December 2010 Archives

With the perspective of history, the '90s SNL brats' "Big Chill," known as "Grown Ups," may well retain its reputation for being the lowest the movies sunk in 2010. Who knows? It's hard to beat with that cast. But the Hindustan Times offers us another perspective -- and some hilarious capsule descriptions -- in an article on "The best of the worst of 2010." In other words, a list of abominable Bollywood films that may be worth not avoiding: "You unfortunately stay away from them, not realising they can offer you pleasures just as really great films can. If nothing else, they make your own lives seem less bizarre." A few samples:

6. Mahesh Nair's "Accident On Hill Road": It's been over 24 hours. A man's bum has been stuck to the windshield of a parked car. A girl had crashed this car on to the old man's bum the night before. She wakes up in the morning, and instead of helping him out, beats the hell out of him with a cricket bat. Her boyfriend fishes out a gun to kill him. The old man, still stuck, recounts conversations with his daughter in his head. Eh? The bum belongs to the great Farooque Sheikh. What more to say. Except, I'm serious. [...]

3. Mani Shankar's "Knock Out": The film's entirely a knock-off (Phone Booth). Except, here's what the hero (Sanjay Dutt) instructs the villain (Irrfan Khan, a political henchman) to do as he's forcibly stuck to a phone booth. He asks him to transfer public funds siphoned off into Swiss banks by his political bosses. The villain fits a Reliance data card to his crummy laptop, gets into the Swiss account, transfers black money into Reserve Bank treasury. Crowds gather outside the phone booth. Click after click, money in Rs 500 crore installments keep getting deposited to the Government of India. Everyone cheers. What an idea. It's so simple, CBI. Why take that long investigating CWG, 2G...

1. Gurinder Chadha's "It's A Wonderful Afterlife": Chatty Mrs Sethi (Shabana Azmi), a sweet caring mom, doubles up as a sickened "curry killer", who can see dead people. Her serial murders make tabloid headlines. Dead bodies are found with "chili content way off human tolerance levels", crazy kitchen implements like the seekh of the seekh kabab, inserted into body parts. Now that's a concept, I tell you. But the scene that completely takes the cake: The only non-brown character in a movie set in the western world's called Linda. It's her engagement party, and everyone's happily high on "ganja pakodas" (what should've been 'bhaang pakodas'). Linda turns into the character of the same name from "Exorcist," scarily screams and levitates, her entire body dripping in red chutney, curries fly off serving tables, so do plates and other assortments.... You think this world's goin' mental? Calm down, watch this film, feel better.

(tip: Corey Creekmur)

[This resurrected piece is my contribution to the Steven Spielberg Blogathon co-hosted by Adam Zanzie (Icebox Movies) and Ryan Kelly (Medfly Quarantine). Originally published in the (pre-home-video) December, 1982, issue of The Informer, a monthly publication of the Seattle Film Society, when I was just a wee lad, barely a quarter-century old.]

"E.T." is a universal film -- and I'm not just talking about the MCA company that released it. Steven Spielberg's latest celluloid fable is fast on its way to becoming the most popular movie ever made. Yet, unfortunately, critical attention has been focused primarily on the phenomenon of "E.T." rather than on the cinematic merits of the movie itself. So much has been said about "E.T." as an extraordinary entertainment, a masterfully orchestrated work of childlike wish-fulfillment, that people seem to have overlooked the fact that it's also -- dare I say it? -- a rich and resonant Work of Art. Perhaps Spielberg is too unassuming, too unabashedly populist in his style and (overt) subject matter to make critics sit up and take notice of what he's doing from shot to shot.

Nevertheless, "E.T." is connecting with millions of people worldwide -- and for good reason. Like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Spielberg's other masterpiece about intergalactic harmony and understanding (and perhaps the largest-scale abstract/experimental film released by a major Hollywood studio since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey."), "E.T." is above all about contact, about the very nature of communication, and the system of signs we human beings have created to bring ourselves closer to one another: spoken language, gestures, symbolic objects, physical contact -- and any combination of the above.

The ad slogan for "Close Encounters" (hereafter referred to as "CE3K") was "We Are Not Alone," and both that film and "E.T." are about alienated individuals who try to break out of their isolation, who struggle to bridge the void between themselves and others. Perhaps the best way to get to the heart of these movies is to take a look at some of the ways Spielberg's characters communicate with (or fail to reach) each other -- and how Spielberg uses cinematic technique to bring film, characters, and audiences, into contact.

"The Social Network," "Carlos," "Winter's Bone"...

Is that starting to sound familiar? The results of two more large-scale critics' polls -- indieWIRE and Village Voice/LA Weekly -- have been announced and those seem to be the consensus picks for best (or favorite-est) movies of 2010. The thing I enjoy most about these kinds of polls is looking at the individual lists, to see if I can determine patterns (based on, say, the writers' geographical locations, publications, politics...) and to get an idea of how the consensus was reached. "The Social Network" placed on 52 of the 85 ballots cast (it would have been 53 out of 86, but I overlooked my e-mail invitation during my recent, month-long mucus infestation) -- a greater percentage than any poll-winner since Todd Haynes' "Far From Heaven" in 2002. The 100+ "critics and bloggers" (some overlapping) in the indieWIRE poll chose it as tops with 71 mentions and 461 points, followed by "Carlos" with 50 mentions and 361 points.

Voice critic J. Hoberman writes of his publications' survey:

The poll has a few anomalies. Three critics named movies as the year's best that figured on no one else's ballots: the Nicholas Winding Refn viking fest "Valhalla Rising," documentary "The Tillman Story" and Rodrigo García's adoption drama "Mother and Child." But these are proudly declared individual statements. Movies are more generally a collective art and social phenomenon.

The LA Times' 24 Frames blog quotes Matt Damon on Steven Soderbergh's plan to retire from directing after three more films:

"He wants to paint and he says he's still young enough to have another career," Damon said. "He's kind of exhausted with everything that interested him in terms of form. He's not interested in telling stories. Cinema interested him in terms of form and that's it. He says, 'If I see another over-the-shoulder shot, I'm going to blow my brains out.' "¹ [...]

"After I worked with Clint [Eastwood] I went back and said, 'Look, Clint is having a blast and he's going to be 80 years old.' And Steven says back, 'Yeah, but he's a storyteller and I'm not,'" Damon recounted. "If you're an actor or a writer or someone working in film, it's such a waste. For me, I'm going to spend the next 40 years trying to become a great director and I will never reach what he's reached. And he's walking away from it."

- - - -

¹ I know the feeling.

At the end of a piece on the "History of Atmospheric Carbon Changes," and the measurements represented by the Keeling curve, a rather cranky Barry Ritholz posted this, which made me laugh. Not that such a statement would be necessary at Scanners (you're better than that) -- but I can think of lots of places on the Internet where this would be fitting:

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, lack of scientific knowledge, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for empirical data. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are anonymous after all.

David Bordwell sums up the terrible news from the totalitarian state of Iran about the outrageous sentence given to director Jafar Panahi ("The White Balloon," "The Circle," "Offside," etc.) after he was accused of conspiring to make an "anti-regime" film:

From Tehran comes the shocking news that Jafar Panahi, one of the finest of Iranian filmmakers, has been sentenced to six years in prison. The sentence also bans him from filmmaking for twenty years, forbids him to leave the country, and forbids him from giving interviews to the press, foreign or domestic. Panahi's collaborator Muhammad Rasoulof was also sentenced to six years in jail. [...]

The charges may be simply a pretext for silencing a prominent figure critical of current Iranian society. Panahi's films do not circulate legally there, and he is widely believed to be in sympathy with liberal forces. The government has sought to eradicate the most visible of these factions, the Green Party. Even Islamic clerics have been swept up in the crackdown. A parallel case to Panahi's is the attack on Mohammad Taqi Khalaji, a dissident cleric. Last January he was arrested and his computer and papers were seized. He too was incarcerated in Evin prison before being released on bail. Yet he was not formally charged with anything. His personal papers, including his passport, were not returned to him.

You can get some grim satisfaction for knowing that movies still matter in some parts of the world. Films have the power to shock bureaucrats and threaten authoritarian regimes. Instead of being simply "assets" or "content" to be extruded across platforms and shoved through release windows, cinema is in some places taken seriously as political critique.

A quality of the light. The play of a shadow. The movement of a hand, a lip, an eye, a branch, a cloud, a field of grass. The tone of a word, a sigh, a groan. The organic geometry of a composition across time and space. These are things that distinguish the extraordinary from the mundane in life and movies. And for the umpteenth year (I've been counting) Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy have taken notice of them, curated and cataloged them, recapitulated them in haiku-like prose. They call it Moments Out of Time, and the 2010 montage is here, at MSN Movies.

Feel free to contribute your own in comments.

A few snippets:

- The wall that is, and isn't, there: "The Ghost Writer"...

- In the hills at night, car lights on a distant curve of road--"The American" and "Let Me In"...

- "You'd do that for me?"--a line spoken to, and later by, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in "The Social Network"; the addressee not getting it in either case...

- "I don't think of them as breasts--just tubes of potential danger"; Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), provider of mammograms in "Please Give"...

Hundreds of sheep a-grazing, two swans a-schizing, one geek a-coding...

The ballots have been submitted, the points (but not the sheep) counted, and the best movies of 2010 have been selected and written about by the contributing critics of MSN Movies. But this isn't just a list. You'll find 300-word essays on the winners (each of which is linked to below) by ten -- count 'em, ten -- of your very favorite crickets! And although I'm still watching and rewatching more movies for crix poll deadlines to come, I present my very first 2010 "best list" below. It seemed like a lackluster year while it was happening, but I've found more to get enthused about in the last few weeks, catching up and revisiting newly hatched movies and theatrical releases from earlier in the year. As usual, I'll be making a wee movie to showcase my Definitive Scanners List (and might even get around to doing the Exploding Head Awards again this year). But now, enjoy these tasty treats:

10. Kat(hleen) Murphy on "Sweetgrass"
9. Don Kaye on "Exit Through the Gift Shop
8. Mary Pols on "Toy Story 3
7. James Rocchi on "Dogtooth"
6. Sean Axmaker on "Let Me In"
5. Glenn Kenny on "Carlos"
4. Richard T. Jameson on "The Ghost Writer"
3. Glenn Whipp on "Winter's Bone"
2. Kim Morgan on "Black Swan"
1. Jim Emerson on "The Social Network"

According to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle, the two best films of 2010 are David Fincher's "The Social Network" and Olivier Assayas's "Carlos." I've no quarrel with that. In fact, those two movies are at the top of a list I made for a critics' poll that will be published any day now because they're both masterful, multi-layered works that I found as stimulating to think about as they are engrossing to watch. Both the LA and NY groups chose "The Social Network" as best picture and "Carlos" as best (and most) foreign-language film -- all five and a half hours and 11 languages: English, French, German, Spanish (with a Venezuelan accent), various dialects of Arabic, Russian, Hungarian, Italian... LAFCA left no doubt about its esteem for both movies, with "Carlos" coming in as first runner-up for best picture and Fincher and Assayas sharing the director's prize. (Both groups also gave "Black Swan" their best cinematography prizes.)

Complete lists of the winners are below, but I wanted to take this opportunity to make some comparisons between these two movies. No, I don't think either of them has much to do with "realism," but both build their disputed nonfictional narrative webs around rather opaque, fictionalized central characters who are seen as heroes by some, villains by others, and neither by the movies themselves. Both "Carlos" (the revolutionary alias of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, played by Edgar Ramirez) and "Mark Zuckerberg" (the Facebook founder played by Jesse Eisenberg) are projections -- like profiles compiled by intelligence agencies or... Facebook pages. Either film could begin with a version of these words, which preface each of the three parts of "Carlos":

This film is the result of historical and journalistic research.

Because of controversial gray areas in Carlos' life, the film must be viewed as fiction, tracing two decades in the life of a notorious terrorist.

His relations with other characters have been fictionalized as well.

The three murders on Rue Toulier are the only events depicted in this film for which Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was tried and sentenced.

The Drugstore Publicis bombing is still under investigation.

In the new issue of American Cinematographer, Darren Aronofsky (whose film "Black Swan" is heavy on close-ups) is quoted saying:

We used a lot of close-ups. For me, the close-up is one of the great inventions of the 20th century; it allows an audience to sit in a dark room and stare into the eyes of a person who's emoting without being self-conscious.

A primal fascination of the cinema, I'd say. A few weeks back I wrote:

"Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer" is a kind of whodunnit. Spitzer makes formidable enemies in his rise to power as New York Attorney General, stepping in to police Wall Street when the feds refused, and we meet a number of furious financial barons (some convicted, some not) who say they would have done anything in their power to bring down the bullying, egomaniacal Spitzer. In the end, though, Spitzer admits he has no one to blame for his downfall but himself. He patronized a fancy call girl service when he was governor, and resigned when he got caught.

The sad thing is that while Spitzer was a paranoid john, many of his Wall Street enemies were pimps and dealers and capital criminals. Spitzer's crime is puny compared with the ones his opponents have gotten away with -- crimes that have ruined so many lives and nearly destroyed the economy, while still making a mint for themselves.