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Belatedly, Iron Man

2008-05-09T08:00:19Z

View image Action hero with eyelashes.

My review of "Iron Man" is at RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:

The world needs another comic book movie like it needs another Bush administration, but if we must have one more (and the Evil Marketing Geniuses at Marvel MegaIndustries will do their utmost to ensure that we always will), "Iron Man" is a swell one to have. Not only is it a good comic book movie (smart and stupid, stirring and silly, intimate and spectacular), it's winning enough to engage even those who've never cared much for comic books or the movies they spawn. Like me.

"Iron Man" begins on dangerous ground: in the harsh terrain of Battleground Afghanistan. A convoy of Humvees (inadequately armored, no doubt) speeds through the desert carrying ultra-bazillionaire Death Merchant, and notoriously dissolute playboy, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), scotch in hand, flirting with the female driver.

Right on cue, an IED detonates, the Hummers are ambushed by Taliban-esque fighters, the American soldiers are slaughtered, and Tony is kidnapped. It won't be the first time that this gaudy piece of summer-movie pulp fiction strays a little too far into bloody Mess o' Potamian reality for comfort. Is this political commentary of some kind, or just exploitation? Like its hero "Iron Man" takes false steps, stumbles, and even occasionally crashes, yet quickly recovers its footing.

The reason it's so nimble is that director Jon Favreau ("Elf," "Zathura") and his fleet crew of actors grasp the action-fantasy premise and treat it with the looseness and sharpness of improvisational comedy. (Favreau himself has worked out with The Groundlings troupe in Los Angeles from time to time.) It's difficult to tell how much of what they're doing is taken directly from the script (credited to four writers, and who knows how many others labored behind the scenes), but even when they're reciting somber dialog-bubble exposition, they treat it the way an improv actor would: smoothly feeding information into the scene, building a foundation on which everybody can work, and play....

The Greed for Speed

2008-05-08T08:00:28Z

View image Motion but no momentum.

My review of "Speed Racer" by the Wachowski Brothers™ is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:

"Speed Racer" is not a feature film in any conventional sense -- although there is nothing so conventional in today's marketplace as a corporate product based on a campy vintage TV show that is developed for extremely brief exhibition in multiplexes on its way to more appropriate platforms such as DVD and video games, which provide the principal justification for its manufacture in the first place.

Neither is "Speed Racer" a commercial avant-garde film (though fans of the Wachowski brothers may wish to make such claims), unless you still consider Laserium shows of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" to be cutting edge. (Lights! Shapes! Colors! Motion! Money!) And there's nothing terribly adventurous these days about Eisensteinian montage treated as if it were William S. Burroughs' "cut up" technique -- with digital clips randomly scrambled like pixelated confetti.

Nor is it some kind of subversive commodity, unless the outré strategy of pandering to a low-brow, retro-nostalgic crowd can be considered anything but business as usual in 2008. The faux naivete on display here -- right down to the imitation-fruit-flavored FDA-food-dye coloring -- is both shamelessly quaint and shamelessly cynical.

Seeing behind the images: Standard Operating Procedure

2008-05-02T08:02:52Z

View image Lynndie England and Charles Graner. In... happier times?

I. What's Past is Prologue

"What are Arabs seeing, and what does that mean for us?" asked Duncan McInnis, the US State Department official in charge of fighting "the war over America's image in the Middle East," in a "Frontline/World" documentary, "News War: War of Ideas" (broadcast March 27, 2007).

"For instance in Iraq. Because Arabs are upset about the presence of armed forces in an Arab country, there are no good images of an American soldier. An American soldier building a hospital in Iraq is still an American soldier in Iraq. In that case, all images are bad. And we need to know that, we need to know that's what they see."

The image is the world's only remaining superpower. Understanding their power of images -- not just what's in the pictures themselves, but what they signify -- is the key to understanding the world and our place within it. It's also, recently, the source of the most deadly and dismal failures in American history. From the attacks of 9/11 through the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Americans' inability to comprehend what they were seeing -- or even to recognize the primacy of the image itself as the representation of events -- has had catastrophic consequences.

]]> German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was pilloried when he said, shortly after 9/11: "What happened there is—they all have to rearrange their brains now—is the greatest work of art ever... Against that, we composers are nothing.” Whatever it was, precisely, that Stockhausen intended to convey (and he immediately regretted saying it in the fever of the time), his words should have shocked us into seeing what was before our eyes, something to which the hypnotic, endless-looop repetitions of the crashing planes and collapsing buildings on every TV screen, may have blinded us: These images were carefully planned, and executed -- composed not so much as "art," as Stockhausen framed it, but as visual propaganda on a spectacular and terrifying scale -- the epitome of "terrorism" as imagery, and vice-versa.

View image Symbolic imagery -- and all-too-real at the same time.

By focusing upon and recycling certain images (the explosions, the dust clouds coming at the cameras) and repressing or censoring others (the unbearable situation of those trapped in the buildings, the ones who jumped or fell and the ones who stayed, the flesh-and-blood carnage on the streets below), the media lodged indelible images in our brains that we thought we understood ("This is an act of war"), but couldn't quite wrap our heads around.

And what we didn't fully get was the nature of the spectacle. To the perpetrators the human toll was almost incidental -- collateral damage. Far deadlier attacks were possible, but this one had grandiose symbolic potency that, like the footage of the explosion of the Hindenburg, would implant terror in the mind of anyone who saw it. And in the case of 9/11 (before it was given that label), that was the point of creating the images in the first place. It wasn't about the casualties but the pictures.

By keeping the cameras at a distance and focusing on the spectacle, the media made it easy for the disaffected to cheer the abstract assault on American power that the smoking, collapsing towers represented. They didn't have to think too much, or feel too much, about the real-life victims. Of course, that's also exactly how the "embedded" American media would later treat military and civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the caskets of soldiers killed in combat became, officially, invisible for the first time in American history.

II. Standard Operating Procedure

"America has never been perceived as more isolated and less influential.... The reality is that America's position is undermined, and nobody needs to understand that more than Americans."
-- David Marash, Washington Anchor, Al Jazeera English, in "News Wars: War of Ideas"

View image "Re-enactment" image of an Abu Ghraib interrogation from "Standard Operating Procedure."

Images have as much power as policy. Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure," an investigation of the photographs of American soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of images, and how the amateur photos with which we have become familiar (the ones that undermined American power and influence in the world more than anything since the decision to invade Iraq itself) came to be what they are. The digital shots are powerful propaganda tools, shocks to the conscience, but they are also common photographs -- taken at a particular time and place by individuals, almost instinctively or routinely and without thought, for reasons perhaps even they don't understand.

View image Manufactured symbolic imagery, courtesy CIA PSYOP.

"America has never been perceived as more isolated and less influential.... The reality is that America's position is undermined, and nobody needs to understand that more than Americans."
-- David Marash, Washington Anchor, Al Jazeera English, in "News Wars: War of Ideas"

As Morris says on the film's web site:

One of my ongoing themes is: photographs can be misleading -- without context we are free to interpret the photographs any way we choose. It's one of the odd and interesting things about photography. You look at a photograph, you think you know what it means, but more often than not you could be wrong. Photographs provide evidence, but usually, it takes some investigative effort to uncover evidence of what?

Morris could be talking about the "evidence" some 9/11 conspiracy theorists claimed to find in the photos taken that day, or about the staged toppling of Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, opposite the Baghdad hotel where the press was hedquartered, with expatriate Ahmad Chalabi supporters flown in the night before to act as liberated demonstrators, even as guerilla warfare was taking place in the streets only blocks away. (And that symbolic covering of Saddam's face with an American flag? Whoops. Get an Iraqi flag up there, pronto!)

The most important element in any picture is the frame. What is included, what is left out, the arrangements of elements within the composition, the technology used to capture it, the context in which it was captured, the perceptions and rationalizations that participants and viewers bring to the image after it is recorded... Those are the subjects of "Standard Operating Procedure." (Roger Ebert's review is here.)

View image Errol Morris on the "set" of "SOP."

Morris's "The Thin Blue Line" was also about a frame -- a man who was falsely convicted of murdering a police officer. A confession by the real killer in the movie itself helped solve the crime. "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" brought together four figures -- a topiary gardner, a lion tamer, a naked mole rat specialist and a robot scientist -- at let you figure out how to fit them into the film's framework. "Mr. Death" (probably the closest to "Standard Operating Procedure") investigated an American inventor of legal execution devices through the larger frame of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and the man's connections with Holocaust deniers. And the Oscar-winning "The Fog of War" re-framed U.S. involvement in Vietnam through the experiences of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who said that the project was doomed from the beginning by America's failure to understand that what we viewed as an aspect of the Cold War, the Vietnamese saw as a civil war.

Late in the film, Morris shows us a cell spattered with blood. The images are nauseating, damning. And yet, they are not at all what they seem.

Through his Interrotron, Morris (and we) look the subjects right in the eye. Their "eyewitness testimony" is, by turns, confused, self-serving, self-deceiving, earnest, defensive, resigned, indignant -- sometimes all in the same interview. Strangely, the only interviewee who seems genuinely angry is Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general in charge of prisons all over Iraq who was made a convenient scapegoat by Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense. She burns with rage, and consequently comes across as one of the more sympathetic and relatable voices in the film. If these photos don't provoke anger, something is wrong.

View image Young lovers Lynndie England and Charles Graner preside over a pyramid of prisoners they've arranged at Abu Ghraib.

Morris interviews all the "seven bad apples" except for Charles Graner, the shutterbug and alleged "ringleader" who appears in so many of the photographs, who made discs of them to give out to friends and fellow soldiers, and who was sexually involved with two of the women in the pictures. (The interviewees include Lynndie England [pregnant by Graner at the time], Megan Ambuhl [now married to Graner], Sabrina Harman, Jamal Davis and Jeremy Sivitz.)

Watching "Standard Operating Procedure" is like exploring a cave. The mouth feels like it's opening into an abyss, and the deeper you venture, the more contours and passageways you begin to make out as your eyes adjust to the darkness.

Morris says this:

I often think that if cameras had not been present, these events would not have occurred. [Consider the timed attacks on the World Trade Center in that light.] The pyramid is an example. Graner, in all likelihood, orchestrated these events for the camera. [...]

The photographs do two things at the same time. They provide an exposé and they provide a cover up. They showed the world that these things were going on, but they point the finger at a very small group of people. They make you think it's these people who are the culprits. These are the people who are responsible for everything. That is a misdirection. It gives you a false picture.

"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases?' (Laughter.) 'Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?' [...]

"It is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over and over and over again of some boy walking out with a vase and say, "Oh, my goodness, you didn't have a plan." That's nonsense! They know what they're doing, and they're doing a terrific job. And it's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things! They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that's what's going to happen here."

-- Donald Rumsfeld, April 11, 2003

Mishima: Blood cult

2008-05-02T08:00:01Z

View image From "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters."

The first thing Paul Schrader wanted to talk about after the Ebertfest screening of his ambitious 1985 "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" was his youthful fascination with the primitive rite of "suicidal blood sacrifice." That's what he said his script for "Taxi Driver" was rooted in -- and, no wonder, since he had been raised a strict Calvinist (is that redundant?) and, as he put it, "Christianity is a blood cult" that glorifies sacrificial suicide. In "Mishima" it's the act of seppuku; in "Raging Bull" it's boxing; in "The Last Temptation of Christ" it's crucifixion... To writer-director Schrader, they're all manifestations of the same bloody thing.

]]>
View image Mishima posing as Saint Sebastian.

Initially, he said, he doing doing a film about "another semi-literate American" and martyr figure, singer Hank Williams, but decided he was too much like Travis Bickle. When faced with all the music clearance problems, and the prospect of writing about another white American from the underclass, he chose instead to "go clear to the other end of the bookshelf" -- "to the Japanese, the artist, the homosexual." Inspiration, he said, is just another word for problem-solving, and "Mishima" presented him with the opportunity to undermine the Western illusion of life as a series of problems, and the existence of definitive solutions that view implies. There are no solutions, emphasized the author of the landmark "Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer." Life presents conundrums to explore, he said, but we should not think of it as something that can ever be fully understood.

Schrader saw Mishima as an outsider, an individualist in a "consensus culture," a post-war military reject who embraced the glory of Imperial Japan, and an artist who relished his role as pop star. Eventually, he came to believe that his image as a public figure eclipsed his works, that his life was his art. His meticulously planned ritual suicide was envisioned as the climax to his greatest fiction -- himself.

View image The real Mishima, giving a speech shortly before his suicide.

Appearing on stage with his costume/production designer Eiko Ishioka, a film novice at the time of "Mishima," Schrader recalled the difficulties of finding an approach to Mishima's life and work, which he broke down into four sections and various interwoven styles: black and white for episodes from Mishima's past, including his childhood; pseudo-cinema verite for the last day of his life; and theatrically stylized, exaggeratedly artificial sets for excerpts from three of Mishima's novels: "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" (1956), "Kyoko's House" (1959) and "Runaway Horses" (1968).

Schrader had brought his personal 35 mm print of "Mishima" with him, and although it looked as dazzling as I'd remembered on the enormous Virginia Theatre screen at Ebertfest (projected to perfection, as always, by James Bond), he said the upcoming remastered Criterion DVD actually sounded better (in a Dolby 5.1 remix). He also added one scene and did a sky replacement (in the mostly day-for-night seaside seppuku sequence from "Runaway Horses" in part 3, to make it look more artificial).

Prepping for Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure

2008-05-01T08:00:22Z

View image From the official "Standard Operating Procedure" web site, which mirrors the film's mosaic-like treatment of its raw material.

“…the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our photographs but in ourselves…”

-- Errol Morris, paraphrasing Shakespeare, in a footnote to an October 4, 2007, New York Times Zoom column about a pair of Roger Fenton Crimean War photos

* * * *

Errol Morris's new film, "Standard Operating Procedure," is not about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It is about the photographs themselves, and what went on in and around them, before, during and after they were taken. Perhaps the most baffling question surrounding them is why they were taken at all.

The film reflects Morris's desire to make another "investigative film" in the vein of "The Thin Blue Line." "I think of the film as a nonfiction horror movie," he says in a Q&A on the official web site. The imagery is designed to take the viewer into the moment the photographs were taken, as well as to evoke the nightmarish, hallucinatory quality of Abu Ghraib."

]]> The title refers to the often (and sometimes deliberately) blurred distinction -- the thin invisible line, if you will -- between behaviors that would be classified under U.S. military law and/or the Geneva conventions as torture, abuse, or "Standard Operating Procedure." And its method grows out of the concerns Morris has been exploring in his New York Times column/blog, Zoom, beginning in 2007. In the first installment, he wrote:

Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all. Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?

I have beliefs about the photographs I see. Often –- when they appear in books or newspapers -– there are captions below them, or they are embedded in explanatory text. And even where there are no explicit captions on the page, there are captions in my mind. What I think I’m looking at. What I think the photograph is about.

I have often wondered: would it be possible to look at a photograph shorn of all its context, caption-less, unconnected to current thought and ideas? It would be like stumbling on a collection of photographs in a curiosity shop – pictures of people and places that we do not recognize and know nothing about. I might imagine things about the people and places in the photographs but know nothing about them. Nothing.

Morris echoes his own words in the "SOP" Q&A:

It all starts with the photographs. They are at the core of this whole project. 270 photographs were given to the Army Criminal Investigation Division, and many of them appear in the movie. "Standard Operating Procedure" is my attempt to tell the story behind these photographs, to examine the context in which they were taken. People think they understand the photographs, that they are self-explanatory. They think they know what they are about -- but do they really? That's the question. Megan Ambuhl, one of the soldiers in the movie, asks: have we looked "outside the frame?" This film is an attempt to do that.

Or, as Morris has written of photographs in general:

We look at them. They are nothing more than silver halide crystals arranged on paper or with digital photography, nothing more than a concatenation of 1’s and 0’s resident on a hard-drive. Yet we believe they have captured something of our essence – something of the stuff that is in our heads.

In other words, consciously or not, we tend to see what we want -- or expect -- to see.

View image From the official "Standard Operating Procedure" web site.

One area the film does not get into is how these amateur photographs -- taken with three personal digital cameras -- came to light, first on CBS's "60 Minutes II" and in Hersh's article. For more about that, see this "60 Minutes" story about Army Reservist MP who became the Abu Ghraib whistleblower:

And then one day, when Joe Darby wanted scenic pictures to send home, he spotted the unit's camera buff, prison guard Charles Graner.

"So I walked up to Graner and I, you know, 'Hey do you have any pictures?' And he said 'Yeah, yeah, hold on.' Reaches into his computer bag and pulls out two CDs and just hands them to me," Darby remembers. [...]

"I don't think he realized what was on, but I don't think it would have mattered either way. I knew Graner and Graner trusted me."

That trust was about to change Darby's life forever. He copied Graner's discs and gave him back the originals. Later, when Darby looked at the photos he first saw scenic shots of Iraq, but then he came upon the pictures that launched the scandal.

Darby handed over the photos to the Criminal Investigations Division (CID) -- at first "in an envelope with an anonymous letter." His anonymity did not last long -- especially after Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld "commended" him by name in front of a congressional committee investigating the scandal: "There are many who did their duty professionally and we should mention that as well," Rumsfeld said in televised hearings. First, Specialist Joseph Darby, who alerted appropriate authorities that abuses were occurring." (Graner, former boyfriend of the infamous petite poser Lynndie England, and father of her child, is now imprisoned himself, and was the only major figure unavailable for scrutiny through Morris's Interrotron.)

According to a print version of the story (also viewable on video) at the "60 Minutes" web site, reporter Anderson Cooper asked Darby if he wished he hadn't been given the photos:

"No, because if they had been given to somebody else, it might not have been reported," Darby says.

"And would that have been so bad, if it had never been reported?" Cooper asks.

"Ignorance is bliss they say but, to actually know what they were doing, you can't stand by and let that happen," Darby replies.

"There's still a lot of people though that'll say 'Look, you know, so what they did this. You know, Saddam did things that were much worse,'" Cooper remarks.

"We're Americans, we're not Saddam," Darby says. "We hold ourselves to a higher standard. Our soldiers hold themselves to a higher standard."

Asked if he'd do it again, Darby says, "Yes. They broke the law and they had to be punished."

"And it's that simple?" Cooper asks.

"It's that simple," he replies.

As Morris's film demonstrates, that may be the only "simple" thing about the photographs from Abu Ghraib.

* * * *

More background (and foreground):

View image Specialist Sabrina Harman with the corpse of a prisoner killed during a CIA interrogation.

Morris and collaborator Philip Gourevitch are publishing a 304-page companion book (available May 15, 2008) that reveals more of the research that went into the making of the film. Part of it has already been excerpted in The New Yorker:

Later, [Sabrina Harman, one of the soldiers in the photos] paid a visit to an Al Hillah morgue and took pictures: mummified bodies, smoked by decay; extreme closeups of their faces, their lifeless hands, the torn flesh and bone of their wounds; a punctured chest, a severed foot. The photographs are ripe with forensic information. Harman also had her picture taken at the morgue, leaning over one of the blackened corpses, her sun-flushed cheek inches from its crusted eye sockets. She is smiling—a forced but lovely smile—and her right hand is raised in a fist, giving the thumbs-up, as she usually did when a camera was pointed at her.

“I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hillah,” Harman said. “Whenever I get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands, so I probably have a thumbs-up because it’s just something that automatically happens. Like when you get into a photo you want to smile.” There are at least twenty photos from Al Hillah in which she is in the identical pose, same smile, same thumbs-up: bathing in an inflatable wading pool; holding a tiny lizard; standing at the foot of a wall that bears a giant bas-relief of Saddam (the button of his suit jacket is bigger than her head); fooling around with her best Army buddy, Megan Ambuhl, who is giving her the finger and flashing a tongue stud; holding a tiny figurine of Jesus; holding a long, phallic melon; mounting the ancient stone lion of Babylon at the ruins of King Nebuchadnezzar’s city; leaning over the shoulder of an M.P. buddy who is holding a Fanta can on top of which sits a dead cat’s head; and so on.

See video clips, outtakes and other background material here, including Seymour Hersh's original New Yorker article exposing the torture and abuse of prisoners by American soldiers, and later reporting on the "chain of command" and the gray zone" created by policymakers like Donald Rumsfeld to allow vaguely defined "extreme interrogation measures" while preserving plausible deniability for the higher-ups.

Outtake excerpt from December 10, 2006 interview with Sabrina Harman:

ERROL MORRIS: What I find…I mean what I find really interesting about the first letter, is you sort of…you’re addressing all of these questions. You somehow know what you’re seeing is not right, in fact is wrong. There’s something wrong here. The need to take pictures, to expose that fact at some future time to the public, so that they can see another face of America, that’s all, all in that letter. I find that interesting.

SABRINA HARMAN: It seems like stuff like this only happened on TV. It’s not something you really thought was going on. At least I didn’t think it was going on. It’s just something that you watch, and that is not real.

ERROL MORRIS: What does that do to your head?

SABRINA HARMAN: Again, I don’t even know where I was at that point. I put everything down on paper that I was thinking. And if it weren’t for those letters, I don’t think I could even tell you anything that went on. That’s the only way I can remember things, is letters and photos.

ERROL MORRIS: So it’s a way of creating memory?

SABRINA HARMAN: I don’t know what it was. I really think I put it all down to forget, in the letters, and then just to prove what was going on, was the photos. Because really, if anybody came up to you and was like, “Hey, this is what’s going on,” there’s no way anybody would believe what was going on. So that’s why the photos were taken.

ERROL MORRIS: And in fact, there would have been no Abu Ghraib scandal without the photographs.

SABRINA HARMAN: No. Not at all.

Autopsy of a scene: The Act ofSeeing with One's Own Eyes

2008-04-30T09:12:00Z

View image Two doors, mirror images. Two sides of a coin that's about to be tossed, and called, by Ed Tom Bell when returns to, and enters, room 114. The crime scene tape stretches across both, visually tying them together.

Because I brought this up in a larger context in "The Uncertainty Principle (or, The Easy Read), I figured I may as well follow through with it. (If you don't want to read another post about that movie, here, just keep a movin' right on through. You can't stop what's coming.)

So, let's take a look at what's here, and what's not here. And by that I mean what's in the movie, not what we might have seen if we'd been somehow been able to enter the picture as invisible ectoplasmic entities, free to wander back and forth at will between the membranes of those motel walls. We may draw different conclusions about what we see (and about how important it is), but let's not invent extraneous fictions beyond what the movie shows us (like Chigurh hiding under the bed or slithering down the drain)....

]]> If you don't know how this is going to turn out, proceed no further.

View image Returning to the crime scene. From Bell's POV, the camera moves in on room 114, where he has previously been, arriving too late to prevent bloodshed. The lock on door 112 is... dark, obscured by a shadow at this moment. Notice two sources of practical illumination here: the light between the doors, and Ed Tom's headlights (which we'll see when he opens the door).

View image As Ed Tom approaches 114, it is cast in shadow and the door to room 112 is now in light.

View image The blown lock on the door of room 114, now illuminated, from Ed Tom's POV to the right of it.

View image Chigurh on the other side of a door. The source of the light shining on Chigurh is ambiguous to say the least. Looks like it's shining up on him from inside the room, not through the hole in the lock, which would cast shadows in the other direction. Not that this matters much. Happens in movies all the time to light what needs to be lit within the frame. Note the gold color of the "hole." We're seeing the inside of the casing, the curve that's facing away from Chigurh. Could this be Ed Tom's POV" shot of something he can't actually see?

View image After cutting outside again, we return to a tighter shot on Chigurh, this time without seeing the light coming through the hole. This is not the first time we've been at a hotel/motel room door trying to intuit what's on the other side.

View image Close-up of the hole. Looks like a reflection of Ed Tom in the housing, but how is light bent around the inside of a rounded surface? What is the source of the light streaming to the left? The previous shot would suggest this is from Chigurh's POV, but we don't know to a certainty (see Eagle Pass Hotel conversation between Chigurh and Wells).

View image Ed Tom prepares to enter. Again, the shot emphasizes another space, room 112, even as it presses in on him entering room 114. Again, the lock of room 114 is in shadow; the lock of room 112 is not.

View image Ed Tom pushes open the door (visual echo of Chigurh entering Llewelyn's trailer), which goes flat against the wall. Nobody is behind it. If you don't believe me, you can watch the shot frame-by-frame on DVD. Notice headlight behind Ed Tom.

View image Entering the room. Multiple shadows, sources of light, reflections (see silhouette in mirror on extreme right) fragment the space. Ed Tom could be walking into a hall of mirrors, entering a shattered world of illusions, possibilities. You know how this is going to end, don't you? No. No, you don't.

What's most obvious about the way this sequence is constructed is that it is deliberately ambiguous. Maybe you prefer to think that the Coens are just "cheating." OK, fine. But what if Chigurh has been inside room 112? In a comment at Glenn Kenny's back in December, I suggested a few reasons we should consider the possibility (although Glenn, who has written brilliantly about "NCFOM," reads the scene differently):

1) He [Llewelyn] took a room adjacent to ~~Moss's~~ his own [38, on the back of 138] in the earlier motel/vent scene. [Chigurh pulls up outside of the visually paired 138 and 139; he checks into 130.]

2) The set-up shot equally emphasizes the two motel doors (with the yellow tape running all the way across both doors -- and the screen).

3) Chigurh is never where you expect him to be, when you expect him to be there.

4) Sheriff Bell is indeed visibly relieved that he did not find Chigurh in that room (the two doors are the equivalent of his "coin toss" -- then he finds a coin on the floor). But he did enter it, looked around, and Chigurh was not there.

5) If Chigurh wanted/needed to shoot Sheriff Bell (say, if he were discovered standing behind the front door, where we can see he isn't), he would have. But the movie is about how we all carry on living in the shadow of death.

6) We're never given any indication that Chigurh has "supernatural powers." Yes, he represents impending mortality (he's always lurking out there somewhere), but if you shoot him, does he not bleed? Yes, he does. We even see him treating his wounds, and he's as much of flesh and blood as Moss.

But, again, the important concept to grasp here is that there doesn't have to be one definitive answer. The Coens make sure we know there is room for more than that. And they do it throughout the movie.

A commenter named Aron at In the Company of Glenn got it just right, as I see it:

I think this is a deliberate discontinuity here and there is no guaranteed explanation. The movie in its final sequences accelerates the rate at which you as a viewer become dissociated from omniscience.... [The Coens use ellipses frequently in the last half-hour of the film, pushing many key events off-screen.]

The point is to make us feel overwhelmed in a similar fashion as Bell by our inability to understand it all.

This particular example is one that steps slightly over the line into Lynch, and its a great example of artistic decision.

Living with uncertainty, with possibilities, with a coin toss that could just as well have turned up heads or tails. That's where this movie lives, in the valley of the shadow between life and death.

- - - -

View image Chigurh checks in: In the near-miss at the Regal Motel, Llewelyn has two double beds in room 138 and in 38, the room directly in back of it. Chigurh, following the transponder, has pulled up in front of rooms 138 and 139. He checks in to room 130, on the inside corner, and kills the Mexicans waiting for Llewelyn in room 138. A pattern is developing...

View image Bonus image #1: Regal Motel: Chigurh pulls up outside rooms 138 (Llewelyn's) and 139, responding to the transponder. As he backs up (look at all the reflections), 139 is visually (and audibly) eliminated from consideration.

View image Bonus image #2: Note the glimmer of light through the peephole when Chigurh shuts the door of room 130 at the Regal Motel.

Here's the scene (imagined slightly differently) from the shooting script (pp. 108 - 110):

EXT. MOTEL

Now very late, empty of onlookers and emergency vehicles.

Sheriff Bell's cruiser pulls up just inside the courtyard.

He cuts his engine.

Sheriff Bell sits looking at the motel.

Very quiet.

After a long beat he gets out of the car. He pushes its door
shut quietly, with two hands.

He looks up the veranda.

The one door, most of the way up, has yellow tape across it.
Its loose ends wave in a light breeze.

Sheriff Bell looks up the street.

Nothing much to attract his attention.

EXT. MOTEL VERANDA

Sheriff Bell steps up onto the veranda. He takes slow, quiet
steps.

We intercut his point-of-view, nearing the door marked by
police tape.

As he draws close to the door he slows.

The yellow tape is about chest high. Above it is the lock
cylinder. It has been punched hollow.

Sheriff Bell stands staring at the lock.

Very quiet. The chick. chick. of the tape-ends against the
door frame.

Still.

INT. MOTEL ROOM

INSIDE

Chigurh is still also. Just on the other side of the door,
he stands holding his shotgun.

From inside, the tap of the breeze-blown tape is dulled but
perceptible. It counts out beats.

Chigurh is also looking at the lock cylinder.

The curved brass of its hollow interior holds a reflection of
the motel room exterior. Lights and shapes. The curvature
distorts to unrecognizability what is reflected, but we see
the color of Sheriff Bell's uniform.

The reflection is very still. Then, slow movement.

OUTSIDE

Sheriff Bell finishes bringing his hand to his bolstered gun.

It rests there.

Still once again.

His point-of-view of the lock. The reflection from here,
darker, is hard to read.

INSIDE

Chigurh, still.

OUTSIDE

Sheriff Bell, his hand on his bolstered gun. A long beat.
His hand drops.

He extends one booted toe. He nudges the door inward.
As the lock cylinder slowly recedes, reflected shapes
scramble inside it and slide up its curve. Before the door
is fully open we cut around:

FROM INSIDE

The door finishes creaking open. Sheriff Bell is a
silhouette in the doorway.

A still beat.

At length Sheriff Bell ducks under the chest-high police tape
to enter.

The worn carpet has a large dark stain that glistens near the
door. Sheriff Bell steps over it, advancing slowly. The
room is dimly lit shapes.

There is a bathroom door in the depth of the room. Sheriff
Bell advances toward it. He stops in front of it.

He toes the door. It creaks slowly open.

INT. MOTEL BATHROOM

The bathroom, with no spill light from outside, is pitch
black.

Sheriff Bell reaches slowly up with one hand. He gropes at
the inside wall.

The light goes on: bright. White tile. Sheriff Bell
squints. A beat.

He takes a step in.

He looks at the small window.

He looks at the window's swivel-catch, locked.

INT. MAIN ROOM

Sheriff Bell emerges from the bathroom. He sits heavily onto
the bed.

He looks around, not for anything in particular. His look
catches on something low, just in front of him:
A ventilation duct near the baseboard. Its opening is
exposed; its grille lies on the floor before it.

Sheriff Bell stares.

At length he leans forward. He nudges the grille aside. On
the floor, a couple of screws. A coin.

* * * *

The Seitz-geist

2008-04-30T08:00:21Z

View image The House Next Door.

Now that Matt Zoller Seitz has announced that he's moving on, back to Dallas from Brooklyn and into full-time filmmaking, I thought I'd take a quick glance over the shoulder at some of the writing he's done at his home, The House Next Door, since he opened the place January 1, 2006. Of course, he's done a lot of other writing -- for The Dallas Observer, The Newark Star-Ledger (the Sopranos' hometown paper), the New York Press and the New York Times among other outlets -- but he became a habit with me through the House.

Matt has been a generous proprietor (sometimes perhaps too generous, but that's hardly a grievous fault). Today the House Next Door masthead lists more than 40 contributors -- novices and vets alike -- including the invaluable editor-cum-landlord Keith Uhlich.

At the same time that I'm excited for Matt (who, by the way, I've never met face-to-face), I'm not going to pretend I'm not bummed. This is how I deal with the grief part: Let's celebrate MSZ for all he's done in (and for) the blogosphere. Consider this a very short clip reel. As the lights go down on one phase of Matt's career, and the curtain opens on another, sit back and immerse yourself...

Oh, and sorry about that headline, guys. (That's as in Zoller-, not polter-.)

Open House (first House Next Door post, January 1, 2006):

My grandfather, a self-educated German-American farmer from Olathe, Kansas, believed that no journey, however seemingly circuitous or self-destructive, was ever truly unnecessary, or even avoidable. Sometimes we just have to continue along a particular path for inexplicable, personal reasons, disregarding warnings of friends and family and perhaps our own internal voices, until we arrive at our destination, whatever it may be. This type of journey, my grandfather said, was the equivalent of "driving around the block backward to get to the house next door."

]]> "The New World" (first theatrical cut, January 2, 2006):

Other people direct movies. Terrence Malick builds cathedrals. "The New World" is my new religion, easily the most pictorially innovative and moving American studio release I've seen in the 15 years I've been a professional movie critic. To appreciate it requires viewers to abandon narrative filmmaking conventions they're comfortable with (perhaps even spoiled by) and learn a new language, a primordial language of pictures that largely bypasses narrative cinema's persistent theatrical influence and plugs into the rhythms of thought. [...]

In service of this unfashionably transcendental vision of life, Malick merges images and music with a silent filmmaker’s muscular grace. The immediacy of Malick’s shooting and editing style (he improvises entire scenes and subplots on the fly, and sends second unit cameramen to pop off shots of anything they deem beautiful, and finds the movie in the editing much as a reporter finds a story in his notes) pushes against the film’s lofty, contemplative elements: the swelling classical score (Wagner, Mozart, James Horner), the ruminative multiple voice-overs. The resultant aesthetic tension jostles us into new ways of seeing. Watching "The New World," we are at once dislocated and free, experiencing the shock of the new while recollecting it in tranquility (or speculating on how we will remember it). Malick’s characters pore over their lives as if words will fix their feelings; sometimes a random, lonely word will puncture a reverie or a moment of intense violence (a word like “mother,” for instance, or “wonder”). But words, Malick realizes, fix nothing because nothing is fixed; there is no past or present, no differences or similarities, except those we choose to mark. In Malick’s films, memory becomes history (or anecdote); thoughts and feelings become images, and images become music, and everything becomes new.

"The New World" (second theatrical cut, January 25, 2006):

Diversity of response isn’t prima facie evidence of a masterpiece, of course. It’s the minimum we should expect from a film that aspires to be more than a diversion. But as I look back on that evening, I am less struck by what happened afterward than by the audience’s behavior during the film. Whatever opinions they formed after the fact, while they watched “The New World,” they gave themselves to it. They knew this movie respected them, and they responded in kind.

I close with a few words from another American visionary, Willa Cather: “Miracles seem to me to rest not so much on faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but on our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what was there always.”

"The New World" is a miracle. I’m glad I’m alive to see it.

View image "The New World."

"No Country for Old Men" (November 16, 2007):

The Coens' shift from up-close, graphic violence to obscured or elliptical violence cements the sense that we've been privy to a mysterious but fundamental change in the universe. We see bloodied flesh close-up when it's a new phenomenon; when it ceases to be noteworthy, the filmmakers stop showing it. A notable exception is the climactic car wreck that injures Chigurh. It has the hallmarks of a deus ex machina, but it occurs too late to prevent the assassin's campaign of terror and it doesn't so much end his rampage as interrupt its denouement. [...]

...[T]he Coens insist that no man can verify if these forces actually exist or if we insist they do out of vanity -- in order to convince ourselves that our existence matters to anyone but us and our loved ones. The confluence of forces that suggests fate or justice might be evidence of a higher power (represented in the conversation between Bell and the old lawman about what God wants), chance (Anton Chigurh's tossed coin, which decides if a person lives or dies -- an intriguing hint that on some level, this stone-cold psychopath feels guilt and perhaps wishes to reassure himself that his bloody deeds were inevitable) or free will (a subject broached in the scene where Carla Jean declines the coin toss to force Chigurh to accept responsibility for his deeds). Or it could be the result of electrons colliding to produce a result that might have been different had a single electron bounced differently. This free will vs. destiny thread runs through all of the Coens' work, even their most maligned and dismissed movie, "The Hudsucker Proxy" -- a comedy in which the story's microcosmic society, the Hudsucker Corporation, persists no matter what executives, workers, stockholders and outside agitators do to influence it. That film's most revealing image is dolt hero Norville's blueprint of three ridiculously successful toys, all represented by the same drawing, a straight line (the side view: free will) and a circle (the overhead view: destiny).

5 for the day: Contrapuntal Narration (January 7, 2006):

"Taxi Driver." (Martin Scorsese, 1976) War vet turned cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) preaches the values of fitness and military discipline, but smokes, pops pills, stays out all night and softens his breakfast cereal with Thunderbird. He bemoans society's decline, declares that all the animals come out at night and says he wishes a real rain would come and wash all the scum off the streets, but he's a sociopathic, combative loner who's so comfortable in hardcore porn theaters that he takes his dream girl there on their first and last date, then channels his wounded anger into "protecting" a child prostitute and stalking a presidential candidate. The difference between Travis and Travis' self-perception is is the true subject of this movie. Written by Paul Schrader, "Taxi Driver," like all great contrapuntally narrated films, exposes the gulf between our sense of our own importance and our actual importance, between what we think we know about ourselves and the truth of the matter. And it shows us, though both narration and subjectively distorted imagery, how feelings warp our sense of life. Scorsese's film is all tension, no closure; all schism, no merger. The blowout finale solves everything and nothing. The hero is a lunatic. The lunatic is a hero. A core of mystery is preserved.

McCabe & Mr. Milch (on "Deadwood" and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," March 5, 2006):

To some degree, nearly all of Altman’s films are anatomies of community. Ditto “Deadwood,” which week to week showcases a panoramic concentration that recalls Altman at the top of his game. Like Altman, Milch is not content to fixate on the plight of one individual -- a fundamental creative choice that puts both men temperamentally at odds with much of American popular culture. Both Altman and Milch prefer to see the big picture, the pointillist mural that takes shape when an artist asks the audience to take a few steps back from the canvas. They study human constellations comprised of distinct human beings who embrace different religions, inhabit different social strata, imbibe different substances, muse on their own pet obsessions and pursue their own strange agendas, all the while remaining largely oblivious to their impact on everyone else. Both Altman and Milch are not just storytellers. They are dramatic anthropologists, devising a collective organism in order to scrutinize it.

On his directorial debut, "Home" (February 28, 2006):

I made the movie because I originally went to college to study filmmaking, got sidetracked into a long and satisfying career as a critic and reporter, but continued to think like a filmmaker whenever I watched movies or TV. My personal background explains why my criticism tends to be equally interested in form and content, often more the former than the latter. It also explains why "Home" is a elliptical movie, very realistic in certain respects and surreal in others, with kind of a hothouse atmosphere, a documentary approach to behavior, and a dry, admittedly strange sense of humor. The style is a mix of classical Hollywood compositions and camera moves and some fairly wild documentary stuff. The narrative blends scripted and improvised scenes, and the finale is open ended and perhaps a bit ambiguous.

"Home" gave me a chance to visually express some of the aesthetic qualities I value as a moviegoer, which I guess makes it a continuation of criticism by other means. The movie also represents an admission that I am and have always been a filmmaker in addition to being a critic, and that I have no intention of choosing one pursuit at the expense of the other, and people on both sides of that line might as well get used to it.

The Sopranos: "Kennedy and Heidi" (May 14, 2007):

The most significant scene in the entire run of The Sopranos occurred in last night's episode, "Kennedy and Heidi." It wasn't the bloody car wreck or its disturbing aftermath. It wasn't Tony's trip (in any sense of the word "trip"). It wasn't either of Tony's two therapy scenes, and it wasn't any of the scenes of mourning (or not mourning). It wasn't even a scene really. It was a five-second cutaway to the two title characters, Heidi and Kennedy -- the teenage girls in the car Chris Moltisanti swerved to avoid.

"Maybe we should go back, Heidi," says Kennedy.
Heidi's reply: "Kennedy, I'm on my learner's permit after dark." [...]

... Any righting of this universe's moral scales will be incidental. Tony's been living an expedient life for too long. If he was going to change, he would have done it. He's been going down this road forever. He's had too many close calls to count. Each time, he hears some version of Heidi and Kennedy in his head, Kennedy saying, "Let's go back," and Heidi saying, "No."

Heidi is driving.

The Sopranos: "Made in America" (June, 11, 2007):

"It's my nature."

That's the punchline of the the fable "The Scorpion and the Frog," a fable repeated in numerous pop culture works, including The Sopranos, which referenced it in Season Two. About 10 minutes into "Made in America," the final episode of the final season of David Chase's drama, that phrase wriggled into my head and stayed there. It's key to appreciating the final episode, and key to understanding Chase's attitude toward people; they are what they are, they rarely change, and when they do, they stay changed for as long as it takes to realize that they were more comfortable with their old selves, at which point they revert; and once they're taken out of the picture, by illness or incarceration or death, the world keeps turning without them.

Which is a roundabout way of saying, what the hell did people expect from David Chase? Closure? Satisfaction? Answers? A moral?

It was the perfect ending. No ending at all. Write your own goddamn ending.

"There Will Be Blood" (December, 26, 2007):

... [I]t mostly sticks with Daniel, a closed-off man who seems to have little soul to lose, and syncs up his lordly ruthlessness and the director's style, robbing the film of the greater complexity it might have achieved from having the hero and the style work at cross-purposes (and they surely would have in a film by Altman or Terrence Malick). From the moment we meet Daniel, he's a terrifying capitalist instrument, telegraphing his objectives (to the viewer, his clients and his rivals) so unambiguously (and with a rumbling, often gleeful voice) that at times he evokes John Huston's Noah Cross from "Chinatown." Between Day-Lewis' hyperreal performance -- always teetering on the edge of theatrical artifice -- and Jonny Greenwood's aggressively dissonant score, Daniel radiates an almost vampiric mix of hunger, patience and indestructibility; midway through the movie, when he's riding on a train and a shaft of sunlight unexpectedly hits his face, I half-expected him to burst into flame.

Yet in characterizing Daniel, here too Anderson mostly transcends his influences, creating a character we haven't seen before in a movie that feels fresh. Daniel is inarguably kin to Michael Corleone and Charles Foster Kane -- a monster of ego, manipulative, ruthless and self-loathing. But there's more here than Lonely Capitalist cliche. Daniel has human potential, but it can't be tapped because his drive is so intense and his emotional armor so thick. You can see it in the way that Daniel dotes on H.W. during their initial train ride together in the 1902 sequence. Even though he's probably already thinking of ways he can amortize this profound emotional investment -- sure enough, in the 1911 section H.W. accompanies Daniel on business meetings, enabling Daniel to declare, "I'm a family man" before he commences screwing whoever he's dealing with -- from the start, the connection between boy and man seems intuitive, elemental, real. Later in the film, after Daniel has used and neglected H.W. and then coldly sent him packing, there still seems to be real love there, however mangled. Later, when the newly-returned H.W. walks through a field with Daniel, who is spouting the usual self-justifying bullshit and otherwise acting as if he's done nothing wrong, the boy hauls off and starts slapping him. Anderson's directorial detachment -- framing the whole exchange in long shot -- is masterful.

On Wong Kar-Wai (from an interview with Keith Uhlich, April 27, 2008):

There’s got to be a review [of "My Blueberry Nights"] out there that’s pointed this out, but I haven’t seen one yet, that the movie is broken up by… you know, it’s a fragmented movie that’s really a series of vignettes and almost a series of character moments. Some of ‘em are big epiphanies, and others are just kind of fleeting conversations. But they’re broken up by these intertitles that are “time” and “distance.” It’ll say, “Four Days Later, 3,221 miles.” And the title cards don’t really mean anything. They’re there and they pop up onscreen, and they seem to be very momentous, and the first time you see them you think, “Ah, this is important. This is the key to everything.” And they keep popping up throughout the movie, and they don’t illuminate anything, and they don’t mean anything. And that’s the point of putting them up there… these distinctions of… Where are you from? Where are you now, physically? What time is it? You know, is it a holiday? Is it an anniversary? These things are not as important as the life that’s going on inside of you, which doesn’t obey any calendar or any clock or any map.

I think it’s Wong Kar-wai sending a message, and it’s very much in tune with the one he’s been sending throughout his filmography, which is “life happens in the moment.” Life happens in the moment; it doesn’t happen… you know, if you spend too much time looking forward or looking back, you’re not really living. And that’s why his movies are focused on… they’re built around the moment in the way that Michael Mann’s films are. They’re about emotions, and when he kicks into slow motion, or fast motion, or freeze frame, it’s almost never to italicize a plot point. It’s usually to italicize a feeling. Or to extend a feeling, or to truncate a feeling, and it’s all about the feelings and the sensations, and what people see and what they hear and what they feel. Very few movies are about that. That aesthetic is not shared by most movies. And I was looking back over the filmmakers that I am generally most attracted to, and they all have that in common.

From the Editor (first anniversary post, January 1, 2007):

Writing is a hall of mirrors, a combination journal and photo album that exists in your head from cradle to grave, present tense; so I guess it's inevitable that no matter what I write about, it somehow circles around to something I've seen before or written about before, someplace I've been before, someone I knew before. [...]

The House Next Door started out as a hobby -- a place to put writing that was too personal, too out-of-the-mainstream, too unclassifiable or too random to publish in NYPress, which employed me as a film critic, or The Star-Ledger, where I worked as TV columnist. But that changed... [...]

Strange that what started out as a solo venture became a collective enterprise. This has happened to me throughout my life, from elementary school comics newsletters up through independent film projects that were originally intended only as screenplays, but that ultimately morphed into self-directed ventures involving dozens of people whose only shared trait, it seemed, was a willingness to get drawn into another person's obsession. Everything's different, nothing's changed.

Amen, Matt.

Matt Zoller Seitz: Rocking the House

2008-04-29T08:02:05Z

View image Matt Zoller Seitz.

Matt Zoller Seitz, long one of my favorite film writers and the pioneering architect of the priceless House Next Door, is moving into full-time filmmaking. That's great news, and sad news for those of us who always look forward to his byline -- and, especially, the wit and insight that unspools beneath it. I want to compile a little "best of" sampling for Matt, just in case you haven't been following him, but I'm a little in shock right now. When I consider the exceptional, collegial atmosphere among our extended network of movie bloggers, and how much we learn and grow through exposure to one another's work, there's nobody of whom I'm prouder to consider myself a "colleague." You can read more about Matt's plans at the House:

Well part of it is… you know I produced a feature film, a low-budget thriller, a few years ago and then went on and directed a little movie myself. I have been working on projects that are in various stages of completion since then and it’s been slow going for a variety of reasons. But I would like to concentrate on that exclusively. I want to concentrate on filmmaking exclusively for a while and see how it goes because I’ve never given it my all. The two features that I’ve been associated with were done while I had a full-time job and a part-time job. So my thinking is, “well if I am not doing anything but filmmaking, what might I be able to accomplish?”

Whatever it is, I'm there. We'll catch up some other time. Meanwhile, we can all be glad that Keith Uhlich is in the House.

Yesterday, Matt posted a beautiful short film called "Some Other Time" in memory of his late wife Jennifer Dawson. The moment I saw the title I knew he'd chosen the version -- the greatest recording of one of my two or three favorite songs -- and he's set the music to movie with grace and understated eloquence.

This day was just a token,
Too many words are still unspoken.
Oh, well, we'll catch up
Some other time.

Just when the fun is starting,
Comes the time for parting,
But let's be glad for what we've had
And what's to come.

See and hear it here...

]]>

The Uncertainty Principle (or, The Easy Read)

2008-04-29T08:00:05Z

View image Son (Michael Shannon). Opening shot: "Shotgun Stories."

In Sally Potter's "Yes," there's a scene in a restaurant kitchen in which a Lebanese chef and a young Brit-punk dishwasher get into fierce confrontation (you can't really call it an "argument") over politics and religion. The kid grabs a frying pan and goes after the chef. The chef picks up a knife. Standoff. The manager arrives. Summarily, he fires the chef.

In the Q & A after the screening at Ebertfest, some people said they thought this was clearly a race-based (or racist) decision on the manager's part. Others debated the choice of weapons: Didn't a knife appear more threatening than a pan?

View image He (Simon Abkarian), "Yes."

Back up two weeks to the Cinema Interruptus series of screenings at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO: We're looking at the scene in "No Country for Old Men" in which Sheriff Ed Tom Bell returns to the scene of the crime at the motel. [Spoiler alert -- although why you would be reading this blog if you haven't seen "NCFM" is beyond me.] The way the scene is constructed, we expect Chigurh to be standing behind the door when Ed Tom enters the room. The door opens flat against the wall. Ed Tom steps over a pool of dried blood in the doorway, looks around the room, checks the bathroom window (which is locked from the inside) and, relieved, sits down on the bed. He notices an air vent that has been removed. Four screws and a dime are on the floor.

What more do you need to know? I'm not saying it's unreasonable to want to know. But take a moment to look before you start jumping to conclusions. What is there and what is not there. Does the movie provide the answer(s) to your questions, or does it not? If not, what does that decision tell you? That the Coens are sloppy or forgetful? That they're interested in something else, like the experience Ed Tom has just gone through? That maybe you're asking the wrong questions? What else?

]]> We ran the scene again, stopping to examine each shot in the scene. A few participants in the CWA crowd just couldn't deal. Was Chigurh actually hiding behind the door after all, just squeezing himself really, really tight against the wall. Did he climb through the air vent (that was less than a foot in diameter)? Was he hiding under the bed and Ed Tom just didn't think to look?

Even when it was in front of their eyes, they couldn't see what was there and what was not there. Cranky and exhausted, I finally lost it and said something like: "Look, you're either watching the movie or you're not. Everything you need to know is right there in the images on the screen and you either see it or you don't see it, but acknowledge the reality of what's in front of you."

What I mean is: The movie is this shot followed by this shot followed by this shot. It's not something you made up and stuck into it later to make yourself feel better. Sure, maybe Chigurh was kidnapped by aliens in the second before Ed Tom opened the door. Maybe he spontaneously combusted but didn't leave any smoke or remains behind because that's just the kind of "magic" guy he is. Maybe he was laying on the floor and Ed Tom just didn't notice him and stepped right over him. Maybe he got sucked into the television like Carol Ann in "Poltergeist"...

All week I'd used one of my favorite "Barton Fink" stories to illustrate how the Coens' minds (and films) work ("What don't I understand?"). I had been enormously grateful to them in 1991 when they chose not to open the box that Barton is carrying at the end of the movie. After all, we pretty much know what's inside. Do we need to see it, too? Does it even matter? The Coens said they'd considered it, but then asked themselves a more important question: If you see what's in the box, where does that get you?

Nowhere. So they didn't.¹ (They didn't have Marge spell out what she'd learned from her experience with Mike -- the key to solving the case in "Fargo"; they didn't have Tom explain why he was doing what he did every step of the way, or even in retrospect, in "Miller's Crossing." Indeed, at the end of the movie, when Leo says people always do things for a reason, Tom replies: "Do you always know why you do things, Leo?")

Flash forward again to Ebertfest 2008 and first-time filmmaker Jeff Nichols talking about his film, "Shotgun Stories." In the twilit first shot, we see scars or lesions or sores or something on the bare back of Son (Michael Shannon). In the movie, several characters tell stories they've heard about what may or may not have happened. Nichols said he wrote an expository scene that spelled it out in dialog.

"It was a terrible scene," Nichols said. He hated it. He cut it. Then he called his older brother and said, "I think I just took out the other shotgun story in 'Shotgun Stories.'" It was an intuitively smart decision. Had that scene been included, it would have violated the spirit and aesthetic of the rest of the movie. Some things are better left unexplained.

Which brings us back to "Yes." If only writer-director Potter had been there to talk about it (she had to cancel at the last minute because she was shooting a movie in New York). Yes, given the context of the scene, there's an implicit and explicit racial dimension to the scene. And maybe a man with a knife does look more dangerous than a man with a frying pan. But does it have to be one thing or the other? Is one more true, or less true, or can they co-exist along with other reasons or possibilities?

It makes you wonder who was actually watching the movie that was on the screen. In the post-movie discussion, several people mentioned how "layered" the film is -- like the duduk that courses through a Cuban salsa melody during a sequence intercutting images of one of the lovers in Havana and the other in Beirut. The film is written and performed entirely in blank verse. It's... poetic. And the easiest way to kill poetry, or cinema, is to nail it down to One Thing.

* * * *

¹ My reading of the motel scene is here and here. (I'm sticking with my take, even though Glenn Kenny sees it differently.) No, I don't find it necessary to imbue Chigurh (or "No Country for Old Men") with supernatural powers to explain the scene, narratively or thematically. But it does come right after Ed Tom says he doesn't see him (he never sees him) as a "homicidal lunatic" but as a "ghost." It does work on that level, too. If you look at the way the shot of Ed Tom approaching the motel doors (two doors, not one) is framed, and you remember Chigurh's m.o. at the first motel where Llewelyn hides the satchel, you should have all the information you need. Also, see if you can catch a glimpse the lock housing on the room next door...

Local hero

2008-04-29T05:50:21Z

View image The most famous phone box in the world.

After the screening of Bill Forsyth's long-unavailable masterpiece "Housekeeping" at Ebertfest (about which more later) somebody asked him why he used the word "moving" in a key piece of dialog rather than novelist Marilynne Robinson's word-of-choice, "drifting." Forsyth said he didn't remember for certain, but imagined it was because "drifting" was simply "too on-the-nose," too "poetic" sounding. Actress Christine Lahti, who played the character speaking the line in question, and who joined Forsyth on stage (neither of them having seen the movie, or each other, for 21 years) confirmed that "drifting" works beautifully on the page of a novel, but wouldn't have sounded right if spoken aloud on the screen. So much artistry is reflected in that simple explanation. What seemed at first like kind of a dumb, nit-picky question was justified by the answer.

Forsyth spun another tale of adaptation that mirrored the oblique and inevitable comic structure of one of his movies:

]]> He loved Robinson's book so much, he said, that he had a devil of a time trying to fashion it into a screenplay. Finally, he decided to simply take a copy of the book and start cutting pieces out of it that he wanted to use, dividing them up into categories like "narration," "action," "dialog," etc. He put them in separate envelopes... and realized that every time he cut a page he destroyed what was on the other side, so he had to go out and buy another copy of the book to cut things from the other side. Maybe you had to be there, but his timing and his Scottish brogue made the anecdote priceless. Just as he does in his movies, he lets the audience get a little ahead of the characters, then acknowledges what the viewers, and the characters in the movie, have been thinking. Like the moment in "Housekeeping" where Sylvie blithely walks across a bridge over Fingerbone Lake... Or some ladies from church come to visit and see stacks of newspapers all over the house. (No, I'm not going to mention the "punch-line" in either case. Just remember 'em.)

David Bordwell has another marvelous Forsyth anecdote from a personal conversation he had with the filmmaker. You'll find this and other Ebertfest coverage (including an extended treatment of the opening night film, "Hamlet") at the invaluable Bordwell-Thompson blog:

Forsyth talked as well about the final shot, one of the most satisfying I’ve ever seen. The original cut ended with Mac returning to his Houston apartment and staring out at the dark urban landscape—beautiful in its own way, but very different from the majesty of the Scottish shore. There the original film ended, but the Warners executives, although liking the film, wanted a more upbeat ending. Couldn’t the hero go back to Scotland and find happiness, you know, like in Brigadoon? They even offered money for a reshoot to provide a happy wrapup. Forsyth didn’t want that, of course, but he had less than a day to find an ending.

The movie makes a running gag of the red phone booth through which Mac communicates with Houston. Forsyth remembered that he had a tail-end of a long shot of the town, with the booth standing out sharply. He had just enough footage for a fairly lengthy shot. So he decided to end the film with that image, and he simply added the sound of the phone ringing.

With this ending, the audience gets to be smart and hopeful. We realize that our displaced local hero is phoning the town he loves, and perhaps he will announce his return. This final grace note provides a lilt that the grim ending would not. Sometimes, you want to thank the suits—not for their bloody-mindedness, but for the occasions when their formulaic demands give the filmmaker a chance to rediscover fresh and felicitous possibilities in the material.

Overheard exposition, Part II

2008-04-28T04:57:03Z

Seeing a series of exquisitely subtle films that includes Jeff Nichols' "Shotgun Stories," Eran Kolirin's "The Band's Visit" and Bill Forsyth's "Housekeeping," you become sensitized to how clumsy most movies are about unloading their expository details. These Ebertfest films and filmmakers know how to reveal what needs to be revealed indirectly, without the audience necessarily even realizing that it's being let in on a wealth of information.

So: A real-life example of efficient, semi-oblique expository dialog overheard in a restaurant in Champaign-Urbana on a stormy Friday night. A young couple have just arrived and are about to be seated.

Hostess (smiling): "Oh, it's just the two of you tonight."

Man: "Yeah, we popped in a Disney movie and slipped out the side door."

See, that's a little movie right there. Filmmakers, take note: How much do we know about the lives of this man, this woman, and their history with this restaurant from these two short lines?

More about this subject (and others) in further catch-up Ebertfest posts...

Wi-Fried in Urbana

2008-04-27T20:19:01Z

The Illini Student Union wi-fi network has been down since late Friday/Saturday morning, so I'll have to file more when I get back home (I'm between planes in Chicago now, on airport wi-fi). I think the Saturday convention of student scientists on the U of I campus (and/or the massive rain-storm the night before) may have overloaded the system.

Overheard in the hall outside one of the science convention meeting rooms, one student to another: "Well, should we just go back to our anti-social lives then?"

Bill Forsyth: "Great"-ness

2008-04-26T01:47:00Z

View image David Bordwell and Bill Forsyth on an Ebertfest panel. (photy by Thompson McClellan)

My Ebertfest has already been made for me because I spoke to Bill Forsyth yesterday and, at one point, he said "Great." This is major -- particularly for a guy who, with his friends, went around saying "Great" in Gordon John Sinclair's Scottish accent from "Gregory's Girl" for years. It's a well-known fact. Bella, bella.

In honor of tomorrow's Ebertfest screening I went back and dug up my original 1987 review of Forsyth's "Housekeeping" -- which was the #1 film on my Ten Best list that year (along with such films as John Huston's "The Dead," Tim Hunter's "River's Edge," Alain Cavalier's "Therese" and John Boorman's "Hope and Glory"):

Ruthie (Sara Walker) and Lucille (Andrea Burchill) are skating on thin ice. The orphaned sisters, now going through a gawky teen-age phase, spin silently in circles on the frozen surface of Fingerbone Lake. In the distance, a cluster of laughing children and barking dogs play rambunctiously, but Ruthie and Lucille keep to themselves. They don't like the noise.

]]> This image, slipped into Bill Forsyth's austere "Housekeeping," is as subtle and powerful an evocation of loneliness as the movies have ever given us. Ruthie and Lucille are chilled to the soul with an unshakable melancholy, as though the cold water of Fingerbone Lake itself had somehow seeped under their skins, pooling in the pits of their stomachs.

The lake is a part of their heritage: This is the same body of water into which their grandfather, a railroad engineer, perished years before when his locomotive plunged from the tracks. The train and its passengers vanished into the depths, leaving behind nothing but a hole in the ice and, bobbing on the surface, three absurdly, almost maddeningly trivial items: "a suitcase, a seat cushion and a lettuce," as the legend has it.

Ruthie and Lucille are alone; their closest relatives are united at the bottom of Fingerbone Lake. And so, the girls long for that sense of community that most families take for granted.

Then, one crisp Northwestern morning, their late mother's itinerant sister Sylvie (Christine Lahti) wanders into Fingerbone and settles into the house to live with her nieces. The perpetually rootless Sylvie is a most unlikely figure around which to construct a nuclear family. Her connections with other people are friendly, but casual -- a habit developed over years of meeting fellow drifters on freight trains, in bus stations and around fires in hobo camps.

But, after putting up with a pair of worrisome elderly aunts for a while, the sisters welcome Sylvie's refreshing eccentricity. And so does the movie audience. We're charmed by her air of unself-conscious flightiness. We'd like her to turn out to be some kind of wonderful, lovable maverick, an Auntie Mame who'll bring some fun and spark into the lives of these girls and shake up the stodgy, hermetic society of this early-'50s small town.

For the girls, Aunt Sylvie is the closest thing to family that they've had, apart from each other, since their mother passed away. Shortly after Sylvie's arrival, the waters of Fingerbone Lake overflow into the downstairs kitchen and parlor, as though the spirits of the girls' ancestors have come flooding back into the house as well.

Viewing everything with benign detachment, Sylvie seems perpetually distracted, her attention flitting from one thing to the next. At other times, she inappropriately fixates on one object of interest at the expense of all others: When a curtain catches on fire during a chorus of "Happy Birthday," Sylvie keeps right on blithely singing and smiling as she swats at the flames. The girls enjoy the freedom Sylvie offers them until they realize that what they have mistaken for trust is closer to unconcern.

One day, when they're supposed to be in school, the girls catch sight of Sylvie, standing as though in a trance on the edge of the bridge over Fingerbone Lake, as though preparing to join the rest of the family at the bottom. Later, Sylvie apologizes for having frightened them, but she says she thought they were in school. The hooky-playing sisters, expecting disapproval, are eager to confess: "We didn't go to school today." Sylvie smiles and replies with her own disjointed logic: "But, you see, I didn't know that." As Ruthie observes: "Aunt Sylvie's attitude toward truancy was unsatisfactory."

All of Bill Forsyth's films ("That Sinking Feeling," "Gregory's Girl," "Local Hero," "Comfort and Joy") have been about eccentrics, who are viewed with an enchantingly Gaelic brand of bemused and generous forbearance. "Housekeeping," his first US film, takes a darker, more complex view of idiosyncratic behavior, and is all the richer for it; it's the first Great American Film directed by a Scotsman. To the loopy highlanders in Forsyth's other movies, eccentricity is a way of life, something to be accepted naturally, as part of the landscape.

But "Housekeeping" takes place in a small backwoods US town where greater emphasis is placed on the social importance of fitting in. Some audiences may find the picture's gravity and ambiguity frustrating, but that's precisely what makes it such a moving (and disturbing) experience. Forsyth doesn't see Sylvie as simply a healthy or an unhealthy influence on her nieces; she's both. Much of "Housekeeping" is funny in the quirky, off-kilter manner of Forsyth's earlier movies, but the overriding tone is a somber one, suffused with melancholy. This movie, photographed in deep shades of blue, brown and gray, evokes a sadness so profound that after a while your bones begin to ache.

It's a sadness that has to do with being an outsider; with the painful loss of surrendering childhood innocence; with the difficulty of finding a place for yourself in a world that isn't what you hoped it would be; with acknowledging the fragility of all human connections and the fundamental unknowability of other people; and most of all, with an overwhelming sense of aloneness.

While marooned in the flooded house, Lucille gets restless and bored. She wants to seek higher ground, to go out and look for other people. At first, Sylvie doesn't understand; to her, the flood has been a blessing, allowing them to live in an ideal, self-contained world. Then, with just a hint of sorrow, Sylvie recognizes Lucille's symptoms: "Oh yes, the loneliness. I know, it bothers some people." Some forms of loneliness, like the kind ingrained in Sylvie, Ruthie and perhaps Lucille as well, are incurable. People just have to find their own ways of living with it.

Shy, awkward Ruthie feels an odd affinity with Sylvie and adores her as a kindred spirit. But the more conventionally pretty and outgoing Lucille starts to sense that there's something wrong with Sylvie's way of life. Wandering on a woodsy hillside one day, she says to Ruthie: "You know, we're just hiding up here," and the sisters, who have always been like two parts of the same person, living in an imaginary world of their own creation, are finally forced to separate.

Sylvie is a difficult role for an actor to play because she is never quite present at the event. There's a kind of disturbing vacancy in her eyes. Not that she's stupid; it's more like her mind has wandered off and left her body behind. Even at the end of the film, she remains elusive. If there seems to be something vague or insubstantial about Christine Lahti's performance, it's only because . . . well, that's Sylvie.

As always, Forsyth's perspective is gentle and tolerant. A more conventional movie would side with the eccentric and turn Lucille's decision into a kind of betrayal, a weak-willed capitulation to society's stifling restrictions. But here, Lucille's choice is every bit as painful and courageous as Sylvie's and Ruthie's. Forsyth shows each character coping with her inner loneliness as best she can.

The title, "Housekeeping," (from Marilynne Robinson's novel) conjures up a number of associations -- of home, domesticity, the maintainence of neat and orderly appearances, keeping up a respectable front. Sylvie turns her house into a cluttered nest, feathered with old newspapers, empty tin cans and stray cats -- a reflection of her state of mind. One of the title's implications is that whoever you are inside is relatively unimportant to most people, as long as you keep your house clean.

Shoot the paparazzo

2008-04-25T04:19:22Z

View image Writer-director Tom DiCillo in the limelight. (photo by Thompson McClellan)

After the Ebertfest screening of "Delirious" Thursday afternoon, writer-director Tom DiCillo ("Johnny Suede," "Living in Oblivion," "Box of Moon Light," "The Real Blonde") recalled sending Roger Ebert an e-mail. He was in despair over the distributor's treatment of his latest film, which Ebert had reviewed quite favorably. Out of frustration, and although he'd never written to a critic before, DiCillo posed five pained (and semi-rhetorical) questions about the injustice of the movie business, the last of which was: "Is this all a Kafkaesque nightmare that will never end?"

Ebert wrote back and answered every question. To the final one, he said yes.

]]> DiCillo accentuated the positive in talking about his film before a packed house at the enormous Virginia Theatre. He said it had taken him six years to make "Delirious," a (mostly) comedy about a low-end paparazzo (Steve Buscemi) who takes on a homeless kid (Michael Pitt) as his assistant. DiCillo wrote the part for Buscemi, but it took him a year and a half before the actor agreed to play it.

In his review of "Delirious," Ebert pointed out that Buscemi has 104 credits on IMDb. (That was in 2006; now he's got nine or ten more.) This is a guy who has only been making movies since 1986, playing an HIV-positive performance artist (still his favorite part) in the late Bill Sherwood's pioneering "Parting Glances." But there's a moment in "Delirious," when Buscemi's character almost breaks down talking about his father, that's more emotionally naked than anything else in his filmography. DiCillo said he suggested, just before the take, that he thought Buscemi was getting close to some issues with his own father. When the actor saw it, he asked DiCillo to take it out. He refused. You can understand how Buscemi might feel a bit vulnerable, but the moment needs to be in the movie.

DiCillo had a word about cinematic violence that I particularly appreciated (see Three Kinds of Violence): "The blink of an eye between two people can be as violent as a gunshot."

Ebertfest 2008: Springing forward

2008-04-24T02:42:04Z

View image Chaz Ebert introduces Timothy Spall (Rosencrantz) and Rufus Sewell (Fortinbras), both in town with the opening night attraction, a full-length (238-minute) 70 mm print of Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet." (photos by jim emerson)

What is Ebertfest without Ebert? Fest? Kicking off the 10th Anniversary edition of Roger Ebert's (formerly Overlooked) Film Festival, Chaz Ebert passed along her husband's sentiments that, today, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time -- that is, in a bed in Chicago instead of in at the Virginia Theatrer in Urbana-Champaign. But, she reported him saying, you could also say the same thing about the day he tripped on the carpet and fractured his hip. Nobody's giving up hope, though. Chaz said they were consulting with doctors day by day and that she wouldn't be surprised if Roger wound up making it here after all before the fest is through. [UPDATE: The next day Roger and his doctors decided that making the trip wasn't worth the health risk.}

View image L to R (I hope): Jeff Nichols ("Shotgun Stories"), John Peterson ("The Real Dirt on Farmer John"), Eran Kolirin ("The Band's Visit"), Chaz Ebert, Timothy Spall and Rufus Sewell ("Hamlet"), Joan Cohl and Hannah Fisher ("Citizen Kohl"), William J. Erfuth and Joseph Greco and Adam Hammel ("Canvas").

Last year Ebertfest seemed to improve his rate of recovery exponentially, so we can only hope he'll make it to town. (For a sample of good wishes see the comments at his blog, Roger Ebert's Journal.)

So, the festival is just getting started tonight, but already I've learned some things just from talking to people and reading the program. For example:

]]> * Ang Lee is a University of Illinois graduate of the University of Illinois, with a BFA in theater in 1980. He'll be presenting his "Hulk" (which I haven't seen) at the matinee on Saturday.

* From the bio of the Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth ("Gregory's Girl," "Local Hero," "Comfort & Joy" -- marvelous '80s cult staples all), who is here along with his 1987 masterpiece, "Housekeeping":

His instincts for remaining on the margins becoming more and more pronounced, Forsyth never felt fully at ease as the maker of commercial feature films. He finally, and with great relief, quit directing films in the 1990s and now spends his time happily writing scripts and, since he is now officially a grumpy old man, letters of complaint to all and sundry.

Let me just add that if you don't know Forsyth's gentle movies (including the 1989 Burt Reynolds comedy "Breaking In") you've missed out on some of the great cinematic joys of the 1980s.

View image David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, who really don't take a bad picture.

* Josef von Sternberg's 1927 "Underworld" (which I've also not seen, but which is screening with live music by the Alloy Orchestra) is one of the first gangster pictures. From Kristin Thompson's festival essay:

Apart from being a beautifully made film, "Underworld" introduced the basic conventions of the gangster genre as we think of it today. There had been plenty of movies including gangsters before 1927, but they were always the villains.... [You'll recall that Howard Hawks' 1932 "Scarface" was sub-titled "The Shame of a Nation" and a coda was tacked on denouncing Tony Camonte, just in case you found Paul Muni's characterization too charismatic.] None of these films actually had a gangster as the protagonist. With "Bull" Weed [played by George Bancroft in "Underworld"] the notion of the "good-bad" man, the sympathetic criminal that William S. Hart had popularized in Westerns came into the gangster genre. Much credit for helping to define the genre goes to the great ["Scarface" writer] Ben Hecht, whose original screenplay received "Underworld"'s only Oscar in the first year those awards were given.

* OK, this I did know, but I was mildly surprised when I blurted it out during a live local TV interview way too early this morning outside the Virginia Theatre. When WCIA Channel 3 reporter Amber Jenne asked me what I was going to be doing all weekend, I just said what was on my mind: "I'm going to be watching movies with David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson!" That's what I enjoy most. We sit way up front. David sometimes uses a counter to keep track of the number of shots in the movie, so as to determine the Average Shot Length. Such is the joy of Ebertfest. (And to Matt Zoller Seitz: We really appreciate the shout out you gave us this morning!)

We'll be here all weekend...

(Special thanks, as always, to Keeem Robeson for technical assistance on the run...)