Scanners

Groundhog Day is here, and here, and here…

Jim Emerson

“Life might very well lack purpose, and it might very well be a struggle. But that doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole about it.”

So writes Ali Arikan in his thoroughly illuminating (and not at all repetitious) “Imagining Sisyphus Happy: A ‘Groundhog Day’ Retrospective” at The House Next Door. This is one of those appreciations that lights up the movie from within, and makes you happy reading just it, as the writer weaves together detailed observations of the film itself and parallels to “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “The Sopranos,” Schopenhauer and Camus. And it’s funny!

A shot of a blue sky (cotton-white clouds floating, lazily, across the screen) opens the film. Every few seconds the shot changes–yet it remains the same. The sky is blue, the clouds as pearly as before and still in their hazy dance, even though they are not the same as the ones from the previous shot. It is a visual metaphor that permeates the rest of the film. That it is intertwined with an otherworldly small town marching band track only adds to the positively Lynchian feel.

The Greed for Speed

Jim Emerson

View image Motion but no momentum.

My review of “Speed Racer” by the Wachowski Brothers™ is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. Here’s an excerpt:

“Speed Racer” is not a feature film in any conventional sense — although there is nothing so conventional in today’s marketplace as a corporate product based on a campy vintage TV show that is developed for extremely brief exhibition in multiplexes on its way to more appropriate platforms such as DVD and video games, which provide the principal justification for its manufacture in the first place.

Neither is “Speed Racer” a commercial avant-garde film (though fans of the Wachowski brothers may wish to make such claims), unless you still consider Laserium shows of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” to be cutting edge. (Lights! Shapes! Colors! Motion! Money!) And there’s nothing terribly adventurous these days about Eisensteinian montage treated as if it were William Burroughs‘ “cut up” technique — with digital clips randomly scrambled like pixelated confetti.

Nor is it some kind of subversive commodity, unless the outré strategy of pandering to a low-brow, retro-nostalgic crowd can be considered anything but business as usual in 2008. The faux naivete on display here — right down to the imitation-fruit-flavored FDA-food-dye coloring — is both shamelessly quaint and shamelessly cynical.

Supply, demand, English food, movies and Paul Krugman

Jim Emerson

Before I get to the movie part of this post, I want to toast Paul Krugman. He is one of the few public figures I’ve ever considered a personal hero. (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are, too, and I’m not joking.)

In the bleakest hours of the new millennium — through 9/11, Iraq, soul-shattering scandals, national elections, and impending financial disasters — Krugman stood as a beacon of hope and, if you’ll pardon the expression, moral clarity in what Nick Lowe (and Elvis Costello) memorably called “the darkness of insanity.”

Hired in 1999 as the New York Times economic columnist, Krugman wound up doing what so many journalists, even at his own paper, were failing to do. He reported. Not just what people said, but how what they said compared to independently verifiable reality. Week after week, column after column, Krugman was virtually alone (alongside Knight-Ridder, NPR and “The Daily Show”) in pointing out, and explaining the significance of, relevant facts that so many didn’t care to notice, even when they were right there in plain sight — and in the public record, if anyone bothered to pay attention.

He wasn’t just a good reporter but a fine critic.

The best American film of the last 25 years?

Jim Emerson

“Look in your heart!”

Andy Horbal at No More Marriages! is asking for opinions: “What is the single best American fiction film made during the last 25 years?”

My choice is just to the right…

(If it was nonfiction, I’d go with Errol Morris’s “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.”)

And don’t forget to send your choices & comments to Andy!

Opening Shots: ‘Star Wars’

Jim Emerson

View image: The crawl recedes…

View image; The camera tilts down.

View image; The surface of a planet spans the lower part of the frame as a ship passes through the top.

“Star Wars” has, not surprisingly, been the popular favorite among Opening Shots contributions. Here’s how several of you saw it:

From Barry Toffoli:

“Star Wars” opens with a shot of space and the soft sound of John Williams score, then the shot shifts to a planet. So right away we know we’re in for adventure on foreign soil, in outer space no less. Then a small vessel comes from the top of the screen. This is quickly followed by a series of blasts as the score turns into that famous booming on sound, akin to Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars’ [from “The Planets”]. This is all quickly followed by the enormously famous and copied shot of a behemoth star cruiser coming in from the top of the screen and going on forever. It doesn’t take long to figure out that this story is a tale of good versus evil, the little guy getting bullied by the big guy. Even the planet in the shot plays into the theme, representing a new undiscovered world a new hope for freedom and life. But we know the journey will be hard as the star cruiser looms over everything from the rebel ship to the planet below to the audience watching it in the theatre.

And long before the death star ever shows up we fear this massive beast could blow up the planet below just as easily as it could blow up the tiny ship, setting the stage for one of the greatest adventures in film history.

The film habits of Homo Portlandia

Jim Emerson

I went to one of the first editions of the Portland International Film Festival back in 1978 or 1979 (thanks to Ruth Hayler of Seven Gables Theatres), where I saw Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” for the first time. They were also doing an Alexander Korda retrospective, and it was great fun to see “The Four Feathers,” “Thief of Bagdhad” and “The Private Life of Henry VIII” on the big screen.

PIFF is now celebrating its 30th year, and DK Holm reports on the films, the fest — and the audiences — at GreenCine Daily:

Portland breeds a different sort of filmgoer. This is the town where its seemingly unemployed Generation Why sit for hours within its numerous coffee houses drinking $5 dollar brews seriatim and typing endlessly into their brand new MacBooks. Everyone in Portland is “in a band.” Or they own a brew pub. Or they virtually live in one. Portland Man rides his bike to work (cursing at the Earth-fracking cars the entire route), enters each of the city’s monthly foot race marathons, works for the city (probably the Water Bureau), shops at Whole Foods, and to this day thinks back fondly on that wine tour of Provence he and the wife made back in ’92. Portland Woman, by contrast, is an independent and independently minded citizen who can’t find a worthy male. She is a mirror image of the “Sex in the City” gals but without the clothes. She is obsessed with shopping, eating, her figure, her co-workers and office politics, her favorite celebrities (or her favorite causes), and is either about to enter, is in, or has just departed her Fag Hag stage. They complain about never meeting any good men and then move in with a meth addict. Personals ads here are very popular and highly effective. People in Portland don’t “date.” They have a date, and then get married.

Within this context, it’s a wonder that any films get seen at all. Yet over the years, the festival has expanded from one small venue to its current reach, four auditoria scattered throughout the city (though all of the theaters are confined to the city’s downtown area), hosting a dizzying number of offerings.

Euphoria in a matter of seconds

Jim Emerson

A dog bounding into a river in “No Country for Old Men.” Bob Dylan’s harmonica wail in the last shot of “I’m Not There.” A traveling shot down a suburban street in Vallejo, CA, from the window of a car on July 4, 1969, in “Zodiac.” These were among the moments that brought me unexpected waves of euphoria in 2007 — and, as you can see, they don’t necessarily have anything to do with “content.” One is shocking and suspenseful (like Hitchcock’s famous illustrations of the sudden explosion versus the ticking time bomb, both condensed into a few electrifying seconds). Another is ineffably mournful and joyful at once, like the sound of a whistling freight train that it purposefully invokes. Another is kinetically exciting to watch, but with a poignant, semi-nostalgic mixture of order and chaos that suggests both innocence and ominousness (accompanied by Three Dog Night on the radio singing their hit single, “Easy to Be Hard,” from the tribal Aquarian love-rock musical “Hair”: “How can people be so heartless / How can people be so cruel?”).

View image Mike Parker, Director of Typographic Development for Mergenthaler Linotype USA, 1961-1981

And then there’s Mike Parker in Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica.” He’s sitting in a brick room, next to a window with venetian blinds, in medium close-up, talking to the camera, or someone just next to it. And what emerges is joy, from the soul of an artist. In this clip, he speaks for about 51 seconds. Watch his eyes sparkle as he describes the figure-ground relationship in Helvetica, where the air around a character holds it, so that it lives in “a powerful matrix of surrounding space.” (It occurs to me he could be talking about the use of frame space in a Fritz Lang or Stanley Kubrick movie — in contrast to, say, a Howard Hawks or Robert Altman movie.) Every time I see it, I can feel my eyes widen and the edges of my mouth curl up like the title character at the end of Chuck Jones’ “Grinch” cartoon. Euphoria.

All four of the movies mentioned in this post leave me feeling that my relationship with the world around me has been sharpened, re-tuned, re-invigorated. That feeling doesn’t hit me all that often, but when it does, I hold onto it for dear life.

(Footnote: I doubt that Mike Parker, despite his successful career in typography, would describe himself as an “artist.” But if we accepted as artists only those — or all those — who chose to identify themselves as such, we’d be a lot poorer.)

Opening Shots: The Girl Can’t Help It

Jim Emerson

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Welcome back to the Opening Shots Project — which has been on a bit of an unscheduled hiatus simply because I’ve had too much else going on. To get us back into the swing of things, I present the introduction to the great 1956 rock ‘n’ roll musical musical comedy, “The Girl Can’t Help It,” directed (unmistakably) by former Looney Tunes animator Frank Tashlin.

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Our tuxedoed host (and co-star) Tom Ewell — coming off a pairing with another pneumatic blonde, Marilyn Monroe, in the previous year’s “The Seven Year Itch” — introduces the film with the proper gravitas. No, this is not the spokesman for Mr. Carl Laemmle, warning us that we may be horrified or even shocked by the specter of “Frankenstein.” Mr. Ewell, instead, plays our genial — if a bit formal — emcee: “Ladies and gentlemen, the motion picture you are about to see is a story of music.” The set — with musical instruments tastefully floating around the soundstage — looks like it could be from a live-action black-and-white version of “Fantasia.”

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Ewell modestly explains his role in the story and proclaims: “This motion picture was photographed in the grandeur of CinemaScope, and… gorgeous, lifelike color by DeLuxe.” It takes a little effort, but he manages to push the frame into the proper aspect ratio and add color to the emulsion.

[Discreet cut to medium shot here.]

In short order, the music Little Richard bursts from a jukebox — “not the music of long ago, but the music that expresses the culture, the refinement and the polite grace of the present day” — drowning out out Mr. Ewell completely. The montage that follows, of colorfully lit couples tearing up the soundstage floor will be evoked in the credits for David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” years later.

But for now, it’s Jayne Mansfield who explodes onto the screen in the grandeur of CinemaScope and in gorgeous, lifelike color by DeLuxe — or rather, garish, lurid color by DeLuxe, and we wouldn’t want it any other way. Then it’s one politely graceful act after another: not only Ms. Mansfield and Little Richard, but Fats Domino, Abbey Lincoln, The Platters, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, The Treniers, and Julie London, Julie London, Julie London and Julie London. She can’t help it.

Highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow?

Jim Emerson

View image What brow(s) are this?

When I hear the word “middlebrow,” I always think of Frida Kahlo. But, wait, that’s something else. This post is in preparation for a pending one about “Speed Racer” (and the brilliant appreciations of it by Glenn Kenny and Dennis Cozzalio) — a movie I naturally assumed would be (re-)viewed as the product of high (avant garde), middle (auteurist work-for-hire) and low (soulless corporate entertainment commodity) culture. It was.

So when I read this in the New York Times Book Review over the weekend, it reminded me of “The Middle Mind” (a book I’d read about five years ago) and it, um, inter-helixed with some thoughts I’d been having about “Speed Racer.” (If you saw the movie you’ll know what I mean.) But you can read it however you like.

From Rachel Donadio’s back page essay, “1958: The War of the Intellectuals”:

It’s hard to generalize about any historical moment, but in the intellectual journals of the era, some central themes emerge: a debate over the merits of the Beat movement, and the attempt by some influential critics to preserve the quickly dissolving distinctions among highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture that had previously held sway. At the same time, the distinction between artistic achievement and commercial success, which American intellectuals had long assumed to be mutually exclusive, was losing its hold.

Give me irony or give me offense!

Jim Emerson

The award winner for best short film at the 2007 US Comedy Arts Festival (now known simply as The Comedy Festival) was “My Wife Is Retarded,” starring Gary Cole, Sean Astin, Leslie Bibb, Phyllis George and George Segal. It was written and directed by Etan Cohen, co-writer of “Tropic Thunder.” Other than that, all I know about it is the IMDb plot description: “A man learns the secret behind his perfect marriage.”

Are you offended yet? I can’t say if I am, because I haven’t seen the movie. If the premise is that an intellectually disabled woman is the ideal spouse, or that all women are intellectually disabled, well… I might find that deplorable, depending on how it’s presented. Is the movie advocating that point of view? Is it “joking” the way R— L——- used to about “feminazis,” implying that a woman’s place is in a coma? Is it the husband who wishes his wife was intellectually impaired? Does she feel like that’s what her husband expects from her? There are so many conceptual approaches you could imagine for a movie of that title, some of which seem to offer comedic possibilities, and others that are maybe not-so-promising. But you never know until you actually see it. And, for some people, not even then.

Tony Bennett, movie critic (Alec Baldwin, SNL)

Jim Emerson

“I like flicks that are great…” This is why Alec Baldwin may be the best host “Saturday Night Live” has ever had. He commits. I’ll put this up there with anything he’s ever done on the show. To me, it’s funnier than “Schweddy Balls” and “Canteen Boy” put together…

President Bartlet’s advice to Obama

Jim Emerson

Irony alert! Has the very idea of Sarah Palin rendered the concept of irony unrecognizable to many Americans, or has she just pointed out its irrelevance to them in ways that even 9/11 could not? Here’s Maureen Dowd channeling/quoting “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin on the subject of irony in America today.

President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) speaking frankly, as politicians say, to Barack Obama:

BARTLET: Well … let me think. …We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know … I’m a little angry.

OBAMA: What would you do?

BARTLET: GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it.

How to Give Your Oscar Speech

Jim Emerson

Water Music From Big Pink: Gwyneth’s Oscar meltdown. Where is she now?

My perennially sage advice on what to do, and not to do, when you win your Oscar (if you lose, you’re on your own) is generating a lot of mail at MSN Movies again. An excerpt:

2. Don’t Assume That God Voted for You

No incarnation of the Creator of All Things is registered as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and nowhere on the Academy ballots is there a category for Best Vessel Through Whom God’s Blessings Might Flow. (There remains some question, however, about whether Jesus Christ personally chooses the Grammy winners.) Winning an Oscar does not make you a special agent of God’s will or the divine favorite over your fellow nominees — or, for that matter, over the lepers in your category who must suffer the enduring shame of not even being nominated. (Didn’t Jesus say that the un-nominated would inherit the earth?) Do not demean the concept of the Almighty by implying that either you, or the members of the Academy who voted for you, are somehow helping to implement God’s Mysterious Plan so that you all can bring about the End Times. Even if it’s true, don’t. It’s just bad form. […]

5. Don’t Overprepare (In Other Words: No Lists)

All persons entering the Kodak Theatre should be frisked for 8 1/2-x-11-inch sheets of paper. Nothing larger than a 3-x-5 card should be allowed into the auditorium…. At most, your index card should have three items on it. For example:

White House: Jeff Gannon, yes; Borat, no

Jim Emerson

Foreign correspondent Borat extend invitation for Premier George Walter Bush at his White House. (Reuters photo)

REUTERS reports:

Secret Service agents turned away British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the boorish, anti-Semitic journalist, when he tried to invite “Premier George Walter Bush” to a screening of his upcoming movie, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”

Also invited to the screening: O.J. Simpson, “Mel Gibsons” and other “American dignitaries.”

Cohen’s stunt was timed to coincide with an official visit by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is scheduled to meet with Bush on Friday.

Nazarbayev and other Kazakh officials have sought to raise the profile of the oil-rich former Soviet republic and assure the West that, contrary to Borat’s claims, theirs is not a nation of drunken anti-Semites who treat their women worse than their donkeys. […]

Cohen’s “Borat” comedy routine has drawn legal threats from the Kazakh government, which keeps a tight lid on criticism in its news media. Kazakh press secretary Roman Vasilenko said he was worried that some may take the Borat routine seriously.

“He is not a Kazakh. What he represents is a country of Boratastan, a country of one,” Vasilenko told Reuters.

And from the New York Times:Mr. Ashykbayev denounced Mr. Cohen’s performance as host of the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last fall, in which a skit mocked the imperial aura that surrounds Mr. Nazarbayev, the country’s president since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr. Ashykbayev suggested that Mr. Cohen was acting on behalf of “someone’s political order��? to denigrate Kazakhstan and that the government “reserved the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of this kind.��?

Mr. Cohen, who is Jewish, responded, as Borat, in a video posted on his Web site, citing Mr. Ashykbayev by name and declaring that he “fully supported my government’s decision to sue this Jew.��?

“Since the 2003 Tulyakov reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world,��? he goes on in the video, citing fictional details in the absurdly stilted English that is central to his act. “Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to 8 years old.��?

But it was the Foreign Ministry’s complaint that gave some in the country’s news media a chance to report on it, and that was when most Kazakhs first learned that a faraway British comedian had turned the world’s attention to their country.

In an atmosphere of legal constraints on press freedoms, if not outright censorship, the ministry’s statement offered a way to poke fun at Mr. Nazarbayev’s near-absolute political power, at least indirectly, by showing what the fuss was all about.

Throw this Jew down the well, so his country can be free!

Mr. Contempt

Jim Emerson

President Bush reminded me of the District Attorney in Chinatown (that is, in “Chinatown”) the other night, as he stood in the White House “liberry,” stiffly mumbling about his “new strategy” for Iraq, which amounts to: “As little as possible.” Then Jon Stewart made me cry last night (with laughter and outrage — and relief that somebody was telling the manifest truth) as he cut through all the lazy, endlessly recycled punditry about how Bush was “really putting it all on the line this time” (as he’s been said to do every time he makes an empty gesture toward Iraq, or his Boratian “War of Terror”). Talk about creating a false sense of drama. Bush put nothing of himself on the line. He risked nothing. He did… as little as possible.

The only people Bush is putting on the line are the troops and the Iraqis. As Stewart pointed out, what is the addition of 21,000 more troops (returning the level to that of two years ago) supposed to accomplish that it didn’t accomplish back then, when conditions were a whole lot better than they are now, and we still couldn’t secure Baghdad? We have 130,000 troops in Iraq now, Stewart observed. Another 21,000 is a 15 percent increase. “That’s not a surge, it’s a gratuity. It’s a tip,” Stewart said. (Watch the whole segment here.) Perhaps Stewart’s best metaphor for the President’s actions: “He cooked up a giant, giant pot of shit, and looked at it last night and said, ‘You know what that needs? … A pinch of salt.'”

The real strategy? Do just enough to pretend you’re trying, then blame the failure on the American people (for not supporting a losing strategy) and Congress (for not supporting a losing strategy) and the Iraqis (for being Iraqis). Amazing. Now here’s a (bullshit) artist who shows nothing but contempt for his audience — and his “characters” (i.e., the lives he’s cynically and recklessly monkeying around with).

From the 2003 RAND Corporation study: “America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq,” Chapter Nine, “Lessons Learned,” page 153:

“The highest levels of casualties have occurred in the operations with

the lowest levels of U.S. troops, suggesting an inverse ratio between

force levels and the level of risk. Germany, Japan, Bosnia, and Kosovo

had no postconflict combat deaths. The postconflict occupations in

Germany and Japan proved relatively risk-free because both Japan

and Germany were thoroughly defeated and because their govern-

ments had agreed to unconditional surrender. The low numbers of

combat deaths also show that postconflict nation-building, when

undertaken with adequate numbers of troops, has triggered little vio-

lent resistance. Only when the number of stabilization troops has

been low in comparison to the population have U.S. forces suffered

or inflicted significant casualties.”

If Bush had proposed to send in 200,000 more troops I still would have thought it was a bad idea (being about three or four years too late), but at least I might have thought he was (once) serious about trying to bring stability, freedom and democracy to Iraq. One again, he’s done nothing more than reveal what a bad bluffer he is.