October 2007 Archives

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Los Dias de los Muertos begin today, October 31 (aka "Halloween") through November 2 (aka All Souls Day -- and Tara Mulan Sweeney's birthday). Time to recycle my appreciation of four critically undervalued horror movies from a few years back: David Cronenberg's "The Brood," Roman Polanski's "The Tenant," Neil Jordan's "In Dreams," and John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" ("The critics were horrified!!!!"):

Critics can be particularly rough on horror pictures. It's so easy -- too easy, sometimes -- to make these spook-shows sound risible and preposterous in synopsis, especially once you remove them from the darkness of the theater and examine them them in the harsh light of black and white newsprint (or monitor pixels). But the horror films I like best are not the abundantly bloody shockers critics love to loathe (though George Romero's extravagantly gory Grand Guignol "Dawn of the Dead" is a treasured favorite), but the ones that are the most atmospheric and creepy -- that suggest far more than they depict.

Continue reading here...

Now this is how to make a list. Richard Corliss writes for Time magazine, a mainstream publication, but that doesn't prevent him from slipping in those inspired, idiosyncratic Corli-cues™ of his. (I just made up that word, and I know it's not a very good one.) Argue all you like with RC's choices (that is the point), this list strikes me as a brilliant balancing of the expected and the unexpected, the mainstream and the marginal, from 1896 to 2004. I think it will thrill you. It might shock you. It may even... horrify you! So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now's your chance to, uh, well, we warned you.

So, sure, you see "Red Dragon" (2002) on there and you immediately think, "The Brett Ratner Hannibal Lecter movie? Has he lost his mind?" Then you think, "Well, at least it's better than the Ridley Scott one. Although he also liked that." And then you remember that Corliss never much cared for "Silence of the Lambs" ("a competent but pallid version of Thomas Harris' soul-chilling novel"), so it kind of makes perverse sense.

And then, beyond the solid chunk of essential 1960s and '70s titles (which together account for 11 slots in the reverse-chronological list of 25 -- and that doesn't even include "Don't Look Now," although of course it should), you spot... "Bambi" (1942). Doe! Why didn't I think of that?! Disney's mommy-killing nightmare was surely the most traum-atic horror movie for every generation of children since it was released -- and one that parents still enjoy "sharing with" (or inflicting upon) their kids. (Compare and contrast with the "Baby Mine" scene of the previous year's "Dumbo," an excruciatingly protracted exercise in maternal separation anxiety that is the essence of emotional torture porn.)

The punchline, though, is the last (and oldest) title in the list, by the Lumiere brothers. I'm not going to give it away, but in its day it provided 50 seconds of terror that must have compared with the "Psycho" shower sequence.

(Full list and links after the jump...)

First, let's get the quote right. When asked if the "Harry Potter" series character, Prof. Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, a proponent of love as a power in the universe, had ever been in love himself, author J.K. Rowling said last week: “My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.”

That's what started the whole rumpus, which Kristin Thompson analyses in splendid detail at "Observations on film art and 'Film Art'." I am particularly impressed by her post because I found it fascinating reading, even though I've never read a "Harry Potter" book or seen one of the movies.

Note that Rowling did not say Dumbledore was gay. She was explaining how she had always thought of the character she created, "probably before the first book was published." As Thompson reports, Rowling also said in a 1999 interview: “I kind of see Dumbledore more as a John Gielgud type, you know, quite elderly and -- and quite stately.” If I may resort to an idiomatic expression: Hello!?!?!

There was no uproar over the Gielgud remark. Others, it seems, had come to think of Dumbledore as more of a Richard Harris type and then a Michael Gambon type, although the movie role had originally been offered to Patrick McGoohan. But her point was that Dumbledore and his best friend Grindelwald had been in love, until the latter became his mortal enemy.

Last weekend, in a discussion about the work of David Cronenberg at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, I recalled that when Cronenberg's "The Fly" was released in 1986, it was widely interpreted as a metaphor for AIDS, and the pain of watching a loved one's body and mind ravaged by disease and transformed into something Other than what they once were. But, after the movie came out, Cronenberg said he'd thought of it simply as a metaphor for getting old, for the degenerative, transforming process of aging. Time and physicality themselves are the autoimmune virus, something to which none of us can develop a resistance.

Does that mean "The Fly" is about aging and not about AIDS? No. Cronenberg, like Rowling, was simply describing his thoughts during the process of creating the work in question.

It is the nature of serial fiction to create a world and let its characters move around in it, while leaving much of what happens to them off-page or off-screen, where we are encouraged to imagine them leading lives beyond what we actually witness as readers or viewers. Indeed, it's essential to the living illusion of the fantasy that we envision characters going about their business between scenes, and not just waiting around off-stage to make their entrances.

As Rowling said of the intense soul-mate relationship between the young Dumbledore and Grindelwald: “It’s in the book. It’s very clear in the book. Absolutely. I think a child will see a friendship, and I think a sensitive adult may well understand that it was an infatuation. I knew it was an infatuation.” Remember, too, that we're talking about a British boys' school here, a place where intimate same-sex relationships are supposedly as commonplace as schoolbooks.

So it's not like Rowling just made this up last week and then tried to slap it onto her seven-book series retroactively....

"The term itself is vague. For German Expressionism was less a unified style than an attitude, a state of mind."
-Horst Uhr, introduction, "Masterpieces of German Expressionism" (1982)

"Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white."
-Paul Schrader, 'Notes on Film Noir' (1972)

Guy Budziak makes film noir woodcuts in high-contrast black and white. He tops the "Roots of Film Noir Prints" section of his web site with the quotes from Uhr and Schrader above. I'm assuming Guy Budziak is the artist's real name, but even if it isn't, it's an appropriately noirish moniker. And he knows his stuff. Budziak writes: "My woodcuts reach back to the very earliest origins of film noir, insofar as it was the woodcut that most accurately conveyed the German Expressionist sensibility."

His love of noir is rooted in his love of black and white:

What's interesting about black and white as opposed to color is this: color more accurately depicts what we all see in visual reality. The same cannot be said of black and white, of course. So in a sense everything filmed in black and white is unreal, or perhaps can be construed as an alternative reality, but not one that we experience naturally.

See Budziak's gallery of prints, from such films as "Nightmare Alley," "Touch of Evil," "Out of the Past," "Ossessione," "Le Samourai" (a color noir!) at "Film Noir: Woodcuts by Guy Budziak."

(My final contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door, which just wrapped.)

Warning: This post (and the short film montage/hommage I put together to accompany it, above) may contain spoilers.

Jesus, Tom, it's the hat.

Take a look at the four shots from Joel and Ethan Coen's "Miller's Crossing" on this page: three close-ups of the same hat and a long shot of another one with a body under. The hat in all three close-ups, hat belongs to Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). The other one is on the head of his boss and friend, Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney). But let's re-wind a little bit.

The movie is set into motion with a close-up of three ice cubes plopped into a glass tumbler. We don't see Tom, our main character until the next shot, where he appears behind the bald head of a man (Johnny Casper, played by Jon Polito) who's delivering a lecture into the camera -- or just past it -- about friendship, character, ethics. Tom is the one who put the cubes into the glass and poured himself some whiskey. He crosses the room out of focus, moves past the camera, and when we see a reverse angle, he's standing behind and to the side of Leo. His tumbler of whiskey is in the frame, but his head isn't. When we finally do get a look at his mug, he's not wearing a hat. Meanwhile, Casper's henchman, the cadaverous Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman) stands behind his boss, holding his hat. And wearing one. It's a sign of respect.

When Tom leaves the room at the end of the scene, he puts on his hat. Then there's this strange credits sequence, like a dream in a forest, with a canopy of autumnal branches overhead. On the forest floor, a hat falls into the foreground of the frame, the title of the film appears (Figure #1), and the hat blows away into the distance. In the next close-up, Tom is roused from a stuporous slumber. He sits up and feels his head, for his hangover and for his hat.

"Where's my hat?" Tom asks.

"You bet it, ya moron," says the friend who woke him up. "Good thing the game broke up before you bet your shorts."

Turns out, the hat left with Mink and Verna. Together, they are the link between Tom's hat and his shorts. We've already heard, in the opening scene, that Mink (Steve Buscemi) is "the Dane's boy." Mink appears only in one brief scene at the Shenandoah Club, explains the whole movie ("as plain as the nose on your -- Turns out he's also involved with "the Schmatte," bookie Bernie Birnbaum (John Turturro), who also happens to be the brother of Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), Leo's twist and Tom's secret squeeze and the subject of Johnny Casper's opening rant.

Got that, or do I have to spell it out for ya?

OK, here's the deal:

(December 7, 2007: Re-submitted as a contribution to the 'Short Film Week' Blog-a-thon co-hosted by Only the Cinema and Culture Snob.)

(This is another contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door.)

Creating, assembling, integrating, asserting, and maintaining a personality is routine for most of us, but there's no denying it's hard work. Some of us have to do it from scratch every day. That's what so chillingly magnificent about the opening credits sequence for Showtime's "Dexter." It shows a man putting himself together (piece by piece, close-up by close-up) in the course of enacting his morning rituals. Yes, there are plenty of playful groaners about knives, flesh, and blood. Dexter is a serial killer -- albeit one who's trying to use his control-freak instincts to keep his habit manageable, within certain ethical boundaries, even as he daylights in forensics for Miami homicide. (He's a blood-spatter expert, naturally.)

We recognize his daily rites as things we all do every day, but they're rendered in such garish (Miami!) colors and macro-close-ups that they appear to us grotesque and purified, ultra-specific and abstractly universal, at the same time, like Pop Art. Even the messy parts look like Abstract Expressionism (like the blood spatters Dexter hangs as art above his desk at work), from the collection of Dexter Morgan. His most valued collection, however, consists of the blood slides of his victims, which he keeps neatly and discreetly filed in a box inside the air conditioner.

The credits gallery is accompanied by jaunty/menacing music that's both spicy Latin in flavor and creepy Gothic in sensibility. A guitar/kalimba/harpsichord sound. Sassy/sinister horns punctuate the mocking melody with bleats, cackles and growls. It's like the "Addams Family" theme played by a Mexican Day of the Dead band of mâché skeleton musicians. Who are, no doubt, Cuban immigrants.

The first time you see it (the titles sequence wasn't used in the initial pilot episode), it tells you everything you need to know about the character. Every time after that, it immerses you into the world of the show, like the best opening montages that took you by the eyelids and pulled you into "Twin Peaks," the New Jersey of "The Sopranos," the muddy shit-hole mining town of "Deadwood."

It begins with an extreme close-up of a mosquito (like Dexter, a blood-sucking predator). SMACK! Dexter swats it and we rack-focus down his extended forearm and notice his face -- still fuzzy, abstract, in semi-darkness, cheek against the mattress. The hint of a satisfied smile. Another kill, another day. Good morning! Time to rise and shine. Let's begin with a shave: Huge fingertips brush over wire stubble; the flesh beneath the bristles is elastic, alive. Shaving gel: Yes, it looks like semen. This is a show about bodily fluids. (And about performing.) A trickle of blood runs flows into the top of the frame and down the tender skin of the neck. A drop -- twothree -- splatters near the drain in the sink. (We have other Jungian -- er, Hitcockian -- memories of blood and drains, don't we?) A piece of tissue soaks up the red from the nick...

Imagine the "Psycho" shower scene without Marion Crane or Mrs. Bates. Alfred Hitchcock's (and Saul Bass's) rapid-cut sequence is renowned for its use of close-ups to suggest the slicing of flesh when, in fact, there is none on the screen. You create that illusion in the cuts.

But what really makes the sequence work, I'd argue, is the way Hitchcock uses plumbing. Back in 1998, I published an extensive web article on Plumbing in the Cinema, in which I quoted from Stephen Rebello's book, "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho":

"The script is shot through with obvious delight in skewering America's sacred cows -- virginity, cleanliness, privacy, masculinity, sex, mother love, marriage, the reliance on pills, the sanctity of the family... and the bathroom.'' Rubello quotes screenwriter Joseph Stephano on the subject of primal-screen plumbing: "I told Hitch 'I would like Marion to tear up a piece of paper and flush it down the toilet and SEE that toilet. Can we do that?' A toilet had never been seen on-screen before, let alone flushing it. Hitch said, 'I'm going to have to fight them on it.' I thought if I could begin to unhinge audiences by showing a toilet flushing -- we all suffer from peccadillos from toilet procedures -- they'd be so out of it by the time of the shower murder, it would be an absolute killer. I thought [about the audience], 'This is where you're going to begin to know what the human race is all about. We're going to start by showing you the toilet and it's only going to get worse.' We were getting into Freudian stuff and Hitchcock dug that kind of thing, so I knew we would get to see that toilet on-screen.'' Just the sight of the flushing toilet was considered shocking enough to mildly unsettle and disorient audiences of the day.

And the same is true today, though perhaps less noticeably so. In the same plumbing piece, here's the way I described what happens next:

Hitchcock's guilty fugitive protagonist, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), having totaled the sum of her indebtedness, monetary and karmic, on a slip of paper, rips up the evidence of her culpability, flushes it down the water chute (although a telltale piece of it misses the bowl, as Detective Arbogast [Martin Balsalm] will later discover) and steps into the shower. Just as she's figuratively washing her the sins of her recent past down the drain, Mrs. Bates pays her a visit with a butcher knife. Marion pays for her sins in blood. And the image of her blood swirling into the blackness of the drain dissolves into an image of her now-lifeless eye. Her head lies on the bathroom floor next to the toilet. For what is a human body itself -- its arteries and intestines and organs and other viscera -- but an elaborate piece of organic plumbing?

That cold, hard biological reality underscores the whole scene, from the time Marion, looking for someplace to dispose of her accounting besides the wastebasket (where that nosy Norman would undoubtedly discover it), first glances toward the bathroom, hesitates, and then decides to take a shower. The hollow sound of the tiled room echoes through the scene -- and, of course, Marion's physical vulnerability is emphasized by her nakedness and the noise of the shower drowning out the rest of the world. She's even made a point of closing the door firmly before stepping into the shower.

You can make all the Freudian jokes you like about the phallic showerhead, but it works. Yeah, it's sexual, and Marion seems almost orgasmic when she slides under its spray. It's also cleansing, even cathartic after all Marion's been through since her furtive afternoon quickie (in bra and panties) with her boyfriend in the hotel room at the start of the picture: Since leaving work the previous day, she's made a rash and fateful decision to steal cash from her employer and skip town. She exchanged cars, had a close encounter with a cop beside the highway in the desert, drove in the dark and pouring rain, and then had that strange little talk with the young man in the back room full of stuffed and mounted birds -- the boy with the mean old invalid-ed mother locked up in that spooky house looming behind the motel. Who wouldn't like to take a nice hot shower after a day-and-a-half like that?

[images missing: insert your memory of Marion's murder here]

What you see on this page are just the close-ups of insentient bathroom fixtures in the sequence. All images containing organic matter have been stripped out. Marion is about to become one of these inanimate objects. The image of her blood swirling in the tub, and her dead face mashed against the white tile floor, shocks us even as it prepares us for the clean-up scene, where we will shift our identification from Marion onto Norman. To Hitchcock's perverse delight, we will soon be rooting for Norman to scrub away and dispose of the evidence of our (ex-) main character's murder. The drain is metaphorical, but it's also the abyss. Marion has been our surrogate; and now her pupil is as void and lifeless as that hole. We peer into it, unable to fathom where it leads, and the blackness beckons...

This is another contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door.

Words are linear. Movies not so much, even though they are encoded onto strips of celluloid or served up as streams or spirals of digital bits.

The web is not so linear, actually. Hyperlinks in all directions are more like the interconnected synapses of the human brain than any other technology or art form I can think of. But sometimes when I try to convey something about my experience of movies -- filtered, as always, through reflections and contrasts between images, memories, themes, styles -- what I really want to do is make a movie about it. That seems like the shortest, most direct way from imagination to articulation. The movie itself (as Godard famously suggested) is the criticism, the analysis.

When I put together the images and commentary for my previous post, "Close-Ups: A free-association dream sequence," in celebration of the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door, that's what I was getting at. I just didn't have the tools to fully express what I wanted to say. Strike that. I had the tools, right here on my MacBook, but I didn't know how to use them.

One weekend and three long nights later, here's what I wanted to say. I will resist the temptation (you don't know how much I am tempted) to analyze my own cinematic essay, but I want you to watch it for yourself first. I'll translate it from web into movie and back into language later. This is a direction in which I want to move my film criticism.

Oh, and it's not a "literal" interpretation of the post. Some things just work differently on the motion picture screen than they do on the computer screen. Think of the first post as the original set of annotated storyboards, from which I felt free to depart whenever it felt right. The idea was not to overthink it, just to go with the flow and see where it led, like the ant-hole in hand / armpit / sea urchin / top of head sequence in "Un Chien Andalou." Enjoy -- and please leave comments, critiques, interpretations and questions! Just be sure to stay all the way through the end credits -- a minute or so of the six-minute running time....

UPDATED 10/19/07: While looking for a frame grab from "Black Narcissus" to honor the late Deborah Kerr, I discovered the source of an indelible mirror-image (you'll see) that I'd previously been unable to locate. It's now been incorporated into the movie.

Memory starts one image pinging off others across time and movies. Ruminating upon the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door (which, obviously, I can't stop doing), I see close-ups flowing into and out of one another, dreams within dreams within nightmares, on themes of memory, loss, identity, the process of consciousness and the end of consciousness -- you know, the stuff movies are made of.

In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies, here's a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards...) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory -- and my DVD collection. Looking back, most of them seem to be filtered, obscured, freeze-framed or reflected faces of characters reaching an impasse or a reckoning -- largely from the endings of some of my favorite movies. I wish I could actually cut the film together, so that I could show them in motion, control how long each shot remains on the screen and fiddle with the rhythms (flash cuts, match cuts, reversals of motion), but I don't know have the technology or the know-how for that at the moment. So, imagine this as a (sometimes perverse) little movie, a "found footage" montage sequence... Kuleshovian, Rorschachian, Hitcockian, Gestaltian, however you want to look at it. I suppose it's also a look in the mirror.

Hope you can see the associations, juxtapositions, oppositions, contradictions I was going for, although I'm not sure I consciously understand all the leaps myself. They just flowed together this way. Feel free to make your own connections. (And, of course, be aware that you may find spoilers surfacing. With a broadband connection all 38 enlarge-able images should load in about 10 seconds.)

For the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at The House Next Door:

When is a long shot a close-up? When it's part of an Alfred Hitchcock cliffhanger sequence on Mount Rushmore in 1959's "North by Northwest," that's when.

Hitchcock is having so much fun with scale and perspective here that I chuckle with delight (even as I tense up) every time I see the, uh, climactic sequence, which ends with an insertion shot -- both long shot and close-up, depending on how you look at it -- that's so naughty, so pornographic it will have to wait until after the jump....

For the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at The House Next Door:

Someone is trying to kill Dr. Sidney Shaefer (James Coburn). Hell, it seems like just about everybody is trying to kill him -- or spy on him or abduct him or drug him or interrogate him or brainwash him or flip him or something. And it's no wonder. He knows too much. He's the president's analyst in Theodore J. Flicker's 1967 "The President's Analyst," one of the great unheralded movies of the '60s and one of the great paranoid political comedies ever -- part "Strangelove," part "Parallax View," part "Our Man Flint," part "Little Murders."

Poor Sidney -- or Sid, as his former patient and CEA (Central Enquiry Agency) agent Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge) calls him. Even the President of the United States now has someone he can talk to. But Sidney can't trust anybody. So, for now, he has managed to slip away in the station wagon of the Typical American suburban Quantrill family of Seaside Heights, New Jersey: Wynn (William Daniels), Jeff (Joan Darling) and their son Bing (Sheldon Collins), tourists he picks up while they are taking a White House tour.

"Gee whiz, Dad. Why can't we take the FBR tour?" Bing whines. "I want to see the files."

"Sorry Bing," Dad replies. "We've got to get back to New Jersey as soon as we finish the White House.

"Now be a good boy and enjoy your heritage," says Mom.

The Quantrills are liberals. Not left-wingers or anything like that, but they're for civil rights. They've done some weekend picketing. As a matter of fact, they even sponsored the "Nigro doctor and his wife" when they moved into the development. Their next-door neighbors are fascists, though.

Stepping into the Quantrill's split-level home, Wynn flicks a switch on the living room wall and groovy Bacharach-esque Muzak begins to play. "Total sound," he explains with evident satisfaction.

"Want a draft beah?"

Dr. Sidney Schaefer slides off his sunglasses and beams ingratiatingly. "Yes."

I defy you to watch Coburn flash his killer pearly-whites here (can you tell Sid is maybe beginning to go a little off his rocker?) and not find yourself grinning, too. This is megawatt star-power, so bright you gotta wear shades.

Now playing, October 12 - 21 at The House Next Door: The Close-Up Blog-a-thon! House publisher Matt Zoller Seitz had this great idea:

Your piece could be as simple as a series of frame grabs with captions, or a blurb about a single close-up in a particular movie or television episode, past or current. Or it could be an essay about a certain performer's mastery of (or failure to master) the close-up.... Or your piece could fixate on a director or cinematographer who is especially adept at pushing in to capture emotion. Or if you're feeling contrarian, you could write about a memorable close-up that does not show a human face. Dealer's choice all the way.

So, I don't know what I'm going to write about quite yet (probably more than one thing), but thinking about it today triggered a recollection of something Alfred Hitchcock had said about the impact and intimacy of close-ups, and how they should not be used indiscriminately. They are the bazookas in a filmmaker's arsenal. ("Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as... close-ups!")

Hitchcock also liked to talk about how context gave meaning to close-ups, a compositional and editorial principle he liked to cite as an illustration of "pure cinematics" (but which also goes by the less exalted name of "montage," a basic element of film grammar). He told Francois Truffaut (in the interviews collected and printed in "Hitchcock/Truffaut" -- or is it "Truffaut/Hitchcock"?): ""Let's take a close-up of ["Rear Window" star James] Stewart looking out of the window at a little dog that's being lowered in a basket. Back to Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But if in the place of the little dog you show a half-naked girl exercising in front of her open window, and you go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he's seen as a dirty old man!"

Here's a clip of Hitch explaining it all for you -- and playing the lead role in a custom-made example:

What he's describing is, of course, the famous Kuleshov effect, which... oh, let Mr. Wiki provide the details:

The Kuleshov Effect is a montage effect demonstrated by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in about 1918.

Kuleshov edited a short film in which shots of the face of Ivan Mozzhukhin (a Tsarist matinee idol) are alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, an old woman's coffin). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mozzhukhin's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mozzhukhin was identical, and rather expressionless, every time it appeared. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about the acting.... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."

So, there you go. Get closer. Check out the Close-Up Blog-a-thon and submit your own ideas. I've got to focus in on mine...

Regarding issues raised by Brian De Palma and "Redacted" (see below): Here are two frame grab from Woody Allen's 1980 feature "Stardust Memories," a United Artists release. The movie is a Felliniesque comedy (it starts right off as a parody of "8 1/2"), not a documentary. The blown-up image on the wall was taken a dozen years before "Stardust Memories" (February 1, 1968) during the Tet Offensive by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams in Saigon.

The man with the gun is South Vietnamese National Police Chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The man in the plaid shirt, who is or is about to be shot in the head (his death is shown in NBC News footage taken at the same time), is thought to be Nguyễn Văn Lém (or possibly Le Cong Na), and was either a Viet Cong officer or a political operative. His face was disfigured because he had been beaten. The title of the photo, which became instantly famous around the world, is "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" and it won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. It was widely reprinted and was used as a symbolic image by the anti-war movement.

Adams later wrote in Time magazine:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'

Although a number of "galleries and artists" are acknowledged in the end credits of "Stardust Memories" for the use of photos and artworks in the film, the source for this picture is not cited. The film does contain a standard disclaimer, reading: "The story, all names, characters and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended or should be inferred."

Consider: If a filmmaker like, say, Brian De Palma, had used actual images of dead and injured Vietnamese war casualties in one of his fictionalized, semi-pseudo-documentary features like "Greetings" (1969) or "Hi, Mom!" (1970), would he or the films' producers or distributors have run a significant risk of being sued by the victims or their families? Are the legal or ethical issues any different now, with the carnage in Iraq? Why or why not? A few things to mull over regarding the latest "Redacted" scandal/controversy/promotional gimmick:

I suspect that De Palma was quite consciously out for publicity at the New York Film Festival press conference for "Redacted" Monday, when he accused Mark Cuban of HDNet and/or Magnolia Pictures of "redacting" the images of actual war casualties in his film's final montage. And it worked. Here's a movie about documentary reporting and amateur video and blogging of the occupation of Iraq and... look! IFC has posted a viral YouTube video of the NYFF confrontation between De Palma and Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles that has been featured (even embedded) on sites such as Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Movie City Indie, GreenCine Daily, spout blog, jürgen fauth’s muckworld and I don't know how many other outlets including... well, the site you're looking at right now.

How much more meta do you want to get?

Bowles denies he was in on any "staging." But De Palma? Isn't that what he does? He provokes, he fakes, he toys with what's genuine and what's phony to the point where the distinctions become tricky or even meaningless. If his role in the press conference, at least, wasn't part of a "Be Black, Baby" performance piece (see "Hi, Mom!") then it sure ought to have been. And even if it wasn't, it still is. Spontaneous, pre-meditated, both, neither -- it's still a spectacle designed for the cameras and the audience.

But that's not really the most important issue, is it? De Palma says he got the images for the montage sequence either off the Internet or otherwise, and that they are photos of real people, with real injuries, that photographers took in Iraq. Except for a couple pictures created specifically for "Redacted" -- an wounded pregnant woman featured earlier in the movie and the victim of the fictionalized, (re-)enacted rape and murder -- the photos are meant to be perceived as shockingly unfiltered, and/or to further the movie's strategy of pushing the viewer to question what is real (I suppose I really should put quotation marks around that word in this context) and what has been composed for the movie you're watching. In the version of "Redacted" shown at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and perhaps in Venice and elsewhere, the faces of the actual victims have been blacked out -- as if someone had taken a marker and scribbled over their eyes to conceal their identities. (The logo of a YouTube-lookalike site shown in the movie has been similarly "redacted.")

De Palma says he wants to use the montage with the unredacted faces. Bowles says (in comments posted at Movie City Indie):

the sole reason that the photos are redacted, is that it is legally indefensible to use someone's unauthorized photo in a commercial work. any claim to the contrary is either hopelessly naive or willfully false. And any indemnification does not preclude getting sued, and considering the asset bases of cuban and wagner versus depalma, there's no issue about who's purses will be attacked (not to mention the presumption of agreeing to the image of one of your loved one's mutilated body living on in the world wide media).

Brian De Palma is neither naive nor stupid. He knows what Bowles says is true -- and that even if a suit went to court and the producers were able to successfully argue that their use of the photos was journalistic in intent, even within the context of a non-documentary commercial feature film, the cost of fighting such a lawsuit would be significant. In fact, "Redacted" announces itself as a "visual document" of "imagined events" (I'm not sure I remember the exact language used in the opening titles, but I believe that's close), and as such does not attempt to present any factual documentation for those events. De Palma also knows that, while "Redacted" plays with documentary, web, home video and other techniques and formats, it can't help but be an exploitation movie too, no matter how serious its concerns. It's right there in the title: Come see what has been forbidden for you to see.

Again, that's what De Palma does....

Nobody's life and work has been analyzed, interpreted, scrutinized for possible meanings and clues, quite like Bob Dylan's. One key tale in Dylan's history/mythology (though it's reportedly true) is that of the hustler/stalker character known as The Scavenger, who regularly sifted through Dylan's garbage looking for skeleton keys to What He Means, and eventually started interpreting himself into Dylan's songs. Todd Haynes' movie, "I'm Not There" (which played the New York Film Festival this week after premiering in Toronto, and opens wider in November) doesn't intend to be any kind of Rosetta Stone for deciphering Dylan or his music. If anything, it applies further layers of imagery to the legend -- deconstructing, reinterpreting and elaborating upon it at the same time.

So, what do you really need to know about Dylan in order to appreciate Haynes' thrilling head-trip of a movie? As little as possible, probably -- or as much as possible, or somewhere in-between. I'm no Dylanologist, but I loved it at first sight and, weeks later, I'm still loving remembering and thinking about it. True, I have all but four or five of Dylan's albums from "Bob Dylan" (1962) to "Oh Mercy" (1989), and most of them again from "Time Out of Mind" (1997) through the Bootleg Series reissues and up to last year's "Modern Times." I worshipped "Blood on the Tracks" in college (still do), but I've never been as obsessive about him as many of his devotees (acolytes? disciples?).

No particular Dylan knowledge is required here, yet I think "I'm Not There" encourages annotation, elaboration, imagination -- not unlike like "Zodiac," another of the year's most fascinating movie. (See my random notes on that one here.) Still, it's the experience of the movie itself that matters most, and that is most enjoyable. As Robert Sullivan writes in a fascinating but sometimes misguided, poorly edited and factually questionable New York Times Magazine story ("This Is (Not) A Bob Dylan Movie"):

"Haynes didn't want to make a movie that was about anything. He wanted to make a movie that is something."

That's the best two-sentence description of "I'm Not There" I can imagine. But let me counter the article's impression (or, at least, the sub-heads') that this is a "weird" movie: "It Has to Be the Weirdest Movie of the Year." No, it doesn't. And it's not. It isn't even as odd or unfamiliar-feeling as Haynes' "Poison" or "Safe" or "Velvet Goldmine," and it doesn't mean to be -- although it's obviously less linear than "Far From Heaven," I'll give you that. Yes, it casts six actors as different versions of the same central figure. But lots of movies (even "Ray" and "Walk the Line") have done those kinds of things to show characters at various stages in their development. The only difference is that "I'm Not There" isn't strictly chronological. It plays with phases in Dylan's life, and public or private personae of his, but doesn't cast them according to age, gender or race. What's so terribly weird about that? (It's certainly less unsettling than Luis Buñuel's deliberately arbitrary and unpredictable casting of two actresses as one woman in "That Obscure Object of Desire.")

I've been listening to Dylan a lot since I saw the movie, re-watching D.A. Pennebaker's "Dont Look Back" and Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," reading liner notes and wading through the mixed-up confusion of Robert Shelton's repetitive, contradictory, over-written and under-organized semi-authorized 1986 biography, "No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan." I feel like watching Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (which is woven prominently into "I'm Not There"), one of my most-loved movies, but it always takes a heavy emotional toll on me, so I don't know if I'm up to it right now.

Meanwhile, here are a few more things I'd like to scribble in the margins of Haynes' movie for now, thoughts to tickle your fancy and to resonate in your mind while you're watching "I'm Not There" (which I fervently hope you will).

Think of it as kind of Viewer's Companion to the film:

At the most basic level, [Haynes] has tried to make a film with the power to carry you away, the power of a song, and what he is asking of the audience is to relinquish control, which is, of course, a huge gamble. "You have to give up a certain amount of control when you listen to music," Haynes told me.
-- Sullivan, NYT Magazine (October 7, 2007)

"The particular magic that Dylan has over, say, twenty million people, is the paradox and the inaccessibility of him. In his music, people are struck by something and yet they don't really seem to know what it is. That's always been the case with the most acute and exalted poetry. There are lines of Shakespeare like this, in which you don't have to know who plays what to be struck by the magic of words. Then the insight of the listener is followed by intense perplexity. We hear something that we finally realize is saying something we think ourselves and then we want to know more about the writer who can tell us something about ourselves."
-- Richard Fariña, quoted from an interview with Shelton in his book "No Direction Home" (1986; republished 1997, 2003; p. 327)

"The amazing thing about Todd Haynes's ceaselessly amazing 'I'm Not There' is how little nostalgia has to do with it. Just as Haynes used an obsolete style of melodrama to stir contemporary hearts with 'Far From Heaven,' he now deploys the life and legend of Bob Dylan to mediate a huge complex of ideas and feelings about the soul of the artist (or any feeling person) right now. Biography is only the vehicle; hagiography is the last thing on his mind. Haynes says more about the impact of Iraq on his psyche by reflecting it through Vietnam..."
-- Nathan Lee, The Village Voice (September 25, 2007)

“I don’t know that it does make sense,” Cate Blanchett says of the film, “and I don’t know whether Dylan’s music makes sense. It hits you in kind of some other place. It might make sense when you’re half-awake, half-asleep, in the everyday lives in which we live. I don’t think the film even strives to make sense, in a way.”
-- Sullivan, NYT Magazine, Op. cit.

"The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he's no longer where he was. He's like a flame: If you try to hold him in your hand you'll surely get burned. Dylan's life of change and constant disappearances and constant transformations makes you yearn to hold him, and to nail him down. And that's why his fan base is so obsessive, so desirous of finding the truth and the absolutes and the answers to him -- things that Dylan will never provide and will only frustrate.... Dylan is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating, and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity."
-- Haynes, in preliminary Weinstein Company press notes for "I'm Not There"

“If a film were to exist in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced, a film that could open up as oppose to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative. The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces — old men, young men, women, children — each standing in for spaces in a single life.”
-- Haynes' "I'm Not There" pitch to Dylan and his management, quoted in Sullivan, NYT Magazine, Op. cit.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (from "Leaves of Grass," 1855)

Maybe there should just be a category in the right column for "Lists." Here's one from the film and music writers of Time Out London (which will always be the only real Time Out) called "50 greatest music films ever except for 'Spinal Tap'." No, I added those last four words, but the editors explain in their intro that "we’re celebrating great films – dramas and documentaries – about real musicians."

As if David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls never actually toured in the flesh? As if they aren't at least as "real" as, say, KISS or the Monkees or Hootie and the Blowfish, which contained no one named "Hootie" and nobody named "Blowfish." (BTW, the Ramones weren't really "Ramones"! Those were just stage names!) Oh, and Gus Van Sant's "Last Days" was about a guy named "Blake." Michael Pitt looked like Kurt Cobain, but it was only about Cobain in the sense that "Velvet Goldmine" is about Bowie or Iggy Pop or Lou Reed, or "Grace of My Heart" is about Carole King or Brian Wilson or any of the Brill Building writers (even though a lot of them wrote songs for the movie). Then there's "'Round Midnight" (which is on the list) with Dexter Gordon playing Dale Turner, a fictionalized version of Bud Powell...

So, OK: No "Spinal Tap." But no "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco"? No "You're Gonna Miss Me: A Film About Roky Erickson"? No "Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser"? No "X: The Unheard Music"? No "The Girl Can't Help It"? No "Wattstax"? No "Woodstock"? No "The Kids are Alright"? No "No Direction Home"? No "The Buddy Holly Story"? No "Theramin: An Electronic Odyssey"? No "Heart of Gold"? No "The Filth and the Fury"? No "We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen"? No "La Bamba"? No "Kurt and Courtney"? See how much fun this is? Really, though, I'd substitute any of these for several of the selections on the list.

But, OK, many of my favorites are included: "24 Hour Party People," "Jazz on a Summer's Day," "Stop Making Sense," "DIG!," "Art Pepper: Notes from a Jazz Survivor" (his autobiography, "Straight Life," is the best account of addiction I've ever read), "The Decline of Western Civilization Parts I and II (The Metal Years)"...

At the toppermost of the poppermost: Todd Haynes' 1987 "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," a 45-minute lo-fi "dramatization" that was never officially released because of music clearance troubles (that is, brother Richard wouldn't let Haynes use any Carpenters tunes). Still, after 20 years as an "underground" item, it's available from Google Video here. It's something you really need to see: a documentary-style biopic of Karen Carpenter performed mostly by Barbie dolls. Yes, its a parody (so are most musical biopics, including others on the list -- see the upcoming Jake Kasdan/Judd Apatow picture, "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" for more on that score). But it presents straightforward facts about anorexia that could have been excerpted from any PBS or 16mm educational doc of the period. It's also a formula showbiz melodrama. But for all the layers of artifice, like Haynes' Sirk opera "Far From Heaven," it becomes strangely, hypnotically -- and genuinely -- moving. Prepare yourself for Haynes' Dylan fantasia, "I'm Not There," by watching "Superstar" and "Velvet Goldmine."

ASIDE: From an interview with Haynes at The Reeler:

I actually think that it's easier for people who know less about Dylan to go with it, if they're up for something different. Clearly, that's the first thing: Whether you know Dylan or not, you have to surrender to the movie to have a good time at all and get anything out of it. If you have a lot of Dylanisms in your head, it's kind of distracting, because you're sitting there with a whole second movie going on. You're annotating it as you go. It's kind of nice to sit back and let it take you. I think people get it: Even if you don't know which are the true facts and which are the fictional things, and when we're playing with fact and fiction, from the tone of it, you know that it's playing around with real life. In a way, that's what biopics always do. They just don't tell you that they're doing it, and they don't make it part of the fun. You have to follow the Johnny Cash story and just sort of think, "This is what really happened." Of course, you know it's being dramatized, but you're not in on the joke. You're not in on the game of that. In this movie, at least, you get tipped off to it.

Oh yeah, but about that list. Here it is. Make of it what you will:

1 "Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story" (Todd Haynes, 1987)
2 "Don't Look Back" (DA Pennebaker, 1967) -- Bob Dylan
3 "Gimme Shelter" (David Maysles/Albert Maysles/Charlotte Zwerin, 1970) --Rolling Stones
4 "24 Hour Party People" (Michael Winterbottom, 2002) -- Manchester scene
5 "Topsy-Turvy" (Mike Leigh, 1999) -- Gilbert and Sullivan
6 "Monterey Pop" (DA Pennebaker, 1968) -- concert
7 "Be Here to Love Me" (Margaret Brown, 2004) -- Townes Van Zandt
8 "Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould" (Francois Girard, 1993) -- Glenn Gould
9 "Cocksucker Blues" (Robert Frank, 1972) -- Rolling Stones
10 "Bird" (Clint Eastwood, 1988) -- Charlie Parker
11 "The Last Waltz" (Martin Scorsese, 1978) -- The Band & Friends farewell concert
12 "Rude Boy" (Jack Hazan, David Mingay, 1980) -- The Clash
13 "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man" (Stephen Kijak, 2006) -- Scott Walker
14 "Bound for Glory" (Hal Ashby, 1976) -- Woody Guthrie
15 "The Decline of Western Civilization Parts I & II" (Penelope Spheeris, 1981, 1988) -- LA punk; '80s metal & hair bands
16 "The Devil and Daniel Johnston" (Jeff Feuerzeig, 2005) -- Daniel Johnston
17 "Sweet Dreams" (Karel Reisz, 1982) -- Patsy Cline
18 "Art Pepper: Notes from a Jazz Survivor" (Don McGlynn, 1982) -- Art Pepper
19 "Elgar" (Ken Russell, 1962) -- Edward Elgar
20 "Rust Never Sleeps" (Neil Young, 1979) -- Neil Young
21 "The Future is Unwritten" (Julien Temple, 2006) -- Joe Strummer
22 "DiG!" (Ondi Timoner, 2004) -- Brian Jonestown Massacre, Dandy Warhols
23 "Some Kind Of Monster" (Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky, 2004) -- Metallica
24 "A Hard Day's Night" (Richard Lester, 1964) -- The Beatles
25 "Jimi Hendrix" (Joe Boyd, 1973) -- Jimi Hendrix
(more)

"The Bridge," Eric Steel's chilling masterpiece exploring the yawning chasm between life and death, between the steel suspension of the Golden Gate Bridge and the cold hard surface of the water below in San Francisco Bay, is now available on DVD. It's a film that goes deeper into that void of despair and self-obliteration than any film I've ever seen. I wrote about it several times in 2006:

A movie that takes suicide seriously, and considers the pain of the person who wishes to die as well as the anguish and guilt of the survivors, is a rarity. Over and over, survivors say they don't understand why someone they knew and loved wanted to cease to exist; but a surprising number admit the agony that would drive someone to suicide is beyond their imagination. They have to accept, and respect, that it was real.

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

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

From my review in the Chicago Sun-Times:

It's an awesome sight from up there, the wind and dizzying height halting your breath as you gaze across the strait. The sun makes silver ripples on the churning blue-green water and the horizon glows blindingly bright at the time of day when the sky and the sea converge. The cliffs, crinkled with shadows, form a paradisiacal gateway. And then, in the periphery, there's a tiny momentary rupture in the mythical postcard landscape. A small white splash flickers in the water. And in the great bright cacophony of the scene, Icarus disappears beneath the surface.

That's a description of Peter Breughel's painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," and William Carlos Williams' poem by the same name, intermingling with images from Eric Steel's "The Bridge," a film about 24 deaths and one survivor in a year in the life of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. "The Bridge" consciously invokes Brueghel, and after I'd watched the movie and looked up the painting again, hundreds of images of the Golden Gate from "The Bridge" (and my memory) came rushing back to me, as though projected at high speed over Breughel's canvas. Each small white splash, of course, marks the end of a life. [...]

Witnessing the last few moments of these people's existence, I thought of Michael Apted's "Up" documentaries, which have followed the contours of a handful of lives for 49 years now, revisiting them at seven-year intervals. "The Bridge" views human life from the other end of the spectrum -- showing the end, and then working back from there.

And because these jumpers chose such an open and public way to end their lives, I have no ethical problem with what the cameras observe; amateur photographers often catch the same sights inadvertently. One survivor tells of being interrupted by a German tourist who asked him to take her picture, just as he was preparing to jump.

Looking this closely and intently into suicide, you almost fear too much empathy, the way you dread the vertigo that accompanies acrophobia: What you're afraid of is not so much that you might fall, but that impulse within you that wants to eliminate the yawning tension between you and the surface below....

"The Bridge" is brave and unflinching, unshakably haunting and deeply mysterious. I doubt I'll forget it until the day I die.

"The Kite Runner," directed by Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball," "Finding Neverland," "Stranger Than Fiction") and based on Khaled Housseini's best-selling 2003 novel, opens the Chicago International Film Festival tonight. But the New York Times reports that Paramount Vantage has delayed the US theatrical release out of concern for the safety of the child actors in the film:

The studio distributing “The Kite Runner,” a tale of childhood betrayal, sexual predation and ethnic tension in Afghanistan, is delaying the film’s release to get its three schoolboy stars out of Kabul — perhaps permanently — in response to fears that they could be attacked for their enactment of a culturally inflammatory rape scene.

Executives at the distributor, Paramount Vantage, are contending with issues stemming from the rising lawlessness in Kabul in the year since the boys were cast.

The boys and their relatives are now accusing the filmmakers of mistreatment, and warnings have been relayed to the studio from Afghan and American officials and aid workers that the movie could aggravate simmering enmities between the politically dominant Pashtun and the long-oppressed Hazara.

In an effort to prevent not only a public-relations disaster but also possible violence, studio lawyers and marketing bosses have employed a stranger-than-fiction team of consultants. In August they sent a retired Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorism operative in the region to Kabul to assess the dangers facing the child actors. And on Sunday a Washington-based political adviser flew to the United Arab Emirates to arrange a safe haven for the boys and their relatives.

“If we’re being overly cautious, that’s O.K.,” Karen Magid, a lawyer for Paramount, said. “We’re in uncharted territory.”

In interviews, more than a dozen people involved in the studio’s response described grappling with vexing questions: testing the limits of corporate responsibility, wondering who was exploiting whom and pondering the price of on-screen authenticity....

Ebert writes of the film itself with great admiration:

How long has it been since you saw a movie that succeeds as pure story? That doesn't depend on stars, effects or genres, but simply fascinates you with how it will turn out? Marc Forster's "The Kite Runner," based on a much-loved novel, is a movie like that. It superimposes human faces and a historical context on the tragic images of war from Afghanistan.

The Times story reports that Paramount Vantage has delayed the theatrical release "by six weeks, to Dec. 14, when the young stars' school year will have ended."

Though the book is admired in Afghanistan by many in the elite, its narrative remains unfamiliar to the broader population, for whom oral storytelling and rumor communication carry far greater weight.

The Taliban destroyed nearly all movie theaters in Afghanistan, but pirated DVDs often arrive soon after a major film’s release in the West. [...]

In January in Afghanistan, DVDs of “Kabul Express” — an Indian film in which a character hurls insults at Hazara — led to protests, government denunciations and calls for the execution of the offending actor, who fled the country.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the “Kite Runner” [12-year-old] actor who plays Hassan... told reporters at that time that he feared for his life because his fellow Hazara might feel humiliated by his rape scene. His father said he himself was misled by the film’s producers, insisting that they never told him of the scene until it was about to be shot and that they had promised to cut it.

Hangama Anwari, the child-rights commissioner for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said on Monday that she had urged Paramount’s counterterrorism consultant to get Ahmad Khan out of the country, at least until after the movie is released. “They should not play around with the lives and security of people,” she said of the filmmakers. “The Hazara people will take it as an insult.”

This reminds me about another must-see movie from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, Christian Frei's "The Giant Buddhas," now available on DVD. I never did get a chance to write about it from Toronto, but I want to rewatch it and discuss what it does -- looking at the statues of the Giant Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 through stories and perspectives both historical and contemporary.

Steven Boone over at The House Next Door has seen the latest -- er, "Final" -- cut of what may now, 25 years after its debut, be "Ridley Scott's" "Blade Runner," in the new version premiering at the New York Film Festival. Above all, Boone was wowed by the digital presentation:

"The Final Cut" is remastered from original 35mm elements and transferred to High Definition digital video at 4K (4096 horizontal pixel) resolution. Projected in HD at 24 frames a second for this year's New York Film Festival, this "Blade Runner" has no visible grain, dirt or scratches, stuttering frames, reel-change "cigarette burns" or soft-focus moments when the film gets loose in the projector gate. Funny how I thought I'd miss all those things, their "organic" qualities, but this restoration gives us a pristine image without sacrificing warmth. The picture even fooled our editor, who at first thought he was looking at a 35mm projection. This "Blade Runner" removes every barrier to getting lost in Scott's fire-and-rain Los Angeles short of presenting it as interactive theater.

I saw the original version first-run in 70 mm at Seattle's Cinerama Theater in 1982, and grain was evident, probably for a couple reasons: 1) many of the visual effects involved multiple, non-digital exposures; and 2) the film wasn't actually shot in 70 mm, but was blown up from 35 mm.

According to an extensive, multi-sourced Wikipedia article on the film, the 1990 version advertised as a "Director's Cut" and shown at the Nuart in LA and the Castro in San Francisco was actually a 70 mm workprint. (In the days before digital, effects were often done in 70 mm, even for 35 mm releases, for better optical quality.) Scott approved the 1992 Director's Cut, but wasn't entirely satisfied with it. Wikipedia offers comparisons of the various versions, citing the primary changes as:

* The removal of Deckard's explanatory voice-over
* The re-insertion of a dream sequence of a unicorn running through a forest
* The removal of the studio-imposed "happy ending," including some associated visuals which had originally run under the film's end-credits.

It was apparent from the beginning that the voiceover was a big problem -- and Harrison Ford (who didn't get on with Scott, much less the studio execs who were calling him in to read narration) has said he did it badly and begrudgingly, hoping they wouldn't even be able to use it. (It's that cringe-worthy at times.) Scott, however, says he wasn't taken off the picture, and that he completed the original release version after it tested badly with audiences.

But the movie was a theatrical flop anyway, producing rentals of only $14.8 million at roughly the same time "E.T." was on its way to zooming past $300 million. According to a definitive piece by Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (September 13, 1992), the film may have died then and there. But the new home video market extended its commercial termination date:

"Blade Runner's" availability on video kept it alive in the eyes of the always loyal science-fiction crowd, and gradually, over time, the film's visual qualities and the uncanniness with which it had seemed to see the future began to outweigh its narrative flaws. Scott says he saw the interest rise, "And I thought, 'My God, we must have misfired somewhere; a lot of people like this movie.' " And not just in this country. In Japan, where the film had always been successful, "I was treated like a king," art director [Snyder reports. "The fans would be too in awe to even look at you." The film's look began to show up in art direction and design: Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and the stage design for the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels tour were influenced by "Blade Runner." And when laser discs appeared on the market, "Blade Runner" was one of the films that everyone just had to get. It became Voyager's top-selling disc immediately upon its release in 1989, never losing the No. 1 spot.

(Are spoiler alerts now becoming unfashionable because we should just assume everybody's seen the movie or knows the ending? I don't care. This is one.)

In Sunday's New York Times ("A Cult Classic Restored, Again"), Scott says of Ford's character, Deckard: “Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.”

Over a wet, grey Seattle weekend, I immersed myself in Wilfred Sheed's delightful book about the architects of the American popular song, "The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty." (This is one of the big reasons I love Seattle: There's nothing better on such a day, when the leaves are just starting to pop yellow orange and red against those dark slate skies, than kicking back with such a book and the Sunday New York Times, and spending the day quietly and cozily soaking it all in.)

Sheed's memoir/survey is an idiosyncratic/anecdotal appreciation of the greats -- Berlin, Gershwin, Arlen, Carmichael, Ellington, Kern, Porter, Rodgers, and others who are included in his canon only if, by his estimation, they have published more than fifty standards "by which I mean in this case more than fifty tunes that are still popular enough over fifty years later for most cocktail lounge pianists to have a rough idea of them, and for their copyrights still to be worth fighting for." Or, perhaps, if he happens to have met them.

To me, film is just music set to light. Yes, once "talkies" became the technological standard, the "lyrics" increased in importance, but the dialogue and the stories it help to tell were never so much about the words. They were about the music -- of motion and stasis, shadows and light, gestures and expressions....

Sheed describes his view of music and lyrics this way, and I see parallels to the relationship between movie and script:

There's musical genius and then there's verbal genius. To match the explosion of melody [in the early 1920s] came a river of light verse that turned up everywhere, from the largest magazines to the smallest local papers, and it seeped into the most minor songs, guaranteeing some wonderfully literate and accomplished lyrics.

But -- and here some readers and I may split -- the tunes were still the big news. "Didn't they write great lyrics back then?" is a common question I've heard, to which I have two Yes, but... answers, one being Yes, but it's my impression that they still do. [...]

My second answer is Yes, they wrote some great lyrics but they also wrote some lousy ones. The standards didn't care. There have seldom been dumber words to anything than those of the young Ira Gershwin's "Lady Be Good" and "The Man I Love," while the Ellington-Strayhorn gem "Take the 'A' Train" barely has a lyric, only an address you wish would change from time to time.

On the other hand, there has never been a standard without a great tune -- not even a great funny standard. Surf the Cole Porter songbook and you will undoubtedly find some great comic poems still waiting for the right tune to drive them off and make them rich and famous. But although Cole could have dashed off another two hundred choruses of "You're the Top," he couldn't have written a second tune to save his life. And without those magic tunes, his light verse was as unsalable as most poetry.

This doesn't mean the right lyric can't make all the difference. A lyricist is a musician too, one who arranges tunes for the human voice so that you can "hear" them for the first time. But once the lyrics have done that, and made you laugh or cry two or three times at most, they fade in importance. Again and again, people will request a favorite song while knowing only its tune.

I don't think anyone would dispute that it's possible to make a good movie from a pretty bad script, or that it's possible to make a lousy movie from a really good script -- but a good script greatly improves one's chances of making a good movie. It's just as hard to make a bad movie as it is to make a good one, yet the odds decisively favor the former over the latter.

Are some movies terrific primarily because of the script? Probably. Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder come to mind. But the script wouldn't work unless it had been acted and directed well. I've heard recorded arrangements of "Night and Day" that made me cringe. Likewise, I've seen actors and directors (and editors and composers) butcher a scene or a sequence that could have been great if they knew how to play it. (Remember, however, that if a scene doesn't work, it's probably least likely to be the actor's fault. Choosing the wrong takes and/or assembling them poorly can make the greatest actor in the world look like a grade school thespian.)

Quotable dialog -- epigrams, witticisms, punchlines -- can be fun, but they don't make a good movie any more than they make a good song. "Here's looking at you, kid" is an immortal line, but it could have been a howler. You wouldn't remember it without the music of Bogart's voice and the look in his eyes. I will never quite understand how "You can't handle the truth!" entered the public domain (however briefly it may remain there) because, although Nicholson sells the hell out of it in "A Few Good Men," it's not a particularly memorable moment. Although both these lines are often used jokingly, acknowledged as clichés when used in casual conversation, one affectionately acknowledges a classic while the other includes an element of sarcasm or satire of the movie itself (almost like "No wire hangers!").

When the words and music seem inseparable, as if one could not exist without the other, that makes for greatness. And in song, and in film, it's a matter of composition -- but also performance and orchestration, whether it's Sinatra singing "So make it one for my baby/And one more for the road," or Walsh (Joe Mantell) intoning those famous last words, "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."

No, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson don't really call it a "Declaration of Principles." But, in recognition of their first blogiversary at on their invaluable blog, Observations on film art and Film Art, David looks back over what they've done in the last year, and notices some "recurrent themes":

*In keeping with the blog’s title, we emphasize film as an art form. More specifically, we’re especially interested in how structure and technique work together, which few blogs outside the industry do.... [We] incline toward somewhat finer-grained analysis of cinematic storytelling, even if that means going shot by shot. If we want as well to make an evaluation of the film, as we sometimes do, we then have some concrete evidence to back it up.

*We also treat film art as tied to film commerce—both the mainstream industry and the less-acknowledged form of commerce known as film festivals. We’ve always believed that there isn’t necessarily a battle between film as an art form and “the business.”...

*We’re happy to find that a lot of filmmakers read and link us. One of the purposes of "Film Art" was to show how artistic expression in cinema is tied to practical decisions made by filmmakers; that’s why we begin the book with an overview of the process of film production....

*We’ve tried to deflate some clichés of mainstream film journalism. Writers of feature articles are pressed to hit deadlines and fill column inches, so they sometimes reiterate ideas that don’t rest on much evidence. Again and again we hear that sequels are crowding out quality films, action movies are terrible, people are no longer going to the movies, the industry is falling on hard times, audiences want escape, New Media are killing traditional media, indie films are worthwhile because they’re edgy, some day all movies will be available on the Internet, and so on. Too many writers fall back on received wisdom. If the coverage of film in the popular press is ever to be as solid as, say, science journalism or even the best arts journalism, writers have to be pushed to think more originally and skeptically.

*There’s the theme we might call the continuing presence of the past. I notice that many of our entries comment on a current event or topic by showing that it has parallels and precedents in earlier periods of film history.... Rather than celebrating apparent innovation, it’s more exciting to see how filmmakers connect to tradition, shaping it in ways that even they might not be aware of doing. We tend to see the present through a narrow window, but historical awareness widens and deepens the view....

Bravo, and nobody does it better. Congratulations David and Kristin on a stellar first year.

Alas, Manohla Dargis wasn't fond, as I was, of Eric Rohmer's "Romance of Astrée and Céladon," Juan Antonio Bayona's "The Orphanage" or Ira Sachs' "Married Life" -- all of which (and more, as usual) are being repeated after their Toronto showings at the New York Film Festival.

But in her overview of the NYFF, she reminds us of the importance of film festivals -- and the word-of-mouth generated on the web -- to the viability of world cinema in the US market:

[The NYFF's] willingness to go beyond its comfort and perhaps even its geographic zone feels especially urgent now because it won’t be long before the old art-house faithful start slipping away like Antonioni and Bergman. Cinemania is alive and well on the Internet, notably in blogs, where young movie nuts rant and rave and help cultivate one another’s cinematic interests. This is heartening, but film — especially the kind that distinguishes this year’s edition of the New York Film Festival — needs more than passion. It needs an audience, a paying public. If we don’t cultivate a new generation of movie lovers who get excited at the very idea of a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, we may as well hold a memorial service for foreign-language-film theatrical distribution right now.

All too true. When I was in college, programming the student film series, local art-house exhibitors understood that showing foreign and specialized films (even older Hollywood movies)to students on campus for a buck-and-a-half per double bill on Friday and Saturday nights wasn't a form of competition or a threat to their ticket sales. It was a way of building an audience for them. Today, that kind of evangelism is happening right here, on the World Wide Internets. (That was the goal of the recent "Top Foreign-Language Films Poll -- to spread the word, get people started..)

I was relieved, and gratified, that so many cinephiles younger than me still cared about Bergman and Antonioni, and still had so much to say (and even more they were willing to discover) about them when they died. I wonder, in fact, if perhaps the giants (or dinosaurs) like Bergman and Antonioni matter more to people in their 20s, 30s than they still do to people of their own, or my, or Jonathan Rosenbaum's generation.

Which (by free association) reminds me of this essay by Rick Perlstein ("What's the Matter with College?") in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

You used to have to go to college to discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who shared, say, a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture — and those hip baby-boomer parents — take care of the problem.

I'm one of those people who never wanted to stop going to college. Make that "never wanted to stop taking classes" -- because, even though it took me a while to consciously realize it, the day I stop learning (or wanting to, anyway) is the day I'm dead. I submit that the greatest classroom the world has ever known is now (literally) at your fingertips. My class schedule isn't temporally or geographically definable, but it's virtually round 'round the clock, just about wherever I am. How about you?

From Paul Clark at ScreenGrab.com:

Despite the sensational buzz for Carlos Reygadas’ "Silent Light" at Cannes, I approached the film with a bit of trepidation when I got a chance to see it in Toronto. I didn’t much care for Reygadas’ previous features, Japon and Battle in Heaven. I could see that he was a talented director, but his attention-grabbing tactics and leaden symbolism made it feel like he was trying too hard. A director who films a shot of a man writhing in agony next to a horse’s corpse is just aching to be taken seriously as an artist.

But all of my doubts melted away during the glorious opening shot of "Silent Light." The film begins with an image of a starry sky, with nothing but chirping crickets on the soundtrack. The camera then tilts slowly downward until we see the horizon in the distance. After this, the sun slowly rises, and we begin to make out the rolling hills, and a few trees. As the sun continues to rise, the soundtrack begins to teem with life- chickens, cows, and the like- and we see a farm. All the while, the camera ever-so-slowly pushes forward toward the horizon, as the sun rises higher and higher above the hills.

If I wasn’t sure before whether Reygadas was worth taking seriously, this shot put my misgivings to rest. Simply put, it’s a stunner, partly because Reygadas makes it feel so effortless. It’s an extremely patient shot, taking at least five minutes, and in this time he acclimatizes us to the deliberateness of the film’s world. "Silent Light" is set in a Mennonite community in Mexico, far removed from fast-paced modern life, where people speak slowly and aren’t prone to snap decisions. The film’s opening shot prepares us for this beautifully.