January 2008 Archives

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.

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":

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.

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].

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.)

* * * *

NOTE: Spoilers lurk sinisterly below.

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.

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.

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....

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....

... 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:

"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....

From Daily Variety (1/21/08):

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").

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.

That must be it.

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!)

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.

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.)

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).

Oh, yes, and I also posted the 2007 Exploding Head Awards as a kind of top-ten alternative. (Let me add that I have enjoyed no 2007 overview more than Dennis Cozzalio's at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.)

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.

In celebration of the DVD release of David Fincher's Director's Cut of "Zodiac" (only a few minutes longer -- I'm not sure what has been changed or added see below), here's a scripted scene, from an undated draft, that you won't find in any version of the movie:

INT. MOVIE THEATER -- NIGHT

Graysmith and Toschi sit in the dark while "Dirty Harry" unspools on the screen in front of them.

MOVIE POLICE CAPTAIN (O.S.)
He calls himself the Scorpio Killer. From what we understand, he's planning on targeting a school bus full of children.

CLINT EASTWOOD (O.S.)

That's not gonna happen.

THE AUDIENCE around Graysmith and Toschi burst into APPLAUSE.

ON SCREEN -- The final scene. Clint has cornered the SCORPIO KILLER. Holding his Magnum .44 on him.

CLINT EASTWOOD (CONT'D)
... maybe I fired five bullets, maybe I fired six. In all the confusion, I lost count. So the only question is, do you feel lucky? Do you? Punk?

A beat. Apparently the Scorpio Killer feels lucky and goes for his gun. Clint blows his head off.

People cheer again. Graysmith and Toschi exchange a look...

And then BURST OUT HYSTERICALLY LAUGHING. At the absurdity of it all. They get some looks, but that only makes them laugh harder. They can't stop. Doubled over. Tears run down their faces. A release of all the built up tension...

What a beautiful, ambiguous scene. I wonder if they could have made it work on film without having to spell it out.

In "Zodiac" itself, Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) goes into the lobby for a smoke, and Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) approaches him for the first time. He shyly introduces himself and, awkwardly, tells Toschi how the movie ended. Toschi makes a defensive remark along the lines of, "So much for due process..." The movie (like "No Country for Old Men") never allows its characters or its audience even a vicarious catharsis. It's all about not knowing -- and having to live with the knowledge of not knowing...

UPDATE: 1 Day Later: January 9, 2008: Please see Zac's comment below for exact notations on the differences between the theatrical and director's cuts of "Zodiac." (I cannot imagine a more fitting response to the movie than this kind of detective work!)

Also: In Fincher's commentary on his movie's "Dirty Harry" scene, he says that Toschi (on whom Steve McQueen modeled his performance in 1968's "Bullitt") was "amused" at the Hollywood take on Zodiac, and that people began to say things to him like, "Guess Dirty Harry solved your case!" Fincher suggests maybe the Eastwood movie provided a kind of artificial closure for the public that they would never get in life, and that perhaps they began to lose interest in Zodiac afterwards because of it. (Four "Dirty Harry" sequels were released between 1973 ("Magnum Force"] and 1988 ["The Dead Pool"].) Fincher recalls that, as he and his family were moving away from the Marin area in 1976 (when he was about 13 or 14), he wondered if they'd ever caught the Zodiac.

As Mr. Peel observes below, Eastwood's voice and likeness are conspicuously absent from "Zodiac." Even a shot of the standee in the lobby is chopped at the neck.

A dog bounding into a river in "No Country for Old Men." Bob Dylan's harmonica wail in the last shot of "I'm Not There." A traveling shot down a suburban street in Vallejo, CA, from the window of a car on July 4, 1969, in "Zodiac." These were among the moments that brought me unexpected waves of euphoria in 2007 -- and, as you can see, they don't necessarily have anything to do with "content." One is shocking and suspenseful (like Hitchcock's famous illustrations of the sudden explosion versus the ticking time bomb, both condensed into a few electrifying seconds). Another is ineffably mournful and joyful at once, like the sound of a whistling freight train that it purposefully invokes. Another is kinetically exciting to watch, but with a poignant, semi-nostalgic mixture of order and chaos that suggests both innocence and ominousness (accompanied by Three Dog Night on the radio singing their hit single, "Easy to Be Hard," from the tribal Aquarian love-rock musical "Hair": "How can people be so heartless / How can people be so cruel?").

And then there's Mike Parker in Gary Hustwit's "Helvetica." He's sitting in a brick room, next to a window with venetian blinds, in medium close-up, talking to the camera, or someone just next to it. And what emerges is joy, from the soul of an artist. In this clip, he speaks for about 51 seconds. Watch his eyes sparkle as he describes the figure-ground relationship in Helvetica, where the air around a character holds it, so that it lives in "a powerful matrix of surrounding space." (It occurs to me he could be talking about the use of frame space in a Fritz Lang or Stanley Kubrick movie -- in contrast to, say, a Howard Hawks or Robert Altman movie.) Every time I see it, I can feel my eyes widen and the edges of my mouth curl up like the title character at the end of Chuck Jones' "Grinch" cartoon. Euphoria.

All four of the movies mentioned in this post leave me feeling that my relationship with the world around me has been sharpened, re-tuned, re-invigorated. That feeling doesn't hit me all that often, but when it does, I hold onto it for dear life.

(Footnote: I doubt that Mike Parker, despite his successful career in typography, would describe himself as an "artist." But if we accepted as artists only those -- or all those -- who chose to identify themselves as such, we'd be a lot poorer.)

Dear David Fincher:

Just a note to say how much I appreciate your film "Zodiac" -- especially its use of 1960s and 1970s analog technologies and strategies. Cryptograms, city grids, travel distances, postmarks, calendars, trailer stall numbers, gun calibers, meal schedules, geographical jurisdictions, faxes, date books, phone numbers, addresses... well, I've expressed my admiration of how your film works and plays with these signs (no, I'm not a semiotician) before, and Manohla Dargis does a fine job of it in today's New York Times, too. (I particularly like her observation that: "'Zodiac' is about thinking, it’s about working things through intellectually, hazarding guesses, trying to solve puzzles (the killer largely communicates through ciphers) and about the dawning of awareness, which encapsulates the experience of watching it." That's one way I like to describe a good movie: It not only teaches you how to watch it, but becomes about the experience you have as you watch it.)

In a movie about obsessive detail, and the life-or-death importance placed upon even the tiniest, one little thing has stood out to me from my first viewing as being slightly... askew. Prominently displayed by the desk of San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) is a campaign button for Richard Nixon. The problem is that this button reads: NIXON. It has always struck me that Avery would have done what so many of us did at that time, which is to flip the button (or bumper-sticker or whatever) upside-down so that it read NOXIN -- a simple visual gag that's also a kind of cryptogram, and maybe a malformed counter-cultural pun (NIXON = TOXIN). We found it amusing that the monolithic GOP (or the RNC or CREEP or the FBI or some other Republican Establishment entity) had unwittingly, through the use of simple block letters, made it so easy to turn their message on its head. Mild subversive gestures were rarely so delightfully effortless. Best of all: 100% analog!

Anyway, I hope you have already made this little adjustment in your Director's Cut of "Zodiac," which I am about to watch. Just in case, I've taken the liberty of making a slight freehand PhotoShop tweak to the still, above.

Many thanks again,

jim

"I am not interested in writing about music as a horse race with Beethoven or Charlie Parker out in front."
-- Alex Ross, December 2004

I've just finished reading New Yorker music critic's Alex Ross's mind-bogglingly ambitious critical history of modern "classical" music, "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century." It's 1) a biting, passionate, ironical survey of political, religious and aesthetic fashions and dogmas (from Richard Strauss to Stalin to Boulez); 2) a serial biography, and 3) an illuminating analysis of individual compositions and musical influences. And I'm absolutely dazzled by it. With incisive humor, Ross chronicles various circular debates (historical, personal, nationalistic, musical) concerning whether, at one time or another, a particular work or a composer or a clique was, let's see, too elitist, too commercial, too bourgeois, too fussy, too fascist, too socialist, too florid, too ascetic, too anal, too free, too beholden to state or other interests, too abstruse, too grandiose, too formal, too casual, too programmatic, too old-fashioned, too melodic, too atonal, etc., etc., etc.

And this was just over last century, when, say, Stravinsky and Shostakovich were hailed and condemned as all of the above -- respectively, sequentially, cyclically, and/or simultaneously.

I came across some inspiring remarks Ross made at a 2004 symposium called "Shifting Ears: A Symposium on the Present State and Future of Classical Music Criticism" (see John Fleming's article in the St. Petersburg Times here). People tend to think of modern classical music as a rarified, elitist realm and movies as a popular industry/art form. But the perceptions are relative: There are big marquee names, big studios (labels, distributors), and major league international venues/festivals in classical music just as there are in movies. And there are academic, niche, or "experimental" circles in both worlds. Ross and John Davidson of Newsday proposed some ways of approaching music that, I think, work just as well for movies. Among Ross's estimable propositions:

# "We're all fighters in a strange guerrilla war in which the object is not to defeat an enemy but to win a place at the table. This doesn't mean you give up objectivity and become a PR agent for the business. It means, instead, that you write with more urgency, more immediacy. The writing itself becomes crucial. Language is our secret weapon."

# "Classical music has an actual audience and a potential audience. I try to write with both fanatical and unconverted readers in mind. The trick is in finding a language that intrigues both."

# "Nothing is more off-putting than the critic who puts down one kind of music in order to praise another. There is no need to mention Britney Spears until such time as Ms. Spears writes her first piano quintet." [This reminds me of Robert Altman's late-life conviction that he and the studios who once hired him were no longer in the same business, and that neither was interested in making the kinds of movies the other was interested in.]

# "If the big orchestra is playing the same repertory ad nauseam, I don't have to complain ad nauseam. Instead, I can seek out youth orchestras, new-music ensembles, chamber groups playing in inner-city schools. Critics can take the lead..."

# "There is nothing shameful in unchecked enthusiasm. If I walk out dancing on air, I say it in the review, even if my colleagues smirk."

"The Rest is Noise," without necessarily intending to do anything so specific, also provides a welcome perspective on year-end critical/historical summaries, polls, and the illusions of meaning we sometimes try to impose upon them, without much real evidence beyond our own hunches. (That -- and not commonplace snarkiness (!) -- is what I was attempting to convey with my loopy, switchback sentences in the post below, about the results of the Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll. What direct cause-effect meanings can be teased out of any snapshot consensus, whether it's a popular election or a secret ballot by committee?)

Ross has posted a paragraph from Marcel Proust on his blog ("The man who saw everything") that I'm tempted to quote in full because it's so hilarious in this regard. Instead, I'll just quote most of it. Ross introduces it as a comment "on the politics of style in twentieth-century music [and] the limits of a teleological interpretation of music history" -- but, you know, it could just as well be about movies:

"There Will Be Consensus": That was the headline for the intro by Village Voice film critic (and self-described "lapsed structuralist") J. Hoberman, accompanying the results of the annual film critics' poll co-sponsored by the Village Voice and the L.A. Weekly, which are both published by Village Voice Media (along with the SF Weekly, Seattle Weekly, Kansas City Pitch, Nashville Scene, Cleveland Scene, Dallas Observer, Miami New Times, Phoenix New Times, Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, and several more). Unless you read the same piece by Hoberman in the LA Weekly, in which case the headline was "If It Bleeds, It Leads." I don't know what the headline was in those other weeklies, but you can look it up if you like.

Here, then, is the bleeding consensus, which is, as you might expect, practically everything you would expect in a consensus -- which is to say hardly anything that you would not expect. (Like Iowa.)

1. "There Will Be Blood" (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)
2. "No Country for Old Men" (Joel & Ethan Coen, USA)
3. "Zodiac" (David Fincher, USA)
4. "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)
5. "I'm Not There" (Todd Haynes, USA)
6. "Syndromes and a Century" (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Austria)
7. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (Julian Schnabel, France/USA)
8. "Killer of Sheep" (Charles Burnett, USA, 1977)
9. "Ratatouille" (Brad Bird, USA)
10. "Colossal Youth" (Pedro Costa, Portugal/France/Switzerland)

No surprises there -- at least not if you've been paying any attention to mainstream movie reviews coming out of New York, Los Angeles or the major international film festival circuit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto -- the launching pads for most of the above) in both 2006 and 2007. Compare to the indieWIRE poll results, which are almost identical -- with late-December opener "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" at #13 (IW) instead of #7 (VV/LA); "Assassination of Jesse James" at #7 (IW) instead of #12 (VV/LA); and -- the most dramatic difference! -- "Ratatouille" at #20 (IW) instead of #9 (VV/LA).

I wonder: Were it not for DVDs -- especially DVD critics' screeners -- and, to a lesser extent, On Demand distribution channels like HDNet and IFC First Take, how many of these films would have had the chance to become critical favorites outside of New York (and maybe LA) by the end of 2007? What are the odds that films that never even played theatrically in more than one or two American towns ("Syndromes and a Century," "Colossal Youth"), or that don't open in more than a few until 2008 ("There Will Be Blood," "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") would have placed so strongly in national critics' polls with mid-December deadlines? I think I'm impressed... unless, wait a minute, the success of such films is actually further evidence of insular critical hype and inbred groupthink. But why choose to think of it in that way?

From this link you can see all the vote-getters by category (feature films, performances, documentaries, first films, undistributed films, worst film), or look at the individual contributors' ballots here. Including mine, although I immediately regretted impulsively citing "Southland Tales" as the "worst" movie I saw in 2007 and still do. I'd much rather make a case against the bloodless literalism of "Sweeney Todd" (musically, sexually and politically neutered) or "Youth Without Youth" or "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." But let's keep things in perspective. None of those movies expressed a cinematic worldview quite as reductive as those reviews of "No Country for Old Men" that invoked this year's most hackneyed substitute for criticism, summarized in this clip from Hoberman's intro:

In formal terms, the Coen brothers' latest pinball machine is obviously superior to 90 percent of the year's releases. But it's also a soulless enterprise, with nothing more on its mind than the expert manipulation of the spectator, critics included.

The Voice didn't run a Hoberman review of "No Country for Old Men" (it reprinted Scott Foundas's admiring piece from the LA Weekly), so we may never know more precisely what Hoberman thinks he is "obviously" saying about the movie, or the movies, or himself. (Some of my responses to similar autonomic spasms can be found here and elsewhere. In what language can something that is "obviously superior to 90 percent" of movie recent releases "in formal terms" be considered the equivalent of a "pinball machine" -- one that manipulates instead of being manipulated? What is the nature or significance of such "formal" superiority if we're drawing comparisons between movies and pinball machines? Is a wristwatch formally superior to a Mondrian? Which one? Why? The answer, obviously, is Salvador Dali's 1937 movie script for the Marx Brothers, "Giraffes on Horseback Salad.")

Hoberman offers the opinion that "NCFOM" might well be his choice for the year's "Most Overrated" picture if there were such a category as that. And in his next paragraph he announces he's pleased that the strenuously over-praised and over-maligned "Southland Tales" tied with the comparably ambitious and significant "The Bucket List" for the year's Worst Film -- though each really only received five votes -- just ahead of "300" and "Hostel: Part II" with four each, and "Juno," "Margot at the Wedding," "Redacted" and "Trade" with three):

You know something's happening when "Southland Tales" also headed three critics' lists as the year's Best Film [Melissa Anderson, Bill Krohn, Nathan Lee]. Time constraints have made it impossible to calculate the 2007 poll's Passiondex— my formula to measure the degree of ardor with which critics voted for particular movies—but my heart tells me that "Southland Tales" is the obvious winner. Here is a movie that some people love and others love to hate. That's double passion! And that's good.

Yes, doubleplusgood passion. Something must be happening. Hoberman predicts that Pedro Costa's "Colossal Youth" (#10) might have been the year's choice for Worst Film "had more critics seen it" ... although, in fact, nobody did vote for it in that category, including critics who had seen it. This makes me wonder if, perhaps, there might have been any other films this year that some critics loved and others just hated... Nah.

I recently participated in a telephone discussion about "No Country For Old Men," moderated by Elvis Mitchell, with Glenn Kenny (whose "A Ghost And A Dream: Notes on the final quarter of 'No Country for Old Men'" is essential stuff -- and the place from which I stole this key image from the movie, too), Jen Yamato from RottenTomatoes.com and Harry Knowles from "Ain't-It-Cool-News." The conversation lasted more than an hour and I enjoyed hearing everybody's takes on the movie. It's now available online as an "exclusive podcast" (in edited form, I assume) on the official "NCFOM" web site: here.

1) "My brain hurts."

2) "I'm feeling much better."