One of the best educations in filmmaking that you can ever get is to spend a day on a set -- even (or maybe especially) as an extra, because that puts you right in the middle of the action, as it were. (When I was doing a Seattle Times story on the shooting of Alan Rudolph's "Trouble in Mind," Alan decided to stick me and my pal Eden, who was also working on the film, into the tiki bar scene, where I could observe everything that was going on all around. We appear as blurs behind the heads of Kris Kristofferson and Lori Singer.)
Anyway, back in 1986 (or early 1987?) my friend Nancy Locke, a longtime Seattle movie publicist, and I were invited to be extras on David Mamet's directorial debut feature, "House of Games." We showed up at Bagley Hall at the University of Washington (my alma mater) and I was put in a classroom, where Lilia Skala was our psych professor. In explaining the scene to us, Mamet mentioned we could now say that we had been directed by David Mamet. So, I'm sayin'.
I don't remember where they used Nancy, or if she made the final cut. (I'll have to ask her.) I do remember we did another semi-surreal scene in the hallway between classes, where we students brushed passed Lindsay Crouse while her character walked in a dazed, almost trance-like state. It was an experiment. They didn't use it.
I was reminded of this experience while looking at the new Criterion Collection edition of "House of Games." Roger Ebert gave the movie four stars, and in 1999 selected it as one of his Great Movies. It's pure Mamet -- hypnotic, suspenseful, surprising -- a noirish con game that reminds me of a Fritz Lang thriller, with stylized performances that hint of Bresson, Fassbinder, or Herzog's "Heart of Glass" (in which the director actually hypnotized the cast), but I've never seen anything quite like it. Three of my favorite actors -- Joe Mantegna, J.T. Walsh and Ricky Jay -- also star. Are you in?
View image Judge Padma and Junior Chef (and Mad Molecular Gastronomist) Marcel, from Season 2, on location in Hawaii.
Because I enjoy the confessional aspect of blogging, I'm going to admit to you something shocking. It's shocking to me, anyway. I have fallen under the spell of Bravo's "Top Chef" program.
Here's the thing: I don't normally watch "reality shows" (though I saw the first few "Survivors" and the bizarre American debut season of "Big Brother") and I don't cook and I rarely eat in "fine dining" restaurants and I don't know anything about food.
But I stumbled into one episode by accident, and that led to another, and then I ordered the first two seasons downloaded to my TiVo from Amazon Unbox and plowed through four or five episodes at a time into the wee hours of the morning. The damn show is like a bag of potato chips.
So, why have I gotten into this show so much? Well, for one thing, I like looking at and hearing about the pretty foods and how they got to be that way. (A friend of mine used to enjoy describing recent meals in loving detail. I called him "The Food Descripter" and he went on to work in a top San Francisco restaurant for a while, where writing the menus was one of his specialties.)
The format "is what it is," to use a favorite expression of the competing cooks. The beats are as comfortable and familiar as those in a genre movie, and they don't pretend to be anything else. (They also recycle the same few music cues again and again, just like early-'60s Godard and similarly irritating and addictive.)
But most of all, I think, I enjoy watching how the producers develop the characters and shape their relationships into "stories." Every carefully cut line and selected mannerism -- tics, gestures, glances -- underlines (and in some cases I mean underlines) which role(s) the individual chefs are supposed to embody: The Outrageously Pretentious Sommelier-Diva-Geek, The Nervous Nelly, The Crunchy Granola Gal, The Egomaniacal Pest Who Annoys Everybody, The Big Sweet Lunk, The Betty Blue Unpredictably Temperamental Foreign Wacko Chick, The Hot-Headed Italian Bulldog Bully, The Mean Mean Bitch Bitch Queen, The Male Model-Lookalike Who Takes Everything Way Way Too Seriously Including Himself, and so on. And, of course, The Guy With The Hair. That one describes at least half the men on the show. I assume the hairdos are good attention-getters when everybody has to wear he same white jackets most of the time.
The cutaways are hilarious, emphasizing each cast member's most memorable personality quirks over and over and over. The off-set interviews (a staple of MTV's "The Real World" -- oops, I also saw some of those, back in the '90s) are chopped up like onions and sprinkled through the show. And sometimes they're supposed to make you cry, too.
The judges are equally outlandish characters. "Chef Tom," the big bald guy, is the disciplinarian -- tough, but fair. It's fun to listen to him squeeze in rapid-fire expository dialog during cutaways to the contestants at the Judges' Table. He doesn't come close to sounding like he's in the same room with himself. Padma Lakshmi, whose name I like to say, is the Frederick's of Hollywood-clad hostess and current or former Mrs. Salman Rushdie, who likes to wear funny little costumes and show off the big scar on her upper arm like a fashion accessory. Which it is. And then there's this woman from Food & Wine Magazine who is, if I get the term right, a ditz.
Guest judges appear, like former (has-been?) TV star Rocco DiSpirito (of NBC's "The Restaurant," which I never saw), who stands around like a praying mantis, waiting to bite somebody's head off. (He actually looks like a praying mantis -- a long-ish insect with a noticeable exoskeleton.) Also Anthony Bourdain, plugging his own books and TV show (absolutely everything on this series is a plug for something), who is evidently supposed to be one of those Yelling Chefs. He actually worked himself up to yell, "What is your major malfunction?!?!" at a contestant. It was 2007 when he said that. When did you last hear that phrase? Talk about leftovers.
OK, it's easy for me to sit back and poke fun at the show, but I really, really like it. I generally avoid junk-food TV because it's a waste of time and it makes me feel guilty and bad. If I want to watch something, I have 300+ movies in my NetFlix queue -- mostly things I really should be watching instead, but this show feels like target practice -- a way to sharpen your eye without trying very hard. It makes it easy and fun to notice how it's assembled piece by piece. Every episode is an little object lesson in how to put bits of film together to manufacture characters and drama out of hours of raw and no doubt mostly mundane material. I'd love to see a Bordwellian Average Shot Length analysis of this show. And a count of and how often they stretch their coverage and reshuffle continuity by repeating footage of the same moment from a different angle, several second after the first time they've shown it. I tell you, it's a Godardian deconstruction of film techniques.
If anything, the rough seams (sorry, can't think of a cooking metaphor) provide an elementary refresher course in moviemaking, and a reminder that documentary and fiction filmmaking are fundamentally the same. Shot-by-shot, second for second, every movie is the product of thousands upon thousands of choices that make it what it is.
(P.S. My headline above, by the way, is a reference to the book, "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991" by the superb music writer Michael Azerrad, whose taped interviews with Kurt Cobain form the narration for the documentary "Kurt Cobain About a Son.")
View image "My advice to Hollywood is to shut down...."
MSN Movies received this despairing e-mail regarding my "Open Letter to Hollywood" piece. I'm not sure what to say, but I thought I'd share it as the cri de coeur of one disillusioned man, and a reminder of the chasm that has always existed between art and commerce in Tinseltown -- but a canyon that is occasionally bridged:
I was recently at a bar north of Boston, and discovered that the bartender was attending Emerson College, studying film production. He was interested in pursuing a career as a DP and eventually a director, and I asked him what kind of films he viewed in his program, mentioning such names as Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Kubrick, the old great studio system directors such as Hawks, Huston, Cukor, etc. He said that he almost never watched such films, at least not as part of a class, and had only marginal curiosity about their work. He was far more interested in the technical [side] of film and the marketing aspects of the industry. He stated he understood the reputation of all of those people (although he had never heard of George Cukor), but his professors didn't stress much film history, and he didn't believe that this old work had much bearing on the reality of the industry today.
I look upon the mainstream films made in the current atmosphere and wonder how many have even a remote chance of standing the test of time. I've sat through dozens of viewings of films like "The Maltese Falcon," "The Quiet Man," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," "Network," and none of these films have lost their freshness. "Titanic," for a while the biggest movie ever, is now ten years old. Does anyone have any interest in it at all anymore, a decade down the line? "Casablanca" is 65 years old. How many Hollywood films made in the last ten years will still generate interest in the years 2062 to 2072?
The film industry as it exists today is no different than any other major corporate enterprise. Corporate enterprises are by nature conservative; their goals are to limit risk exposure and do whatever is the easiest thing within a given business structure. They want to sell you things they know you'll buy because you've bought them already, so the conglomerates that own the studios will keep churning out sequels, franchises, and copycat product until you stop buying, and then they'll go on to the next thing and bleed that to death.
Art? Philosophy? Forget it; if it happens at all in current Hollywood, it's because someone bankable like George Clooney gets together with a few like-minded producers to create "Syriana." Given that corporate enterprises are populated with individuals all striving to get obscenely rich before age 35, and given the complexities of making a film in the first place, nurturing art and artists to enable their ability to make future masterpieces doesn't even appear on the radar. My bartender from Emerson knows this, and realizes the futility of even bothering with art. Why watch the intricacies of "Juliet of the Spirits," "Persona," "Rashomon," or "2001: A Space Odyssey" when no one you will ever work with will ever green
light such a project? You're better off making Wal-Mart and Burger King ads anyway - they'll pay.
My advice to Hollywood is to shut down. In the past century, they've already made enough quality films to entertain a lifetime of viewing. Hollywood employs a vast array of talented people; imagine if all of these people used their talents toward creating reality instead of fantasy? The world currently faces myriad problems requiring staggering amounts of work to fix, and Hollywood would do well to allow itself to quietly expire. Most of the film ideas Hollywood currently attempts to realize are ones that shouldn't have been pursued in the first place, and those working for
Hollywood could use their talents toward more worthwhile goals.
View image "We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.... The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars for our poems, not our corpses."
That's right. Either from beyond the grave ("Anything that says there's anything after death is ultimately an optimistic story," Kubrick said of "The Shining"), or from within it, Stanley Kubrick responds to a critic who accuses him and his films of nihilism:
Is this, I wonder, because he couldn't actually find any internal evidence to support his trend-spotting? If not, then it is extraordinary that so serious a charge should be made against [my film] (and myself) inside so fuzzy and unfocussed a piece of alarmist journalism.
The accuser is Fred M. Hechinger in the New York Times, the movie in question is "A Clockwork Orange," and the date is February 27, 1972. "A Clockwork Orange" was the subject of red-hot debate all over the place, celebrated as a masterpiece and condemned as everything from "fascistic" to "anarchistic" to "nihilistic."
I'd never read this letter before today, when I found it while searching through the New York Times archive. Naturally, one should always trust the art and not (just) the artist, but Kubrick has to much to say here about about his view of humankind, and this is so revealing of the vision expressed in his films, that I'm going to quote him at length:
Hechinger is probably quite sincere in what he feels. But what the witness feels, as the judge said, is not evidence -- the more so when the charge is one of purveying "the essence of fascism."
"Is this an uncharitable reading of the film's thesis?" Mr. Hechinger asks himself with unwonted, if momentary, doubt. I would reply that it is an irrelevant reading of the thesis, in fact an insensitive and inverted reading of the thesis, which, so far from advocating that fascism be given a second chance, warns against the new psychedelic fascism -- the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug-orienting conditioning of human beings by other beings -- which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.
Make what you will of Kubrick's stated intentions, but note the value he places on humanity and free will. He continues:
It is quite true that my film's view of man is less flattering than the one Rousseau entertained in a similarly allegorical narrative ["Emile"] -- but, in order to avoid fascism, does one have to view man as a noble savage, rather than an ignoble one? Being a pessimist is not yet enough to qualify one as a tyrant (I hope).... [Times film critic Vincent Canby] classified "A Clockwork Orange" as "a superlative example" of the kind of movies that "seriously attempt to analyze the meaning of violence and the social climate that tolerates it." He certainly did not denounce me as a fascist, no more than any well-balanced commentator who read "A Modest Proposal" would have accused Dean Swift of being a cannibal. [...]
Kubrick continues...
... Mr. Hechinger seems to rest his entire case against me on a quote appearing in The New York Times of January 30, in which I said: "Man is isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved... and any attempt to create social institutions based on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure." From this, apparently, Mr. Hechinger concluded, "the thesis that man is irretrievably bad and corrupt is the essence of fascism," and summarily condemned the film.
Mr. Hechinger is entitled to hold an optimistic view of the nature of man, but this does not give him the right to make ugly assertions of fascism against those who do not share his opinion.
I wonder how he would reconcile his simplistic notions with the views of such an acknowledged anti-fascist as Arthur Koestler, who wrote in his book "The Ghost in the Machine," "The Promethean myth has acquired an ugly twist: the giant reaching out to steal the lightning from the Gods is insane... When you mention, however tentatively, the hypothesis that a paranoid streak is inherent in the human condition, you will promptly be accused of taking a one-sided, morbid view of history; of being hypnotized by its negative aspects, of picking out the black stones in the mosaic and neglecting the triumphant achievements of human progress.... To dwell on the glories of man and ignore the symptoms of his possible insanity is not a sign of optimism but of ostrichism. It could only be compared to the attitude of that jolly physician who, a short time before Van Gogh committed suicide, declared that he could not be insane because he painted such beautiful pictures."
It is because of the hysterical denunciations of self-proclaimed "alert liberals" like Mr. Hechinger that the cause of liberalism is weakened, and it is for the same reason that so few liberal-minded politicians risk making realistic statements about contemporary social problems.
The age of the alibi, in which we find ourselves, began with the opening sentence of Rousseau's "Emile": "Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault." It is based on two misconceptions: that man in his natural state was happy and good, and that primal man had no society.
Consider the previous paragraphs in light of the "Dawn of Man" section of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Kubrick does not hate the "ignoble savage." What sense would that make? He simply accepts the nature of the beast within us.
Robert Ardrey has written in "The Social Contract," "The organizing principle of Rousseau's life was his unshakable belief in the original goodness of man, including his own. That it led him into most towering hypocrisies, as recorded in the 'Confessions,' is of no shaking importance; such hypocrisies must follow from such an assumption. More significant are the disillusionments, the pessimism, and the paranoia that such a belief in human nature must induce."
Kubrick -- known for his distant, detached style -- sees hubris, in the form of a falsely idealized vision of man -- as the very cause of much of human misery.
Audrey elaborates in "African Genesis": "The idealistic American is an environmentalist who accepts the doctrine of man's innate nobility and looks chiefly to economic causes for the source of human woe. And so now, at the peak of the American triumph over that ancient enemy, want, he finds himself harassed by racial conflict of increasing bitterness, harrowed by juvenile delinquency probing championship heights."
Rousseau's romantic fallacy that it is society which corrupts man, not man who corrupts society, places a flattering gauze between ourselves and reality. This view, to use Mr. Hechinger's frame of reference, is solid box office but, in the end, such a self-inflating illusion leads to despair.
The Englightenment declared man's rational independence from the tyranny of the Supernatural. It opened up dizzying and frightening vistas of the intellectual future. But before this became too alarming, Rousseau replaced a religion of the Supernatural Being with a religion of natural man. God might be dead. "Long live man."
"How else," writes Ardrey, "can one explain -- except as a substitute for old religious cravings -- the immoderate influence on the rational mind of the doctrine of innate goodness?"
Finally, the question must be considered whether Rousseau's view of man as a fallen angel is not really the most pessimistic and hopeless of philosophies. It leaves man a monster who has gone steadily away from his original nobility. It is, I am convinced, more optimistic to accept Ardrey's view that "... we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles and our irreconcilable regiments? For our treaties, whatever they may be worth; our symphonies, however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams, however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars for our poems, not our corpses."
Kubrick's films are discomforting, chilly and oftentimes harsh, but they are among those poems.
View image"The Shining": A bug under a microscope.
The most superficial and shopworn cliché about Stanley Kubrick is that he was a misanthrope. This is up there with calling Alfred Hitchcock "The Master of Suspense," and leaving it at that. The cliché may contain a partial truth, but it's not particularly enlightening. It's just trite.
In the free Seattle weekly tabloid The Stranger, Charles Mudede writes about a local Kubrick series, and begins by stating: "Kubrick hated humans. This hate for his own kind is the ground upon which his cinema stands." This is a nice grabber -- particularly for readers who don't know anything about Kubrick, or who want to feel the thrill of the forbidden when reading about him. ("Imagine! He hated humans!")
Unfortunately for readers, this is Mudede's thesis, and he's sticking to it. Here's his summary judgement of "2001: A Space Odyssey":
As is made apparent by "2001: A Space Odyssey," his contempt was deep.
It went from the elegant surface of our space-faring civilization down, down, down to the bottom of our natures, the muck and mud of our animal instincts, our ape bodies, our hair, guts, hunger, and grunts. No matter how far we go into the future, into space, toward the stars, we will never break with our first and violent world. Even the robots we create, our marvelous machines, are limited (and undone) by our human emotions, pressures, primitive drives. For Kubrick, we have never been modern.
OK, that's one interpretation (though it gets the direction of the movement entirely wrong), but I think it's a facile misreading of the film. Is there really something un-"modern" about portraying the raw, simple fact of evolution, with a little otherworldly nudge?
And why does Mudede have such contempt for apes and "animal instincts"? Is he going to apply "Meat is Murder" morality to primates? (Besides, they're so dirty!) Or does he not feel the awesome and primal beauty in the whole "Dawn of Man" sequence? If he doesn't, I suppose it's no wonder he sees no wonder in the rest of the movie.
Kubrick's vision may be unsentimental, indifferent, even cruel, but he's not just a hater. That main ape (identified as "Moon-Watcher" in the credits, and played by Daniel Richter) is the protagonist of the first part of the movie. He's smart, sympathetic, beautiful (look in his eyes), and brave, if the latter isn't anthropomorphizing too much. The film portrays a breakthrough in the evolution of our species -- the use of tools (animal bones) as weapons -- and that development is a formidable one, but hardly a vile or deplorable one. Does Moon-Watcher "hate" his enemy tribe, or is he just battling to survive? Does HAL "hate" Frank and Dave? The term isn't relevant. In one of the most celebrated splices in movies, that first tool becomes a sophisticated satellite, floating in space to the "Blue Danube" waltz. Is Kubrick equating the two (bone = satellite = ancient brutality), or showing -- in a single cut -- a leap across time and space, from primitive to modern technology?
And it's not the ancient, barbaric nature of mankind that derails the Discovery mission. It's intellect and rationality, our "higher" brain functions -- and the germ of ego and emotion that grows, semi-programmed, in HAL's personality. As Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke have often said, HAL is the most human character in the movie -- and probably the most sympathetic. Not because Kubrick hates mankind, but because HAL is the product (almost the distilled essence) of mankind, and perhaps the next stage in human evolution (not unlike the Replicants in "Blade Runner"). If you don't feel some sympathy for HAL, and some sadness over his absurd fate, when he calmly begs for his "iife" and sings "Bicycle Built for Two" (so funny, so poignant), then I think you're missing out on the most beautiful aspects of the movie.
In "2001," mankind is not defeated or condemned to eternal muck by "our ape bodies, our hair, guts, hunger, and grunts." It's our most civilized, refined, higher brain functions -- our intellect and rationality -- that aren't sophisticated enough to comprehend the advanced intelligence signaled by the monolith. The attitude of the movie (to invoke a couple Shakespearean counter-clichés) is an awestruck, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," not a merely contemptuous, "What is this quintessence of dust?"
It's often been said that Kubrick observes his characters with "godlike detachment." That, I think, is closer to the truth than to say he hates them and all members of their species. (If anything, in arguing for free will in "A Clockwork Orange," he doesn't express enough contempt for Alex and his Droogs.) That yellow Volkswagen bug in the opening credits of "The Shining" is, I believe, his little joke about his directorial point of view. As it scurries through the majestic Oregon landscapes, the director looks down as if viewing an amoeba through a microscope. Is that the same as hate?
Mudede does a similar disservice to my other favorite Kubrick film, "Barry Lyndon." He writes:
Because the world is nothing but shit, the ideal Kubrickian subject must have very low standards and no high hopes. In short, he must be like Barry Lyndon: a man who goes from situation to situation with no particular aim or goal in mind. One moment he is on this side of a war; the next he is on the other side of it. One moment he is rich; the next he is poor. The way the world goes, he goes with it. If he finds happiness, he takes it without question; if trouble appears, he flees from it without hesitation. And if someone is dead or in pain, he always says to himself: "Better you than me." That is the best a human can do in what Kubrick pictured as the worst of all possible worlds.
I've written in some detail about "Barry Lyndon" here. But everything you need to know about how to read the movie is set up very clearly in the opening title, the opening shot, and the opening narration, and the ironic, playful ways the three interact. Again, it's a complex mix: gorgeous, funny, satirical, (sym)pathetic. (OK, Lord Bullingdon seems pretty hateful, but he is a rotten, spoiled child and exactly what his parents have made him. He's not beyond good and evil, just kind of beneath consideration.)
Barry does drift opportunistically from one thing to another -- because he's a con-man and a gambler. And, as the title that sets up Part I explains, in the first half of the film we are seeing "By What Means Redmond Barry Aquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon." He doesn't drift because he doesn't care; he plays to get ahead. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses (death assures we will all come out equal in the end), and his successes and failures depend as much on chance and luck (the title of Thackaray's first-person narrative was "The Luck of Barry Lyndon") as they do on Barry's skill or cleverness. In fact, he achieves nobility and loses it in the same instant, with one gentlemanly act that clinches his ignoble fate.
Kubrick is a profoundly moral filmmaker, and his deepest and most complex sympathies are with his screwed-up anti-heroes: Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) in "The Killing"; the three men awaiting execution in "Paths of Glory"; Humbert Humbert in "Lolita"; Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Hayden), Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), Maj. TJ "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) in "Dr. Strangelove"; HAL; Alex; Barry; Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson" in "The Shining"; Leonard (Vincent D'Onofrio) in "Full Metal Jacket" -- even Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), the butt of the elegant and ingenious conceptual joke that is "Eyes Wide Shut." Nearly all of them are monsters in some way -- or they become monsters at times. None of them is the object of the filmmaker's unmitigated, unambivalent, unambiguous hatred or contempt.
If this were not the case, people would no more be presenting Stanley Kubrick retrospectives than Alan Parker retrospectives. If you don't see the difference... then may Stanley have mercy on your soul.
What the hell is wrong with the studio risk-management -- er, movie -- business these days? I share some of my own modest ideas for improvement in an "Open Letter to Hollywood" at MSN Movies.
Now, some people say everything is just fine, and that we've even had a better-than usual crop of summer pictures this year: "Knocked Up," "Ratatouille," "Superbad," "The Bourne Ultimatum"... On the other hand, there's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "Hostel Part II," "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry"... These, I submit, are conscious or unconscious cries for help.
None of my prescriptions is a panacea, but among the measures I suggest Mr. and Ms. Hollywood might want to consider are: more nudity (way more nudity); less emphasis on pain and torture as a form of entertainment (bad for concessions sales, for one thing); better recycling of stars who have fallen out of fashion (like John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction"); watch HBO and learn about sex, violence, character, and storytelling; don't keep making sequels until the original audience hates you for it (even the last installments in "trilogies" tend to range from disappointing to insulting); stop wasting time and depleting resources fighting protracted, losing battles against technologies that have always proven to make you more money in the end: "The future arrived the day before yesterday and you're still pretending it's due next week."
An excerpt:
...[Why] why do adults in Hollywood movies still behave as if they're on "The Dick Van Dyke Show"? (Nothing against "The Dick Van Dyke Show," which is one of the great achievements in television history, but you know what I mean: Rob and Laura not only slept in separate twin beds but they always wore pajamas.)
Sex in the movies seemed like it was going somewhere in the '70s, with "Five Easy Pieces," "Last Tango in Paris" and "Don't Look Now." In 1993, the great Julianne Moore played out a full-frontal scene -- an argument at home with her husband -- in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," and it wasn't the nudity that was shocking, it was the physical and emotional reality of the scene. Do you know people who pop out of bed after sex sporting underwear? Who's in such a blasted hurry to get dressed?
The best special effect in the history of movies is the human face, with the human body coming in a close second. Use it. You think torture porn sells? The audience for porn-porn is exponentially larger. (Have you heard of this thing called the World Wide Internets? It revolutionized a whole lucrative section of the movie industry -- mostly the one located beyond Warners, Disney and Universal in the farther reaches of the San Fernando Valley.)
So many movies have opening shots that are like overtures, condensed miniatures of the whole film. In Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" you might even say it contains the entire movie in one shot. Not only does it begin with the ending, but the movement of the shot (together with the next one) takes us from underground (the land of the subconscious, the imagination) up into the light of day -- or, looked at another way, from political and psychological repression into the liberation of the open air. This presages the momentum of the entire movie.
"Pan's Labyrinth" is so locked into the emotional and fantasy world of its protagonist, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), that the camera itself lies on its side next to her and is then plunges vertiginously into her pupil, entering her head, where the movie takes place. This initial dazzling sweep (actually a composite shot, but executed in once continuous motion) sucks us into the movie so quickly that we barely register what we've seen until the end, when we remember these prophetic first few seconds from the start of the movie.
"Pan's Labyrinth" is riddled with pupils and irises, holes and portals that lead to new worlds. In this first shot, we appear to rise out of the ground (although it's a right-to-left movement, reversing time), into Ofelia's eye into a fantasy realm of her own creation, and then moves back to the right (setting the story into forward motion), following a running figure (Ofelia herself) up a circular stairway and through another doorway, into another chamber, with another stairway. The next shot follows her up the stairs, leading through a reverse of the opening pupil-shot: an eye-hole flooded with white light. And, with that, the movie-proper begins...
Roger Ebert has published a Great Movies review of "Pan's Labyrinth. My own review, originally in the Chicago Sun-Times, is at RogerEbert.com, too, in the Editor's Notes section.
Nobody does a better job of reminding us that movies are always in the present tense, no matter how long ago they were made, than movie historian, critic, and (above all) enthusiast Leonard Maltin, who's celebrating the fifth anniversary of his own, personal movie-zine, "Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy" ("A Newsletter for People Who Love Movies"). That's right -- it's a newsletter. As in, printed on paper and snail-mailed to you. The "Collector's Corner" of the most recent issue (which just arrived in my mailbox today), appropriately features some vintage promotional envelopes -- one from RKO studios, and one "Direct From Location" in Old Tucson, AZ, for Wesley Ruggles' "Arizona," starring Jean Arthur. I love Jean Arthur. Almost as much as Barbara Stanwyck.
Though he also has a web site (and writes a "Journal" -- not a blog!), I love that someone of Leonard's stature still puts out a good, analog-style newsletter. (Could we consider it "artisanal"?) But, of course, it's also perfectly in character for Leonard, someone whose passion for movies has always been deeply personal as well as professional. (I take pride in getting Leonard on the web in the first place. He used to fax his weekly columns to me at Cinemania Online, which was a bit "klugey," as we used to say. So, I went to his house and set him up on e-mail in 1996 or so. Leonard was an ebay early-adopter -- for his astounding collection of movie memorabilia, of course -- and once he discovered e-mail, he took to it like a sprocket to celluloid.)
The new issue features an interview with 92-year-old Leslie Martinson, a television director and former MGM script supervisor who worked for Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, Sam Wood, Rouben Mamoulian and others, and who has plenty of stories to tell -- including anecdotes about Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
"Long before I had any real awareness of directors and their careers, I knew the name Leslie H. Martinson," Leonard writes, recalling his days as a budding auteurist. "No one who watched television in the 1950s and '60s could have avoided seeing that name. It was emblazoned on countless TV shows, ranging from "Topper" and "The Millionaire" to every Warner Bros. show imaginable, when that studio dominated the airwaves..." Martinson directed episodes of such series as "Maverick," "Hawaiian Eye," "77 Sunset Strip," "Mannix," "Mission: Impossible," "ChiPs," and "Dallas" -- and some movies, too ("Lad: A Dog," "PT 109," the 1966 feature "Batman," based on the hit TV show).
The cover story, "Grade B -- But Choice," is devoted to an obscure 1934 musical called "Young and Beautiful," featuring "budding starlets, grade-A character actors, grade-B musical numbers, a pair of vaudevillians, a look behind the scenes of Hollywood, bogus appearances by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and a script by Dore Schary" [later famous as a producer of films such as "Crossfire," "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," "They Live By Night" and "The Red Badge of Courage"].
Maltin describes "one of the most bizarre musical numbers ever staged, in which actors wearing full-face masks of major stars appear on stage together," along with the WAMPAS girls, beauties selected by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers -- an organization that, between 1922 and 1934, chose an annual list of promising "Baby Stars," which included Clara Bow, Mary Astor, Fay Wray, Joan Crawford, Janet Gaynor, Lupe Valez, Jean Arthur (!), Ginger Rogers and Gloria Stuart.
These stars were not on display in "Young and Beautiful," however. (Betty Bryson, anyone? Dorothy Drake? Hazel Hayes? Lucile Lund? Neoma Judge?) Imagine this:
At first, youre not sure whether or not to believe your eyes; many of the caricature masks are quite good. Some of the performers adopt the actors' body language, and appear in costumes from the stars' most recent roles: John Barrymore as he appeared in "Reunion in Vienna," Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa from "Viva Villa," George Arliss as "The Iron Duke," Joe E. Brown in uniform from "Son of a Sailor," Eddie Cantor in costume from "Roman Scandals," along with Clark Gable, Maurice Chevalier, Adolphe Menjou, Jimmy Durante, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. After an introductory sequence, the bogus stars participate in a kind of elaborate parade with the WAMPAS lovelies.
If that doesn't sound tantalizing, I don't know what will.
This is not good. Soon, we will have a choice between the re-animated Paulettes who dominate the print media and the Knowles-nothing fan boys who dominate the internet. Which in my book isn't much of a choice at all.
As far as I can tell from the CP web site, Nelson's final piece for them was on the critically acclaimed documentary "No End in Sight" ("Surge This," August 22, 2007):
As the movie's more begrudging admirers will likely acknowledge, Ferguson is no Michael Moore. His background is as a scholar and a Brookings wonk, and "No End in Sight" — his first film, amazingly — is less a work of investigation (or activism) than history. There's no psychology in the movie (e.g., Dubya has daddy issues), and neither are there conspiracy theories (e.g., the war is about redrawing the Middle East map and further fueling Halliburton's tank). On some level, it even endeavors to be a film without politics—and might be that if such a thing were possible. [...]
Ferguson has assembled a wealth of on-the-ground footage from a variety of sources, using it mainly to annotate his interview material, although near the end of the film he includes a horrifying home video of private military contractors randomly picking off Iraqi civilian motorists with machine-gun fire, Elvis's jaunty "Mystery Train" booming from the Americans' car radio. Throughout the film are images of burning cars, stacks of torn bodies, bombed-out homes, Iraqis weeping into open coffins—the sort of pictures conspicuously missing from network news coverage. Is the movie's reporting biased? Not if you consider that anyone who'd testify to the "good intentions" or overall success of the campaign—Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld—naturally refused to comment. The evidence speaks for itself...
View image You can't really like this "Seven Samurai" movie, can you? It's old and Japanese!
Here are questions cinephiles and critics still hear all the time: "Why do you like old movies and foreign movies so much? What about new movies? Aren't you just being elitist to say you like movies that are in black and white or have subtitles? Movies are supposed to be fun!" The implicit assumption is that "old movies" are outmoded movies and that new movies (with the latest technologies, unrestricted by old codes regarding sex, violence, drugs and other content) are inclined to be more liberated or superior. Oh, and that "fun" cannot be inspired by anything made before one was born. Not that there's anything inherently inferior about recent, English-language movies, either, but what's wrong with a kiss, boy? (Yes, I quote ol' Monty Python a lot.)
I like to counter this narcissistic question with another proposition: "Think of the new music you've heard that's been issued over the last year. Is more of it "better" than what's been made over the last 100 years? Would it be "elitist" to say that it's more likely you'll find more favorites from the last 99 years than from the last one? Even in purely statistical terms, it just makes sense.
Let's say I'm an even 50 years old. Well, movies themselves have only been around for about 100 years, so I would not be surprised to find that I had at least as many favorites that were made before I was born (1957) as I do that were made since the advent of my existence. Now let's assume that I am turning 30 in 2007. If I say I'm really interested in movies, then it shouldn't seem the least bit unlikely that I've seen more great movies made between 1900 and 1977 than I have between 1977 and now. Especially since so many of them are so easy to see -- whether on basic cable (Turner Classic Movies) or DVD.
I know, I know -- there are people who don't like musical styles of the past, either. They don't like punk or rockabilly or bebop or big band swing or Western swing or blues or Romanticism or Baroque music. And that's their taste, and they're entitled to it. But, if they haven't been sufficiently exposed to these styles, that doesn't mean those tastes are terribly well-rounded tastes. (This is where we could argue about whether some "opinions" carry more weight than others in a debate.) We don't have to like everything, we just need to have enough knowledge and experience to know what it is we don't like.
The question itself seems understandable, if misguided, at first hearing. Until you consider it for about three seconds. And then you see how insulting it really is, because another underlying assumption is: "You can't really like that stuff, can you?"
As Sammy Davis, Jr., one wrote: Yes, I can. (Whether Frank Sinatra says it's OK or not.)
Is Beyonce a greater singer because she's relatively new and young and recorded with the latest technology? Are Aretha Franklin and Edith Piaf and Dinah Washington and Patsy Cline and Martha Reeves and Susannah McCorkle and Billie Holliday and Astrud Gilberto automatically not as good because they recorded a lot of their best stuff earlier -- and some of it was not in English? It just depends on what you like, not on when it was new.
So, why do cinephiles and critics like old movies, and movies from other lands, so much? Maybe for the same reason oenophiles like vintage wines so much: They've stood up over time, and different regions have different styles and distinctive flavors. And maybe because it's part of the definition: Anybody who doesn't consider movies made more than 10 or 20 or 30 years ago has no business calling him/herself a critic or cinephile any more than somebody who dismisses the traditional cuisines of the world could be considered a gourmet. (I've been watching "Top Chef," you see...)
View image A family meeting: Who is that sixth man (on the far right)? Hint: It's not Kevin Spacey.
Longtime Scanners commenter and Ebert correspondent Ali Arikan, in Istanbul (one of my favorite cities), solves the mystery of The Sixth Man in "The Godfather" (or "One," as they say in the Sopranos family) and "The Godfather, Part II" in Roger Ebert's latest Answer Man column. The unidentified man in question is present during the meeting in which the Corleones plan the killing of a New York police captain. And his name is...
... Rocco Lampone... [whom you may remember from] the earlier scene in the film where Rocco executes Paulie in the car as Clemenza urinates outside (the “leave the gun, take the cannoli” scene).
... He eventually becomes one of Michael’s two caporegimes (Al Neri is the other one). Incidentally, it is Rocco who, in the second film, assassinates Hyman Roth at the airport, only to be shot in the back by a police officer as he tries to flee the scene.
Read the full item here and last week's original question here.
Naturally it's nice to see this kind of attention lavished on some of history's finest yet lately neglected films; but between Copeland's poll (coming after The Guardian's similar exercise earlier in the year) and the surging popularity of foreign movies in the UK, I can't help wondering how much of the current enthusiasm for what was once known as world cinema is purely that - and how much a rejection of Hollywood at a time when the wider America is so reviled. In other words, is George Bush responsible in some odd tangential way for the rediscovery of Jean Renoir and Fassbinder?
If so, it's clearly a phenomenon with differing degrees of enmity; few US bloggers are likely to share the anti-Americanism of many British audiences. And yet in both cases there may be an underlying notion of Hollywood as a tool of a cultural imperialism that, however murkily, reflects the actual imperialism of US foreign policy. Follow that logic far enough and Hollywood flicks aren't just dopey time-killers - but sermons straight from the bully pulpit.
I see his angle regarding Hollywood hegemony, but to attribute anti-American (or, rather, anti-Bush) motives to this particular project is stretching things quite a bit.
When it comes to Hollywood movies, I thought we had the British (Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat) and the French (the Cahiers du Cinema crowd) to thank for originally helping us see the artistic worth of American studio pictures once dismissed as "dopey time-killers."
On the other hand, according to the incessant drumbeat of Fox and the rest of the far-right media, "Hollywood" is America's greatest enemy (since Ronald Reagan left town, anyway) -- especially its outspoken movie stars and Jewish singers! Their favorite targets are Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, Barbara Streisand... So, in this climate, if we really wanted to appear "anti-American" (by their definition) wouldn't we actually align ourselves with "Hollywood"?
But this effort to showcase films that aren't in our native tongue (including non-British films, if you want to put it that way) has nothing to do with contemporary politics. It has to do with looking beyond the English-speaking film-world to... the rest of the world and the diversity of movies beyond the five government-selected nominees for the annual Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and the like.
I like The Guardian's film coverage, but they do have a peculiarly blindered view of non-English-language cinema. Look at this story/headline: "Ever been duped into seeing a foreign film?"
Foreign films, we're told, are enjoying an unprecedented boom at the British box office. A recent study from the UK Film Council claims that since 2004, 23 subtitled films have taken more than £1m at the box office, while in the 1990s, only nine foreign-language films crossed the £1m mark. While some cinephiles rejoice, however, others know all too well what lies behind this sudden renaissance.
Indeed, very often, the success of a foreign film in Britain lies in a shrewd pre-release campaign whose main aim has precisely been to deprive the film as much as possible of its foreignness. Instead of fighting famous British prejudices against all things foreign, distributors feel they haven't got any other choice but to accept them and play with it.
There are now marketing rules when distributing a foreign-language film in Britain. First, sell it as a genre film, a black comedy for Volver, a thriller for "Tell No One" or "The Lives of Others," a war film for "Apocalypto," a romantic film for "La Vie En Rose" and "A Very Long Engagement," an action movie for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," a horror film for "Pan's Labyrinth."
Second, make it look sexy at all costs: promote Penelope Cruz rather than Almodovar, Juliette Binoche rather than Michael Haneke....
And this is different from the marketing campaigns for English-language (even "Hollywood") films... how? Sex, genres and movie stars (not necessarily in that order) have always been the main selling points for movies. Yes, it's long been a joke that English-language distributors make trailers that use a corny narrator and deliberately avoid using footage with foreign dialogue. But are people really "duped" by that approach -- any more than they are by every other trailer that grossly misrepresents some component of the film, whether it's the amount of sex or violence or action or laughs?
Does anybody recall when "Swedish movie" was primarily a pop-culture euphemism for (soft-core) porn? Johnny Carson and Bob Hope made a million jokes about it. Let's not forget the American sales campaigns for some of Ingmar Bergman's early movies:
"Summer Interlude" (1951) -- retitled "Illicit Interlude" in the US: "The most INTIMATE love story ever told"
"Monika" (1953): "A Picture for Wide Screens and Broad Minds"
"Sawdust and Tinsel" (1953) -- retitled "The Naked Night" in the US: "DESPERATELY they fought the desires, the passions that dragged them down deeper and deeper into... 'The Naked Night'"
View image Examine this image: "The Wild Bunch"... or "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"?
There's a movie moment for nearly every occasion in life. Take this one from Harold Meyerson -- arguing against impeachment (of Bush and Cheney, anyway) in a cover story in The American Prospect:
You may recall the scene in Clint Eastwood's 1992 Western "Unforgiven" where Eastwood's character levels his gun at Gene Hackman's malevolent sheriff, whom he is about to dispatch to hell's lower depths. "I don't deserve this," Hackman protests. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it," Eastwood replies, and pulls the trigger.
View image Buñuel's "Discreet Bunch": On the Road to Nowhere...
And that -- a touch overstated, I'll admit -- is pretty much my position on impeachment. Does George W. Bush deserve to be impeached? Absolutely. Problem is, that doesn't resolve the question of whether trying to impeach Bush (and, necessarily, Dick Cheney, too) is a good idea.... "Deserve" does have something to do with it, but not enough to carry the day. At least, not this day. [...]
View image It takes a Village of Damned Critics. Are there more where he came from?
Are movie critics too much alike? Not just in their opinions, but in their very approach to movies, or their writing styles? In March, Andy Horbal, formerly of the film criticism blog No More Marriages! and now writing at Mirror/Stage, observed, "When looked at side-by-side at sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes most movie reviews reveal themselves as guilty of a shocking degree of sameness."
Of course, 10 or 20 years ago, virtually nobody outside a newspaper's local circulation area would have any idea of what its movie critic said about a particular film. I wonder: Are aggregation sites like RT and Metacritic revealing sameness, or influencing it, or creating an illusion of it? Could this appearance of uniformity have something to do with the little chunk-ettes these sites choose to excerpt from the reviews -- not unlike the (even shorter) ones studios choose to use in ad campaigns?
I'm frustrated by the film blogosphere. I'm also frustrated by journalistic film criticism, and the primary problem in both cases is what I see as a plague of sameness. Additionally, I'm frustrated by the imitative quality of much blog writing: specifically, the way film blogs imitate journalistic film criticism which, as I said, frustrates me itself.
As I've written before, I think these are golden days for film criticism -- in large part because of the unprecedented explosion of writing now easily accessible on the web: not only the writing of big, established critics and scholars, but the distinctive voices and perspectives of many bloggers who in the past would not have had access to a publisher, or an audience. At our fingertips we have not only considerations of new movies, but vast archives of writing, from the present and the past, about the whole history of movies.
This has never been possible before, when you'd have to make a trip to the library to physically search for newspapers and magazines, perhaps in bound volumes or on microfilm. Now, no matter how small a town you live in, as long as you can get on the Internet, you have access to much of what was once available only in big-city libraries. And, if you have a mailbox, you can watch or rent more movies on DVD (through NetFlix, for example) or on cable or satellite TV (Turner Classic Movies, On Demand, premium channels or any number of pay-per-view services, including Amazon Unbox) than you'd ever have had the opportunity to see in any major city over the course of several years. (How many times were "Le Samourai" or "Madame de..." or "Celine and Julie Go Boating" or even "La Dolce Vita" actually projected on screens in your town during the 1970s, '80s or '90s? They and many thousands of others are now available everywhere, all the time. That is revolutionary -- beyond anything we could ever have predicted in the 1970s, when we saw these films in 16mm student film series or film societies. Or, if we were lucky, in 35 mm at rep houses, but even then the prints were often dirty, scratchy, choppy or multiple-generation dupes.) All this access also allows us to correct the millions of errors contained in pioneering works of film criticism that were, of necessity, based on old notes or faulty memories. The movies are more alive to us than ever.
I hold movie bloggers (and web sites) to a higher standard than I do daily newspaper critics, because they have luxuries of time and space and choice that the pros don't: 1) they don't have to write on deadline about something they've seen only once before it is released; 2) they can take the time (if a film is on DVD) to be sure they quote it correctly (not just rely on memory or notes hastily scribbled in the dark), and even provide clips or frame grabs to illustrate their points; 3) they can include hyperlinks to related sources of information and opinion; 4) they get to pick and choose which movies they actually want to write about, instead of being limited to what we used to call "the review treadmill" of whatever happens to be opening this week; 5) they are not subject to the many, many constraints of conventional print journalism, including limited word counts, layout restrictions, editorial concerns about writing for a "broad" or "mainstream" readership, and so on.
There's a lot of amateurism on the web -- which can be refreshing and stimulating (especially when, as Andy points out, the writers do not try to imitate some mythical "professional" style, and instead write in their own voices), or it can be embarrassing and stultifying (when ignorance combines with arrogance and a dull or strident writing style). At the same time, there are a plenty of reviewers holding jobs with major newspapers or magazines whose stuff isn't up to the standards -- of readability, accuracy, knowledge, or basic interest and engagement -- that I would consider "professional" quality, either. Yet some bloggers have all this and more. In most cases, they've got everything but longtime professional (i.e., paycheck-cashing) experience writing about movies. (Just try reading some of those reviews you find on RottenTomatoes for some excellent negative examples. Next time you read a printed review, ask yourself if you think this writer actually likes his/her job. Or movies. You may have discovered one of those former sportswriters or feature reporters who've been unceremoniously shifted over to the "movie beat.")
Meanwhile, over at The Aisle View, The Vancouver (WA) Voice movie blog, DK Holm suggests that too many newspaper and magazine reviews suffer not only from a uniformity of opinion, but a uniformity of tone:
There is another kind [of plagiarism], that is more pervasive and insidious and nearly invisible. That’s the group-think that sweeps across the nation as certain reviews and reviewers set the tone and limit the terms of response to a film. What these writers are doing is plagiarizing a tone, the way the Paulettes from long ago, and even to this day, took their cues from Pauline Kael’s New Yorker reviews and her private exhortations.
"Plagiarists" of this kind, Holm writes, are "never" caught, "yet can unduly influence the fortunes of a film. In this light, perhaps it’s a good thing that no one pays attention to movie reviewers any more."
I see his point, but I don't quite follow the logic here. No one pays attention to reviewers anymore, yet they somehow have the power to set a tone that limits the terms of response to films? How can this be?
I've noticed a tendency, which I've remarked upon repeatedly, of pundits either overestimating or underestimating the influence of critics. Reviews don't have much influence at all over the fortunes of most mainstream movies. If people go to see them, it's because of the ad campaigns, and because they have friends who want to go. "Word-of-mouth" gets started before the picture is even released. As a former art-house exhibitor, however, I can tell you that reviews can (or used to) can have a big impact on foreign or indie releases that can't afford big ad blitzes.
But Holm is talking about framing the debate, not necessarily influencing the box office. If he's right, what causes this "group-think"? If everybody's writing on the same deadline (opening day), then they can't very well read one another's copy, and re-write their own, in time for publication. Do critics just grow to think alike, the way they say old married people (and their dogs) come to look alike? What about the young ones? Are they so eager to emulate their elders that they (or their editors) try to stuff them(selves) into a certain mold? Are they even aware this is happening? I don't know the answers to these questions.
Naturally, I have my favorite professional critics (people like Roger Ebert, Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Ty Burr, Wesley Morris, David Ansen...), and my favorite movie bloggers (Dennis Cozzalio, Girish Shambu, The Shamus, Kim Morgan, Andy Horbal...) -- and other favorites who do both (like Matt Zoller Seitz, or David Bordwell on the academic side). But I don't read them because I consider them in my "camp," or because I wold necessarily expect to agree with them, any more than I would expect to agree with critics I can't stand. (There are lots of those, too.) I read them precisely because they have their own voices and their own perspectives. I learn something from them, or see things from a point of view I hadn't considered, at least as often as they make me go, "Yes! That's exactly what I saw!" Sometimes I can tell what they will like or not like, but I never know quite what they're going to say about it. And I certainly don't know whether they will be in the RottenTomatoes majority or minority.
Yes, there have been some indications that certain cliquish New York critics, at least, do tacitly agree on the "proper" approach to certain films*, and there's often a vogue for certain filmmakers or types of films -- currently those labeled (wince)DIY or "mumblecore," the subject of a ten-film series at NY's IFC Center ("The New Talkies: Generation DIY." I like some of the movies, but these cutesy, pompous, and sanctimonious promotional labels make me gag. BTW, if you want to read a solid and insightful piece about these films, see MZS's NYT review of "Hannah Takes the Stairs.")
Films and filmmakers go in or out of fashion with critics and the public all the time, and that's the way it's always been. (Don't forget: Scorsese and Coppola [Francis] are hot, hot, hot again; Fellini and Bergman are passé; Lars von Trier and Abbas Kiarostami are so 1990s!)
But while there may appear to be a consensus on a given film or director at a given moment, it's never quite as unanimous as it may seem. Hugely influential films like "La Dolce Vita," "Vertigo," "L'Avventura," "Nashville," "Psycho," "Last Tango in Paris," etc., all strongly divided critics and moviegoers alike. That was the idea: Get people talking. If your movie can "cross over" to the Op-Ed pages, all the better. Meanwhile, I seem to be the only person, or at least the only Spielberg fan, on the face of the earth to think that "Always" is really good classic romantic-fantasy storytelling, and "Schindler's List" (he consensus movie of our age) is, for all the artistry it displays, too concerned with covering its bases and collecting representative anecdotes to amount to much as a work of art. I don't expect many to agree with me about either of those things, by the way. But my day will come!
Where was I? Three paragraphs ago, I wanted to say that I don't think I'd mistake any of my favorite critics' writing for anyone else. Yes, I might find a streak of Kael here, or a nugget of Sarris there, but everybody has influences, and the best incorporate them into their own sensibilities. I should do a test sometime: I think I could tell an Ebert review from a Dargis review from a Rosenbaum review from a Hoberman review...
So, what do you think? Are established critics and reviewers, and relatively new bloggers, plagued by unoriginality and sameness? Do they emphasize a restrictive or uniform perception for some films? Are too many of them consciously or unconsciously regurgitating the same press-kit spin? Got any examples?
* P.S. In response to an earlier Scanners post about what Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman described as films "that all the critics kind of collude on deciding are good," David Edelstein responded with a comment in which he said:
... I heard from an LA critic that LA screenings of "Notes on a Scandal" and "The Good Shepherd" were pretty disastrous, and I wasn't surprised to see many LA critics panning those films. My take is that it's cliquier out there, but who knows?
My own initial (internal) response was: Why wouldn't those movies get a semi-disastrous reception? "Notes" was just a nastier "Sleuth" without the cleverness, and "Shepherd" was as flat and dull as an old sheet of microfiche. (See "Breach" -- now on DVD -- instead. It got virtually no attention but is a vastly superior movie.)
The link was to a pair of articles listing Total Film's choices for "The Greatest Directors Ever" Part 1 (100 - 49) and Part 2 (50 - 1).
Will I return to this site? I think probably not. Why am I linking to it now? Because it's my shameless attempt to stimulate discussion, which I hope will be on a more informed level than this list. Or maybe it's just to have a laugh. Or a moment of sadness. What do I think of the list itself? Well, let's see:
Baz Luhrmann is #97.
Tony Scott is #74, just edging out Milos Forman, Kenji Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Buster Keaton, who comes in at #88.
Bryan Singer is #65, two slots below Robert Bresson, who immediately follows Sam Raimi.
Rob Reiner is #35.
Michael Mann (#28) is on the list, but Anthony Mann is not.
Bernardo Bertolucci is... not on the list.
Otto Preminger is... not on the list.
Richard Lester is... not on the list.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder is... not on the list.
Max Ophuls is... not on the list.
George Cukor is... not on the list, but George Lucas (#95) is.
Andrei Tarkovsky is... not on the list.
Eric Rohmer is... not on the list.
Claude Chabrol is... not on the list.
Luchino Visconti is... not on the list.
Vittorio De Sica is... not on the list.
Michelangelo Antonioni is... not on the list. Not even the top 100.
What's worse are the little names they have for each director. Sophia Coppola (#99) is "The dreamer" ("Dreamy, brave and cool, this Coppola is doing it for herself"). Singer is "The new Spielberg." Robert Altman (#26) is "The outsider" -- oops, but so is Hal Ashby (#58). Somebody ran out of labels. Well, at least they are not outside all alone; they are outside together. Sam Fuller (#50) is "The hack." Mike Leigh (#49) is "The grouch." Quentin Tarantino (#12) is "The motormouth."
OK, that's enough. Have at it if you feel like it. If you don't feel like it, you'll probably live.
ADDENDUM: A reader, spleendonkey, describes TotalFilm as a British magazine aimed at teens and pre-teens, designed to broaden their film horizons. For the record, here's the mag's description of itself on its subscription page:
In 2007, Total Film celebrates its tenth year of being the only film magazine that nails a monthly widescreen shot of the whole movie landscape. It’s the essential guide for anyone who’s passionate about movies - whether they’re into Cruise or Cusack, Hollywood or Bollywood, multiplex or arthouse, popcorn or - er - sweetcorn. Each issue is pumped full of reviews, news, features and celebrity interviews on all the latest cinema releases. The all-new home entertainment section, Lounge, is the ultimate one-stop-shop for everything you should care about in the churning world of DVDs, books, videogames and, occasionally, film-related novelty furniture. The mag regularly features highly desirable, Ebay-friendly FREE stuff - exclusive film cells, posters, postcards, DVDs… We’re currently in discussions with Health & Safety operatives about sticking a magical compass to the cover when "His Dark Materials" comes out. Subscribe to Total Film now, or forever be belittled by precocious children in discussions about what’s best and worst in movieland.
Doesn't sound all that different from Entertainment Weekly to me, but there you go...
If moviemaking were a science, then it would be a science. But guess what? Quite often elements that have nothing to do with the movie itself -- timing, release pattern, marketing, advertising -- have more to do with what makes the thing a hit or a flop. Especially today, when pictures are in and out of theaters before the public has a chance to decide whether they're worth seeing -- much less worth seeing again. Repeat business, which used to be a big factor in determining a hit, doesn't really kick in until the DVD release anymore.
But there are still would-be alchemists who imagine they can scientifically -- or, at least, statistically -- measure the ingredients of a successful movie. Take Professor Dean Simonton at UC Davis, for instance. He says he's isolated the components of the magical formula that accounts for a movie's appeal, with audiences and with critics.
Movies are supposed to be about getting lost in emotion. But one scientist has broken down the film industry to cold, hard facts. A psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, has done a statistical study of thousands of movies to determine what makes them critical darlings or box-office hits.
Films that earn awards and praise from reviewers tend to be R-rated and based on a true story or a prize-winning play or novel, says professor Dean Simonton. The original author or the director usually have written the screenplay.
Big-budget blockbusters — whether they're comedies, musical, sequels or remakes — don't ordinarily draw acclaim, Simonton found. Neither do summer releases, PG-13 movies, movies that open on thousands of screens or ones that have enormous box office numbers in their first weekend.
"I had this hope that there was a difference between blockbusters and really great art films — films that can be considered great cinematic creations," said Simonton, who presented his findings Friday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco. "It was gratifying to find out they're very, very different and you can find out what's different about them."
Simonton says he's not a movie buff — "I'm a consumer like everyone else" — but in his longtime studies of genius, creativity and leadership, he started compiling data about the collaborative process of filmmaking in 1999. He's also done a study comparing the Oscars with the Razzies.
Now, before you say "Duh" (and you should), Simonton says he's not a movie buff but "a consumer like everyone else," and he does admit that, "All these things are just statistical relationships — there are always exceptions to every finding you have."
How true. And close empirical (and statistical) analysis should indeed be a part of the study of how movies work. See Cinemetrics for a fascinating and useful database cataloging the average shot length of many movies. Such facts and tools can be used to examine stylistic features and trends, and make specific notations about films in any number of ways. And, natually, valid film criticism should always be rooted in direct observations of, and examples from, the movie(s) under scrutiny. But it's one thing to study and dissect films; it's something else to present analysis as a recipe or a prescription.
As I've said many times before, and plan to say many times again, the two most important things to remember about the so-called Hollywood studio product industry today are:
1) They're in the risk management business, not the entertainment business. Which means that studio execs are less likely to go with their guts, as the moguls of old were known to do on occasion, than to rely on previously successful formulas in attempts to cover their asses in case they should fail. After all, the studio bosses no longer work for themselves. They are beholden to their corporate bosses (at General Electric, Viacom, Newscorp) and, if they're public companies, the shareholders. As Simonton says, "Hollywood falls back on sequels and remakes. Even though you've seen them before, you know they've succeeded in earlier versions."
2) The "fast food" analogy is more apt than ever -- it's all about In-N-Out, as it were. (See "Crix Nix Kix Flix (Part I).") A movie doesn't need a long, lucrative engagement to become a popular success anymore. Hit summer movies regularly not uncommonly do 40 around 30 percent of their total theatrical business in their opening weekend. Revenues frequently plummet by 50-60 percent in the second weekend and 40 percent or more in each succeeding week, which is fine with the studios and the exhibitors, because that means faster turnover and higher per-screen averages. After the second or third week, they can move 'em on out (into smaller corrals) to make room for the next available cash cow. Even top-grossing movies may stay in wide release for only six or eight weeks, or even less. (More actual numbers below.)
Columnist Mark Harris in Entertainment Weekly covers some of this same ground in a piece called "Buzz-Lite Year," in which he says of these One Weekend Wonders: "It's bad news for moviegoers that studios can now make money without having to worry about that pesky variable, word of mouth."
A slight exaggeration (word-of-mouth travels a lot faster in the days of blogs, e-mail, mobile phones, and text-messaging) but he's basically right. For most of the corporate life of the cinema, executives have done their darndest to figure out a way to manufacture movies without all that troublesome talent: writers, directors, actors, and anybody who belongs to a union. They joked about it, but if they could have done it, they would have. And there's been a lot of press the last couple years about how studios are theoretically squeezing critics out of the box-office equation (predicated on the unsupported assumption that critics were ever a significant part of it in the first place).
Now, the corporations can make a profit on a movie even without you, the audience. With pre-sales of what were once "ancillary rights" (DVD, cable, foreign theatrical distribution, etc.) some movies are in the black before they're even released. Sometimes it seems the only thing that can really hurt a movie investment is to actually show the picture to people. Best to get it In-N-Out before anybody catches on to what's actually being sold. (I kid to some extent, but to make a point.) Remember, the theatrical release is basically a publicity stunt, an elaborate marketing campaign to prepare for the TV and DVD releases, where the real money is. And, by then, it doesn't matter so much how "good" the product is. People are a lot less picky and more forgiving when it comes to watching movies at home on cable/satellite or DVD than they are when they make the effort to go out, stand in line, buy tickets, and watch a movie in theaters.
If they could only get rid of the movies and just sell consumers the ads, then they'd have it made. Oh, wait, that's already happening. Who needs a feature when you've got 20 minutes or more of commercials to sit through? At least on the damnable DVDs that come pre-loaded with ads you can push MENU during the bloody previews. Well, on some of them you can...
(BTW, I should mention that In-N-Out is my second-favorite drive-in burger chain -- it's delicious! -- and my reference to it in this context, because of its picturesque name, is not intended to disparage In-N-Out restaurants, only to comment on the studios' fast-food approach to selling and releasing films. In-N-Out itself is a much classier operation. I'll take an In-N-Out burger over "Rush Hour 3" any day -- a higher quality product, and more gratifying experience, all around, I'm sure.)
(Thanks to Ken Lowery and Chris, both of whom sent me links to the "statistical analysis.")
Continuing our discussion about the nauseating properties of hand-held, quick-cut, whip-pan, rack-focus camerawork, David Bordwell sends along this account of an unlucky filmgoer who saw "The Bourne Ultimatum" in IMAX:
We went to see "BU" on the IMAX in San Francisco. Near the end, when Webb is having the flashback to when he is forced to show his commitment to the project, the lady next to me spontaneously unleashes a huge amount of vomit all over my leg and all over the floor in front of her! I have never experienced anything like it in my life!
Now all the action sequences, the nauseating use of moving cameras, and the relentless score were enough to make anyone dizzy, but to throw up?
This, as DB observes, is truly a "Technicolor yawn."
That's what flashed through my mind when I saw this top image in an online ad, anyway. One of these pictures is from a "Star Wars" movie (I forget which one, but it was Episode I, II, or III, I can tell you that). The other is from "Resurrecting the Champ," starring Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett. Can you tell which one is which?
(Hint: One of the movies does not, as far as I know, feature the Grand Master of the Jedi Order.)
Answer: In the top image, Jackson plays an older Yoda. In the bottom picture, Yoda is played by a different actor.
Or, as pacheco suggests, perhaps the upper picture is from an "Alien vs. Predator"-type sequel, combining the "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" franchises.
View image Wim Wenders' "Kings of the Road" (or literal English translation: "In the Course of Time"). You may recognize the poster image from outside the theater in which "Duck Soup" is playing in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters." This movie can also save your life.
An ad hoc bunch of 51 online movie enthusiasts (online movie critics, bloggers, et al.), organized by Edward Copeland, the eponymous proprietor of "Edward Copeland on Film," recently composed our unordered lists of up to 25 most significant (or enduring or even favorite) "foreign-language" talkies.
Eduardo (as he might be known in, say, Mexico or Spain or Uruguay or Nicaragua or Puerto Rico) took on the gargantuan task of tabulating the ballots and coming up with the initial list of 122 nominees. As he explains:
I set a few guidelines for eligibility: 1) No film more recent than 2002 was eligible; 2) They had to be feature length; 3) They had to have been made either mostly or entirely in a language other than English; 4) Documentaries and silent films were ineligible, though I made do lists for those in the future if this goes well. In all, 434 films received votes, not counting those that had to be disqualified for not meeting the criteria.
In order to make the final ballot, films had to receive at least three "votes." I'm happy that most of my initial choices made the finals. And there were five I've never seen, so I have these to look forward to: Elem Klimov's "Come and See," Sergio Corbucci's "The Great Silence" (a spaghetti western), Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood For Love," Bela Tarr's 7.5-hour "Satantango," and Hayao Miyazaki's anime "Spirited Away." (And I've never made it all the way through "Amelie" or "Chungking Express.")
This exercise also reminded me of a bunch of movies I need to re-watch, because it's been too long (at least 20 years) and I don't remember them very well, including: Jacques Rivette's "Celine and Julie Go Boating" (always hard to see, but available on Region 2 DVD, at least), Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Days of Wrath," Lucino Visconti's "The Leopard," Kenji Mizoguchi's "The Story of the Late Crysanthemums" (and, for that matter, "The Life of Oharu," which deserved to be on the list and which I have on import DVD), and Edward Yang's "Yi-Yi" (which I've been meaning to revisit since his untimely death).
Best of all, the list serves as a reminder that the vast majority of these films, available on DVD, are easier to see now than they have ever been since they were made! Most are just as easy to borrow from NetFlix as "Wild Hogs."
For my Own Personal List, and some observations about the preliminary results, click to continue...
Meanwhile, if any of the participants -- or any readers -- would like to publish their own lists, please feel free to do so in comments! I'll show you mine if...
I limited my own choices to one title per director, and chose not to vote for a series of films or episodes (like Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" or Kieslowski's "Three Colors Trilogy" [I narrowed it down to "Red"] or "The Decalogue"). It wasn't as idiosyncratic a list as I might have liked, but I was trying to get my choices on the final list of candidates (although I did go for Truffaut's "The Green Room," which I honestly didn't think two other people would vote for).
My list (in no order whatsoever that I can detect -- except that the two most recent ones were the last I squeezed in):
"Sansho Dayu" (Mizoguchi)
"Le Boucher" (Chabrol)
"Kings of the Road" (Wenders)
"Knife in the Water" (Polanski)
"A Year of the Quiet Sun" (Zanussi)
"Playtime" (Tati)
"The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" (Fassbinder)
"M" (Lang)
"Perceval" (Rohmer)
"Masculin-Feminin" (Godard)
"The Green Room" (Truffaut)
"Late Spring" (Ozu)
"Ran" (Kurosawa)
"French Can-Can" (Renoir)
"Le Samourai" (Melville)
"L'Argent" (Bresson)
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (Bunuel)
"L'Eclisse" (Antonioni)
"Persona" (Bergman)
"Madame de..." (Ophuls)
"La Dolce Vita" (Fellini)
"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (Herzog)
"Red" (Kieslowski)
"Time Out" (Cantet)
"Le Fils / The Son" (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Seems like a pretty reasonable, accessible list to me! Remember that this was winnowed down from at least a hundred titles I wanted to consider. I was saddest that Chabrol's "Le Boucher" didn't make the cut -- in part because I really thought it had a chance (unlike Zanussi's "A Year of the Quiet Sun" or Renoir's "French Can-Can," which I figured others would overlook). The film I'm most surprised is not on the final list: Roman Polanski's "Knife in the Water."
Most popular directors on the list: Akira Kurosawa (8 titles), Ingmar Bergman (7), Federico Fellini (5), Francois Truffaut (5), Jean-Luc Godard (5), Krzysztof Kieslowski (5) -- including mentions of the "Three Colors Trilogy" as votes for the three individual films), Luis Bunuel (4), Kenji Mizoguchi (3), Michelangelo Antonioni (3), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (3), Robert Bresson (3), Werner Herzog (3), Alain Resnais (2), Carl Theodor Dreyer (2), Jean Cocteau (2), Jean Renoir (2), Jean-Pierre Melville (2), Lucino Visconti (2), Max Ophuls (2), Pedro Almodovar (2), Vittorio de Sica (2), Wong Kar-Wai (2), Yasujiro Ozu (2), Zhang Yimou (2). I'm really sorry Chabrol is a no-show. I'm telling you, "Le Boucher" is one of the all-time great love/horror/suspense films.
Of the final candidates, only a few seem to me absolutely out of the question -- because they're so trite/light, or not even close to their directors' best work, or because I don't think the director has done any work worthy of this caliber. Maybe later I'll tell you which ones I'm thinking of, but you can probably guess if you've been reading Scanners for a while...
View image A non-god's-eye-view from the final sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Eclisse."
In the discussion about my hypothetical Athiest Film Festival (before the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni), I was trying to get at the difference I see between Bergman's theological sensibility (seeing/defining the world in terms of man's relationship with god, even if that relationship involves god's silence, indifference, death or nonexistence) and a view in which god is not only not a default position, but not even a question. This, I think, is closer to Antonioni's aesthetic and philosophical outlook, at least as far as his films express it.
There's an excellent, and long overdue, article in the New York Times Magazine today ("The Politics of God"), which is primarily about how the West has (catastrophically?) failed to comprehend that, even in modern times, "theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong."
The piece, by Columbia University humanities Professor Mark Lilla, is adapted from his upcoming book "The Stillborn God: Religion Politics and the Modern West," but the passage that got me thinking about the Atheist Film Festival (and the "Banana as Atheist's Nightmare") again was this one:
Theology is, after all, a set of reasons people give themselves for the way things are and the way they ought to be....
Imagine human beings who first become aware of themselves in a world not of their own making. Their world has unknown origins and behaves in a regular fashion, so they wonder why that is. They know that the things they themselves fashion behave in a predictable manner because they conceive and construct them with some end in mind. They stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for them to assume that the cosmic order was constructed for a purpose, reflecting its maker’s will. By following this analogy, they begin to have ideas about that maker, about his intentions and therefore about his personality.
In taking these few short steps, the human mind finds itself confronted with a picture, a theological image in which God, man and world form a divine nexus. Believers have reasons for thinking that they live in this nexus, just as they have reasons for assumi
