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That was the fest that was

Jim Emerson

An image from “The Host”: It all depends on how you look at it.

I kinda wish I’d had girish’s Toronto. I saw some great stuff — “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” being my favorites, and was also impressed with “Volver,” “Shortbus,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” and a few others. Not bad, but (as I wrote earlier) not as overwhelming as last year. I steered away from most of the big commercial titles (except for “Borat”!) and concentrated on some of the high-profile foreign and “specialty” films, including some that had attracted attention at Cannes. In other words, titles I thought readers of Scanners would be particularly interested in.

Girish, on the other hand, followed his bliss and… well, here’s his assessment of his Own Private Toronto:

Of the eight TIFFs I’ve attended, I think this year’s was probably the strongest. Unlike last year, I took my laptop with me and fully expected to blog the fest, but it turned out that many of the films I saw were not so casually bloggable. I’m still trying to figure out how to think about many of them.

Of the twenty-five films I saw in Toronto, there were two flat-out masterpieces: Jia Zhang-ke’s Chinese diptych “Still Life”/”Dong”; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Syndromes And A Century” from Thailand. Other favorites: Pedro Costa’s “Colossal Youth” (Portugal); Alain Resnais’s “Coeurs” (France); Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Climates” (Turkey); Abderrehmane Sissako’s “Bamako” (Mali); Sophie Fiennes’ “The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema” (UK); Hong Sang-Soo’s “Woman On The Beach” (S. Korea); Bong Joon-Ho’s “The Host” (S. Korea); Jafar Panahi’s “Offside” (Iran); etc.

I had most of those on my “want to see” list, but they got bumped by other screenings or time I spent blogging from the fest. I’m hoping I’ll be able to catch up with many of these (and I’ll have to look up that Mali film in the catalog).

So, out of the “10 days, 352 films, and 27,747 minutes” of the 2006 TIFF, has anybody else had time to digest/recover? How was your Toronto?

Chigurh: It’s all about the money

Jim Emerson

View image Just gimme money. That’s what I want.

In an early post about “No Country for Old Men,” I wrote that Chigurh could be seen as the embodiment of capitalism (or materialism) run amok: “Perhaps if Chigurh needs to be reduced to an ’emblem’ of something, it’s ruthless, indifferent force in the single-minded pursuit of any goal (religious, financial, political, genocidal).” The satchel of money is the MacGuffin (and the film doesn’t pay much attention to what happens to it in the end)… but it’s also a satchel full of money.

Sami Pöyry in Tampere, Finland, writes:

It’s not the first time the Coens have made a movie about blind greed but “No Country for Old Men” certainly is their strongest take on this theme yet. Thus it feels very odd to me how this whole sense of impervious capitalism has been neglected in the discussion around the movie.

“No Country for Old Men” is all about money and money taking the place of moral principles. Chigurh sees himself as someone whose job is to make people see their blind greed. The coin toss is there to point out how money in general decides people’s fates. He ends up there just like the coin does, as he states to Carla Jean in the end. Chigurh has principles and is not bound by money — until this point.

HORROR has a new… accent!

Jim Emerson

Almost as scarily involving as 3-D! And it returns your calls! In Percept-O!

(tip: Víctor Escribano Fernández de Santaella)

Opening Shots: ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”

Jim Emerson

An empty landscape, an endless, desolate (and TechniScope-horizontal) landscape…

… suddenly replaced by another enormous sun-baked landscape, and the long shot is instantaneously transformed into a close-up of…

… a human face, staring into the camera — and, by extension, into the distance off-camera. It’s a variation on the signature Leone shot, and for him these faces (Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach — and in other movies Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jack Elam, Woody Strode…) were landscapes, and landmarks, as characteristic of his stylistic world as the buttes of Monument Valley were for John Ford. — JE

We’ve had several excellent appreciations of how the opening shot of Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” works, each with its own unique angle, if you will. Here are a few — beginning with Roger Ebert’s 2003 Great Movies review:

A vast empty Western landscape. The camera pans across it. Then the shot slides onto a sunburned, desperate face. The long shot has become a closeup without a cut, revealing that the landscape was not empty but occupied by a desperado very close to us.

In these opening frames, Sergio Leone established a rule that he follows throughout “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” The rule is that the ability to see is limited by the sides of the frame. At important moments in the film, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot be explained by the practical geography of his shots.

There is a moment, for example, when men do not notice a vast encampment of the Union Army until they stumble upon it. And a moment in a cemetery when a man materializes out of thin air even though he should have been visible for a mile. And the way men walk down a street in full view and nobody is able to shoot them, maybe because they are not in the same frame with them.

Leone cares not at all about the practical or the plausible, and builds his great film on the rubbish of Western movie clichés, using style to elevate dreck into art. When the movie opened in America in late 1967, not long after its predecessors “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964) and “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), audiences knew they liked it, but did they know why?

1. Ten 2. Best 3. Lists

Jim Emerson

There is none so blind as he who will not see. It’s true. Ray Stevens sang it in the hit single “Everything is Beautiful (In Its Own Way).” I have no idea why I just mentioned that.

MSN Movies has published its main movie contributors’ lists of the year’s best films (and, yeah, we cheated freely — our lists don’t all contain ten titles). Here you’ll find lists from me and (in alphabetical order) some other names you may recognize: Sean Axmaker, Gregory Ellwood, David Fear, Richard T. Jameson, MSN Movies chieftan Dave McCoy, Kim Morgan and Kathleen Murphy. As is my custom, I don’t make what I see as artificial and qualitatively meaningless distinctions between categories (documentary, “foreign language”) because, the way I see it, a feature film is a feature film, and a doc or a movie from somewhere else in the world is every bit as much a product of conscious and unconscious artistic decision-making, skill, planning, determination and luck as any other kind of picture with a running time of around an hour or more. (That, arguably, is a meaningless distinction, too. Heck, “Simon of the Desert” and “Wavelength” are only 45 minutes long, “Sherlock, Jr.” is 44, ” and “Un Chien Andalou” is only sweet 16!)

I’m cooking up a different sort of list I want to do for Scanners and RogerEbert.com, but if you want to see my faves (as of my deadline last week — and nothing I’ve seen since then would change my rankings), use the link above and/or check after the jump. Please see my post about listmaking in general, below… and please, as always, feel free to post your own lists and responses in the comments section!

Oh no! The secret is out!

Jim Emerson

A trio of guys try and make up for missed opportunities in childhood by forming a three-player baseball team.

A serious breach of security has ripped through the movie industry. Somehow, some way, a critic in Florida (of course) got in to see “Benchwarmers” — and leaked it to the press! Well, OK, so maybe that shouldn’t be considered much of an intelligence leak (more like a diaper leak), but it happened to Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel, and he’s going public about it. On his blog, Frankly, My Dear…, Moore says he got an invitation to a screening Monday night at a local theater, where seats were saved for the press. It seems the regional Sony publicist had forgotten to inform him that the press had been uninvited. (He should have read Scanners last week!)

Jim Crow casting?

Jim Emerson

View image Marianne Pearl as Marianne Pearl.

My paen to a new, browner America in the age of 300 million (below) was in part a satirical (though sincere) reaction to the non-story about whether a “real mixed-race actress” should play Mariane Pearl, the wife of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, instead of Angelina Jolie, who is reported to wear make-up that darkens her skin-tone. This is how far we’ve come from Jim Crow laws: race is everything and if you’re an octoroon, you’d better have the credentials to prove it if you want a job as an actor!

View image: Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl

In the current HBO documentary, “The Journalist and the Jihadi, Mariane Pearl herself describes her background: “I was born in Paris, my mother’s Cuban, my father’s Dutch, I’m a Buddhist — all this exotic stuff.” Angelina Jolie, however, has a French name and a French godmother (Jacqueline Bissett) but was born in America to the grandson of a Czech immigrant (actor Jon Voight) and a mother who is part American Indian (Haudenosaunee). So, do we really have to have a contest about who’s more “mixed race”?

Daniel Pearl, meanwhile, was a Jew from Encino, a classically trained violinist who switched to country fiddle and then to journalism. Who the hell are they gonna get to play that?

ADDENDUM: Mariane Pearl role originally to have been played by Jennifer Aniston; Pearl’s response to Jolie.

jim’s annotated best favorite movies of 2008 part 2

Jim Emerson

… continued from here…

5. “Wendy and Lucy” (Kelly Reichardt, heartbreaker). A couple bad breaks and a stubborn act of unkindness push a girl and her dog over the edge, from a marginal migratory existence into near-invisibility. Wendy (Michelle Williams) is driving to Alaska with her dog Lucy to find work in the fishing industry, probably in a cannery. (Note to Eastern critics who found this notion strange or fanciful: It’s not even unusual. Many people, especially young people, in the Pacific Northwest head to Alaska for good-paying seasonal work.) Only a few acts of kindness manage to keep her from falling off the map entirely. This (almost) opening shot (again, I present only a chunk from the middle) is scored to the humming in her head, and represents a perfect miniature of the movie as a whole: Wendy and Lucy walking in the woods, playing fetch, moving in and out of the frame, passing through light and shadow, occasionally disappearing behind trunks and thickets, then emerging on the other side. (Christopher Long has a beautiful appreciation of the shot and the film at DVDTown.)

He’s Here: The Legend of Pete Seeger

Jim Emerson

View image Pete Seeger singing “If I Had a Hammer” at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Rally in Greenwood, MS, 1963. From “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.”

(A brief review of Jim Brown’s documentary, “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song,” opening in select theaters around the country in the next few weeks, and in Seattle September 21.)

I’m a-goin’ to Berlin

To Mister Hitler’s town

I’m gonna take my forty-four

And blow his playhouse down.

— “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” by Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell and Pete Seeger (recorded by the Almanac Singers in 1942)

“It’ll be a little soggy but we’ll keep slogging.

We’ll soon be on dry ground.”

We were waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool said to push on.

— “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” by Pete Seeger (performed on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” 1968)

Pete Seeger is an American legend, in a class with Paul Revere (he rang out warning), Johnny Appleseed (he sang out all over this land), and Paul Bunyan (he had a hammer — and an ax). Like all three, he’s attained mythical stature, and like the first two, he’s for real.

View image Bob Dylan singing “Only a Pawn in Their Game” at the same 1963 SNCC rally shown above. From “Don’t Look Back.”

Seeger may not always have been in synch with his times, but he has always been timeless, carrying the American folkloric tradition out of backwoods and into the mainstream. He sang old songs and gave them new life: the 1886 song “Goodnight, Irene” was adapted by Leadbelly and became a surprise commercial hit for the Weavers in 1950; ten years later, “We Shall Overcome” was revived, revised, and sung by Seeger at the first meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, NC, and became the anthem associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement.

Seeger has been able to take songs of the past and bring them alive in the context of the present. “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” (collected in a songbook, called “Anti-Fascist Songs of the Almanac Singers: Timely American songs based on timeless worksongs, patriotic ballads, cowboy ballads, spirituals, etc., from America’s folklore”) is of its moment in 1942. (Woody Guthrie later added a verse about Goering.) But “Big Muddy” — which begins, “It was back in nineteen forty-two” — was an anti-Vietnam war song, and is now an anti-Iraq occupation song. Could Seeger ever have anticipated that his ballad would become a relevant protest song again in his lifetime? Perhaps only in the sense that he understands mankind’s uncanny ability to keep repeating the same historical mistakes.

Seeger’s own songs — “If I Had a Hammer,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” — well, they sounded like traditional classics the first time you heard them, didn’t they? Whether speaking (singing) to a particular time and place, or in general about the state of human beings and the planet we live on (and often both at the same time), Seeger’s work is ageless.

So, don’t expect just the usual muffled, scratchy old clips from Jim Brown’s “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.” The images may be from the past, but the sound is vibrant and present. It begins with a quintessential Seeger singalong, and you could swear you’re sitting in the middle of the audience, surrounded by voices. As Bob Dylan says, Seeger had the ability to coax out the singer in everybody.

The paths of so many American folk legends cross in this film: Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen — and the last four appear in interviews, as do Seeger and members of his family. While the movie is an unabashed celebration of the life, music, politics, and humanitarianism of Pete Seeger, it’s just as much a tribute to Toshi Seeger, the Japanese-American woman who married Seeger in 1943. She’s the one, as somebody observes, who “allowed Pete to be Pete.”

“The Power of Song” reflects the essential qualities of its eponymous hero: enthusiastic, idealistic, patriotic (but not nationalistic), shamelessly earnest, maybe (as the subtitle indicates) even a little corny. And I mean that as an expression of admiration and affection. Seeger may have gone in and out of fashion — blacklisted from television for 17 years because of his brief affiliation with the American Communist Party, hailed as a prophet during the folk revival of the 1960s — but he’s never been “fashionable.” He is who he is. And aren’t we lucky to have lived to hear him?

Matt Zoller Seitz: Rocking the House

Jim Emerson

View image Matt Zoller Seitz.

Matt Zoller Seitz, long one of my favorite film writers and the pioneering architect of the priceless House Next Door, is moving into full-time filmmaking. That’s great news, and sad news for those of us who always look forward to his byline — and, especially, the wit and insight that unspools beneath it. I want to compile a little “best of” sampling for Matt, just in case you haven’t been following him, but I’m a little in shock right now. When I consider the exceptional, collegial atmosphere among our extended network of movie bloggers, and how much we learn and grow through exposure to one another’s work, there’s nobody of whom I’m prouder to consider myself a “colleague.” You can read more about Matt’s plans at the House:

Well part of it is… you know I produced a feature film, a low-budget thriller, a few years ago and then went on and directed a little movie myself. I have been working on projects that are in various stages of completion since then and it’s been slow going for a variety of reasons. But I would like to concentrate on that exclusively. I want to concentrate on filmmaking exclusively for a while and see how it goes because I’ve never given it my all. The two features that I’ve been associated with were done while I had a full-time job and a part-time job. So my thinking is, “well if I am not doing anything but filmmaking, what might I be able to accomplish?”Whatever it is, I’m there. We’ll catch up some other time. Meanwhile, we can all be glad that Keith Uhlich is in the House.

Yesterday, Matt posted a beautiful short film called “Some Other Time” in memory of his late wife Jennifer Dawson. The moment I saw the title I knew he’d chosen the version — the greatest recording of one of my two or three favorite songs — and he’s set the music to movie with grace and understated eloquence.

This day was just a token,

Too many words are still unspoken.

Oh, well, we’ll catch up

Some other time.

Just when the fun is starting,

Comes the time for parting,

But let’s be glad for what we’ve had

And what’s to come.

See and hear it here…

Opening Shots: Army of Shadows

Jim Emerson

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From: Andy Horbal, Mirror/Stage:

“Army of Shadows” actually begins with an epigram: “Unhappy memories! Yet I welcome you… you are my long-lost youth… “

Perhaps a French person would immediately recognize the film’s subsequent opening shot as the ultimate unhappy memory, but it took a bit longer for this American viewer to grasp the significance of what he was seeing. The transition from a black screen with white letters to the Arc de Triomphe towering over a frame also marked by a pallid, even sickly, gray morning light is like the shock of abruptly waking up in the middle of a dream. The sound of marching drifts in from somewhere offscreen. …

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After a few seconds a column of soldiers emerges from the left of the frame. Dwarfed by the monument, they look like a line of black ants. A few more seconds and the cadence of their footfalls (which seem to grow steadily louder and more ominous) is joined by the sound of a military march. The beginning of the column reaches the middle of the Arc and sharply pivots right towards the camera, towards us.

You don’t even want to know what a scrunt is…

Jim Emerson

Don’t let a scrunt near that bleedin’ narf!

The ferocious topiary bear-like creatures who inflict near-fatal superficial wounds on a narf in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Lady in the Water” are called “scrunts.” (I think there’s only one of them in the movie, but it’s hard to tell.) Shyamalan, who improvised this tale for his young daughters before he released it as a movie and a children’s book, may have some explaining to do. According to the Urban Dictionary, a “scrunt” is nasty filthy slang for a … dirty lady and her parts. If you want to learn more, beware: the vulgarism contained in the word “scrunt” (aka the c-word) is part of the definition. According to MSN Encarta, however, “scrunt” is Caribbean slang, an intransitive verb meaning “financially strapped: to be in a poor financial situation.” Like the wolf at the door, if you catch my drift.

You’re in safer waters with narf, which is said to be “a substitute word, does not need to be for a curse word, can be used in any circumstance,” from the TV show “Pinky and the Bean Brain.” BTW, “Tartutic” and “Eatlon” are undefined.

(Thanks, I think, to Jeff Shannon)

Do critics hate comic-book movies?

Jim Emerson

I’ve been hearing from some disgruntled comic-book and superhero fans that they think critics have a prejudice against the genre. Or genres. I think there’s a distinction to be made between comic-book, graphic novel and superhero movies (though, obviously, certain pictures overlap categories). So, I thought I’d do a little (and I mean a little) research to see if I could discern a trend. I did, and it was a pretty clear one.

So I sampled a few titles at RottenTomatoes and MetaCritic. Not that these sites should be considered the ultimate authorities on such matters, but they do give some indication of a movie’s critical reception. Here’s what I found:

Opening Shots: ‘Deep Red’

Jim Emerson

View image: The kind of thing that can ruin a childhood.

From Robert Daniel, Birmingham, AL:

“Deep Red” (Dario Argento, 1975): The scene opens a floor-level shot. We hear a stabbing sound and a loud scream. The knife falls in from the left and the child’s feet rush in from the right. Then the screen goes black for the credits. I guess I counted this as an opening shot because the camera does not move, nor isthere ever a cut. It is one short, continuous take.

The whole giallo is based on this event. It is the murder of a parent in front of the child (whose legs we see). Most of the film happens 15 or so years later, with the child as an adult. The string of brutal and creative murder set-pieces all relate back to what happened in this shot.

The shot is made more effective by the fact that a very eerie child’s nursery rhyme is playing in the background. Rumor has it that the nursery rhyme music was played before in an episode of “Davey and Goliath”!

JE: Thanks, Robert — and thanks for sending in the frame grab, too. I can’t believe I haven’t seen this major Argento (one of those embarrassing gaps for me), but it’s been in my Netflix queue for a long time. I’m gonna have to bump it up to the top now.

South Parkers speak out at last

Jim Emerson

Comedy Central is still just a little afraid of this…

… and this.

“South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have finally explained some of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that prevented their Tom Cruise/Scientology-ridiculing episode, “Trapped in the Closet” from repeating as scheduled, and why Comedy Central kept them from showing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad in the most recent season (“Cartoon Wars, Part II”), even though they’d already shown Muhammad in a 2001 episode, “Super Best Friends.”

CNN reports (“‘South Park’ guys still upset”):

“So there are two things we can’t do on Comedy Central: show Muhammad or Tom Cruise,” Trey Parker said during the MTV Networks portion of the Television Critics Assn. summer press tour.

Parker and Matt Stone said they had no doubt that the “Trapped in the Closet” episode was yanked as a result of Cruise’s starring this summer in “Mission: Impossible III,” the movie from Paramount, Comedy Central’s sister company. […]

“We didn’t do any press because we were just going to get in a pissing war with Tom Cruise, and we didn’t want to be in the same article as that guy,” he said. “But we picked the wrong guy to parody because we’re going to be asked about Tom for the next two years.”

They added that they have not been contacted by Scientology representatives but did sit down the week after the episode aired with a “very upset” Isaac Hayes, a Scientologist who portrayed the character of Chef. Hayes has since exited the show.

“We didn’t want to be hypocrites,” Parker said. “We thought it could piss Isaac off, but we had to do it for that very reason” of not being labeled hypocrites. [So, it looks like Roger Friedman was full of crap.]

Regarding the decision not to air the image of Muhammad during the “Cartoon Wars” episode, the pair said it was a corporate decision that could become a slippery slope if other groups begin making threats and affecting content. They also noted that Muhammad seems to be off limits, while it is “open season” on Jesus, who happens to be a “South Park” character. (Depictions of Muhammad are strictly prohibited in Islam.)

Comedy Central president Doug Herzog admitted, “It’s tough, but I think I would say we did overreact. … Matt and Trey enjoy a fair amount of creative freedom. History might show that we overreacted, and we will live with that.”

He added that the image probably will not be shown on the DVD version either, but “I look forward to the day when we can uncover it.”

Yes, gayer than “Dreamgirls”

Jim Emerson

I saw “Top Gun” in 1986 when it came out (as it were), with a few friends, one of whom was gay (still is) and who said before the credits were over: “This is the gayest movie I’ve ever seen.” Eight years later, in “Sleep With Me,” Tony Scott fan Quentin Tarantino explained it all for us. In this YouTube clip (beware the f-word — it’s Tarantino talking), QT’s exegesis is illustrated for the first time with actual clips from “Top Gun.” And remember: This was years before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

(Thanks to MCN.)