Paul Schrader

As you probably know by now, writer-director Paul Schrader (whose book "Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer" I consider an indispensable part of my film library) has a hefty article in the current Film Comment in which he discusses his abandoned book project, based on the idea of a 60-film cinematic canon.

Schrader writes:

Aesthetics, like the canon, is a narrative. It has a beginning, middle, and end. To understand the canon is to understand its narrative. Art is a narrative. Life is a narrative. The universe is a narrative. To understand the universe is to understand its history. Each and every thing is part of a story—beginning, middle, and end.

The much-debated “end of Art� is not the end of painting and sculpture (they abound), but the closing of the plastic arts’ narrative. Life is full of ends; species die or become outmoded. There are still horses, but the horse’s role in transportation has come to an end. Likewise movies. We’re making horseshoes. [...]

I’ve always been interested in films that address the contemporary situation. Historical films interest me more as history than art. I have, perhaps, 10 years of films left in me, and I’m perfectly content to ride the broken-down horse called movies into the cinematic sunset. But if I were starting out (at the beginning of my narrative, so to speak), I doubt I’d turn to films as defined by the 20th century for personal expression.

Beginnings, middles and endings are more often than not elusive, in life and in movies. When I think of my favorite films in these terms, I wonder: What is the beginning of the story of "Citizen Kane," or "Mulholland Drive," or "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," or "Nashville," or "Taxi Driver"? What is the end? For me, these films are great in part because they don't insist on neatly defined linear storytelling. (Still, movies do give some kind of shape and structure to experience; lives, as they are lived, don't have much narrative structure.)

Evolution itself -- and I appreciate Schrader's contention that cinema is evolving into new forms, whatever they may be -- resists the beginning-middle-end formulation, because everything is always in a state of flux. Evolution does not start or end -- it's all middle. A species may come into being, and may die off, but other branches will continue to grow and die and change. On the other hand, a story is still a story, no matter what form or language or medium is used to tell it. And storytelling has been around for thousands of years, because that's a fundamental way we give shape to experience. So, will telling stories with images be all that much different from what we know now -- even if the grammar and the language and the form all change?

As for Schrader's canon, it's not online and I haven't seen the magazine yet. But, having published an old canon (of sorts) of my own (from 1999) recently, I love the way Schrader sets up his:

The notion of a canon, any canon—literary, musical, painting—is 20th-century heresy. A film canon is particularly problematic because the demise of the literary canon coincides, not coincidentally, with the advent and rise of moving pictures. There is much debate about the canons but no agreement. Not only is there no agreement about what a canon should include, there’s no agreement about whether there should be canons at all. Or, if there is agreement, it is this: canons are bad—elitist, sexist, racist, outmoded, and politically incorrect.

Yet de facto film canons exist—in abundance. They exist in college curriculums, they exist in yearly 10-best lists, they exist in best-of-all-time lists of every sort. Canon formation has become the equivalent of 19th-century anti-sodomy laws: repudiated in principle, performed in practice. Canons exist because they serve a function; they are needed. And the need increases with each new wave of films. What I propose is to go back in order to go forward. To examine the history of canon formation, cherry-pick the criteria that best apply to film, and select a list of films that meet the highest criteria. [...]

Film studies’ subordination to these “isms� hasn’t reached the grotesque proportions Bloom ["The Western Canon"] speaks of, but it’s catching up. Film departments abound with resentful academics. Film is not literature, of course, and the issues involved, though similar, are not the same. The greatest difference is that there is still a debate about whether motion pictures are art at all.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell at the 2006 Overlooked Film Festival. (photo by Jim Emerson)

The Vancouver International Film Festival is now underway: 300+ films in 16 days (September 28 - October 13). Be sure to check out dispatches from the fest from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson on their new blog!

From David's initial VIFF entry:

The festival is particularly strong in Asian cinema, programmed by the indefatigible Tony Rayns; the festival also gives the “Dragons and Tigers� prize to young Asian filmmakers. It was while serving on that jury last year that I came to fall in love with this festival. There are over 40 Asian programs this time, including Ann Hui’s "My Postmodern Aunt" (starring Chow Yun-fat), Tsai Ming-liang’s "I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone," and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s "Hana" (his last film was the very touching "Nobody Knows"). A special treat is Bong Joon-ho’s "The Host," already a cult monster movie that has Hollywood studios fighting for the remake rights.

Vancouver is also very strong in Canadian cinema, as well as documentary, experimental, and international work. Like all great festivals, it’s actually several festivals in one: No way you could see everything you want to see. It was so exciting last year that I determined to return and try to see even more new films.

Festivals are important to us film lovers, because you want to keep up with creative work being done all over the world. Living in the US makes it hard, because so many wonderful films–sometimes masterpieces–don’t get released theatrically. Marketing a film in a country as large as the US requires massive amounts of money, and many interesting films just won’t attract a big enough audience to pay back costs. Also, I’m afraid that some Americans are narrowing their tastes in movies, so that they won’t give a “foreign film� or a “little movie� a chance. Festivals exist to do just that.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"The Queen": NYFF Friday, commercial theaters Saturday.

In this morning's New York Times, A.O. Scott offers his "Critic's Notebook" view of where the NYFF fits into movie culture (at least in New York). Scott sees it as a showcase for "quality." Compare to my questions and comments about NYFF:

Film festivals crowd the calendar and circle the globe, but New York’s is different. Instead of hundreds of films, it presents a few dozen, and it presents them, for the most part, one at a time, rather than in a frenzy of overscheduling. It is neither a hectic marketplace nor a pre-Oscar buzz factory, like Cannes or Toronto, or a film industry frat party, like Sundance. Its tone tends to be serious, sober, and perhaps sometimes a little sedate, even when the movies it shows are daring and provocative.

If I may trot out another metaphor, the New York Film Festival might be compared to an established, somewhat exclusive boutique holding its own in a world of big box superstores, oversize shopping malls and Internet retailers.

If you want quantity — racks and shelves full of stuff to sort through in the hope of finding something that might fit your taste — wait for Tribeca, with its grab-bag programs and crowd-pleasing extras. The New York Film Festival, in contrast, prides itself on quality, refinement and selectivity. It is not so much programmed as curated. This selection is a form of criticism — it involves applying aesthetic standards and deciding that some films are better than others — and to understand this festival it helps to understand that its selection committee, led by Richard Peña, the festival’s program director, is made up of film critics. This year’s movies were chosen by Mr. Peña; Kent Jones, associate programmer at the Film Society and editor at large of Film Comment; Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly; John Powers of Vogue; and Phillip Lopate, editor of the recently published Library of America anthology of American movie criticism and an all-around man of letters.

These critics, like others in their profession, incline toward material that is sometimes described as difficult or challenging, but that requires a disciplined, active attention. In previewing the movies that will be shown over the first week of the festival — and some that will come later — I have been struck by how few of them conform to the conventions of genre and narrative that dominate American commercial cinema. The split between the domestic mainstream and the world of international “art� films has rarely seemed so wide. As the big Hollywood studios, with their eyes on the global market, strive for maximum scale and minimal nuance, independent-minded filmmakers in other countries seem to be going in the other direction. Or, rather, in their own idiosyncratic directions, forging a decentralized, multifarious cinema of nuance, intimacy and formal experimentation.

But when nearly every film in the line-up has already been shown (and received international press coverage) at Cannes, Telluride and/or Toronto, and is then going into domestic theatrical release within a few days or weeks of its NYFF screening, what does the festival itself do for these films? Where's the "prestige" (a word Scott does not use, but Caryn James did in her earlier piece) come in, when the program is cherry-picked mostly from films that have already premiered at other, more prominent (and in Telluride's case, even more "exclusive" and "selective") US and European festivals? Where is the excitement of discovery a festival can offer, when virtually everything has been pre-discovered and there is nothing unheralded to be found around the edges of the galas? Don't misunderstand me -- I see no reason why a movie shouldn't play all these festivals. But what is "special" about NYFF? Is it really, as some have said, the New York Times Film Festival, because the NYFF showing marks the occasion of a Times review? (Like the opening night film, "The Queen," which is a festival premiere only in a technical sense, since it plays the festival on Friday and goes straight into theatrical release on Saturday.) Is that the NYFF's primary significance? Discuss.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

What is the NYFF crowd going to make of "The Host"?

NYFF! Huh! (Good gawd, y'all.) What is it good for?

I laughed when I read Caryn James' tired and trivial "All the King's Men" piece in the New York Times the other day -- especially this little nugget of unsupported parochial spin:

Oscar-ready films that have opened in September, like “Mystic River� and “Good Night, and Good Luck,� have come out of the prestigious New York Film Festival. “All the King’s Men� went to the nonexclusive Toronto film festival, and the word there was that the movie was mediocre at best.

As David Poland points out ("Why We Don't Link To Caryn James Much"), that notion is "as wrong as wrong can be." He cites the obvious counter examples of Oscar faves shown at Toronto but not NY: "Crash," "Brokeback Mountain," "Capote," "Sideways," "Ray," "Finding Neverland"... and mentions that Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" also isn't being shown at NYFF. (For that matter, neither is Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," although both films open in October.)

But who even cares whether a film festival screens a movie that's later nominated for an Oscar? That's not what film festivals are about. So, is James suggesting that the more "exclusive" a festival is, the better it is? In that case, surely the Floating Film Festival (which shows twenty-something films and is programmed mostly by film critics, including Roger Ebert, Richard and Mary Corliss and me), and which is held aboard a cruise ship for only 200 or so festivalgoers, is the more "exclusive" fest. (Bruce Kirkland of the Toronto Sun has called it "the world's most exclusive.") Still, Roger Ebert says the two best film festivals in the world -- in terms of influence and quality -- are Cannes and Toronto.

Or maybe James is suggesting that "mediocre at best" pictures are helped by exposure at "prestigious" film festivals, but not at "nonexclusive" ones? (Didn't seem to help "The Da Vinci Code" or "Southland Tales" get better reviews out of Cannes...) Does she think people would think the movie was better if it was in NYFF rather than TIFF? Does she also have a bridge for sale?

But the question I really want to ask is: To whom does the New York Film Festival matter and in what ways? The general public can't get tickets, which are almost exclusively reserved for donors to the Film Society of Lincoln Center. NYFF is social payback -- time to give the old rich folks a little cinematic baksheesh for their generous financial support.

OK, so it doesn't do a helluva lot for the movie lovers of New York. How does it help the films themselves? I asked several prominent specialty distributors recently, and they only thing they all agreed upon was that if you put your movie in the NYFF, and you opened it shortly after the festival screenings (in many cases, that means releasing it the very next day), you could save a lot of money because Lincoln Center would cover practically all your publicity costs (getting the filmmakers in town for interviews, etc.). Basically, the festival pays for the launch of your movie -- and it's damned expensive to open a movie in New York. Plus, you get a good word-of-mouth screening out of it.

Unfortunately, "art films" in New York are unhealthily dependent on a single, make-or-break New York Times review, and (until this year, when the Times revised its policy) films in the NYFF were reviewed only once -- when they played the festival. Naturally, if you got a good review, you'd want to open the movie as soon as possible to capitalize on it. (If the Times review isn't going to be so good, or if it's uncertain, you open the movie on a Sunday. If the review turns out to be positive, you buy ads and reprint it.)

Nobody I talked to spoke of any particular "prestige" associated with being in the NYFF. One person did tell me a story about negotiating for the US rights to a foreign film, and how the producer held out for more money after the film was selected for the NYFF. Problem was, an NYFF slot didn't appreciably increase the value of a film in the American market. (For that matter, neither would any other film festival.) The Times review was not so great. And the movie went without a US distributor.

You may have noticed that this week Robert De Niro and the Tribeca Film Festival gang were making headlines, upstaging the opening of the NYFF with a press converence expressing solidarity with the newly launched festival in Rome, which begins later in October. That festival has been criticized for competing with the Venice festival, just as Tribeca has been criticized for competing with the old guard NY Fest. And, of course, that kind of competition is exactly the point of mounting the new festivals in Rome and Tribeca.

So, I ask YOU -- whether you're a distributor, a filmmaker, a publicist, a critic, a moviegoer: What do you get out of the NYFF? How does it help film in New York, or anywhere else? Or does it? Feel free to post comments anonymously if you have to -- or send me an e-mail and I'll do it for you. I think you see my point of view -- so, enlighten me, change my mind if I'm wrong, or confirm my impressions with your own experiences and observations. I really want to know what this apparent dinosaur has to offer the film world in the 21st century...

P.S. Over at The Hot Blog, Texas-based Variety critic Joe Leydon comments: "At this point in time, when a film plays the New York Film Festival, it does more for the festival than it does for the film. Seriously. Is there a more irrelevant festival in any major North American city? Hasn't Toronto made the event almost comically redundant?"

Posted by Jim Emerson at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

"Look in your heart!"

Andy Horbal at No More Marriages! is asking for opinions: "What is the single best American fiction film made during the last 25 years?"

My choice is just to the right...

(If it was nonfiction, I'd go with Errol Morris's "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.")

And don't forget to send your choices & comments to Andy!

Posted by Jim Emerson at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (42)

An image from "The Host": It all depends on how you look at it.

I kinda wish I'd had girish's Toronto. I saw some great stuff -- "Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" being my favorites, and was also impressed with "Volver," "Shortbus," "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" and a few others. Not bad, but (as I wrote earlier) not as overwhelming as last year. I steered away from most of the big commercial titles (except for "Borat"!) and concentrated on some of the high-profile foreign and "specialty" films, including some that had attracted attention at Cannes. In other words, titles I thought readers of Scanners would be particularly interested in.

Girish, on the other hand, followed his bliss and... well, here's his assessment of his Own Private Toronto:

Of the eight TIFFs I’ve attended, I think this year’s was probably the strongest. Unlike last year, I took my laptop with me and fully expected to blog the fest, but it turned out that many of the films I saw were not so casually bloggable. I’m still trying to figure out how to think about many of them.

Of the twenty-five films I saw in Toronto, there were two flat-out masterpieces: Jia Zhang-ke’s Chinese diptych "Still Life"/"Dong"; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s "Syndromes And A Century" from Thailand. Other favorites: Pedro Costa’s "Colossal Youth" (Portugal); Alain Resnais’s "Coeurs" (France); Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s "Climates" (Turkey); Abderrehmane Sissako’s "Bamako" (Mali); Sophie Fiennes’ "The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema" (UK); Hong Sang-Soo’s "Woman On The Beach" (S. Korea); Bong Joon-Ho’s "The Host" (S. Korea); Jafar Panahi’s "Offside" (Iran); etc.

So, out of the "10 days, 352 films, and 27,747 minutes" of the 2006 TIFF, has anybody else had time to digest/recover? How was your Toronto?

Posted by Jim Emerson at 05:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Foreign correspondent Borat extend invitation for Premier George Walter Bush at his White House. (Reuters photo)

REUTERS reports:

Secret Service agents turned away British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the boorish, anti-Semitic journalist, when he tried to invite "Premier George Walter Bush" to a screening of his upcoming movie, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."

Also invited to the screening: O.J. Simpson, "Mel Gibsons" and other "American dignitaries."

Cohen's stunt was timed to coincide with an official visit by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is scheduled to meet with Bush on Friday.

Nazarbayev and other Kazakh officials have sought to raise the profile of the oil-rich former Soviet republic and assure the West that, contrary to Borat's claims, theirs is not a nation of drunken anti-Semites who treat their women worse than their donkeys. [...]

Cohen's "Borat" comedy routine has drawn legal threats from the Kazakh government, which keeps a tight lid on criticism in its news media. Kazakh press secretary Roman Vasilenko said he was worried that some may take the Borat routine seriously.

"He is not a Kazakh. What he represents is a country of Boratastan, a country of one," Vasilenko told Reuters.

Mr. Ashykbayev denounced Mr. Cohen’s performance as host of the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last fall, in which a skit mocked the imperial aura that surrounds Mr. Nazarbayev, the country’s president since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr. Ashykbayev suggested that Mr. Cohen was acting on behalf of “someone’s political order� to denigrate Kazakhstan and that the government “reserved the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of this kind.�

Mr. Cohen, who is Jewish, responded, as Borat, in a video posted on his Web site, citing Mr. Ashykbayev by name and declaring that he “fully supported my government’s decision to sue this Jew.�

“Since the 2003 Tulyakov reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world,� he goes on in the video, citing fictional details in the absurdly stilted English that is central to his act. “Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to 8 years old.�

But it was the Foreign Ministry’s complaint that gave some in the country’s news media a chance to report on it, and that was when most Kazakhs first learned that a faraway British comedian had turned the world’s attention to their country.

In an atmosphere of legal constraints on press freedoms, if not outright censorship, the ministry’s statement offered a way to poke fun at Mr. Nazarbayev’s near-absolute political power, at least indirectly, by showing what the fuss was all about.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

View image Rise and shine...

What do we have here? It's the opening shot of one of my favorite 1970s comedies, a dark absurdist urban paranoid masterpiece called "Little Murders" (1971) written by Jules Feiffer ("Carnal Knowledge") and directed by Alan Arkin (as was the second, successful run of the play in New York in 1969; the first staging a year earlier closed in a week). As you might guess, it's a movie about windows and frames. Look out any window, and there's another one looking right back at you -- with a telescope, a camera, maybe even a gun. After a while, you don't want to know what's out there. You shut off the TV, bar the windows and bolt the door just to keep the madness... out?

Elliott Gould plays Alfred, a listless, benumbed photographer who shoots piles of dog shit. That's his subject. In this shot, Alfred is somewhere outside the window, getting beat up. That's Patsy (Marcia Rodd) in bed. The sounds of Alfred's mugging are drifting in her window, but that's not what awakens her. It's the phone -- another call from the heavy breather (in an era where "obscene phone calls" were the latest in pornographic technological phenomena). But although the image may at first remind you of Kitty Genovese (the murder victim whose screams were ignored by neighbors in Queens), Patsy intervenes. And that's the way it all begins.

Arkin jump-cuts into the scene a few times as the credits appear, in a way that reminds me of the percussive cuts of Harvey Keitel waking up (to the Ronettes' "Be My Baby") at the start of "Mean Streets" (1973). By the end of the film, the windows will be flung open again, to let the fresh air in... and the sniper rifles out.

P.S. Roger Ebert's original 1971 review of "Little Murders" gets at why I think it's such a good, and disturbing, comedy. It doesn't tell you when it's OK to laugh:

Arkin said, shortly after the film was released, that he'd only seen his movie once in a theater, and he was afraid to go again. When he saw it with an audience, he said, he thought it was a flop because there was no pattern to the laughs. People were laughing as individuals, almost uneasily, as specific things in the movie touched or clobbered them.

That's my feeling about "Little Murders." One of the reasons it works, and is indeed a definitive reflection of America's darker moods, is that it breaks audiences down into isolated individuals, vulnerable and uncertain. Most movies create a temporary sort of democracy, a community of strangers there in the darkened theater. Not this one. The movie seems to be saying that New York City has a similar effect on its citizens, and that it will get you if you don't watch out.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 08:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule

When I noted last week that I see films and film criticism as two sides of the same coin ("The unexamined film is not worth watching"), I was trying to imagine what it would be like if the conversation about movies (whether academic study, criticism, or casual after-movie talk) ended with the final credits. What if the movie was just over and you never thought about it or discussed it with anyone again? It's unthinkable, about as likely as the prospect that movies themselves -- storytelling with moving images -- would cease to exist.

On his newly snazzified (i.e., attractively redesigned) web site, David Bordwell has a piece (from 2000) analyzing the different ways we talk about movies: in ordinary conversation, reviews, and study; what needs they serve, their different methods and goals, and what they have in common. All of them contain an evaluative component ("I loved it!"), and are meant to communicate something about the experience of watching the movie. (I might question whether this applies to certain applications of "film theory," however -- stuff that's not really intended to convey ideas, or be read or understood even by other academics; it's just meant to be published. Job security, you know.)

Bordwell notes that criticism and academic study are more likely than ordinary conversation or daily newspaper reviews to put films in a historical context and to provide analysis of how they do what they do. Read the piece. I was especially delighted by his conclusion, in which he compares the in-depth analysis and appreciation of fans to that of academic study. I think he's right -- which is the source of my enthusiasm for certain intelligent and enthusiastically analytical movie blogs.

Speaking of which: Dennis Cozzalio, whom you must know as the owner and proprietor of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, has a terrific overview of critical approaches taken to Brian De Palma's "The Black Dahlia," wherein he puts his finger on something that I think captures why I love good film criticism as much as I love movies. Dennis quotes from a splendid and passionate review by Matt Zoller Seitz, before exploring his own response to "The Black Dahlia." He writes:

What’s fascinating to me in reading a review like Matt’s, as a self-avowed, but not uncritical or all-forgiving, member of the De Palma camp, is the degree to which it is utterly convincing—that is, a compelling, understandable, no-bullshit analysis of the film from his distinct point of view-- while being so divorced from my own experience and conclusions. Where Matt locates zeal and energy in the formal aspects of "The Black Dahlia" that proceed on to artistically engorge the film for him and flush it with meaning, I saw a film that lacked exactly the urgency that he and others have found to be so abundant in it. To my heart and mind, "The Black Dahlia," despite its considerable craft and obvious serious of intent, feels listless, indifferent, and disconnected from the film noir tropes, character conflicts, and even the meticulously reconstructed 1940s-era Los Angeles (shot entirely on sets in Bulgaria) it so tantalizingly recreates.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

When the issue of torture comes up, many people think of the way it's portrayed on the screen (especially in '24'), as an effective tool for extracting vital information in a ticking-clock scenario. Hey, it works for Jack Bauer, and he's saved the country, and the world, several times over, right?

In real life, however, torture has proved to be a lousy way of getting anything meaningful out of, uh, "suspects." (And then there's that whole Geneva Convention thing...) To quote Professor Darius Rejali ("Torture and Democracy") in Salon.com:

Aside from its devastating effects and the wasted time and resources, does torture actually work? Organizations can certainly use torture to intimidate prisoners and to produce confessions (many of which turn out to be false). But the real question is whether organizations can apply torture scientifically and professionally to produce true information. Does this method yield better results than others at an army's disposal? The history of torture demonstrates that it does not -- whether it is stealthy or not.

When Americans think of torture they think of Dirty Harry standing over a serial killer whose next victim is running out of air at a remote location. Americans think of Harry as a hero for doing everything he can to save the victim. But what most people fail to realize is the thing that makes Harry the hero is not the act of torture. It is the choice to torture given he will face consequences for his action. If the consequences are removed then Harry becomes a meter maid.

Once the torture bill passes it won't take long before many, many more terror suspects will be tortured. A time will inevitably come when a detainee is found to contain some information that could have stopped a loss of life or property. At that time interrogators will have to account for not getting the information. Torture will become a cover-your-ass technique.

This is a sad time for morality and accountability.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

View image Sven Nykvist, behind the camera.

Roger Ebert interviewed the late master cinematographer Sven Nykvist in a fascinating visit to the set of "Face to Face" in 1975:

Sven Nykvist photographs Bergman's films. He is tall, strong, fifty-one, with a beard and a quick smile. He is usually better-dressed than Bergman, but then almost everyone is; "Ingmar," a friend says, "does not spend a hundred dollars a year for personal haberdashery." Nykvist first worked for Bergman on 'The Naked Night' in 1953, and has been with him steadily since 'The Virgin Spring' in 1959. This will be his nineteenth title for Bergman, and the two of them together engineered Bergman's long-delayed transition from black and white to color, unhappily in "All These Women" and then triumphantly in "A Passion of Anna" and "Cries and Whispers."

Nykvist is in demand all over the world, and commands one of the half-dozen highest salaries among cinematographers, but he always leaves his schedule open for Bergman. "We've already discussed the new film the year before," he says, "and then Ingmar goes to his island and writes the screenplay. The next year, we shoot -- usually about the fifteenth of April. Usually we are the same eighteen people working with him, year after year, one film a year."

At the Cannes Film Festival one year, he said, Bergman was talking with David Lean, the director of "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Dr. Zhivago." "What kind of crew do you use?" Lean asked. "I make my films with eighteen good friends," Bergman said. "That's interesting," said Lean. "I make mine with 150 enemies."

Posted by Jim Emerson at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Matt Zoller Seitz's "The House Next Door."

I feel strongly that film, and film criticism, are two sides of the same coin, each essential to the experience of the other. Without both sides, the coin itself couldn't exist in three-dimensional space (and certainly wouldn't be worth anything!). If movies are just forgettable eye exercises, patterns of light and shadow and sound that have no artistic or psychological or cultural significance, then what is there to analyze or criticize? And if the unexamined life is not worth living, then I don't see how the unexamined film is worth watching.

Last Saturday, I was supposed to have been on a panel called "Why Film Critics Matter" at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Washington State, organized by Kathleen Murphy. And I would have been, if it hadn't been for a scheduling misunderstanding. As it turns out, I was still in Toronto. But I sent Kathleen some thoughts to share on the panel, and I'd like to share 'em with you, too. This e-mail was composed after a lunchtime conversation with one of my favorite movie bloggers, Girish Shambu, and what we talked about was still reverberating in my head, so I want to thank him for his substantial contributions to this train of thought:

* * *

It's Friday, I'm still at the Toronto Film Festival which winds up this weekend, and I just got back from lunch with Girish Shambu, a movie blogger based in Buffalo, NY. I'd never met Girish before -- I've known him only through his blog, and the community of bloggers who contribute to critical discussions of movies on one another's sites (including my Scanners blog) -- and I've never been more excited about the future of film criticism than I am at this moment.

First, let me explain what I mean by "film criticism." In traditional, mainstream print media (mostly newspapers and magazines), it is usually thought of as reviewing. Newspapers run their critics' reviews of movies that are entering theatrical release in their local market. This is the most common, and narrowest, definition of what "film criticism" can be -- part consumer guide (a recommendation on a binary or sliding scale from positive to negative), part reportage (what the story's about, who's in it, who directed it), and, if you're lucky, part film appreciation (how the movie functions as an assemblage of images and sounds).

The limitations of this approach to film criticism are obvious: It is monolithic, one-way communication from a writer to a mute and invisible audience, written under the assumption that the writer has seen the movie and the reader hasn't. The number of people who get paid to write such reviews are very few, which means there's a limited range of voices. And how can you really get into and explore a film -- a complicated effort involving thousands of choices and decisions over a year or more of its makers' lives -- in a few column inches, without destroying for the reader the process of discovery that's essential to any experience of a movie?

Also, reviews are more or less limited to discussing just ONE movie at a time, which is no way to talk about film as a living form -- artistic, industrial, political, cultural... Movies are neither made, shown, nor seen in a vacuum. They are not museum pieces, even though some may wish to isolate them from contemporary culture and give them sanitized treatment in the name of "art." One movie is never just one movie, but a prism through which you can view, well, basically everything in the world. I enjoy exploring the relatively self-contained world of one movie (and, above all, I'm an advocate of the , but context is crucial. Although Roman Polanski's "Chinatown" is, I think, a perfect and self-contained film -- you can't fully understand it without some knowledge of, say, the phenomenon of film noir, and private eye fiction, and the history of land and water use (embodied in the film by the real-life Department of Water and Power) in Southern California and so on...

So, for me, reviewing is the crudest level of film criticism -- just one basic building block in the edifice. There are critics who can elevate it to an art, but the form itself is by nature extremely narrow and limited in scope. You would hope that a film critic, or reviewer, brings a broad knowledge of the history and traditions of film, to what they write, but that's not often the case. But we all bring our experiences and knowledge to the viewing of a film -- including what we know about all the other films we've seen, books we've read, subjects we've studied, ideas and conversations we've had, and so on. Where I think the best film criticism begins is with one person's deeply personal exploration of a movie or movies.

And that's why the most exciting place for film criticism, and an informed film community, these days is on certain Internet blogs -- where each individual blogger can write in detail (with digressions and tangents into other areas of related knowledge) -- but that is just the beginning of the conversation, since others can post comments, continue the discussion, and elaborate upon the original post. The blogger also has the opportunity to clarify, refine, and move the discussion into a fruitful direction. These are knowledgable, personal voices -- much more fun and distinctive and interesting than most of the edited and sanitized stuff that appears in "professional" outlets -- written mostly by people who are doing it for the love of the medium, rather than because they're getting paid to. As Girish put it today: I feel like we're all little Manny Farber termites carving out our own paths through the cinema.

Let me be clear that I'm NOT talking about celebrity or showbiz gossip sites, or places like the infamous Ain't-it-Cool-News, where freaks and geeks and frat boys post, mostly under pseudonyms, about drafts of scripts they've read or test screenings they've snuck into or rumors they've heard. (The mainstream media, including the Los Angeles Times, has been heading in that disastrous direction, too.)

I'm talking about blogs like Girish and Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, and The House Next Door and Like Anna Karina's Sweater and No More Marriages! and Lost in Negative Space, just to name a few -- places where the bloggers themselves write about their obsessions, what they know and whatever they want, when they want. They respect their readers (with spoiler warnings, for example) -- and the readers themselves respect each other in the reasoned comment-section discussions that are ignited. For any film critic, this is the ideal audience -- a bunch of people who are smart, well-informed, passionately interested, who actually go and see the movies for themselves, and then come back to read and respond to what you and other readers have written. (You can find an ever-growing list of links to my favorite critics and professional bloggers in the right-hand column of Scanners.)

One more thing about the whole idea of film criticism as writing: Written language is perhaps not the ideal medium for discussing film. (To me, film has always seemed closer to music -- patterns of images and movement and color, than to literature or theater or any other art form, and that can be hard to capture solely in words, sentences and paragraphs. Maybe "dancing about architecture" is a good idea...) I've been experimenting with different kinds of film criticism on my blog, and (going back to 1998) on my web site, Jeeem's CinePad -- using images and layout to create ways of exploring film that are not limited to linear text. On CinePad, this includes a whole section devoted to various motifs in David Lynch's "Twin Peaks," and "The Dark Room" (still unfinished), an image map built around a composite movie photo, where you click on various items in the room -- a cigarette, a hat, a dead body -- to find an essay about the significance of these elements and images in film noir; or a multi-part exploration of the use of Plumbing in Cinema as a powerful metaphor. On Scanners, I've been hosting the Opening Shots Project, encouraging readers and other critics and filmmakers to send in detailed descriptions of their favorite opening shots (accompanied by actual frame grabs from the movies), and to explain how these shots work to set up the movies, or how they relate visually to the journey the movie takes.

I saw a movie in Toronto called "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema," in which a philosopher, psychoanalyst and cinephile named Slavoj Zizek takes a 150-minute Freudian and Lacanian journey through a whole bunch of movies -- concentrating mostly on Hitchcock, David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky, but also pulling in "The Matrix," Charlie Chaplin and "Eyes Wide Shut," just to name a few. What he does has the feeling of a stream-of-consciousness improvisation, in which his mind wanders through these films, finding connections and reverberations. He even appears to step into the movies at times -- either on a set or by visiting an actual location where a film was shot. It's a beautiful example of one direction film criticism needs to move into -- idiosyncratic, educated, impassioned explorations not of an individual film in isolation, but of all of cinema.

It's this stream-of-consciousness, improvisational aspect of blogging that I find most liberating and enlightening. For me, writing isn't just about communicating, but also about discovering. I admire people who can write disciplined, elegantly structured essays and stick to their point, but I'd much rather have the experience (as a writer and a reader) of beginning with one idea and then finding myself going off in directions (or on digressions) that I hadn't anticipated. (I feel the same way about watching movies.) That, I think, is where the real critical trailblazing is done -- where we have the informed curiosity and freedom to wander from the beaten path.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Thierry Ehrmann: "'In your resistance,' I tell them, 'you are contributing to this work. This work is encapsulating you, absorbing you.'"

It's a place, it's a sculpture, it's an installation, it's a performance piece, it's a movie, it's a house, it's a home. It's La Demeure du Chaos, the Abode of Chaos, outside the French town of Lyon. This headline in The Australian caught my eye: "Town outraged over chaos house":

Crashed aircraft, fire-blackened walls, a swimming pool of blood and portraits of Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden adorn a sprawling "shrine to chaos" which is at the centre of a dispute in a village on the outskirts of Lyon in France. [...]

Thierry Ehrmann, 44, the owner and creator, was fined E200,000 ($A336,000) for failing to seek planning permission to turn his 17th-century coaching inn and its grounds in the village of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or into a theatre of war. The appeal judges annulled a lower court order to have the site, developed by 45 European artists, restored to its original state.

Ehrmann's celebration of the apocalypse, inspired by his experiences in the Middle East and by the events of September 11, 2001, has enraged residents who are offended by its charred walls, twisted metal, burnt-out cars and battlefield debris. A mock oil platform sits on one roof amid camouflage netting. The garden includes a sculpture recreating the remains of the World Trade Centre. [...]

The swimming pool of blood.

Ehrmann, who occupies the house with his two Great Danes, Saatchi and Reuters, said that the ruling was a victory for art. The mayor was helping to publicise a site which has become the most visited free open museum in France, he added. "We get about 90,000 people a year," he said. Little was visible from the outside, he added.

I feel a strange connection to Ehrmann -- beginning with his two dogs and their names, which made me laugh. To me, there's something profoundly necessary about taking the chaos of the world around you and bringing it home -- incorporating it into your everyday life -- in the form of art. Watching the (heavily censored) images on television on 9/11, I was reminded of the famous Hieronymus Bosch triptych, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," the nightmarish vision "depicting the dreams that afflict people who live in a pleasure-seeking world" (Britannica).

View image How does your garden grow?

I'd always been fascinated -- attracted and repulsed -- by it since first finding and endlessly studying a picture of it as a child; later, I would stand and scrutinize it for myself at the Prado, feeling I was in the presence of something timeless and uncanny. I suddenly felt the need to have it around me, to remind me of... something. Not just of 9/11, but of the fact that something like it, though not necessarily of the same scale or media magnification, happens every day. And that we make our own heaven and hell on this earth every day. And other things I still haven't sorted out. Hardly profound or original notions -- but I felt a need to incorporate it into my world, my consciousness. (This is, I think, part of my attraction to horror movies -- a drive to get close to the horror without being destroyed by it.) I ordered a print from the Prado, framed it, and placed it above my dinner table. It's a symbolic gesture, and some might see it as trite or trivializing, but all I can say is that it means something to me. I wonder if something like that is going on with Ehrmann. Imagine living with a swimming pool of "blood"... (Good thing his dogs are both solid black.)

Posted by Jim Emerson at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

View image Captains of America.

Imagine a country where, even at the highest levels of power, ignorance is flaunted and incompetence rewarded. OK, maybe that's too easy. Imagine a studio dumping a movie because it just doesn't know how to sell it. Well, that doesn't take any imagination at all, does it? "Idiocracy," the new film by Mike Judge ("Office Space," "King of the Hill," "Beavis and Butthead"), opened in a handful of theaters in the United States while I was in Canada for the Toronto Film Festival. When I got back I learned that none of those theaters was in Seattle, so -- guess what? -- I haven't been able to see it.

But Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule reports that it's superficially dumb, deceptively smart -- and funny:

The groundwork for "Idiocracy" is laid in a hilarious parody of authoritarian educational films that exposes the roots of humanity’s slippery slide toward pea-brain-osity in the frigidity of intellectuals (or at least their yuppie subset) and the unchecked rutting of the uneducated poor. Smart folks are too selfish to procreate, while Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae can’t keep their genitalia to themselves.

Sounds simple enough, right? But by the time the movie really gets going Judge has laid culpability for the crumbling mental capacity of society at the feet of lawmakers, corporations and opportunistic politicians too. And let’s not forget the military—insofar as they represent by definition the aggressive arm of any government, Judge certainly hasn’t. A low-level army base slacker (Luke Wilson) and a randomly selected hooker (Maya Rudolph) are selected to participate in a military experiment, headed by an officer with more than just a little taste for the pimpin’ lifestyle—that’s how the hooker gets roped in. The experiment is designed to monitor physical changes in cryogenically frozen subjects over a period of a year. But when the officer’s illegal activities end up getting him imprisoned and the base bulldozed, Wilson and Rudolph are left on ice not for a year but for 500. The pair, barely three digits in the IQ department between them to start with, awaken to a world so battered and worn down by an abased pop culture, relentless corporate corruption and political ineffectuality that they are, by acidly ironic default, the smartest people on the planet.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

David Thomson, or "David Thomson"? Critic or stalker?

David Thomson is often described as a "film critic," but film criticism is not quite what he does. Nor is he a journalist or a biographer or a historian by any traditional definition of those terms. Thomson is a cinephile, a fantasist and an autobiographer, who writes about movies -- and the characters in them, and the people who make them -- as his possessions, imagined aspects of himself.

In the introduction to his best-known book, the idiosyncratic and provocative "A Biographical Dictionary of Film," he admits that, in writing about movies, he is unavoidably writing about himself -- and, indeed, the book might be better titled "An Autobiographical Dictionary of Film." All film criticism (and all writing, fiction or "non-fiction") is to some degree autobiographical, and Thomson has been more aggressive and up-front about his obsessions with his fantasy-objects, from Warren Beatty to Nicole Kidman, than most. But I'm not sure his treatment, or imaginative possession (sexual and otherwise), of his not-at-all-obscure objects of desire is any less tabloid-creepy because it is presented as critical nonfiction rather than as gossip or on some fanatical fan blog, except that Thomson's writing is better.

Last week, Kidman's reps said Thomson had misrepresented himself in the one telephone interview he did with Kidman for his ostensible biography, being sold under the title "Nicole Kidman." From The Daily Mail:

According to the star's publicist Wendy Day: "Nicole has never met David Thomson. She has only spoken to him briefly on the phone about her acting processes and various films.

"He's a well-respected film writer and she accepted the interview only because she was under the impression he was writing a series of film essays."

“I should own up straightaway that, yes, I like Nicole Kidman very much. I suspect she is as fragrant as spring, as ripe as summer, as sad as autumn and as coldly possessed as winter.... That’s why I’m writing this book, I think, to honor desire.�

“Just as I take the breakup with Cruise as the liberating and altering experience in Kidman’s life, so we have to see that Tom was changed, too.�

“I dare say she wakes up some nights screaming because she felt it [aging, losing her looks] was about to happen. (Not that I can be there to witness it — or stop imagining it.)�

Together, the extended schedule and the natural blood lust of the British press towards celebrities promoted unsubstantiated rumours that Cruise and Kidman required some psychological and sexual education to do their work. The couple successfully sued the Star in relation to these allegations. [...]

A director is an interloper if he is male and his actress is married. He says, I have to talk to you privately, intimately, because I have to talk to you about the way your desires — your desires, Nicole — may merge with and give body to your character. Alas, this has to be done away from your husband. It must be just the two of us. Oh, Tom, I must take Nicole away to somewhere private. This afternoon.

The two players took off their robes. They were stark naked. Goba noticed how beautiful she was. Then Nicole asked for a closed set. Kubrick would operate the camera himself. It was just the three of them.

It lasted six days.

Many situations were shot that do not figure in the film. There was a scene in a bath, for instance. There was also a scene in which he administered cunnilingus to her, in some detail, for which she wore a pubic wig. The restraint of the film-making process, its etiquette, is wondrous. I do not mean to suggest that the scene is gratuitous or unnecessary. It is an important part of the arc of the film. Not that it had to be as graphic as it is. Not that it is easy to see why six days were needed to get it all done. [...]

"Eyes Wide Shut" ends with huge uncertainty and the feeling of a psychic load not quite delivered. It’s as if the divorce between the leading players is the ending it needs. I think Kubrick made a film that whispered to Kidman: you are a real actor, a sexual phenomenon — and he is not. Nobody can see the film without inhabiting that dismay. So why should the two central players not feel it themselves?

There’s enough that’s self-indulgent in Mr. Thomson’s book to enable a certain kind of critic—the ones who clutch their pince-nez glasses as they lecture the class—to dismiss it as the equivalent of a hot-sheet special, the effusions of a critic in lust.

But Mr. Thomson has always put himself out there—he’s one of the rare writers who view criticism as an art form in its own right, and every artist has to reserve the right to fall on his face. In this particular book, there’s a dream sequence set in a Parisian bordello that verges on the embarrassing, and there are occasional sentences that could have been lifted directly from Photoplay magazine circa 1938: “It is Nicole’s nature to be sturdy, cheerful, robust, a real person, full of common sense.� At these times, the book is simply what my grandfather used to call a “mash note.�

Mr. Thomson has earned the right to his enthusiasms, if only for his "A Biographical Dictionary of Film," which is never less than interesting, frequently irritating, occasionally maddening—and one of perhaps half a dozen indispensable books about the movies.

Last week I wrote about "Death of a President" and the British tradition of presenting speculative fiction about future events in the form of a documentary. Is that something like what Thomson thinks he's doing here, presenting his speculations about past events, real and imagined, from Kidman's off-screen life (mixed with his own sexual fantasies about her) as a "biography" -- the obverse of Edmund Morris's fictionalized "official" biography of Ronald Reagan, "Dutch" -- a biography presented as fiction? If so, shouldn't "Nicole Kidman" be positioned as criticism/fiction in the form of a celebrity biography, rather than as traditional nonfiction?

How much license does a critic or other kind of writer have over the image of an actor or filmmaker? When it comes to libel law or fair use of a person's likeness, is an actress the same kind of "public figure" as an elected government official like a president? How are Thomson's biographical speculations, mixtures of journalistic sources and fictional techniques, significantly different from James Frey's autobiographical self-inventions in "A Million Little Pieces"? If fantasies about the personal life of an actress are to be considered legitimate forms of film criticism, then on what grounds do we object to reviews in the Los Angeles Times of screenplays, which likewise have a relationship to, but do not actually correspond to, what appears in a finished motion picture?

As you can probably tell, I'm bothered by the ethical implications of this kind of writing about film and celebrities. Thomson has long assumed the role of critic/stalker, a perpetual outsider who imagines himself an insider, who fantasizes himself an intimate of the people he writes about and makes few distinctions between them as movie characters, public figures, or actual human beings. It can be a fascinating approach, and (often at the same time) a horrifying and pathetic one. (I remember an insufferably smug Film Comment piece he wrote about Scorsese in the 1980s that spoke directly to "Marty" in a sophomoric way that made me mildly ill. He has written screenplays, including one -- as yet unmade -- called "Fierce Heat" that, according to his Wikipedia entry, was to have been produced by Scorsese and directed by Stephen Frears. I don't know what it's about or why it was not made [maybe I'll imagine a piece of criticism about it sometime], but Scorsese has made a movie about a Thomson-esque character before: Rupert Pupkin, in "King of Comedy.")

I've admired Thomson's criticism -- especially his indispensable "Biographical Dictionary" -- for years, but found his "journalism" (particularly his feigned "insights" into how the American entertainment business and culture works) to be superficial and largely based on speculation and wish-fulfillment. Which is why what I've read of, and about, this book has been troubling. This blurb on the Random House site about Thomson's collection, "Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts," nicely summarizes Thomson's fantasy approach to movies:

If most film critics write about movies, David Thomson creates their literary counterpart with essays that are as dazzling, haunting, and moving as the pictures they discuss. In this bravura new collection, the Esquire columnist trains his eye on Hollywood's ghosts, exploring their tendency to rise from the grave or descend from the screen to intimately haunt our lives.

Thomson conjures up Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, and Cary Grant in any of the pictures where he makes every scene look like a lucky accident. With equal aplomb, he imagines a James Dean who survived the car crash and a post-Saturday Night Fever Tony Manero. We learn the "20 Things People Like to Forget About Hollywood" (Number 3: "You Are Their Playthings, Not the Other Way Around"). And on every page of Beneath Mulholland, we are educated, entertained, and enlarged by a book as savvy and incisive as any Hollywood reportage and as lyrical as the best fiction.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Collaborator with Roman Polanski on "Repulsion," "Cul-de-Sac," "Fearless Vampire Killers," "The Tenant," "Tess," "Frantic," "Bitter Moon" and others. From The Guardian:

"Cul-de-Sac" (1966) had echoes of "Waiting for Godot," but was more directly influenced by Harold Pinter, not only in the casting of Donald Pleasence, who had triumphed in Pinter's "The Caretaker" a few years previously, but also in the portrayal of sexual humiliation and in the relationship of the two gangsters. However, the depiction of a married couple's sexual tensions that erupt into violence when an outsider intrudes on their world was a favourite theme developed in the Polanski-Brach screenplay.... [...]

Throughout their partnership, Brach did most of the writing. "We talk and then he writes it," Polanski explained. "Then he comes back into the room and we change it together."

Besides his work with Polanski, Brach co-wrote screenplays for several of the most notable films of the 1980s, mostly for non-French directors: "Identification of a Woman" (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982), "Favourites of the Moon" (Otar Iosseliani, 1984) and "Maria's Lovers" (1984) and "Shy People" (1987), both by Andrei Konchalovsky. Nevertheless, his most acclaimed screenplays were for Frenchmen: Berri, the two-part Marcel Pagnol adaptation, "Jean de Florette" and "Manon des Sources" (1986); and Jean-Jacques Annaud, "The Name of the Rose" (1986), "The Bear" (1988), "The Lover" (1992) and "Minor," currently being shot in Spain.

Brach was agoraphobic, and for almost the last 10 years he hardly ever left the Paris apartment where he lived alone, rarely receiving visitors, except for the occasional director.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

FIPRESCI Critics' Choice: "D.O.A.P."

"After 10 days, 352 films, and 27,747 minutes," a Toronto International Film Festival press release announces, the "People's Choice Award" (bestowed in recent years upon such films as "American Beauty" and "Tsotsi"), went to "Bella," an American film directed by Alejandro Gomez Monteverde. The Prize of the International Critics (FIPRESCI Prize) was awarded to the British film "Death of a President," directed by Gabriel Range "for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth."

More prize winners here. And I'll be posting more of my own thoughts about this year's frestival in the next few days.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Beauty is overrated": Patrick Wilson to Kate Winslet in "Little Children."

What are your expectations about the second feature directed by Todd Fields (Nick Nightingale in "Eyes Wide Shut") after "In the Bedroom"? Ditch them -- a smart thing to do before watching any movie. If "In the Bedroom" was the child of Chabrol (specifically "La Femme Infidel"), "Little Children" takes a sample of Todd Solondz's DNA. I don't think it's giving away anything too important to say that "Little Children" is a melodramatic tragi-comedy (co-written by novelist Tom "Election" Perratta, based on his novel), and that the title refers not so much to wee ones who have been born recently as to the immature young adults who are now faced with raising their offspring.

It's a funny, frustrating, even infuriating film -- and at Toronto people seemed to either love it or hate it. I know I did. It just depended on the scene. I think I appreciate it more now, 24 hours later, than I did the moment it was over. It's an odd film, with a wryly intrusive, deep-voiced narrator who appears to be standing just behind the screen reading excerpts from the novel.

"Little Children" takes place over the course of one summer in a hermetic, parochial and puritanical (surprise!) small town in New England, a part of the country I admit I find rather creepy, stultifying and alien. As its monicker suggests, it's not quite Old World (though definitely mired in a calcified European-style social/financial hierarchy), and not quite contemporary American, either. (I'm just admitting my prejudices here; yes, I suppose this story could have taken place anywhere, but it doesn't.) The movie captures that suffocating feeling splendidly; it's as palpable as the stifling summer humidity. Every character is deeply entrenched in some kind of rut from the past, and consequently seems to have long-ago forgotten what it's like to be alive. For now, everybody's just going through the zombified motions, one day at a time.

At heart, it's a story of three couples, and three sets of children. Sarah (Kate Winslet) has a Master's in English Lit. and views her own child as an alien being to whom she feels little connection. The key: She can't get the kid to ride in the child safety seat, so they have to walk everywhere. She's married to Richard (Gregg Edelman), whose crime is not so much that he visits dirty web sites as that he's in "branding," wears a sweater around his neck at dinner, and is thoroughly repulsive and insufferable.

Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) is a documentary filmmaker so wrapped up in her "work" (which looks pretty trite and conventionally manipulative) that she spends hardly any time with her former Golden Boy husband Brad (Patrick Wilson) and their son. Kathy runs their marriage like a line producer. Perhaps the most horrifying scene in the movie is when Brad finds a bill for three magazine subscriptions on the table, with the titles circled and a note from his wife: "Do you really need these?"

The third couple is a convicted flasher with the requisite three names common to all convicts, Ronald James McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley, of "Breaking Away" and "Bad News Bears") his mom, May (Phillis Somerville), who live together in an old house full of clocks and kiddie tchotchkes. Ronny knows he suffers from pedophiliac compulsions, but Mommy knows he's a good boy who just needs to find a girl his own age. "I don't want a girl my own age," he says.

So, everyone is haunted by something they've done in the past, or are doing in the present, and feels guilty about it, but not enough to change. They're all unlikable and shallow (which is not necessarily a bad thing in a movie). Melodramatic incidents pile up near the end to teach almost everyone a lesson and tie up the interwoven storylines.

One strange caveat: Brad, who is good-looking in a bland and generic way, makes a comment about his wife Kathy's beauty that upsets Sarah, even though she's pushed him to tell her. And, yes, Jennifer Connelly is a stunning woman -- though she's photographed to look thin and hard here. Winslet, on the other hand, is supposed to be plain -- when, in fact, she's such a voluptuous, natural beauty that it seems ridiculous nobody in the movie even seems to notice.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 06:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

An attempted "Chinatown" shot from "The Black Dahlia."

I've been holding back my thoughts about Brian De Palma's "The Black Dahlia" since I saw it at the end of July, and now (especially after ten days at the Toronto Film Festival) those thoughts are more distant and disorganized than ever. I had intended to review the movie for RogerEbert.com, but that proved to be nigh impossible -- I've just been too busy with Toronto and other stuff, and I found the movie rather flat and ininspiring, so I didn't feel passionately motivated to write about it. (I'm still in Toronto as I write this.)

So, I'm going to offer just a few general comments (including some mild spoilers about particular shots and sequences), and then I'd very much like to hear your comments about the movie.

As I think back on the film, I'm surprised to find that the predominant color I associate with it is a rosy pink. Not black. Not blood red. But a mild color that Vilmos Zsigmond has used in his peculiar pastel palette for the film. That's not what I expected of a De Palma film of James Ellroy's "The Black Dahlia," but there it is. And somehow that characterizes what I think is wrong with the movie: After the first hour or so, which seems like a good set-up for a De Palma extravaganza, it grows pale and indistinct. From the start it's too controlled, rarely risky or dangerous. By the end, lots of people are getting shot (in pretty unimaginative ways for De Palma), just so it seems the filmmaker can hurry up and get the movie over with. Things fall apart. I didn't feel like De Palma cared about the picture anymore at this point, and so neither did I. You can feel the filmmaker losing interest in his own movie.

The set-pieces: The discovery of the Dahlia's body is a bravura shot that belongs with De Palma's best. It comes when you don't expect it -- during a shoot-out on the next block over, involving LAPD dicks Bucky (Josh Hartnett) and Lee (Aaron Eckhart). The camera cranes over the building up to the rooftop and, far below, away from the gunfire in mid-morning sunlight, we see a woman pushing a baby carriage toward a naked, segmented corpse in the grass. From here, we see the body shortly before she does -- but this seems to have nothing to do with the gunfight scene we've just been lifted out of. The woman's panic and horror is witnessed from this distant aerial vantage point, as she screams in alarm (and, with a nod to "Potemkin" and "The Untouchables," temporarily abandons the stroller). It will turn out, of course, that the shoot-out has everything to do with the Dahlia; we just don't see it yet.

My favorite scene is a bizarre dinner at the home of the wealthy, dotty, and undoubtedly corrupt Linscott family -- a twisted, hot-house outgrowth of something from "The Big Sleep." Bucky has met the movie's apparent femme fatale, Madeleine Linscott (Hillary Swank, smoldering in a way I've never seen her) at a lesbian nightclub, and gets invited home to meet the parents and little sis. These people are beyond eccentric -- they're the inbred (literally or figuratively) and insane products of high society. And what makes the scene (and particularly Fiona Shaw's unhinged performance) so wonderful is that, at the moment it's taking place, you have the feeling the movie could go just about anywhere from here -- tonally, narratively, cinematically. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is a long, slow, dispiriting downhill slide.

When Bucky goes to rendezvous with a shady character on a marble staircase, you know you're in for a multi-level set-piece. Lee is up above, struggling over the ballustrade with William Finley ("Phantom of the Paradise"), while Bucky is on the stairway, halfway between salvation and damnation. It's a set-up that's repeated back at the Linscott home, but to no particular effect.

The image that stays with me most when I think about "The Black Dahlia" isn't from the film itself, but from another De Palma film: "The Fury." I see a melding of Fiona Lewis spinning in the air, and John Cassavettes flying apart in all directions.

P.S. I'm distressed to report that Mark Isham -- a composer I usually like (especially his work for Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns," which I love -- has contributed two terrible unoriginal scores this year: a distractingly dull piece that lifts wholesale from Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant, last-minute music for "Chinatown" (trumpet and rustling strings) ; and the bombastic music for "Bobby" -- which caused some at the Toronto press screening to hiss his name when it appeared at the end of the film.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

The Los Angeles Times -- which likes to fancy itself as the "paper of record" for the entertainment industry -- has officially jumped the shark. Wednesday it inaugurated a weekly column by Jay A. Fernandez called Scriptland, which is to be dedicated to "the work and professional lives of screenwriters." What this means, evidently, is that the L.A. Times is now in the business of providing free script coverage for the studios, because the first column features a gushy mini-review of a draft of a script by Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation."). I could barely make it past this without gagging:

I have the new Charlie Kaufman screenplay on my desk.

I've read it — no, lived it. I've been moved and astounded by it. And I'm tortured by the dilemma of what I should or should not say about it here. I feel a bit like Frodo palming the One Ring. [...]

But many people, beginning with Kaufman, do not want me to have the script, do not want me to read the script, and without question do not want me to write anything about the script. Words like "super-sensitive," "invasive" and "freaked" have been cautiously leveled at me as I've reached out to those involved with the project to get their thoughts on it.

No. It's not. Fernandez isn't a journalist and he isn't a critic; he's a leech, on the level of those self-aggrandizing amateur web trolls who think their premature, uninformed opinions about an unfinished work are "news." If the L.A. Times is going to play by these rules, it will be publishing its writers' opinions about leaked manuscripts of books before they are edited or revised by the authors, and unmixed rehearsal tapes of recording sessions. In the interest of fairness, the paper should also run commentary on early versions of L.A. Times stories before they appear in print, so we can see how that sausage is made. Everything needs to be pre-digested, doesn't it? Meanwhile, expect Times employees to spend a lot of time going through showbiz garbage cans. I'm sure readers will find all this extra groundless speculation -- and spoilers -- terribly useful and informative.

I hope that movie critics, and actual journalists, will protest. Loudly. This really is a new ethical low, tarring the efforts of the paper's real reporters by sticking their work with gossip and innuendo. What is newsworthy about a work-in-progress -- unless (like Emilio Estevez's "Bobby" in Toronto) its makers have decided to screen it for the press and ticket-buying public? Fernandez hasn't seen the movie in any form. Kaufman is set to direct it himself, but hasn't even finished casting it yet. "Meanwhile," Fernandez concludes his item (after telling us an image that appears on "Page 1"), "I feel terribly sick to my stomach." Yeah, he's not the only one. What a self-serving piece of crap. I have a great idea, L.A. Times: Why don't you go put your Calendar entertainment coverage behind a web subscription wall again?

(Tip: Hot Blog.)

Posted by Jim Emerson at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

View image Wayne Newton and Suzanne Pleshette -- er, Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore stud the all-star cast of "Bobby."

We're told that Emilio Estevez's "Bobby" takes place at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, but it feels like it was originally released back around then. It's