View image Just a few pieces from my Days of the Dead art collection that make me very happy. That's Catrina on the right. Meanwhile, in the rear center, the Virgin of Soledad is calming the "orrendas visiones" of Doña Micaelita Dominguez on Nov. 2, 1897.

"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!

View image Señor Deadline sneaks up behind me and fractures my bleeding skull with a golden hammer while I'm seated at my desk.

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!)

View image O, happy reunion!

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.")

I hope you've been following the new Showtime series, "Dexter," about a serial killer whose dad was a cop and who now works as a blood-spatter specialist for the Miami police department. Dexter is one of the living dead, emotionally speaking. He's a hollow man. As he says of his sister: "If I had feelings, I'd have them for her." There's something terrifying about that. Dexter, like most sociopaths, is quite good at faking ordinary human interactions (and to some extent we all go through the motions, "acting" emotions we don't really have because, well, it's just easier to survive that way). But Dexter's mask of ordinariness is what makes him so frightening, the knowledge that there's a killer lurking under the skin. And that goes to the heart of the horror of the living dead: They look like us (or once did), but now they are mindless predators. Our greatest fear is not even that they'll catch us and eat us, but that we will become like them and develop a taste for human blood.

Just a few random thoughts about life, death, undeath and the movies on All Hallow's Eve. Now, here's another of my favorite William Carlos Williams poems. It's a favorite because it captures the moment when death seems to make a mockery of life and love, and captures the impulse (all too prevalent in our culture) to simply turn away. (In the Kubler-Ross progression, I guess this would fall somewhere between stages 1 and 2: Denial and Anger). I also love it because it brings home the emptiness and absurdity of death, with its language about potatoes and acrobats; and yet mocks the notion of viewing a natural process as empty and absurd. (Which is more empty and absurd: Death itself, or the human inability to see it for what it is?) But the anguish here is hard and genuine, because it's about betrayal, the inability of love to fulfill our illusions and to conquer or transcend death. OK, enough of my literary autopsy. Although this poem is far from festive... Happy Days of the Dead!

He's dead
the dog won't have to
sleep on his potatoes
any more to keep them
from freezing

he's dead
the old bastard -
he's a bastard because

there's nothing
legitimate in him any
more
he's dead
he's sick-dead

he's
a godforsaken curio
without
any breath in it

he's nothing at all
he's dead
shrunken up to skin

Put his head on
one chair and his
feet on another and
he'll lie there
like an acrobat -

Love's beaten. He
beat it. That's why
he's insufferable -

because
he's here needing a
shave and making love
an inside howl
of anguish and defeat -

he's come out of the man
and he's let
the man go -
the liar

Dead
his eyes
rolled up out of
the light - a mockery

which
love cannot touch -

just bury it
and hide its face
for shame.

-- William Carlos Williams

Posted by Jim Emerson at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

View image Bridge into the void...

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.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

It's fiction.

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.

The scenario is a familiar one: What would happen if a much-hated world leader was killed in office? Since the failed assassination attempts on Adolph Hitler, fictions imagining how things might have changed with the elimination of one powerful figure have fascinated historians and the public. How could they not?

We all know that three four U.S. presidents have been assassinated, and that every president faces that threat every day. Gerald Ford, one of our most benign chief executives, survived two murder attempts in the month of September 1975 alone -- and he was never as divisive and generally reviled as Bush Jr., whose methods and ideology have been vilified as Hitlerian in real-life speeches and demonstrations that we've all seen already. (I'm speaking only about the real-life hatred the man has evoked worldwide, not the aptness of the Nazi comparison or whether such virulence is justified by his words and actions in office.)

"Death of a President" sticks to the assassination and the search for the killer, without exploring the domestic or global political repercussions of an official Cheney administration -- or even whether President Cheney runs for re-election. It covers events from October, 2007, to about a year later. What the film does is to take the real events that have characterized the Bush administration -- particularly its most infamous political modus operandi of marshaling selected and manufactured "facts" to fit a preordained conclusion -- and transpose them from the past into the future. When a forensics expert talks about the evidence against a suspect as being supportive but, in itself, inconclusive (nine points of comparison on a single fingerprint), and says he was told repeatedly to "look again" to strengthen a weak case, it's exactly like the CIA analysts who were interviewed in several "Frontline" documentaries talking about the phony case the administration made for the invasion of Iraq.

There is talk of the hundreds of people -- including, perhaps, American citizens -- who suddenly "vanished" from the US after 9/11, rounded up and detained indefinitely in shadow prisons abroad. Something similar happens after the assassination. "Patriot Act III" is passed in the immediate aftermath of Bush's death, giving the FBI and Homeland Security more unspecified surveillance and arrest "powers" -- when what's really needed is stricter adherence to existing procedures and (better analysis of existing intelligence).

The Bush assassination, which takes place outside the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Chicago, is politically exploited, just like 9/11, within hours. President Cheney looks for any excuse to go after Syria. A likely suspect is identified in an article on "page 3 or 4" of the Chicago Sun-Times, but somehow that story never catches the public's attention and is overlooked by officials more interested in job security and appearances. Again, just like the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. (The joke about Bush I was always that nobody would even try to assassinate him because it would guarantee a President Quayle. That joke sounds more chilling under Bush II.)

Everyone seems to agree that the anti-Bush demonstrations in Chicago that day were exceptionally angry. A top Chicago police official says he may disagree with the demonstrators, but that they have the right to protest. But, he claims, the key language in the First Amendment says such expressions must be "peaceful and law-abiding." (The First Amendment does mention the right of the people to "peaceably assemble," but, of course, the question is always what constitutes "peaceable," and what state actions are appropriate to protect the public -- and, in this case, the president -- from potential harm.) As a Secret Service agent explains, his job is to protect the president, and when demonstrators break police lines, actually stop the motorcade and come into contact with the presidential vehicle, that is no longer free speech but a direct security threat. I wouldn't contest that at all.

Most of all, "Death of a President" is electrifying drama, and compellingly realistic. The actors chosen for interview segments (including the mom from "Freaks & Geeks" as a presidential speechwriter) are unerringly authentic as real people, speaking spontaneously before a documentary lens -- even when it's clear they've rehearsed in their heads what they're going to say, and may even have told these same stories any number of times before. (An arrogant interrogator is particularly convincing in telling self-aggrandizing anecdotes about his assessment and treatment of a suspect.)

There's no reason to be threatened by this film, any more than there was to be by "United 93" or "World Trade Center." It's responsible and observant about the world we live in -- and it's certainly not going to give anybody any ideas they haven't had already. In its use of real or fictionalized narratives to examine recent political events -- especially the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq -- "Death of a President" isn't all that different from innumerable other films in this year's festival, from "The Host" to "Pan's Labyrinth" to "Rescue Dawn."

"Death of a President" has been in the Toronto festival guides as "D.O.A.P." (or "dope"), as if the actual title of the film was too inflammatory for publication (perhaps in the way the comedy "The Pope Must Die" was retitled in America as "The Pope Must Diet"). The "D.O.A.P." designation does not appear on the movie itself. At the press/industry screening Tuesday morning, however, the acronym was conjured by an anti-Bush protest sign in the film that got a good laugh from the international audience: "Solid as a Rock. Only Dumber."

Posted by Jim Emerson at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Ted Turner called. He wants his crayons back.

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.

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?

Posted by Jim Emerson at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (34)

Jumpy: a scene from "The Departed."

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!

Posted by Jim Emerson at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

My semi-trusty Amstrad, circa 1988.

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?!?!

A flashback: In 1988, I bought my very first DOS-based 8086 home computer, an Amstrad (big name in Europe at the time) with a color monitor (16 or 64 colors, I can't remember). I'd worked on various other machines with green or amber monochrome displays -- and even used the original no-hard-drive Mac and the then-ubiquitous (for journalists) "portable" Tandy 1000 (with a small liquid-crystal display and a modem you could hook up by placing suction cups over a phone receiver) -- but this was my gateway to the new world. Windows hadn't caught on (3.1 wouldn't take off until after 1992), but I could run GEM Desktop (a GUI built on DOS) -- and I could hook up a 1200 bps Hayes-compatible modem without an acoustic coupler!

That was when I got on Prodigy, one of the early online networks (then only available in a few cities, including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, as I recall). The next summer, when Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" came out, rumors and paranoia and arguments ran hot and heavy. I had known Spike slightly through mutual friends since I'd tried to book "She's Gotta Have It" at the Market Theater in Seattle, and was able to post quotes from my own past and current interviews with him (as well as my detailed readings of the movie) to contribute the online "message boards." I was working for the Orange County Register in Los Angeles at the time, and my stuff was syndicated over Knight-Ridder, but at that time you couldn't read newspaper movie reviews outside of a paper's local circulation area unless you could get a copy at the newsstand.

Anyway, these heated discussions about "Do the Right Thing" made me realize this was a medium -- and a form of writing -- that I loved even more than newspaper journalism and criticism. I'd always loved the immediacy of newspapers -- the sense of writing as a spontaneous performance (despite all the training and research that went into it) -- but this was such a rush! It taught me (and I'm still learning) about how to be more specific in my writing, to really hone in on what I wanted to say -- and, in ensuing exchanges, to correct myself when I was wrong, clarify when I hadn't said precisely what I meant to say, and pinpoint exactly what I did say whenever someone misrepresented it. Best of all, I had some fascinating exchanges of ideas with people I'd never even met. I'd already written for newspapers for some years, and received letters and phone calls from readers, but never the kind of really engaging, complex interactions that the online world provided.

And now, here we are, 17 years later, and I still dig writing on the web more than any other form I've ever tried -- and I can't think of many that I haven't (except opera!). Radio is fantastic, because you get to use your voice; film and theater and television are amazing because you get to hear other people give life to your characters, words and ideas. But I can't think of any other medium in which you can initiate a discussion -- or let a thread or a tangent take you off in a direction you hadn't foreseen -- and collaborate with so many other people in where and how the conversation flows. Even better, the conversation takes on a life of its own and people "discuss amongst themselves." (Thanks, Linda Richman.)

So, while I'm procrastinating on three reviews and a big list of Scanners posts I want to get to (including lord knows how many Opening Shots), I just wanted to take this moment to say thanks. In another four months (O, how Internet time flies!) I wonder what other unanticipated territories we will have explored together...

Posted by Jim Emerson at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

View image

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.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

View image Marianne Pearl as Marianne Pearl.

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!

View image: Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl

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.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

View image: Pieter Brueghel, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" c. 1558.

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.

View image: From "The Bridge," directed by Eric Steel (2005)

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.

View image From "Vertigo," directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1958)

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.)

Posted by Jim Emerson at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

View image: Julia's new CD: A beautiful loss-of-faith story.

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?

Posted by Jim Emerson at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

View image One question: Sure, the desaturated color is extra-artsy looking in a self-consciously pretty/gritty way, but Clint: Why not just go ahead and have the balls to make the movie in black and white?

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.'"

"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. "

"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."

Posted by Jim Emerson at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

The opening shot of Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly."

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.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

View image The Blocks on the block. Such a nice Jewish family.

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.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

View image Sonja Sohn (left, with Dominic West as Detective McNulty, in "The Wire"): The future of America, I hope!

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.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

View image Scorsese and Company: Leonardo Di Caprio, Scorsese, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (with light meter around his neck), Jack Nicholson. (Others unidentified.)

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.

"The Departed" has calmed Scorsese’s urge to track a bit, but that’s balanced by its over 3200 cuts. The result is an average shot length (ASL) of about 2.7 seconds. Not unusual for an action picture nowadays, but consider where Scorsese started by conning these ASLs:

"Mean Streets" 7.7 seconds
"Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore" 8.0 seconds
"Taxi Driver" 7.3 seconds
"King of Comedy" 7.7 seconds
"Gangs of New York" 6.7 seconds
"The Aviator" 3.6 seconds

Like his contemporaries, Scorsese has succumbed to the fast-cut, hyper-close style that has made our movies so pictorially routine, however well-suited they may be for display on TV monitors and computer screens and iPods. In 1990 he seems to have realized that he needed to pick up the pace. Of "GoodFellas" (ASL 6.7 seconds) he remarked: “I guess the main thing that’s happened in the past ten years is that the scenes [shots] have to be quicker and shorter. ["GoodFellas"] is sort of my version of MTV. . . but even that’s old-fashioned� ("The Way Hollywood Tells It," p. 152).

Posted by Jim Emerson at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (41)

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.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Bad, bad Jack, feasting on food and scenery.

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.)

Dave Kehr:

Martin Scorsese’s return to the contemporary gangster genre — via a remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s glossy, stylized Hong Kong film of 2002, “Infernal Affairs� – has a bored, dutiful feeling, as if Woody Allen had been forced to remake one of his “early, funny ones.� The plotting is completely artificial, and makes sense only within a context of self-conscious formal play: a junior member of Boston’s Irish mob (Matt Damon) is assigned by his eccentric godfather (Jack Nicholson) to infiltrate the ranks of the Massachusetts State Police, at the same time a dutiful police cadet (Leonardo DiCaprio) is assigned by his boss (Martin Sheen) to ingratiate himself with Nicholson’s gang. For the first hour or so, Scorsese and his editor, Thema Schoonmaker, treat the material as a premise for a virtuoso exercise in parallel montage; the film achieves a fugue-like structure at times, as Scorsese and Schoonmaker move through three or four levels of simultaneous action at once, finding creative and sometimes quite beautiful transitions based on matching rhythms, textures, movements, and shapes.

David Edelstein, New York Magazine:

The movie works smashingly, especially if you haven’t seen its Hong Kong counterpart and haven’t a clue what’s coming. But for all its snap, crackle, and pop, it’s nowhere near as galvanic emotionally. The star of "Infernal Affairs," Tony Leung, had the stillness of a volcano; in the film "Hero," he made practicing calligraphy seem fiery. DiCaprio, as good as he is, is on the lumpish side. He has a wide face and lots of brow to furrow, but Scorsese doesn’t linger on him long enough to help us connect with his feverish alienation. It’s easier to read Damon, with his darting little eyes and slippery-squirt smile, but we don’t give a fig about him. [Screenwriter William] Monahan has made the character more of an out-and-out villain—a conscienceless opportunist—than he was in the original. Sullivan hungers for a career in politics. He has no loyalty to anyone, not even his surrogate-father crime boss, and so he has no dramatic stature. Plus, he’s lousy in bed.

J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader:

...[In] moral terms it may be the least involving story that Scorsese -- an artist much preoccupied with morality -- has ever taken on. Costigan [DiCaprio] spends years working for Costello [Jack Nicholson], unencumbered by the legal restrictions of being a sworn policeman, but he's never forced to do anything that truly repulses him; his only on-screen transgressions are a few beat downs of scumbags who have it coming anyway. Sullivan [Damon] takes advantage of his badge to romance a lively police psychiatrist (Vera Farmiga), but the relationship never prompts him to examine what he's doing with his life. The mentors are comparably one-dimensional...

Rick Groen, Toronto Globe and Mail:

Predictably, the dirty cop is having no trouble pretending to be clean, but this very ease is problematic. Sullivan remains a cipher, leaving Damon with precious little character to develop. He relies on his screen charm, which can be considerable, and his "Good Will Hunting" accent, which is formidable, yet it's just so much dressing on an opaque window.

JE: I want to mention here that I think all the performances (except Nicholson's) are terrific, especially Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin, who are very funny. It's just that, as these critics have noted, the actors aren't all given full characters to play. The roles played here by Damon, DiCaprio, Nicholson and (especially) Martin Sheen were much more fully developed (and morally conflicted) in "Infernal Affairs."

Dana Stevens, Slate.com:

"The Departed" isn't the masterpiece I have the feeling some may hail it as. It feels like the kind of movie critics might overpraise, if only because it's nice to see Scorsese back in the saddle and a treat to find a cops-and-robbers thriller with some energy and wit. [...]

In "Infernal Affairs," every plot twist clicked satisfyingly into place as the fate of the two leads converged inexorably toward a central vanishing point. The good guy pretending to be bad and the bad guy pretending to be good: What better setup for a classic existential and moral riddle? But here, for every "aha!" moment, there's an equal and opposite "ouch." It's hard to get into details without spoiling something in a movie this rife with double agents and triple fakeouts, but much of the two informants' surveillance—conducted by means of text messaging on barely concealed cell phones—is implausible to the point of absurdity, and the ending leaves several red herrings flopping on the deck. [...]

Rick Groen, Toronto Globe and Mail:

Yes, what with bullets fired between eyes and bottles smashed to faces and severed hands encased in zip-locked bags, there's gore aplenty here — another Scorsese trademark from his vintage years. But, back then, the violence arose naturally (and thus frighteningly) out of the characterizations — out of a raging bull's jealousy, or a goodfella's temper, or a taxi driver's pent-up ennui. This violence, however, jumps haphazardly out of the twitchy plot (courtesy of William Monahan's erratic script), and so it often seems gratuitous, inorganic, just splatter for splatter's sake.

Speaking of gratuitous, check out Nicholson, who, apparently channelling The Joker, mugs and rolls his eyes and delivers a performance as slovenly self-indulgent as his greasy comb-over. Astonishingly, Scorsese not only does nothing to rein him in, but occasionally adds an out-of-left-field sequence (the mobster in a literally operatic tryst with a couple of coke whores) that only encourages the guy's theatrics. The result? Rarely has a star's look-at-me turn so completely torpedoed a project. Whenever the picture threatens to gain some momentum, up pops Jack to stop it dead in its tracks.

J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (at least I hope he's still at the Voice, which has cut loose some very good critics in recent weeks):

Towering over both youngsters, Jack Nicholson has the meaty—and here vastly inflated—role of the patriarchal crime boss. Eric Tsang stole "Infernal Affairs" with his high-spirited moonfaced malevolence; Nicholson is handed the keys to the kingdom in his first scene. [...]

Neither a debacle nor a bore, "The Departed" works but only up to a point, and never emotionally—even if the director does contrive to supply his version of a happy ending. "I don't want to be a product of my environment," Nicholson boasts at the onset. "I want my environment to be a product of me." Yeah, yeah, and that's the problem. Overwrought as "The Departed" may be, it's nothing that wouldn't have been cured by losing Jack (and maybe half an hour). Too bad the bottom line meant Scorsese had to sell that hambone Mephistopheles his soul.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times:

Mr. Damon enters the story about the same time that Mr. Nicholson exits the shadows. Too bad he doesn’t stay there until the final credits. This Janus-like actor has long presented two faces for the camera, the jester called Jack and the actor named Nicholson. He has worn both faces for some of his famous roles, but over time he has grown fond of the outsize persona called Jack, with his shades and master-of-ceremonies sneer, and it’s hard not to think that the man has become his mask. Mr. Nicholson has some choice moments in “The Departed�: he owns the thrilling opening minutes and is persuasively unnerving in his early scenes with Billy, whom he only knows as a neighborhood loser ripe for the plucking.

But as the story twists and twists some more, Mr. Nicholson begins to mix too much Jack into his characterization. In Alexander Payne’s “About Schmidt,� he plays a man whose tamped-down disappointment meant that he had to pull the performance from deep inside; he committed to the part without the help of his sidekick persona. In “The Departed� he’s playing bigger and badder than life with engines roaring. It’s a loud, showy performance. Frank even comes equipped with a trove of gaudy accouterments: a goatee like an arrow, a leopard-print robe, a bevy of babes, a severed hand and a ridiculous fake phallus. Another actor might wear these accessories; Mr. Nicholson upstages them.

Dana Stevens, Slate.com:

Nicholson is often hilarious here, but I would have liked to see him mute the wackiness a little in the interest of the movie's overall tone. The cutesy last shot, which I'll leave as a surprise for the viewer, seems complicit with the jokiness of Nicholson's performance, and it does a disservice to the seriousness (not to mention gruesome violence) of much of what's gone before. Though "The Departed" has flourishes of black comedy throughout, it's not "Prizzi's Honor"; it's a truly dark movie in which many people die horribly, and ending on a goofy visual pun makes fools of the audience for caring.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (178)

From "Syndromes and a Century."

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.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Unbelievable? You bet! Here's your Fox News: See, on Bill O'Reilly's Nothing But Spin Zone, they simply turned Mark Foley into a Democrat, even though he's a Republican. Who cares about basic facts? Hey, the Fox slogan doesn't say anything about being "accurate."

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