View image Two doors, mirror images. Two sides of a coin that's about to be tossed, and called, by Ed Tom Bell when returns to, and enters, room 114. The crime scene tape stretches across both, visually tying them together.

Because I brought this up in a larger context in "The Uncertainty Principle (or, The Easy Read), I figured I may as well follow through with it. (If you don't want to read another post about that movie, here, just keep a movin' right on through. You can't stop what's coming.)

So, let's take a look at what's here, and what's not here. And by that I mean what's in the movie, not what we might have seen if we'd been somehow been able to enter the picture as invisible ectoplasmic entities, free to wander back and forth at will between the membranes of those motel walls. We may draw different conclusions about what we see (and about how important it is), but let's not invent extraneous fictions beyond what the movie shows us (like Chigurh hiding under the bed or slithering down the drain)....

If you don't know how this is going to turn out, proceed no further.

View image Returning to the crime scene. From Bell's POV, the camera moves in on room 114, where he has previously been, arriving too late to prevent bloodshed. The lock on door 112 is... dark, obscured by a shadow at this moment. Notice two sources of practical illumination here: the light between the doors, and Ed Tom's headlights (which we'll see when he opens the door).

View image As Ed Tom approaches 114, it is cast in shadow and the door to room 112 is now in light.

View image The blown lock on the door of room 114, now illuminated, from Ed Tom's POV to the right of it.

View image Chigurh on the other side of a door. The source of the light shining on Chigurh is ambiguous to say the least. Looks like it's shining up on him from inside the room, not through the hole in the lock, which would cast shadows in the other direction. Not that this matters much. Happens in movies all the time to light what needs to be lit within the frame. Note the gold color of the "hole." We're seeing the inside of the casing, the curve that's facing away from Chigurh. Could this be Ed Tom's POV" shot of something he can't actually see?

View image After cutting outside again, we return to a tighter shot on Chigurh, this time without seeing the light coming through the hole. This is not the first time we've been at a hotel/motel room door trying to intuit what's on the other side.

View image Close-up of the hole. Looks like a reflection of Ed Tom in the housing, but how is light bent around the inside of a rounded surface? What is the source of the light streaming to the left? The previous shot would suggest this is from Chigurh's POV, but we don't know to a certainty (see Eagle Pass Hotel conversation between Chigurh and Wells).

View image Ed Tom prepares to enter. Again, the shot emphasizes another space, room 112, even as it presses in on him entering room 114. Again, the lock of room 114 is in shadow; the lock of room 112 is not.

View image Ed Tom pushes open the door (visual echo of Chigurh entering Llewelyn's trailer), which goes flat against the wall. Nobody is behind it. If you don't believe me, you can watch the shot frame-by-frame on DVD. Notice headlight behind Ed Tom.

View image Entering the room. Multiple shadows, sources of light, reflections (see silhouette in mirror on extreme right) fragment the space. Ed Tom could be walking into a hall of mirrors, entering a shattered world of illusions, possibilities. You know how this is going to end, don't you? No. No, you don't.

What's most obvious about the way this sequence is constructed is that it is deliberately ambiguous. Maybe you prefer to think that the Coens are just "cheating." OK, fine. But what if Chigurh has been inside room 112? In a comment at Glenn Kenny's back in December, I suggested a few reasons we should consider the possibility (although Glenn, who has written brilliantly about "NCFOM," reads the scene differently):

1) He [Llewelyn] took a room adjacent to Moss's his own [38, on the back of 138] in the earlier motel/vent scene. [Chigurh pulls up outside of the visually paired 138 and 139; he checks into 130.]

2) The set-up shot equally emphasizes the two motel doors (with the yellow tape running all the way across both doors -- and the screen).

3) Chigurh is never where you expect him to be, when you expect him to be there.

4) Sheriff Bell is indeed visibly relieved that he did not find Chigurh in that room (the two doors are the equivalent of his "coin toss" -- then he finds a coin on the floor). But he did enter it, looked around, and Chigurh was not there.

5) If Chigurh wanted/needed to shoot Sheriff Bell (say, if he were discovered standing behind the front door, where we can see he isn't), he would have. But the movie is about how we all carry on living in the shadow of death.

6) We're never given any indication that Chigurh has "supernatural powers." Yes, he represents impending mortality (he's always lurking out there somewhere), but if you shoot him, does he not bleed? Yes, he does. We even see him treating his wounds, and he's as much of flesh and blood as Moss.

A commenter named Aron at In the Company of Glenn got it just right, as I see it:

I think this is a deliberate discontinuity here and there is no guaranteed explanation. The movie in its final sequences accelerates the rate at which you as a viewer become dissociated from omniscience.... [The Coens use ellipses frequently in the last half-hour of the film, pushing many key events off-screen.]

The point is to make us feel overwhelmed in a similar fashion as Bell by our inability to understand it all.

This particular example is one that steps slightly over the line into Lynch, and its a great example of artistic decision.

- - - -

View image Chigurh checks in: In the near-miss at the Regal Motel, Llewelyn has two double beds in room 138 and in 38, the room directly in back of it. Chigurh, following the transponder, has pulled up in front of rooms 138 and 139. He checks in to room 130, on the inside corner, and kills the Mexicans waiting for Llewelyn in room 138. A pattern is developing...

View image Bonus image #1: Regal Motel: Chigurh pulls up outside rooms 138 (Llewelyn's) and 139, responding to the transponder. As he backs up (look at all the reflections), 139 is visually (and audibly) eliminated from consideration.

View image Bonus image #2: Note the glimmer of light through the peephole when Chigurh shuts the door of room 130 at the Regal Motel.

EXT. MOTEL

Now very late, empty of onlookers and emergency vehicles.

Sheriff Bell's cruiser pulls up just inside the courtyard.

He cuts his engine.

Sheriff Bell sits looking at the motel.

Very quiet.

After a long beat he gets out of the car. He pushes its door
shut quietly, with two hands.

He looks up the veranda.

The one door, most of the way up, has yellow tape across it.
Its loose ends wave in a light breeze.

Sheriff Bell looks up the street.

Nothing much to attract his attention.

EXT. MOTEL VERANDA

Sheriff Bell steps up onto the veranda. He takes slow, quiet
steps.

We intercut his point-of-view, nearing the door marked by
police tape.

As he draws close to the door he slows.

The yellow tape is about chest high. Above it is the lock
cylinder. It has been punched hollow.

Sheriff Bell stands staring at the lock.

Very quiet. The chick. chick. of the tape-ends against the
door frame.

Still.

INT. MOTEL ROOM

INSIDE

Chigurh is still also. Just on the other side of the door,
he stands holding his shotgun.

From inside, the tap of the breeze-blown tape is dulled but
perceptible. It counts out beats.

Chigurh is also looking at the lock cylinder.

The curved brass of its hollow interior holds a reflection of
the motel room exterior. Lights and shapes. The curvature
distorts to unrecognizability what is reflected, but we see
the color of Sheriff Bell's uniform.

The reflection is very still. Then, slow movement.

OUTSIDE

Sheriff Bell finishes bringing his hand to his bolstered gun.

It rests there.

Still once again.

His point-of-view of the lock. The reflection from here,
darker, is hard to read.

INSIDE

Chigurh, still.

OUTSIDE

Sheriff Bell, his hand on his bolstered gun. A long beat.
His hand drops.

He extends one booted toe. He nudges the door inward.
As the lock cylinder slowly recedes, reflected shapes
scramble inside it and slide up its curve. Before the door
is fully open we cut around:

FROM INSIDE

The door finishes creaking open. Sheriff Bell is a
silhouette in the doorway.

A still beat.

At length Sheriff Bell ducks under the chest-high police tape
to enter.

The worn carpet has a large dark stain that glistens near the
door. Sheriff Bell steps over it, advancing slowly. The
room is dimly lit shapes.

There is a bathroom door in the depth of the room. Sheriff
Bell advances toward it. He stops in front of it.

He toes the door. It creaks slowly open.

INT. MOTEL BATHROOM

The bathroom, with no spill light from outside, is pitch
black.

Sheriff Bell reaches slowly up with one hand. He gropes at
the inside wall.

The light goes on: bright. White tile. Sheriff Bell
squints. A beat.

He takes a step in.

He looks at the small window.

He looks at the window's swivel-catch, locked.

INT. MAIN ROOM

Sheriff Bell emerges from the bathroom. He sits heavily onto
the bed.

He looks around, not for anything in particular. His look
catches on something low, just in front of him:
A ventilation duct near the baseboard. Its opening is
exposed; its grille lies on the floor before it.

Sheriff Bell stares.

At length he leans forward. He nudges the grille aside. On
the floor, a couple of screws. A coin.

* * * *

Posted by Jim Emerson at 01:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (26)

View image The House Next Door.

Now that Matt Zoller Seitz has announced that he's moving on, back to Dallas from Brooklyn and into full-time filmmaking, I thought I'd take a quick glance over the shoulder at some of the writing he's done at his home, The House Next Door, since he opened the place January 1, 2006. Of course, he's done a lot of other writing -- for The Dallas Observer, The Newark Star-Ledger (the Sopranos' hometown paper), the New York Press and the New York Times among other outlets -- but he became a habit with me through the House.

Matt has been a generous proprietor (sometimes perhaps too generous, but that's hardly a grievous fault). Today the House Next Door masthead lists more than 40 contributors -- novices and vets alike -- including the invaluable editor-cum-landlord Keith Uhlich.

At the same time that I'm excited for Matt (who, by the way, I've never met face-to-face), I'm not going to pretend I'm not bummed. This is how I deal with the grief part: Let's celebrate MSZ for all he's done in (and for) the blogosphere. Consider this a very short clip reel. As the lights go down on one phase of Matt's career, and the curtain opens on another, sit back and immerse yourself...

Oh, and sorry about that headline, guys. (That's as in Zoller-, not polter-.)

Open House (first House Next Door post, January 1, 2006):

My grandfather, a self-educated German-American farmer from Olathe, Kansas, believed that no journey, however seemingly circuitous or self-destructive, was ever truly unnecessary, or even avoidable. Sometimes we just have to continue along a particular path for inexplicable, personal reasons, disregarding warnings of friends and family and perhaps our own internal voices, until we arrive at our destination, whatever it may be. This type of journey, my grandfather said, was the equivalent of "driving around the block backward to get to the house next door."

"The New World" (first theatrical cut, January 2, 2006):

Other people direct movies. Terrence Malick builds cathedrals. "The New World" is my new religion, easily the most pictorially innovative and moving American studio release I've seen in the 15 years I've been a professional movie critic. To appreciate it requires viewers to abandon narrative filmmaking conventions they're comfortable with (perhaps even spoiled by) and learn a new language, a primordial language of pictures that largely bypasses narrative cinema's persistent theatrical influence and plugs into the rhythms of thought. [...]

In service of this unfashionably transcendental vision of life, Malick merges images and music with a silent filmmaker’s muscular grace. The immediacy of Malick’s shooting and editing style (he improvises entire scenes and subplots on the fly, and sends second unit cameramen to pop off shots of anything they deem beautiful, and finds the movie in the editing much as a reporter finds a story in his notes) pushes against the film’s lofty, contemplative elements: the swelling classical score (Wagner, Mozart, James Horner), the ruminative multiple voice-overs. The resultant aesthetic tension jostles us into new ways of seeing. Watching "The New World," we are at once dislocated and free, experiencing the shock of the new while recollecting it in tranquility (or speculating on how we will remember it). Malick’s characters pore over their lives as if words will fix their feelings; sometimes a random, lonely word will puncture a reverie or a moment of intense violence (a word like “mother,” for instance, or “wonder”). But words, Malick realizes, fix nothing because nothing is fixed; there is no past or present, no differences or similarities, except those we choose to mark. In Malick’s films, memory becomes history (or anecdote); thoughts and feelings become images, and images become music, and everything becomes new.

Diversity of response isn’t prima facie evidence of a masterpiece, of course. It’s the minimum we should expect from a film that aspires to be more than a diversion. But as I look back on that evening, I am less struck by what happened afterward than by the audience’s behavior during the film. Whatever opinions they formed after the fact, while they watched “The New World,” they gave themselves to it. They knew this movie respected them, and they responded in kind.

I close with a few words from another American visionary, Willa Cather: “Miracles seem to me to rest not so much on faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but on our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what was there always.”

"The New World" is a miracle. I’m glad I’m alive to see it.

View image "The New World."

"No Country for Old Men" (November 16, 2007):

The Coens' shift from up-close, graphic violence to obscured or elliptical violence cements the sense that we've been privy to a mysterious but fundamental change in the universe. We see bloodied flesh close-up when it's a new phenomenon; when it ceases to be noteworthy, the filmmakers stop showing it. A notable exception is the climactic car wreck that injures Chigurh. It has the hallmarks of a deus ex machina, but it occurs too late to prevent the assassin's campaign of terror and it doesn't so much end his rampage as interrupt its denouement. [...]

...[T]he Coens insist that no man can verify if these forces actually exist or if we insist they do out of vanity -- in order to convince ourselves that our existence matters to anyone but us and our loved ones. The confluence of forces that suggests fate or justice might be evidence of a higher power (represented in the conversation between Bell and the old lawman about what God wants), chance (Anton Chigurh's tossed coin, which decides if a person lives or dies -- an intriguing hint that on some level, this stone-cold psychopath feels guilt and perhaps wishes to reassure himself that his bloody deeds were inevitable) or free will (a subject broached in the scene where Carla Jean declines the coin toss to force Chigurh to accept responsibility for his deeds). Or it could be the result of electrons colliding to produce a result that might have been different had a single electron bounced differently. This free will vs. destiny thread runs through all of the Coens' work, even their most maligned and dismissed movie, "The Hudsucker Proxy" -- a comedy in which the story's microcosmic society, the Hudsucker Corporation, persists no matter what executives, workers, stockholders and outside agitators do to influence it. That film's most revealing image is dolt hero Norville's blueprint of three ridiculously successful toys, all represented by the same drawing, a straight line (the side view: free will) and a circle (the overhead view: destiny).

"Taxi Driver." (Martin Scorsese, 1976) War vet turned cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) preaches the values of fitness and military discipline, but smokes, pops pills, stays out all night and softens his breakfast cereal with Thunderbird. He bemoans society's decline, declares that all the animals come out at night and says he wishes a real rain would come and wash all the scum off the streets, but he's a sociopathic, combative loner who's so comfortable in hardcore porn theaters that he takes his dream girl there on their first and last date, then channels his wounded anger into "protecting" a child prostitute and stalking a presidential candidate. The difference between Travis and Travis' self-perception is is the true subject of this movie. Written by Paul Schrader, "Taxi Driver," like all great contrapuntally narrated films, exposes the gulf between our sense of our own importance and our actual importance, between what we think we know about ourselves and the truth of the matter. And it shows us, though both narration and subjectively distorted imagery, how feelings warp our sense of life. Scorsese's film is all tension, no closure; all schism, no merger. The blowout finale solves everything and nothing. The hero is a lunatic. The lunatic is a hero. A core of mystery is preserved.

To some degree, nearly all of Altman’s films are anatomies of community. Ditto “Deadwood,” which week to week showcases a panoramic concentration that recalls Altman at the top of his game. Like Altman, Milch is not content to fixate on the plight of one individual -- a fundamental creative choice that puts both men temperamentally at odds with much of American popular culture. Both Altman and Milch prefer to see the big picture, the pointillist mural that takes shape when an artist asks the audience to take a few steps back from the canvas. They study human constellations comprised of distinct human beings who embrace different religions, inhabit different social strata, imbibe different substances, muse on their own pet obsessions and pursue their own strange agendas, all the while remaining largely oblivious to their impact on everyone else. Both Altman and Milch are not just storytellers. They are dramatic anthropologists, devising a collective organism in order to scrutinize it.

I made the movie because I originally went to college to study filmmaking, got sidetracked into a long and satisfying career as a critic and reporter, but continued to think like a filmmaker whenever I watched movies or TV. My personal background explains why my criticism tends to be equally interested in form and content, often more the former than the latter. It also explains why "Home" is a elliptical movie, very realistic in certain respects and surreal in others, with kind of a hothouse atmosphere, a documentary approach to behavior, and a dry, admittedly strange sense of humor. The style is a mix of classical Hollywood compositions and camera moves and some fairly wild documentary stuff. The narrative blends scripted and improvised scenes, and the finale is open ended and perhaps a bit ambiguous.

"Home" gave me a chance to visually express some of the aesthetic qualities I value as a moviegoer, which I guess makes it a continuation of criticism by other means. The movie also represents an admission that I am and have always been a filmmaker in addition to being a critic, and that I have no intention of choosing one pursuit at the expense of the other, and people on both sides of that line might as well get used to it.

The most significant scene in the entire run of The Sopranos occurred in last night's episode, "Kennedy and Heidi." It wasn't the bloody car wreck or its disturbing aftermath. It wasn't Tony's trip (in any sense of the word "trip"). It wasn't either of Tony's two therapy scenes, and it wasn't any of the scenes of mourning (or not mourning). It wasn't even a scene really. It was a five-second cutaway to the two title characters, Heidi and Kennedy -- the teenage girls in the car Chris Moltisanti swerved to avoid.

"Maybe we should go back, Heidi," says Kennedy.
Heidi's reply: "Kennedy, I'm on my learner's permit after dark." [...]

... Any righting of this universe's moral scales will be incidental. Tony's been living an expedient life for too long. If he was going to change, he would have done it. He's been going down this road forever. He's had too many close calls to count. Each time, he hears some version of Heidi and Kennedy in his head, Kennedy saying, "Let's go back," and Heidi saying, "No."

Heidi is driving.

"It's my nature."

That's the punchline of the the fable "The Scorpion and the Frog," a fable repeated in numerous pop culture works, including The Sopranos, which referenced it in Season Two. About 10 minutes into "Made in America," the final episode of the final season of David Chase's drama, that phrase wriggled into my head and stayed there. It's key to appreciating the final episode, and key to understanding Chase's attitude toward people; they are what they are, they rarely change, and when they do, they stay changed for as long as it takes to realize that they were more comfortable with their old selves, at which point they revert; and once they're taken out of the picture, by illness or incarceration or death, the world keeps turning without them.

Which is a roundabout way of saying, what the hell did people expect from David Chase? Closure? Satisfaction? Answers? A moral?

It was the perfect ending. No ending at all. Write your own goddamn ending.

... [I]t mostly sticks with Daniel, a closed-off man who seems to have little soul to lose, and syncs up his lordly ruthlessness and the director's style, robbing the film of the greater complexity it might have achieved from having the hero and the style work at cross-purposes (and they surely would have in a film by Altman or Terrence Malick). From the moment we meet Daniel, he's a terrifying capitalist instrument, telegraphing his objectives (to the viewer, his clients and his rivals) so unambiguously (and with a rumbling, often gleeful voice) that at times he evokes John Huston's Noah Cross from "Chinatown." Between Day-Lewis' hyperreal performance -- always teetering on the edge of theatrical artifice -- and Jonny Greenwood's aggressively dissonant score, Daniel radiates an almost vampiric mix of hunger, patience and indestructibility; midway through the movie, when he's riding on a train and a shaft of sunlight unexpectedly hits his face, I half-expected him to burst into flame.

Yet in characterizing Daniel, here too Anderson mostly transcends his influences, creating a character we haven't seen before in a movie that feels fresh. Daniel is inarguably kin to Michael Corleone and Charles Foster Kane -- a monster of ego, manipulative, ruthless and self-loathing. But there's more here than Lonely Capitalist cliche. Daniel has human potential, but it can't be tapped because his drive is so intense and his emotional armor so thick. You can see it in the way that Daniel dotes on H.W. during their initial train ride together in the 1902 sequence. Even though he's probably already thinking of ways he can amortize this profound emotional investment -- sure enough, in the 1911 section H.W. accompanies Daniel on business meetings, enabling Daniel to declare, "I'm a family man" before he commences screwing whoever he's dealing with -- from the start, the connection between boy and man seems intuitive, elemental, real. Later in the film, after Daniel has used and neglected H.W. and then coldly sent him packing, there still seems to be real love there, however mangled. Later, when the newly-returned H.W. walks through a field with Daniel, who is spouting the usual self-justifying bullshit and otherwise acting as if he's done nothing wrong, the boy hauls off and starts slapping him. Anderson's directorial detachment -- framing the whole exchange in long shot -- is masterful.

There’s got to be a review [of "My Blueberry Nights"] out there that’s pointed this out, but I haven’t seen one yet, that the movie is broken up by… you know, it’s a fragmented movie that’s really a series of vignettes and almost a series of character moments. Some of ‘em are big epiphanies, and others are just kind of fleeting conversations. But they’re broken up by these intertitles that are “time” and “distance.” It’ll say, “Four Days Later, 3,221 miles.” And the title cards don’t really mean anything. They’re there and they pop up onscreen, and they seem to be very momentous, and the first time you see them you think, “Ah, this is important. This is the key to everything.” And they keep popping up throughout the movie, and they don’t illuminate anything, and they don’t mean anything. And that’s the point of putting them up there… these distinctions of… Where are you from? Where are you now, physically? What time is it? You know, is it a holiday? Is it an anniversary? These things are not as important as the life that’s going on inside of you, which doesn’t obey any calendar or any clock or any map.

I think it’s Wong Kar-wai sending a message, and it’s very much in tune with the one he’s been sending throughout his filmography, which is “life happens in the moment.” Life happens in the moment; it doesn’t happen… you know, if you spend too much time looking forward or looking back, you’re not really living. And that’s why his movies are focused on… they’re built around the moment in the way that Michael Mann’s films are. They’re about emotions, and when he kicks into slow motion, or fast motion, or freeze frame, it’s almost never to italicize a plot point. It’s usually to italicize a feeling. Or to extend a feeling, or to truncate a feeling, and it’s all about the feelings and the sensations, and what people see and what they hear and what they feel. Very few movies are about that. That aesthetic is not shared by most movies. And I was looking back over the filmmakers that I am generally most attracted to, and they all have that in common.

Writing is a hall of mirrors, a combination journal and photo album that exists in your head from cradle to grave, present tense; so I guess it's inevitable that no matter what I write about, it somehow circles around to something I've seen before or written about before, someplace I've been before, someone I knew before. [...]

The House Next Door started out as a hobby -- a place to put writing that was too personal, too out-of-the-mainstream, too unclassifiable or too random to publish in NYPress, which employed me as a film critic, or The Star-Ledger, where I worked as TV columnist. But that changed... [...]

Strange that what started out as a solo venture became a collective enterprise. This has happened to me throughout my life, from elementary school comics newsletters up through independent film projects that were originally intended only as screenplays, but that ultimately morphed into self-directed ventures involving dozens of people whose only shared trait, it seemed, was a willingness to get drawn into another person's obsession. Everything's different, nothing's changed.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

View image Matt Zoller Seitz.

Matt Zoller Seitz, long one of my favorite film writers and the pioneering architect of the priceless House Next Door, is moving into full-time filmmaking. That's great news, and sad news for those of us who always look forward to his byline -- and, especially, the wit and insight that unspools beneath it. I want to compile a little "best of" sampling for Matt, just in case you haven't been following him, but I'm a little in shock right now. When I consider the exceptional, collegial atmosphere among our extended network of movie bloggers, and how much we learn and grow through exposure to one another's work, there's nobody of whom I'm prouder to consider myself a "colleague." You can read more about Matt's plans at the House:

Well part of it is… you know I produced a feature film, a low-budget thriller, a few years ago and then went on and directed a little movie myself. I have been working on projects that are in various stages of completion since then and it’s been slow going for a variety of reasons. But I would like to concentrate on that exclusively. I want to concentrate on filmmaking exclusively for a while and see how it goes because I’ve never given it my all. The two features that I’ve been associated with were done while I had a full-time job and a part-time job. So my thinking is, “well if I am not doing anything but filmmaking, what might I be able to accomplish?”

Yesterday, Matt posted a beautiful short film called "Some Other Time" in memory of his late wife Jennifer Dawson. The moment I saw the title I knew he'd chosen the version -- the greatest recording of one of my two or three favorite songs -- and he's set the music to movie with grace and understated eloquence.

This day was just a token,
Too many words are still unspoken.
Oh, well, we'll catch up
Some other time.

Just when the fun is starting,
Comes the time for parting,
But let's be glad for what we've had
And what's to come.

See and hear it here...

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

View image Son (Michael Shannon). Opening shot: "Shotgun Stories."

In Sally Potter's "Yes," there's a scene in a restaurant kitchen in which a Lebanese chef and a young Brit-punk dishwasher get into fierce confrontation (you can't really call it an "argument") over politics and religion. The kid grabs a frying pan and goes after the chef. The chef picks up a knife. Standoff. The manager arrives. Summarily, he fires the chef.

In the Q & A after the screening at Ebertfest, some people said they thought this was clearly a race-based (or racist) decision on the manager's part. Others debated the choice of weapons: Didn't a knife appear more threatening than a pan?

View image He (Simon Abkarian), "Yes."

Back up two weeks to the Cinema Interruptus series of screenings at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO: We're looking at the scene in "No Country for Old Men" in which Sheriff Ed Tom Bell returns to the scene of the crime at the motel. [Spoiler alert -- although why you would be reading this blog if you haven't seen "NCFM" is beyond me.] The way the scene is constructed, we expect Chigurh to be standing behind the door when Ed Tom enters the room. The door opens flat against the wall. Ed Tom steps over a pool of dried blood in the doorway, looks around the room, checks the bathroom window (which is locked from the inside) and, relieved, sits down on the bed. He notices an air vent that has been removed. Four screws and a dime are on the floor.

What more do you need to know? I'm not saying it's unreasonable to want to know. But take a moment to look before you start jumping to conclusions. What is there and what is not there. Does the movie provide the answer(s) to your questions, or does it not? If not, what does that decision tell you? That the Coens are sloppy or forgetful? That they're interested in something else, like the experience Ed Tom has just gone through? That maybe you're asking the wrong questions? What else?

We ran the scene again, stopping to examine each shot in the scene. A few participants in the CWA crowd just couldn't deal. Was Chigurh actually hiding behind the door after all, just squeezing himself really, really tight against the wall. Did he climb through the air vent (that was less than a foot in diameter)? Was he hiding under the bed and Ed Tom just didn't think to look?

Even when it was in front of their eyes, they couldn't see what was there and what was not there. Cranky and exhausted, I finally lost it and said something like: "Look, you're either watching the movie or you're not. Everything you need to know is right there in the images on the screen and you either see it or you don't see it, but acknowledge the reality of what's in front of you."

What I mean is: The movie is this shot followed by this shot followed by this shot. It's not something you made up and stuck into it later to make yourself feel better. Sure, maybe Chigurh was kidnapped by aliens in the second before Ed Tom opened the door. Maybe he spontaneously combusted but didn't leave any smoke or remains behind because that's just the kind of "magic" guy he is. Maybe he was laying on the floor and Ed Tom just didn't notice him and stepped right over him. Maybe he got sucked into the television like Carol Ann in "Poltergeist"...

All week I'd used one of my favorite "Barton Fink" stories to illustrate how the Coens' minds (and films) work ("What don't I understand?"). I had been enormously grateful to them in 1991 when they chose not to open the box that Barton is carrying at the end of the movie. After all, we pretty much know what's inside. Do we need to see it, too? Does it even matter? The Coens said they'd considered it, but then asked themselves a more important question: If you see what's in the box, where does that get you?

Nowhere. So they didn't.¹ (They didn't have Marge spell out what she'd learned from her experience with Mike -- the key to solving the case in "Fargo"; they didn't have Tom explain why he was doing what he did every step of the way, or even in retrospect, in "Miller's Crossing." Indeed, at the end of the movie, when Leo says people always do things for a reason, Tom replies: "Do you always know why you do things, Leo?")

Flash forward again to Ebertfest 2008 and first-time filmmaker Jeff Nichols talking about his film, "Shotgun Stories." In the twilit first shot, we see scars or lesions or sores or something on the bare back of Son (Michael Shannon). In the movie, several characters tell stories they've heard about what may or may not have happened. Nichols said he wrote an expository scene that spelled it out in dialog.

"It was a terrible scene," Nichols said. He hated it. He cut it. Then he called his older brother and said, "I think I just took out the other shotgun story in 'Shotgun Stories.'" It was an intuitively smart decision. Had that scene been included, it would have violated the spirit and aesthetic of the rest of the movie. Some things are better left unexplained.

Which brings us back to "Yes." If only writer-director Potter had been there to talk about it (she had to cancel at the last minute because she was shooting a movie in New York). Yes, given the context of the scene, there's an implicit and explicit racial dimension to the scene. And maybe a man with a knife does look more dangerous than a man with a frying pan. But does it have to be one thing or the other? Is one more true, or less true, or can they co-exist along with other reasons or possibilities?

It makes you wonder who was actually watching the movie that was on the screen. In the post-movie discussion, several people mentioned how "layered" the film is -- like the duduk that courses through a Cuban salsa melody during a sequence intercutting images of one of the lovers in Havana and the other in Beirut. The film is written and performed entirely in blank verse. It's... poetic. And the easiest way to kill poetry, or cinema, is to nail it down to One Thing.

* * * *

¹ My reading of the motel scene is here and here. (I'm sticking with my take, even though Glenn Kenny sees it differently.) No, I don't find it necessary to imbue Chigurh (or "No Country for Old Men") with supernatural powers to explain the scene, narratively or thematically. But it does come right after Ed Tom says he doesn't see him (he never sees him) as a "homicidal lunatic" but as a "ghost." It does work on that level, too. If you look at the way the shot of Ed Tom approaching the motel doors (two doors, not one) is framed, and you remember Chigurh's m.o. at the first motel where Llewelyn hides the satchel, you should have all the information you need. Also, see if you can catch a glimpse the lock housing on the room next door...

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

View image The most famous phone box in the world.

After the screening of Bill Forsyth's long-unavailable masterpiece "Housekeeping" at Ebertfest (about which more later) somebody asked him why he used the word "moving" in a key piece of dialog rather than novelist Marilynne Robinson's word-of-choice, "drifting." Forsyth said he didn't remember for certain, but imagined it was because "drifting" was simply "too on-the-nose," too "poetic" sounding. Actress Christine Lahti, who played the character speaking the line in question, and who joined Forsyth on stage (neither of them having seen the movie, or each other, for 21 years) confirmed that "drifting" works beautifully on the page of a novel, but wouldn't have sounded right if spoken aloud on the screen. So much artistry is reflected in that simple explanation. What seemed at first like kind of a dumb, nit-picky question was justified by the answer.

Forsyth spun another tale of adaptation that mirrored the oblique and inevitable comic structure of one of his movies:

He loved Robinson's book so much, he said, that he had a devil of a time trying to fashion it into a screenplay. Finally, he decided to simply take a copy of the book and start cutting pieces out of it that he wanted to use, dividing them up into categories like "narration," "action," "dialog," etc. He put them in separate envelopes... and realized that every time he cut a page he destroyed what was on the other side, so he had to go out and buy another copy of the book to cut things from the other side. Maybe you had to be there, but his timing and his Scottish brogue made the anecdote priceless. Just as he does in his movies, he lets the audience get a little ahead of the characters, then acknowledges what the viewers, and the characters in the movie, have been thinking. Like the moment in "Housekeeping" where Sylvie blithely walks across a bridge over Fingerbone Lake... Or some ladies from church come to visit and see stacks of newspapers all over the house. (No, I'm not going to mention the "punch-line" in either case. Just remember 'em.)

David Bordwell has another marvelous Forsyth anecdote from a personal conversation he had with the filmmaker. You'll find this and other Ebertfest coverage (including an extended treatment of the opening night film, "Hamlet") at the invaluable Bordwell-Thompson blog:

Forsyth talked as well about the final shot, one of the most satisfying I’ve ever seen. The original cut ended with Mac returning to his Houston apartment and staring out at the dark urban landscape—beautiful in its own way, but very different from the majesty of the Scottish shore. There the original film ended, but the Warners executives, although liking the film, wanted a more upbeat ending. Couldn’t the hero go back to Scotland and find happiness, you know, like in Brigadoon? They even offered money for a reshoot to provide a happy wrapup. Forsyth didn’t want that, of course, but he had less than a day to find an ending.

The movie makes a running gag of the red phone booth through which Mac communicates with Houston. Forsyth remembered that he had a tail-end of a long shot of the town, with the booth standing out sharply. He had just enough footage for a fairly lengthy shot. So he decided to end the film with that image, and he simply added the sound of the phone ringing.

With this ending, the audience gets to be smart and hopeful. We realize that our displaced local hero is phoning the town he loves, and perhaps he will announce his return. This final grace note provides a lilt that the grim ending would not. Sometimes, you want to thank the suits—not for their bloody-mindedness, but for the occasions when their formulaic demands give the filmmaker a chance to rediscover fresh and felicitous possibilities in the material.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Seeing a series of exquisitely subtle films that includes Jeff Nichols' "Shotgun Stories," Eran Kolirin's "The Band's Visit" and Bill Forsyth's "Housekeeping," you become sensitized to how clumsy most movies are about unloading their expository details. These Ebertfest films and filmmakers know how to reveal what needs to be revealed indirectly, without the audience necessarily even realizing that it's being let in on a wealth of information.

So: A real-life example of efficient, semi-oblique expository dialog overheard in a restaurant in Champaign-Urbana on a stormy Friday night. A young couple have just arrived and are about to be seated.

Hostess (smiling): "Oh, it's just the two of you tonight."

Man: "Yeah, we popped in a Disney movie and slipped out the side door."

See, that's a little movie right there. Filmmakers, take note: How much do we know about the lives of this man, this woman, and their history with this restaurant from these two short lines?

More about this subject (and others) in further catch-up Ebertfest posts...

Posted by Jim Emerson at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The Illini Student Union wi-fi network has been down since late Friday/Saturday morning, so I'll have to file more when I get back home (I'm between planes in Chicago now, on airport wi-fi). I think the Saturday convention of student scientists on the U of I campus (and/or the massive rain-storm the night before) may have overloaded the system.

Overheard in the hall outside one of the science convention meeting rooms, one student to another: "Well, should we just go back to our anti-social lives then?"

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

View image David Bordwell and Bill Forsyth on an Ebertfest panel. (photy by Thompson McClellan)

My Ebertfest has already been made for me because I spoke to Bill Forsyth yesterday and, at one point, he said "Great." This is major -- particularly for a guy who, with his friends, went around saying "Great" in Gordon John Sinclair's Scottish accent from "Gregory's Girl" for years. It's a well-known fact. Bella, bella.

In honor of tomorrow's Ebertfest screening I went back and dug up my original 1987 review of Forsyth's "Housekeeping" -- which was the #1 film on my Ten Best list that year (along with such films as John Huston's "The Dead," Tim Hunter's "River's Edge," Alain Cavalier's "Therese" and John Boorman's "Hope and Glory"):

Ruthie (Sara Walker) and Lucille (Andrea Burchill) are skating on thin ice. The orphaned sisters, now going through a gawky teen-age phase, spin silently in circles on the frozen surface of Fingerbone Lake. In the distance, a cluster of laughing children and barking dogs play rambunctiously, but Ruthie and Lucille keep to themselves. They don't like the noise.

This image, slipped into Bill Forsyth's austere "Housekeeping," is as subtle and powerful an evocation of loneliness as the movies have ever given us. Ruthie and Lucille are chilled to the soul with an unshakable melancholy, as though the cold water of Fingerbone Lake itself had somehow seeped under their skins, pooling in the pits of their stomachs.

The lake is a part of their heritage: This is the same body of water into which their grandfather, a railroad engineer, perished years before when his locomotive plunged from the tracks. The train and its passengers vanished into the depths, leaving behind nothing but a hole in the ice and, bobbing on the surface, three absurdly, almost maddeningly trivial items: "a suitcase, a seat cushion and a lettuce," as the legend has it.

Ruthie and Lucille are alone; their closest relatives are united at the bottom of Fingerbone Lake. And so, the girls long for that sense of community that most families take for granted.

Then, one crisp Northwestern morning, their late mother's itinerant sister Sylvie (Christine Lahti) wanders into Fingerbone and settles into the house to live with her nieces. The perpetually rootless Sylvie is a most unlikely figure around which to construct a nuclear family. Her connections with other people are friendly, but casual -- a habit developed over years of meeting fellow drifters on freight trains, in bus stations and around fires in hobo camps.

But, after putting up with a pair of worrisome elderly aunts for a while, the sisters welcome Sylvie's refreshing eccentricity. And so does the movie audience. We're charmed by her air of unself-conscious flightiness. We'd like her to turn out to be some kind of wonderful, lovable maverick, an Auntie Mame who'll bring some fun and spark into the lives of these girls and shake up the stodgy, hermetic society of this early-'50s small town.

For the girls, Aunt Sylvie is the closest thing to family that they've had, apart from each other, since their mother passed away. Shortly after Sylvie's arrival, the waters of Fingerbone Lake overflow into the downstairs kitchen and parlor, as though the spirits of the girls' ancestors have come flooding back into the house as well.

Viewing everything with benign detachment, Sylvie seems perpetually distracted, her attention flitting from one thing to the next. At other times, she inappropriately fixates on one object of interest at the expense of all others: When a curtain catches on fire during a chorus of "Happy Birthday," Sylvie keeps right on blithely singing and smiling as she swats at the flames. The girls enjoy the freedom Sylvie offers them until they realize that what they have mistaken for trust is closer to unconcern.

One day, when they're supposed to be in school, the girls catch sight of Sylvie, standing as though in a trance on the edge of the bridge over Fingerbone Lake, as though preparing to join the rest of the family at the bottom. Later, Sylvie apologizes for having frightened them, but she says she thought they were in school. The hooky-playing sisters, expecting disapproval, are eager to confess: "We didn't go to school today." Sylvie smiles and replies with her own disjointed logic: "But, you see, I didn't know that." As Ruthie observes: "Aunt Sylvie's attitude toward truancy was unsatisfactory."

All of Bill Forsyth's films ("That Sinking Feeling," "Gregory's Girl," "Local Hero," "Comfort and Joy") have been about eccentrics, who are viewed with an enchantingly Gaelic brand of bemused and generous forbearance. "Housekeeping," his first US film, takes a darker, more complex view of idiosyncratic behavior, and is all the richer for it; it's the first Great American Film directed by a Scotsman. To the loopy highlanders in Forsyth's other movies, eccentricity is a way of life, something to be accepted naturally, as part of the landscape.

But "Housekeeping" takes place in a small backwoods US town where greater emphasis is placed on the social importance of fitting in. Some audiences may find the picture's gravity and ambiguity frustrating, but that's precisely what makes it such a moving (and disturbing) experience. Forsyth doesn't see Sylvie as simply a healthy or an unhealthy influence on her nieces; she's both. Much of "Housekeeping" is funny in the quirky, off-kilter manner of Forsyth's earlier movies, but the overriding tone is a somber one, suffused with melancholy. This movie, photographed in deep shades of blue, brown and gray, evokes a sadness so profound that after a while your bones begin to ache.

It's a sadness that has to do with being an outsider; with the painful loss of surrendering childhood innocence; with the difficulty of finding a place for yourself in a world that isn't what you hoped it would be; with acknowledging the fragility of all human connections and the fundamental unknowability of other people; and most of all, with an overwhelming sense of aloneness.

While marooned in the flooded house, Lucille gets restless and bored. She wants to seek higher ground, to go out and look for other people. At first, Sylvie doesn't understand; to her, the flood has been a blessing, allowing them to live in an ideal, self-contained world. Then, with just a hint of sorrow, Sylvie recognizes Lucille's symptoms: "Oh yes, the loneliness. I know, it bothers some people." Some forms of loneliness, like the kind ingrained in Sylvie, Ruthie and perhaps Lucille as well, are incurable. People just have to find their own ways of living with it.

Shy, awkward Ruthie feels an odd affinity with Sylvie and adores her as a kindred spirit. But the more conventionally pretty and outgoing Lucille starts to sense that there's something wrong with Sylvie's way of life. Wandering on a woodsy hillside one day, she says to Ruthie: "You know, we're just hiding up here," and the sisters, who have always been like two parts of the same person, living in an imaginary world of their own creation, are finally forced to separate.

Sylvie is a difficult role for an actor to play because she is never quite present at the event. There's a kind of disturbing vacancy in her eyes. Not that she's stupid; it's more like her mind has wandered off and left her body behind. Even at the end of the film, she remains elusive. If there seems to be something vague or insubstantial about Christine Lahti's performance, it's only because . . . well, that's Sylvie.

As always, Forsyth's perspective is gentle and tolerant. A more conventional movie would side with the eccentric and turn Lucille's decision into a kind of betrayal, a weak-willed capitulation to society's stifling restrictions. But here, Lucille's choice is every bit as painful and courageous as Sylvie's and Ruthie's. Forsyth shows each character coping with her inner loneliness as best she can.

The title, "Housekeeping," (from Marilynne Robinson's novel) conjures up a number of associations -- of home, domesticity, the maintainence of neat and orderly appearances, keeping up a respectable front. Sylvie turns her house into a cluttered nest, feathered with old newspapers, empty tin cans and stray cats -- a reflection of her state of mind. One of the title's implications is that whoever you are inside is relatively unimportant to most people, as long as you keep your house clean.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

View image Writer-director Tom DiCillo in the limelight. (photo by Thompson McClellan)

After the Ebertfest screening of "Delirious" Thursday afternoon, writer-director Tom DiCillo ("Johnny Suede," "Living in Oblivion," "Box of Moon Light," "The Real Blonde") recalled sending Roger Ebert an e-mail. He was in despair over the distributor's treatment of his latest film, which Ebert had reviewed quite favorably. Out of frustration, and although he'd never written to a critic before, DiCillo posed five pained (and semi-rhetorical) questions about the injustice of the movie business, the last of which was: "Is this all a Kafkaesque nightmare that will never end?"

Ebert wrote back and answered every question. To the final one, he said yes.

DiCillo accentuated the positive in talking about his film before a packed house at the enormous Virginia Theatre. He said it had taken him six years to make "Delirious," a (mostly) comedy about a low-end paparazzo (Steve Buscemi) who takes on a homeless kid (Michael Pitt) as his assistant. DiCillo wrote the part for Buscemi, but it took him a year and a half before the actor agreed to play it.

In his review of "Delirious," Ebert pointed out that Buscemi has 104 credits on IMDb. (That was in 2006; now he's got nine or ten more.) This is a guy who has only been making movies since 1986, playing an HIV-positive performance artist (still his favorite part) in the late Bill Sherwood's pioneering "Parting Glances." But there's a moment in "Delirious," when Buscemi's character almost breaks down talking about his father, that's more emotionally naked than anything else in his filmography. DiCillo said he suggested, just before the take, that he thought Buscemi was getting close to some issues with his own father. When the actor saw it, he asked DiCillo to take it out. He refused. You can understand how Buscemi might feel a bit vulnerable, but the moment needs to be in the movie.

DiCillo had a word about cinematic violence that I particularly appreciated (see Three Kinds of Violence): "The blink of an eye between two people can be as violent as a gunshot."

Posted by Jim Emerson at 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

View image Chaz Ebert introduces Timothy Spall (Rosencrantz) and Rufus Sewell (Fortinbras), both in town with the opening night attraction, a full-length (238-minute) 70 mm print of Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet." (photos by jim emerson)

What is Ebertfest without Ebert? Fest? Kicking off the 10th Anniversary edition of Roger Ebert's (formerly Overlooked) Film Festival, Chaz Ebert passed along her husband's sentiments that, today, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time -- that is, in a bed in Chicago instead of in at the Virginia Theatrer in Urbana-Champaign. But, she reported him saying, you could also say the same thing about the day he tripped on the carpet and fractured his hip. Nobody's giving up hope, though. Chaz said they were consulting with doctors day by day and that she wouldn't be surprised if Roger wound up making it here after all before the fest is through. [UPDATE: The next day Roger and his doctors decided that making the trip wasn't worth the health risk.}

View image L to R (I hope): Jeff Nichols ("Shotgun Stories"), John Peterson ("The Real Dirt on Farmer John"), Eran Kolirin ("The Band's Visit"), Chaz Ebert, Timothy Spall and Rufus Sewell ("Hamlet"), Joan Cohl and Hannah Fisher ("Citizen Kohl"), William J. Erfuth and Joseph Greco and Adam Hammel ("Canvas").

Last year Ebertfest seemed to improve his rate of recovery exponentially, so we can only hope he'll make it to town. (For a sample of good wishes see the comments at his blog, Roger Ebert's Journal.)

So, the festival is just getting started tonight, but already I've learned some things just from talking to people and reading the program. For example:

* Ang Lee is a University of Illinois graduate of the University of Illinois, with a BFA in theater in 1980. He'll be presenting his "Hulk" (which I haven't seen) at the matinee on Saturday.

* From the bio of the Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth ("Gregory's Girl," "Local Hero," "Comfort & Joy" -- marvelous '80s cult staples all), who is here along with his 1987 masterpiece, "Housekeeping":

His instincts for remaining on the margins becoming more and more pronounced, Forsyth never felt fully at ease as the maker of commercial feature films. He finally, and with great relief, quit directing films in the 1990s and now spends his time happily writing scripts and, since he is now officially a grumpy old man, letters of complaint to all and sundry.

View image David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, who really don't take a bad picture.

* Josef von Sternberg's 1927 "Underworld" (which I've also not seen, but which is screening with live music by the Alloy Orchestra) is one of the first gangster pictures. From Kristin Thompson's festival essay:

Apart from being a beautifully made film, "Underworld" introduced the basic conventions of the gangster genre as we think of it today. There had been plenty of movies including gangsters before 1927, but they were always the villains.... [You'll recall that Howard Hawks' 1932 "Scarface" was sub-titled "The Shame of a Nation" and a coda was tacked on denouncing Tony Camonte, just in case you found Paul Muni's characterization too charismatic.] None of these films actually had a gangster as the protagonist. With "Bull" Weed [played by George Bancroft in "Underworld"] the notion of the "good-bad" man, the sympathetic criminal that William S. Hart had popularized in Westerns came into the gangster genre. Much credit for helping to define the genre goes to the great ["Scarface" writer] Ben Hecht, whose original screenplay received "Underworld"'s only Oscar in the first year those awards were given.

We'll be here all weekend...

(Special thanks, as always, to Keeem Robeson for technical assistance on the run...)

Posted by Jim Emerson at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

View image The eponymous Roger Ebert.

I'm in Urbana. My bag isn't. (It's an old canvas backpack thing that I never should have checked anyway. Now I'm paying for it.) I'll be reporting from Ebertfest this week, but I'm heartbroken that, for now at least, Roger won't be here. In case you haven't checked out his brand new, under-construction blog, Roger Ebert's Journal, please do so. Roger writes:

The 10th Anniversary Ebertfest begins tonight in Urbana-Champaign. It is with some melancholy that I write these words on a legal pad in a hospital bed in Chicago. After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip....

Posted by Jim Emerson at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

View image Kimberly Peirce.

The first time I interviewed Martin Short (one of my "SCTV" idols) in 1987, he told me an anecdote about his experiences in Hollywood. A typical encounter with studio executives would begin with something like, "Wow! We love you! You did this and you did that and we think you're great!" Followed, almost immediately, by, "And now that we've hired you, don't do that stuff anymore because that's not what we want from you. Just do it our way."

Here's director Kimberly Peirce on why nearly ten years elapsed between her last feature, "Boys Don't Cry," and her latest one, "Stop Loss":

... After "Boys Don't Cry," Hollywood came and offered me some very expensive projects, some very good stuff.... I had one project that I got almost to fruition, "Silent Star," about the unsolved murder of [the silent movie director] William Desmond Taylor in the 1920s. It was wonderful - the story of how Hollywood was built on an unsolved murder and a cover-up. We had it cast and ready to go, and the studio ran the numbers and they said, "We want to make it for x amount of money." And I said, Uh, all right. But then they said, "We don't want to spend that much, we want to spend 10 million dollars less." I said, Well, I don't know if that's a good idea, but I'll go ahead and make the adjustments I can. And they said, "Well, we don't want to see the version of the movie that we're prepared to pay for. We want to see the version we're not willing to pay for."

Posted by Jim Emerson at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

View image Those plucky, sympathetic teens of yesteryear.

You know what? "Sex and the City" was for girls! Yes, it's true. First it was for (and about) gay boys, but eventually it revolved around a certain brand of perfume-insert, fashion-magazine womankind: rich, white, co-dependent, status-obsessed, desperate for a man to complete her.

Know what else? Judd Apatow makes movies about guys -- and heterosexual relationships with women, but mainly about what used to be known as "male bonding." (The fashionable term now is "bro-mance," which is cuter and invoked largely by what used to be called "metrosexuals.") The Apatow guy tends to be underemployed, white, Jewish (or Canadian), slobby, geeky, smelly, childish (not just "childlike") and more or less happy, unaware that he's desperate for a woman to complete him. Then, once he becomes aware, he's not entirely sure that's possible, or desirable.

This, I submit, is a minor breakthrough in romantic comedy. OK, perhaps I am single and bitter, but I'm also right.

In the New York Sun (also known as "the conservative New York Sun"), Steve Dollar mentions that Catherine Keener's character in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" "pretty much takes the blame for making the poor guy sell all his collectible model toys (but whose side is Apatow on?), and spends much of her screen time mothering her infantile boyfriend."

Is that what happens? Even if so, whose side is Mr. Dollar on? (And who said it was necessary to divine and choose "sides"?)

Dollar describes a passage from "Knocked Up": "After mutual fights, the boys skip off to Vegas, eat some psychedelic mushrooms, and have profoundly wacky conversations about the meaning of life. The girls get dressed up and go to a nightclub, only to be rejected by the doorman because one is pregnant and the other is too old (thus prompting one of [Leslie] Mann's character's shrieking fits of invective)."

And the point is...? That particular nightclub scene is the the least convincing thing in the movie (I'd believe Katherine Heigl would have a baby with Seth Rogen before I'd believe a club bouncer would break down and apologize like that), but is Dollar saying that Heigl's character is not visibly pregnant or that Mann's married, mother-of-two character is not at least 10 years older than the average patron?

The article continues: "Mr. Apatow wants to offer a paean to the pleasures of family life and adult responsibility, but his movies are more convincing when they revel in the beer-soaked bacchanals and jokingly — or, in the case of the 'Superbad' duo, not so jokingly — homoerotic chemistry of male bonding."

True. Patently obvious, in fact. And the point, again, is what?

Then we get to it. Between 1984 and 1987, Dollar says:

...[John] Hughes managed to create strong, sympathetic female characters who had more to offer than drunken rites of passage or stern lectures about putting childish things behind.

Think about Molly Ringwald's plucky, introspective heroines in "Sixteen Candles" and "Pretty in Pink," or Mary Stuart Masterson's streetwise tomboy drummer in "Some Kind of Wonderful." There's a generosity and sensitivity to such characters that coexisted just fine with the lowbrow antics inherent to the teen genre. The girls in "Superbad" display brief flashes of personality beyond their roles as masturbatory icons, but the plot discharges so much energy on dirty jokes and drunken mayhem that there's little time for further development.

As someone who believes that casting speaks louder than words (and who had a crush on Molly Ringwald, too), I would hope that she and Mary Stuart Masterson and Catherine Keener and Katherine Heigl and Leslie Mann and Emma Stone and Martha MacIsaac and Carla Gallo and Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis... would smack any guy upside the head if he called their characters "plucky" or "sympathetic." ("Sympathetic" is the last refuge of the misogynist. "Plucky" is probably the first. Any character conceived in such terms is a patronizing contrivance. Don't even get me started on "streetwise tomboy.")

I wonder if it's the female characters that make some critics uncomfortable or if it's really the male ones. To say that Steve Carell or Seth Rogen or Jonah Hill or Michael Cera or Jason Segel play "immature" guys is like saying the same of John Candy in Hughes' "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" or "Uncle Buck" -- plucky and sympathetic though they all are. Yes, they are characters in comedies -- R-rated sex comedies in Apatow's case -- who do not behave like grown-ups. Alert the media.

I give myself the last word, from my appreciation of Judd Apatow at MSN Movies:

The marriage of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann -- Apatow's offscreen wife) in "Knocked Up" is one of the few examples of matrimony in ApatowLand -- and it's not a rosy one. "Marriage is like an unfunny version of 'Everybody Loves Raymond,'" says Pete. "Only it doesn't last 22 minutes. It lasts forever." For Apatow's characters, relationships -- for all their satisfactions -- are often grueling work. They don't come naturally to them at all. [...]

In "Knocked Up," Pete confesses a revelation to Ben when they're high on mushrooms in Vegas: "The biggest problem in our marriage is that she wants me around. She loves me so much that she wants me around all the time. That's our biggest problem, and I can't even accept that? Like, that upsets me?"

"You can't accept love?" Ben cries. "Love -- the most beautiful, shiny, warmy thing in the world -- you can't accept it? ... She's chosen to give you her life! She's picked you as her life partner!" If only it were that simple. Everybody knows what they think they're supposed to feel, but then what? If Apatow's characters "learn" anything it's not that they should have read the baby books, or that it's time to put away the action figure of the Six Million Dollar Man. It's that choices -- any choices -- don't solve anything. Even when they're the "right" ones, living with them may be just as hard as if they'd made the "wrong" ones. But once you've made them, there's no way to know for sure.

If the role of women in their lives involves guiding the boys toward the fabled "responsibilities of adulthood," the gals could learn a thing or three from them about how to loosen up and learn to play. When a guy tosses a toy for a little girl and she fetches it, he's not treating her like a dog (see "Knocked Up"). They're sharing a game, and they're having fun. Together.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

View image Jonah Hill, Mila Kunis, Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Russell Brand -- happy to see them all!

My review of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. (Also: "My Blueberry Nights" and "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?.") Here's an excerpt:

Jason Segel's penis probably would not sell a lot of tickets all by itself. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but most of us don't think of the co-star of "Freaks and Geeks," "Knocked Up" and "How I Met Your Mother" in that way. As wise men (and women) always point out, it's not the thing itself that matters, it's what you do with it. And what Segel does with it as star and writer of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is magnificent. Between his brief nude scene at the very beginning (a humiliating, emotionally naked break-up and breakdown), and his even briefer final one (a welcome reunion of sorts), he discovers quite a lot about himself through his genitalia. [...]

... Segel's script [is] a mash-up of "10," "Modern Romance" and "Better Off Dead...," no doubt enlivened by spontaneous invention on the set. Remember Brian Dennehy as the nurturing bear of a bartender who looks after Dudley Moore in his hours of alcoholic sexual desperation? Here that role is split into two massive resort workers and one laidback beach dude, and they're all funny in their own ways. But there's also a real-world twist: One of the guys with whom Segel feels a vacation-connection turns out to be flying on autopilot, just doing his job the best he can. Not with malicious intent -- it's just his personality, which is probably what got him hired in the first place....

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

View image Ramin Bahrani on the set of "Chop Shop."

Ramin Bahrani's first two features, "Man Push Cart" and "Chop Shop," live and breathe like few other films these days. (That's why they're two of my favorites of the current century.)

In an interview at IFC Blog, Bahrani gives a beautiful description of the kinds of movies he values -- and, in the process, indicates what makes him such a fine filmmaker. Of course, I also happen to feel the same way about movies, so no wonder I like his so much:

Film is really 24 frames a second in the present, and I realize when you leave certain gaps, it allows space for the viewer to enter the film. That requires a viewer who wants to be engaged, who wants to have an emotional connection to a film, which should not be confused with films that elicit emotions like weeping and whatnot. You watch a certain movie, and the director puts you in a headlock through ways of dramaturgy, music, camera moves and excessive acting. It hits certain synapses in your brain and makes you cry, then you leave, and the next day you're having a hamburger and you don't really remember what the film was. Despite that those are the kinds of films that get lots of accolades and attention, it doesn't attract me as a person nor as an artist. I'm more interested in the ones — because of your participation — [that] seep into you, and two months later, are still a part of you. I don't know if I've accomplished this, but it's what I'm striving for.

But back to Ramin Bahrani. I like what he has to say about characterizations, too:

A lot of people say that I'm interested in marginal, immigrant or socially and economically poor characters... maybe? I don't find them marginal; I find them to be the majority. Most people don't live like Woody Allen characters. Those characters don't resemble most of the three billion people within the world. [...]

I get bored seeing the same characters again and again and again. I find it more engaging to learn about things I don't know a lot about, and I really do learn about them. I spent one and a half years hanging around the chop shop, talking to everyone. I did research into safe homes, a lot of which got cut out of "Chop Shop."... But with each film, I realize I'm not interested in explanation and excessive amounts of backstory to make the viewer say: "Oh, now everything makes sense to me. I can go home and feel good!" There's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't interest me.

One hundred percent, but the big difference is that I want my actors to have emotions in the film; he did not. Of course, you can see non-actors, but also his use of sound, and the rigor of what you see and what you don't see. When [Alejandro] tells his sister, "Go to the left to the bathroom," I don't cut. Everyone else would cut. But Bresson told you, "Don't cut. Show it. " Rossellini, Kiarostami, none of the people I respect would've shown that girl down there because it cuts off the viewer's imagination.

If you're getting bombarded by [sights and sounds] every day, then I have to be slower so that it seeps into you. In fact, films 40 or 50 years ago could have had a faster pace. I think they wanted to. But today, they cannot. There are certain things I don't do in my life. I don't watch television, I don't see a lot of new films, I don't look at magazines, and I try to hide my eyes from billboards. [laughs] Going to Times Square makes me nauseous....

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

View image Funny guy. (photo by Jason South)

"Exclusive Video: Comedy Genius Robert De Niro Dazzles Us with Best Performance in Years." That was the headline at Defamer after De Niro's speech Monday night at the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute to Meryl Streep.

Comedy genius? Defamer facetiousness? You decide. The words "De Niro" and "comedy" do not generally belong in the same sentence because (with the notable exception of "King of Comedy," "Hi, Mom!," "Midnight Run" and moments in "New York, New York" -- all of which get good laughs from extreme discomfort) he couldn't be funny if he tried -- and that's precisely the problem. He tries so very hard. In this speech, read from index cards, he tossed off canned one-liners like a bored celeb hired to appear at an industrial -- say, the Upper West Side Association of Farsighted Florists.

Wasn't he funnier in "Cape Fear"?

Posted by Jim Emerson at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall": Kristen Bell and Russell Brand. P to the V.

Excerpt from an Apatowian appreciation I wrote for MSN Movies, covering "Freaks & Geeks" to "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" to "Knocked Up" and "Superbad" and "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (with the inconspicuous omission of "Drillbit Taylor"):

Writer/director/producer Judd Apatow, the man Entertainment Weekly recently crowned the 'Smartest Person in Hollywood,' has made a solemn promise to put a penis -- at least one penis -- into every movie he makes from now on. He's slipped penises into his pictures before, of course: all those obsessive-compulsive drawings in "Superbad," his own on comically disconcerting display in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," and Jason Segel's for a humiliating breakup in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." Sometimes, too, his films include breasts and vaginas. And there are perfectly good reasons for that. Not the least of which is that all genitalia and externally visible glands are funny.

... Cast your memory back to the romantic comedy of an earlier age: specifically the execrable "When Harry Met Sally ... ," an anemically romantic, allegedly comic ersatz "Annie Hall." In that movie, Billy Crystal (Jew) and Meg Ryan (shiksa) set out, with their magic screen chemistry, to prove that men and women cannot be friends because their sexual organs fit so nicely together that it's impossible to keep them apart. Apatow's movies approach the "When Penis Met Vagina ..." dilemma from another angle, which is that although friendship between men and women (or boys and girls, or boys and women) may lead to sex, the guys actually hope that the sex will lead to friendship. Women represent a possible win-win scenario: the love and acceptance that comes with friendship combined with the joys of animalistic rutting. Besides, as Ben (Seth Rogen) observes when he and Alison (Katherine Heigl) are getting naked in "Knocked-Up," "You're prettier than I am." [...]

In ["Superbad"'s] final images, Seth and Evan part ways on a mall escalator, physically and metaphorically, each taking his first tentative independent steps with a girl, glancing back with a slightly apprehensive shrug in anticipation of what awaits him on the next "level."

If there's a myth we cling to in America, it's that life is arranged in stages of "personal growth," and each one leads to a higher plane of enlightenment. But Apatow seems at least somewhat ambivalent about the idea, which is why his movies tend to end with reunions rather than the weddings or engagements that have concluded traditional comedies for centuries.

You know what they say about the difference between comedy and tragedy -- it's all in where you choose to end the story. Apatow's films begin with something less than tragedy ("Are you living your dream?" Ben's dad asks him sarcastically in "Knocked Up") and end with something less than a love-you-forever promise. The road ahead for Andy (Steve Carell) and Trish (Catherine Keener) in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," Peter (Segel) and Rachel (Mila Kunis) in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (billed as "The Ultimate Romantic Disaster Movie") and, especially, Ben and Alison in "Knocked Up," will be uphill and, most likely, riddled with obstacles and potholes they can't possibly anticipate until they hit 'em. That emotional open-endedness feels both satisfying and refreshingly honest....

Full story here.

Posted by Jim Emerson at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

View image Hands up.

I do believe the best single piece of film criticism that I've read in 2008 (and I've thought so ever since I read it two months ago) is David Bordwell's "Hands (and faces) across the table" -- which, parentheses aside, also happens to be the title of a delightful 1935 comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen ("Easy Living," "Midnight," "Remember the Night") starring Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray and Ralph Bellamy. (Manohla Dargis's review of Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" deserves mention, too. And Glenn Kenney became my hero this year when he posted "'Pierrot le Fou: An Annotated Bibliography," Parts 1 & 2.)

But Bordwell's article centers on a scene from Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" (just released on DVD) and the director's orchestration of screen space, which involves creating rhythm and texture by moving the actors, not just the camera. (This, too, is mise-en-scène.) Writes DB:

In books and blogs, I’ve expressed the wish that today’s American filmmakers would widen their range of creative choices. From the 1910s to the 1960s (and sometimes beyond), US filmmakers cultivated a range of expressive options—not only cutting and camera movement but other possibilities too. Studio directors were particularly adept at ensemble staging, shifting the actors around the set as the scene develops.

You can still find this technique in movies from Europe and Asia, as I try to show in "Figures Traced in Light" and elsewhere on this site. But it’s rare to find an American ready to keep the camera still and steady and to let the actors sculpt the action in continuous time, saving the cuts to underscore a pivot or heightening of the drama. Now nearly every American filmmaker is inclined to frame close, cut fast, and track that camera endlessly. I’ve called this stylistic paradigm intensified continuity....

(See Bordwell's analysis of the map scene with Paul Sunday, and accompanying frame grabs.)

Without any close-ups or cutting, Anderson has skillfully steered us to the main points of the scene, which are carried by the performers. The drama builds through small changes of position, shifts of weight, and facial expressions that accompany the dialogue. (The somber, plaintive music adds an uneasy edge.) Daniel seems more threatening when we don’t see his reaction, and Anderson’s camera forces us to scrutinize Paul’s expressions and body language for signs that this is a scam. It takes confidence to make a raised hand the climax of a scene, but the gesture gains its force by being the most aggressive moment in an arc of quietly accumulating tension.

All the principles involved here—frontality, spacing of figures, slight shifts of compositional focus, actors’ body language—are simple in themselves, but they gain a strong impact by cooperating with one another. The scene’s quiet obliqueness is characteristic of the film, which, at least until the last few minutes, carries us along with hints about where the action might go and what drives its characters....

Posted by Jim Emerson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

View image Roger Ebert at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. (photo by jim emerson)

In the middle of the week, while I was away at the Conference on World Affairs so beloved by Roger Ebert, I got my first e-mail (via Treo) from Roger since he underwent his latest surgery January 24. He said he was "Back in the saddle." The next e-mail, hours later, contained an obit/tribute for Charlton Heston and Richard Widmark. Ebert does not waste time.

Sunday's New York Times features a appreciation of Roger's return by A.O. Scott who, as he so often does with movies, gets right to the heart of his subject ("Roger Ebert: The Critic Behind the Thumb"):

For his loyal readers Mr. Ebert’s resumption of reviewing (April 1 happened to be the 41st anniversary of his debut in The Sun-Times) is a chance to pick up an interrupted conversation. For those who labor beside or behind him in the vineyards of criticism it is an incitement to quit grousing and pick up the pace.

Not that any of us could hope to match his productivity. Nor could we entertain the comforting fantasy that the daunting quantity of the man’s work — four decades of something like six reviews a week, as well as festival reports, learned essays on classic films and the occasional profile — must entail a compromise in quality. As A. J. Liebling said of himself, nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster. The evidence is easy enough to find: in the Web archive, in his indispensable annual movie guides and in a dozen other books.

It is this print corpus that will sustain Mr. Ebert’s reputation as one of the few authentic giants in a field in which self-importance frequently overshadows accomplishment. His writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer.

His criticism shows a nearly unequaled grasp of film history and technique, and formidable intellectual range, but he rarely seems to be showing off. He’s just trying to tell you what he thinks, and to provoke some thought on your part about how movies work and what they can do....