Scanners

Another Year: Passing judgment

Jim Emerson

One of the great accomplishments of Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” — and perhaps an essential reason for its existence — is to test the audience’s judgments and perceptions of the characters. It’s rare that you find such a wide range of interpretations about what is actually going on in a movie. Take a look at some of these reactions, from the insightful to the blind. But which, do you think, is which?

“Tom [Jim Broadbent] and Gerri [Ruth Sheen] are cheery, comfortable old lefties who’ve understood that they’re not in a position to change the world anymore, and have gotten to be fine with that — there’s a correlation between this picture and Leigh’s 1988 ‘High Hopes, in which a younger (obviously), punkier, leather-jacketed Sheen played one half of far a more agitated couple in Thatcherite Britain. As for Mary [Leslie Manville], her life is one (largely invented) turmoil after another, and the couple’s dealings with her frantic plaints eventually get the viewer to wondering whether these nice, settled folks are really all that nice. Mary is very clearly an alcoholic. But the A-word is never once dropped in the film. And Gerri, who’s a therapist herself, never even suggests counseling, or a support group, to Mary until an almost cruel hammer-dropping scene near the film’s end. Tom and Gerri are so very polite, so very indulgent, so very correct in all their dealings, all the while dispensing conventional left-liberal wisdom spiked with conventional complacent cynicism whenever contemplating a crisis, be it global or local. But it’s clear that all the while, they’re stifling their own strong feelings of put-upon-ness and resentment. As much as you like them — and maybe you won’t like them, (that’s one of the things about Leigh’s films and their characters, they’re so unusually and thoroughly textured that they never seem designed to elicit a simple response) — you have to wonder if they’re so besotted by their own comfort and contentment that they can’t help but act as passive-aggressive near-monsters to the people they’re supposedly close to.

“As Tom and Gerri are laid bare (or are they? That’s another thing about Leigh, that he never appears himself to be making any kind of overt judgments on his characters, or even preparing any kind of melodramatic reveal of their hidden natures) the film brims with uncomfortable little touches.” — Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies

ICUN4D: Two-eye-witness report from Korea on 4-D Avatar

Jim Emerson

Many thanks to Seano in Seoul for this report:

I went to see it yesterday (that’s why I was searching for some info on it). Anyway saw it at the theatre in TimesSquare CGV, the screen and cinema is average size with the seats in 4 seater units in 3 columns with about 10 rows. Ticket price is W18,000 (about $16). The experience definitely enhances the 3D and is more than just a gimmick, though there is room for improvement.

The motion effects include the 4 seater unit pitching and yawing along with the expected vibrating and dropping, so in the flight scenes the seats are swaying and leaning with the helicopters and those reptile birds and obviously shaking you about with every explosion. There are individual effects on each seat with a automated brush at ankle level that spins across your legs and a kicker in the back of that feels like the person behind you is kicking your seat when activated.

Baby Dren’s First Photo Album

Jim Emerson

If you haven’t seen the family’s home movies of Dren — now in theaters under the title “Splice” — you might not want to leaf through the album just yet…

She was cute from the moment she poked her little head out…

The real Halloween

Jim Emerson

By that, of course, I mean the John Carpenter film. Seattle-based Parallax View has begun performing, under the editorship of Sean Axmaker, an invaluable service to film scholarship: publishing the entire back catalog of Movietone News on the web. That great publication, edited through the 1970s and into the 1980s by Richard T. Jameson before he topped the masthead of Film Comment for the duration of the 1990s, was proclaimed “The best publication on film in the English language” by Molly Haskell.

All of which brings us back to the Days of the Dead in which we are currently living (and dying), and Jameson’s review of the anamorphically photographed 1978 Carpenter movie that redefined the holiday, and horror filmmaking, for the next generation. RTJ plunges straight into the heart of the matter in his opening paragraphs (originally published in the February 1979 issue of MTN:

A thing that bugs me about the vast majority of contemporary films is, they rarely give the feeling anyone cared much about framing them. The movement away from studio (i.e., factory) filmmaking has had a lot to do with this. Advancements in film speed, equipment mobility, and other such factors that ought to have been unqualifiedly liberating have had the counterproductive effect of encouraging slovenliness rather than responsible flexibility. A movie can get made anywhere now, one place is as good (i.e., workable) as another–and somehow that extends to frame-space as a “place” too. Throw in careless labwork (we waved byebye to real Technicolor several years ago) and you’ve got smeary colors and big, fuzzy grain to help reduce definition, and definitiveness of vision. It’s hard to maintain faith that a given movie had to look the way it does, because it could just as well have looked, well, a little different.

The Return of the Son of the Opening Shots Project, Part 2

Jim Emerson

Nearly five years ago (June 16, 2006), I announced what I called the Movies 101: Opening Shots Project, and I figure it’s past time for a re-launch. I want to elaborate a little on what I wrote back then, when I started off with the opening title/shot of Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon”:

Any good movie — heck, even the occasional bad one — teaches you how to watch it. And that lesson usually starts with the very first image. I’m not talking necessarily about titles or opening sequences (they’re worth discussing, too — but that’s another article); I’m talking about opening shots. As those who have been reading Scanners (and my Editor’s Notes on RogerEbert.com) know, two of my cardinal rules for movie-watching are:

1) The movie is about what happens to you while you watch it. So, pay attention — to both the movie and your response. If you have reactions to, or questions about, what you’re seeing, chances are they’ll tell you something about what the movie is doing. Be aware of your questions, emotions, apprehensions, expectations.

LA & NY crix love The Social Network and Carlos

Jim Emerson

According to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle, the two best films of 2010 are David Fincher’s “The Social Network” and Olivier Assayas’s “Carlos.” I’ve no quarrel with that. In fact, those two movies are at the top of a list I made for a critics’ poll that will be published any day now because they’re both masterful, multi-layered works that I found as stimulating to think about as they are engrossing to watch. Both the LA and NY groups chose “The Social Network” as best picture and “Carlos” as best (and most) foreign-language film — all five and a half hours and 11 languages: English, French, German, Spanish (with a Venezuelan accent), various dialects of Arabic, Russian, Hungarian, Italian… LAFCA left no doubt about its esteem for both movies, with “Carlos” coming in as first runner-up for best picture and Fincher and Assayas sharing the director’s prize. (Both groups also gave “Black Swan” their best cinematography prizes.)

Complete lists of the winners are below, but I wanted to take this opportunity to make some comparisons between these two movies. No, I don’t think either of them has much to do with “realism,” but both build their disputed nonfictional narrative webs around rather opaque, fictionalized central characters who are seen as heroes by some, villains by others, and neither by the movies themselves. Both “Carlos” (the revolutionary alias of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, played by Edgar Ramirez) and “Mark Zuckerberg” (the Facebook founder played by Jesse Eisenberg) are projections — like profiles compiled by intelligence agencies or… Facebook pages. Either film could begin with a version of these words, which preface each of the three parts of “Carlos”:

This film is the result of historical and journalistic research.

Because of controversial gray areas in Carlos’ life, the film must be viewed as fiction, tracing two decades in the life of a notorious terrorist.

His relations with other characters have been fictionalized as well.

The three murders on Rue Toulier are the only events depicted in this film for which Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was tried and sentenced.

The Drugstore Publicis bombing is still under investigation.

The Master: Who are you?

Jim Emerson

I apologize for the lack of postings the last few weeks. A recent flare-up of heart problems left me with little energy to write. But as the emaciated old man in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” says: “I’m feeling much better!”

At one point well into Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” I thought that the movie was going to reveal itself as a story about the meaninglessness of human existence. But that notion was based on a single piece of aphoristic, potential-thesis-statement dialog that, like much else, wasn’t developed in the rest of the movie. Which is not to say that “The Master” isn’t about the meaninglessness of human life. The line, spoken by Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the cult guru known to his acolytes as Master, is addressed to the younger man he considers his “protégé,” a dissolute mentally ill drifter named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), and the gist of it is that the itinerant Freddie has as much to show for his life as somebody who has worked a regular 9-to-5 job for many years. The point being, I suppose, that for all Freddie’s adventures, peculiarities and failures, he isn’t all that much different from anybody else. Except, maybe, he’s more effed-up.

(spoilers)

When smart people say stupid things

Jim Emerson

Robert Siegel was interviewing Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and now chief product officer for an Internet “taste-profiling” service called Hunch.com, on NPR’s “All Things Considered” the other day. It’s a software-driven inference engine of the sort you see all over the web these days that provides you with “if you like this, then we suggest you’ll like this” recommendations. Netflix has one, Amazon has one, iTunes’ relatively new “Genius” feature is one.

A Serious Man: Kafka in Minneapolis

Jim Emerson

“We’re Jews. We have that well of tradition to draw on, to help us understand. When we’re puzzled we have all the stories that have been handed down from people who had the same problems.”

— Mimi

“Mere surmise, sir.”

— Clive

Larry Gopnik didn’t do anything. In the whole movie he doesn’t do anything. Not much of anything, anyway. He just wants to understand what is happening to him. So, every time he protests that he didn’t do anything, he’s really asking a related question: “What did I do to deserve this?” Joel and Ethan Coen’s “A Serious Man” is an x-ray of Larry’s life, but even the title doesn’t respect him. It’s a reference to another man, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who is passive-aggressively taking over Larry’s wife life. To add insult to injury, it seems to be a fait accompli — just came at Larry out of the blue. And Larry, remember, hasn’t done anything.

Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) lives in a Minneapolis suburb, circa 1967-70 (between “Surrealistic Pillow” and “Santana Abraxas”). It is a flat world without curbs, without fences, without boundaries. The streets and the lawns and the houses all kind of run together, and it’s hard to tell which is which. His neighbor’s mowing crosses the invisible property line, infringing on Larry’s grass. The TV antenna on the roof picks up all kinds of things out of the air, but “F-Troop” is not coming in clearly on channel 4. And Larry himself is becoming indistinct, as if he were breaking up and fuzzing out like the television picture.