October 2010 Archives

The other night, I had dinner with some film-critic friends -- people I've known for much or most of my life -- and the subject circled around to 2010 ten-best list obligations. Two of us immediately said we'd rank episodes of "Mad Men" on our lists. I did not see (m)any theatrically released motion pictures this year that I thought were superior to, say, "The Rejected," "The Suitcase," "The Beautiful Girls," "Tomorrowland"... In fact, out of the 13 episodes shown between July and October, I could list ten titles and not feel terribly guilty about the feature films I'd be leaving off.

This video essay, "The Ladies and the Boxes," draws upon several episodes from Season 4, culminating with the final one, "Tomorrowland." Sally Draper says she gets upset when she thinks about "forever" -- the concept of death that most troubles her, but also the promise (if not the reality) of marriage. Sitting outdoors in a vacant lot, with the remnants of a old, overgrown shed behind her -- as unlike the rigid, rectilinear architecture of SCDP as possible -- she likens it to the Indian girl on the Land o' Lakes butter box, holding a box with her picture on it, holding a box...

When I stepped up to buy my ticket for "Hereafter," the woman in the booth (who has worked there for many years) said, "This movie's directed by Clint Eastwood." I know, I said. "He's not in it," she said. "I guess it hasn't been getting very much publicity."

I don't know if it has or hasn't, but it got me to thinking: I'm not sure I could identify a Clint Eastwood movie on sight. Is there an identifiable Eastwood directorial vision or style, apart from a certain willfully "classical" gloss applied to a professional reserve that sometimes borders on indifference? Is he like a William Wyler or a Robert Wise, a journeyman, capable of making some very good movies, whose sensibility is identifiable primarily through the combined talents of his collaborators? Who is Clint Eastwood, the director?

Eastwood hires top-of-the-line folks (after all, he can), has them do their things, and prides himself on shooting the script as written, on time and on (or under) budget. Some very good directors I know don't consider what he does to be direction so much as project management, because they don't see anything particularly distinctive in the results, film after film. Still, Eastwood can get movies made that perhaps nobody else could, based on the strength of his commercial reputation and long association with Warner Bros.

Some critics I greatly admire find his work impressive and moving. Many of those who've worked with him describe the atmosphere Eastwood fosters on the set as his greatest contribution to the picture: He creates the conditions he needs to get the movie he wants from he people he's hired -- which is, to a lesser or greater extent, what all good directors must do. (See Robert Altman for a striking example.) But, when watching a post-"Unforgiven" Eastwood picture, I frequently detect a peculiar detachment, a feeling that I'm watching something coasting along on auto-pilot without any particular human or artistic vision to guide it.¹ I respond to directors who have been accused of glacial misanthropy -- from Antonioni to Kubrick -- and that is integral to their worldview. With Eastwood, I simply sense an almost mechanical disengagement from his material. Parts of some of these movies seem to have been made by robots.

Last spring I was on a panel at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO, called "Why We Still Go to the Movies." The first thing I said (because it was the first thing I thought of) was: "Permission to stare." I wasn't thinking about any particular movie (the title said "the movies") or about the business or anything like that. I was trying to get at the essential appeal of the movie-watching experience. And, for me, that has always been about looking really closely, and paying rapt attention to what is on view. Remember how your mom always said it wasn't polite to stare? Well, it's just the opposite at the movies.

(Actually, I guess it's not technically staring because my eyes tend to be constantly looking all around the frame to see what's going on, not just fixing on one particular thing. Unless it's a creature of spectacular beauty.)

You can call it voyeurism (because that's also what it is), but it's a special kind of staged, mediated voyeurism. Even when I was a little tyke and my parents would take me to Disney movies like "Pinocchio" and "Bambi" and "Mary Poppins," I of course wanted to lose myself in a Magical World of Entertainment, but I also liked that nobody in there could see me, and that I would be allowed to vicariously experience and study behaviors, situations and emotions that I might encounter in real life, too. Later, I felt the same way about watching Godard and Truffaut and Altman and Welles and Mizoguchi and Ozu and... (And even later I'd find out that was also part of a classic child of alcoholic behavior -- an obsession with trying to figure out what "normal" is and knowing you aren't it.)

Let's start at the end, that is with the last two shots of the "Mad Men" Season 4 final episode, "Tomorrowland." The penultimate image is a beaut, with Don and Betty in the dark, empty kitchen of the house they once shared. Don is there to meet a real estate agent. Betty, the blonde in the blue Disney Evil Queen coat, has returned to box up some things she "forgot" from the cabinets in the guest bathroom. Don, characteristically, has a secret he hasn't forgotten about -- a fifth of whiskey stashed in the cupboard above the oven. They share a few sips from an old ornate bathroom cup and Betty, ostensibly speaking of the kitchen in her new house which she will probably have remodeled, looks Don in the eye and says, "Things aren't perfect."¹

Yeah, it's a cliché (Betty almost always sounds like she's reading a script), but in this context it's also a wonderful moment, poignant and funny. Because she says it almost as though a) she believes "things" actually could achieve a state of perfection; and b) she thinks imperfections are shameful secrets and this is an intimate confession -- never mind that Don knows perfectly well what a mess she is. His reply -- which could be read as tender (letting her off the hook) or pointed -- is delivered/deflected with a gentle smile and received with understanding: "So, you'll move again."

You've heard all the arguments. These two trailers represent two different approaches to selling the same movie. Which plays better for you, and why? Here's the original:

The Dilemma Trailer - Watch more Movie Trailers

Here's the substitute:

The only thing I'm going to say (that I haven't already said here and here) is that neither of them makes me terribly excited to see the movie, which I feel like I've already seen several times before.

As "Jackass 3-D" splats into theaters, Frank Paiva and I, over at MSN Movies, debate such urgent questions as: "Are we done with the 3-D yet?"; "What does 3-D add to or subtract from the cinematic experience?"; "Is the technology itself any good?"; and, "What's the best use for it? Science-fiction spectaculars? Art films? Porn? Amusement park rides?"

Here's part of my take:

I think 3-D is simply another incarnation of the much-hyped "Angle" feature on DVDs. You know -- it's still there on your remote. It was the feature that was supposed to allow You, the User, to select alternate angles within a scene (assuming the filmmakers had provided the footage). Your invocation of Megan Fox's cleavage and Jake Gyllenhaal's chest hairs is right on the money. The most commercially viable use for 3-D (and for "Angle" and for the Internet) is porn.

@jeeemerson god. Pretty soon we won't be able to tell a knock knock joke, for fear of hurting a doors feelings. STFU

That's an offended tweeter's response to my previous post, "The "gay" Dilemma: If it's a joke, what does it mean?" -- except that it's not really a response, exactly, since it doesn't address anything I actually, you know, said.¹ It's a tweet. Still, it expresses a fairly common attitude among those who are easily offended that others take offense to things they are not offended by: Why are people hurting my feelings by getting their feelings hurt over what I say or what I like? So, to those whose feelings have been bruised in this way, I want to say: Don't stop whining. Don't stop making it all about you. Keep on complaining that your sensibilities are being hurt because you feel that other people should not express opinions other than your own. How dare other people claim that things you honestly feel are funny are not only not funny to them, but maybe even painful or insulting!?! What if that's not even what you meant at all? Just remember, when your feelings are hurt by somebody who says you've hurt their feelings, it's all their fault for being so sensitive to what words mean and being so rude as to tell you. Blame them. You shouldn't have to accept responsibility for what you do or say or laugh at. That's just not fair!

But seriously, folks...

Several of yesterday's commenters mentioned comedic treatments of the anti-gay epithets "fag" and "faggot" on "South Park" ("The F Word") and Louis CK's series, "Louie," which is where the clip above comes from. A group of comedians are discussing the implications of using the word "faggot" in Louis's stage act. Louis asks Rick, the only gay comic at the table, if he thinks he shouldn't use the word. Rick says, "I think you should use whatever word you want... but are you interested to know what it might mean to gay men?"²

On the day after the near-mystical cosmic alignment of Columbus Day and National Coming Out Day (did the Postal Service suspend delivery on the day Columbus came out in 1492?), and the very day that a US district judge issued a worldwide injunction ordering the Department of Defense to stop enforcement of its absurd, 17-year-old "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy for kicking gays out of the military (best of all, the case was brought by the Log Cabin Republicans!), I have found myself reading about a stupid gay joke that's been removed from trailers for the upcoming Ron Howard comedy "The Dilemma," starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James.

I saw the trailer in front of "The Social Network," October 1. Vaughn's character is speaking to some automotive businessmen (is this a follow-up to Howard's "Gung-Ho"?) and says: "Electric cars are gay. I mean, not homosexual, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay."

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper reportedly went on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and said he was "shocked" that Universal "thought that it was OK to put that in a preview for the movie to get people to go and see it." Universal responded by quickly pulling the scene from the trailer. No word on whether it will remain in the movie, which opens in January.

"There is sin and evil in the world, and we're enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might. Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal."
-- Ronald Reagan, in the 1983 "Evil Empire" speech, quoted in Matt Reeves' "Let Me In"

It was the pre-nuclear winter of our discontent. The Cold War was at its coldest since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Jonathan Schell's 1981 New Yorker series about the catastrophic climatic effects of a full-scale nuclear war became a best-selling book, "The Fate of the Earth," in 1982. By 1983, with the escalation in rhetoric between Ronald Reagan and Soviet leaders, movies like Lynne Littman's "Testament" and Nicholas Meyer's "The Day After" -- one a bleak art-house drama; the other a network television nightmare -- were dealing seriously with the prospect of American life in the wake of atomic armageddon, as if to prepare us for the inevitable.

It was one of the darkest periods in modern American history (being too young to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, I recall only the aftermath of 9/11and the invasion of Iraq with comparable feelings of doom). And the snowy, barren landscapes of (where else?) Los Alamos, New Mexico, provide the Americanized setting for Matt Reeves' "Let Me In," a remake of Tomas Alfredson's magnificent Swedish horror film, Let the Right One In" (2008).

Part 1

Claude Chabrol's "La Rupture" (1970) begins in what could be a cave, with the quotation: "What utter darkness suddenly surrounds me?" The camera abruptly dollies to the right a short distance and the "cave" is revealed to have been a close-up of the bark of a tree. The movement pulls in a rustic-looking apartment building (which the DVD commentary explains is a fake French farmhouse, a suburban style popular at the time). The lens has been focused on the building in the distance the whole time; the camera has just moved around the obstacle of the old tree to show us what was "hidden" behind it. And that's what the movie's about, looking into the darkness beneath middle-class suburban life. This opening is, in its way, a less overtly surrealistic forerunner of the first sequence of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," 16 years later. (Yet there's still something disturbingly surreal about it, don't you think?)

Robert Siegel was interviewing Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and now chief product officer for an Internet "taste-profiling" service called Hunch.com, on NPR's "All Things Considered" the other day. It's a software-driven inference engine of the sort you see all over the web these days that provides you with "if you like this, then we suggest you'll like this" recommendations. Netflix has one, Amazon has one, iTunes' relatively new "Genius" feature is one.

The first thing that happens after Erica (Rooney Mara) breaks up with Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in "The Social Network" is that he goes back to his residence hall. It's a long, long walk, even though Mark takes it at a clip that's closer to running. Why, after the rapid-fire skirmish in the opening scene, would the movie take so long to simply get Mark from the Thirsty Scholar, just off-campus, to Kirkland House?

Well, for one thing, it's an opportunity to roll the opening credits. But at one point this was envisioned as the most extravagant sequence in the picture -- and that's saying a lot, given that it was directed by David Fincher ("Fight Club," "Zodiac," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"). According to Michael Goldman's cover story in the October issue of American Cinematographer, the whole trek was designed to be accomplished in one long take, with multiple cameras stationed along the route. The footage (if you can still call it that, when the images are being captured on 16GB CF cards) would then be stitched together in post-production to create one seamless shot. There's even a satellite map of the course in the magazine.

Since I saw "The Social Network" Friday and filed my first post about it, I've had a chance to read what some other people are saying. Some most intriguing angles, and all of them more or less valid. My take was that it's a movie about codes of communication. At Time Out, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said he thought of it as a movie "about a guy who is an antihero for the first hour and 55 minutes of the movie and a tragic hero for the final five minutes of the movie." Matt Zoller Seitz offered a way of reading it as a horror film, and led me to Richard Brody, who compares it to "Amadeus" (with the Winklevii as Salieri) and interprets it as a new media tale of outsider entrepreneurs and Jewish assimilation, along the lines of Neal Gabler's book about the original movie moguls, "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood." (That book is essential reading for lovers of American movies, by the way.)

Harvard Law professor and "free culture" advocate Lawrence Lessig comes at "The Social Network" from a legal perspective:

"When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him already possessed. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude toward them, his competence, his trustworthiness, etc. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect from them and what they may expect from him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him."
-- from "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" by Erving Goffman (1959)

Relationship status:
Interested in:
-- Facebook (2004)

The actual Mark Zuckerberg is said to have taken fencing when he was at Harvard. That's what the movie Mark Zuckerberg is doing in the opening scene of David Fincher's "The Social Network" -- only he's doing it with words and attitude, over a beer at the Thirsty Scholar, with his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. The verbal thrusts and parries, feints and ripostes, zip by at 4x fast-forward. It's like a compressed version of an Aaron Sorkin screwball comedy dialog scene, written as self-parody. Only not quite. The speed and affectlessness is part of Mark's code, and part of his character's DNA.

Once you adjust to its breakneck tempo, the scene becomes a fascinating back-and-forth about communication in code, and the infinite ways it can misfire. "The Social Network" is about a lot of things -- notably the American social and economic system, built on class privilege, money, networking, sex, entrepreneurialism, self-presentation/self-promotion; and the age-old patterns of friendship, misunderstanding and betrayal between collaborators in any creative or business enterprise -- all of them forms of code, understood by insiders and incomprehensible to outsiders. Mark has a valuable insider's understanding of computer code, but is an outsider when it comes to most of these other areas. And yet he has an acute analytical intelligence that allows him to deconstruct these codes and notice elements that others who are closer to them might take for granted.

After the devastating news of Sally Menke's death last week, I read some moving and heartfelt tributes to her... and yet, some of them didn't seem to understand what an editor actually does, or what made Menke's work in particular so remarkable.

I suppose just about anybody could string together a rough assembly of a movie. All you have to do is follow the script and put things in the right order, as Sir Edwin, the great Shakespearean actor played by John Cleese, said of words in a play: "Old Peter Hall used to say to me, 'They're all there Eddie, now we've got to get them in the right order.'"