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TIFF 08: The waiting-for-it-to-start post

Jim Emerson

Oh, I have plenty to write about. Some of it even about TIFF, which officially kicks off Thursday. But I have to get up early to get to the first press screenings Wednesday morning. They start, auspiciously, with the new Guy Ritchie film, “Rocknrolla,” at 9 am. (That’s 6 am real time.) So, that means I can sleep in at least until 9:30 or 10. On the other hand, it would be nice to cover some films that probably won’t get wider distribution. Ritchie sure fits that bill.

Meanwhile, Bloor Street looks like Gitmo (new construction!) and all Torontonians want to talk about is the governor of Alaska — either with great concern or great disdain. (The Canadians have been openly laughing at us, nervously, for eight years.)

The movies will surely offer a welcome respite from the horror-comedy of the world at large right now…

Nighty-night. Be seeing you.

Can one bad shot ruin an entire movie?

Jim Emerson

UPDATED with more examples — and questions — after the jump.

Can one bad shot ruin a movie? I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head — I don’t think it happens very often — but I do believe it’s possible. I’m not among those who think the final shot of Hal Ashby’s “Being There” takes a marvelously sustained balancing act and kicks it to the ground. But I can understand how somebody might feel that way.

But how can just one bad decision — maybe on screen for just a second or two — deflate a full-length motion picture? Well, roughly the same way a pinprick in a balloon can, I guess. It can puncture the thin membrane that’s sustaining the thing. Without shape and purpose, there’s nothing to keep it aloft any longer.

Try thinking of a movie like a pop song. One misplaced note in the melody, one cheesy chord, one tacky lyric, one mispronounced word (“Yes, I hate the way he says ‘don’t diszgard me’ too,” Robert Christgau wrote of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” in 1974, and I still remember him mentioning it 35 years later) can render the whole record unlistenable, depending on how sensitive you are to the particular offense.

Or think of a movie as a piece of architecture. A misplaced brick of the wrong color or texture, a sloppy corner, a window stuck in the wrong wall — could conceivably demolish the overall effect of an otherwise well-designed building. Leave out a stone, or put in one of the wrong size or shape or strength, and all or part of the structure could come crashing down.

Or think of a movie as your face. With one festering pimple right there. And it’s permanent. It doesn’t take up a lot of facial real estate, but it mars the visage so that it’s all anybody notices.

Superheroes. Seriously.

Jim Emerson

If I say that I’m not much of a fan of comic-book or superhero movies, it’s not because of the source material but because of the movies made from them. Comics fans haven’t been as ill-served by the movies as video gamers, but I’ve noticed that even some of the most fervent appreciations of “The Dark Knight” carry an undertone of defensiveness, almost as if surprised that the filmmakers would treat this “crusader in tights” material seriously, instead of as camp. (Let’s just not mistake “serious” for “dreary” or “pedantic.”)

“The Dark Knight” has been praised as “the best superhero ever made” — or even “the first great superhero movie,” but even if I thought those things were true, they sound like backhanded praise to me. How sad would it be if it took until 2008 for somebody to claim they’d seen “the first great horror movie” or “the first great comedy,” to name a couple other still-disreputable labels? As I’ve said, I don’t think “TDK” is an exceptionally strong or resonant movie, but it never occurred to me to think less of it because it’s about characters named Batman and the Joker.

The way I look at it, a metaphor is a metaphor. Batman or the Joker or Spider-Man can become cinematic metaphors as rich and evocative as Achilles or Nosferatu or Carrie or Jesus. Why not?

Odds and Ends Beginnings for 2007

Jim Emerson

View image Frances Bean Dog.

I’m back from break but hopelessly preoccupied because my eldest dog Frances had a couple lumps on her back foot and I had to take her in early this morning for a surgery/biopsy. This talk of “spindle cells” worries me tremendously, but Frances herself has shown no signs of feeling ill. Because I’m a terrible fretter, this has left a big cloud over the end of my year, and made me even more reluctant than usual to keep in touch with the people I care about. Because, basically, I get paralyzed with worry and just want to get into the fetal position until the uncertainty and apprehension is over. I know it’s idiotic. I went through the same thing worrying about Roger Ebert’s recovery last summer, and am so happy that he’s come through and working his way back (even doing occasional reviews when he can).

Plunging ahead into 2007…

Best News of the Year So Far: I was thrilled to see the byline of Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times this morning as I was blearily trying to wake up before taking Frances to the vet. (It’s DARK at 6 a.m. in January in Seattle. Who knew?) Matt is the founder and editor of one of my favorite movie/TV blogs, The House Next Door. I do not miss the Links for the Day. And Matt himself is a terrific writer. His review of “Children of Men” is the best thing I’ve read about that film, conveying the excitement of watching it as well as the disappointment that it had nowhere to go. (Some thought the ending was brave and open-ended. To me it felt like a mushy sentimental cop-out — although there was that flashing red buoy light, perhaps [I hope] to remind us, as in the ending of Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life,” that this superficial resolution isn’t necessarily what it seems to be. I know, I know: How can this ending be considered overly tidy, pat or a form of commercial condescension when so much of the fate of Humankind itself is left at sea? Well, the movie is about particular characters, not the apocalyptic sci-fi world they live in; it’s a matter of foreground vs. background…)

Condensed Fight Club in 2 min. 25 seconds

Jim Emerson

This is my condensed version of David Fincher‘s 1999 romantic comedy masterpiece, “Fight Club,” to accompany and expand on my personal/critical essay. Notice that only one punch is thrown. The violence is psychological, inner-directed and apocalyptic. That’s the idea. See for yourself. (Speaking of condensation: Did you know that you can make explosives from soap and condensed orange juice? Tyler Durden says so. But don’t talk about it.)

PLAY THIS MOVIE LOUD.

Spoilers abound.

The Dark Knight is Confused

Jim Emerson

(tip: Matt Rosen)

100 Ways to Love a Cat: Way 34

Jim Emerson

Those who think this is funny (as I do) and those who think it is not funny probably do so for the very same reasons. Your take?

Bordwell & Thompson: Crix of the ’00s!

Jim Emerson

Matt Zoller Seitz (aka InsomniacDad) pays due tribute to to the “Critics of the ’00s”: David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, at IFC Blog.

Why? Well, because they’ve written some of the most influential and illuminating film books (and textbooks) of our age, educating a generation of up-and-coming moviemakers and moviegoers? Because their work, in print and on their essential blog (“Observations on film art”) is simultaneously rigorous and readable, scholarly and accessible? Because their enthusiasm for cinema is unparalleled? Because they look at film as film, examining the images themselves and not just treating the medium as pop-culture detritus or literature with pictures?

Well, yes, all of the above and more. MZS puts it most eloquently in his introduction:

Film criticism as we know it tends to fall into a handful of time-worn categories: an expression of one’s personality, politics and taste, with traces of social critique and memoir (Pauline Kael, James Agee); or a kind of performance art on the page, using individual films, actors or filmmakers as springboards for sustained riffs on art and life (Manny Farber); or a scholarly attempt to draw connections between films and film movements, rank filmmakers by aesthetic significance and put works in historical context (Andrew Sarris).

Famous propaganda

Jim Emerson

Title card from perhaps the most famous propaganda film of all time, Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” (1935). Hitler and the Nazis were repeatedly elected to power during the 1930s, one piece of government at a time, before Der Fuhrer assumed full-fledged dictatorial rule.

Edward Bernays, the founder of modern public relations, on the ways in which power is maintained in a democracy (as opposed to the much cruder, more conspicuous and therefore more vulnerable power held by totalitarian rulers), in his hugely influential 1928 book, “Propaganda”:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society…. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.(Also quoted in Larry Beinert’s “Fog Facts.”)

Just a timely reminder about thinking critically in “every act of our daily lives”: Every movie you see, every story you read (fiction or nonfiction), is to some extent propaganda. It’s trying to sell you something — an idea, a philosophy, a version of events, a vision of reality. Just try to be aware. Even this is propaganda, but it’s true:

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity. — Wendell Phillips (1852), Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society

So, what are some propaganda films you’ve seen recently, what do you think they were trying to sell, and how did they go about doing it? (And let’s hear it for “Snakes on a Plane” for at least succeeding in undermining the myth of “airport security” — which, we should all know by now, is but a flimsy facade designed to give us the illusion of being “safer,” even though we aren’t. Still, the odds against snakes or bombs or terrorists on a plane are pretty good, for reasons that have little to do with those increasingly lengthy security lines.)

Best movie ad tag line ever?

Jim Emerson

OK, here comes another one — the third in my tests of web polling software. These are some of my favorite tag lines (and I’m sure there are lots more, which you can add in Comments). Help me test this one out — and let me know which of the three I’ve tried so far you like the best. Thanks.

View MicroPollWeb SurveyFree Web Polls

UPDATE (2/7/07): Be sure to check out the comments below for some more really terrific tag lines.

Three kinds of violence: Zodiac, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood

Jim Emerson

View image A figure in the shadows.

1. I have a competition in me.

I want no one else to succeed.

2. I hate most people….

I see the worst in people.

I don’t need to look past seeing them to get all I need.

3. I want to rule and never, ever explain myself.

I’ve built my hatreds up over the years, little by little.

Match the above comments to the character who speaks or writes them:

a) Anton Chigurh, “No Country for Old Men”

b) The Zodiac, “Zodiac”

c) Daniel Plainview, “There Will Be Blood”

(Answers at end of post.)

* * * *

NOTE: Spoilers lurk sinisterly below.

View image Daniel Plainview, “There Will Be Blood.”

Three of the most admired and fervently debated American films of the year move inexorably toward a climactic confrontation with a killer — or someone’s conception of a killer. Only Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” actually culminates in a eruption of savagery, while David Fincher’s “Zodiac” and Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men” gradually steer their attention away from the assaults and into the psyches of the characters who are haunted by the brutality penetrating their lives.

View image Anton Chigurh, “No Country for Old Men.”

View image The Zodiac, “Zodiac” — or as close as we ever get to seeing him.

Much has been written about the violence in these movies, the darkness they find in the American landscape, and what some see as their bleak, fatalistic and/or nihilistic attitude. Does this somehow reflect the country’s moral ambivalence about being mired in two bloody, confusing guerrilla wars on the other side of the world? A sense of No Exit hopelessness that the Vietnam nightmare is recurring? Mainstream (or art house) torture porn that allows us to vicariously groove on — as we are simultaneously appalled by — the crimes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Dissatisfaction with the materialistic emphasis on the American Dream? A cynical exploitation of artfully staged killings for our (cathartic?) entertainment?

The popular press likes to talk about violence in movies with a superficiality that assumes all violence and all movies are the same, that blood is blood (and that gore and gunplay are automatically more sensational than depictions of beatings or other forms of physical and psychological abuse). But that Sunday feature-section approach ignores what it’s like to watch the movies themselves, and the diverse contexts in which they present acts of cruelty and lethality. To say that “Zodiac,” “NCFOM” and “TWBB” are all “violent films” tells you as much about them as saying they all use the color red.¹ I’d like to consider how the violence in these films conveys its own meaning, apart from any op-ed political parallels that can be drawn, however legitimately.

Bill Maher attempts to corroborate his theory that Americans are stupid by behaving like one

Jim Emerson

“If u get a swine flu shot ur an idiot.”

— Bill Maher, Twitter, September 26, 2009

“This is not a liberal versus conservative issue. This is a science versus nonsense issue.”

— Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times health blogger

Bill Maher may as well believe in Creationism, for all he knows about science or religion. (See above.) The problem I’ve always had with him is that, no matter what position he may take up, his reasoning is likely to be manifestly unsound. Listen to him talk and most of the time you soon realize he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It doesn’t matter if you eventually “agree” with his stance because he’s reached it for invalid reasons.

Take his latest anti-vaccine pronouncement, made to Bill Frist on Maher’s HBO show: “I would never get a swine flu vaccine, or any vaccine. I don’t trust the government, especially with my health.” OK, fine. If Maher doesn’t “believe” in vaccines, or the ability of the U.S. to provide a working one, he’s free to pass and to keep himself quarantined if he gets sick so he doesn’t infect anybody else. When he reaches Medicare qualification age (he’s 53) he can choose not to take advantage of it or any other health insurance he doesn’t believe in and pay cash for his hospitalizations and medical treatments. But telling people (like young people and pregnant women) who are at high risk from serious flu complications not to get vaccinated because he doesn’t “believe” in vaccines or doesn’t “trust the government”? That’s sick.

“This is my happening and it freaks me out!”

Jim Emerson

Enlarge image: Messrs. Meyer and Ebert at the time of their collaboration.

Yes, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” is available on DVD at last. Dennis Cozzalio has a fine assessment of Russ Meyer’s busterpiece over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule — and an appreciation of the commentary track by “BVD” screenwriter Roger Ebert, as well:

And now it seems that time, and film critics and film audiences, may finally have caught up with Ebert and Meyer. Last week’s DVD release of “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (in tandem with the straightforward Mark Robson-directed 1967 adaptation of “Valley of the Dolls”) provides a chance to see the candy-colored Panavision psychedelia, the free-associative montage, and the unbridled energy that powers Meyer and Ebert’s play(boy/Pent)house sensibility to greater advantage than it has probably ever been seen.

Glen Hansard slags the Once DVD cover

Jim Emerson

View image “I put together the DVD cover and the poster originally. And then they took it and f–king bastardized it.”

Academy Award-winning Irish songwriter Glen Hansard (the Academy urges us to identify Oscar-nabbers that way for the rest of their lives) speaks out about the lousy/cutesy DVD image manipulation on the cover of the US edition of “Once.” (Previous Scanners discussion here.) He’s waiting for the Criterion edition. From an interview at Pitchfork:

GH: Oh, man. They f–kin’ killed it. You’re right. They have us holding hands, which we never do in the film! Those legs aren’t mine. Those legs are like three times longer than my legs. It’s a completely new body. They literally just used my face. I’m wearing a hat in the original picture, so they Photoshopped my head. If you look at my head, my head looks totally weird, because whoever did the Photoshop job was sh-t. My head looks really weird, they took my hat off, and they gave me an entirely new body. It’s completely bizarre.

Opinions: Are they really worth a damn?

Jim Emerson

Do you agree that Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” is a terrific movie? Well, Nile Gardiner of the Daily Telegraph also thinks so. Does that mean you agree with him? He says that it’s one of “The Top 10 Conservative Movies of the Last Decade.” Here’s the way he sees it:

What is refreshing about the film is its willingness to portray the US military presence in Iraq in an overwhelmingly sympathetic light, and the al-Qaeda-backed enemy as barbaric and fundamentally evil. There are no shades of gray in “The Hurt Locker,” and this is a strikingly patriotic motion picture that has been embraced by an American public weary of the anti-Americanism churned out by Hollywood in its portrayal of the War on Terror – from “Rendition” and “Lions for Lambs” to “Redacted” and “In the Valley of Elah.” “The Hurt Locker” is by far the best conservative film of 2009, and one of the greatest of the decade.

I hope this example persuasively illustrates several things (and why Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron got divorced is not among them¹):

NORAD, 9/11 and United 93

Jim Emerson

View image: Patrick St. Esprit as Major Kevin Nasypany in “United 93.”

Michael Bonner (an associate producer on “United 93”) has an article in Vanity Fair reconstructing events of 9/11 from 30 hours of previously unreleased tapes from the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) . Bonner concludes that the situation was more chaotic and uncertain than the Pentagon would later claim, and the tapes support that conclusion. He interviews several of the key participants, including NEADS mission-crew commander, Major Kevin Nasypany:

Five years after the attack, the controversy around United 93 clearly eats at Arnold, Marr, Nasypany, and several other military people I spoke with, who resent both conspiracy theories that accuse them of shooting the flight down and the 9/11 commission’s conclusion that they were chasing ghosts and never stood a chance of intercepting any of the real hijackings. “I don’t know about time lines and stuff like that,” Nasypany, who is now a lieutenant colonel, said in one of our last conversations. “I knew where 93 was. I don’t care what [the commission says]. I mean, I care, but—I made that assessment to put my fighters over Washington. Ninety-three was on its way in. I knew there was another one out there. I knew there was somebody else coming in—whatever you want to call it. And I knew what I was going to have to end up doing.” When you listen to the tapes, it couldn’t feel more horrendously true.

When I asked Nasypany about the conspiracy theories—the people who believe that he, or someone like him, secretly ordered the shootdown of United 93 and covered it up—the corners of his mouth began to quiver. Then, I think to the surprise of both of us, he suddenly put his head in his hands and cried. “Flight 93 was not shot down,” he said when he finally looked up. “The individuals on that aircraft, the passengers, they actually took the aircraft down. Because of what those people did, I didn’t have to do anything.”

Related story, from Scripps-Howard via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Poll: A third of U.S. public believes 9/11 conspiracy theory.