tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68439709730848956612024-02-19T08:45:02.204-05:00"I escaped somehow. Let's go!" *Reflections and observations on film
(but not necessarily reviews)Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.comBlogger485125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-70597169002972225272017-01-16T15:31:00.000-05:002017-01-16T15:31:00.865-05:00The Dead Body In The Pool In The Beautiful Rented Villa<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2056771/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">A Bigger Splash</a> (2015) direted by Luca Gaudigno is like his superior <a href="http://24timespersecond.blogspot.com/2010/12/appealing-to-all-senses.html" target="_blank">I Am Love</a> an exploration of the lives of people with too much time on their hands. <i>Splash</i> is much, much slighter, a mere improvisation with a premise of stunning predictability. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYFx1nFAi37QSasyrvdXB1CG3tB583RKYGs06o0LSQ0t7Ft-6iyZ7T9OOXbsA8SqhDidwNtEQ90xYhYQFIAOwrDRWh6Bx1eh-jhbA0OVI95YGg_6I1WtJ92h6zwklIqYcNOQa9kxs162L7/s1600/bigger_splash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYFx1nFAi37QSasyrvdXB1CG3tB583RKYGs06o0LSQ0t7Ft-6iyZ7T9OOXbsA8SqhDidwNtEQ90xYhYQFIAOwrDRWh6Bx1eh-jhbA0OVI95YGg_6I1WtJ92h6zwklIqYcNOQa9kxs162L7/s400/bigger_splash.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Of course, that is probably immaterial to Mr. Guadigno. We Americans preach narrative economy above all, and drive headlong from story point to story point. Texture is just for cinematographers or post-production sound mixers. But like most European filmmakers, Mr. Guadigno is not afraid to slow down and let the rhythms of life flow by, which makes this film about 20-25 minutes longer than it would be under an American film director.</div>
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And then you would have lost one of the strangest and most interesting grace notes of the film. I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to learn that one of the four principal characters pictured above dies in a pool before the film is over. In an American picture, we would barrel ahead to the interrogations, the unanswered questions, the betrayals, etc., etc. But we are in Italy, and this is a rented house. And the film takes its time to show just how unpleasant and uncomfortable it would be to have someone die in the pool of your beautiful rented villa in Italy. The uniformed policemen come and put up some very tatty crime scene tape. Then the pool must be emptied, and that takes time. A lot of time. Time enough that one can go down to the police station and back and it's still not quite done and the body has still not been extricated. The whole matter is just ugly and nasty and even if the dead person in the pool wasn't close to you, it still would throw an awful shadow over your vacation, as if someone had thrown sewage into the wine barrels.</div>
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I don't think many American filmmakers would have stopped to note that. They want to focus on who and how and how that makes the protagonists feel, but that approach would have missed the comical upbeat at the end of the movie, in which the police chief insists on getting an autograph from vacationing rock star Tilda Swinton in the middle of an absolute downpour. Does that explain anything? No, but it helps make <i>A Bigger Splash </i>just a bit more special than it would have been.</div>
Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-92002245099846527152017-01-03T21:57:00.000-05:002017-01-03T21:57:53.982-05:00Immersion<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2uEaiTEgT9GV1jEuogbOxU1kjXyHtzJPznidB1-hrY9DdXqysYWHijqBbkYEC4Lm4qN9lphodzbVPo8ov4EM89S9GrE5hRaW1lPqws32CvXASlz1TzSeZYzgO7At_QnD8WyJpWbOQZyIl/s1600/cineramaholidayflyerf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2uEaiTEgT9GV1jEuogbOxU1kjXyHtzJPznidB1-hrY9DdXqysYWHijqBbkYEC4Lm4qN9lphodzbVPo8ov4EM89S9GrE5hRaW1lPqws32CvXASlz1TzSeZYzgO7At_QnD8WyJpWbOQZyIl/s320/cineramaholidayflyerf.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>
I saw two films recently -- neither film was released recently, but I experienced them that way, within a proximity of weeks, and although their intentions were utterly apposite, one to entertain, the other to inform, they seemed to me to both be attempting to create an immersive experience on film. That one failed and the other succeeded and the means by which they did that seem worth examining.<br />
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The first was <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047939/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Cinerama Holiday</a> (1955) one of the original feature-length films designed to demonstrate the three-camera, three-projector Cinerama format, develop and audience and a a demand and possibly suggest to filmmakers that what might be seen as a gimmick might have narrative possibilities. The film has been restored for Blu-ray and evidently does the best it can to simulate that overwhelming experience in the home setting. Actually, the photography and sound are still impressive. What prevents it from becoming overwhelming is the overall mundanity and lack of imagination in the design of the film.<br />
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The content is simply two intercut travelogues, representing a young American's trip through Europe, and a young Swiss couple's trip across America. Thankfully, there is no phony story cooked up, no chase, no lost passports or jewelry, no getting caught up in foreign intrigue. There is a certain goofy naive integrity to the whole Cinerama project, which probably inspired the hiring of one of the squarest of the square filmmakers, Louis DeRochemont, creator of The March of Time to execute <i>CH. </i>After all, the financiers didn't want anything "extra." They just wanted to show the world how awesome Cinerama was, with no other frills or furbelows.<br />
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<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eWeZ0qYGVP4/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eWeZ0qYGVP4?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Cinerama projects at about a 2.75 ratio, but on an enormous screen that was often 40 feet high and about 110 feet wide. If you sat inside the curve, the projected picture could occupy your entire peripheral vision. You were literally inside the picture. This was augmented by super-duper-multi-stereo recording, which must have been pretty startling to mid-50s filmgoers (remember home stereo records didn't arrive until 1958) and still sounds pretty good, especially in the field recordings of actual sounds, such as the bobsled run and the hiss of skis on snow. The approach is to envelop, surround and dominate the viewer, reduce him or her to a state of helpless surrender to the sheer scale of this form of filmmaking.<br />
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(In home video, the picture is deliberately distorted in a "Smile Box" as show in this video, to simulate in two dimensions the look of a huge curved screen.)<br />
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It's really not too bad -- the sheer novelty holds the interest for most of the two hours, although some of the scenes of the country fair in Vermont hardly justify this kind of spectacular approach, and their are interludes that lag. Still, to blow up what is ordinarily a 10-minute feature before the film, the travelogue, and make it a feature attraction has its own sort of audaciousness.<br />
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But you can't call this a moving or an emotional experience. And strangely, it's not really that immersive, at least not in home video.<br />
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<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rf9EfoSrlcE/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rf9EfoSrlcE?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>On the other hand, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 2015, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3808342/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Son of Saul</a>, takes what might be called the reductive approach to immersion. Released in Academy ratio, that is commonly known as 4:3 or 1:37, the camera doggedly follows a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz carrying out his hellish duties in a hellish environment. When I say follow, I mean follow. Probably two-thirds of the film is a shot of his upper back and shoulders. The camera uses a very short focal length, which means that nearly everything except that which is very close is out of focus. It is hard to make out what is going on, which at times is a mercy, especially in the most ghoulish and horrific parts of the story.<br />
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Conversely, the soundtrack is rich and complex, if just as incomprehensible. I am told eight languages are heard, or rather barked, languages of captors and the captured carrying out their literally insane duties. In the clip I've embedded here, you can see just what a confusing and relentless existence this is.<br />
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And yet, better than any documentary I've seen, any dramatic film from <i>Schindler's List</i> to <i>Europa Europa</i> to <i>Fateless</i> to <i>The Boy In The Striped Pajamas</i>, etc., etc., <i>Son of Saul</i> conveys the feeling of being inside this bizarre and historically unparalleled phenomenon. There is no solemn music, no extended speeches (barely any complete sentences in the entire film), no musing on the meaning, no plea for help or understanding or anything except a request that a boy's body not be burned, so that Saul, who believes the boy to be his son (the film never resolves that question) may have the Kaddish said over him and buried with proper respect. There is a parallel story about the attempted uprising of the Sonderkommandos -- I'm not sure if it was necessary, and it certainly never becomes central or even very well explained.<br />
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But that's the point. Nothing is explained. No one makes sense of anything, because this is a world without sense. Instead of pre-empting your peripheral vision, like the Cinerama screen, director Lazslo Nemes has chopped off your peripheral vision with the use of the square format picture. In its place he has given you super hearing, but what you can hear is chaotic and untranslated, and is mostly of little help, being its own source of confusion and terror.<br />
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And so, by cutting off your senses and forcing you to try and piece together what is happening, Nemes has provided much greater immersion than Louis DeRochemont's gigantic Cinerama experience. Which is just the kind of paradox that a filmgoer has to love.<br />
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See <i>Son of Saul</i> even if you're fed up with Holocaust films. I promise you, you will not be bored for one single solitary second.<br />
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<br />Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-232117736636697662015-11-08T20:53:00.003-05:002015-11-08T20:53:57.723-05:00What the camera likes<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy-JMEqLL_gzGeUg5mUHhzVU8YF68Cf4WLbiXtL3RZQ64nkPbjVhUHQRUelWpzIZxg2E7nkt7gTskdCbLBBhtWyA2ws8LZsKEgkvAz-U2B-ZCjJ7t3wUGGCsSY50o1g0qxX4IEqob97iJu/s1600/goodlie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy-JMEqLL_gzGeUg5mUHhzVU8YF68Cf4WLbiXtL3RZQ64nkPbjVhUHQRUelWpzIZxg2E7nkt7gTskdCbLBBhtWyA2ws8LZsKEgkvAz-U2B-ZCjJ7t3wUGGCsSY50o1g0qxX4IEqob97iJu/s400/goodlie.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reality saves the fiction film</td></tr>
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It was without intention that this blog moves from <i>Good Kill</i> to <i>The <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2652092/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Good Lie</a> </i>(2014), but here is another issue-based film in which deflection and dissembling may be the key to survival.<br />
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In the one and only film course I ever took, the instructor had us read large portions of Siegfied Kracauer's Theory of Film. Kracauer was not a working film critic, but a philosopher and sometime historian. He conceived an idea that because film recorded the reflection of light taking place in front of its lens, that a natural photo-chemical process place took place during the process of film-making, that the medium was drawn towards true events -- sports, dancing, even porngraphy. Because cinema was most cinematic when it heeded the dictates of the real world. <br />
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I'm not sure how digital filmmaking affects this theory. The electrons don't care much about how the 1s and 0s arrange themselves -- they are agnostic about content, and it seems to me that artificial manipulation is not a lesser method of arranging electrons than exposing a photo-sensor to light, other than permitting a bit more of chance in the latter. But that does not seem to me to be "better" only different.<br />
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Nonetheless, there is still something about Kracauer's idea that still tickles our brain, no matter how the images got there. We are curious about the integrity of what we are seeing and audiences at Q&As want to know if a stunt was really done, if the star did it, did those animals really do that thing, did those children really say that or was that written for them? We can't help asking, "is it real?"<br />
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Coupled with that phenomenon is the fact that there are stories in which the stakes are so high, the importance of truth and precision is so great, that it is almost insulting to build fictional narrative on such a sensitive base. Such might be the story of the Lost Boys of Sudan. Screenwriter Margaret Nagle did, as one would expect, exhaustive research on this difficult complex structure. But then she did the unexpected -- she did not base her story on a true story. Nor did she get some brilliant actors to portray the Lost Boys.<br />
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Nagle made up a composite story and she cast actors who were 15 years too old for the roles. They were too old because they were some of the real Lost Boys of 2000. They are the film's entire raison d'etre and your reason to see the film. Yes, it has some canny storytelling and good performances from Reese Witherspoon (in a supporting role she clearly took in order to assist with the financing of the film) and the rest of the American company, but the reason the film works at all is the simple and real presence of Arnold Oceang, Emmanuel Jal, and in this clip, Ger Duany, to bring the breath of real life to what could have been a mere "liberals feeling good about doing good" exercise.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MZoGjAtCIAI" width="560"></iframe><br />
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There is a lot more that could be said about the film, but what fascinated me was the indissoluble lump of documentary truth in the middle of what is otherwise a "lies like truth" story. These three and the other Sudanese Lost Children appearing truly save the film from itself. From them, the film takes a sense of quiet decency instead of the passionate sermons one might expect, given the subject matter.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2582496/" target="_blank">Me and Earl And The Dying Girl</a> (2015) would seem to have no documentary impulse whatsoever. At its surface it seems like a Cody Diablo script written for Wes Anderson to direct. It starts with both feet firmly planted in the Land of Twee. It happens that I like Twee, especially when we are talking about self-conscious young people, who tend to label and categorize the components of their lives as a way of handling the inherent ambivalence and confusion of it all.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJEmSUCAjsPQteiLYIWPHAXcUyrKasvMb2aK4OTYx-ANrG4sJUdA8UJMj45EY0MCmZl_svBNyFpIgv7K8jLLiVh6fHwZgv5SZ4oViZkJBQXgqyeG40QKm5IIPvt-jn9-EA8LywJcQov_Lp/s1600/me-and-earl-and-the-dying-girl-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJEmSUCAjsPQteiLYIWPHAXcUyrKasvMb2aK4OTYx-ANrG4sJUdA8UJMj45EY0MCmZl_svBNyFpIgv7K8jLLiVh6fHwZgv5SZ4oViZkJBQXgqyeG40QKm5IIPvt-jn9-EA8LywJcQov_Lp/s400/me-and-earl-and-the-dying-girl-1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 2.40 ratio used to show the distance and awkwardness of this relationship.</td></tr>
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And although the artifices are dialed down as the story becomes more serious and the relationship between the two principal characters becomes more real, it still is at heart a "made-up" story. Nonetheless, reality helps anchor this movie and makes it work more profoundly than it would otherwise. No, not the "reality" of facing down death at a young age, nor of realizing that as a teenager, you are often more mature than the adults around you (Connie Britton, Nick Offerman and Molly Shannon all do excellent if mannered turns as the neurotic adults in the story). No, it is the "reality" of actors really performing together in a real space and in real time, without the benefit of camerawork and editing.<br />
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It comes about two-thirds of the way through the film -- deep enough into their relationship for geeky Greg to feel free to scold Rachel for starting to give in to death. The camera is set in a low corner with what looks like between a 10 and 20mm lens, as in the picture above. Rachel is large in the foreground, still, listening. Greg is farther from the camera, small, impotent, almost squeaking out his protest against Rachel's gathering indifference to the fate she is headed toward. She neither dismisses him nor agrees with him, but her quiet ratchets up his frustration. The scene must run six or seven minutes without a cut, a testament to the writing, to the confidence of the direction and to the skill of these very young actors to pull off this sequence which is on the one hand theatrical in concept and on the other, documentary in effect, due to its eschewing all but a few of the tools in the kit of the narrative filmmaker. The result has an ascetic quality in a movie which begins in a rather antic mode.<br />
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I seem to find myself in a death-ridden mode in my films this week. There is an odd resonance to events in my own life, but let us leave that aside. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3163304/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">The Farewell Party</a> (2015) is packed with the kind of eccentric yet everyday old people that leaves one surprised the film comes from Israel and not the BBC. The story is simple to the point of being rudimentary, and in structure, it takes a turn to the left, another turn to the left, a turn to the right and home again, home again, jiggety jig. You know, your typical assisted-suicide comedy. Astute filmgoers will have no trouble staying ahead of its slim narrative. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8LALkTH6JxNDiLseSeNufVcXyY4PinOaLnJO38jv818K7HKBnMsJ1fhLLmR9XfnB3wfwzmo4y2-lnIEgNxeF_RWJZGrRVbNZFio9l-dRB1VRe8C5NhXSBvafCNANN_YjPj6nGpq9kAfqM/s1600/farewell+party.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8LALkTH6JxNDiLseSeNufVcXyY4PinOaLnJO38jv818K7HKBnMsJ1fhLLmR9XfnB3wfwzmo4y2-lnIEgNxeF_RWJZGrRVbNZFio9l-dRB1VRe8C5NhXSBvafCNANN_YjPj6nGpq9kAfqM/s400/farewell+party.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">For now the folks of THE FAREWELL PARTY are full of life.</td></tr>
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But <i>Farewell Party </i>is not really about death or even about life. It is about that awful moment that most couples put off and put off until they can't -- the recognition that no matter how close they are, no matter how much two people become one thing, there will be a cruel and merciless parting. That is probably the reason those of us without religious faith still hope for some sphere of existence beyond this one -- the wish for a reunion, somewhere, sometime.<br />
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Yes, love outlives death, but still exacts its price, and we must honor its power by making sure we have a good leave-taking. Of the three suicides in the film, the first is devoutly-wished by the spouse who sees her partner's suffering. The second is by an old woman who has no partner and no one to answer to but herself. The third is not suffering pain, and to the eye looks healthy; but she is already leaving the earth by stages and decides she'd rather do it at once. <br />
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What makes a film which is paradoxically light-hearted in the face of these terrible questions so powerful is the real presence of these no-longer-young actors. Sure, they probably have years to go before these questions come up, but not as many as you and I have. And the simple quiet good sense of these characters makes everything less silly yet more entertaining. Would that we would all go on from this place in such good company as the cast of <i>The Farewell Party</i>. Without old people, this movie would be offensive. Would them, a story about the best way to die counts as a good time.<br />
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I forgot to mention there are some big walloping belly-laughs in this movie. Don't be afraid to show it to Grandma and Grandpa. It will probably bother them less than you.<br />
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In the end, whatever you think you can do for the dying, it is inadequate. And that is OK. You might as well have a good laugh when you're forced to sit in Death's front parlor.Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-40259555694570067182015-10-18T09:54:00.000-04:002015-10-18T09:54:11.265-04:00Remote controlled<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5HL4aq97cYJvpmJfV48mu14vghdM6nKUrX02XUr4P3AGj7EuMbqzFhEklHXMyBs1RhPhObja9lQ8ynPKx_AC3tXIZV3eSQsbk5UZdPI5knnKD-_vFN14X_8wpsHkh1D9qoEGh7syeV0FI/s1600/goodkill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5HL4aq97cYJvpmJfV48mu14vghdM6nKUrX02XUr4P3AGj7EuMbqzFhEklHXMyBs1RhPhObja9lQ8ynPKx_AC3tXIZV3eSQsbk5UZdPI5knnKD-_vFN14X_8wpsHkh1D9qoEGh7syeV0FI/s400/goodkill.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">How would warriors of the past done with their CO riding them all day?</td></tr>
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Andrew Niccol (creator of the airless <i><a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/gattaca/Film?oid=1069992" target="_blank">Gattaca</a></i>) is a bloodless sort of filmmaker, which makes him either the best or the worst person to guide <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3297330/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Good Kill</a> </i>(2015), a movie about the toll the drone war puts on the people conducting it. <br />
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How to explain? Well, for example, there's that damned Peter Coyote, our modern-day <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9uHaAAsF5w" target="_blank">Alexander Scourby</a>, an actor who sounds so inhumanly good he is instantly unbelievable. You know Peter Coyote, he's the guy you that makes you think "I thought Henry Fonda was dead" when you hear his voice-over work. He was even featured on-camera as the announcer at the Oscars. As a former counter-cultural figure, he once was an avatar of authentic independence and quirkiness. Now he is the simulacrum of those American qualities.<br />
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In <i>Good Kill</i> the voice of Peter Coyote is employed with implicit satirical intent as the voice of the CIA, telling military personnel who to blow up and when, regardless of the violation of military rules of engagement. But Coyote does not sound like a Man Who Knows. His authenticity has been sanded off. He sounds like what he his, an experienced actor who has recorded his lines very well. Given this is about an artificial remote-control war, perhaps that is the intent. But the result is that all the scenes in which his character, code-named "Langley" (some code), appears are slack, lacking tension, suspense or really any interest after his first appearance.<br />
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You can't critique slickness and artificiality unless you have something to compare it to, and <i>Good Kill</i> lacks any actual human behavior to form a critical baseline. Ethan Hawke is an impossible Boy Scout. Bruce Greenwood plays the same gruff and lovable CO that we've seen in the movies since Ward Bond's heyday. January Jones plays an empty-headed blonde wife. Zoe Kravitz is a Latina soldier, so she is disciplined, yet spicy.<br />
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Doesn't anybody write second drafts anymore? <br />
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The idea for this film was so good, that it's a shame that this placeholder film had to be first. To its credit, it tries to be fair. It is not an extreme liberal anti-war diatribe. Even the unreflective aggressive military types are given time and space to be right. Bruce Greenwood's character points out toward the end that if we walk away from this war, the enemy won't.<br />
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But <i>Good Kill</i> is constantly cheating. [Spoiler Alert] Defying orders, Ethan Hawke takes aim at a terrorist fighter not on the target list, but whom he has seen raping a virtuous mother. At the last moment, the woman steps into the kill zone and Hawke believes he has killed rapist and victim at once. That is a smart story idea about going out on your own without support, without preparing, without a rationale, just operating on emotion, and the terrible toll rash action can have, even if acting for the best reasons. But then the film does the old Disney switch (they've been doing this since <i>The Jungle Book</i>) and hurray! the woman is not dead, but just knocked down by the impact of the blast, and Hawke was right all the time.<br />
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Well, that (a) settles nothing morally; (b) is super-phony and (c) smug. A hat trick of bad storytelling.<br />
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In similar fashion, Hawke has to agonize for perhaps minutes about losing his airhead civilian wife but attracting the romantic interest of the smart female officer who sits next to him all day. Introduce problem -- solve it conveniently within minutes.<br />
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I'm no fan of <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/18/local/la-me-syd-field-20131119" target="_blank">Syd Field</a>, but are we going to complete ignore his observations? <br />
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Maybe the best thing we can do if we want to contemplate the danger of remote-control war is not to make a new movie, but just take another look at <i>Dr. Strangelove</i>. [Confession -- when in doubt I <b>always</b> watch <i>Dr. Strangelove</i>.]<br />
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<br />Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-23178567161456744872015-09-29T09:37:00.001-04:002015-09-29T09:41:56.377-04:00Slow, maybe; Kiwi certainly, but completely bad-ass<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The scarecrow's resemblance to the Reaper is no accident.</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3205376/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Slow West</a> (2015) is a stunningly sensitive bad-ass nuanced balls-out Western that looks like a John Ford picture, if Utah were in Colorado and Colorado was in New Zealand. Over the last decade, Westerns have been forced into the false choice between repetition of standard tropes for an undemanding audience (usually of cable TV subscribers) and European-style deconstructionist elegies both for an historical moment that may never have really existed and for an era of filmmaking when art could comfortably hide behind genre formulas, undetected by the mainstream press, and happily taking care of itself without anyone getting wise.<br />
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It seems only Quentin Tarantino can make a Western for the theatrical market without being accused of Art, which is ironic, given that Tarantino's <i>Django</i> is one of his usual post-modern collages of other people's work, decipherable only in a world of manufactured objects and without reference to real people, real history or the real world at all. If that's not arty, I don't know what is.<br />
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<i>Slow West </i>may be a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner (how many Westerns have ever come out of Sundance?), but it has a story simple enough for a Randolph Scott-Budd Boetticher film, a similar running time and Michael Fassbender in a part Scott would have been comfortable man, the bad man who has decided to do something good for a change and a little bit of money (which of course turns out not to matter). A Scottish boy pays an ex-bounty hunter to guide him West to claim his love, whose father has taken her with him a-pioneering. That's it -- just a lot of hard country to pass through, and, as you will expect if you know Westerns, a destination far different than the one anticipated.<br />
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I think this clip demonstrates the tantalizing balance between heavy consequences and light reaction that guides the film.<br />
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Sure, Jay almost died a gruesome death and got an arrow through his hand, but Silas's reaction is "Nice catch." And the slapstick payoff would have made Buster Keaton proud.<br />
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Certainly an American fan is going to miss familiar markers -- Bronson Canyon locations, oft-used character actors, dialogue tropes (I don't think one person says the word "reckon" in this film), but otherwise it is absolutely completely satisfying as a piece of Western entertainment, fusing the Ford-Hawks vision of the individual in the landscape with the long, slow buildup to terrible violence of a Leone film. The two styles live very well side-by-side, with a surprising and terrible conclusion, that is satisfying, right and largely unanticipated. The final encounter between Jay and his beloved, (Caren Pistorius) results in two acts of brutality that are beautifully and poetically balanced. <br />
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And, as evidenced by the clip, the film has a wonderfully black sense of humor -- the finale (which seems to have been directed by a morbid Harold Lloyd) gives new life to the phrase "rubbing salt into the wound."<br />
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Not many films today give such balance to word, picture, character and story as does writer John McLean here; although he does seem to favor picture. I commend to you a stunning sequence with a farmhouse under siege, the villains hiding in the tall grass you see at the picture at the top of this post. Given that the occupants in the house have barely any ability to fight back, it probably is not necessary that each gunman pop up, fire a shot and then disappear like a lethal brand of Whack-A-Mole. But it makes for a lethal yet funny sequence, the illogic of which one forgives for the sake of the visual poetry.<br />
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And, oh yeah, there's three Congolese guys singing in French in the middle of the prairie. For no good reason. Gotta love that.Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-36411240661027071372015-03-01T15:04:00.000-05:002015-03-01T15:09:52.442-05:00Stage directors portrayed on film<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Birdman</i>'s theater scenes were shot in the legendary St. James Theater</td></tr>
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This year's Academy Award Best Picture is the story of an actor-turned-playwright and stage director. One Facebook acquaintance's reaction was, not in these words, "if I want to see a stage director in a movie, I prefer Warner Baxter." This set me off thinking about the character of the stage director on film, and once I dipped my toe tentatively into that particular rabbit hole, I realized how deep it was. Which suggests that the stage director has some deep resonance in our culture, deeper than film directors, who are statistically rarer.<br />
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Perhaps that is because more of us have experienced stage directors. We did plays in school or in community groups. If we were in a student film, the direction was probably minimal (fledgling directors have too many technical issues to work through to have much brain space available to direct the actors). Stage directors have little to do except worry about the performances. (Yes, they can amusingly scream at the costume designers, but that really is a side show next to berating the actors.)<br />
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Movies have reflected that experience and our collective ideas about the people who direct plays and musicals. And despite a wild diversity in these portraits, they have two things in common. (1) They are brilliant; and (2) They are complete a**holes.<br />
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This is not an exhaustive list, it does not include documentaries, and we start with talkies, because it is hard for a theater director to make his personality felt without the use of his voice (Marcel Marceau and Bill Irwin can sit down now).<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://ytimg.googleusercontent.com/vi/YHrpJLRkhNs/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/YHrpJLRkhNs?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe><i>Warner Baxter in </i><span style="font-style: italic;"><b>42nd Street</b></span> It is hard to see what Baxter actually accomplishes with his direction. Someone else does the choreography (the improbable but very diverting Frank McHugh), not to mention the writers, who are shadowy figures in the orchestra seats (as they should be). Baxter's direction seems to be limited to regularly scheduled temper tantrums, demanding everything be done louder and faster. Nowadays this childish behavior would motivate no one, but Baxter manages to produce a hit that winds up killing him. (No tears.)<br />
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He does, however, get to deliver all the best speeches in the movie.<br />
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<i>John Barrymore in </i><b style="font-style: italic;">Twentieth Century </b>This portrait is ground zero for the concept of "director as Svengali" the man who creates stars by his own sheer force of will, with or without talent from the actress. In fact, Svengali and Trilby are referenced by name in this film, which is based on a play which no one produces anymore except in its musical comedy adaptation <i>On The Twentieth Century</i>. Although he had recently enjoyed a major turn in <i>Grand Hotel</i>, Barrymore was well on his way to becoming a parody of himself and director Howard Hawks encouraged him over the brink. Oscar Jaffee is clearly a madman, dreaming up lavish tasteless spectacles sprinkled with late-Victorian literary respectability. How Lily Garland became a respected actress amid such overinflated hogwash is hard to understand, but the film works because Lily is at least as crazy as Oscar. (And although Lombard had been in movies for over a decade, this is the picture that sent her off into the pantheon.) Here the director is not the leader of a vast horde, but a Pygmalion sculpting his one perfect Galatea.<br />
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<i>Chico Marx in </i><b style="font-style: italic;">Room Service</b> Bet you didn't remember this one. It really shouldn't count, because it is an accident of circumstances. RKO bought a play for the Marx Brothers to do on screen, a play that wasn't written for them and a play that didn't really fit their personae, except for the endless busy-ness and prevarication of the established Groucho character. Reaching for something for Chico to do, screenwriter Morrie Ryskind found the director, named Harry Binion, the typical a**hole genius director type given to taking his clothes off in moments of inspiration, inspiration that results in a vision of the Theater of the Future..."I can see it... no actors...no audience....just scenery and critics."<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">That sort of passion was inappropriate for Chico, renamed Binelli, and again, his directorial contribution was probably limited to eating walnuts and pinching the girls in the cast. The only thing we know for sure is that play "makes a great-a rehearsal<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">. <span style="line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">I still think it's a terrible </span><span style="line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">play</span><span style="line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">, but it </span><span style="line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">makes</span><span style="line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> a wonderful </span><span style="line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">rehearsal." Thereafter Chico is required to help Groucho put his scams over and rehearsing the play seems to be forgotten. This is the stage director portrayal that breaks the mold. Clearly any idiot can do the job, and Groucho has found just the idiot.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"><i>Gary Merrill in </i><b style="font-style: italic;">All About Eve</b> may not be a genius, and if he's an a**hole, he's the kind of a**hole you drift into an affair with. We'll start with the name -- Hugh Marlowe. That's the name of a stiff from the get-go. He's not about inspiration. He's all about sweat and effort and utterly dismissive of glamour, as we see from this colloquy.</span></span><br />
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I try to avoid extra-textual analysis, but it is necessary to point out that Bette Davis met Merrill on this picture, they married and stayed married for quite a few years, producing some children and several more joint appearances. So perhaps Marlowe's realism rubbed off on his portrayer.<br />
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<i>Jack Buchanan in </i><b style="font-style: italic;">The Bandwagon</b> is a hybrid, though. All at once, he is humble practical man of the theater, Welles-ian visionary and razzle-dazzle performer. The part was conceived as a mild rib of actor-director Jose Ferrer, who once had three shows he had directed running concurrently on Broadway, appearing in one of them himself (<i>The Shrike</i>). <br />
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Ultimately, Buchanan's vision fails, but Comden and Green play fair. It's not merely a matter of Buchanan's director being pretentious; it's that his pretension is misplaced. It's the wrong approach for the very light material turned out by the characters Comden and Green based on themselves (and they were indeed very lightweight writers). Buchanan gets to prove he is a good sport and he and Astaire meet on their mutual territory of tail-coated suavity.<br />
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<i>Jose Ferrer in <b>Enter Laughing</b> </i> got to respond to his kidding in <i>The Bandwagon</i> with his own prissy-genius portrayal as a Depression-era down-at-the-heels shyster (another Marlowe!) who makes money charging apprentices to rehearse for his never-to-open bilgewater productions.<br />
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It's not clear from the film (directed by Carl Reiner from his own novel and the play Joseph Stein made out of it -- which explains Rob Reiner's appearance in this clip) whether Marlowe had talent at some point, but by now he has clearly drunk it away and is marking time until he takes his final bow.<br />
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<i>Christopher Hewitt as Roger DeBris in </i><b style="font-style: italic;">The Producers</b>, on the other hand, may be at the very height, or perhaps the very nadir of his feeble talents -- the difference is almost imperceptible. Whereas Chico is an idiot in <i>Room Service</i>, Roger is a useful idiot in <i>The Producers</i>. And yet, and yet, I can't help feeling that the hiring of Roger DeBris (and of L.S.D. to play Hitler) is a textbook example of placing a hat on a hat. Clearly Franz Liebkind's demented vision of a lovable singing and dancing Hitler was quite repellant enough to guarantee certain disaster, without the overlay of incompetent cliche that Roger plasters over the show (not to mention LSD's drugged-out departure from the agenda completely). Perhaps the audience is meant to see that a faithful production of <i>Springtime For Hitler</i> could not be topped for flop-abbility, but Max Bialystock is a greedy and desperate man and his desperation seeks the companionship of the Prince of Flopsweat, Roger DeBris, who obviously cannot bear to leave a terrible idea untouched, but must highlight and decorate it to a "T."<br />
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Before rehearsals begin Roger promises that this show will not be just the same, "turn turn kick turn," but that is, of course, exactly what he delivers because it is all he knows.<br />
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<i>Roy Scheider in </i><b style="font-style: italic;">All That Jazz </b>has a lot more on his mind than kick-turn because he is playing a version of theatrical choreographer and innovator Bob Fosse, not coincidentally, the creator of the film we are seeing. Here the genius a**hole paradigm is turned inward in one of the most remorseless self-indictments any artist has ever created, and certainly the one with the most singing and dancing. The onscreen Fosse gets to pay for his crimes against humanity by elaborately dying on screen, but not before he is lashed himself (and everyone else around him) into a lather trying to re-arrange the same old sparkle-dazzle into new shapes and forms of expression (see <i>Cabaret</i> and <i>Chicago</i> to experience Fosse's meta-showbiz). <br />
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Despite Fosse's apparent self-loathing, in the audition sequence above (which is so well staged and edited that, for me, it obviates the need for a film version of <i>A Chorus Line</i>), Scheider's character is quite sensitive and decent, showing real respect and sympathy for his auditionees, even the most incompetent.</div>
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But Fosse earns his a**hole credentials, not in relation to the other characters in the film, but in his utterly indulgent and narcissistic celebration of his own death. I suppose he was actually hoping that the audience will shout "get on with it!" because this is the longest, slowest death since Victorian melodrama, even with the dancing girls.</div>
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<i>Christopher Guest in </i><b><i>Waiting for Guffman</i> </b>is almost a-hat-on-a-hat, because he is only a genius-a**hole in his own mind. Which is what makes him so lovable. True, he is not actually creative, talented, or, indeed even competent, but neither is he the martinet he believes himself to be, but rather a petulant child, taking us back to those Warner-Baxter-stomping-his-feet days. On top of these qualities, Guests's Corky St. Clair is unicorn-and-double-rainbow-delusional, but in a way that his uninformed cast finds inspirational.<br />
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<i>Phillip Seymour Hoffman in </i><b style="font-style: italic;">Synecdoche, New York</b> is probably a genius, but has veered into solipsistic incoherence, allowing a replication of his own life to become larger and larger drilling down farther and farther into an endless series of Russian doll-type scenes, so packed with meaning that meaning has been exploded. His creation has literally turned into a city with no audience. This film is the definition of a work disappearing up its own wazoo, but in this case quite deliberately.<br />
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It is fitting to let <i>Orson Welles in </i><b style="font-style: italic;">Orson Welles and Me</b> have the last word. Welles is the great exemplar, the theatrical genius who was also a cinematic genius. Perhaps if he had taken up landscape architecture, he would have been a genius at that. This neglected film tells the story of Welles' first Mercury Theater production, the modern dress <i>Julius Caesar</i> whose visual echoes can be seen not only in theater to this day but in <i>Citizen Kane</i> and from there throughout all of <i>film noir</i>. Christian McKay as Welles portrays all of his facets -- charmer, martinent, brilliant stager, manipulator, publicity hound, artist, interpreter of poetry and leader of men -- to virtual perfection. <br />
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Portraying artists in the arts is tricky, because you're going to have to deal with the art. Either you keep it completely out of sight and risk being dodgy, or you put it on display and risk the art itself not justifying the acclaim that your fictional artist receives. McKay's Welles is as fine a representation of a performing artist on film as has ever been. Here, he displays the charm and decisiveness that made him easy to become his follower. <br />
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This little clip hardly conveys all the charms of this film, which is very true to the experience of making theater, and I urge you to seek it out. Sadly, Welles himself never made an entire film about the theater. On the other hand, given his penchant for expressionism and symbolism, maybe ALL of his films are really about theater.<br />
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I haven't yet seen Polanski's <i>Venus In Fur</i> -- I am very much looking forward to seeing just how big a fool Polanski is willing to make himself as the besotted would-be Svengali.<br />
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So why does this trope appear so frequently? Is this a way for a film director revealing himself in disguise? Acting out a fantasy of control over actors? (Ridiculous, because film directors ultimately have much more control than stage directors.) Distancing oneself from the embarrassing revelation inherent in being any creative artist? In any event, this character is as likely to disappear from the screen as he is from real life.<br />
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But so far, he is still only male. A gender shift may have to be the next important development...Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-36193747323790163602014-08-17T10:52:00.000-04:002014-08-18T10:53:30.483-04:00Dialogue in film is so 2009<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Is <i>Under The Skin</i> looking into the rear-view mirror of film history and aesthetics?</td></tr>
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You've probably learned at some point that once <i>The Jazz Singer</i> debuted in the autumn of 1926, with Al Jolson not only singing, but ad-libbing dialogue, every studio rushed to get into the talking picture game and that the silent film died almost immediately. That is almost completely untrue. (If you are interested in the much more complex true story of this relatively rapid technological changeover, a precursor of a process we live through a couple of times per year nowadays, I highly recommend <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Talkies.html?id=KFB_oT-jupQC" target="_blank"><i>Talkies: America's Transition to Sound</i> by Donald Crafton</a>, part of the University of California film history series, possibly the best series there is.)</div>
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A few weeks before <i>The Jazz Singer</i> opened, Warner Bros. opened another film for which they had high hopes, which represented a format they believed would be more enduring and popular than the novelty of synchronized speech and song. The film was <i>Don Juan</i> starring John Barrymore, and it had a synchronized sound track, but only of score music and selected sound effects. The dialogue was still delivered in title cards. (<i>Jazz Singer</i> has title cards for most of its length, BTW.) Here is a sample. The Spanish subtitles on the title cards are not original, but I wanted to use this excerpt because of the swordfighting sequence.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Xzztz9EXsO4?rel=0" width="420"></iframe>
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From the filmmaker's point of view, this format offers the best aspects of silent and sound film. It preserves the universality of film, since characters are not only not tied to any language, as title cards are replaced in each territory with those in the local language, but not burdened with a voice which does not match either the character nor the actor's appearance. Undercranking and other silent film devices are still possible. Yet the filmmakers can ensure that the audience is given the proper emotional cues with either a specifically-composed or a hand-selected underscore, rather than being dependent on the whims (and often limited skills) of the local musicians in each theater. And key sound effects can be included as may be advisable to inform the audience, and reducing the need for close-ups on noise-making objects, often needed in silent film to call attention to unheard sounds (as if the audience had to be reminded that things CAN actually make sounds, even in the strange dream world of silent film).<br />
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This, the moguls of 1926-7 believed, was the technological future of movies, mixed with a program of short subjects with synchronized sound featuring singers, dancers and novelty acts; plus occasional synch sound features to show off singing stars of Broadway and popular music. But a film was to have a truly dramatic story, it needed to be shot silent with music and effects added in post-production.<br />
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History went another way, and by 1928, it was important for films to be All-Talking, All-Singing, All-Dancing, All-Run-Around-And-Bop-You-On-The-Head-With-Our-Synch-Sound. But perhaps, at least aesthetically, those moguls of the late 1920s were right about the technology. We've put up with too much jabber over the last almost 90 years of film, and it's time to put things back.<br />
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Scarlett Johansson might have felt that way herself, having to yak non-stop in three Woody Allen movies, and (after <i>Under The Skin</i> was produced) being heard but not seen in the super-creepy <i>Her</i> (2013). <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1441395/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Under The Skin</a></i> (2013) is Ms. Johansson's boldest and most significant project choice since her breakout role, <i><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/sofia-coppola-discusses-lost-in-translation-on-its-10th-anniversary.html" target="_blank">Lost In Translation</a></i>, and the first since that earlier film to employ her somewhat unreal aura, after so many projects which attempted to root her in everyday reality.<br />
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As you can read in a thousand other places, Johansson plays a visitor from another planet who wears the body of a young woman provided by its handler. The alien uses that woman's allure to draw in young men who are consumed or transformed in some way that looks like this.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKrUjiU2igZ_hNJnc2QG1wAkXhtTlboOs2DCqO1ulH984HyXcfsvjarefl5fbXg1KdHWj0a_d8I9L-vFPqp6WEvxRP9m_CnQ29idAlEHxtZWZmpDnxnXXJeG-XeNf5cxiPwXRHjpYlLF4i/s1600/under_the_skin_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKrUjiU2igZ_hNJnc2QG1wAkXhtTlboOs2DCqO1ulH984HyXcfsvjarefl5fbXg1KdHWj0a_d8I9L-vFPqp6WEvxRP9m_CnQ29idAlEHxtZWZmpDnxnXXJeG-XeNf5cxiPwXRHjpYlLF4i/s1600/under_the_skin_3.jpg" height="181" width="400" /></a></div>
What is more interesting, and what makes the film worth seeing, is the alien point-of-view of our world the film presents so successfully, employing some documentary techniques to place the glamorous Ms. Johansson in the least glamorous environment in the world, the city of Glasgow, a working-class city, the largest in Scotland.<br />
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In fact, although I lived in Glasgow for a year, the accents were so thick that I had to switch the titles on for the scenes Johansson improvised with non-actor Glaswegians, shot by hidden cameras. Nonetheless, those scenes are the ones I found the most valuable, though their aesthetics might cause <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/the_films_of_abbas_kiarostami_a_retrospective" target="_blank">Abbas Kiorastami</a> to weep in recognition. (That's a small joke.) Her reticence, the use of the fewest words possible and the blankness, the "silence" of her facial expression is what makes this part of <i>Under The Skin</i> so effective. This clip also features the main theme of the brilliant score by first-time film composer Mica Levi.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x1iqg3s" width="480"></iframe><br />
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Tellingly, director and co-writer Jonathan Glazer has revealed that the original version of the script contained lengthy preliminary explanations of the aliens, their plans, their methods, all of which were deleted and replaced with a few stunning and mysterious images which, on re-examination, are visually packed with hints and clues about the story.<br />
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Curiously, strange and disorienting as they may be, the sci-fi special effects come off as more conventional than the "van" footage; nonetheless, <i>Under The Skin</i> would be almost meaningless if it had unpacked its heart with words like a very drab. Its very opacity makes it not unclear (except to the willfully obtuse) but clears the deck to let the pictures convey the meaning instead of the text.<br />
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As I wrote <a href="http://24timespersecond.blogspot.com/2014/05/silent-film-lives.html" target="_blank">earlier in this blog</a>, silent pictures may be coming back. No, not silent pictures -- the music and sound are too important to the title effect. Pictures with sounds, instead of the years of illustrated radio which is so easy and comforting for film financiers but so limiting for film artists. <br />
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Paradoxically, this may have been enabled by the shift to digital imaging. The new cameras handle low light extremely well, encouraging filmmakers to move cameras into environments that require less artificial preparation. Moreover, long takes are easier (no worry about how much film remains int he magazine) and breakdowns within a take are less of a problem, since editors can digitally stitch together two different takes into a single seamless entity. Whereas long takes are looked at as being theatrical in the work of Welles, Wyler and Renoir, these new long takes constitute a new definition of cinematic, as cameras weave together multiple events and multiple environments into a unified physical and emotional environment. First digital tools and non-linear editing sped editing up, encouraging the rapid cutting that vapid and lazy journalists called "MTV editing"; now digital filmmaking has not only resuscitated the long take, but made it the norm, liberating actors and cinematographers into more complex and revelatory work.<br />
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We just might be entering a silver age for pictures that move.<br />
<a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1iqg3s_under-the-skin-clip-2-night-drive_shortfilms" target="_blank"></a></div>
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<br />Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-18732203658741036682014-08-15T11:27:00.000-04:002014-08-15T11:27:02.701-04:00PRISONERS took no prisoners, and paid the price<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh17RlwOx8GO-OPb4GRo9SSenNorlVyEjBc66-quDaAzIJCdReBArt_iQvI65eoscppYbDMnr_hWs-JlXITcIiKwXs-1oJDJIIEc-1XOIrsrHOYqMiJqiTkirzV6n1DNWeaAkV-NjrhflwU/s1600/Prisoners+noir.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh17RlwOx8GO-OPb4GRo9SSenNorlVyEjBc66-quDaAzIJCdReBArt_iQvI65eoscppYbDMnr_hWs-JlXITcIiKwXs-1oJDJIIEc-1XOIrsrHOYqMiJqiTkirzV6n1DNWeaAkV-NjrhflwU/s320/Prisoners+noir.jpg" height="197" width="400" /></a></div>
Back in September 2013, a challenging drama called <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392214/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Prisoners</a>. It was fairly well-reviewed and had reasonable commercial success, but by the time of the award season it had been swamped by such inferior material as <i>American Hustle</i>. The only Academy nomination it received (and thoroughly deserved) was for Roger Deakins's cinematography, and although Aaron Guzikowski's sceenplay, written on spec, won a number of several script competitions, including <a href="https://www.blcklst.com/lists/" target="_blank">The Black List</a> and <a href="http://www.bluecatscreenplay.com/" target="_blank">The Blue Cat</a>, it got very little attention when prizes were dispensed for actual films.<br />
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What happened?<br />
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Before going any further, I need to say that you should see this film. It is too visually and morally complex to adequately describe or summarize in a blog post like this, and it will repay your time. Put it in your queue or get it from your library or borrow it from a friend, clear out an evening and watch this, preferably not alone. And if you haven't seen director Denis Villeneuve's previous film, <i><a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/incendies-2011" target="_blank">Incendies</a></i>, go back and see that as well. My guess is that like me, you will try and see all of Mr. Villeneuve's films in future.<br />
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Back to my question. First, <i>Prisoners</i> is a godawful title. Yes, it makes sense in a philosophical metaphorical way AFTER you've seen the film and had some time to think about it. But most people don't want to see a movie about prisoners, unless they're American GIs breaking out of WWII prisoner camps. Moreover, it is a confusing description in a literal level. I am not going to exhibit <i>hubris</i> sufficient to propose alternate titles, but I know this one is absolutely terrible and had to have contributed to the general audience indifference.<br />
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Second, the film was marketed as a thriller. In fact, it begins by employing thriller tropes, but by 45 minutes in, it is clear we are in deeper waters than the typical Liam Neeson movie. (Admittedly there is a thriller-style twist ending, and the only hint I will give you is to pay close attention to the casting.)<br />
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Overall, <i>Prisoners </i>feels more like a neo-<i>noir</i> than a thriller, especially in its look, as in this clip.<br />
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More significantly, <i>Prisoners</i> shares the <i>noir </i>ethos that no one is in sole possession of the moral high ground, nor is any villain made of pure villainy; stylized as it is, <i>noir</i> recognizes that life is more mixed than melodrama would have it.<br />
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There are certainly allegorical or at least metaphorical aspects of the story, in that Jackman's character, a good guy who captures a boy-man suspected of kidnapping his daughter and brutally tortures him, is reminiscent of the United States succumbing to fear and cowardice and engaging in torture to combat terrorism. But the allegory doesn't hold for long, because the film has more subtle and complex moral fish to fry. (And that is a <i>terrible</i> use of idiom there.)<br />
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Next, as far as awards and nominations go, <i>Prisoners</i> does not end on a triumphal note (though the ending is not as ambiguous as a lot of obtuse people want to think), and the good guys and bad guys are all muddled up morally. Moreover, the stellar cast is truly used as an ensemble, which makes handing out award nominations much harder. (The National Board of Review actually nominated the cast AS an ensemble.) If there is someone to be singled out, it has to be Jake Gyllenhall, with the best work of his I have seen yet. Here's a little bit.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xCyzdQ8kqis?rel=0" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<i>Prisoners</i> is not a film that calls for a sequel, but I would like to see Gyllenhall play this character again.<br />
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If you're still on the fence about the rewards of seeing this film, I urge you in the strongest terms to click <a href="http://mattscottvisuals.com/blog/2014/1/10/-what-are-you-looking-at-disecting-the-work-of-a-master" target="_blank">this link</a> and look at this superb and detailed analysis, written by cinematographer Matthew Scott, of the look of the film and the depth of its craft. As an example, here is the still I put at the top of this post, as de-constructed by Mr. Scott.<br />
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<br />Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-79729231773359799632014-05-25T14:00:00.000-04:002014-05-25T14:00:50.651-04:00Movies with high demands<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The cowboy life Flanders-style</td></tr>
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"When I go to the movies, I don't want to think. I just want to be taken out of myself," I hear. And I think there will be many, many years to not think when you're dead. Mindless entertainment makes me restless and bored, and too much of it physically nauseates me, especially since it's often built on lies. Shoot me, but I like a movie or a play to actually be about something more than bringing me 100 minutes closer to my death.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024519/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Broken Circle Breakdown</a> (2013-USA) is a tough and a tough-minded movie. At first sight, it is exhiliaratingly free-sprited and wild, about the careless romance between a sometime phlegmatic Flemish bluegrass musician (he and his pals sing in perfect American English) and a whilring dervish of a tattoo artist, a romance interrupted by pregnancy. That pregnancy brings joy, then heartache, all reflected through the music in a way that recalls the Irish film <i>Once</i> more than the structure a conventional stage musical. Tough as that all becomes, the film then ventures into darker areas than you ever thought -- not pessimism or morbidity, but the absolute truth about the way married people can talk to each other and the stupid unthought things they can say. And the pain that becomes more poignant as there is little or no time to take back the words. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/-LprqBP0JTw" width="560"></iframe>
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This clip gives you some small sense of how the music plays with and against the image and just how good Belgians can be singing country music. (Well, Flemish people anyway-- I'm prejudiced, as the Lockharts purportedly emigrated from Flanders to Scotland...) By the way, the end of this clip is by no means the hardest part of this movie.<br />
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But if you like to be challenged, if you appreciate the echo of real life instead of the recycled BS of our commercial myth-machines, you will like this film. Downer as it is -- and I wept through the last four minutes of the film -- I felt better for having seen it.<br />
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One side note: the most unbelievable thing about this movie is that it has been adapted from a play by the playwright and the film's director. I cannot see the fingerprints of theater anywhere in this movie-- not in the scenes, the language, the structure, the performances, the music, nothing. I've never seen the whiff of the footlights so thoroughly eradicated in any other such adaptation.<br />
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So often actors think that good acting is theater acting. Meryl Streep, formerly a fine artist, is spiralling down into a maelstrom of twitches, sniffs, shrugs and counter-intuitive line readings, trying desperately to help the poor crippled script across the street, when in fact plays like DOUBT and AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY need no such help, and in fact are marred by Streep's determined eccentricity.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3SC5dD6fgwJa3XU-EtqdXEjGdmMBfYE9pqZMEyEj8LHrdkNrEhPVTpj0BtEmWuK6yVpD67QhvloqxOltVmzaWK1HSqkSCPe_k9w1VJxFfuciF1Xh5Vf6_YCseHZDDNQVo7M3K3aP0qSdD/s1600/img-trailer-still-mine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3SC5dD6fgwJa3XU-EtqdXEjGdmMBfYE9pqZMEyEj8LHrdkNrEhPVTpj0BtEmWuK6yVpD67QhvloqxOltVmzaWK1HSqkSCPe_k9w1VJxFfuciF1Xh5Vf6_YCseHZDDNQVo7M3K3aP0qSdD/s1600/img-trailer-still-mine.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Irene still remembers she loves Craig</td></tr>
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She could take a lesson from the clear-eyed, economical and completely true performance of James Cromwell in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2073086/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Still Mine</a> (2012), a film that is Canadian not only in terms of financial resources, but has the kind of unpretentiousness, directness and plain common sense one associates with Canadians.<br />
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Based on a true story, it tells of a farmer in his 80s who sees his wife sinking into dementia or worse and decides a smaller, more manageable house for them to live on, on his own property, using wood from timber he owns himself. The "A story" as they say in television is about Craig's legal battle to build his house his own way, despite laws and regulations designed to protect the unknowing from the unscrupulous, but in this case, barring a man from living his life his own way on his own land on his own terms. But that A-story is driven by the B-story, the fierce cleaving-together of this unsentimental, but very-much-in-love couple as she drifts away from him. Fans of independent film might be reminded of <i>Away From Her</i> or the more light-hearted <i>The Castle</i>. But this film has a clear-sky clarity like the New Brunswick skies it was shot under.<br />
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And at the heart of that clarity is the model performance of James Cromwell, playing his first leading role in his early 70s. Never once do you catch him "acting." There is no big speech, no big moment in this movie; just a lot of real true human behavior (something you could also say about <i>Broken Circle Breakdown</i>). <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/GNEKK_7Hbcc" width="560"></iframe><br />
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Cromwell reminds me of Spencer Tracy here, and his acting is, if anything, even more invisible. It doesn't get fake-folksy, nor fake-eloquent, but treads that narrow in-between ground of smart but not over-educated people talking about what they truly know. When Cromwell as Craig Morrison tells what his father, a shipwright, taught him about wood and about building --well, he never uses the word "spiritual" or "soul" but there is a profound, mystical religious quality about Craig's faith in what he has learned and what he can do that links him both to the earth and to the dozens of generations before him. It is a master class.<br />
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There's nothing wrong with stupid movies in their place and time. But you can't live on marshmallow, and if you'd like some good strong fibre of human life in your movie diet, check out these films.Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-66802347112487765422014-05-12T15:28:00.000-04:002014-05-13T09:59:58.484-04:00Silent film lives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This might be wishful thinking, but I think I am detecting a mini-trend in films that eschew dialogue, at least as a means of conveying narrative information. Even in some fairly talky films, what seems to be important is who is talking to each other and why, not whatever it is they're saying.<br />
<br />
I'm not talking about the obvious examples such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655442/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">The Artist</a> or <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1854513/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Biancaneves</a>, which aspire to an earlier form in a self-conscious way, but the stripping away of dialogue in order to arrive at deeper narrative revelation that words can cover up. <br />
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Exhibit A: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2027064/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Blue Caprice</a> (2013), an abstract fictionalization of the 2002 Beltway sniper incident. Although there is a soundtrack, it is one of the most profoundly silent movies made in the last few years, both literally and metaphysically. It seems to have infuriated many of the critics that the film offers no explanation or motive for the violence this would-be father-and-son team inflicted. But really, what explanation would be possible? The point of it WAS motiveless crime. It's even sketched out by John Muhammed (played by Isaiah Washington) in those very words. What makes the crimes insoluble is their sheer motivelessness, their lack of connection and lack of predictability. Go ahead -- you explain that. Irrationality is the heart and soul of the act. So the film is built on a spiritual silence as to what these acts mean or what their purpose is, a silence it never ever breaks.<br />
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C'mon kids, artists are not here to explain. They are here to observe, to re-interpret and re-present the world back to us. Judgments are for the audience, not for the artist. You want an explanation for terrible violence? Check out the psychiatrist scene in <i>Pyscho</i>. Boring. Meaningless. Just there to give everyone a chance to calm down from all the screaming before they leave the theater. Explanations don't belong in movies.<br />
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But there are even more profound and localized silences around the deaths in <i>Blue Caprice</i>. The first on-screen shooting incorporates a visual misdirection and an audio clue that the shooting has begun. As one victim passes into oblivion, an oblivious shopper goes by with her cart. The placid surface of the carpet-like grass disturbed by the incongruity of a snowblower. The rampage is represented by the sounds of police calls playing asyncronously against shots of police cruisers and pictres of crime scenes. The arrest itself is literally silent as far as the film is concerned, since it takes place offscreen. And once that arrest happens, Muhammed disappears utterly (and silently) from the film, and his "son" Richmond's only utterances are to confirm his intention to maintain his silence.<br />
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Critics seemed to get downright angry about this film. Why wouldn't it explain the roots of gun violence, they said? What is it avoiding? But the film is not about gun violence -- it's about psychological violence. The child abuse of a man who picks up a drifting boy and turns him into an emotionless killing machine, seeking only the "father's" approval for a well-aimed shot. Sorry -- no socio-economic, legal, policy explanations behind this tale, just complementary illnesses. The film portrays the very lack of affect that makes such crime possible -- which is its strength and the very reason the professional opinionators and verbalizers are uncomfortable with it.<br />
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Such chilliness would have been anathema to Hitchcock, who I suspect would have loved <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2017038/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">All Is Lost</a> (2013), given all its very deliberate limitations. For one thing, Redford's virtually wordless turn is the kind of eloquent, expressive performance that places him alongside Hitchcock favorite James Stewart, as well as Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood (the latter two nearly always better when they're not talking.)<br />
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Paradoxically, the film was built as an explanation for a brief letter that writer-director J.C. Chandor wrote in the earliest stages of creation. It was an apology and a confession. As he read it, Chandor realized that this imaginary farewell was built on the unspoken question, "How long is hope reasonable?" Here is the text:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry... I know that means little at this
point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To
be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't.
And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is
lost here... except for soul and body... that is, what's left of them...
and a half-day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How
it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure... but it did. I
fought 'til the end, I'm not sure what this worth, but know that I did.
I have always hoped for more for you all... I will miss you. I'm sorry.
</blockquote>
Other than the sentence in the middle about "soul and body" and "a half-day's ration" nothing in this sentence calls for a story about a man lost and alone at sea. Which is what makes the nit-picking about the safety details of this film so ridiculous. (So what if the man had had an "EPIRB." Then he either gets rescued or the EPIRB is somehow made non-functional. Narratively or emotionally speaking, what has been added by attending to such a detail?) It is a real boat and not a real boat. It is the Indian Ocean and not the Indian Ocean. Our Man is a real man or not. They are both at once. It doesn't matter. This is a metaphysical journey from hope to reality and the necessity of letting go. The subject itself is profoundly silent -- it lives at the core of the soul and not subject to debate or persuasion. It is a feeling question, and therefore perfectly suited to film.<br />
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It is about accepting failure. It is one of the most painful movies ever made.<br />
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It is wordless but not at all silent. Wind, water, the creaks of the boat, some expletives. But mostly wind and water. And pictures of a man thinking. He thinks deliberately. He moves slowly, with purpose. No panic. No false hope. Reasonableness. Reasonableness defeated.<br />
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Two "silent" films -- one cold, the other cool, both warming themselves at the glowing hearth of the origin of film -- pictures in motion, without the intervention of theatrical chatter. "Look at this" says Film. Don't measure it, don't judge it. At least not yet. Just look, then look closer. Only see.<br />
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What did you want? A speech?Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-5333008046442907582014-01-02T15:28:00.000-05:002014-01-02T15:28:49.010-05:00You Can't Cheat An Honest Man -- or can you?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill's characters discuss their legal options.</td></tr>
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There are a certain amount of feathers ruffled among traditional business circles about the rampant amorality to be found in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0993846/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">The Wolf of Wall Street</a> (2013) a black-comedy romp directed by Martin Scorsese that could be described as "<i>Goodfellas</i> without the murders." Personally, I believe you should be suspicious of anyone who is offended by the fact that the characters in the story receive only minimal incarceration and fines for their extensive misdeeds and appear to learn nothing from the whole debacle. At the end they are just as greedy and stupid as they were at the start.<br />
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Being offended by such things is just silly. First, the punishments administered adhere to the facts of the true-life case, which acknowledge the extensive assistance the defendants gave in making cases against other malefactors. Second, if incarceration and fines comprises your concept of punishment, you need to check your moral compass. Third, people rarely learn and scarcely ever change. Certainly, legal sanctions rarely have the power to instill a genuine sense of right and wrong in a sociopath -- only a surface understanding of what the social expectations are. (To this day, the person on whom DiCaprio's character is based has not made complete payment of the restitution due from his plea deal of 10 years ago.)<br />
<br />
One of the things Scorsese does best is make films about closed social groups. <i>Mean Streets, Goodfellas, After Hours, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, Shutter Island</i> all deal with tight-knit communities and the way they can close ranks against outsiders. (Not surprising considering Scorsese's own background. Incidentally, his other great mode is the story of the Loner, also unsurprising when you know how much time he spent alone, sick in bed, as a child. Many spectators have complained that <i>Wolf</i> does not show the damage caused to decent citizens and their financial security by its characters' depredations. The answer is simple -- the film is told from the characters' point-of-view (DiCaprio frequently addresses the audience directly). They had no idea of, nor any concern for, the effect of their actions on anyone else -- that's the nature of a sociopathic personality. It is true, there is no one in the film that expresses moral disdain for what is happening. Even the FBI man played by Kyle Chandler is mostly anxious for the kill, for the success of the hunt, for bringing down the big target, than for rendering justice in any cosmic sense. He's also a career builder, albeit one who is content with his modest means.<br />
<br />
Judgment, says Mr. Scorsese, is for you, the audience. If you're not up to that, you may not be up to a Scorsese film.<br />
<br />
Incidentally, I had never known Mr. S to be a maestro of slapstick comedy, but the sequence illustrated above, exhibits some of the best physical comedy seen since Peter Sellers's stuntmen retired. Mr. DiCaprio's character has taken an inordinate number of Quaaludes which suddenly take delayed effect, rendering him incapable of walking or talking. The way he slithers into his Lamborghini, opening the gull-wing door with an exquisite scissor-leg move, and then tries to prevent Jonah Hill's character from talking on the bugged telephone, in a slow-motion, rubber-muscled tussle on the floor, can only be compared with this masterpiece:<br />
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The 1980s con games in <i>Wolf of Wall Street</i> are relatively crude, especially when compared with CDOs and the other entertaining manipulations of the 2002-2008 period. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800241/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">American Hustle</a> (2013), on the other hand, manages to con even the audience, including your obedient servant, a lifelong Jerseyite, convincing me that the 1970s-era story was shot on my native soil, whereas it was made entirely in Massachusetts (those rapscallions!). Whereas DiCaprio invites you along on the ride, though he lies right to your face, Christian Bale's character would like to keep you and everyone else at arm's length so you can't see how the faux-hair is pasted on under the combover and exactly what is hidden up his sleeve.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bradley Cooper adjusts Christian Bale's accoutrements.</td></tr>
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Thusly, the film pulls some remarkable surprises and a full-out concluding con comparable to the finale of <i>The Sting</i>, yet it doesn't seem to be about that. And what's more, unlike <i>Wolf</i>, <i>Hustle </i>toys with your notions of who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and everything in between.<br />
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Two slam-dunk predictions, and a few chancier ones. <i>Hustle</i> will be nominated for Costumes (they make a huge contribution to both the atmosphere and in establishing the characters) and for Jennifer Lawrence as Best Supporting Actress. She is truly the new Meryl Streep, in that she disappears into variegated roles, and, I would argue, disappears much more completely into them. Her Rosalyn is rife with telling detail. (No disrespect to Amy Adams, although one wonders why David O. Russell gets work out of her that no other director does. Is that they don't think to ask?) Presuming there will be 10 Best Picture Nominees, <i>Hustle</i> will make the cut (and <i>Wolf</i> probably will, too). Russell will be nominated as director, and the screenplay will be as well. <br />
<br />
Beside the dodgy relationships with money, <i>Wolf</i> and <i>Hustle</i> have much in common stylistically. Rapid dolly-in shots and fast cuts, bright colors in the design (especially the retro clothes in both films), nostalgic soundtracks (<i>American Hustle</i> offers some real boomer-bait). But thematically, they part company over the old con-man ethic expressed in the title of this post. Irving Rosenthal, the role played by Christian Bale (who will not be nominated because toward the end of the film he appears to be channeling DeNiro), is a true classic con, who can live with himself morally because he only cheats those who want something for nothing, or an unfair advantage over another person. You Can't Cheat An Honest Man, they say. You take money from those who deserve to be taken. And Rosenthal refuses to hurt the people that matter to him. That puts him 180-degrees diametrically opposed to Jordan Belfont, DiCaprio's character, who has no idea and no concern who he hurts and how. These films live comfortably side by side, yet inhabit totally different moral universes.<br />
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But don't take it from me when you can get it from the horse's mouth.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/mHgv4McMJUk" width="420"></iframe><br />Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-62052067275863172972013-11-02T20:35:00.000-04:002013-11-02T20:35:14.652-04:00Trying to get time onto our side<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/aW9SYbCViJI" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2059255/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1" target="_blank">No</a> (2012) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2366450/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Stories We Tell</a> (2013) both play interesting games with time and memory, and use similar means to do so, specifically by employing outdated technology <br />
<br />
<i>No, </i>the based-on-fact story of the advertising campaign employed to unseat Pinochet as dictator of Chile in 1988 confused me when I first popped it into the DVD player, because the picture is in the 1:33, Academy ratio, often called "Fool Screen." I couldn't believe that a distributor of serious foreign film was still issuing full screen additions, and had to check Imdb to confirm that the film was indeed shot in the old television ratio, and for a very specific reason. <i>No </i>was shot on 3/4" Beta so that its original footage could be seamlessly integrated with historic advertising and news footage. Some scenes actually show the same real-life figure shot in 2011 side-by-side with 1988 footage running on a nearby monitor. <br />
<br />
So <i>No</i> hopes to make the intervening years melt away for the viewer, not by bringing the past up to the present, shining it up and making it contemporary, but sending the present back to a fuzzier, grainier time with bad clothes, bad music and even worse haircuts. And somehow it works, making the present-day performances and the old videotape blend into one slightly blurry but still quite legible artifact. Which contains its own irony, in that the whole story is about a manipulation of the truth which was engineered so as to make the truth possible to be spoken aloud. <br />
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For somehow, somewhere, someone realized that we are not rational beings. We do not vote, or purchase things, or live places, or fall in love based on any kind of rational measuring of the risks and rewards, costs and benefits. We live emotionally, and most especially we vote emotionally. So the tiny band that wanted to unseat Pinochet, given an absurdly small volume of resources, limited money, personnel and a mere fifteen minutes a night, had to turn the enormous slow-moving ship which is a nation's politics 180 degrees from the direction it was moving. (Pinochet was seeking a vote of confidence and to give the illusion of fairness the television stations -- all state-controlled of course -- granted fifteen minutes per night for the "Vote Yes" and the "Vote No" contingents.) The old anti-Pinochet crowd wanted to trot out all the old sufferings and martyrdoms, the torture, the suppression, the shunning by the rest of the world. But the marketing consultant they bring in (a composite character played by Gael Garcia Bernal) points out that you can't vote against a negative. There is no such vote. You have to vote for something. And Bernal proceeds to market the new Chile like a new soft drink, car, or even charity appeal (one part of the campaign includes a "We Are The World" type anthem, a recording session recreated by the original participants).<br />
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To these eyes, we were plunged back into 1988 (especially the corny advertising of the day), the intervening time elided and the filmmakers doing their best to render the film itself transparent so as to let the rather astonishing events show through clear.<br />
<br />
<i>Stories We Tell</i>, on the other hand, is reflective to the point of being reflexive, a film about itself, a film seemingly determined to eat its own tail -- or perhaps to be eaten by it.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/IClaiuQj6s4" width="560"></iframe><br />
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It's the most familiar old kind of family secret -- I feel as though I've seen two or three films this very year that have turned on this device (although here it is not a device, because it is what really happened in and to this family.) But the focus is not on the story, but the telling of it, or more precisely, of them, of stories in the plural, which is the whole point. Everybody has a story, or at least a point of view about the central story and everyone is permitted to chime in, much to the discomfort of some of the participants.<br />
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Like the central character of <i>No, </i>Pinochet, the central character of <i>Stories We Tell</i> is dead and cannot speak for herself. So she must be created out of the collective recollections of her family, friends and extended family and friends, like the elephant described by the blind men, or a whole gang of people describing their own shadows in Plato's cave. Also like <i>No,</i> the illusion is aided by blending authentic antique Super 8mm footage with newly staged and newly shot Super 8mm with lookalike actors and artificially created settings supplementing the real footage.<br />
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However, to be honest, the stories don't really contradict each other, but only inform them. The only real conflict (this is tricky to do without writing a spoiler) is between Polley and the man who would like to be accepted as part of the family, but is not and cannot be, who asserts that only he knows The Truth, whereas he knows his own truth, which he refuses to share because it will not be accepted as the sole or at least the primary truth.<br />
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And finally there is one piece missing. Polley herself never addresses the ambiguity of her own situation caused by the events she relates in her film. We see her interacting with her father and with other family members who refuse to be passive participants in the film and can't resist the urge to drag her into the storytelling, whether she wants to be included or not. And we see her working with her director of photography on the staged sequences, yet never clearly labels or identifies which sequences are real and which are re-created -- in fact she does not even acknowledge the artifice but for editing in these "making of" shots into her film. Her father points out on camera that she will take all the interviews which in all fairness should run unedited at length and chop them out and put them in counterpoint with each other to create a new narrative, "her" narrative, a constructed thing. <br />
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But honestly what is her choice? To make a film is always to force a liason between reality and artifice and the question is what balance will be struck. No film will ever live entirely in one camp or another, so why all the embarrassment and reticence about the very medium Polley has chosen to explore these questions? She needs to take a look at <i><a href="http://24timespersecond.blogspot.com/2011/02/reality-and-its-alternatives.html" target="_blank">Exit Through The Gift Shop</a></i> or even <i><a href="http://24timespersecond.blogspot.com/2009/09/here-are-all-my-posts-from-my-previous.html" target="_blank">Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story</a></i> to see just how this bargain can be made without equivocation, in fact with the kind of cheeky grin that <i>Stories We Tell</i> could really use.Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-23767938055086454862013-10-27T09:52:00.000-04:002013-11-08T08:14:11.791-05:00Haven't we suffered enough?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD8sX6j1_4AYs1d1el5Vm3zZ4cGOiqAyF5qtEex6MAteQ-LEqm3_ocKW0NW4WCmE7kkve720l8iO7vwLCeYjY5sikfHYf-D8iYEIxMhBEbgFLxVuNLZ-9Fy1ED_wQIduJf4PcMIQsfEhvC/s1600/nathan-lane-julianne-moore-the-english-teacher.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD8sX6j1_4AYs1d1el5Vm3zZ4cGOiqAyF5qtEex6MAteQ-LEqm3_ocKW0NW4WCmE7kkve720l8iO7vwLCeYjY5sikfHYf-D8iYEIxMhBEbgFLxVuNLZ-9Fy1ED_wQIduJf4PcMIQsfEhvC/s400/nathan-lane-julianne-moore-the-english-teacher.jpg" height="250" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Julianne Moore tries to convince Nathan Lane they make the script work.</i></td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2055765/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">The English Teacher</a> (2013) is about a woman who mistakes a bad script for a good one. But enough about Julianne Moore, let's talk about the character she plays in the film.<br />
<br />
This woman reads nothing but great classical literature but somehow becomes convinced that the faux avant-garde playscript written by a former student is immortal art, the implication being that she is biased because the writer IS a former student.<br />
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It is possible that the writers of this film not only don't know any English teachers, but never had any English teachers. Maybe they always cut class. Most English teachers I know care for their students very much but start out with the assumption that whatever they write is going to be absolutely terrible and that the teacher must decide how and what is fixable before this writing is unleashed on an innocent public. They do NOT begin with the premise that their former student's play is going to be a piece of genius, such that they walk around in a fog for WEEKS until they SUDDENLY realize that the play was crap all along. I mean these people READ FOR A LIVING. It's questionable whether the writers and producers of such drivel are literate at all.<br />
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This is also the kind of movie in which nobody notices that Julianne Moore is hot because she is wearing classes, and nobody notices that Nathan Lane is a pompous fraud because, well, actually, I have no idea why they don't notice that. He virtually has it tattooed on his forehead. (And why haven't Lane and his boss, played by Norbert Leo Butz realized that instead of running this crummy school, they should be co-starring in a HILARIOUS Broadway musical?) Moreover we have to endure the movie-high-school-play-production cliche
that the acting is terrible but the set, which is either beautiful or
hideous, is in any event, completely professionally assembled, clearly
painted by members of Local 829 of the United Scenic Artists who happen
to still be attending high school.<br />
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Most insultingly, we are also subjected to the common Movie World idea that all of high school is permeated with a sweaty cloud of sex. Now while a lot of our students may be walking around in that sort of funk, no faculty I have been a part of (and I have taught in rural, suburban AND urban settings) is anything but a bit ascetic. Frankly, you can't survive in a school setting without a parental mindset. Teachers call their students "my kids" partly because it's useful shorthand, but partly because there is some truth. To a limited degree they are your kids. You share responsibility for part of their lives. Any teacher who does otherwise is dangerous and may even be psychologically unstable.<br />
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[UPDATE: I've since heard an interview with the writers which implied that they had no intention of portraying real teachers, but reflecting a students-eye view of teachers. That would have been nice if your screenplay had articulated that idea. From what is on the screen, I can only presume that the script reflects the writers' own immature ill-formed ideas of who teachers are. Look, kids, I never said teachers don't have illusions. They do. But somebody already made a GOOD film about a teacher having his illusions stripped away. It's called ELECTION, it's adapted by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from a very good novel by Tom Perotta and you should be required to watch it twenty times from beginning to end before you're allowed to try and write another script of any kind ever again.]<br />
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I've already spent more time, and wasted more of YOUR time on this thing than is worth it. Much, much better films have come and gone without comment by me. (But I'm working on catching up. Really. I am.) But this is a milieu that I knew well. That, in fact, MILLIONS of people know well and the sheer effrontery of preserving and rehearsing these destructive old cliches about schools and teachers is especially galling.<br />
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Still -- somewhere there's a movie co-starring Nathan Lane and Norbert Leo Butz waiting to be made.Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-23016466736886008332013-10-17T21:23:00.003-04:002013-10-17T21:31:28.341-04:00Prisoner of love<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC_SetDc0P3Ih6K46bF5BKVxyAn9Ds6FPNdDFEqCb727MYliH2wdi7-PcwWAe-WPVbZP1XrmFDflXhYS8MvM10570f9LCV23yVhzq10e4TCM8Cq6uCvC3iOv_WE_5tUFvmuNHLTETjgAvV/s1600/mozarts-sister.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC_SetDc0P3Ih6K46bF5BKVxyAn9Ds6FPNdDFEqCb727MYliH2wdi7-PcwWAe-WPVbZP1XrmFDflXhYS8MvM10570f9LCV23yVhzq10e4TCM8Cq6uCvC3iOv_WE_5tUFvmuNHLTETjgAvV/s400/mozarts-sister.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One is a princess, one is a genius, both confined for being women.</td></tr>
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They're going to have to make a mini-series about Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang Amadeus, in order to explore all the stories and complexities of this ambiguous figure in music history. In <i>Amadeus</i>, he was the enabler, in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1653911/" target="_blank">Mozart's Sister</a> (2010), the disabler of musical genius.<br />
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I presume you can guess at the story premise from the title. R<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">e</span>n<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span>
F<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span>ret, the film's writer-director, has imagined that Nannerl was not only a fine performing musician, but an incipient composer, an idea which can be neither proved nor disproved, since although we have no surviving compositions by her, F<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span>ret proposes that she burned all her manuscripts when her path to composing became impassable. But it feels plausible, especially given the very nice music composed for her by Marie-Jeanne Serero. (In time Nannerl is persuaded by her father Leopold to give up the man she loves and marry a nobleman of his choice, then to turn over her only son, named Leopold for her father to raise in case he was also a musical genius, which he was not. She died blind and impoverished, having turned almost everything she had, material and spiritual to her voracious father.)<br />
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F<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span>ret's screenplay makes Nannerl the confidant of princesses, most notably the youngest daughter of Louis XV, who had no contact with her parents after early childhood and eventually became an abbess, turning to the only people who had shown her love, the nuns of the abbey in which she was raised and lived. Louise and Nannerl (shown above) are played by daughters of Féret, which raises questions as to how much of a Leopold Mozart is the director of the very film we are watching, and is the whole thing just a hall of mirrors?<br />
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Two more observations and I'll go. First, this is a very difficult type of film to make without the audience getting lost in the elegant surfaces of late 17th century court life. It helps that the Mozarts are often living in shabby circumstances which diminish the glam factor. And starting the film with Nannerl peeing in the snow might help some people. But I suppose we can never resolve the tension as to whether people of previous epochs are just like us with fancy clothes, or utterly unlike us other than a superficial flesh resemblance, albeit the flesh factor is magnified by the film medium.<br />
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Second, it's odd to see Wolfgang Mozart relegated to a small supporting part as a bright-eyed, somewhat mischievous but still rather sweet child. Maybe <i>Amadeus</i> would have been easier to take if we had seen that he once had not been an insufferable pig.<br />
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Third (I know I said I'd confine myself to two, but I thought of another and if you really want to hold me to my word, you're going to have to stop reading because Lord knows, I can't control what you do with your free time), I don't know whether it's Féret or just being French or even being European, but the film is a little bit like that person you're trying to finish a conversation with and he makes his point and you acknowledge that you understand and accept that and now it is time for you to get in your car or the elevator or what-have-you but you can't because he is making that same point again, and you are politely nodding and trying to indicate with body language that you are ready to move on and that he should be, too, and yes, he nods his head suggesting that he has read your non-verbal message and you are about to turn away but still he takes on that pre-emptory inhale that warns that long-winded important things are to be said, and alas, they are the very things that have been said.<br />
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The point is, we know that it sucks to be a woman and that it really, really sucked 275 years ago and we never really believed that she was going to make a career as a composer because...guess what...we've never heard of her music. So, M. Féret, we're way ahead of you and we stay ahead of you for most of the two attenuated hours.<br />
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But there is no question, as far as performances <span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">by the daughter of the director go, <span class="itemprop" itemprop="name" style="background-color: #f6f6f5; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1430115/?ref_=tt_cl_t1" itemprop="url" style="background-color: #f6f6f5; text-decoration: none;">Marie Féret</a> has got Sofia Coppola beat six ways from Sunday.</span></span>Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-28330994236945294652013-10-13T15:57:00.002-04:002013-10-13T15:57:16.506-04:00I went to the woods because I wished to live deliquescently...<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQTp4AbVuuk8CtVGvc-Hgo4oX-mhCQr_QJ8Hk0_rWxZaHSOQjiXMRcsKoa1Kn1E3di92yxEeJoh0zlEfInCts9a1rqenv4zGFceSwhDpopW_y7IZsTzlMj8QOg6UHn1zoJE8JS0yE4-566/s1600/kings-of-summer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQTp4AbVuuk8CtVGvc-Hgo4oX-mhCQr_QJ8Hk0_rWxZaHSOQjiXMRcsKoa1Kn1E3di92yxEeJoh0zlEfInCts9a1rqenv4zGFceSwhDpopW_y7IZsTzlMj8QOg6UHn1zoJE8JS0yE4-566/s400/kings-of-summer.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The <i>Kings of Summer</i> perform the primal drainage pipe dance.</td></tr>
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So in comparing <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2179116/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">The Kings of Summer</a> (2013) with <i><a href="http://24timespersecond.blogspot.com/2013/10/regrettably-david-chase-did-such.html" target="_blank">Not Fade Away</a> </i>(inevitable because, not only are both first features by refugees from television and both are male coming-of-age stories, but <i>Not Fade Away</i> is the film I saw immediately prior to this one), I must address the age-old critical dilemma -- is it better to aim high and fall short or to have more modest goals and achieve them? Because <i>Kings of Summer</i> lands with an assurance in its off-kilter humor and a skepticism toward its central character that <i>Not Fade Away</i> can not manage, still nursing 50-year-old resentments and injuries.<br />
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But <i>Kings of Summer</i> knows that we grow and change and has the preciense to reconstruct our larval selves with an ironic and skeptical eye that renders the vision more accurate than Chase's precise recollection of every fight, every betrayal, every abandonment. But Chris Galetta, the writer of <i>Kings</i> and its director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, knows that those clashes that formed the crucible of our character are long forgotten, plastered over in our memory by the sheer pleasure of having survived it all and having become who we are.<br />
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This is a great example of how you can be less realistic and be more true. Early in the story, best friends Joe and Patrick acquire a completely unexplained mascot, Biaggio, who provides much of the energy and variety of the piece.<br />
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As played by Moises Arias, likely to become a significant comic personality, Biaggio proves to be the glue of unasked-for, unearned loyalty and affection that holds the boys and the film together. Biaggio is ridiculous, he resembles no actual human being who lived and yet there is an essential truth to both his weirdness and his steadfastness that no character in <i>Not Fade Away</i> can lay claim to.<br />
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But finally the difference between the two films is that Chase has still not left television. His film is made up of pictures of people talking (to use Hitchcock's phrase) and dialogue is the key to understanding the characters and their relationships. Chase does not even demonstrate much skill in staging and the use of space to delineate his ideas. He wisely puts his rebellious teen across the yard in a grey-looking barbecue scene, but proceeds to break up the scene in a set of reverses that obviates any relationship between Alienated Youth and the family trying to act out a scenario of happiness.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3QE5q7FqLd7MOm-jQYRKYRLJmjFACnWiG4zLLt24QcTji6WJoZsTDTGqUQELp-n5-EqIhL9pif5Y8_Ug4LrHzMtYzm5ZQBnt2YgXL2SDOYf_LDHCyrue4V5ShFhSrQZPuR96FZpXr5XbD/s1600/kings-of-summer-house.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3QE5q7FqLd7MOm-jQYRKYRLJmjFACnWiG4zLLt24QcTji6WJoZsTDTGqUQELp-n5-EqIhL9pif5Y8_Ug4LrHzMtYzm5ZQBnt2YgXL2SDOYf_LDHCyrue4V5ShFhSrQZPuR96FZpXr5XbD/s320/kings-of-summer-house.jpg" width="320" /></a><i>The Kings of Summer</i> is all about control of space. The boys want to escape their parents' spaces and create a new one of their own, the house they build in the woods out of scrap that provided the original name for the film -- "Toy's House." Instead of imitating their parents lives, like the frustrated and frustrating teens of Chases's film, Joe, Patrick and Biaggio try to reinvent life from first principles. Sadly, both films revert to the Yoko trope, the Girl Who Wrecks Everything. In fact, in both cases, the girl in question has been with multiple boys in the band, real and metaphoric in the respective films. But <i>Kings of Summer</i> doesn't even need that idea -- it seems merely a device to create a separation between Joe and Patrick. Joe takes command of the space by himself and defends it against the ultimate Edenic intruder, a poisonous snake, defending girl, father and almost Biaggio, who inserts himself in the snake's path to his regret.<br />
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At the end of both <i>Not Fade Away</i> and <i>Kings of Summer</i> there is a supporting character in the hospital. In <i>Not Fade Away</i> he provides a small plot development, pushing the hero to the West Coast by himself (reinforcing the narcissism of what is supposed to be the identification figure). In <i>Kings of Summer</i>, Biaggio finds himself under medical care due to a heroic if misguided gesture that resonates with the central themes of the film. But Mr. Galetta's and Mr. Vogt-Roberts's craftsmanship and emotional logic are far more impressive than that of the famous, grouchy and evidently self-absorbed David Chase.<br />
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BTW -- are Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly now the center of the Six Degrees of Separation game? They are becoming ubiquitous lately. I think Nick Offerman has appeared in more movies this year than Bryan Cranston, which is saying something. (Incidentally, he's just fine, although Mullaly is a bit cartoon-y, as is her wont.)<br />
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Finally, I can recommend <i>Kings of Summer</i> to any women who want to understand men of any age in the way it lays out that the specifics of that narrow passage from adolescence to the beginning of adult life. That is truly news you can use, if you have males in your life.<br />
<br />Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-58465925106459680292013-10-12T11:46:00.001-04:002013-10-12T11:47:48.204-04:00You Can't Always Get What You Want, Can You David Chase?<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/EffOSyDJ50o" width="560"></iframe>
Regrettably, David Chase did such a thorough job plumbing the psyche of his own youthful self in writing and directing <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1230215/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Not Fade Away</a> (2012), that the result is not merely a misfire, but a peculiarly adolescent one.<br />
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It is sort-of embarrasing to see a man in his 60s, a few years older than me, with such a stunningly successful body of work behind him such as creating and guiding <i>The Sopranos</i> through seven seasons, to succumb to his own undigested influences in this flailing, unfocused, imitative film.</div>
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Chase blows the gaffe halfway through when hereo Doug's college-educated girlfriend Grace takes him to <i>Blow-Up,</i> which he professes to be confused by, given the lack of narrative or underscore music ("I think the trees are the music," says Grace, acting as ventroliquist dummy for writer-director Chase), despite the fact that Doug is supposed to be interested in filmmaking. But it is all a cover for the fact that Chase is himself attempting to make an Antonioni movie set in 1960s New Jersey, made most apparent in the brief final sequence in Hollywood, when Doug makes a desultory attempt to hitchhike at Hollywood and Vine and then his teenage sister pops up onscreen to narrate a thematic conclusion and then do some unmotivated and unsolicited go-go dancing (I wish I could find a video online to show you). Chase's art-house ambitions couldn't be plainer by these theatrical affectations.<br />
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Some of the narrative failures couldn't be more basic. One can almost hear young Chase whining to his screenplay professor, "But I want to make an ENSEMBLE story...that's why there are all these random, incomplete storylines." Despite good intentions, the film clearly takes sides, telling Doug's story from beginning to end. So the rambling and unrewarding thread about his girlfriend's hippy sister rebellions against father Chris MacDonald (and is there anything more cliched than being opposed to Chris MacDonald? They even do it on network television) and the emotional thrashings of confused erstwhile lead singer Wells lead nowhere. Even Gandolfini's gruff grumblings, as Doug's working class father seems a pointless warming over of familiar tropes, both of working-class dads with college sons, not to mention Gandolfini's own grouchy turns on <i>The Sopranos</i>. Not even his contracting cancer can lead significance or originality to his story.<br />
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A sympathetic producer or story-editor could have helped Chase realize what his real story was, and stop trying to represent the entirety of the 1960s as seen from the suburbs of Essex County. But them he or someone would have realized that what they had was a standard-issue <i>bildungsroman</i> adorned by some good old tunes and at least one good new one, heard in this clip in which they audition for a Bigtime Record Producer. <br />
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To its credit, the bands always sound like real bands playing at a realistic level of skill in real rooms for real people. But other filmmakers have crashed on the same rocks, trying to avoid the cliche of show biz story crowned with success by having the hero crash through to the middle, or to nowhere, as this hero does. We know the sequel -- our hero quits music and goes into TV, writing fine shows like <i>The Rockford Files</i> and <i>Northern Exposure</i> and still covering himself in the self-loathing that hovers every frame of this movie like the odorous haze over the Jersey Meadowlands, and prevents the audience from taking pleasure in even the most triumphant of scenes.<br />
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I understand that Mr. Chase is a fairly prickly and difficult fellow. God knows, if he had any friends, they might have looked at this film and helped him to make something genuinely original and rewarding from it, instead of the desultory, self-indulgent thing it is.Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-53544687115532696062013-06-15T17:56:00.000-04:002013-06-15T17:56:49.005-04:00What, and give up show business?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQxpT6FeJHJZVQrVCbKz46z3zVysOqhk9niSpwOGOiI_7uEWvUjsNS2EvqxKa0_aqH1LYrsp1NmqqYZQNvRzNW4h2g1zi8YOQvhpNIKragbZC2G3t1z103CSd4cf24sv4UXsLBE37ymbsw/s1600/Starlet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQxpT6FeJHJZVQrVCbKz46z3zVysOqhk9niSpwOGOiI_7uEWvUjsNS2EvqxKa0_aqH1LYrsp1NmqqYZQNvRzNW4h2g1zi8YOQvhpNIKragbZC2G3t1z103CSd4cf24sv4UXsLBE37ymbsw/s400/Starlet.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The noxious barrennes of the San Fernando Valley</td></tr>
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Just caught up with two small films set on the margins of show business that have a surprising amount of common ground, given their different milieus. In both cases, the corrosiveness of dreams of fame give way to the pull of new and deepening friendships, friendships formed to almost deliberately spite the bitch goddess of showbiz.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2035630/?ref_=sr_1" target="_blank">Starlet</a> (2012) by Sean Baker approaches its story from one direction, that of a seemingly aimless young woman befriending a very old woman who appears to be harboring secrets. The irony is that the young woman has a much greater secret, namely, that between bouts of getting high and shopping she is a porn "model," an occupation which seems to mean nothing at all to her. Certainly not as much as her friendship with Sadie and her dog Starlet, the first Chuahuahua I've ever seen that actually seemed more like a companion than vermin.</div>
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Sadie has a different secret than her young friend thinks, but it's worth your time to watch this mostly quiet, contemplative (and not sleazy, despite ts frankness) film. One of its most striking aspects is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0156547/" target="_blank">Radium Cheung</a>'s anamorphic cinematography, which captures the burned-up, burned-out grey-green-greasy littered sterility of the San Fernando Valley, its oppressive openness and lack of landmarks or even directionality. It is the most densely inhabited physical and spiritual desert in the world, and Cheung seems to have captured life near the bottom of this languid and rancid bowl. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqGdUQGixcI9MnRuWoHvLVi4vUEQq536KywRDIBRIFmnDxaF7HJIgRrOHszTcC97TZxD0XPqWGQ-rB9PNkw8qAqh9gIydRRBpMFBMS9xD_5OT3lyqGPNFJEG-u7-mRe-RCbSV5xWIz5Rv9/s1600/GWS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqGdUQGixcI9MnRuWoHvLVi4vUEQq536KywRDIBRIFmnDxaF7HJIgRrOHszTcC97TZxD0XPqWGQ-rB9PNkw8qAqh9gIydRRBpMFBMS9xD_5OT3lyqGPNFJEG-u7-mRe-RCbSV5xWIz5Rv9/s320/GWS.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Clarence explains the music biz as if he knew something.</td></tr>
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It makes a startling contrast with the virtually artless photography of Craig Zobel's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0826547/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Great World of Sound</a> (2007), a semi-improvised dramedy about song-sharking, the art and science of taking money from people based on their hope of having a music career. Where <i>Starlet</i> is set in the airless open sky of the Valley, <i>Great World </i>is shoved into cramped motel rooms, chain restaurants and airport lobbies, all lit by seemingly radioactive flourescent light radiating cancer into the souls of those who would feed on the hopes of others.</div>
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Martin and Clarence, having failed in other fields, wash up in a conclave of hopefuls summoned by a set of hucksters straight from <i>Glengarry Glen Ross</i>, substituting recording contracts for real estate deals. Their job is to blow into town, advertise that they are looking for recording talent, let the folks sing a song or two, then get them to put some earnest money down towards a recording session, which will lead to a record release. Whether the session or the release happen is no concern of theirs. <br />
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Martin is a well-meaning milquetoast who would like to be an artist, or at least involved with artists. Clarence is a man who would to like to eat regularly and will say, well not ANYTHING, but a lot of things in order to make that happen. After the expected friction, they arrive at a good cop-bad cop routine that gets the hopefuls hopeful enough to plunk down a few hundred or even a few thousand of the ready. <br />
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But for all its virtues, it is a film aesthetically at war with itself. The engine that drives the movie is this Odd Couple relationship. But the <i>raison d'etre</i> of the film is the prank at its heart. The filmmakers really <b>did</b> advertise for hopeful musical artists, really did film their auditions and the sales talk. (The last part was actually sort of brilliant, since it forced the actors to do their best to close the deal.) After the "scenes" were finished, the situation was explained to the auditioners and the filmmakers got the releases, so there were no surprises when the film was released -- but two problems remain. The scenes we are seeing are not really not part of the story -- they are honest-to-goodness pranks. And secondly, the auditioners were rarely at a laughable level of awfulness. Most of them are very good amateurs, not ready for a professional arena but not suitable for ridicule. I suppose the message here is how very nice and decent people with some talent, if not blinding talent will let their ambition and naivete and belief in themselves will let them be tricked by cruel and ruthless hucksters. Including the hucksters who made the movie.<br />
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Here's a roughly typical example of the level of talent that appears in the finished film:</div>
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What do you do with this? You're not overwhelmed, yet you can't dismiss it, either. And that painful ambiguous knife-edge, resting on the line between competence and genuine art is a self-inflicted wound at the heart of <i>Great World of Sound</i>.<br />
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See it anyway, because the experiment was worth trying and nearly everyone in the film provides good company on the journey.</div>
Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-3065647362007764272013-04-28T12:40:00.000-04:002013-04-28T19:05:45.881-04:00The First...for now...<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOyK5Qn6mOXK_2AcpL_UTrPrEM2Y9ZOCeudF4pgyiJlZCqXEltfqudMxI2dto8zZQqDmJDjjWiRv7ug7QUXMIbZnAejr3hVIs6G_BX0nQ8mFz-6fLI1Z8U8DsNf2njJKR3cbU6_6q1tRyA/s1600/42-movie-box-office-beat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOyK5Qn6mOXK_2AcpL_UTrPrEM2Y9ZOCeudF4pgyiJlZCqXEltfqudMxI2dto8zZQqDmJDjjWiRv7ug7QUXMIbZnAejr3hVIs6G_BX0nQ8mFz-6fLI1Z8U8DsNf2njJKR3cbU6_6q1tRyA/s320/42-movie-box-office-beat.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pee Wee Reese shows his Kentucky family who he is.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">First of all, baseball movies virtually always work, at least on a minute-to-minute level for the same reason that courtroom dramas always work at the same level. The events are constructed perfectly for drama, and especially drama to be picked up and assembled from multiple perspectives. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
In courtroom drama, you get to ask a person a whole lot of questions and they're not allowed to storm out of the room in a huff. They can refuse to answer, but that refusal is drama (and tactics) in itself.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
Baseball has all the stakes of any athletic contest, with two important differences. One is the starts and stops that many deplore about baseball, but which we aficionados appreciate as time to contemplate, meditate, consider the multiple directions the moments immediately before us can take. For the screenplay writer, those pauses give plenty of time to build tension, conflict, multiple points of view and even to crank up the inspirational music on the soundtrack. Second is the fact that anything can happen in a split second. Sure, that's true in any sport. Even soccer football must surely have its astonishing reversals (I've never stayed awake through an entire game to tell you). But generally in those long continuous games-- football, hockey, basketball, things continue the way they started. Unless the teams are closely matched, the outcome is readily forseeable from the outset.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
But in baseball, the best team can lose and often does. Baseball is for people who love underdogs, long shots and outcasts. Nobody makes movies about the Yankees. Why bother? A bunch of overpaid arrogant jerks whose pinstripes ought to be on corporate-type suits with diamond stickpins and wing-tipped shoes. That's not drama. But Dem Bums is always a story waiting to be told, a story that often ends "<a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Wait_Till_Next_Year.html?id=X--krrW6QAsC" target="_blank">Wait till next year</a>."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453562/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">42</a> (2013) is at least the fourth major go-round with the Jackie Robinson story, including<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042609/?ref_=sr_2" target="_blank"> the film starring Robinson</a>, a musical called <i><a href="http://ibdb.com/show.php?id=3577" target="_blank">The First</a></i> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115631/" target="_blank">a television movie</a>, not to mention a major portion of <a href="http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/baseball/pastime/ken.html" target="_blank">Episode 6 of the Ken Burns series <i>Baseball</i></a>. I must admit that I took pleasure in remembering and recognizing the story points in a tale I had heard so many times. And <i>42</i> offers up many, many movie-movie pleasures. Ford's quirky Branch Rickey, Boseman's burning intensity, the prodigious warmth and intelligence of Nichole Beharie as Rachel Robinson, the give and take of the play on the field and the cheers and taunts of the crowd, John C. McGinley doing an excellent Red Barber, Hamish Linklater as the good-natured Ralph Branca, some old-time high-key cinematography by Don Burgess, the extremely satisfying scene illustrated above between Lucas Black as Pee Wee Reese and Boseman's Robinson--underwritten and underplayed to perfection, the brilliant use of a young Black fan as point-of-view--a character who has his own story, as we learn at the end. If nothing else, <i>42</i> is an immensely satisfying popcorn movie.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
But this begs the question. Why tell the story again? Why now? Why in 2013 do we need this reminder of a partnership in courage between a member of the ruling elite of capitalism and of the underclass?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
Well, I can't be the first person to have thought of it, but to me <i>42</i> read like an allegory of the Obama era. Obama, like Robinson is The First; and, presumably, like Robinson, only the first of many. (Can you imagine the first Female Latin President. She would tell you What's What!) The most important point <i>42</i> makes is that putting Robinson on the team was ONLY THE BEGINNING. It was not enough to send him up to the majors. The long, difficult journey had only begun. Robinson had to demonstrate his skills, win the respect and ultimately, the loyalty, of his teammates, resist the natural desire to defend himself and to use his fists (or his mouth). It also emphasizes that even a great hero like Robinson needs a team behind him. In this case, not the Dodgers, but manager Rickey, writer Wendell Smith (presumably standing in for a network of African American opinion makers and fixers) and most importantly, his wife Rachel Robinson, who read and approved the script of this film.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP-pFGevXjlkJxmo8UMltBXIw6VxRNq0EWc-tQ2y0lvKG8SL0t3PB5IEsGWOvzbTp5uzXkuc60fAsM8G8rTjpKAR5J6TFuhEPeQAWdHdx80nBjhEg7bmfM0ISViqQGzv5fL67W82UU0Muk/s1600/obama_robinson_wh_605.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: #cccccc; clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP-pFGevXjlkJxmo8UMltBXIw6VxRNq0EWc-tQ2y0lvKG8SL0t3PB5IEsGWOvzbTp5uzXkuc60fAsM8G8rTjpKAR5J6TFuhEPeQAWdHdx80nBjhEg7bmfM0ISViqQGzv5fL67W82UU0Muk/s320/obama_robinson_wh_605.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc;">The President and another hero, Rachel Robinson</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">I hope I don't offend anyone, but I was and am a supporter of President Obama. But although I volunteered and contributed to the 2008 campaign, like a lot of his supporters, we figured getting him into office would create the usual wave of goodwill that envelops a new president and things would Start To Pop. We were naive fools. Getting him elected was only the beginning. And like Robinson, Obama had to be three times as good and keep his mouth shut when being provoked by redneck morons, even (or especially) when one of the redneck morons is the minority leader of the Senate.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEiJyxBUkOPELPUM1a1J3eAITsdMdOheNcrgklKQmE7ROHMQRKjZrIZHmyTb7vNVI-t-YInzr5vlpDaf_82VfrzT2ExByTesNVZbDaHZ0g036Lw7PfPy01aYE409GvUVRDGwY4pCdWsiAw/s1600/witch+doctor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: #cccccc; clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEiJyxBUkOPELPUM1a1J3eAITsdMdOheNcrgklKQmE7ROHMQRKjZrIZHmyTb7vNVI-t-YInzr5vlpDaf_82VfrzT2ExByTesNVZbDaHZ0g036Lw7PfPy01aYE409GvUVRDGwY4pCdWsiAw/s320/witch+doctor.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc;">What's the difference between this and Ben Chapman </span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">shouting "Nigger nigger nigger" at Jackie Robinson?</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">Listen, I get it that it is necessary and desirable to have a wide range of political opinion in our country. Our Constitution is designed to force people to acknowledge each others' points of view and to hammer out solutions that provide positive outcomes for as many people as possible. Anyone who says compromise is un-American is an illiterate jackass who does not understand the Constitution or the temper of the Founders. And vigorous abuse has a long history in our country. Abraham Lincoln was called an ape, and a US Representative beat a Senator with a stick on the floor of the Senate.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
But what we have today is different. I am up for debate based on the facts (not the facts you make up yourself, but actual verifiable-by-multiple-independent-sources-facts), history and logic. But that is not what much of the opposition to Obama is about. It's about ignorant, atavistic fear, the tribal fear that "our group" will not have enough resources to withstand assault from the "other group." </span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
Well, they're still playing baseball. Black, white, Latin, Asian and every possible combination and permutation thereof. And the sport is making more money than ever. American will similarly survive President Obama and both his principled and his racist opponents. But <i>42</i> reminds us that the fight is long and hard, and we never get to declare the battle over. Not if we're still battling idiot racism 66 years after Robinson came up to The Big Show.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><br />
Michele Obama asked it herself <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/02/jackie-robinson-comes-to-the-white-house-as-first-lady-hosts-talk-on-42/" target="_blank">at the White House screening of <i>42</i></a>: <span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 13px; line-height: 22.09375px;">"You're left just asking yourselves, how on Earth did they live through that? How did they do it?" Just what we tell our students (I teach high school in the inner city, if you didn't know). Perseverance. Character. Courage. <a href="http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/" target="_blank"><i>Grit</i></a>. <i>42 </i>is much more than a biopic and much much more than a baseball picture. It is our <i>Beowulf</i> our <i>Iliad</i>, the warrior who slays the monster, who slays the thousands of enemy troops, who represents our best, the person for whom we create the word "hero."</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia; font-size: 13px; line-height: 22.09375px;"><br /></span>Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-21846585925612832013-03-30T14:38:00.001-04:002013-03-30T14:38:27.403-04:00Obedience<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjra7s-EbLYWQuBMqjp2_XI3lnF9ZRmj4h2coZw4uj5cw5nMWWAJxDHD9v25H-0BU6rfnabiNkPolpYPQP-kvNwR32LtsqD__PFXEKrofELkCY37Q84rd2Vi_vxoKJCdSHE63IV5dQWVrbG/s1600/farewell_Queen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjra7s-EbLYWQuBMqjp2_XI3lnF9ZRmj4h2coZw4uj5cw5nMWWAJxDHD9v25H-0BU6rfnabiNkPolpYPQP-kvNwR32LtsqD__PFXEKrofELkCY37Q84rd2Vi_vxoKJCdSHE63IV5dQWVrbG/s400/farewell_Queen.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Clothes make the woman. A servant dressed as a duchess.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There is one fascinating sequence in the unexpectedly mild <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1753813/?ref_=sr_1" target="_blank">Farewell My Queen</a> (2012), the only film I've seen about the French Revolution which could be described as "understated." The Revolution has begun, everyone is fleeing Versailles and Sidonie, reader to Marie Antoinette and profoundly devoted to the queen, has been asked to assume the disguise of the queen's intimate friend, the Duchess of Polignac. (Everyone is all in a tizzy about the suggestion of homosexuality in this film, but it seems a rather tame escalation of the intimacy among women customary of the time. It was a way to experience tenderness unavailable in conventional marriage, and for the Queen it was a relationship which avoided the accusations of treason which would have followed any relationship with any male.) The Duchess will pose as her maid. It is simply a matter of exchanging clothes.<br />
<br />
Tellingly, this exchange of identity begins with a ritual humiliation. One of the Queen's attendants insists on stripping Sidonie down to her skin. No man is present, but clearly Sidonie feels vulnerable and attempts at first to cover herself, but admonished to stop. The implication is that such modesty is presumptuous in the presence of her superiors, especially the Queen. And it works. The ordinarily feisty Sidonie is docile, accepting -- perhaps a little resentful -- but she patiently waits for the Duchesses's gown to arrive to be put on her.<br />
<br />
What follows is equally instructive. As you can see by the illustration above with Lea Seydoux (whose performance has been woefully underappreciated), Sidonie's head is no longer bowed and subservient. Her head is up, her shoulders are back, she walks with command. Anyone who has worn formal clothing of a previous era may recognize how the structure of those clothes affect the way one holds one's body and, consequently,the physical attitude one presents to the world. Sidonie walks as a duchess, and even though the other staff knows who she is, they are confused as to how to acknowledge her, now neither wholly another domestic, but not wholly a duchess. (This is complicated by the fact that Polignac's elevation to the title was rather questionable to begin with.)<br />
<br />
As the film ends, the charade is successful. Polignac is rather snippy and bitter for a maid, at least within the privacy of the coach, but upon presentation of the papers to the guard, Sidonie is appropriately both demure and haughty, and she and the Duchess and the Duchess's beard-husband are given safe passage. From then on, Sidonie literally disappears, vaporizes. We hear her, but we do not see her, as she mourns the fact that she shall now become no one. Because, after all, what dress is she to put on now?<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMofwoS6Q8C958tOIhNNE25AWbytmdlHY_9RU60wyn7-gUcJB0CjROa6tW2vNthd7c6ey72GWy1A6wmqyjmV2TRYCiXFe-3KvPSrEu226GxsLJ9LAyP3-Lr-onJaG-UJyA_zuvmm_zbLCb/s1600/Dreama_Walker_Compliance.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="128" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMofwoS6Q8C958tOIhNNE25AWbytmdlHY_9RU60wyn7-gUcJB0CjROa6tW2vNthd7c6ey72GWy1A6wmqyjmV2TRYCiXFe-3KvPSrEu226GxsLJ9LAyP3-Lr-onJaG-UJyA_zuvmm_zbLCb/s320/Dreama_Walker_Compliance.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stripped of uniform, stripped of personhood.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1971352/?ref_=sr_1" target="_blank">Compliance</a> (2012) seizes on the difference between being clothed and being naked and builds it into almost its entire narrative. Again, the agenda is humiliation, and again, that humiliation can lead to a loss of identity, of self-possession, of self itself. It is not necessary to recap the plot -- the internet is full of discussions of its veracity. I also recommend you check out the various videos on line on <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlllu7_stranley-milgram-obedience_school#.UVcbPhyG2So" target="_blank">the Milgrim experiment</a> and the <a href="http://www.schooltube.com/video/237e7769aa970bcec446/" target="_blank">Stanford Prison Experiment</a> about the way people will both comply with authority and assume dictated roles of power. [These ideas are also explored in the two films - German and English- of <i>Funny Games</i> directed by Michael Heneke and in <i>Das Experiment</i> and <i>The Experiment, </i>also German and English films, which restage the Stanford experiment.] At least Marie Antoinette had a benign intention -- to save two beloved companions. Here the sole item on this fastfood menu is cruelty.<br />
<br />
And as if having to wear a fast food uniform wasn't humiliating enough by itself, now poor Becky is forced to take it -- and all her clothing off. A lot of other things happen, and the real central manipulation takes place between the prankster and the distressingly foolish store manager, a woman so unable to handle authority that it is a wonder she was not part of the last presidential administration. But it is Becky who is functionally naked for over and hour of this film's brief running time, and as it progresses we see how she loses the ability to object, to protest, to resist; the share fact of nakedness compels submission. A naked person is a weak person and that simple step virtually destroys the young woman's sense of herself as something worth attention, respect, simple decency.<br />
<br />
Even the epilogue of the film virtually ignores her in favor of her confused manager. I suppose it makes sense -- the manager is our surrogate in the film, the one who is manipulated in a way we are seduced into saying could never happen to us. She makes the mistakes we would make. It's harder to identify with a victim as purely victim as Becky. Moreover, she becomes voiceless and almost numb somewhere after the half-hour mark of the film. And if <i>Compliance</i> is meant to be a cautionary tale, than the behavior to be cautioned against is that of the manager who truly had the power to put a stop to the whole thing, not the poor naked employee. Happily, director Craig Zobel manages to keep that going without having to humiliate the actress herself.<br />
<br />
And most terrible for both characters in these two different films is that they are made to feel shame when it is those who put them in that position who should feel the shame. And a nod to both directors, (Benoit Jacquot and Craig Zobel, respectively) who made us witnesses to their degredation without creating a prurient or voyeuristic filip to the action, other than what is already embedded in these sorry events.Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-20456439286959243302013-03-17T16:44:00.000-04:002013-03-17T16:44:06.865-04:00Belief<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRg527sZUBycTLlcbEpkfsELYtozexzZ_o_0lxkYE13JLS6E7Qk85k0ugkz2GU5QlntwJpJ5rp4hu3AA5dVYLvuqX0qbea4uyK_xCNVS8MPPeR-mxyVgZZKIh7_DEnCPdtNDneABUC91bm/s1600/oz-the-great-and-powerful-munchkins.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRg527sZUBycTLlcbEpkfsELYtozexzZ_o_0lxkYE13JLS6E7Qk85k0ugkz2GU5QlntwJpJ5rp4hu3AA5dVYLvuqX0qbea4uyK_xCNVS8MPPeR-mxyVgZZKIh7_DEnCPdtNDneABUC91bm/s400/oz-the-great-and-powerful-munchkins.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This time around, the people of Oz will decide whether fear wins over freedom</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Three films encountered over the past week grapple with the question of belief, not in the context of conventional religion, but along the porous border of Faith and Science which has become the new<br />
demilitarized zone, except it's not so demlitarized -- bombs seem to bursting overhead every day.<br />
<br />
As this is written <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1623205/?ref_=sr_1" target="_blank">Oz The Great and Powerful</a> (2013) is the number one film in the US and worldwide. Films can be successful merely by being fun, but this level of success suggests that <i>Oz </i>has some resonance for the audience, something beyond pleasant diversion. The audience we saw the film with applauded at the end, and that is by no means a common experience anymore. I believe that much of that resonance comes from the filmmakers' genuine respect for a central tenet of the L. Frank Baum legacy: this is, above all, an <b>American</b> fairy tale. Yes, there are princesses and witches, but the stakes are not so much personal ascension to prominence and wealth, but securing peace and freedom across a very diverse, and often strange and dangerous land. Moreover, Baum was, more than anything, all about the dawn and the promise of the 20th century, a would-be tinkerer in the Age of the Tinkerer-King, Thomas Edison (who is rightly cited as an inspiration by Oz in the film).<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWw7E0j5tZCzjG7fgULdVRmsHQblH11tpqawJrkdE6hFw4LEmdn4pYgOLEqN4cdZdFCQe0jotPXLXb0G7nlQLKJmaOu4tND16JsvlGwbjCGbVqg4xVNwkT9u2KZO2iISHgm52B0_uZvH5c/s1600/wiz-diploma.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWw7E0j5tZCzjG7fgULdVRmsHQblH11tpqawJrkdE6hFw4LEmdn4pYgOLEqN4cdZdFCQe0jotPXLXb0G7nlQLKJmaOu4tND16JsvlGwbjCGbVqg4xVNwkT9u2KZO2iISHgm52B0_uZvH5c/s320/wiz-diploma.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The power of credentials: cynical or self-affirming?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
So, whereas the heroes of the 1939 MGM film (to which <i>Oz</i> pays much deep homage) were in search of personal redemption and rescue, and had to be exhorted to only believe in the powers that they already possessed, Oscar the hero of <i>Oz</i> must save the entire land and its varied peoples from tyranny and the rule of force. And, taking a page from the classic film, he takes inspiration from the Wizard of Menlo Park to create an illusion of superior force and power, with the collaboration of entire race of Tinkers. The day is won, then, not be actual superiority, but by its perception. What can be more American than that? We are the capitol of self-aggrandizemnt and humbug. But as many have pointed out before, Oz wins by being the biggest and best humbug around. And, in an improvement over the original, Oz enlists his people in creating many of the triumphal illusions. Perhaps the people of the Land of Oz will lose their fear of magic in favor of mastery of technology. (Will the Tinkers become the new priests of Oz?) Arthur Clarke would weep in happy recognition. (Clarke wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")<br />
<br />
I suspect that those critics --and there are many-- who are describing the film as lacking heart and emotional engagement, saw the film in a screening room without "hot bodies" (as the stage director George Abbott described paying customers). Those bodies warm up the film with their own enthusiasm and with the joy of making connections with the MGM film, most notably, the sepia Academy ratio prologue (in a drab Kansas) expanding to a full-color 2.39 widescreen image, the nod to the Yellow Brick Road, Dark Forest and Emerald City and most particularly the transformation of Theodora into the Wicked Witch, which is a worthy analog to the earlier film's transformation of the image of a troubled Auntie Em (the Good Mother) in the crystal ball into the cackling cruelty of the Wicked Witch (the Bad Mother).<br />
<br />
Personally, I regret that the producers' number one and number two choices for the title role, Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, respectively, turned them down. (I thought of them myself as I watched the film, and learned later they had a history with the property.) Downey and Depp would have had the convincing theatricality to carry off the charlatan magician. Mr. Franco is famous for pursuing his education, but he has a thick tongue, the California nasality that disfigures the speech of actors such as Kevin Costner and Chris O'Donnell, who sound inept in period roles, suggesting a surfer taking a pause between the waves. Nor does Mr. Franco have the control of his hands and body that would be <i>de rigeur</i> for a working magician. My hope is that he does not consider tackling the classics until he goes back to school again.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs9OiQ3SWViaVN2UhUhkBu1JwUvL5fHloHjCL7z8Vlm_3tIDlG9lXNafES89pT37QfCQ36NHI0QZJ63O61gLJi3_wIBTVY0Cx7YJT7cfjGNX7KdEA3XO6MoSHlkSti5H72HDsu8PlqR5bO/s1600/The+Master-+Paul+Thomas+Anderson-+Phoenix-Hoffman+(32).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs9OiQ3SWViaVN2UhUhkBu1JwUvL5fHloHjCL7z8Vlm_3tIDlG9lXNafES89pT37QfCQ36NHI0QZJ63O61gLJi3_wIBTVY0Cx7YJT7cfjGNX7KdEA3XO6MoSHlkSti5H72HDsu8PlqR5bO/s320/The+Master-+Paul+Thomas+Anderson-+Phoenix-Hoffman+(32).jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A society of mutual belief</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Phillip Seymour Hoffman, for example, seems as though he could be a fine prestidigitator, especially with the fa<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 11pt;">ç</span>ade of calm confidence he exudes in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1560747/?ref_=sr_1" target="_blank">The Master</a> (2012). The faith of Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie in Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd is perfectuly understandable. Dodd's faith in Freddie is the puzzling core of this puzzling film. <br />
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What writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson does with great facility is to create a complete and detailed imaginary universe right next door to the world we know, close enough so that we recognize a few landmarks, but very far distant in terms of human motivations and desires. Given that his story is merely about the unfortunate and unproductive attraction between two men who cannot and will not do each other any good, it is unclear why Freddie needs an elaborate backstory in his World War II service, drifting and alcoholism, or why, for the purposes of the narrative, Dodd needs to have created a complex system of belief which brings both followers and the unwelcome attentions of the authorities, which chase Dodd and his believers all the way to England. At least, we're told it's England, although what we see is a few hallways and an office with a big window--an architectural flourish you will never ever see in sunshine-deprived England. <br />
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The thing that gives the Dodd system the slightest bit of plausibility (leaving aside all the borrowings from the life of L. Ron Hubbard) is that it places itself at the intersection of medicine and magic. The original medicine men were magicians and, when it comes to mental health, they haven't moved that far from those origins. Thus, most patients require neither consistency or cohesion. Relief from suffering is enough to trigger acceptance of all explanations. But the story would have been just have effective if Dodd had been a singular fraud, a traveling charlatan who does Freddie some good despite the shady origins of Dodd's skills. The whole invented belief system is an iceberg, the bulk of which is hidden from us, which is simply unnecessary. Anderson has put a loaded gun in the drawer, occasionally taken it out to look at or polish, but he has never fired the gun, and my friend Anton Chekhov would be pretty darn steamed.<br />
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The larger question <i>The Master</i> raises is, can acting performances be great when they story which embraces them is an intellectual cul de sac? Can we applaud the actor's specificity and care of observation when the result leads nowhere and yields nothing? I am perfectly prepared to find out I am wrong in a few years -- many people think other PT Anderson films are as empty as I think <i>The Master</i> is, so my mind may well change. But for the time being, <i>The Master</i> is a film about belief which fails to induce it.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSY4Mi979AYhj8nvGHKYuOrGXerILij52AwhykcVrafz9zc00QljjJXhv9SONFPii22J4ydhqNaD3hpX7jXnEzGfIXkQNJwKyydZP508RLTmAqAtsfeCjgo0AWRcU5Q3ueKxCZLfy3B8ir/s1600/safety-not-guaranteed-l-icyw1k.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSY4Mi979AYhj8nvGHKYuOrGXerILij52AwhykcVrafz9zc00QljjJXhv9SONFPii22J4ydhqNaD3hpX7jXnEzGfIXkQNJwKyydZP508RLTmAqAtsfeCjgo0AWRcU5Q3ueKxCZLfy3B8ir/s320/safety-not-guaranteed-l-icyw1k.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kenneth asks Darius to trust him and she does.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I guess sincerity matters, because the characters in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1862079/?ref_=sr_1" target="_blank">Safety Not Guaranteed</a> (2012) may be just as insane as those in <i>The Master</i>, but they are clearly more earnest, well-meaning, lacking the narcissism and solipsism of Anderson's world. Kenneth's claims are far madder than Dodd's, yet Kenneth has far less to gain personally. He is not building an empire, but trying to fix the past. Kenneth avers he has built a time machine, and rather than travelling in time, the whole movie is going to be spent trying to figure out if he's a genius or a madman. And to their credit, writer Derek Conolly and director Colin Trevorrow balance it pretty well. Duplass seems both sincere and unstable; the government men following him seem both genuinely concerned and paranoid screwy at the same time.<br />
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Not surprisingly, Aubrey Plaza's role was written for her, because if her laser-like skepticism about everything in the world did not exist, it would need to be invented in order to tell this loopy story. And given how rarely Plaza smiles un-ironically, the payoff is that much greater when she finally drops her guard, gives her heart and commits herself to belief in Kenneth. Happily, unlike <i>Looper</i>, <i><a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/08/primer-and-the-handwriting-of-time-travelers" target="_blank">Primer</a> </i>and <i><a href="http://www.cinemablend.com/reviews/Timecrimes-3573.html" target="_blank">Timecrimes</a> </i>but like the careless shaggy dog indie, <a href="http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/05/sound-of-my-voice-interview/" target="_blank"><i>Sound Of My Voice</i></a>, <i>Safety</i> need not ever address the paradoxes and inconsistencies of time machine movies. We take it -- on faith -- that time travel is a matter of faith.<br />
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Then, sadly, the film blows itself up. If you want to know how a film's conclusion can be<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/06/the-one-glitch-in-safety-not-guaranteed/258992/" target="_blank"> both exhilarating and disappointing</a>, watch <i>Safety Not Guaranteed</i> right to the end. I guess I prefer ambiguity to certainty, which is why I prefer art to religion.<br />
<br />Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-31682434403104466772013-02-03T15:43:00.000-05:002013-02-03T16:00:58.269-05:00Keeping up with the Oscars<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkuwzVSQspPU_rIRcImDF-Cmaxjmu9xLxl6M9xSWvUWcBlx0R1JS2OJgqH4K4dgWmcHX1xuGddj2TiWWJeP-njAq8w3FBB1SFDGtbclONZWLLEzKGuA8hE3EFpTSxl9EPjdslXH_r38yV6/s1600/Paperman_still_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkuwzVSQspPU_rIRcImDF-Cmaxjmu9xLxl6M9xSWvUWcBlx0R1JS2OJgqH4K4dgWmcHX1xuGddj2TiWWJeP-njAq8w3FBB1SFDGtbclONZWLLEzKGuA8hE3EFpTSxl9EPjdslXH_r38yV6/s320/Paperman_still_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
It can be tough to see all the important nominees before the night of the Academy Award ceremonies. (My wife and I have been working hard at it, and we are still short a couple of titles, including <i>Amour</i> which is evidently illegal to see outside of Manhattan.) This is even tougher these days with 9 Best Picture nominees, plus the other films represented by other key nominations.<br />
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But you can be completely up-to-date with the Best Animated Short Subject category by clicking the link to <a href="http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/reviews/review-the-2013-academy-award-nominees-for-best-animated-short-film.php" target="_blank">this page</a>, which has embedded trailers for all of the nominees, as well as the complete film, <i>Paperman</i> (which is the favorite at the moment). Won't you feel clever when your choice wins the big one a few Sundays from now?<br />
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Update: I have since located the complete <i>Longest Daycare. </i>Here it is (with apologies for the Spanish language commercial you will probably have to wait through):<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.metatube.com/es/videos/167997/Maggie-Simpsons-in-The-Longest-Daycare-Full-Short/embed/" width="420"></iframe><br />
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Here is <i>Fresh Guacamole:</i><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FQMO6vjmkyI" width="560"></iframe><i><br /></i>Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-90519926828440635502013-01-30T12:32:00.000-05:002013-01-30T12:32:10.819-05:00Perhaps it all comes down to Walton Goggins<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWuHqU64Odfyv0eAooz5B1I8Jd8nGYR-Qgu5aZ_BZawqCpKlCDpzQDdH4_foe168npwWvAt0z2y53hW_30IUyxW4uqYZ2JTdJrA9tkHm0dvqPbuC0aOD6I0zs7tZxVUjR-dQBUVuE_RtqD/s1600/walton+goggins.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWuHqU64Odfyv0eAooz5B1I8Jd8nGYR-Qgu5aZ_BZawqCpKlCDpzQDdH4_foe168npwWvAt0z2y53hW_30IUyxW4uqYZ2JTdJrA9tkHm0dvqPbuC0aOD6I0zs7tZxVUjR-dQBUVuE_RtqD/s320/walton+goggins.png" width="214" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Boyd Crowder changes hiI'</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'm <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/12/07/1298521/walton-goggins/" target="_blank">not the first person to notice</a> that Walton Goggins is the most palpable link between the most f<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">ê</span>ted films of the current Oscar season, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443272/" target="_blank">Lincoln</a> (2012) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/" target="_blank">Django Unchained</a>. But maybe Mr. Goggins's progress from unrepentant scoundrel Billy Crash, through the ambiguously wicked Boyd Crowder in <a href="http://justified.wikia.com/wiki/Justified_Wiki" target="_blank">Justified</a> through the conflicted <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/wells_hutchins/405850" target="_blank">Clay Hutchins</a> is itself a microcosm of good and evil in the morally compromised landscape of American history. (And, incidentally, am I <i>unjustified</i> in suspecting that an actor named Walton Goggins who has a certain unpredictable quality will never play a character named Bob Johnson or Tom Smith?)<br />
<div>
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As portrayed in Tony Kushner's screenplay, Hutchins is swayed to vote in favor of the 13th Amendment by a promise of employment as a postmaster, given that his re-election prospects were virtually nil. (A Democrat in post-Civil War Ohio was virtually a non-person.) There has been a lot of harrumphing written about the horse-trading involved in getting slavery outlawed, as if Doris Goodwin or Tony Kushner had invented corruption in the 19th century, when everyone was obviously more pure and good than they are now. (Which is why they had slavery and child labor and oppression of women and minorities and no labor or product safety regulation. 'Cause folks used to be good and we didn't need all them pesky laws.) Much of the pleasure of the film is observing the amount and manner of deals that must be made in order to get mediocre people to do great things, a fact confined neither to history nor to the present moment. It is all very well for great people to lead us, but they are going to have to appeal to the desires of the mediocre.<br />
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And Clay Hutchins, at least as portrayed here, is no better than mediocre. So Mr. Goggins, over the past year of his work, moved from the straightforward sadism (probably rooted in self-hatred) of slavemaster Billy Crash, through the amoral Boyd Crowder, who cares nothing for others, but is uninterested in cruelty for its own sake, to the wavering Clay Hutchins, who is willing to do the right thing if there's something in it for himself as well. Perhaps this is the most accurate representation of the ways in which a democracy moves toward the moral light, through the historical odyssey of Walton Goggins.<br />
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Before I go, a couple of random observations about both theatrical features. <br />
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One of the most admirable aspects of Spielberg's <em>Lincoln</em> is how little it looks like a Spielberg film. I see him as the master of camera movement and manipulation, and it is amazing how quiet and calm the camera is in <em>Lincoln</em> -- even more than it was in <em>Schindler's List</em>. Evidently, Spielberg discerned that a text this dense was going to require some stillness so that the audience would absorb the words and not be distracted by shifting images. It's not static by any means, and the shenanigans of Mr. Bilbo are especially entertaining. (Despite the uniqueness of that patronimic, I can find no connection between William Bilbo and Theodore Bilbo, the odious white supremacist Senator of the 20th century.)<br />
<br />
Does anybody else think this is the <strong>darkest</strong> Spielberg movie yet? Not in mood or philosophical outlook, but literally low in footcandles? Good thing we don't have drive-ins any more. The film does make it clear what a shabby and ramshackle place the Executive Mansion was and how dark most places were after sunset. Spielberg has called on cinematographer <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001405/" target="_blank">Janusz Kaminski</a> to be quite a chameleon over the course of their work together, and in this film he impersonates Gordon Willis, the Prince of Darkness.<br />
<br />
And one bit of trivia about <em>Django</em>. This is a measure of exactly how big a movie geek Quentin Tarantino is. The lettering of the opening titles, is not just old-timey-Western sort of lettering. It references a specific period of late 50s-early 60s B Westerns released by Columbia. The specific shade of red, the splintered-log style letters, all shout "late Randolph Scott (mostly, but not always directed by Budd Boetticher)!" This is the definition of Too Hip (or Too Lame, depending on how you want to see it) For The Room. It's mostly of interest because the critics have only referenced spaghetti Westerns, but of course <em>Django</em> is no dish of spaghetti. For one thing, it's way, way too talky for a non-English-language Western (not to mention that the lips are synchronized with the sound, which is not true in Italian and German Westerns). And the talk is interesting and tasty and probably dominates the visuals, which is odd for a Western. Which takes us right back to Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher and <em>The Tall T</em>, a Western which, for about two-thirds of its running time takes place in a small circle around a campfire.<br />
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So what will it take to get Mr. Tarantino to write for the stage?</div>
Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-36998143453152947612013-01-20T16:23:00.000-05:002013-01-20T16:23:51.011-05:00As it happens<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4GnVt8ewDcDJn45pK-jaaF9GuD8J7d8THCZlsa0dtjP8c7dSxenWVg6SmeMvBgwabOkl-f0VOTyWRbaw6lAPY2c99Tjwvl5-VdMt3cgUzY3b24wEKOlbgJA8YaN2IYOAIsNV-U3Ky9ZdE/s1600/silverlinings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4GnVt8ewDcDJn45pK-jaaF9GuD8J7d8THCZlsa0dtjP8c7dSxenWVg6SmeMvBgwabOkl-f0VOTyWRbaw6lAPY2c99Tjwvl5-VdMt3cgUzY3b24wEKOlbgJA8YaN2IYOAIsNV-U3Ky9ZdE/s320/silverlinings.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jane Austen for bi-polar characters, letters included.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The most marvelous thing happened at the showing of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1045658/" target="_blank">Silver Linings Playbook</a> (2012) I attended. As Jennifer Lawrence's character reveals a very painful portion of her backstory, an audience member gasped and let go of a sympathetic "Ohhhh" as if this confidence was a true story being recounted in our own presence. Even better, we all resisted the temptation to chuckle at this naive expression of sympathy, because we were not far from where that tender woman was. At this point, still in the first act, all of us in the audience were already so invested in these characters that we had become genuinely worried about them and concerned for their emotional recovery and survival. <br />
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That's particularly impressive because at this point in the movie, they're both a pain in the neck. That's a hallmark of the characters in writer-director <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/a-conversation-with-david-o-russell-director-of-the-fighter-and-silver-linings-playbook-8424180.html" target="_blank">David O. Russell</a>'s films, a corpus which includes <i>Spanking The Monkey, Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster, I ♥ Huckabees </i>and <i>The Fighter.</i> The films and the characters tend to be smart, acerbic, obsessed and a bit superior. But there is a wonderful echt-Austen moment in the meeting of Lawrence's and Bradley Cooper's characters, the instant recognition of kindred damaged spirits and the consequent opening of hostilities as a mode of flirting. Obviously, if you hate yourself, you're going to hate anyone you're attracted to, right? After all, if your mind is broken, at least it shows you have one.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/eIVQUJYUKoY" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
But where body and mind meet, that's where cinema lives. So the film really takes off when Cooper and Lawrence dance together (charmingly, like the amateurs they are) to Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing." Arlene Croce said it in her book about Astaire and Rogers: When two characters sing together, they're falling in love; when they dance together, they want to have (or they are actually having) sex. There is an intimate energy to the rehearsal montage (that word!) that is irresistible.<br />
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One last note -- the family dynamic is astonishingly similar to that of <i>The Fighter</i>, something I was thinking about in the theater before I remembered that the two films had the same writer-director. There is the oppressive influence of the parents, the slightly soiled (and disapproved) girlfriend, the weight of brotherly expectation. When you consider that the one piece is based on a true story and the other on an utterly unrelated novel, the critic feels invited to see autobiographical qualities in those shared elements. And in both cases, Russell smoothly blends stars and journeyman actors into a seamless ensemble.<br />
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It seems Russell was always telling us about broken people -- it's just that he has now shifted his emphasis to the ways in which they fix themselves, and the result is exhilarating.<br />
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Enough to make you gasp and say, "Ohhhh..."Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-12623371130397197212013-01-20T11:44:00.000-05:002013-01-20T11:44:31.378-05:00Surprises from the pre-classical era<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKEOyA4uvEWxv0mXbu49U17aTNDte9IjeUOxdmtSWS2dgefmb89PYQ3MCAWClnpycNCE6ZjjIL7mmnJeWVl3rgBGXk_MrUS8Mc8-aHt4dcJwkW5krO-LAU1OZc2CqeJ1miiUeNhcWwnG2j/s1600/phantom+carriage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" hea="true" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKEOyA4uvEWxv0mXbu49U17aTNDte9IjeUOxdmtSWS2dgefmb89PYQ3MCAWClnpycNCE6ZjjIL7mmnJeWVl3rgBGXk_MrUS8Mc8-aHt4dcJwkW5krO-LAU1OZc2CqeJ1miiUeNhcWwnG2j/s320/phantom+carriage.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I've only just gotten around to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0012364/" target="_blank">The Phantom Carriage</a> (1921) which has been rediscovered and hailed as an early landmark of Swedish and of silent cinema. As for the content of <a href="http://greatbutforgotten.blogspot.com/2010/06/victor-sjostrom.html" target="_blank">Victor Sj<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">ö</span>str<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">ö</span>m</a>'s remarkable and haunting film, I don't have anything to say beyond the reams that have been written, either about the contemplation of death-in-life, nor about the impeccable in-camera double-exposure effects that seem incomprehensibly impossible before the advent of the optical printer.<br />
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But it is always a pleasure to see films made before styles and studio procedures were set into the hard expectations of the market and of genre itself, which is one of the principal rewards of early silent cinema itself. The filmmakers were still working out the rules, syntactical, stylistic and commercial. And one of the issues that most concerns the producers and exhibitors is making sure that the actors are clearly visible at all times, so that the audience knows that they're seeing the people they paid to see. This is no concern of the filmmaker, who is driven primarily by narrative (which is<a href="http://www.dailywritingtips.com/narrative-point-of-view/" target="_blank"> not the same thing as plot or story</a>).<br />
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So look at this still, which (unlike many production stills) is an accurate reflection of this scene in the film. The low and partially obscured light source perfectly sets the hushed, anxious yet warm tone of the scene. Is there any question that this is a deathbed, albeit <u>not</u> a frightening one? This is the deathbed of a person who is lived well and wishes to die well. The light is neither evenly balanced, as Classical Hollywood would demand, nor is it dramatically expressionistic, as in <i>Citizen Kane</i> and its <i>film noir</i> offspring. The effect is oblique, but not in overstated way. The light throughout <i>Phantom Carriage</i> is rarely realistic, yet it often seems that it is, because--although it is NOT expressionistic--it is highly expressive of the inner states of the characters. A photographer like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005748/" target="_blank">Julius Jaenzon</a> becomes a true co-author in a work like this, especially in silent film, in which dialogue is not a significant factor. <br />
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Students and even devoted film lovers are always resisting silent film, perhaps sensing that it requires closer attention and is therefore, harder work. But without a stream of chatter, sound effects and music closely synchronized to the image, the viewer is forced to shut up and look. And when it comes to film, the pictures, there's where the goodies are.Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6843970973084895661.post-24279749673832589292013-01-20T10:05:00.001-05:002013-01-20T10:05:50.801-05:00How to do coming of age--female edition<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4YUFTvpPbZF6vSMGt_KhyphenhyphenOSAqVb8JFor_jxUfKp2nc5HX8mn_jvKHnfQdDXLkZkbqajQh3TPkNNePulh21bLDLxuThy-chK-NRm-Xv3fTnRPb8xXg6M2JWCfLOtwyG_yQeHf91QYJvRDs/s1600/margaret_2072636b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" rea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4YUFTvpPbZF6vSMGt_KhyphenhyphenOSAqVb8JFor_jxUfKp2nc5HX8mn_jvKHnfQdDXLkZkbqajQh3TPkNNePulh21bLDLxuThy-chK-NRm-Xv3fTnRPb8xXg6M2JWCfLOtwyG_yQeHf91QYJvRDs/s320/margaret_2072636b.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just one of the many awkward moments in MARGARET.</td></tr>
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Two films released in the last couple of years represent object lessons-- positive and negative, respectively -- in the dramatization of the coming of age of a young woman.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0466893/" target="_blank">Margaret</a> (2011), written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (<em><a href="http://www.indiewire.com/article/decade_kenneth_lonergan_on_you_can_count_on_me" target="_blank">You Can Count on Me</a></em>) is not so much a narrative as a core sample, both of the life of its protagonist, Lisa Cohen and of a strata of urban life, and the upper middle class of the Upper West Side of Manhattan in particular. (Margaret is merely an allusion to a Gerard Manley Hopkin poem.) Although there is a strong dramatic core that invokes questions of death and the meaning of life without strain, the film loses interest in such things from time to time, letting the camera wander about the landscape in a seemingly aimless fashion, although what it is doing is placing Lisa in her context.<br />
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The coming-of-age aspects <em>Margaret</em> touches on include political passion, pretentious language, conflict with parents, awkward sex with contemporaries, inability to express real affection, inappropriate sexual attraction to adults, resistance of threatened step-parents, the desire to engage in a cause bigger than herself, and a need for self-expression greater than her need to understand others. But the saving grace of <em>Margaret</em> is the way it sets its story against the tapestry of New York and its battered and brittle inhabitants. No one listens to anyone else and Jeannie Berlin plays what might be the most impossibly irritating character in the history of film, constantly asking people to explain themselves, and continuing to shout over them as they try to answer her. Nearly everything she hears is an insult or an affront. By herself she virtually stands for an entire substrata of New York -- the Umbrage People.<br />
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(This is a movie so rich that Matthew Broderick can show up just to read the poem that provides the title of the film, Mark Ruffalo can be dealt with in two short scenes and Alison Janney is on hand solely for the purpose of being hit by a bus. Seems like hard work to be Ken Lonergan's friend!)<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-mrX-SoSMZtHg3Ik1C_MRsZcA_uxo0gxquXser-miThugmOXGnnzQnD_FlzPF3gXRZPCTDOhdfy353JCm8UUccO3ZIvYlCZXBs-qjFoPMZCC5zmednHk-KC1s1057mqo5amorQY_-j-hg/s1600/Girl-In-Progress.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-mrX-SoSMZtHg3Ik1C_MRsZcA_uxo0gxquXser-miThugmOXGnnzQnD_FlzPF3gXRZPCTDOhdfy353JCm8UUccO3ZIvYlCZXBs-qjFoPMZCC5zmednHk-KC1s1057mqo5amorQY_-j-hg/s320/Girl-In-Progress.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Cierra Ramirez (left). Remember her. Eva Mendes is in it, too.</td></tr>
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<em>Margaret</em> seems more like a time capsule than a coming-of-age, whereas <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1817676/" target="_blank">Girl in Progress</a> (2012) seems to have been built from a literature class diagram of the <em>bildungsroman</em>. The youngster in question even organizes her maturation around a checklist of to-dos. Dye hair, go emo, lose virginity, learn to drive, yada, yada, yada. Are you paying attention? The film is actually announcing exactly how formulaic and robotic it intends to be. <i>Girl in Progress</i> and <i>Margaret</i> have virtually identical de-virginization scenes (they both deliberately pick heartless idiots as partners), but where <i>Girl</i> intends to be smart and funny and incorporates a twist meant to be satiric (she rejects the boy because he expresses tenderness), it falls into the trap of teenagers being a heartless pack of jackals. <i> </i>Lisa's degradation is small and personal; Anciedad's becomes public in a way unfamiliar to people who live among human beings rather than endlessly recycled movie archetypes. So sad to see a film toss away an opportunity for insight and character growth in favor of a very unpleasant and tired cliche.<br />
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There is life in <i>Girl in Progress</i>, which comes from the powerful dynamic between mother Eva Mendes and the whip-smart Cierra Ramirez. One of the reasons I want to stay alive for another 20 years is to see this generation of brilliant young actresses -- Ellen Page, Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, and add Ms. Ramirez to this list. (I don't include Anna Paquin, star of <i>Margaret </i>to this list, because I suspect that she is so intelligent she may well have retired from acting in 20 years.) Ramirez is consistently better than her material, real and precise; I am concerned that she has come from and has now returned to television, which relies on a lot of freeze-dried refried acting...I hope she will get away from that as soon as she can. As soon as she comes of age. Lockharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13533251453746731956noreply@blogger.com0