March 2010 Archives

Somebody named Michael Jones -- essentially the same Mr. Jones Bob Dylan wrote about years ago -- appeared on HuffPo recently with a piece called "That Steely Dan Moment" -- you know, about a discovery of musical taste that makes you wonder if you could ever love the person who possesses it. The twist is that he's the one who falls short and doesn't know it. Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening, Mr. Jones.

Anyway, I wouldn't have paid attention except that his story (who knows where or when it originally appeared if it was on HuffPo) reminded me of an article my friend Julia Sweeney did for the February, 1993, issue of SPIN magazine that was written and edited by the staff of "Saturday Night Live." It probably wasn't an entirely original idea then, either, but it was called "Men, Music & Me," and in it she discussed her assessments of collegiate and post-collegiate boyfriends -- using their cinematic and musical tastes as a guide. (Please also see my entry on Carl Wilson's book, "Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.")

We tend to remember long takes that call attention to themselves as such: the opening shots of "Touch of Evil" or "The Player"; the entrance to the Copacabana in "GoodFellas"; all those shots in Romanian movies, and pictures directed by Bela Tarr and Jia Zhangke... And then there are the ones you barely notice because your eyes have been guided so effortlessly around the frame, or you've been given the freedom to explore it on your own, or you've simply gotten so involved in the rhythms of the scene, the interplay between the characters, that you didn't notice how long the shot had been going on.

For this compilation, "Deep Focus," I've chosen eight shots I treasure (the last two I regard as among the finest in all of cinema). They're not all strictly "deep focus" shots, but they do emphasize three-dimensionality in their compositions. I've presented them with only minimal identifications so you can simply watch them and see what happens without distraction or interruption. Instead, I've decided to write about them below. Feel free to watch the clips and then re-watch (freeze-frame, rewind, replay) the clips to see what you can see. To say they repay re-viewing is an understatement.

Whenever I feel a profound connection to a work of art, I can't help but see signs of it everywhere, all around me. The Coens' "A Serious Man" is, unsurprisingly, no exception -- because it is such a magnificent synthesis of my strongest interests: movies, music, philosophy, religion, morality, mortality (especially as an ex-dead person), mystery, humor, passive-aggressiveness, uncertainty, randomness, coincidence, probability, the new freedoms, sleep...

Screenwriter Todd Alcott has written the most detailed analysis of the Coens' masterpiece that I've yet encountered, and he begins by addressing those who have said they don't like the movie because it has "a passive protagonist." Ha! Why, you may as well be talking about the disappearance of the interventionist God between the "Old Testament" (Torah) and the "New Testament"! Indeed, I would argue, that is exactly what you're talking about. Alcott puts it this way:

Almost as scarily involving as 3-D! And it returns your calls! In Percept-O!

(tip: Víctor Escribano Fernández de Santaella)

I have been repeating this tirelessly for a quarter century now, and I'm very glad to read A.O. Scott saying it again so well, in Dave Itzkoff's NY Times story about the demise of the "Siskel & Ebert"-style "At the Movies" format on TV:

"It's always been true that people can go to the movies without reading what critics have to say about the movies," Mr. Scott said. He added: "Criticism matters to the people who care about it. It's not that everybody out there in the world needs to hear what we have to say, but some people want to. And there is still, I think, an appetite."

The illustrious and industrious David Bordwell has begun reporting from the Hong Kong Film Festival ("Dragons at your doorstep"), where the weather appears to be well-suited to movie-watching:

Once more, Hong Kong. Still a spellbinding place, although the municipality is doing whatever it can to force pedestrians underground and surrender the streets to cars. Even a dragon has to wait for the pedestrian light. And now, thanks to the sandstorms in China, the air is thick with pollution. I have taken defensive measures. My students probably wished I'd worn one of these more often.

Much more festival news and distinctively Bordwellian imagery here.

(photos by David Bordwell)

UPDATE (3/26/10): "The spy who came in from the typhoon."

Ann Powers, the excellent music critic for the LA Times (and once a fellow contributor to Seattle's semi-legendary The Rocket) posted this link on Facebook, with the following disclaimer:

I hesitate to share this ridiculous dismissal of the field to which I am devoted and about which I am so passionate, but I guess I do so to say, okay, then, perhaps this writer should never approach the subject of music again, because every act of writing about culture involves some kind of critical assessment, and he... is against that process...

She refers to this piece by Steve Almond in the Boston Globe, appearing under the headline "Love music, hold the criticism," in which Almond recalls securing a paying gig as a know-nothing El Paso newspaper music critic during the "heyday of Hair Metal," whose "only qualifications... consisted of a willingness to work nights and hit my deadlines":

My standard template was to start off with a bad pun then proceed to the concert set list, with each song title modified by at least three adjectives. If I was feeling ambitious, I described the lead singer's hair.

Wretched as I was, I loved being a music critic. I got to feel like a big shot, the one guy whose opinion (no matter how misbegotten) mattered.

But one night, he says, at an MC Hammer show, he had an epiphany:

I dutifully spent the evening scribbling witty insults in my reporter's notebook. But at a certain point (after I'd fulfilled my quota of witty insults) I turned my attention to the folks all around me. They were enthralled. And what I realized as I gazed at them was this: I was totally missing the point. [...]

I'd come up against a concept I've since come to think of as the Music Critic Paradox: the simple fact that even the best critics -- the ones, unlike me, with actual training and talent -- can't begin to capture what it feels like to listen to music. [...]

It was as if my critic credibility depended on my not being fooled into actually enjoying myself.

Bruce Eaton, in his 331/3 book on Big Star's "Radio City" (2009):

Beyond talent, there's the often dismissed importance of experience -- in music and life. Does an artist have something interesting to say and the ability to say it in a unique and interesting way? The answer is usually "not really." One of the chief reasons that rock and roll from the 1960s and early 1970s still looms large is that its creators had deep reserves of experience to draw upon when the time finally came to go to the well in the recording studio. Take The Beatles or The Stones, Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. Each knew hundreds upon hundreds of cover tunes -- a disparaged concept today but vital to learning how music works -- and had played endless gigs trying to sell them to indifferent, if not downright hostile, audience. That experience takes patience but it eventually can get you to a point where you can write songs of your own that become a meaningful and permanent part of other peoples' lives.

It's the 30th comment in a "he said, she said" post about the ridiculous Armond White v. J. Hoberman "kerfuffle" (that seems to be the most popular term for describing it) -- a beautiful defense of film criticism itself by the estimable F.X. Feeney:

The whole scrimmage that's been set up between internet critics and print critics operates on a false premise -- the idea that somebody is actually going to win this contest.

Speaking as one who has, at best, eked a marginal living in the racket since 1980 (I have no 401K to defend against the likes of Harry Knowles, and never have) I would like to point out that James Agee sets the standard NOT because he wrote "for print," but because he WROTE, period.

Film Criticism at its best is nothing more or less than the practice of literature. A humble corner of literature, to be sure -- but talent, depth of comprehension and communication are the arbiters of what's good and true. They always were, always will be. The topic is fleeting, and today's insight wraps tomorrow's fish, but the abiding joy comes of saying what you've experienced so truthfully and so well that strangers get your meaning whether they agree or not.

I know, we shouldn't give him any more attention, but the elusiveness of his language (it's not quite English, but what is it?) is fascinating. Try to pin down meaning, or responsibility, and they just slip away...

Armond White, review of "Mr. Jealousy," June 3, 1998:

I won't comment on [Noah] Baumbach's deliberate, onscreen references to his former film-reviewer mother except to note how her colleagues now shamelessly bestow reviews as belated nursery presents. To others, "Mr. Jealousy" might suggest retroactive abortion.

Armond White, referring to the comment above in a non-review of "Greenberg," March 17, 2010:

The last line is not Oscar Wilde but it's also not a death warrant; its impact is in your inference. It clearly points out the clubhouse aspect of Baumbach's raves, then contrasts natal congratulations with their demurral. No more than that. The abortion quip is easily understood unless your goal is to besmirch another critic and wage a personal attack.

Alex Chilton, Box Tops to Big Star.

(Photo: Memphis Commercial Appeal. Undated.)

"What would I give if I could live / Out of these waters? / What would I pay just for one day / Warm on the sand? / Betcha on land, they understand / Bet they don't reprimand their daughters / Bright young women, sick o' swimmin' / Ready to stand!"

"Part of Their World" by Howard Ashman and Alan Mencken, from "The Little Mermaid" (John Musker and Ron Clements, 1989).

(reminder: @ryknight)

NEXT...

In Part 1 of this post, I provided a clip from Martin Scorsese's 1995 documentary, "A Personal Journey... Through American Film," in which George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola talked about the contribution computers were making to filmmaking as it evolved from a photographic medium into a painterly one.

In the clip above, from the "making of" promotional documentary, "Avatar: Creating the World of Pandora," director/camera operator James Cameron, producer Jon Landau and many CGI effects artists and technicians show how "Avatar" was created -- not so much in the camera as in the computer. None of these people is Mauro Fiore, who recently won an Oscar for Best Cinematography for his work on "Avatar." What was his role on the film? This has been the subject of much debate -- much of it in the forum at cinematography.com, where professionals have been discussing the question: "What is "Cinematography," now that an 80% CG Movie Has Won Its Highest Honor"?

"Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences?"

Think of the implications of that question, and how it affects how we think about our lives. I'm tickled and intrigued by some of the things psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has to say in this TED talk, "The riddle of experience vs. memory," and how they apply to our experiences (and memories) not only of our lives, but of works of art. He tells a story of someone who said he had listened to a wonderful symphony, but how a "dreadful screeching sound" at the end "ruined the whole experience."

But it hadn't. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.

F.X. Feeney, writing in the L.A. Weekly, thinks so: "... relentless in its suspense; funny when you least expect it; above all, deeply conscious of political power and its corruptions." The film was in the final stages of post-production when Polanski was arrested in Switzerland (he finished it while under house arrest) and Feeney sees in it themes that lead, as all Polanski themes must, through the filmmaker's life and, inevitably, back to "Chinatown":

Noah Cross (owing to Robert Towne's superb screenplay) could proclaim a demonic philosophy when cornered, saying: "Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they're capable of anything." [Tom] Wilkinson's smooth operator conceals what he's thinking at all times, usually behind an inscrutable grin and lighthearted (if poison-tipped) reproaches: "A less equable man might find your questions impertinent."

Imagine the headline: "Up" Wins Oscar for Best Cinematography. That's essentially what happened Sunday night, but the movie was "Avatar." "Up" won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. "Avatar" won for Best Visual Effects and Best Cinematography. Realistically, "Up" and "Avatar" should have also have competed in a new category -- something like Best Computer-Assisted Animation. It's past time to acknowledge the difference between cinematography -- the photographic process that involves capturing light through a lens -- and animation or green screen work that involves compositing digital images in a computer. Both can be extraordinarily impressive. Let's just agree to call them by their right names.

Here's a spoiler-loaded reading of the Coens' masterpiece from Father Robert Barron, self-described "Catholic Evangelist." I don't know anything about Fr. Barron, but this is certainly a Catholic interpretation -- of the movie, of the book of Job, and of the Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love." Of course, I don't see the movie the way he does (and he doesn't even mention Larry's doctor or Schrödinger's cat or the... dybbuk?), but he does have some interesting ways of looking at it. I do like the way he understands how we reconsider the rabbis' counsel as the movie goes along.

And Fr. Barron makes one simple, important point that I think some people overlook: "No one in the movie disbelieves in God. It's not a question of is there a God or not. But they're trying to discern, what does God want? What is God doing?" That is correct. The film takes place in a world in which God is obviously not dead (although it's set not long after the TIME cover) because these people still believe Hashem is a presence in their lives -- if a somewhat distant one. Instead, God is either silent, indifferent, passive-aggressive, or nonexistent. The question, then, becomes not so much what God wants from these characters as what these characters want from the (unexamined?) vision of God that they cling to, and how are they going to square that faith with the day-to-day world they live in?

What do you think? And let's agree that all comments below are for people who've seen the movie...

And when?

UPDATE (3/11/10): Answer below...

I said just about everything I had to say about the Oscars in a dozen or so tweets I filed the evening of the broadcast, in between juggling manual updates for a couple of stories on RogerEbert.com (including Roger's live-tweets of the show) and approving Oscar comments on Roger's blog. I think I got out of my chair two or three times between 3:30pm and 9:30pm PST.

So, yeah, I made a few observations -- like this:

Instead of playing "I Am Woman" after Kathryn Bigelow's win, why didn't they play "Papa Can You Hear Me?" for Babs? #oscars

And this:

Elinor Burkett's Oscar performance marks the official arrival of the word "Kanye" (or "Kanyed") as a verb. http://j.mp/9XIwqy #oscars

And this:

Has "Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" become the new "Electric Boogaloo"?

Many thanks to Seano in Seoul for this report:

I went to see it yesterday (that's why I was searching for some info on it). Anyway saw it at the theatre in TimesSquare CGV, the screen and cinema is average size with the seats in 4 seater units in 3 columns with about 10 rows. Ticket price is W18,000 (about $16). The experience definitely enhances the 3D and is more than just a gimmick, though there is room for improvement.

The motion effects include the 4 seater unit pitching and yawing along with the expected vibrating and dropping, so in the flight scenes the seats are swaying and leaning with the helicopters and those reptile birds and obviously shaking you about with every explosion. There are individual effects on each seat with a automated brush at ankle level that spins across your legs and a kicker in the back of that feels like the person behind you is kicking your seat when activated.

I didn't want to mention this whole thing, and Vadim Rizov has already done a fine job of going over the history of Armond White's critical ad hominem attacks on Noah Baumbach movies here. Publicist Leslee Dart (who did not "ban" White from screenings of "Greenberg" -- but she originally moved him to a later one) did mention that White had called Baumbach an "asshole." ("You look at Noah Baumbach's work, and you see he's an asshole. I would say it to his face," he told Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism. "... I don't need to meet him to know that. better than meeting him, I've seen his movies.")

Dart also noted that White had said Baumbach's mother, former Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown, "should have had an abortion." And, you know, people just expect that kind of thing from White. But did he really say that?

This is pretty much exactly what most new indie and studio movies look like to me. Not just the Oscar-hopefuls and the Sundance selections. And not just the trailers, but the entire movies themselves (which are usually laid out, beat by beat, in the trailers). This one's funnier, though, because it doesn't pretend to be anything more than a familiar schematic diagram. Which is exactly what these comfy, risk-averse movies seem to be aiming for.

Starring Robert Pattinson or Adam Sandler, Natalie Portman or Sandra Bullock. Directed by Ron Howard or someone whose only previous work has been on YouTube.

(tip: Max Kleger)

What does Variety -- once known as "The Showbiz Bible" -- think it has to offer its readers? After Monday's news that the paper has jettisoned (what's the reverse of "ankled"? I forget...) veteran film critic Todd McCarthy, whose name was synonymous with Variety even before the publication's reviews had actual bylines, I don't see much future in the once-essential trade paper. Lay off the people who are your reputation, your authority, your influence, and what's left? Nothing. There will still be a batch of web and paper pages legally entitled to call itself "Variety," but so what? It's like one of those bands that tours under a once-famous name without actually offering the work of any of the names that made it what it was.

How much is that worth to you right now?

In case you didn't know, the top five Muriel Awards for Best Picture of 2009 are:

1) Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds"
2) Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker"
3) Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox"
4) Joel & Ethan Coen's "A Serious Man"
5) Olivier Assayas's "Summer Hours"

(Click titles above for mini-appreciations by Muriel voters.)

Surprisingly, three of those are among the ten Oscar nominees for Best Picture, too. I was honored to be asked to provide a Muriel blurb for the Coens' existential comedy, my favorite movie of the year. It goes something like this:

I'm not particularly fond of the snatch-and-grab, shaky-cam style Kathryn Bigelow employs in "The Hurt Locker" -- or those fusillades of twitchy, punch-in and recoil zooms, either -- but I got past it pretty quickly. Unlike many other films in this style, "Hurt Locker" is guided by a steady hand and a solid intelligence. As Kathleen Murphy writes at MSN Movies:

... few recent films have been as consciously and masterfully directed, in real time and space, as "The Hurt Locker." Script, sound, cinematography -- every aspect of this movie serves clarity and coherence, forcing us to feel, in all of our senses, the awful vulnerability of flesh and blood, and the randomness of its destruction. Calling to mind tough art like Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and Picasso's "Guernica," "Locker" is not a pretty picture.

Bigelow delivers three-dimensionality the hard way: She moves and cuts her camera through a complex arena of wartime action as precisely as a sculptor's tool, exposing multiple forms of visceral fear and sudden death. Every inch of her dusty, sun-scorched Iraqi streets is wired to deliver nonstop tension; the human software threatened by instant dissolution in these badlands can't anticipate, post-blast, blithely slipping into a brand-new suit of flesh.

Here's the late, beloved Henry Gibson on my favorite sitcom, "The Dick Van Dyke Show," in 1966. (When I grow up, I still want to be Rob Petrie.) On "Laugh-In" (1968-1971), he was known for his recitations, which began with him holding a large artificial flower (he himself was only 5'3") and announcing: "A poem... by Henry Gibson." This particular poem, originally penned by a guy named Frank Stanton circa 1920, later became a song by Gibson and Richard Baskin, performed by Haven Hamilton at the Grand Ole Opry (and sponsored by Goo Goo Candy Clusters) in Robert Altman's "Nashville" (1975). Full lyrics to Haven's inspirational anthem below:

(via Robert C. Cumbow, >Richard T. Jameson)

"Movie criticism of the elevated sort, as practiced over the past half-century by James Agee and Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, J. Hoberman and Dave Kehr... is an endangered species..."
-- Richard Corliss, Film Comment, 1990

Good gracious, film criticism is still dying all over the Internet again this week. Who's killing it this time? The usual suspects, depending on who you ask, ranging from "Siskel & Ebert" to "the bloggers." The quotation above was written 20 years ago, and that wasn't the first time its dire predictions were made. Now they've just become conventional wisdom, so people feel the need to repeat them every few hours. IFC.com reports that, at a UCLA panel discussion of filmmakers and critics following a screening of Gerald Peary's affectionate documentary overview of American film criticism, "For the Love of Movies," TIME magazine curmudgeon Richard Schickel announced, to no one's surprise, that he never loved them. That's right: No love from Mr. Schickel. None. (This is confirmed by his attitude toward Robert Altman.)

"Watching all these kind of earnest people discussing the art or whatever the hell it is of criticism, all that, it just made me so sad. You mean they have nothing else to do?" asked Schickel before adding, "I don't know honestly the function of reviewing anything."

Yes he certainly doesn't, which has been clear in print for some years, but I don't know the function of what Schickel was doing on this panel. You could make the same complaint about any kind of writing, or any enthusiasm that people feel like writing and talking about, from sports to politics. Oh, you tech columnists and food writers -- stop communicating with others about things you're interested in! What is the point? If you have to ask, you're not likely to feel ardent about engaging in the practice -- except, perhaps, for the paycheck. Now that is sad.

No modern director is more in love with the artifice of filmmaking than Martin Scorsese, or more overt in his expression of it. From the "drunk-cam" in "Mean Streets" (1973) to the self-consciously stylized performances in films like "Raging Bull" and "King of Comedy," the William Cameron Menzies opening of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" to the ersatz two-strip Technicolor of "The Aviator" to the 1954 Hitchcock psychodrama look of the current "Shutter Island," Scorsese packs his frames with dense layers of Hollywood history.

Sometimes, as in "New York, New York" (my favorite of his films, along with "King of Comedy," "After Hours" and "GoodFellas"), he contrasts '40s, '50s and '60s studio gloss with the no-less-mannered "naturalistic" improvisational acting favored by Kazan and Cassavetes from the same era. Likewise, in films like "Shutter Island" he immerses himself and his audience in a world that never existed outside of the movies. "Raging Bull," for example, isn't just a boxing picture and a showbiz biopic, it's a study of boxing pictures and showbiz biopics. "GoodFellas" isn't just a gangster film, it's a movie about gangster films. Has any other director offered a nearly four-hour "Personal Journey... Through American Film" (a 1995 guided tour beginning with clips from "The Bad and the Beautiful" and "Duel in the Sun"), followed by another four-hour personal essay on Italian cinema (1999's "My Voyage to Italy")?

To salute the surprise success of "Shutter Island" (top of the box-office for two weeks running), I took some excerpts from an introductory interview Scorsese did for the now out-of-print 2005 MGM DVD release of "New York, New York" and interpolated frame grabs from that movie and others. The result might serve as a primer on how to watch any Martin Scorsese picture.

The Rube Goldberg contraption in this OK Go video for "This Too Shall Pass" is one of the best visual metaphors I've seen for the way a well-put-together movie works. If something misfires or doesn't go right, the cumulative payoff is diminished. Anywhere along the line, the whole thing could come crashing to a halt or just veer off course and peter out. It has nothing to do with narrative; it's about construction, creating momentum (and anticipation and suspense) and the interactions between many details that ultimately make the thing whiz and whir and tick. I'm not yet crazy about the song itself, but I have a feeling it's going to grow on me...

(tip: MattRosenDP, @GregMitch)

There's also a four-part film showing how they did it, starting here: