View image Richard Widmark, straight shooter.

You may have heard some version of this story about Richard Widmark, who died last week at age 93. I was there, at the Telluride Film Festival in 1983 when it happened, in the Sheridan Opera House for the tributes to Andrei Tarkovsky and Widmark. Emotions were heightened, perhaps, not only by the thin mountain atmosphere, but but by a terrifying Cold War showdown between Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union and Ronald Reagan's USA (I don't know which scared me more at the time) over the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which we didn't learn about until we got to Telluride. Things were chilly up there.

The emotions associated with my memories are indelible, even if their precision has faded. But the gist of what Richard Widmark said that weekend, and the eloquence with which he said it, will always stay with me. Shortly after Widmark's death, I contacted Gary Meyer, director of the Telluride Film Festival (whom I'd known as co-founder of Landmark Theatres), to see if Widmark's tribute speech was transcribed anywhere, because I would love to reprint it. Those were relatively early days for the Telluride festival (which began in 1974 and seemed much more remote than it is now) and Gary couldn't find any record of the speech, which I remember Widmark reading from notes he produced from his jacket pocket. But he did find some 1983 press coverage, from which I have pieced together the following "story."

(Thank you again, Gary!)

First, Telluride, Tarkovsky and 1983 must set the scene for Widmark's entrance:

The Russian Tarkovsky ("Andrei Rublev," "Solaris," "Stalker") and Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi ("Camouflage," "The Constant Factor," "The Balance") had driven to Telluride through Monument Valley -- which provided the source of an idea, and a stunning image, that Zanussi would use in his next masterpiece, "A Year of the Quiet Sun" (winner of the Golden Lion at the 1984 Venice Film Festival). The multi-lingual Zanussi -- mentor to Krzysztof Kieslowski ("The Double Life of Veronique," the "Three Colors" trilogy) who would later become more much more famous -- seemed to be translating for everyone that year, including Tarkovsky.

Joan Juliet Buck, Vanity Fair, December, 1983:

For the past ten years the extremely small (population 1,100 Colorado town of Telluride has been dedicated to the proposition that there is more to films than glamour. The festival is high-minded and obscure. European directors know about it because many of them have been honored here before they were heard of in the rest of America. It is familiar to the American avant-garde: abstract filmmaker Stan Brakhage and documentary filmmaker Les Blank are recurrent visitors with the status of mascots. [...]

View image Inside the Sheridan Opera House

Sheila Benson, The Los Angeles Times, September, 1983:

The Korean jetliner incident had just occurred, throwing everything into a peculiar bas relief. There was the town's remoteness, a dot on the map surrounded by the towering San Juan mountains in southwest Colorado, and there was at the same time the presence of an extremely international community: film makers from Poland, the Soviet Union, West Germany, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Mexico, Hungary, France, Italy and Sweden.

It gave the town a second dimension, one in which international politics were never absent. And at the gilt and velvet Sheridan Opera House, films were passionately championed, denounced, booed and walked-out upon. It seemed that everyone with a deeply held artistic or political point of view managed to air it, frequently from the Opera House stage.

The result was the scrappiest, most polarized festival since they mounted a tribute to Leni Riefenstahl 10 years ago -- and the most extraordinary.

Buck, Vanity Fair:

Tarkovsky was talking in Italian about his drive through the Southwest: "Monument Valley: It's not American. It's another world, not the material one. It wasn't put there so westerns could be shot, but as a place to meditate. The Indians were right to pray there and look for God."

The Festival crowd was hungry... for meaning -- itchy for big answers to the big questions. [...]

That night was the tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky. The Sheridan Opera House was full, little pink lights aglow on its balconies. Zanussi and Tarkovsky stood in front of the stage curtain, which depicts a Swiss-Venetian fantasy with swans. Tarkovsky's speech, translated by Zanussi, sounded like a call to throw the money changers out of the bank.

View image Widmark, Stewart (Telluride tributee the previous year), Ford: "Two Rode Together."

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News, September 11, 1983:

"The birth of cinema was sinful and took place in the marketplace," said Tarkovsky, whose films have won no popularity contests in the Soviet Union. "Cinema was born to earn money. No other discipline of art was born for this purpose. Up until now, whoever made films must face the fact of this birth.

"Cinema is not an entertainment; it is a high poetical discipline of art. As Goethe said, 'It is equally difficult to read a good book as to write a good book....' If I ever make a film that would please everybody, I would feel I had done something wrong. My intuition tells me that the audience is in a very critical moment now, that they are willing to find in cinema something different -- not an entertainment but something deeper and more substantial."

William K. Everson, Daily Variety:

There is no question that in some ways Tarkovsky is entitled to be ranked as a contemporary Eisenstein, but alas, the man was somewhat less impressive than his films.

In a very pretentious address, he underlined old artistic cliches. The cinema, he said, was not and should not be an entertainment, only an art. He went on to say that his new film ["Nostalghia"] did not contain a single frame of "entertainment," but was purely art, and anybody who just wanted to be entertained should leave.

Benson, LA Times:

"For years the spectator demanded from us films that entertained. Now that spectator is bored and abandons theaters" [said Tarkovsky]. "... I am not like a $100 bill which pleases everybody. But just the experience of such a festival as this brings hope to my life.... My intuition tells me that masses of spectators are at a critical moment now, willing to find something far deeper and more substantial that will refer to their lives.

"You may say that I'm an idealist. I am an optimist and this festival supports my great hope."

View image Telluride, CO.

Everson, Variety:

The audience, much impressed by his work, and to a degree sympathetic to him as a person (his personal and public problems in Russia are well known and ongoing) applauded and there were no signs of dissent at his comments, but it was more a matter of politeness -- and of assuming that possibly his zeal did not translate well.

Buck, Vanity Fair:

"Nostalghia" is a slow film. A Russian writer in Italy yearns for home and dreams of his dacha, refuses the advances of a beautiful Italian interpreter, while Italians bathe in the steamy waters that fill what looks like a cloister garden, a madman sets himself on fire astride Marcus Aurelius's statue in the Campidoglio while more mad people look on, and the writer at last attempts to cross the captive water holding a lit candle, and dies. The image of the dacha returns, and is ringed at the end by the walls of a ruined church.

People lied a lot about this one.

Everson, Variety:

However, there were balancing repercussions the next day, the kind of non-passive response that has always made Telluride lively.

Richard Widmark, at his tribute, seemed relatively restrained. He is a shy and self-effacing person, an facing a large crowd obviously made him uncomfortable. But after the expected pleasantries, he suddenly turned passionate...

Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News:

Widmark's long career began in 1947 with "Kiss of Death," in which he played Tommy Udo, a sadist who pushed a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. And giggled. [Widmark received an Oscar nomination for the role.] After an especially entertaining selection of clips, Widmark took to the stage, where he thanked the festival -- the first he had ever attended -- and read from a prepared statement.

"Before I go," said Widmark, I'd like to say a word in defense of entertainment. Film is a medium in which there is room for everyone. But we should never forget that it's a medium that had its beginnings in simpler times...."

Everson, Variety:

Without specifically referring to Tarkovsky, he pointed out that there as room for art and entertainment -- and that Griffith, Keaton, Lloyd and Chaplin were all "entertainers." The applause was deafening, and clearly Widmark was saying what most would only say privately.

[I also recall him mentioning Orson Welles and John Ford -- with whom he had worked twice, though maybe my memory is just chiming in from a distance. Widmark's tribute film was Jules Dassin's "Night and the City."]

View image A place where people look for God.

Benson, LA Times:

To at least one audience member, Tarkovsky's words demanded an answer. The next night, Widmark waded into the fray like the John Ford stalwart he played in "Two Rode Together," which the audience had seen only minutes ago [in career clips]. Calling film a medium with room for every kind of expression, and listing a dozen or more of its great actors and directors, "entertainers all," Widmark said that each person was entitled to his own opinion, "but in the real world, let us not denigrate entertainment. Pretentiousness and pomposity are not art."

Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News:

The next morning I spotted Widmark at a restaurant and asked him why he felt he needed to defend entertainment, which isn't exactly under seige anyway. Why had he made such an impassioned plea? Widmark replied with a single word.

"Tarkovsky."

Buck, Vanity Fair:

... Richard Widmark, interviewed at his own tribute, said: "Tarkovsky. He's a phony. He stinks."

* * * *

The ironies of the occasion(s) still thrill and fascinate me. They began with the spectacle of Zanussi, in my opinion a more profound artist than Tarkovsky could dream of being, acting as a humble translator. Zanussi would reveal a spiritual and distinctly American vision of Monument Valley in "A Year of the Quiet Sun." I don't know if Tarkovsky (who died in 1986) ever saw Zanussi's film, or if he would have understood it if he had.

Tarkovsky was clearly giving a crowd-pleasing performance, doing a "Mad Russian" routine for the American film festival audience that was perhaps a variation on Oscar Wilde's more effete schtick when he visited -- and entertained -- Colorado and the American West in 1882. (At least he didn't go full-cretin on us and start pounding his shoe on the stage, Khrushchev-style.) I agree with him that his movie was not remotely entertaining -- at least no more so than Ridley Scott's "American Gangster," from which I am taking a break to write this because I find it so incredibly tedious.

As Everson wrote, it is easy to sympathize with showman Tarkovsky's passion on the stage, even if you don't see it in a film like "Nostalghia." Widmark was just as impassioned, only classier (even when saying, "He stinks," in private), because his vision of cinema was both broader and deeper than Tarkovsky's. (And let me add that Zanussi could make anyone sound more eloquent than they already were. Widmark didn't even have the benefit of Zanussi's translation skills!) Entertainment does not preclude art. For that matter, neither do pretentiousness and pomposity, and there's no question Tarkovky unashamedly aspired to both. Meanwhile, strangely, it was Tarkovsky, not Widmark, who was promoting the idea that "masses of spectators" should drive or determine what could be explored in cinema -- asserting his own false correlation between artistry and popular acceptance. (Who would believe it possible that any film could "please everyone"? Only someone who believed that was the definition of "entertainment.")

Still, I wouldn't trade the poetry and artistry of all Tarkovsky's work for that one long shot of Widmark and James Stewart on the bank of the river in "Two Rode Together." What's more, I would never think that I had to.

At Telluride, Tarkovsky was a tourist. His provincialism and condescension were palpable. Nobody is surprised by arrogance in film directors, but he knew nothing about the westerns he was pontificating against. Besides, you don't come through Monument Valley to Telluride to assert your artistic superiority to the likes of John Ford -- especially when you know there's a man who worked with Ford right there. Widmark saw that the town -- and the world, and the cinema -- was big enough for both of them. Tarkovsky, if we take him at his word, could not. (I don't think this was due to his conditioning under Soviet-style "communism," but goes back to something more ancient and fundamental -- plain old aesthetic messianism.)

Today I like to think that Widmark's Telluride speech could stand as his epitaph, and that he, too, ranks among those film artists, entertainers all.

* * * *

See Dennis Cozzalio's splendid appreciation of Widmark at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule and Kim Morgan's at Sunset Gun.

* * * *

Tarkovsky post-script: While some of us were nervously joking (heh-heh) that perhaps remote little Telluride was not such a bad place to be on this weekend of what felt like nuclear brinksmanship, Lynne Littman's "Testament" premiered. As if to underscore the political tension and paranoia of the moment, it featured Jane Alexander as a small-town survivor in the fallout (literally) of a massive missile attack on the US. The characters' willingness to go gently into that good nightmare rang false to me. So, I appreciated Tarkovsky's comment at a panel discussion (reported by Buck): "I congratulate the author to be able to imagine what a nuclear war is. I am envious when I see such a naive and unrebellious vision of atomic war, amazed at how out of such tragic material you may make such a limited, mild fairy tale."

Then he returned to the polemical Christian mysticism that typifies him and his work: "Human spirit, soul, are immortal. If I were of a different opinion I wouldn't be able to survive ten minutes because my life would be senseless. If happiness and senselessness are identical, I don't want happiness -- who told you you were born to be happy?" [That last inquiry is among the key questions of our time, but the premise that "happiness = senselessness" is as absurd as Littman's film. It's also a characteristic Tarkovsky false dilemma. What he was really saying, perhaps, was that, for him, "senselessness = negation" -- with the perhaps unconscious corollary that, for him, "meaning = self." Which is pretty much what you'd expect a messianic artist to believe with all his might.]

"Humanity is falling into war. We want to be saved and yet ask others for our salvation. If somebody is ready to sacrifice, it will be his self-realization and he will never suffer. I make films in order to share. Sharing the substance. I hope to be a medium between the universal spirit and human beings. But I won't make a step in your direction to make your perception of my work any easier."

Tarkovsky defected to Western Europe the next year. His final film, "The Sacrifice," premiered at Telluride in 1987, the year after his death. It was a nightmare of nuclear holocaust, and a promise to his son. I mean no disrespect when I say I found it both moving and entertaining.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (38)

This cover band, Young @ Heart, is the eponymous subject of a documentary to be released by Fox Searchlight in April, 2008. They do everything from the Bee Gees to the Clash to Sonic Youth. This is what punk is all about -- D.I.Y. Put me in a wheelchair and get me to the show.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

View image Is this man a nonbeliever?

Here's an angle I hadn't thought of. This e-mail actually came to Scanners, but with the writer's permission I also published it at RogerEbert.com. First the letter, then my response:

From Brad Smissen, Murrieta, CA:

Re: "No Country for Old Men": I'm a bit surprised that nobody has really touched on Chigurh's theology or lack thereof. In the book McCarthy makes clear that Chigurh is a non-believer. This is huge. I believe it's McCarthy's intention to say that Chigurh's atheism carved him into a Darwinian creature with a powerful survivalist function. That's the thing, Chigurh isn't meant as some reaper figure at all. He's an atheist/survivalist, plain and simple. It's not an accident that Chigurh is able to give himself first rate medical care after his leg gets shot up. Nor is McCarthy alluding to some military/medical background. Chigurh has equipped himself to live, he means to live above everything else.

Now, remember when he tells Carson Wells -- if the rule you followed led you to this then what good is the rule? This tells us two pretty revealing things about Chigurh. One, that Chigurh is pretty sophisticated and understands that lawmen of all stripe/mode must operate within confined moral/legal spaces. And two, it would appear that Chigurh willfully operates under an evil banner because it's . . . are you ready for this -- safer, i.e. it best serves his strong survivalist function. Many people have labeled "No Country" as one of Cormac's more simple books. But I don't see it that way at all. I see it as a modern classic, a deep meditation on the natural conclusion of atheism (the recklessly craven positioning of self for purposes of survival) and the believers who dare to exist for causes outside of self, an endeavor that "No Country" makes clear is noble indeed but corrosive to the soul.

First, Wells is not a lawman of any kind. He's hired by the crooks, after all, and his sole job is to retrieve the money. He knows full well he'll need to kill Chigurh to get it.

In the book, the line "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" comes after Chigurh tells Wells why he'd let himself get arrested: "I'm not sure why I did this but I think I wanted to see if I could extricate myself by an act of will. Because I believe that one can. That such a thing is possible. But it was a foolish thing to do. A vain thing to do. Do you understand?"

In the movie, it comes after Wells challenges Chigurh's "certainty." Chigurh says: "I do know to a certainty. And you know what's going to happen now. You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it."

In both contexts, Chigurh is simultaneously asserting the primacy of his "principles" (as Wells characterized them earlier) and avoiding responsibility. With his victims, Chigurh assumes a passive role. He doesn't make the choice to kill them. They have made choices that have summoned him. He sees himself as an agent of fate -- a fate that others have brought upon themselves. The coin toss makes it pretty explicit that he does not see himself as The Decider.

The "nonbeliever" reference (which is in the novel, not the film) comes in Chigurh's conversation with Carla Jean. He claims he gave his word and he can't change it. Carla Jean argues that he has the power to change it if he wants to, but he responds: "I don't think so. Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact." Although Carla Jean calls him a "blasphemer" for invoking God in that way, he's not exactly saying he believes God does not exist. "But what's done cannot be undone," he continues. "Your husband, you may be distressed to learn, had the opportunity to remove you from harm's way and he chose not to do so. He was given that option and his answer was no. Otherwise I would not be here."

In the movie, Chigurh says, "Your husband had the opportunity to remove you from harm's way. Instead he used you to try to save himself." "Not like that," Carla Jean responds. "Not like you say." "I don't say anything," says Chigurh. "Except it was foreseen." (This echos Carla Jean's mother, whom she has buried that very day: "I pre-visioned it.") Both Wells and Carla Jean respond to Chigurh's "logic" by calling him crazy. And he is. But an "atheist/survivalist"? A "Darwinian creature with a powerful survivalist function"? I don't think so. Chigurh doesn't kill in order to survive. He is, therefore he kills.

There's certainly a mythic, Old Testament dimension to McCarthy's work, but I don't read it as necessarily religious, and I don't detect the presence of God in the world of the Coens' movie. (Perhaps God is conspicuous by His absence.) The book ends with Sheriff Bell's recollection of a hand-carved stone trough:

Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I read a little bit of history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one. But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that.... I have to say that the only thing I can think of is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all.

What do you think?

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (72)

View image Love bites.

My review of "Teeth" is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. (Also: "21" and "CJ7.") Here's an excerpt:

"Teeth" sinks its incisors into a cross-cultural myth known as vagina dentata. Or, as Juno might call it, "Vaggie D." Depending on who you ask (not that you should bring it up in polite intercourse), it is said to represent the male fear of castration and of feminine sexuality in general. It also symbolizes the woman's anxieties about penetration, and/or her desire to devour her mate, who is attempting to fulfill his own bio-mythological destiny by returning upstream to spawn in the womb from whence he originated. (Or, as the movie puts it, "the dark crucible that hatched him.")

Whether you view it as a primordial image from the collective unconscious or a practical warning against promiscuity, vagina dentata makes an indubitably memorable impression -- and an ideal premise for a tongue-in-cheek thriller about uncontrollable urges.

Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein's teen horror-(of)-sex comedy begins with a big visual pun about a different portion of the feminine anatomy: An impressive pair of atomic power-plant silos protrude from the horizon like... you know. The camera tilts down to the lawn of a suburban home where nuclear family fusion is about to occur. Bill (Lenny von Dohlen) and his son Brad (John Hensley) are about to join Kim (Vivienne Benesch) and her daughter Dawn (Jess Wexler) to form a single-household zygote. Mutations ensue....

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

View image Nathan Lee.

Yesterday, Nathan Lee sent out an e-mail to colleagues in which he announced:

In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for "economic reasons." My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in "My Blueberry Nights."

And so I am, as they say, "looking for work," though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist.

On certain homophobic but ostensibly (and patronizingly) pro-gay reactions to "Brokeback Mountain": "If I hear one more straight critic complain that 'Brokeback Mountain' isn't particularly gay, I'm gonna spit on my hand, lube up my c---, and f--- him in the b---."

On "Transformers": "Director Michael Bay never met a rhetorical apocalypse he didn't love. Dude could film a round of Jenga with greater shock and awe than the collapse of the World Trade Center. There are mini-robots hiding inside his mega-robots. His lens flares have lens flares. He evidently controls the magic hour at a flick of a switch, and flips it willy-nilly for 'poetic effect.' In what may constitute the zaniest authorial signature in contemporary cinema, he has a habit of arresting an action set piece in order to indulge outlandishly backlit, monumentally pointless romantic interludes."

On "Zodiac: "... 'Zodiac' is the most information-packed procedural since 'JFK,' though far more restrained when it comes to theorizing.... The result is an orgy of empiricism, a monumental geek fest of fact-checking, speculation, deduction, code breaking, note taking, forensics, graphology, fingerprint analysis, warrant wrangling, witness testimony, phone calls, news reports. 'I felt like I was stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours,' complained one viewer. Exactly!"

On ""I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry": "Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, 'I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry' is as eloquent as 'Brokeback Mountain,' and even more radical. 'The gay cowboy movie' liberated desires latent in the classic western, and made them palpable (and palatable) by channeling them into the strictures of another genre, romantic tragedy. Progressive values were advanced by a retreat to a traditional mode of storytelling, the love that dare not speak its name rendered intelligible through the universal language of the upscale weepy. [...]

"Gay themes won't deter the [Adam] Sandler cult, who can rely on their man not to be a fag. And that, precisely, is the canny maneuver here. Our p---y-loving men's men are New York City firefighters to boot, the very embodiment of all-American heroism (and object of gay fetishism). Sandler's womanizing bachelor Chuck Levine reluctantly agrees to play the homo husband of his buddy Larry Valentine to help secure pension benefits for Larry's kids—one of whom, a flaming little 'mo named Eric (Cole Morgan), likes to practice numbers from Pippin' in an outfit inspired by 'Flashdance.' Oh, snap! Chuck and Larry is the first movie to effectively hijack that all-purpose justification for right-wing bigotry, 'protecting the children,' and redeploy it as a weapon of the homosexual intifada."

On "Chop Shop": "You come away from 'Chop Shop' with a mood, the voluptuous sum of its fine-tuned parts: the way a rundown patch of Queens is always flooded with mud, no matter how recently it rained; the frightful gusto of a junkyard pit bull gnawing on his favorite toy, a giant steel car jack; flocks of pigeons, rice and beans, a plastic-wrapped sneaker sample and castaway flip-flop floating down a rain-slicked street; hot dogs marinated in lighter fluid, smoking from a sidewalk BBQ; the huge, muffled, incantatory chant of "LET'S GO, METS!" that spills out into the parking lot of Shea Stadium, where a 12-year-old boy, dodging the eye of security, pries off hubcaps with a screwdriver. [...]

"All this is imagined by Ramin Bahrani, the acclaimed writer-director of 'Man Push Cart' (2005), though 'Chop Shop' derives much of its value from the sense of being found, not made."

In a thread at girish's a few weeks back, I commented that nearly all of the movie criticism I read these days is in books or on the web -- written by movie bloggers or by paid critics (I'm trying to avoid using the word "professional" in this context) writing for print publications. It wasn't long ago that you couldn't read what other critics were saying outside your own town, unless you subscribed to number of nationally available papers and magazine by mail, and that could be pretty expensive. Papers could always run syndicated reviews off the wires, but their editorship and/or readership preferred original writing, local perspectives, and in-house accountability.

Matt Zoller Seitz speaks for a lot of us when he writes at The House Next Door:

I find these days that I'm more likely to find lively writing and original viewpoints on blogs than in print outlets.

At the same time, though, it's important to acknowledge that the idea of criticism-as-profession (as opposed to vocation or hobby) has a lot of merit. There's no way that a blogger who isn't independently wealthy can cover the full spectrum of current releases as diligently as somebody who's getting paid to do it, much less be able to get newsworthy film people on the phone for thinkpieces, features, obituaries and the like, or cover local, regional, national or international film festivals, as film critics for large and even medium-sized papers have traditionally been encouraged to do (depending on the outlet).

What we're seeing here is the passing of a notable and vibrant phase of movie writing. It'll be replaced by something else, yes, but something very different.

I think we're fast approaching the point where criticism will become, for the most part, a devotion rather than a job.

Not that one excuses the other, that's just the way it is and the way it has always been, though the average level of competence and watchability in movies seems to have declined noticeably since the mid-1990s or so. Or maybe it's my patience that has declined. But while the best movies seem as great as ever, and the horrible ones just as horrible, the mediocrity bar has fallen pretty low. It seems to me a movie used to have to be significantly better before it could be considered mediocre. (And I've always been somewhat hyper-averse to cinematic ineptitude, deriving little or no pleasure from badness for its own sake.)

In the twilight of what Matt calls "the era of newspapers and magazines" (and network television broadcasting, too), the relationship between art/entertainment and "the press" is changing. Arts criticism in general-circulation newspapers and magazines is a centuries-old tradition, because the arts were considered to be matters of cultural significance. Reviews were often a form of journalistic analysis, reporting on an event that had taken place because the event itself was considered worthy of coverage.

View image Lee: Eye wide open.

Mainstream movie (and television) reviewing grew out of that tradition. A metropolitan daily newspaper had a music critic (and, later, a pop music critic, maybe a jazz critic), a theater critic, a book critic, a dance critic, a visual arts critic (painting, sculpture)... They would review performances or exhibitions regardless of whether their readers would later have an opportunity to experience the works for themselves. Because film and television were pre-recorded (as they used to say), the custom eventually became to provide the critic with an opportunity to see the "show" before it became available to the general public, so that the review could appear on the day of its premiere. This, too, wasn't all that far removed from the showbiz ritual of reviewing the opening night of Broadway shows for the next morning's paper.

+ + + +

From the Vienna newspaper Der Freimütige, September 11, 1806: "Recently there was given the overture to Beethoven's opera 'Fidelio,' and all impartial musicians and music lovers were in perfect agreement that never was anything as incoherent, shrill, chaotic and ear-splitting produced in music. The most piercing dissonances clash in a really atrocious harmony, and a few puny ideas only increase the disagreeable and deafening effect."
(Thanks to Nicholas Slonimsky's invaluable "Lexicon of Musical Invective.")

+ + + +

What has changed? The expectations of the audience, for one thing. The more people have become accustomed to approaching art and entertainment as consumers (trying to get the optimal return on their investment of leisure time and money), the more they've come to think of reviews as buying guides. (And DVDs have made paramount the idea of movies or TV shows as not only products, but possessions that take up shelf space in your life.)

At the same time (and probably as a consequence), criticism itself has been subjected to cost-benefit analysis. I assume that's why some reviewers have been up in arms about the studios realizing they had nothing to gain by screening certain films in advance. Then it's up to the publications to make the call: Is it worth sending someone to see a movie once it opens, so that the review can run over the weekend or early the next week? (In most cases, personally, I don't think so. Unless it proves to be something out of the ordinary, why give it undue attention? Why not just wait to review the DVD release, when there's less time pressure?) Reviews used to represent the first independent evaluations of a movie outside the studio's marketing apparatus. If that is still true, how much does it matter -- to readers, or to the publications who are trying to sell advertising? I don't know.

From my experience as an art-house exhibitor in the '80s, I can say that good reviews could sometimes help get ticket-buyers in the door on opening weekend -- but only if they made the movies sound like something enough people wanted to see. Films that don't have huge ad budgets rely on reviews to reach their potential audience. After Friday's entertainment section was in the recycling bin, though, only word-of-mouth (and more advertising, highlighting the good review quotes) can keep it going.

View image

When people say that a big Hollywood release is "critic-proof," I think they're assuming the critics have a lot more power than they really do. "Transformers," for example, isn't so much "critic-proof" as "critic-irrelevant." By opening day, when people read the reviews of "Transformers," most of them have already decided whether they're going to see it or not. They may read the review for its entertainment value, or to give them an idea of what to expect (hey, if you can talk about the movie before anybody's seen it, you may have even more cultural currency), but they already know they're going to see it. That's about the only social aspect of moviegoing that's left -- being able to talk about a movie when the ads are still on TV and all over the web. (Even if you never set foot in a theater and simply watched a bittorrent download.)

I've always thought that the "influence" of reviews on box office returns was greatly overestimated. More significantly, I never really understood why people would expect there to be any correlation between the two. A movie succeeds or fails because of three things: 1) the expectations created by the marketing campaign; 2) whether those expectations are persuasive enough to get people to fork over their time and money, rather than spend it on something else; 3) whether people feel they got their time and money's worth. A movie's success in theaters used to depend on word-of-mouth, which might even have a chance of overcoming a bad marketing campaign. That's no longer the case because movies open on so many screens. If they don't hit right away, they're replaced by the next ad campaign. Word-of-mouth doesn't really figure into the equation until the DVD release.

So, why do people read movie reviews anymore (assuming, of course, that they do)? As the founding editor of RogerEbert.com I can tell you that a lot of people still read Roger for guidance and suggestions -- but a lot of them also read him because they enjoy reading HIM. Some of the most popular reviews are also some of the most negative ones, and I'm pretty sure it's not because there were so many people anticipating "Basic Instinct 2" and dying to know whether Roger thought it was any good. (Would people have bought two Ebert anthologies, called "I Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie" and "Your Movie Sucks," if they were only interested in recommendations?)

Nathan Lee says the Voice cut him loose "for economic reasons." We can only assume we know (or someone at Village Voice Media knows) what that means. Is the Voice, which already shares reviews and reviewers with some of its other publications such as the L.A.Weekly, going to scale back its film coverage? Or just rely more on in-house syndication and freelancers? Did they determine that advertising sales were not sufficient to cover the salaries of two staff movie critics (J. Hoberman remains)? Did they feel that having a critical voice identified with the Village Voice was no longer something of value -- to the readers or the bottom line?

I'm afraid that the demise of writing and reporting for newspapers and magazines may be attributable to nothing so much as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once readers start feeling that a publication offers no particular personality, that one review or reviewer is interchangeable with any other, then the next step is inevitable: They realize there's no reason to pick up that particular publication. The web has more than its share of ignorant, inarticulate movie bloggers -- but it also offers strong, distinctive personalities and points of view. I'm overwhelmed by how many smart, vigorous, thoughtful ones I find, simply by jumping from one blogroll to another (and I add new ones to my right column whenever I can).

In print, I still read the New York Times because A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis (and Matt Zoller Seitz) mean a lot to me. And because I can get it delivered to my doorstep (not inexpensively) and I like the smell of the newsprint while I'm drinking my coffee. The bottom-liners and quantifiers are never going to understand how to weigh any of those things, and it may be the death of them.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

View image No comment.

How good, or bad, does a movie have to be in order to make an impression -- enough of one, anyway, so that you can remember it, or even still feel like talking about it, 15 minutes after you've seen it? Inspired by "The Hottie and the Nottie," Joe Queenan suggests criteria for The Worst Movies of All Time ("From hell") in The Guardian.

Among the movies he considers: "Futz!" (a 1969 satire, based on a hit LaMaMa Broadway production, about a man who marries a pig), Marco Ferreri's "La Grande Bouffe," John Huston's "A Walk With Love and Death," Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom," Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful" ("as morally repugnant -- precisely because of its apparent innocence -- as any film I can name"), Kevin Costner's "The Postman," Martin Brest's "Gigli" and Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate." Queenan writes:

A generically appalling film like "The Hottie and the Nottie" is a scab that looks revolting while it is freshly coagulated; but once it festers, hardens and falls off the skin, it leaves no scar. By contrast, a truly bad movie, a bad movie for the ages, a bad movie made on an epic, lavish scale, is the cultural equivalent of leprosy: you can't stand looking at it, but at the same time you can't take your eyes off it. You are horrified by it, repelled by it, yet you are simultaneously mesmerised by its enticing hideousness....

To pass muster as one of the all-time celluloid disasters, a film must be so bad that when a person is asked, "Which will it be? Waterboarding, invasive cattle prods or 'Jersey Girl'?", the answer needs no further reflection. This phenomenon resembles Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim ends up befriending his tormentors, so long as they promise not to make him watch any more Kevin Smith movies. The condition is sometimes referred to as Blunted Affleck.

(Last year, Paul Verhoeven's outlandish Nazi soap, "The Black Book," landed on a number of critics' ten best lists. I wonder if they would have looked at it the same way if they hadn't already known it was by the director of "Showgirls" and "Starship Troopers.")

To me, a bad movie is by definition something that's excruciating to watch -- and the more it conforms to conventional standards of "entertainment" the more offensive and agonizing it becomes. I've seen so many bad movies over the years, some but not all in the course of regular reviewing, that it's now rare I see one that's bad in a way I haven't seen before. That, at least, can be intriguing, even illuminating. But Queenan gets a masochistic thrill out of gawking at disaster:

To be honest, that is the reason I became a critic in the first place; criticism seemed to be a way to channel my unwholesome fascination with train wrecks and fires into a socially acceptable framework. The truth is, every time I go to the pictures, I get goose bumps all over, anticipating that this, after all these years, could be the worst movie ever made.

So, that could include anything from "Porky's 3: The Revenge" to "Steel Magnolias" to "Cocktail" to "Clerks" to "Look Who's Talking" (I'm just reeling off the most unpleasant experiences I've had at the movies -- first ones that come to mind) to almost anything written by Neil Simon or directed by Alan Parker. They don't have to be insidiously evil set-ups (like "Life Is Beautiful" or "Crash" or "Mississippi Burning" or "Natural Born Killers" -- no, "Funny Games" isn't even close to their company). It's enough that they try to make an audience feel good or bad about themselves by prodding their reflexes and prejudices.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (130)

View image The politics of "Glengarry Glen Ross" in a nutshell.

Although I'm still reeling from the shocking revelation that David Mamet once considered himself a liberal ("David Mamet says he is not a brain-dead liberal anymore"), I find myself looking forward to his next (screen-)play more than ever, if only to see if I can detect an interest in ideological politics that I never noticed in his work before.

The week of his much-publicized announcement, history presented him with a perfect subject for a future writing project: the collapse of the investment banking film Bear Stearns and the last-minute bailout by the Federal Reserve, allowing it to merge with JP Morgan Chase. What a dilemma for free-marketeers! This could make for great drama in Mamet's hands. Imagine a "Glengarry Glen Ross" in which Mitch and Murray are rescued from bankruptcy by the intervention of the federal government.

Mamet writes: "...a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

And: "[William Allen] White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they're always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it."

And: "... I began to question my hatred for 'the Corporations'—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live."

So, how do all these beliefs duke it out in a Bear Stearns-like scenario? If a company fails to compete successfully in the free marketplace, should it be allowed to fail no matter what the causes (mismanagement, poor loan decisions, investor panic) or consequences (unemployment, stockholder losses, damage to the stock market and the larger economy)? Should the government intervene to rescue businesses from unfavorable economic trends or bad business decisions?

View image "Mamet was never simply a liberal. He is not now simply a conservative." -- UK Independent Arts Editor David Lister.

Personally, I find myself aligned with the newly enlightened Mamet: The company, which could not survive under the conditions of the free marketplace (whether that was its "fault" or not doesn't matter), should have been allowed to go under. The Fed should not have stepped in because, one way or another, the market would sort itself out -- even if a recession or a depression resulted. That is the point of the Reagan-led deregulation revolution, is it not? We can't have American companies complaining they're being held back by federal restrictions, and whining about unfair competition from international competitors who receive state subsidies, and then have them turn around and accept taxpayer-financed government favors. Can we? Don't conservatives want to dismantle New Deal-style checks and safety nets?

On the other hand, if we acknowledge that the USA provides an environment in which legal businesses benefit from tangible economic advantages (socio-political stability, abundant capital, wealthy consumer market, reliable infrastructure, advanced technology, skilled workers, etc.), should the government that fosters these conditions have no say in setting accountability standards for the conduct of those businesses -- whether bookkeeping practices or limits on pollution of public or private property? Isn't that just part of the cost of doing business here -- instead of in the less predictable political climate of, say, China? If companies establish off-shore operations to avoid taxes and US laws -- in other words, to avoid contributing to the maintenance of an economy that offers so many valuable corporate-friendly advantages -- then should they be entitled to those advantages anyway? (Isn't this at the heart of the conservative's economic argument against illegal immigration -- that non-citizens do not have the right to taxpayer-supported services?)

There is potential here for a moral grappling match as wrenching as the one in "Oleanna" between the male professor and the female student who exploits the principles of political correctness to accuse him of sexual harassment . I hope Mamet will write it. If he does, I'll bet that (like "Glengarry Glen Ross" or "Oleanna" or "Wag the Dog" or "Spartan") it will reflect a struggle of philosophical ideas and not the triumph of any political ideology. Some things don't change.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

View image The youngest victims of the games.

1) A letter from Kate Johnson, published at RogerEbert.com:

Too late I read your review [of "Funny Games"]. I was blindsided by this movie. Went with a friend and didn't know a THING about it beforehand. All I kept saying was, "Let's get out of here. It's a MOVIE. The director/ producer / whatever is trying to force-feed us with S--T. How can the actors even think of being in such a movie -- what about that little boy?"

Finally when it was over and my "friend" looked like a deer in the headlights -- I was physically sick. I demanded my money back from the box office only to have the girl laugh at me -- at first. I threw up on the floor right in front of her -- and it splattered. She gave me the money, helped me clean up and actually cried. My "friend" was embarrassed by my behavior -- and therefore has lost my friendship. This whole last scene (starring me, my friend, the cashier at the box office), seemed a sequel to the movie.

2) In a story headlined "Haneke plays 'Games' with critics," Variety reports: "'We always expected it would have a polarized response,' says WIP topper Polly Cohen, who admits she was both repulsed and compelled by the film. 'It's for a very specific audience.'" (Barf or applaud: It's up to you! The critical reaction is split right down the middle at RottenTomatoes.)

That article includes a self-reflexive comment in the spirit of "Funny Games." Be sure to read through to the final sentence to see who gets the last laugh:

The pic did resonate with a certain aud, generating $520,000 at 289 theaters for a $1,799 per-screen average in its opening weekend. And Cohen expects it to resonate even more with Europeans. "We realized with American tastes it could go either way," she says.

JANINE: WE CAN CUT THESE NEXT TWO GRAFS FOR SPACE:

Even some of the harshest critics acknowledge Haneke's skills -- while wringing their hands at his choices.

"It's this moralistic finger-wagging -- scolding us for lapping up what he's serving -- that makes 'Funny Games' so infuriating," Newsweek's David Ansen opines. "That this relentless barrage of psychological and physical torture is extremely well made and powerfully performed... somehow makes it worse."

Ironically, Haneke could soon get a taste of his own medicine: A Ron Howard redo of "Cache" is in development at U.

3) Steve Hyden writes at the Onion A.V. Club Blog:

Haneke thinks we’re all sick and depraved to seek out violent entertainment, and he uses his film like a golf club to bludgeon us for our sins. Only his bludgeoning felt good to me. I didn’t feel implicated; I felt moved, like I had just seen a virtuoso do something impressive, even if the virtuoso himself didn’t seem to understand exactly why it was impressive. [...]

The implication of "Funny Games" is that violent pop culture points to a lack of morality in society, and I reject that idea, just as I reject it when it comes from right-wing politicians every four years. I just don’t think “enjoying” fake violence — which is stylized, cinematic, and, you know, fake -- is in any way like enjoying real violence — which is clumsy, ugly, and, you know, real — unless you’re f--king nuts. [...]

I actually found myself feeling relieved whenever the fourth wall was broken, because it was a brief respite from the overwhelming “reality” of the film. “Oh yeah, these aren’t real people in a real situation, it’s just a bunch of actors pretending to hurt each other.” This is fiction, not snuff. So, what am I supposed to feel bad about? That I enjoy letting Haneke make me feel supremely uneasy over imaginary people getting hurt? If that’s the case, then all drama — whether the conflict is physical, emotional, or spiritual—is morally suspect. And, sorry, but I don’t buy that. If Haneke thinks dumb, violent American films are harmful (though, again, I think he’s misguided in that belief) the proper response is to make more smart thrillers like "Funny Games," only without the hectoring next time.

(tips: Dave McCoy, Nick Tinsley)

Posted by Jim Emerson at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (33)

View image Alejandro Polanco plays... Alejandro.

My review of "Chop Shop" is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:

Three shots into Rahmin Bahrani's "Chop Shop," and you're already pulled into its world with an effortless economy and precision that leave you no doubt you're in the best of cinematic hands.

As day laborers stand by the side of a busy road, we don't see the road, but we can hear the traffic. Their heads turn as a truck pulls up off-camera, and they rush over to be chosen for work. The driver, speaking English, selects a few guys and tells a kid he doesn't need him. Just as the truck pulls back out onto the highway, the kid hops into the pickup bed. He needs the work. Wherever this is, it's a Third World economy.

Second shot: The truck rolls past the camera, and we see the kid sitting up in the back. Third shot: The truck pulls over, and we notice the Chrysler Building, then the Empire State Building, in the distance. The driver gets out, lifts the protesting kid out of the back of the Chevy, gives the kid some money out of his own pocket and tells him to buy himself breakfast. Then the title of the movie appears....

Three shots in two minutes and we know so much about this boy's toughness and resilience, the industrial gray-market conditions to which he has adapted and -- despite his confidence and self-reliance -- his inescapable dependence on the adults around him. The 12-year-old Ale (Alejandro Polanco) is an accomplished hustler, whether reselling bags of candy on the subway with a polished sales pitch or stealing hubcaps.

Continue reading full review here.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

View image Another evolutionary stage.

"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?"
-- Arthur C. Clarke, in a 1999 interview with Free Inquiry magazine

"I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be interpreted as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism."
-- Albert Einstein

Edward Rothstein addresses the currently fashionable science vs. religion debate in a New York Times "appraisal" of the late Arthur C. Clarke's work ("For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically"):

“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral” were the instructions left by Arthur C. Clarke, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90. This may not have surprised anyone who knew that this science-fiction writer, fabulist, fantasist and deep-sea diver had long seen religion as a symptom of humanity’s “infancy,” something to be outgrown and overcome.

But his fervor is still jarring [...]

Stanley Kubrick’s film of Mr. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” for example — a project developed with the author — is haunting not for its sci-fi imaginings of artificial intelligence and space-station engineering but for its evocation of humanity’s origins and its vision of a transcendent future embodied in a human fetus poised in space [...], a moment of transcendence in which some destiny is fulfilled, some possibility opened up.... a new evolutionary stage, inspiring as much horror as awe.

(And at the risk of sounding fervent, I should point out that, although I read some of Clarke's books as a teenager, I'm not familiar enough with his body of work to talk about more than his film collaboration with Kubrick, which was probably the closest thing to a religious revelation in my young life until I saw "Nashville" seven years later.)

Let me back up (a few millennia): The "Dawn of Man" section is a condensed metaphor for evolution, focusing on the primates' discovery of tools -- bones as weapons, crude extensions of their own bodies (and crude resurrections of the skeletons of the dead). Cut to the distant future and we see the same thing, only now the bones have developed into higher technologies (including orbital nuclear weapons) -- not only embellishments of the body (the arms and hands of the space pods) but of the brain (HAL 9000).

It would be stretching it to characterize the black monolith, the symbolic catalyst for mankind's "character arc" in "2001," as a god or an agent of god. In the movie's terms it's a signaling device placed on earth by an advanced alien civilization (Clarke's original short story was called "The Sentinel") -- and a pointed reminder that humans do not occupy a privileged place in the universe, certainly not at the center or the top of any religious diagram of Creation. The monolith may function as a nudge in the evolutionary process, but it's not the manifestation of Divine Will or predestination.

(But can we tell the difference? Only recently have neuroscientists found that stimulation of a certain part of the brain brings on the kind of revelatory visions that people describe variously as religious epiphanies, out-of-body or near-death experiences... or accounts of being kidnapped by aliens. Likely they're all expressions of the same biological processes.)

Rothstein writes:

For all his acclaimed forecasting ability, though, it is unclear whether Mr. Clarke knew precisely what he saw in that future. There is something cold in his vision, particularly when he imagines the evolutionary transformation of humanity. He leaves behind all the things that we recognize and know, and he doesn’t provide much guidance for how to live within the world we recognize and know. In that sense his work has little to do with religion.

But overall religion is unavoidable. Mr. Clarke famously — and accurately — said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Perhaps any sufficiently sophisticated science fiction, at least in his case, is nearly indistinguishable from religion.

Richard Dawkins addresses the same Clarke quote about "magic" (his Third Law of prediction) in "The God Delusion":

The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods, just as missionaries were treated as gods (and exploited the undeserved honour to the hilt) when they turned up in Stone Age cultures bearing guns, telescopes, matches, and almanacs predicting eclipses to the second.

In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but their provenance. Entities that are complex enough be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn't start that way.

I will say that the God concept is at the heart of "2001" but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high.

Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

FI: If religion does indeed represent an immature stage of humanity, do you see any prospects for humanity growing up?

Clarke: Yes, there is the possibility that humankind can outgrown its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in "Childhood's End." But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are. There are, for example, so many different religions -- each of them claiming to have the truth, each saying that their truths are clearly superior to the truths of others -- how can someone possibly take any of them seriously? I mean, that's insane....

FI: Do you see any value at all in the various religions?

Clarke: Though I sometimes call myself a crypto-Buddhist, Buddhism is not a religion. Of those around at the moment, Islam is the only one that has any appeal to me. But, of course, Islam has been tainted by other influences. The Muslims are behaving like Christians, I'm afraid.

FI: What appeals to you in Islam?

Clarke: Historically, Islam had a great deal of tolerance for other views and offered the world its priceless wisdom in the form of astronomy and algebra. And, as you know, Islam helped rescue Western civilization from the Dark Ages by preserving classical texts and transmitting them to the West. We, on the other hand, burned the library at Alexandria. If Islam hadn't fallen into internecine warfare and had gone on to conquer the rest of Europe, we'd have avoided a thousand years of Christian barbarism.

There before him, a glittering toy no Star-Child could resist, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples.

He had returned in time. Down there on that crowded globe, the alarms would be flashing across the radar screens, the great tracking telescopes would be searching the skies -- and history as men knew it would be drawing to a close.

... He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe.

Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.

But he would think of something.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

View image Michael Haneke, Austrian experimenteur.

UPDATED (03/15/08)

Selected interviews: From Adam Nayman's interview/review with "Funny Games" director Michael Haneke in Toronto's eyeweekly:

“I’m trying to impart in my films what mainstream movies work to take away,” explains Haneke in an exclusive interview. “Namely: reality. I’m making movies that are inconsumable. And I can only do that by portraying the suffering of the victim, rather than the enjoyment of the perpetrator.” [...]

Haneke says that he had always conceived "Funny Games" as an assault on American films, and that the remake merely serves to place the action in its correct context. (It also creates severe cognitive dissonance; my eyes kept scanning the impeccable, palpably Euro-art-house compositions for subtitles.) Over the past decade, American genre flicks have only grown more sadistic.

“This makes my film even more up-to-date than it was before,” laughs Haneke. So what about the trailers, which make the film look like the very dreck it means to critique?

“If that kind of marketing brings in the audience that I want to reach, then that’s fine,” says Haneke. “The bigger the audience, the better… every filmmaker feels that way. The difference [between myself and other filmmakers] is that I am not willing to make any concessions within the films themselves.”

From Nick Dawson's interview at Filmmaker Magazine:

Haneke: ... There is not one source but the whole of society is at the [core of the problem]. For me, the most irritating point today in comparison with 10 years ago [is that], even for the intellectual people, in this kind of post-modern view of life it became chic to make violence as an entertainment, even for the filmmakers and the critics, and this I find is a little bit disgusting. [laughs]

Filmmaker: So do you watch Tarantino movies and the like?

Haneke: Of course. If you are in the business you need to see at least the most exposed examples. [laughs] But I don't go very often to the cinema. I prefer to see the films I like [laughs] when I have time, so I'm not somebody who's going to see the newest films.

View image Promotional art for the 1997 version.

Filmmaker: You were talking before about how this film is about violence in American cinema and how you wanted it to reach an English-speaking audience. So what do you hope the impact will be? And what change do you hope might come about?

Haneke: A film can do nothing, but in the best case it can provoke so that some viewer makes his own thoughts about his own part in this international game of consuming violence, because it's a big business. [laughs] So maybe one or other [person will ask], “What am I doing when I'm working for this? Why am I working for this?” That's the top from the possibilities. [laughs] And I'm not a social worker. [laughs]

Filmmaker: So in an ideal world...

Haneke: I don't believe in an ideal world. [laughs] [...]

Filmmaker: You were famously quoted as saying that cinema was “twenty-four lies per second.”

Haneke: This was a joke because it's famous phrase from Godard [“Cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second”], and I said it's a lie 24 times a second to serve the truth. What I will say is that film is always a manipulation.

Filmmaker: I mentioned that quote because there's a line in the film which says that an act of violence is real if we see it, whether it is fake or real.

Haneke: This is a very ironic dialogue, [laughs] but in a certain way it's true. Because the violence is in you, in your mind, so it is real. [...]

I try to provoke a little bit, to reflect where I am looking at cinema. That's all. I have no lesson to give, because I wouldn't know what the lesson is. [laughs]

"Funny Games" (2008).

From Peter Keough's interview in the Boston Phoenix:

I was thinking of the scene with the kid with the pillowcase over his head — Abu Ghraib crossed my mind.

It was actually on the poster of the first "Funny Games," and it was way before Abu Ghraib, but the associations of course have multiplied.

So do you think "Funny Games" inspired Abu Ghraib?

You don’t need to inspire these kinds of things. You don’t need to tell people how to commit violence. When the first film came out — well, it had not come out yet, it was finished, but nobody had seen it yet. There was an article in Der Spiegel about a case in Spain where two young men got white gloves [part of the MO in "Funny Games"], very polite, the whole thing, and tortured a family — one person to death. [...]

With "Funny Games," however, you are making a movie criticizing Hollywood, and therefore Hollywood subverts itself.

Yeah, I hope.

What does Hollywood get out of the deal?

I would think it’s the classic motive that they make money on it.

You don’t think they brought you out to Hollywood to corrupt you?

I am not famous enough for this.

From John Weis's interview in the New York Times:

“It was funny — funny for me, at least — how the theater [at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival] reacted to Anna’s shooting of Dickie,” Haneke told me, referring to a scene late in the film when the heroine turns the tables on her captors. “There was actual applause at first — then, when... [the audience is made] conscious of what it’s cheering for, the theater went absolutely silent. There was a general realization, even though the victim in this case was a villain in the film, that they’d been applauding an act of murder.” Haneke frowned slightly at the memory, but the frown appeared to be one of satisfaction. “I’m hoping for something similar when ‘Funny Games’ shows here.”

The decision to remake his signature work in America with an A-list cast caused considerable controversy among hardcore cinephiles, not least because of Haneke’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most outspoken critics. Haneke was quick to defend himself. “Of course I’m a critic of the studio system,” he said, as if it were unthinkable not to be. “But that doesn’t mean that one can’t work within that system. ‘Funny Games’ was always made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood’s attitude toward violence. And nothing has changed about that attitude since the first version of my film was released — just the opposite, in fact.” When I asked whether the average American moviegoer was likely to appreciate having his attitude adjusted, Haneke-style, the director thought for a moment, then threw up his hands in mock surrender. “I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.”

Posted by Jim Emerson at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (39)

View image The tagline reads: "You Must Admit, You Brought This On Yourself." Here's the bait. Do you want it?

My review of "Funny Games" is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:

* * * *

"Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn't need the film, and anybody who stays does."
-- Michael Haneke on his previous version of "Funny Games"

The new Hollywood edition of "Funny Games," writer-director Michael Haneke's clinical reenactment of his Austrian torture-comedy experiment from 10 years ago, is an attempt to replicate the earlier study under English-language conditions.

You (the lab rat) are placed in a Skinner box (the movie theater) and subjected to random negative stimuli (filmed violence, as a substitute for painful electrical jolts). Haneke, whose academic background is in psychology, philosophy and theater, assumes the role of empirical taskmaster. He hypothesizes that his box will shock you into a knee-jerk ethical dilemma. To pass the test, you must reject the false premise of the experiment itself (if only on the grounds of insufferable smugness) and walk out.

View image From "Funny Games." Does this remind you of any other now-infamous image of torture?

An even better response, theoretically, would be to storm the booth and rip the film out of the projector, thus symbolically declaring your refusal to swallow the force-fed medicinal doses of synthesized abuse the film is administering. And if you really wanted to ace the challenge, you would just not see the movie.

But if you liked those pictures from Abu Ghraib, you'll love "Funny Games"! ...

Read full review here.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)

View image Nudge-nudge. (2008)

UPDATED (03/15/08)

(My review of "Funny Games" is here. See also Your User's Guide to Movie Violence, a discussion below.)

* * * *

"You Must Admit, You Brought This On Yourself"
-- advertising tagline, and line of dialog, from "Funny Games" (2008)

"Funny Games" (the 2008 Hollywood movie-star version of the virtually identical 1997 Euro-version) is a conceptual work, an aestheticized test. It's debatable whether the movie (already a replica) is necessary, except as an object that represents the larger concept -- like, say, an Andy Warhol Brillo box or Jeff Koons' vacuum cleaners in plexiglass cases.

View image Wink-wink. (1997)

You could say something similar about the high-concept "Snakes On a Plane," and you'd be right. The difference is that the marketing campaign behind the packaging of "Snakes On a Plane" was designed to sell exactly the entertainment experience that the title promised. With "Funny Games," there's a deliberate element of bait-and-switch involved. It's being sold as entertainment, but that's not at all what it intends to deliver. The experience of "Funny Games" exists in the tension between the pitch and the delivery -- which will largely determine the relationship between the viewer and the film he/she sees.

So, the promotional materials for "Funny Games" (poster art, trailers, online videos, etc.) are more than the usual extensions or enhancements of the movie. They frame the experience, but they're also essential elements of the movie itself. Why you decide to watch it (or not) is every bit as central to the movie's concerns as anything in the movie itself. That may be true of any movie, but "Funny Games" puts it right there in the foreground where you can't miss it.

View image Promotional art for the 1997 version.

If you go expecting entertainment and are entertained (or, at least, terrified -- held hostage by your own expectations), that will be one thing. If you go expecting a moral lesson about the appeal of violence in movies, and you feel chastened and sullied, that will be another. If you go expecting a thriller or a comedy and find nothing thrilling or funny about it, that will be something else. If you go expecting to be toyed with and, say, enjoy feeling that you're ahead of the movie (maybe because you've already seen the 1997 version), that will provide yet another experience. If you value writer-director Michael Haneke's other work and want to see why he's chosen to remake this one... well, I hope you get the idea.

So, the first part of the experiment involves your decision to participate or not. The movie is the second part.

A friend of mine describes "Funny Games" as an endurance test -- something that has to be experienced so that you can talk about it afterwards. I think that's a pretty good description, because the reviews and the discussion are at least as important as the marketing and the movie -- and very likely more emotionally engaging than the film itself. I see it as a different kind of test, a test of free will. Whether you loathe the movie, or laugh at it, or enjoy it, or find it edifying, or think it's dumber than you are, or wonder what all the fuss was about, all that really matters is: What will you sit still for, and why?

"Funny Games" is an experiment along the lines of the famous Milgram and Stanford prison experiments. In other words, the movie is also an incitement to action. To politely and willingly submit to the movie's terms of authority is to sheepishly put yourselves in the same position as the captives in the movie, to accept its premise that "You brought this on yourself."

Once you buy into that, even a little bit, then you are trapped. The film demands something more than that you just sit there and take it, especially if you reject what you're seeing. If you passively "give up," then both you and the movie have failed the conceptual challenge. Maybe this is taking Haneke too seriously, but if he really means what he says he's attempting to do, he might well claim that fitting, healthy responses to the film would involve forms of protest and civil disobedience that... well, you'll have to figure out where to draw the line yourself. For me, free speech demands more free speech.

J. Hoberman in the Village Voice writes:

"Funny Games" is ultimately about forcing the viewer to confront his or her expectations. Would you enjoy seeing a terrified, helpless, half-naked woman? (The remake's major concession to the American market is a long scene of Naomi Watts hopping around in her underwear; in the original, the wife is clothed.) Are you getting bored? Isn't it about time for something to happen? Do you want to see the worm turn? Or simply wish the movie would end? Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should.

"Funny Games" represents the laborious execution of an abstract notion. The concept is the movie, kind of like Andy Warhol's 1964 "Empire," an eight-hour stationary shot of the Empire State Building. You don't have to sit through the whole thing to get the point, unless you really want to.

So, you will have your reasons for seeing "Funny Games" or not seeing "Funny Games." And you will have your reasons for sitting all the way through it or walking out. The essential thing is to understand why you are choosing to do whatever you do. If you're curious to see how it turns out, then go ahead. If you find yourself feeling that life is too short to subject yourself to this kind of game, that's OK, too. But it's your decision.

And now, for fun, here are some excerpts from the reviews. Haneke should be absolutely thrilled with every one of these -- perhaps especially the negative ones:

The picture, remade by the maestro Haneke himself, is every bit as gripping, suspenseful and upsetting as the original. And it's even more of a crock. [...]

Throughout the picture, Haneke demonstrates an imperial hauteur that completely undercuts his already dubious point. After having his characters establish the unreality of the piece by addressing the camera, he then depicts, as realistically as contemporary cinematic technology will allow, the very real pain and humiliation suffered by victims of actual violence. [...]

Not terribly convincing stuff, as it happens, and a bit too-little-too-late after Haneke's high-handed deck-stacking. Funny Games is an accomplished film... but my ultimate advice to movie lovers is to spare yourselves some needless abuse and not bother to play at all.
-- Glenn Kenny, Premiere

The white gloves should be a tipoff, for, ingratiating good manners aside, the two are a couple of psychopaths whose idea of “funny games” is first verbal and then physical abuse and brutality. And the rules of these games, diabolical and repeatedly changed to keep screwing the unwilling players, have a kind of sick logic and a demented justice. As much as you want to root for the victims — excruciatingly portrayed by Watts, Roth, and Gearhart — you might also suspect that they’re getting what’s coming to them. Even the dog is an annoying yapper.

Yet not even [10-year-old] Georgie deserves what these creeps eventually dish out. [...]

Audiences, in America especially, are happy to be entertained by the spectacle of graphic violence and not so happy to have to confront the human toll in pain and loss. You could ask why, but what fun would that be? Moral queries aside, "Funny Games" is a masterpiece of making audiences squirm and understanding why they do.
-- Peter Keough, Boston Phoenix

By withholding the worst we can imagine, yet finding ways to deliver worse, Haneke rigs the movie into a weapon against its audience. Like the infected porn that destroys perverts in Cronenberg’s "Videodrome," "Funny Games" means to kill our pleasure in the very thing we theoretically paid to see: zipless, guilt-free, morally untroubled mayhem.

That mission makes "Funny Games" an easy movie to despise but an impossible one to shake. The ultimate irony is that Haneke is very, very good at the genre he appears to hate: His anti-suspense measures prove far more upsetting than the usual thriller gear-grinding, which is why thrill junkies are already salivating over the movie’s opening day, eager to watch Haneke launch his assault upon an unsuspecting megaplex audience. I might even show up myself, just to see the suckers flinch. That’s entertainment.
-- Jim Ridley, L.A. Weekly

Michael Haneke's nearly shot-for-shot English-language remake of his 1997 Austrian thriller "Funny Games" has to be one of the most perverse experiments in cinema history—more so even than Gus Van Sant's "Psycho," which at least had the advantage of updating a film that people consider fondly. Haneke's film, by contrast, doesn't play the audience like a piano so much as rap its fingers for touching the keys; his tone is deliberately aggressive, confrontational, and scolding, and many of the critics, festival-goers, and arthouse audiences who saw "Funny Games" in '97 responded with equivalent outrage and contempt. A chilly and extraordinarily controlled treatise on film violence, "Funny Games" punishes the audience for its casual bloodlust by giving it all the sickening torture and mayhem it could possibly desire. Neat trick, that.
-- Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club

With "Funny Games," Michael Haneke's uber-disturbing remake of his own 1997 Austrian thriller, the director reasserts his omnipotence over all he surveys and constructs -- namely, a home invasion on Long Island's tony North Shore that features terror, murder, degradation and a Bunuelian bursting of characters' bourgeois bubbles, sans the Bunuelian laughs. It is a puppet-master's movie, a manipulation -- agit-prop dressed as absurdist black comedy. [...]

Some may ask why Haneke felt compelled to remake a film that was so unpleasant to begin with.... As the original film's purpose was a critique of American-style media violence, what we have now is a challenging movie made more accessible, at least to Americans.
-- John Anderson, Washington Post

“Why don’t you just kill us and get it over with?” George whimpers. His would-be killer’s reply — “What about entertainment?” — carries beyond the screen, where the voyeuristic masses are implicated in the gruesome spectacle of senseless cruelty. Are we, though? What if the guilt trip never takes off? Or, even worse, what if the American audience, cretins that we are, were to embrace Mr. Haneke’s vision not for its moral stringency but for the thrill of, say, watching Ms. Watts, bound at the ankles and wrists, hop around in her underwear? Who will be implicated then? I started out by calling Mr. Haneke a sadist, but it seems to me that he may be too naïve, too delicate, to merit that designation, which should be reserved only for the greatest filmmakers. [...]

... (If Mr. Haneke wanted to break into the American market, rather than take solace in the ambivalent embrace of the intelligentsia, he should have undertaken not a remake but a sequel.) The “Hostel” pictures and their ilk revel in the pornography of blood and pain, which Mr. Haneke addresses with mandarin distaste, even as he feeds the appetite for it.
-- A.O. Scott, New York Times

Michael Haneke's remake of his 1997 film is pure tension. I always complain about stupid victims; here, the victims are mature and privileged. Their arrogance -- bad things don't happen to people with a Long Island Sound summer mansion -- infuriates the viewer. These people cannot imagine anything bad ever happening to them. It's their downfall. [...]

German director/writer Michael Haneke presents a subtly frightening experience that American audiences haven't seen before. It's slow and deliberate. Except for some foolishness by the victims -- don't bother to pick up a knife but keep blow-drying the wet cell phone -- Haneke's style and the harrowing ending makes this the most chilling, best movie I've seen so far this year.
-- Victoria Alexander, Films in Review

Hating Michael Haneke’s Funny Games would be altogether too easy, because that’s exactly what the movie wants you to do. Deliberately despicable, it’s an outrageous provocation aiming for obscenity. That it is also a model of impeccable craftsmanship makes it perhaps even more bothersome. An art-punk lecture gone weirdly wrong, the film works in ways the director presumably never intended. But the nasty thing works all the same.
-- Sean Burns, Philadelphia Weekly

"Who on earth would want to see that?”
—Overheard at a Los Angeles multiplex during the trailer to Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games"

“That was weird, but I kind of want to see it again.”
—Overheard following the midnight premiere of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival

[...]

"Funny Games" offers a genuine revelation... in the form of the 26-year-old American actor Michael Pitt ("Last Days," "The Dreamers"), whose performance as the film’s alpha intruder, Paul (played in the original version by "Benny’s Video" star Arno Frisch), rivals Malcolm McDowell’s iconic turn in "A Clockwork Orange" in its balletic, gleeful amorality. It’s a performance so commanding, in fact, that it shifts the focus of the film from the homeowners to their uninvited guests. “In the Austrian version, you had the impression that the main parts are the parents, and now it’s different,” Haneke concurs. “Now you know that [Paul] is the main part.”

But the greatest strength of Haneke’s film remains its unceasing conceptual rigor. Seen a decade ago, the movie’s hard-line critique of media violence and its transformation of human torture into a spectator sport might have seemed a tad reactionary. In 2008, it feels like a high-IQ smart bomb launched into the culture of commemorative Abu Ghraib snapshots, the endless slo-mo looping of the 9/11 attacks, and the use of odds-making vernacular to turn everything from the Iraq war to the presidential election into their own brand of funny games.
-- Scott Foundas, from an interview with Haneke in the L.A. Weekly

Haneke, the Austrian director whose "Cache" explored like-minded themes of paranoia, menace, and toggling realities (the hero's reality, and the moviegoer's), is devilishly smart. He's an adept manipulator who goes one better by calling attention to his manipulations, questioning them, and then, still, managing to freak us out in the coldest, cruelest ways.
-- Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

Although derived from the siege situations memorably played out in "The Desperate Hours," Sam Peckinpah’s "Straw Dogs," or John Brahms’ agreeably hokey 1967 feature "Hot Rods to Hell," Haneke’s film refuses the cathartic release of those earlier movies. The particular greatness of "Straw Dogs" was in Peckinpah exercising recognizable social tensions surrounding sex, imperialism and machismo. "Straw Dogs" triggered the American appetite for justice or kick-ass resolution and then—masterfully—scrutinized it. Only people without Peckinpah memories will buy Haneke’s specious claim to modern sophistication. [...]

Haneke’s cruelest, chicest ploy comes when Paul taunts Anna to pray. She doesn’t know how, but the serial killer does; rigging her in a pathetic, supplicating position so that Haneke can dare a God-is-dead provocation. This hopeless message is now fashionable among the movie-culture elite. That explains the critics’ dismissal of Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, which explored human connection and the nature of vengeance in the post-9/11, post-feminist world. It’s also why the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men is willfully trivialized as a horror-comedy; critics misinterpret the ending as nihilistic, deliberately overlooking the spiritual hope expressed in Tommy Lee Jones’ wry concluding dream. Paul’s demand that Anna and George gamble on their fate recalls the Coens’ superior moment when Kelly Mcdonald rejects Anton Chigurh’s wager as phony existentialism. Haneke’s two-hour gambit is similarly perverse.
-- Armond White, New York Press

It doesn't take long for you to realize that, as part of the audience, you are being held captive, as well. With one difference: Unlike the unlucky family in the film, you chose to be there.

And yet you'll see that I've given this film a positive review. How can that be, if it's an intellectual version of "Saw"?

Because in this case, ratings are almost impossible. Yes, I'm calling it a good movie. I could just as easily have called it a bad one. "Funny Games" exists somewhere beyond that kind of qualitative evaluation, or at least outside it. [...]

It's not a fun ride, but "Funny Games" forces us -- almost against our will -- to examine its characterization of violence and our response to it.
-- Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

At heart, “Funny Games” is a stern rebuke to everyone who laughed a little too loudly at the scene in Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” where the man in the back of the speeding car gets blasted all over the upholstery. Morally, he’s right; cinematically and dramatically in “Funny Games,” he’s a bit of a pill. The differences between the two versions of “Funny Games” are telling. In the original the louche young sociopaths turned to the camera at odd moments and treated the viewers as their partners in crime. This happens in the remake less often, I think. Yet without the Brechtian ironies, what good is this thing?

I don’t know if any major director—and Haneke certainly is that, despite his willful waterboarding of the audience—can create something of real value when settling for such a blatant photocopy of an earlier work. So why does a comparative lark such as “Cache” work its own games so insinuatingly? Because it is not an exercise, or a theatrical contraption. It’s a film with its own sureness of tone and sense of the unknowable. By contrast “Funny Games,” the U.S. remix, is just a dubious idea fulfilled.
-- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

It’s one thing to make a movie filled with mayhem and then implicate the audience for watching it; it’s another thing entirely to come back ten years later with the same movie, hype it with a marketing campaign, and try to implicate the viewer again. One nice thing about America is that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.
-- J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

But hang on: Despite the sight of Watts hopping around bound up and in lingerie, it's not an exploitation