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TIFF: Matters of Life and Death

Jim Emerson

View image Three tales in “The Fountain”: Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.

There’s nothing tepid about Darren Aronofsky, and I love him for it. “The Fountain,” his grand mythical fantasy that interweaves three tales about the fear of death and the quest for eternal life, is a terrifically ambitious spectacle that Aronofsky commits to completely. I have no idea how critics and audiences are going to receive it (I never do), but it’s exhilarating to see somebody go this far out on a limb for his vision.

Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz appear as versions of the same characters in all three narratives. Dr. Tommy Creo is research doctor studying brain tumors while his wife Izzy (or “Iz,” as in “is”) is dying of one; as Spanish conquistador Tomas Creo, serving Queen Isabella during the 16th century terror of the Inquisition, who is sent on a quest for the Tree of Life in a story called “The Fountain,” written by Izzy; and as some kind of monk/space traveller hurling toward a nebula with the ancient tree in what looks like an interstellar snowglobe, haunted by the ghost of Izzy.

Film noir: Carved in black & white

Jim Emerson

View image Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat.” A film noir woodcut by Guy Budziak.

“The term itself is vague. For German Expressionism was less a unified style than an attitude, a state of mind.”

-Horst Uhr, introduction, “Masterpieces of German Expressionism” (1982)

“Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film ‘noir’, as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.”

-Paul Schrader, ‘Notes on Film Noir’ (1972)

Guy Budziak makes film noir woodcuts in high-contrast black and white. He tops the “Roots of Film Noir Prints” section of his web site with the quotes from Uhr and Schrader above. I’m assuming Guy Budziak is the artist’s real name, but even if it isn’t, it’s an appropriately noirish moniker. And he knows his stuff. Budziak writes: “My woodcuts reach back to the very earliest origins of film noir, insofar as it was the woodcut that most accurately conveyed the German Expressionist sensibility.”

His love of noir is rooted in his love of black and white:

What’s interesting about black and white as opposed to color is this: color more accurately depicts what we all see in visual reality. The same cannot be said of black and white, of course. So in a sense everything filmed in black and white is unreal, or perhaps can be construed as an alternative reality, but not one that we experience naturally.See Budziak’s gallery of prints, from such films as “Nightmare Alley,” “Touch of Evil,” “Out of the Past,” “Ossessione,” “Le Samourai” (a color noir!) at “Film Noir: Woodcuts by Guy Budziak.”

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Jim Emerson

View image This is not Bresson’s pipe!

I’m always intrigued when critics and academics try to characterize themselves — or the appeal of something they like — primarily in opposition to something else that they don’t like. Or vice-versa. I’m not just talking about contrarianism but, specifically, about attempts to define or justify something not by what it is, but by how it allegedly does not resemble another thing. Like Jonathan Rosenbaum recently did with his pantheon-gate-slamming, anti-Bergman piece (e.g., “His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson…”), or Prof. Ray Carney in his intro/promo for a series of independent films that flew “under the radar” at the Harvard Film Archive. Tell me what you think of Carney’s “Now how much would you pay?” sales pitch:

If we ask why many of these works are still lurking in the shadows or searching for a distributor, the reasons are not that hard to come up with. These films do not push dependable box–office ticket–sales buttons. Their characters are not “cute,” “charming,” or “sweet” in the “Napoleon Dynamite” way. Their stories are not “clever,” “crowd–pleasing,” or “feel–good” in the “Little Miss Sunshine” way. They do not feature big–name actors making “in–joke” cameos. Though most of these films are made by Gen–Y artists about Gen–Y characters, they don’t even fit the pattern of Gen–Y movies. Their male characters are not introverted and narcissistic; their female characters are not whiney or clingy; and their narratives are not reducible to the group–hug ethos that says everything will be OK if only you have friends. The films in this program do not pander to the prejudices or predilections of young viewers or attempt to flatter audience members of any age. They take the pulse of contemporary American life toughly and unsentimentally. They challenge the viewer to look at experience in new and potentially disorienting ways and, at their best, ask the viewer to think freshly about the untapped expressive possibilities of the art.It seems to me that this exclusive hard-sell approach shamelessly panders to the prejudices and predilections of young viewers and attempts to flatter audience members of all ages.

At what point do critics turn into fashionistas, more concerned with dictating today’s styles or appealing to hipper/holier-than-thou posers than addressing the movies themselves? To me, this seems like such an adolescent approach: “Yeah, man! Disco sucks!” We all do it on occasion, but some rants are more effective than others.

There’s a terrific discussion at The House Next Door about Carney and his complaints about the lack of mainstream media coverage (greatly exaggerated by Carney) for the series he cannily sold as anti-mainstream. (What did the filmmakers themselves think of that approach?) I don’t know how well Carney’s laboriously insular sales pitch actually worked, selling exclusively to a crowd that wants to flatter itself as anti-mainstream and elite (or elitist). But for me Carney’s prose (perhaps especially his patronizing use of the term “Gen-Y,” which in his hands sounds more than ever like a personal lubricant) destroys any credibility he might have as someone capable of understanding what makes an interesting movie. All I know is what he dislikes about commercial and Sundance-indie stuff, which is pretty much the same crap we’re all sick of. But what does that have to do making a series of “under-the-radar” movies sound appealing? Are these films worth seeing just because they’re NOT “Napoleon Dynamite” or “Little Miss Sunshine”? Wow, what a recommendation.

Does Carney’s approach turn you off as much as it does me? Do so-called “mainstream” anti-intellectualism and Carney’s bitter and equally reactionary anti-anti-intellectualism seem like two sides of a coin?

Practice your Portuguese while peeing in the shower

Jim Emerson

Conserve water. Save the rainforests. A Brazilian public awareness campaign.

Confessions of a lousy critic

Jim Emerson

Ann Powers, the excellent music critic for the LA Times (and once a fellow contributor to Seattle’s semi-legendary The Rocket) posted this link on Facebook, with the following disclaimer:

I hesitate to share this ridiculous dismissal of the field to which I am devoted and about which I am so passionate, but I guess I do so to say, okay, then, perhaps this writer should never approach the subject of music again, because every act of writing about culture involves some kind of critical assessment, and he… is against that process…

She refers to this piece by Steve Almond in the Boston Globe, appearing under the headline “Love music, hold the criticism,” in which Almond recalls securing a paying gig as a know-nothing El Paso newspaper music critic during the “heyday of Hair Metal,” whose “only qualifications… consisted of a willingness to work nights and hit my deadlines”:

My standard template was to start off with a bad pun then proceed to the concert set list, with each song title modified by at least three adjectives. If I was feeling ambitious, I described the lead singer’s hair.

Wretched as I was, I loved being a music critic. I got to feel like a big shot, the one guy whose opinion (no matter how misbegotten) mattered.

But one night, he says, at an MC Hammer show, he had an epiphany:

I dutifully spent the evening scribbling witty insults in my reporter’s notebook. But at a certain point (after I’d fulfilled my quota of witty insults) I turned my attention to the folks all around me. They were enthralled. And what I realized as I gazed at them was this: I was totally missing the point. […]

I’d come up against a concept I’ve since come to think of as the Music Critic Paradox: the simple fact that even the best critics — the ones, unlike me, with actual training and talent — can’t begin to capture what it feels like to listen to music. […]

It was as if my critic credibility depended on my not being fooled into actually enjoying myself.

Arthur C. Clarke: Do aliens dream of anthropomorphic gods?

Jim Emerson

View image Another evolutionary stage.

“I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that’s one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that’s true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?”

— Arthur C. Clarke, in a 1999 interview with Free Inquiry magazine

“I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be interpreted as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”

— Albert Einstein

Edward Rothstein addresses the currently fashionable science vs. religion debate in a New York Times “appraisal” of the late Arthur C. Clarke’s work (“For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically”):

“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral” were the instructions left by Arthur C. Clarke, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90. This may not have surprised anyone who knew that this science-fiction writer, fabulist, fantasist and deep-sea diver had long seen religion as a symptom of humanity’s “infancy,” something to be outgrown and overcome.

But his fervor is still jarring […]

Stanley Kubrick’s film of Mr. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” for example — a project developed with the author — is haunting not for its sci-fi imaginings of artificial intelligence and space-station engineering but for its evocation of humanity’s origins and its vision of a transcendent future embodied in a human fetus poised in space […], a moment of transcendence in which some destiny is fulfilled, some possibility opened up…. a new evolutionary stage, inspiring as much horror as awe.

You can sense where Rothstein is heading when he detects “fervor” in Clarke’s funeral instructions. “Fervor”? Really? Seems to me that Clarke is simply leaving specific instructions about he wants. And why shouldn’t he want his funeral to accurately reflect his beliefs? Rothstein tries a little too hard to create a dialectic between science and faith, claiming that “religion suffuses Mr. Clarke’s realm.” But I think he confuses mystery with mysticism in “2001.”

Opening Shots: ‘Fight Club’

Jim Emerson

View image: From synapses deep inside the brain…

View image

View image: … out through a sweaty pore…

From Robert Humanick, a film odyssey:

I’m not sure if this applies to the “opening shot” rules, in that it is included as part of the opening credits, as well as the fact that it was digitally rendered (some people are picky about such things). But having already read (and agreed with) many of the other submitted choices (particularly “Aguirre,” my personal favorite), I felt this one needed a voice of its own.

“Fight Club” opens from remote darkness into unrestrained chaos, the camera pulling back at near-breakneak speed out of an unknown quarter through various layers of strangely textured substances, the frantic nature compounded by the Dust Brothers’ pulse-techno soundtrack. Ultimately, the microscopic journey reveals itself to have been taking place within the brain of the film’s unnamed main character (Edward Norton). The point-of-view shot exits his body through a pore on his face (a bead of sweat rolling down from it just as the camera retracts from the skin), pulling further back over more differing terrains to ultimately reveal a hazy human figure. Just as the picture comes into focus, revealing the figure to be at the mercy of the film’s quasi-villian (who has a gun shoved mercilessly into his mouth), the recurring voiceover begins: “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.”

Critics: Irrelevant, or just… right?

Jim Emerson

X-Men: Flameout.

Dave Kehr asks:

Now that “The Da Vinci Code��? has fallen another 40 percent (according to today’s New York Times), can we expect all of those trade papers that ran “Film Critics Proved Irrelevant��? stories to come back with “Film Critics Proved, As Usual, To Be Highly Prescient?��?…

I’ve yet to meet a movie critic who thinks that she or he has any real influence on the box office, and if I did, I’d think that he or she was nuts. How can a 500 word movie review, appearing inside a newspaper with a circulation of a few hundred thousand at best, possibly compete with a network television advertising campaign? The ego satisfaction is very low in this line of work, the financial satisfaction even less so. And anyone who enters this field for any reason other than a passion for movies has been profoundly misled.

A critic’s job, obviously, is not to predict box-office success, and as Kehr points out, you can hardly expect reviews to compete with advertising and pre-existing anticipation for movies based on mega-hit books (like “The Da Vinci Code”) or franchise pictures (like “X-Men: The Last Stand,” which plummeted a precipitous 67 percent in its second weekend, “the steepest post-Memorial Day opening drop on record,” according to Box Office Mojo). But critics’ reactions often reflect the word-of-mouth response of people who go to see the film on opening weekend… resulting in a quick die-off the next weekend if the first wave of ticket-buyers didn’t much like what they saw.

What’s in David Lynch’s DVD player?

Jim Emerson

View image The Inland Empire is under that hair.

Sean Axmaker talks to David Lynch about digital video in general, and the new DVD of “Inland Empire” in particular, over at MSN Movies:

You have, of course, never done a commentary track, but the “Stories” section of the “Inland Empire” disc could almost be a stand-alone commentary because you talk about so many things around the film.

I believe talking is OK separate from a thing, but a commentary track that goes along through a film, I think, is maybe the worst possible thing a person could do. From then on, the film is seen in terms of the memory of that commentary and it changes things forever.

You have about 70 minutes of deleted footage in the “More Things That Happened” section and you’ve edited them so they play like their own dreamlike film.

Right. There are things in “More Things That Happened” that give a feeling that could be like a brother or sister to the film. It’s like if you know a family, but you haven’t met the sister yet. You go over to Ohio and meet the sister, and it adds more to the feeling of the whole family.

In the “Stories” section of the “Inland Empire” supplements, you go on a rant about people watching movies on their phones. So how do you feel about the huge explosion of home theater?

I feel great about the home theater. It’s so hopeful. It’s a counterpart to the telephone experience, or the computer screen, but a lot of people are going to see their films on computers and phones and they will think they saw the films, but they will not have seen the film. And that’s a sadness, as I say in “Stories,” that’s a real sadness. It’s very hard to sink into a world when the picture is so small. I hope that the home-theater big screens at home will be something they embrace so they can feel and think in the world — not have all this distraction around it.

I’m waiting for my DVD of “Inland Empire” to arrive. (I almost always watch them at night, with the lights off, on a 55″ Sony LCD projection HDTV with surround sound.)

Even if you haven’t seen Lynch’s latest magnum opus (“Twin Peaks” was similarly big and deep), you can still check out my review, which was written as a sort of “Viewers’ Guide to ‘Inland Empire,'” suggesting various ways of looking at it. A synopsis would be impossible, anyway…

A few more revealing angles on the schoolbus getaway

Jim Emerson

Above, this may be the best view of all: You can see exactly how the camera is mounted for the shot. The set-up is indeed designed to camouflage that there is no actual hole in the “bank wall.” I didn’t know exactly why it was done this way when I originally saw the movie, but I had a hunch. Again: It’s not a debacle, it’s not a Crime Against Cinema, it’s a directorial (or budget) choice. Take it for what it is. Then again, it’s also a failure of imagination. They can do wonders with opticals and CGI these days (see the astonishing, virtually invisible Digital Domain work on “Zodiac”). Watch the “Zodiac” footage. Or build a bigger/deeper add-on set. Why settle for less?

Here you see one full take, and some of the vehicles returning to positions afterward.

After the jump: Better glimpses of the flats used to extend the building and provide the “hole” in the exterior wall of the Gotham bank…

Belatedly, Iron Man

Jim Emerson

View image Action hero with eyelashes.

My review of “Iron Man” is at RogerEbert.com. Here’s an excerpt:

The world needs another comic book movie like it needs another Bush administration, but if we must have one more (and the Evil Marketing Geniuses at Marvel MegaIndustries will do their utmost to ensure that we always will), “Iron Man” is a swell one to have. Not only is it a good comic book movie (smart and stupid, stirring and silly, intimate and spectacular), it’s winning enough to engage even those who’ve never cared much for comic books or the movies they spawn. Like me.

“Iron Man” begins on dangerous ground: in the harsh terrain of Battleground Afghanistan. A convoy of Humvees (inadequately armored, no doubt) speeds through the desert carrying ultra-bazillionaire Death Merchant, and notoriously dissolute playboy, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), scotch in hand, flirting with the female driver.

Right on cue, an IED detonates, the Hummers are ambushed by Taliban-esque fighters, the American soldiers are slaughtered, and Tony is kidnapped. It won’t be the first time that this gaudy piece of summer-movie pulp fiction strays a little too far into bloody Mess o’ Potamian reality for comfort. Is this political commentary of some kind, or just exploitation? Like its hero “Iron Man” takes false steps, stumbles, and even occasionally crashes, yet quickly recovers its footing.

The reason it’s so nimble is that director Jon Favreau (“Elf,” “Zathura”) and his fleet crew of actors grasp the action-fantasy premise and treat it with the looseness and sharpness of improvisational comedy. (Favreau himself has worked out with The Groundlings troupe in Los Angeles from time to time.) It’s difficult to tell how much of what they’re doing is taken directly from the script (credited to four writers, and who knows how many others labored behind the scenes), but even when they’re reciting somber dialog-bubble exposition, they treat it the way an improv actor would: smoothly feeding information into the scene, building a foundation on which everybody can work, and play….

It’s a God! It’s a Man! It’s Super-Jesus!

Jim Emerson

Kal-El descends to Earth in his Super Jesus Christ Pose

The figure responsible for last year’s so-called Hollywood slump may just be be the savior of this year’s summer grosses, according to some biz types. Yes, we’re talking about Jesus Christ. Mel Gibson’s blockbuster “The Passion of the Christ” attracted so many people who don’t ordinarily go to the movies in the spring of 2004, that it made the revenues for 2005 look out of whack in comparison. But this year, JC helped inspire “The Da Vinci Code” to a miraculous opening (despite generally bad reviews — a miserable 24% on the TomatoMeter). It’s been the top grosser for five weeks overseas, where Box Office Jesus has trumped all the X-Men’s superpowers combined. Next, the King of the Jews is poised to take on “Forrest Gump,” making “The Da Vinci Code” the biggest Tom Hanks movie ever. Holy Fool!

(Second) Coming Soon: “Superman Returns.” He’s been away, but now he’s back. Just like You Know Who….

“Mein Führer, I kann valk!”

Jim Emerson

Tom Brokaw, NBC News: “It’s unfortunate for Vice President Cheney to have had this accident obviously, because there will be those who don’t like him, who will be writing tomorrow that he had a Dr. Strangelove appearance as he appeared today in his wheelchair.”

Brokaw brought it up. Judge for yourself. Did it occur to Brokaw that that this could have been a wily piece of black-hearted/suited satirical stagecraft on Cheney’s part? Wonder what was in those boxes that he was reportedly moving — himself — when he injured his back. Shreddable secret documents, perhaps? Or could the former CEO of Halliburton not afford to hire movers?

(AP Photo)

UPDATE: Reports that the ex-VP was doing a little recreational waterboarding down by the Potomac when he slipped on the ice have not been confirmed.

A view from ‘The Bridge’

Jim Emerson

View image: Pieter Brueghel, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” c. 1558.

Today, I’ve been writing about “The Bridge” (opening in Chicago next week), a documentary about the stories of people who jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004.

View image: From “The Bridge,” directed by Eric Steel (2005)

I read that the director, Eric Steel (who had cameras on the bridge from dawn to dusk for the entire year) had invoked Breughel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” — and that resonated with me. Then I remembered the poem of the same name by one of my favorite poets, William Carlos Williams.

View image From “Vertigo,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1958)

For me, as an American, a West Coaster and a cinephile, the Golden Gate Bridge has always loomed large in my consciousness. Today, as I attempt to digest this shattering film, I am moved and awed to offer these images, from Brueghel to the bridge — visions not just of a magnificent structure or landmark, but of a place of mythic stature in the imagination.

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”by William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel

when Icarus fell

it was spring

a farmer was ploughing

his field

the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling

near

the edge of the sea

concerned

with itself

sweating in the sun

that melted

the wings’ wax

unsignificantly

off the coast

there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was

Icarus drowning

(Statistic: Most American suicides take place in the spring.)

IndieWIRE crix poll: American blood, blood, blood

Jim Emerson

View image Paul Dano anoints Daniel Day Lewis in “There Will Be Blood.”

IndieWIRE has announced the results of its annual critics’ poll, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” dominates (picture, director, screenplay, cinematography, lead performance), followed by David Fincher’s “Zodiac” and Joel & Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men.

For most American viewers, this is going to be a Netflix list: Two of the top ten movies never barely opened theatrically outside of New York (“Syndromes and a Century,” “Colossal Youth”); two never played in more than 20 theaters at once (“Offside,” “Killer of Sheep” — the restoration of Charles Burnett’s 1977 film); two haven’t opened yet, and won’t in most places until 2008 (“There Will Be Blood,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days”); and, in these days when wide releases typically launch on 2,000 – 4,000 theaters, two never made it to more than 400 at any given time (“I’m Not There” [149], “The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford” [301]). Only two others ever spread beyond 1,000 screens: “No Country for Old Men” and “Zodiac.” Three of the ten best selections — “Killer of Sheep,” “Offside” and “Zodiac” — are currently available on DVD.

Poll administrator Dennis Lim noted that, compared to 2006 when “the relative dearth of truly exciting films” was lamented by many critics, this year’s 106 participants were more enthusiastic about their choices. One eyebrow-raising development was cited in the indieWIRE introduction, though:

If there is a strking hole to be found in this year’s [poll results]… it is the utter lack of American indie films. While last year’s survey celebrated outside-the-system films such as David Lynch’s “Inland Empire,” Kelly Reichart’s “Old Joy,” Ryan Fleck’s “Half Nelson” and Andrew Bujalski’s “Mutual Appreciation,” the acclaimed new films from American filmmakers this year came from directly within the Hollywood and Indiewood system, starring name actors.Other poll-toppers: Best First Film (Sarah Polley, “Away from Her”), Best Documentary (“No End in Sight,” Charles Ferguson), Supporting Performance (Cate Blanchett, “I’m Not There”), The complete results in all the categories can be scrutinized here. And the individual critics’ ballots (including mine) are here.