Deliberate Cinema

What Would You Have Done?

2009-01-09T15:46:00.000-08:00

The Reader has become one of my two favorite films of the year (along with Let the Right One In). It's a simple story, but it involves a series of subtle moral choices on the part of the writer and director which are executed flawlessly. A true high-wire act of introspection.

Broadly speaking, it addresses the impenetrable moral briar patch of Germany's national guilt following the Holocaust. But rather than paint easy caricatures of good and evil, and thereby allow us to feel good about ourselves for making the correct binary choice (see Schindler's List), it chooses an archetype that was unquestionably more common at the time: a normal, everyday person who allowed terrible things to happen because they didn't choose to do otherwise.

While even this stereotype is familiar by now (it was famously addressed by Hannah Erendt as "the banality of evil" in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem), what is astounding about the picture is that it considers the subject in a complex way. A film like Schindler might make us feel better, but in doing so it lets us imagine ourselves incapable of allowing the same horrors through our own inaction. We - all of us - would be Schindlers of our own given the same circumstances, right? Unlikely. How many Germans owned munitions factories or had the means to manipulate local politics?

What is the correct moral framework with which we should address such people? Is it practical to condemn an entire nation to life imprisonment? Or execution? On the other hand, even if it isn't practical, isn't it in fact morally correct to do so?

As a minor character in the film, a student, says to his professor, "How could you let this happen? And why didn't you kill yourself when you found out?"

Storm Over Tuzla

2008-04-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

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2005

2006-01-04T12:50:00.000-08:00

Sorting through the "Best Of" list below, I'm forced to concede that 2005 was, once again, a good year for the cinema. And yet I find it impossible to think of it that way. I suspect this is true in part thanks to the extreme nature of the "Worst Of" list below it, coupled with the realization that I actually sat through those films (and many other mediocre ones which appear on neither list).

What did you think of 2005? Let me know.

The Best of 2005:

1. Junebug
2. The New World
3. The Squid and the Whale
4. Me and You and Everyone We Know
5. Capote
6. Shopgirl
7. Nine Lives
8. Last Days
9. A History of Violence
10. Caché
11. Brokeback Mountain
12. Oldboy
13. Grizzly Man
14. Broken Flowers
15. Downfall
16. Good Night, and Good Luck
17. The Weather Man
18. Crash
19. The 40 Year-Old Virgin
20. Where the Truth Lies

Also Good in 2005: The Aristocrats, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Batman Begins, Coach Carter, Corpse Bride, The Devil's Rejects, Flightplan, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Hustle & Flow, King Kong, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Kung Fu Hustle, Land of the Dead, Mad Hot Ballroom, The Matador, Match Point, Melinda and Melinda, Millions, Murderball, My Summer of Love, Red Eye, Rock School, Sin City, Syriana, Three... Extremes, The Upside of Anger, Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, War of the Worlds, Zathura

The Worst of 2005:

1. Alone in the Dark
2. White Noise
3. Boogeyman
4. The Island
5. The Phantom of the Opera
6. Doom
7. Hostel
8. Rent
9. Hide and Seek
10. The Amityville Horror
11. Fantastic Four
12. Sahara
13. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
14. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
15. Robots
16. Saw II
17. Cursed
18. Elektra
19. The Skeleton Key
20. Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Also Bad in 2005: Aeon Flux, Assault on Precinct 13, Be Cool, Bewitched, Chicken Little, Derailed, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Family Stone, Into the Blue, Kicking & Screaming, Lords of Dogtown, The Ring 2, Rumor Has It...

The Biggest Disappointments of 2005:

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
2. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
3. The Brothers Grimm
4. Munich
5. Wolf Creek
6. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
7. Lord of War
8. Pretty Persuasion
9. November
10. Constantine

Jarheaded

2005-11-07T07:15:00.000-08:00

To paraphrase David Spade, "Jarhead? I seen it. Only I liked it better the first time, when it was called Full Metal Jacket."

Operation Desert Storm was a four-day "war." If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that it just didn't have the same pathos/gravitas/meaning that Viet Nam did. Sure, it's been used successfully as the backdrop to films with something else on their mind, like Three Kings. But as a subject in and of itself, it's not particularly rich in meaning vis-a-vis the human condition.

There is in Jarhead, for instance, a scene where Jake Gyllenhall, who is going stir crazy from waiting to fight, points a gun at a fellow recruit and threatens to kill him if he doesn't recite a Marine mantra ("This is my gun. There are many like it, but this one is mine," etc. - Yes. That's right. The one from Full Metal Jacket). And you just don't buy it. I mean, really: these guys are going crazy in the desert not because of the horror of war, but because they're being denied the opportunity of participating in the horror of war.

The film's director, Sam Mendes, clearly feels the same way. It's a little pathetic watching an artist who was fortunate enough to grow up during a period of relative peace try to disingenuously appropriate the angst of his parents' generation. About halfway through Jarhead, a helicopter flies over the heads of Gyllenhall and his marine buddies, playing the Doors' Break On Through. He turns to his buddy and says "That's Viet Nam music. Can't we get our own fucking music?"

Exactly so.

Diabolical

2005-09-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, I knew The Exorcism of Emily Rose was going to suck. And it does. It is, as you might imagine, a second-rate rip-off of The Exorcist. But I didn't realize it was going to be a retelling of Inherit the Wind. Except this time, wouldn't you know it, William Jennings Bryan - played by, uh, Laura Linney - brings the house down.

"Based on a True Story" (uggggghhhhh), the film is about a priest on trial for denying a young girl medical treatment even though she clearly needed it. She was epileptic and psychotic, as any doctor would point out. But of course, in the film version of the story (the real one involved a German girl named Anneliese Michel), the doctors are closed-minded cynics who won't allow for the possibility that Emily's symptoms are caused by the inhabitation of her body by Belial, Satan, and four other demons. Silly doctors.

In real life, Anneliese claimed that one of the demons inhabiting her was Adolf Hitler. The film wisely replaces Hitler with an old-time, scary-sounding demon, because hey - Hitler? Well that's just crazy. The priest takes her off her antipsychotic medication, and over a period of days allows her to mutilate and starve herself rather than stabilize her in a hospital.

The film starts off pretending to be a Rashomon-like, balanced portrayal of the events. You know: Linney puts a defense witness on the stand who describes events, and we see a flashback with creepy demonic effects (Emily's eyes go black, she screams in multiple voices, she bends her joints at unnatural angles, etc). Then the pencil-moustached prosecutor puts a doctor on the stand, and we see the same flashback as if it were being seen by a rational person (Emily contorts in the less-supernatural throes of an epileptic fit). But before long, the film goes off the reservation, rationally speaking, and gives us flashback after flashback of strictly Linda-Blair-style antics, with no narrative rebuttal from the scientists.

This departure from a balanced presentation inside the courtroom is matched by the whittling away of Linney's own perfunctory doubts about her client. A spattering of supposedly unexplainable events (...a stopped watch - call the Vatican!), and suddenly Linney's ready to accept Jesus Christ as her personal savior. Her closing argument (you know - the one set to rising, weepy strings, that's supposed to make our hearts soar?):

"The prosecution has presented you with facts. But facts get in the way of... possibilities."

Indeed they do. The difference between The Exorcist (a film I love dearly) and this dreck is that, while The Exorcist taps primal fears in the service of a real examination of faith and reason, this film disingenuously purports from the get-go to be based on fact, and thus requires no such consideration. Instead, it sets medical science up as a convenient straw-man standing in the way of a wider societal acceptance of Christian truth.

Nearly a century after the Scopes trial, a startling number of people - more than half the population of the country - have come to believe that Bryan had a point. Particularly given this frightening trend, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is worse than irresponsible filmmaking. It is, in fact, truly diabolical.

Les Justes

2005-02-13T22:09:00.000-08:00

Most of our experiences with horror in the cinema are metaphoric. In everyday life, there are no ravenous aliens waiting to tear us to shreds, no vengeful ghosts bringing doom to us in our homes late at night. The devil is not lurking in the shadows, ready to possess our bodies. These are all frightening scenarios, but when we relate to them in the cinema, we do so according to the conventions of metaphor - as representations, generally speaking, of our real-world desire to be safe, both physically and psychologically.

In this respect, it can be said that most horror films play upon our nostalgia for childhood, for that time when fantasy and reality were still inextricably entwined, a time when we felt that there really was something in the darkness that wished us ill. Growing up gives us a new view of our world, and while the perspective of adulthood (for most) removes the irrational fantasies of youth, it does nothing to eliminate the very real existence of everyday horrors.

That man has a gun. What can I say to him to prevent him from shooting me?

There is no food and the water is undrinkable. How am I going to survive?

It is imperative that they believe me, but they do not. How can I convince them that what I am saying is true?

These kinds of fears are more real, or at least more immediate, because they address situations that the real world may actually thrust upon us. These are grown-up fears, made all the more terrifying when the tenets of reason that we have taken such cares to develop cannot be applied to dispel them.

German filmmaker Michael Haneke recently gained world recognition with his film The Piano Teacher, which won the Jury Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, but it was a departure from his usual focus: the threat of real-world horror. I first became aware of Haneke when I saw his 1997 film Funny Games, a uniquely unsettling piece about a suburban family who are inexplicably tormented by two young men with no apparent motive. The scene it sets is made all the more terrifying by the plausibility of the premise – there but for the grace of God go I is an understandable reaction to the film.

Haneke’s latest film, Time of the Wolf, seems to pick up where Funny Games left off. In its opening scene, a middle-class French family enters their summer home to be inexplicably confronted by a stranger and his own family. The man is carrying a gun, and he sets the film in violent motion by using it.

While Time of the Wolf shares this image of shattered domestic tranquility with Funny Games, it develops it in an entirely unexpected direction. Forced by the menacing family to flee their home, the mother, Anna (Isabelle Huppert) and her children Eva (Anaîs Demoustier) and Benny (Lucas Biscombe) return by foot to their small town in the French countryside. An ominous fog fills the streets, which are strangely empty, save for piles of cattle carcasses burning in the darkness. Knocking on neighbors’ doors for help produces either no response or whispered demands (threats?) to go away.

As the mother and her children seek shelter and food, it soon becomes evident that some form of cataclysm has taken place. Strangely, though, its true nature is never revealed to us. We see no evidence of actual destruction, but we are told that the water supplies and rivers are contaminated. Was the event biological? The fact that we are never given an answer, that there is no rational explanation, simply adds to a mounting feeling of dread. Inevitably the trio comes across a group of survivors, and while their discovery gives us hope that the film’s fairy-tale horrors will be dispelled by this last vestige of society, we are dismayed (though perhaps not surprised) to discover that they will in fact only be replaced by more practical – more real – fears.

As in his previous films, Haneke here shows himself to be a filmmaker in stark control of both camera and cutting. Rigid frames, ice-cold dolly moves, and a methodical, deliberate pace provide perhaps the only comfort the film gives us: a sense that behind the horrors exists some semblance of reason – even if it is only in the form of a passive, omniscient observer of the action.

Equally deliberate is Haneke’s use of light, which is a character here more so than in his previous work. Serving the theme of society as a beacon in the darkness of savagery, an early, seemingly interminable scene finds Huppert stumbling through an absolutely pitch-black countryside in search of her son, the only light available to her (or to us) given off by handfuls of hay she carries with her and sets alight one at a time. It is a haunting image: her small, desperate, terrified face glowing intermittently out of a darkness which seems to want to swallow her alive (as it may already have done to her son).

Even the daylight here seems to fuel an ominous tone. Muddy and diffuse, it gives the film a sense of having been shot underwater. On a practical level, the mysterious cataclysm has made all electrical light defunct, but in this world, even the light of the universe itself seems to have been dimmed. In the village, a white fog fills the streets, obscuring visibility and making its residents appear like ghosts in the mist. At the train station where survivors gather, waiting in desperation for a train that will never come, the countryside seems eternally shrouded in grey cloud cover. Huddled inside the station for warmth, the survivors seem to peer at each other out of an inky gloom.

Traditionally, civilization has been viewed as something that protects us from our real-world fears. Agreeing amongst ourselves not to hurt each other seems to provide a relief from them, whether real or imagined. In Time of the Wolf, Haneke makes no claims regarding this observation, but he does make it clear that the lack of civilization is a certain cause for terror. We are shown that when it is removed, nothing remains to prevent us from enacting horrors upon our neighbor – or to prevent them from harming us. In the face of such a collapse, a reversion to our primal selves becomes inevitable.

It seems inevitable then, too, that mythology works its way into Haneke’s bleak world. In the new community, we witness the slaughter of horses, dogs and goats, and while it is rationalized by the survivors as a necessary step for preserving the water supply, Haneke’s dispassionate observation of the acts lends them a primal, sacrificial quality.

If this ritual sacrifice is for us (the audience) only metaphoric in nature, it is nevertheless reiterated by the film’s community in the form of a whispered myth, referred to as Les Justes (“the Just”). Though no one has ever seen one (many claim to know someone who has), we hear that there are apparently 36 of these chosen people, and they keep our world going by being alive. If even one of them dies, the world will end. Later, we hear that one of them was spotted in town, stripping down before throwing himself into a fire. The person telling the story seems to think that it is this bizarre act of self-sacrifice on the part of the Juste, rather than his survival, which is meant to be our salvation. The ironic contradiction in interpretations is of course significant: if the citizens of this devastated place are to believe the myth, then it is either vitally important that these Justes die, or that they live. Not knowing which is the correct belief in turn adds to the maddening uncertainty of the survivors' lot.

While some of the adults whisper these stories with absolute conviction, Anna and a number of the others take them with a grain of salt, unsure whether to abandon their skepticism in favor of the bizarre hope they suggest. But Anna’s son, Benny, who has become silent following his wander through the darkness early in the film, is still a child, unencumbered by the logic of adulthood, and he has also heard the stories. Awakened by one of the relentless, gruesome bloody noses he spontaneously suffers throughout the film, he wanders again out into the night, drawn by the light of the community’s signal fire.

To Benny, it seems there are things in the darkness that wish him and his family ill. And in Haneke’s film, a world stripped of the uniquely adult trappings of civilization and society, it is easy to believe that his reasoning is just.

Appurushîdo

2005-01-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

Japanese animé is not my cup of tea. Despite this fact, earlier this week I found myself compelled to check out Appleseed, Shinji Aramaki’s spectacular adaptation of a manga comic by Ghost in the Shell’s creator Masamune Shirow. I had heard it employed a new animation style that was worth a look. To call this an understatement would be a major, well, understatement.

The story is about a girl named Deunan, a fighter in a post-apocalyptic ruins who discovers a utopian city where replicant-like “bioroids” live among us, and where her longtime fighting companion Briareos, whom she once feared dead, is discovered to have been surgically built into a mechanoid rabbit who…

But who am I kidding? I have no idea what was going on in this film. As is so often the case with animé, exposition is given in rapid-fire bursts of giddy Japanese dubbing of a kind outpaced only by the most limber-lipped Texas auctioneers. When painstakingly re-examined and pieced together, even the best animé plots are usually threadbare and packed with wild, head-scratching non-sequiturs.

This is the reason I usually stay away from the genre, though making such statements is an open invitation to a flamewar by the true believers, who collectively comprise an enormous audience. Animé is big business thanks to the devotion of its adherents. And despite the fact that its stories don’t usually jive for me, another facet of the genre occasionally gets me back into the theater: it is often not only a showcase for the true vanguard of animation technique, but also one of the few proponents of its aesthetically satisfying execution.

Having said that, it is only fair to observe that Appleseed itself employs no new animation methods. Photorealistic 3D rendering, 3D cel shading, and motion capture have all been used and refined elsewhere. But the genius stroke made here by Aramaki is the decision to merge these seemingly discrete techniques together, creating what is to my mind a wholly new style of animation. The effect is immediately breathtaking, but maddeningly difficult to describe.

Photorealistic 3D rendering involves animating three-dimensional wireframe models, over which photorealistic textures are laid (and lit with ray-traced lighting sources), giving the effect that a computer-generated object exists in a real-world, three-dimensional space, and is being photographed naturally. Jurassic Park was the first major example of this style, and it has been formidably refined in the decade that followed.

3D cel shading is a technique in which 3D objects constructed in a computer are filled in as if they were traditional 2D cartoons. Rather than giving them photorealistic 3D textures, portions of them (such as a face) are inked in a single color, giving a final effect that looks, well, like a 2D cartoon moving in three dimensions. The effect is much easier to observe than to describe, and can be seen in a limited way in films such as The Iron Giant and tv shows like Futurama.

Motion capture is exactly what it sounds like: the performance of an actor is recorded using body markers, and used as a guide to move the wireframe models referred to above. Traditionally, motion capture has been used for photorealistic 3D rendering (Final Fantasy is a good example of this), but less so for cel-shading, whose subjects are usually more “cartoony,” and don’t require realistic human motions.

Appleseed features motion-captured performances, which are rendered as 3D cel-shaded characters, which are then incorporated into a photorealistic 3D world. If this combination has been employed before, I am unaware of it, and it has certainly never been executed at the level achieved here by Aramaki. It is a combination that seems unlikely to produce a satisfying effect; shades of Roger Rabbit floated through my brain as I was on my way to the theater. But nothing could have been further from the truth.

A page in, and I am quickly realizing that the pictures this film left behind in my head, while dazzling in every way, simply cannot be described. Regardless of your feelings about Japanese animé, if part of your love for the cinema is an appreciation of its power to produce breathtaking images, Appleseed is well worth your time. But see it before it leaves theatres - even a big screen tv won't do this artwork justice.

Ararat

2005-01-12T13:49:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago I posted a piece about Hotel Rwanda, which deals with the Tutsi genocide of 1994. Quite by accident, Atom Egoyan's Ararat ended up being next on my Netflix queue. Aside from a couple of aborted first attempts, Egoyan's films have consistently impressed me. Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and Felicia's Journey are all examples of perfect metaphoric storytelling, executed by a clear intellect with no doubts about his subject matter.

Ararat continues the tradition, although it didn't enjoy much of a release. Again, who wants to hear about genocide when there's a new episode of Friends on tonight?

Egoyan is one of the most exceptional filmmakers we have with us today. Ararat is among his best: a deeply moving, quietly human, thoughtfully constructed film. It should be seen.

Hotel Rwanda

2005-01-10T17:53:00.000-08:00

Not all deliberate films are good films. Neither does the lack of a deliberate approach always signal a bad film. Sometimes, the deliberate intent of a filmmaker is all that is required. Sometimes, when what you have to say is important enough, just getting your head above the fray and attracting people’s attention long enough to say it is achievement enough.

Terry George's Hotel Rwanda is not a film I would describe as deliberately-constructed. Its production design is flat and uninspired. Its cinematography is uniformly bland. Its costume design is not particularly realistic (have you ever seen soldiers’ fatigues so neatly pressed during a time of war?). Its cast, led by the inimitable Don Cheadle, acquits itself admirably, but aside from Cheadle himself, there are no star turns of note here. Frankly, nothing in the film’s style is worthy of comment.

And while I can say nothing to recommend it to the aesthete, I nonetheless must insist that you take the time to see it, for some things in this world are more important than good cinematography and breast-beating actors.

Do you know where Rwanda is? Do you know what happened there in 1994? If you do, you are the exception to the rule in this country, even among “intellectuals.” But if you are aware of these things, ask yourself whether you can say why it was that no countries outside of Rwanda, including our own, stepped in to prevent what was happening there at the time.

When should the United Nations, or the United States, for that matter, intercede in the affairs of other nations to stop innocent bloodshed? What is the litmus test? Is it an empirical matter of body-count? Did the nearly one million lives lost in Rwanda meet that test in 1994? How about the nearly two million lives lost in the Sudan last year? Or is it a matter of means? Is the slow, bleeding, suffocating deaths of hundreds of thousands of Kurds as a result of Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks trumped by the machete butchery of the Interahamwe in Rwanda? Or the Janjaweed in Darfur?

These are among the unspoken questions begged by Hotel Rwanda. They are important questions. And they remain unanswered by a population who would rather flip the channel over to watch reruns of “Friends” when the word genocide appears on CNN.

Let me say it again: see this film. Think about it. And then decide what to do. Or decide to continue to do nothing.

2004

2004-12-20T15:14:00.000-08:00

It has been a good year for the cinema.

Here is a near-final attempt to quantify my feelings about 2004's offerings. It should be noted that I have yet to see some (probably) good stuff released this year (in fact, if you notice any glaring omissions here, I'd be interested to hear about them). As this is the case, revisions to the list below are practically inevitable.

What were your favorites? Least favorites? Let me know.

The Best of 2004:
1. Birth
2. Closer
3. Before Sunset
4. Sideways
5. Million Dollar Baby
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
7. The Passion of the Christ
8. Incident at Loch Ness
9. Hotel Rwanda
10. The Polar Express
11. Primer
12. Garden State
13. The Clearing
14. Gozu
15. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
16. Friday Night Lights
17. A Very Long Engagement
18. Tarnation
19. Spartan
20. The Door in the Floor

Also good in 2004: Spider-Man 2, The Incredibles, Open Water, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, P.S., The Aviator, Mean Girls, Shaun of the Dead, Maria Full of Grace, The Final Cut, Finding Neverland, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

The Worst of 2004:
1. What the #$*! Do We Know?
2. Catwoman
3. Troy
4. White Chicks
5. Thunderbirds
6. Exorcist: The Beginning (Renny Harlin version)
7. AVP: Alien vs. Predator
8. Darkness
9. Mindhunters
10. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
11. Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
12. The Day After Tomorrow
13. Van Helsing
14. National Treasure
15. Around the World in 80 Days
16. I, Robot
17. Little Black Book
18. Eulogy
19. Saw
20. King Arthur

The Biggest Disappointments of 2004:
1. The Machinist
2. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
3. The Village
4. The Forgotten
5. Code 46
6. Saved!
7. Napoleon Dynamite
8. Club Dread
9. Hellboy
10. The Chronicles of Riddick

This Will Hurt

2004-12-19T18:42:00.000-08:00

The comparisons are inevitable, but when they happen they will be flawed. In 1966, director Mike Nichols plumbed the depths of sexual cruelty with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Nearly four decades later he is at it again with Closer, but the new film makes the first look like a nursery rhyme.

It can sometimes be comforting to observe that men and women were not meant to get along with each other, and there is no dearth of films in the kitty to lend credence to the opinion. Fairytale romances also abound, and in greater number, perhaps because they allow us to be transported away from reality, to a place where there is a happy-ever-after for all good hearts, and where we do not cut each other to pieces with our mouths.

But life is not like the movies, except in those rare instances where the movies are allowed to tell it to us straight. Closer is such a film, and it is an understatement to say it pulls no punches. It is an adaptation of Patrick Marber’s successful West End play, and Nichols’ hands are without a doubt the best that could be found to handle the transport. Marber’s characters make mincemeat of each other with dialogue that somehow seems natural, despite being anything but. It has often been compared to Mamet, and while on the surface its clipped nature might suggest this, there is a visceral underpinning to it that goes for the throat in a way that is unique to Marber. In the cinema, this kind of interplay is Nichols’ territory, and it is comforting to find that he is the one handling it here.

The film begins with a lingering sequence which, although interrupted by cutting, still manages to echo the ponderous long takes that open so many of Nichols' films. This time it is a slow-motion homage to love at first sight. Extrapolating from the opening scene of Marber’s play, which is set in a hospital emergency room, Nichols here shows us its precedent: in the morning sidewalk bustle of London, Dan (Jude Law) spots Alice (Natalie Portman), and is encouraged by her smile. The distraction is just enough to allow Alice to be hit by an oncoming taxi. “Hello stranger,” she says to Dan, who worriedly bends over her damaged body in the street. And on this portentous note, we are off to the races.

We will finish the film as we began it, with Dan and Alice, but first we will watch as their lives collide with two more strangers. Anna (Julia Roberts) is a photographer hired to shoot Dan’s photo for his upcoming book. Larry (Clive Owen) is an anonymous doctor conned by Dan in an online wankroom to hook up with Anna, who has rejected Dan’s adulterous advances. It is the first of many icy ploys biopsied by the film, inadvertently inflicted upon an innocent (Larry) by a spiteful stranger (Dan) with the intention of hurting someone else altogether (Anna). Actions against others come with consequences, and the immediate outcome of Dan’s jealous whimsy is nothing compared to the avalanche that will follow it.

Closer is populated with hateful people. What is important is that they are thus not so much as a result of the things they do to each other, but because the manner in which they do them will remind us of our own selves and lovers. We often hate most those things in others that remind us of our own deficiencies, and while we may like to think of ourselves as “good people,” it is only a liar or a rare gem indeed that can say they have not used language to strike out at a lover in jealous spite. If we are typical specimens, we will find that the film’s bitter taste comes not from what it shows us, but from the fact that it has shown it to us in a mirror.

Having said this, one of the smarter aspects of Marber’s script is its acknowledgment that most people are not in fact monsters, but are nonetheless capable on occasion of behaving monstrously toward one another. Closer distills the romantic relationships of its characters down to their cruelest moments, making huge elliptical jumps in order to whittle out only the most primal, brutal vignettes in these people’s lives. We are instinctively aware that these lovers have experienced long and satisfying periods of bliss with one another, but these days are of no interest to either Marber or Nichols. Muddling the good times with the bad would be strictly beside the point here.

The character flaw that Closer lingers over in its participants is a familiar one: they insist upon the truth in their relationships. It is a predictably disingenuous policy, however, as it is only ever employed to illuminate lies already committed. And while admitting indiscretions may seem to the idealist the honorable thing to do, someone who has done so might tell you differently. “Why did you tell me?” asks Larry of Anna when she says she’s been sleeping with Dan. “I couldn’t lie to you,” she replies, and when asked why says, “Because I love you.” As the film moves inexorably forward, this naïveté is exchanged for cold estimation, as admissions become opportunities not for penitence but for emotional laceration.

Insisting on the truth by asking for details when you discover you’ve been cheated on is also naïve. Although you may manage to extract it, it will usually be a truth you’re better off not knowing. Anna’s confession to Larry leads to one of the film’s most grueling confrontations. Questions like “Did you come?” and “What did it taste like?” will naturally lead to answers like “Yes” and “Sweeter than yours.” When pressed, Anna suggests that she prefers Dan’s gentle lovemaking to Larry’s roughness. He asks if she feels he makes love to her “like a whore.” “Sometimes,” she says, and the word is hardly out of her mouth before he parries with: “Now why would that be?” Once the entire, grueling truth has been extracted, Larry, who only moments earlier was as in love as it is possible to be, closes with: “Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die, you fucked up slag.”

Truth, and its strategic exclusion, operates in the mouths of these people like powder in a musket barrel. As the film is winding down, Larry and Dan trade rough barbs in Larry’s office, but seem nonetheless to come to a sort of understanding. In a moment of refreshing kindness, Larry tells Dan, despite loathing him, that he never slept with Alice. We are almost as heartened by the fact as Dan is, until Larry stops him on his way out the door. Unable to help himself, Larry says to him: “I lied to you. I did fuck Alice. Sorry for telling you. I’m just not big enough to forgive you.”

Although the feelings may be familiar, no one speaks exactly like this in real life, and it's a good thing. The language these characters use is much like the timeline of the film: it has been distilled down to its rawest, most efficient elements. The French have a figure of speech, l’esprit d’escalier, which refers to those things you later wish you had thought to say at the time. It is a feeling people often have after an argument, but it is not an affliction shared by Marber’s characters. Their repartee is fast and furious, and no opportunity to inflict wounds is missed simply because of the speed of the battle. These people are never at a loss for words when it comes to verbal mutilation.

It is this seemingly spontaneous (but in fact absolutely deliberate) prose that will make Closer memorable long after the dreck of this year’s box office is washed from the streets. “Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off,” says Anna to a desperate Larry, refusing him the solace he seeks. “But it's better if you do." Later, when Dan speaks of the complexity of the human heart, Larry fires back: “Have you seen a heart? It looks like a fist covered in blood.”

As the film comes to a close, the abbatoir has been washed and sterilized, and we are brought back again to square one with one of the most perfect bookends in recent memory. Once again, Alice is strolling a sidewalk in slow-motion telephoto. This time, however, she is back in New York, and there is no Dan. Instead she is surrounded by hungry-eyed men who turn to leer at her as she passes, sizing her up like a veal cutlet. We see in her eyes that she is aware of the attention, and derives an icy joy from it. She has been returned by the events of her life to the position of sexual quarry, but the romance of the job has been replaced by cold experience. And thus it is that the carnivores go about their business.

Upon seeing the film recently, an acquaintance of mine told me she thought “it shows how men really think.” I was struck by the statement - struck that she hadn’t bothered to keep score, focusing exclusively on the damage done by Dan and Larry, and leaving the deception, cruelty, and poor choices of Alice and Anna behind. Her oversight was an almost primal display of sexual self-preservation, and reminded me again of the power of Marber’s characterizations and Nichols’ interpretation, how close to the nerve they cut with them. Their film, like her unknowing statement, suggests an enthusiastic answer to the question of whether men and women were meant for one another:

"Of course they are," it says. "They deserve each other."

Collaboration

2004-12-03T23:18:00.000-08:00

You hear the refrain all the time, and it is strictly disingenuous: “Film is a Collaborative Art Form.” While this may be an accurate observation regarding the majority of today’s cinema, it is a poor practical philosophy, and should be discouraged. Those who cling to this idea practice the kind of equivocation that serves as a blockade to individual expression. Deliberate cinema is not an option for its adherents.

Not surprisingly, the individual who is least comforted by such a statement is the one who is actually held accountable for the final product of the filmmaking act: the director. In fact, let us be clear about this: there is typically an inverse correlation between the urgency of the “collaborative belief” of a film technician and the net effect that technician has on the final picture.

I will state the very obvious: the moment a director chooses a piece of material to film and begins attaching other technicians to his enterprise, he is starting down a long road filled with potential impediments to his vision. Each time he answers a question posed to him by his "collaborators," he is offered an unspoken choice: to deny their deflection and insist yet again on his own vision, or to allow that vision to be watered down yet one more time.

Here is a famous story. On the set of The Killing, Stanley Kubrick worked with cinematographer Lucien Ballard. At the time, Ballard had been working as a cameraman for twenty-seven years. Kubrick had been working with motion pictures for only five, and The Killing was his first studio (which is to say: non-independent) picture. There was no doubt about whose tenure was greater, and the two were working together for the first time.

In the film, there is a tracking shot that rakes Elisha Cook through his apartment. Silhouetted bookshelves and furniture intermittently separate Cook from the camera. Kubrick asked Ballard to place the dolly track close to the furniture and mount a 25mm lens for the shot. Upon returning to the set shortly thereafter, he discovered that Ballard had moved the track back and mounted a 50mm lens instead. When Kubrick asked him why he had disobeyed his instructions, Ballard responded that moving the track back made his work easier, and that replacing the 25mm lens with a 50 made up for the difference in the track’s position. “What about the change in perspective?” Kubrick asked. “It doesn’t matter,” Ballard replied. Kubrick’s response was the correct one: “Move the track back where I asked it to be, and mount a 25mm, or get off my set.”

Few first-time directors would allow themselves the conviction required for such a response. Filmmaking is an expensive business, and therefore imposes upon a director a very real responsibility. Weak personalities placed in such a position will look for comfort where they can, and the statement “Film is a Collaborative Art Form” can seem to provide it. But it is a comfort that is self-nullifying. It produces an “art” created by bet-hedgers, which is to say, no art at all. It supports the dictum of the studio, which is: “generalize.” The familiar equation is relentless: the greater the expense, the blander a film needs to be to turn a profit. How easy, then, to take comfort in the “collaboration” of your more experienced D.P., or Art Director, or Assistant Director, or Producer, or Actor, who “knows better.” After all, if you continue forward with such “collaborations,” you may yet be spared the ignominy of having to explain yourself when you fail.

It is weakness and weakness alone that causes a director to deviate from his plan, or worse yet, to allow others to dictate it. But the other side of the coin is equally pale: it is vanity pure and simple that causes a technician to intrude upon their director’s vision. There is a difference between offering a professional opinion and inflicting one, and the difference is a belief in “collaboration.”

“But my director is not great,” you will say. “He needs my help.” And indeed, lacking that help, he may fail. On the other hand, consider that you may be wrong: he may not. But whether he fails or not, he should be allowed to come by his fate honestly, which is to say by his own doing. When he says he wants a red door instead of a green one, whether he is right or wrong in the matter, a red door is in fact what he deserves. It is what he is owed.

And again, we must be clear: none of this is to say that using your skills to offer suggestions is not productive. It is, after all, one of the reasons you were hired. Hopefully, you are talented, and have an opinion. But it is your job, too, to understand the difference between a useful suggestion and a harping series of annoyances. And to comply when your director selects against your recommendations and judgments.

In True and False, director David Mamet warns actors against the fashionable-but-indulgent practice of “the Method,” noting that “the work of characterization has or has not been done by the author. It is not your job, and it’s not your look-out.” Rather than try to “help” the play by “creating a character,” Mamet advises actors instead that their challenge is to “open the mouth, stand straight, and say the words bravely,” and thereby perform an act which serves the play and its audience rather than themselves.

The same is true for the film technician. If you are a Best Boy, and the director has asked that a light be cut in a certain way, do not adjust your flag because you think something important has been left dark. If you are a Costume Designer and the director has asked that you fit an actor with a porkpie hat, do not insist instead upon a tweed cap because you feel “it’s what the character would wear.” And if you are an actor, and the director has told you to forget your preoccupation with backstory and instead speak your line clearly, then do so – and if you find that you are incapable of the performance without inventing such a backstory, then get on with it in silence and do not inflict it upon your employer.

Finally, here is some truth: if you want to direct a film, you should go direct a film. Otherwise, do your job. If you are not the director, then your job is not to “collaborate” with the director. It is to serve the director. If you believe otherwise, you are not only acting as an impediment to his work, you are also lying to yourself. Only a fool would consider such a course advisable.

Growing Up

2004-11-20T23:30:00.000-08:00

In 1995, director Richard Linklater made a film I despised. Okay, I confess: “despised” is an overstatement. In reality I simply disliked it. But I was younger at the time, and often used phrases like “despised” when in fact what I meant was “disliked.” Hyperbole is an affliction of youth, and these can be forgiven, can’t they?

I had been a fan of Linklater for the smart, hilarious, and totally original Slacker, his first film, but Before Sunrise, which followed it, and which I did not despise, but did dislike, left me reconsidering my opinion of his talents. Slacker had been a virtuoso performance: Linklater’s camera acted as a silent, floating observer, following one kooky young Austin, Texas resident after another like an invisible relay-race baton on a seemingly aimless real-time meander through town. This narrative technique had no precedent that I’m aware of, and when combined with the inspired real world casting of quirky local characters, it produced one of the finest, and certainly the funniest, city symphony I’d seen.

It was these storytelling strengths that Linklater seemed intent to capitalize on again in Before Sunrise. Once again, the film was a city symphony of sorts (this time, Vienna). Once again, it moved (mostly) in real time, and once again the camera was a tagalong, following characters on a grand meander. But this time, instead of moving from one character to another throughout the night, it settled in on two: American Eurailer Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Parisian traveler Celine (Julie Delpy). The setup was simple enough: Jesse was such an endearing guy that Celine couldn’t help but interrupt her train ride home to Paris in order to spend an evening with him, wandering the streets of Vienna, before his flight home to the U.S. in the morning.

And indeed the similarities with Slacker did not end there. Jesse and Celine could be seen as sort of emulating the wandering camera’s position as they encountered one quirky Vienna resident after another, residents not dissimilar to those in Slacker. Two students hand them fliers for a play about a cow; a literate bum writes them an on-demand poem including the word “milkshake;” a palm reader notes “we are all made up of stardust;” a bartender gives Jesse a bottle of wine on the promise that he’ll mail him the money later.

The difference this time, though, was that our focus on Jesse and Celine never strayed. They were joined at the hip throughout the night, and so, by association, were we. Which would have been lovely if they weren’t both so irritating. What had been passed off as humorous, zany observations on life, the universe and everything by the quirky characters of Slacker were now coming out of the mouths of two young (pseudo) intellectuals as if they were profound, insightful truths.

“Man,” I thought to myself, “I hate these guys.” And by “hate,” of course, what I really meant, being young and hyperbolic, was “dislike.”

What a difference ten years makes.

It is now 2004, and Linklater, Hawke and Delpy have crafted a sequel to Before Sunrise. It is called Before Sunset, and it is the cinematic day to the first film’s night. Jesse, now ten years older, has come to a Paris bookstore to finish off a European tour promoting his latest novel. It concerns a young couple who, not unlike he and Celine, meet for a single night in Vienna. As in the first film, the characters in his book agree after one whirlwind night together to meet again on a Vienna train platform six months later. As in the film, the question of whether or not they actually do is left unanswered by the book.

But the answer is soon revealed to us, if not to the book’s audience. Celine appears from behind a bookshelf as Jesse is finishing his interview, and after a brief and cordial hello, the two, who have in fact not met since that night ten years ago, set off on another walk, faced with another deadline (Jesse leaves on a flight to the U.S. in a few hours), and an entire decade to catch up on.

Having despised (sorry: disliked) the first film so much, I was not eager to see the second. But somehow I did, and in doing so learned a great deal about how we grow up: as people, as lovers, as filmmakers. Before Sunset is an extremely careful film, made by an extremely careful filmmaker, about two people who are, by necessity, extremely careful with each other. Its pace, like its technique, is deliberate, and it ushers us one careful moment at a time toward quiet answers to the questions that these two, and by extension their audience, need to ask.

I won’t go into too much detail about the content of the discussion that forms the entirety of the film. It is too precious, too well written, and too intimately portrayed for me to easily give up the delights of observing it firsthand. But I will note that for me, the most gratifying aspect of the film is that all of its individual elements work together to express a single unifying concept: maturity.

Take as an example our two main characters. The Jesse and Celine of the first film talked the way young liberal arts students in love always do: real feelings were danced around, couched in discussions about philosophy, poetry, and gender relations, and interspersed with intellectualized, pseudo-anthropological observations on human behavior. Generally speaking, the two came off in nearly everything they said as enthusiastically naïve. Theirs were the observations of intelligent people, yes, but they were intelligent young people. They speculated about the way the world works with a sense of certainty, but it was a certainty produced by naïvete. People who have been around the block a few more times, who have seen a little more of the world, who have known a few more people and had a few more relationships, would never talk the way they did then.

People, for instance, like the Jesse and Celine of Before Sunset. In the current film, the two reveal about themselves a skepticism which hadn’t been present a decade before. When Jesse tells Celine a story about German soldiers refusing to set off explosive charges to destroy Notre Dame at the end of the occupation, she asks him something she never would have the first time around: “Is that true?” And his answer, too, has been prefigured by a loss of adolescence: “I don’t know.” Similar stories told to each other on that brief night in their youth had been accepted on faith.

This more developed worldview reveals itself even more significantly in the mannerisms of the two with respect to one another. A decade earlier, their exuberance for each other had been breathless, but now they take the care that is required by two people who want to do each other no unintended harm. Answering the question of whether either of them showed up at the train platform requires delicate footwork, for if one of them had, it must have been hurtful to them that the other had not. The fact that Jesse is now married arises very late in the conversation, tentatively observed by Celine, who has read it on his book’s jacket cover. And so on.

It is this care, too, which keeps them from the frank subject of whether they still have feelings for one another, a fact which provides far more suspense than one might expect from such a gentle little movie. Late in the film, as the deadline looms over them, Jesse stares out a car window and admits something he thinks perhaps he shouldn’t. Celine silently responds with a small, perfect physical gesture, unnoticed by him, which speaks volumes. It is a precious, human moment of a kind rarely seen in movies, and it begins an inexorable process: the brick-by-brick removal of the buttress wall that the two have been building for each other’s protection throughout the afternoon. This circumspect, deliberate, emotionally considerate behavior is of a kind that would have been inconceivable to Jesse and Celine in their youth, but we have no troubles accepting it as consistent with the mature adults they have become.

Gloriously, the growing up which Jesse and Celine have done is mirrored by that which the filmmakers themselves seem to have undergone. Hawke and Delpy co-wrote the screenplay - the aforementioned aspects of maturity evident in the older Jesse and Celine were bestowed upon them by these two grown up writers. Their central thesis here seems to be that getting older is no anathema to the concept of romance; that in fact, mature romance may even be more satisfying. A grown-up idea indeed.

And as delightful as it is to watch these young, irritating lovers become older, seasoned, more likable ones, the evidence in the film of Linklater’s maturing is even more satisfying for me to observe. The differences between the filmmaker who made Before Sunrise and the one who ten years later made Before Sunset are striking.

There are a few very nicely observed moments in the first film. At one point, young Celine and Jesse enter a listening booth at a record store and pretend to listen studiously to music while we watch them sneaking surreptitious glances at each other. In a bar, much later in the evening, they play a telephone game, pretending to talk with friends about their newfound lovers, and in doing so reveal themselves to one another.

But these are moments that seem more accident than plan, more ad-lib than studied choice. In this respect they depend more on the actors than the director. This makes them no less appealing, but the film is filled with at least as many misfire moments. One in particular, another discussion in a bar, is so filled with distraction (they play pinball as they speak) that the subject of the conversation, which was of the pseudo-intellectual variety to begin with, is completely lost. This balance of hits and misses within the film reinforces the impression that it was made by a young filmmaker.

Not so the Linklater of Before Sunset. One of the strongest signals of his new maturity here is his ability to examine the earlier film and accurately reference in it the elements that worked. For me the most effective scene in Before Sunrise is the montage which closes it, a series of locked-off shots in which we see, one at a time, the places Jesse and Celine inhabited the night before: the alley where they talked, the café table where they had their palms read, the lawn where they made love, two glasses and a bottle still sitting there unnoticed as an old woman passes them by. They are all bathed in a cold morning light, and the absence of the two lovers’ animated voices leaves them feeling empty, and their audience feeling wistful.

And just as the first film ended with such a montage, so, in totally symmetrical fashion, Before Sunset begins with one: a series of locked-off shots of empty spaces in Paris, each of which will soon be filled with the voices and lives of these two. It is an absolutely deliberate choice, reflecting Linklater’s understanding of the structure of his first film, and by extension making plain the fact that he is a filmmaker who has learned from experience.

But perhaps the clearest example of his growth is his execution of the technical high-wire act that serves as the film’s structure. While Before Sunrise was a film that more or less moved in real time, Before Sunset is a film that takes place in absolutely rigid continuity. Aside from its opening montage, the film moves forward without a single lost second. To be sure, there are cuts (no film camera in the world can hold ninety minutes of film stock), but these are only the briefest of breaks, sometimes made for practical editing purposes (to move to a different take of the same scene, for instance), or sometimes to intentionally allow the audience a breath.

At the same time, it is also important to note that the film is not entirely composed of long takes, as one review I read of it suggested. There are in fact long scenes shot in traditional shot-reverse (the café, the bookstore). But the long steadicam and dolly shots that Linklater favors here are so immediate, and so appropriately encapsulate the simple nature of the story (two people walking and talking) that it is easy to remember the film this way in retrospect.

What is surprising, and what to my thinking is the greatest technical achievement of the film, is that the difficulties of maintaining this continuity will in all likelihood go completely unnoticed by all but the most wonkish viewers. This is in part a testament to the totally absorbing nature of the dialogue (both spoken and unspoken), but this alone could not have sustained it had not Linklater been very careful with his editorial choices.

The best example of this occurs during the central sequence of the film, in which Jesse and Celine step onto a tour boat on the Seine and continue their conversation, which reaches a poignant beat just as they arrive at the dock on the far side. It is a masterpiece of timing. If you watch carefully, you can see how editing achieved it, but it was nonetheless created both in the script and on set in a way that gets the two to the other shore at exactly the right moment. And yet these sorts of micro-observations are deflected by the strength of the scene itself. The fact is that the final product of this deliberately created sequence is one that flows so smoothly, whose subjects are so compelling, it seems like pure accident that they get off the boat when they do.

There are other choices in the film that also echo its director’s matured talents. In 1995, for instance, Linklater never would have thought to leave one of these two alone by themselves – they seemed joined by a short, invisible tether the entire evening. Here, there is a wonderful pause, also on the boat: as Jesse dials his driver, the camera drifts away to follow Celine, wandering forward with her to the prow, where it watches her quietly smiling to herself.

Or perhaps it is the characters who have changed in this way. One could argue that in 1995 they wouldn’t let each other out of their sight, but now, years later, that thrilling, terrifying fear of losing each other has been replaced with the temperance and calm that time and distance have thrown in its way. These are two people who after all this time may dance around their emotions with each other, but they are also calmer, more rational, more deliberate people now.

And then there is the final scene. It cannot be discussed here, for doing so would ruin what is truly one of the great moments in contemporary cinema. But suffice it to say that it involves a question which is not spoken by Celine, but communicated by her nonetheless, and with absolute clarity. And because our arrival at the scene has been so meticulously crafted, moment by moment, by three filmmakers who, like the characters they have created, have matured with age, Jesse’s response to the unspoken query is not simply inevitable – it has in fact been prefigured in our own dreams.

Had I been able to see it in 1995, I would have said that Before Sunset is one of the best films I’d ever seen. Now, in 2004, I am older and hopefully a little wiser, hopefully less prone to such hyperbolic overstatement.

And Before Sunset is one of the best films I have ever seen.

Two From the Grave; One Deliberate

2004-11-06T17:07:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I pointed to two trailers for films whose stories seemed so similar to me as to be laughable. Didn't the two companies involved (Fine Line and Newmarket) know that there was a carbon-copy of their film being developed out there? And even once both films were posted, how could they allow them to share such close release dates? What were their executives thinking?

The films were P.S. and Birth, two pictures about women encountering seemingly-reincarnated former lovers, and now that I've seen both, I am very glad that neither of them got the axe due simply to their cosmetic similarities. As it turns out, both are excellent, and one is in my estimation truly brilliant. Here are the trailers for both: P.S. and Birth.

P.S. takes the basic idea above (woman meets seemingly-reincarnated ex-lover), and plays it as a pleasant absurdity - a reaffirmation of the joyous nature of love. I won't reveal whether the "reincarnated lover" (Topher Grace) of the woman in question (Laura Linney) is actually the real McCoy, because in this film it is fun finding out for yourself, and in the end it hardly even seems to matter. But I will note that director Dylan Kidd (who also adapted the screenplay) has done a remarkable job of capturing the enduring quality of passionate love. One scene in particular, in which Linney, a Columbia University admissions officer, first makes love to Grace, a prospective student, is so ecstatic and genuine that it comes as an overwhelming, breathtaking surprise. I won't speculate regarding Linney's acting method, but suffice it to say I've never seen a more satisfyingly-executed on-screen orgasm. And pedestrian as such a thing might be, it is a moment that absolutely crystallizes the spirit of the film. There is an aching that two people in love can share when they are apart, and this film is a better expression of it than any other that comes to mind.

Where P.S. rings as a joyous song, writer-director Jonathan Glazer's Birth plays a somewhat similar story line as an ominous overture to dark revelation. Again in question here is the veracity of an identity: is the young boy Sean (Godsend's creepy Cameron Bright) actually the reincarnated lover of Anna (Nicole Kidman)?

What is striking to me is not the fact that Glazer takes a clearly preposterous supernatural idea and makes it urgently plausible, but the deliberate nature with which he does it. The film is richly photographed to be sure, but it is the consistent editorial choices it displays, in particular its unbroken gaze, favoring unusually long takes, which create the portentous, introspective mood necessary for us (and for Kidman) to take the subject matter seriously. Film editing has often, and rightly, been likened to the act of musical composition. The languorous, often-silent long takes of Birth remind me of nothing so much as the unsettling nature of a drawn-out sostenuto.

Indeed, despite the fact that much of the film takes place in relative silence, a number of very significant and careful uses of music appear as variations upon the themes elaborated in the editing. Composer Alexandre Desplat's simple, brooding strings share screen time with a couple of carefully-chosen classical pieces, and each serves to reinforce the same unsettling quality of the languid cutting. One shot in particular, characterized by some reviewers as indulgent (nothing could be further from the truth), follows Kidman into an orchestra hall and remains on her in close-up for what seems an eternity, while the swelling music in the hall becomes for all intents and purposes an iteration of the unspoken thoughts unfolding just behind her eyes. It is an elegant piece of filmmaking, exhibiting an absolute confidence on Glazer's part in both his subject matter and his skill.

This use of music is without question a deliberate choice on the part of the director, as the film resembles nothing if not a gothic chamber piece in both the musical and the literary senses of the phrase. Set in small rooms and intimate places, the film creeps forward with a quiet insistence toward conclusions which we'd rather not make. And while most studio films would bow to the necessity of wrapping up the "is-he-or-isn't-he" story line with a convenient answer, Glazer uses it instead to create a forbidding atmosphere, a backdrop against which the real emotions of love, loss, pain and regret can be played out for our consideration. Providing a neatly-tied bow at the end would be the kind of knee-jerk choice that might make a film like this evaporate over its closing credits. Glazer instead chooses the more troubling road demanded by the story's gothic roots, and in so doing leaves us with something to think about.

I have been mulling over for several years now a lengthier essay regarding what I've taken to calling "deliberate cinema." It sprang from thinking about the films of Stanley Kubrick, films which to my thinking embody a set of qualities that can be collectively referred to as "deliberate." In Kubrick's films, the various elements that form a motion picture - sound, picture, editing, music, dialogue, narrative structure, themes, lighting, production design, set dressing - all seem carefully considered and intentionally - deliberately - chosen. Examples of this rigorous method of filmmaking exist outside Kubrick, but few approach the totality of deliberate will apparent in his films. This has often been the impediment I've faced not only as a moviegoer tired of watching sloppy filmmaking, but as a writer eager to make observations about this fledgling cinematic litmus test growing inside me.

Having seen Birth today, I think I may have found a common departure point from which to begin that writing.

What the #$*! Were They Thinking?

2004-10-31T21:16:00.000-08:00

Okay people.

There is a film making its way around the country right now called What the #$*! Do We Know (more commonly referred to as What the Bleep Do We Know), which is getting some unusual attention and press time. It is a "documentary" which combines talking-head interviews of "scientists" with Errol-Morris-Style narrative sequences featuring Marlee Matlin as the subject whose life is impacted by the various things the "scientists" are talking about. I read a couple of reviews about it in the past few months, and decided not to see it. However, because a friend of mine told me he'd "heard good things about it," I decided against my better judgment to see it today, if only to have a basis from which to proceed in the inevitable conversations that will spring from it later (this is, after all, Hollywood).

Its basic gist seems to be (and trust me: "seems to be" is a generous choice of words) that because the theory of quantum mechanics suggests that there is no objective universe (the first of many incorrect assertions made in the film), and that reality is epistemologically determined entirely by the act of observing (the second of those many incorrect assertions), we can therefore assume that we can not only affect the universe around us by observing it, but we can in fact definitively transform the physical nature of that universe by simply thinking about it.

Uh huh.

What the film doesn't tell you is that it was both funded by and directed by adherents to the Ramtha School of Enlightenment in Washington state. The Ramtha School was founded by a woman named JZ Knight, who derives her teachings by channeling a 35,000 year old warrior spirit from Atlantis named Ramtha. For those of you genuinely interested in the Ramtha School of thought (and who wouldn't be?), you can find out more about them here.

Please check out the site, and be sure to click on the link at the bottom where you can purchase "Elfin Magical Capes." As Legolas says, you can never have too many.

What the film also chooses not to tell you is that the "scientists" interviewed for the film are all adherents to a variety of ideas similar to those propagated by the Ramtha School. Not included in the film, of course, are representatives of the much wider scientific community, proponents of the view that these guys don't know what the bleep they're talking about.

The one exception to this is David Albert, a professor of physics at Columbia University, who was apparently "outraged at the final product" of the film, which he says wildly mischaracterized the on-camera discussion he had with the filmmakers. According to Albert, he "spent nearly four hours patiently explaining to the filmmakers why quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness or spirituality, only to see his statements edited and cut to the point where it appears as though he and the spirit warrior are speaking with one voice."

If you still don't believe me, and before you run out and try to convert your Toyota hatchback into a stack of gold bars by thinking about it hard enough, check out for yourself what "real" scientists are saying about the film. A nice succint example is found in an article from the Christian Science Monitor, here.

On the other hand, if you still don't believe those "close-minded" scientists with all their silly "evidence" and stuff, and want to hear a little more from one of the filmmakers themselves regarding what the bleep they were thinking in making the film, you can look at this inevitably softball interview with Will Arntz on CNNfn.

Just remember when you're watching it that this is the same guy who said that the reason a kid with Down Syndrome couldn't "think" his way out of his physical predicament is because (get this:) he is being punished for transgressions he made in a previous life. So much for changing our world by thinking about it.

By seeing the film today, I have already acted contrary to my usual "Occam's Razor" approach to determining which ideas warrant my consideration, given the limited amount of time I have on this earth. I therefore won't go on at greater length about the reasons the film is both silly (to those with critical minds) and potentially dangerous (to those without them). That's already been done to great effect elsewhere, and there is a pretty good review of the entire film here for those who aren't asleep yet.

However, I should note that one good thing did come out of the viewing: I was reminded yet again that, to paraphrase Jefferson, the price of knowledge is eternal vigilance.

Think smart, people.

Maddening & Wonderful: Primer

2004-10-28T22:23:00.000-07:00

In the "worth seeing" and "best runner up" category: Primer, a very very low-budget film by Shane Carruth. It is delightfully hard to describe, but "engineers accidentally discover time travel while working after hours in their garage to create a new technology startup company" comes close.

I've rarely held this opinion before, but this is an indie that begs to be remade. Not because more money would make it a better film, but because a one-pass rewrite and better actors would. In fact, those two things might make it an exceptionally brilliant film, and the execution required to realize them would be very straightforward.

What is wonderful about the film is the way that Carruth wrote his screenplay with Mamet-like overlapping and clipped dialogue, riddled with technobabble, with absolutely no regard for the audience (who are intentionally and repeatedly left in its dust), in order to make the premise seem more realistic. And the fact that it succeeds (unequivocally) at that goal is what is so appealing about watching the thing unfold. One thing is sure: you've never heard scientists talking this way in films before.

Arguably, the same verbal obfuscation is what gets the film into trouble in its third act, at exactly the moment when it needs to slow down and be a little more deliberate with its timeline. Time travel paradoxes are always a little confusing, and so require a little more patience with their audiences. This is the flaw of the film, but the execution of the first two acts is so compelling and (I risk becoming redundant here) delightful, that I'm happy to let that fact slide.

Have a look at this thing if it's playing in your area, and tell me if you feel the same way. Worst-case scenario is you contribute a few bucks to a young filmmaker who shows some serious promise.

Friday Night Lights

2004-10-19T20:36:00.000-07:00

I'm not a huge football fan.

Don't get me wrong: I like drinking and watching the game with the guys on a big screen on Sundays. And drinking. But I couldn't tell you, for instance, who's favored in the AFC East this year, or who the Seahawks' quarterback is. I know that the Patriots won at least two of the last three Super Bowls (...uh, I think), but that's about where my involvement with the game trails off.

Having said that, Friday Night Lights, which I just saw, is the best football film I've ever seen (and I've seen a few). More than that, it's also one of the best sports films I've ever seen (and I've seen quite a few). And, though I can hardly believe I'm saying it, it is actually one of the very few best films I've seen this year.

It never ceases to amaze me. In the morass of bad filmmaking out there, just in the nick of time, someone always comes along to remind me that storytelling isn't dead just yet.

Check this one out if you can. Even if you don't like football (and you know who you are).

Stanley Kubrick

2004-08-19T13:20:00.000-07:00

The American Film Institute is running a weekly series of films at Arclight Cinemas Hollywood based upon its "100 Years, 100 Movies" list. Every Wednesday, they show one of the films from the list at what is arguably the best theater in Los Angeles (some have said the world, though I can't back this up by personal experience - however, based upon the theaters I have seen, I might be inclined to agree). You can get the scoop here.

Stanley Kubrick has always been my favorite director. It's no exaggeration to say that although he may not have been the director who first made me want to make films, he is certainly the one who has kept that passion alive. Each year, as I see more and more directors enter the field, that estimation of him becomes more and more solidified. Although I am excited at the prospect of some day discovering his better, and in fact anxiously awaiting their appearance, it hasn't happened yet. Last night, I saw what is arguably the best film from his canon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, at the Arclight, part of the AFI series.

I say "arguably," because I have too often entertained the eggheaded question of which is his best, Kubrick at the top of his game. It's a difficult question to answer, and I've only ever been able to narrow it down to five:

2001: A Space Odyssey
Lolita
Dr. Strangelove
The Shining
Eyes Wide Shut

He made 8 other feature films and 3 documentaries, but the list above is usually the point at which my brain shuts down and begs equivocation. After all, it's difficult to choose which strand of hair on the head of your beloved seems most lustrous; to choose which turn of her wrist is the one that sent you first reeling; to choose...

But I digress.

I have seen 2001 dozens of times, but had never seen it on the big screen until now, and I couldn't have asked for a more perfect experience. The print, if not new, was certainly clean and uninflected by time. The facility at the Arclight is as close to perfect as one could hope. The brightness of the screen is rigorously controlled. The sound is flawless, rich, and calibrated in a way that would make even Ben Burtt or Alan Splet weep with emotion. And the audience (oh, yes - them) was reverent and unobtrusive.

Other than perhaps a couple of Kubrick's other films (see above), nothing that has been projected on a movie screen before or since that film was released has even come close to a real comparison. I should say it again, with emphasis: no one has ever come close to it.

I've made an annoying habit of complaining about the current state of the cinema, and while I can't give up that observation, I am comforted by the occasional reminder that there is hope. If you haven't seen a Kubrick film in a while, I recommend you do. Here is a complete list of his films - pick one and watch it this weekend:

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The Shining (1980)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb (1964)
Lolita (1962)
Spartacus (1960)
Paths of Glory (1957)
The Killing (1956)
Killer's Kiss (1955)
The Seafarers (documentary short - 1953)
Fear and Desire (1953)
Flying Padre (documentary short - 1951)
Day of the Fight (documentary short - 1951)

The cinema is our art form. It is the best, most complete means of self-expression we have. It can be a forum for ideas, for intellect, for passion. It doesn't have to be the banal circus that we have come to accept. It's too easy to forget that sometimes.

Sometimes, I need to be reminded.

Bad Writing

2004-07-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

Okay. I tried to let this one slide, but it's burning a hole in my brain.

Here's a perfect example of what seems to me to be wrong with screenwriting these days. In Catwoman, which you know is rife with bad writing (I'm certain you've seen it), Sharon Stone's character berates her philandering husband by advising:

"...resist the urge to date children born the same day they invented the cell phone."

Now, even in the theater, this struck me as a presumptuous, uneducated throw-away line. I'm no expert, but even at the time, I thought to myself: You know, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that the cell phone was invented at least as far back as the fifties.

One google later, I confirmed that cell phone technology was first tested in 1947, and enjoyed steady (albeit small) growth in usage until 1968, when an FCC ruling opened a wider allocation of frequencies for the technology, and it began to take off in a huge way. Which means that if you take Sharon Stone's line at face value, she's criticizing her husband for dating young girls - you know, girls in the range of 36 to 57 years old.

It took me about fifteen seconds to find this information on the internet. I am not exaggerating. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that the guy who wrote that line felt so comfortable with his uninformed presumption (which I'm sure played out in his head along the lines of well, I didn't own a cell phone until the eighties, so they must have been invented then) that he didn't feel the need to take that fifteen seconds to confirm he was right. Remember: this isn't a little indie script with a couple million dollars at stake. More than $100 million was invested in the script that contained that uninformed joke. One hundred million dollars. Imagine for just one moment how many people vetted that line of dialogue before it hit the screen.

The problem, of course, is that it doesn't matter. The audience I saw the film with (not surprisingly, it was packed) laughed their ass off at the line. And I was left with a feeling that's becoming common to me as I watch what passes for motion pictures these days: nowhere in the open, free-market economics of the film industry are there any natural incentives to prevent brutish, mouth-breathing, uneducated producers from hiring brutish, mouth-breathing, uneducated directors to direct screenplays by brutish, mouth-breathing, uneducated writers. No such incentives exist, because the majority audience for these films, by a country mile, is comprised of brutish, mouth-breathing, uneducated slobs.

There's no need any more for the Robert Townes, or the Herman Makiewiczes, or Edmund Norths. Why bother? Why bother trying to find another Dashiell Hammett, or Horton Foote, or Garson Kanin? It's hardly worth the effort, right? I mean, those guys were, like, writer writers, who even, you know, wrote books and stuff. Who wants to bother dealing with them? Jesus, these days, everyone living in the greater Los Angeles area has a poorly-written-but-properly-formatted screenplay under their bed anyway - let's just pick one and make it, right? Hire a cheap, brutish, mouth-breathing, uneducated "polish" writer to throw a couple of recycled one-liners in there (no, no need to make them pithy; as long as the audience believes they're supposed to laugh, they will) and moviegoers will eat it up.

Toss the slop, watch the pigs run, right?

Am I wrong here? Stating the obvious? Is misanthropy not the logical response to this phenomenon, which is not exclusive to the motion picture economy, but is in fact an element of our society at large? Am I being myopic here?

Help me out, people.

Cut Me, Please

2004-03-22T13:05:00.000-08:00

On the recommendation of a friend I saw Jane Campion's In the Cut tonight. It affected me, but not the same way it did him. He is a smart guy, whose opinion about films I respect. Despite our sometimes vocal disagreements, I feel we more often share similar views, but this time I'm going to have to part ways. I wouldn't go so far as to say the film offended me (being offended is so easy), but it did irritate me enough to write it all down.

Only someone too young to have seen Looking For Mister Goodbar (or someone who had seen but forgotten it) could consider this stuff original. And to be clear: I am speaking here of the ideological and emotional landscape of the film, not its potboiler structure. Although it was clearly tagged with the social earmarks of its time (the advent of the ERA), Goodbar was at least an honest film. Its implication was simple: it's unfair being a woman because when you're a woman, A) although it's your right to do so, expressing your sexuality nonetheless makes you a target because you're physically weaker than the men around you, and B) those men will often take that expression as an invitation which cannot be revoked. It's unfair, the film says, even horrific, but it's also a biological fact of life which will not change no matter what rules we impose on our society.

In the Cut, on the other hand, is the kind of female power fantasy that was much more common when radical, academic feminism was getting its start (the outrageously myopic observations of Andrea Dworkin are the archetypal example). It belies a desperate search for some kind of power-equivalency with men, and is only able to find it in the (convenient, delusional) observation that all men are either sexually-attractive-but-anti-intellectual thugs (Mark Ruffalo), or neurotic milksops (Kevin Bacon). With such imperfect choices, what's a girl to do? Well, if men can't offer up a suitable candidate, at least some power can be found in the prerogative to choose or reject the imperfect options. And when that ability to choose is endangered (by the inevitable violence of men, of course), an equivalent power is found in the matter-of-fact observation that violence on the part of men makes them somehow inferior. The very presence of male violence in the film seems somehow intended to create a de facto pathos between the audience and Meg Ryan's character, elevating her (and by association, one assumes, her sex).

I gave Jane Campion credit as a filmmaker for creating The Piano, despite its having a similar power-fantasy at its heart (perhaps because it was less central to the story or muted by the Victorian setting), but here she shows herself to be much less original, if not intellectually bankrupt, by picking up the worn-out lookingglass of 80's-era academic feminism. The world-image it produces is filled with pathetic, unrealistic characterizations of men. Aside from the brutish lothario and neurotic pansy mentioned above, we're also given the crowd of leering, empty-eyed strip club patrons conveniently located downstairs from Jennifer Jason Leigh's apartment. Even the one intellectual man in the film, Ryan's student Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), is depicted as misguided (to say the least), as his attempts to intellectualize John Wayne Gacy produce in him sympathy ("he was a victim of desire") instead of the traditional revulsion. What Campion seems to be saying is that men's sympathies toward their own sexual desires are misplaced - that those desires are in fact destructive and evil. They are contrasted with women's sexual desires, which are shown to be transcendent, and only rarely achieved (because men are generally unable to fulfill them). The association of male sexual desire with the obsessions of John Wayne Gacy might strike the film's audience as patently sexist, if that audience hadn't been raised during the 70's and 80's on exactly the same kind of ridiculous observations.

Also irritating is the unending string of ungrounded visual references Campion throws into the mix. If I weren't so turned off by the idea of sitting through even one more frame of the film, I'd go back and count the number of insert shots there are of American flags. Is this supposed to be important? Does Campion feel she's saying something about American society with this tired genre piece? And what the hell is the significance of the incessant ice-skating flashbacks with Ryan's parents? Are they supposed to suggest that even the one perfectly-romanticized man in Ryan's life, her father, was in fact a physical danger to her mother? Campion seems to know the answer, but doesn't feel the need to share it. It's like watching a student film in which the "filmmaker" feels that being intentionally obscure lends an automatic cachet to his "art."

I'd like to say at least that the performances please, but Campion gets in the way there, too. While some have suggested she lets her actors work with each other to develop a verbal "shorthand," that easy way people have who have known each other for a long time, here it just strikes me as tedious acting-class bullshit, more exercise than narrative. Lingering scenes in which nothing happens (particularly those between Ryan and Leigh) do nothing to motivate the story Campion's telling, which in the end leaves them feeling artistically gratuitous. These empty scenes are even worse than the hackneyed police procedural which surrounds them, and that's saying something.

It is a peculiarity of the age we live in that men who make generalized, disparaging remarks about women are called sexist, or myopic, or evil, but women who make the same generalizations about men are called observant. Having grown up in such times, I am obliged to agree that Campion's film is very "observant."