Scanners

New terror sleeper cell uncovered?

Jim Emerson

Seven men from now: How many Chicagoans does it take to make up a phony terror cell?

On Monday night’s The Daily Show, Jon Stewart reported on the big press conference called by Attorney General (and Pillar of Integrity) Alberto Gonzales to announce the arrest of seven men for “conspiring to support the Al Qaeda organization” — by, maybe, tossing out the idea of blowing up the Sears Tower. Or something. Except that it turns out the men were a gaggle of losers living in Miami, had no weapons or explosives and no terrorist network connections, and one of them had mentioned the Sears Tower one time. However, one of the, uh, “alleged terrorists,” was familiar with Chicago. (As Maureen Dowd described them on Saturday (“We Need Chloe!”): “[The] Miami gang of terrorist wannabes… look like they couldn’t find the local Sears, let alone the Sears Tower. These guys were so lame they asked an informant for boots, radios, binoculars, uniforms and cash, believing he was Al Qaeda — and that jihadists need uniforms.”)

Observed Stewart: “No weapons, no actual contact with Al Qaeda, but one of them had been to Chicago. By that standard, I believe this [see above] may be a terror cell.” No doubt A— C—–r & Co. would agree. Your Homeland Insecurity dollars at work…

“Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia…”

Jim Emerson

I regret that I haven’t seen Guillermo Del Toro’s “Hellboy” (2004) or “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (2008), though De. Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” was my top movie of 2006. Andrew Tracy at Reverse Shot evidently isn’t impressed with the Hellboys, and I say “evidently” because I’m putting off reading the whole of his review of the new one until I’ve seen it.

But that hasn’t stopped me from relishing the first two paragraphs! Because Tracy is articulating thoughts I’ve often entertained but too rarely raised in public. He begins:

Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia has become a marvelous way to avoid talking seriously about the serious. The slew of hyperbolic, overheated critical rhetoric that follows in the wake — hell, in advance of — the latest high concept blockbuster is enough to make one gag. In these cases, critical investigation has by and large become a matter of repeating verbatim the films’ stridently announced surface-level themes with some linguistic curlicues and intellectual tumbling tossed in.

Opening Shots: ‘Miller’s Crossing’

Jim Emerson

Enlarge image: Clink!

Enlarge image: Gurgle.

From Dave McCoy, Editor, MSN Movies:

The Coen Brothers love to use objects as symbols for characters, especially before we actually meet them. Think of the tumbling tumbleweed that starts “The Big Lebowski” — blowing from the outskirts of Los Angeles, through the city streets and finally making its way, aimlessly, down a beach to the sea. And is there a better metaphor for The Dude (Jeff Bridges)? “He’s the man for his time and place,” says The Stranger (Sam Elliott), our narrator. “He fits right in there. And that’s The Dude, in Los Angle-ess.” In a matter of seconds, the Coens both introduce us to our hero’s wandering demeanor and the film’s casual, quirky and directionless tone.

But in their 1990 masterpiece, “Miller’s Crossing,” it takes the Coens but one quick shot to establish their cool, hard-as-nails, no-nonsense protagonist, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne).

Movie critics: Pros and cons

Jim Emerson

View image Nathan Lee.

Yesterday, Nathan Lee sent out an e-mail to colleagues in which he announced:

In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for “economic reasons.” My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in “My Blueberry Nights.”

And so I am, as they say, “looking for work,” though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist.

In the last 24 hours, Lee’s lamentable departure and the whole moribund notion of “the professional movie critic” have been passionately discussed (at The House Next Door, The Reeler, and elsewhere). But before we get to the latter: Nathan Lee, a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, is a perfervid cinephile (I hope he’ll appreciate that phrase), a writer whose insights and observations are penetrating, often pointed and even more often hilarious. A few highlights:On certain homophobic but ostensibly (and patronizingly) pro-gay reactions to “Brokeback Mountain”: “If I hear one more straight critic complain that ‘Brokeback Mountain’ isn’t particularly gay, I’m gonna spit on my hand, lube up my c—, and f— him in the b—.”

On “Transformers”: “Director Michael Bay never met a rhetorical apocalypse he didn’t love. Dude could film a round of Jenga with greater shock and awe than the collapse of the World Trade Center. There are mini-robots hiding inside his mega-robots. His lens flares have lens flares. He evidently controls the magic hour at a flick of a switch, and flips it willy-nilly for ‘poetic effect.’ In what may constitute the zaniest authorial signature in contemporary cinema, he has a habit of arresting an action set piece in order to indulge outlandishly backlit, monumentally pointless romantic interludes.”

On “Zodiac: “… ‘Zodiac’ is the most information-packed procedural since ‘JFK,’ though far more restrained when it comes to theorizing…. The result is an orgy of empiricism, a monumental geek fest of fact-checking, speculation, deduction, code breaking, note taking, forensics, graphology, fingerprint analysis, warrant wrangling, witness testimony, phone calls, news reports. ‘I felt like I was stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours,’ complained one viewer. Exactly!”

On “”I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry”: “Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, ‘I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry’ is as eloquent as ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ and even more radical. ‘The gay cowboy movie’ liberated desires latent in the classic western, and made them palpable (and palatable) by channeling them into the strictures of another genre, romantic tragedy. Progressive values were advanced by a retreat to a traditional mode of storytelling, the love that dare not speak its name rendered intelligible through the universal language of the upscale weepy. […]

Roger Ebert on the critics of criticism

Jim Emerson

“It is not enough to like a film. One must like it for the right reasons.”

— Pierre Rissient

This is entirely coincidental, so consider it a fortuitous double-bill. Just as I posted the item below (“The sins of the critic”), Roger Ebert posted a blog essay on the subject: “‘Critic’ is a four-letter word.” Here’s a taste:

Too many simply absorb. They are depositories for input. They can hardly be expected to be critical of their own tastes, can they? Of course they can. It is not enough simply to be a “Cubs fan,” although I confess I am one. It is necessary to feel the philosophy, the history, and even the poetry about the activity called “baseball.” It is helpful to step outside a little, and see that sports teams are surrogates for our own desires to conquer, and expressions of our xenophobia. For some, they are even the best way ever invented to drink beer outdoors. If you are only a Cubs fan, you are a willing automaton in a business venture. Join me in being a Cubs fan, but know why you do it. What is my most fundamental reason? I am a fan because they are always the underdogs. That may be why I bought a Studebaker 30 years after the company went out of business.

Read the entire piece here.

The Evil, the Bad and the (Self-)Important

Jim Emerson

When she put “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” on her Worst Movies of 2008 list, Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwartzbaum referred to the Holocaust melodrama as “Honey, I Gassed the Kids.” And, if she honestly believes the movie is as awful as she describes it (and I have no reason to think she doesn’t), it is her moral duty as a critic to pummel it with everything she’s got. A “dumb summer comedy” can be awful, undendurable; an irresponsible or simpleminded film that exploits and trivializes a “powerful subject” (genocide, racism, pedophilia, rape, suicide, torture, any number of historical atrocities) can be flat-out evil — precisely because it presents itself as Serious (or Risky or Important or Challenging) Cinema. If filmmakers choose to play with fire, they’d better be morally and artistically equipped to handle the responsibility, or they deserve to get burned.

“The moral of this outrageous, British-accented nonsense appears to be that if you build a death camp, sometimes the wrong people get killed,” Schwarzbaum wrote. “Not for the last time, alas, has the Holocaust been co-opted into a kitschy ‘universal’ story of ‘tolerance’ about how we’re all ‘one.’ But this one is supposed to be a story for children!”

I can’t vouch for Schwarzbaum’s take on “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” (although that title made me throw up in my mouth a little, as they say) because I haven’t seen it, but I know exactly what she means. I feel the same way about the denial fable of “Life is Beautiful.” (Protect your kid from the cruelty and stress of immediate danger by telling him death camps are just fun ‘n’ games! While you’re at it, why not tell him that if he throws himself under a truck it will just bounce off him? And he can really fly if he wants to, too! Don’t shatter his dreams!)

Bye, Sally — Sally Menke, 1953 – 2010

Jim Emerson

Sally Menke, editor of all Quentin Tarantino’s features, from “Reservoir Dogs” to “Inglourious Basterds,” was found dead in Bronson Canyon early this morning, where she had gone hiking with her Labrador retriever in yesterday’s record-setting 113-degree heat.

“Hi Sally” reels — little messages sent from the set to the editing room — appear as extras on some Tarantino DVD releases, including the above from “Death Proof,” and the one below from “Inglourious Basterds.”

P.S. I’ve read at least one (mis-)appreciation that, unsurprisingly, doesn’t quite seem to understand what an editor like Menke does — attributing structures that were in the script to the “editing.” But it’s not that simple. As Tarantino says in the clip above, he considers the final draft of the script the first cut of the movie, and the final cut of the movie the last draft of the script. Wesley Morris has a much smarter (and beautifully written) appreciation of their collaboration:

A Coen brothers movie you’ll enjoy the hell out of

Jim Emerson

A “NCFOM” spin-off from “Chacun son Cinema,” (“To Each His Own Cinema”), Cannes 2007. Starring Josh Brolin. Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.

(tip: Baris Azman)

Oh, the ‘Idiocracy’!

Jim Emerson

View image Captains of America.

Imagine a country where, even at the highest levels of power, ignorance is flaunted and incompetence rewarded. OK, maybe that’s too easy. Imagine a studio dumping a movie because it just doesn’t know how to sell it. Well, that doesn’t take any imagination at all, does it? “Idiocracy,” the new film by Mike Judge (“Office Space,” “King of the Hill,” “Beavis and Butthead”), opened in a handful of theaters in the United States while I was in Canada for the Toronto Film Festival. When I got back I learned that none of those theaters was in Seattle, so — guess what? — I haven’t been able to see it.

But Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule reports that it’s superficially dumb, deceptively smart — and funny:

The groundwork for “Idiocracy” is laid in a hilarious parody of authoritarian educational films that exposes the roots of humanity’s slippery slide toward pea-brain-osity in the frigidity of intellectuals (or at least their yuppie subset) and the unchecked rutting of the uneducated poor. Smart folks are too selfish to procreate, while Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae can’t keep their genitalia to themselves.

Sounds simple enough, right? But by the time the movie really gets going Judge has laid culpability for the crumbling mental capacity of society at the feet of lawmakers, corporations and opportunistic politicians too. And let’s not forget the military—insofar as they represent by definition the aggressive arm of any government, Judge certainly hasn’t. A low-level army base slacker (Luke Wilson) and a randomly selected hooker (Maya Rudolph) are selected to participate in a military experiment, headed by an officer with more than just a little taste for the pimpin’ lifestyle—that’s how the hooker gets roped in. The experiment is designed to monitor physical changes in cryogenically frozen subjects over a period of a year. But when the officer’s illegal activities end up getting him imprisoned and the base bulldozed, Wilson and Rudolph are left on ice not for a year but for 500. The pair, barely three digits in the IQ department between them to start with, awaken to a world so battered and worn down by an abased pop culture, relentless corporate corruption and political ineffectuality that they are, by acidly ironic default, the smartest people on the planet.

I recommend checking out Dennis’s essay about the film — and what happened to it — here. (BTW, as I write this, “Idiocracy” has a 71% rating on RottenTomatoes.com, compared to 43% for last week’s box-office topper, “Gridiron Gang”; 31% for Brian De Palma’s “The Black Dahlia”; and 17% for “All the King’s Men,” opening Friday.)

Nightmare on Wall Street 2: Enron’s Revenge

Jim Emerson

When I first tried to understand what the whole financial meltdown was about, it sounded to me like some kind of perpetual motion machine — a black box that reversed the first law of thermodynamics (“econo-dynamics”?) to produce energy from nothing, or money from debt. Turns out the principles behind the “financial instruments” that caused the collapse were indeed crafted in part by physicists and mathematicians who designed complex formulas that defied real-world understanding, but that appeared to guarantee profits out of nothing.

Here’s my quick take on the smoke-and-mirrors magic-of-the-marketplace that deregulation made possible at the turn of the last century (y’all remember Enron) and how it’s manifesting itself in today’s financial crises — using clips from CBS’s “60 Minutes” report, “Wall Street’s Shadow Market”, (10/6/08) and Alex Gibney’s documentary, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” (2005).

VIFF: Hurricane Kapital

Jim Emerson

“American Casino” may be mis-titled in some respects because although it acknowledges the casino-gambling principles behind the world financial meltdown that have been obvious and undeniable for many years, the most revealing facet this very fine “Frontline”-style documentary is how it portrays rabid entrepreneurialism spreading through American culture like a fatal self-replicating virus. The widespread damage — not just financial, but physical and emotional — is devastating, and the majority of victims in the United States are mainly the middle- and under-class. “American Casino” shows us a nationwide Hurricane Katrina, with similar political causes and consequences, that has decimated lives and property — and was entirely man-made.

Without pushing the metaphors too far, the movie (directed by Leslie Cockburn and included in VIFF’s “Follow the Money” series), traces the very real connections between the endlessly multiplying and dividing derivatives that caused the crash to the wrecked dreams and deteriorating real estate that now blight both urban and suburban areas from Baltimore to California. While people in offices were using computers to calculate “fourth-dimensional” Ponzi schemes that defied human comprehension, others were being evicted from their homes.

A miracle of a movie

Jim Emerson

One of the year’s most subtly extraordinary movies opens in Chicago today: Ramin Bahrani’s “Man Push Cart.” (See Roger Ebert’s review here). As readers of this blog know, I first encountered it at Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival in May and my experience with it was like falling in love, and not fully realizing it until the final credits were rolling. And that’s exactly what’s great about it: I never felt like I knew where it would go, or that it was straining to fit a traditional narrative structure; I just became absorbed in the daily (and nightly) struggles of this one human life, an almost invisible man in New York City. Roger sees in it “the very soul of Italian Neo-Realism”; I see the purity and minimalism of Bresson and Ozu. We’re both right.

Here’s part of what I filed from the Overlooked:

Alfred Hitchcock supposedly said that while most movies are a slice of life, his were a slice of cake. He’s right about the last part, although most movies are not slices of anything resembling life as most of us experience it. But “Man Push Cart,” the film by Ramin Bahrani, a director born in Iran and raised in North Carolina, is not only an exquisitely realized slice of life but a slice of filmmaking perfection. I didn’t know, as I became absorbed in this portrait of a New York City street vendor whose life is slowly slipping from his grasp (like his heavy pushcart on one occasion), that it would become one of my favorite movies of recent years until moments after its inexplicably magnificent ending.

All I can tell you is that when the moment came, a thought flashed through my mind: “Wow, I would just end the movie right here — wouldn’t that be great?” And then, one more shot, and the movie was over. So, yes, I felt absolutely in synch with the vision of the filmmaker (whose manifest influences include some of my favorite directors: Robert Bresson and Lodge Kerrigan — not to mention Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”), but the film also had me so completely in its spell that it subtly prepared me for arrival at this ending (which, in formulaic conventional movies, would hardly be considered a conclusion at all). It just felt absolutely, ideally right. (Hitchcock also liked to say he played the audience like an organ; “Man Push Cart” is no less masterful, but its method and effects are not the bravura manipulations of Hitchcock but the subtle, underplayed shadings of Bresson or Yasujiro Ozu.)

On the most prosaic level, the story of Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi, a former restauranteur who’d never acted before), a Pakistani-American who pushes (or pulls) his breakfast cart to 54th and Madison every day, could be seen as something of a downer. But, as Roger Ebert is fond of saying, no good movie is ever depressing — because the experience of being in the presence of such artistry is elevating. (A friend and I, in the grips of a paralyzing mutual depression, once made a pilgrimage to “GoodFellas” and the experience — though it’s hardly an upper of a movie — temporarily, at least, lifted us out of our low-seratonin stupor because it was just so exhilarating to watch something so beautifully composed and performed.) “Man Push Cart” is that kind of movie.

I posted an Opening Shot Project entry for “Man Push Cart” here. Please come back after you’ve seen the film and let me know your impressions. It may be my favorite movie of the year.

Wes Anderson scavenger hunt: Truffaut, Welles, Peanuts…

Jim Emerson

Those who doubt how thoroughly the sensibilities of the French New Wave have been absorbed into the work of today’s filmmakers (see discussion of the recently posted Opening Shot for Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows”) should check out Matt Zoller Seitz’s series of video exploring the “scavenger-hunt” sensibility of Wes Anderson, “The Substance of Style,” at Moving Image Source. Part 1 (of five) has been posted, with the rest to follow over the first week in April.

Matt — as writer, editor and narrator — not only compares images that Anderson has lovingly quoted and reinterpreted from the works of Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles and Charles Schultz (and Bill Melendez, director of the Peanuts television specials), but teases out subtler influences at play in Anderson’s work — his features (“Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tennenbaums,” “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” “The Darjeeling Limited), shorts and commercials, including his famous American Express ad based on the Opening Shot of Truffaut’s “Day for Night.” (Coming in Part 2: Martin Scorsese, Richard Lester and Mike Nichols.) Says Matt:

Anderson draws much inspiration from French New Wave filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard, a clear influence on his cutting, and Louis Malle, whose “Murmur of the Heart” heavily influenced the tone of all his films. But towering over the rest is François Truffaut, an impresario in the Welles tradition, but a warmer and more earthbound auteur.

Bardem, Ledger and the truth about movie acting

Jim Emerson

View image Javier Bardem in an eloquent moment at the SAG Awards. (SAG photo)

Javier Bardem said it beautifully when acknowledging his “No Country for Old Men” directors Joel and Ethan Coen in his Screen Actors Guild Award acceptance speech Sunday night:

“I want to share this with my very good friend, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee, and Kelly Macdonald, and with a great cast of “No Country For Old Men.” And to dedicate it to the Coen Brothers who ultimately are responsible for all of this. Thank you guys for hiring me, and thank you for taking the hard work of choosing the good takes, instead of the ones that I was really – I mean, where I really sucked.”Bravo to Bardem for publicly acknowledging what every cinematic actor knows but few talk about publicly. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “How can Actor X be so good in one picture and so bad in another?” — Bardem’s got your answer in a nutshell: Any performance is created from many random bits and pieces of film, carefully chosen (we hope!) and assembled from among hundreds of choices and many thousands of possible combinations. Actors may give several very different readings of the same scene, adjusting nuances and emotions or improvising something spontaneous that the director and the editor (n the Coens’ case, the pseudonymous Roderick Jaynes — can’t wait to hear his Oscar speech) must put together from what would otherwise be incoherent scraps.

Razzle Dazzle: Projections of fame on the screen

Jim Emerson

The production team of Aaron Aradillas (writer, producer), Steven Santos (writer, producer, editor), Matt Zoller Seitz (writer, producer, editor) and Richard Seitz (producer, editor) have posted the sixth and final chapter of their extraordinary video essay series, “Razzle Dazzle: Fame Through Movies,” a rather dazzling prismatic look at how the cinema has dealt with the power of celebrity.

Totaling about 70 minutes all together, the segments are all available at Moving Image Source: Part 1: The Pitch; Part 2: The Hero; Part 3: The Fraud; Part 4: The Parasite; Part 5: The Maverick; and Part 6: The Takeaway.

The series reaches its apotheosis in this final chapter, in which images, ideas and speeches from movies and television — factual and fictionalized, journalistic and infotainment — collide with one another, as if you were watching TV with a remote run amok. “The Takeaway” focuses on the movies’ treatment of other mass media, from TV news to talk radio, mashing together the quick and the nimble (“The Insider,” “Videodrome,” “Being There,” “A Cry in the Dark”) with the leaden and fumble-footed (“Network,” “Talk Radio,” “Absence of Malice,” “Natural Born Killers”) and letting them kick it out amongst themselves…

“This is where he wanted to be, this is where he is…”

Jim Emerson

Roger and Chaz Ebert on opening night. Roger gets his own La-Z-Boy recliner in the back of the Virginia for the duration of the fest! (Thompson-McLellan photo)

Three cheers for Roger Ebert, for the 9th Overlooked Film Festival (aka Ebertfest, now in progress) and for technology! I wrote and filed the following story for Thursday’s Sun-Times, sitting on the stairs to the balcony in the Virginia Theatre in Champaign, IL, Wednesday night — between 7:30 and 8:30. Had my PowerBook G4, which I typed on. Then transferred the story (via synch) to my Treo 680, and wirelessly e-mailed it to the paper in Chicago. More about Ebertfest soon — I’m kind of in the middle of things, and I’m waiting to borrow a cable or card reader to retrieve my own photos; for some reason mine can’t read the XD card….

“It’s my happening and it freaks me out!” said Chaz Ebert on behalf of her husband, Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, on stage at opening night of the ninth Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign-Urbana. The line (memorably quoted by Mike Myers in the first “Austin Powers” movie) is from the Ebert-penned screenplay for Russ Meyer’s 1970 cult classic “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” which is among the titles in this year’s festival.

It was Ebert’s first public appearance since he suffered complications from surgery last June, and it brought down the full house at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign. As he announced in a message featured in the Sun-Times and on his web site (rogerebert.com) Tuesday, Ebert is not able to speak now, pending further surgery, so Chaz had to do the talking for him. As Ebert wrote on a pad before the screening, “After we go onstage, Chaz will read one line from me that will say it ALL.”

View image Jim Emerson, Boy Reporter, at Roger’s first public appearance — a reception at the house of U of Illinois President Joseph White (and his wife Mary and dog Webster) Wednesday night. Roger’s head is in the lower left; Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribute is also comfortably seated on the floor at the right. (Thompson-McLellan photo)

Chaz recounted how the festival was nearly cancelled late last year, when Ebert was in the hospital and the pace of his recovery was uncertain. But Festival Director Nate Kohn visited Ebert in his Chicago hospital room with a message from Mary Susan Britt, the festival’s Associate Director: “The festival passes sold out in a little over a week in November. You have to get out of that hospital bed and come down to Champaign-Urbana.”

“At that moment,” Chaz said, “Roger made a commitment. If it was at all possible, he would be here tonight…. This is where he wanted to be, this is where he is, this is where he’s staying,” she said, and the crowd responded with a standing ovation.

Through his wife, Ebert reminded the audience of the personal importance of Champaign’s Virginia Theatre, the restored movie palace in which the Ebertfest films are screened. “I saw ‘Gone With the Wind’ here, and my father saw the Marx Brothers on this very stage.”