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Fear of fauna: Of horses & men & ZOO

Jim Emerson

View image From the poster for “Zoo.”

“Zoo,” tagged unfairly at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival as “the horse-f—ing movie,” is pure artsploitation. Although labeled a “documentary” by some, it’s really more of a pristine horror-fantasy about sex — that doesn’t quite have the nerve to face the sex or the horror, and only barely scratches the surface of the fantasy. It starts off almost as if it could become a Val Lewton movie (“Cat People”), but keeps at a distance. Its shadows are viewed as atmospheric effects rather than dark, unknown regions in which a body could get lost. Warily, the movie circles the sexuality of its subjects as if terrified of getting its hands (or whatever) dirty.

It’s based on the Enumclaw Horse Case. In 2005, a man in Washington State died from “acute peritonitis,” internal wounds from having intercourse with an Arabian stallion on a farm where social-sexual gatherings were sometimes held for such purposes.

“Zoo” exploits this sensational, scandalous death with ravishing visuals and an ominous score (like Michael Nyman’s work with Peter Greenaway, minus the wit), but steers away from close examination of the physical, emotional, sexual, political, ethical or spiritual ramifications of zoophilia — the movie’s Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The name is spoken, of course, but apart from a few brief, provocative voiceover comments about animal “consent,” or humans who really love their animals wanting to take that love further, to fuse with (or become) other mammals, “Zoo” contemplates man and beast from a cool remove. It’s all nicely theoretical and abstract. And yet we can’t honestly grapple with the implications (moral or otherwise) of what zoophiles do if we avoid confronting what they do, to and with the animals. I expected a little more raw emotion — or, at least, passion — here.

No doubt the movie’s reticence comes in part because the three zoophiles who allowed their voice interviews to be used in the film are understandably hesitant to discuss their sexual activities and what drives them — perhaps especially now that bestiality has been officially outlawed in Washington. “Zoo” could have gained some credibility from a little honest (or even dishonest) eye contact, but almost all interviews take place off-camera, including those with people who were not involved in the case, and not at all in the practice of inter-species sex.

TIFF: A-maze-ing

Jim Emerson

View image Not for the wee ones.

Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” is that rarest of cinematic rarities, a fully and flawlessly realized fantasy film. It’s also, as of today, my favorite movie of the dozen or so I’ve seen in Toronto. Layers of imagery and storytelling fold back on themselves to create a completely formed world. And, best of all, it’s a fairy tale that has not been prettified or bowdlerized for kids. It stakes out imaginative territory much closer to the fantastic visions of Bergman or Cronenberg than to those of C.S. Lewis or Tolkien. (The R rating for “graphic violence and some language” should tell you something. I think the film earns its R — though I’m sure there are plenty of kids under 17 who will love it — but I’d prefer that the R be attributed to “gruesome imagination.”)

It’s 1944, after the Spanish Civil War, and the fascists under dictator Francisco Franco are fighting the insurgents (or rebel “freedom fighters,” as the film portrays them). A little girl named Ofelia is taken by her pregnant mother to live with her evil fascist stepfather, Captain Vidal, at a military installation in an old mill in the forest, next to an ancient stone labyrinth. Ofelia longs to join her real father, now dead, and to sit at his side as the princess of a fantasy kingdom. Insects, faeries and a faun appear to her, claiming that she is the long-lost princess they, and her father, have been waiting for.

Opening Shots: Brazil

Jim Emerson

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From Raymond Ogilvie, happyreflex:

This is really the second shot, following a brief bit of above-cloud photography. Let’s not be too picky.

It starts with a TV set turning on. A suitable enough opening that many films have used. We know that when the movie starts with some TV, always with a healthy dose of analogue noise, we’re being greeted by a commentary on the movie’s world before we enter it. The TV set itself has a retro-futuristic design; the kind that was popular at least from the 20s into the 50s. All smooth curves, no sharp angles. Red and blue lights outside blink on and off, casting subtle glows onto the scene.

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The TV shows a commercial from Central Cervices. An imposing logo and a happy little jingle: “Central Services. We do the work, you do the pleasure!” And already we don’t trust them! It’s a very Orwellian thing. We’ve lost freedom of choice in this society, and that’s exemplified here by Central Services. All our home repair needs are now taken care of by official government employees, who can be as inefficient, bureaucratic, and unaccountable for their own blunders as they please. The customer comes last.

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Now here’s the Central Services spokesperson. He’s here to tell us about how we can replace our old, unsightly ducts with newer, more fashionable unsightly ducts. They just get in the way and clutter up your living space, don’t they? The ducts are just like the bloated, bureaucratic government: they exist only for their own benefit. The public is an afterthought. You’ll see just how little the bureaucracy cares about human beings when the innocent Mr. Buttle is wrongly arrested and accidentally killed during interrogation, and no one feels any remorse: they just don’t want to be stuck with the paperwork.

Has Tarantino produced a “legacy of greatness”?

Jim Emerson

Quentin Tarantino told a BAFTA audience in London last month that he’d like to remembered for a body of work, like Howard Hawks.

This sparked a discussion between Anne Thompson and Jack Mathews of moviefone.com over at the indieWire-hosted Thompson on Hollywood (cross-posted at Slate Film Salon) — a “dueling blog” about whether Tarantino (who told the New York Times that he worked quickly to get “Inglourious Basterds” ready for Cannes because he “wanted to have a masterpiece before the decade’s out”) can be said to have produced “a legacy of greatness”:

JM — … No question, he has proven his greatness to his hardcore fans, among whose numbers many critics and film scholars can be counted. But in the 16 years since “Pulp Fiction,” he has not come close to matching that film’s brilliance. His movies, while enjoyable to watch, are self-indulgent games for him. If “Inglourious Basterds” is a great war movie, “Blazing Saddles” is a great Western. They’re both fun but that’s all they are.



AT –Wow. Do movies have to educate us?

Giving in to it: Tiger Woods Voicemail Slow Jam Remix

Jim Emerson

I tried to avoid it, but it took too much effort. Now I’ve given up, given in. I don’t care about whatever’s going on with Tiger Woods, the pro golfer. I had managed to ignore nearly all references to it, except for a rather amazing Taiwanese news-ish video re-enactment of crash scenarios (below, after jump). But then I accidentally happened upon this, and it made me laugh/cry. Not because it has much to do with that golfer, but because of the skill and wit with which it nails a particular musical style, using an actual “found” voicemail message and transforming it into a hilarious melodramatic narrative. I await the vintage Grand Ol’ Opry version…

Opening Shots: ‘Petulia’

Jim Emerson

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From Tom Sutpen, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats:

There is no more enigmatic image in the badly underappreciated canon of Richard Lester than the opening shot of his 1968 masterpiece “Petulia.” Outwardly it gives us scant information, it establishes little that could be called functional, it lasts a handful of seconds, no more; yet it instantly sets the tone for a film in which nothing fully belongs to recognizable human reality except the errant bursts of emotion its principals seem to have forgotten they were capable of.

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Silent but for the sound of sqeaking rubber wheels, three overdressed, wheelchair-bound whiplash cases are guided through a somewhat dank, inactive, seedy-looking hotel kitchen by impassive attendants. Though Lester’s camera never leaves the front of this odd train as it travels down a long corridor, one neck case following the other, there’s no sense of real movement in the shot (as there would have been had, say, Stanley Kubrick executed it), apart from the wheelchairs and the camera seemingly joined in concord.

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The people being transported . . . even the attendants ostensibly doing the driving . . . seem incidental. And the looks on their faces say it all. They could be going to a Coronation, they could be going to the Gas Chamber; they’d probably look the same in either event: Too deadened even for passivity. One almost concludes from the elements of this shot that things, objects, have more life in them, more reflex even, than humans do. Which is wholly consistent with a film where style and manners and form appear to have consumed all of humanity’s natural impulses while its back was turned.

Generic Movie Based on the Movie They’ve Been Releasing Every Single Week Since the 1980s

Jim Emerson

This is pretty much exactly what most new indie and studio movies look like to me. Not just the Oscar-hopefuls and the Sundance selections. And not just the trailers, but the entire movies themselves (which are usually laid out, beat by beat, in the trailers). This one’s funnier, though, because it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a familiar schematic diagram. Which is exactly what these comfy, risk-averse movies seem to be aiming for.

Starring Robert Pattinson or Adam Sandler, Natalie Portman or Sandra Bullock. Directed by Ron Howard or someone whose only previous work has been on YouTube.

(tip: Max Kleger)

The Favoritest Movies (or Everybody Loves Lieblingsfilme)

Jim Emerson

View image Just a few of my very favorite stars from “Boogie Nights.”

Yes, I know “favoritest” isn’t a word, but I’m (mis-)using it in the spirit (though not the letter) of the German language, in which you can construct all kinds of nifty words freely and on the spot — like “Nachkriegsjahrzehnte,” which as near as I can tell means “the decade after the war.” All in one word! Wundervoll! Es ist mein neues Lieblingswort! German happens to be the primary language of the excellent film magazine Steadycam, edited by Milan Pavlovic, which has just published a magnificent 50th edition/25th anniversary issue (354 pages, plus a 24-page insert — the size of a film festival catalog!), featuring a massive tribute to Robert Altman and an international poll of “lieblingsfilme” — or, as I prefer to think of them, “favoritest films.” (I’ll take that over “most unique” any time.)

See, these are not just favorite films. They are the 30 most favorite films of the participating critics and filmmakers. (I suggested some online critics be included, so some of my favoritest — including Dennis Cozzalio and Andy Horbal — were also invited to contribute faves.) The last such Steadycam poll was in 1995, and although many of these movies are also on the AFI 100, I really enjoy the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of these individual and collective selections.

I’ll have more about my 6,000+ words on Lady Pearl in “Nashville” (greatly expanded from a spontaneous Scanners post after Altman’s death last year), but since we’ve been talking so much about the AFI 100 and other lists recently, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share the results of Steadycam’s poll, along with my “30 lieblingsfilme” — as I threw them together the day I submitted my list….

Chinatown, My Chinatown: An Andalusian Doglove poem in images and music

Jim Emerson

Eyes, frames, lenses, doorways, windows, photographs, mirrors, smoke, hands, flesh, water, power…

There are movies I count among my best friends, with whom I have loved, learned, and grown. This is one I treasure most. (Only for those who know their way around “Chinatown.”)

[notes to come]

a labor of deepest love, for Mrs. Mulwray and Gina Namkung (1937, 1974, and counting…)

… and, of course, for Matt Zoller Seitz, Kevin B. Lee, Steven Boone…

Don’t forget it, Jake: It’s Chinatown in Boulder!

Jim Emerson

View image: My Polish “Chinatown” poster, designed by Andrzej Klimowski.

For more than 30 years, Roger Ebert has led a theater full of people in a group analysis of movies at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in (the People’s Republic of) Boulder. The film is shown in its entirety on Monday, the first day of the Conference (this is called the Uninterruptus), and then Roger goes over it with the audience — shot by shot, as it were — for two hours a day, Tuesday through Friday. This is called the Cinema Interruptus. Anyone can shout out “Stop!” to make an observation or ask a question or back up (slightly) at any time, and it’s amazing what people come up with. As Roger always says: “Someone in this room has the answer to any question you can come up with.” Or, if they don’t, they will have it the next day.

Over the last few years — at the CWA and on the Floating Film Festival — I’ve seen Roger go through “Citizen Kane,” “The Third Man,” “La Dolce Vita,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Adaptation.” (there’s a period in the title) and others. Other films he’s presented and analyzed with the audience in Boulder include “Amarcord,” “Taxi Driver,” “Casablanca,” “Raging Bull,” “3 Women,” “Out of the Past,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “JFK,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Fargo,” “Fight Club,” “Vertigo,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Floating Weeds,” “Dark City” and “The Rules of the Game.”

It’s a priceless experience to really watch a movie this way — and it increases (sometimes exponentially) your appreciation of the film, because even if you’ve seen the movie before, there’s always something you’ve never noticed, or some dots you hadn’t previously connected.

Although it’s hard for me to imagine the CWA without Roger, he won’t be able to attend this year. So, I’m filling in, and will be guiding the Interruptus through one of my favorite films, Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown”, — among the all-time great movie masterpieces and the ultimate Los Angeles film noir, in sun-baked Panavision color (and no less sinister for it). So, if you happen to be near Boulder, Colorado in a few weeks (April 9 – 13, 2007), come by Macky Auditorium on campus at 4 p.m. and join us to sit in the dark and talk about detective movies, noir, the history of LA, the Department of Water and Power, William Mulholland and the St. Frances Dam catastrophe, Johnny LaRue, eyes, doors and windows, venetian blinds, orange groves, fish, monstrous evil, kitty-cats, and the nose on your face. (And that’s just for starters.) It’s free, and, as they say, so much fun it’s a wonder it’s still legal.

The Muriel Awards: I See You

Jim Emerson

Some Muriel history here. She’s alive.

Study: George W. Bush was not unintelligent

Jim Emerson

A scholarly study finds it was the 43rd president’s personality, not brain capacity, that limited his functional abilities. This is an important distinction. It is not that the former chief executive was incapable of learning (the “Bush is dumb” meme), but that he did not want to learn, and did not believe it was something he needed to do. From the research paper, “Bush’s Brain (No, Not Karl Rove):‎ How Bush’s Psyche Shaped His Decision-Making,” included in the Stanford University Press anthology, “Judging Bush (Studies in the Modern Presidency),” authors Robert Maranto and Richard E. Redding find:

… [The] best studies, in which raters evaluate statements without being aware of their source, suggest that Bush lacks integrative complexity and thus views issues without nuance. The leading personality theory (the “5-Factor Model”), as measured by the NEO Personality Inventory, suggests that Bush is highly extroverted but not very agreeable or conscientious. He also rates low on “Openness to Experience.” Similarly Immelman (2002) had expert raters judge Bush’s personality using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria. Raters identified Bush as fitting the “Outgoing,” “Dominant (Controlling),” and “Dauntless” personality patterns, which together constitute a style given to lack of reflection, superficiality, and impulsivity.

So, in essence, what did he lack? Critical thinking skills.