October 2006 Archives

"The Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery." -- Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, 1976

I'm sure Paz intended that statement as a tribute to the defiant spirit of the people of Mexico.

Seven years ago, my dear friend Julia Sweeney and I were in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the Days of the Dead (Los Dias de Los Muertos), October 31-November 2, the holiday that has had the most personal meaning for me ever since I found out about it. Discovering that there was a three-day holiday -- the biggest and most festive of the year, surpassing Christmas even in a now mostly Catholic nation -- in which people build altars to remember and celebrate their dead, decorate graves with marigolds and stay up all night drinking and partying in cemeteries, where kids eat sugar skulls and "demons" are invited to join families in dancing and feasting... what a revelation!

For somebody who was raised in a culture where death was rarely acknowledged with anything but whispers in hospitals or screams in movie theaters, the Mexican embrace of death with a three-day fiesta seemed to me to move beyond denial to something much richer and healthier. No, I don't believe the souls of the departed dwell in the Land of the Dead and return to visit their loved ones for three days a year -- but I sure think it's a fantastic idea.

I think Julia was still more or less Catholic (her background) when we were in Mexico -- although I'll never forget her exclaiming, in reference to how the Mixtecs skillfully adapted their pagan gods and beliefs to accommodate, and escape the wrath of, the Spanish missionaries: "Wow, they just took Roman Catholicism and ran with it!" (Viva la Virgin of Guadalupe!)

Fifteen months (and one cardiomyopic heart-stoppage on my part) later, we would be in Guangzhou, China, where I accompanied Julia as she adopted her daughter Mulan. While we were in the People's Republic, we learned that Mulan's birthday had been November 2, 1999 -- All Souls' Day, the very time we had been on the other side of the world, in Oaxaca, celebrating the Days of the Dead. (Cue Theramin music here.) Neither of us, I think, is inclined to attribute such a delightful and miraculous synchronicity to any Divine Influence or Plan -- indeed, we revel in the wonder of such an occurrence all the more because it is so spectacularly fortuitous. (Hi Mu: I'm so glad I was with your mom when you were adopted in China!)

I was introduced to the Days of the Dead through a little import shop on "The Ave" in Seattle's University District, La Tienda Imports, where as a Junior in high school I discovered a wonderful white coffin with my name on it ("Jaime"). You pull the string at the foot of the coffin and Jaime's skeletal head pops up through the hole on top of the coffin. This little handcrafted item has been with me for more than 30 years now. In 1976 I saw the extant footage of Sergei Eisenstein's "Que Viva Mexico" at the Second Seattle International Film Festival at the Moore-Egyptian Theatre, and fell in love with the holiday.

A year or two later I would try a mind-altering substance for the first time (courtesy of "The Dude," later immortalized in "The Big Lebowski") deep in the bowels of this same theater on the opening night of that edition of the festival, and then get lost trying to work my way through the "catacombs" to the surface for the midnight premiere of George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead," still the goriest, funniest, and my favorite of all "undead" movies (I was a little too young for "Night of the Living Dead" when it was first released). John Huston's underappreciated-masterpiece adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" also begins with Days of the Dead imagery, in Cuernavaca (and the credits sequence is one of the most eerie and delightful I've ever seen).

So, I've been reflecting on what it is, exactly that scares us so much about the "undead" (in the sense of Romero's "Living Dead" and other zombie-spawn)? Well, first of all, they're ugly, smelly, and have a ravenous appetite for human flesh, of course. But a dead body is a dead body -- an inert object (see poem by William Carlos Williams at the end of this post). The terrifying thing about the living dead is that they're dead but they won't stay that way. It's not their death that horrifies us, it's their life -- their refusal to play by the rules of the natural world. The living dead are very much like the "pod people" of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," only they have a harder time "passing." (They still go to the mall, though, in "Dawn of the Dead" -- because it was "once an important place in their lives.")

Today in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com I have a review of Eric Steel's documentary "The Bridge," which has haunted me for two weeks since I first saw it. A movie that takes suicide seriously, and considers the pain of the person who wishes to die as well as the anguish and guilt of the survivors, is a rarity. Over and over, survivors say they don't understand why someone they knew and loved wanted to cease to exist; but a surprising number admit the agony that would drive someone to suicide is beyond their imagination. They have to accept, and respect, that it was real.

A father says: "“Some people say the body is a temple. He thought his body was a cage, a prison. In his mind, he knew he was loved, that he had everything and could do anything. And yet he felt trapped, and that was the only way he could get free.� "The Bridge" makes the unthinkable, taboo subject of suicide real in honest and realistic ways that maybe even those who have never considered it can understand. The mother of a jumper recalls it took someone else to finally get her to realize: "It's not about you. It has nothing to do with you." That may be as hard for some to get their heads around as the suicide itself. Suicide is the ultimate solipsistic act; it's not about anyone else.

The few, mostly superficial discussions of suicide we have in our culture (30,000+ in the U.S. in an average year; only about 25 or so off the Golden Gate, which is nevertheless the world's leading suicide destination), tend to objectify the suicidal person and concentrate on prevention and grief and downplaying the reality out of fear that others may be encouraged to try it. Copycat incidents are real, but peer pressure is not one of the leading causes of suicide -- particularly off the Golden Gate Bridge. It takes a certain kind of personality choose such a dramatic, public exit, and the bridge is already famous as a suicide spot.

"The Bridge" is being used by some to advocate a multi-million-dollar barrier to help prevent jumping off the Golden Gate. I guess one's attitude toward this would depend on whether you see suicide as a problem of mental illness or architecture. Barriers have to be erected to keep people from accidentally falling off tall structures, and to protect those below. But I don't know of anyone who has accidentally gone off the bridge (unless, perhaps, they foolishly decided to jump up on the railing), or anyone who has been hurt by a falling suicide jumper. "The Bridge" de-mythologizes and de-romanticizes suicide. I think that's healthy.

From my review:

Looking this closely and intently into suicide, you almost fear too much empathy, the way you dread the vertigo that accompanies acrophobia: What you're afraid of is not so much that you might fall, but that impulse within you that wants to eliminate the yawning tension between you and the surface below. But as several in the film acknowledge, the eternal dilemma of suicide is not something we can diminish by hushing it up or mischaracterizing what it is.

The indignation over the BBC British speculative fiction film "Death of a President" has died down substantially since the film received its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Some of those who were initially alarmed and offended and downright disgusted at the idea of a film about the assassination of an American president seem to have figured out that presidential assassination is not a novel idea, even in the movies. (I do not recall a storm of outrage after season two of "24," which ended with an attempt on the life of President David Palmer; nor after the beginning of season five last January, which began -- SPOILER ALERT -- with a depiction of his assassination far more explicit than anything in "Death of a President.")

The most shocking thing about the movie is portrayal of the essential truth: that George W. Bush, like his father before him during Iran-Contra, is out of the loop of history. He's a dupe, the "wimp factor" personified, and he serves only as a placeholder for the people who decided to put him in power, when he was still a pathetic nobody in Texas (the pathetic nobody he reveals himself to be every time he opens his mouth). Dubya is but a balloon with a cartoonish face painted on it. Sooner or later, the illusion will pop. By 2006, that news shouldn't be shocking to many people -- but as a perspective on history, it's still a little ahead of the curve.

For the literalists among us, however, it's all in a name. As long as the character's name is fictional (even if the office he holds is not), then the dramatization of the repercussions of a hypothetical assassination (in the case of "DoaP," set in the future: October, 2007) is OK. Just as it's apparently OK to use Robert F. Kennedy's death as an opportunity to turn the Ambassador Hotel into something like "Neil Simon's California Suite with Assassination" (in "Bobby") because, well, that murder actually happened. Right? Then there's Philip Roth's 2004 alternate history novel, "The Plot Against America," in which Charles Lindberg defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election and turns the United States into an anti-Semitic isolationist dystopia. That one has been read as an allegory for the current Bush administration, too, but Roth used other real names instead of George W. Bush's. Meanwhile, "South Park" and "Team America: World Police" graphically kill off real public figures by name, but use cartoons or puppets (with realistic gore). And disaster and horror movies depict the destruction of entire real-life cities and landmarks, with thousands or even millions killed, without any serious intent, but just for entertainment.

I don't know what the fuss is about, except that it's provided people on the right and the left with an opportunity to profess disingenuous pseudo-patriotic horror (they are shocked, shocked!) that such a thing would be deemed a suitable subject for a motion picture, and it's a good thing the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of speech because this is in bad taste and going too far, blather, blather, blather... (These are the same people who think Borat lives in the real Kazakhstan.)

Either you understand the difference between fact and fiction -- whether the names are real or not -- or you don't. Here's what I wrote after the Toronto press screening of "Death of a President":

"Death of a President," the documentary-style speculative fiction about the assassination of the 43rd President of the United States, is seamless, intelligent and maybe even necessary to an understanding of George W. Bush's role in the world today, and his place in the wider scope of history. Especially when public awareness of the facts about his administration lags so far behind what has already been documented.

Written and directed by Gabriel Range, this very convincingly staged television "documentary" falls into a tradition of fictionalized British films (going back to Peter Watkins' famous "The War Game" and "Punishment Park" in the early 1960s) that use nonfiction techniques to explore contemporary social and political issues. Range himself made a film in 2003 called "The Day Britain Stopped," about what might happen if public transportation came to a standstill. Before that, he made "The Menendez Murders" (2002), described as another form of docu-drama.

I meant to see Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" last weekend -- and I'd meant to see it at a couple of press screenings in the weeks before that. But... I don't feel like it. And -- as a civilian moviegoer who'd just go buy a ticket without being obligated to write about the picture -- I'm struggling with why I feel that way. All I know is that I was looking forward to it up until I saw the first images in the trailer, with that artsy desaturated color and lemon-chiffon-tinted cannonfire that reminded me of the early days of Ted Turner and his colorization crayons. (The marketing has been exceptionally trite and schizophrenic -- alternating between rah-rah battle action and equally sentimentalized sap, both of which seem false and trivializing in a time of such dire news from Iraq. But I'm fully aware how rarely the marketing for a movie actually resembles the movie itself -- which is why I routinely fast-forward through TV spots, except when I'm watching "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report" live!)

The movie opened to a "disappointing" $10.2 million on 1,876 screens and now everybody's writing about how the "expectations" they had for it being a leading Oscar contender are now "jeopardized" -- or something like that. I find it difficult to care about Oscar buzz or box office grosses. But one thing in this morning's New York Times semi-post-morem (Omigod! They might have to spend more money on the Oscar campaign!!!) struck me as, well, a little... odd:

... [Paramount distribution exec Rob] Moore said Monday morning that Paramount, DreamWorks and Mr. Eastwood had agreed to expand by 300 screens nationwide this week. He cited the movie’s reviews, as well as exit polls of audience members that were 50 percent better than average — a sure gauge of word of mouth, he said.

Copy desk! What do you suppose that tortured phrase about exit polls "50 percent better than average" is supposed to mean? That 50 percent of moviegoers surveyed said "Flags of Our Fathers" was above average -- compared to another 50 percent who said it was... average, or below average? That doesn't sound very good. That the average rating for "FoOF" was 50 percent higher than the average for all movies? Even that doesn't sound so impressive.

What's the median score?

Anybody else either reluctant to see, or eager to see, "Flags of Our Fathers." If you contributed to that $10 million over the weekend, what did you make of the movie?

A few notes (and I took lots!) on seeing Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" for a second time:

I actually enjoyed the film more the next time around, and I think the usual forces are at work here: 1) since I already knew where it was going and how it was going to get there, I wasn't bothered so much by my memories of "Infernal Affairs" and how many sequences, performances and techniques I thought were more effective in the earlier movie; and 2) some of the rough spots often seem to smooth out a little once you've been over them before. I've always found this to be true with movies, and maybe even more so with music: the irritating things that stick out the first time don't seem quite as glaring with repeated exposure, if only because you already know they're there, and that makes them easier to accept, get past (and, perhaps, downplay).

Even Jack Nicholson's meretricious Jack-off performance seemed slightly less awkward, a little more nuanced (in spots) the second time. But I still think it's the movie's most conspicuously damaging flaw.

I took note of a couple scenes I thought were cut together in discontinuous ways that were particularly distracting and harmful to the performances. The first is in the seafood restaurant (with the nun and the priests sitting by the window). It's mostly a conversation between Frank (Nicholson) and Billy (Leonardo DiCaprio), intercutting two shots from different angles, one favoring Frank on the left and the other favoring Billy on the right. With both actors' faces fully visible in both angles (they're seated side by side), the challenges of matching shots is doubly difficult. DiCaprio changes expression or shifts the direction of his gaze -- sometimes dramatically -- from cut to cut.

Something similar happens in the scene in the bar between Frank and Billy, where Frank makes his rat face and lights the drawing on fire. Here, most of the discontinuity is in Nicholson's performance -- possibly because he reportedly improvised a lot of business for this scene. I suppose you could make an argument that the jumps and shifts space and demeanor indicate that Frank is coming apart at the seams (or splices).

But, again, it's a trade-off. Scorsese may have chosen these takes because he liked what the actors were doing in each of them and wanted those moments in his film. On the other hand, because the footage doesn't cut together so smoothly, some of us were thrown out of the picture by these jarring cuts.

The two scenes I found the most thoroughly enjoyable, aside from every minute Mark Wahlberg or Alec Baldwin were on screen, were (like those characters) newly created for "The Departed" and not in "Internal Affairs." The first is the charming encounter in the elevator between Colin (Matt Damon) and Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), where they spar and she gives him her card. The second is the one in Madolyn's office between her and Billy, as they try to out-psych each other.

Anybody else see things a bit differently upon watching "The Departed" for a second time? Got specific examples of what you thought worked or didn't work? This "Departed" topic (see below) and its follow-up have received the most comments of any postings in the brief life of Scanners!

Scanners is only a little over a year old. If I recall correctly, it began on RogerEbert.com shortly before the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival in the fall, then shifted over to the new Sun-Times/Moveable Type publishing platform a few months later in spring, at the beginning of the 2006 Overlooked Film Festival -- 254 Moveable Type entries ago. It's been almost exactly four months since I persuaded the Sun-Times that I really wanted to have Comments enabled, and they became available here for the first time in June. Last week, without my even noticing it, we passed 1,000 comments (almost 1,100 as of today) -- and for that, I am extremely grateful to you!

Since June, I've instigated the Opening Shots Project -- with many contributions from readers (and many still to be published, and many frame-grabs to be grabbed -- I haven't forgotten, I'm just overwhelmed) -- and we've had some exceptionally terrific and rewarding discussions about "The Descent," "The Departed," all kinds of approaches to film criticism, and more other subjects than I can think of right now. Scanners is rapidly evolving into the very thing I hoped it would become, a place where people can have impassioned, intelligent, provocative (and funny) discussions about critical thinking in all its guises -- beginning with "moving images" (film and video and TV) and extending in all directions into even the touchiest related (but unavoidable) subjects of sex, business, politics, race, religion, philosophy, mythology and art. How much fun is that?!?!

One of the year's most subtly extraordinary movies opens in Chicago today: Ramin Bahrani's "Man Push Cart." (See Roger Ebert's review here). As readers of this blog know, I first encountered it at Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival in May and my experience with it was like falling in love, and not fully realizing it until the final credits were rolling. And that's exactly what's great about it: I never felt like I knew where it would go, or that it was straining to fit a traditional narrative structure; I just became absorbed in the daily (and nightly) struggles of this one human life, an almost invisible man in New York City. Roger sees in it "the very soul of Italian Neo-Realism"; I see the purity and minimalism of Bresson and Ozu. We're both right.

Here's part of what I filed from the Overlooked:

Alfred Hitchcock supposedly said that while most movies are a slice of life, his were a slice of cake. He's right about the last part, although most movies are not slices of anything resembling life as most of us experience it. But "Man Push Cart," the film by Ramin Bahrani, a director born in Iran and raised in North Carolina, is not only an exquisitely realized slice of life but a slice of filmmaking perfection. I didn't know, as I became absorbed in this portrait of a New York City street vendor whose life is slowly slipping from his grasp (like his heavy pushcart on one occasion), that it would become one of my favorite movies of recent years until moments after its inexplicably magnificent ending.

All I can tell you is that when the moment came, a thought flashed through my mind: "Wow, I would just end the movie right here -- wouldn't that be great?" And then, one more shot, and the movie was over. So, yes, I felt absolutely in synch with the vision of the filmmaker (whose manifest influences include some of my favorite directors: Robert Bresson and Lodge Kerrigan -- not to mention Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus"), but the film also had me so completely in its spell that it subtly prepared me for arrival at this ending (which, in formulaic conventional movies, would hardly be considered a conclusion at all). It just felt absolutely, ideally right. (Hitchcock also liked to say he played the audience like an organ; "Man Push Cart" is no less masterful, but its method and effects are not the bravura manipulations of Hitchcock but the subtle, underplayed shadings of Bresson or Yasujiro Ozu.)

On the most prosaic level, the story of Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi, a former restauranteur who'd never acted before), a Pakistani-American who pushes (or pulls) his breakfast cart to 54th and Madison every day, could be seen as something of a downer. But, as Roger Ebert is fond of saying, no good movie is ever depressing -- because the experience of being in the presence of such artistry is elevating. (A friend and I, in the grips of a paralyzing mutual depression, once made a pilgrimage to "GoodFellas" and the experience -- though it's hardly an upper of a movie -- temporarily, at least, lifted us out of our low-seratonin stupor because it was just so exhilarating to watch something so beautifully composed and performed.) "Man Push Cart" is that kind of movie.

I posted an Opening Shot Project entry for "Man Push Cart" here. Please come back after you've seen the film and let me know your impressions. It may be my favorite movie of the year.

My paen to a new, browner America in the age of 300 million (below) was in part a satirical (though sincere) reaction to the non-story about whether a "real mixed-race actress" should play Mariane Pearl, the wife of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, instead of Angelina Jolie, who is reported to wear make-up that darkens her skin-tone. This is how far we've come from Jim Crow laws: race is everything and if you're an octoroon, you'd better have the credentials to prove it if you want a job as an actor!

In the current HBO documentary, "The Journalist and the Jihadi, Mariane Pearl herself describes her background: "I was born in Paris, my mother's Cuban, my father's Dutch, I'm a Buddhist -- all this exotic stuff." Angelina Jolie, however, has a French name and a French godmother (Jacqueline Bissett) but was born in America to the grandson of a Czech immigrant (actor Jon Voight) and a mother who is part American Indian (Haudenosaunee). So, do we really have to have a contest about who's more "mixed race"?

Daniel Pearl, meanwhile, was a Jew from Encino, a classically trained violinist who switched to country fiddle and then to journalism. Who the hell are they gonna get to play that?

ADDENDUM: Mariane Pearl role originally to have been played by Jennifer Aniston; Pearl's response to Jolie.

Today, I've been writing about "The Bridge" (opening in Chicago next week), a documentary about the stories of people who jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004.

I read that the director, Eric Steel (who had cameras on the bridge from dawn to dusk for the entire year) had invoked Breughel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" -- and that resonated with me. Then I remembered the poem of the same name by one of my favorite poets, William Carlos Williams.

For me, as an American, a West Coaster and a cinephile, the Golden Gate Bridge has always loomed large in my consciousness. Today, as I attempt to digest this shattering film, I am moved and awed to offer these images, from Brueghel to the bridge -- visions not just of a magnificent structure or landmark, but of a place of mythic stature in the imagination.

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"
by William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

(Statistic: Most American suicides take place in the spring.)

A personal note: I hope you've seen my dearest friend Julia Sweeney's "God Said 'Ha!'" (Roger Ebert's review here), which is available on DVD. And I hope you've seen her stage monologues, "In the Family Way," about her decision to adopt her daughter, Tara Mulan Sweeney, from China (my photo account of the journey itself is here, with my text written in Borat-esque Engrish); and, especially, "Letting Go of God," about her messy breakup with the Almighty, which she has performed in LA and New York (she's about to do nine shows through October 29 at the Ars Nova Theatre -- right next to "The Colbert Report"!) -- and abridged one-night engagements in a few other cities, including Seattle and Austin, where she did Q&As afterwards with Ira Glass.

You may have heard a small excerpt from "Letting Go of God" on Glass's "This American Life" NPR show, the most popular episode in that broadcast's history. But now -- for the first time! -- you can obtain a double-CD of the whole show (which comes with a beautiful booklet transcription of the piece) -- as well as a separate, single-CD recording of "In the Family Way." I'm so proud of, and moved by, Julia's accomplishments that I could do a dance -- which I indeed do, but in private.

Some of the happiest moments of my life have been working and playing and collaborating and consulting with Julia in various respects over the last 30 years of our enduring friendship -- on various projects for stage, print, TV and movies -- and I'm delighted to be listed as an Extra Special Creative Consultant on "Letting Go of God." The CDs go on sale at her web site October 25 (my birthday). "Letting Go of God," like "God Said 'Ha!'," will become a film of some kind (Julia is still playing around with ideas for how to shoot it). Here's an excerpt -- two of my favorite passages (although others are considerably funnier) -- that just happen to address this blog's core subject. No, not movies -- critical thinking:

God requires faith. Faith does not require evidence, right? But the more I thought about it, my faith was based on evidence. The evidence of how I felt when I prayed. The evidence of everyone believing in God, almost everyone I had ever met from the time I was a kid. The evidence of what I had been taught by other people I trusted, admired, and who ultimately had authority over me.

So, my faith in God was based on evidence. Well then, how could I not examine that evidence? But how did I examine anything? How did I know what I knew? I had to know! [...]

I thought of Pascal's Wager. Pascal argued that it's better to bet there is a God, because if you're wrong there's nothing to lose, but if there is, you win an eternity in heaven. But I can't force myself to believe, just in case it turns out to be true. The God I've been praying to knows what I think -- he doesn't just make sure I show up in church. How could I possibly pretend to believe? I might convince other people, but surely not God.

And plus, if I lead my life according to my own deeply held moral principles, what difference did it make if I believed in God? Why would God care if I "believed" in him?

It's a funny, informative, enlightening and suspenseful struggle if, like Julia (and me), you're inclined to Question Authority and figure things out for yourself. (Which is not to say you'll necessarily share Julia's conclusions -- and she doesn't expect you to -- just that you'll appreciate the switches, setbacks, false peaks and hard-won lessons of the journey...)

I don't know if I'll feel the same way about these movies, but these critics have a way with a memorable phrase. (I didn't read past the first line of Gozalez's review -- quoted here -- because I'm seeing the movie when it opens.) And, yes, I'm also quoting them, on my blog, because something tells me I might be inclined to agree with them. I'll let you know either way...

Ed Gonzalez on Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" (written by William Broyles Jr. and rewritten by Paul Haggis):

"The stink of 'Crash' hovers over 'Flags of Our Fathers.'"

Nathan Lee on "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning":

"Where did Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) get his flesh mask, and how did he come to select his signature power tool? What’s the back story of Officer Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey), and why does he eat people?

"The answers are beside the point. The movie exists to brutalize. Like 'The Passion of the Christ,' it is an invitation to hard-core sadism. Mel Gibson tried to turn atrocity into spiritual catharsis. The producers of 'The Beginning' merely package it, sell it to the masses and hope they don’t vomit in their nachos. "

David Edelstein on "Jesus Camp":

"Although the film tracks several kids—among them the adorable, snub-nosed Rachael and the dapper budding evangelist Levi—its dark heart is preacher Becky Fischer, who tells children that in the Old Testament a warlock like Harry Potter 'would have been put to death.' Oh, sure, she believes in democracy, she says to Air America host Mike Papantonio, but 'we can’t give everyone equal freedom because that’s going to destroy us.' 'Jesus Camp' makes the best case imaginable for atheism."

You want dark? How's this for dark: Matt Zoller Seitz chillingly sets the scene before plummeting headlong into the moral darkness of Robert Aldrich's noir masterpiece "Kiss Me Deadly" (Opening Shot Project dissection by Kim Morgan here), as part of Dennis Cozzalio's "Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon":

It defines the difference between cynicism and nihilism, then throws down with the nihilists, if for no other reason than to show you what it means to live in a world where nothing matters. Cynics expect the worst of humanity and are rarely disappointed, but in their hearts, they hope for some evidence that humans are innately kind and that morality is more than a sucker’s game. Cynicism is pre-emptive disappointment; you can’t be let down by anyone or anything unless you secretly nurse a kernel of hope. A nihilist, on the other hand, knows that the difference between cynicism and optimism is a matter of degrees. Like Neo in "The Matrix" blocking the agents’ bullets and then suddenly understanding, truly and deeply, that the world he's long accepted as "real" is just an intellectual prison built of ones and zeroes, the true nihilist has had his moment of cosmic disillusionment, and his accompanying realization that democracy, religion, equality -- hell, the Golden Rule itself -- are all just scam jobs sold to sheep by wolves; that everybody’s mainly concerned with playing the angles and getting ahead in the here and now, even if they pretend otherwise. After realizing that morality and ethics, religion and philosophy, good and evil are illusions of various sorts, and that there’s no percentage in decency, guilt and shame vanish and life becomes a present-tense proposition, a zero-sum game played by beasts that wear suits and drive cars.

In "Kiss Me Deadly," you might say the smoking gun comes in the shape of a mushroom cloud. And after watching last night's "Frontline" ("The Lost Year in Iraq") I'm still trying to decide whether the Bush administration is, in addition to stupid and incompetent, either cynical or nihilistic. I'm leaning toward the latter. It's a sign of our times: They just don't give a shit about anyone but their own insiders.

One of the highlights of my moviegoing experience at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival is about to become one of the best theatrical releases of 2006: Doug Block's "51 Birch Street" opens Wednesday in New York, Friday in Los Angeles and then slowly around the rest of the country from there. Check out the release schedule here. If this movie doesn't get an Oscar nomination, we'll know that there's something seriously wrong with the Academy's docu-- oh, wait, we already know that, don't we?

Although my post below is safe, I urge you NOT to read too much about the movie before you've seen it. But after you have, check out Doug's web site at 51birchstreet.com and this article that appeared in the New York Times and this one from The London Times.

Here's my original post, from September 15, 2005:

TORONTO -- How much do you know about your parents' marriage? How much do you want to know? How much should you know? Those are the dilemmas faced by filmmaker Doug Block in his quietly shattering, and eventually healing, documentary, "51 Birch Street." Block's film, as engrossing as any murder mystery but without melodrama or histrionics, could be this year's "Capturing the Friedmans" -- and yet the lives it investigates are more or less ordinary ones. No, there are no accusations of child pornography or molestation as in "Friedmans," but the film is no less compelling for being about a seemingly unexceptional, unremarkable, but relatively stable and successful marriage -- indeed, one that lasted more than 50 years.

As Block has said: "I never intended to make this film. But looking back on it, I guess it was the film I was born to make." Certainly it is a film only he could have made, because it is about his own family. It's a mystery he kind of stumbled into, interviewing his parents for a "family history" video he was thinking of making, and using the camera (a la Ross McElwee ["Sherman's March"], who is thanked in the credits) as a tool for getting closer -- to his father, in particular. He didn't expect to find what he found -- like 30 years of his mother's daily journals, beginning in 1968, which were mostly about her psychotherapy and her unhappiness with his father.

"51 Birch Street" is, in some ways, an antidote to the sugarcoated myths and lies the movies have taught us about love and marriage. I wish it could be shown as a second feature to every one of those "happily ever after" movies that culminate with the wedding ceremony -- as if that was an ending rather than a beginning. (It's like they say about the difference between comedy and tragedy being dependent entirely on where you choose to stop telling the story.)

The movies teach us romantic cliches that, once we become aware of them, are leached of their potency in real life. How romantic can a moonlight walk on the beach really be when, in the back of your mind, you're thinking: "Wow, this is just like a movie! How romantic!" Or: "Wow, a Moonlight Walk on the Beach. I'm inhabiting a cliche out of a movie. Can't we come up with something more original than this?" Maybe the very idea of "romance" belongs to the movies and art and pop culture and "silly love songs" (see John Turturro's deconstructionist musical love story, "Romance & Cigarettes"). What we live is something else.

Same goes for marriage. "51 Birch Street" is an account of the disappointments, resentments, accommodations and hard-fought compromises (with oneself and one's partner) that a marriage entails. There are no heroes or villains or homewreckers or philanderers. There's just husband and wife, Mom and Dad.

I can't wait to read your comments and questions after you see it -- and maybe some of your own stories, as well...

The wee bundle of joy who raises the US population to an even 300 million (for a fraction of second before we zoom past the milestone) may be a beautiful brown baby boy! We're a nation of ethnic mutts (and I'm of English-Irish-Italian-Cuban heritage -- proudly "mixed race"), but I wish I could live long enough to see the day (and it won't be that long) when most Americans will resemble Tiger Woods or Sonja Sohn or Bejamin Bratt or Halle Berry or Cameron Diaz or Jimmy Smits or Salma Hayek or... Well, OK, the beautiful ones, anyway. From Reuters:

A baby boy of Latino heritage, born in Los Angeles on Tuesday, might well be the 300 millionth American. The 200 millionth, a Chinese-American lawyer in Atlanta, says he'll be very relieved.

U.S. population will top 300 million at about 7:46 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 39 years after the 200 million mark was reached on November 20, 1967. [...]

It is possible to make an educated guess at who the 300 millionth American will be, said demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution.

"I predict it's going to be a Latino baby boy, born in Los Angeles to a Mexican immigrant mother," Frey said by telephone.

This prediction makes sense, Frey said, because about half of U.S. population growth is due to Hispanics, the biggest gains in the Hispanic population are in Los Angeles, more boys are born than girls and the U.S. population is growing more due to natural increase than through immigration.

"In theory, it could be anybody who crosses a border, who comes off a plane as a new immigrant or is born anywhere in the United States but if you have to put the odds on high probability, I would say my guess is pretty good," Frey said.

What a country!!!

UPDATE: Revisiting "The Departed."

A number of times while watching Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" I was distracted by cuts that didn't match. I'm not one of those petty "gaffe squadders" who look for continuity errors -- but I was bugged by actors who shifted in space from shot to shot. Sharp-eyed David Bordwell is the first person I know of to have written about these lapses in traditional Hollywood standards of professionalism and craftsmanship -- and a lot more. Check out a series of related entries on From his blog:

Speaking of editing: It’s blasphemy, but I’ve been long convinced that Scorsese’s films aren’t particularly well-edited. Look at any conversation scene, particularly the OTS [over-the-shoulder] passages, and you’ll see blatant mismatches of position, eyeline, and gesture. Spoons, hands, and cigarettes jump around spasmodically. In "The Departed," Alec Baldwin somehow loses his beer can in a reverse shot, and in the swanky restaurant, it’s hard to determine if there are one or two of those towering chocolate desserts on the table.

This may seem picky, but craft competence is not for nothing. Current reliance on tightly framed faces tends to sacrifice any sense of the specifics of a place. In most scenes, actors are so overcloseupped that little space is left for geography, even the mundane layout of a police station. Choppy cutting also subtly jars our sense of a smooth performance. Why can’t our directors sustain a fixed two-shot of the principals and let the actors carry the scene -– not just with the lines they say but with the way they hold their bodies and move their hands and employ props? Scorsese, though always a heavy shot/reverse-shot user, held full shots to greater effect in earlier movies.

Space on a larger scale matters too. The atmosphere of Hong Kong was conveyed far more vividly in the original "IA" than the landscape of Boston is here. The most concrete locale seems to be a Chinatown porn theatre (filmed at New York’s Cinema Village). There’s also a gilded State House dome that is distressing in its lumpy symbolism.

While others are applauding, Bordwell says this time he'll have to sit on his hands. He also presents an illuminating breakdown of shot lengths in Scorsese films here:

We have three new pieces by Roger Ebert on RogerEbert.com this week:

Ebert's review of "The Queen"

An interview with director Michael Apted regarding "49 Up"

PLUS: Roger's latest recovery update

(And I have a review of "Infamous," the new Truman Capote movie.

As most of you know, Roger Ebert has been undergoing physical therapy in a rehabilitation facility in Chicago, and -- great news! -- is recovering well and has filed his first review since June (of Stephen Frears' "The Queen") for Friday. We'll also have Roger's interview with Michael Apted about "49 Up," which is going into limited release around the country in October and November. Meanwhile, read Roger's latest letter from rehab here. An excerpt:

During all of this, I didn't lose any marbles. My thinking is intact and my mental process doesn't require rehabilitation.... -- although, curiously, I found myself more interested in plunging into the depths of classic novels ("Persuasion," "Great Expectations," "The Ambassadors") than watching a lot of DVDs. I prefer to see the new Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood films on a big screen, for example. But our "Ebert & Roeper" producer Don DuPree brought around a DVD of "The Queen," and when I viewed it, I knew I wanted to review it.

A few more recent movies also will be reviewed, but I won't be back to full production until sometime early next year. The good news is that my rehabilitation is a profound education in the realities of the daily lives we lead, and my mind is still capable of being delighted by cinematic greatness.

I plan to have my Overlooked Film Festival again in April, and cover the Academy Awards and Cannes. I can't wait to be back in the Sun-Times on a full-time basis, and to rejoin Richard Roeper in the "Ebert & Roeper" balcony.

UPDATE: Revisiting "The Departed."

Everybody's saying "The Departed" is Martin Scorsese's best picture since "Casino" -- or even "GoodFellas." And some of the (over-)praise has struck me as pretty condescending to Scorsese: "Good boy. You stick to your mobsters now, won't you?" I'll go out on a limb and say I think it's his best picture since "The Aviator."

Adding almost an hour to the running time of "Infernal Affairs," the film on which it's based, "The Departed" does indeed fill in some of what one critic called the "ellipses" in the plot of the original film (and opens up at least as many other holes in the process). And yet, as others have also observed, Scorsese's movies have never been driven by plot but character -- and, in "The Departed," the characters, performances, moral ambiguities, and even the filmmaking prowess itself (all the things we treasure in A Martin Scorsese Picture) are not as rich or developed as those of its 2000 Hong Kong predecessor, much less Scorsese's own best and most personal work. (And let me add that this is not a knee-jerk response; I'm no big fan of Hong Kong action films. What I liked about "Infernal Affairs" was that there was more going on than in most of the HK crime movies or policiers I've seen, which I thought were bursting with empty action and little else.)

I'm going to write more about "The Departed" next week (to continue what I began in my MSN Movies essay, "GoodFellas and BadFellas", but in the meantime, I've patched together some of the critical observations from others that made me go "Yes! That's it!" -- either because I felt the same way, or because they expressed something I hadn't been able to formulate for myself in my initial thinking about the movie.

Meanwhile, after taking a look at these critical observations, please weigh in with comments of your own. (Just remember, it may take a while for comments to actually show up on the site.)

Manohla Dargis (one of my favorite critics) does a fine job of putting the New York Film Festival into perspective in today's New York Times. This is very much the kind of realistic historical and aesthetic evaluation I've been hoping somebody would write, ever since I posed my own questions about the role and relevance of today's NYFF, in posts and comments here and here. Dargis writes:

Good, bad and sometimes just blah, most of the selections in the coming week support Mr. Peña’s assertion that the festival represents something like the state of the art. Too bad the fine art has to share precious shelf space with white-elephant frippery like “Little Children� and “Marie Antoinette.� Along with the similarly audience-friendly film “The Queen,� which was released in theaters the day after it opened the festival, these selections feature the bulk of the recognizable faces in the event. All three are red-carpet bait, the sort of star-gazing entertainments that attract the mainstream-media attention that is so crucial for festivals from Cannes to Los Angeles. All three are also being released by a studio or studio division, and are among the small set of English-language films that will dominate awards chatter until the Oscars in February.

Given the increasing competition for the audience’s attention, it would be easy to justify putting any one of these three in the festival: films like “The Queen� sell tickets (and newspapers), and probably make board members happy. But it is harder to justify programming all three in a festival with just 25 slots in its the main section. The New York Film Festival isn’t a grab bag; it’s an elitist event for film lovers willing to shell out as much as $40 a show. In a D.I.Y. world with too many choices, including an estimated 600 film festivals, some of which have seriously deep pockets and no qualms about pandering to their audiences, elitism is a virtue. It’s also this festival’s greatest strength.

The public’s appetite for serious work of the sort that has defined the New York Film Festival since its inception in 1963 has diminished, at least in theatrical terms. The generation that watched Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculin Féminin� at the festival in 1966 and continues to get to Lincoln Center this time of year, still sometimes frequents its local art-house theater. Not so, apparently, that generation’s progeny: a similarly large and dedicated younger audience for filmmakers like Mr. Weerasethakul ["Syndromes and a Century," also shown in Toronto], whose films show at prestigious festivals the world over, racking up ecstatic reviews along the way, has yet to emerge in America. That said, the vanguard of fiercely engaged cinephiles blogging online about the latest in Korean cinema suggests that a new generation of passionate filmgoers could emerge with more nurturing.

There are a multitude of complex, interconnected reasons why foreign-language cinema has taken such a hit, including its displacement by American independent film in the public’s over-multimedia-stimulated imagination. In this climate small distributors are finding it difficult to take chances with challenging, difficult, thoughtful (each adjective another kiss of death) foreign-language films, even when individual titles come equipped with glowing notices and the imprimatur of a world-class festival like Cannes. When even well-received American independent films like “Old Joy� and “Mutual Appreciation� are facing a tough market ride, it becomes increasingly difficult for a director like Mr. Weerasethakul to get a toe in the distribution door. His films don’t look, sound or play like the usual Hollywood or Sundance fare; they are, like their director, sui generis.

It’s great that “Syndromes and a Century,� which has yet to find an American distributor, is on the menu this year; too bad that the entire program isn’t similarly adventurous. It has always been the case that some good films, like Jia Zhang-ke’s “Dong� and Tsai Ming-Liang’s “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone,� both of which showed at recent festivals, don’t make it into the New York lineup. ["Dong," shown in Toronto, is a companion piece to "Still Life," which won the Venice festival this year and was belatedly added to the Toronto line-up, but neither "Still Life" nor "Dong" is in NYFF.] Festival programming is always a matter of timing, taste, desperation, politics and logistics, not to mention worthiness. But if the New York Film Festival is going to remain relevant in these difficult movie times, it needs to work harder to secure the best, and it needs to nurture a new audience, not just dine out on the faithful. Whether it scales up or retains its modest proportions, it needs to embrace the very exclusivity that makes it occasionally maddening and generally indispensable.

Brava! As a recent NY commenter here at Scanners recently reported, the NYFF is running a trailer for itself saying something like: "Some people accuse us of being selective and having high standards, but that's what our audience expects from us." I'm all for elitism -- as long as it implies having standards. Simply having a small number of slots does not alone make a festival "selective" or "elitist" or "prestigious" or "exclusive." It makes it limited. And that's fine. Telluride (held over Labor Day Weekend) doesn't have all that many slots, either. A festival is defined by what its programmers do to fill the slots that are available. As a film festival programmer myself (from the epic Seattle International Film Festival to the "exclusive" Floating Film Festival), I know how hard it is to program these events, whether you have hundreds of showings or only a few, so I am fully sympathetic. But any festival needs to figure out its identity and its role in the film culture (based, in part at least, on its location and its desired audience). I think Dargis's assessment of NYFF is right on.

I'm supposed to be "on vacation" this week, but this was just too good. People are always complaining about studies that simply "prove" the obvious, but in-depth studies and analysis are absolutely needed in a country where majorities of people believe things that are factually wrong (say, that Saddam did indeed have WMDs) or disbelieve things that have long ago been demostrated to be true (say, evolution). So, here comes a journalism study from Indiana University that finds news coverage on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" is as substantive as network news. The only part of this I question is the word "as." It should be "more." If you don't read newspapers and listen to NPR, you might not even understand what's being satirized on "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report." If you got most of your news from network evening newscasts, you wouldn't know what the hell was going on. (See this transcript from a recent Katie Couric CBS Evening Gossipcast, posted on the blog of a prominent conservative.)

No, Stewart and Colbert may claim to be the "fake news," but they are firmly rooted in the "reality-based community" -- and provide more incisive cut-through-the-bull analysis of current events than anything on commercial television. (Only "Frontline" goes deeper -- the show that, as at least one TV critic pointed out earlier this week, would have told the powers in the White House and the Pentagon and the intelligence community the things they needed to know, but now claim they didn't, if they'd only bothered to watch it. It's on PBS, Condi!)

From the official announcement of the "Daily Show" study, to be published in the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, published by the Broadcast Education Association:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Which would you think has more substantive news coverage -- traditional broadcast network newscasts or "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"?

Would you believe the answer is neither?

Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University isn't joking when she says the popular "fake news" program, which last week featured Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a guest, is just as substantive as network coverage.

While much has been written in the media about "The Daily Show"'s impact, Fox's study is the first scholarly effort to systematically examine how the comedy program compares to traditional television news as sources of political information.

The study, "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign," will be published next summer...

I have an essay over at MSN Movies on Martin Scorsese's morally conflicted characters -- in "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "The Last Temptation of Christ," "Casino" and "The Departed." It's called "GoodFellas and BadFellas," and it's about crooks, cops, saints, sinners and (of course) Catholic guilt in movies with and without God. An excerpt:

By the time of "GoodFellas" and "Casino," Scorsese's mobsters are no longer troubled by guilt over their actions, because there's no God taking notice of them.

Instead, they aim for an infallible position in the heirarchy of men where they can get away with anything in the name of piling up cash. People make mistakes -- like whacking a made guy -- and they pay the price, but there's no spiritual dimension to these wiseguys' transgressions. You break the rules, you fall out of favor, that's all.

Narrator-protagonists Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in "GoodFellas" and Sam "Ace" Rothstein (De Niro) in "Casino" are attracted to the mafia and Las Vegas, respectively, because they offer godlike status through earthly immunity. As a boy, Henry watches the gangsters across the street and marvels that they could get away with whatever they wanted and nobody, not even the cops, would complain.

For Ace, Las Vegas is a return to the Garden of Eden. We see him whisked from a limo through the glittery gates of Paradise (the Tangiers Hotel and Casino) as he recounts his ascension to a state of grace: "Anywhere else in the country I was a bookie, a gambler, always looking over my shoulder, hassled by cops day and night. But here, I'm 'Mr. Rothstein.' I'm not only legitimate, but running a casino, and that's like selling people dreams for cash ... Las Vegas washes away your sins. It's like a morality car wash. It does for us what Lourdes does for humpbacks and cripples. And along with making us legit comes cash. Tons of it." [...]

"As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster," declares Henry Hill at the start of "GoodFellas." "To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States." Looking at "GoodFellas" today, you may wonder what's the big diff. The world is divided into "somebodies" (us) and "nobodies" (them), and any measures taken by the elect -- including fraud, torture and execution -- is justifiable in the cause of preserving their way of life.

A U.S. postman is kidnapped and (briefly) detained by wiseguys who threaten to put him in a pizza oven if he delivers any more truant notices from Henry's school. The freeze-framed shot of the "nobody" mailman's head shoved near the opening of the oven could almost be a snapshot from Abu Ghraib. "How could I go back to school after that and pledge allegiance to the flag and sit through good government bulls***?" Henry wonders. Yeah, how?

Henry explains what it means to be a "good fella, a good guy," as the camera glides over the bones of a devoured feast at the Bamboo Lounge -- a meal nobody at the table will pay for. "To us, those goody-good people who worked [s*****] jobs for bum paychecks and who took the subway to work every day, worried about their bills, were dead. They were suckers ... If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice, they got hit so bad believe me they never complained again. It was all routine, you didn't even think about it. "

These are the words of a sociopath, reminiscent of Enron, where traders joked about fleecing "Grandma Millie" during the 2000 California energy crisis. Or, in the famous words of a Bush White House aide, reported by Ron Suskind in 2004: "When we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do." From there, it isn't far to Henry's statement from a bit later in the movie: "Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules ... Shooting people was a normal thing. It was no big deal."

The world Henry describes is one in which there's no higher power taking moral inventory. It's the same out West, where Ace describes the order of things: "In Vegas, everybody's gotta watch everybody else. Since the players are looking to beat the casino, the dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men, the pit bosses are watching the floor men, the shift bosses are watching the pit bosses, the casino manager is watching the shift bosses, I'm watching the casino manager, and the eye in the sky is watching us all." He's talking about the surveillance cameras overhead, not God, but you get the idea. (And who's watching the cameras and the tables from the rafters? "Former cheaters" who know all the tricks -- cast-outs for whom toiling in purgatory above the ceiling is as close to paradise as they are allowed to get in a place where cheaters are banished, or, for the most serious transgressors, driven into the desert never to be seen again.)

Inside the casino, Scorsese cuts from table-level close-ups of cards and dice to cosmic God's-eye-views, as Ace outlines his moral universe. Sure, the casinos are owned by gangsters, and millions are skimmed straight out of the counting room, but from the point of view of the man in the middle like Ace, the bosses are the gods and the only real sinners are the cheaters.

I'm taking my first week off this year! Plan to read and sleep and work in the garden and watch movies, but not write. Back October 10. Please keep up the comments discussions, though -- I'll still be publishing those. Now I must rest...

Meanwhile, here are some of my recent reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com:

The Science of Sleep
The US vs. John Lennon
Half Nelson
This Film is Not Yet Rated
The Illusionist
Conversations With Other Women

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has issued the following statement about "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," which opens in the US November 3:

When approaching this film, one has to understand that there is absolutely no intent on the part of the filmmakers to offend, and no malevolence on the part of Sacha Baron Cohen, who is himself proudly Jewish. We hope that everyone who chooses to see the film understands Mr. Cohen's comedic technique, which is to use humor to unmask the absurd and irrational side of anti-Semitism and other phobias born of ignorance and fear.

We are concerned, however, that one serious pitfall is that the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.

While Mr. Cohen's brand of humor may be tasteless and even offensive to some, we understand that the intent is to dash stereotypes, not to perpetuate them. It is our hope that everyone in the audience will come away with an understanding that some types of comedy that work well on screen do not necessarily translate well in the real world -- especially when attempted on others through retelling or mimicry.

My response: If anybody is stupid enough to think that "Borat" reinforces their own bigotry, then they can find reinforcement just about anywhere -- including the ADL's statement, which will probably do more to unintentionally inflame anti-Semitism than anything in "Borat."