View image Opening shot: Above it all.

View image Second shot: A street in a neighborhood: Vallejo, CA - July 4, 1969. Music: "Easy to be Hard," from "Hair."

It's probably the second shot of David Fincher's "Zodiac" that you remember best: the linear, smooth-gliding traveling shot (out the passenger window from within the car that will be the site of the movie's first "Zodiac Killer" murder) through a suburban neighborhood on July 4, 1969.

View image What is this boy running from -- or to?

The first shot is a simple (if breathtakingly beautiful) aerial establishing shot, of the sort that will be used repeatedly to introduce timecoded segments throughout the rest of the movie. We won't know it until the next shot, but the fireworks we see are exploding over Vallejo, CA. From above, we get a sense of the terrain -- the bridge over the river, the cityscape stretching into the distance. Nobody in the movie gets to see this Big Picture this way. Everyone is limited to looking at events from ground level, trying to map out the larger view, one piece at a time, in their heads.

View image The kid approaches the car and his face appears in the (window) frame.

View image Same "kid," last frame.

This is a movie about maps, about time and place and getting from one point to another and how long it takes to get there and whose jurisdiction events fall within. It is, as I've written before, an analog movie set in an analog world. It is about, and made up of, an obsession with details -- an investigation into our need as pattern-seeking animals to understand and make sense of the evidence we observe or uncover or have delivered to us by phone or mail or courier (but only rarely by fax). The Zodiac Killer proved elusive in large part because he didn't stick to his patterns. In so doing, he sent police and newspapermen scurrying all over the map, and they kept losing him in the details. (See also: Hurdy Gurdys and Aqua Velvas: Misc. "Zodiac" fax....)

View image Noticing what is in front of one's nose: "This can no longer be ignored. What is it?"

View image A typical "Zodiac" establishing shot, marking the temporal and geographical coordinates, as if putting a pushpin in a map of time and space: "September 14, 1972 - Santa Rosa, CA - Sunset Trailer Park - Space A-7." What do all these details add up to?

The film's other establishing shots may be aerial views or more conventional exteriors or wide-shot interiors, but they accomplish the same purpose: to place the next piece of action in a particular time and place in relation to the previous one. The movie's second shot -- from the street, but with glimpses of the fireworks overhead connecting it to the first -- shows a neat row of subdivision houses. The parallel motion of the camera emphasizes the geometric orderliness of the setting, but there are glimpses of life in passing property as we glide by -- but there's also something a little creepy about them: a kid entering a house, a girl with a sparkler, a cone fountain ("CAUTION: Emits shower of sparks") erupting in a front yard, a man with a Weber, a family congregating in the rear of a driveway/alley.... The shot ends when the camera stops in front of a house and a boy runs from the front steps, down the sidewalk, and into view from the driver's POV. His face, framed in the car window, the first we see clearly in the film, will also be the last shot in the movie. That will be years later, and this boy will be a different person. "Zodiac" traces the distance from this face to that one. His face is one of the movie's maps or cryptograms.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 07:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

View image 1. The title of the film and the name of the writer and director. Michael Nyman's chugging strings and pounding piano build tension and suspense on the soundtrack.

View image 2. Opening shot: The mystery begins. Two children pull a dalmatian (black-and-white spotted dog) toward the ZOO. A guard mans his station, to keep people out or to keep animals in or to direct traffic or for some other reason or reasons. The dog strongly resists being pulled toward the ZOO.

Consider this a kind of expanded "Opening Shots" entry -- from the titles sequence of Peter Greenaway's "A Zed and Two Noughts" (1985), one of the director's taxonomy films -- in a category with "The Falls" (92 mini-bios of people whose names begin with F-A-L-L), "The Draughtsman's Contract" (twelve architectural drawings), "The Belly of an Architect" (nine months), "Drowning by Numbers" (1-100) -- about the ordering and classification of things, including images.

View image 3. A tiger, a striped cat, in a cage with bars, stripes. The feline paces back and forth. On the floor is the head of another black-and-white animal, a zebra, that perhaps provides food for the tiger.

View image 4. Closer view of the above.

There's a story: Twin brothers Oswald and Oliver Deuce (played by identical twins Brian and Eric Deacon) are shattered when both their wives are killed in a collision with a pregnant swan outside the London Zoo. They become obsessed with death and decay, making time-lapse photographic studies of decomposition, beginning with an apple and continuing through the alphabet to a zebra... and then beyond. They both become sexually involved with Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol), the only survivor of the accident, who has lost one leg because of it. The other is later removed for the sake of symmetry.

View image 5. A hand with a counter. Someone appears to be sitting outside the tiger's cage, counting the number of times it paces from one side of the cell to the other.

View image 6. Wider view of the man with the counter. He is taking notes. There are black-and-white circles of light and shadow within the squares of the cell and the bars.

There also a character named Venus de Milo (Frances Barber, with two arms) and a mysterious, black-clad character called Van Hoyten (Joss Acklund). The film is narrated by the great voice of BBC nature documentaries, David Attenborough.

View image 7. Repetition/continuation of shot #4. Followed by repetition/continuation of #5, close-up of hand with counter, clicking to a symmetrical 676.

View image 8. Repetition/continuation of shot #6. The sounds of a crash and a scream are heard. The man, hearing the sounds, looks up. Glances at the camera?

That's the skeletal outline. "ZOO" is about ways of processing grief and facing the reality of death, and about photography as a means of recording and preserving the processes of change and decay. It's also extremely funny (emphasis on "extreme," in every way), full of visual and verbal puns and puzzles. And it's a study in mortification (again, in all senses of that word). It is also ravishingly beautiful, in a striking and painterly fashion (photographed by Greenaway's frequent collaborator, Sacha Vierney, 1919 - 2001). Greenaway's most recent film, "Nightwatching" (which I unfortunately missed in Toronto), is a deconstruction of Rembrandt's famous painting, "The Night Watch," and the murder mystery behind it.

View image 9. The accident. Stripes. Tiger. Woman's head. White Mercury. Pair of wings. Pair of headlight circles. "Z" for ZOO in background. License plate: 26 (letters in alphabet), B/W (black and white)... Patters upon patterns upon patterns...

At right: The opening of "A Zed & Two Noughts," by the numbers Some shots are separated by blackouts with film credits on them. A shot or two is left out of the sequence, for the sake of asymmetry...

Posted by Jim Emerson at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

View image Think you know which movie this is from? Tell Filmbrain.

I enjoy Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quizes over at Like Anna Karina's Sweater, which as to be one of the best blog names out there -- along with Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, of course. (And thank you, FB, for the recent post about one of my favorite films of the 1970s, Jerzy Skolimowski's "Deep End." At the moment, moviegoers may be discovering Skolimowski the actor -- Uncle Stepan in David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises.")

So, I'm not sure which picture the capture above is from (and, of course, I wouldn't give it away even if I knew the answer -- as I did last week, but that one was pretty easy). But this, appearing at the same time as Flickhead's Bunuel-a-thon (Flickhead/Filmbrain -- the associations are unavoidable) made me think of a great double-bill I'd like to do for Broken Projector's upcoming Double Bill Blog-a-Thon (Oct. 22-26), which would involve pairing Bunuel's "The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz" with the movie I think this image is from. But, you know, I could be wrong -- and then there'd be trouble in paradise. That's all I want to say for now.

But, in the meantime, take a look at that portrait from a 20th Century Fox film that appears on the far wall. You may ask yourself: Where have I seen that before? You know the feeling of something half remembered... of something that never happened, yet you recall it well. You know the feeling of recognizing someone that you've never met as far as you could tell... How familiar those eyes seem. Is it her? Or is she only a dream?

P.S. Well, damn me to hell. OK, I just figured out it's NOT the movie I thought of at first sight, but I can't wait to go ahead with that double-bill idea...

Posted by Jim Emerson at 06:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

View image A dream of dying: "Los Olvidados."

Flickhead is hosting a Buñuel blog-a-thon this week, with postings on famous and obscure Buñuelian objects of desire. From the intro:

Few filmmakers have held my attention, respect and admiration for as long or as deeply as Luis Buñuel. For years I’ve thought of him as my ‘favorite’ director, mostly due to a personal connection I feel with his attitudes, humor and outlook. A surrealist, a wandering spirit, a cynic, a recovering Catholic…Buñuel used the cinema to explore these areas and took special delight in society’s inexorable draw to the seven deadly sins—especially pride, lust and greed. Among the very few masters capable of channeling elevated social and cultural criticisms into popular cinema, he took aim at the whole of humanity, recognizing the folly of our desires.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

View image From the poster for "Zoo."

"Zoo," tagged unfairly at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival as "the horse-f---ing movie," is pure artsploitation. Although labeled a "documentary" by some, it's really more of a pristine horror-fantasy about sex -- that doesn't quite have the nerve to face the sex or the horror, and only barely scratches the surface of the fantasy. It starts off almost as if it could become a Val Lewton movie ("Cat People"), but keeps at a distance. Its shadows are viewed as atmospheric effects rather than dark, unknown regions in which a body could get lost. Warily, the movie circles the sexuality of its subjects as if terrified of getting its hands (or whatever) dirty.

It's based on the Enumclaw Horse Case. In 2005, a man in Washington State died from "acute peritonitis," internal wounds from having intercourse with an Arabian stallion on a farm where social-sexual gatherings were sometimes held for such purposes.

"Zoo" exploits this sensational, scandalous death with ravishing visuals and an ominous score (like Michael Nyman's work with Peter Greenaway, minus the wit), but steers away from close examination of the physical, emotional, sexual, political, ethical or spiritual ramifications of zoophilia -- the movie's Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The name is spoken, of course, but apart from a few brief, provocative voiceover comments about animal "consent," or humans who really love their animals wanting to take that love further, to fuse with (or become) other mammals, "Zoo" contemplates man and beast from a cool remove. It's all nicely theoretical and abstract. And yet we can't honestly grapple with the implications (moral or otherwise) of what zoophiles do if we avoid confronting what they do, to and with the animals. I expected a little more raw emotion -- or, at least, passion -- here.

No doubt the movie's reticence comes in part because the three zoophiles who allowed their voice interviews to be used in the film are understandably hesitant to discuss their sexual activities and what drives them -- perhaps especially now that bestiality has been officially outlawed in Washington. "Zoo" could have gained some credibility from a little honest (or even dishonest) eye contact, but almost all interviews take place off-camera, including those with people who were not involved in the case, and not at all in the practice of inter-species sex.

So, instead, there's a bizarre on-camera interview with an actor who plays Cop #1 (I think that was the character's name), sitting on a stool in a full shot, facing the camera against a white background, playing nervously with his index finger positioned between his spread legs. (Subtle, guys.) He talks about getting the part and what it meant to him, especially after an experience he once had with death. I think the movie offers this guy up for ridicule, but even if that wasn't the cruel intention, why is he in here?

My impression was that the filmmakers simply couldn't get anybody else. "Zoo" is only 76 minutes long, barely feature length, but I soon found myself thinking: "Oh-oh, they didn't get the interviews they needed to make the movie." Whether that's from a failure of research or a lack of cooperation or something else, I don't know. But through all the portentous filler, the delays and digressions, you can feel missed opportunities slipping by as you watch it. The reenactments are presented with such anal-retentive pictorial beauty that they become mere decorative distractions. Wow, those shots of Mt. Rainier at dusk (especially through that living-room picture window) are gorgeous. And the day-for-night quality of that footage with the guy walking through the blooming rhododendrons that seem to glow in the twilight? Exquisite. But they're inert, superficial, disconnected images. They just float there, attractively.

I should re-phrase my assertion above: It's not that director Robinson Devor and his co-writer/-researcher Charles Mudede didn't necessarily get what they needed to make a movie. It's that they only used whatever they got to make this movie, and that didn't feel like enough to me. I felt I was watching a wannabe Errol Morris film (without the unflinching Interrotron-Vision), filtered through a wannabe Greenaway film (it's almost a non-humorous parody of Greenaway's "ZOO," aka "A Zed and Two Noughts") -- an attempt to fashion something out of not-much without ever figuring out what that something might be. Without a sense of discovery or shape, the primary theme seems to be: "Quick, let's make a movie about this horse-f---king case." As with any exploitation movie, the subject guarantees a certain level of voyeuristic interest. I just didn't feel the filmmakers were all that interested.

Two examples: 1) The opening shot is fantastic, clever, enthralling. It reflects, in microcosm, the process of what watching the movie should have been like: A light appears, floating in the darkness. As the camera gets closer and closer to it, we realize it's the opening of a tunnel. We hear the sound of a modem attempting to connect. The next shot is a mundane reverse angle of what is supposed to be the entrance to a mine. Over the next few shots a voice describes growing up in rural mine country where he felt he was denied real experiences, and how the Internet exposed him to a larger world.

A promising beginning, but the words are self-consciously layered over the images without really connecting to them. It wasn't the last time in the movie that I felt the camera was pointed in the wrong direction. This is hard to describe, but investigate Morris's "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" for an example of images and interviews and music working together to pique your curiosity and pull you into the movie -- or any Buñuel film for an uncanny manifestation of the uncontrollable essence of desire, or a Cronenberg movie ("Videodrome" or "Crash") for a fully fleshed-out understanding of sexual attraction-repulsion, or a Greenaway film for a scatological anatomy lesson involving the "dirty bits and naughty bits"... (In terms of the movie's momentum, I felt like we should have been moving into the opening of that tunnel, not fleeing to escape it.)

2) The statement that concludes the movie, and the one thing nearly everybody who actually saw the film seems to have felt compelled to quote in their reviews, is from a "horse rescuer" who says that since her involvement in this case she did some research on zoophiles, and although she wasn't sure how she felt about it she was just short of understanding it. A great line. How I wish "Zoo" had been capable of venturing closer to that place she was talking about.

Instead, "Zoo" is, intentionally or inadvertently, a limp study of denial, avoidance and repression -- and not just that of the people depicted in the film. For a movie about the reality of a man penetrated by a horse in a sexual act, it's bloodless and gutless. Not that we needed to see blood and guts, but the horses -- the objects of desire themselves -- remain abstract nonentities. What could possibly be so gratifying about these creatures that people would risk their lives to connect with them? For all the talk about physical contact between the species, the film shows no appreciation for the physicality of horses -- or of people, for that matter. The closest it comes is near the end, in clinically lit operating-room footage of a tranquilized, unconscious horse being hoisted and gelded. (The only other scene so brightly and harshly exposed is the actor interview.) How strange that the movie finally acknowledges the flesh-and-blood reality of animals so belatedly, in such a lifeless, sterile manner.

The implication seems to that the castration of this limp, anesthetized animal is more brutal than any sex could be, but the film itself offers no basis for comparison and no indication it cares about horses any more than it does the people who f--k or are f---ked by them. No one describes the sexual acts between men and horses; they just drop hints here and there. Are the horses or humans harnessed or restrained in some way? If a person makes himself available to a horse and the horse takes the initiative, as a voice tell us horses will... what is the human's next move if he wishes to avoid being crushed or battered or harpooned to death? The film doesn't answer even the most basic, practical questions, treating the subject as so appalling -- the climax is a hysterical series of circular shots of shocked faces watching a barely-glimpsed video of The Act -- that it can't be acknowledged by the rational mind. That's the spot where you'd hope a better movie would begin.

What disturbs me about "Zoo" is its evident unwillingness to disturb. It's an oddly prudish picture, not so much afraid of getting close to humans or horses as, perhaps, unaware of the possibility. What at first comes across as an attempt at openness soon feels more like evasiveness. The movie remains vague without being subtle (boy, is that music not subtle). And it manages to convey a sort of dreaminess without being dreamlike -- pretty, but unable to suggest the potency of sexual appetites.

"Zoo" repeatedly uses what looks like NASA footage on a TV screen, and (budgetary reasons aside) I found myself wondering what it was doing there. Do these zoophiles see themselves as sexual frontiersmen, defying the laws of man and physics and nature? Or are they animal-lovers whose passion follows a course that just happens to cross certain social taboos? Or is it more that the movie itself, beamed in from the uncomprehending distance of another planet, doesn't really want to think about it too much?

++++

P.S. "Zoo" had been in the "save" section of my Netflix queue for a long time, until it recently came out on DVD. A few weeks back, when I commented on a Charles Mudede article about Stanley Kubrick ("Stanley Kubrick hates you"), someone mentioned his connection with "Zoo" and I promised to see it as soon as I could. I was especially intrigued because, as I wrote, I thought the writer of the Kubrick piece had had a real contempt for animals, and didn't have much of an appreciation for what it meant to be one, whether a mammal or a descendant of primates. ("2001: A Space Odyssey," he wrote, dove "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.... [to where] our marvelous machines, are limited (and undone) by our human emotions, pressures, primitive drives." Sounds like a shame spiral to me, but it's gutsier and more engaged than "Zoo.")

After watching "Zoo," while looking up more information about the "Enumclaw Horse Case," I came across an early 2006 article by Mudede (with pictures by Devor) called "The Animal in You," in which he writes:

... as dawn breaks on a new era in our state, which will become the 37th state to prohibit human-animal sexual relations, one wonders why it took so long for such a law to be enacted here. There are two possible reasons for this surprising omission from Washington State's legal code: Either the State of Washington overlooked bestiality (which is not a bad thing to overlook considering there are much bigger problems to worry about—wars, poverty, earthquakes, health care... These issues are pressing; horse f---king is not), or, the reason for the law's absence—the one I believe is much more likely—is that no one wanted to contemplate horse f---king, much less talk about it. The formation of any law requires a lot of thought and even more talking. To pass a measure against bestiality means you have to picture it, write about it, and describe it in great detail.

Mudede postulates:

Perhaps the equestrians of Enumclaw—sometimes called "horse people"—were upset about the horse f---king because it made their own closeness to horses seem somehow suspect. True, it's a socially accepted closeness, but it nevertheless involves touching the animals, brushing them, caressing their wavy manes, cleaning their hooves, breeding them, riding atop them. The only intimacy that separates the proud horse owner from the perverse horse f---ker is the act of sex, which is why socially accepted proximity to horses is disrupted when placed next to socially rejected proximity to horses. Brushing them, caressing them, feeding them, riding them—these people are always with horses, and horses are always with them. So what truly differentiates an average equestrian from an extraordinary equestrian? One way or the other, both derive pleasure from horses.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

View image It's called a laptop for more than one reason...

Weren't there stories just like this about the invention of the telephone? These kinds of reports mystify me, as if they're coming from someplace in the distant past and have only just now reached our present:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web. [...]

"People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behavior.

"They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family," she told Reuters.

The poll, released on Wednesday, found the use of cell phones and the Internet were becoming more and more an essential part of life with 48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.

More than a quarter of respondents -- or 28 percent -- admitted spending less time socializing face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online.

It also found that 20 percent said they spend less time having sex because they are online.

Cell phones won out over television in a question asking which device people couldn't go without but the Internet trumped all, regarded as the most necessary.

"It is taking away from offline activities, among them having sex, socializing face-to-face, watching TV and reading newspapers and magazines. It cuts into that share," said Mack. [...]

"We are calling them 'digitivity denizens,' those who see their cell phones as an extension of themselves, whose online and offline lives are co-mingled and who would chose a Wi-Fi connection over TV any day," said Mack.

"This is how they communicate, entertain and live."

Wouldn't the planet as a whole be a lot healthier if we used the web more and our cars less? Is the web allowing us to remain more in touch (and with more people) and do a better job of filtering out the people we don't want to have much contact with? Don't e-mail, chat and text technologies allow us more opportunities for instantaneous and regular contact with our real friends, regardless of geographical distance? Is there anything worse than being physically present in a room with people you don't want to be around? Is that not a terrible waste of the very essence of life -- your enjoyment of how you spend it? Is e-mail not more reliable and efficient than exchanging phone calls involving logistical or practical details? Do web services (bill-paying, prescription ordering, online scheduling, shopping, etc.) not reduce the time and drudgery expended on routine household maintenance tasks and errands (not to mention the cost parking and gasoline and the inconvenience of waiting on hold or in line)? On the other hand, isn't Scanners better than sex, anyway? (Don't answer that.)

Posted by Jim Emerson at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

View image

From Forbes.com:

But which pundits have the most sway over America? Or, more specifically, which have the most influence by appealing to those most sought after by advertisers?

To find out, Forbes analyzed data compiled by market research group E-Poll on more than 60 well-known pundits who follow and critique the worlds of politics, current events, law, entertainment and sports. This is the same group that conducts the polling for the Forbes 08 Tracker presidential poll each month.

While the results show that plenty of cable talking heads like Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs and Geraldo Rivera score highly, the most powerful pundit in America is veteran film critic Roger Ebert, who appeals to 70% of the demographic and whose long career makes him well known to well over half the population. A longtime writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, he's been offering up his cinematic views on television with partners Gene Siskel (from 1975-1999) and Richard Roeper (since 1999) for 32 years.

Ebert leads a list we compiled by scoring candidates on awareness and likability measurements among respondents within the demographic gold mine of advertisers--those between the ages of 25 and 54, with a college degree, making at least $50,000 annually....

Popular pundits score with advertisers thanks not only to desirable demographics and an emotionally attached set of viewers, but because they draw largely fragmented audiences that produce consumers with similar tastes. The trick is having wide enough appeal to draw a large audience, while still being focused enough to weed out viewers that advertisers don't want to waste money trying to reach. Basically the sweet spot is somewhere between a general audience network show and a narrowly focused Web site.

"It's use of targeted media--you're reaching people with specific traits," says Jeff Chown, president of Dave Brown Talent, a unit of research group The Marketing Arm....

Ebert, despite being limited to print reviewing over the past year as he battles cancer, is viewed by the public as intelligent, experienced and articulate, the three most common traits associated with the top 10 list. And his widespread appeal makes sense. Unlike political pundits who bring a liberal or conservative voice to the table, his strong opinions are generally confined to individual movies. Hence, he's not drawing cheers from half the population and jeers from the other half.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

View image Pete Seeger singing "If I Had a Hammer" at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Rally in Greenwood, MS, 1963. From "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song."

(A brief review of Jim Brown's documentary, "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song," opening in select theaters around the country in the next few weeks, and in Seattle September 21.)

I'm a-goin' to Berlin
To Mister Hitler's town
I'm gonna take my forty-four
And blow his playhouse down.
-- "Round and Round Hitler's Grave" by Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell and Pete Seeger (recorded by the Almanac Singers in 1942)

"It’ll be a little soggy but we’ll keep slogging.
We’ll soon be on dry ground.”
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
-- "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" by Pete Seeger (performed on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," 1968)

Pete Seeger is an American legend, in a class with Paul Revere (he rang out warning), Johnny Appleseed (he sang out all over this land), and Paul Bunyan (he had a hammer -- and an ax). Like all three, he's attained mythical stature, and like the first two, he's for real.

View image Bob Dylan singing "Only a Pawn in Their Game" at the same 1963 SNCC rally shown above. From "Don't Look Back."

Seeger may not always have been in synch with his times, but he has always been timeless, carrying the American folkloric tradition out of backwoods and into the mainstream. He sang old songs and gave them new life: the 1886 song "Goodnight, Irene" was adapted by Leadbelly and became a surprise commercial hit for the Weavers in 1950; ten years later, "We Shall Overcome" was revived, revised, and sung by Seeger at the first meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, NC, and became the anthem associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement.

Seeger has been able to take songs of the past and bring them alive in the context of the present. "Round and Round Hitler's Grave" (collected in a songbook, called "Anti-Fascist Songs of the Almanac Singers: Timely American songs based on timeless worksongs, patriotic ballads, cowboy ballads, spirituals, etc., from America's folklore") is of its moment in 1942. (Woody Guthrie later added a verse about Goering.) But "Big Muddy" -- which begins, "It was back in nineteen forty-two" -- was an anti-Vietnam war song, and is now an anti-Iraq occupation song. Could Seeger ever have anticipated that his ballad would become a relevant protest song again in his lifetime? Perhaps only in the sense that he understands mankind's uncanny ability to keep repeating the same historical mistakes.

Seeger's own songs -- "If I Had a Hammer," "Turn, Turn, Turn," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" -- well, they sounded like traditional classics the first time you heard them, didn't they? Whether speaking (singing) to a particular time and place, or in general about the state of human beings and the planet we live on (and often both at the same time), Seeger's work is ageless.

So, don't expect just the usual muffled, scratchy old clips from Jim Brown's "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song." The images may be from the past, but the sound is vibrant and present. It begins with a quintessential Seeger singalong, and you could swear you're sitting in the middle of the audience, surrounded by voices. As Bob Dylan says, Seeger had the ability to coax out the singer in everybody.

The paths of so many American folk legends cross in this film: Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen -- and the last four appear in interviews, as do Seeger and members of his family. While the movie is an unabashed celebration of the life, music, politics, and humanitarianism of Pete Seeger, it's just as much a tribute to Toshi Seeger, the Japanese-American woman who married Seeger in 1943. She's the one, as somebody observes, who "allowed Pete to be Pete."

"The Power of Song" reflects the essential qualities of its eponymous hero: enthusiastic, idealistic, patriotic (but not nationalistic), shamelessly earnest, maybe (as the subtitle indicates) even a little corny. And I mean that as an expression of admiration and affection. Seeger may have gone in and out of fashion -- blacklisted from television for 17 years because of his brief affiliation with the American Communist Party, hailed as a prophet during the folk revival of the 1960s -- but he's never been "fashionable." He is who he is. And aren't we lucky to have lived to hear him?

Posted by Jim Emerson at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

View image Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sansho Dayu" (aka "Sansho the Bailiff").

The ballots came in from all over the web. Edward Copeland tabulated them (and found nice stills for all the winners), under the supervision of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jimmy Carter. OK, I don't know about that last part, but Edward did some great good work here.

He's calling it "The Satyajit Ray Memorial Anything-But-Definitive List of Non-English Language Films." Copeland writes: "The name comes, of course, from the great Indian director who failed to land any of his acclaimed works on the final list of 122 nominees."

In all 174 people chose their top 25-or-so non-English-language talkies made before 2002 (nominees had to be at least five years old). The Top 100 is here -- accompanied by comments from people who chose them. (Comments and vote totals for the other 22 nominees are here.)

My top choice was Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sansho Dayu" (which came in at #46 and is available on a Criterion DVD), about which I wrote:

If I had to choose just one movie –- one movie –- above all others on this list, Mizoguchi's would be it. I've long felt that if there were a god, the closest expression we're likely to find on this earth is in this movie. It's not the only film on my list that gives me goosebumps whenever the title is mentioned, but I don't believe there's ever been a greater motion picture in any language. This one sees life and memory as a creek flowing into a lake out into a river and to the sea.

Here's the Top 25:

1. "The Rules of the Game" (Jean Renoir)
2. "Seven Samurai" (Akira Kurosawa)
3. "M" (Fritz Lang)
4. "8 1/2" (Federico Fellini)
5. "Bicycle Thieves" (Vittorio De Sica)
6. "Persona" (Ingmar Bergman)
7. "Grand Illusion" (Jean Renoir)
8. "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (Werner Herzog)
9. "The Battle of Algiers" (Gillo Pontecorvo)
10. "The 400 Blows" (Francois Truffaut)
11. "Fanny and Alexander" (Ingmar Bergman)
12. "Tokyo Story" (Yasujiro Ozu)
13. "Rashomon" (Akira Kurosawa)
14. "Ikiru" (Akira Kurosawa)
15. "The Seventh Seal" (Ingmar Bergman)
16. "Ran" (Akira Kurosawa)
17. "Jules and Jim" (Francois Truffaut)
18. "The Conformist" (Bernardo Bertolucci)
19. "La Dolce Vita" (Federico Fellini)
20. "Contempt" (Jean-Luc Godard)
21. "Breathless" (Jean-Luc Godard)
22. "Ugetsu Monogatari" (Kenji Mizoguchi)
23. "Playtime" (Jacques Tati)
24. "Au Hasard, Balthazar" (Robert Bresson)
25. "Andrei Rublev" (Andrei Tarkovsky)

(continued...)

Bad news: "Amelie" made the list (though only at #92). Good news: "Life is Beautiful" (which isn't) wasn't even nominated!

Stop wasting your life. Get watching.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 06:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (42)

View image Roger & Chaz Ebert, with Roger's second sidewalk star. (All photos by Jim Emerson. Thanks to Kim Robeson for the use of the camera on this one!)

View image Man Push Dog. Anyone will tell you that one of the joys of TIFF is the street food. I was inspired to take this after seeing "Chop Shop," Ramin Bahrani's second film after "Man Push Cart." Want green olives on that dog? I do.

On average, I saw two to four movies a day at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival -- and, incredibly, I didn't see a bad movie. That's nine days and 20-something pictures (less than one tenth of the total screened), but I don't think I've ever had a run of good movies like that in my life. No, I didn't write about everything I saw -- but I also liked Ira Sachs' "Married Life," Chaude Chabrol's "A Girl Cut in Two" (figuratively and literally), Gus van Sant's "Paranoid Park," and those other movies I saw, except for the one I walked out on (the third in a four-movie day) that was not so much bad as doleful and predictable. And there was the Woody Allen movie I accidentally half-saw, without knowing I was half-seeing it.

View image Toronto Film Festival Co-Founder Dusty Cohl with Roger Ebert. Ya got a coupla stars here.

View image Ingmar Bergman's Death (center, rear) welcomes ticketbuyers, lined up at the TIFF box office in the Manulife Centre, which is being remodeled (nice duct-work, eh?) and currently looks like something out of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." The woman in orange (center, foreground) is one of the fest's fantastically friendly and organized volunteers.

On the other hand, I also didn't take all that many risks. Most of what I saw was by familiar directors I like, or came recommended by fellow critics or other film festivals. There were some movies I wanted to see just because they sounded interesting (not because I'd ever heard of the filmmakers), but I couldn't squeeze them in, and in that sense I did not have the full experience a festival has to offer.

View image They do love their celebs up in Toronto. Last year, air-polluting, environment-destroying Sean Penn smoked at a press conference and it was a huge scandal. The paparazzi couldn't wait to catch him with a cigarette this time. And when they did -- front page news!

View image The "Juno" guys.

More photos after the jump...

Anyway, although I fear some of the films I saw even ten days ago are no longer as vivid in my memory because of the ones I've seen since, here were my ten favorite Toronto movies, in very rough order of preference:

"No Country for Old Men" (Joel & Ethan Coen)
"I'm Not There" (Todd Haynes)
"Chop Shop" (Ramin Bahrani)
"Secret Sunshine" (Lee Chang-dong)
"Eastern Promises" (David Cronenberg)
"Atonement" (Joe Wright)
"The Orphanage" (Juan Antonio Bayona)
"Persepolis" (Marjane Satrapi & Vencent Paronnaud)
"Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon" (Eric Rohmer)
"4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days" (Cristian Mungiu)

More photos after the jump...

View image Critics Kathleen Murphy, Richard T. Jameson and Dave McCoy between features. No, I don't know why he's doing that, either.

View image The Manulife Centre not a very distinguished building, really, but I'm fascinated by the different surfaces and lighting. This is where most of the TIFF press and industry screenings are held, so it is Mecca for many of us.

View image See? I can't help it.

View image Why a duct? Because it's under (re-)construction, that's why.

View image Ghost in the modern hotel mini-suite.

View image The ceiling of the grand old Elgin Theatre, from my seat on the main floor. Great place to see a BIG movie like "Atonement."

View image Best. T-shirt. Ever. In my travels around the world, I have found the three most popular commercialized images to be: the Marlboro logo, Bob Marley, and Che Guevera. (Coke and Pepsi are probably fourth and fifth.) Seen in a shop window on Yonge St.

View image He has one on Hollywood Blvd., too, but this one's on Dundas St. in Toronto -- thanks to Dusty Cohl and Barry Avrich.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

View image Celia (Keira Knightley). I have a question about these kinds of dresses: Are they meant to be worn more than once? Don't they get dirty and wear out pretty fast, dragging around on the ground like that?

My dog ate the book. Well, not really, but when I was about 200+ pages into Ian McEwan's 350-page "Atonement," my copy somehow disappeared. I found it weeks later, in a dark corner under the bed, and by then was already on to something else. I put it aside, intending to pick it up again soon, but the next thing I knew months had gone by and I was on my way to the Toronto Film Festival where a movie called "Atonement" was being screened.

While watching Joe Wright's intensely cinematic interpretation of McEwan's book (co-executive-produced by McEwan and written by Christopher Hampton, best known for adapting "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Honorary Consul"/"Beyond the Limit," "The Quiet American," "The Good Father), I kept wondering how far into the story I had actually read. Every once in a while something would happen and my memories of the book would snap into place. But by the end (actually, by the point Robbie reaches the beach and goes for a drink), I had lost any literary moorings and was completely immersed in the movie.

Actully, I was immersed in the movie from the beginning: a shot that follows a parade of toys on a little girl's bedroom floor to the desk where she sits before a typewriter, composing her first play, "The Trials of Arabella." Using a typewriter as a musical instrument in the score may sound a bit precious, but it works cleverly and hauntingly in "Atonement," the story of a 13-year-old girl -- an aspiring writer -- who enlists her extended family in her imaginative productions... with, as they say, disastrous results. Her "ruthless innocence" (in a phrase used, I believe, by Kathleen Murphy) spurs her to miscast the roles in a melodramatic fantasy-scenario that's beyond her understanding. And yet, once she imagines it, she sticks to her story, and crushes lives with her godlike (author-like) will.

View image Robbie (James McAvoy): An idealized vision.

This is the story of the uncomprehending gaze of pretty blonde Briony Tallis, how fixes her subjects like insects pinned to a board -- as in a repeated shot of her cold blue stare through a windowpane. She frames a scene in her imagination and fits it into a false outline of events. The moment is stunning in the true sense of the word -- but among the many things Briony doesn't realize at the time is that she is freezing her 13-year-old self in the same instant. She determines the consequences of what she has witnessed, and what she has imagined, and in those moments has locked herself into her own existential coffin. For the rest of her life, no matter what she does (or writes), she will never be anything but that 13-year-old girl, stuck in the past.

"Atonement" is an intelligently, evocatively directed movie in every aspect, from the adoring ways in which the romantic leads are photographed (who would have thought James McAvoy could be filmed as gorgeously and lovingly as Keira Knightly?), to a long take along the shore at Dunkirk that is one of the most complex and emotionally shattering single shots in movies.

I don't want to say much more now, until we can have a more detailed discussion about the last ten minutes or so. But as I wrote in a comment earlier, I wasn't sure the 2,000 or so people at the public screening in Toronto's grand old Elgin Theater were reading the ending the way I did. When I got home, I delved into the epilogue of the book (it gives nothing away to say it's set in "London, 1999") and discovered that Hampton and Wright had conceived an impressively cinematic way to transform what is, almost by definition, a thoroughly literary conceit. I think the ending of the book is even more devastating than the film's. But let me say this much: It's based on a moral tale by Ian McEwan, the man who wrote "Enduring Love," a book (and a fine movie) with a similarly ambiguous title. "Atonement" may describe its subject as acutely as "Do the Right Thing" describes what Spike Lee's movie is about....

Posted by Jim Emerson at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

View image They could be nuns. Those could be habits. But they're burkas.

What is that supposedly ancient Chinese curse? "May you live in interesting times"? The proverb may be of dubious origin, but it captures the fate of Marjane, the heroine of "Persepolis," in a Persian nutshell. The precocious Iranian girl is born during the reign of the Shah (Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi), witnesses his overthrow during the Islamic Revolution, becomes enamored of pop music and punk rock (and Bruce Lee) as powerfully disruptive and liberating political forces, and experiences a new world of sexuality and materialism in Europe. "Persepolis," based on the autobio-graphic novels by Maryjane Satrapi and co-written and co-directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, is absolutely enchanting -- a history lesson, a fairy tale, and a girl's-eye-view of growing up. It's a movie that makes you feel glad to be alive.

I wasn't familiar with Satrapi's work, but from what I've seen since, the (mostly black-and-white animation renders her style beautifully: a mix of charming, early Hanna-Barbera coloring-book simplicity, and more atmospheric watercolors or charcoals that suggest a '60s and '70s European sensibility. The delicately modulated tones of "Persepolis" are similarly sophisticated. It veers from hilarious to poignant, sweet to terrifying, abstract to concrete, personal to political, cynical to rhapsodic... and back again.

Our guide is the stubborn, courageous, effervescent Marjane herself, a smart and instinctively rebellious girl who (like most young Westerners) instinctively cobbles together her identity through pop culture and politics. Or make that pop culture as politics. The privately and publicly expressed preference of ABBA over the Bee Gees (or Iron Maiden over both) is just as important -- and in many respects equivalent -- to favoring the Revolution over the Shah. Marjane isn't always admirable (who is?), but we unfailingly empathize with her emotional, philosophical and ideological struggles. (And she has the wisest grandma in the world -- who also disapproves of her granddaughter's actions at times, but never offers anything less than unconditional love.)

"Persepolis" streams by in no time, yet manages to convey the sense of an entire childhood into early adulthood. Upon getting back to my room I immediately ordered the books, "Persepolis" and "Persepolis 2."

(Thanks to Ken Lowery for recommending this movie. It was just the nudge I needed to reshuffle my screening schedule.)

Posted by Jim Emerson at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

View image The inaugural edition of The Projectionist.

David Edelstein, one of my favorite early "movie bloggers" (when he was at Slate he hosted the annual Slate Movie Club, an e-mail conversation between critics) has returned to the, uh, "interactive" world. David Edelstein, now at New York Magazine, has launched a blog under its auspices (or, at least, root URL) called "The Projectionist."

Oh, sure, I "disagree" with him plenty (and sometimes just his tone), but as anyone who visits Scanners knows, I read critics for their writing styles and insights, not for their opinions, and Edelstein's is a valuable voice. I'm especially glad to see him returning to writing specifically for the web, and not just within the provincial confines of NYM (although the mag has a web site too, of course). But today, the World Wide Internets is the only forum that really matters, and if you're not participating on that level you may as well be doing cave paintings -- even if they're in midtown Manhattan.

Edelstein outlines his reasons for blogging in one of his initial posts:

And so I welcome you to my occasional blog, the Projectionist, a place for second thoughts, third thoughts, musings both important and self-indulgent, and — I hope — a fluid exchange with readers.

I’ve missed that here at New York. In my nine and a half years at the online magazine Slate, I got thousands of e-mails from readers. That last one I got here was two months ago. It’s not, I’m convinced, that I’m that much less read. It’s that the distance, literal and existential, between a glossy weekly print mag and cyberspace is vast. I send e-mails to bloggers and online writers often but can’t remember the last time I mailed someone at a glossy, even when I’ve read an article online. My fingers aren’t poised over the keyboard in the same way.

Cyberspace being infinite, at Slate I had license to write between 250 and 2,500 words on a movie, and no digression was too digressive. Now, there’s the horror, the horror of eliminating whole paragraphs to fit the page — in addition to changing, for example, “did not” to “didn’t” to pick up a line and removing anything in parentheses. I do not always want to use contractions, and I like parentheses. You never know where they might lead.

P.S. Please note my inability to use words such as "disagree" and "interactive" without some hesitation, above. Both have been overused beyond the point of meaninglessness -- and the former so grossly that simply stating disagreement is now considered a logical counter-argument. "Oh, I disagree," is no longer the beginning of a discussion but, for many, the substitute for a discussion.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

View image Me with post-festival headcold, after just getting back home and sinking into the comfort of my den-like Man Chair. (all photos by Jim Emerson, except as noted)

My taxi driver to the airport yesterday (he was Ethiopian, but had lived in Toronto for 18 years) asked me if I'd seen any "movie stars" at the film festival. I had to admit I hadn't -- although I've encountered people I consider to be movie stars on the street in past years: Luis Guzman, Liev Schreiber, Brian De Palma, Sara Polley, Stephen Rea, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne...

View image The ubiquitous (and deservedly so) Girish. A man with cinecurean tastes. (That's a neologism of my own invention that is related to "epicure" and has nothing to do with "sinecure," I don't think.)

Toronto, at least at festival time, is a celebrity-mad city like no place I've ever seen. Celebrities make the front pages of the newspapers just because they're celebrities and they're in Toronto. Rogers cable used to have a non-stop TIFF schedule of celebrity gossip, celebrity interviews, off-the-cuff "reviews," and celebrity press conferences. I don't know if they did that this year, because I never turned on the television in my hotel room. (Meanwhile, TiVo was covering other necessities for me at home.)

View image Andy Horbal plays Mephisto at the foot of the Stairway to Heaven (the escalator to the Varsity Cinemas).

View image The House Next Door's Keith Uhlich took this shot of himself with his MacBook, outside the press office at the Delta Chelsea.

Some journalists and critics were doing celebrity interviews in addition to going to movies, with stars like George A. Romero (whose girlfriend was the bartender at my hotel!) or Jodie Foster or Brian De Palma or Bela Tarr -- in gang-bang roundtables or 15-30-minute individual sessions. The people I was most excited about getting to meet were my fellow movie bloggers. I had lunch with Girish Shambu between screenings in Toronto last year, and it was a pleasure to see him again, particularly since he enjoyed the oblique, androgynous eroticism of the luminous Eric Rohmer movie as much as I did. His highest recommendation was for Barcelona-born director Jose Luis Guerin's "Dans la ville de Sylvia" -- which, unfortunately, I missed. We also thought Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine" was among the very best things we'd seen.

View image Frames within frames within frames -- and film-festival bedhead. Me at work in my Toronto hotel room.

Keith Uhlich, editor of "The House Next Door," organized a mid-fest critics' roundtable podcast, 'round a tiny round table in Nathan Lee's hotel room with Nathan (whose byline should be familiar from the Village Voice, Film Comment, The New York Times), Torontonian eyeWeekly critic Adam Nayman, Keith, and me. It was too much fun -- we ran out of time long before we ran out of stuff we wanted to talk about. Of course, that was the morning I forgot to bring my camera. Too bad, because if you saw Nathan's new-mown haircut, you'd want to rub his head. It's that cool. (I'll post a link to the podcast when it's available, if you want to hear us go on about the trials of film critics filing reports and interviews from festivals, our indelible images from TIFF, Brian De Palma, Bob Dylan, Todd Haynes, semiotics [not much!], and I forget what else.)

View image Christopher Long, in Philly Eagles t-shirt, who has a woman on his right shoulder saying: "Come, have another cup of coffee!" and a man on his other shoulder saying: "No, there's a huge schedule of films to see -- what's next?"

I also got to meet up with Christopher Long, a frequent and valued contributor to Scanners comments, and reviewer for DVDTown and other sites. Chris claims to loathe Paul Haggis's "Crash" (and Sam Mendes's "American Beauty" -- two peas in a pod) even more than me. I don't know if that's possible, but I found him convincing. They both do the same morally corrupt thing, anyway: taking grotesque clichés and then flipping them around so that that they are... even more insulting clichés. All in the name of "enlightenment." We had a nice talk about our mutual admiration for Divine, too. Don't recall how that one came up.

I'm delighted to have more faces to put with the words I've appreciated from these folks for so long.

View image Another shot of Andy, so you can see the π tattoo on his neck. I have eight tattoos, which to me are like a living map of who and where I've been. The oldest of them is about 15 years, and I've never regretted any of them for even a second -- though I might like to retouch a couple...

View image OK, I gotta get going if I'm gonna make it to the next screening... (photo by Tess Lemon)

Posted by Jim Emerson at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

View image So, like, what is reality, man?

When I reviewed Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain" last year, after having first seen it at TIFF 2006, I wrote:

"The Fountain" is a science-fiction historical adventure-fantasy about a man's (or Man's) struggle to face the incontrovertible fact of death.

It begins with Tomas (Hugh Jackman, a boy a long way from Oz) as a 16th century Spanish conquistador exploring the land of the Mayans in search of the biblical Tree of Life at the behest of Queen Isabella (Rachel Weisz). The movie slips into the 21st century, where Tommy (Jackman) is a surgeon and research scientist desperate to discover a cure for the tumor in the brain of his wife, Izzi (Weisz), who is writing a fairy-tale book called The Fountain that includes the 16th century story.

Surging forward another few millennia into the 26th century, the film finds Tom (Jackman) as a kind of zen astronaut hurtling through space in a big bubble with a dying tree and the ghost of 21st century Iz (Weisz) on their way into a mysterious nebula. The three stories flow into and out of one another.

Roger reviewed "The Fountain" last week (he gave it half a star less than I did), and observed -- here be spoilers:

Did I have it figured out? It didn’t take me long, and here was my thinking: Since there is not a single element in the film claiming that the same man is alive in all three time periods, he obviously is not. There is a critical belief that you should not bring story elements to fiction that cannot be found there. The fictional identity of the first man is explained by Izzy’s novel, in which she would obviously visualize her own lover as the hero. The fictional nature of the third man is explained because, hey, people don’t go floating through the cosmos inside a bubble while levitating and eating bark, even in “the future.” There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, but not that. Stephen Hawking will back me up. The film’s central section is unalloyed realism, and generates the fantasy of the first and third. Since Izzy dies in it, magic isn’t allowed. Fiction sets its rules.

... I was struck by what an amazing tale it told. A quick Google search later led me to believe that so far no one has given it credit as a story that makes much sense; I found simply a mass of possible interpretations. I actually believe there is a very clear and linear story being told (albeit in a "Pulp Fiction"-y kind of timeline). Since I have not come across any explanation similar to my own, I thought I would share it -- film fan to film fan.

To begin our exploration of just what the hell is going on in "The Fountain," our first task is to determine which, if any, of the three story lines presented is real.

Me, I think either of these readings are fine (whatever floats your bubble), but I think they are utterly beside the point. In a movie of this sort, the movie is the experience, and it's reductive to try to say one story is more "real" than another. I wrote an article about this subject on RogerEbert.com a few years ago (about "Fight Club" and "Taxi Driver" and "The Wizard of Oz" and "American Psycho" and "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Citizen Kane" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"...) called "Head Trips: Movies Inside the Skull":

It’s silly how many moviegoers and critics insist upon making an artificial distinction between what is “real” and what is “unreal” in a movie – often at the expense of what the film itself is actually about. It’s as if, to them, the predominant idea behind any given picture boils down to nothing more than: Did It Really Happen Or Was It All In His/Her Head? Well, look at it this way: If it’s on the screen, it’s there for a reason – to convey something about character, story, theme. And that is all that matters.

A movie consists of nothing more or less than the images in front of you, and what you go through while you watch them. Consider: Does it honestly matter if Dorothy really goes to the Merry Old Land of Oz, or if it was “all a dream” – or, for that matter, if her “trip” was the result of a concussion, or magic Munchkin mushrooms? Of course not. As any child can (and will) tell you, the important thing about Dorothy’s journey to Oz and back is what she experiences along the way, and what she gets out of it, not whether she physically travels anywhere....

Of course, in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), the distinction between “reality” and “fantasy” is made pretty explicit because, as we all know, Kansas is a monochromatic state (of mind) and Oz is a horse of a different Technicolor. (I’m not so sure I picked up on that, though, the first time I saw the movie as a small child – watching it on black-and-white broadcast TV.)

Want to dip your toe in this argument? Or float your own theory about the structure of "The Fountain"? Dive in....

Posted by Jim Emerson at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (47)

View image Roger Ebert with his "star" -- outside Dusty Cohl's annual Floating Film Festival Chinese dinner in Toronto. (photo by Jim Emerson -- with Kim Robesons's camera)

I've got several planes backed up on the runway (and by that I mean movies to write about lined up in my head) from this year's Toronto Film Festival -- plus a couple posts' worth of photos -- but for now, here are the official TIFF 2007 award winners. I'll have a list of the best of my fest soon. Now I gotta catch a plane...

Audience Award: "Eastern Promises" (David Cronenberg, Canada/USA). My review here. Roger Ebert's here. Runners up: "Juno" (Jason Reitman), "Body of War" (Phil Donohue and Ellen Spiro).

FIPRESCI International Critics Award: “La Zona” (Rodrigo Pia)

CityTV Award for Best First Canadian Film: "Continel, Un Film Sans Fusil" (Stephane Lafleur)

Artistic Innovation Award: “Encarnation” (Ahani Bemeri)

Diesel Discovery Award: “Cochochi" (Israel Cardernas and Laura Amelia Guzman)

Toronto City Award: "My Winnepeg" (Guy Maddin)

Roger Ebert's dispatch about all the TIFF 2007 awards is here.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

View image Look familiar? A redacted web image from Brian De Palma's "Redacted."

Because of the whole "Hitchcockian thriller" rep that's stuck to Brian De Palma for so many years and so many movies ("Sisters," "Obsession," "Carrie," "Dressed to Kill," "Blow Out," "Raising Cain," "Mission: Impossible," "Femme Fatale," "The Black Dahlia") some people seem to forget that De Palma is (was?) first and foremost a political filmmaker. Because his "Redacted," a fictionalized film that uses a variety of documentary techniques from amateur combat videos to "Al Jazeera" to YouTube," concerns war crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq, the connection to his Vietnam movie "Casualties of War" seems obvious.

But the stronger connection, I think, is to "Greetings" (1968) and "Hi Mom!" (1970), two then-counter-cultural comedies, more influenced by Godard than Hitchcock, that toyed with our perceptions of Vietnam, terrorism, law and order, Black Power and other issues of the day as they were filtered through the mass media. De Palma provocatively mixed satire, "documentary," pornography, voyeurism, journalism, improvisation and Godardian alienation strategies into volatile, combustible Molotov-cocktail-movies.

I don't know when De Palma has ever been accused of being sincere, but "Redacted" feels to me as close as he's ever come. He's engaged in a way he did not seem to be with "The Black Dahlia" (though I realize that's not saying much) and sections of the film are shocking and incendiary. De Palma won the best director award at the Venice Film Festival, and I think he really set out to give the audience a better, more visceral understanding of what has been going on in Iraq for years now -- not by painting the Americans as "villains," but by showing what happens when raw recruits are thrown into guerilla warfare. Very much like in that other undeclared war that we're told we're not supposed to compare the current one to. And, as the title suggests, this effort is designed to get past the heavily censored narratives and images we have gotten from our government officials and embedded reporters (WMD, Jessica Lynch, looting, Pat Tillman...), to tell some of the stories that the mainstream press is still too cowed to report.

But chief among my problems with "Redacted" is that, if you've seen "Greetings" and "Hi Mom!" (and you absolutely should -- they're both on DVD), and you know that De Palma has now made an Iraq movie, that pretty much tells you everything you need to know. The night raid scene in "Redacted" is the "Be Black, Baby" National Intellectual Television documentary in "Hi Mom!" But what seemed radical and revolutionary and experimental in the late 1960s and early 1970s is now fairly commonplace. Adding visual references to Arab satellite networks and Islamist web sites and video conferencing doesn't have the same immediate impact. We've all seen this sort of thing in other movies and on network TV.

In fact, if you've watched the actual documentaries about Iraq on "Frontline" ("News War," "The Soldier's Heart," "The Lost Year in Iraq," "A Company of Soldiers," "Beyond Baghdad," "The Insurgency") and "Bill Moyers' Journal" ("Buying the War") and "60 Minutes" ("The Killings in Haditha"), "Redacted" looks like pretty tame and routine stuff, despite its inflammatory subject. (Do check out those links in the previous sentence, if you haven't seen them already.)

And while I think the movie is pretty fair about making points on all sides (it's a good sign that His Ignorance B--- O'------ started attacking the movie as "anti-troop" before he or virtually anyone had even seen it), I think it fatally wrongheaded in its handling some of the boots-on-the-ground characters. It's self-consciously a take on the platoon movie, with Kubrick references from "Paths of Glory" to "Barry Lyndon" to "Full Metal Jacket" on prominent display. We have the requisite platoon types, of course: the book-reading, glasses-wearing intellectual/moralist; the "journalist" who's out to collect war stories (only here he's an aspiring, untalented filmmaker who uses every cheesy transitional device in iMovie and doesn't stand a chance of getting into film school); the fence-sitter who's so morally shellshocked that he can't make sound decisions between right and wrong; the idiot follower; and the psychopathic killer the idiot follows. Although a French documentary takes pains to show the stress the troops are under, and how these men must make split-second decisions about life and death at any moment (see "Frontline"'s "The Soldier's Heart" for some real un(der)reported stories), the American Psycho and his fat toady are just flat-out cartoon-evil in ways that don't illuminate anything and, what's worse, simply hand ammo to the enemy (e.g., B--- O'------, A-- C------, and other propagandists and demagogues who unfailingly value ideology uber alles).

Where are the many, many good, decent soldiers (and Marines) who signed up after 9/11 and then, because they were thrown into this situation without adequate preparations or resources, found themselves ill-equipped to deal with blowback beyond anything their leaders had led them to expect? We know they're out there (over there and back here, if they were lucky), and any one of their stories is much more inherently dramatic and tragic and morally challenging than simply pitting "decent" American fighters against "evil" ones. I'm sure both kinds exist, but this is exactly the kind of senseless black-and-white false dilemma that got us into the Iraq-mire to begin with. There's a scene in which the two "bad apples" (did Donald Rumsfeld tape this bit?) shoot their own badass video that is so callous and crazy and pointless that I began to wonder if De Palma had consciously decided to include it in order to feed inflammatory material to the Fox News agit-prop machine. That ought to help promote the movie....

Posted by Jim Emerson at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

View image Todd on Bob: Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), as one incarnation -- a name-dropping bluesman in 1959 (with tales of Blind Willie McTell and Gorgeous George) who seems to think he's still in the Great Depression. Others include Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), Jack Rawlins/Pastor John (Christian Bale) and "Billy" McCarty (Richard Gere).

"I was born a poor black child..."
-- Steve Martin, "The Jerk"

"God, I'm glad I'm not me."
-- Bob Dylan, on reading an article about himself in 1965
(quoted in the press kit for Todd Haynes' movie, originally titled "I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan")

Folk-turned-electric singer/songwriter Jude Quinn (looking for all the world like Bob Dylan circa 1965 and played by Cate Blanchett) is riding in a big black limousine when, unaccountably, Allen Ginsburg (David Cross) appears on a golf cart in the rear window, smiling and waving with his frizzy hair blowin' in the wind. Ginsburg pulls up alongside the limo, Quinn rolls down the window, and they travel along parallel trajectories (past a cemetary) while having a brief exchange about an interview Ginsburg had done with a reporter in which the Beat poet was asked about Quinn's musical motives as if all Voices of Their Generation were pretty much one and the same. "They asked you that?!?" Quinn laughs.

View image Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) in "I'm Not There" in "Don't Look Back" in "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in black and white.

That's a little taste of what it's like to watch Haynes' "I'm Not There," which is not only a kaleidoscopic view of events in the life, music and myth of Bob Dylan, but a critical deconstruction and synthesis of Dylan's various media representations -- from D.A. Pennebaker's legendary "Don't Look Back" to Dylan's own "Reynaldo and Clara" to Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan." In some ways, it's the natural companion to "Don't Look Back" (actually re-enacting some scenes and interviews from that documentary in a new context), the movie Dylan probably wanted "Reynaldo and Clara" to be, and in other ways the movie Haynes wanted "Velvet Goldmine" to be. It actually goes back inside these films (Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," Richard Lester's "A Hard Day's Night" and "Petulia," Godard's "Masculin-Feminin," Fellini's "8 1/2" and others, too) -- and the old stories, the album covers, the liner notes, the newspaper and magazine clippings -- and recapitulates and reinterprets them in new contexts. I was thrilled by it, moved, dazzled, entranced. I love this movie.

View image Christian Bale (this guy can do anything) as Jack Rawlins.

The earlier film was about the glam era, freely mixing bits and pieces of fact and lore from the lives of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Brian Ferry and others (don't forget Oscar Wilde, who is deposited on earth by a UFO), and that's the kind of thing Haynes is up to here -- mostly with Dylan, but also with "real" and fictional characters around him. Some are identified by their familiar names (like John, Paul, George, and Ringo), some are thinly disguised (or undisguised) stand-ins. And this time he has the music rights, too. Just about the only thing missing is Donovan.

View image Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger).

Do you have to know about, or have lived through, the life and legend of Dylan to "get" this film? I don't know. I don't think so, but you'll certainly understand it on more levels if you've seen the Pennebaker, Dylan & Sam Shepard, Scorsese, Peckinpah, Godard, Lester, Fellini, et al. movies mentioned above. And if you know at least some of the music, and something about the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene and the war in Vietnam and the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in protest and Joan Baez (and "Diamonds and Rust") and Sara and Swinging London and the Beats and Albert Goldman and The Hawks (and The Band) and The Basement Tapes and the Rolling Thunder Revue and "Tarantula" and Columbia Records and the motorcycle accident and the "electric" debut at the Newport Folk Festival and the so-called "Royal Albert Hall" concert in 1966 ("Judas!" "I don't believe you...") which actually took place at Manchester's Free Trade Hall (just another part of the legend) and Elvis Presley movies and James Dean movies Marlon Brando movies and Montgomery Clift movies... and so on.

View image Jude Quinn (Almighty).

I was a senior in high school when "Blood on the Tracks" came out and utterly changed my life (not the first time Dylan would do that for me), so although most of '60s Dylan predated my awareness of his actual records (we sang "Blowin' in the Wind" in my fourth grade homeroom, with Miss Kwinsland on ukelele, but I didn't know it was a Dylan song; we sang Woody Guthrie tunes, too), I absorbed a lot of this stuff simply by being a young American with an interest in politics and art and pop culture. But do you have to be familiar with all of this in order to appreciate "I'm Not There"? I don't think so. (But consider this: Bruce Greenwood plays Quinn's BBC interviewer/adversary, Mr. Jones, and Pat Garrett.)

A Dylanophile friend was asked if he was in "Dylan heaven" after the film. He thought for a moment and then said, "Yeah. I guess I am." I don't know about that. But I'm at least knockin' on heaven's door.

That's all I'll say for now, because I'm salivating over the prospect of seeing and writing about this movie in more detail later....

Oh, just one other thing. I've talked to five or six people who, unprovoked, described exactly the same response to different moments in the movie. But they all involved having the experience of consciously thinking: "I am in love with Cate Blanchett."

Posted by Jim Emerson at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Look at this woman. Do you hate her character yet?

Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding" is one of the scariest films ever. Because it plays like a hidden-camera home movie as psychological x-ray. And no