June 2010 Archives

Above: What THIS scene needs is more dimensionality!

Roger Ebert says that M. Night Shyamalan's "The Last Airbender" is such an "agonizing experience" that it "puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D":

it's a disaster even if you like 3D. M. Night Shyamalan's retrofit [shot in 2-D, digitally reprocessed for 3-D] produces the drabbest, darkest, dingiest movie of any sort I've seen in years. You know something is wrong when the screen is filled with flames that have the vibrancy of faded Polaroids. It's a known fact that 3D causes a measurable decrease in perceived brightness, but "Airbender" looks like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens.

Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's "The Killer Inside Me" is one of the deepest, darkest films noir ever made -- an unflinchingly nasty, nihilistic piece of work that pulls no punches, literally or figuratively. This is what noir is all about: facing the worst possibilities of human nature, a bottomless sense of dread that makes you feel like you're drowning in fetid bog of blood (see "Macbeth"). And it's all your fault, the undeniable consequences of following your own overpowering desires, of making your own messy mistakes. And maybe some rotten luck -- the kind you invariably bring on yourself.

Not that we totally identify with our deadpan sociopathic narrator and main character, but that's precisely what happens to Lou Ford, the clean-cut young deputy sheriff of Central City, Texas, (Casey Affleck, in another masterful performance to rank with his work in "Gone Baby Gone" and "The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford"), a small-town psycho with a taste for compulsive, 1950s pulp sadism (really dirty, dangerous stuff -- let's say S&M without the safe word). One murder becomes necessary to cover the previous one until Lou is stepp'd in blood so far that, should he wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.

(tip: Paul Hansen)

It's a question to ponder -- especially when they're Andy Warhol movies (whether or not Andy Warhol actually had anything to do with them besides putting his name on them). Consider this story from Reid Rosefelt at My Life as a Blog:

... I was a huge fan of Warhol's films, despite the fact that I had never seen a single one. Most, if not all of the films had been withdrawn from circulation, or very rarely shown, certainly not in Madison. That didn't stop me. I read everything I could about them, and I was totally fascinated.

Spotting Warhol standing at an appetizer table, plastic cup in one hand and plate in the other, during a late-1970s party in New York, RR worked up the nerve to approach the artist. It went something like this:

1) Milestone 20th Anniversary: Yes, this very day is Milestone Films' 20th Anniversary Day on Turner Classic Movies, which means you have an opportunity (Wednesday, June 23, 2010, into the wee small hours of Thursday, June 24, 2010) to see such restored essentials as Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep," Kent Mackenzie's "The Exiles," Mariposa Film Group's "Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives," Henry de la Falaise's "Legong: Dance of the Virgins and Roland West's "The Bat Whispers. Check your local listings, dammit.

And keep an eye out this year for the Milestone 20th Anniversary Road Tour, bringing 35mm prints of these and other great and near-great films to a town near you (no need to lock up your daughters). Much gratitude and affection to Amy Heller and Dennis Doros for more than 20 years of great work -- and hearty congratulations! (Adam, you are indeed a fortunate son -- in a good way!)

Errol Morris kicks off a five-part, 20,000-word series about how the test of true stupidity is our inability to recognize our own stupidity. (Or, in Forrest Gump's phraseology: "Stupid is as stupid does.") It's called "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What it Is," and it revolves around the idea of "unknown unknowns," particularly as reflected in the famous quotation from Donald Rumsfeld (February 12, 2002) about instability in Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasion:

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns."

Few movie mannerisms annoy me as much as the gratuitous zoom, which modish hack directors have been using since the 1960s to underline and over-punctuate their shots. For a number of years (particularly in the late '60s to mid-'70s), the ubiquitous zoom, having no correlative to any function of the human eye, was most often deployed as a cheap substitute for actual camera movement. And yet, in the hands of, say, certain French New Wave filmmakers, the zoom could feel refreshingly free and spontaneous, like guerilla documentary footage. Or it could signify varying degrees of counter-cultural psychedelic grooviness, from "Laugh-In" to "Easy Rider" to... "Austin Powers." (Meanwhile, directors such as Altman and Kubrick have been known to use the zoom's telephoto properties with purpose and intelligence -- though the former used it to open up the frame and the latter to lock it down.)

Any device can be used or misused, but not even such egregious clichés as the now-ubiquitous snatch-and-grab and shaky-cam techniques, or the endlessly circling twirly cam, irritate me as much as the wanton zoom. Which is why I found this passage from Glen Kenny's piece on the Duplass's movie "Cyrus" to be both amusing and gratifying. (It doesn't matter if you or I have seen "Cyrus," or how zooms are used in that film; it's the precision of Kenny's bullshit-detector argument that I appreciate.) He observes:

Commenting on Jonathan Rosenbaum's article in Cineaste ("DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia," Michael Althen wrote that, for him, cinema is not what it used to be:

It only exists in festivals -- and on DVD. That's a long way from my/our former belief that cinema can only exist if it follows the well-known liturgy of an anonymous mass staring at a screen. On the other hand, this was a somehow romantic construct fueled by Truffaut's "Day by Night" and other cinephile movies. To be honest, that was not how I discovered the Movies. Born in [the] Sixties, growing up in a suburb, I saw most of the influential movies of my life on TV: "Le samourai", "The Party," "Jules et Jim", "Citizen Kane", "Le scandale"... Did these less-than-ideal-viewing-circumstances diminish in any way the experience? Maybe.... [Maybe] Cinema is not dead -- but it's different. Its future will be defined by those who grow up having the possibility to choose between Blu-ray at home and 35mm somewhere in the dark.

It seems that cinema, like criticism, is forever dying and never quite dead. (See my recent post, "It's the End of the Cinema as we know it (then and now).") Movie formats and formulas are always being tinkered with -- which is not to say you have to like the new recipes, any more than you were obliged to savor the flavor of New Coke back in the 1980s.

For Francois Truffaut, it was James Bond. In a 1979 interview with Don Allen in Sight & Sound, Truffaut said he felt "the film that marks the beginning of the period of decadence in the cinema is the first James Bond -- 'Dr. No.' Until then the role of the cinema had been by and large to tell a story in the hope the audience would believe it... For the first time throughout the world mass audiences were exposed to what amounts as a degradation of the art of cinema, a type of cinema which relates neither to life nor the romantic tradition but only to other films and always by sending them up."

As Ronald Bergan points out in his book "Francois Truffaut: Interviews), the Cahiers du Cinema critic turned nouvelle vague auteur was "recognizing postmodernism before the concept became current in the 1980s." Truffaut (himself known as "The Gravedigger of French Cinema" for his scathing reviews in Cahiers during the 1950s) died in 1984. Surely there were those for whom the French New Wave itself indicated the End of Cinema -- a decline in professional production values and, well, what Truffaut himself attacked as the tradition "the well-made film."

"Once I had a secret love..."
-- Doris Day, "Secret Love" (1953)

"Everywhere people stare
Each and every day
I can see them laugh at me
And I hear them say
Hey, you've got to hide your love away"
-- John Lennon, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" (1965)

"Girls like me
Have to hide our hearts away..."
-- Kelly Porter, a fictionalized character based on Lesley Gore in "Grace of My Heart" (1996), singing the song "My Secret Love," co-written by Gore, Larry Klein and David Baerwald

From "Romeo and Juliet" to "Avatar," few romantic myths are as compelling as the Secret Love -- the love that dare not speak its name because society, or families, or the lovers themselves just aren't ready to face it yet. A lot of perfectly ordinary relationships go through this phase, too, for all sorts of reasons. I know a pair of high school seniors who've been seeing each other surreptitiously because his socially conservative South Asian Subcontinental parents don't want him dating while he's in school. But it's really no big deal for either of them.

So, I don't quite get why the French "Come As You Are" McDonald's commercial about the dad, the gay teenager and the secret boyfriend is such a matter of consternation for Bill O'Reilly. Other than, of course, that he is Bill O'Reilly, so it's kind of his job to say things that make him appear ridiculous. The ad employs a perfectly familiar formula -- only this "secret love" story isn't the traditional tale of tortured melodrama; it's a sweet little comedy, an unobtrusive private exchange played out in a bustling public place.

"Splice" has the DNA of a really great philosophical horror/science-fiction movie, but in the less-than-fully formed thing that was delivered to theaters, some of its most promising traits remain recessive, under-developed.

You may notice the first sign of this gestational glitch in the otherwise wonderfully gooey in vitro credits sequence, where the title and the names of the lead actors are spelled out in mutant organic forms, like veins bulging beneath the surface of fetal skin. The credits read: "Screenplay by Vincenzo Natali & Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor" -- which indicates that director Natali worked on it with Bryant, and Taylor was probably either the original writer or did enough of a re-write to merit a screen credit. Someone -- or something -- almost certainly re-formed the last half-hour of the movie, when it suddenly dies and comes back as the predictable horror clone into which it had successfully avoided mutating up until that point.

You can almost feel the splice at which the erratically paced, action-packed ending to another, lesser scary movie has been grafted onto the genetic horror of this one. It happens right around the time Sarah Polley says something like "What's happening?" and Adrien Brody (off-screen, looped dialogue?) says, "I don't know. But she's dying." Thank you, Dr. Exposition.

If you haven't seen the family's home movies of Dren -- now in theaters under the title "Splice" -- you might not want to leaf through the album just yet...

She was cute from the moment she poked her little head out...

Michael Chabon, probably best-known as the author of the novels "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and "Wonder Boys," has an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times called "Chosen, but Not Special" -- about the myths of Jewish exceptionalism that Semites, anti-Semites and Judeophiles all share: the fanciful notion that Jews possess "an inborn, half-legendary agility of intellect, amounting almost to a magical power." Chabon argues we should acknowledge the dangers of this dumb stereotype right now.

The "widespread shock at Israel's blockheadedness in the aftermath of the raid" on the Mavi Marmara should, perhaps, not have been so shocking, Chabon writes:

An honest assessment of Jewish history must conclude that even the collective act that might seem most tellingly to argue in favor of Jewish intelligence -- our survival across millenniums in spite of constant hatred, war, persecution, intolerance and genocide -- is ultimately just the same trick performed by our species as a whole (at least so far).

"I'm not a racist by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever people start talking about diversity, it's a word I can't stand."
-- Prescott, AZ, City Councilman (and former radio talk-show host) Steve Blair

Roger Ebert posted a blog entry with his thoughts about the Prescott, AZ, Miller Valley Elementary School mural fiasco that Steve Blair ignited. It's bizarre beyond belief: On his radio show, Blair objected to large images of children of color on the mural (the models were actual students at the school); which prompted some Prescott citizens to drive by and shout things like, "You're desecrating our school," "Get the nigger off the wall," and "Get the spic off the wall," at the artists working on the mural; which led "school officials" to direct the muralists to lighten the faces of the darker children -- you know, so they wouldn't incite such controversy...

They've since reversed that latter decision, but that's not even the craziest part of the story. Blair was fired from his FOX News radio affiliate gig, but he's still a city councilman (as of this writing) and here's what he actually said on the air, May 21:

I like this Einstein fellow's intellectual attitude (see the final paragraph, below). While firmly disagreeing with someone's philosophical stance, he nevertheless insists that they may have much to say to each other "if we talked about concrete things." (Hey, what do I always say? Any valid exchange of ideas must be rooted in specific, mutually recognizable observations and solid reasoning, no matter what your opinions. Einstein said so, and he was no dummy!)

This letter, dated January 3, 1954, was written to Erik Gutkind, author of the book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt," which had been recommended to Einstein by a mutual friend, Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer. (Full document at Letters of Note.)

Still, without Brouwer's suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this....

Over Memorial Day weekend I attended a high school graduation in Albuquerque. One of the graduating senior boys gave a speech in which he used car parts as a metaphor for the components of one's personality or identity. It was a clever piece he'd co-written with a friend, delivered with wry humor. Afterwards, the head of the school -- a man I'd estimate was in his 60s -- took the stage and thanked the student, quipping: "Baby, you can drive my car anytime."

Thud. Thunderous silence mixed with scattered, bewildered titters.