Journey to the Center of the Dump: Wall-E, color & close-ups
View image Color can be used sparingly -- even in family-friendly animation.
I don't hear NPR's movie critic Bob Mondello all that often anymore ('cause I'm not in my car as much as I used to be), but I've never heard him more excited than when he reviewed "Journey to the Center of the Earth" last week. Not the new Brendan Fraser 3D one, but the 1959 version with James Mason, Pat Boone, Arlene Dahl and Diane Baker.
Although Mondello's greatest enthusiasm by far is for the 1959 film, his best lines describe the 2008 production: "It's considerably more "real"-looking -- in a differently fakey way.... It'll just show you what Hollywood used to do, and do well, done well." Well put. As I was saying about movie blood, what we accept as "realistic" isn't necessarily realistic at all. It's as much a convention of the times we live in as anything else. Much of the groundbreaking CGI of today isn't much better than it was ten years ago, and a lot of the old CGI -- which seemed so convincing at the time -- now looks... well, better than the rubber octopus in "Ed Wood," but dated nevertheless. Even some of the great special effects movies like "Jurassic Park" (1993) don't look much more sophisticated than "King Kong" (1930) these days.
Meanwhile "Wall-E" (and "Finding Nemo") writer-director Andrew Stanton sounds like a really savvy filmmaker. He told Terry Gross on Fresh Air about a lot of the brainstorming that went into "Wall-E," and I had another one of those NPR "driveway moments" during this part of the interview:
(This essay on "Fight Club" was originally published in 1999. I'm re-posting it now in preparation for a coming piece...)
by Jim Emerson
"A fascist rhapsody!" — David Denby, The New Yorker
Ooof!
"Morally repugnant! Socially irresponsible!" — Anita M. Busch, The Hollywood Reporter
Ugh!
"Deeply misogynistic!" — Susan Stark, The Detroit News
Orgh!
"Macho porn!" — Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
Ouch!
Don't expect to see any of the above quotes in movie ads for "Fight Club" (although, come to think of it, if Fox did decide to use 'em, it would certainly be in keeping with the gleefully subversive, anti-consumerist spirit of this major studio movie). "Fight Club," a brutally funny and provocative satire directed by David Fincher ("Se7en"), may have scored a late-round box office victory in its first weekend, but it also received a vicious pummeling from a number of (mostly mainstream) critics. While some reviewers praised the film as "an apocalyptic comedy of rage" (Jay Carr, "Boston Globe") and "an uncompromising American classic" (Peter Travers, "Rolling Stone"), those who felt less enthusiastic about the picture didn't just dislike it — they loathed it, reviled it, demonized it.
View image Story diagram stolen -- er, borrowed -- from "Observations on film art and Film Art."
Kristin Thompson, author of "Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique," a book I can't believe I haven't read and have therefore just ordered, explores her observations and theory of story structure in a blog entry called "Times go by turns," which gets to the heart of how movie storytelling works by showing how familiar structures involve the use of more than the "three acts" we're accustomed to thinking about. She was inspired by the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image conference in June at the University of Wisconsin in Madison -- and, boy, does that ever sound like something that would be up my street. (Also: See my post "Tell me a story... or don't.")
I wasn't old enough to experience the French New Wave first hand. My introduction to the New German Cinema (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, et al.) was getting my mind blown by Werner Herzog's 1973 "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" when it was released in the US in 1977. The bossa nova craze was before my time, as was Elvis, but I vividly remember Beatlemania and felt that punk and grunge were mine. It's hard for me to imagine what it must be like to look back on some of the things I experienced first-hand and to approach them retroactively.
I've been thinking about this for a while -- what a pleasure it has been, for example, to see Steven Spielberg develop, having watched his TV movie "Duel" when it was first broadcast and being absolutely riveted; discovering the monstrous phenomenon of "Jaws" when it opened and created the "summer blockbuster" before we had a term for it; witnessing the remarkable suburban double-whammy of "E.T." and "Poltergeist" (in which Spielberg's presence was clearly felt) in the summer of 1982...
But what brought it to the forefront of my consciousness was this (last?) week's Entertainment Weekly cover story touting a big ol' list of 1,000 "New Classics" in film, music, theater, video games, etc. I'm not entirely sure what their definition of "classic" is meant to be, though among the terms they use to describe them are "iconic" ("Pulp Fiction"), "primal work of popular art" ("Titanic"), "quotable" ("Jerry Maguire"), "apotheosis of its genre" ("A Room With a View"), "most amazing" ("Children of Men")... and, um, "classic" ("When Harry Met Sally").
View image Lesson for the kiddies: Don't take Turkish Delight from an icy Tilda Swinton and don't be fooled into thinking this seemingly innocent underground-dwelling creature has your best interests at heart. Got that?
... Character is not destiny in the "Narnia" pictures. Destiny is. Which creates some moral and dramatic dilemmas for the viewer. With all the dramatis personae Lewis has crammed into his filagreed fantasies, few of the players have the opportunity to leave much of an impression, or acquire significance, beyond what the tale demands of them. (Who's that badger again?) They do what is asked of them -- in the story and by the story. And once we realize that even the leads are predestined to play their parts in fulfilling prophecies, and that all they have to do to meet the requirements is to abide by (or guess) whatever certain mystical authority figures want them to do, the tension deflates a bit.
The moral options, as set forth in the movies so far, are fairly clear-cut: believe the beautiful lion and the friendly beavers; don't trust the sepulchral ice queen bearing Turkish Delight or the hideous dark demons extolling the forces of hate. What could be simpler? A child could do it. And what kind of lesson does that communicate to the child who can? That it's easy to tell right from wrong? Not a wise maxim.
What responsibilities do the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve (how does that work?) bear for their own decisions, and the consequences of their actions, if everything can eventually be set right by some deus ex machina -- the healing properties of supernatural potions, or the corrective powers of magic lion's breath? What becomes of free will, of meaning itself?
In Steve Erickson's novel "Zeroville," a young man with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in "A Place in the Sun" imprinted on his shaved head arrives in Hollywood in the summer of 1969. Raised a strict Calvinist (not coincidentally like Paul Schrader, writer of "Taxi Driver"), his hunger for, and obsession with, movies has a religious fervor to it.
He develops protective feelings for a young girl in the Hollywood fast-lane (echoes of Travis Bickle and Iris). He takes her to the Fine Arts for a revival of "A Place in the Sun." The audience laughs at some of the "dated" moments, and the girl (Isadora, who goes by Zazi -- as in "... dans le métro" by Louis Malle, 1960?) thinks it's silly. He is devastated. But one night she watches the movie, alone, on TV. It is a revelation to her.
"The thing is, that movie last night is a completely different movie when you watch it by yourself. Why is that? Movies are supposed to be watched with other people, aren't they? Isn't that part of the point of movies -- you know, one of those social ritual things, with everyone watching? It never occurred to me a movie might be that different when you don't watch it with anyone else. And that movie... [...]
"That's a movie you see alone and it gets into you. I've been up all night. I said it was silly when we saw it together, but that was way off. There's nothing silly about that movie. Twisted and deeply f---ked up, yeah... but silly, no. Too twisted not to be private, you know?
"I mean, five hundred or a thousand people or however many it is in a theater -- what are they going to do with a movie like that? There's too much common sense floating around the room, and what you have to do with a movie like that is give up your common sense, which is easier to do when it's just you alone. It just seems... radical, any movie that, like demands your privacy, because it's, you know... a movie like that makes common sense completely beside the point, and you're one on one with it, in the living room by yourself rather than the theater with all those people, and watching it is like being naked and you can't be naked like that with strangers, you can't even stand the idea of it, and you know that after you're finished with it, much more with a movie like that than any stupid horror flick, some deep dark shit is going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs... so I just couldn't sleep. That movie's like a ghost. Watch it and you become the thing or person that it haunts. Last night, the movie became mine and no one else's."
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....
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.
Jason Segel's penis probably would not sell a lot of tickets all by itself. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but most of us don't think of the co-star of "Freaks and Geeks," "Knocked Up" and "How I Met Your Mother" in that way. As wise men (and women) always point out, it's not the thing itself that matters, it's what you do with it. And what Segel does with it as star and writer of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is magnificent. Between his brief nude scene at the very beginning (a humiliating, emotionally naked break-up and breakdown), and his even briefer final one (a welcome reunion of sorts), he discovers quite a lot about himself through his genitalia. [...]
... Segel's script [is] a mash-up of "10," "Modern Romance" and "Better Off Dead...," no doubt enlivened by spontaneous invention on the set. Remember Brian Dennehy as the nurturing bear of a bartender who looks after Dudley Moore in his hours of alcoholic sexual desperation? Here that role is split into two massive resort workers and one laidback beach dude, and they're all funny in their own ways. But there's also a real-world twist: One of the guys with whom Segel feels a vacation-connection turns out to be flying on autopilot, just doing his job the best he can. Not with malicious intent -- it's just his personality, which is probably what got him hired in the first place....
The script is less than effervescent, but Clooney and his cast are game. Although "Leatherheads" probably has fewer dull moments than your average NFL contest, sometimes you wonder if the clock is still ticking or if somebody's called a timeout. A scene will end and, just as you're moving on to the next one, you may find yourself wondering: Why was that there?
Yet there's always something interesting to notice: a face, a throwaway visual joke, the way the winter rain on a window contributes to the tone of a scene, or the sight of the muscular 1920s Chicago skyline in the distance behind the ballfield.
Even before the opening credits montage is over, Clooney demonstrates the fleetness of his comedic footwork -- getting a better laugh from a cow and a ball than you'd have any right to hope for. He knows how to compose a shot (the retro short-focus camerawork by Newton Thomas Sigel immediately puts you in a classic Hollywood frame of mind) and how to cut comedy so that it doesn't cramp the actors' style.
Best of all are the picture's abundant grace notes. Clooney's a team player, and his generosity toward his collaborators, as an actor and a director, shines throughout the movie....
My review of "Teeth" is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. (Also: "21" and "CJ7.") Here's an excerpt:
"Teeth" sinks its incisors into a cross-cultural myth known as vagina dentata. Or, as Juno might call it, "Vaggie D." Depending on who you ask (not that you should bring it up in polite intercourse), it is said to represent the male fear of castration and of feminine sexuality in general. It also symbolizes the woman's anxieties about penetration, and/or her desire to devour her mate, who is attempting to fulfill his own bio-mythological destiny by returning upstream to spawn in the womb from whence he originated. (Or, as the movie puts it, "the dark crucible that hatched him.")
Whether you view it as a primordial image from the collective unconscious or a practical warning against promiscuity, vagina dentata makes an indubitably memorable impression -- and an ideal premise for a tongue-in-cheek thriller about uncontrollable urges.
Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein's teen horror-(of)-sex comedy begins with a big visual pun about a different portion of the feminine anatomy: An impressive pair of atomic power-plant silos protrude from the horizon like... you know. The camera tilts down to the lawn of a suburban home where nuclear family fusion is about to occur. Bill (Lenny von Dohlen) and his son Brad (John Hensley) are about to join Kim (Vivienne Benesch) and her daughter Dawn (Jess Wexler) to form a single-household zygote. Mutations ensue....
How good, or bad, does a movie have to be in order to make an impression -- enough of one, anyway, so that you can remember it, or even still feel like talking about it, 15 minutes after you've seen it? Inspired by "The Hottie and the Nottie," Joe Queenan suggests criteria for The Worst Movies of All Time ("From hell") in The Guardian.
Among the movies he considers: "Futz!" (a 1969 satire, based on a hit LaMaMa Broadway production, about a man who marries a pig), Marco Ferreri's "La Grande Bouffe," John Huston's "A Walk With Love and Death," Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom," Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful" ("as morally repugnant -- precisely because of its apparent innocence -- as any film I can name"), Kevin Costner's "The Postman," Martin Brest's "Gigli" and Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate." Queenan writes:
A generically appalling film like "The Hottie and the Nottie" is a scab that looks revolting while it is freshly coagulated; but once it festers, hardens and falls off the skin, it leaves no scar. By contrast, a truly bad movie, a bad movie for the ages, a bad movie made on an epic, lavish scale, is the cultural equivalent of leprosy: you can't stand looking at it, but at the same time you can't take your eyes off it. You are horrified by it, repelled by it, yet you are simultaneously mesmerised by its enticing hideousness....
Many films use scrambled chronology just to make the story seem more interesting than it really is. That's not what happens in "Paranoid Park." The story, told as Alex pencils entries into a lined notebook, is an elliptical record of how he processes the terrible thing that happened one night in the neighborhood of Paranoid Park. The narrative moves in arcs and curves, like the skateboarders who float and glide around in dreamy 8mm slow-motion, as Alex circles the truth in his writing, promising himself, "I'll get it all on paper eventually."
The world has other gambling meccas -- Monte Carlo, Atlantic City, Reno -- but none as storied or mythologized as Las Vegas, an American dream-zone strategically located in the arid wasteland between Hoover Dam and Hollywood. The neon oasis is a concrete mirage: The closer you get, the more real the place becomes, but when you reach out to grab it, it slips through your fingers anyway. A surreal amalgamation of landmarks historical and imagined (Egypt, New York, Camelot), it rises out of shimmering heat and dust, a dazzling C.B. DeMille monument to profligate waste and the proposition that anything can be purchased or accomplished for a price.
Vegas is a Hollywood movie made corporeal, a surreal experience built on sand, powered by electricity, riches and promises of desires fulfilled. The electricity comes from the dam, the money comes from the odds that always favor the house, the desires come from the human heart (as well as a bit lower and to the right). But how sinful can sin be in a place called Sin City, where everything sinful in the outside world is overtly or tacitly permitted?
UPDATED: Three more trailers (1997 & 2008) added below for comparison.
When Michael Haneke's movie-star remake of his own "Funny Games" opens Friday, he claims it will pose a direct challenge to American audiences. (In my review, which will appear that day, I call his bluff and propose a few counter-challenges in the same spirit. Two -- or more -- can play at this funny game!)
If you've seen the 1997 version, you've pretty much seen the English language one, because it's virtually a shot-for-shot recreation. Here, from the studio press kit, is what Haneke (whose "Code Unknown" and "Caché" I consider to be masterpieces) has to say about what he's trying to do with "Funny Games":
"I’m trying to find ways to show violence as it really is: it is not something that you can swallow. I want to show the reality of violence, the pain, the wounding of another human being....
"Recently a friend and critic who recently watched 'Funny Games' said to me 'now the film is where it belongs.' He is right. When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the middle of the 90s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naïveté, the way American Cinema toys with human beings. In many American films violence is made consumable....
"Have you seen her? Tell me have you seen her?" (Chi-Lites, 1971)
Some movies evoke strong opinions and some leave barely a trace behind in your memory. When I glance back at the deadline reviews I've been filing for the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com the past few weeks, I notice that most of the movies haven't made much of an impression on me. Ask me right now and I couldn't tell you what I reviewed two weeks ago, much less what's coming up two weeks from now, without calling up iCal. I'm always amazed at how Roger does what he does -- which is way more than I feel capable of doing.
If you want to judge by the obligatory "star ratings" (and I don't, but in this case I think they reflect something), just about everything in the last month (I know: February) feels like a 2.5 to me -- just short of "recommended" (which would be 3.0), but not unwatchable if you wanted to pay the money and kill the time it takes to watch it. Passable (B-/C+) for what it is, but not memorable -- especially when you consider that the scale tops out at 4.0, with no "A+" possible. So, "Chinatown": 4 stars. "Sansho the Bailiff": 4 stars. "The Bank Job": 2.5. "Cocktail": 0.0.
We all have a pretty good what kind of experience we had watching a movie (though it may take a while, maybe even another viewing, to process it), and what we saw and heard. But to paraphrase something a filmmaker recently said (or that I recently read, even though I can't recall who or where): If you put 300 people in a room and show them a movie, you'll get 300 different accounts of it. Even when I take notes (as I do when I know I'm going to write about a movie), I invariably misremember a word here, a shot there.
That's the way they're promoting the British heist movie "The Bank Job" -- on the web, anyway. The Flash ads say "The BJ," and then the B and the J move around and spell out the title. Gets your attention, I guess. This follows a catchy set-up slogan that says, "Somebody's Getting Royally Screwed!" Just to put you in a susceptive frame of mind.
A serviceable B-grade British heist movie, “The Bank Job” is no worse than its generic title. And no better. It front-loads the naughty sex and back-loads the plot twists (the titular crime takes place in the middle), but apart from the prominence of Princess Margaret in the subterfuge, it’s a pretty routine job, as the use of the hackneyed phrase “plot twists” earlier in this sentence should indicate.
“The Bank Job” begins with a quick time-shuffle of the sort to which modern audiences have become accustomed. It starts in 1970 in the Caribbean. Literally in it. Brief shots of sub-aquatic toplessness are followed by a quick-and-blurry tropical fornication montage and a little retro-voyeuristic shutterbugging. Next, it’s East London in 1971 and some hoods are making violent threats against a stubbly car shop dealer named Terry Leather (Jason Statham). Then it’s three weeks earlier and...
You know the drill. At first you think Guy Ritchie might be rolling in his grave — only he’s not dead, just his career. That’s the kind of cheap shot you have plenty of time to think about as this movie grinds through its laboriously disjointed exposition....
Thanks to Dennis Cozzalio and Larry Aydlette for calling my attention to these lively and imaginative animations that breathe Kinetic Typographical life into great (and even not-so-great) chunks of movie dialog.
Above: Some choice words from "The Big Lebowski," written by Oscar-winners Joel and Ethan Coen. In Helvetica.
If Russ Meyer had made "The Other Boleyn Girl," Anne and Mary Boleyn would have yanked some hair, scratched some eyeballs, walloped each other in their respective kissers, and the movie would have been all the better for it. Just imagine: "Beneath the Valley of the Tudorvixens": Meee-oww!
As it is, "The Other Boleyn Girl" is a sullen genre picture, hardly as vivacious as Meyer's uncategorizable sexploitation films, and not as edifying, either. It's built on sturdy old generic conventions, as familiar as those in any slasher film or naughty-nurses potboiler.
A few things we can learn from the experimental horror-comedy "The Signal":
1. Do not live in a place called "Terminus." There's no future in it.
2. If your cable goes out, don't stare at the mesmerizing static, just turn off the TV.
3. Do not put on headphones and listen to music while strolling down the corridor in your apartment building if it's strewn with freshly slaughtered corpses, especially if madmen with garden shears are also present.
4. It doesn't hurt to wear a tinfoil hat sometimes.
That first one is a given. The second one you should already know from life experience and from movies like "Videodrome" and the Japanese horror film "Ringu" ("The Ring"). The third one you should know from every zombie or slasher movie ever made, and besides it's common sense. And the fourth, well, that's just a bonus tip that could come in handy someday.
View image Their hearts will go on, even if they're all wet.
Who says there's no accounting for taste?¹ Maybe there is. New Yorker music critic and Alex Ross (whose brilliant book "The Rest is Noise" I wrote about last month) mentioned another book on his blog and now I've gotta get ahold of it (as Barak Obama maybe sorta allegedly did).²
From a review by Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:
Wilson’s real obsession here is not Céline but the thorny philosophical problem on which her reputation has been impaled: the nature of taste itself. What motivates aesthetic judgment? Is our love or hatred of “My Heart Will Go On” the result of a universal, disinterested instinct for beauty-assessment, as Kant would argue? Or is it something less exalted? Wilson tends to side with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that taste is never disinterested: It’s a form of social currency, or “cultural capital,” that we use to stockpile prestige. Hating Céline is therefore not just an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one, a way to elevate yourself above her fans—who, according to market research, tend to be disproportionately poor adult women living in flyover states and shopping at big-box stores. (As Wilson puts it, “It’s hard to imagine an audience that could confer less cool on a musician.”)
When young filmmakers gather to shoot cinema-verite video documentaries, watch out: Something really bad is going to happen. In “The Blair Witch Project,” it was ... well, we don’t really know what it was, but it sure freaked out Heather.
In “Cloverfield,” it was something large with an antipathy toward Manhattan landmarks. And in George A. Romero’s “Diary of the Dead,” as you have probably gathered by now, it is the meat-eating undead. These movies give the shaky-cam a reason to get shaky — but the kids try not to miss a shot.
View image A world traveler for whom geography means nothing.
My review of "Jumpers," the new movie from director Doug Liman ("Swingers," "Go," "The Bourne Supremacy," "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"), is at RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:
In a world gone horribly wrong, where actions have no consequences, where all of humanity has become unaccountably oblivious to blatant violations of the time-space continuum, where rules exist not to be broken but to be disregarded, where continuity is irrelevant... anything is possible!
There you have the premise for Doug Liman's "Jumper: The Prequel," a movie so silly you may find yourself giggling helplessly even as you wish you could magically transport yourself almost anywhere else in the world but where you are, in front of the screen showing it.
And here's an interesting take on the movie from an entirely different angle by James Hannaham at Salon, who wonders what kind of signals "Jumper" sends to the rest of the world about Americans:
In a twisted fashion, when films like "Jumper" go abroad, the outside world often responds in a counterintuitive way -- and sometimes this can be devastating. I am not the first critic to suggest that the disaster films of the '90s helped to inspire the terrorist plots of the early 21st century....
Black humor: Stepin Fetchit to Richard Pryor to Tyler Perry (Part II)
Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, 1902 -1985
"We need to examine the history of blacks in film to appreciate their deep roots.... Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, the top comedy stars of the 80s, have a strange, subversive ancestor in Stepin Fetchit, America's first black millionaire actor."
-- Richard Corliss, Time, "The 25 Most Important Films on Race"
The day Clarence Thomas was nominated by George H.W. Bush for the Supreme Court, I was interviewing 23-year-old writer-director John Singleton about his upcoming movie "Boyz N the Hood" (1991). Singleton was sitting in front of a hotel-room TV tuned to CNN and the first words out of his mouth were: "He's the biggest Uncle Tom."
That memory came back again recently as I was reading Harvard Law Professor and Supreme Court bar member Randall Kennedy's book, "Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal." [1] Kennedy writes:
Sometimes "Uncle Tom" is used interchangeably with "sellout." In a Washington Post profile of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, two journalists write that "Uncle Tom is among the most searing insults a black American can hurl at a member of his own race." They describe "Uncle Tom" as a "synonym for sellout, someone subservient to whites at the expense of his own people."
How to Act Black: "Black Acting School" from "Hollywood Shuffle" (see clip below).
This usage is ironic. The original Uncle Tom -- Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom -- was a character who chose death at the hand of his notorious owner, Simon Legree, rather than reveal the whereabouts of runaway slaves. Still there are those who use "Uncle Tom" to refer to any black whose actions, in their view, retard African-American advancement. Others are more discriminating. For many of them, the label "sellout" is more damning than "Uncle Tom" or kindred epithets -- "Aunt Thomasina," "Oreo," "snowflake," "handkerchief head," "white man's Negro," "Stepin Fetchit"....
View image The late Richard Pryor, All-African-American. Negative criticism of Pryor is usually limited to his acceptance of inferior material.
Of course, all those terms aren't synonymous, either. The name of Stepin Fetchit is nearly as well-known, and almost synonymous with "Uncle Tom" -- and that, too, may be somewhat ironic. Fetchit (born Lincoln Perry, 1902-1985) was a tremendously popular movie star with black and white audiences. But his act, on stage and screen, was also vilified for perpetuating a stereotype of African-American men as lazy, shuffling, bowing and scraping buffoon. (Other stereotypes of black men as pimps, gangstas, rapists, con artists, drug pushers/addicts, violent criminals, woman-abusers would come from elsewhere, and long outlive him.) He was admired and in many ways emulated by Muhammad Ali, with whom he converted to the Nation of Islam, and he was honored with an NAACP Image Award in 1976.
But how many people today have actually seen him in a movie?
"I love subtextual film criticism, especially when it's fun, when a guy knows how to write in a readable, charming way. What I love the most about it is that it doesn't have a f---ing thing to do with what the writer or the actor or the filmmakers intended. It just has to work. And if you can make your case with as few exceptions as possible, then that's great."
-- Quentin Tarantino, in Sight & Sound, February, 2008
Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of Pauline Kael, who may have encouraged more people to articulate their love for movies than anyone of her generation. She wasn't necessarily all that big on what he calls "subtextual film criticism," but she knew how to write in a readable, engaging and idiosyncratic style. The titles of her collections of reviews and essays, with their suggestive sexual and romantic overtones -- "I Lost It at the Movies," "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," "Deeper Into Movies," "Reeling," "When the Lights Go Down" -- told you everything about her approach to movies. I don't remember her using the word "film" or "cinema" much, unless it was to deride them as vacuous or pretentious. Though she became most famous and influential while writing for an upper-caste, urban(e) institution, The New Yorker, that reeked of calcified East Coast provincialism, she presented herself as an ardent movie populist. (Kael came from the northern coast of California.)
In November, 1964 -- that would be about 43 years ago, for those keeping count -- she published an essay for The Atlantic Monthly called, "Are Movies Going to Pieces?" in which she asks a lot of questions we're still asking today (see recent Scanners post and discussion, "Moviegoers who feel too much," and Stephen Whitty's column in last Sunday's Newark Times-Ledger," Critic's Choice").
View image "If I say I am a film critic, you will agree."
Standard disclaimer-cliché: I obviously don't concur with all that Kael says here (but at least at this point in her career she was willing to admit to feeling some ambivalence!). One of the things I've always found fascinating about her is that, even when I believe she's dead wrong, she unwittingly includes much of the evidence to make a case against her right there in her review. It's not that she didn't observe what was there, but that she drew such different conclusions from it. Also, her favorite rhetorical trick is the false dichotomy. It's fun to consider her arguments, but are we really forced to make such dramatic (or simplistic) either/or choices: "The Eclipse" or "His Girl Friday"? "Art" or entertainment? Right brain or left brain? Herman J. Mankiewicz or Orson Welles? George W. Bush or Osama bin Laden?
I trust I won't be mistaken for the sort of boob who attacks ambiguity or complexity. I am interested in the change from the period when the meaning of art and form in art was in making complex experience simple and lucid, as is still the case in "Knife in the Water" [Roman Polanski, 1962] or "Bandits of Orgosolo" [Vittorio De Seta, 1960], to the current acceptance of art as technique, the technique which in a movie like "This Sporting Life" [Lindsay Anderson, 1963] makes a simple, though psychologically confused, story look complex, and modern because inexplicable.
This is as concise and valuable a primer on editing and acting as I've seen anywhere.
First Meirelles explains the rough assembly, the loose draft of the film that's usually put together by the editor while the film is still shooting: "This kind of assembly is just putting all the scenes together as they were written in the script. Even if a certain scene did not work out as we planned when we shot it, it will still appear in this rough assembly. (This does not include the scenes that were embarrassing beyond all doubt; some things are better off forgotten.)"
Note that Meirelles is not saying that his actors have flat-out failed, but that certain scenes just don't work and should be tossed right away, if possible. Eventually, after whittling down an assembly of three or four hours (or more) into, say, a 160-minute cut, the challenge may become one of reducing that to around two hours:
And at this stage, when you succeed in diagnosing and locating where are the exact problems in the script or its cinematic interpretation, you can... change the design of certain characters, to make the acting more precise and logical than it was in the actual filming of the movie. (That’s why the best advise I can give an actor who wants to develop his career: suck up to the editor. Bring him chocolate, or flowers – if it is a woman editor. Even expensive wine, if your acting was exceptionally weak this time).
Charles McGrath wonders if critics and the public give genre work enough credit. In "Great Literature? Depends Whodunit," published in Sunday's New York Times, McGrath makes a case for pulp fiction that applies to movies as well as to literature. Often behind the generic labeling, he says, is:
... the assumption that genre fiction — mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories — is a form of literary slumming. These kinds of books are easier to read, we tend to think, and so they must be easier to write, and to the degree that they’re entertaining, they can’t possibly be “serious.”
The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow — between genre writing and literary writing — is actually fairly recent. Dickens, as we’re always being reminded, wrote mysteries and horror stories, only no one thought to call them that. Jane Austen wrote chick lit. A whiff of shamefulness probably began attaching itself to certain kinds of fiction — and to mysteries and thrillers especially — at the end of the 19th century, with the rise of the “penny dreadful,” or cheaply printed serial. The market and public appetite for this stuff became even larger in the early years of the 20th century with the tremendous growth of pulp magazines, which specialized in the genres and eventually even added a new one: science fiction.
I think of genre conventions as something akin to sonata form in music, or the chord progressions from a popular standard that jazz musicians may use as a foundation. The familiar prototype is just that: a recognizable structure upon which a craftsperson (even an artist) can create almost anything at all -- even turn it inside out or blow it apart.
View image Robert De Niro in the last shot of Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America": How does this make you feel?
"Sometimes the best movies are the ones we make up."
-- from the trailer for Michel Gondry's upcoming "Be Kind Rewind" (2008)
* * *
"This wasn't the film we'd dreamed of, this wasn't the total film that each of us had carried within himself . . . the film that we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live."
-- Paul (Jean-Pierre Leud) in Jean-Luc Godard's "Masculin-Feminin" (1966)
* * *
Between the idea
And the reality...
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
-- T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men" (1925)
Given his gift for perceptive film-critical thought, I wish Jones would now address himself to a problem that few critics (including me) have tackled with the care, energy, and resourcefulness that it demands: the predisposition of nearly all film critics to approach their subject(s) in terms that value the emotional over the intellectual and the descriptive over the intuitive. Good movies touch our feelings, of course, but that isn’t the only thing that makes them good; and while Jones knows this—hence his high praise for masters of film-thought like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, for instance—he too falls into the commonplace pattern of privileging the feelings that good films give him, and signaling his reactions in telegraphic ways that won’t mean much to people who aren’t equally familiar with the film or filmmaker in question.
What’s needed today is a new paradigm of readily accessible yet rigorously thoughtful prose combining theoretical analysis with intuitive ideas about cinema and the aesthetic world it creates.
OK, so let's tackle it! (Prepare to comment.) Seriously.¹
When somebody says they "admire" a movie without much "liking" it (or being "moved" by it), they may be addressing, at least superficially, what Sterritt is getting at above. But how much can we, or should we, attempt to separate our emotional responses from our intellectual observations, our descriptions ("This is what happens") from our intuitions ("This is what's going on")?²
My standard joke, when somebody asks what a movie is "about," is to describe the movie in stylistic or thematic terms -- which, in all honesty, speak to me more directly and powerfully than the plot. What's "Barry Lyndon" about? Oh, it's about slow, stately zooms. Or, it's about a man who keeps trying to exert his free will only he can't because he's trapped in a Stanley Kubrick film/frame. To me, both those descriptions are just different ways of saying the same thing, and in stating them I'm only being semi-facetious.
The Burt-a-Thon (formally known as the Burt Reynolds-a-Thon) starts today over at Welcome to L.A.. The awesome Larry Aydlette, whom some of you may know from his blog-lives as That Little Round-Headed Boy and/or The Shamus, has set himself a truly daunting, awesomely ambitious task: For the entire month of February, he will... well, let Larry explain it himself:
Obviously, Burt Reynolds didn't get the e-mail that he was supposed to go quietly away. But that's not the Burt Reynolds way. In his autobiography, "My Life," he begins with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live."
So, I've decided to honor that work ethic and use his birth month for 29 straight days of Burt Reynolds coverage. This isn't a love-a-thon. In rewatching a lot of his movies, I've come to the conclusion that he didn't necessarily deserve to win the Oscar for the films that he and many critics thought he should have won them for. And he was never nominated for what seems to me to be his one indisputable masterpiece (although I doubt many critics will agree with me). But there are quite a few of his films that are very, very good, and deserve reconsideration.
1. I have a competition in me.
I want no one else to succeed.
2. I hate most people....
I see the worst in people.
I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need.
3. I want to rule and never, ever explain myself.
I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little.
Match the above comments to the character who speaks or writes them:
a) Anton Chigurh, "No Country for Old Men"
b) The Zodiac, "Zodiac"
c) Daniel Plainview, "There Will Be Blood"
(Answers at end of post.)
* * * *
NOTE: Spoilers lurk sinisterly below.
View image Daniel Plainview, "There Will Be Blood."
Three of the most admired and fervently debated American films of the year move inexorably toward a climactic confrontation with a killer -- or someone's conception of a killer. Only Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" actually culminates in a eruption of savagery, while David Fincher's "Zodiac" and Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" gradually steer their attention away from the assaults and into the psyches of the characters who are haunted by the brutality penetrating their lives.
View image Anton Chigurh, "No Country for Old Men."
View image The Zodiac, "Zodiac" -- or as close as we ever get to seeing him.
Much has been written about the violence in these movies, the darkness they find in the American landscape, and what some see as their bleak, fatalistic and/or nihilistic attitude. Does this somehow reflect the country's moral ambivalence about being mired in two bloody, confusing guerrilla wars on the other side of the world? A sense of No Exit hopelessness that the Vietnam nightmare is recurring? Mainstream (or art house) torture porn that allows us to vicariously groove on -- as we are simultaneously appalled by -- the crimes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Dissatisfaction with the materialistic emphasis on the American Dream? A cynical exploitation of artfully staged killings for our (cathartic?) entertainment?
The popular press likes to talk about violence in movies with a superficiality that assumes all violence and all movies are the same, that blood is blood (and that gore and gunplay are automatically more sensational than depictions of beatings or other forms of physical and psychological abuse). But that Sunday feature-section approach ignores what it's like to watch the movies themselves, and the diverse contexts in which they present acts of cruelty and lethality. To say that "Zodiac," "NCFOM" and "TWBB" are all "violent films" tells you as much about them as saying they all use the color red.¹ I'd like to consider how the violence in these films conveys its own meaning, apart from any op-ed political parallels that can be drawn, however legitimately.
View image Attend the pale and Teeny Todd. He doesn't exactly cut an imposing figure. Jack Skellington with a thicker head of hair.
"Tim Burton has made a miniaturist 'Sweeney Todd.' Wispy, anemic, paper-thin, sanitized. Petit Guignol. Teeny Todd..."
Those were among the first notes to myself that I typed after returning from a December screening of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." Before that, it had seemed to me that Tim Burton (the Tim Burton of "Batman" and "Batman Returns," not "Mars Attacks!" or "Nightmare Before Christmas") might be, hypothetically, an ideal choice to make a film of Stephen Sondheim's musical-thriller masterpiece about a vengeful barber who conspires with a randy pie-shop proprietress to bake his victims into meat pies. Surely Burton would make it his own, a movie that wouldn't have to compete with the stage version because it would be a Tim Burton Film, existing in parallel to, but apart from, Sondheim and Harold Prince's achievement.¹
Not quite. It's one thing to Devoid of passion, grandeur, ghastly humor and operatic lunacy, Burton's "Sweeney Todd" is a plastic wind-up toy, a fast-food tie-in trinket. It belongs on a little gingerbread tchotchke shelf, next to your collectible "Macbeth" action-figurines. The best that can be said for it is that nobody's yet adapted the title property for film, so maybe that's something we can still look forward to.²
Sondheim himself has done a fine job of explaining why the filmmakers made the choices they did in bringing this "Sweeney" to the screen (New York Times: "Sondheim Dismembers 'Sweeney' .") And they're all perfectly good reasons. I understand the difficult choices that had to be made. How do you squeeze the show into less two hours? Slash some numbers, condense others, speed up the tempos. Do the performances (and the voices) have to be as strong and idiosyncratic for film as they do on stage? Not necessarily....
View image "There Will Be Blood" features a score that sounds like it could have been heard in the period, 1898 - 1927 (with the bulk of it taking place in 1911, the year Arnold Schoenberg published "Harmonielehre"). Some of it was composed in 2005-06 (Greenwood); some in 1878-79 (Brahms).
Jonny Greenwood's original score for "There Will Be Blood" has been ruled ineligible by the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. [...]
The disqualification has been attributed to a designation within Rule 16 of the Academy's Special Rules for Music Awards (5d under "Eligibility"), which excludes "scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music."
[Radiohead lead guitarist] Greenwood's score contains roughly 35 minutes of original recordings and roughly 46 minutes of pre-existing work (including selections from the works of Arvo Pärt, as well as pieces in the public domain, such as Johannes Brahms' "[Violin] Concerto in D Major"). Peripheral augmentation to the score included sporadic but minimal useage (15 minutes) of the artist's 2006 composition "Popcorn Superhet Receiver."
Given that "Popcorn," commissioned by the BBC in 2005 and previously performed in concert, broadcast, published, and made available on the Internet, is less than 20 minutes long, almost all of it (15 minutes) was evidently used in "There Will Be Blood." I wonder if this contributed to my impression (not as strong the second time I saw the movie), that pre-existing swatches of music had simply been laid on top of cut footage, regardless of what was onscreen. (The intrusive, dissonant score -- period-appropriate in its retro-modernism -- bleeds over adjoining and unrelated scenes without changing from one to the next.)
What's peculiar is that the Oscar nominations are due to be announced Tuesday the 22nd, and the Academy didn't announce it's disqualification ruling until Monday the 21st. So not only was it too late for the filmmakers to appeal, but members of the music branch who voted for Greenwood's score were unable to vote for something else instead.
The ruling is perfectly valid and consistent. The timing is inexcusable. AMPAS continues to screw up royally, even according to its own rules.
A dog bounding into a river in "No Country for Old Men." Bob Dylan's harmonica wail in the last shot of "I'm Not There." A traveling shot down a suburban street in Vallejo, CA, from the window of a car on July 4, 1969, in "Zodiac." These were among the moments that brought me unexpected waves of euphoria in 2007 -- and, as you can see, they don't necessarily have anything to do with "content." One is shocking and suspenseful (like Hitchcock's famous illustrations of the sudden explosion versus the ticking time bomb, both condensed into a few electrifying seconds). Another is ineffably mournful and joyful at once, like the sound of a whistling freight train that it purposefully invokes. Another is kinetically exciting to watch, but with a poignant, semi-nostalgic mixture of order and chaos that suggests both innocence and ominousness (accompanied by Three Dog Night on the radio singing their hit single, "Easy to Be Hard," from the tribal Aquarian love-rock musical "Hair": "How can people be so heartless / How can people be so cruel?").
View image Mike Parker, Director of Typographic Development for Mergenthaler Linotype USA, 1961-1981
And then there's Mike Parker in Gary Hustwit's "Helvetica." He's sitting in a brick room, next to a window with venetian blinds, in medium close-up, talking to the camera, or someone just next to it. And what emerges is joy, from the soul of an artist. In this clip, he speaks for about 51 seconds. Watch his eyes sparkle as he describes the figure-ground relationship in Helvetica, where the air around a character holds it, so that it lives in "a powerful matrix of surrounding space." (It occurs to me he could be talking about the use of frame space in a Fritz Lang or Stanley Kubrick movie -- in contrast to, say, a Howard Hawks or Robert Altman movie.) Every time I see it, I can feel my eyes widen and the edges of my mouth curl up like the title character at the end of Chuck Jones' "Grinch" cartoon. Euphoria.
All four of the movies mentioned in this post leave me feeling that my relationship with the world around me has been sharpened, re-tuned, re-invigorated. That feeling doesn't hit me all that often, but when it does, I hold onto it for dear life.
(Footnote: I doubt that Mike Parker, despite his successful career in typography, would describe himself as an "artist." But if we accepted as artists only those -- or all those -- who chose to identify themselves as such, we'd be a lot poorer.)
My favorite documentary of 2007 (which I haven't had a chance to write about yet) is Gary Hustwit's "Helvetica," a look at a ubiquitous typeface. It's the kind of movie that helps you to see the world around you anew, freshly attuned to all the fonts in your world. Me, I'm a Helvetica guy. I hate fonts that call attention to themselves, and Helvetica is so clean and strong and elegant you can do almost anything with it just by varying sizes, colors, weights, spacing and placement. Our good friend Larry Adylette, the superlative movie and music and pop culture blogger formerly known as The Shamus (and, before that, That Little Round-Headed Boy), has a few words on Helvetica (and "Helvetica") over at his new blog, Welcome to L.A. -- which is also the title of Alan Rudolph's funny-peculiar 1976 debut feature, starring Keith Carradine, Sally Kellerman, Harvey Keitel, Sissy Spacek, Lauren Hutton, Geraldine Chaplin, Viveca Lindfors and Richard Baskin. (A parenthetical time-out to say: "Hello, Larry!," as they used to remark on NBC for a very short time in 1979-80 after McLean Stevenson left "M*A*S*H," thus providing Garry Shandling with a great network-meeting joke in an early episode of "The Larry Sanders Show.") Larry writes:
