Aloha 2008

Some background: For me, 2008 will be remembered as The Year I Graduated and The Year I Got To Work. I happily earned a BA in English for writing an essay mix ‘n’ matching the utopianisms of Thomas More, Emerson, Peter Weir, and Into the Wild while computer programming on the flip side and riding that technical knowledge to my very own 9-to-5 cubicle. And, oh yeah, there was an election or something. This all left very little time for my already quite limited blogging and forum posting, and, despite hosting a blog-a-thon with mixed results, Film at 11 went into hibernation for much of ’08. Consider this post a revitalizing jolt of electricity.

Where to start…Despite the economic downturn, Hollywood chugged along, for better or for worse. The Dark Knight’s cape hung over mainstream fare since its release; I readily admit to seeing the biggest American moneymaker of the year three times with three sets of friends, and finding myself each time in a familiar role: the lone holdout with reservations. It’s difficult to simply like the movie anymore, for all that’s been said and done in its holy gilded name. But I stand by Ledger’s thoughtfully maniacal performance as one of the best of the year, and the whole thing as a well-oiled engine of narrative propulsion. Its 150 minutes fly by. Other mainstreamers like Spielberg, Shyamalan, and Scott brought tepid projects, the latter two attempting to be relevant, that failed to retain the spark of predecessors. For all of those, however, there were still vital gems of pop cinema, ranging from Jon Favreau’s buoyant Iron Man to Michel Gondry’s lo-fi community remixes in Be Kind Rewind.

But it’s no surprise that 2008’s standout mainstream entertainment came from the able craftsmen at Pixar. It has been decades since the mere name of a studio guaranteed at least a modicum of quality, but Pixar has consistently delivered that and more. WALL-E, apparently one of the concepts drummed up over lunch by the studio’s founders in 1994, marries a plainspoken environmentalist and anti-overconsumption message with eye-poppingly effective sci-fi trappings. Equally echoing the articulate beeps of R2-D2 and the emotional relationships of Silent Running, the robotic protagonist Wall-E and his iFashionable counterpart Eve provide the necessary grounding in character to make the film succeed. From innovative sound design to that right mix of cuteness and chrome, Pixar hit another one out of the park in ‘08.

I’d hate to call 2008 my own “year of Change,” but there it is, staring me in the face. As I want to write more frequently about cinema, I find myself with less and less time to do so. As much as I’d like to keep abreast of world cinema, I have neither the money nor time to mount an expedition to even the nearest festival location. So I guess the ‘Net will have sate me in the meantime. Fortunately, I’ve also become increasingly inured against some of the end-of-year Oscar bait pandering by the mainstream critical press and more intrigued by international festival fare. Sorry Clint, Gus, Doubt, et al. Lack of blogging time hasn’t stopped me from following the exploits of those in my blogroll to the right, though, and they’ve kept me generally up to speed. Other broad events of note:

-some of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and the Dardennes, released flicks this year, not that I was able to see them;

-parts of the critical establishment feted a return-to-form from a guy who never lost his stride in the first place (Jonathan Demme) and another who made his comeback a few years ago (Mickey Rourke, in 2005’s Sin City);

-topical cinema from Oliver Stone and Errol Morris got trounced by the politics of absurdly contemporary DC paranoia in the Coens’ Burn After Reading and of brute materialism in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, and everything got trumped by the election drama on TV;

-Slumdog Millionaire joined my lukewarm list while audiences cheered;

-young Ju Xiao played a boy in CJ7, Robert Downey, Jr. played black, Jean-Claude Van Damme played himself, and Mike Leigh played happy.

To come back to my Top 11: ’06 and ’07 were my strongest years to date in terms of seeing everything I wanted to see, but I quickly realized these utopian notions were for nought, and that was part of the fun. I haven’t seen everything I would have liked to have seen before this calendar year winded up, and until I can write about film professionally, I probably won’t. No matter. Using IMDb dates has its advantages: your lists don’t tend to look like anyone else’s, and you’re constantly ahead of or behind the curve depending on your point of view. On the flip side, it makes 2008 look like an even paltrier year than it really was, what with the Hou, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol, Herzog, Breillat, Jia, and Maddin movies, to name but a few, actually world debuting in ‘07. But I find reevaluation an imminently important critical process, and despite (thanks to?) my penchant for listmaking, I have no plans to carve this or any other Top 11 list into stone. For the record, here are my most unfortunate blind spots for 2008:

Che (Stephen Soderbergh)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)

And without further ado, as of exactly…now, my Top 11 films of 2008:

11. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson)
10. Four Nights with Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski)
9. Splinter (Toby Wilkins)
8. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
7. Sparrow (Johnnie To)
6. Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen)
5. CJ7 (Stephen Chow)
4. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
3. Hunger (Steve McQueen)
2. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)
1. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton)

In ’08 we lost some undeniable artists, ranging from Manny Farber, Paul Newman, and Richard Widmark to Kon Ichikawa, Youssef Chahine, and Bruce Conner. Most lived full lives while enriching the cinematic landscape. But who knows how many more roles Heath Ledger could have played or more announcements Don LaFontaine could have made?

So what will happen to Film at 11? I hope to keep it and its Top 11s companion more up to date in the coming year while expanding the types of content I put up. Video criticism is still, Kevin Lee notwithstanding, an underutilized tool, so I may experiment with that, trigger-happy copyrighters be damned. Every blog seems to be film-related or political or both, making niche-carving a necessary proposition. I’ll have to see what I can come up with. In any case, I guess I’m back, if I was ever “here” at all. Onwards and upwards to ’09!



And on a side note, thanks to Matt Groening, David X. Cohen, Peter Avanzino, Dwayne Carey-Hill, and everyone else involved in bringing Futurama back from the dead. I don’t think you’ll disappoint on the final DVD.

2 - Rachel Getting Married

Directed by: Jonathan Demme
Written by: Jenny Lumet
Country: USA
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger

Don’t be thrown by the similarities between Jonathan Demme’s new film and other quirky dysfunctional family dramas like Pieces of April and Margot at the Wedding. Even at their best, those films tend to devalue any hope for pleasure, empathy, good will, or togetherness unless slathered in irony, hatred, or the knowing impossibility of real redemption. Enter Demme, the most humanistic of American directors, a chronicler of individuals of every size, shape, and stripe. Seemingly counted out post-Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Demme has since been amassing an impressive collection of undervalued documentaries, concert films, and adaptations/remakes. No one else could have revealed the heights and depths of sorrow and celebration lurking within Rachel Getting Married.

We begin with Kym (Hathaway), our thoroughly unlikable but fiercely honest heroine, returning from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding. We further encounter her doting dad (Irwin) and the estranged sister-bride (DeWitt), and mostly catch glimpses of their remarried mother (Winger). Before and during the wedding rehearsal we finally meet the black musician-groom (Tunde Adebimpe), his best man and Kym’s fellow rehabber (Mather Zickel), and their friends and family. I’ve been using the pronoun “we” because Rachel features highly probing, prowling handheld digital cinematography by Delcan Quinn, one of two major Dardennes-inspired camera performances (the other being The Wrestler) this year. Quinn’s eye bores into the (newly extended) family dynamics when the guests finally congregate for the rehearsal dinner. This sequence is painfully played out for all of the inherent in-jokes, awkwardness, euphoria, and generosity when one family first meets another; all of its discomforting potential is realized when, despite raucous recitations of family stories and confessions, Kym receives an embarrassed silence during her toast when she memorably dubs herself “Shiva, the destroyer of worlds” and clumsily tries to make amends according to the 12 Steps. At the heart of the film is a tragedy relating to Kym I won’t spoil, but its reverberations are clear even when its specifics are not. She, like every other major character in the film, “has her reasons,” to rephrase the famous formulation by Renoir, one of Demme’s earliest antecedents, but the trick is overcoming those reasons but for a day, an event, a celebration that engulfs the family: pride, history, and all.

There’s nothing token about the multiculturalism on hand, as those characters never exhibit nor discuss ethnic stereotypes. One waits for the objections to interracial marriage to be brought up or a Freudian slip to uneasily divide the celebrants, but thankfully nothing ever happens. Yet Demme isn’t so post-racial as to let the white, liberal Connecticut family totally off the hook. The wedding sequences themselves become overwhelmingly multiculti and polyreligious, putting into stark relief the intra-family squabbling and making it clear that the bride’s family is overcompensating. The juxtapositions of saris and rabbis, of belly dancers and jazzmen, are clever pokes at a family’s outward togetherness hiding inner turmoil. Blood is thicker than water, it seems, but wine is thicker than blood. But Demme likes people too much to hammer or humor them only; even the illusory reconciliation between sweetly drunken family members is given its fair heft, as a moment among moments, circling around a blessed event.

Some reviewers have noted a creative clash between what they see as the rote indie dysfunction of Jenny Lumet’s (daughter of Sidney) screenplay and the inclusive, celebratory tone of Demme’s treatment of the wedding-related sequences. Without knowing exactly what is Lumet’s and what is Demme’s and what is theirs jointly, I suspect the satiric diversity was there at the start but that the director enlivened and brightened what was a slyly funny but downer screenplay. The welcome cameos by Robyn Hitchcock, Roger Corman, and many of the other musicians obviously came from Demme, and they lend immeasurable texture to the jubilant wedding sequences, even when intercut with Kym’s intense black sheepishness. Music has frequently been at the heart of Demme’s evocations of Americana, mostly notably in the gawky cool of Stop Making Sense and the gentle, auburn soul of Heart of Gold. His son is a guitarist at the wedding, and as much as reality and fiction intermingle in this Dogme-influenced film, the making of and viewing of Rachel Getting Married are undoubtedly family affairs.

Make no mistake, the film is depressing; lies are uncovered, tempers slowly burn, words are exchanged that are hard to take back. The cast admirably manages to evoke the spontaneous but dutiful affection of a long overdue family get-together, before and as the agonizingly unspoken rears its head. Each performance is of a piece, although the three leading ladies (Hathaway, DeWitt, and the always welcome Winger) are especially commendable for their bottomless capacities to inflict and absorb contentment and contempt. Rachel Getting Married isn’t the beginning or the end for its characters, or for Demme, that master of pluralism, less a maestro or a ringmaster than an emcee for a boisterous, ever-enveloping get-together that’s gotta end sometime.

1 - WALL-E

Directed by: Andrew Stanton
Written by: Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon
Country: USA
Starring: Fred Willard, the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver

Apocalypse isn’t the typical subject matter for a children’s movie. But then again, neither is a rat cooking in France or over-the-hill superheroes, yet Pixar made it so. The studio is not simply the standard-bearer for American animation anymore but sits at the top of mainstream filmmaking in general. Its various directors and animators simply refuse to separate animation from cinema as an art form, kids from adults as an audience, art from entertainment as an aim. Pixar’s ninth effort, WALL-E, manages to fulfill all expectations for a science fiction story, an imaginatively-conceived animated film, a straightforward yet sophisticated treatise on consumption and environmentalism, and a further evolution of the animation studio’s celebrated product.

In liberally but adeptly using elements from science fiction films (most notably Silent Running, Star Wars, and 2001: A Space Odyssey) and animation (anthropomorphized Disney characters, for instance) of the past, WALL-E builds upon a fine tradition of identifying the humanity of non-human beings and visualizing a fantastic but conceivable idea of the future. The unassuming and plucky little garbage compactor WALL-E, the last of his kind on a desolate and waste-covered Earth, utilizes silent-movie expression and underdog longing in his pursuit of EVE, the sleekly advanced probe droid sent to survey for signs of vegetation. Like Tracy and Hepburn and Allen and Keaton before them, WALL-E and EVE, the crumpled, neurotic male and the sharp, businesslike female who somehow fit together, join a clear comic tradition that grounds the film’s more esoteric premises. Their bickering couple dimension is all the more impressive for the film’s lack of dialogue, forcing nonverbal communication to uncharacteristically carry the weight. This “gendered” conventionality (noted by a few critics) seems a lesser problem when juxtaposed with WALL-E’s post-apocalyptic, anti-overconsumption elements.

Few mainstream films animated or otherwise push storytelling boundaries to establish mood, character, and theme as effectively as in WALL-E’s first, near-silent, Earthbound half. The main character’s sense of duty, higher aspirations, and quirky loyalty to humanity’s detritus are defined clearly and comically, his realistically-rendered robotic exterior masking the soul of a heartfelt romantic. In addition to being Pixar’s perhaps most ambitious film technologically, the futuristic fable also contains the most epic emotional canvas the studio has yet devised: the demise and rebirth of human culture as we know it. Swiftly and cleverly, the disastrous results of mass consumption and merging of government and business come into focus with likably smarmy (and live-action, thus connecting the film to non-animated reality in a way previously unknown to Pixar) Fred Willard as its spokesman. A political agenda can be extrapolated from the simplest of scenarios, and WALL-E’s devotion to homegrown values and collective responsibility isn’t hard to parse. Yet the film’s lightness of touch and deft mixture of good humor and barbed criticism rightly soften its political blow. Far from a screed yet denser than a supposedly apolitical cartoon, the film is as prescient and topical as one wants to make it, without losing a bit of its visual wonderment and other considerable virtues. Such a perfect mélange of social critique, entertainment, unforced technological fluidity, and storytelling acumen is hard to find in any medium; for Pixar it’s expected yet continually astonishing.

Unbearably poignant, the lonely robot of WALL-E is both the custodial guardian of his masters’ lost culture and a forgotten member of it. Yet WALL-E him/itself is only either doing his duty or chasing his companion, hardly ever consciously standing in as hope for humanity’s survival. He’s parallel to the single plant that can ensure humanity rejoining its rightful home, if recognized and used properly. Despite his and EVE’s agency, it’s the people who must take their world back. The delightful end credits sequence was apparently tacked on after an early audience screening, the only worthwhile result of that process I can name. From cave drawings to more sophisticated artworks, the chronicling of humanity’s future devotion to its world ends the film with the perfect dose of optimism while acknowledging the inevitable work ahead.

3 - Hunger

Directed by: Steve McQueen
Written by: Enda Walsh, Steve McQueen
Country: Ireland
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham

Brutal and poignant in its dedication to the materialistic aspects of common humanity, Hunger reconfigures and reenergizes the formal potential of political filmmaking. Directed and co-written by installation artist and Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, the haunting depiction of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands’s last weeks of life embraces its context without becoming a walking history textbook. With only a few major characters, one long, tensely-delivered dialogue scene, and moments of mundanity alongside moments of cruelty alongside moments of beauty, Hunger thrives by unflinchingly visualizing the cold reality of the Maze prison in 1981.

Intensely focused on each moment, McQueen’s film opens with the decontextualized daily morning routine of a man who turns out to be a prison guard (Graham), most harrowingly including his check for bombs underneath his car. A face in a mirror, bloodied knuckles, and shoving a uniform in a locker become, under the camera’s sure gaze, isolated events eventually crystallizing into a mosaic, beautiful on their own but disturbing in their building implications. Without knowing every facet of recent Irish political history, an audience member can still make the clearest distinctions between the violent and the violated, and how power is secretly fought by the powerless and how the powerful fight back. Every bit of calm is threatened by turmoil, and every burst of sadism is eventually met by a contemplative solemnity. Nothing is apolitical in these men’s lives, even if their fates are not officially recognized as such. Out of this alternately somber and dizzyingly aggressive maelstrom come Bobby Sands (Fassbender) and a priest (Cunningham) to debate whether Bobby should go through with his proposed hunger strike.

Their seventeen-minute long take conversation anchors and frames the film around it. While obeying the laws of exposition in detailing the political nuances of what will come after, the scene equally challenges and humanizes Sands as a person, as a leader, as a symbol for his cause. Depending on whether one agrees or not with Sands’s decision to hunger strike, his aggressively noble rationalizations may turn even a folly into a holy one. The unbrokenly shot conversation undoubtedly transcends its gimmick.

The remainder of the film is difficult to watch due to Sands’s minutely detailed physical suffering. As horrifying as the punishing blows and bloodletting of the movie’s first half, it makes it clear that Sands’s body as a vessel for his soul deteriorates rapidly even if that soul does not. Refusing food but unable to stand, Bobby remains defiant to the end. The body itself, in all its honorable, sad fragility as the final landscape for political dissent, takes center stage. The scenes still have a kind of unsentimental, clear-eyed beauty, and Fassbender’s performance makes the relatively superficial aspirations of, say, Christian Bale in The Machinist or even the men in Rescue Dawn, look practically immoral by comparison. In the end, a viewer must make up his or her own mind as to whether the subsequent results are adequately worth the agony endured, but Hunger’s unabashed politics aren’t about agreeing or disagreeing, it’s about recognizing a person’s ability to etch his protest inside and outside, for himself and for others.

4 - Happy-Go-Lucky

Written and directed by: Mike Leigh
Country: United Kingdom
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman, Sylvestra Le Touzel, Samuel Roukin

Has Mike Leigh traded his characteristic social realist dramedies for an irritatingly perky character study? Not quite. Utilizing his trademarked improvisational techniques to build characters and story with his actors, Leigh had the gall to help shape Sally Hawkins into the likable eternal optimist Pauline “Poppy” Cross and then not shatter her idealism into a million little pieces. Refreshingly sunny and open about her life and world, Poppy can, in individual scenes across Happy-Go-Lucky, seem like that one constantly cheerful friend who urges you to “buck up” during a bad day. But as the film builds and she has further encounters with strangers and friends alike, a portrait coalesces revealing a with-it, helpful woman legitimately curious and hopeful about the world around her. What a concept.

The relatively plotless film is nonetheless shaped by Poppy’s conflict with her driving instructor, the repressed, aggressively misogynist and racist Scott (Marsan). Ostensibly her natural opposite, he challenges her good faith in people with his suspicions and paranoid recriminations. It would have been easy to turn the character into merely a gargoyle but his apparent emotion nakedness garners some kind of sympathy, and those less inclined to take the Poppy pill can hope that his manner will rub off and depress his inexhaustibly positive driving student. Her personality attracts if not changes Scott, and after the film one can either imagine him becoming even more violent having been spurned or reacting more thoughtfully having met someone like Poppy, their choice.

Mike Leigh is unabashedly an actor’s director, but his use of widescreen opens up his Britain to a wealth of experience, with Poppy and Scott as the magnetic poles keeping things stable, with Happy-Go-Lucky nonetheless gravitating toward Hawkins. Her frequently funny and affable portrayal never veers into cloying sainthood or makes Poppy an object of ridicule because the film continually tests her resolve. In her natural fit as a schoolteacher, she tries to help bullied and bullying boys as best she can but never makes a crusade out of it. It’s not that she never extends her good will outside her immediate surroundings; it’s that it’s clear that the outside world doesn’t want it. As much as she looks on the bright side, people like Scott and the rambling homeless man seemingly out of Leigh’s own Naked and her bickering sisters enter her orbit and she enters theirs and they both leave as barely different people. Stormclouds continually threaten the horizon even if they never actually come. Although the most drama and tension is wrung out of Poppy’s encounters with Scott, no sequence is given much precedence over another. This narrative freedom allows a fuller, more complex view of Poppy to be reached at the end, of a person who takes things as they come without sentiment, a lack of humor, or preconceptions. Anyone willing to give her a chance should be rewarded.

5 - CJ7

Directed by: Stephen Chow
Written by: Stephen Chow, Vincent Kok, Tsang Kan-Cheong, Sandy Shaw Lai-King, Fung Chih Chiang, Lam Fung
Country: Hong Kong / China
Starring: Stephen Chow, Xu Jiao, Kitty Zhang Yuqi, Danny Chan Kwok Kuen, Tin Kai Man

Stephen Chow’s brand of goofball populism, even when coated in a family-friendly sheen, hits me in the right place. Seemingly a departure from his madcap previous films, Shaolin Soccer and Kung-Fu Hustle, CJ7 nonetheless shares with them a love for underdogs and simple, heartfelt morality. Having joined the pantheon of the most world-renowned bankable filmmakers, Chow takes a cue from another of that company, Steven Spielberg, in melding high-concept fantasy with an accessible worldview. Although the title is a reference to China’s Shenzhou manned rocket missions, it and its plot obviously also refer to Spielberg’s E.T. , another story of friendship between a boy and an alien that is a family drama at its core; where the films depart are in Chow’s specific concerns for the Chinese working class while adhering to his successful “mo lei tau” brand of ethnically specific nonsense comedy.

Working off a series of clearly defined dichotomies (rich/poor, appearance/reality, male/female), CJ7 couches its lessons of hard work, perseverance, loyalty, and forgiveness in a digestible but by no means unsophisticated package. The biggest coup perhaps is shifting the Everyman role from Chow himself to the lead character of Dickie (Xu Jiao), a precocious poor kid who, like most Chow protagonists, starts out talented but greedy and ungrateful, and gains wisdom through his trials. In subverting the expectations of both the audience and Dickie, who initially thinks his new alien pal CJ7 can bring him power, prestige, and good grades (ironically, this fantasy plays through references to Hollywood and even Chow’s own previous works), the film becomes the writer-director-star’s most earthbound, so to speak, project to date. Chow’s own resolutely grounded performance as Dickie’s father Chow Ti, firm, fair, a model of working-class dignity, brings a dimension of emotion, realism, even consequence missing from his previous films. For all of the CGI at work (and it is easily Chow’s most expensive movie to date), its real fireworks arise from genuine heartbreak and newfound responsibility.

Like E.T. but unlike most movies aimed at younger audiences, CJ7 portrays childish characters without itself ever becoming wholly childish. With one foot firmly in the harsh reality of Chow Ti’s construction job, the film is free to indulge in the whimsy of Dickie’s world. The otherwise visually inexplicable non sequitur of the large, obviously male actor playing a schoolgirl comes into focus by learning that performer Xu Jiao is actually a girl cross-dressing to play Dickie, thus balancing out the equation. This leveled gender dynamic celebrates itself by playing laughs off of Dickie’s discomfort at the “schoolgirl’s” pursuit and by making “her” the most physically imposing presence in the schoolyard milieu. That integrity and goodness can come from the most visibly unexpected of places is one of CJ7’s chief tenets, another being that foregiveness and renewed potential can overcome disappointments we feel between each other (Chow Ti toward his son and vice versa, Dickie toward CJ7). And CJ7 itself is adorable, rivaling WALL-E’s anthropomorphic hero in cuteness and, in its way, unassumingness. Its power is obviously lifted from E.T. , but its results are reversed in order to bring the creature’s selfless “humanity” as a model more clearly to the fore.

But no amount of rationalization can precisely capture or explain Chow’s sheer ridiculousness, still evident but surprisingly toned down in a kid’s picture. From Chow Ti and Dickie’s father-son game of cockroach-smashing to Dickie’s fantasy of Mission: Impossible 2-style gadgetry, CJ7 tilts the world of childhood transition somewhere between Ozu’s naturalistic satire I Was Born, But… and the Chow-starring high school gangster gagfest Fight Back to School. A heartfelt and loopy hug to the largest audience he’s ever had, Stephen Chow continues dismantling the barriers between high and low, East and West, silliness and sincerity.

6 - Burn After Reading

Written and directed by: Joel and Ethan Coen
Country: USA
Starring: Frances McDormand, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins

In the realm of terrific Coen brothers titles, Burn After Reading may be the best. It perfectly sums up the comedic holocaust that engulfs its characters in the end. It not only refers to the cloak-and-dagger plot but to the hilarious near-dismissal of the whole thing by J.K. Simmons’s CIA chief. And it’s also as anachronistic to the digital age as the bumbling gym employees Linda (McDormand) and Chad (Pitt) are to the contemporary state of political affairs. As ruthlessly detailed and resolutely existential as its predecessor, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, the film takes aim at pretention, vanity, and sheer idiocy on its own turf: Washington, D.C.

Even if the Coens never set out to satirize the self-centered power plays of D.C., with that setting they couldn’t have helped it. Malkovich’s unfortunately-named CIA analyst Osbourne Cox sets the tone, all preening pomp souring into self-absorbed despair upon being fired from the agency. His decision to write his memoirs (emphasis on the oir) coincides with his wife Katie’s (Swinton) investigation into his assets in order to initiate divorce proceedings; a mishap at the gym lands Cox’s financial and personal records into the hands of Linda and Chad, who, too narcissistically focused on the physical to worry about the ethical, are bent on blackmail to finance Linda’s plastic surgery. Meanwhile, dumbly suave Treasury agent Harry (Clooney) has been romantically embroiled with both Katie and Linda and responds to what he sees of the building plot with more than a little paranoia. Just as in the best Fritz Lang melodramas (and many of the Coens’ films, for that matter), the overarching plot seems to have a malevolent life of its own yet in reality is motivated by nothing more cosmic than the participants’ collective, sometimes unrelated, human desires.

If there is any kind of conspiracy that fulfills the characters’ various paranoias, it’s the American culture of needless personal gain disguised as deservedly fulfilling a self-image (Harry and Osbourne’s Cold War-era views of themselves as at the center of things) as well as simply charging in when way over one’s head (“I’m just a good Samaritan…” Chad keeps moronically saying when blackmailing Cox). Even poor Ted (Richard Jenkins) has pitifully reinvented himself from a Greek Orthodox priest into a gym manager and deludes himself into pining for the undeserving Linda. That nobody realizes what an insignificantly small fish in a big pond he or she is comes best into focus when neither the Russians nor Americans particularly care about the various schemes. Burn After Reading’s crucial Greek chorus is composed of David Rasche and J.K. Simmons, CIA men struggling to make sense of it all. Their failure to grasp, and ultimate decision to simply scrap all trace of, the seeming randomness of the film’s Rube Goldberg-esque plot machinations sums up the Coens’ unsparing but bleakly affectionate view of human nature. We like to watch and experience life just to see what it does, but when we screw up and want to make sure we don’t screw up again, we’ll be damned if we could tell you what the hell we just did or why.

7 - Sparrow

Directed by: Johnnie To
Written by: Chan Kin-Chung, Fung Chih-Chiang, Milkyway Creative Team
Country: Hong Kong
Starring: Simon Yam, Kelly Lin, Lam Ka-Tung, Law Wing-Cheong, Kenneth Cheung

Shot during a three-year period between other Milkyway Image projects, Johnny To’s newest film, compared to his previous ones, is still a heady brew of male camaraderie, extravagant cinematography, and aesthetic violence, albeit with a decidedly different mixture of spices to top it all off. Defying easy categorization, Sparrow could be described as a quirky-romantic-action-crime-comedy. The always suave Simon Yam heads a motley team of “sparrows” (slang for “pickpockets”) who become embroiled with a beautiful young woman (Lin) out to seduce them into committing a crime for her. The sparrows are professionals like any other in To’s filmography, proud but knockabout, yet much less hardened criminals than skilled craftsmen plying their trade just enough to get by. Yam in particular gives a likeable, flowing performance, perfectly suited to the equally fluid, formidable direction by Johnnie To.

Sparrow is perhaps the perfect blend of To’s earnest crime pictures and frothy romances. With his absolutely mastery of the frame and editing, he narrows his focus down from the nature of crime and thievery to the literal mechanics of a pickpocket; hands, jackets, and wallets take the place of guns, bullets, and bodies so prominent in Election or Exiled, to name two of his recent genre works, except the stakes aren’t so high and intimacy trumps, or at least equals, bravado. The throwaway narrative leaves To a lot of room to indulge his formal chops, staging some hilarious and astonishing manipulations of space everywhere from a sidewalk to a rooftop to an elevator, akin to the various solutions to the dilemma of visualizing multiple personalities in Mad Detective. The final kicker, and perhaps one of the most satisfying sequences in all of this genre master’s films, is what I like to call “Pickpocketin’ in the Rain:” a dexterous, slow-motion contest of pickpocketing acumen within crowds of umbrella-wielding suited pedestrians moving along a crosswalk in the pouring rain. The near abstractness of water droplets, fingers, eye lines, and black and white suits converging is both comfortingly prosaic and acutely pleasurable, epitomizing To’s genius in mashing genre familiarity with continually inventive visual forms.

8 - Wendy and Lucy

Directed by: Kelly Reichardt
Written by: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt
Country: USA
Starring: Michelle Williams, Will Patton, John Robinson, Wally Dalton, Larry Fessenden

Kelly Reichardt’s brand of downbeat Americana, so manifest in the nostalgia and disconnectedness of the two men in Old Joy, fits well with Michelle Williams’s forlorn, destitute performance in Wendy and Lucy. Both the film and its predecessor are based on Jonathan Raymond’s short stories, giving each film a loose, miniaturist quality that makes each verge on character study without neglecting context. The eponymous Wendy (Williams) finds herself drifting to Alaska from Indiana with her companion pet dog Lucy when her car breaks down in a small town in Oregon. Thus begins the muted, poignant portrait of a destitute and resilient young woman unmoored from a stable socioeconomic status with only her dog and herself for steadiness. So desperately attached is Wendy to Lucy that the dog’s disappearance causes her strongest displays of emotion and most crucial decision at the end.

The always politically-minded Reichardt is less concerned with the whys than the hows of Wendy’s situation. She’s beset by petty parking laws, suspicious clerks, the general indifference held by those with a place against those without. She’s lost for the first time in her life between social strata, in the cracks currently plaguing so many in this economic downturn. And she’s far more anonymous than the high-minded, well planning protagonist of Into the Wild; lacking street smarts or a comfortable milieu, Wendy is vulnerable where she should be sneaky, sullen and self-contained when she should be gregarious with those in a similar plight. For all of the distress and despondency in Wendy and Lucy, there are still moments of bittersweetness and hope. Some incidental details, like Wally Dalton’s sympathetic security guard only being able to spare a few dollars for Wendy, feel true to life in their negotiations between ideals and reality. Like in Old Joy, such national iconography as the woods (and here, also the train) bring possibilities, escapes, and, yes, changes, to those willing to move. Doggedly independent, Reichardt’s modest film speaks for a wider set of vital, contemporary experiences that go generally underreported in American cinema.

9 - Splinter

Directed by: Toby Wilkins
Written by: Kai Barry, Ian Shorr, Toby Wilkins
Country: USA
Starring: Shea Whigham, Paulo Costanzo, Jill Wagner, Rachel Kerbs

Seen at an all-night horror-fest (along with 35mm prints of Psycho, Jaws, and Dead Alive, among others), Splinter is a refreshingly well-paced and effectively acted horror flick, punctuated with leavening humor and imaginative effects work. The film merges the escape-from-a-besieged-central-locale sub-genre (a la Night of the Living Dead or the recent Vacancy) with Carpenter/Cronenberg body horror without making a fuss out of either. In fact, after a teaser intro at a gas station promising infectious prickliness to come, the plot begins sedately: our young protagonist couple Seth and Polly (Costanzo and Wagner) arrive in the wilderness for a romantic camping trip only to find it pretty wanting. Suddenly on the way back to the roads, they’re jacked by convict Dennis and his drug-addled girlfriend (Whigham and Kerbs), infusing this early stretch of the film with Hitcher-like overtones even as the tenseness of the situation is heightened when the car blows a tire running over an animal infected with the mysterious titular parasite. Enter the gas station. The rest of the film follows a quite logical, ratcheting progression as the characters lose one of their own and gradually try to discover the nature of the creature barring them from leaving the station.

The splinter parasite’s original host seems to be a kind of grisly porcupine, its quills infecting other creatures and causing death and atrocious limb contortions that come to life thanks to Splinter’s inventive stop-motion animation and prosthetics. Akin to the tactile terrors of Carpenter’s The Thing or the reanimated dead of early Sam Raimi, Wilkins’s monster(s) elicits disgust and admiration equally. As resourceful as its makers are the film’s characters, flesh-and-blood emotional beings confronting terror with logic and levelheadedness. With a short running time and realistically escalating pressure, the movie easily prevents itself from getting stale without insulting one’s intelligence.

Welcome to the "American Cinema" Anniversary Blog-a-Thon!

As announced a month or so ago, this is a blog-a-thon to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema, one of my personal favorite books on film and one of surpassing influence. Starting this week (and hopefully beyond), you'll be seeing entries on directors since 1968 from all around the blogosphere. If you want to contribute something, feel free to email me at TGTEleven@gmail.com or leave a comment on this post. I'll add pieces by category below as they come in.

Links without authors attached are by me. Names without links are my personal entries that I plan to write.

About Sarris and The American Cinema
Discovering The American Cinema by itsamadmadblog2's Joseph B.

The Pantheon
Robert Altman
Paul Thomas Anderson by Acidemic-Film's Erich Kuersten
John Cassavetes
Frederick Wiseman

The Far Side of Paradise
Woody Allen
Hal Ashby
Francis Ford Coppola
Jonathan Demme by Burning Emulsion's Phil Ward
Spike Lee
Michael Mann by Radiator Heaven's J.D.
Steven Spielberg

Expressive Esoterica
John Carpenter
Alex Cox
David Cronenberg by The Sickness' Cinema's El Gigante
Elaine May
Sam Raimi
Paul Verhoeven

Fringe Benefits
Lars Von Trier by Project Film School's Gina Telaroli
John Woo

Less Than Meets the Eye
Ron Howard
Wolfgang Petersen
Ridley Scott

Lightly Likable
Mel Brooks
Joel and Ethan Coen by MovieZeal's Evan Derrick

Strained Seriousness
M. Night Shyamalan
Oliver Stone

Oddities, One-Shots, and Newcomers
Lucky McKee by Coffee coffee and more coffee's Peter Nellhaus
Richard Rush

So Far Uncategorized
Sam Peckinpah by The Agitation of the Mind's Neil Fulwood

Strained Seriousness - M. Night Shyamalan (1970- )

FILMS: 1992—Praying with Anger. 1998—Wide Awake. 1999—The Sixth Sense. 2000—Unbreakable. 2002—Signs. 2004-The Village. 2006—Lady in the Water. 2008—The Happening.

The Shyamalan universe, with writer/director/producer/actor Shyamalan at the center, is rapidly contracting with each passing film. Two low-key, earnest efforts preceded his commercial breakthrough, The Sixth Sense, but even then aims of cultural and spiritual redemption appeared that far exceeded his technical and artistic grasps. Those stories of a disaffected Indian teen and a spiritually jaded young boy were marred by, among other things, narrative shortcutting and simple inexperience. What made Sense such a success was an able blending of pop mysticism, calculated moodiness, and advantageous casting at the service of a genuinely affecting conceit. One would be hard-pressed to claim that each film’s “twist ending” is not its raison d'être, no matter what other virtues it may have; the difference with Sense is the wholeness it gains from Shyamalan’s off-balance, ambient spookiness and the still revelatory naturalism of Haley Joel Osment. Compared to this film, M. Night’s two follow-ups contain equally taut handling of continually more schematic narratives, and Sense remains his only film that rewards multiple viewings because of its ending.

A Shyamalan film refers to nothing outside itself yet strives higher. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs start from narrative foundations of collective pulp memory: ghost story, comic book, and alien invasion, respectively. To his major credit, Shyamalan then elides most of the traditional genre thrills, leaving us only glimpses of vengeful spirits, superheroics, or UFO landings. The fact that audiences responded so well to such resolutely melancholy, unexciting genre fare proved that Shyamalan’s was a distinctly new pleasure in the multiplex landscape at the turn of the millennium. Underpinned by vaguely religious themes ranging from transcendence to sacrifice to Manichean duality, Shyamalan’s first three successes (even the explicitly faith-centric Signs) balance moderate artistic aspirations and overriding commercial considerations. His stab at social relevance, The Village, despite effective work from Bryce Dallas Howard and cinematographer Roger Deakins, thwarted an interesting utopian plot with unnecessary contrivances and the almighty twist, never mind the absurd studio advertising. This relative failure led to the unfortunate fiasco-cocoon of Lady in the Water, an amalgam of Shyamalan’s most solipsistic auteurist quirks: his biggest on-screen role since Praying with Anger, the barest of generic frameworks (this time a "bedtime story”), and the conveniently rushed acceptance of the fantastic by the average person. What began as a successful genre entertainment/spirituality hybrid, with only touches of over-ambition, has reduced itself to egotistical, Shyamalan-as-savior shtick. The swallowing of his own hype grew steadily more evident post-Signs, and audiences and critics seem to have caught on. The three successes, however, still carry considerable cachet, and whether Shyamalan can parlay that residual good will with another crackerjack plot remains to be seen.

Le Beau Serge (1958, Claude Chabrol)

Equal parts overbearing Catholic allegory and interesting, visually unadorned on-location examination of the inhabitants of French village Sardent, Claude Chabrol’s debut Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge), considered one of the opening salvos of the French New Wave, starts out strong and richly textured but eventually succumbs to an overly schematic and redemptive conclusion. Jean-Claude Brialy portrays Francois, a theology student returning to his native town after years away to recover from a bout of tuberculosis. It isn’t exactly how he left it, especially his childhood friend Serge (Gérard Blain), now a drunk with a troubled past and marriage. With the town pastor having resigned to let the village spiritually crumble, Francois takes it upon himself to redeem his friend and oppose the corrosive and entangled influences of the other villagers. The bourgeois town hides an underbelly of mortal sins and squandered promise.

The film has an obvious narrative trajectory towards redemption, even if it is complicated by similarly religious stirrings of guilt and transference, modes that would play more decisive influences on Chabrol’s subsequent thrillers. Themes of incest, rape, and congenital deformity bring a sordid reality to bear on the film’s otherwise Catholic overtones, diluting the protagonist’s faith in human nature and transformation. Nineteen-year-old Bernadette Lafont played a two years younger sexpot, reflecting the distasteful possibilities that awaited Serge’s stillborn son and upcoming child, just as Serge and Francois are the same train running on separate, parallel tracks. This doubling, as well as some brutal violence between the former friends and a thorough investigation of the dark side of French village life, reveals Chabrol’s literary and cinematic debts to Hitchcock and such sturdy native genre directors as Clouzot and Duvivier.

What also separates this debut from the likes of Le Boucher or Les Biches ten years later is also what animates the other first films of Nouvelle Vague directors: a nod towards neorealism by respecting and utilizing personal, lived-in space and performers. Indeed, how less dynamic would The 400 Blows or Breathless be without their genuine locations? Serge’s bravura opening sequence of Francois’s arrival allows the viewer to effortless gain their bearings and to situate himself in the naturalistic milieu. Even if the narrative becomes overtly symbolic and a few of the performances are mannered, Chabrol stays true to the location’s obscuring simplicity and its constricting impact on the inhabitants’ worldviews.

Yet for all the efficient if superfluous camera movements, Le Beau Serge is resolutely a young novice’s film; wildly inappropriate music overtakes perfectly subtle moments, and the ending undeservedly concludes on a hopeful note, despite the undeniably nuanced and problematic interactions throughout the film, for the sake of bludgeoning thematic significance. Perhaps knowing what would come later forces me to underrate the work, for Chabrol would certainly develop as a screenwriter and filmmaker even if the technical skills were there. As it is, Serge remains a merely good film with great timing.

IMDb page

Announcing the "American Cinema" Anniversary Blog-a-Thon, starting April 14

About Andrew Sarris

About The American Cinema

The gist of the blog-a-thon

Known as the bible of American auteurism, Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 turns 40 this year. A compendium of critical commentary and categorization of cinema (sorry!), this enormously influential and eminently readable text tackled the history of American film as a history of dominant personalities that tend to take the production role of director.

An expansion of his article from Film Culture 1963, the explicitly polemical The American Cinema evaluates, analyzes, and ranks the major and the minor directors of the past according to the ever-elusive personal expression of mise-en-scène, borrowed, like the term auteur, from the French writers of Cahiers du cinéma. In his terrific run through of Sarris' career from Film Comment, Kent Jones encapsulates the "daring" of shifting these ideas to the US:

To embrace American movies and moviemakers in Paris was one thing. To embrace those same movies and moviemakers in the country that had made and marginalized them in the first place was a far riskier proposition. This was a systematic destruction and reconstruction of the standard view of American cinema and, by extension, all of cinema, an insistence that cinematic beauty did not come from without (the right subject, actors, set designer, cinematographer, etc.) but from within, and that it was a matter of simple logic that it was the director rather than the writer or the performers from whom the final result was generated.

The power and usefulness of Sarris' ideas, bolstered by his public persona as a major American critic, inaugurated a director-centric aesthetic movement in the heads of moveigoers that, in some ways, we are still existing in. It seems more than reasonable now to be "obsessed with the wholeness of art and the artist," to "look at a film as a whole, a director as a whole," as Sarris states that an auteur critic will, in "Toward a Theory of Film History," a lead-in to The American Cinema. Even since its original publication in 1968, we're still grappling with the "tantalizing mystery of style" that Andrew Sarris in no small way helped bring to the forefront of thinking about movies in America.



But this blog-a-thon will be more about the book than about the man himself. The American Cinema was published forty years ago and itself encompasses about forty years of cinema history. Therefore, understanding that I wouldn't want Andrew to shift focus from his continued prose at the New York Observer, it could still use an update. So I propose to enlist the fine cinematic blogosphere to write up the next generation of The American Cinema by tackling the careers of auteurs since.

For those who have never read the book in question, there are three components to every entry: a complete filmography, a completely subjective subset of which is italicized as the director's most personal works; a concise but thorough discussion of the filmmaker; and a place in one of the book's hierarchical categories. Those were:

The Pantheon: "These are the directors who have transcended their technical problems with a personal vision of the world." Originally these included Chaplin, Ford, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lang, Renoir, and Welles, among others.

The Far Side of Paradise: "These are the directors who fall short of the Pantheon either because of a fragmentation of their personal vision or because of disruptive career problems." Aldrich, Capra, Cukor, Fuller, Minnelli, Sirk, Von Stroheim, et al.

Expressive Esoterica: "These are the unsung directors with difficult styles or unfashionable genres or both...they are generally redeemed by their seriousness and grace." Boetticher, Donen, Dwan, Penn, Siegel, Tashlin, Tourneur, et al.

Fringe Benefits: "The following directors occupied such a marginal role in the American cinema...but a few comments may be in order." Antonioni, Buñuel, Eisenstein, Polanski, Truffaut, et al.

Less Than Meets the Eye: "These are the directors with reputations in excess of inspirations." Overrated, basically. Houston, Lean, Mamoulan, Wilder, Wyler, et al.

Lightly Likeable: "These are the talented but uneven directors with the saving grace of unpretentiousness." Berkeley, Curtiz, Korda (both), Whale, et al.

Strained Seriousness: "These are talented but uneven directors with the mortal sin of pretentiousness." Brooks, Dassin, Frankenheimer, Jewison, Kubrick, Lumet, Rossen, Wise, et al.

Oddities, One-Shots, and Newcomers: "These are the eccentrics, the exceptions and the expectants, the fallen stars and the shooting stars." Boorman, Cassavetes, Coppola, Lupino, Nichols, Peckinpah, Watkins, et al.

There are also "Subjects for Further Research," "Make Way for the Clowns!," and "Miscellany," but let's stick with the major categories.



By no means do you need to write or think like Citizen Sarris. I just hope to achieve some creativity in the framework that he set up forty years ago. Basically, pick a director who either debuted or had significant work in the period since 1968; several big names, from Coppola to Kubrick to Cassavetes, have minor write-ups in Sarris' tome but produced major works since. One of Sarris' most likable qualities is his openness for reevaluation, and even in the cases of the above, he's about-faced on some opinions. Feel free to choose anyone related to American filmmaking, and write about their about their career up to this point.

As an example, I could envision writing about John Woo in the category of "Fringe Benefits" by delving into the differences and similarities between his American and Hong Kong work. Conversely, someone like Ang Lee, despite having released several foreign-language films, has always been so firmly entrenched in the American filmmaking scene that he merits inclusion in a different category.

So whether or not you're an avowed auteurist, feel free to pick someone you love, someone you hate, or someone you just want to jot down some notes about. If you want to participate, email me or comment to let me know who you want to write about, and optionally in what category you're planning on including him or her in, or if you even want to invent your own category, just so that there aren't a million repeats and, if you email, to keep things a secret. This is the first blog-a-thon I've tried to host, but I'm confident in its potential. Have fun, and I'm looking forward to any and all entries.

Qu'est-ce Que Le Cinéma? Une Réponse #1

The first in hopefully a series of images, sounds, and videos that, for this moment, capture the essence of "movieness" for me. Shout-out to if charlie parker was a gunslinger... and André Bazin for inspiration and a title.





Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)

I'm Not Mishima: Artistic (Auto)Biography

How to present a real person’s life? This is the central quandary of the biopic genre, and too often the answer according to filmmakers is to smooth out the unquantifiable human experience to fit the constraints of traditional dramatic structure. While not fully eschewing this linear, arc-filled mode of storytelling, I’m Not There (2007) and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) take more holistic, personal approaches to the biopic, envisions a plethora of existence within the artistic individual, full of mystery, complexity, symbol, and contradiction. The ostensible subjects of the films are Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman), American folkie-cum-electrified rock star, and Yukio Mishima (born Kimitake Hiraoka), prolifc Japanese author and intellectual; both writers, performers, and celebrities with ambivalent ties to the political and artistic worlds of their day. Each film is divided into intertwining but discrete segments with their own stylistic idiosyncrasies. I’m Not There presents six individuals who represent, to put it simplistically, the “personas” of Bob Dylan, ranging from a black boy playing Depression-era folk songs to an aged, hiding Billy the Kid; and Mishima weaves straightforward dramatizations of Yukio’s final day and private and public lives with stylized visualizations of three of his major works, that sometimes verge on Dogville-like abstraction. Both movies illustrate that truism from Midnight’s Children that, in order to understand someone, “you’ll have to swallow a world.” Those who deem either film as too challenging or academic are missing the immediately sensual and intellectually gratifying rewards that come with the experience of one artist grappling with, and finding camaraderie in, another. Neither film is the epitome of the traditional biopic, but the choices made by the makers of I‘m Not There and Mishima could nonetheless be learned from when approached from that context.

The directors and co-screenwriters of the films are Todd Haynes (writer with Oven Moverman) and Paul Schrader (writer with his brother Leonard, along with translation assistance from Leonard’s wife Chieko), and the films represent clear intersections between director and subject. A semiotics graduate, Haynes treats the many elements of Dylan’s existence as signs to be playfully reinterpreted in various settings (like he previously did by making Karen Carpenter into Barbie or by pushing the limits of Sirkan melodrama) in just the same way that Dylan himself capitalized on classical and cultural allusions, or maybe just the sound of the words themselves, in his songwriting. As others have pointed out, I’m Not There moves not unlike a Dylan song, riding cadences and feelings of the visual rather than verbal variety to arrive at a point unencumbered by the limits of conventional logic and drama. It’s not that the songs steer clear of stories or sense, but that his hyperliteracy forges fascinating connections and synthesizes influences in a way that is indebted to poetry rather than to songwriting. Yet there is a tradition being followed, from Thomas to Rimbaud to Guthrie to Elliott, and the past and the present converge in Dylan’s oeuvre just as the phases of Dylan’s own life interact in I’m Not There.

That said, I don’t believe that watching the film is like reading a factual written biography on the singer just with the pages rearranged. A world is, after all, impossible to really swallow, and similarly I never found I’m Not There particularly enlightening as to the whys of Dylan’s artistry. Both it and Mishima feature scenes of the protagonist writing, yet the work is less output than outgrowth, less a compiled end product of experience than a fragment of that experience itself. For Haynes, Dylan’s work is as much grist for his semiotic investigation of DYLAN (as a thing, as a representation of the person/time/place/forebears/influence) as Zimmerman’s real biography is; for Schrader, who took his material in a more rigorously formal direction, Mishima’s unabashedly autobiographical literature is but one facet of his life (and death), the committed, personally cohesive artistic statement of honor and individuality that ultimately pitted him against the politics and culture of his day.

Paul Schrader’s cinema encapsulates manhood and morality, stemming most likely from his Calvinist upbringing but entailing secular repercussions in such films either written or directed by him as Blue Collar, Taxi Driver, and Affliction. Yukio Mishima, about whom out of the four artists intersecting in these films I know the least, combined politics, history, and discipline into a controversial but celebrated career that refused to separate art and life, which ended in ritual suicide following a failed political coup. Despite a dramatic through line that unfolds regarding his sexuality, beliefs, and stringent self-restraint, Schrader’s film rearranges chronology and designates certain sections of Mishima’s life with stylistic motifs that almost do more to present the man’s life than plot points ever could. Opening with a reserved but portentous scene of Mishima dressing for what he knows may be his last day of life, the film slowly builds a somewhat impressionistic portrait of a man fashioning his own artifice out of the world around him, not unlike Dylan, and facing the consequences. The incarnations of Mishima, ranging from a scrawny kid to his literary alter-egos to the stately central performance by Ken Ogata, coalesce finally at the time of death, a life having been lived uneasily yet unapologetically. Where Dylan continues to wander the byways of America in the guise of a resurrected outlaw, Mishima finds peace in the outmoded traditions of imperial Japan.

If every person is made up of a world through associations, connections, and history, this doesn’t mean that every person controls what world he or she is made up of; it took calculation and authority for Mishima and Dylan to construct themselves as they did. The films depict artist-celebrities who both shun and crave attention on their own terms, at times antagonizing their audiences (and themselves) for failing to keep up. Some may feel that Schrader and Haynes similarly forge their personal, literate portraits of heroes or kindred spirits without worrying about audience reception, but both films are as much cinematic autobiographies as biographies. Perhaps this is what ultimately separates I’m Not There and Mishima from the standard biopic fare: just as the most creative and cogent forms of criticism illuminate the critic as much as the work being criticized, so too some of the most enthralling, fascinating films visualize the entangled intersections of artist and subject. As illustrations of influence and creative possibility (the working title for I’m Not There was Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan) the movies resonate by positioning their subjects as founts of inspiration, the filmmakers moored with one foot in the dirt of “facts” and the other in the pool of freeform imagination.

There's more than a fair share of I'm Not There articles online, but here's the recent Great Movies entry for Mishima by Roger Ebert.



Additional thoughts, as of 1/19:
-The stunt casting of Cate Blanchett as electrified rebel Jude Quinn goes surprisingly unremarked upon in the film considering the director of Velvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven. Schrader of Hardcore and American Gigolo on the other hand presents all of the sexually contradictory sides of Mishima, even if they spring from his literary doubles.
-Both films mix and match music while relying on a single source: the multiplicity of Bob allows for originals and covers to stand side by side (except for the intrusion of a Monkees track), and Philip Glass's magisterial score for Mishima uses varying instruments depending on the segment.
-Haynes' freewheeling (sorry for the pun) visual tactics include aping such Dylan docs as Don't Look Back and No Direction Home, as well as referencing Fellini, another artist whose career's formal shifts perplexed some and delighted others. Schrader picks from a more conservative set of influences, especially Japanese theater.
-Although a mere mix-up over narration recording prevented a Japanese speaker from hearing a Japanese narration, at least until the most recent DVD release, Roy Scheider's voice actually speaks to the multicultural nature of the project: two American brothers, steeped in Japanese culture (both writers of The Yakuza), tackling a figure quite controversial in his native country. Spiritual affinity is more the issue than cultural similarity. Ben Whishaw's ruthlessly quotable Arthur Rimbaud on the other hand serves as a distilled example of Dylan's penchant for wordplay and ambivalent spokesman status.
-Both films rely on certain standard narrative filmmaking techniques, most notably match cuts on faces and entrances/exits, in order to effectively conjoin the various worlds on display into at least a visually coherent whole.
-Another challenging, formally daring cinematic autobiography: Takeshis' (2005).



Here's a mash-up I made of the Schrader and Haynes films, illustrating some visual motifs and parallels, as well as favorite moments and sometimes intuitive musical editing:

Spaghetti Madness: Alex Cox's "Straight to Hell" (1987)

Alex Cox’s 1987 flick Straight to Hell is an odd duck, to say the least. Cult fans know its bizarre history already, but for the rest of you, here’s the rundown from an interview with the director on his personal website: Producer Eric Fellner planned to expand a Brixton show featuring the Pogues, Joe Strummer, and Elvis Costello benefiting the leftist Sandinista Liberation Front into a full-blown tour of that organization’s home of Nicaragua. Politics came into play after the musicians agreed to hold off their own plans for August 1986, so Fellner convinced everyone to shoot a low-budget feature during that time instead. Hastily collaborating with co-star Dick Rude, Cox cobbled a screenplay together, and it was filmed in a few weeks in the expansive deserts of Almería, Spain, shooting location for many of the spaghetti Westerns that inform Straight to Hell. It was and always will be primarily a lark for the circle of friends who created it. But should it have ever been released to a wider audience?

Reviewers at the time certainly didn’t think so. Roger Ebert, having liked Cox’s previous films Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, described it as “a record of aimless behavior, of a crowd of pals asked to dress up like cowboys and mill about on a movie set.” Washington Post writer Hal Hinson jeered that Cox “never attempts anything other than antagonistically unfunny, home-movie-style gags.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin was more positive, merely dismissing it as “a mildly engrossing, instantly forgettable midnight movie,” although she also thought it was “[not] even halfway as amusing as it sounds.” Even contemporary reviews mostly write it off as the incomprehensible and indulgent equivalent of a cinematic vacation slideshow. The film did poorly in theaters but, like many of Cox’s features, has languished in cult status since.



I’m happy to report that twenty years have been good to this do-it-yourself, witty, sly little hodgepodge of a movie, and it’s time for a reevaluation. The ostensible plot involves three bungling but cool hit men (Sy Richardson, Clash frontman Joe Strummer, and co-writer Dick Rude) and their pregnant, whiny moll (a chubby, pre-plastic surgery Courtney Love) high-tailing it to Mexico when they over-sleep a job at a motel. They quickly rob a bank, the spoils of which are constantly being swept up by the wind or dropped by the inept crooks until they are finally buried, and find themselves in a ghost town run by a motley gang of coffee-addicted cowboys and Western stereotypes. As played by such punk luminaries as the Pogues, Elvis Costello, and Zander Schloss of the Circle Jerks, and near-respectable actors like Miguel Sandoval and Xander Berkeley, the townspeople are funny, unpredictable caricatures, as apt to sing a song as to fire a six-shooter. The strangers ingratiate themselves through droll comic vignettes, killing off the dominant gang’s enemies, unsuccessfully romancing the local chicks, but kept alive only so long as their loot is still hidden. Eventually the thieves’ boss, an incongruously growling Jim Jarmusch, makes an appearance and triggers a nihilistic bloodbath tempered by some fine visual gags and ellipses. The final credits promise to go “BACK TO HELL,” but there’s not much chance for that at this point.

The first thing to notice in Straight to Hell is its striking visual style. Obviously taking a cue from, among others, Corbucci and Leone (even aping that director’s signature extreme close-ups), as well as the jagged landscape of Spain, cinematographer Tom Richmond employs a sumptuous widescreen aesthetic that allows all kinds of interesting compositions and eye-popping colors. The empty, piercingly blue sky in particular (even if its shade of blueness shifts between shots) gets a wealth of deserving screen time, contrasting with the grungy, lovingly-detailed characters below it. Costumes, from the mariachi-style dress of the Pogues to Jarmusch’s crisp white suit, bring characters a distinct visual appeal quite beside their performers’ acting abilities. If this sounds like an apology to Ebert’s phrase “dress up like cowboys and mill about on a movie set,” so be it; I am merely commenting that time, effort, and artistry went into this throwaway excursion of a film, and it shows.

From a generic standpoint, the movie is surprisingly, radically glib, most obviously influencing the work of Tarantino. It’s no less in-jokey and violent than Reservoir Dogs, say, and Sy Richardson’s Jheri-curled badass Norwood may as well be getting royalty checks from Jules Winnfield; but it purposefully lacks the slick, transgressive language Tarantino is known for in favor of cliché and deadpan comic dialogue. Despite this, it somehow received an MPAA R rating for “strong language” when the saltiest thing said is “heck.” While being ahead of its time, for better or worse, in fusing bloodily comic irrationality with specific genre tropes, Straight to Hell has its own share of cinematic referents and direct homages, from sassing a classic quote from Shane (“A gun is just a tool, it ain’t no better or no worse than the man who uses it.” “Just like shoes.”) to staging Peckinpah-inspired massacres; it at times has the sun-drenched incoherence of a punk-rock movie nerd’s El Topo. Even when the film’s non-sequiturs become more absurd than funny, a few actors still manage engrossing presences; Joe Strummer in particular has an energetic nonchalance, whether idly smoking a cigarette or running a gasoline-coated comb through his hair, that also enlivened Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. The aforementioned Schloss, as an inexplicable hot dog vendor-cum-commercial jingle singer, gets a ridiculous performance scene than nonetheless binds the community like a campfire singalong in Hawks or a funeral dirge in Ford.



Which brings me to perhaps rightfully Straight to Hell’s most overlooked feature, its pretty unsubtle capitalist satire. To call the film a revolutionary comic attack on corporate imperialism is blowing its real but minor virtues out of proportion, yet such a group of dedicated, organized political figures could not have made anything but with a left-wing bent. Without giving too much away, a major if somewhat indistinct plot point involves the smiley cameo of Dennis Hopper (who made his own disastrous pseudo-Western, The Last Movie) as oil magnate I.G. Farben and his drilling operation in the middle of the town. Such incidental details as his name on a pump handle in the city and oil drill towers dotting the landscape belie the shoot-em-up going on within the town, and death may be just another step in someone’s business deal. Money is supposedly at the root of the crosses and double-crosses that punctuate the film’s second half, yet it turns out to be a slippery commodity in itself. Whether purposefully considered or merely a byproduct of Cox’s and Rude’s political feelings, this subtext is admittedly slight compared to its insistence at being a down-and-dirty paean to the Western, camaraderie, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Buoyed by a lively, earthy soundtrack by some of the musicians involved, Straight to Hell is a relatively obscure, worthwhile cult diversion. What it lacks in polish, dramatic heft, and multidimensional characterization it nearly makes up for in visual verve and good-natured, clever senselessness. It deftly mingles punk’s homegrown spirit of communal anarchy with the movies’ creative generic structures, to produce a fun, headlong romp that’s too short to overstay its welcome.



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A Personal Alternative to the AFI Top 100, Part 3

21. A Face in the Crowd (57, Kazan)
An extremely well-paced indictment of media saturation and superstardom. Making his film debut, America’s favorite sheriff Andy Griffith plays Lonesome Rhodes, a hobo/jailbird who becomes a radio and later TV folk hero with songs, wit, and not a little manipulation. Patricia Neal initially takes notice of him and is caught up in his media rise to fame. Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg mine the corruption of American glamour and its whirlwind in the media spotlight.
Alt to the Alt: Quiz Show (94, Redford). Some of the same themes show up in the real life drama of fixed TV quiz games.


22. Fat City (72, Huston)
John Huston’s career produced a number of fantastic films in various genres, but Fat City is perhaps the most underrated of his filmography. Stacy Keach and the perennially underrated Jeff Bridges play boxers on opposite slopes of the profession, one going down and one going up. Fat City is in line with Huston’s subtle, realistic, dramatic output, from Night of the Iguana to his swan song, The Dead. If you can find it, it’s a real winner.
Alt to the Alt: Champion (49, Robson). With a searing performance by Kirk Douglas, this is also one of the great boxing films, akin to a classic Hollywood Raging Bull.


23. Feed the Kitty (52, Jones)
Genius is taking the simplest concept and making every moment and detail count. Chuck Jones is one of the undisputed geniuses of animation, and Feed the Kitty is but one example of it. A bulldog named Marc Anthony happens upon and is immediately charmed by a fearless little kitten, and the entire cartoon concerns his efforts to hide it from his owner. From this bare premise Jones and Maltese and their team craft some of the most brilliant facial acting in Looney Tunes history, and despite his muteness, Marc Anthony truly comes alive in each of its seven essential minutes.
Alt to the Alt: One Froggy Evening (55, Jones). The other great animal Looney Tune, also with some fabulous animation via the frog’s owner and Michigan J himself.


24. Force of Evil (48, Polonsky)
The eventually blacklisted Abraham Polonsky made his first film a keeper, a New York-based critique of the evils that can be perpetrated by capitalism. John Garfield (a corrupt lawyer) and Thomas Gomez (a banker trying to stay straight) are brothers caught in the web of illegal business. With poetically hard-boiled dialogue and a classical plot structure, Force of Evil is like a Shakespearean On the Waterfront.
Alt to the Alt: East of Eden (55, Kazan). Another brother-brother drama with gorgeous cinematography.


25. Freaks (32, Browning)
Unquestionably among the greatest of all American films, Tod Browning’s Freaks is a disturbing but humane examination of prejudice, mistrust, and conformity. Using real sideshow performers as actors and entirely sympathetic characters, the film upends the conventional connection between outer and inner beauty and instead puts the audience in with the “freaks.” Only when the performers eventually turn on the “normal” people does their righteous anger appear horrifying. A complex and important piece of work.
Alt to the Alt: The Elephant Man (80, Lynch). Less horrifying but still touching.


26. The Front (76, Ritt)
This black comedy about the Hollywood blacklist is the best Woody Allen movie that he didn’t write or direct. He’s Howard Prince, a politically neutral nebbish hired to stand in for writers in the industry. He still gets caught up in the House Committee on Un-American Activities witch hunter and must make a moral choice. Also features a superb turn by Zero Mostel in the most dramatic role of his career.
Alt to the Alt: Good Night, and Good Luck. (05, Clooney). Stirring and claustrophobic look at the McCarthy phenomenon from behind the doors of CBS News.


27. Groundhog Day (93, Ramis)
A high concept stretched just far enough and helped along by a genuinely transformative performance. Bill Murray deftly straddled humor and drama (although liberally leaning into the former) as the asshole forced by fate to change his ways on the most absurd of holidays. He carries the film on his shoulders and never falters on each successful day/life.
Alt to the Alt: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (41, Hall). A dead boxer is given a second chance at life by inhabiting the body of a millionaire. Hilarity and romance ensue.


28. Harold and Maude (71, Ashby)
Perhaps the most unlikely romance in the history of film, Harold and Maude are portrayed with vigor and life by Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon. He’s a death-obsessed adolescent who likes to stage fake suicides; she is a senior who ignores the law and defies social convention. It seems by the end that Maude provided Harold with the piece of his life, the joy of living, that he lacked; but perhaps they each had something the other needed.
Alt to the Alt: “Quirky” is a poor epithet for Ashby’s achievement, but another colorful tale of adolescence, age difference, and, let’s say, a “unique sensibility” is Ghost World (01, Zwigoff).


29. The Haunting (63, Wise)
A psychological ghost story of the highest caliber, this adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s story is blessed with an effective, low-key cast and the sure hand of Robert Wise behind the camera. Julie Harris is the ostensible heroine as the psychic and emotionally stunted Nell who is enlisted with others to investigate the haunting of Hill House. Brilliant sound design ratchets up the terror until the literally haunting conclusion.
Alt to the Alt: Rebecca (40, Hitchcock) is a similarly Gothic story more interested in character than outright scares.


30. The Heartbreak Kid (72, May)
The second film in Elaine May’s ill-fated directorial career is perhaps her most perceptive on gender dynamics and the peculiar tendencies of the middle-aged Jew. A perfectly cast Charles Grodin waffles between poor, whiny Jeannie Berlin and fluttery blonde Cybill Shepherd. Infinitely funny and infinitely sad. A pitch-perfect final scene as well.
Alt to the Alt: My Favorite Wife (40, Kanin). Less cynical but still a funny marriage farce.

R.I.P. Two Masters of Cinema

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007)

Harry Potter has begun to truly grown up and with him the film series, for better or for worse, has outgrown the limiting drama of school life and childish make-believe into the realm of disenchantment. The awed faces of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his cohorts at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry have matured and become suspicious of adult authority, hardened by successively twisted Defense against the Dark Arts teachers and the full return of the big baddie, Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). At the conclusion of the previous installment, Goblet of Fire, Harry watched a fellow student die at the hands of the Dark Lord, a repetition of his earliest trauma of watching his parents die at the same hands. This Freudian complication also serves to further distance Harry from the reigning adult world when the Ministry of Magic deems the student’s death an accident and resolutely denies the return of Voldemort. In the opening scene of Order of the Phoenix, Harry practices his wizardry in a life-or-death situation against the wraithlike Dementors in the Muggle (non-magic) world, breaking the rules of the Ministry and in the process severing all ties to its bureaucratic regime. With an ultimate evil out there, practical application in the real world trumps theory in the classroom, and this is comically played out when the pink-suited iron fist of Dolores Umbridge (the sweetly sinister Imelda Staunton) rules over Hogwarts as an instrument of the Ministry. Magical standardized testing and overzealous punishments are her specialties, and the educational parallels with our current world become all too clear, as do surprisingly conservative jabs at contemporary politics; the Ordinary Wizarding Level (OWL) tests, although based on British secondary exams, could be called “No Wizard Left Behind,” and the Ministry’s collective head in the sand concerning the ultimate evil causes Harry to go it alone with his young “coalition of the witching.” But although Umbridge’s autocratic rule concerns much of the film’s plot, her fate and that of her administration are poorly handled, betraying a kind of weariness for Hogwarts hi-jinks and a stronger fascination for Harry’s psychological development.

Despite being the eponymous hero of the series, Harry has thus far had to share major screen time with his fellow students and teachers, and Daniel Radcliffe has been clearly overshadowed by various British acting heavyweights and modern luminaries including Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane, and Emma Thompson; Order of the Phoenix somewhat changes that. Fine supporting turns by Staunton and Evanna Lynch as the dotty, pale outsider Luna Lovegood are tempered by the unfortunate interchangeability of nearly everyone else but Radcliffe, with recognizable faces like David Thewlis and Helena Bonham Carter shown then discarded. However, this film is finally Harry’s showcase and provides Radcliffe an emotionally dark dimension that has been hardly hinted at. Already angered by the Ministry’s worthlessly stringent rules and its denial of Voldemort’s return, Harry is betrayed not once but thrice by his male authority figures: headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) disappears in a fiery puff in a vain attempt to distance himself and thus keep Harry safe; adoptive uncle Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), for all of his honesty and warmth in comforting young Potter’s confusion, is dispatched in slow-motion during a climatic battle; and, in a despairingly touching scene, Harry lashes out at the mind-reading Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) with a taste of his own medicine, discovering that Harry’s assumedly angelic father was really a bully while at Hogwarts. Sour disappointment at the duplicity of adulthood strikes much deeper than special effects, and Radcliffe makes the most of these crucial emotional low points, highlighted by quickly cut nightmares. But all hope is not lost, for Harry’s first kiss and burgeoning leadership skills offset his myriad disillusionments. The title thus makes sense as the beginning of a young man's rebirth from destruction by personal tragedy. As the only Hogwarts student with any experience in using magic outside school walls, he takes it upon himself to prepare his friends for the inevitable attack of the Dark Lord, gathering a force of young people against what has amounted to a betrayal by the adult world, whether symbolized by Umbridge’s management, Harry’s father figures, or the series’ literal cavalcade of teachers-turned-Voldemort pawns. Harry is now beginning to take up the burdensome mantle of responsibility for his world’s future, and Radcliffe’s portrayal is equally up to the task.

However, the force of his growth is diminished by the film’s leaden plot threads, chief among them the aforementioned Zero for Conduct-esque school revolt and a muddled quest for a prophesying object at the Ministry of Secrets. Overused narrative shorthand, like animated newspaper stories, weakens the already obviously compressed storyline’s flow and coherence. Even the titular Order of the Phoenix, an assemblage of wizards and witches out to defend Harry and oppose Voldemort, only serve as a climactic deus ex machina. Unlike the imaginative style of the so far high point of the series, Prisoner of Azkaban, everything here (except for the opening scene that almost feels like a different film) is treated with the same visual stasis that prevents momentum and vitality. The proceedings at times seem perfunctory, and the admittedly solid computer effects have become workmanlike and fail to impress any more. Magic is unfortunately now the norm, no longer brightening the eyes of Harry, his compatriots, or the audience, supplanted instead by the gloomy concerns of Harry’s young adulthood. If only the series could capture that same spark of heroic sorrow that momentarily flash in Daniel Radcliffe’s eyes when he realizes the illusory magic of growing up.