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All apologies (and new reviews)

Jim Emerson

I haven’t been able to post as much as I’d like recently (and I’ve got some real juicy Opening Shots waiting) because I’ve been so busy doing reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com, to help pick up some of the slack while Roger is resting and recovering. (See message from Chaz here — kind of a teaser trailer for Roger’s own progress reports!) This week I’ve got reviews of Woody Allen’s “Scoop” and Betty Thomas’s “John Tucker Must Die.” You’ll never guess which one I thought was funnier. I’ve already written three more for next week: “Little Miss Sunshine,” “The Night Listener” and “The Descent.” More about that last one, especially, in the next few days…

Bordwell covers coverage

Jim Emerson

View image A shot from Steven Soderbergh’s “The Good German.”

David Bordwell has a capacious post (with 23 illustrative images) beautifully assaying the Hollywood custom of coverage — basically, the industry practice of “covering” a scene by shooting it from plenty of angles, from master to close-up, so there are lots of options in the editing room. He’s following up, and expanding upon, Dave Kehr’s New York Times article on Steven Soderbergh’s decision to shoot his film “The Good German” as if it were a Michael Curtiz studio production in the late 1940s. (Bordwell discusses lenses and lighting in a previous post.)

In Kehr’s illuminating article, actor Tobey Maguire says “what was fascinating to me is how [Soderbergh] was cutting the movie in his head. There’s really no fat on the film. He really didn’t do ‘coverage.’ He only shot the parts of the scene he was going to use, and if he wasn’t going to use it, he didn’t shoot it.”

But the description of traditional coverage in the article — involving shooting with multiple cameras — isn’t the classical Hollywood method, which would be to re-shoot at least parts of the scene again and again from different angles, usually involving extensive re-lighting (and even slightly different blocking) for each new lens and camera position. It’s part of what makes actors go stir crazy waiting in their trailers/dressing rooms between set-ups.

Don’t miss Bordwell’s elaboration on the subject, with quotes from his own interviews with filmmakers and a fascinating analysis of a strange and awkward passage from George Stevens’ “Giant.” This is another example of why the Bordwell-Thompson blog (launched only months ago) is such a welcome addition to the cinematic blogosphere!

TIFF: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

Jim Emerson

Slavoj Zizek in the wake of Melanie Daniels, crossing Bodega Bay in a small motorboat.

At 150 minutes, in three parts, “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” (catchy title, no?) is probably the fastest-moving, most shamelessly enjoyable film I’ve seen in Toronto so far this year. There is no story, and only one character — but what a character he is. He’s Slavoj Zizek (more precisely, Žižek), Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, and he comes across as a delightfully unhinged Freudian maniac, the sort of heavily-accented mad doctor who might narrate an Ed Wood movie. But, believe it or not, he’s the real thing. (I Googled him to be absolutely sure, and now I can’t wait to read more of, and about, him.)

And what he does as narrator of this film (directed by Sophie Fiennes, sister of actors Ralph and Joseph) is talk — and talk and talk and talk — about movies. He’s terrific at it, too. Turns out the good doctor is quite the cinephiliac (with a strong Freudian/Lacanian bent, natch), and in what feels almost like a two-and-a-half-hour free-association, he lets his brilliant and facile mind wander through many of the greatest films ever made — with a heavy concentration on Hitchcock (emphasis on “Psycho,” “Vertigo” and “The Birds”), David Lynch (“Lost Highway,” “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Wild at Heart”) and Andrei Tarkovsky (“Solaris,” “Stalker”). One image, one idea, flows into the next, which makes for an intoxicating strain of film criticism.

This isn’t quite the first film of this sort (“A Journey Through American Cinema with Martin Scorsese” springs to mind) — but there ought to be more. The genre of movies about movies — in-depth appreciations and evaluations of films that go beyond clip reels like “That’s Entertainment!” into something deeper and, well, more entertaining — is something I hope will blossom over the next few years. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot: Film criticism needs to expand beyond mere words, and make better use of other media, including the web and film/video itself, where the images themselves can be seen while they are analyzed.

Four minutes of deer-on-dog action!

Jim Emerson

And the kid who shot this shows an instinctive understanding of the zoom lens superior to the self-conscious artiness of the Duplass brothers.

I’m Not There: Ode to Joy

Jim Emerson

View image Jude Quinn. Bob Dylan. Mona Lisa. (Cate Blanchett.) Enlarge and see. The eyes, the mouth, the verge of a smile.

The message may not move me,

Or mean a great deal to me,

But hey! it feels so groovy to say…

— Peter, Paul & Mary, “I Did Rock & Roll Music” (1967)

The sun’s not yellow

It’s chicken

— Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues” (1965)

I listen to Bob Dylan for the music, not the words. I know: heresy. But it’s the truth: I listen to him for the way he sounds, and that includes the sound of the words. The literal meaning of the lyrics, or what people used to call the “message” (if one can be found or deciphered), is secondary, just one dimension of his art. In his 1960s folk-pop-culture ascendance, Dylan’s songs were scrutinized for coded messages — supposedly embedded “between the lines,” as die-hard folk-popsters PP&M put it in their satirical ditty about the superficiality and commerciality of rock ‘n’ roll music. That pop-culture illusion — that Dylan and the Beatles were sending out encrypted signals into the collective consciousness, and especially to you — is something Todd Haynes plays around with quite a bit in “I’m Not There” — a pseudo-documentary/biopic not unlike his “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” but with six actors playing Dylan instead of Barbie dolls playing The Carpenters.

But before we get to that: No, I’m not at all knocking Dylan as a poet or a lyricist. (I read Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings for their music as much as anything else, too.) If Dylan’s words weren’t so satisfying to sing out loud, he wouldn’t be much of a songwriter, would he? I mean, how does it feel to sing “How does it feel?” It feels fantastic, that’s how. The black bile of those spleen-venting, “finger-pointing” songs (“Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street,” “Ballad of a Thin Man”) can be so cathartic. All those playfully cryptic, electric-surrealistic rhymes in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (cue cards, anyone?) can make you dizzy with delight. A simple couplet like, “They sat together in the park / As the evening sky grew dark,” doesn’t look like all that much on the page, but you hear Dylan sing it and you feel a spark tingle to your bones.

What I mean to say is that, even if Dylan were writing in a language no one else on Earth knew (and sometimes I think that’s exactly what he means to do), his great songs would still be great songs. Take Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Do you need to know the meaning of the words in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to appreciate the fusion of vocal and orchestral sounds in the last movement?

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!…

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,

Tochter aus Elysium,

Wir betreten feuer-trunken,

Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

Deine Zauber binden wieder,

Was die Mode streng geteilt;

Alle Menschen werden Brüder,

Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Admit it! It feels so groovy to say! (Or sing.) I feel the same way about “My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,” and “Awop-bop-a-loo-mop alop bom bom” (by Dylan’s idol Little Richard) and “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat” (The Ramones) and “A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido” (Nirvana).

Tex Avery: Escape from Alka-Fizz

Jim Emerson

“Boo.”

Dennis at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has posted his favorite Tex Avery cartoon, “Rock-a-Bye Bear,” in response to posts by Peet Gelderblom and That Little Round-Headed Boy, who remarked that this exchange has turned into a sort of spontaneous de-facto Tex Avery blog-a-thon. Well, include me in!

The naughty fairy tale “Red Hot Riding Hood” and “King-Size Canary” are treasured classics, but one of the funniest ‘toons ever, for my money, is “Northwest Hounded Police,” (1946) starring Droopy Dog as Sgt. McPoodle of the Mounties. Its surreal sensibility anticipates “Duck Amuck” (Chuck Jones, 1953) by way of “Cops” (1922). Only instead of the wanted man being pursued by a whole stampede of cops (they accumulate, like the avalanche of boulders and brides in “Seven Chances”), he’s hounded by what an extraordinarily persistent Droopy. The nightmare logic is relentless — and part of what makes it so funny is that it’s also creepy and anxiety-inducing…

UPDATE: After watching “Rock-a-Bye Bear” on Dennis’s site, something struck me (and it wasn’t a mallet or a club or an anvil): It’s built upon the same recurring gag as Abbas Kiarostami’s “The Wind Will Carry Us.” Yep, that fancy-schmancy Iranian artiste has been stealing from Tex Avery! One involves a dog repeatedly running out into the snow to make noise; the other involves a man repeatedly running out into the desert to get cell phone reception.

The reviews are in: Let the Funny Games begin!

Jim Emerson

View image Nudge-nudge. (2008)

UPDATED (03/15/08)

(My review of “Funny Games” is here. See also Your User’s Guide to Movie Violence, a discussion below.)

* * * *

“You Must Admit, You Brought This On Yourself”

— advertising tagline, and line of dialog, from “Funny Games” (2008)

“Funny Games” (the 2008 Hollywood movie-star version of the virtually identical 1997 Euro-version) is a conceptual work, an aestheticized test. It’s debatable whether the movie (already a replica) is necessary, except as an object that represents the larger concept — like, say, an Andy Warhol Brillo box or Jeff Koons’ vacuum cleaners in plexiglass cases.

View image Wink-wink. (1997)

You could say something similar about the high-concept “Snakes On a Plane,” and you’d be right. The difference is that the marketing campaign behind the packaging of “Snakes On a Plane” was designed to sell exactly the entertainment experience that the title promised. With “Funny Games,” there’s a deliberate element of bait-and-switch involved. It’s being sold as entertainment, but that’s not at all what it intends to deliver. The experience of “Funny Games” exists in the tension between the pitch and the delivery — which will largely determine the relationship between the viewer and the film he/she sees.

So, the promotional materials for “Funny Games” (poster art, trailers, online videos, etc.) are more than the usual extensions or enhancements of the movie. They frame the experience, but they’re also essential elements of the movie itself. Why you decide to watch it (or not) is every bit as central to the movie’s concerns as anything in the movie itself. That may be true of any movie, but “Funny Games” puts it right there in the foreground where you can’t miss it.

View image Promotional art for the 1997 version.

If you go expecting entertainment and are entertained (or, at least, terrified — held hostage by your own expectations), that will be one thing. If you go expecting a moral lesson about the appeal of violence in movies, and you feel chastened and sullied, that will be another. If you go expecting a thriller or a comedy and find nothing thrilling or funny about it, that will be something else. If you go expecting to be toyed with and, say, enjoy feeling that you’re ahead of the movie (maybe because you’ve already seen the 1997 version), that will provide yet another experience. If you value writer-director Michael Haneke’s other work and want to see why he’s chosen to remake this one… well, I hope you get the idea.

So, the first part of the experiment involves your decision to participate or not. The movie is the second part.

Glengarry Bear Stearns

Jim Emerson

View image The politics of “Glengarry Glen Ross” in a nutshell.

Although I’m still reeling from the shocking revelation that David Mamet once considered himself a liberal (“David Mamet says he is not a brain-dead liberal anymore”), I find myself looking forward to his next (screen-)play more than ever, if only to see if I can detect an interest in ideological politics that I never noticed in his work before.

The week of his much-publicized announcement, history presented him with a perfect subject for a future writing project: the collapse of the investment banking film Bear Stearns and the last-minute bailout by the Federal Reserve, allowing it to merge with JP Morgan Chase. What a dilemma for free-marketeers! This could make for great drama in Mamet’s hands. Imagine a “Glengarry Glen Ross” in which Mitch and Murray are rescued from bankruptcy by the intervention of the federal government.

Mamet writes: “…a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”

And: “[William Allen] White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they’re always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it.”

And: “… I began to question my hatred for ‘the Corporations’—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.”

The Tina Fey-Palin scenario

Jim Emerson

We’ve gotta cash in on this quick, so here’s my pitch:

Tina Fey plays Sarah Palin as Tina Fey as Sarah Palin in a semi-remake of “Dave.”

Animal Control nabs Palin off the street, mistaking her for a stray pit bull whose previous owner tested makeup on animals. Palin is asked to host “SNL” the week before the election, but nobody notices she’s missing because the McCain campaign is so successful at keeping her away from the press that they forget where they put her. Security is airtight. Because Fey does a better Palin than Palin does, she is forced to do the show as Palin as Fey as Palin.

Why we are all doomed

Jim Emerson

Director Richard Kelly. (Note motion picture camera.) Not to be confused with suspected terrorist James Kelly. Or soap-operatic rapper (and little girl fancier) R. Kelly. Or “Singin’ in the Rain” dancer Gene Kelly. Or former Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly.

One of the things I love about “24” (not just this season, which is the best one ever, but in general) is the way it shows how people never cease being petty and self-centered, even in the midst of potentially catastrophic international crises in which millions of other people’s lives are at stake. What it all comes down to is this: In any crisis, office politics are probably more important than global politics. We see it all the time with our politicians’ egocentric defenses of indefensible ineptitude and gridlock caused by inter-agency squabbling (which the papers always call “turf wars”).

Now, here’s another example of bureaucratic bungling in the name of Homeland Security that shows why, as Jon Stewart recently observed, if terrorists have not yet attacked us since 9/11 it can only be because they are even more incompetent than our own so-called “security” apparatus: Director Richard Kelly (“Donnie Darko,” “Southland Tales”) is being investigated as a possible terrorist and may not be able to attend the premiere of his new movie at the Cannes Film Festival next week, where his film is in competition for the Palm d’Or. Why?

Tracing the image #2: The rebirth of ‘The Descent’

Jim Emerson

Whenever you watch a movie, you’re also probably watching just about every other movie you’ve ever seen. The images that flash by trigger associations in your brain — some of them deliberately planted by the filmmakers, others not. Still, you’ve got all these images and memories banging around in your head and they’re going to connect with something no matter what.

View image

As I wrote in my review of “The Descent” and subsequent postings, director Neil Marshall quite deliberately conjures up memories of other movies (especially, but not exclusively, horror movies) to evoke emotions and effects that have lingered in viewers’ imaginations.

Take the “rebirth” of one character, who emerges from the ground coated in blood, like a baby from the womb. This image resonates with memories from a number of terrific movies. Before I get to a more detailed discussion, the usual **SPOILER ALERT** is in order — not only for “The Descent,” but several of its antecedents, including “Deliverance,” “Carrie,” “Evil Dead 2” and “The Third Man.” OK, let’s give these movies a hand!

Why movie critics make such darn good political pundits

Jim Emerson

One of the things film critics do for a living is to pay close attention to how people behave, and how that behavior is presented through visual media. This applies not only to actors playing characters, but to people who play themselves, in fictional or nonfictional settings, on and off the screen. It should come as no surprise to learn that some of our best movie critics have backgrounds in psychology.

When Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sex with that woman,” it now seems impossible to believe that he fooled anyone at that particular moment. But if any movie critic misread Clinton’s voice and body language, that critic should have been impeached. As opaque as the clumsy verbal gymnastics of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin may often be, behind the contortions it’s hard to avoid seeing the painful truth, which is simply that they don’t know what their own words mean, and even when they know what they’ve been told to say they don’t know how to communicate it. As actors, they’re thoroughly unconvincing: You can see the wheels turning inside their heads — only the gears aren’t even engaged. There’s a lot of whirring and spinning, but nothing happens. That can be excruciating to watch, but it’s also the stuff of modern comedy. Christopher Guest, Ricky Gervais, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert and the whole Judd Apatow crew come to mind.

Patrick Goldstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times, argues that film critics like Roger Ebert, sophisticated in their knowledge of media presentation and human behavior, make more insightful political pundits than the usual beltway-bubble spin-docs employed by television, radio, print and online outlets. In a piece called “From film critic to political pundit,” Goldstein writes:

To me, film critics, like TV and theater critics, are especially well equipped to analyze today’s politics, which is why Frank Rich made such a seamless transition from theater to media and political commentator. In fact, in some ways film critics are probably better equipped to assess the political theater of today’s presidential campaigns, since our campaigns are — as has surely been obvious for some time — far more about theater and image creation than politics.