The Burt-a-Thon (formally known as the Burt Reynolds-a-Thon) starts today over at Welcome to L.A.. The awesome Larry Aydlette, whom some of you may know from his blog-lives as That Little Round-Headed Boy and/or The Shamus, has set himself a truly daunting, awesomely ambitious task: For the entire month of February, he will... well, let Larry explain it himself:
Obviously, Burt Reynolds didn't get the e-mail that he was supposed to go quietly away. But that's not the Burt Reynolds way. In his autobiography, "My Life," he begins with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live."
So, I've decided to honor that work ethic and use his birth month for 29 straight days of Burt Reynolds coverage. This isn't a love-a-thon. In rewatching a lot of his movies, I've come to the conclusion that he didn't necessarily deserve to win the Oscar for the films that he and many critics thought he should have won them for. And he was never nominated for what seems to me to be his one indisputable masterpiece (although I doubt many critics will agree with me). But there are quite a few of his films that are very, very good, and deserve reconsideration.
I do think the breadth of his career is certainly worthy of an honorary Oscar. Let's not forget that he ruled America's box office from the late '70s to the early '80s. He is the self-proclaimed "Picasso of car pictures." He was a big, big star. Just because he hasn't chosen to be a less ubiquitous star shouldn't negate the fine and interesting work that fills his resume.
After an investigation on the eve (literally) of the official Oscar ballot mailing, the executive committee of the Academy's music branch "has met and endorsed the validity of 'Falling Slowly' [from 'Once'] as a nominated achievement. The committee relied on written assurances and detailed chronologies provided by the songwriter of 'Falling Slowly,' the writer-director of 'Once' and Fox Searchlight" [the film's US distributor]. For details, see "Is Once ineligible for Best Original Song Oscar?" below.
The issue centered on whether the song was actually written for "Once" (as Academy rules require), or for the 2006 Czech film "Kráska v nesnázích" ("Beauty In Trouble"), or in some other context. In addition to its performance by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in "Once," "Falling Slowly" appeared in various versions on three 2006 albums: Hansard and Irglova's "The Swell Season," the "Beauty in Trouble" soundtrack album (also sung by Hansard and Irglova), and "The Cost" by Hansard's band The Frames.
According to David "The Carpetbagger" Carr at the New York Times, music branch chairman Charles Bernstein released a statement about the evolution of "Once" and "Falling Slowly":
“The genesis of the picture was unusually protracted, but director John Carney and songwriter Glen Hansard were working closely together in 2002 when the project that became ‘Once’ was discussed. ‘Falling Slowly’ began to be composed, but the actual script and financing for the picture was delayed for several years, during which time Mr. Hansard and his collaborator Marketa Irglova played the song in some venues that were deemed inconsequential enough to not change the song’s eligibility.”
Whether one of those inconsequential venues included the film "Beauty in Trouble" was not immediately clear. But perhaps "Once" will benefit from this extra burst of publicity. Final Oscar ballots were set to go out tomorrow (Wednesday, January 30, 2008).
View image Javier Bardem in an eloquent moment at the SAG Awards. (SAG photo)
Javier Bardem said it beautifully when acknowledging his "No Country for Old Men" directors Joel and Ethan Coen in his Screen Actors Guild Award acceptance speech Sunday night:
"I want to share this with my very good friend, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee, and Kelly Macdonald, and with a great cast of “No Country For Old Men.” And to dedicate it to the Coen Brothers who ultimately are responsible for all of this. Thank you guys for hiring me, and thank you for taking the hard work of choosing the good takes, instead of the ones that I was really – I mean, where I really sucked."
Bravo to Bardem for publicly acknowledging what every cinematic actor knows but few talk about publicly. If you've ever asked yourself, "How can Actor X be so good in one picture and so bad in another?" -- Bardem's got your answer in a nutshell: Any performance is created from many random bits and pieces of film, carefully chosen (we hope!) and assembled from among hundreds of choices and many thousands of possible combinations. Actors may give several very different readings of the same scene, adjusting nuances and emotions or improvising something spontaneous that the director and the editor (n the Coens' case, the pseudonymous Roderick Jaynes -- can't wait to hear his Oscar speech) must put together from what would otherwise be incoherent scraps.
View image Heath Ledger as the Joker in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight."
Any time an actor looks good, it's in large part because the director and editor have made wise decisions about what to use and how to use it. Likewise, if the actor looks bad, it's probably as much the fault of the director and editor as it is the performer. It could be that what you're seeing is exactly the performance the director wanted to elicit from the actor -- even if you don't like it. Then again, the director may have failed to capture the footage needed for a cohesive performance during production -- either because he/she didn't realize everything needed was not yet "in the can," or because of some kind failure of communication, or because, for whatever reason, the actor and director didn't see eye to eye on what the performance should be. The full performance is recorded, somewhere, when an actor leaves the set. After that (with the exception of tweaks that can be made in looping) it's up to the director and the editor to choose and assemble the right takes, and to augment the performance with music, sound and visual effects. The actor can be made to look ridiculous -- or much better than anticipated -- at any point.
Director Christopher Nolan ("Memento," "Batman Begins") recently directed the late Heath Ledger as The Joker in the Batman sequel "The Dark Knight." In a touching reminiscence for Newsweek, he explains the process from the other side:
When you get into the edit suite after shooting a movie, you feel a responsibility to an actor who has trusted you, and Heath gave us everything. As we started my cut, I would wonder about each take we chose, each trim we made. I would visualize the screening where we'd have to show him the finished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watching the movements of his head for clues to what he was thinking about what we'd done with all that he'd given us. Now that screening will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.
"A responsibility to an actor who has trusted you." And a responsibility to the movie. That's what all those choices, mistakes and happy accidents come down to.
View image The Oscar-nominated song "Falling Slowly" (the only one not from "Enchanted" or "August Rush") may have been recorded for a Czech film -- and appeared on two albums in 2006, before "Once" was finished.
Not sure why this has become an issue now (does nobody at Fox Searchlight or the music branch of the Academy do any research until the last minute -- or beyond?), but Dublin film critic Paul Lynch passes along this report from his Sunday Tribune critical colleague Una Mullally:
The Sunday Tribune understands that the Academy query relates to whether the song, from the John Carney-directed movie "Once," was written specifically for the film, as the eligibility rules for the Best Original Song category demand.
"Falling Slowly" was originally recorded by the film’s co-stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova when Czech director Jan Hrebejk asked the two musicians to contribute songs to his 2006 film "Kráska v nesnázích" ("Beauty In Trouble"). Hansard and Irglova ended up recording the album "The Swell Season," of which "Falling Slowly" was a key track. That album was released in April 2006. Hansard’s band, The Frames, then rerecorded the song for their September 2006 album "The Cost. "Beauty In Trouble" was released in October 2006, with "Falling Slowly" played almost in full over the film’s trailer [above].
The rules for eligibility in the Best Original Song category state that: “An original song consists of words and music, both of which are original and written specifically for the film.” The rules go on to state: “The work must be the result of a creative interaction between the filmmaker(s) and the composer(s) or songwriter(s) who have been engaged to work directly on the film.”
"Falling Slowly" is the electrifying acoustic duet performed in the music store in "Once." The Czech soundtrack album for "Kráska v nesnázích" ("Beauty in Trouble") includes "Falling Slowly." "Beauty in Trouble" played the Karlovy Vary Film Festival July 2, 2006 and was released in the Czech Republic in September, 2006; "Once" played the Galway Film Fleadh July 15, 2006, and was theatrically released in Ireland in March, 2007. It's unclear when the song was written, or which film it was written for (if either!), since both were first publicly screened around the same time. Which does the Academy think is the most important consideration: the writer's intention, the soundtrack recording date, or the film's screening/release date?
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UPDATE (12/27/08): Irish journalist Adam Maguire questions whether the Academy's reported "investigation" is necessary -- or even actually happening:
"Once," which was filmed over a 17-day period in January 2006; months before "The Swell Season" or "Beauty In Trouble" came out - something that wasn’t mentioned in The Sunday Tribune article. From this muddled time-line it seems as though the only revelation that could disqualify the song would be if it could be proven that either "Beauty In Trouble" or "The Swell Season" were wrapped and fully produced before Hansard was approached by John Carney in relation to "Once." Given the respective release dates of the two, that seems unlikely.
After all, even if the reality is far different, Hansard can easily claim that he wrote "Falling Slowly" for "Once" at any time as long as it can be shown that he was aware of the film’s production. It doesn’t matter where or when the song was used after that fact.
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The scores for "Into the Wild" and "Enchanted" were ruled ineligible by the Academy due to “predominant use of songs” -- although three of the latter's tunes were nominated in the Best Original Song category. I know, it's confusing.
If you care to learn more about the history of the Academy's Original Score/Original Song Score rule changes, see this article from the New York Times in 2000, "Squeezing Music Into Pigeonholes":
Alan Bergman, the chairman of the academy's music branch and the winner of three songwriting and scoring Oscars, believes that academy voters were being distracted by their memories of catchy tunes. ''People were voting for the songs, not the underscores,'' Mr. Bergman said. ''We felt that academy members outside the music branch didn't distinguish between the two. So when a score like 'The Lion King' is competing against a drama like 'Forrest Gump,' it's apples and oranges -- not in the quality of the score, but in the way it functions in the movie. There's a big difference.'' [...]
So early last year [1999], after a vote of the academy's board of governors, the Oscar music categories reverted to the system used in 1984: awards would be given, as usual, for the best song; dramas and comedies would compete for best original score; and musicals would compete for best original song score.
But only two films -- ''Tarzan'' and ''South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut'' -- were submitted this year for the song score award. And the Oscar rules state that if four or fewer films are submitted in a category, the branch can recommend that no award be given. When the composers of both films tried to submit their underscores -- that is, all the music except the songs -- for the original score award, they were rebuffed; both received letters saying that their underscores -- about 45 minutes of music -- did not constitute what the academy considered an original score.
1. I have a competition in me.
I want no one else to succeed.
2. I hate most people....
I see the worst in people.
I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need.
3. I want to rule and never, ever explain myself.
I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little.
Match the above comments to the character who speaks or writes them:
a) Anton Chigurh, "No Country for Old Men"
b) The Zodiac, "Zodiac"
c) Daniel Plainview, "There Will Be Blood"
(Answers at end of post.)
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NOTE: Spoilers lurk sinisterly below.
View image Daniel Plainview, "There Will Be Blood."
Three of the most admired and fervently debated American films of the year move inexorably toward a climactic confrontation with a killer -- or someone's conception of a killer. Only Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" actually culminates in a eruption of savagery, while David Fincher's "Zodiac" and Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" gradually steer their attention away from the assaults and into the psyches of the characters who are haunted by the brutality penetrating their lives.
View image Anton Chigurh, "No Country for Old Men."
View image The Zodiac, "Zodiac" -- or as close as we ever get to seeing him.
Much has been written about the violence in these movies, the darkness they find in the American landscape, and what some see as their bleak, fatalistic and/or nihilistic attitude. Does this somehow reflect the country's moral ambivalence about being mired in two bloody, confusing guerrilla wars on the other side of the world? A sense of No Exit hopelessness that the Vietnam nightmare is recurring? Mainstream (or art house) torture porn that allows us to vicariously groove on -- as we are simultaneously appalled by -- the crimes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Dissatisfaction with the materialistic emphasis on the American Dream? A cynical exploitation of artfully staged killings for our (cathartic?) entertainment?
The popular press likes to talk about violence in movies with a superficiality that assumes all violence and all movies are the same, that blood is blood (and that gore and gunplay are automatically more sensational than depictions of beatings or other forms of physical and psychological abuse). But that Sunday feature-section approach ignores what it's like to watch the movies themselves, and the diverse contexts in which they present acts of cruelty and lethality. To say that "Zodiac," "NCFOM" and "TWBB" are all "violent films" tells you as much about them as saying they all use the color red.¹ I'd like to consider how the violence in these films conveys its own meaning, apart from any op-ed political parallels that can be drawn, however legitimately.
In all three films, somebody gets away with murder: By the end of "Zodiac" and "NCFOM," the Zodiac (played anonymously by several unidentifiable actors, according to varying eyewitness accounts of the assaults) and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in "NCFOM" fade into the landscape as if dispersing into some kind of pervasive fear or threat. These films broaden their focus, while "TWBB" narrows down to a single hard point, like the tip of a drillbit. Its heart of darkness is located in one man, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis), a petty tyrant driven by monomaniacal greed and a hatred for those repugnant little creatures he contemptuously calls "people." Plainview paints himself into a corner -- with blood. Yet he isn't caught red-handed any more than Zodiac or Chigurh. His deeds don't catch up to him; he simply fulfills his character-as-destiny, expressing the essence of who he is, and who he has been since he first appeared on the screen, a demon scratching for treasure in the depths of the earth. That final scene is as unavoidable as the ending of "Oedipus Rex."
View image The most brutal scene of all: "There Will Be Blood."
"There Will Be Blood," as its title promises, heads directly for its explosive gusher like a locomotive speeding through the California desert, through long, torturous passages of cruelty and sadism. The extended cinematic treatment of its beatings and slappings (in lengthy takes) feels more brutal than the brief, bloody executions in "Zodiac" and "NCFOM." But although "TWBB" is perhaps the most unremittingly harsh of the three films, and displays an inhospitable majesty in some sequences, it may be the thinnest in resonance.² It's dark and viscous, but as Plainfield says: "Just because there's something on the ground doesn't mean there's anything beneath it."
Still, the movie works as a traditional, old-style Hollywood melodrama³ (like a silent film overlaid with a sleek, dissonant, period-appropriate score), an epic morality play illustrating the deadly sins of pride, greed, envy and wrath. "TWBB" has been praised as something "new," but that's a misunderstanding of its classical strength: Its straightforward manner of storytelling is the most conventional of the three movies. Nearly every scene (with a very few brief, transitional exceptions) is structured simply and clearly as a direct confrontation -- between two or more people, or between people and the earth itself -- as befits a movie driven entirely by competition and one man's titanic ego in conflict with the universe. The climactic showdown between Plainview the oil man (commerce) and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) the preacher (religion) is inevitable because they are competitors, and God is Eli's oil. (I don't think it's quite accurate to say that Plainview metaphorically kills God in the final scene, because Eli -- a sinner, perhaps a charlatan, perhaps a genuine believer -- is a diminutive man, not a symbol of God, and Plainview the unbeliever never sees him as anything more than a rival upstart businessman: "That was a goddamn helluva show" he says after one of Eli's sermons.)
The more radical linear (analog) construction of "Zodiac" traces a cause-and-effect logic that breaks down and falls apart in the course of time. "TWBB" also adheres to a strict chronology marked by on-screen date-stamps and little or no inter-cutting of parallel action, but does so for the simple reason that it is locked onto one central character.⁴"Zodiac" and "NCFOM" have multiple protagonists, while "TWBB" places a solipsistic monster dead center.⁵
The specter of violence looms over all these movies from beginning to end. There's never a moment when you don't feel something terrible could happen. All three contain bloody, merciless killings. Yet violence, and the threat of violence, is used to dramatically different ends in each:
* "Zodiac" is a chronicle of professional and amateur detectives piecing together an elusive criminal's identity from crumbs, an epistemological thriller driven by the obsessive need for definitive answers in a world where empirical evidence and eyewitness accounts don't necessarily add up to anything conclusive or complete. In other words, it's not about who the killer is; it's about trying to find out who the killer is. The men who pursue the investigation have only disconnected fragments of information to work with: letters, cyphers, locations, dates and times, forensic scraps. "Zodiac" might have been made without showing the killings at all. As it is, the filmmakers depict only attacks as they could be reconstructed from forensic residue and the memories of those who were present. We never see the Zodiac himself; the movie's strategy is to show how he lives in other people's heads. In that sense he resembles Chigurh, existing not so much as an individual but as a shadow, an indistinct and incomplete pattern of signs and clues. (Sounds a little like "Bob Dylan" in "I'm Not There.")
View image A killer rises: Our first blurred sight of Chigurh's face in "NCFOM." As he moves forward, into focus, to make his first kill, we still don't get a good look at him because his head rises above the top of the frame. His victim, the deputy, never sees what's coming, and Chigurh, chillingly, doesn't even bother to look at his face while he garrotes him.
* "NCFOM" and its characters aren't even much interested in who the killer is or where he comes from. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) mainly just wants to prevent Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) from getting slaughtered. Chigurh is tracking a satchel of stolen drug money, and that's as much as anybody needs or cares to know, other than that he is unstoppable. He is a presence, not a person like other people. And that's not because he is supernatural but because he is inexplicable, an implacable force, an undeniable fact. Let's put it this way: Nobody who gets in his way and meets him face-to-face survives. Like the chess-playing avatar of Death in Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," to whom he has been compared, Chigurh exhibits the occasional glimmers of personality -- pride, arrogance, annoyance, determination -- as do Zodiac and Plainview, but he never succumbs to the latter's fits of dudgeon. He kills not from anger, or even for money, but because it is his nature. Plainview is a petty bully, his unmanageable fury a sign of weakness that Chigurh would consider frivolous and self-indulgent. (That said, let no one suggest a "Chigurh vs. Plainview" sequel, please.)
* "TWBB" is the one film of these three that is expressly about murder as virulent misanthropy -- not just about the willful annihilation of human life but about the taking of it. Zodiac and Chigurh exhibit no emotion in their killings, because they are indifferent to their victims, some of whom are randomly or opportunistically chosen. For Chigurh, eliminating people is part of his work; he kills as an accountant would crunch numbers. For the Zodiac, it's is a challenge and humans are simply "the most dangerous game"; he gets a kick from the hunt itself, but even more so from getting away with it. For Plainview, it's personal. He assails only those close enough to insult, humiliate or betray him. And when his sense of dignity is offended, he acts out of spite to obliterate the "competi-tor." It's not enough that he should triumph; his victory is complete only when he can deprive others of what is dearest to them -- their very lives: "I want no one else to succeed."
View image Phoning it in: Phony killer, real psycho.
Of course, "Zodiac" recounts the case of the infamous series of murders in California during the Age of Aquarius. Yet none of these movies presents its slayer as a classical serial killer. "Zodiac" comes with a built-in critique of the familiar psycho profile just to demonstrate how its namesake does not fit it. An institutionalized impostor calls a live TV morning show to melodramatically complain to Melvin Belli (Brian Cox) on the air that his headaches are compelling him to kill. It's a prank, a phoned-in performance based on tormented characters from movies and television, and it provides no clues about the Zodiac. Later, when Belli theatrically proclaims, "Killing is his compulsion. It's what drives him. It's in his blood," we know he's not only being haughty and self-serving but naïve.
View image Melvin Belli with a piece of the Zodiac puzzle. It's not what he thinks.
Each killer, however, is uniquely methodical in his madness. (And each is successful at what he does, though there's nothing admirable about him.) After initially focusing on young couples, Zodiac begins not only selecting (and announcing) his targets in a deliberately random manner, so as to spread fear and evade detection. Further, he takes credit for crimes he didn't commit to enhance the power of his myth, and to throw off his pursuers. Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) realizes what's going on after the murder of a taxi driver: "He's breaking the pattern." And once he does, anyone and everyone becomes a potential victim. (If Anton Chigurh were a publicity hound, the people of West Texas might feel the same way about him. Instead, he is internalized by the other characters, transformed into the abstract embodiment of their fear of death. Abstract until he's standing in front of you, that is.)
Chigurh, with careful attention to a cryptic internal logic of process and principle ("You use the one right tool"), operates under a rigid set of rules that no one but he understands. Really, though, it's pretty simple: 1) He eliminates anyone who comes between him and and the completion of his mission; 2) He never makes a threat or a promise that he doesn't intend to fulfill. "You don't have to do this," people keep telling him. They're wrong: He absolutely does. The way Chigurh he sees it, he's just doing what he has to do. The choice is not his, it's the other's: "Call it."
Chigurh and Zodiac intentionally keep to the shadows where they assume extra-human dimensions, while Plainview greedily grabs center stage -- at once all-too-human and less than human. As a man, and as a character, he is no more than the sum of his wants (or his lacks). In some ways he is a model of serial-killer alienation, incapable of intimacy and disdainful of humanity, a malignant shell of a human whose anti-social motivations are rooted in psychopathology. His attacks are rash and impulsive, the acts of a man desperate to satisfy the gnawing feelings of resentment and entitlement that have eaten away his insides (aided, no doubt, by rot-gut whiskey).
Plainview arises out of the earth, nothing if not corporeal, and only thick black oil can fill the cavity within him. (That and a milkshake -- as long as belongs to someone else.) The deadly forces of "Zodiac" and "NCFOM" seem to blow in on the wind and fade away when they're finished. Plainview simply stops in his own tracks. Chigurh enters the Coens' movie the way Plainview leaves Anderson's, with his back to the camera. The first time we see his face, he's an blurry presence in the background of a shot, rising over a man's shoulder to make his first kill. Zodiac appears out the blackness and turns a blinding flashlight on his prey. You might say that Zodiac and Plainview kill to act out their fantasies of omnipotence; that Plainview and Chigurh (because he's ostensibly after a bag of money) are images of predatory capitalism run amok; that Chigurh and Zodiac are portrayed as semi-illusory (they are hauntings), while only Plainview is cast as a psychological personality, strictly limited to flesh and blood. And there's evidence in the films to support all of those interpretations concurrently.
Indeed, Chigurh and the Zodiac linger in the consciousness beyond the last frames of their respective films in ways that Plainview does not. They are not captured; the dangers they pose are not dispelled. When Plainview announces he's finished, he's finished. We don't imagine a life for him after the final cut to black. Swallowed by his own emptiness, spent and sprawled on the floor (the closest he comes to a post-orgasmic moment), he's not going anywhere. He's done. He waves us away with a dismissive gesture, acknowledging that his story is over, no reason to continue. Without bothering to face our gaze with anything more than a glance over his shoulder, he gives up. Nobody else's judgment matters to him, anyway.
The homicidal/suicidal finish of "TWBB" is a narrative, philosophical and existential dead end, the terminal raving of a drunken, impotent lunatic against god, man and the universe.³ He's not Lear (Plainview is incapable of recognizing his own sins, or seeing his place in the world as anywhere but the center of it); he's not Ahab (Plainview's greed doesn't assume the tragic metaphorical grandeur of Ahab's quest for the Great White Whale); he's more like Yosemite Sam.... doing a John Huston impression -- a drooling, blustery blowhard.
View image A damaged man: The final shot of "Zodiac."
"Zodiac" and "NCFOM" also terminate abruptly with a plunge into blackness, but in their last moments they contemplate the faces of men who have been damaged by the violence they've seen. Mike Mageau (Jimmi Simpson) is nearly a ghost, a deeply wounded soul who is 80 percent certain of his own certainty but, like everyone else, wishes he could be sure. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), sitting in the fragile peace and security of his kitchen in the wasteland, has given up, yet also attained a measure of experiential wisdom, an old man's acceptance that there's no hiding from the grim reaper. He recounts a dream of his father, who died younger than Ed Tom is now. (It points forward to Cormac McCarthy's "The Road.") The dream -- like all dreams, all films -- is open to interpretation, but Ed Tom no longer seems to see his long-dead father as a giant "old timer" of romanticized stature, beside whom he will always fall short, but as a guide and a pioneer, carrying a light for him on a path into all that cold and all that dark that lies ahead for all of us.
View image An overmatched man: The final shot of "No Country for Old Men."
So, are "Zodiac," "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood" entertaining movies, and dark, and violent? Absolutely. Which is not the same as saying, for all their commonalities and contrasts, that they're the same movie, with identical views of cruelty or indistinguishable depictions of death. In a movie, a kill is never just a kill.
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¹ Jean-Luc Godard on "Pierrot Le Fou": "It's not blood but red."
² "TWBB" is set up as a high-concept battle between God and Greed (there's a magnificent overhead shot of a man and his baby son [who grows up to be HW] on the rim of a blacker-than-black crater: oil pit as hellmouth), but neither the characters nor the movie quite support the metaphorical weight. The film comes down to a struggle between two egos locked in conflict: Plainview and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). One is a bigger-than-life oil man and the other a punier-than-life man of the cloth. Eli's diminutive presence makes his conflict with Plainview all the more striking: physically and charismatically it's an uneven match. But these nemeses share two things: a killer instinct and a deadness at the core of their beings.
I’ve long argued, along with Kristin [Thompson], that mainstream US filmmaking, dubbed long ago "classical Hollywood cinema," has cultivated a sturdy and pervasive tradition of storytelling. (1) That tradition depends on clearly defined characters pursuing well-defined goals. This commitment in turn creates a plot that displays linear cause and effect: In pursuing goals, the protagonist makes one thing happen, and that makes something else happen, which in turn triggers something else. Moreover, the mainstream tradition lays these actions and reactions along a fairly rigid structural layout. And this tradition depends on a system of narration that constantly reiterates the characters’ traits, their goals, important motifs, and the overall circumstances of the action.
While this description applies to all three films, only "TWBB" is built exclusively around the singleminded goals of its protagonist, if only because it's the only one with a single character that dominates every frame.
⁴ I can think of only one scene in the theatrical release cut of "There Will Be Blood" in which Daniel Plainview is not present: a confrontation at the Sunday family dinner-table in which the mud-caked Eli (having been thrashed by Plainview in the scene previous) denounces and physically attacks his father, Abel. Note biblical references.
⁵ "There Will Be Blood" is a movie I admire without thinking it's particularly successful (or even ambitious) -- a less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts kind of film. It also feels curiously bloodless to me, dry and diagrammatic, while still reasonably compelling to watch, even if you watch from a distance. For the simple reason that I haven't written much about it previously (I was waiting until I'd been able to see it a second time), it probably gets more than its fair share of attention here -- especially in these footnotes.
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ANSWERS: All three quotations above are from the same speech by c) Daniel Plainview in "There Will Be Blood." He's the only one of the three who explicitly spells out his own motives in dialogue. But I could almost imagine Chigurh saying 2 and Zodiac writing 3.
From McSweeney's Internet Tendency: If Werner Herzog were a guest entertainment pundit on the VH1 TV series "Best Week Ever," discussing the success of "Juno," by Michel Duchampbuffet:
The Phenomenon of Pregnancy creates in the Physiognomy of the Host the Epitome of humanity's Displaced Cannibalistic Desires: one believes oneself to be engaging in the act of Creation, only to discover, behind the Blinding Cloak of Elation, the Insidious Mask of Suicide. One need not be reminded of the Mating Habits of the Appalachian Dung Beetle to realize that Pregnancy is merely an act of Self-Immolation, veiled by the Momentary Pleasure of Copulation so as to dispel the one Elemental Truth of Human Existence: that we are provoked not by the desire for Preservation but rather by the need for Destruction....
Inside the uterine wall lie the foundations of the Chaos on which our Universe has been constructed. The mother Creates so as to be Devoured by her Creation. As the mother feeds and cares for her child, it is only in the most Fathomless Depths of her Psyche that she realizes that she is preparing herself for her own inevitable Murder, the Murderer being the very child she has reared.
Rare is the performance that can honestly be called a "revelation," but that's what it felt like to watch Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain." Not only did he bring iconic life and nuance to the existential loneliness of Ennis Del Mar, a taciturn but complex (and conflicted) character, but for such mature work to spring from the teen-idol star of "10 Things I Hate About You" and "A Knight's Tale" was... well, revelatory itself -- the astonishing revelation of a suddenly, fully developed actor whose juvenile efforts scarcely hinted he'd be capable of such moving depth and clarity. Ledger emerged as if from a cocoon, gleaming with promise and flexing his wings.
Only two years after he received his first Oscar nomination for this iconic, star-making performance, it seems unthinkable that we should be mourning his death, at the age of 28....
Ledger's work as Robbie Clark, one of six "Bob Dylan" figures in Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" -- and the tantalizingly creepy advance stills of his makeup-smeared face as The Joker in Christopher Nolan's upcoming "Batman Begins" sequel, "The Dark Knight" -- proved he was somebody it would be a joy to watch morph and change over time. It never occurred to me that he wouldn't create an impressive body of work across a wide range of roles, and probably win more Oscar nominations for them, in the course of the rich and varied career ahead of him.
View image Heath Ledger in the trailer for 2007's "I'm Not There."
In "I'm Not There," he plays an actor who once played fictionalized Dylanesque folksinger Jack Rollins (played by his "Dark Knight" co-star Christian Bale, three years his senior and another of the most exciting actors of his generation) in a Hollywood bio-pic. It takes a fine actor to play a decent actor giving a not-so-good performance (yet still good enough that he might become a star because of the role). And in the scenes with his wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a romance that spans the Vietnam era from Godardian cafe conversations to domestic breakup melodrama, Ledger shines with youthful exuberance and intelligence.
"I would like to know what is at the center of your world," Claire says early in their acquaintance.
"Well, I'm 22, I guess I would say me," Robbie replies.
It's a favorite moment, both a confession and a sly evasion, from one of my favorite films of last year -- refreshingly candid, funny, bright, unpretentious. And now heartbreaking as well.
... Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland -- and un-nominated co-conspirator, Carter Burwell -- for sound in "No Country for Old Men"! (See below.)
Meanwhile, I'm happy to see several mildly surprising nominations: Viggo Mortensen for "Eastern Promises"; Saoirse Ronan for "Atonement"; Hal Holbrook for "Into the Wild"; "Persepolis" for animated feature. No surprise, and absolutely proper: Roger Deakins for shooting both "No Country for Old Men" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (though I hope they don't cancel each other out). But nothing for "Zodiac"? At the very least it should have received a nomination for its amazing visual effects. But unless you've seen the Director's Cut DVD (or some Digital Domain clips on YouTube) you probably wouldn't have known they were effects. That's how good they are.
Looking at the odds, "Atonement" is an unlikely best picture because its director (Joe Wright) wasn't nominated. "Michael Clayton" and "Juno" lack an editing nomination, which (statistically speaking) is are crucial to winning the top prize. On the other hand, "Michael Clayton" is honored in three acting categories, for George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton -- and guess which branch of the Academy is the biggest? "No Country for Old Men" didn't claim a lead acting slot, perhaps because it's an ensemble piece. If you go strictly by statistically significant nominations, only "There Will Be Blood" has 'em all -- an old-fashioned Hollywood epic built around a big performance (by a previous Oscar winner). But will its unremittingly bleak nihilism (and the bizarre ending that alienated even some admirers) prove too bitter for Academy voters? I dunno.
I just want to take a moment here to acknowledge my favorite nomination. (This is where I congratulate myself on my foresight -- hey, I predicted Tom Wilkinson, too -- even though I'm a lousy Oscar guesser.) Back in September when I first saw "No Country for Old Men" in September, I wrote:
A moment here to celebrate the genius of one of the greatest talents in motion pictures, supervising sound editor Skip Lievsay, who has worked with the Coens (and Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese and others) since way back before the mosquito buzzing and peeling wallpaper of "Barton Fink." Since the bug zapper in "Blood Simple," in fact. Also, composer Carter Burwell ("Psycho III"!) has been associated with the Coens for just as long. He's credited with the music in "No Country," too, but it's to his merit that I don't even recall any music in the picture -- except for one memorably Coen-esque appearance by a mariachi band.
And among the nominees for Best Sound Editing are: Skip Lievsay (also for Sound Mixing), Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland. (Of course, Burwell's score wasn't nominated -- way too subtle.) Incredibly, Lievsay ("Do the Right Thing," "Last Temptation of Christ," "Silence of the Lambs," "GoodFellas," "City of Hope," "Fargo," "The New World") has never before been nominated for an Academy Award. This, in my view, has been one of the most egregious oversights in Oscar history.
As I've noted before, the attention to sound in the Coens' films gives them a vivid dimension that most films don't begin to explore. And, in "NCFOM," the music and the sound design are one. Earlier month, Dennis Lim wrote a piece on Lievsay, Burwell and colleagues for the New York Times that's one of the best "awards season" pieces I've ever read ("Exploiting Sound, Exploring Silence"):
What is unusual about “No Country for Old Men” is not simply the level of audio detail but that it is a critical part of the storytelling. Skip Lievsay, the sound editor who has worked with the Coen brothers since their first feature, “Blood Simple” (1984), called “No Country” “quite a remarkable experiment” from a sonic standpoint. “Suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music,” he said. “The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what’s going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You’re not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone.” [...]
That decision was made with the help of Carter Burwell, the Coens’ regular composer, who has also been part of their stable since “Blood Simple.” (Mr. Lievsay introduced him to the Coens.) “My first suggestion was that if there’s music, it should somehow emanate from the landscape,” Mr. Burwell said. He tried a few “abstract musical sounds, just the harmonics of a violin or some percussive sounds,” but found that even these small touches “destroyed the tension that came from the quiet.”
Like film editing, film sound remains a somewhat misunderstood craft, partly because at its best it tends to be imperceptible. “The better we do our job, the less people realize what’s going on,” Mr. Lievsay said. “I think a lot of people think the sound just comes out of the camera.”
Score one for the sound artists.
(PS: Great line from Mix magazine: "The strongest influence Skip has had on me isn't how to marry a dog bark with a chin sock, but how to fish with a fly.")
View image Attend the pale and Teeny Todd. He doesn't exactly cut an imposing figure. Jack Skellington with a thicker head of hair.
"Tim Burton has made a miniaturist 'Sweeney Todd.' Wispy, anemic, paper-thin, sanitized. Petit Guignol. Teeny Todd..."
Those were among the first notes to myself that I typed after returning from a December screening of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." Before that, it had seemed to me that Tim Burton (the Tim Burton of "Batman" and "Batman Returns," not "Mars Attacks!" or "Nightmare Before Christmas") might be, hypothetically, an ideal choice to make a film of Stephen Sondheim's musical-thriller masterpiece about a vengeful barber who conspires with a randy pie-shop proprietress to bake his victims into meat pies. Surely Burton would make it his own, a movie that wouldn't have to compete with the stage version because it would be a Tim Burton Film, existing in parallel to, but apart from, Sondheim and Harold Prince's achievement.¹
Not quite. It's one thing to Devoid of passion, grandeur, ghastly humor and operatic lunacy, Burton's "Sweeney Todd" is a plastic wind-up toy, a fast-food tie-in trinket. It belongs on a little gingerbread tchotchke shelf, next to your collectible "Macbeth" action-figurines. The best that can be said for it is that nobody's yet adapted the title property for film, so maybe that's something we can still look forward to.²
Sondheim himself has done a fine job of explaining why the filmmakers made the choices they did in bringing this "Sweeney" to the screen (New York Times: "Sondheim Dismembers 'Sweeney' .") And they're all perfectly good reasons. I understand the difficult choices that had to be made. How do you squeeze the show into less two hours? Slash some numbers, condense others, speed up the tempos. Do the performances (and the voices) have to be as strong and idiosyncratic for film as they do on stage? Not necessarily....
But reasons aren't as important as results. And what's wrong with Burton's "Sweeney" is that nearly every single decision -- in the cutting, the quickening, the casting, the character conceptions, the shot choices -- diminishes the power of the tale. OK, the opening (and recurring) "Ballad of Sweeney Todd," sung by a Greek chorus of streetfolk and Sweeney victims, is gone. But it was never just a device to speed up the narrative, setting up the story you're about to see. It creates anticipation and dread, and a sense of inevitability, building Sweeney into a figure of mythic dimensions, not some pathetic little barber who went batty and slit some throats. ("By the Sea" -- a number completely re-conceived for film and nothing like anything in the stage production -- is the most engaging song in the movie, and shows what Burton is capable of doing, had he put more thought into making the material his own.)
Burton's "Sweeney" begins as a disappointment (with an animated overture/credits sequence that's just a cutesy version of the one for Roman Polanski's "Fearless Vampire Killers"), and degenerates into a disaster... of mini-proportions. There's no yawning abyss here, no filthy cesspool, no "great black pit" called London. Just a puny soundstage mud puddle.
The music is here -- well, some of it, anyway, given what's been cut and what isn't sung, only rasped or mewled, by Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett (Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, embarrassingly miscast). What's missing from Burton's version is the dance, the lilting quality that gives it a (fetid) air of delirium and dementia. Burton's characters, the pedestrian Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett especially, are too stiff and sober. Even Toby (who should be played by a man-child with an ambiguous, almost Munchkin-like voice -- not an actual child with the clear, high voice of a boy!) doesn't play drunk when he's drowning himself in gin. Nobody knows how to cut loose.
View image Anthony (or is that Johanna?) and Mrs. Lovett.
Here's the thing about "Sweeney Todd": Everyone is crazy. And they like it. They start off damaged and unbalanced (even in their naiveté) and slip over the edge, into the yawning pit of madness. It's a fallen world, long past redemption. Sure, Judge Turpin (played here by Alan Rickman) feels tormented about his lust for his ward Johanna (Jayne Wisener), daughter of the couple (Benjamin and Lucy Barker) whose lives he destroyed -- although the scene in which he flogs himself into sexual agony and ecstasy has been cut. (It was also eliminated from the Broadway run, but you'd think it would be the first thing Burton would have realized the film needed.) But Turpin and his Beadle Bamford are perverts, and they secretly get off on knowing it and flaunting it, like flashers parading naked beneath their robes of authority and respectability.
Sondheim has fun with his inane young lovers, the Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones of this deranged "Night at the Opera." Anthony's (Jamie Campbell Bower) "love" for Johanna may be more benign than Judge Turpin's but equally compulsive and obsessive. He catches a glimpse of her in a window (echoes of the Judge's description of the sun from the window illuminating her body beneath her gown, from missing flagellation number) and it's love at first peep. Immediately he wants to kidnap -- er, rescue -- her: "Even now I'm at your window... / I am in the dark beside you, / Buried sweetly in your yellow hair! / I feel you, Johanna / And one day, I'll steal you!" (That's right: "buried.") Johanna herself has been driven mad by years of trauma and captivity, reduced to flitting around like a high-strung birdbrain in gilded cage.
View image Yellow-haired, feather-headed Johanna at her window.
Although Anthony and Johanna's songs of passion and hysteria ("Green Finch and Linnet Bird," "Ah, Miss," "Kiss Me"), from Burton's movie, Bower and Wisener's voices have a power and presence that Depp and Carter can't approach. You know something's out of whack when the show's kinkiest, most chilling moment belongs to Anthony, an androgynous, virginal creature who exhibits greater drive and passion than the rest of the characters put together. After being threatened by Turpin ("You gandered, sir!") and beaten by the Beadle, he sings desperately of his desire to be "buried sweetly" in Johanna's yellow hair, with blood smeared around his mouth like lipstick.
Everything that's wrong with Burton's "Sweeny Todd" can be found in his treatment of one of the show's crucial turning points, "A Little Priest." It's an escalating verbal competition in which Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney goad each other, testing just how far into madness and mayhem each is willing to go. It begins as an idea that just pops into the creative little mind of Mrs. Lovett, a purely practical solution to two pressing problems: 1) the disposal of Sweeney's leftovers (i.e., the bodies of his sacrifices); and 2) a shortage of meat for pie fillings. I mean, Mrs. Mooney's neighbors' cats have been disappearing and, "a pussy's good for only six or seven at the most." It's not just appallingly funny to us; they take perverse joy and delight in imagining their future crimes of feeding the aristocracy into the guts of beggars (to paraphrase Hamlet).
It's Swiftian: "Oh what's the sound of the world out there / Those crunching noises pervading the air? / I't's man devouring man, my dear." Moreover, it's political, a dimension entirely missing from this "Sweeney": "The history of the world, my sweet / Is who gets eaten and who gets to eat... / How gratifying for once to know / That those above will serve those down below!" (The stage show begins with a curtain image of "The British Beehive," an illustration of the class structure.)
"A Little Priest" is an exercise in seduction through imagination, but there's nothing ripe or risque (or risky) about Burton's sexless approach (elsewhere, the Beggar Woman's obscene come-ons have been clinically excised!), and he dumbs down the wit by having Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett literally gaze out the window to receive their ideas. Show us a clergyman, and somebody sings a line about the clergy. Thud. So much for wordplay.
Above all, the song is a waltz. It's (queasily) romantic! Coming after Sweeney's bloody breakdown (the appropriately titled "Epiphany"), we -- and Mrs. Lovett -- need to feel that Sweeney actually could be falling in love with her when he sings: "Mrs. Lovett, how I've lived / Without you all these years, I'll never know! / How delectable! / Also undetectable! / How choice! / How rare!" In the depths of his despair, she has taken the risk of suggesting something one step beyond his bloodiest revenge fantasies -- and makes him laugh, turning tragedy into farce. He greets the cannibalistic abomination as "a charming notion." And yet in Burton's film the music, the staging and the performances are humorless and inert. Sweeneys exclamations ("Oh!" "My dear!" "How choice!") are affectless, as flat and dry as Mrs. Lovett's pasty pies.
That's one approach to the character. But it's a small one. And that is a tragedy.
- - - -
¹ I saw "Sweeney Todd" at the Uris Theater on Broadway in early 1980 -- my first New York stage musical -- and was so blown away by its bloody grandeur, gutsy characterizations (Len Cariou, Angela Lansbury) and cutting socio-political comedy that no other musical stage production I've ever seen comes close. I'm not a big fan of musicals, but Sondheim and "Sweeney Todd" appeal to those who never got into the whole Broad-way, balcony-belting, Ethel-Merman style. No wonder it's said half the opening-night audience in 1979 walked out in disgust -- too rich for Broadway blood! I recommend the George Hearn/Angela Lansbury DVD of the stage show over the Burton movie -- not because one captures the stage show and the other is a movie, but because I find the interpretation of the material is much richer and stronger in the former. (BTW, I think Laurence Olivier's Oscar-winning film version of "Hamlet" is pretty thin and unsatisfying, too.)
² I'm no fan of Sam Mendes, a director attached to the project before Burton. But, hell, maybe he deserves a shot. What have we got to lose?
View image "There Will Be Blood" features a score that sounds like it could have been heard in the period, 1898 - 1927 (with the bulk of it taking place in 1911, the year Arnold Schoenberg published "Harmonielehre"). Some of it was composed in 2005-06 (Greenwood); some in 1878-79 (Brahms).
Jonny Greenwood's original score for "There Will Be Blood" has been ruled ineligible by the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. [...]
The disqualification has been attributed to a designation within Rule 16 of the Academy's Special Rules for Music Awards (5d under "Eligibility"), which excludes "scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music."
[Radiohead lead guitarist] Greenwood's score contains roughly 35 minutes of original recordings and roughly 46 minutes of pre-existing work (including selections from the works of Arvo Pärt, as well as pieces in the public domain, such as Johannes Brahms' "[Violin] Concerto in D Major"). Peripheral augmentation to the score included sporadic but minimal useage (15 minutes) of the artist's 2006 composition "Popcorn Superhet Receiver."
Given that "Popcorn," commissioned by the BBC in 2005 and previously performed in concert, broadcast, published, and made available on the Internet, is less than 20 minutes long, almost all of it (15 minutes) was evidently used in "There Will Be Blood." I wonder if this contributed to my impression (not as strong the second time I saw the movie), that pre-existing swatches of music had simply been laid on top of cut footage, regardless of what was onscreen. (The intrusive, dissonant score -- period-appropriate in its retro-modernism -- bleeds over adjoining and unrelated scenes without changing from one to the next.)
What's peculiar is that the Oscar nominations are due to be announced Tuesday the 22nd, and the Academy didn't announce it's disqualification ruling until Monday the 21st. So not only was it too late for the filmmakers to appeal, but members of the music branch who voted for Greenwood's score were unable to vote for something else instead.
The ruling is perfectly valid and consistent. The timing is inexcusable. AMPAS continues to screw up royally, even according to its own rules.
I'm a little confused about precisely where we stand at this very moment in the "Juno" backlash cycle, but I predict the anti-backlash backlash will begin any moment now if it hasn't already. The movie was warmly embraced at the Toronto International Film Festival (OK, the director is the son of the rich and famous Canadian director of "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters") and was greeted with predominantly positive reviews when it opened in December, although some critics, me included, thought it got off to a grating start. Roger Ebert even named it his favorite movie of 2007. My 16-year-old niece says it's her favorite film "ever."
Then came the inevitable backlash after the movie was no longer a "discovery": Why was this snarky teen comedy getting all this attention -- even Oscar buzz? (BTW, I've been doing occasional Google searches for "Juno"+"snark" since before the movie opened in December and the latest total is "about 26,500 results.") Arguments lit up all over the place. At Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Dennis Cozzalio chose it his worst film of the year. On rock critic Jim DeRogatis's Chicago Sun-Times blog, he accused the movie of "glib insincerity," suggested it could be seen as "anti-abortion and therefore anti-woman, despite its arch post-feminist veneer," and declared, "As an unapologetically old-school feminist, the father of a soon-to-be-teenage daughter, a reporter who regularly talks to actual teens as part of his beat and a plain old moviegoer, I hated, hated, hated this movie" ("Why 'Juno' is anti-rock," "More Juno Fallout," "And even a little bit more Juno").
Here at Scanners, we've been discussing whether the quip-laden language is too self-consciously "clever" for the teenage characters, after I expressed the opinion that the movie was eventually rescued by some perfectly pitched performances, if you could get past the cloying, "over-perky anachronistic pop-culture dialogue -- which is exactly what I've always disliked about "Pulp Fiction" (to cite the most obvious example)."
Q.I have been following the debate about the clever dialogue in "Juno" and there are two things I don't understand: (1) Why do people continue to expect every film they see to be a flawless reflection of reality when no film, not even a documentary, could ever accomplish such a feat? Isn’t one of the pleasures of going to the movies in seeing things we don’t usually see in the real world? (2) Why aren't more people refreshed that a film has gone against the grain by creating characters more intelligent than real people, as opposed to the Hollywood norm of creating characters who are considerably dumber and more shallow than real people?
(Adam Breckenridge, Edmond OK)
A. In other words, to quote Professor Higgins, why can't people be more like us? There's a sort of Mediocrity Enforcement Squad that slaps down anything with the effrontery to be different. [...]
In short: Movie characters don't talk like real people. If they did, they'd drive us nuts.
My problem with some of the dialogue in "Juno" (particularly in those irritating first 20 minutes or so) isn't that the characters don't sound like real teenagers (or drugstore clerks or parents), it's that the stylized, deliberately over-written speech sounds like belabored sitcom writing to me, not clever or funny but stiff and fussy, as if awaiting a laughtrack to punch it up.
OK, I have some reservations about "Juno." I don't buy, for example, that a girl as smart and beautiful as Juno wouldn't have more friends, or that the only two she would have would be a cheerleader and a guy on the school cross-country team whose members inexplicably don't wear jocks while running. And I wonder if she's really stupid enough to think her third over-the-counter pregnancy test in one day would require her to drink a whole gallon of Sunny D -- in which case, as one of DeRogatis's commenters pointed out, "A mild desire to urinate would be the least of your problems..." (A bottle of water? Two cups of naturally diuretic coffee? A wee spot of herbal tea, if caffeine is not your thing?) Turns out, Juno is not such an idiot, and "Juno" is not "Citizen Ruth 2," a scabrous satirical socio-political comedy. It's a more conventional, sentimental romantic comedy about a high school girl in trouble.
But I actually want to say something here in defense of "Juno" -- or, at least, in defense of J.K. Simmons, the splendid actor who plays Mac, Juno's dad. (Alison Janney, Michael Cera, Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner also deserve as much credit for the success of "Juno" as lead actress Ellen Page.)
In a New York Times Op-Ed piece earlier this week ("Sex and the Teenage Girl"), Caitlin Flanagan writes:
For the most part, the tone of the movie is comedic and jolly, but there is a moment when Juno tells her father about her condition [pregnancy], and he shakes his head in disappointment and says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.”
Female viewers flinch when he says it, because his words lay bare the bitterly unfair truth of sexuality: female desire can bring with it a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine, and so it is one appetite women and girls must always regard with caution. Because Juno let her guard down and had a single sexual experience with a sweet, well-intentioned boy, she alone is left with this ordeal of sorrow and public shame.
Yes, there's some truth there, and the movie is not unaware of it, but I also think it's a misreading of the scene she mentions, and the movie as a whole.
When Mac says that line about "the kind of girl who knew when to say when" -- not until near the end of the scene -- he's saying not so much what he really thinks (both he and Juno's stepmother Bren [Janney] are in shock, as they later discuss when they're alone) as something he feels he is obligated to say as a parent because, well, isn't that the kind of thing a father is supposed to say? It feels like an afterthought: "Oh, I should probably express my obligatory authority-figure scolding here, before I forget, lest anyone think I am implicitly condoning reckless sexual behavior."
Juno is expecting the adults to go through the roof with anger and outrage, but instead they take the news with sympathy, unexpected humor and equanimity. The whole tone of the scene deliberately plays against expectations, Juno's as much as the audience's. And her reply -- "I don't really know what kind of girl I am" -- is the first time we see her lower her snark-guard. In that moment she exhibits a potential for wisdom (and, with it, maybe even some form of human likeability) that we hadn't seen before, and that puts her father's hollow words to shame. For me, this was the first glimmer of hope that this Juno character might have the potential to become somebody worth watching for another hour or so.
Flanagan also doesn't seem to give the movie credit for not portraying Juno as a helpless victim. And Juno doesn't accept that role for herself, either. (Besides, nobody ever taunts or isolates her because she's showing, even at school, which she continues to attend. She isn't faced with "public shame," nor does she acknowledge any.) One of the things "Juno" gets absolutely right is that teenage girls (even more so than 20 or 30 years ago) are more sexually advanced, and in many cases more sexually aggressive, than teenage boys. (I'm speaking of biology here, not necessarily experience. In the movie, the strong implication is that both Juno and her best friend Paulie Bleeker [Cera] are virgins when they have sex "that one time.") At the end of the scene mentioned above, Mac shakes his head and jokes that he didn't think Paulie "had it in him." Bren immediately says, "You don't think it was his idea." Juno says the same thing to Paulie -- something like, "At least it wasn't your idea," as a mild slap in the face before riding off on her bike, leaving him standing in front of his parents' house, teary-eyed, bewildered and afraid, asking: "Who's idea was it?"
Strangely, and more than a little disconcertingly, "Juno" avoids the question of birth control almost entirely. All we know is that the idea of boysenberry flavored/scented condoms (or at least too much personal information about them shared by a women's clinic volunteer) seems to gross out Juno. She claims the sex with Paulie was "premeditated" on her part, at least since Spanish class last year. And you definitely get the impression that Paulie finished real fast, before either of them anticipated it (maybe one or the other thought pulling out was sufficient?), but "Juno" ventures no further into prophylactic territory.
Juno has the full support of her family, her cheerleader friend, the baby's potential adoptive parents -- and Paulie, if she'd allow him more of a role in her life. This is another of the movie's more perceptive observations (and one it shares with "Knocked Up"): In the United States today, unplanned pregnancy is no longer considered "a woman's problem" -- but how to handle it is absolutely a woman's decision. Men do not have an equal say in the matter because men don't get pregnant, and women have the moral and ethical right to choose what to do with their own bodies. Men, who share the responsibility but not the same biological consequences, are expected to stand by whatever decision the woman makes, without asserting undue pressure or influence.
This is the way "Juno" frames its title character's pregnancy, but the movie's central dilemma is the obvious fact that Juno is a girl, not a woman, and Paulie is a boy, not a man. Both try to act cool, mature beyond their years, because they don't know how else to behave. An inexperienced kid in an "adult" situation will often attempt to act like (his/her idea of) an adult, and feign an adult understanding, even when he/she has no way of understanding what that is. Trying to take responsibility for what she sees as her idea to try sex (although she knows Paulie wanted it at least as much as she did, and maybe that's one reason she made it happen to begin with), she pushes him away more forcefully than she realizes. Trying to give her the "space" she needs, he seems more distanced and standoffish than he wants to be. For these two, their first steps toward "growing up" will largely become a matter of recognizing and accepting the fact that they're still kids.
"Juno" is a romantic teen fairy tale that offers the illusion, at least, of a return to innocence after the fall. It's a "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?" fantasy -- look at that idyllic last shot, it has lupines! -- that some find endearing and others appalling. I appreciate both perspectives. (Is it inconsistent of me to see the fairy-tale "Life Is Beautiful" as an unconscionable act of Holocaust denial committed by a deluded parent in the name of maintaining his -- and the audience's -- illusion of his child's "innocence" at the expense of, say, the kid's ability to survive? I don't know.)
Before all the hype, I thought of Diablo Cody's screenplay as a first-timer's modest but strained effort -- something the actors, the director, and the movie itself had to build upon, but also to overcome, even to work as a teen-sex genre comedy. And it's not easy to overcome a line like "Silencio, Old Man! Look, I just drank my weight in Sunny D and I gotta go pronto!" (Then again, if "American Pie," something I suffered all the way through, is considered a mild critical success, a popular hit, and a kind of genre milestone, I'll be grateful for the occasional "Juno." And even more so for "Superbad," which strikes me as a more subtle, smart and funny movie, mainly because its teen-vulgar humor depends so much on the personalities and insecurities of its characters rather than on their quips. The funniest lines don't assert themselves as overtly "clever" on the page, and don't nag you with a "Listen to me!" undertone when they're delivered on screen.)
Perhaps we can never return to that pre-Toronto moment when "Juno" was a no-name comedy starring some good actors, most of whom were best-known for their work on no-longer-extant TV shows. But wouldn't it be pretty to think so?
I almost forgot, but I would like to thank the Writers Guild of America for the best Golden Globes ever. I didn't watch the press conference, but I heard there were some awards and that maybe some people who could afford it had some parties somewhere, even at their own homes. Perfect!
I was reminded of this by an article in today's New York Times about the Grammy Awards headlined "Music World Braces for a Low-Wattage Grammy Night." This caught my attention because it seems odd that so much bracing would be necessary for so little wattage. High wattage, maybe. Considerable bracing might be in line if you were preparing to stick your wet fingers in a light socket. But low wattage? Like the little electrostatic shock you get when you pet a cat and then touch a doorknob? Not really worth a significant brace.
Anyway, the article says:
As the Writers Guild maintained on Monday that it was unlikely to grant a request from Grammy producers for an interim agreement that would allow writers and other unionized Hollywood personnel to take part in the show, talent managers, label executives and even record shops worried over prospects of a gala drained of major stars, particularly musicians who are also members of the Screen Actors Guild, which has lined up with the writers.
Lackluster turnout by the stars, executives say, could embarrass the industry and waste a much-needed opportunity to publicize artists and gin up sales. (Even if there’s an agreement, one much-nominated star, the British soul singer Amy Winehouse, might not appear because of visa troubles.)
First, I liked how they worked that Amy Winehouse parenthetical in there, but I wish they'd mentioned some other stars who might not be there because, say, they're in rehab or jail or under house arrest. Or just too high to call a cab.
I also really like the phrase "a gala drained of major stars," which I hope can be reused many times in the coming weeks. Especially if my fellow writers consider my proposal: Instead of negotiating with the Grammys (Grammies?) and the Oscars about strike exemption agreements, how about -- even once the whole digital media residuals thing is settled -- agreeing to a different kind of exemption, like not writing for any awards shows? Just try it and see what it's like. It might even restore some small lustre, or at least lend an illusion of integrity, to the honors themselves.
Also this week: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences "Phase I committee" announced its "shortlist" for the 2007 Foreign Language Film category. Among the 63 films under consideration, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" and "Persepolis," despite the international acclaim they've received in Cannes and elsewhere, were not among the "top nine" picked for a possible Oscar nomination.
Perhaps the members of the Academy's elite selection committee were really trying to focus attention on other, lesser-known films that had not already received awards recognition or publicity.
WARNING: Adolf Hitler uses objectionable language, above.
This YouTube clip puts the whole HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray thing in perspective, all right. From press reports you may have gathered that the competition for an HD standard on little plastic discs (remember CDs? CD-ROMs? DVDs?) was a fight to determine the future. It still seems to me -- and most consumers, apparently -- that it's a case of refighting the last war. Or several wars before that.
As of last fall, somewhere between 13.7% (Nielsen) and 36% (Consumer Electronics Association) of American households were estimated to have "tuners capable of receiving HDTV signals" -- and somewhere between 40%-60% of those are "still being fed exclusively with standard-definition content" (from the trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable, October 30, 2007).
The revised deadline for switching all over-air television broadcasting from analog to digital is February 17, 2009 (it had originally been in 2006). But that's not HDTV, it's just a digital signal. It doesn't apply to cable (although many cable systems are now all-digital, as are satellite services like DirecTV and DishNetwork). All TVs sold since March, 2007, have to be digital-capable, and older TVs can be upgraded with the addition of an add-on digital tuner.
According to Nielsen, DVD players, which were introduced 11 years ago (1997), finally surpassed VHS players in US households... a little over one year ago, in the third quarter of 2006. And DVD (its path to acceptance having been prepared for by CDs) is one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history.
So, how compelling is the incentive for upgrading to a high-definition DVD technology, requiring new players (or player-recorders) and new discs? Most consumers can't get the benefits of it yet, and most people with HD televisions (especially the majority with sets less than 50 inches wide -- 42-inch models being the most popular) don't think the quality improvements between standard DVD and HD-DVD or Blu-Ray are all that significant, especially if they already use regular players that upconvert to 720 or 1080 resolutions (though not to true HD).
By the time high-definition television (even at the current standards) is widely accepted, will we still be relying on plastic discs -- that have to be physically transported, whether bought or borrowed -- to deliver the "content"? How sad if that proved to be the case.
Meanwhile, congratulations Blu-Ray. Perhaps you are not the Betamax of 2008. But you are the CD-ROM of tomorrow.
(tip: Jeff Shannon) (thanks to Kristin Thompson for the new link!)
View image Cap'n Dusty Cohl aboard his Floating Film Festival in 2002: Larger than life, then as now. (photo by jim emerson)
Dusty Cohl was a tall man and an even taller character. Larger than life? Absolutely. And he made my life feel larger just knowing him.
Ten years ago, in February of 1998, I first met Dusty aboard his Floating Film Festival. An invitation had been extended to me via Roger Ebert to join the FFF as one of its critic-programmers. (I had the honor of presenting the world premiere of my best friend Julia Sweeney's "God Said 'Ha!'" that year, and will present her latest film monologue, "Letting Go of God," aboard the FFF next month.) I didn't quite know it at the time, but legend has it that Dusty and his wife Joan -- who met most of the programmers (Roger, Richard and Mary Corliss, Kathleen Carroll) at the Cannes Film Festival in the 1970s -- started the FFF after Cannes, and later the Toronto International Film Festival (which Dusty co-founded), got too big and too busy for them to see all their friends, including their fellow Torontonians George and Gail Anthony, Barry Avrich, Bill Ballard and so many others. The Floater was Dusty's way of bringing them all together. On a boat. With movies. And food. And sun. And booze. And cigars. It was and always will be known as Dusty's party.
View image Haskell Wexler photographs Dusty Cohl on the 2002 Floater. (photo by jim emerson)
My first year, I had just turned 40 and immediately became known to Dusty as "Kid." I called him "Cap'n" forever afterwards. But as welcome and accepted as he and Joan made me feel from the get-go, I guess I found his outsized persona somewhat overwhelming or intimidating: I always seemed to be doing something exceptionally awkward (even for me) around him, like walking into walls or getting lost or sticking my foot in my mouth. Many people thought of him as a big kid, but to me he would always be a Big Kid.
Everybody wanted to please Dusty. His approval could light you up inside. My fellow FFF programmers and I noticed that Dusty's smooth and potent blend (as in Crown Royal, the blended Canadian whiskey that was his favorite only drink) of brusqueness and warmth was perfectly expressed in the term he always used with us when signing off a communication -- whether an e-mail or a phone call: "Lovesya."
So long, Cap'n.
Lovesya.
(Please see Roger Ebert's personal memories of Dusty -- and more photos -- here.)
View image The funniest scene in the funniest movie of the year. I think.
Instead of a "ten best list," Armond White makes an annual "Better Than List" which, in principle, I'm all against -- simply because of the formula: He uses a few adjectives and a "greater than" symbol to bash selected movie titles with selected other ones, like Daniel Plainview bludgeoning someone with a heavy object.
Then again, any "ten best list" (or "top ten list" or "favorites list") represents a preference for some movies over some other movies, seen by somebody under certain circumstances during a period of time. And, to not-quite-paraphrase Jean Renoir, "Everybody makes his own rules."
So, perhaps White is really just doing what (I hope) any list-maker does: Making a claim for his/her own critical taste and values, while recommending some movies. That he assumes the attitude of a bully over the approach of a critic or movie lover is, perhaps, not so important. (Quote: "'No Country for Old Men' > better than 'There Will Be Blood,' 'Zodiac.' The Coen brothers hauntingly mythologize Americana, while P.T. Anderson and David Fincher make it morbid, sadistic and self-congratulatory." Is there an inverse relationship between "morbid, sadistic and self-congratulatory" and "hauntingly mythological" -- Americana-wise, I mean?)
But look: Now I'm using other top ten lists to bash White's. Is there no getting around this? I fell ill (think of the scene with the old lady on the street in "The Orphanage") just as I was about to annotate my own 2007 list, after submitting various rankings to critics' polls at MSN Movies, indieWIRE and the Village Voice/LA Weekly poll, each of which had slightly different rules, categories and deadlines. (Then I posted a list in video form in late December). Consequently, I missed reading a lot of other peoples' lists (though The House Next Door and David Hudson at GreenCine, and the folks at Movie City News have put together invaluable lists of lists -- and/or lists of links -- that have helped me in my efforts to catch up, because, as I am fond of repeating, I actually learn from browsing these things).
Now, just to wrap up this whole 2007 wrap-up thing, I'm going to recommend some movies and (in munchable blurbs of 150 words or less -- I hope) give you some idea of what I liked about them, without the intention of over-selling them. If I've written more extensively about them, I'll link their titles to a more detailed review or posting.
Two more things before I get started:
* I read a lot of online writing every day (including print publications I wouldn't otherwise see), but I want to mention five blogs to which I am utterly faithful, even though only one of them is updated every day. (Which reminds me: I really need to update my blogroll. There's more good stuff out there than I can possibly even remember, much less keep up with.) Even if I unaccountably forget to visit for a few days, I always catch up with these eventually. Listed alphabetically by URL:
* I neither pretend to have seen, nor feel particularly guilty about not seeing, every movie somebody may consider worthy of consideration (or necessary for disqualification) during the calendar year before I made this list. I don't know how many movies I saw in 2007, or even how many I wrote about. (I've never kept track of numbers like that.) But even the most "comprehensive" accounting is inevitably going to boil down to: Movies I Saw That I Preferred Over Other Movies I Saw But Not Necessarily Over Ones I Didn't See -- Which You May Or May Not Have Seen, Too. And, as "Army of Shadows" and "Killer of Sheep" have shown, it may take another 30 or 40 years to catch up with some of the best movies of 2007.
List of Abstract Semi-Autobiographical Sales-Pitch Blurbs (2007):
10. "Helvetica." All the arguments we have about movies, all the enthusiasms and tastes and dislikes and metaphors, are here in this movie about a ubiquitous typeface. It's around you all the time (with hundreds and thousands of other fonts). You have only to see it, to pay attention to how it figures into your world. I appreciate all the conflicting points of view -- that Helvetica is a form of perfection, overused, corporate, infinitely flexible, idealized, neutral, clean, capitalist, socialist. They're all true, they're all inadequate, but the people in this movie care deeply, and try passionately to articulate why. It's a movie about finding meaning. That's all.
9. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." Coming out of this movie, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd been somewhere as tangible as anyplace in memory or geography, even if it doesn't exist outside of the picture itself. The look (much of it as if through an old, wavy beveled window) and the narration place it in the past tense, but I didn't feel that we were looking back at these legendary outlaws through the lens of history, or the sensibility of a nickel book. More like the film itself embodied a ghost, wandering through these landscapes and these rooms where these events happened once upon a time... and are re-enacted again and again for all eternity -- perhaps with slight variations as each of the performers adapts, to wearies of, or chafes against, the role he's stuck in. We watch silently as each self-conscious character imagines himself in other roles, other scenes, that he imagines himself playing better than the one he's in...
8. "The Orphanage." Death is not an abstraction in "The Orphanage." The reason the movie works so well as a horror movie is that it's purely subjective. It's about the experience of this woma
