July 2010 Archives

I greatly appreciated A.O. Scott's NY Times piece last Sunday, under the headline "Everybody's a Critic Of the Critics' Rabid Critics." (And not just because he had kind words for me and Dennis, though I most certainly appreciate that, too.) The article was about the curious reception of "Inception" (before it even opened), and the critical rush to proclaim it either a masterpiece or a disaster. As if it could only have been one or the other.

Scott's review of the film itself, like my initial response and many others, was ambivalent. I love his summation of the critical reaction (and reaction to the critical reaction) in his final four paragraphs, which I quote in their entirety:

So maybe I was subconsciously splitting the difference. Or maybe -- like the Nolanistas and anti-Nolanistas who had come before -- I was just trying to give an honest account of what I had seen. In the end I don't believe that the smitten first responders were simply bedazzled by hype, nor that the second-wave skeptics were merely being contrarian. Just as critics need to operate in good faith, so should consumers of criticism proceed from the assumption of good faith. We may be wrong, but we tend to say what we mean. It's a responsibility of the job, as well as one of the perks.

Phillip Noyce's (and definitely Angelina Jolie's) lean and unpretentious "Salt" is proof positive that dumb summer thrillers don't have to be stupid. That is, it revels in absurd implausibilities that are as outrageous as in the movie playing the next auditorium down the hall (and the one next to that), but it never breaks a sweat trying to convince you that it's anything other than what it is. The difference between "Salt" and most ludicrous trying-too-hard action movies is a matter of grace under pressure: a veteran director with a firm command (and respect for) the integrity of screen space; a stripped-down screenplay that gives you just enough exposition to create suspense and keep you guessing about what's going on (What's she doing? Why is she doing it? Does she know why she's doing it?); and an iconic leading lady whose poise is exceeded only by her stubborn resilience.

And then there's her face, which is the real subject of the film. You won't find a more thrilling moment in summer movies than the shot -- "Queen Christina" via "The Scarlet Empress" -- of Jolie's Evelyn Salt, wearing a Russian fur hat and wrap, standing on the Staten Island Ferry, with Ellis Island in the distance. The camera moves in on her from behind, causing the distant silhouette of the Statue of Liberty to sweep across the horizon from right to left, then swings around her into a breathtaking close-up profile. The whole movie is contained in that shot, from a far shot of the abstract Lady Liberty, into a close-up of another statuesque lady of questionable loyalties. (I couldn't help but think of Truffaut dollying around the stone bust of the Greek goddess with the serene, unreadable expression in "Jules and Jim" -- Jolie's Eve(lyn) being as mysterious and even more deadly than Jeanne Moreau's Catherine who, after all, was not CIA.) The shot has nothing to do with the plot; it just serves to get Salt to a rendezvous with a Russian sleeper cell. But it's a great movie-star moment, the kind of image you could imagine being built around Garbo or Dietrich or Ingrid Bergman.

Oh yes, they're here at last. Look -- how lifelike! (Not to mention "official" and "collectible.") But Mattel has switched out the original cast just like the Darrins on "Betwitched." I'm fairly certain that Joan has been replaced by a Hannah-Barbera cartoon character -- kind of a cross between Jane Jetson and Wilma Flintstone with a little Agnes Moorehead as Endora thrown in, I'm not quite sure. But she looks so familiar. (Or maybe I'm thinking of a painting by Shag.) Roger Sterling is played by the white-haired guy from "This Island Earth" (1955). Now that Nestor Carbonell has left The Island, his complexion has lightened (but his Natural Man Mascara remains as distinctive as ever) for the role of Don Draper -- although he will occasionally be swapped for Bob Cummings. And Betty Draper has been recast as the drunk Lee Remick from "The Days of Wine and Roses." More images after the jump...

"I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away."
-- writer/director/actor Tom Noonan (see epigraphs at right)

The whole reason I keep at this blog is because it gives me the freedom to write about whatever I want and not have to write about anything I don't. And it lets me communicate with Viewers Like You. After many years on what we used to call the "review treadmill" of unidirectional daily and weekly newspaper movie reviewing (with tight deadlines and/or tight space restrictions), this is a luxurious change of pace for me. I can freely obsess over minutiae in obscure (or mainstream) films, new and old, if it strikes my fancy. And I have the liberty to virtually ignore things I don't care about that are being obsessively covered elsewhere ("Twilight," Lindsay Lohan's jail time, Harry Potter, Comic-Con, Oscars, box-office). Then again, if some pop-culture phenomenon piques my curiosity (say, a new movie by James Cameron or Christopher Nolan, or The Return of 3-D), I may just find myself compelled to say something about it. Then we can examine it, look at it from different angles, and bandy it about.

But in the more than five years since I started writing Scanners as a separate editorial offshoot (an annex, really) of RogerEbert.com, I've never sought to give equal coverage to all kinds of motion pictures. This is a blog about looking critically at movies -- based on my ideas of film criticism (of which I have many after doing it for so long) and my kinds of movies, and positive and negative examples that serve to illuminate both. That's all.

"You look at the first Fellini movie and you can see the seeds of all of Fellini there," said David Cronenberg in a 1999 interview with Sean Axmaker (connected to the release of "eXistenZ"). He was using the example to speak of any filmmaker with a discernible vision, including himself: "Everything is filtered through my own sensibility and my experiences of life and so on, and I'm going to continually be drawing from the same pool of imagery and themes I'm sure, with modifications and adjustments to the angles and of course I'm learning different things about myself, but the connections should be there."

You can certainly see the seeds of Christopher Nolan's later work in his 1998 debut feature "Following," which I just saw for the first time and quite enjoyed.* And I'm not just referring to the auspicious Batman sticker on the door of its protagonist's flat (how could he have known... unless the past and the future were somehow folded together... ?) or the hommage to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (another movie in which past, present and future intermingle) next to the guy's typewriter.

I remember seeing this on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" (my favorite show for a while). I saw so much I broke my mind. And then, many years later...

"If the career of Christopher Nolan is any indication, we've entered an era in which movies can no longer be great. They can only be awesome, which isn't nearly the same thing."
-- Stephanie Zacharek on "Inception"

Well, people certainly want to talk about "Inception" on the Internet. The opening lines to Stephanie Zacharek's review above may sound flip, but she's zeroing in on something crucial about the kinds of spectacle movies to which we have, perhaps, become accustomed. I remember having an argument with some younger friends back in 1994 over Roland Emmerich's "Stargate," which I found inert and lugubrious, but my friends enjoyed for what they called "visual splendor." (I don't remember how baked we were at the time.) As I believe I said back then, I'm all for visual splendor, but I don't go to narrative movies for (just) a light show, no matter how splendiferous. (I'd rather watch Stan Brakhage for that kind of thing.)

In my hastily keyboarded notes after seeing "Inception" last weekend, I began by saying the biggest disappointment for me was that it was so contrived and remote -- like a clever mechanical puzzle, but not at all dreamlike. Even more disappointing for me, I didn't feel I had much of interest to say about it. Now, more than 200 reader comments later, I find it more fun to theorize about than it was to watch. (Seems awfully anal and pedantic for a "summer movie.") In that post and the previous one about "Signs" and "The Prestige," I wound up writing more in response to comments than I did in the original post, and I really enjoyed the back-and-forth. (But if you want to spare yourself my expanded thoughts -- and others' -- here about what doesn't work in the movie and read more about the implications of two of the most important shots, spoilers and all, feel free to skip to the numbered boldfaced headings below...)

Normally I don't like to watch trailers because they have come to consist of all the high points of the movie condensed into a big spoiler package. I don't recommend watching them for anything you might want to have the opportunity to discover for yourself. But this one (shown before "Inception" this weekend) is more than just a collection of clips from David Fincher's "The Social Network," about the founding of Facebook. The use of a choir singing Radiohead's "Creep" over images from Facebook pages is inspired: an angst-ridden, self-loathing (but aspirational) song about a self-described "creep" yearning to be accepted.* All of us tailor our identities for particular audiences (it's called "living"), and in its first 30 seconds or so this mini-movie encapsulates something poignant (and, perhaps, somewhat sinister) about that process in the era of the online "social network."

Also, instead of telling you the whole story of the feature film (much of which is already well-known Internet history), these two and a half minutes pack more emotion -- related to friendship (in several senses of the word), ambition, success, betrayal, rejection, revenge -- than most features. Rather than simply condensing the juiciest bits into a quick sales pitch, it poetically (and cinematically) suggests what the movie might be... something that combines an entrepreneurial success story with a legal drama and a portrait of a (sociopathic?) misfit who achieves... what? You'll have to see the movie to find that out.

The movie's muse explains it all for you! Very good!

(tip: Vulture, Michael Phillips)

Boy, was I misinformed. I'd gotten the impression that Christopher Nolan's "Inception" was about dream states, but what this movie's facilely conceived CGI environments have to do with dreaming, as human beings experience dreams, I don't know. For what it's worth, Warner Bros. describes it as a "science fiction action film." But the movie's concept of dreams as architectural labyrinths -- stable and persistent science-fiction action-movie sets that can be blown up with explosives or shaken with earthquake-like tremors, but that are firmly resistant to shifting or morphing into anything else -- is mystifying to me.

Knowing that the summer would bring new releases by two of today's most "controversial" (as Entertainment Weekly might put it) auteurs -- M. Night Shyamalan and Christopher Nolan (one with a critical reputation on a downward slide, the other on the upswing) -- it seemed like a good time to plug some notable gaps in my experience of their filmographies. I still haven't seen Shyamalan's pre-"Sixth Sense" features, "Praying with Anger" (1992) or "Wide Awake" (1998), or Nolan's pre-"Memento" chronology-shifter, "Following" (1998) -- which, the credits reveal, features a thief named Cobb, like "Inception." More significantly, I suppose, I hadn't seen (all of) Shyamalan's hit "Signs" (2002), or any of Nolan's "The Prestige" (2006) -- the former because it just hadn't held my interest the first time I tried to watch it and the latter because my critic-friends who'd seen it were unanimous in finding it dull and uninspired.

You know what I liked about the olden days when movie reviews were really and truly embargoed until opening day? First, I miss the civility of the arrangement: OK, studios, you're going to show us the movie when it's done and we'll publish our reviews when it's available for real people to see it. That seemed to work fine for many years. I also liked not knowing what my fellow critics were going to say about the movie until all our reviews came out at once (or at least after my Friday arts section deadline, even in the case of alt-weeklies that used to hit the stands on Wednesdays). It was fun -- part of the challenge of being among the first to engage with a movie -- to see who would say what about the picture, and how it would compare to your own take. Sometimes it was uncanny how two critical minds would synch up -- or perceive entirely different qualities in the same film.

And the kid who shot this shows an instinctive understanding of the zoom lens superior to the self-conscious artiness of the Duplass brothers.

For some reason I have the notion that the guy with the camera, getting the low-angle shots of Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) against that American flag that stretches across the Parthenon from sea to shining sea, is the cinematographer Paul Lohmann. Is that right?

I didn't know it at the time, but 35 years ago the course of my life was set into motion. It began, no doubt, the previous summer with Roman Polanski's "Chinatown," followed the next June by Robert Altman's "Nashville." If those two movies -- seen at the impressionable ages of 16 and 17 -- don't thoroughly transform your world, then I don't know what would. I'd always loved the arts, but from that moment on I knew for certain that movies were the art form of the century -- my century -- because never before could such vibrant, kinetic masterpieces have been born. They made me feel fortunate to have come into the world just at the moment in human history when, at long last, such miracles became possible.

It has come to my attention that the ol' spam filter has been a little hyperactive recently. I just went back over a couple hundred spam comments and released about a dozen legit ones from the Limbo of Spamitude. In the future, if your comment doesn't show up (and you didn't do anything bad in it, like make ad hominem attacks on somebody, that aren't worth anyone else's time to read), then please let me know at the e-mail link above. Now I want to write some responses to some of the thoughtful comments that have unjustly done time in purgatory...