Scanners

Welcome aboard the first train to blogville!

Jim Emerson

After eight months of existence, Scanners has finally grown up and become (not unlike Pinocchio) a real live blog. With a Moveable Type publishing platform and everything. While I continue with unabated enthusiasm in my capacity as founding editor-in-chief, webmaster and contributor to RogerEbert.com, the new interface for Scanners should make it even more clear than it was before that what appears here is… just totally my fault. Don’t blame Roger. According to the principles of separation of church and state upon which our nation was founded (though it’s not clear which site represents the church and which represents the state), RogerEbert.com and Scanners exist, side by side, as distinct entities. Scanners is devoted to the criticism and opinionated observations of Yours Truly alone — hence the new logo and byline and design and URL and e-mail address and wee goofy picture that collectively say, with wry understatement, “You’re not in RogerEbert.com anymore.” But you’re never more than a click away, as the top navigation menu indicates. Remember: If you’re seeing gold, you’re in Ebert’s fold; if you’re seeing blue, it’s You-Know-Who.

(Thanks to Roger and Cath and John and everybody else at the Sun-Times who made this possible.)

Fight Club: I Am Jack’s Manic-Depression

Jim Emerson

“…There is nothing either good or

bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”

— “Hamlet” Act 2, scene 2

If you’ve ever suffered from clinical depression, you know the experience is impossible to convey to someone who hasn’t also gone through it. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like trying to describe why you love somebody. How do you explain a lack of feeling, or interest, or pleasure, that is both numbing and excruciatingly painful? How do you account for a disconnection with the past and any conception of a future? It’s not “living in the moment” — it’s being stuck in a moment from which you can’t imagine any escape — not just the feeling that this asphyxiating near-deadness will go on forever, but that you can’t imagine ever having felt any other way (even though, logically, you know that is not possible). You can remember feeling pleasure — no, make that “having felt pleasure” — but you have no memory of what it actually felt like.

One of the (many) reasons I probably connect so strongly with David Fincher’s “Fight Club” (1999) is that, by capturing clinical depression more accurately than any other movie I’ve ever seen (though Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out” and Eric Steel’s “The Bridge” delve mighty deep into that abyss), it helped shake me out of the grips of a depression that was sucking me down at the time. I was the only person in the theater convulsed with laughter from beginning to end, because it was liberating, exhilarating, to see the truth of my own inner experience reflected back at me in its funhouse mirror. I recognized myself in the movie, relished the psychological acuteness of what I was seeing, felt its black absurdity resonate in my poor, chemically imbalanced noggin. From the very first images deep inside the human brain, I felt it could not be about anything else, even though I didn’t know where it was going to go from there.

(Spoilers? Oh, yes.)

TIFF 2007: Robert Zimmerman Bob Dylan Revisited

Jim Emerson

View image Todd on Bob: Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), as one incarnation — a name-dropping bluesman in 1959 (with tales of Blind Willie McTell and Gorgeous George) who seems to think he’s still in the Great Depression. Others include Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), Jack Rawlins/Pastor John (Christian Bale) and “Billy” McCarty (Richard Gere).

“I was born a poor black child…”

— Steve Martin, “The Jerk”

“God, I’m glad I’m not me.”

— Bob Dylan, on reading an article about himself in 1965

(quoted in the press kit for Todd Haynes’ movie, originally titled “I’m Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan”)

Folk-turned-electric singer/songwriter Jude Quinn (looking for all the world like Bob Dylan circa 1965 and played by Cate Blanchett) is riding in a big black limousine when, unaccountably, Allen Ginsburg (David Cross) appears on a golf cart in the rear window, smiling and waving with his frizzy hair blowin’ in the wind. Ginsburg pulls up alongside the limo, Quinn rolls down the window, and they travel along parallel trajectories (past a cemetary) while having a brief exchange about an interview Ginsburg had done with a reporter in which the Beat poet was asked about Quinn’s musical motives as if all Voices of Their Generation were pretty much one and the same. “They asked you that?!?” Quinn laughs.

View image Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) in “I’m Not There” in “Don’t Look Back” in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in black and white.

That’s a little taste of what it’s like to watch Haynes’ “I’m Not There,” which is not only a kaleidoscopic view of events in the life, music and myth of Bob Dylan, but a critical deconstruction and synthesis of Dylan’s various media representations — from D.A. Pennebaker’s legendary “Don’t Look Back” to Dylan’s own “Reynaldo and Clara” to Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.” In some ways, it’s the natural companion to “Don’t Look Back” (actually re-enacting some scenes and interviews from that documentary in a new context), the movie Dylan probably wanted “Reynaldo and Clara” to be, and in other ways the movie Haynes wanted “Velvet Goldmine” to be. It actually goes back inside these films (Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” Richard Lester’s “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Petulia,” Godard’s “Masculin-Feminin,” Fellini’s “8 1/2” and others, too) — and the old stories, the album covers, the liner notes, the newspaper and magazine clippings — and recapitulates and reinterprets them in new contexts. I was thrilled by it, moved, dazzled, entranced. I love this movie.

View image Christian Bale (this guy can do anything) as Jack Rawlins.

The earlier film was about the glam era, freely mixing bits and pieces of fact and lore from the lives of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Brian Ferry and others (don’t forget Oscar Wilde, who is deposited on earth by a UFO), and that’s the kind of thing Haynes is up to here — mostly with Dylan, but also with “real” and fictional characters around him. Some are identified by their familiar names (like John, Paul, George, and Ringo), some are thinly disguised (or undisguised) stand-ins. And this time he has the music rights, too. Just about the only thing missing is Donovan.

View image Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger).

Do you have to know about, or have lived through, the life and legend of Dylan to “get” this film? I don’t know. I don’t think so, but you’ll certainly understand it on more levels if you’ve seen the Pennebaker, Dylan & Sam Shepard, Scorsese, Peckinpah, Godard, Lester, Fellini, et al. movies mentioned above. And if you know at least some of the music, and something about the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene and the war in Vietnam and the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in protest and Joan Baez (and “Diamonds and Rust”) and Sara and Swinging London and the Beats and Albert Goldman and The Hawks (and The Band) and The Basement Tapes and the Rolling Thunder Revue and “Tarantula” and Columbia Records and the motorcycle accident and the “electric” debut at the Newport Folk Festival and the so-called “Royal Albert Hall” concert in 1966 (“Judas!” “I don’t believe you…”) which actually took place at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall (just another part of the legend) and Elvis Presley movies and James Dean movies Marlon Brando movies and Montgomery Clift movies… and so on.

View image Jude Quinn (Almighty).

I was a senior in high school when “Blood on the Tracks” came out and utterly changed my life (not the first time Dylan would do that for me), so although most of ’60s Dylan predated my awareness of his actual records (we sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” in my fourth grade homeroom, with Miss Kwinsland on ukelele, but I didn’t know it was a Dylan song; we sang Woody Guthrie tunes, too), I absorbed a lot of this stuff simply by being a young American with an interest in politics and art and pop culture. But do you have to be familiar with all of this in order to appreciate “I’m Not There”? I don’t think so. (But consider this: Bruce Greenwood plays Quinn’s BBC interviewer/adversary, Mr. Jones, and Pat Garrett.)

A Dylanophile friend was asked if he was in “Dylan heaven” after the film. He thought for a moment and then said, “Yeah. I guess I am.” I don’t know about that. But I’m at least knockin’ on heaven’s door.

That’s all I’ll say for now, because I’m salivating over the prospect of seeing and writing about this movie in more detail later….

Oh, just one other thing. I’ve talked to five or six people who, unprovoked, described exactly the same response to different moments in the movie. But they all involved having the experience of consciously thinking: “I am in love with Cate Blanchett.”

The Great(ness) Debate:Flesh, blood, Day-Lewis (and Oscar)

Jim Emerson

View image “… with these… people!

(Consider this a parallel addition to thread of reader comments in the post below: Big Acting, Best and Worst: Over the top, Ma!)

Kathleen Murphy and I try to drill down to the bottom of Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There will Be Blood” in a “Point/Counterpoint” exchange at MSN Movies. For me, it was almost like a therapy session, forcing me to confront my deep ambivalence about Day-Lewis as an actor and my admiration-disappointment response to Anderson’s film. (Overall, I don’t feel strongly enough in either direction to characterize it as a “love-hate” relationship. I have reservations, but there’s no question it’s a “must-see.”)

Kathleen’s reading of the film is just magnificent. I don’t share it, but I that doesn’t prevent me from loving and appreciating it, and she makes her case most eloquently. Here’s a sample of our back-and-forth:

Kathleen Murphy: Like the dissonant sounds and music that thrum through so many scenes in the movie, Plainview operates against the grain of mundane, familiar humanity — and Day-Lewis plays him like fingernails on a chalkboard. A quintessentially American confidence artist, Plainview’s a dynamo that runs hotter and faster than any flesh-and-blood metabolism. Day-Lewis isn’t acting a human being at all, but a force, a power, ultimately a blight that haunts America still.

Critics better love The Dark Knight — or else!

Jim Emerson

Success is no longer its own reward. At least not according to some partisans of “The Dark Knight.” Fame, critical approbation, unimaginable riches, pop-cultural impact — they are inadequate achievements. The picture must be showered with year-end awards consistent with the all-consuming Batmania of last July, no matter what else was released in 2008. Dammit.

Alarmed by what he deems insufficient obeisance to director Christopher Nolan’s movie in annual honors announced so far (LA & NY crix, Golden Globules), Josh Tyler at CinemaBlend has been moved to issue movie critics an ultimatum: “Ignore ‘The Dark Knight’ at your peril.” Actually, he issues several ultimata, in various forms, including this one, vague but menacing:

In any year, but especially in this, a particularly weak year, there’s nothing out there which compares to “The Dark Knight.” It must transcend your petty big box office biases since it has already changed the way we think about movies forever. It’s more than the best movie of the year, it’s one of the best movies ever made. Snub it and there will be consequences.

Yikes. So much for the integrity and diversity of critical discussion — but what might those consequences be? Perhaps… death?!?!

War Is Over (If You Want It)

Jim Emerson

WARNING: Adolf Hitler uses objectionable language, above.

This YouTube clip puts the whole HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray thing in perspective, all right. From press reports you may have gathered that the competition for an HD standard on little plastic discs (remember CDs? CD-ROMs? DVDs?) was a fight to determine the future. It still seems to me — and most consumers, apparently — that it’s a case of refighting the last war. Or several wars before that.

As of last fall, somewhere between 13.7% (Nielsen) and 36% (Consumer Electronics Association) of American households were estimated to have “tuners capable of receiving HDTV signals” — and somewhere between 40%-60% of those are “still being fed exclusively with standard-definition content” (from the trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable, October 30, 2007).

The revised deadline for switching all over-air television broadcasting from analog to digital is February 17, 2009 (it had originally been in 2006). But that’s not HDTV, it’s just a digital signal. It doesn’t apply to cable (although many cable systems are now all-digital, as are satellite services like DirecTV and DishNetwork). All TVs sold since March, 2007, have to be digital-capable, and older TVs can be upgraded with the addition of an add-on digital tuner.

According to Nielsen, DVD players, which were introduced 11 years ago (1997), finally surpassed VHS players in US households… a little over one year ago, in the third quarter of 2006. And DVD (its path to acceptance having been prepared for by CDs) is one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history.

So, how compelling is the incentive for upgrading to a high-definition DVD technology, requiring new players (or player-recorders) and new discs? Most consumers can’t get the benefits of it yet, and most people with HD televisions (especially the majority with sets less than 50 inches wide — 42-inch models being the most popular) don’t think the quality improvements between standard DVD and HD-DVD or Blu-Ray are all that significant, especially if they already use regular players that upconvert to 720 or 1080 resolutions (though not to true HD).

By the time high-definition television (even at the current standards) is widely accepted, will we still be relying on plastic discs — that have to be physically transported, whether bought or borrowed — to deliver the “content”? How sad if that proved to be the case.

Meanwhile, congratulations Blu-Ray. Perhaps you are not the Betamax of 2008. But you are the CD-ROM of tomorrow.

(tip: Jeff Shannon)(thanks to Kristin Thompson for the new link!)

He’s putting the Ebert in Ebertfest!

Jim Emerson

View image Roger bounces back. (Photo by Dom Najolia/Chicago Sun-Times)

THIS is the Roger Ebert I know and love! Read the full piece on RogerEbert.com:

Message from Roger Ebert on the eve of the 9th Overlooked Film Festival (aka Ebertfest):

My Ninth Annual Film Festival opens Wednesday night at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and Chaz and I will be in attendance. This year I won’t be speaking, however, as I await another surgery.

I have received a lot of advice that I should not attend the Festival. I’m told that paparazzi will take unflattering pictures, people will be unkind, etc. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. As a journalist I can take it as well as dish it out.

So let’s talk turkey. What will I look like? To paraphrase a line from “Raging Bull,” I ain’t a pretty boy no more. (Not that I ever was. The original appeal of Siskel & Ebert was that we didn’t look like we belonged on TV.)

What happened was, cancer of the salivary gland spread to my right lower jaw. A segment of the mandible was removed. Two operations to replace the missing segment were unsuccessful, both leading to unanticipated bleeding.

A tracheostomy was necessary so, for the time being, I cannot speak. I make do with written notes and a lot of hand waving and eye-rolling. The doctors now plan an approach that does not involve the risk of unplanned bleeding. If all goes well, my speech will be restored.

So when I turn up in Urbana, I will be wearing a gauze bandage around my neck, and my mouth will be seen to droop. So it goes.

I was told photos of me in this condition would attract the gossip papers. So what? I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers….

Taste into theory

Jim Emerson

“It’s film-tastic!”

A warm-up for this weekend’s Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon — from Manohla Dargis’s piece on the Film Comment Selects series, in today’s New York Times:

Film criticism, as it has been observed, is the rationalization of taste into theory. No matter how involved the argument, writing about the movies almost always comes down to a question of personal taste, to that web of influence through which we filter each new film. In this respect there are no good or bad movies, just good and bad arguments, a thought that serves as a useful introduction to the latest edition of “Film Comment Selects,” a giddily idiosyncratic annual series that could only have sprung from feverishly partisan minds. […]

For serious critics, and the critics who write for Film Comment are nothing if not serious (and at times self-serious), the second-best thing to perfection is often the near-miss, the disreputable and even the despised. Next to discovering a new director, planting a flag in an uncharted national cinema or sitting next to Zooey Deschanel at an event, few things please a critic more than polishing a tarnished career or taking on a dubious cause, particularly if everyone else really hated it.

Prescient words of wisdom from Cary Grant

Jim Emerson

“When I find myself in a position like this, I ask myself: ‘What would General Motors do?’ And then I do the opposite!”

— Johnny Case (Cary Grant) in “Holiday” (1938). Screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, based on the play by Philip Barry. Directed by George Cukor.

High rollers and lowlifes

Jim Emerson

James Bond (Daniel Craig) in “Casino Royale.” With every move he makes, another chance he takes. Odds are…

What accounts for the movies’ fascination with gambling? That’s a question I mull over in a survey of pictures (from “Gilda” to “Barry Lyndon” to “Casino” to “California Split” to “The Cooler”) about the addictive alchemy of luck, chance, fate and skill at MSN Movies. Making a movie is itself a grand gamble. You never know how it’s going to turn out, and the results have as much to do with circumstance as they do with talent or craftsmanship. An excerpt from “High Rollers”:

Gambling does not rank among the “seven deadly sins.” It doesn’t have to. Just about all the capital vices can be found in the psyche of the gambler, and not just in the usual suspects, greed and envy. There’s also plenty of room for gluttony (overindulgence, addiction, substance abuse); wrath (rage, vindictiveness); sloth (indifference, jadedness, existential apathy); lust (licentiousness, dissolution); and, the deadliest of all sins: pride (hubris, arrogance, usually expressed in the form of cheating, or a misplaced belief in a dubious “system” designed to beat the odds).

The grandest “Casino Royale” — the ultimate gamble — is, of course, the game of life itself: a series of cosmic wagers in which the stakes vary wildly from day to day, bet to bet. Some people seem to go “all in” all the time, some ante up just enough to get them through each hand they’re dealt, and others are perpetual folders who try to opt out of the game entirely in order to avoid risking too much.

But since the time of Oedipus the central question has always been: How much of the outcome is governed by free will and how much by predestination? The answer depends on the (rigged?) nature of the game you’re playing, and whether the winners and losers are predetermined, either by some higher interventionist power (appeased by superstitious rites, such as blowing on dice or disingenuously proclaiming the need for new footwear for one’s tot), or by a simple calculation of the odds that invariably favor “the house.”

Although one can only play the hand one is dealt, a poker or blackjack player retains a small degree of influence over his fate, as some game variables are subject to decision-making based on statistical knowledge and experience. Those who gamble on a roll of the dice or a spin of the wheel, however, rely on pure chance. Or, as it is known in gaming circles, “luck.”

The odds of winning are never better than 50-50 (red or black in roulette), which is why most gambling stories — and gambling movies — are either about chance, or about cheating. As in the 1946 classic film noir, “Gilda,” with Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth, these tales are of the men and women who learn to “make their own luck.”

The only way to increase your luck without trickery is with skill — by learning to read the odds based on the cards that have already been played, or by learning to read the people who play them. In Curtis Hanson’s new “Lucky You,” hot-headed poker player Huck Cheever (Eric Bana) has to learn how to do both if he wants to woo songstress Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore). As his father, L.C. (Robert Duvall), tells him: “You’ve got it backwards, kid. You play cards the way you should live life, and you live life the way you should play cards.”

That’s the lesson movie gamblers are always trying to learn. Everybody has a “tell” — a little unconscious tic that reveals when they’re bluffing. In David Mamet’s “House of Games,” renowned psychoanalyst Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) thinks she understands human behavior until she is schooled by Mike (Joe Mantegna) in the ways of gamblers and con men who avoid being understood. The big gamble comes down to a matter of pride — and the skill and intuition to fool the other players.

In the most recent “Casino Royale” film, the hubris of James Bond (Daniel Craig) costs him a high stakes game, and nearly costs him his life. Every scene in the movie involves a bet, a bluff, or a calculated risk. Whether the game is espionage, romance, the stock market, or poker, the rules are basically the same: Outwit, outplay and outlast your opponents….

Continue reading at MSN Movies…

Chaos reigns: Out-foxing Fox

Jim Emerson

Here’s a wickedly perceptive analysis from John Scalzi at Whatever about how the Obama administration is playing Fox News. Scalzi says that the White House is “delighted” that Fox has skewed so far to the right, and knows that by calling out the network as an ideological outlet rather than a news organization, Fox will only spin furiously, even further out into fringe territory — solidifying its base (in the Palin sense) and alienating even more of the mainstream audience:

Fox News isn’t the number one cable news channel because it has a broad spectrum of viewers or because the quality of its news reportage is better than those of other cable news networks or organizations. It’s the number one cable news network because it’s explicitly conservative in viewpoint where other news networks and organizations are not. Fox News garners the viewers for whom ideology trumps news; every other news organization splits the rest of the viewers. […]

Or to put it otherwise, 2.5 million Americans watch Fox News [roughly the same as an average episode of Fox’s just-cancelled recently truncated “Dollhouse”], which means that 297.5 million Americans don’t.

Two quibbles: A more meaningful comparison might be to the (shrinking) number of people who get their news from TV, rather than to the total population. And, again, I would argue that Fox is not principally or uniformly “conservative.” There are plenty of traditional American conservatives who have no respect for Fox’s lowbrow pandering, but those kinds of conservatives have been marginalized by the talk-radio mentality that Fox promotes. “Reactionary” is a better term for Fox’s style and content. The channel’s figureheads don’t pretend to unite behind one coherent political philosophy. There are dabs of libertarianism, neoconservatism, partisan Republicanism, paranoid Know-Nothingism, Evangelical Protestantism — all reflecting a general attitude that’s anti-liberal and anti-moderate, but not necessarily coherently conservative.

Nevertheless, Scalzi explains how he thinks the game will play out:

Opening Shots: ‘Repo Man’

Jim Emerson

View image

From Schuyler Chapman:

Down a desert road the car ambles erratically, while the motorcycle-cop watches from the far side of the road. Lapsing, perhaps, four seconds and consisting of a 180-degree pan that follows the car as it heads toward and passes the camera and police officer, it’s not a terribly long shot — but it perfectly encapsulates the film, “Repo Man,” that follows.

View image

A synthesized sound and clanging industrial rhythm accompany the automobile’s desultory progress. The music that scores the first shot, like the jagged, punk rock guitar played over the credits, creates a sense of dread — an undercurrent of menace — that complements the bizarre Chevy Malibu. Music is integral to this scene (and the movie), establishing a sense of tension that might have been otherwise lost. Listen to the thrumming electronics and the rhythm vaguely reminiscent of heartbeats. This atmospheric touch tells us that something’s not right. This auto is not swerving as the result of an intoxicated driver — or rather the result of a driver intoxicated by the typical substances — it’s the result of something unknown and alien.

View image

The audience is set up for the film that follows: a surreal and slightly sinister chase for an old Chevy. Another aspect of the shot clinches it for “Repo Man” offering one of the best and most appropriate cinematic openings: the movement of the car itself. How have I described its motion? Desultory, erratic — I should also add forward. Like the story that tracks its movements, the Malibu wanders hither and thither but maintains general forward momentum toward some discernible end. There will be slight detours but they never take us far off course and, frankly, make the narrative a more “scenic” trip.

The Coen ideology

Jim Emerson

View image

Here’s a sampling of various political/ideological (and generic) readings of Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country For Old Men.” This just gets more and more fascinating to me — probably because I would not emphasize such an approach to the movie myself. (Not that all the following do, either.) I’m frustrated that, before I can write about “No Country” again with a fresh memory, I have to wait another week for it to open in Seattle. For now, a critical debate/montage from multiple perspectives — those who love it and hate it and have mixed feelings:

The mechanics of “No Country for Old Men” recall those of a vintage film noir, and in that respect, the movie is brilliantly executed, as gripping and mordantly funny a treatise on the corrosive power of greed as “The Killing” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” were before it. […]

View image Malcolm McDowell in Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 critique of capitalism, “O Lucky Man!”

It’s easy to imagine how the Coens, whose Achilles’ heel has always been their predilection for smug irony and easy caricature, might have turned McCarthy’s taciturn Texans into simplistic Western-mythos archetypes — the amoral criminal, the righteous peacekeeper, and the naive but basically goodhearted rube in over his head. Instead, they’ve made a film of great, enveloping gravitas, in which words like “hero” and “villain” carry ever less weight the deeper we follow the characters into their desperate journeys. Like McCarthy, the Coens are markedly less interested in who (if anyone) gets away with the loot than in the primal forces that urge the characters forward. “They slaughter cattle a lot different these days,” sighs a weary Bell late in the film. But slaughter them they still do, and in the end, everyone in “No Country for Old Men” is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction.– Scott Foundas, LA Weekly

… [T]he Coens have made a crime movie that seems quietly aghast at the likelihood of death and menace occurring on American soil. Unlike “American Gangster”’s sensationalized crap, this is a crime movie/western exercise that contemporizes the miasma of a world at war. […]

Coen artistry heightens our level of perception. They reveal the first murder with an astonishing image of shoe sole scuff marks on a jail floor that looks as avant-garde as a Jackson Pollack painting—a harbinger of modern chaos that puts post-9/11 terror in artistic focus. But not sentimentally. When Sheriff Bell expresses existential fatigue, the sorrow he vouchsafes to his father is actually spoken to himself (thus to us in the audience). And still, the Coens contextualize: Bell is brought to reality when his father tells him, “What you got ain’t new. Can’t stop what’s coming. Ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.” The Coens make that wisdom mythical and all encompassing—from Vietnam to 9/11 to Iraq and to the Texas homeland.– Armond White, New York Press

(headline: “A crime movie for a world at war”)

The most rewarding thing about “No Country” is the way in which its narrative is set up as a singularly unstoppable force, a shark constantly moving forward (every scene seems to have a goal, every frame initially gives off the impression of tightly relaying crucial plot information), only to allow itself to purposefully break down, both in terms of resolution and traditional narrative payoffs. What initially seems perfectly calibrated and dazzlingly “efficient” is finally revealed as a false comfort: the film’s trio of sad characters will probably never be able to emerge from its shadows. The trail of bloodshed that occurs in the wake of the film’s central crime feels increasingly less like whiz-bang noir pastiche and more like the final actions of a nation in irrevocable moral decline.– Michael Koresky, IndieWIRE

On the face of it, “No Country for Old Men” doesn’t need to be set in 1980. […] It could be taking place anytime in the past 40 years, really.

By locating the action in the year of Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the presidency, though, “No Country” stands at the pivot of the Old West and the New Avarice, a point in time when the last vestiges of frontier morality have been washed away by a pitiless modern crime wave fueled by drug profits.– Ty Burr, Boston Globe

The story takes place in 1980, but cut out the cars and the drugs and we could be in 1880—look at Bell and his deputy, saddling up to scour the crime scene. (“You can’t help but compare yourself against the old timers,” Bell confides to us, in voice-over.) Indeed, the characters’ rapport with the soil is more reliable, in its grounded primitivism, than their relations with one another, and the Coens certainly honor the novelist’s abiding preference for the mythical over the modern.– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

Borat: For Make Milgram Experiment

Jim Emerson

Your typical Cannes bathing beauties.

Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen, currently appearing as Jean Girard in “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”) has a movie coming out in November with a title as good as “Ricky Bobby.” It’s called “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” and people who have seen it are raving about how subersively smart and revealingly funny it is.

Cohen and his characters (particularly hip-hop dimwit Ali G) are huge in Great Britain, and Naomi Alderman has an analysis of what makes Borat run in the UK Guardian:

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest film is due for release in November, but the storm of protest has started early. Already the film, in which Borat, a fictional Kazakh reporter, spits out food given to him by Jews on the ground it may be poisoned, and refuses to fly “in case the Jews repeat their attacks of 9/11”, has been called “disgraceful” and “disgusting”.

I first encountered the character of Borat in a clip from his HBO TV show which has circulated widely on the internet. Baron Cohen, as Borat, stands in front of an audience at a redneck bar in Arizona and announces that he will sing “a song from my country”. He then sings, “In my country there is problem, and that problem is the Jew. They take everybody money and they never give it back.” The chorus is particularly catchy: “Throw the Jew down the well (so my country can be free).” [Clip and lyrics here.]

I am a Jew. I’ve written about my community in a way that is critical but none the less, I hope, affectionate. I love the Jewish community with all its flaws and insecurities. And I think that Borat’s song may be the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life. It is funny because it is ridiculous, because it parodies the most stupid kinds of anti-semitism, because the viewer is in on the joke. And, like the best humour, it is funny because it is viscerally, nauseatingly terrifying. It contains images every bit as unsettling as Leni Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will.” It is funny because it is true….

The reason it is unsettling to hear Borat sing “Throw the Jew down the well” is because of the reaction of those listening. Some sit in mute astonishment and horror. But some join in. Some sing along, smile and stamp their feet. One woman even – unprompted, mind you – puts her fingers to her forehead to make horns when he sings, “You must take [the Jew] by his horns.” Borat is unsettling not because his opinions are outlandish but because he reveals how many ordinary people share them….

Borat is shocking because we cannot help but imagine ourselves in the place of his hapless victims and because we understand – though not, perhaps, consciously – that we might have acted precisely as they did. We too might have remained silent when Borat suggested “hanging” homosexuals, or nodded politedly at the suggestion that a Humvee is suitable for “running over Gypsies.” Not because we fear for our lives if we disagree but, perhaps, to avoid embarrassment. Borat is funny because he is shocking, and he is shocking because he reveals the truth.

After watching the clip, I’m not so sure that at least some of the people in the crowd weren’t in on the joke — particularly the lady who makes the horns, because she seems aware she’s on camera and has evidently decided to play along. Complete “Throw the Jew Down the Well” lyrics after jump…

Griffin Mill and ‘The Return of the Player’

Jim Emerson

He’s baaaaack. And he’s miserable.

Michael Tolkin, who wrote the novel and screenplay on which Robert Altman’s “The Player” was based, has published a sequel in which studio executive Griffin Mill, now 52, is trying to get out of Hollywood. Tolkin has this to say about the state of movies, in a New York Times interview:

“The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t,��? he said. “Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what they were will never return.��?

The source of all this creative- industrial- complex angst is the death of what he both eulogizes and parodies: the classic journey-of-the-hero story structure, analyzed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940’s, popularized a generation ago by George Lucas through “Star Wars,��? spouted and shorthanded by studio executives ever since, and all but trampled to death, Mr. Tolkin said, by nearly every subsequent action movie and thriller that Hollywood has turned out.

Or as Griffin puts it: “Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome and Hollywood cracked the story.��?

What he’s talking about, of course, is the ubiquity of screenwriting guru Robert McKee’s story structure techniques, satirized in “Adaptation.” with Brian Cox playing McKee.