Sex and subtitles: An Open Mind Is Advised
Two of the better fest trailers I’ve seen, from the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival:
Sex after the jump:
Scanners
Bill Maher: Dumb jokes for the TV talk show set
“Remember during the campaign when John McCain attacked Obama for acting like a celebrity and we all laughed at the grumpy old shellshocked fool? Well, it turns out he was right. […] It’s getting to where you can’t turn on your TV without seeing Obama.”
What grumpy old shellshocked fool said that? It was comedian Bill Maher, whose approach to political satire is to talk about televised presidential photo ops as if they were interfering with, or substituting for, policy-making. I mean, the guy admits he thinks what he sees on TV is “news,” and then he watches PR puff pieces about presidential puppies and romantic nights out on Broadway and thinks it’s Obama who lacks substance? Turn off the boob tube, Bill, and read a newspaper or a web site — or a blog. If you wanted to learn something about politics (and “topical humor”) from TV, you should be watching Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, not Leno. But I warn you, it’s going to make you feel as tired and ancient as your schtick. You may as well be telling jokes about airline food and Geritol. (Anybody remember Geritol? That’s my point.)
Elected: 100 Must-See Foreign Films
Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho Dayu” (aka “Sansho the Bailiff”).
The ballots came in from all over the web. Edward Copeland tabulated them (and found nice stills for all the winners), under the supervision of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jimmy Carter. OK, I don’t know about that last part, but Edward did some great good work here.
He’s calling it “The Satyajit Ray Memorial Anything-But-Definitive List of Non-English Language Films.” Copeland writes: “The name comes, of course, from the great Indian director who failed to land any of his acclaimed works on the final list of 122 nominees.”
In all 174 people chose their top 25-or-so non-English-language talkies made before 2002 (nominees had to be at least five years old). The Top 100 is here — accompanied by comments from people who chose them. (Comments and vote totals for the other 22 nominees are here.)
My top choice was Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho Dayu” (which came in at #46 and is available on a Criterion DVD), about which I wrote:
If I had to choose just one movie –- one movie –- above all others on this list, Mizoguchi’s would be it. I’ve long felt that if there were a god, the closest expression we’re likely to find on this earth is in this movie. It’s not the only film on my list that gives me goosebumps whenever the title is mentioned, but I don’t believe there’s ever been a greater motion picture in any language. This one sees life and memory as a creek flowing into a lake out into a river and to the sea.That seems a little florid to me now (it was the night before I left for Toronto, and I was trying to tie together the imagery in the first and last shots of a masterpiece), but the emotions, and the awe, are genuine.
Here’s the Top 25:
1. “The Rules of the Game” (Jean Renoir)
2. “Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa)
3. “M” (Fritz Lang)
4. “8 1/2” (Federico Fellini)
5. “Bicycle Thieves” (Vittorio De Sica)
6. “Persona” (Ingmar Bergman)
7. “Grand Illusion” (Jean Renoir)
8. “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (Werner Herzog)
9. “The Battle of Algiers” (Gillo Pontecorvo)
10. “The 400 Blows” (Francois Truffaut)
11. “Fanny and Alexander” (Ingmar Bergman)
12. “Tokyo Story” (Yasujiro Ozu)
13. “Rashomon” (Akira Kurosawa)
14. “Ikiru” (Akira Kurosawa)
15. “The Seventh Seal” (Ingmar Bergman)
16. “Ran” (Akira Kurosawa)
17. “Jules and Jim” (Francois Truffaut)
18. “The Conformist” (Bernardo Bertolucci)
19. “La Dolce Vita” (Federico Fellini)
20. “Contempt” (Jean-Luc Godard)
21. “Breathless” (Jean-Luc Godard)
22. “Ugetsu Monogatari” (Kenji Mizoguchi)
23. “Playtime” (Jacques Tati)
24. “Au Hasard, Balthazar” (Robert Bresson)
25. “Andrei Rublev” (Andrei Tarkovsky)
(continued…)
Bad news: “Amelie” made the list (though only at #92). Good news: “Life is Beautiful” (which isn’t) wasn’t even nominated!
Stop wasting your life. Get watching.
Happy 5th B-day, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule!
Stop by one of the most-loved movie blogs on the Intertubes and give Dennis your best! Several of us already have, as you can see when you get there…
On the devaluation of monsters… and movies
Wiley Wiggins has some beautifully phrased thoughts on why monster movies aren’t scary anymore:
Now we no longer populate these movies with humans but with fodder. We’ve learned how to show the Monster but forgotten how to show people, and they become increasingly flimsy, predictable and mawkish — to stare at them too long is to get bored while waiting for them to be eaten. Instead we fetishize the Monster, and in staring at it too long, it loses its power too — everything has its depth stripped away, nothing means anything, and we’ve diffused or at least ignored our fears by shining a flashlight on every menacing shadow in the room. These movies have lost the capacity to connect to any real fear, and instead only appeal to our infantile desire to break our toys against each other.
Spectacle has been diminished in the name of “showing everything.” Just because it can be shown, doesn’t mean it should be. A movie with all “money shots” has no climaxes. It just neutralizes itself. The rules of storytelling apply to CGI: if anything can happen, then what’s the significance? Today’s CGI, when noticeable as a “special effect,” plummets fatally into the uncanny valley. It’s so pristinely close to photo-“real” it looks utterly fake.
(image by Till Nowak)
People who live in Glass houses…
My uneasiness about the relationship between Mike Daisey’s theatrical piece “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” and its presentation as journalism on This American Life centers on three things. The first has to do with the art of storytelling. Daisey is a performer and storyteller who combines personal anecdotes, fiction and fact, into stage monologues. Nothing wrong with that; it’s what monologists do. The second has to do with journalism. This American Life, the Chicago Public Radio/PRI show, also focuses on storytelling — often personal stories — but expects them to meet the factual standards of journalism, unless otherwise noted. As host Ira Glass said in the show’s most recent episode, retracting the earlier one called “Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory”: “Although [Daisey is] not a journalist, we made clear to him that anything that he was going to say on our program would have to live up to journalistic standards. He had to be truthful. And he lied to us.”
And the third, and probably the most troublesome aspect for me, has to do with the media’s definition of “the story” itself, which has focused on details about Apple (because it makes a better story to connect the shiny new iPad or iPhone to cheap Chinese labor), even though Apple is just one of many major corporate customers of Foxconn, the company that runs the factories. Some very good reporting has been done on the subject (by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza in the New York Times and various reporters at CNN and NPR, just to name a few). But the hook is always Apple. And while I have no reason to believe the reporting is untrue, the framing of the story can be misleading.
ANNOUNCING: The Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon: Do the Contrarian (Part III)
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I enjoyed our “Contrarian Week” discussions so much (even made it its own category!) that I wanted to open it up even more and ask my fellow movie bloggers to discuss any and all aspects of contrarianism on their blogs (and send me a link!) for a “Contrarian Blog-a-Thon,” the weekend of February 16-18, 2007 — a full month from today. That’s the weekend before the Oscars, so things should be pretty dull around then (and if you’re not sick of Oscar speculation by then, you never will be). Please help me spread the word.
Most of us like to inveigh against the conventional wisdom from time to time. What do you think makes for a good contrarian argument — or a bad one? Make your own contrarian argument for/against a movie or a specific moment in a movie or a filmmaker’s work or a whole genre if you want to. Just make sure you build a real argument (with examples!) rather than a crackpotty ad hominem attack.
I’m excited to see what you come up with. Please feel free to drop me a line (address in nav bar above) to let me know if you’re “in.” Muchas gracias!
Opening Shots: ‘Dawn of the Dead’
View image: Waking into a nightmare.
From Brad Damare, New Orleans, LA:
“Dawn of the Dead” opens with an close-up of one of the lead characters, asleep against a blood-red carpeted wall. She seems both alone and surrounded by the red — an echo of what will be the film’s finale, in which she has to escape the mall rooftop alone, possibly alone in the world. But Romero jump-cuts with something of a joke: She’s only dreaming, and she’s actually in a room full of people. But that room full of people is in full-panic mode: She’s awakened from one nightmare into another.
JE: Thanks, Brad, for mentioning one of my all-time favorite horror movies. It’s like she’s in a red-shag womb, about to be born into a world that’s worse than anything she could have dreamed. That jump-cut happens as she cries out, waking herself up — and at the same instant a man pops into the frame and grabs her: “Are you alright? The shit’s really hitting the fan.” And the zombie head is really hitting the helicopter blades… A TV station colleage, watching a debate on a monitor (“We don’t know that,” says a man on the screen. “We gotta operate on what we do know!”), observes: “Still dreaming…”
One long weekend
I’m taking an actual vacation (from the computer) — back in action Wednesday, June 2. Hope you have a meaningful (and, yes, enjoyable) Memorial Day Weekend. I will.
Wiley Wiggins’ Sausage Party
From the immortal star of “Dazed and Confused,” “Waking Life” and “Sorry, Thanks.”
“Blade Runner” meets “The Matrix”
The naked eye: What would reality “look” like, if our senses could perceive it?
The debate about whether video games are art continues unabated, but maybe there’s another question that transcends it: Are video games just a smaller simulation of reality? Or, is life as we know it a form of video game? John Tierney, the libertarian former Op-Ed columnist for the NYT, ponders the notion that consciousness is digital and virtual:
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.
You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. […]
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
It’s “The Matrix,” “Blade Runner” and Errol Morris’s superior and even more challenging and imaginative “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” merged into one. And, as David Cronenberg will tell you, evolution is not limited to the organic…
No Country, under the skin
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UPDATED 03/03/08: The author of the original letter expands his thoughts:
We received this very fine letter to the editor yesterday at RogerEbert.com. It’s from Nicholas Rizzo and it offers a deeply felt understanding of “No Country for Old Men” (and one I happen to share). The “Country” of the movie’s title is America, and the West, but it’s also age, and death:
I’ve just seen “No Country for Old Men”. And I’m wondering about something. I’m at a crossroads in my life. And for the first time I’m feeling left out. I’m 39, about to turn 40. I work as a physician, and my practice is in a transition due to forces beyond my control. After hours I coach a high school wrestling team and that has to go by the wayside as our head coach is finally stepping down and I’ve injured my neck. So my coaching days may be over. I’m divorced, have some gray hairs, and am essentially in between the young daters and the “available divorcees” in age — kind of in a relationship limbo. Admittedly, I’m facing my own mortality on several fronts. And this movie hit home for me because of this. But after that hit, there was something more that I found, and I’ll cover that at the end of this writing.
Regarding your review, I agree with it entirely. It’s an incredible film, and in all the aspects you mention. Except, you didn’t mention the point of the film, at least as I see it. The first clue to it lies in its title, which is a double entendre. That is, “country” as in place to seek a safe place to be, and also “country” referring to the U.S.A. and our way of life. The latter relates obviously to our society’s neglect of older generations, as the younger ones just pass us by. But that’s another conversation.
This film is expertly crafted in three layers. The first layer is the literal one, where there is a cop chasing a killer chasing a victim. The real treasures of this film lie in its abundant symbolism and meanings – all on a secondary level. The third level may only be my invention, but I like it.
Is Once ineligible for Best Original Song Oscar?
The Oscar-nominated song “Falling Slowly” (the only one not from “Enchanted” or “August Rush”) may have been recorded for a Czech film — and appeared on two albums in 2006, before “Once” was finished.
Not sure why this has become an issue now (does nobody at Fox Searchlight or the music branch of the Academy do any research until the last minute — or beyond?), but Dublin film critic Paul Lynch passes along this report from his Sunday Tribune critical colleague Una Mullally:
The Sunday Tribune understands that the Academy query relates to whether the song, from the John Carney-directed movie “Once,” was written specifically for the film, as the eligibility rules for the Best Original Song category demand.
“Falling Slowly” was originally recorded by the film’s co-stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova when Czech director Jan Hrebejk asked the two musicians to contribute songs to his 2006 film “Kráska v nesnázích” (“Beauty In Trouble”). Hansard and Irglova ended up recording the album “The Swell Season,” of which “Falling Slowly” was a key track. That album was released in April 2006. Hansard’s band, The Frames, then rerecorded the song for their September 2006 album “The Cost. “Beauty in Trouble” was released in October 2006, with “Falling Slowly” played almost in full over the film’s trailer [above].
GoodFellas and BadFellas
Who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy? Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Departed.”
I have an essay over at MSN Movies on Martin Scorsese’s morally conflicted characters — in “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Casino” and “The Departed.” It’s called “GoodFellas and BadFellas,” and it’s about crooks, cops, saints, sinners and (of course) Catholic guilt in movies with and without God. An excerpt:
By the time of “GoodFellas” and “Casino,” Scorsese’s mobsters are no longer troubled by guilt over their actions, because there’s no God taking notice of them.
Instead, they aim for an infallible position in the heirarchy of men where they can get away with anything in the name of piling up cash. People make mistakes — like whacking a made guy — and they pay the price, but there’s no spiritual dimension to these wiseguys’ transgressions. You break the rules, you fall out of favor, that’s all.
Narrator-protagonists Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in “GoodFellas” and Sam “Ace” Rothstein (De Niro) in “Casino” are attracted to the mafia and Las Vegas, respectively, because they offer godlike status through earthly immunity. As a boy, Henry watches the gangsters across the street and marvels that they could get away with whatever they wanted and nobody, not even the cops, would complain.
For Ace, Las Vegas is a return to the Garden of Eden. We see him whisked from a limo through the glittery gates of Paradise (the Tangiers Hotel and Casino) as he recounts his ascension to a state of grace: “Anywhere else in the country I was a bookie, a gambler, always looking over my shoulder, hassled by cops day and night. But here, I’m ‘Mr. Rothstein.’ I’m not only legitimate, but running a casino, and that’s like selling people dreams for cash … Las Vegas washes away your sins. It’s like a morality car wash. It does for us what Lourdes does for humpbacks and cripples. And along with making us legit comes cash. Tons of it.” […]
“As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster,” declares Henry Hill at the start of “GoodFellas.” “To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States.” Looking at “GoodFellas” today, you may wonder what’s the big diff. The world is divided into “somebodies” (us) and “nobodies” (them), and any measures taken by the elect — including fraud, torture and execution — is justifiable in the cause of preserving their way of life.
A U.S. postman is kidnapped and (briefly) detained by wiseguys who threaten to put him in a pizza oven if he delivers any more truant notices from Henry’s school. The freeze-framed shot of the “nobody” mailman’s head shoved near the opening of the oven could almost be a snapshot from Abu Ghraib. “How could I go back to school after that and pledge allegiance to the flag and sit through good government bulls***?” Henry wonders. Yeah, how?
Henry explains what it means to be a “good fella, a good guy,” as the camera glides over the bones of a devoured feast at the Bamboo Lounge — a meal nobody at the table will pay for. “To us, those goody-good people who worked [s*****] jobs for bum paychecks and who took the subway to work every day, worried about their bills, were dead. They were suckers … If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice, they got hit so bad believe me they never complained again. It was all routine, you didn’t even think about it. “
These are the words of a sociopath, reminiscent of Enron, where traders joked about fleecing “Grandma Millie” during the 2000 California energy crisis. Or, in the famous words of a Bush White House aide, reported by Ron Suskind in 2004: “When we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.” From there, it isn’t far to Henry’s statement from a bit later in the movie: “Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules … Shooting people was a normal thing. It was no big deal.”
The world Henry describes is one in which there’s no higher power taking moral inventory. It’s the same out West, where Ace describes the order of things: “In Vegas, everybody’s gotta watch everybody else. Since the players are looking to beat the casino, the dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men, the pit bosses are watching the floor men, the shift bosses are watching the pit bosses, the casino manager is watching the shift bosses, I’m watching the casino manager, and the eye in the sky is watching us all.” He’s talking about the surveillance cameras overhead, not God, but you get the idea. (And who’s watching the cameras and the tables from the rafters? “Former cheaters” who know all the tricks — cast-outs for whom toiling in purgatory above the ceiling is as close to paradise as they are allowed to get in a place where cheaters are banished, or, for the most serious transgressors, driven into the desert never to be seen again.)
Inside the casino, Scorsese cuts from table-level close-ups of cards and dice to cosmic God’s-eye-views, as Ace outlines his moral universe. Sure, the casinos are owned by gangsters, and millions are skimmed straight out of the counting room, but from the point of view of the man in the middle like Ace, the bosses are the gods and the only real sinners are the cheaters.
Use your allusion: Is it funny if you have to explain it?
“In that case I’ll get in touch with Chic Sale.” — Groucho Marx, “Animal Crackers” (1930)
“Adam 1-3’s incipient negritude will come as a pleasant surprise to his honorary Aquarium parents, Ralph Bunche and Ida Lupino.”
— Firesign Theatre, “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers” (1970)
The awesomely prolific Matt Zoller Seitz (no, he’s still got just the two kids, but he’s been writing a lot of good stuff lately — mostly in his capacity as the new TV columnist for Salon.com) recently asked the musical question: “When a comedy builds a lot of its identity around pop culture references, is it hastening its own irrelevance?” — or, “Will future generations understand ‘The Simpsons’?” (I think the term “ask the musical question” is a pop culture reference, but I’ll be darned if I can find out where it originated.)
Matt writes of watching one of the great “Simpsons” episodes (“Krusty Gets Kancelled”) with his kids and laughing at references that pre-dated their pop-cultural awareness (like, back before Arnold Schwarzenegger was a governor):
Learning from lists
Dana Stevens (at Slate.com), Susan Gerhard (SF360.org), and I are the only critics I know of who put “Man Push Cart” on our best of 2006 lists. Roger Ebert probably would have been a fourth, if he’d made a list this year — because he programmed “MPC” in his Overlooked Film Festival. Time and DVD will no doubt correct this ghastly critical oversight.
If it hadn’t been for the 1981 Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll, I would never have discovered one of my all-time favorite albums: Human Switchboard’s “Who’s Landing in My Hangar?” It’s the only studio LP by a Velvet Underground-influenced band from Ohio (Bob Pfeifer, Myrna Macarian and Ron Metz), released on Faulty Products/IRS Records and, well, it didn’t get much advertising or marketing support. (You can still read Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide mini-review here. See if you can find it on LP. It never made it to CD.) It came in at #11 in the poll, and ranked #10 on The Dean’s List, between Psychedelic Furs’ “Talk Talk Talk” (yes, the one with “Pretty in Pink” on it) and Tom Verlaine’s “Dreamtime” (another favorite of mine to this day).
Which is why I find it helpful to scour critics’ polls (and individual lists): to alert me to titles I may have overlooked — and, perhaps, may even come to treasure. (Just beware of those who prize obscurity — or obtuseness — for their own sake.) The First Annual LA Weekly Film Poll has a nifty interface, where you can click through by category, see which critics voted for what, or look at individual critics’ lists. There’s even a Worst Film category, the top four winners (winners?) being:
1) “Lady in the Water”
2) “Babel”
3) “World Trade Center”
4) “Miami Vice”Everything else averaged two points or fewer. (I really dug watching “Miami Vice” myself. It was an exercise in style, not unlike “The Departed,” but it had a spark that, actors aside, I felt Scorsese’s picture lacked.)
Other crix polls:
IndieWire Critics PollFilm Comment Poll
And, of course, the Biggest of Them All: The Master List of Top Ten Lists at Movie City News Awards Watch (now with more than 250 individual critics’ lists. Editor David Poland’s statistical analysis here.
And don’t miss David Bordwell’s Best Danish Films I Saw at the End of 2006 List. You may discover something you’ll eventually love if you make the effort to see it!
TIFF 08: Revolution and starvation, personal and political
“The war is over. The revolution has just begun.”
— Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro), after Cuban guerillas have overthrown Batista’s dictatorial regime on New Year’s Day, 1959, in “Che”
Even without titles or credits, the running time of the gorgeous digital print of Steven Soderberg’s “Che” that screened at the Toronto Film Festival was listed as 261minutes (that’s four hours and 21 minutes for those of you without calculators). The working title for the epic was “Guerilla,” then “Che,” and despite Benicio Del Toro’s fully-lived performance as Che Guevara, a more suitable title might be “Revolutions.” Because this doesn’t feel so much like a biopic as a documentary portrait of the recipes for political revolutions, successful and failed, in Cuba and Bolivia. The titles may rhyme, but nobody’s going to mistake “Che” for “Ray.”
Neuro-cinema turns brains to zombie mush!
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The cinema is Max Castle! At least, according to the pompous French scholar Victor Saint-Cyr in Theodore Roszak’s spooky-satirical 1991 novel “Flicker,” which I’m now in the middle of reading. (I didn’t know when I started it, but Darren Aronovsky is reportedly working on a film version — something that’s now announced on the trade paperback cover.) Saint-Cyr proclaims that the fictitious Castle, obscure maker of seriously unclean sexploitation and horror films, “alone of all directors grasped the essential phenomenology of film. In the entire history of motion pictures, only he and Lefebvre have understood the technology so profoundly.”
In one of the funniest chapters so far, Saint-Cyr pronounces himself the founder of a new film theory he calls Neurosemiology, which in essence posits that it’s all about the flicker. The medium of cinema itself, alternating patterns of light and shadow, is a powerful form of mass hypnosis that alters the brain, quite independent of the images we think we see on the screen. One of Sant-Cyr’s students, “a bushy-haired, tautly nerved young man” named Julien, “who smoked incessantly while he spoke and never once raised his eyes,” offers an elucidation of the theory:
