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The Watchmen dilemma

Jim Emerson

But I just had to look,

Having read the book…

— John Lennon

Really, I just wanted to point out that a glowing blue naked guy is the hero of one of the most anticipated mainstream movies in years. Did you know that? Seriously, though, I do have a dilemma: “Watchmen” opens March 6. I read the compiled comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons back in the early 1990s, I think — just around the time Terry Gilliam was attached to make the movie version. Here’s the poser: Having read the book so long ago I’ve forgotten it, should I read it again before seeing the movie?

“Watchmen” is something many fans know practically by heart. I know one who attended an early screening of the movie and said it was one of the best adaptations he’d ever seen. An already notorious Nerd World post by “Simpsons” executive producer Matt Selman (“My Own Private Watchmen”) broke the review embargo by proclaiming that he didn’t consider himself “press” and wasn’t actually reviewing the movie, but couldn’t control the 14-year-old still living inside him: “Someone took the most special personal thing of my adolescence and put it on a movie screen.”

The Return of the Autobiographical Dictionary of Film

Jim Emerson

Ever since David Thomson’s “A Biographical Dictionary of Film” was published in 1975, browsers have said that they love to hate Thomson’s contrarian arguments — against John Ford or Frank Capra, Coppola or Kubrick, for example.¹ Fans and critics can cite favorite passages of resonant beauty, mystifyingly vague and dismissive summary judgements, and entire entries in which the man appears to have gone off his rocker. And that’s the fun of it.

To be fair, Thomson broke faith with (or has been suffering a crisis of faith in) American movies at least far back as “Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking” (1981), and he’s been writing about his crisis ever since. To put it in a sentence that could serve as the ending of one of his entries: I am willing to believe that he loves (or once loved) movies even if he doesn’t like them very much. (Wait — how does he conclude the Katharine Hepburn piece? “She loved movies, while disapproving of them.”)

When I encountered the first edition of this book, the year I entered college, I immediately fell in love with it because it was not a standard reference. It was personal, cranky, eloquent, pretentious, pithy, petty, ambitious… It was, as I think Thomson himself suggested in the foreword to the first or second edition (this is the fifth), more accurately titled “An Autobiographical Dictionary of Film.” Many times over the years I have implored my employers or partners to license digital rights to Thomson’s book so that it could augment and be integrated with other movie databases and references (at Cinemania, FilmPix, Reel.com, RogerEbert.com)… but we’ve never done it. What, they would ask, is the “value-add”? (Really. Some people used to talk that way.) As a reference, its coverage is too spotty (Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopedia is much more comprehensive but also has loads of incomplete filmographies), as criticism it’s wildly idiosyncratic (nothing wrong with that) and as biography it’s whimsically selective and uneven, leaving as many holes as it fills.

Opening Shots Project: Pop Quiz

Jim Emerson

It feels like an unbroken stream (of consciousness)…

We’ve received some terrific contributions to the Open Shot Project. Thank you so very much. And please keep ’em coming in. (And tell your cinemaniacal friends.) I’m going to start posting them next week. But remember: We’re talking about single opening takes, not entire sequences or montages. Doesn’t matter if the image comes before, during, or after the titles — just as long as it’s the first image. (Of course, the first shot of a montage could be significant and wonderful and worth considering on its own, especially when you consider how the succeeding images build upon what it establishes.) I’d even include this shot from David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” because, although it is really a combination of layered opticals, it gives the illusion of being a single, unbroken take — no clear cuts, just a lot of overlapping fade-ins, fade-outs and dissolves.

Today, I’ve decided to offer a little pop quiz. What follows after the jump are single frame-grabs from some of my favorite opening shots in some of my favorite movies from the ’20s to the ’00s — some famous, some fairly obscure. I don’t necessarily expect anybody to get them all (unless they know me personally!), but see what you can do. In most cases, the frames are taken from the first second or two of the shot. Some shots last only a few seconds, others a minute or more, and some begin as dissolves out of the opening titles. Keep in mind that filmmakers often like to hit you with a distorted image you can’t quite make out — an extreme close-up, or a reflection, or a shot from a peculiar angle — just to grab your attention and pull you in. Ready? Begin…

The AFI Top 100

Jim Emerson

View image Still the One. I’ve tried, but I can’t think of a better, more thoroughly entertaining and endlessly rewarding American movie.

Here’s Roger Ebert’s take. Some oversights have been corrected since the first list was compiled (by polling film “critics, historians and experts” — categories that are mutually exclusive?) in 1998. To me, that’s “the day before yesterday.”

Anyway, the good news is that “Nashville” went from 0 (i.e., not on the list) to 59. At this rate, it will easily reach its rightful place in the top ten by 2017. Buster Keaton (previously unrepresented) scored with “The General” at number 18, which means it will surpass “Citizen Kane” by next Tuesday. And “Sunrise” finally made it aboard at 82. Other new additions include: “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Titanic,” and “The Sixth Sense” (all newly eligible) and “Cabaret,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “All The President’s Men,” “Spartacus,” and “A Night at the Opera.”

More good news: “The Searchers” leapt from 96 to 12. Maybe people are starting to understand it after 51 years.

Welcome, too, to these new arrivals in the Class of ’07: “Intolerance” (much more engaging than “Birth of a Nation”), “Sullivan’s Travels” (though I’d prefer “The Lady Eve” or “Miracle of Morgan’s Creek”), “Cabaret,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “All the President’s Men,” “A Night at the Opera,” “Swing Time,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Do the Right Thing” and “Blade Runner” (maybe the next version Ridley Scott has planned will finally make it the masterpiece we’ve always wanted it to be).

Still MIA: “Miller’s Crossing,” “Scarlet Street,” “The Woman in the Window,” “Blue Velvet” (which even I don’t think belongs — though perhaps “Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Dr.” or “Inland Empire” would), “Lone Star,” “Boogie Nights,” “The Long Goodbye,” [your choices here].

And where did “Fargo” go?

Also very much missed (i.e., dropped off): “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “A Place in the Sun,” “The Third Man” (but isn’t that a British film?), “”Stagecoach,” “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Not much missed: “Mutiny on the Bounty,” “Patton,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “Fantasia,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “My Fair Lady,” “An American in Paris.”

Still unaccountably on the list: “The Sound of Music,” “Tootsie,” “Ben-Hur”… (And, really, “Star Wars” is lots of kiddie fun — but one of the best American movies? Hardly. Alhough I could say that about “The Wizard of Oz,” too. Both “Oz” and “Star Wars” are movies people love because they loved them as kids — and that’s wonderful. Technically, they’re also quite delightful. But as artistic achievements they’re pretty thin. This isn’t a popularity contest. Oh, actually it is. Still, I’ll take “Pinocchio” or “Babe: Pig in the City.”) And, one day, “Schindler’s List” will be put into perspective, ranking slightly above “1941” (and below “Always” and “Amistad”) in Steven Spielberg’s body of work. For that matter, “Raging Bull” belongs above “The Departed” but below “After Hours” and way below “New York, New York” in Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre.

Reuters notes that D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” “fell off the list entirely because of its now unpopular ideology, despite its history of technical innovations.” Well, maybe. But has anybody watched it recently? Anybody even felt like it? And did “The Jazz Singer” drop off for the same reason?

What great injustices (and justices) do you see? Take a look at the list and let me know what you think.

P.S. That reminds me: My own Top 100+list is here.

UPDATED (06/21/07): Films are nominated by the pollees and then the top 100 are selected by ballot. According to the AFI, 43 new films (released between 1996 and 2006) were eligible this time that weren’t eligible in 1998.

Raping Dakota: From the Sundance resumé movie to “Indie Guignol”

Jim Emerson

Raping Dakota and Feeling Minnesota: Despite all the publicity, “Hounddog” ain’t nothin’ but a dog, say critics. It’s not dangerous, after all.

“As its poster and advertising remind us, “Quinceañera” won both the jury and audience prizes at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and those honors are strangely indicative of its dramatic and stylistic limitations. If there was ever a movie that seemed precision-tailored for a Park City reception, this is it — the quintessential example of the festival’s favored brand of hand-crafted, slice-of-life, youth-oriented filmmaking that expresses affection for a nicely captured American subculture. In other words, it’s a Sundance specialty, right from the box.

“This is a shopping-list movie: A double coming-of-age story spiced with local color; a bittersweet portrait of a Los Angeles neighborhood in transition; a warm and soapy celebration of a Mexican-American community. “Quinceañera” is also a thoroughly predictable melodrama that’s both kitchen-sink and ‘After-School Special.'”

— from my review of “Quinceañera” last summer

One of the debilitating side effects of the pop-culture “mainstreaming” (if I may use an ugly marketing term) of the Sundance Film Festival brand over the last 20 years or so has been the over-glorification of what I call resumé movies. These are films, cobbled together from familiar elements designed to appeal not only to a Sundance jury (or audience), but with an eye toward getting the filmmakers some “Hollywood” money for their next picture. And that, in itself, is fine. Nothing wrong with trying to climb the ladder of success. But I don’t particularly want to watch somebody’s resumé on a movie screen, particularly when it’s sold to me as a “personal story” (or a “subversive thriller”) and plays like pure Hollywood formula schlock.

John Sayles admits that “Return of the Secaucus 7” was just such a resumé picture. After years of writing horror and exploitation scripts for Roger Corman (“Piranha,” “The Lady in Red,” “Alligator”), he wanted to start directing his own, more personal stuff. The reason there’s a basketball game in the movie was simply to show that he knew how to handle an action sequence. But Sayles was expanding his craft and moving from formulaic commercial genre filmmaking toward more personal projects, not the other way around.

Remember “Project Greenlight,” the HBO (then Bravo) series, produced with good intentions by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, with the Weinstein Miramax? The deal was that they would choose an unproduced first-time script and give a novice director a chance to make the movie, which Miramax would finance and distribute. By the third (and final) season, they joined forces with Wes Craven and were making a horror exploitation film for Miramax’s Dimension division.

Dark Knight Quiz #1: What’s wrong with this picture?

Jim Emerson

NOTE: Reader Cameron Smith has noticed that this shot has been cropped for the DVD version of the film. See his explanation here.

Although I enjoyed certain aspects of “The Dark Knight” (especially the gorgeously real Chicago cityscapes, which I thought stole the movie out from under even Heath Ledger), I have confessed I couldn’t tell what was supposed to be going on from one moment — often one shot, or one line — to the next, and, for that very reason, soon stopped caring. Now that I’ve been able to go through it several more times since its release on DVD and Blu-ray last month, and have cross-checked the movie itself with the screenplay for clarification (it’s available as a .pdf here, For Your Consideration), I’m able to better understand exactly why. And it’s not just me. Now, at last, we have the means to really look past the phenomenon directly at the picture, and to understand how it works. Or doesn’t.

Let me start by asking you to examine one simple, minor early example that has to do with narrative logic and, perhaps, setting up the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief in a comic book universe rendered with hyper-realistic visuals (even, occasionally, in IMAX): Please watch the shot above, the final piece in the opening sequence, showing the Joker’s escape from the “mob bank” robbery and giving us our first “overview,” if you will, of the scene. The Joker has backed a school bus into the lobby of a bank, filled it with mob cash, and then makes his exit.

After the jump is the script’s description of the shot. But before you read it, please leave a comment with your account of the shot AND your assessment of how the Joker planned this getaway. Pay special attention to the timing (dust/debris, busses, traffic signal, arriving cop cars). Ready? Begin.

“The Bridge”: Legends of the Fall

Jim Emerson

This is the end.

“The Bridge,” Eric Steel’s chilling masterpiece exploring the yawning chasm between life and death, between the steel suspension of the Golden Gate Bridge and the cold hard surface of the water below in San Francisco Bay, is now available on DVD. It’s a film that goes deeper into that void of despair and self-obliteration than any film I’ve ever seen. I wrote about it several times in 2006:

A movie that takes suicide seriously, and considers the pain of the person who wishes to die as well as the anguish and guilt of the survivors, is a rarity. Over and over, survivors say they don’t understand why someone they knew and loved wanted to cease to exist; but a surprising number admit the agony that would drive someone to suicide is beyond their imagination. They have to accept, and respect, that it was real.

A father says: ““Some people say the body is a temple. He thought his body was a cage, a prison. In his mind, he knew he was loved, that he had everything and could do anything. And yet he felt trapped, and that was the only way he could get free.�? “The Bridge” makes the unthinkable, taboo subject of suicide real in honest and realistic ways that maybe even those who have never considered it can understand. The mother of a jumper recalls it took someone else to finally get her to realize: “It’s not about you. It has nothing to do with you.” That may be as hard for some to get their heads around as the suicide itself. Suicide is the ultimate solipsistic act; it’s not about anyone else.

The few, mostly superficial discussions of suicide we have in our culture (30,000+ in the U.S. in an average year; only about 25 or so off the Golden Gate, which is nevertheless the world’s leading suicide destination), tend to objectify the suicidal person and concentrate on prevention and grief and downplaying the reality out of fear that others may be encouraged to try it. Copycat incidents are real, but peer pressure is not one of the leading causes of suicide — particularly off the Golden Gate Bridge. It takes a certain kind of personality to choose such a dramatic, public exit, and the bridge is already famous as a suicide spot.

From my review in the Chicago Sun-Times:It’s an awesome sight from up there, the wind and dizzying height halting your breath as you gaze across the strait. The sun makes silver ripples on the churning blue-green water and the horizon glows blindingly bright at the time of day when the sky and the sea converge. The cliffs, crinkled with shadows, form a paradisiacal gateway. And then, in the periphery, there’s a tiny momentary rupture in the mythical postcard landscape. A small white splash flickers in the water. And in the great bright cacophony of the scene, Icarus disappears beneath the surface.

That’s a description of Peter Breughel’s painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” and William Carlos Williams’ poem by the same name, intermingling with images from Eric Steel’s “The Bridge,” a film about 24 deaths and one survivor in a year in the life of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. “The Bridge” consciously invokes Brueghel, and after I’d watched the movie and looked up the painting again, hundreds of images of the Golden Gate from “The Bridge” (and my memory) came rushing back to me, as though projected at high speed over Breughel’s canvas. Each small white splash, of course, marks the end of a life. […]

Witnessing the last few moments of these people’s existence, I thought of Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries, which have followed the contours of a handful of lives for 49 years now, revisiting them at seven-year intervals. “The Bridge” views human life from the other end of the spectrum — showing the end, and then working back from there.

And because these jumpers chose such an open and public way to end their lives, I have no ethical problem with what the cameras observe; amateur photographers often catch the same sights inadvertently. One survivor tells of being interrupted by a German tourist who asked him to take her picture, just as he was preparing to jump.

Looking this closely and intently into suicide, you almost fear too much empathy, the way you dread the vertigo that accompanies acrophobia: What you’re afraid of is not so much that you might fall, but that impulse within you that wants to eliminate the yawning tension between you and the surface below….

“The Bridge” is brave and unflinching, unshakably haunting and deeply mysterious. I doubt I’ll forget it until the day I die.

Star Wars: Episode VII — Resurrecting Mace Windu

Jim Emerson

View image

That’s what flashed through my mind when I saw this top image in an online ad, anyway. One of these pictures is from a “Star Wars” movie (I forget which one, but it was Episode I, II, or III, I can tell you that). The other is from “Resurrecting the Champ,” starring Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett. Can you tell which one is which?

(Hint: One of the movies does not, as far as I know, feature the Grand Master of the Jedi Order.)

View image

Answer: In the top image, Jackson plays an older Yoda. In the bottom picture, Yoda is played by a different actor.

What the hell’s happening in The Happening?

Jim Emerson

View image Mark Wahlberg attempts to teach his Film 101 students how to craft a major motion picture.

The first sentence of “horror scholar” Kim Newman’s stirring Guardian film blog defense of M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening” is: “Here’s the thing: ‘The Happening’ is not that bad.”

After noting that the film opened to “near-universal derision in America and Britain,” and acknowledging that Shyamalan’s “scripts are sometimes mawkish, sometimes pretentious,” Newman defends the writer-director’s “knack for genuine ‘jump’ moments and whispered, intense conversations that raise a chill.” Newman concludes: “Can it be a kind of racism that the Indian-born, Philadelphia-raised auteur is hammered for his apparent character (or funny name) rather more than, say, Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee?”

Wow, so the best the “horror scholar” can muster on behalf of “The Happening” is that it’s “not that bad” — and the hostile reaction to Shyamalan must have to do with the filmmaker’s “funny name” or his race? That’s insulting. What about his Philadelphianism? Maybe that explains it.

TIFF 08: What are you looking at?

Jim Emerson

A winter afternoon. A man walks down a muddy village backstreet with his shoulders hunched against the chill, accompanied by what could be industrial noise or a string score. Whatever it is, it evokes tension and anxiety. The catches the attention of a passing German Shepherd, who strains on its leash to keep an eye on him — all the more so when the man attempts to conceal himself around a corner. In a small general store, he buys an axe. The clerk wraps the blade neatly in crisp brown paper. The camera tracks a slow-moving car that is being pushed along by several other men, the “driver” looking behind him through an open door. The man places the axe against his side, facing us, to shield it from their view.

What are we watching?

Later, a man enters a flat. The door of a small refrigerator is ajar, the light glowing inside. The man grabs an object from a white plate sitting on top of the fridge. It is a woman’s black shoe.

So, what is this? A horror movie? A crime thriller? A macabre mystery? Sure. But I think a more accurate genre description would be romantic comedy.

Making movies in your head

Jim Emerson

I started making movies before I was a teenager. Making movies on actual film, that is. I was always making movies in my head, but it wasn’t until my dad lent me his 8mm Kodak Brownie wind-up movie camera and a light meter that I and some friends started actually putting things on celluloid. Our early efforts had titles like “Gores Galore” [sic], “Land of the Giants,” “The Murderer” and “Potpourri” (a title we took from “Laugh-In” for a hodge-podge of stunts and gags we just made up as we shot them). For special visual effects we used a lot of extreme camera angles (low and high), miniatures (Matchbox cars, army men), smoke bombs, fireworks, dummies stuffed with newspapers, red food coloring, Vampire Blood™, and cooked spaghetti for innards.

If I remember correctly, the total running time of one exposed reel was about three to five minutes. You bought the film in double-width form and loaded it into the camera, then had to go into a dark room (or deep shade) and flip the reel to re-load halfway through shooting. The lab would cut it down the middle when you mailed it in for developing and send it back to you as an 8mm reel with one glue-splice that strung it all together. (This was not the new Super 8, which was too fancy and expensive, even though it was only one millimeter wider.) They were all silent, of course, though we made syncrhonized 3-inch-reel tape recorder “soundtracks” with music and narration by simply running the film, playing records, and speaking into a microphone.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of Anti-Semitism for Make Benefit Stupid Bigots?

Jim Emerson

View image Borat for USA.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has issued the following statement about “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” which opens in the US November 3:

When approaching this film, one has to understand that there is absolutely no intent on the part of the filmmakers to offend, and no malevolence on the part of Sacha Baron Cohen, who is himself proudly Jewish. We hope that everyone who chooses to see the film understands Mr. Cohen’s comedic technique, which is to use humor to unmask the absurd and irrational side of anti-Semitism and other phobias born of ignorance and fear.

We are concerned, however, that one serious pitfall is that the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.

While Mr. Cohen’s brand of humor may be tasteless and even offensive to some, we understand that the intent is to dash stereotypes, not to perpetuate them. It is our hope that everyone in the audience will come away with an understanding that some types of comedy that work well on screen do not necessarily translate well in the real world — especially when attempted on others through retelling or mimicry.

My response: If anybody is stupid enough to think that “Borat” reinforces their own bigotry, then they can find reinforcement just about anywhere — including the ADL’s statement, which will probably do more to unintentionally inflame anti-Semitism than anything in “Borat.”

TIFF: What’s missing here?

Jim Emerson

View image The ManuLife Center (glowing beacon in the middle of the shot), where most of the Toronto Film Festival press and industry screenings are held.

The hallway of the Varsity Cinemas, with theaters on both sides.

What’s missing from these pictures? I’l tell you what: Roger Ebert! Many festival regulars have been saying it feels weird not seeing Roger around town this time of year. And in that respect, we’re already anticipating Toronto 2007. David Poland at The Hot Blog expresses the sentiments of no small number of us on this morning:

Roger’s name comes up often as many of us gather in this annual reunion tour, as it is rather sad to have a festival without him. He missed his first George Christy luncheon in 22 years this year. But his gathered friends all applauded his improving health and look forward to seeing him next year.Hear, hear!

Film noir: Carved in black & white

Jim Emerson

View image Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat.” A film noir woodcut by Guy Budziak.

“The term itself is vague. For German Expressionism was less a unified style than an attitude, a state of mind.”

-Horst Uhr, introduction, “Masterpieces of German Expressionism” (1982)

“Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film ‘noir’, as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.”

-Paul Schrader, ‘Notes on Film Noir’ (1972)

Guy Budziak makes film noir woodcuts in high-contrast black and white. He tops the “Roots of Film Noir Prints” section of his web site with the quotes from Uhr and Schrader above. I’m assuming Guy Budziak is the artist’s real name, but even if it isn’t, it’s an appropriately noirish moniker. And he knows his stuff. Budziak writes: “My woodcuts reach back to the very earliest origins of film noir, insofar as it was the woodcut that most accurately conveyed the German Expressionist sensibility.”

His love of noir is rooted in his love of black and white:

What’s interesting about black and white as opposed to color is this: color more accurately depicts what we all see in visual reality. The same cannot be said of black and white, of course. So in a sense everything filmed in black and white is unreal, or perhaps can be construed as an alternative reality, but not one that we experience naturally.See Budziak’s gallery of prints, from such films as “Nightmare Alley,” “Touch of Evil,” “Out of the Past,” “Ossessione,” “Le Samourai” (a color noir!) at “Film Noir: Woodcuts by Guy Budziak.”

Arthur C. Clarke: Do aliens dream of anthropomorphic gods?

Jim Emerson

View image Another evolutionary stage.

“I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that’s one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that’s true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?”

— Arthur C. Clarke, in a 1999 interview with Free Inquiry magazine

“I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be interpreted as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”

— Albert Einstein

Edward Rothstein addresses the currently fashionable science vs. religion debate in a New York Times “appraisal” of the late Arthur C. Clarke’s work (“For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically”):

“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral” were the instructions left by Arthur C. Clarke, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90. This may not have surprised anyone who knew that this science-fiction writer, fabulist, fantasist and deep-sea diver had long seen religion as a symptom of humanity’s “infancy,” something to be outgrown and overcome.

But his fervor is still jarring […]

Stanley Kubrick’s film of Mr. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” for example — a project developed with the author — is haunting not for its sci-fi imaginings of artificial intelligence and space-station engineering but for its evocation of humanity’s origins and its vision of a transcendent future embodied in a human fetus poised in space […], a moment of transcendence in which some destiny is fulfilled, some possibility opened up…. a new evolutionary stage, inspiring as much horror as awe.

You can sense where Rothstein is heading when he detects “fervor” in Clarke’s funeral instructions. “Fervor”? Really? Seems to me that Clarke is simply leaving specific instructions about he wants. And why shouldn’t he want his funeral to accurately reflect his beliefs? Rothstein tries a little too hard to create a dialectic between science and faith, claiming that “religion suffuses Mr. Clarke’s realm.” But I think he confuses mystery with mysticism in “2001.”

Off to Ebertfest

Jim Emerson

I’ll be blogging and reporting from Ebertfest in Champaign-Urbana this week. The fest runs Wednesday through Sunday and the schedule can be found here. Panels, film introductions and post-film discussions will be live-streamed here. And it’s an all-star line-up: Eberts! Bordwell! Cohl! Seitz! Arikan! Morgan! Odienator! Phillips! Britt! Kohn! Barker! Pierson! Rosman! Poland! Voynar! And those are just some of the organizers and attendees. The roster of films and filmmakers is impressive, too. Give it a look.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Jim Emerson

View image This is not Bresson’s pipe!

I’m always intrigued when critics and academics try to characterize themselves — or the appeal of something they like — primarily in opposition to something else that they don’t like. Or vice-versa. I’m not just talking about contrarianism but, specifically, about attempts to define or justify something not by what it is, but by how it allegedly does not resemble another thing. Like Jonathan Rosenbaum recently did with his pantheon-gate-slamming, anti-Bergman piece (e.g., “His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson…”), or Prof. Ray Carney in his intro/promo for a series of independent films that flew “under the radar” at the Harvard Film Archive. Tell me what you think of Carney’s “Now how much would you pay?” sales pitch:

If we ask why many of these works are still lurking in the shadows or searching for a distributor, the reasons are not that hard to come up with. These films do not push dependable box–office ticket–sales buttons. Their characters are not “cute,” “charming,” or “sweet” in the “Napoleon Dynamite” way. Their stories are not “clever,” “crowd–pleasing,” or “feel–good” in the “Little Miss Sunshine” way. They do not feature big–name actors making “in–joke” cameos. Though most of these films are made by Gen–Y artists about Gen–Y characters, they don’t even fit the pattern of Gen–Y movies. Their male characters are not introverted and narcissistic; their female characters are not whiney or clingy; and their narratives are not reducible to the group–hug ethos that says everything will be OK if only you have friends. The films in this program do not pander to the prejudices or predilections of young viewers or attempt to flatter audience members of any age. They take the pulse of contemporary American life toughly and unsentimentally. They challenge the viewer to look at experience in new and potentially disorienting ways and, at their best, ask the viewer to think freshly about the untapped expressive possibilities of the art.It seems to me that this exclusive hard-sell approach shamelessly panders to the prejudices and predilections of young viewers and attempts to flatter audience members of all ages.

At what point do critics turn into fashionistas, more concerned with dictating today’s styles or appealing to hipper/holier-than-thou posers than addressing the movies themselves? To me, this seems like such an adolescent approach: “Yeah, man! Disco sucks!” We all do it on occasion, but some rants are more effective than others.

There’s a terrific discussion at The House Next Door about Carney and his complaints about the lack of mainstream media coverage (greatly exaggerated by Carney) for the series he cannily sold as anti-mainstream. (What did the filmmakers themselves think of that approach?) I don’t know how well Carney’s laboriously insular sales pitch actually worked, selling exclusively to a crowd that wants to flatter itself as anti-mainstream and elite (or elitist). But for me Carney’s prose (perhaps especially his patronizing use of the term “Gen-Y,” which in his hands sounds more than ever like a personal lubricant) destroys any credibility he might have as someone capable of understanding what makes an interesting movie. All I know is what he dislikes about commercial and Sundance-indie stuff, which is pretty much the same crap we’re all sick of. But what does that have to do making a series of “under-the-radar” movies sound appealing? Are these films worth seeing just because they’re NOT “Napoleon Dynamite” or “Little Miss Sunshine”? Wow, what a recommendation.

Does Carney’s approach turn you off as much as it does me? Do so-called “mainstream” anti-intellectualism and Carney’s bitter and equally reactionary anti-anti-intellectualism seem like two sides of a coin?