the bullhorn putting the actors through their paces. As it turns out, the previous take proves to have been better, I think. The pair in black barely register, and the red car doesn't take hold and lead the shot as it should...
 The power of images: A conscious attempt was made to answer the indelible destructive images of 9/11/2001 with a healing one in this Ground Zero memorial that was seen all over the world via the media (and could actually be seen by satellites from space). Following up on my posts about "Wag the Dog"/JonBenet/Iraq & 9/11 and modern propaganda films:
As we approach the fifth anniversary of the atrocities of 9/11, I still think one of the most important yet least explored aspects of the day's attacks is how they were carefully designed and staged for the cameras. Deadly spectacles that everyone kept saying was "like a movie" actually were directed that way, as a horror/disaster movie with unforgettable psychological impact -- because it wasn't just a movie, it was real. The "terror" in "terrorism" is about spreading fear and panic, and the World Trade Center towers weren't just chosen because they were symbols of American riches and hubris, but because they were visual symbols that would make for spectacular and terrifying footage. The first plane guaranteed that the second would come as an even greater shock -- and would be caught by thousands of cameras. That was the way the perpetrators spread their murderous message: they intended to terrify not just the government but the population. And, initially, they succeeded. (Nobody looked more terrified on that day than Brave President Sir Robin, who bravely ran away, away, for most of the day: "When danger reared its ugly head / He bravely turned his tail and fled...")
So, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who called the WTC attacks "the greatest work of art ever" -- later changing it to "Lucifer's greatest work of art") was pilloried for being insensitive (and he was), while his larger point was ignored.
British artist/provocateur Danien Hirst elaborated a bit more in 2002, but it was still "too soon" for many, who thought his words sounded flip: "The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually." No matter what you think of his tone or his timing, I don't see how one can contest that.
Lawrence Wright's new book, "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," explores this in greater detail than any reporting or analysis that has come along so far. A piece in Salon.com cites Osama bin Laden's role as "director": At the heart of Wright's wide-ranging narrative is America's arch nemesis. "One can ask whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it," he says. "The answer is certainly not." That's why I'm skeptical that a plot to blow up airliners somewhere in the middle of the Pacific is really the biggest plan out there. It's missing the visual aspect that is so effective at creating the fear and panic that lead to hysterical, reckless, wasteful, counter-productive and even self-destructive decision-making of the sort we've seen since 9/11. Politicians, no matter what their party affiliation (or lack of one), still haven't come to their senses.
And bin Laden himself used propaganda and mythmaking techniques to create a larger-than-life role for himself in the popular imagination. Salon continues:By exposing al-Qaida's clash with America, Wright also helps us see the road beyond it. His work reminds us that the consequences of the Iraq war, massive deficit spending on security and the military, and the degradation of America's moral standing fit bin Laden's goals. Indeed, when his terrorist organization officially trained its mass-murderous sights on the United States in the early 1990s, Wright explains, "al-Qaeda's duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular, modernizing West. In order to do that, bin Laden told his men, al-Qaeda would drag the United States into a war with Islam -- 'a large-scale front which it cannot control.'" [...]
... [Bin Laden was a man who] had long shaped aspects of his life after the prophet Mohammed's -- a man who, in Wright's view, would come to use political and religious mythmaking "brilliantly" in the service of his ominous cause. [...]
Bin Laden's move, Wright says, was emblematic of his "public-relations genius." Only by retreating from modernity and the corruption of society could bin Laden presume to speak for "the true Islam" and those who longed to restore its purity and dominion. "Inside the chrysalis of myth that he had spun about himself," Wright says, "he was becoming a representative of all persecuted and humiliated Muslims."That image was mostly hogwash, but it worked.
Equally scary is Wright's account of the ways in which the FBI, CIA and other law enforcement agencies let the 9/11 hijackers simply slip through their fingers: The highly secretive National Security Agency, which was monitoring a pivotal al-Qaida phone number in Yemen that could have helped track Hamzi and Mihdhar, was as possessive of its information as the CIA, and equally unhelpful. Ironically, FBI agents investigating the 1998 embassy bombings had found the pivotal phone number in the first place. "This Yemeni telephone number would prove to be one of the most important pieces of information the FBI would ever discover," Wright says, "allowing investigators to map the links of the al-Qaeda network all across the globe." [...]
Still more astonishing, the CIA chose not to inform FBI investigators once they knew, by summer 2001, that Hamzi and Mihdhar had entered the United States. The FBI had an intelligence liaison with the CIA's "Alec Station" devoted to hunting bin Laden, but "the wall" still stood in the way. Even though another FBI analyst, Dina Corsi, was made aware of the information, she wasn't allowed to share it with the criminal investigators in her own agency.
By late August 2001, it did reach one of them, an FBI agent working with Soufan named Steve Bongardt -- when an urgent e-mail from Corsi was accidentally copied to him. Bongardt, one of several FBI sources Wright interviewed, called Corsi on the phone, incredulous. "Dina, you got to be kidding me! Mihdhar is in the country?" Following orders from on high, Corsi told him he had to delete the e-mail.
The next day, in a phone call with Corsi and a CIA supervisor from Alec Station, Bongardt was again told to "stand down" from any effort to track Mihdhar. Bongardt insisted that the intelligence should be shared, and that the wall was a misguided bureaucratic construction that was hurting the agents' mission. "If this guy's in the country, it's not because he's going to fucking Disneyland!" he said. In a follow-up e-mail to Corsi, he said, "someday somebody will die -- and wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective."
Wright reports that several of his FBI sources strongly believed that the CIA shut them out because the CIA was interested in recruiting Mihdhar and Hamzi, having never been able to penetrate al-Qaida with an agent. If the FBI collared the two as terrorist suspects, the opportunity to recruit them as agents would have been lost to the more transparent criminal investigative process. The nearly 3,000 lives lost on 9/11, Wright suggests, was the net result of the CIA's strategy. When are we going to see that movie?
From Mike Calia:
Bare tree branches set against an oppressive grey sky, meeting somewhere between impressionism and expressionism and setting the palate for the whole movie (save for the blaring reds and wood tones that pop up later in the institutional settings). Then the camera points down, almost straight down (setting up the well scenes in Buffalo Bill's lair, as well), to the bottom of a hill, where Clarice Starling enters the frame and starts climbing and doesn't stop for the rest of the movie. It's part obstacle course, part fairy-tale woods, and not one frame is wasted. Add in Howard Shore's haunting score (unjustly snubbed by the Academy that year) and you have the perfect blend of modern police procedural suspense and gothic horror.
JE: Good one, Mike! This is such a deceptively simple beginning (and it takes you a little while to figure out what's going on), but you're absolutely right -- it leaves you with a feeling, of Clarice running through the cold, hazy, wintry woods, that stays with you for the whole picture. (Demme is so unfussy and elegant.) There's something about the starkness and emptiness of those titles -- white outlines filled with black -- that's chillingly effective, too. And then there's the way Clarice glances to the left -- not behind her down the vertiginous path from whence she came, but off in another direction -- before running out of the frame to the right. You get the feeling she's running from something, perhaps something from the past about to pounce into the present, and she isn't quite sure where it will come from.
By the way, Dr. Lecter offers an excellent Socratic lesson in the principles of critical thinking here:
Dr. L: I've read the case files, have you? Everything you need to know to find him is right there in those pages.
Clarice: Then tell me how.
Dr. L: First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius -- of each particular thing ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?
Clarice: He kills women.
Dr. L: No! That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?
Clarice: Anger. Social acceptance. Sexual frustration --
Dr. L: No! He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now...
Clarice: No. We just --
Dr. L: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?
Those words ought to be inscribed as an example in every classroom. See each thing for itself. Then consider its context. Understand how your enemy or adversary thinks. What may seem most important to you, may be only incidental to him...
Whenever you watch a movie, you're also probably watching just about every other movie you've ever seen. The images that flash by trigger associations in your brain -- some of them deliberately planted by the filmmakers, others not. Still, you've got all these images and memories banging around in your head and they're going to connect with something no matter what.
As I wrote in my review of "The Descent" and subsequent postings, director Neil Marshall quite deliberately conjures up memories of other movies (especially, but not exclusively, horror movies) to evoke emotions and effects that have lingered in viewers' imaginations.
Take the "rebirth" of one character, who emerges from the ground coated in blood, like a baby from the womb. This image resonates with memories from a number of terrific movies. Before I get to a more detailed discussion, the usual **SPOILER ALERT** is in order -- not only for "The Descent," but several of its antecedents, including "Deliverance," "Carrie," "Evil Dead 2" and "The Third Man." OK, let's give these movies a hand!
First let's take a look at the shot itself, and the build-up to it. It's preceded by a couple of images as breathtaking as any in the history of horror: a climb up a subterranean stairway of bones toward the light, a painful, desperate ascent out of the darkness of the underworld. (There are a couple more shots between the spectacular frames I've chosen here.)
When Sarah breaks through the earth's crust, as it were, emerging back into the world from the underworld of Hades, the shot is brilliantly overexposed -- as your eyes would see things when coming out of the dark into the light. The shot begins with a narrow depth of field, flat and with the background washed out, but as it adjusts to a normal exposure, more and more of the surroundings come into view and it becomes fully dimensional. It's as if the the world is opening up for Sarah, the atmosphere itself expanding and becoming breathable again after the constriction of claustrophobically narrow, dusty and airless underground passages.
Sarah grasps the air and then gasps for it. Coated in blood as she emerges, she really does look like she's being (re-)born out of the earth. (But, of course, as we know, Hades is extremely reluctant to let anyone leave his underworld domain. One way of looking at the movie, if you read it through Greek mythology, is that all the characters are dead before they enter Hades.)
This is the first image that flashed through my mind when I saw Sarah's hand come up out of the ground, one of the greatest shots in all of cinema, from Carol Reed's "The Third Man": Harry Lime (Orson Welles), a terrible sinner thought to be dead, trapped in the sewers of Vienna, from which he will never emerge. I've written a lot over the last 20 years or so about the ways filmmakers have used plumbing (sewers, pipes, drains, toilets, showers, baths...) as metaphors for the human body and the human psyche -- the return of the repressed, often having to do with the cleansing or repression of guilt. In "The Third Man," Harry Lime is pure Id, opportunistic, solipsistic, concerned only with his own survival. He's a witty, crafty and intelligent shark in a black hat. Now, I'm not saying at all that Sarah is Harry Lime, but if you think of movies as a labyrinth (see "The Shining"), you must remember that the dead ends are just as much a part of the whole maze as the through-paths. Could Sarah be, in some respects, the unwitting villain of the piece? It's interesting to speculate about one movie in light of another it recalls. I'm doing a little critical spelunking here, and I'm not sure where this route leads, but I don't want to close it off...
This nightmare image from John Boorman's "Deliverance" is explicitly about guilt and the return of the repressed. The evidence of what Jon Voight and his pals (Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox) did upstream is submerged under the water behind a new dam. But the memories are not. You have to wonder which haunts the survivors more: the knowledge of their guilt (even if it is "justifiable homicide") or the remembrance of their emasculating humiliation. Both, of course. In this image it's the hand of a dead man that rises from below the surface, which suggests provocative implications for the character of Sarah in "The Descent." If you see the original ending, you may wonder if she is a "survivor," or if the evidence of her and her compadres' crimes (murder, betrayal, adultery) will remain forever entombed below the surface.
The effect of the grabber-ending of Brian DePalma's "Carrie" has never been surpassed. It, too, is a nightmare born out of guilt and fear, as Sue (Amy Irving), who has tried to be kind to Carrie (Sissy Spacek) only to have her efforts backfire spectacularly, resulting in multiple deaths, dreams of tenderly laying flowers on Carrie's grave, only to be grabbed by Carrie's bloody arm and pulled down into hell. It works so well for many reasons: DePalma shot some of the walk to Carrie's house/grave backwards, to give it a disconcerting dreamlike quality (watch the red VW bug reverse down the road, echoing the arrival of Sue's boyfriend, and Carrie's prom date, Tommy (William Katt) in an earlier shot from the same position. Also, there's a turbulent mix of emotions: Sue meant well, but she knows Carrie thinks she (and Tommy and Miss Collins, the sympathetic teacher played by Betty Buckley) was in on the scheme to humiliate her. How might this relate to "The Descent"? Think of Sarah as "Carrie," whose righteous anger is unleashed in the hellish flare-lit caverns, consuming the innocent and the guilty trapped within chambers as hellishly inescapable as Carrie's flaming high school gym.
Horror cinema is rife with images of undead corpses rising out of the earth, but few as stylish and sprightly as this one from Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead 2." If you've seen the original ending posted earlier (and please note that I've added "The Descent" as its own category here, because you guys have generated the most fascinating and illuminating discussion of the film in Scanners comments), you know that there's a strong suggestion that Sarah is, in fact, deceased and has joined her beloved daughter in the land of the dead (aka Hades, which is not actually a synonym for "hell" but simply the underworld where the dead go).
I favor a reading of "The Descent" in which Sarah's life actually ends with the darkness chasing her down the hotel corridor, and the rest of the film is in her head -- cathartically processing her inchoate feelings of grief, fear and rage at the moment of her death so that she and Jessica (Paul, her apparently unfaithful husband, is conspicuously absent from her thoughts) can be together again. Sarah's homicidal fury at Juno is rooted in betrayal -- feelings that Juno betrayed her with Paul, and that she betrayed Beth by abandoning her to die (after accidentally inflicting the mortal wound). Whether those feelings are justified is ambiguous, but they're not the point; the point is that Sarah feels them, and the movie identifies strongly with Sarah.
If you look at the movie this way, Sarah's rebirth out of the earth is not unlike a corpse returning from the grave. She thinks she "escapes," but once purged (figuratively and literally, by vomiting) she finds Juno sitting right next to her. Is this an image of guilt and fear, not unlike Jon Voight's dream in "Deliverance" or Amy Irving's in "Carrie"? When Sarah awakens, she's not at home in bed with a lover or a mother -- she's alone back in the cave. But she's not alone for long: The familiar, comforting image of Jessica and her birthday cake soon reappears....
From Andrew Wright, The Stranger:
Cinematic brimstone manna for pubescent Cinemax viewers, Paul Schrader's unjustly neglected 1982 remake of "Cat People" leaves the watcher uneasily poised somewhere between needing a wet-nap and a steel-wool shower. Working again with "American Gigolo"'s visual consultant Ferndinando Scarfiotti, the director's interpretation of the wittily Freudian source material is chock full with the promise of tantalizing sex and violence, which is ultimately delivered so nastily that it's difficult not to feel guilty for enjoying it. Schraeder, a dude who knows a thing or three about temptation himself, here delivers one lulu of a cautionary tale: What you want to see may not really be what you want to see, no matter how much you think you want to see it.
Nowhere is this poisoned voyeurism more evident than in the opening shot, which quite literally unearths the film's joint fascination with turn-ons and snuff-outs. Beginning with a patch of hallucinatory, nuclear-Antonioni colored desert, a wind slowly, sensually, blows across the surface of the sand to reveal a polished human skull, and then another, and another, and yet another, until an entire boneyard is uncovered. All this, while David Bowie and Georgio Moroder are moaning orgiastically on the soundtrack. Just writing about it, I want a cigarette. And a hairshirt, possibly.
JE: Muchas gracias, Andy. That ultra-lapsed Calvinist Schrader does indeed know something about putting out a fire with gasoline. I haven't seen his "Cat People" in, let's see, 24 years, and all I remember about it is the Bowie song and the way somebody jumps, catlike, onto a table or something. That image you sent sure is purrty, though...
 Title card from perhaps the most famous propaganda film of all time, Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" (1935). Hitler and the Nazis were repeatedly elected to power during the 1930s, one piece of government at a time, before Der Fuhrer assumed full-fledged dictatorial rule. Edward Bernays, the founder of modern public relations, on the ways in which power is maintained in a democracy (as opposed to the much cruder, more conspicuous and therefore more vulnerable power held by totalitarian rulers), in his hugely influential 1928 book, "Propaganda": The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.... We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. (Also quoted in Larry Beinert's " Fog Facts.")
Just a timely reminder about thinking critically in "every act of our daily lives": Every movie you see, every story you read (fiction or nonfiction), is to some extent propaganda. It's trying to sell you something -- an idea, a philosophy, a version of events, a vision of reality. Just try to be aware. Even this is propaganda, but it's true: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity. -- Wendell Phillips (1852), Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society So, what are some propaganda films you've seen recently, what do you think they were trying to sell, and how did they go about doing it? (And let's hear it for "Snakes on a Plane" for at least succeeding in undermining the myth of "airport security" -- which, we should all know by now, is but a flimsy facade designed to give us the illusion of being "safer," even though we aren't. Still, the odds against snakes or bombs or terrorists on a plane are pretty good, for reasons that have little to do with those increasingly lengthy security lines.)
 Dustin Hoffman doing a real Robert Evans impression in "Wag the Dog" (not at all like what Martin Landau did in "Entourage," which could never be mistaken for Evans). It's enormously frustrating and stressful trying to live in three places at once, especially when they're: 1) the "reality-based community"; 2) the arena of critical thinking; and 3) America in the 21st century. So, who was surprised by this headline?
Prosecutors drop case in Ramsey slaying Prosecutors abruptly dropped their case Monday against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, saying DNA tests failed to put him at the crime scene despite his insistence he sexually assaulted and strangled the 6-year-old beauty queen.
Just a week and a half after Karr's arrest in Thailand was seen as a remarkable break in the sensational, decade-old case, prosecutors suggested in court papers that he was just a man with a twisted fascination with JonBenet who confessed to a crime he didn't commit. The only difference between this story and innumerable others (like, say the non-case for invading Iraq) is how quickly and easily it unravelled (or, rather, evaporated), after the press and the public suddenly realized they'd never had any good reason to accept it as legitimate in the first place.
This isn't even a story I've followed, or had much interest in. (Sorry, the simple odds are that someone in the family did it and the others either don't know or have tried to protect him or her.) It's just another example of authorities jumping to unsupported conclusions and the yammering media following along.
Last week you couldn't avoid the headlines about how some guy had "confessed" to the Christmas JonBenet Ramsey at her parents' house in Colorado ten years ago. He said he was in love with her and he had a special relationship with the famous dead girl. And he said it when apprehended in Thailand on what authorities said was some kind of sex vacation. So, the evidence against him was... ? Nonexistent. And the authorities knew they had nothin' when they shipped him back to Boulder, only they didn't admit it until the DNA tests came back negative.
The first thing any lawyer knows is that the only thing less reliable than an eyewitness account is a confession. Neither are good for much of anything without solid evidence -- especially in a case like this, where a decade has gone by and the former "suspect" was known to be delusional by any definition. The cops said they arrested him because they thought he was on the verge of doing something bad with some young girls in Thailand, and it's good they may have prevented that. But will they even be able to make that charge stick? I doubt it. (It's like the way the Bush administration goes after "terrorists" -- randomly, usually arresting the wrong people, and doing it so clumsily that they couldn't prosecute them even if they were guilty. So, did arresting authorities even try to place their suspect at the scene of the crime before announcing they'd apprehended an obviously disturbed individual who'd "confessed" to this tabloid murder scandal? Did it matter that his brother said the guy had never missed Christmas with his family? Couldn't be too difficult to verify. This is why we're in Iraq, and why George W. Bush is still in the White House: People don't pay any attention to the reality-based world until it's too late.
I try to think critically, and to put events (including movies) in some kind of context. I think I'm even somewhat inclined by nature to do so, yet I don't always succeed. But when I hear, for example, that Saddam Hussein's refusal to produce weapons of mass destruction (or evidence of having destroyed WMD) actually confirms that he must be hiding them, I think: That's not even the most likely explanation. Of course he's not going to admit he has them, or doesn't have them. The only reason he's in power is because the US and neighboring countries believe he has them. If he reveals he doesn't (rather than play his usual bluff-the-West game), his power is so weak that he'll be invaded and overthrown in no time.
Or when I hear that the evidence in favor of an immediate pre-emptive invasion is either old (pre-1998) or inconclusive, I have to think: If that's all they can come up with, there must be some other reason for wanting to invade Iraq. (See: Grenada, Panama, the Falklands.) Or, if that's the best they can do, they're likely not capable of invading, occupying and stabilizing Iraq because they clearly don't know nearly enough about the place. Or, if they keep downplaying the idea of having a plan for success in Iraq, maybe the reason is that they don't think such a plan is important. So, maybe they don't have one. (OK, I confess I didn't make that last leap ahead of time. The reality was more absurd and unconscionable than I could have envisioned.)
I've been reading "Fog Facts," the 2005 book by Larry Beinhart (who wrote "Wag the Dog") and it's full of examples of how some stories (even some facts) that fit the official myths made it into public consciousness, while other more important facts -- though reported -- just never "stuck." I was reminded of Roger Ebert's review of Wag the Dog" from 1998. See if anything here strikes you: So, why did we invade Grenada? A terrorist bomb killed all those Marines in Beirut, the White House was taking flak, and suddenly our Marines were landing on a Caribbean island few people had heard of, everybody was tying yellow ribbons 'round old oak trees, and Clint Eastwood was making the movie. The Grenadan invasion, I have read, produced more decorations than combatants. By the time it was over, Ronald Reagan's presidency had proven the republic could still flex its muscle -- we could take out a Caribbean Marxist regime at will, Cuba notwithstanding.
Barry Levinson's "Wag the Dog" cites Grenada as an example of how easy it is to whip up patriotic frenzy, and how dubious the motives sometimes are. The movie is a satire that contains just enough realistic ballast to be teasingly plausible; like "Dr. Strangelove," it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder. Just today, I read a Strangelovian article revealing that some of Russian's nuclear missiles, still aimed at the United States, have gone unattended because their guards were denied bonus rations of 4 pounds of sausage a month. It is getting harder and harder for satire to stay ahead of reality. In "Fog Facts," Beinhart uses simple, on-the-record, uncontested facts to topple the prevailing myths about contemporary "stimulus-package" (formerly known as "trickle-down") economics, Iraq, terrorism and 9/11 ... and is especially good at detailing the ample evidence collected in the months before 9/11 that terrorists were planning an attack on the World Trade Center using civilian aircraft -- more than enough to have prevented it if the system had worked as it should have.
I'm amazed at how many people I talk to don't remember any, or even one, of these stories, which were reported in 2001 and 2002, before fading into the fog.
For example, Beinhart offers a few notable "fog facts" that contradict Bush and Condoleeza Rice's assertions that nobody could have predicted or imagined anything like 9/11: On March 4, 2001, Fox broadcast a pilot for an "X-Files" spin-off series by Chris Carter, "The Lone Gunmen" (now available on DVD), about a terrorist attempt to fly a passenger jet (by remote control) into the World Trade Center. An article in Wired describes a "jet loaded with passengers heading toward New York’s World Trade Center."
In December 1994, Al Qaeda had hijacked an Air France plane and tried to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. (This was the first thing I thought of when I heard Rice say she didn't think "anyone could have predicted these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." How in the world could you NOT have thought of it, when it was your job and you knew the WTC had already been, and remained, a primary Al Qaeda target?)
In October, 2000, the Pentagon performed a MASCAL training drill based on the idea of a hijacked plane crashing into it. From a Department of Defense news release, Nov. 3, 2000 (since scrubbed): "The fire and smoke from the downed passenger aircraft billows from the Pentagon courtyard.... 'You get to see the people that we'll be dealing with and to think about the scenarios and what you would do," Sgt. Kelly Brown said. "It's a real good scenario and one that could happen easily.'" (Photos here -- scroll down.)
More evidence summarized here -- a Fox News/AP story! Beinhart also has one of the best explanations for the mass delusional behavior we've witnessed over the last four or five years that I have seen anywhere: "The tragedy of 9/11 was a result of the failure to see the facts that were in front of us.... If we could have known, utilizing the resources that were already in place, which were normal police and intelligence functions, and all we had to do was pay better attention [to the evidence already collected], then that's all we have to do: pay better attention.
Instead of merely paying better attention [first and foremost, improving computer systems for database sharing among and within security and law enforcement agencies] we have had two wars with a few thousand of our people dead, over 100,000 Iraqis dead, some number of Afghans dead that has never been estimated or mentioned in public, the creation of a vast new homeland security bureaucracy, and serious incursions into our civil rights.
This has cost well over $200 billion. That's on top of all our normal defense and intelligence and criminal justice spending. Yet not a single one of the 9/11 backers, planners, or supporters has been brought to trial, convicted, and sentenced. As of March 13, 2005, "The 120 terrorism cases recorded on Findlaw... have resulted in only two terrorism convictions -- both in a single case, that of Richard Reid, the notorious shoe bomber." Whew. OK, I admit it: I needed to vent. Here's the main thing I want to get across: Never, never assume that the first stories you read about anything are giving you the full picture of what's going on. Most likely they are spin or misleading fabrications at worst, incomplete and in need of further investigation at best. Always step back, ask yourself what's missing, and see if the story would still be the same if those missing pieces were found. Then keep alert and try to find them.
Here's a dazzling concept for a music clip: One shot, stationary camera, five guys. This performance of "Cold Irons Bound," from which Amazon.com is posting on their page for Bob Dylan's new album "Modern Times" (to be released Tuesday), lets you do your own cutting as you watch it. Keep your eye on Mr. Zimmerman as much as you want, but you'll no doubt find yourself focusing at times on the bass player, or one of the guitar players or the drummer. So, it's different every time you watch it. It's interactive! (And further proof that the integrity of mise-en-scene is aesthetically and morally superior to montage...)
Three eloquent and distinctly personal appreciations of the opening of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love":
From Nareg Torosian, ScreenPlay:
The opening shot of one of my favorite films of recent years, Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love" (2002). As described on the DVD's back cover, the focal point of the movie is Barry Egan, "a socially impaired owner of a small novelty business, who...is unlikely to find love unless it finds him." On the surface, nothing much happens during the handheld shot that begins the movie, but for this first minute and a half, Anderson is able to set up three crucial elements for the rest of the film:
1. Barry's loneliness. The set is about as sparse as can be - one desk and one chair in the corner of a large, unadorned, warehouse-like room. No one else will enter the frame, and other than the voice on the other end of the telephone, no other sound can be heard. (A metallic ping that breaks the silence will attract Barry's attention and cause him to leave, thus creating a bridge to the film's next shot. Jon Brion's lush, atmospheric score/soundscape will not come to play for several minutes.) Anderson shoots the sequence in a long shot, and the resulting amount of empty, indifferent space conveys the character's sense of isolation and emotional distance; this composition is mirrored later when Barry calls the phone sex service in his apartment and when he calls Lena from a pay phone in Hawaii. Even the first spoken line ("Yes, I'm still on hold") subtly hints at his feeling of emotional repression and arrested development.
2. Barry's phone etiquette. In the opening dialogue, Barry politely and rationally explains a loophole in one of Healthy Choice's promotional campaigns to one of the company's phone representatives. This is one of many phone conversations he will have during the course of the film, and it will become clear that he is a man who (initially) seems more confident and can express himself more clearly over the phone than in person.
3. The film's color scheme. Color is very important in this movie, and the shade of blue on the warehouse wall and on the suit Barry wears will be closely identified with him throughout the film. It is not until Lena's appearance that a vibrant red will make its way into Anderson's palette, literally and figuratively signaling a change in Barry's monotonous existence.
From Patrick Svensson:
... My mind keeps reeling back to the fantastic, hilarious, surreal, evocative, and jarring opening shot of PT Anderson's relatively popular 2002 film, "Punch-Drunk Love." The film cuts abruptly from a black screen to a shadowy shot of Barry Egan, impressively conveyed by Adam Sandler, sitting at his desk talking on the phone with a representative at Healthy Choice Foods about their promotion involving clipping POPs from their product in exchange for frequent flyer miles. Barry is dressed in blue, as he is throughout the whole film, and sits against a field of blue paint which covers the bottom half of the walls. His desk appears very small and is located in the corner of a seemingly empty, grey room; random, hollow noises of quiet warehouse air surround him. Immediately we sense Barry's loneliness -- the sonic vacantness and the swarthy lighting and color scheme communicate a modern sort of despondency which afflicts Barry.
The representative on the phone is not responding helpfully to Barry's discovery of a loophole in their promotion that would potentially award him more frequent flyer miles than the promotion guidelines suggest -- Barry's mumbling way of communicating doesn't help matters. He's hopelessly lost with words; he apologizes for no reason and fills the air with awkward pauses. After ending the phone conversation (which is very funny, setting up the film's unique sense of conversational humor), Barry picks up his thermos and walks across the room. The camera follows him into what seems like complete blackness (it reminds me of several shots in David Lynch's "Lost Highway," in which the camera follows a person into pure shadow). Then the abrupt, rackety sound of the large metal door opening upward fills the soundtrack, and we see the dirty blue haze of a Los Angeles dawn. Barry shuffles outside and the camera swoops around his head, making sure to capture the tranquil ambiance of the morning atmosphere, and looks in the direction Barry's looking. The parking lot is out of focus, but after a few beats, the focus pulls back and we see everything that Barry sees.
This shot means everything to the movie (the second shot, with the car crash, means a whole lot too). It introduces the audience to its unorthodox presentation of its maladroit main character, startling noises, quirky humor, suggestive lighting, alternately static and sweeping camerawork, and complete spatial reorientation. It's a beautiful mini-mood piece starting off one of my favorite films. There are many many more that I would love to submit, but this will have to suffice.
From Will Garroutte:
Whenever P.T. Anderson comes in conversation, it's typically in the context of either "Magnolia" or "Boogie Nights." "Punch-Drunk Love" is pretty much entirely passed over, which is a shame. It's my favorite of his movies, and a very strong contender for my favorite movie of all time. As much as it disappoints me, though, it's understandable. The movie's rather uncomfortable to watch - character interactions that are constantly tinged with awkwardness and failure to communicate; a stark palette that results in a world of color bars (Look at how the food in the supermarket aisles are arranged, for instance); sudden transitions in mood and tone. All of these
factors are employed to get the viewer into Barry Egan's mindset, and all of them are on display right in the opening shot.
There are no title cards and no opening credits. The very first image is Barry at a desk in the corner of a room, and nothing else. His suit matches the stripe of blue running around the room, in contrast to the larger white portion of the wall, and he nearly blends into it. He's at an odd angle to the camera, and situated far away from it. All of this combines to make him seem utterly insignificant, right in the first second of film. And note his conversation with the Healthy Choice customer service man -- asking questions in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, apologizing, doubting his own understanding of the situation, and unsure how to end the conversation. When he finally does, he stands up and walks towards the edge of the frame, passing rapidly into complete darkness. A garage door is opened, and it's another sudden transition back to light.
The whole sequence is very disorienting, being entirely devoid of the trappings we expect at a movie start and being unrelentingly awkward. But it is an amazing microcosm of Barry's mental landscape -- he feels uncertain and unable to properly express himself; insignificant and yet different from the rest of the world; and filled with bipolar shifts. Excellent stuff.
P.S. Speaking of lesser-lauded Anderson flicks, I was glad to see the opening shot of "Sydney" [aka "Hard Eight"] in your Opening Shots quiz -- it's another of my favorites. I love when the semi passes the screen, and you can still see Sydney below it. It's just a really cool composition.
JE: Fantastic. Thanks to all three of you for your perceptiveness, your enthusiasm ... and your patience! Patrick: Terrific comment about the way the shot passes through darkness on the way from the barren, artificial fluorescent interior to the open, promising, natural (as natural as light gets in LA) exterior early-morning sunlight is magnificent. (That light is warm, pinkish, feminine -- in stark contrast to the cold blue associated with Barry.) This is the vantage from which two fortuitous signs appear to him, like angels to rescue him from his solipsistic isolation -- first the harmonium, then Lena. It is, of course, the journey Barry takes in the movie -- and I couldn't help but think of "Lost Highway," too! The blackness of that passage reflects the darkness of Barry's rage and alienation, which he has to pass through to get to the (sun)light he yearns for.
Also, I love the rack focus at the very end of the shot that goes from Barry to the parking lot entrance. Not only does it convey the feeling that Barry is out of synch with his surroundings, but it has the effect of focusing the viewer's (and Barry's) attention to that little opening through which something is about to enter Barry's world.
 The Formal Mr. Poland, aboard the 2006 Floating Film Festival. (Photo by Kim Robeson) Happy "Birthday" to David Poland, whose Hot Blog, Hot Button column and Movie City News are favorite sources of information and commentary about The Biz around here. This week marks the Ninth anniversary of The Hot Button and the 1000th entry in The Hot Blog.
Check out the latest column to see how much has changed (and hasn't) over these nine years. He's also posted his Rules of Thumb -- sort of a combination of the Ten Commandments for Understanding Showbiz and Charles Foster Kane's "Declaration of Principles." I think he's dead right on all counts.
Congrats, David!
TOP TEN HOT BUTTON RULES OF THUMB
1. Great Media Outlets' Standards Are Less Stringent When The Subject Is Entertainment And That Sucks.
2. $150 Million Is No Longer A Blockbuster In Theatrical… But Right Now Represents The Start Of A Road To More Than $200 Million In Returns to The Studio In Most Cases Thanks To The New DVD Market And Expanded International Theatrical Market.
3. Successful Movie Advertising Sells One Idea At A Time… And There Actually Has To Be An Idea Worth Selling
4. The Story Of The Moment Is Almost Never The Real Story
5. There Are Very Few Journalists In Entertainment Journalism
6. Talent Is Your Friend Until It's Time For Talent Not To Be Your Friend
7. Reviewing Scripts Or Test Screenings Is Selfish And Immoral… You Do Not Know What Effect Sticking Your Nose Into Process Will Have And More Often Than Not It Is Negative
8. Opening Weekend Is Never About The Quality Of The Movie
9. There Are Things I Know And Things I Don't Know And Sometimes They Change
10.Love What You Do And Do What You Love Or Get The F--- Out.
Does this kind of behavior reflect badly on Paramount?
Does it reflect badly on Scientology?
Is it good for the Jews?
Didn't John Travolta do this very same thing back in 1977?
You tell me. (No, I really don't care.)
UPDATE: Lunch with David on the non-story: "Have You Picked a Side Yet?"
 Bob Balaban (left) plays an Evil Film Critic in "Lady in the Water." "Reviews should be objective. Keep your opinions out of your reviews!"
-- actual comments from alleged "readers," sent to Roger Ebert and just about every other critic on every planet in the solar system (except Pluto)
(NOTE: If the above quotation does not bring tears of laughter to your eyes, do not let those eyes tarry here.)
People love to quote William Goldman's famous saying about the movie industry, which is that "Nobody knows anything." Most people who quote it have absolutely no idea what it means. The phrase is tossed about as being the wisest thing ever said about showbiz, and fortunately for those who are doing the tossing, it's just vague enough to sound true under almost any circumstances. So, it is thought to be "right" more often than a stopped analog clock, which is said to tell the correct time twice a day. (The clock is not "right," of course -- it just coincides with external events that allow someone to perceive it as being correct if you check it at certain times. It's a coincidence. That's an important distinction.)
I think perhaps the most profound meaning of "Nobody knows anything" (out of all possible meanings) is not just that nobody knows what will be a hit, but that the audience does not know what it wants. They'll tell you what they want, but if they could really articulate it or quantify it, and if the studios could create some kind of quality control mechanism to manufacture it, Disney and Paramount and Warners and Fox and Sony would be as financially successful as, say, oil companies.
When I worked at Microsoft, editing the CD-ROM and web movie encyclopedia Cinemania, I and my colleagues at Music Central had a difficult time explaining to the marketing folks the qualitative differences between people's (I'm sorry -- consumers') relationships to movies and music and, say, their relationships to their kitchen appliances. We liked to say that movies and music were not refrigerators, but that didn't help. Marketing still didn't know what we were talking about.
But here's the thing: Some people choose refrigerators (or cars or spouses) with their analytical brains -- by comparing features, reading test lab results, consulting reviews, and making lists of pros and cons. Some people look for movies or music this way, too, but it doesn't work as well since you can't check the stats on the cameras or microphones or guitars to find out which makes better movies or music. Other people don't care at all about stats or track records or anyone else's opinions -- they may not be able to describe in advance what they want, but they know it when they see it, and will immediately buy or drive or boink or even marry it when they do.
People are happy to tell you how they make decisions about what movies to see. They invariably insist that they are never swayed by advertising or reviews, that they rely almost entirely on their own inerrant predictive judgment and taste, and the recommendations of their trusted friends and family. Somehow, this applies even to those who go to the theater on opening night with their trusted friends and family. It's not so much that they're deliberately trying to fool pollsters; they're just like all of us -- really good at fooling themselves.
But people don't like to be fooled by others -- they don't want to look like suckers, especially not to themselves. So, there's a cultural (or maybe just human) instinct to want to justify time and money spent. People are far less likely to trash the movie if asked about it as they emerge from the theater (and they still have the ticket stub in their pocket) than they are a few days later, when they are more likely to look back on it as a trial-by-fire bonding experience, and yowl about how hilariously awful it was to sit through. Plus, who wants to admit they paid 10 bucks to see "Lady in the Water"? Only after a little time goes by does it become fun to talk about how bad it was.
When it comes to film criticism... well, most people know as much about it as they do about the self-defrost mechanisms in their freezers. They will say, for example, that all they want is an "objective" assessment of the movie, without understanding that there can be no such thing as "objective" criticism of art or entertainment -- which is inherently subjective. It's the critic's point of view that matters, coupled with reporting skills. Moviegoers will also say they want to know the story -- but don't give too much away. I'm always amazed at how much of the story they want to know -- pretty much everything except the ending in many cases. Some people really don't like surprises -- not in their dinners, and not in their entertainment. As a critic, I am not willing to oblige them, and prefer to describe little more than the premise and then talk about the imagery, the characters, the music, and so on.
And, of course, movie fans (and just about everybody considers himself a movie fan) demand some kind of quantifiable scale of measurement -- stars, thumbs, letter grades -- to fool themselves into thinking this represents a definitive (and "objective") form of evaluation. In fact, these gimmicks are just clumsy attempts to quantify non-quantifiable judgments. Roger Ebert has, on occasion, gotten so frustrated with people who quibble with him about stars or thumbs that he tells them they shouldn't even bother to read reviews. (They probably wouldn't understand them anyway.)
"What're you doin'?"
"Nothin'."
"Wanna see a movie?"
"Yeah, sure."
"There's that new 2.5-star at the Neptune."
"Cool."
A movie audience that has no use for film criticism, doesn't understand it or realize that it has nothing to do with predicting box-office success or failure, and even less with predicting what you will think of a movie (most critics don't know you), can hardly be expected to understand that movie reviewing is only incidentally a consumer guide -- or that the vast majority of film critics I know never even think about influencing audience behavior. They're critics because they like to write about movies.
As the illustrious Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll indicates, most people claim not to read reviews before they see movies (they've already made up their minds). So, if they read reviews at all, when do they read them? My experience from my years at newspapers and Cinemania and RogerEbert.com (though not as scientific and objective as Times/Bloomberg) is that many people who like to read reviews actually prefer to read them, and discuss them, after they've seen the movie (especially after watching them on DVD).
Again, that's a small segment of the moviegoing audience -- but it's also the most passionate, informed, intelligent and influential. Outside of a few film societies, the most stimulating discussions about movies are happening at online blogs with comment threads such as (just to name a few) girish, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, and The House Next Door -- and, I hope, Scanners.
In 30 years of writing movie reviews, from my college newspaper to the web, I've learned a lot from readers. One of the things I've learned is that film criticism is whatever a particular reader likes, and is not what that reader does not like. That hasn't changed, and never will. Really. You could do a poll on it.
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