Actor director writer producer Patrick McGoohan has died at the age of 80. (News story here.) In fond remembrance, I resurrect this essay — the only one I’ve done with voiceover — about the opening of his most ambitious project, the 1960s television series “The Prisoner.” The show is currently being remade for AMC, with James Caviezel in McGoohan’s role as Number Six and Ian McKellen as Number Two.
It’s a question to ponder — especially when they’re Andy Warhol movies (whether or not Andy Warhol actually had anything to do with them besides putting his name on them). Consider this story from Reid Rosefelt at My Life as a Blog:
… I was a huge fan of Warhol’s films, despite the fact that I had never seen a single one. Most, if not all of the films had been withdrawn from circulation, or very rarely shown, certainly not in Madison. That didn’t stop me. I read everything I could about them, and I was totally fascinated.
Spotting Warhol standing at an appetizer table, plastic cup in one hand and plate in the other, during a late-1970s party in New York, RR worked up the nerve to approach the artist. It went something like this:
Here’s a wonderful video essay written by Dipnot.tv film critic, Far-Flung Correspondent, House Next Door contributor, longtime Scanners commenter and International Man of Mystery Ali Arikan, and edited by writer/photographer and Press Play producer Ken Cancelosi. As far as I’m concerned, it makes the case — and does so even without including my personal favorite scene from “Moneyball”! (I think he should have been nominated for supporting actor in “The Tree of Life,” too.)
Ali writes:
There is real mystery to Pitt’s take on Billy Beane. He loves the game, but knows the game is changing. He knows he has to get wins in order to keep his job, and is more than willing to modernize for that reason. But he also knows there is something you can’t calculate about the game of baseball. The scenes of Pitt driving to work or sitting in the locker room show a man who is constantly trying to figure out the odds and knowing deep down that there are some things you can’t figure out.
… He brings to the role an assured quality on overzealous, yet understated, lust for ultimate success that was forged in the fires of years and years of failure. He’s charming and cheeky and funny, and very good looking (despite the hideous early naughties’ haircut and lumbering fashion sense). Pitt brings a subtle comedic take to what could have been a rather boring central role; his various dealings with other managers, his scouts and players, betray genius-level timing and mimicry.
OK, I really wouldn’t mind seeing Gary Oldman win for “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” either — but this was Pitt’s year.
View image: Cal Naughton, Jr. and Ricky Bobby drink beers and talk about peanut butter and ladies.
I’ve got reviews of four new releases on RogerEbert.com this week, and all the movies are actually pretty good (or even better) for a change!
“The Descent” — the scariest and most cinematically adept horror-thriller in years. (Don’t look it up, don’t watch the TV spots or the trailer — just go. Now. Read reviews later.)
“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” — Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as NASCAR drivers. Did you laugh at that title? Then you’ll probably laugh at the movie.
“Little Miss Sunshine” — Steve Carrell, Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear, Alan Arkin. What more do you need to know? (Except, maybe, why they’d open a comedy with Carrell and Kinnear opposite a Will Ferrell comedy, in which Carrell was also offered a role but had to pass for scheduling reasons.)
“The Night Listener” — a Hitchockian thriller, based on a novel by Armistead Maupin, also starring Toni Collette, and a performance by Robin Williams that is not only watchable but relatively nuanced. Who’da thunk it?
It has come to my attention that the ol’ spam filter has been a little hyperactive recently. I just went back over a couple hundred spam comments and released about a dozen legit ones from the Limbo of Spamitude. In the future, if your comment doesn’t show up (and you didn’t do anything bad in it, like make ad hominem attacks on somebody, that aren’t worth anyone else’s time to read), then please let me know at the e-mail link above. Now I want to write some responses to some of the thoughtful comments that have unjustly done time in purgatory…
Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.
Matthias Stork, a German film scholar now based in Los Angeles, has created a most stimulating two-part video essay on a subject near and dear to my heart: “Chaos Cinema.” At Press Play, it’s given the sub-head “The decline and fall of action filmmaking,” while an analysis at FILMdetail considers it from the angle of technology: “Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the Avid.” Stork, who also narrates his essay, describes his premise this way:
Rapid editing, close framings, bipolar lens lengths and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial filmmaking…. Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action movies, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload, and the result is a film style marked by excess, exaggeration and overindulgence: chaos cinema.
Chaos cinema apes the illiteracy of the modern movie trailer. It consists of a barrage of high-voltage scenes. Every single frame runs on adrenaline. Every shot feels like the hysterical climax of a scene which an earlier movie might have spent several minutes building toward. Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of flair and spectacle. It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits. Directors who work in this mode aren’t interested in spatial clarity. It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones. […]
Most chaos cinema is indeed lazy, inexact and largely devoid of beauty or judgment. It’s an aesthetic configuration that refuses to engage viewers mentally and emotionally, instead aspiring to overwhelm, to overpower, to hypnotize viewers and plunge them into a passive state. The film does not seduce you into suspending disbelief. It bludgeons you until you give up.
It seems to me that these movies are attempting a kind of shortcut to the viewer’s autonomic nervous system, providing direct stimulus to generate excitement rather than simulate any comprehensible experience. In that sense, they’re more like drugs that (ostensibly) trigger the release of adrenaline or dopamine while bypassing the middleman, that part of the brain that interprets real or imagined situations and then generates appropriate emotional/physiological responses to them. The reason they don’t work for many of us is because, in reality, they give us nothing to respond to — just a blur of incomprehensible images and sounds, without spatial context or allowing for emotional investment.
The thing about speaking truth to power is that the powerful don’t really like it all that much. That was apparent at the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday night, when Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s satirical “The Colbert Report” (basically a Fox News parody in which Colbert plays a fact-challenged, egomaniacal character based on Bill O’Reilly — and Sean Hannity, Britt Hume, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter…) delivered a speech that cut maybe just an eentsy bit too close to the truth (or “truthiness”) for the comfort of the President, the First Lady and the ineffectual reporters in the audience.
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From Ali Arikan, Istanbul, Turkey:
The first shot of “Withnail and I” is deceptive in its simplicity. As the camera opens on the eponymous “I” of the title, obviously depressed and downtrodden, we see a 30-something-man at the end of his tether, drowning in angst; both literally and figuratively, trying to breathe. A desk lamp, the single light source, and the books and notepads scattered over a desk in front of him betray the possibility that he is a writer. The rest of the furniture has that all-too-familiar aura of the maudlin British middle class. All this, combined with the sluggish zoom of the camera and the melancholy use of the last ever King Curtis live performance of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum, presents the audience with an irrevocable feeling of denoument. Almost as if this is the final shot of a film and not its first.
“One” is the loneliest number.
“I’m afraid I’m going to lose my family. Like I lost the ducks.”
— Tony Soprano, Episode 1, January 10, 1999
” _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _”
— Tony Sproano, Episode 86, June 10, 2007 (TBA)
“The Sopranos” didn’t look terribly promising to me back in 1999 when I saw the first promos. Another Italian-American mob show? What could be more of a cliché? Of course, I was hooked after the first episode (the ducks, the shrink’s office), and it continued to astound me week after week with how smart and savvy and rich it was. It took the pop gangster mythology of “The Godfather” and “GoodFellas” (and “Miller’s Crossing,” though I don’t recall any characters specifically referencing it) and turned them inside out.
“The Sopranos” is about a small-time mob family in Jersey for whom “this thing of ours” is “trending downward,” and who long for the legendary status of movie gangsters. They’re shmucks, losers, the very definition of a dysfunctional family, and subconsciously they may even know it. But petty and corrupt as they are, they’re still clinging to the American Dream, right down to the characterless and strangely empty McMansion in the suburbs. In “The Sopranos,” the mob is a metaphor for contemporary capitalism and consumerism and those treasured illusions of “family” that seem like vestigal instincts. That’s why I think the final tableau of the first part of Season Six was one of the series’ most brilliant and haunting moments. All the trappings were there — the festive decorations, the lovely home, the extended clan gathered ’round the hearth — but we knew then that the greeting-card Christmas image was a sham. The tension was stomach-clenching because we (and perhaps they) could feel that this hollow moment was merely the calm before the storm of the final eight episodes. And now it’s all coming down.
Since the third season or so, “The Sopranos” may have lost much of its ability to astound, but that’s mainly because we now know anything is possible. Other shows kill off significant characters or rupture the storylines’ major arteries, too. By the time Adrianna was wacked, it didn’t seem so shocking. As with the best drama and comedy (and “The Sopranos” is an operatic tragicomedy), it seemed inevitable in retrospect. I hated losing her, but whaddaya gonna do?
“The Sopranos” made acclaimed shows like “The Wire” and “Deadwood” possible. I have friends who think “The Wire” is “better than” “The Sopranos,” but that seems like a silly and fruitless comparison to me because they exist in entirely different dimensions. “The Wire” is consistently brilliant and thrilling to watch, with its teeming cast of characters and long, tangled narrative threads. I love it. But “The Sopranos” is much bigger, more deceptively complex, because it can work a meta-metaphor, make a satirical observation about contemporary politics or history or popular culture, and keep you absolutely in the moment with these characters in this particular set of circumstances. It makes your heart race, your eyes water and your head explode. It lives up to the word “masterpiece.” And this single series has probably been more consistently excellent than all the rest of the American cinema over the last eight years. It hasn’t just made a subscription to HBO indispensible (and an unbelievable entertainment bargain for the money), it’s helped make watching television as essential as going to the movies.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but there have been times when I didn’t want to watch the next episode, because I was too fearful for the characters. I feel incredibly apprehensive about Sunday night, because I’m afraid of what I’m going to see, and how I’ll feel about it. And I don’t want it to be over. Maybe I should just TiVo it and then, when I’m feeling a little less vulnerable… Well, that’s not going to happen. That’s part of what the show is about: Having to face things you’d rather were kept out of sight (like the stashes of cash and guns around the Soprano household), and having to know that everything comes at a price.
I wonder if to say I care deeply about these characters is to say I love them, when I feel I shouldn’t. I know how horrible they are. But I guess they’re like family. And as we know from Season One, that doesn’t guarantee love, either. (I’ll admit it: for all her avarice and denial, I’m probably in love with Edie Falco’s conflicted Carmella. Hey, one of the show’s consistent themes is that you can’t help who you fall in love with. And if I ever met James Gandolfini I would want to hug him — the actor, for creating such a tremendous character, not Tony.) I’m sure they deserve whatever’s coming to them. But series creator David Chase doesn’t necessarily think that way. As he says on page 163 of “The Sopranos: The Book” (which I haven’t even begun to read) in the article called “What We’ll Never Know”: “If you’re raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and network television, you start to think, Obviously there’s going to be some moral accounting here. That’s not the way the world works. It all comes down to why you’re watching….”
“Wal-Mart? I’d like to order another copy of ‘The Da Vinci Code.'” Alfred Molina plays Cardinal Fang a bishop with a cell.
The protests against “The Da Vinci Code” are expected to reach their peak this opening weekend. And in reading some of the reactions to the movie and the book (see here), I noticed that much of the heat seems to center around whether people will mistake the book’s and movie’s fictions for historical realities. You’d think the general public would be smart enough to understand what a novel is, and that such books are different from scholarly works of nonfiction, even when they incorporate actual facts or events.
For example, one of my all-time favorite novels is Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” and it is about a bomber squadron based on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa during World War II, but to my knowledge the titular rule has never been part of U.S. Air Force regulations, nor did Clevinger actually pilot a plane into a cloud and not come out the other side. In part, that is because Clevinger, like Robert Langdon (the hero of “The Da Vinci Code” and Dan Brown’s previous novel, “Angels and Demons”), is a fictional character. World War II and the U.S. Air Force and Pianosa, however, are real. And so is the Mediterranean.
Anyway, I was surprised to find that Wal-Mart is (still) selling “The Da Vinci Code” on its web site with this false and misleading description:
It’s a movie. No, it’s a ride. No, it’s a movie and a ride! Variety reports that Koreans have been lining up for 4D “ride films,” beginning with last year’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” The 4D, “five-sense” version of “Avatar” now features
more than 30 effects during the 3D film’s 162 minute run, including moving seats, smells of explosives, sprinkling water, laser lights and wind. Despite the much higher $15.80 ticket price (an average ticket costs $6.90), screenings are regularly sold out.
“We (started to) prepared the ‘Avatar’ 4D ride last summer,” says Tom Oh, prexy of 20th Century Fox Korea. […]
“There is no 4D theater like ours around the world. CGV’s 4D plex is the first in the world that fully offers five-sense experiences with a movie title,” says Kim Daehee, publicity manager of CJ-CGV.
Coming: 4D versions of Chris Columbus’s “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” and others.
Are we circling back around to flight-simulator theme park attractions built around movie “narratives,” like Disney’s 1987 Star Tours “Star Wars” ride? (Or, for that matter, like 1955’s Peter Pan’s Flight at Disneyland?) At what point does the experience cease to become a movie experience (as we’ve known it since the beginning of the 20th Century) and become a virtual reality simulation? The “ride movie” has nearly become a (sub-)genre of its own since “Raiders of the Lost Ark” perfected the form — and movies are often based on video games or even amusement park rides (“Rollercoaster,” “Pirates of the Caribbean”), so is this just another gimmick — like William Castle’s Percepto process for 1959’s “The Tingler,” or Universal’s Sensurround for 1974’s “Earthquake” (and other “immersive” disaster movies), or John Waters’ Odorama for 1981’s “Polyester”? Have we been here before (just another element in a cross-promotable “transmedia storytelling platform”), or is this something “new”? And, in any case, does it (or 3-D) satisfy the same appetites that have traditionally attracted people to movies? Now that they’re retro-fitting existing movies for additional dimensionality, what would a 4-D Eric Rohmer movie be like? How about a 4-D “My Dinner with Andre” — with the smell of real dinner? Would a 4-D Rob Zombie movie allow the audience to actually feel the pain of the victims onsceen?
Meanwhile, Wim Wenders is making 3-D movies in Italy…
(tip: Steven Santos)
Saint Luis.
Every now and then, there comes a time to make a pilgrimage to a sanctuary, a place of retreat where one can let oneself float unhindered in a sanative state. Now — yes, right now — is one of those times, and among my most beloved wellsprings of renewal and re-invigoration is “My Last Sigh” by Luis Buñuel, the most reverie-like of all directorial memoirs. (I think of it as my Buñuelian bible, and would never want to live without it.) Buñuel liked to have his reveries in bars, stimulated by a little alcohol (I reprinted the recipe for the Buñuel martini some time ago), but similar conditions can also be enjoyed with the aid of books — or movies.
And so, a few (more) inspirational passages from “My Last Sigh”:
… [The] proliferation of gutter words in the work of modern writers disgusts me. They use them gratuitously, in a pretense of liberalism which is no more than a pathetic travesty of liberty….
* * *
Foreshadowing “Fight Club”: … I’ve seen only one pornographic movie in my life — provocatively called “Sister Vaseline.” I remember a nun in a convent garden being f—ed by the gardener, who was being sodomized by a monk, until finally all three merged into one figure. I can still see the nun’s black cotton stockings which ended just above the knee. René Char and I once plotted to sneak into a children’s movie matinee, tie up the projectionist, and show “Sister Vaseline” to the young audience. O tempora! O mores!
View image Portrait of the artist as a young man. (by Dali, 1924)
* * *
I’ve often wondered why Catholicism has such a horror of sexuality. To be sure, there are countless theological, historical, and moral reasons; but it seems to me that in a rigidly hierarchical society, sex — which respects no barriers and obeys no laws — can at any moment become an agent of chaos. I suppose that’s why some Church Fathers, Saint Thomas Aquinas among them, were so severe in their dealings with the disturbing aspects of the flesh. Saint Thomas went so far as to affirm that the sexual act, even between husband and wife, was a venial sin, since it implied mental lust. (And lust, of course, is by definition evil.) Desire and pleasure may be necessary, since God created them, but any suspicion of concupiscence, any impure thought, must be ruthlessly tracked down and purged. After all, our purpose on this earth is first and foremost to give birth to more and more servants of God.
Ironically, this implacable prohibition inspired a feeling of sin which for me was positively voluptuous. And although I’m not sure why, I also have always felt a secret but constant link between the sexual act and death. I’ve tried to translate this inexplicable feeling into images, as in “Un Chien Andalou” when the man caresses the woman’s bare breasts as his face slowly changes into a death mask. Surely the most powerful sexual repression of my youth reinforces this connection.
View image Those lips, those eyes…
* * *
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing….
Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lives into truths. Of course, fantasy and reality are equally personal, and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance…. I am the sum of my errors and doubts as well as my certainties.
Before I do my proper “ten best” honors (in a form that is not a critics’ poll ballot), I just want to say that the best things I saw on any screen in 2008 were:
1) “Generation Kill” (seven-part HBO mini-series, adapted by Ed Burns and David Simon, the makers of “The Wire,” and Evan Walker Wright, a reporter embedded with the 1st Recon Marines in Iraq in 2003, based on Wright’s book). I don’t like the title. At some point in Episode Three I thought this was the funniest show on TV. About 15 minutes later, I still felt so, but I also felt something radically different. Susanna White is one hell of a director.
2) “Liverpool” (Lisandro Alonso; seen at Toronto Film Festival)
3) “Four Nights with Anna” (Jerzy Skolimowski; seen at Toronto Film Festival)
4) “35 Rhums” (Claire Denis; seen at Toronto Film Festival)
5) “Mad Men” (AMC, Season Two)
6) “In Treatment” (HBO, Season One)
Just because they didn’t play for a week or more on US movie screens doesn’t mean they should go unacknowledged (any more than “The Dekalog” or “Fanny and Alexander” should), and I hope to have the opportunity to write about them in depth in 2009. (“Generation Kill” was just released on DVD December 16.)
At last week’s Conference on World Affairs, I was on a panel somewhat facetiously titled “An Epic Debate: Are Video Games an Art Form?” with Roger Ebert (whose answer to the titular question is, as you probably know, “no”). Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko was supposed to join us, but at the last minute he couldn’t make it. Fortunately, we were able to recruit author, brain expert and laparoscopic surgeon Leonard Shlain to join us.
… and channels roles from the entire career of James Earl Jones. That’s the premise of this very funny short, “Vader Sessions,” from Akjak Moving Pictures, in which the Imperial Villain speaks in Jones’ voice through sound clips from “The Great White Hope” to “Clear and Present Danger” to “A Family Thing.” (I kept waiting for him to announce: “This… is CNN.”) I know: Is it possible for yet another “Star Wars” parody to be funny? I think these guys have demonstrated that it is. I’d love to know the sources of all the dialog used — so feel free to post a comment with whatever you recognize.
(Thanks to Alonso Sobrado in Costa Rica!)
View image Burt Reynolds, Superstar.
The Burt-a-Thon (formally known as the Burt Reynolds-a-Thon) starts today over at Welcome to L.A.. The awesome Larry Aydlette, whom some of you may know from his blog-lives as That Little Round-Headed Boy and/or The Shamus, has set himself a truly daunting, awesomely ambitious task: For the entire month of February, he will… well, let Larry explain it himself:
Obviously, Burt Reynolds didn’t get the e-mail that he was supposed to go quietly away. But that’s not the Burt Reynolds way. In his autobiography, “My Life,” he begins with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live.”
View image Cosmo centerfold Burt, 1972.
So, I’ve decided to honor that work ethic and use his birth month for 29 straight days of Burt Reynolds coverage. This isn’t a love-a-thon. In rewatching a lot of his movies, I’ve come to the conclusion that he didn’t necessarily deserve to win the Oscar for the films that he and many critics thought he should have won them for. And he was never nominated for what seems to me to be his one indisputable masterpiece (although I doubt many critics will agree with me). But there are quite a few of his films that are very, very good, and deserve reconsideration.
A tangential follow-up to the recent discussion, “Rehearsing your own prejudices,” from the Institute for the Destruction of Tooth Fairy Science, via Hell’s News Stand (which also has the R-rated version).
A drop of diluted background (from Wikipedia) on homeopathy — a little dab’ll do ya:
… Homeopathic remedies are usually diluted to the point where there are no molecules from the original solution left in a dose of the final remedy. Since even the longest-lived noncovalent structures in liquid water at room temperature are only stable for a few picoseconds, critics have concluded that any effect that might have been present from the original substance can no longer exist. No evidence of stable clusters of water molecules was found when homeopathic remedies were studied using NMR.
Furthermore, since water will have been in contact with millions of different substances throughout its history, critics point out that any glass of water is therefore an extreme dilution of almost any conceivable substance, and so by drinking water one would, according to homeopathic principles, receive treatment for every imaginable condition.
P.S. As we all know, homeopathy only works when making dry martinis. You allow one ray of light to shine through the bottle of vermouth into the bottle of gin before pouring the latter.
(tip: Tim Lloyd)
“Junebug” director (and still photographer!) Phil Morrison at the Overlooked. (Photo by Jim Emerson)
At several moments during the Eighth Overlooked Film Festival, I thought I had been transported to a time in which the greatest artists of the movies were not only familiar to all, but properly and enthusiastically appreciated and revered. That such a time would be in the spring of 2006 kind of threw me for a loop, but this was a festival in which (I swear) the two most commonly (and reverently) invoked cinematic influences were not Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino but Robert Bresson (“Pickpocket,” “Au Hasard Balthazar,” “Lancelot du Lac,” “L’Argent”) and Yasujiro Ozu (“Tokyo Story,” “Late Spring,” “Early Spring,” “Floating Weeds”). Not that any of the young filmmakers at the Overlooked were trying to claim their work was on par with these cinematic masters, but you could tell from their films that Ozu and Bresson really mean something to these guys, their influences genuinely and thoroughly absorbed into the cinematic sensibilities of another generation. It gave me hope for the future of movies as something more than a commodity.
Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” was shot in Essex and several boroughs outside of London (IMDb lists Barking, Havering and Tower Hamlets among them) and these landscapes — variously industrial, suburban, undeveloped — look as chilly and otherworldly as anything in Antonioni. Only shabbier. It took me all year to get around to seeing “Fish Tank,” but as an admirer of Arnold’s nightmarish 2006 “Red Road,” I’m not terribly surprised to discover that it’s one of the most vividly directed US releases of the year. And I say that even though it consists almost entirely of hand-held camerawork (which is not a style I generally appreciate). Through Arnold’s lens, this slice of soggy Britain takes on the surreal look of a dream, or science fiction.
The film follows (literally, much of the time) 15-year-old Mia (Kate Jarvis), who lives in a run-down apartment complex with her thirtysomething party-girl mum and bratty younger sister. Mia is headstrong, abrasive, foul-mouthed (did I mention she’s 15?) and always seems to be storming off, exiting one situation and headed somewhere with a purpose in mind — though we rarely know what it is until she gets there. Sometimes she’s not so sure herself, even after she appears to get where she’s going. Her refuge is an empty flat in one of the apartment towers where she surreptitiously practices hip-hop dance routines.
I’m not going to say much more about the story, except that I think “Fish Tank” would make a fine double-bill with “Winter’s Bone,” as they’re both movies about teenage girls looking for their daddies, as it were. In Mia’s case, though, it’s not her father — it’s her mum’s new Irish boyfriend (Michael “Hunger” Fassbender), and her desires are no more familial than his are parental.
