Trying to get time onto our side

No (2012) and Stories We Tell (2013) both play interesting games with time and memory, and use similar means to do so, specifically by employing outdated technology

No, 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.  No 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.

So No 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.

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).

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.

Stories We Tell, 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.



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.

Like the central character of No, Pinochet, the central character of Stories We Tell 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 No, 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.

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.

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.

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 Exit Through The Gift Shop or even Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story to see just how this bargain can be made without equivocation, in fact with the kind of cheeky grin that Stories We Tell could really use.

Found in America

Aladeen explains the fine points of the Bill of Rights to a NYC policeman

You knew as you were watching Sasha Baron Cohen's film Borat that, like Daffy Duck blowing himself up, it was a one-time only performance.  The film's very popularity would make it impossible for Cohen to slip invisibly into another identity with which to trap and trick people.

It turned out to both true and not, as people have short memories and Cohen has a very adaptable face.  Still he is never going to take America by surprise quite the same way again.  So he can hardly be faulted for taking the scripted route to pursue many of Borat's themes and tropes again in The Dictator (2012)   He can be faulted for adopting the hoary old substitute-the-double-for-the-king plot that goes back at least to The Prisoner of Zenda and never seems to stop being reworked.  You'd think monarchies would have the good sense by now to seek out all the perfect doubles that seem to riddle the earth and have them done away with to avoid problems.

Three other observations.  The female lead played by Anna Faris claims to have attended Amherst College.  This is impossible because (a) she is wearing the Mt. Holyoke College uniform (basically grunge drag) and (b) she pronounces the name of her school "Am-hhurst."  Even those who attend U Mass are aware that the "h" is not pronounced.

Second, what is there about comedies about dictators which calls for a speech late in the third act?  Chaplin's Great Dictator speech is (rightly) criticized for being overlong and unfocused.  Cohen avoids such problems and goes straight for the jugular.  Yet, though this is the sharpest humor in the film, it seems to go unnoticed amid the slapstick and buffoonery.



By definition the film can't be as outrageous as Borat but it almost makes up for it by incorporating a large cohort of sketch and stand-up comics, probably the contribution of director Larry Charles, who is more likely to be plugged into American comedy circles.  Aasif Mandavi, Rizwan Manji, Horatio Sanz, Chris Parnell, Jessica St. Clair, Chris Gethard, Fred Armisen, Chris Elliot, Jon Glaser, Bobby Lee, Joey Slotnick, J.B. Smoove, Kathryn Hahn, Seth Morris, Nasim Pedrad, Ed Norton, B.J. Novak, Jim Piddock, John C. Reilly and Gary Shandling all have walk-ins and sometimes quite a bit more in this film.

It really suggests that what Cohen and Charles should be reworking instead of Zenda is an all-star comedy extravaganza along the lines of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Fog of war

A number of commentators on The Green Zone, directed by Paul Greengrass are still complaining about the immersive camera technique Greengrass favors. Come on, folks, you've had at least since 2002 when Bloody Sunday, Greengrass's brilliant film on the 1972 incident in which British troops fired on and killed unarmed protesters in Northern Ireland. If you haven't seen this superb film, rent or borrow it NOW! Put it in your queue now. Open up another tab on your browser and go to Netflix NOW! I'll wait.

OK, back again. Greengrass has an unusually coherent body of work in film which is bound together by unity of subject matter and style. In fact, the two may be indissolubly linked.

Greengrass makes movies about people who are seeking the truth. Not big, universal, philosophical truth; just trying to find out what happened. And today, with the welter of media outlets mostly controlled by a few outlets, governments managing information and news items categorized not by significance, but by "buzz," finding out what happened is about the most difficult think one can do. It's not comfortable, it's not simple, and the information doesn't arrive in a nice linear order or an elegant three-act structure.

In this context, Greengrass's camera style, being in the thick of it, not moving smoothly from master to medium to close, not framing things perfectly, with foreground obstructions and uneven lighting, makes perfect sense; the truth is got at incrementally, the bits one can piece together which the world conspires to obscure.

Incidentally, contrary to those contemporary films with over-edited fight and chase scenes in which the viewer cannot orient himself and therefore feels alienated from the action, in a Greengrass film I always now where I am, where the other characters are, where the danger is coming from. (A side benefit from a one-camera-on-the-shoulder approach is that it is rare to find a cut across the axis, because the director has not made those kinds of shots.)

Frankly, I am getting sick of the critics my age or older who say "It's cut too fast," or "The camera shakes" or "It's so meta- [or so subjective] that I can't identify what the objective reality is." Who guaranteed anyone that a film would present a view of objective reality, or that editing rules of classical Hollywood would go on forever and ever. How is that different from complaining, "That music today is just noise." Either retreat into the past or go away--life is change, and to stay alive, you are obligated to keep up with that process.

Anyway, back to Green Zone. Damon plays a military professional who gradually realizes that his stated mission is nonsensical and that it is based on either bad or deliberately false intelligence. This is evidently a source of political controversy. I admit room for debate as to the wisdom of the invasion of Iraq (but only because I want to err on the side of reasonableness), but is there a serious argument that planning and early execution of the invasion was amateurish, based on unfounded beliefs and wishes? This is not a matter of left or right--Damon's character's question is simply: "What is it I'm supposed to be doing? And if it's looking for imaginary things, that's an insult to my professionalism and a detriment to the safety of my men."

Thus Greengrass's camera style, which some find confusion and disorienting (I don't) is not a stylistic flourish but a statement of the central theme of the film, if not of the entire body of Greengrass's work: that truth is not-obvious, seldom if ever grasped in toto and ever-changing.

The counter-argument, that truth is always simple and obvious, is a natural point of view for those who are simple and obvious.

Emergency! Everybody to get from stritt!

As it is August, and I would rather be in Maine, I pulled out an old friend, the movie The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming (1966) which reminds me of New England and of the summer in Maine when I first saw it. (I was surprised to learn it was shot in Sausalito, so accurate are the rickety little New England houses and stores built for the movie.) I loved the movie then and my inner 10-year-old still loves it, perhaps because the children are the only ones who behave sensibly while the adults run around like idiots. The art is in the varieties of hysteria exhibited by the denizens of a small New England island (based on Martha's Vineyard in the 50s) when they believe Russians have launched an attack.

My first reaction in re-watching it, is to wonder why Jewison didn't cast a stronger leading man as the writer played by Carl Reiner. Reiner was never successful as a star (his sitcom Head of the Family didn't work when he starred in it, only when it was recast with Dick Van Dyke). Dick Van Dyke would have been a logical choice--he was making a lousy picture for Walt Disney at the time that could have been postponed. Jack Lemmon would have been good, too.

But then I realized Reiner was the perfect choice, because he is actually second banana. The story is really about the submarine officer leading the landing party, and again director Norman Jewison exhibits his casting genius by bringing Alan Arkin to the screen for the first time, in the fully justified confidence that Arkin would more than carry the film--he would triumph. In this case, the movie is inconceivable with anyone but Arkin. I can't think of another comic actor of his generation who seeks so little approval from the audience, or even awareness of them. Like Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, he is fully absorbed in the task in which he is engaged and has no time for "business" or "takes." He just exists, unaware of and undistracted by the absurdities piling up around him. Yet, somehow, he is likeable, if only because of his earnestness and the way his essential competence has been tripped up by circumstance.

The film has the usual flaws of a film based on a script by William Rose: it is too long and redundant, with many scenes devolving into mere squabbling, without real comic bite or crispness. Rose has an interesting career, with a lot of almost-great work. He was an American living in England, and had his first hit with Genevieve, a sort of low-rent version of The Great Race, which exhibits his trademark over-talkativeness. Then came the brilliant Ladykillers (the original British version, puh-lease) and the charming Smallest Show On Earth, which should be better known to film-lovers, because it is about them. Then he seems to have run afoul of American producers, and the drift began. He wrote Scent of Mystery, a gimmick film in which clues were rendered as "Smell-O-Vision." Then came the grotesquely swollen It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a brilliant idea buried in mountains of dull dialogue. (I was going to call it pedestrian, but that would be unsuitable for a road movie.) Then Russians, The Flim-Flam Man, a not-bad con movie with George C. Scott and Guess Who's Coming for Dinner, for good or ill, and again with the redundant dialogue. What Rose could have done with a good editor or co-writer!

Back to Russians: I have seen criticism of this movie on a political basis; that it establishes a moral equivalency between the US and the Soviet Union. This is the kind of irony that's hard to pull off. To judge this film that way is to make exactly the same mistake made by the hysterical ninnies in the movie. This movie is not about dreaded Soviet invaders. (Why is it that today's conservatives can't remember that Ronald Reagan's dream was not to defeat the Soviets, but to negotiate disarmament with them?) The movie is about a poor cluck who has an idiot for a boss, and idiot who made a problem (running the sub aground) which he now has to fix. Clearly, they have no interest in ideology or conquest. Arkin and his crewmates are just trying to keep their heads down and get their jobs done--just like anyone else in this predicament. Soviet Communism was not like a terrorist cell, or some other tiny group of fanatics. It was a huge bureaucracy, and the process of surviving under one of those is universal and essentially apolitical.

And it is good to see Norman Jewison unafraid of letting broad actors do their broad stuff. Paul Ford, Tessie O'Shea, Ben Blue (forever chasing his horse "Beatrice"), Jonathan Winters, Michael J. Pollard--this is one of the biggest servings of ham ever put on film. Today, directors mostly have two modes: (a) fear of actors, so they are never given an opportunity to do what they can, because their performance has been cut into tiny shards of film, and composited like a Byzantine mosaic; or (b) over-solicitousness of actors, so that the camera zooms in on each quivering eyelid and pulsing cheek muscle in long-long takes of nothingness. Jewison and his actors were old enough to remember the last stages of vaudeville (Jewison started in television variety programming) and knew that actors like these need space and time to do what they can do. Then Jewison places Brian Keith as the quiet, still center of the movie which heightens all the lunacy around him.

Incidentally, this is one of the few films or plays (The Importance of Being Earnest is the most important example) that observes the Rob Lockhart Terminal Title Drop Rule (by which rule, once the title is stated, the film, play, novel, what-have-you Must End Immediately). In the case of Russians, it's hilarious.

And--I can testify from seeing the film with audiences over the years--the movie still stimulates laughter. Laughter--how can I explain what that was...See, in the old days, in comedies, instead of people merely performing bodily functions or saying the baby words for them (which excites hysterical laughter in 2-year-olds of all ages), they actually did things that were funny and made you laugh, which Wikipedia says is "an audible expression or the appearance of happiness or an inward feeling of joy (laughing on the inside)."

Oh yeah, joy.

Everybody get off here

As best I can tell, novelist James Parini and film writer-director Michael Hoffman intended The Last Station (2009) to be an investigation of how people maintain long and often difficult marriages. It is meant to be a paean to enduring love. Unfortunately it is as packed with useless clutter as a 19th-century dacha which cloud the virtues of the project.

First, they confuse the audience by casting James McAvoy to play the same role he played in The Last King of Scotland, goggle-eyed witness to the eccentricities of the celebrated. In order to give him an actual role, they concoct a 20th-century woman for him to fall in love with, then whisk her offstage, failing to disguise what an empty story line she represents. Then Hoffman cast, in the place of two thoughtful complicated people, two of the biggest theatrical hambones on the planet. Mind you, I think they are wonderful actors, but subtle they ain't.

Christopher Plummer plays Tolstoy as if he were looking for a proscenium to climb and some scenery to chew on, and Helen Mirren's character alternates between being an overprivileged whiner, an elderly paranoid crackpot, and a sex-crazed lady of a certain age who thinks she's still 16, especially when she jumps in the lake because she's not getting enough attention. Moreover, Tolstoy does not appear to be a great novelist but an old-time barnstorming actor, and the Countess was his manager. The Tolstoyans thus come off not as ascetics but groupies. The fine and often subtle Paul Giammati has been called upon to make a grumpy infant face and pound his fist on the table a lot. The whole thing looks as if the cast had slipped from the director's control, which, given his mediocre track record (Restoration, One Fine Day and the worst version of Midsummer's Night Dream on film, and that includes the one with Mickey Rooney).

The one commendable aspect is the physical production, largely due to being so low budget, which forced shooting in East Germany, and the use of pre-existing theater costumes rather than new built. Everything looks a bit lived-in, as is right and proper.

The final encounter, the title event of the piece, is expressly designed to short-circuit dramatic confrontation. This famous man decides to run away until he gets sick; his momentarily-estranged wife follows, and do they have a tender reconciliation? No, because history must be observed, and Tolstoy was too sick to really talk with his wife or understand much of what was going on. He dies (and oh, by the way, for no good reason, McAvoy's randy girlfriend pops up again to cheer him up).

If they hadn't been stuck with Tolstoy, they might have invented a tempestuous older couple with plenty of sturm and drang in their relationship, and they would have had the freedom to resolve their story any way they liked. Instead, they serve up this tepid porridge slathered over with outrageous overacting, which is the perfect recipe for the middlebrow cultural snob hit.

Too bad, because the theme of maintaining love between two strong people over 50 or 60 years is an excellent subject, and I hope somebody does make a good movie about that some day.