May 2008 Archives

View image The animated banners, archived, are worth the price of admission alone...

Jonathan Lapper offers an inspired free-associative montage/meditation on the moving part of the movies at Cinema Styles, which you must see. It's called "Frames of Reference," a little under seven minutes long, and it marvelously (too marvelous for words, obviously) orchestrates cinematic motion and memories to Oliver Nelson's "Complex City." (If you suspect you're unfamiliar with the great jazz arranger, think "Stolen Moments" -- which might make a great subtitle for this reference-packed short subject.) My favorite transition: From "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" to "Citizen Kane." You'll see why.

And now, for fans of Richard Lester, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan (and Leo McKern and Graham Stark and Norman Rossington...), my own movie reference: "Frames of Reference" is "The Tracking, Exploding, Kissing, Watching, Crashing, Throwing, Fainting, Dancing, Drinking, Flying, Falling Backwards Film," though not necessarily in that order. And that's not the half of it....

View image

The cinema is Max Castle! At least, according to the pompous French scholar Victor Saint-Cyr in Theodore Roszak's spooky-satirical 1991 novel "Flicker," which I'm now in the middle of reading. (I didn't know when I started it, but Darren Aronovsky is reportedly working on a film version -- something that's now announced on the trade paperback cover.) Saint-Cyr proclaims that the fictitious Castle, obscure maker of seriously unclean sexploitation and horror films, "alone of all directors grasped the essential phenomenology of film. In the entire history of motion pictures, only he and Lefebvre have understood the technology so profoundly."

In one of the funniest chapters so far, Saint-Cyr pronounces himself the founder of a new film theory he calls Neurosemiology, which in essence posits that it's all about the flicker. The medium of cinema itself, alternating patterns of light and shadow, is a powerful form of mass hypnosis that alters the brain, quite independent of the images we think we see on the screen. One of Sant-Cyr's students, "a bushy-haired, tautly nerved young man" named Julien, "who smoked incessantly while he spoke and never once raised his eyes," offers an elucidation of the theory:

View image The beginning of the dissolve (recall, with nostalgia, when Paramount was A Gulf + Western Company?).

View image The new/old Paramount Pictures Presents.

(... or "You're a Better Man Than I Am, Short Round")

This is a contribution to Ali Arikan's Indiana Jones Blog-a-Thon at Cerebral Mastication.

View image Lucasfilm gets gonged.

"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" tells you how to watch it in the first shot. Well, actually before the first shot, since the Paramount logo dissolves (as it did in "Raiders of the Lost Ark") from one mountain into another, so that it pokes into the movie for a few seconds. This time the twin peak is revealed to be embossed on a gong -- which establishes the retro-1930s "Oriental"-exoticism theme of the adventure, and kicks off Kate Capshaw's Cantonese "Anything Goes" musical number with a bang, beginning with the extended take that immediately follows.

For movie fans of all ages, this gong instantly evokes fond, resonant memories:

View image "Welcome to the Cannes Film Festival, kid."

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" screened all over the world yesterday -- on a Sunday afternoon, roughly in synch with the gala unveiling of the picture at the Cannes Film Festival. The usual film-festival and press-screening review embargoes were promptly ignored, so although the movie opens May 22, many outlets ran full reviews on their websites immediately. Because... well, because they could, I suppose. Variety even posted a preview of the review that its reviewer was about to write, in case, after 19 years of anticipating the next "Indiana Jones" movie, you couldn't stand waiting one more minute while he took the time necessary to process and record his thoughts about the film he'd just seen. Not because he believed it was great or a disaster or even because he had anything in particular he wanted to say about it right away, but because... well, Daily Variety knew its readership simply could not do without knowing instantly that the movie "begins with an actual big bang, then gradually slides toward a ho-hum midsection before literally taking off for an uplifting finish." OK! Doesn't that just whet your appetite for the full-course review?

As Roger Ebert noted on his blog Monday, he saw the film in Chicago and loved it, but at the time he filed his review he suspected he might be going against the critical tide, if there was one:

View image Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars...

"One of the most genuinely confounding films to come along in years... This is not a film occurring in an alternate or imaginary reality; rather, it is a film of no reality, that is, a picture that changes the rules of its universe strictly according to its creators' whims. Hence, the film is likely to inspire even more heavy thinking on the part of cultural theorists than 'The Matrix' did."

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"A lot of fluorescent, 7-Eleven-tinted images flash by, any of which could easily be removed or re-arranged without significantly disrupting the film's continuity, because it has none. If you can determine the spatial relationship between Speed's Mach 5 (or Mach 6) and any other race car for more than a few consecutive seconds, then good for you. As on the TV series, the pictures don't seem to move so much as repeat -- movement with no momentum."

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"'Speed Racer' is not a feature film in any conventional sense... Whatever information that passes from your retinas to your brain during 'Speed Racer' is conveyed through optical design and not so much through more traditional devices such as dialogue, narrative, performance or characterization."

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"Alas, this radicalization of film language, while certainly impressive to behold, yields heretofore un-dreamed of levels of narrative incoherence, but hey, not every experiment succeeds."

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"One of the more blatantly anti-capitalist storylines to come down the cinematic pike since, I dunno, Bertolucci's '1900.'"

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""Speed Racer" is a manufactured widget, a packaged commodity that capitalizes on an anthropomorphized cartoon of Capitalist Evil in order to sell itself and its ancillary products."

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Three of the above quotations are taken from a three-star review of "Speed Racer." The other three are from a one-and-a-half-star review. Can you tell which is which? Perhaps the tone gives something away, but the descriptions of the movie, what it does and how it works, are strikingly similar. Clearly both of these critics saw the same movie, although one found the experience less daring, less exhilarating, than the other.

View image Lesson for the kiddies: Don't take Turkish Delight from an icy Tilda Swinton and don't be fooled into thinking this seemingly innocent underground-dwelling creature has your best interests at heart. Got that?

My review of "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" is at RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:

... Character is not destiny in the "Narnia" pictures. Destiny is. Which creates some moral and dramatic dilemmas for the viewer. With all the dramatis personae Lewis has crammed into his filagreed fantasies, few of the players have the opportunity to leave much of an impression, or acquire significance, beyond what the tale demands of them. (Who's that badger again?) They do what is asked of them -- in the story and by the story. And once we realize that even the leads are predestined to play their parts in fulfilling prophecies, and that all they have to do to meet the requirements is to abide by (or guess) whatever certain mystical authority figures want them to do, the tension deflates a bit.

The moral options, as set forth in the movies so far, are fairly clear-cut: believe the beautiful lion and the friendly beavers; don't trust the sepulchral ice queen bearing Turkish Delight or the hideous dark demons extolling the forces of hate. What could be simpler? A child could do it. And what kind of lesson does that communicate to the child who can? That it's easy to tell right from wrong? Not a wise maxim.

What responsibilities do the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve (how does that work?) bear for their own decisions, and the consequences of their actions, if everything can eventually be set right by some deus ex machina -- the healing properties of supernatural potions, or the corrective powers of magic lion's breath? What becomes of free will, of meaning itself?

View image Imprinted on/in your head...

In Steve Erickson's novel "Zeroville," a young man with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in "A Place in the Sun" imprinted on his shaved head arrives in Hollywood in the summer of 1969. Raised a strict Calvinist (not coincidentally like Paul Schrader, writer of "Taxi Driver"), his hunger for, and obsession with, movies has a religious fervor to it.

He develops protective feelings for a young girl in the Hollywood fast-lane (echoes of Travis Bickle and Iris). He takes her to the Fine Arts for a revival of "A Place in the Sun." The audience laughs at some of the "dated" moments, and the girl (Isadora, who goes by Zazi -- as in "... dans le métro" by Louis Malle, 1960?) thinks it's silly. He is devastated. But one night she watches the movie, alone, on TV. It is a revelation to her.

"The thing is, that movie last night is a completely different movie when you watch it by yourself. Why is that? Movies are supposed to be watched with other people, aren't they? Isn't that part of the point of movies -- you know, one of those social ritual things, with everyone watching? It never occurred to me a movie might be that different when you don't watch it with anyone else. And that movie... [...]

"That's a movie you see alone and it gets into you. I've been up all night. I said it was silly when we saw it together, but that was way off. There's nothing silly about that movie. Twisted and deeply f---ked up, yeah... but silly, no. Too twisted not to be private, you know?

"I mean, five hundred or a thousand people or however many it is in a theater -- what are they going to do with a movie like that? There's too much common sense floating around the room, and what you have to do with a movie like that is give up your common sense, which is easier to do when it's just you alone. It just seems... radical, any movie that, like demands your privacy, because it's, you know... a movie like that makes common sense completely beside the point, and you're one on one with it, in the living room by yourself rather than the theater with all those people, and watching it is like being naked and you can't be naked like that with strangers, you can't even stand the idea of it, and you know that after you're finished with it, much more with a movie like that than any stupid horror flick, some deep dark shit is going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs... so I just couldn't sleep. That movie's like a ghost. Watch it and you become the thing or person that it haunts. Last night, the movie became mine and no one else's."

View image What brow(s) are this?

When I hear the word "middlebrow," I always think of Frida Kahlo. But, wait, that's something else. This post is in preparation for a pending one about "Speed Racer" (and the brilliant appreciations of it by Glenn Kenny and Dennis Cozzalio) -- a movie I naturally assumed would be (re-)viewed as the product of high (avant garde), middle (auteurist work-for-hire) and low (soulless corporate entertainment commodity) culture. It was.

So when I read this in the New York Times Book Review over the weekend, it reminded me of "The Middle Mind" (a book I'd read about five years ago) and it, um, inter-helixed with some thoughts I'd been having about "Speed Racer." (If you saw the movie you'll know what I mean.) But you can read it however you like.

From Rachel Donadio's back page essay, "1958: The War of the Intellectuals":

It’s hard to generalize about any historical moment, but in the intellectual journals of the era, some central themes emerge: a debate over the merits of the Beat movement, and the attempt by some influential critics to preserve the quickly dissolving distinctions among highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture that had previously held sway. At the same time, the distinction between artistic achievement and commercial success, which American intellectuals had long assumed to be mutually exclusive, was losing its hold.

View image Action hero with eyelashes.

My review of "Iron Man" is at RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:

The world needs another comic book movie like it needs another Bush administration, but if we must have one more (and the Evil Marketing Geniuses at Marvel MegaIndustries will do their utmost to ensure that we always will), "Iron Man" is a swell one to have. Not only is it a good comic book movie (smart and stupid, stirring and silly, intimate and spectacular), it's winning enough to engage even those who've never cared much for comic books or the movies they spawn. Like me.

"Iron Man" begins on dangerous ground: in the harsh terrain of Battleground Afghanistan. A convoy of Humvees (inadequately armored, no doubt) speeds through the desert carrying ultra-bazillionaire Death Merchant, and notoriously dissolute playboy, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), scotch in hand, flirting with the female driver.

Right on cue, an IED detonates, the Hummers are ambushed by Taliban-esque fighters, the American soldiers are slaughtered, and Tony is kidnapped. It won't be the first time that this gaudy piece of summer-movie pulp fiction strays a little too far into bloody Mess o' Potamian reality for comfort. Is this political commentary of some kind, or just exploitation? Like its hero "Iron Man" takes false steps, stumbles, and even occasionally crashes, yet quickly recovers its footing.

The reason it's so nimble is that director Jon Favreau ("Elf," "Zathura") and his fleet crew of actors grasp the action-fantasy premise and treat it with the looseness and sharpness of improvisational comedy. (Favreau himself has worked out with The Groundlings troupe in Los Angeles from time to time.) It's difficult to tell how much of what they're doing is taken directly from the script (credited to four writers, and who knows how many others labored behind the scenes), but even when they're reciting somber dialog-bubble exposition, they treat it the way an improv actor would: smoothly feeding information into the scene, building a foundation on which everybody can work, and play....

View image Motion but no momentum.

My review of "Speed Racer" by the Wachowski Brothers™ is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:

"Speed Racer" is not a feature film in any conventional sense -- although there is nothing so conventional in today's marketplace as a corporate product based on a campy vintage TV show that is developed for extremely brief exhibition in multiplexes on its way to more appropriate platforms such as DVD and video games, which provide the principal justification for its manufacture in the first place.

Neither is "Speed Racer" a commercial avant-garde film (though fans of the Wachowski brothers may wish to make such claims), unless you still consider Laserium shows of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" to be cutting edge. (Lights! Shapes! Colors! Motion! Money!) And there's nothing terribly adventurous these days about Eisensteinian montage treated as if it were William S. Burroughs' "cut up" technique -- with digital clips randomly scrambled like pixelated confetti.

Nor is it some kind of subversive commodity, unless the outré strategy of pandering to a low-brow, retro-nostalgic crowd can be considered anything but business as usual in 2008. The faux naivete on display here -- right down to the imitation-fruit-flavored FDA-food-dye coloring -- is both shamelessly quaint and shamelessly cynical.

View image Lynndie England and Charles Graner. In... happier times?

I. What's Past is Prologue

"What are Arabs seeing, and what does that mean for us?" asked Duncan McInnis, the US State Department official in charge of fighting "the war over America's image in the Middle East," in a "Frontline/World" documentary, "News War: War of Ideas" (broadcast March 27, 2007).

"For instance in Iraq. Because Arabs are upset about the presence of armed forces in an Arab country, there are no good images of an American soldier. An American soldier building a hospital in Iraq is still an American soldier in Iraq. In that case, all images are bad. And we need to know that, we need to know that's what they see."

The image is the world's only remaining superpower. Understanding their power of images -- not just what's in the pictures themselves, but what they signify -- is the key to understanding the world and our place within it. It's also, recently, the source of the most deadly and dismal failures in American history. From the attacks of 9/11 through the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Americans' inability to comprehend what they were seeing -- or even to recognize the primacy of the image itself as the representation of events -- has had catastrophic consequences.

View image From "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters."

The first thing Paul Schrader wanted to talk about after the Ebertfest screening of his ambitious 1985 "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" was his youthful fascination with the primitive rite of "suicidal blood sacrifice." That's what he said his script for "Taxi Driver" was rooted in -- and, no wonder, since he had been raised a strict Calvinist (is that redundant?) and, as he put it, "Christianity is a blood cult" that glorifies sacrificial suicide. In "Mishima" it's the act of seppuku; in "Raging Bull" it's boxing; in "The Last Temptation of Christ" it's crucifixion... To writer-director Schrader, they're all manifestations of the same bloody thing.

View image From the official "Standard Operating Procedure" web site, which mirrors the film's mosaic-like treatment of its raw material.

“…the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our photographs but in ourselves…”

-- Errol Morris, paraphrasing Shakespeare, in a footnote to an October 4, 2007, New York Times Zoom column about a pair of Roger Fenton Crimean War photos

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Errol Morris's new film, "Standard Operating Procedure," is not about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It is about the photographs themselves, and what went on in and around them, before, during and after they were taken. Perhaps the most baffling question surrounding them is why they were taken at all.

The film reflects Morris's desire to make another "investigative film" in the vein of "The Thin Blue Line." "I think of the film as a nonfiction horror movie," he says in a Q&A on the official web site. The imagery is designed to take the viewer into the moment the photographs were taken, as well as to evoke the nightmarish, hallucinatory quality of Abu Ghraib."