Scarlett Cinema

Top Ten Films of 2011

2012-01-17T16:38:00.000-05:00

An old punchline from a dear friend and cineaste sums upthis post nicely: “Yesterday’s news tomorrow!”

Here, finally, is a list of my favorite movies from 2011. But why now on this odd date? January 17^th? What is that, a Tuesday? Everything about this is unremarkable. But I saw Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) for the first time onlythree days ago. This, taken with afew more 2011 releases over the past two weeks, makes me feel sufficientlyversed to submit a comprehensive favorites list.

Hugo was promptly moved to the top of a previously submitted(though not published) Top Ten Films of 2011 list through one Mr. Tativille(Michael Anderson). Hissite complies the results of select film critics’ top films of the year fora cumulative ranking. Mylist was in poor form when it arrived in his inbox at the 11^th houron the day of his deadline. And asthe deadline approached, apathy not urgency took over my mind state. For all of the cinema I had missed from2011 at that point, it became impossible to reckon these omissions with thepublication of a list that implies a level of authority on the subject.

So I scrapped together ten films that were not altogetherdifferent from a list that might be titled, “The Ten Films I Watched in 2011.” The playing field was that small thisyear. New interests and routinestook me in directions away from new film—though not entirely off itstrack. My vigor for the movies hasbeen newly restored after watching Hugo, a life-affirming ode to the movies, tomovie history; a capable example of what makes 3D worthwhile, and a sweet storythat tenderly affirms humanity. And those are just the platitudes!

But that’s the key: a total engagement with what cinemais—how it works technically, narratively and emotionally—is what makes Hugo thestandout film of 2011. I use it asa tactful juxtaposition to show the flaws of the films I disliked in 2011, big favoriteslike The Artist, for example. I watched only half of this movie, asaccharine homage to silent cinema, before I gave up. The Artist was content to display its knowledge offilm history—as a business and technical art—without inventively sayingsomething, anything new about it.

It is here I’d like to invoke one of Mrs. Tativille’s (LisaBroad) great lines about Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) asanalogy. Midnight is, she says, “lightentertainment for geniuses.” And while our sentiment for Midnight differs, herpoint is taken, and by extension I’d like to say The Artist is something akinto this, perhaps “light entertainment for film history students.” Or something like that. There’s a kind pandering or self-regardabout it, like a cute show of “this is how things used to be” while it yawnsone big stretch of “so what?” as it goes along.

Walking out of movies is not my typical behavior either. I used to consider the integrity of afilm and demand that I finish it whole, even if gave me heartburn to doso. But the intervening years havetaught me that time is too precious to be wasted this way. A keen topic, time is, in the contextof this note remarking on another year gone by. It’s for this simple reason that I enjoyed Allen’s Midnightin Paris, which cheerfully asks us to love the past, to anticipate the future,but to always, always be alive in the present. As you look through my list of the top films of 2011 below,I think you’ll find that’s a sentiment favored in them all. Even Insidious. But really,that movie is so good it’s scary, punintended. Any movie that makes mesuppress terror-vomiting or that incites roller-coaster quality screams for asolid third of its running time garners the title of “Best Horror Film SinceThe Exorcist” in my book.

Happy belated New Year, everyone.

The Top Ten Films of2011

Hugo
Insidious
Drive
Midnight in Paris
Pina
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Certified Copy
A Separation
Poetry
Bill Cunningham New York

Janie Jones (2011)

2011-11-13T16:46:00.001-05:00

Oh, Jesus, I've been away from this blog long enough for my precious few followers to completely forget about it. I'm genuinely sorry about that, but I have good news. I'm breaking the long silence. Fresh up on CampusCircle.com is a tiny review I've written about the new indie release Janie Jones starring Abigail Breslin, who steals an otherwise lame show. She's actually the one thing I loved about this movie. She's very comfortable in front of a camera and exudes such a natural presence. I wanted to like more about Janie Jones, but its technique overwhelmed me. Read the review for more complete thoughts on that. In closing, I LOVE YOU. Thank you for clicking back over to my blog, nice reader!

Tabloid (2011) - Review in The Rumpus Today!

2011-07-19T16:47:00.006-04:00

My review of Errol Morris' new documentary Tabloid (2011) went easier on the director and his latest film than I think my heart had in mind. I walked out of the film totally irked by the fact that a male filmmaker devised a film about the nature of exploitation while exploiting his very own subject, who happens to be female. It seemed unjust to me that the only one speaking on behalf of this woman was that woman herself.

Meanwhile, her story is contradicted by a number of tabloid journalists and a few male associates she knew in the past. It seems way too easy to malign this woman who already seemed at a terrible disadvantage. It's almost like Morris got joy out of labeling Joyce McKinney as the unseemly figure she was made out to be in 1977, when a stack of professional nude photographs emerged in the media.

Isn't there something innately tragic about a woman who falls back on the porn/nude modeling industry without the media and Morris bringing further insult to it? Later, McKinney is splayed across tabloid covers with no regard for what perhaps brought her to such extreme measures (that's the real nature of tabloid journalism); and later still Morris profiles her with silly frivolity here in Tabloid.

Which is not to say the film isn't capably constructed. Which is not to say the movie didn't move quickly and hold your attention at every turn. Which is not to say I don't think Morris has an actual interest in McKinney and the business and nature of the tabloids. I only find it offensive that his interest is framed in way that's so completely oblivious to his role as the dominant male dictating how this story about a woman plays out. It's a movie to me that's contentedly ignorant of the boy's club it comes from.

My much gentler handling of this movie is here, at The Rumpus.

Dumbstruck (2011) - Review Up Today!

2011-05-25T22:38:00.001-04:00

New review up today on CampusCircle.com! No new notes to add here that aren't already in the review itself, which you can read here, except to say putting the word "dumb" in the title of your movie is a practice that should just be avoided. Just sayin'. Anyway, IT'S A VENTRILOQUISM MOVIE HOLY SHIT!

Poetry (2011) - review out now!

2011-05-06T23:49:00.000-04:00

South Korean director Lee Chang-dong's newest picture Poetry (2011) has been touring about the festival circuit for the past year, and has finally landed in theaters from distributor Kino International. The film follows a single grandmother who is diagnosed with Alzheimer's and raising a troubled grandson on her own. Immediately after her diagnosis she enrolls in a poetry class. Her assignment, write a poem by the course's end. The film follows her struggle to express herself while the world around her increasingly loses its meaning. Poetry is a subtle portrait of a woman struggling to create an impression on the world when she herself is fading from it. You can read my full review at CampusCircle.com!

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) - on The Rumpus!

2011-04-30T11:13:00.000-04:00

Visit The Rumpus today to read my review of Werner Herzog's latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It is a marvelous show of natural history and the world's oldest--at 32,000 years old--works of art. Herzog narrates in his usual tone, filled with wonderment and curiosity. Cave of Forgotten Dreams opens today in New York at the IFC Center. Don't miss it!

My Perestroika (2011)

2011-03-23T17:57:00.359-04:00

When does history become history? There is uncategorized historical detail that encompasses everything in the past time continuum, and then there are the moments that make you aware of yourself and your surroundings suddenly, in revelation, that makes you blurt out-loud, "I just witnessed history," or something to that effect. Historic history, if you will: the kind that's qualified and remembered even if it is something you did not live through yourself. A thing that embeds itself into a total consciousness of a society; the essence of its collectively branded self, perpetuated as a legitimizing indicator of what that historical moment actually was and has come to mean. How you arrive at widespread historical agreement is confusing and deceptive, particularly if the historical event in question is one that took place in your own lifetime, for what if your personal memories--your unique understanding--of an event doesn't match the story popularly held? The discrepancy of one's personal memories are a side matter for later thought. For now I want to hone in on the process of history-making and the kind of self-consciousness it--the history-making thing--has to have in order to survive a long-term frame of time, that is, the process of consciously making "one for the record books."

I'm fascinated by this within the context of the new documentary film My Perestroika (2011) by Robin Hessman, a film whose majority of footage is derived from old 8mm home movie reels starring its five primary characters. They are a mixed group of thirty-something Russian citizens who came of age during the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. Their reels of film are long and pristine. Starting within the household of Borya and Lyuba Meyerson who grew up across the street from one another, we get to know them and their childhood friends and acquaintances. All five are from roughly the same neighborhood and they all went to school together, so Borya Meyerson's home movies capture--by virtue of mere vicinity--the film's other four subjects, Lyuba, Ruslan, Olga and Andrei, as well. That the film carries footage of each of these characters is necessary to know, firstly, so you know how the documentary is structured. My Perestroika is a combination of this 8mm footage and present-day interviews with its grown subjects. In some scenes, footage of the same location (a shot of Borya entering the front door of the apartment, for example) is spliced together from the two different time periods, giving us a sense of uncanniness, downright spookiness, but also sheer amazement that the footage should exist for the comparison. The extant body of silent film reels were available to cover each character with a strong, if somewhat ineffable, level of historical accuracy. But the mere availability of these film reels serves as the preface to a much larger question: why were so many spools of film purposefully shot in regular routine and in great detail and kept on record? Everyone nowadays has a video camera to capture family moments, but few (with the exception of Exit Through The Gift Shop's (2010) obsessive videographer, Thierry Guetta) have documented their family and friends' lives as well as Borya Meyerson's father. Robin Hessman: "Borya opened up a closet stacked with 8mm film cans--his father had been obsessed with making home movies. To my utter amazement, he had even followed Borya into school many times and filmed his classmates!"

Borya's father, apparently, made it his business to author history. By the simple practice of committing the regular dealings of his family and community to film, he gave meaning to the mundane that might have been forgotten within the larger context of the documentary's subject, Perestroika, or the total restructuring of the Russian government in 1991. If Perestroika is the "historic" event, widely covered by the media at the time, what life was like as a kid in propagandistic Soviet society in the 70s and 80s becomes relatively minor by comparison. Yet, the arc of the film is made by the comparison of this day-to-day life in the Soviet Union versus revolutionary Russia in 1991, as well as the decades that succeed it up to the present. In the film, each of the characters recount the stories of their childhood. They talk about their friends and neighbors, the clothes they wore, their first day of school; and while this is happening we get a glimpse of them all on Borya's family films. The first day of school in Soviet Russia (September 1st) is a ceremonial day. Formal dress is required, and bouquets of flowers are brought to school administrators and teachers. It's a moment documented on Borya's films that is later superimposed with the same event taking place in the present day. This time, Lyuba and Borya, and Andrei take their own kids to school. The dress is still formal. The blooming flowers are still in arm. As the comparative story shows us, the value of certain cultural and social institutions are unchanged even after 30 years, and in spite of the highly-documented historic revolution of 1991. Which leads me back to my original question, when does history become history? While there may not always be widespread media coverage to show it, in reality, everyday is one for the record books.

Take Me Home Tonight (2011)

2011-03-22T23:27:00.000-04:00

Take Me Home Tonight's (2011) broadside poster on the subway platform announced itself about two weeks before the film's opening. Personally, it doesn't take much to sell me on a sugary pop film, but from this poster I recognized three things that made it even more salable: 1980s style, Topher Grace and Anna Faris. Two hilarious comic actors and one awesome decade? A fine combination so far. I found the trailer online and watched it. No discernible story is apparent. It is more like a montage of party shots with a comic male lead and a blonde female costar. Still, it's vaguely recognizable as a romantic comedy. Plus there's Eddie Money's 80s pop hit "Take Me Home Tonight" playing on the commercial soundtrack, so that's a big yes. A vehicle to promote 80s culture driven by sheer nostalgia? All systems are go, captain! Color me sold.

But against expectations of it solely being sentimental sugar pop, Take Me Home Tonight is a playful trip back to 1987 that's a little wiser than its trailer leads on. The movie doesn't mock the 1980s, insofar as you are able to portray what is perhaps the most made fun of decade in recent history. Frosted pink lipstick has become a punchline in and of itself. But that mocking tone is something you might especially expect a comedy to do, since easy laughs can be had just by showing any one of its characters' sartorial choice for, say, glam-rock shoulder padded outfits. That tactic might be easy, but it's also cheap. Instead, I'd say, Take Me Home Tonight is a period piece--a hazy one at times when you really wish the camera would sneak around and show us a detailed survey of all the little gadgets, accessories, furniture and old brand packaging specific to those many consecutive mornings in America--but an un-ironic period piece nonetheless. It very earnestly sets us inside the 1980s without giving us that snicker that says, just look how silly we were. It is not condescending.

And thank goodness it isn't. It's about time we start to see this decade with fresh, fascinated eyes. As we get further and further from the 1980s it seems like it's going to be easier to tease out the real look of this time without being facetious. Had the romantic comedy plot of Take Me Home Tonight been firmer, it could have been 80s comedy kin to Zodiac's (2007) look at the 1970s. The female lead Teresa Palmer, who plays Topher Grace's love interest, is unfairly matched against his marvelous wit, timing, and deft facial expressions, and looks deadpan by comparison, just as she does in the company of Anna Faris, who plays Topher Grace's twin sister. Faris, in an almost auxiliary role, is miscast and underutilized by miles and would have been better suited for Palmer's spot. But this, the over-scripted lines from comedian Michael Ian Black as a marshmallowy version of Patrick Bateman, and a few unfeasibly opportune plot incidents near the story's climax, are forgivable for Grace's comic lovability and the script's general funniness. Oh, and of course, an amazing 80s soundtrack. Eddie Money lives.

UNCLE BOONMEE Opens Today

2011-03-02T10:41:00.002-05:00

Opening in theaters today is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's mysterious reincarnation tale Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). It screened at the New York Film Festival last September and made many best-of lists for 2010. Reposted below is an excerpt of my essay on Uncle Boonmee, written after its New York debut. Click through for the full essay, and please see this truly marvelous movie while it is in theaters!

[Uncle Boonmee is] a movie of contradiction, deliberate ambiguity, and conflicting simultaneity; one that makes us consider narrative structure as we know it on-screen as we're watching the very movie on-screen. As Weerasethakul said, this is a movie with which to interact. Our engagement with it is what brings it to life, our experience with it is what will begin to shed light on its enigma, one that explores the nature of life and death, reincarnation, ghosts amidst the natural world, and of hybrid species with glowing red eyes in monkey suits. Monkey suits? Yes, and that's the fantastic beauty of Uncle Boonmee, how it so exuberantly expresses playfulness. Even if the film's effects were made on-the-cheap, its intentions, which straddle deep layers of fear, surprise, and tenderness, are not. Read full essay >>

We Are What We Are (2011)

2011-02-18T10:31:00.128-05:00

Francisco Barreiro as “Alfredo,” Paulina Gaitan as “Sabina” and Alan Chávez as “Julián” in
WE ARE WHAT WE ARE directed by Jorge Michel Grau (L to R)
Photo credit: © Selina E. Rodríguez Martínez
An IFC Films release

This week started with the Film Noir Blog-A-Thon, a wide-ranging analysis of the kind of films that explore the dark side of humanity psychologically, or physically, in the spaces its characters can inhabit--shady back rooms, shadowy alley ways, etc.--and where violence, murder, sex and intrigue are characteristics of the genre's general body. So We Are What We Are (Somos lo que hay) opened theoretically in good company to receive the story's demented family dynamic and ritual cannibalism. If noir is defined by alienation and the plight of the outsider, We Are What We Are plunged right off that sheer precipice into insanity. It may not be noir itself, it is instead, with a stake through its heart, a horror whose syrupy human entrails are so tactile they might get caught in your teeth. But that's the hitch. We meet a nuclear family of five banging their fists on the table for cuisine that's inhuman, unpalatable, but for them, normal.

Hidden in a secluded nook of Mexico City apart from the sterile geometry of its downtown, are rusted, scrap metal-sided houses where the family resides, hungry and waiting for their patriarch to arrive with their next meal. When he never comes, a mother and her three kids redefine the role of head of household, and fend for themselves in a series of predatory power plays. Who is the next patriarch? Is the unwitting prey they drag across the threshold of their home appetizing to everyone? This isn't a matter of chicken or pizza for a weekday dinner, these lonely offspring argue over a prostitute or a policeman. Amidst an old analog backdrop of a wall of cacophonously ticking clocks, these human hunters are so separate from the rituals of society that they intervene almost mockingly, as if to say, If we can't join you for dinner, we'll just have you for dinner. If We Are What We Are was not so sodden in its aesthetic of sticky blood, you might not forgive its anemic social commentary. In either case, you won't be going back for seconds.

Film Noir Blog-A-Thon: Happy Endings, I'll Drink To That

2011-02-17T01:01:00.000-05:00

We don't think of happy endings when we think of film noir. Yet, the two films I watched here for the first time, and will discuss as my contribution to the exciting Film Noir Blog-A-Thon, Union Station (1950) and The Woman in the Window (1944), end on amazingly upbeat notes. Literally, each of their scores twist up to a flute-like chirp at their resolutions, like something you might hear in a screwball comedy. There is a lot of dark brooding going on in film noir, and make no mistake, there's plenty of that signature fear and loathing in the shadows in the films I am about to discuss here, too. But structurally, they are designed in a way that lets us comfortably exhale when they are over. They provide a happy return to the status quo after justice has been served, or in the case of the the first film, after one quietly wakes from a dream.

The Woman in the Window is a sharp little picture from auteur director Fritz Lang. The year is 1944, so we're looking at this through a lens that is on the cusp of the post-war era that defines classical noir. But noir's borders are movable, as we know, so transient in fact that we don't even call noir a proper genre. Noir is more like a mood. Which is why it's classically linked to one of the more disillusioning times in American history, the postwar period. Of course, the war didn't end in the summer of 1945 and wave a formal go-ahead to movie studios that now was their time to spool out all of the worrisome grit leftover in their studio writing rooms and back lots. For as helpful a structuring device as time is, the point at which we say an historical era begins is a hazy concept. Likewise, as noir scholar James Naremore puts it in his excellent text More Than Night: Film Noir In Its Contexts, "film noir is an unusually baggy concept." A "baggy" concept. With no pun intended, how absolutely fitting his description is.

The Woman in the Window opens at a sunny university campus where Professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) lectures an auditorium of students on the psychology of homicide. Homicide in the classroom? And we're off! A painting of a woman catches his eye in a shop window later that evening; his friends observe his admiring gaze from afar and laugh. There's no harm in his looking, but it sure speaks to his emasculation that for him sexual intrigue is reduced to a series of inanimate brushstrokes. But Wanley is too aloof and a tad too pathetic to care, and dashes off to the upper-crust dinner club where he dines with his friends. Inky wines and cocktails are drunk from precious little glasses with collegiate panache. Trouble strikes up when the woman in the window comes to life:

If you stare hard enough at that painting Joan Bennett appears. Alice (Bennett) looks a little Glinda here, but the woman--la femme, perhaps I should say--needs a light for her cig. They go back to her apartment, she asks seductively, "You mean you're afraid of me?" Oh, you vamp, you, Alice. She is a real vamp too, because storming in from the rainy streets is a hulk of a man with a jealous temper to match--how on Earth has she done him wrong, we wonder? Well, he catches a stabbing from Wanley and goes down. The professor of homicidal psychology a murderer himself? It was self-defense of course, but he and Alice conspire to cover it up. Risky business for a family man with a staid job at a university. But the methodical, thoughtful professor that he is, Wanley lays out each and every procedure the two are to follow: the victim's belongings are stashed, his body is wrapped, transported through two police checkpoints, until Wanley dumps him at long last. Exhale.

Yeah, exhale until you realize how completely off his rocker Wanley is. Why didn't he just call the police? If only he had simply called the police his mind, wracked with guilt, would be free. Blame the woman. Blame the rainy streets, the cigarettes, the cocktails. We can't be rational with the weight of the cruelly dark world upon us in a noir picture. Wanley acted in self-defense, after all. You don't mean to say killing in self-defense has negative psychological effects, do you? No officer, PTSD had nothing to do with it. Dumping his body seemed like the right thing to do. It was the logical thing to do. It was the logical thing to do. Wanley is operating in a world where the logical next step is to deny exactly what your first instinct tells you. Police, nah. They're only going to blame you for it, as if you planned the attack. Paranoia like this can only be salved with one thing:

The making of drinks feature prominently in The Woman in the Window and in Union Station below, too. It's not a simple pouring of a cocktail, but a whole scene designed around the presentation of how a proper cocktail is mixed. Above, Alice is standing before a creep of a man who threatens and blackmails her--even shoves her in one scene; he promises to make public the killing and cover-up she's mixed up in if she doesn't pay him $5,000, and yet, here she stands poised, concocting a couple of Scotch and sodas like this is business as usual. Noir!

The big twist comes just when we think our protagonist Professor Wanley is committing suicide as his only escape from this nightmare. Nightmare? By jove, it was all a dream. His conscience is cleared. Wanley wakes in his chair at the dinner club, strolls out to the street, and there is the woman in the window again. Cue that chirpy music I mentioned, and Wanley scurries home. So noir can have a happy ending. As gruesome as some moments are here with Alice and Wanley, they're not, for example, even close to the raw nerve endings that exist between Vera and Al.

Next up is Rudolph Maté's Union Station (1950), starring William Holden and the beautiful facial structure of Nancy Olson. Maté is known for one of the most famous noir pictures, D.O.A. (1949) that opens with the gut yanking line, "I'd like to report a murder, my own." By comparison, Union Station is more polished, if for no other reason than the presence of William Holden, handsome, and bravely saving the day with integrity and even a little joy. The plot is this: Joyce (Nancy Olson) boards a train headed to Chicago's Union Station; on the way she notices two suspicious men board at the next stop, one of them has a gun; she reports it to the conductor, who reports it to the police, and once the train arrives in Chicago Joyce is tied up in a sting to catch these and other key criminals in a kidnapping ransom demand for $100K.

Lt. William Calhoun (William Holden) is the lead officer on the case who, besides an urgency to catch these crooks, also shares with Joyce a fondness for the taste of lemons. Joyce's mother tells us in one scene how she liked to eat them as a kid. All grown up, Joyce and Willy take them now with their cocktails. Inspector Donnelly (Barry Fitzgerald) makes himself and Willy, below, a drink at home. He sliced a bowl full of lemons especially for Willy's drink:

If you watch enough film noir you get an honorary bartending degree. As in The Woman in the Window, Union Station has a very intricate procedural scene in which a drink is prepared. Donnelly is making Hot Toddies. This is beyond the simple Scotch and soda that Alice made, this involves a series of ingredients: whole cloves, boiling water, rum, a cinnamon swizzle stick. Watch and learn, noir fans. And notice their surprising moderation, as well. They're not binging. These characters are taking the edge off, and good on them for it! What did you do today to deserve that glass of wine? Crowded commute on the Lexington Avenue line? Your boss "yelled" at you over email? Oh, I'm sorry, Willy got SHOT AT. Willy bled today. Willy earned that Toddy. I'm surprised, frankly, that he doesn't drink more than he does. Wanley (Robinson) had a great many more cocktails in The Woman in the Window, but he also took his drink at a classy pace, never seeming to be drunk.

Moving on, there are two noteworthy chase scenes in Union Station. One takes place just outside the Chicago elevated train line, but here a continuity error is revealed: palm trees in the far background of the chase that's spilled from the train platform into a south side cattle corral. The second chase is the climactic scene between the kidnapper and Willy through an underground tunnel system. The camera work here could possibly be hand held, but my guess is part of the scene was put together with a dolly that lumbers over a bumpy surface. Whatever the case, the camera scares up a heap of terror with both Willy and his antagonist literally shooting in the dark--and just look at the lighting contrast:

Beautiful compositions, and both very dark. Union Station doesn't have many of the signature noir characteristics we look for when we define this type of film. You won't find a femme fatale, there are no venetian blinds, and aside from the climactic scene, the film is lit relatively bright. Soft focus puts the finishing touches on Olson's flawless complexion, and Holden looks trim and tanned. Joyce and Willy even find love in the end. Another happy ending. Just look at that face.

The Woman in the Window and Union Station are both available for streaming on Netflix.

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Say, and don't forget to donate! The Film Noir Blog-A-Thon was kicked off to raise funds for the Film Noir Foundation, see. Chip in your spare nickels!

Open Up Your Heart, Illuminate Yourself

2011-02-14T16:21:00.002-05:00


An American In Paris (1951), John Alton, DP

In the last chapter in the late, heavy pages of John Alton's Painting With Light, the author transmutes from an instructor on cinematographic lighting technique to practically a dating how-to columnist. As strangely out of place as this initially struck me to be, I looked at the calendar and thought, well, this is the day of the candy chalk heart, after all, let's hear the man out. Because apparently for John Alton, it's more than just the movies that hinge on good lighting, all of our love lives are potentially at stake, too. For you and me, it might just be, as Alton subheads his chapter, "Love At First Light."

The time will come when home lighting from a beautifying angle will be as natural as having an icebox is today. . . Until that time arrives, however, you will have to do your own beautylighting with whatever equipment you have available. While the lamps of today were not especially designed for that purpose, we can nevertheless, by intelligent selection and juggling around, improve conditions considerably, and improve your looks also.

If you expect a visitor whom you esteem highly and upon whom you would like to make an especially good impression, you can work miracles even with the primitive lamps. Rehearse the places where you think you will be sitting during the evening.

Well, I say, Clueless (1995) taught me that. Cher (Alicia Silverstone) and Dionne (Stacey Dash) where hip to good lighting during preparations for Cher's date with Christian (Justin Walker). Good lighting was essential to the date's success:

"[Christian] said he'd come over with some videotapes and we'd watch them. A night alone with Christian? I sent for reinforcements. . . Di and I had to design a lighting concept."

"And costume decisions! I don't rely on mirrors, so I always take Polaroids."

Alton asks us to use mirrors as our reference point, but wrote in an age without Polaroids--yet even those are outdated by today's standards. Lucky you, you can use your digital camera, and Alton has tips to expedite the design scheme. If you have a fireplace, which he advocates, I envy the benefits of this illumination and also your real estate.

In the first place, take away the light that causes the strong shadows and replace it with one that is softer, perhaps with one that has a translucent silk shade. If that does not do the trick, then kill the light before it can do the same to you. Put it out, but in a hurry. If another look in the mirror tells you that it is now too dark, put the light on again, and change your sitting position. Move it to some other place. If you still do not look well, change both the light and your place. If time allows, and it should if you want to look your best, you will have to repeat this performance with each place where you think you will sit during the evening. It is a lot of work and takes patience, but it is well worth the trouble. It will pay off in the long run. . . .

If it is wintertime and you have a fireplace in the living room, try the following experiment. Put out all the lights in the room. This leaves the fireplace as the only light source. . . If the light from the fireplace is too strong, too contrasty, casting harsh shadows, then place the screen in front of it. This will soften its light. If you think that this light scheme is somewhat ultramodern, light a lamp in one of the distant corners of the room, but behind you. This will light up the room and your hair, but not your face; the fireplace will take care of that.

When your friend arrives, watch his facial expression. Not so much for his looks, but his surprise when he sees a new, more beautiful girl than he has known. Thus you will see the miracles that light can work.

Anyway, Happy Valentine's Day.

A Moment of Silence for Miriam Hansen

2011-02-07T14:18:00.000-05:00

I did not know Miriam Hansen well, if you can say we were even acquaintances. But during the years I lived in Chicago I was socially associated with her circle of colleagues and students and had the privilege to meet her and speak with her on several occasions. As intimidating as Miriam was, she was always kind.

Once I told her I had read an essay of hers on "Vernacular Modernism," the meaning of which evaded me then and continues to evade me now. I told her I wanted to talk about it--why not get an elucidated explanation right from the source herself? And with a comic sigh as she left the party we were at, she smiled, patted my hand and said, "Just, not now."

I have never worked with Miriam and only know her scholarship superficially. But I can say without equivocation, she worked hard.

She was also beautiful. She was slender and stylish, and she held herself with graceful composure. I used to look at Miriam in awe: she really was a celebrity of cinema studies, if there ever was one. Impeccably smart, thoughtful and beautiful--that is how I will remember this woman whose influence on the growth of the cinema studies field was truly spectacular.

Her poise and intellect is inspiring to me.

A moment of silence in remembrance of Miriam Hansen.

My personal condolences to all of the family, friends and colleagues near to her.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: V is for Visconti

2011-01-10T17:31:00.000-05:00

Visconti, Luchino
It is easy for him to enthrall, enlight, dominate, instruct, bewitch all without even trying.

TRON: Legacy (2010)

2011-01-07T10:23:00.007-05:00

One of three images my eyes were naturally able to rest upon during the course of TRON: Legacy was its main character's face, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges). The other two I could register were Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) and Quorra's (Olivia Wilde) faces. The rest were interrupted by a very fast cut to a dizzying, and unnecessarily, 3D image. But the characters' faces were each granted enough uninterrupted screen time so I could admire their features, glowing against the muted ambiance of neon illumination. Key light is obsolete, a practically extinct form, like the rays of the sun that its cyber-imprisoned characters so long to see.

TRON follows the father-son Flynn duo in a continued battle in cyberspace. They fight Tron and the elder Flynn's computerized uncanny, Clu, to escape the grid unscathed. It's Jeff Bridges's face, in its current state contrasted by its smooth-featured younger incarnation taken from 1982's TRON that griped my attention at this show, however. What is it about Jeff Bridges's face that is so calming? His is a reassuring presence that took me by surprise. Or maybe it was because his static shots were some of the few that didn't make me sea sick. It's a combination of these factors, and probably also nostalgia for his decades work. In real life Bridges's persona is known to always be pleasantly devoid of pretension; maybe I sought subconscious refuge in that to deflect from a body of visuals that I found assaultive and, overall, uninteresting.

The movie's 3D usage is not particularly compelling. All but a handful of its 3D shots neglect to convey enhanced depth to the frame, rendering the technology mostly meaningless. A DOS-like computerized notice is typed across the screen at the beginning of the film telling us two sequences are not converted from 2D. A cursor sits blinking dumbly at the end of the sentence, just saying. For me, TRON's use of 3D was simply in keeping with the traditions of the original film, which was also presented in the same format.

But on another note, and anecdotally, TRON has a fantastically esoteric continuity error noted on its IMDb page regarding a computer processor type:

I suppose if there was a movie in which such an error would ever possibly be noticed though, TRON, the computer gamer's wet dream of fantasy films, is it. Congrats to that guy who figured that one out. You totally rule, dude, and I'm not even being sarcastic. For a movie whose overall visuals are too disorienting for me to make meaning of, you should know, anonymous IMDb contributor who pinpointed an "i386 processor type," your marvelously sharp observation is simply off the grid.

New Book Release: "Screening Generation X"

2011-01-03T23:18:00.001-05:00

I am pleased to announce the 2010 book release from Scarlett contributor Christina Lee. The text, Screening Generation X: The Politics and Popular Memory of Youth in Contemporary Cinema, is Christina's second publication in just a few short years. As mentioned, and full disclosure, she is an occasional contributor here at Scarlett, and was the editor of the text Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema, a book to which I also contributed a chapter in 2008. While I can personally attest to Ms. Lee's academic and professional integrity, there are others with far greater credibility than myself who also agree.

In July 2010 she spoke with Split Reel's Kevin Fullam on CHIRP Radio in Chicago. You can listen to their full interview and discussion at the Split Reel website. They discuss her work in depth, particularly teen films from the 1980s--from John Hughes' Pretty in Pink (1986) to Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and the strong sense of teen cultural identity for Gen X during that decade, an identity which seems to become fragmented with subsequent generations.

You can find a full description of Ms. Lee's text at the Ashgate Publishing website, but below is a bite-sized summary of her thesis:

Screening Generation X: The Politics and Popular Memory of Youth in Contemporary Cinema examines popular representations of Generation X in American and British film. In arguing that the various constructions of youth are marked by major cultural shifts and societal inequalities, it analyzes the iconic 'Gen X' figures ranging from the slacker, the teenage time traveller, and third wave feminists, to the oeuvre of Molly Ringwald and Richard Linklater.

Many congratulations to Christina Lee for her major accomplishment in 2010.

Top Ten Films of 2010

2011-01-02T15:29:00.002-05:00

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
The Social Network (David Fincher, USA)
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, Italy)
Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz, Portugal)
Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, USA)
Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy)
Unstoppable (Tony Scott, USA)
Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, USA)
The Fighter (David O. Russell, USA)
The Other Guys (Adam McKay, USA)

Honorable Mentions: Please Give (Nicole Holofcener, USA), Ruhr (James Benning, Germany)

Every year Scarlett Cinema is a part of Michael J. Anderson's "Year in Cinema" top ten list compilation at his site Tativille. This year is no exception. Please visit Tativille to read the multitude of top ten lists from Scarlett's sister site contributors, as well as from other scholars and critics dropping by for some Listmania. A huge, hearty thanks goes out to Michael for spearheading the show.

Happy New Year!

WWJD?: John Alton on "The First Director"

2010-12-30T17:38:00.000-05:00

How do you make a movie? It is a complex, collaborative process. In the first lines of John Alton's Painting with Light, he tells us just how complex the process is, right down to the moment you arrive at the studio gates:

Visiting the studio, as we arrive at the gate we meet the first director, who claims that without him there would be no shooting. How right he is; as the gateman, he holds the keys to the studio. They call him Traffic Director, who directs all the tourists to the different stages.

But, John, if the gateman is a director, how many more directors can we expect to meet at the studio?

"That is nothing," [the gateman] claims, "wait till you see the canteen, it is named The Directorate." The word payroll has been replaced by Directory--so appropriate. As we proceed, we meet the First Assistant Director, Second Assistant Director, Art Director, Musical Director, Director of Orchestra, Dialogue Director, Process Director, Sound Director, In-Director, who has it "in" for the man who directs the picture, The Director.

Now that this web of workers, all perfectly integral to the making of a movie have at least been mentioned, next up we shall learn more about "the man whose work interests us most...the Director of Photography." Stay tuned.

Holiday Movies: The Bishop's Wife (1947)

2010-12-26T21:35:00.008-05:00

The most remarkable thing about The Bishop's Wife (1947) is the most obvious: Cary Grant. He's magical. He's debonair. He's charming. For god's sake, he's Cary Grant, and he stars in this Christmas movie directed by Henry Koster (who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Director for the film), as an angel sent to earth to save the marriage of a bishop (David Niven) and his wife Julia (Loretta Young). If that premise sounds unfathomable, remember this angel's name is "Dudley," marking the first time in history magnetic grace and charm would be associated with such a dullard name. Which is to say, I'm willing to believe anything you say if you're Cary Grant telling it to me. I'll even believe your name is Dudley. The film is entirely a vehicle to showcase the actor's utter charm and attractiveness. The Bishop's Wife, in short, is about Cary Grant, by the sheer force of his wonderfulness, gorgeously framed by cinematographer Gregg Toland's camera, making everything better.

And by god, Cary Grant does make things better. He befriends Julia to make her husband Bishop Henry jealous. Grant brings love back to the couple's marriage by showing Henry the lightness he's capable of achieving with Julia. In the meantime--spoiler alert--he falls in love with her, but don't worry, this is Cary Grant, and he is magnanimous enough to go back to heaven before he is tempted too strongly by physical pleasures. Cary Grant has such restraint. Cary Grant is perfect on the inside and out. Cary Grant is a goddamn angel, you guys. Not only that, he's downright magical. He can decorate a Christmas tree with the wave of a hand:

See?

Holiday Movies: Trapped in Paradise (1994)

2010-12-13T00:10:00.001-05:00

There is a surprising dearth of holiday movies on Netflix instant. There is no "holiday" category to search, so I Googled "christmas movies on Netflix instant" and of the titles that came up I found a handful of features that were not cartoons or did not star a purple dinosaur. I was looking for the 1938 adaptation of A Christmas Carol, or Christmas in Connecticut (1945) with Barbara Stanwyck, or The Bishop's Wife (1947) with Cary Grant--a movie my dad has watched every season since I was a kid, but I managed only to see in peeks over his shoulder; none of these titles were available for instant streaming.

Then a friend made a recommendation: Trapped In Paradise (1994), starring Nicolas Cage as a morally-conscious elder brother of two jail-bird siblings, Alvin (Dana Carvey) a kleptomaniac, and Dave (Jon Lovitz) a compulsive liar, who are freshly out of prison on probation. The delinquent two are tipped off about an easy bank to rob in Paradise, PA; they go there, rob the bank, and in the ensuing scenes after their disguises are ditched and a hell's bells blizzard commences, the townspeople shower them with impromptu Christmas gifts and a sleighful of empathy for their loneliness on Christmas Eve.

Here's what Roger Ebert wrote about it on its release on December 2, 1994:

As for "Trapped in Paradise," it should be preserved by the Library of Congress, as an example of creative desperation. It plays like a documentary about a group of actors forced to perform in a screenplay that contains not one single laugh, or moment of wit, or flash of intelligence, or reason for being.

Damn!

But it wasn't so bad. Fans of the cast (a group in which I count myself) are going to be entertained for reliable stand-bys such as Jon Lovitz's Cheshire cat grin punctuating the end of a shot instead of dialogue, or another scene in which Dana Carvey is busted by his brother for stuffing a tinsel Christmas tree under his coat. There's also a three-legged dog named Tripod (played by himself, per the credits), and if a three-legged dog named Tripod doesn't make you laugh, you're dead inside. The plot is certainly ham-handed, and it's annoying that holiday movies are consistently crafted with a leaden moral at their tail, but that's also why we get Bad Santa (2003) as their delightfully dark antidote.

That aside, if there is a virtue of this movie worth boasting it comes in the performances from Richard Jenkins and Florence Stanley. Jenkins was lauded for his comedy chops in Step Brothers (2008), but they're clearly on display here, too, (although in a more minor way) in his role as a frustrated police agent. He plays the angry-frustrated guy well, like when we catch him off guard playing a game where he flips the hat off his head without using his hands:

And Florence Stanley, who was known to me as the crotchety grandmother-type in TV roles on My Two Dads, Night Court, and as Bernice Fish where my parents probably remember her in Barney Miller (1975-1977), provides one zinger after another, like in the scene when Nicolas Cage discovers her being held hostage by a couple of thugs after the same bank loot:

Bill (Cage): Mom! What are you doing here?

Ma (Stanley): I'm being held hostage on the night baby Jesus was born. What does it look like?

Bhutto (2010)

2010-12-10T21:25:00.000-05:00

Please read my review of the new documentary film Bhutto (2010), out today in Time Out Chicago!

New Scarlett Series! "WWJD: What Would John Do?"

2010-12-07T01:00:00.001-05:00

I asked a dear old friend recently if he could recommend a book on cinematography. He said, "I only know one book about cinematography, and it's Painting with Light by John Alton." Well, I bought the book and have begun devouring it one glossy page at a time.

Cinematographer John Alton began shooting pictures in Argentina in 1932. Ten years later he moved back to Hollywood where he worked until 1960, during which period he acquired great fans and foes alike. Some people loved his style, others reviled it. He described his trade as "painting with light," and he was the first film technician to write a book on the Whats and Hows of cinematography (the book was first published in 1949). He's responsible for shooting the ballet sequence in An American in Paris (1951), a series of Anthony Mann pictures, including Border Incident (1949), and a string of films from B movie directors Allan Dwan, Richard Brooks, Joseph H. Lewis and others. John A., as you can see, became synonymous with the Bs: his cinematography widely influenced the look of B film noirs, and subsequently, a broad chunk of the history of film style.

As I pick through the pages of this beautifully bound book whose cover reads more like coffee table art, I'll be sharing historical tidbits, technical facts, and some of John Alton's lively anecdotes. The book is a pleasure to read and it is chock-full of production details, many that in this digital age are naturally outdated. But the basics remain unchanged, and his artistic spirit shines on every page, like it does here, in his preface:

"If there is a philosophy in this book, it might be thought of in terms of the author's sincere desire to share the fruits of his experience with kindred souls who also delight in capturing bits of light at rest on things of beauty."

-J.A.

Black Swan (2010)

2010-12-06T01:00:00.001-05:00

Based on the ballet that defines ballet, Swan Lake, Black Swan (2010)--director Darren Aronofsky's highly-anticipated fall release--looks like a schizophrenic performing ballet in a cage of mirrors while strung out on high end party drugs. It's a beautiful, grueling trip that extends the typical standards of a dance movie to the ends of all rationale, and then asks you to take it as a serious drama, not a grotesque absurdity, which it on the surface appears to be. The star is Natalie Portman as Nina, the newly crowned Swan Queen who performs most of her own sequences (her double is ABT's Sarah Lane for the more complicated dances) in a taut and sinewy body that makes the image of "Hollywood Skinny" suddenly seem fat. She is mentally tortured among family and peers. Her mother (a wickedly great Barbara Hershey) tucks her into a pink bedroom stuffed with plush toy animals, and in one scene feeds her a lick of thick, pink birthday cake frosting from her finger after a fit of rage. Her best frienemy, Lily (Mila Kunis), is the first to greet Nina at the studio, where she is reviled by everyone else for landing the lead role, then slips her X at a bar, and tries to steal her dual role as The Black Swan away from her. Or so we think.

Black Swan is a psychological horror ballet, at once commentary on the immense pressure put upon on a ballerina to be perfect, and then a show of the more prominent paranoia that Nina develops over the course of the film--shot on an icy-hued mixture of digital and 16mm--that diminishes all sense of reality in the narrative. Is her mother a brutally infantilizing caretaker or a de facto mental nurse? Probably a combination of both, which keeps the plot coursing on quickly in diabolical pleasure. In another scene her ballet instructor Thomas (Vincent Cassel) stops just short of seducing her at his apartment; he asks her if she is a virgin, but we cannot entirely rely on the truth of her answer. In spite of its traits as a typical dance movie--bouts of bulimia, cruel peer competitiveness, frazzled parental nerves, and misguided love (some combination of Center Stage (2000), The Company (2003), The Turning Point (1977), All That Jazz (1979) and others)--it's really not like any other you've seen. The final shot of Black Swan, which I will describe in vague enough terms so as to not give anything away, lands smack on the eyes of Nina: maybe it was all--beautifully, horrifically--in her head.

New York Moves: All That Jazz (1979)

2010-11-27T03:22:00.249-05:00

All That Jazz (1979), the loose autobiographical picture of the iconic stage and screen choreographer, Bob Fosse, is a dance movie first and a New York movie second. For its jaw-dropping performances from Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer and Ben Vereen, the film is the kind of terpsichorean catharsis dance fanatics crave.

But you could just as easily switch that order depending on your bias, which for me is likely, as a child of the 1980s who was obsessed with New York as the American cultural pantheon. The city is as fascinating, if a looming specter of a presence, as Fosse's energizing, provocative, and borderline grotesque dance sequences in the film, adjectives I would also use to describe the physical and cultural landscape of New York City at the time. While that assessment of New York is true, it's also part of an imagined nostalgia I have for the city in the late 1970s through the 1980s, that for all of its rawness, had an energy (as absorbed in this and other NYC movies of the era; Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985) comes to mind) that in subsequent decades was replaced with staid commercialism.

Take for example, the commercial revitalization of Times Square, now a spot where big box stores are more likely than peep shows. In the movie, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) peers out the window of his high-rise dance studio in Times Square and sees the neon chasing lights of a burlesque club's marquee. All at once he's taking a break, searching for artistic inspiration, and reflecting on a past that has been filled to the brim with debauchery and philandering. The immediate result is a new piece of choreography that's as beautiful as it is sexually promiscuous. The dance is as much a self-deprecating critique of the choreographer's life as it is a simple reflection of his day-to-day surroundings: there's not much there that's redeeming, but it's sure exciting.

Hereafter (2010)

2010-11-22T11:20:00.013-05:00

It is difficult for us to contemplate, fixedly, the possibility, let alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity, will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us. This is what growing up means. And it is a frightening prospect for a race which has for so long relied upon its own invented gods for explanation and consolation. . . . you can smell the fear. Believe in what I believe--believe in God, and purpose, and the promise of eternal life--because the alternative is fucking terrifying.

- Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

No matter how much the Hollywood standard bearer Clint Eastwood ages, now in his 80th year, he continues to make himself not just present in the filmmaking scene (something he can presumably do by virtue of his stature at the studios alone) but an active voice in altering the rhetoric of American society and culture. When one has been as prolific and successful as Eastwood, you wonder momentarily, how it is that he keeps going? As an octogenarian my grandmother ambulated around the house tethered to an oxygen tank she nicknamed "Charlie" and was active inasmuch as she could get herself to the sofa to watch General Hospital. That's not to say my grandmother's physical capabilities are the defining index of the habits one into their 80s might practice on a daily basis, but only to say 80-year-olds can have great physical limitations to what they can pursue. The physical self is only half of this equation: consider the political or moral ideals you have of yourself now, which, if you are a reader of this blog, likely places you somewhere in your 20s or 30s (though I am sure there are exceptions). It is safe to say you have defined virtues, vices and prejudices at this juncture. Imagine how hardened they will be in another 50 years, should we be lucky enough to travel through the time continuum as long.

Clint Eastwood seems to have few of the limitations seen in a typical eightysomething, though, of course, he is not infallible.

Nowhere near the retirement community and more active than most guys half his age (filmmaking is grueling work), what fascinates me about Clint Eastwood is his serious intellectual examination of characters living with the repercussions of a fraught past, in particular those characters who, like himself, are well into retirement age when there might not be incentive to change. I'm thinking of Walk Kowalski (Eastwood) in Gran Torino (2008), and his Frankie Dunn in Million Dollar Baby (2004), as favorite recent examples, both of whom struggle with guilt and using religion as a means of rectifying it. That repeating theme of religion and repenting in the context of those two very skeptical characters, has been one of ambivalence. As an historically-conscious director, watching Eastwood eschew religion, not as a fundamental presence in his characters' lives, but as an element that he believes won't solely yield emotional peace and intellectual clarity within them, has been an exciting signature facet of his auteurism.

Hereafter is a total outlier in this regard. The story of psychic George Lonegan (Matt Damon) who can communicate with the dead is one of three overlapping narratives about life defined by death. The other narratives follow a French journalist, Marie Lelay (Cécile De France), who sees the light of the afterworld after being knocked out by a Tsunami wave, briefly, before she is resuscitated and pens a book about her experience; and an underprivileged London boy, Marcus (Frankie/George McLaren), who becomes infatuated with communicating with the dead after his twin brother is struck by a car and dies. None of these characters appear to be god-fearing. There are no confessionals at the Catholic church (as in Million Dollar Baby), no priests knocking at their doors, urging reconnection with the church (Gran Torino); the connection to the afterlife in this instance is not all parochial, it's viewed instead as an atheistic inevitability proved by science (there is a scene at a lab in Switzerland where a renowned scientist studies the existence of the afterlife), as a kind of bourgeois reassurance that hope does lie beyond the grave--the secular can have sacred beliefs too! it seems to imply. I thought of that line from Stella (2005), "It's like I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious. . . . It's like I can get off spiritually with the sunlight through trees."

Hereafter is a lot of optimism brought to you in the tone of a self-improvement handbook and by three of the most aesthetically un-offending faces in show business: Matt Damon, Bryce Dallas Howard (as Damon's brief love interest), and Cécile De France. The afterlife: now that's a product I want to buy--I've lathered, rinsed and repeated, now when does this take effect so I can die? (But not really.) It's a baffling deviation for Eastwood who has for so long been committed to the role of unresolved fear, desperation and loneliness in the growth of his characters. These are the kind of people who are wracked with guilt and struggling to prevail against a flawed past, often dealing with it through an organized religion toward which they harbor ambivalence and even resentment, and in the end still struggling to be better. Growth and self-awareness are valued. Where has that sentiment gone in Hereafter?

Since when has the past been so easily forgiven?

On The Town (1949)

2010-11-13T17:32:00.003-05:00

Gene Kelly bounding effortlessly through the air in arabesque will get your spirits up. So just think of the effect if you throw Frank Sinatra, a brassy female cab driver (Betty Garrett), a "prehistoric man" (Jules Munshin) and a tap dancing bombshell who pines after him (Ann Miller), and a button-nosed ballerina from Indiana (Vera-Ellen) into the crowd. Well, the gregarious bunch is real in Stanley Donen's On The Town (1949), which played at the New York Film Society's Walter Reade Theater last Monday night as part of the week-long "The One, the Only Stanley Donen" series.

It's a big, bright Technicolor affair from the studio that did musicals best, MGM. My favorite Donen feature, Singin In The Rain (1951) sets a high bar for spectacle and what is hands-down an impeccable narrative, but the same bunch of creators--Alolph Green and Betty Comden its screenwriters, and Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen its directors--from that production were together for On The Town just a few years earlier to make this 90-minute picture that moves fast and talks even faster (Howard Hawks smiles). From its super-saturated Technicolor palate, to the physicality and vocal capability of its performers that can only be described as superhuman, to its script that churns out witty dialogue so subtle your brain is processing it a beat before you laugh, On The Town is a perfect movie: utterly at-ease, funny and bright.

It's a top-notch New York location film, too. Placing the camera in live, hectic intersections of the city--at 50th and Broadway in one shot, Columbus Circle in another--the fact that these shots were recorded without interference is a feat in and of itself. The New York you see here is not average B-roll footage conventionally spliced among character shots, the kind you typically see taken at a distance from pedestrians, often from a plane or from a crane placed on a cordoned off city block. The New York depicted in On The Town looks alive. It has authenticity that lends the film credence as a significant historical document of the city. It's like we are there in its heart, just as it looked in 1949, only our tour guides are Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra who take us on one overwhelmingly gleeful ride.

-------

Thank you again to @FilmLinc for the complimentary ticket I won in their Twitter contest!

"Anchorman Reconsidered" at the 92Y Tribeca

2010-11-06T00:10:00.369-04:00

Image courtesy Matt Singer, IFC.com

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy screened last night at the 92Y Tribeca as the centerpiece of the event "Anchorman Reconsidered," which invited critics Jessica Winter, R. Emmet Sweeney, Scott Foundas, Nick Dawson and Christian Lorentzen to speak about the film's impact and value in the now six years that have elapsed since its theatrical release. I anticipated this event for a few reasons. One, I love the movie. Two, it's particularly fascinating to hear how comedy is analyzed. The difficulty in this is simple, in that as soon as you break down a joke it loses its humor. How do you discuss comedy in a serious way without sounding humorless? Analyzing a joke actually counters a joke's own end, after all.

The panelists here provided a great discussion though, noting the influence of surrealism on director Adam McKay's work, a point that Jessica Winter outlined earlier this year in her review for Slate, and all, with the exception of Christian Lorentzen, who stood by his statement that the film was both boring and witless, shared a genuine affection for it, a comedy quickly becoming, to this critic, as quotable as Ghostbusters (1984). But the big kicker of the evening came from Lorentzen, who I thought was brave to sit in front of a room of people as the sole dissenting voice. That's no easy spot to be in. So I had open, forgiving ears.

Until I didn't. There came a point when the discussion turned to the nature of comics, how often they are dark and angry types, for from these emotions and moods come the greatest comic observations, and indeed comedy comes from a very dark place. Nothing to disagree with there. The train derailed for me when Lorentzen, to paraphrase, wondered how McKay, Ferrell, and the rest of the cast that includes some of the least controversial and most amicable figures in Hollywood--Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, and David Koechner--could possibly qualify as purveyors of good comedy because they are happy people. The natural response to this of course is, WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT?, and from here onward the tenor of the panel conversation and the subsequent exchange with audience members, who one by one turned progressively sour toward the film (at least those who raised their hands for questions, including one man who claims to have seen Anchorman in the upwards of 70 times in spite of his distaste for it. What?), became defensive.

It was confusing, and condescending to the film to hear how its criticisms were being articulated. One example, "It's just stupid." Another, "I was slightly amused." I expect that everyone has an opinion, but I never knew the depths of the burden this film could inflict on people. "Slightly amused." Who knew one could be so put upon? But this only speaks to my greater point that there seemed to be a condescension toward comedy film in general. Lorentzen, a full-time literary critic, occasional film critic, discounted Anchorman for its lack of written narrative coherence, a predictable response from a literary critic, and an unfair critical framework that film scholars are working hard to move away from. Why does film have to work within the same standards of criticism as does a piece of written fiction? What if spontaneous non-sequiturs in the surrealist vein are precisely the point of a film? Why do we automatically work from the premise that film is dependent on narrative, even if it is a Hollywood product? And with comedy in particular, non-nonsensical goofiness is what often makes it work.

I would argue that one of Anchorman's best sequences is during the opening credits. It's a montage of Will Ferrell's improvisational moments, a series of voice exercises, absurdist in meaning (repeat: "the human torch was denied a bank loan") that function out of time and independent of the over-arching narrative, and they work. The credit sequence even conveys the ephemeral nature of Ferrell's punchlines in its editing: the image of his head shot fades to black with each passing phrase, a new shot refreshing the screen as he delivers a new line. It's like a montage in homage to the silliness the Ferrell-McKay team had on set, which is to say, finally, these guys are playing and we're made privy to watch. After a few viewings, we are able to quote the words they say as they're saying them. That's what makes it a successful comedy, it's one that lets you play along with the joke, too.

See the word I picked there? "Play." It means diversion, fun, something that on the surface evades intellectualizing, even if the act of play in comedy is essentially an intellectual sport. If you resent fun and diversion, that's cool, just don't show up to the game. But if you decide to play along and find out you like it--even in a "slightly amused" way, perhaps it's time to redefine your standards of judgment.

Also read Matt Singer's aptly described review of the evening at IFC.

NYFF 2010: Film Socialisme

2010-10-15T08:31:00.092-04:00

Looking at the pixelated pastiche of Jean-Luc Godard's latest (and maybe last) picture on the big screen, a montage of metallic squares of digital information scattered amidst stretches of takes that are so crystal clear it looks like you might be able to reach out and touch them, you realize that this is a serious poetic assault on your senses. It's not only loud in a visual sense, but literally so too. There are scenes with characters shot through a clear lens and we hear them speak plainly, at an average volume; but the bulk of the score is made up of the ambient sound of a crowded casino hall. The memory of the sound in Film Socialisme, in short, to me is like one long needle scratch across a record. So it's jarring, as it is meant to be, a perfect aural companion to its picture that is just as frequently difficult to absorb and see whole. While I don't have anything new to add to describe this experience that has not already been said by others, I will say that I don't think this film was constructed as a means to confound for the sake of confounding its audience. Yes, it would be an understatement to say making meaning of this film in absolute terms is difficult, but that does not mean there is not immediate aesthetic value, and even pleasure. Its characters are interesting, even if we know little about them and they speak to us through broken subtitles. Its visuals are stunning, even the shots on analog video that reminded me of my home movies from 1985. Funny, it was an accident to invoke home movies here, it happened totally by surprise; but I suppose that's the one thing you can always say about a Godard film, it is personal. Nothing seems to be coolly coincidental in this picture. It's a personal exploration of the digital medium. A justified and curious action, I think, for a guy whose fostering in of the New Wave has defined him unwaveringly as an experimenter. Film Socialisme is a characteristically loud extension of that.

I also enjoyed Jonathan Rosenbaum's rant on critical responses to Godard and his films on his site.

NYFF 2010: The Hole in 3D

2010-10-13T13:39:00.000-04:00

Joe Dante is not selling you spectacle or a gimmick. For that, Joe Dante is an American hero. I've been bandying that phrase about for weeks, interjecting it like a cool revelation, looking for a laugh, but mostly for credibility, like I've discovered something about this down-to-earth director that no one else in the critical commonwealth has ever noticed. Regardless, I stand proudly next to my assessment of Dante, especially after seeing his new film (that has no American distributor), The Hole (2010), in 3D last Saturday, October 9th at the New York Film Festival.

Dante arrived comfortably in faded black jeans and a black jacket that he did not peel off, even under the stage lights, and he very clearly stated his intentions about using 3D in a non-gimmicky way, as well as his relief that popcorn is actually served at such an erudite festival as New York's.

It is apparent right away that Joe Dante the man has no interest in pomp or pretense in his life or in his filmmaking. Anyone who speaks as transparently as he does could not possibly fit into a culture as trenchantly over-produced as Hollywood's, a culture that thrives on jargon filled junkets and marketing campaigns. Dante likes good scripts and he likes to get them made, simply. Naturally, there's a conflict of interest for him, then, when he seeks financing to get these pictures made. An audience member asked during the Q&A if he had scripts in the works; he explained that he had many, each of which is circulating around the studios where he said he "goes begging" to get them financed. Hollywood's red carpet generally does not extend to convention-bucking can rattlers. So how does Dante convince people to give him money for a film of which he demands full control, and one (if his previous movies are any indicator) that is likely to critique the business itself? It is standard practice that once given funds, studio producers come aboard to co-helm the ship, he says, and he is not interested in (to paraphrase) "other people making mistakes on [his] films when [he] makes enough on his own."

That's fair enough, and rather respectable, I think. The Hole is about as flawless a movie as a self-admitted flawed man can make, which is to say it's pretty good. The sets are simple, the actors mostly unknowns, and the script--a family horror with hearty comic moments--uncomplicated. 3D technology is used in this film to enhance its story, not as spectacle for spectacle's sake, as 3D is increasingly used in recent blockbuster cinema (the film was conceived with 3D in mind as it was shot, not used as an aftereffect). The Hole is a story about two brothers overcoming their deepest fears when the residual effects of their abusive father threatens to splinter them apart. Their mom (played by the not often seen, but always bright, Teri Polo) plays a peripheral role in the kids' growth. Seeing her off to the side as the story is steered by Dane (Chris Massoglia) and his kid brother Lucas (Nathan Gamble) means this film does not pander or condescend to its kid audience either. The brothers find a pad locked trap door in the basement of their new home that when opened reveals a bottomless hole. Hauntings ensue. Ghosts of their past are unleashed. A talking Eric Cartman doll makes a cameo. Bruce Dern, as an eccentric old neighbor, is exiled to the abandoned "Orlac Glove Factory" (wink-wink) and warns of death and darkness, but the brothers, and their new neighbor, Julie (Haley Bennett), have strength and a sense of humor that this particular adult doesn't give them credit for.

You can guess who prevails in the end. There will be no spoilers here, at least not explicitly so, but nor will the story have you gasping in shock. But if you have ever seen any Joe Dante film you know that spoilers just don't matter. The enjoyment of his movies are not found in twists and revelations (or overbearing 3D effects), it's found in watching how simply and mischievously this man understands the medium, and likewise, the business.

NYFF 2010: Le Quattro Volte

2010-09-30T11:41:00.070-04:00

Goats are great. This is the main point Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino wants you to take away from his film, the second feature in his history, Le Quattro Volte (2010), that features the reincarnation of a man four times over (the title translates to "the four times"), including once as a goat.

Frammartino's film screened last Sunday, September 27th at the New York Film Festival, the first of two movies that day that featured reincarnation. The second was Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (review below) which is noted for its narrative ambiguity; but while Frammartino's flick is none too ambiguous, it's equally playful in its story of an old shepherd reincarated as a goat, then as a tree, and finally as smoke rising from coal made from the tree's burned-out trunk. It's one neat circle of life constructed from scenic long shots of a southern Italian mountain town. Textured takes strewn with the high natural light of the rural landscape look almost tactile. Close-ups and long shots alike reveal rough details of this place that confirm both its reality and its total mystery. The town is like a place out of time, with its ritualistic ceremonies, religious processions, and course of daily life that, from our view, is completely devoid of the technology part and parcel of a modern era.

Le Quattro Volte is a minor key to Uncle Boonmee's major scale at the festival, but it is a unique little gem that shows not only Frammartino's aptitude for purely visual storytelling (goat bleating is more prominent than human dialogue), but also his balanced exploration of nature and life that is as much enigmatic as it is funny. At the post-show Q&A the director was, much to my personal pleasure, eschewing complicated questions in reference to Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar (1966) in favor of facts about goats. His comic evasions speak to the film's straightforward simplicity. He really just wanted to use his time in the spotlight to tell all of us cinephiles something about which none of us knew: goats.

NYFF 2010: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2010-09-29T14:33:00.000-04:00

SCOPE: Do you think about death a lot? Are you conscious of your own mortality?

APICHATPONG: Not really. I think about death in a more conceptual way, about the idea, and reincarnation, but not about mine. You?

SCOPE: I think it’s an issue that you think about the older and older you get. I asked because there’s sickness in your movies everywhere.

APICHATPONG: Maybe it has to do with growing up in a hospital. I like the idea of having a physical sickness and needing to have it cured, because it’s the same idea of having darkness and lightness, or silence and noise at the same time. When you experience a sickness you become aware of life, and of well-being.

"Ghost in the Machine: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Letter to Cinema"
Cinema Scope, Interview by Mark Peranson and Kong Rithdee

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The hardest day of a film history class I taught in the winter quarter of 2009 was the day we covered Sergei Eisenstein and his montage theory (I thought to myself when it was over, "Let us never speak of this day again."*) The second hardest day was when I led a discussion on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-up (1966). In every class subsequent and prior my students had immediate reactions, thoughts they were able to express clearly, and quite aptly considering all but one of them had never taken a film class before, and yes, that even goes for the day we covered montage theory (bless their souls). But long stretches of David Hemmings wandering surreptitiously through acres of a wooded London park, the sound of its full green leaves rustling in the wind; the veritable emptiness of the landscape that was suddenly made vastly deep and textured, and home to a simultaneously frightening and mesmerizing chaos; and then add to that scenes of fashion photography, an antique propeller purchase, and a tennis match with a group of guerrilla mimes, and my class sat in our basement screening room so befogged no one knew whether to shit or wind their wristwatch.

Cinematic time? Structure? These are not things easily recognizable to a beginning film student. "I just thought it was boring," one student flatly told the class. I can't say I entirely blame him for rebelling, and I like that Blow-up provoked that in him. It means it did precisely what it set out to do: confound and question. All the same, this was a film class, and "boring" was not going to cut it.

I bring up this experience, because it is a little like the crowd's reaction after watching Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) at the New York Film Festival Sunday night at Alice Tully Hall, though no one murmured a thing about it being "boring," quite the contrary. It's a movie of contradiction, deliberate ambiguity, and conflicting simultaneity; one that makes us consider narrative structure as we know it on-screen as we're watching the very movie on-screen. As Weerasethakul said, this is a movie with which to interact. Our engagement with it is what brings it to life, our experience with it is what will begin to shed light on its enigma, one that explores the nature of life and death, reincarnation, ghosts amidst the natural world, and of hybrid species with glowing red eyes in monkey suits. Monkey suits? Yes, and that's the fantastic beauty of Uncle Boonmee, how it so exuberantly expresses playfulness. Even if the film's effects were made on-the-cheap, its intentions, which straddle deep layers of fear, surprise, and tenderness, are not.

The first time we see the Monkey Ghost, a creature that takes on a mythical existence in very real natural surroundings, its red eyes address us directly through the camera lens (see image above), peering at us, making us acknowledge them beyond our initially fearful reaction. That's another fine signature of Weerasethekul, the long camera take that holds on the image extendedly, or at least for a beat or two longer than a standard shot. We see everything. Weerasethekul makes it our job to see everything, whether or not it is real. And then he asks, what is real? Our job is to internalize the fantastical or supernatural with the same respect we do the natural. The opening sequence shows us an open clearing in a jungle, an animal is tethered to a tree. Like Antonioni's Blow-up, we hear the wind pulsing through the limbs of the trees, rattling its leaves to play for us that ambient percussion, softly, softly; and it reminds us that there is life as big as the animal that the clearing of the forest frames, and as small as the blades of grass. For a number of minutes (I don't know the exact count) this sequence continues and we observe the animal's skin shining against the moonlight, and its movement as it pulls the knot of its leash loose and runs away across the jungle floor.

For a few minutes, it's like a really arty National Geographic reel. Then, when we least expect it, the shadow figure arrives, the Monkey Ghost, staring at us unmoving. As an audience member, my first reaction was paralysis, then fear. But the camera continued to hold on it, and the longer it was in my frame of vision the more natural it seemed. With each of the creature's subsequent visits (alone in a shot of the jungle, or with its direct interaction with human characters) the ghost becomes a comforting presence. He becomes one of the family (and is actually Uncle Boonmee's (Thanapat Saisaymar) son reincarnated as a Monkey Ghost), and in one of the most lighthearted scenes of the film, takes a seat at the dinner table. In this setting, the most mundane of domestic spaces, Uncle Boonmee's late wife Huay (Nattakarn Aphaiwonk) appears as an apparition. They jump at first, frightened, like I was the first time the Monkey Ghost stared back at me in the film's first sequence, but Huay's ghost becomes a regular presence too. She tells Jen and Uncle Boonmee something to the effect of, "Spirits are not attached to places, they are attached to people." No matter if a person is dead or alive in the natural world, their presence--whether through memory or live contact--is with the ones who love them. In a moment of absolute tenderness, Uncle Boonmee and the ghost of his wife, Huay, embrace. Uncle Boonmee has a liver disease and is dying, but we realize then there is nothing to be afraid of.

In the lovely Cinema Scope interview with Weerasethakul excerpted above, the director talks about having to go through sickness to appreciate health. In having to know darkness to appreciate light. Throughout all of Uncle Boonmee we're confronted with opposing themes--lightness and darkness, sickness and health, natural and supernatural--and by the film's end the idea of mortality, as Weerasethakul says, is abstracted. The classical narrative structure's beginning, middle and end loses meaning. The world has not gone topsy-turvy necessarily, nothing's flipped on its head; but story, and indeed life, are looked at instead as one big, borderless thing. It's all just one magnificent experience. As film history courses on, I'm sure in the future someone will watch Uncle Boonmee, like my class did Blow-up, and be intellectually confused. What just happened? What is going on? Why is this scene of a man in a monkey suit at the dinner table with a ghost and its aging family taking place in such calmness of mood? But life happens in moments, which are usually mundane. It all makes sense, and it is definitely not boring.

Also read: Michael Anderson and Lisa Broad's review at Tativille, and R. Emmet Sweeney's review at Movie Morlocks. More coverage from the 48th Annual New York Film Festival is coming soon!
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* I was fractionally relieved when Tom Gunning, my friend's University of Chicago PhD adviser, who, after being relayed the horrors of my experience, said I shouldn't worry about it because "even Eisenstein didn't know what Eisenstein was talking about." Get Out of Jail Free card: used.

Going The Distance (2010)

2010-09-03T01:00:00.007-04:00

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from      Pamela Kerpius
to           --
date       Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:25PM
subject   RE:
Just saw GOING THE DISTANCE and here's what I've learned: no one involved with the making of that movie has been in a long distance relationship.

Wait--how many characters is that? Dude, I think I just wasted a tweet.

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It is a modern age of love and long distance relationships are not uncommon.

Having been in one myself years ago I couldn't wait to see the scenes when the lead characters in Going The Distance (2010), the new romantic comedy where Drew Barrymore and Justin Long struggle through a long distance relationship, would make phone calls to one another and literally nothing would happen. Like, there would be nothing said, I'm talking dead air.

It would go this way because after awhile there is only so much of your day to relay to the other person, so you sit on the phone with stretches of silence while you respond to emails or clip your nails. At least, this is part of my humble experience. Extended calls of either comfortable silence, or frustrated longing, when a simple expression could acknowledge your presence far greater than a wistful gasp delayed by poor cell phone reception.

Erin (Drew Barrymore) and Garrett's (Justin Long) phone calls go into the depths of the night with a constant stream of jokey banter. "Why are they so happy," I asked myself? I considered the frequency of the couple's reunions, there are a solid four months between meetings (if my calculations are accurate), and I started to seriously doubt they could remember what each other looked like.

Purple! Red! Fuchsia! End scene.

Though, one of the most outstanding features of Going The Distance is in fact Drew Barrymore's face, brushed with makeup of myriad hues, sparkling purple-peony lips in one scene, then a glossy nude in another. Which is to say nothing of her eye shadow--pinks and purples, metallics, deep smoky shades, all alternating from a scene at the office to the morning-after in bed, where, to ostensibly stay true to that gritty, sunken-into-the-pores look, her thick black eyeliner is ever-so-smudged--just a tinge--but it's hardly reality, and that's okay: Barrymore has been a CoverGirl cosmetics model and spokesperson for more than three years, why stop the campaign just because we're at the movies?

That said, product placement was surprisingly less visible in this mainstream money press than is usually the case for Hollywood. One suspicious outlier is the bottle of Brooklyn Brewery beer in Charlie Day's hand as he does his business with the bathroom door open. It brings literal meaning to the phrase "toilet humor."

Charlie Day plays Garrett's roommate Dan, a character playing the exact Charlie Day we know from his role as "Charlie" in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. So now you're probably saying to yourself, "Hey, P.L., are you saying Dan (Charlie Day) is not a new character at all but one recycled from a still-airing show?" Yes.

Dan hews so close to Charlie that I stopped to wonder if dialogue was scripted for his role, or if the director just let him ad-lib. And while Dan lives in the "squalor" of a low-rent Brooklyn apartment, it's an awfully glossy version of it, nothing akin to the detritus of Charlie's sweat stained pad in the hit FX show.

Still, the sentiment is there, which is why that bottle of Brooklyn brew is all the more anomalous to his setting. I can believe a Pabst or Natural Ice, but I draw the line at Budweiser. Dear Props Department, What, you've never been to an unemployed thirtysomething's pad? Seriously, come over. The gang can't wait to meet you.

This comfortably imagined lifestyle is exactly the bother with Going The Distance. It's like a movie version of the Friends set, huge New York apartments furnished, and stylish. The boys' apartment is relatively drab in color, but it somehow takes on a grungy chic of its own.

Courtesy The Onion

When we meet Erin, she's whizzing through a newsroom, her current employer a daily paper, in the midst of layoffs, where she serves as a intern. She's dressed impeccably, like she's arrived freshly back from a stop at Topshop. What are interns making these days?

The couple is silly, having harebrained dates with Garrett's two roommates, Dan and Box (Jason Sudeikis), in none other than a Central Park row boat (Check: we've got a NYC location film, people), and they maintain an almost alien-like placidity in their good-bye embraces at the airport. Hardly a tear in sight. If I could have bottled what came out of my tear factory all those years ago, we might replenish the seas of the ravaged Gulf of Mexico today.

I'm being finicky, because the most awkward element of Going The Distance are the jokes that spew out of the couples' mouths. I know they're up against it, you know, the spot-on absurd and edgy humor of the Adam McKays and Will Ferrells of the world. At one point, Erin, now working in San Francisco as a waitress, talks about the anatomical "tip" she expects from Garrett, who's just made a surprise visit to the left coast. It all struck me as overcompensating.

But my friend said it best when she stood up from her seat when it was all over, "I think I have comedy indigestion."

Take your Dramamine. There's turbulence ahead.

August, Part 2

2010-09-01T00:55:00.103-04:00

The End of Summer: The inadvertent Part II, in which the author realizes she will never perform Swan Lake's Pas de quatre, but resumes, in a lumpy leotard, regular ballet training anyway, whilst considering two visits to the movie theater among a batch of mostly unpointed ones in the summer months of 2010.

Note the date of this writing before you proceed. August has been shaken, not stirred, and poured right over the rocks, it is cold. The air conditioners are off in all three bedrooms of this particular Brooklyn apartment, and they were off at the dance studio today during one of two weekly classes that have completed an almost full revolution around the calendar since I began them in late 2009. I know I bid summer farewell already, but I expected to be graced with more days of sun, as a gift, at least, from the gods, after I so selflessly forgave the onset of the cold last week! Maybe I won't get back to the beach before all is said and done. I can be content with my skin fading from bronze to a milky tan, the color of those overpriced Starbuck's lattes, like vaguely beige-tinted milk. But I say I deserve recognition, Mother Nature. I deferred to your presence with such heart, but there is no medal of honor pinned, no gold star sticker stuck to my velour jacket that I wear as I sit here in my room when a tank top alone should still suffice. Where has the August heat gone?*

Do not misunderstand me, my sentiments are more along the lines of befuddlement than bitterness, and that goes for the movies as much as the weather. I may have been to the theater a lot this summer, though fewer times than has been historically the case, but I can think of only two films off the top of my head that I all-out enjoyed--and is it ironic that one of them is the bitterly cold Winter's Bone (2010)? That was a movie of sheer devastation, stripped-to-the-bone minimalism, and deadly real performances. A young woman (Jennifer Lawrence) cares for her mentally imbalanced mother and two small siblings with next to no food, no funds, and only rare support at her disposal. A neighbor takes pity on her with a box of provisions: fresh deer meat and a scant few potatoes and things. She cooks for her family while seeking out the missing part of it, her father, a convicted drug dealer out of prison but gone mysteriously AWOL. If she can't find him, her family will be kicked out of their house and off their land, the price of his delinquent bail bonds. Winter's Bone was directed by a woman, Debra Granik (her second feature), with solemn tenderness, and after experiencing the plight of these characters' Ozark-area lives, you realize yours is comparatively gilded to the hilt. You realize, as you leave the theater, in pitiful middle-class homogeneity, that you will never (as was illustrated in a somewhat mundane fashion for the characters in this film) be reduced to gutting and frying a squirrel for your supper.

In June I added another weekly ballet class. An intermediate class that truly moves at an advanced pace. It was, and remains, far beyond my ability, but from the chaos of its barre warm-up alone, done always on relevé (and sometimes allegro, and sometimes with pirouettes, and if they really want to work us, we're holding that retiré), I find moments of precision and control, exactly what I seek. If that is not considered success, it's a minimal consolation prize that will eventually build toward it, I think, that is, until one day my best friend asks rather pointedly, "What are you trying to accomplish by taking all of these ballet classes? You will not be a professional dancer, you know." Boom. But if he understood how my tendu improved from a lazy dangle to a strong line stretched tautly atop the floor, if he knew how my petit allégro foot articulation has changed from mush to a steroidal flex, he would be gliding along to Chopin's Nocturne #8 in his head all day long too. It was on the first day of this class in June that it became clear to me how much my technique had progressed and how much I still had left to accomplish. I could not then (and cannot now) run with the regulars in this class, and they aren't even ballet's big dogs.

I wish I could march into the studio and perform with Terry Hoitz's (Mark Wahlberg) precision as in The Other Guys (2010):

My turnout is not as good, and we don't even attempt those fouettés en tournant. Needless to say I felt a flush come over my face when that sequence started in the theater. Ballet: this is something that I knew, and I was especially self-conscious among my row of friends who have patiently tolerated me for months jeteing through their living rooms silently screaming LOOK AT ME! and sometimes actually screaming that. In either case, bashful is not the word I would choose to describe my exuberance for ballet over the past year, and while I imagine my friends might chalk up my cravings for the spotlight as a normal, even mundane facet of my character at this point, I felt an incredible urge to pounce to my feet and dance right there in the theater with Terry Hoitz. That would have taken them by surprise. That would have embarrassed them. I sat firmly in my seat instead and laughed my head off at director Adam McKay's latest cut up that I refuse to over-think: it is simply funny. The Other Guys could really just translate to "the regular guys," because that's who they are. They're not testosterone-fueled supercops like P.K. Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Christopher Danson (Dwayne Johnson) who jump headlong off a building in a spectacle so blind they miss the "bushes" below that would cushion their fall. If you haven't seen The Other Guys that reference won't make a lot of sense, but Terry Hoitz and Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell), both flaccid in figure and demeanor next to their skydiving counterparts, are funny just because they are clearly not 'roid raging heroes of bloated summer action flicks, but ironic caricatures of them. Allen is like the Homer Simpson of action heroes, and Terry his agitated partner, like Homer's Frank Grimes.

Ballet class will continue as scheduled in a couple of days. Labor Day in a couple more, and that means fall movies--the big ones, the critics' favorites, the Oscar contenders. I am in shape to receive it all, center stage or not, cold weather be damned.

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* Again, in the time taken to complete this post the weather has flipped and it is hot. 90+ degrees in the two final days of August. I should really stop being dramatic about this, but kill me, I like summer.

August, Lukewarm

2010-08-24T01:24:00.002-04:00

I blame August for the frequency of updates on Scarlett slowing to a syrupy drip. The city is dead. The streets are barren on many days, especially on Fridays. Subway seats are noticeably more available than they will be soon, as fall descends and the crowds are back from the beaches. Everything moves slower. I, with equal lethargy. While the temperatures may still be hot, the spark of the July heat that flickered forth has dimmed to a slow burn. Today is one of those thick, humid days. Hot, but with the specter of autumn in the rain that has broken up the heat and blue sky. Fall is near.

Fall: the spring green that summer basked in with languor decays. There is a cool edge to the air, glue sticks and wide-ruled Justin Bieber notebooks go on sale. There is the September issue, less rosé and more Merlot, and the start of film festival season (New York, Telluride, Toronto, Chicago and so on)--all very predictable, dependable happenings, ranging from the frivolous to poignant markers of time that has passed. Summer, to me, always passes blindingly fast. Just as it is beginning to feel normal--when having your skin exposed from the meager coverings of a pair of shorts and a tank top produce an expression of shock (this is how weather should be!) fades to a second-nature expectation (I'll never need that wool coat, I think I'll sell it at consignment)--a wind moves in that advises long sleeves are better suited for the day. If summer is the frenetic climax of the seasonal narrative, fall is its cool resolution, an exhale.

I mourn summer's loss every year, rather melodramatically. I've vowed to not vocalize gasps of autumn's defeat against summer this year. We're a clear month away from the start of fall anyway, but while I don't want to wax nostalgic for something that is still in fact with us, I have to anticipate its end. Better to be prepared than shell shocked, and that's why today I have Marlene Dietrich's ABC on my mind. The book is almost at its end, but I am not ready to close the cover.

The ABC project has had an obvious limitation: there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. As I've neared the end of Marlene's dictionary (the last ABC communique was the letter U), I realized I don't want to let go of this little book. Its worn cloth cover is soft in my hands, and I appreciate its presence on the shelf at desk side, a spot reserved for books I am reading or that are frequently referenced. Its hardback binding from 1962 is brittle from the decades and it creaks when the pages turn. It is a little relic. Its yellowed coarse-grained pages that have proven their durability from one owner ("Marjoree Burrell of Grand Rapids, Michigan"--the original owner?) to another (me; was there anyone else in between?), and it was in these back pages that I found a glossy paper photo of Ms. Dietrich, her eyes lit with a twinkle.

So I have resolved to keep it alive in my possession. I will continue to post the remaining letters of Marlene's alphabet in sequential order until the end: Z. But if and when the mood strikes my fancy to share more quotes with you, in no particular order, well, then, so it shall be--Marlene, her summery spirit, shall go on! That's good news. Sometimes I have to remind myself that despite restrictions (there will never be more than 26 letters covered in Marlene's book) I still have control over how this inanimate object will play a role in my life. It boils down to this: "Frankly, Marlene Dietrich's ABC, I like you, and as such I am going to read you and share you with people who also like you for as long as I please."

To be honest, right now I am not interested in the next letter in Marlene's alphabet. It's V. To remain consistent with how things have unfolded in this series thus far, I would pick a word from her pages of the select chapter and force some cohesiveness between it and the rest of what's going on in this post today. I've revealed new-found jubilation and liberation in the fact that this book is going to stick by my side for awhile longer, indefinitely, really. So why force the issue? You could say I am "lukewarm" about Marlene's chapter V.

Lukewarm
When this adjective applies to feelings, stop feeling whatever you are feeling.

V is not alone in the dispassion I harbor toward it. That feeling is fleeting, I know, because as with moods, something random or innocuous or even consequential (whatever it may be) can spring to mind but not stick on certain days. At a later date, when it becomes urgent, I'll grasp it. Everyone finds that lack of urgency in duties and experiences from time to time. I begin reading books almost on a weekly basis that I lose interest in after a chapter or less, only to pick them up a month or a year or more later and fall in love. I have not met a single person with an active Netflix queue who has not had a disc sit on their desk collecting dust for weeks because they can't summon the enthusiasm to watch it. Finally, you make a decision to put it on (at which point, when this happens to me, I cannot understand in retrospect why it was so difficult to watch; the movie ends up being fantastic, or at least a quick chore to watch while eating your dinner), or you simply resign yourself to the fate that that sonofabitch is getting sealed in its enveloped tonight and dropped in tomorrow's mail unwatched.

Netflix users, I think it's time we institute a rule that any movie you don't want to watch, and that sits on your coffee table for a minute longer than it would take me to huff down a cigarette in an all-consuming panic attack has to go now. Pack it up. Let's stop being lukewarm. Things are always put on hold, and for now (like that Netflix disc you're sealing as you read this), V is on hold.

When I began writing this post yesterday evening it was hot, but tonight, as I complete it, a wind is rattling the frayed edges of the London Plane leaves across the street at the Lowry Triangle together like two twigs trying to spark a flame. I hesitate to say it, but by August's standards, it's cold outside. A spare few souls darkened to shadows strode through the streets like ghosts audibly howling at the oncoming wind to yield. The jets scheduled for landing at LaGuardia for the most part have slipped between the low-hanging clouds into remarkably smooth descents. But there was one plane that had a real go of it, churning across the headwind with a powerful low groan, it was tired. I felt it and the wind and the wetness of the still dampened concrete all in one gust, and with it, bid summer farewell.

Bobby Caught Barefoot

2010-07-13T07:43:00.000-04:00

I thought Bobby Teenager was polite and wholesome.

Deep down though, I think I always knew he was a troubled kid.

But let us not forget the first lessons from Bobby: always bring a valid photo ID to AMC Theaters. You'll need it to get into 20th Century Fox's Taking Flight: The Hunt for a Young Outlaw, release date pending.

Don't Throw Out Your Dino-Riders: Toy Story 3 (2010)

2010-06-29T04:24:00.001-04:00

Tonight I shot up in a flurry to see Toy Story 3 that would begin playing in 25 minutes from the time I decided to see it. Another race against time, a race I imposed upon myself for a movie that was playing at a gross of other theaters across town, nearly every hour on the hour. But sometimes you need such structuring of your time. And thus, out the door I tripped into the humid stick of this horribly hot evening air. There you have it, another reason to go to the theater then: free air conditioning. If I needed a second reason to see Toy Story 3 tonight it was to escape the tepid air being stirred lethargically through my apartment from one lame air conditioning unit 30 feet away down the hall from where I type to you now.

Still, there were better reasons to see Toy Story 3. At a time when I am analyzing my past both professionally and personally, the time line of events does not just grow long but curiously nuanced too.

I had my first date with the first boy I kissed at the first Toy Story movie in 1995. I forget that fact sometimes, and I did tonight when I left for the show; by the time I had my seat in the theater it dropped back into my mind unannounced. I loved the first Toy Story movie. I did not love my date's sweaty palm gripping mine. I remember we shook that grip loose at the earliest possible moment that communicated tacitly that we were not meaning to offend one each other, that we were likely going to resume said physical contact later when the show was over; but being confined there in my seat then with a thick grip of flesh around my hands felt wholly discordant with the experience projected in front of us in that south-suburban Denver theater and I wanted free. Liberated, I think we both absorbed the movie fully then. It was witty. It was bubbly and cute and I felt sophisticated that I understood the cultural references these cartoon "kids'" characters made. You could not have called me a wise or sophisticated teenager, at least not if being judged by my outward behavior, but watching Toy Story in 1995 confirmed in me that intellectually something was stirring. Not solely because I understood the depth of the jokes in Toy Story--everyone did--it was simpler than that: I was conscious of this movie as entertainment, art, and as my own experience. I honestly thought to myself in some small way, Hey, I'll never forget this movie because I'm seeing it with this person who is defining my time and course of action.

Perhaps it was not that literal.

But it did roughly amount to that. And isn't it a kick in the pants all these years later, all these bloody 15-years later, that I still remember the sonofabitch? He might be married, he might have children of his own--are they old enough to see this movie for themselves? Will they remember dad putting Toy Story in the DVD player? And if they do (and even if they do not) does dad remember being in the theater with me the first time he saw it? Does he recoil thinking about us slithering away from our sweaty palm grip so we could just enjoy the damn thing? Mostly, those questions should not be bothered for an answer. They can lie mysteriously in space. I wouldn't dare attempt to answer the question of his experience too. Mine is enough and slippery at that.

I bought a copy of Toy Story on VHS tape when it was released, and I still have it here in my living room, though I have not watched it in years.

I have not thought about or seen Toy Story 2 (1999) in years either, and I'm sad to say I don't have a date story to pair with it. I don't even have a loner story to accompany it. Dear God, the memory of Toy Story 2 has fallen out of my head completely. Don't push for details. 1999 was a curious year, and an important one because it marked the time when I began to take the movies so seriously that--get this--I read books about them. No one who is me ever did that before. Though I can't remember anything specific about the movie, I do remember that I liked it. "I liked it," a phrase that was presented to me that same college year as an unacceptable response to "What did you think [of the movie we just watched in this academic film class]?" "Liked it," turns out, was vague. I stopped saying it for a long time, until I really had a use for it, like I do today, to truthfully say as I did at the top of this paragraph, that I don't remember much about Toy Story 2. But I know I liked it.

Toy Story 3 rolled tonight and I thought of all these things. I thought again, like I did when I was 16, that I am going to remember this movie as part of a full experience: it's the third installment of the Toy franchise and I suppose the last, and I've created an arc of memories from start to finish. Like any Pixar picture it was wonderful to watch. I paused for a minute to reflect also that the technology had changed so much since the first Toy Story. For instance, in the film tonight there was a sock from Andy's bedroom floor that the toys hoisted and dragged; this image looked so real that it made me think how un-real so many of the images from the first Toy Story are in comparison. Life repeats itself when I recall my first vocal observation from 1995's Toy Story, "It looks so real!"

While I ventured to the theater alone tonight, I was amongst a smart, albeit sparse crowd. They were my dates and they clapped and cheered wildly during the final escape sequence. It was grand and woke me to the movie in a way I would not have experienced were I watching it alone, or at a later showing when fewer children might have been in attendance. I annoyingly go on about how important it is to see kids movies with children frequently, and I'm pretty sure my friends are marking these declarations as strikes in the "con" column when considering whether or not to continue our friendship. I know it's one of those precious and whiny cliches to drone on about how kids brighten up a kids' show, but that does not mean it's any less true. They really do.

What Toy Story 3 did for me more than anything else was brought to me in a simple story line. Andy is grown and doesn't play with his toys anymore. They're packed up, and he's packing up for college, ostensibly to abandon them forever. Should he save them? Trash them? Donate them to the local day care? I'm so diligent about providing spoilers, but I will not do that today and tell you what Andy chose.

It wouldn't matter if I did, because what makes Toy Story always so consistently amazing is how it livens you to the joy of play. Just look at the word this form is play is centered upon: toy! There aren't many words that elicit much more levity. Come on, say it: TOY! Don't ever get rid of yours. No matter how much your parents may harangue you to clear out the basement or attic of your old toys, don't ever abandon them. When I see mine from time to time I realize I had forgotten them until that moment; but once your eyes are upon them, the memories come back. Childhood toys are one of the few elemental things we have in common. Everyone had toys--some more than others, and everyone's varied of course, but we all had our favorite pieces of plastic.

Mine were the Dino-Riders and I sold them off at a garage sale when I was 12 or 13, an action that gives me to this day my greatest pangs of regret. Dear Dino-Riders, you may be gone, but you are not--nor will you ever be--forgotten.

Dear Dad, You Really Are Bigger Than Life

2010-06-20T21:51:00.000-04:00

Happy Father's Day!

Still image from Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956)

Watergate Week: On this Date, June 17, 1972

2010-06-17T13:21:00.000-04:00

Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) woken in the middle of the night, June 17, 1972. Learns five men have broken into the Watergate Hotel complex at the Democratic National headquarters in Washington D.C.

Actual page from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's notebook on June 17, 1972.
Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.

Bob Woodward (Redford) takes notes at burglars Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio R. Gonzales, James W. McCord, Eugenio R. Martinez, and Frank A. Sturgis's hearing on the morning of June 17, 1972.

Actual page from Woodward's notebook from the hearing on June 17, 1972. Lists names and information on three of the five burglars involved in the break in.

Watergate Week: Nixon and Double Take (2010)

2010-06-16T22:56:00.000-04:00

This week marks the 38th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. I wanted to present that fact with better phrasing since an anniversary connotes celebration of some sort. Given the events of June 17, 1972, when five administration-approved burglars broke into Democratic headquarters, and the subsequent resignation of president Richard M. Nixon roughly two years later as a result of it, we have hardly a cause for celebration. But "anniversary" really only means a broad yearly remembrance of a significant event, and as such, I bring you a small prelude of the impact Richard Nixon wrought upon our modern political world and culture at large. His influence was not entirely negative and obviously did not begin with Watergate. More importantly, his character is inextricably linked to the Cold War as an inciting figure in the Red Scare, the atomic age, and the Vietnam conflict; and simultaneously, as a peacemaker too, in his many trips abroad, the most important of which to Russia and China.

Richard Nixon is very much embedded in our thinking of the post-war period.

Just last week, for example, I saw director Johan Grimonperez's Double Take (2010), a movie good for anyone with an affection for academic meditation on image association, existential thought, and a nerdy obsession with Richard Nixon. Alfred Hitchcock may be the lead character of this show--in all of his duplicate manifestations--but Nixon is the political force keeping it together. Here, he is the poster child for the country's nascent Cold War fright--and why not? He was the one leader present in the shaping of American foreign policy almost from the time WWII ended until the early 1990s when he consulted later presidents in the war's resolution. If you have to pick a figure who has held a lot of sway in the last half-century, Richard Nixon is definitely your guy.

He's on display here as more than just a political figure. Grimonperez poses him seamlessly amidst montages of Hitchcock and his lookalikes, like a stream-of-consciousness recollection of newsreel footage, televised portions of the "Kitchen Debate" with Nikita Khrushchev in 1952, and an odd series of instant Folger's coffee spots aligning the disillusioned housewife with the director's notoriously spooky tales. I absorbed this free-associative montage as a haunting homage to Hitchcock and the popular memories of the director's formative years, dreamlike and pensive.

Mostly Double Take was a reminder to me about just how subtly influential Richard Nixon continues to be in our collective consciousness. "If you meet your double you should kill him," Hitchcock says, "two of you is one too many." For the ubiquity images of Nixon still have in our culture, I wonder if one after the the other are merely diluting the potency of his character. When his image repeats, are we understanding him better, or only his mythical carbon copy? Double Take doesn't attempt to and may not even be aware of this question, but at the very least Nixon is seen in portions of unedited documentary footage from the time. For me, the start of his high-level political career with Khrushchev is a good place to begin rethinking Nixon--here, prior to everything that happened this week in 1972 that would continue to shadow the president's characterizations for decades to come.

Tiny Furniture (2010)

2010-06-11T15:54:00.003-04:00

Writer-director Lena Dunham's second feature Tiny Furniture (2010) is certainly her best, a sprightly and logical next step in her growing and maturing body of work. I already think of her as an auteur, as this live work-in-progress whose movies are essential viewing, regardless of critical or artistic success. I've fictionalized her to an extent, which maybe is an expected description of her character, considering her films are always semi-autobiographical (her first feature film was titled Creative Non-fiction). She is on a constant quest to define herself, as she does with great nuance here in Tiny Furniture, a film starring both her real-life mother (Laurie Simmons) and sister (Grace Dunham), and of course, herself.

Lena is Aura. A young woman in a post-graduate funk who has returned home to her parents' sleek Tribeca apartment--one bewildering panel of sterile white cabinetry and stainless steel appliances, the most prominent visual marker of her own lack of organization. Her mom and sister have lives that are neatly compartmentalized here. Aura, who's compass is left spinning in this once familiar domestic space, is a stranger in her own home, not because her family doesn't welcome her or show her affection, only that unbeknownst to her she has grown out of it. After a fraught week of house guests and fighting with her family her mom asks her, "Do you even like living here?" "Of course I do!" she pathetically shrieks.

While you might be thinking this is just another twenty-something coming-of-age story ("life is so hard, I am so alienated!") Lena is too savvy for that nonsense. For as self-deprecating and soul-searching as she can be in her characterizations of herself, she is also humbly aware of her ambitions and early successes as an artist. It's astounding to remember the director is only 23-years-old, and in a short two years since college graduation she has made two feature films, both of which premiered at the SXSW film festival, and both of which required keen vision and determination to make, something that, if you'll excuse the generalization, most 23-year-olds simply don't have. Maybe this speaks to my own experience too much, but when I think of the early twenties, I see people in the beginning stages of crap jobs to which they make themselves strangely committed, sloppy off-hours partying, and a series of unfortunate relationships. Lena and Aura are two very well-adjusted young women all things considered, and absolutely refuse to become complacent.

As an artist, complacency is death. Aura's professional life is centered on a series of short videos posted on YouTube and that are later included in a gallery art installation; we see Aura's successes come to fruition just as we see the real-life Lena's creations online and on the big screen. Aura has separated herself distinctly from the typical twenty-something in spite of the vices, disappointments, and self-loathing that she (and the rest of us) is equally capable of too. If you can get past the fact that this 98-minute monologue is of an age that you might be gleefully past (the dark specter of failure of your late twenties and early thirties is just so much more goddamn enriching), you're going to get a nice slice of humanity. Aside from the occasional hyperbole and pretension of a few characters, Aura herself is utterly sympathetic. She is smart. She works hard. She fails constantly and makes poor decisions in her love life, but she is--as Lena's best friend Isabel Halley (also the star of Lena's web series Delusional Downtown Divas) said when I interviewed them both briefly last winter--doing her best.

But it's not just the dynamism of Aura herself that stakes claim of our interests here. The slate of Tiny Furniture's characters are a ton of fun. From her old pal Ashlynn, played marvelously with that old familiar frienemy snideness by comedian and actor Amy Seimetz, to her rekindled BFF-affair with the wealthy, entitled Charlotte (Jemima Kirke), who exclaims, "Let's go to Odeon and order everything on the menu! It's okay I have my dad's credit card," you feel cool being among them. They are incredibly flawed and lovable characters. They're the kind of people you expect from a coming-of-age movie, with a lot more raw reality, which is probably a result of its New York City-centric space. In that, it is also a great location film, with the cool stone Tribeca streets in the backdrop, and even a little cameo from repertory house Film Forum. (No homogenized skyscraper montages here. I'm talking to you Sex and the City.)

Lena's first feature Creative Non-Fiction was about a college girl trying to find herself and project how she might survive in the post-college world. That was her moratorium on adulthood. Tiny Furniture is the next step into adult life where our protagonist is almost completely unsure of herself, playing house (figuratively and literally) with her mom's collection of tiny dollhouse furniture. Personally, I can't wait for her next feature, wherein, perhaps, she'll make a trip to Ikea to pickup her own first pieces of furniture.

Lena Dunham will be in person at the New York City premiere of Tiny Furniture (2010) tonight at BAM.

Cuisinart v. Chrysler: Sex and the City 2 (2010)

2010-06-10T12:37:00.001-04:00

Time to add to the critical melange of Sex and the City 2, the official movie of 2010 that everyone loves to hate. Men and women alike have truly delighted in dumping on it, and while the reviews and even the reviews about the reviews have been entertaining, I can't help but say, *YAWN* this is the most boring movie of the summer and summer doesn't start for two more weeks.

But for those of you keeping track of the hate, go ahead and see how you rate.

Here's my official unscientific Hate-O-Meter for critics to rank their level of disagreement with Ms. Bradshaw and friends as they trek through Manhattan and the Middle-East. Where do you fall?

Sex and the City 2 Hate-O-Meter
1 - Not really helping The Cause, ladies, but whatever. Can we have lunch now?
.
.
.
5 - Jerk alert: did you see Kristin Stewart at the MTV Movie Awards?
.
.
.
.
10 - I want to stab these women in the Fallopian tubes with a Manolo stiletto.

I refuse to budge from the 1 to -2 range for SATC2's absolute apathy-inducing boredom. I give it this ranking in terms of its quality as a movie (story, technical precision, character originality, etc.) and as an extension of a cultural movement.

I was not a follower of the show, but as I understand it--and I have seen enough episodes to know who each character is by both personality and name--women really loved these four women. They wanted to be them (how many times have women played the "Which SATC character are you" game?), or at least have their shoe collections. The latter simply must be so for the show's main character and narrator Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), who has impossibly good fashion fortune on the salary of a newspaper columnist. Though, now that she's married to a man who is so wealthy he could light a Bradshaw book burning bonfire with rolled up 100-dollar bills, her conspicuous consumption is way more justified.

And maybe some women envied Samantha Jones's (Kim Cattrall) slutty determination--prudes and serial monogamists everywhere oogled in stunned curiosity. Or they just didn't give a damn because her reductive style was too much of an anathema to productively effect a women's cause. So she's horny. That's not really a sexual revolution. Last I checked a montage of ad infinitum sexual positions was considered the less culturally sanctioned film genre called porno. I don't follow N.O.W. on Twitter, but I don't think they like those. In any event, she stays fully clothed for almost the entire duration of SATC2, making her character an even less interesting version of herself, only taking the time out every few sequences or so to rub hormone cream, and when that's not available, pureed yams, on her nether regions.

The two characters I always, always wanted more from was the careerist and stressed mom Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) and her uptight, freakishly preppy friend Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) who, get this, wants--wants--to be a stay-at-home mom and never work and only shop and take brunch breaks. Wait a minute, I've got it all wrong: Charlotte is the stunner of this story. Forget thinking and working for a living. What kind of ambition does it take to resolve never to work but always have money? Lots and lots of it. The woman converted religions to make this happen, for god's sake. I never would have thought of that! This chick's got it so made, she takes vacations from her vocational vacation. Yes, she's got to raise "the girls" but she's got her full-time braless milkmaid nanny to take the reins after "the girls" have sabotaged her "vintage creme Valentino," which is to say, most of the time. I want a serious psychoanalysis done on Charlotte, because I want to know how a woman who came of age in the 80s in urban America managed to so obliviously discard modern mores of career and independence.

The good news for Miranda is that she finally took a page from Charlotte and quit her job because an undeveloped plot line had it that her crude, misogynistic boss did not respect her. He really didn't, but that's beside the point. The issue at stake here for the movie is that this totally awesome chance to explore how a woman deals with overt sexism in the workplace is ignored. The sole communication we see between her and her boss is clipped short: no talking, no exchange, she just quits. I'll do a fifty jumping-jack cheer for any woman with the balls to quit a shit job, but I kind of want to know the nitty-gritty too. Why was your man-boss a dick? Tell us about it. Us ladies will identify with you in boastful revelry.

But then, I suppose, this brings us to the film's flawed behind-the-scenes conceit: a woman did not write SATC2's script, rather, a gay man did, who has a deserved affection for his female characters, but who is still nonetheless a type that will never innately understand the female psyche. Miranda walking out of her job on the turn of a dime was his way of saying "You go, girl!" without actually saying it--Miranda, in this instance, is vocally paralyzed, after all. What does she think? We don't know, because Michael Patrick King, the director and writer, doesn't know, and he doesn't know because he is a guy and because he wrote the script. How in the world would he know what dear Miranda would say? Not to imply he couldn't have concocted an educated guess, just that he didn't bother to try for one at all.

Still, I am over thinking it entirely. Sex and the City 2 is such a poorly realized contribution to pop culture, constructed in the utmost mood of self-satisfying irony, so as to make it--in spite of all the negative reviews--critically bullet-proof. People are going to see this movie, if only to see for themselves the horrors and offenses so many critics have assigned it, but in the end, what the viewer is going to leave the theater with is a giant question mark looming over their head: That's it?

I did not find this movie ethnically offensive nor its story offensive or provocative. In a sick way I sort of wish I did. Maybe then I'd find the critical uproar more warranted. I'll grant that Samantha's show at the souk gyrating her hips while scrambling for the confetti of condoms just sprung from her purse (during Muslim prayer hour, no less) was a little awkward, but mostly because the joke fell flat. I'll grant that Carrie's rejection of Big's thoughtful anniversary present was just plain bitchy. I'll grant that the "motherhood is hard" heart-to-heart between Miranda and Charlotte was off to an amazing start then turned instantly sour when they wonder aloud how mothers without full-time nanny help survive, "How do they do it?" That doesn't even deserve an answer.

As I see it, Sex and the City 2 can be reduced to two shots: the Chrysler Building and a silver Cuisinart coffee maker. The iconic New York City skyscraper is revealed in a 360-degree montage in the credit sequence. Its symbol of glamor and class is so full of excitement; its architectural beauty is tireless and timeless--everyone loves to see this building, it means you've arrived in the city, it means dreams bigger than this building are apt to occur. Later, we meet Cuisinart. The camera tracks up its silvery front panel in almost pornographic exploitation. It screams, "Look at me, I'm sexy!" It screams, "Fuck me, and fuck you, Mr. Coffee!" It screams, atonally, "BUY CUISINART."

And there you have it. The dreams of Sex and the City are over.

Now, it is just another object.

A Few Thoughts on: Please Give (2010)

2010-05-23T22:02:00.008-04:00

When I think of director Nicole Holofcener, I think of Catherine Keener. The two go hand-in-hand, like John Wayne and John Ford, like Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese.

Holofcener has worked with Keener almost exclusively in all of her work: Walking and Talking (1996), Lovely and Amazing (2001), Friends with Money (2006); and with the exception of Holofcener's TV work (a few episodes of Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, The Gilmore Girls, and most recently Bored to Death), there's one more addition to the duo's filmography, Please Give (2010).

Please Give is essentially about family and neighbors, and the bonds we create (or neglect to create) among them. What's so interesting about the characters here, is their difficulty seeing the need for compassion in one another, no matter their proximity or relation. Kate (Catherine Keener) and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt), who operate a upscale vintage furniture store, are self-centric people, acquiring their merchandise from the deceased at less-than-market value, then selling it at inflated prices.

This capitalistic distraction seems to help the couple navigate their lives together well enough, but as Kate's guilt complex grows out of these continued transactions, she seeks respite and revival.

She hands twenty-dollar bills to homeless people on the street, but denies her daughter a new pair of jeans, the cost of which is no doubt exorbitant, but not in terms of the family budget, and certainly not when compared against the hundreds of dollars Kate gives out over the course of the film to complete strangers.

She tours an elderly facility for a volunteer opportunities when a lonely, aged woman is on the cusp of death just next door. There are chances for Kate to play the caretaker role all around her, but she sidesteps those in favor of those that might give her public recognition.

But she can't follow through with any of those volunteer roles either. In Kate's character Holofcener calls the bluff on bourgeois causes. From a wealthy perch anyone can hand out cash and feel good about themselves. To get on the ground and have real interactions with these disadvantaged people, however, is too intimidating for Kate to commit herself to.

Kate's failed attempts at compassion show just how empty her cause actually is. As that emptiness is exposed and realized the story takes a turn, which will not be spoiled here. But as a film by a woman, starring a woman it is fascinating to see Holofcener's exploration of an essential women's issue: care taking. The expectation women have to fulfill this role shows how the modern condition (e.g. career, commodities, the isolation of city life) makes it so difficult to determine what it even is.

In Kate's case, she misplaces compassion on people and things that don't give back to her.

It's not such a big deal that she sells furniture at a marked-up price--she has to make a living, doesn't she? It's just that she projects more meaning on the acquisition of these inanimate objects than she does on the living family and friends around her.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: U is for Unemployment Insurance

2010-05-15T01:24:00.001-04:00

Lightening struck two weeks ago when I was laid off from my day job. Then again, it wasn't such a unique moment considering the economy, even if my New York Times breaking news updates alert me every few days that unemployment statistics are on the up-and-up and the nation will soon take one big collective sigh of credit-card-swiping relief. I believe we've climbed down from 10% unemployment to something like 9.5%.

Time to head to the mall!

I agree, we're all long overdue for a mindless shopping spree, particularly if that spree includes the purchase of an overvalued mortgage, but we're not there yet. Ejection from a big house in the suburbs is fun, but personally I'll take a long series of monthly minimum payments on a credit card any day. Bargaining with your landlord to knock off an extra fifty-bucks from your rent each month in exchange for sweeping up the building's laundry room is also a great way to save. Now you can redirect those funds to little things like, oh, I don't know, groceries?

So we're all finding ways to survive.

I'm finding many ways. For instance, you can cancel your Netflix subscription and rent movies instead from the public library. The Brooklyn Public Library has a fine collection, but my spirits may also be high because I'm endowed with roommates who keep their own queue active. So I've got a fresh mix of semi-new films (like Brothers (2009), which arrived in our mailbox today) and way old and boring movies, like Summer Stock (1950) starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly as opposite yet inevitable lovers producing a show in a country barn. (Full disclosure: I watched this today on fast-forward. I would have liked to have shown it more attention, but I'll be damned, I would have rather gone back to my day job than watch it in full.) During a Kelly dance sequence I found myself murmuring aloud, "I love you, I love you, I love you," totally by accident. The movie also includes the great Garland number "Get Happy," a song I've been alternating between singing and whistling all day and night. It was worth a look-see for that.

So you see, things really aren't that bad. Sure, it's a financial shit storm, but when I listen again to Marlene and she tells me

Up
Look there.

I have to admit it is a genius idea. I plan to do it regularly. It really works! Go ahead, try for yourself.

If there is anything one on the unemployment line needs to be firm about though, it's working diligently to make your day have structure, otherwise everyday quickly becomes a Saturday. An undeserved, lethargic one. And no matter how many times you look up, you're going to feel very down. Defy gravity by waking up no later than 8:00 - 9:00AM every weekday (you may still sleep in on Saturday and Sunday--that's what they're for!). Set daily and weekly goals to check off from a list. This will make you feel productive, and also, depending on the nature of the task, keep your Unemployment Insurance valid. The list should include things like faxing documentation to state unemployment offices and student loan lenders, updating your resume (and if you're ultra-mod, your LinkedIn profile) and posting it to public sites like Monster. This means you are visible to people, even if those people a) aren't offering positions in your field, or b) are offering positions in your field but there is an inflated number of applicants vying for it as a result of our severely disheveled economy.

You should also add to your list to make time to reflect on the things you would actually like to be doing. For example, if you have a graduate degree in (just spit balling here, you can fill in any subject area) Cinema Studies, take time to answer the question, Do I want to write marketing materials for a living, or would I rather get paid to blog about film? And when you do find the answer to that question, be sure you follow through with steps to ensure your real career goals come to fruition. In this case, you would blog.

Also take time to talk with your friends, meet new people, and heaven help us, yes, even network. Don't stay locked in, these people and the people you will meet are there to help. Especially if they stroke your ego ("You were better than that job") and buy you jiggers of bourbon. But most importantly of all, do not become complacent, apathetic, or inactive; because although you are out of work you still have plenty of work to do: research companies, send sincere letters of interest, consider the possibilities of freelance work, and be quick to apply for the rare dream job that may come across the fraction of worthy job boards (Media Bistro never did anyone harm).

This will give your day form. This will give you purpose.

Usefulness
"Count that day lost whose low descending sun Views from thy hand no worthy action done." Anon.

A recap. Block off your time. Be productive. Keep thinking, keep up, and if worse comes to worst, remember Trader Joe's sells a product called "Simpler Times." The name is so apt. It is a drink some call "beer," but I like to call it "creative juice," and for $3.99 a six-pack (plus $0.35 liquor tax if you're in Brooklyn) at 6.2% alcohol by volume, you'll find both solace and distraction at a rate even food stamps recipients can afford.

You are not alone.

I feel better already.

An Afternoon Coffee Break

2010-05-12T13:04:00.001-04:00

"Let's pretend this coffee is champagne."

"Why would we do that?"

"To celebrate life, like the rich, elegant people do."

From Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), "Champagne," with Taylor Mead and Bill Rice.

The Notebook (2004)

2010-04-24T21:58:00.002-04:00

"I'll be seeing you..."

The Notebook, featuring its two young leads Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling on its poster in full embrace, suggests that it is a story of teen romance and melodrama. It's also rated PG-13, should that be another indicator of the audience it aims to address. But the story opens in present day, with a house full of aged seniors shuffling among its corridors, quietly grumbling about the state of life. "I keep trying to die," an anonymous character says while waiting in line for his medication, "but they won't let me." Noah (James Garner) quips, "Well, you can't have everything," and its story then is established as something far more sophisticated than teen love. Not that there is anything about young love and first loves to condescend to--they are light, fun, and free, as love should be no matter what the age. Time has a way of embittering people, though, which makes it easier to roll our eyes at two taut-skinned 17-year-olds making out with vigorous abandon.

I think that's why I avoided director Nick Cassavettes's film for so long. I assumed this story would would take advantage of the optimism I generally obscure from the world about true love's profundity when it is thoughtfully cultivated and held very tenderly. Love, the hardest task to master (easy to find, difficult to keep), as we see it portrayed often in movies so clumsily, just doesn't resonate in a real way. In romantic movies, make-out montages, impossible lines of dialogue ("You complete me"), swells of music--I can take or leave it all depending on the mood of the day. It might be light-hearted fun, but it's merely ephemeral.

As a movie made ostensibly for teenagers, were The Notebook left within a standard narrative structure, where Noah and Allie are played by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams solely, it probably would have fallen into that category of cliched romantic movies: underwhelmed emotions as the result of overwrought circumstances and behavior from its characters (does Jerry Maguire really "complete" her?). This story is told from the perspective of one aging man, Noah (James Garner), who through the repeated retelling of his life-long romance with his wife Allie (Gena Rowlands)--she, in present day suffering from severe dementia--makes their love last in the worst of human circumstances.

In a rare few minutes of their day, Allie awakens from the dementia put upon her. Then, suddenly, she falls back into her mind's fog; she forgets Noah. She's stricken with panic, pain and fear of everything that surrounds her. Noah, helplessly looks on as nurses restrain her, as seen in the sequence of shots above. He is not sad like characters are sad when they break up in a typical romance that plays on emotions of loss to, ironically, make you feel stronger toward love, like it is a thing to capture and hold. Romance here is not premised on dependency, victimization, and the idea that the experience of love is something that can be tallied up as a failure (a breakup) or as a success (togetherness).

Looking at Noah's face above (a staggering performance from James Garner), we see that love is something that simply is. It is always there if you remember it. You can access that feeling in your memory. But Allie, now sunken back into her mind's confused slumber, can't remember. And that, as we see so devastatingly across Noah's face, is love truly lost--there, but forgotten.

This is a love story for teenagers, no doubt. But more so, The Notebook is a story for adults not merely going through the motions of love's experience, but enduring it with sophistication and mortal awareness.

The Room

2010-04-10T23:36:00.013-04:00

Yesterday, I attended a late-night screening of The Room at Luna Cinema in Leederville in Perth (Western Australia). The flier read “Written, produced, directed and starring accidental genius Tommy Wiseau, THE ROOM is like no other film you’ve ever seen.” As the MC stated at the beginning, we weren’t going to just watch a film. This was going to be… an experience.

To be expected, the audience was a largely indie film crowd – picture horn-rimmed glasses, half-shaven men and women with severe bangs. You know the type. They quote lines from popular culture texts with reckless abandon, occasionally slip in the name of some high-end film theorist during a conversation (getting their money’s worth from a Film degree) and for them, cardigans are never out of fashion. Pretension was the name of the game. And pretension could have been the name of the movie we were all queuing up to see.

Now, a guy who writes, produces, directs and stars in his own film would – in normal circumstances – be considered somewhat of an artiste, an auteur. Think Orson Welles. Think George Clooney. Think Clint Eastwood. But when it comes to Tommy Wiseau, ‘normal circumstances’ do not apply.

The Room was produced in 2003, and has since then garnered a cult following because it is so tragically appalling. To borrow from the adage, “it’s so bad, it’s good.” And when I mean “good,” I mean yelling out profanities and throwing plastic spoons throughout the screening.

The Room explores a love triangle between Johnny (Wiseau), his “beautiful fiancée” Lisa (Juliette Danielle who looks like Britney Spears after a particularly bad alcohol bender) and Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). Johnny is the ever-sincere protagonist devoted to his girl, and – as the filmmaker so fervently reminds us – a great catch (constant references are made about his financial strengths and an anticipated job promotion), while his “future bride-to-be” is the manipulative tramp who plays him whilst having a tryst with his best friend. Sounds pretty plausible for a narrative, right?

It’s not so much the story-line that has audiences groaning and cackling in the aisles. It’s the execution. The dialogue is dire (it makes Days of Our Lives look like Shakespeare)*, the acting is dreadful (after all the protracted sex scenes, and there were many, I wanted to wash my eyeballs out with disinfectant), the editing and cheesy cinematography leave much to be desired, and the film is peppered with so many random scenes, shots and character interactions that you end up just giving up and enjoying the pointlessness of most of the film. For instance, the resident kid in the apartment complex – Denny (Philip Haldiman) – spends most of his time appearing at odd points (prompting “Hello Denny!” from the audience), then disappearing just as quickly after some badly-scripted dialogue (prompting a vigorous “Bye Denny!”). Unnecessarily long pan shots of the entire Golden Gate Bridge, long shots of a busy street with a Disney Store on the corner, and images of Alcatraz are repeated throughout the film for no reason other than to remind us that we are in San Francisco. Functional cut-aways, these were not. And there were those completely arbitrary scenes – does anyone else know why the men were all dressed in tuxedos at one point and tossing a football around? Yeah, me neither.

If art is an expression of the artist, then Tommy Wiseau is, quite frankly, bloody strange. Watch The Room and tell me that his chicken impersonations are not odd.

Now, if this were a “black comedy” (as Wiseau had promoted it, yeah Tommy – pull the other one) that would be a completely different story. The Room has become popular for the simple fact that what was originally supposed to be a serious melodrama was butchered beyond recognition by the talentless hack of a filmmaker. And the result is a big pile of stinking sh*t that is wholly pleasurable to hurl abuse at. You get the distinct feeling that Wiseau has an ego so out of touch with reality that when he looks in the mirror, he sees Orson Welles instead of Ed Wood; thus proving that obliviousness and self-delusion is a powerful combination for the truly untalented.**

The Room is melodrama at its very worst. For budding filmmakers, please go see The Room. It’ll teach you how not to make films.

* One of the many dialogue gems in this film:
Lisa: Do you want me to order a pizza?
Johnny: Whatever, I don't care.
Lisa: I already ordered a pizza.
Johnny: You think about everything, ha ha ha.

** I was reminded of a short film I worked on in university where the writer/director shot a scene where it was supposed to be raining. Within the same frame you could see the water going up from the hose, and down again. He was fine with that. *groan*

Clash of the Titans (2010)

2010-04-06T00:24:00.009-04:00

I admit it. As much as I swoon over the directorial genius that is Wong Kar-Wai, I like a good action fantasy movie as much as the next person. But the latest Clash of the Titans (directed by Louis Leterrier) had me rolling my eyes more times than not, and wondering “Who the hell gave the director all that money to make that complete piece of sh$^?”

Spurred on by nostalgia for the original 1981 film Clash of the Titans (directed by Desmond Davis), I turned up at the cinema on a Sunday night; ready to be thoroughly entertained. When the lights dimmed, the first of the previews began playing. Sort of. There was a high-pitched squeal and the image was back-to-front. First bad sign.

Second bad sign. Early in the story, there is a contrived attempt at rousing the audience’s sympathy for the hard-done-by-Perseus (played by Sam Worthington who speaks in a distinctly Australian accent) when his father, mother and younger sister are killed by Hades (played by Ralph Fiennes who sports a receding hairline and a husky voice).

Third bad sign. A really strange mélange of accents. I know this isn’t supposed to be high-brow art, but the façade of trying to be somewhat ‘authentic’ would have been appreciated.

Fourth bad sign. Really bad acting (I do, however, give credit to Mads Mikkelsen as the character Draco who manages to exude ‘ancient Greekness’ while not looking too embarrassed to be in this lemon of a film).

Fifth bad sign. Awful dialogue. Palpable groans emanated from various parts of the audience during the screening.

Before I get carried away with ‘bad signs’ (trust me, there were more than five), a synopsis first. Zeus (played by an awkward-looking Liam Neeson) and his court of immortals are incensed that humans have lost reverence and fear for the higher beings. The people of Argos, in particular, are retaliating against the deities. Enter Hades who promises his brother Zeus that by releasing the monstrous Kraken upon the human ingrates, this will bring them under the thumb of the gods and goddesses again. Hades (that sneaky devil) has plans to bring Zeus down in the process.

Enter our hero, a buff and tanned Perseus who finds out that he is actually the son of Zeus and a mortal woman. As a demigod, it is prophesized that Perseus will save the city of Argos and humankind from certain destruction. With plenty of action sequences, fantastical creatures, nubile women, men wearing short tunics and familiar mythological elements, you’d think that it would be a relatively sure-fire crowd pleaser. The lack of the audience’s enthusiasm as they left the theatre said it all.

The problem with this latest version of Clash of the Titans is that it puts all the emphasis upon its CGI at the expense of diluting the story and characterization. As a result, the audience has very little emotional investment in the narrative. When the various main characters die, no-one really cares. In fact, no-one even remembers their names. The unfurling of events seemed tokenistic, as if the filmmakers were simply going through the motions of a Greek mythology and ticking off the boxes. Winged-horse Pegasus – check. Three deformed witches – check. Medusa’s head getting lobbed off – check. This viewer was left completely underwhelmed by the experience and unable to suspend reality enough to go on the journey with Perseus and posse.

I wanted to like this film a lot. I really did.

I think the only way to regain those 2 hours of my life back is to go back to the 1981 version and enjoy stop-start animation and miniature monsters that seemed to be infinitely more effective than a few million dollars worth of computer graphics. Sometimes, Hollywood should just leave the classics alone.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: T: True Love, or the Smell of Rotting Meat

2010-04-03T17:37:00.000-04:00

Now that I've sloughed through the last remains of winter and rounded the corner of spring, I come to Marlene Dietrich's alphabetic chapter T slightly askew.

With the mossy spring scent in the air, I automatically search for its analogous sentiment to bloom on the pages of ABC. I know that's a matter of projecting my state of mind onto her written words, a sheerly coincidental fact of timing from when I first picked up her book and began posting from the letter A to where we are now, a mere six letters away from the end of it. Alas, who knew it would be a cheerful spring day when I arrived at the letter T, one of Marlene's most melancholic?

Throughout all of ABC, Marlene imparts a deep sense of simplicity lost, mostly due to the course and demands of modern life. In chapter T that nostalgia, melancholia, and wizened sadness is most pronounced. She struggles with modernity while being a direct product of it. Her public persona is after all entirely dependent on the proliferation of mass media, modern mechanics and automation. If film is considered the medium of modern popular culture, rivaled or perhaps shared by television, Marlene would have to admit that she is an inextricable part of the cinematic zeitgeist. Even if you don't know much about film history or classic movies, Marlene's face is an iconic one. Everyone knows who she is. Everyone knows she's a definitive character of the Golden Age of Hollywood, if not by name, undoubtedly by face.

If Marlene Dietrich's ABC is a dependable measure of her personality, an index of her politics on culture, marriage, children, and even food and dieting, Marlene is definitely a woman caught between ages. She is confidently an independent modern woman, but Marlene has affections for a pre-War European pastoral that go beyond fondness to a skin-deep identification. The old world is, so to speak, imprinted on her total being.

Take how she speaks about plants and flowers. She's a real Romantic in her attention paid to nature as a soul-enriching emollient.

Tarragon
The delicious! Puts the Made in France label on your salad.

Tuberoses
The only time I sleep with closed windows is when I have tuberoses in the room. I jealously keep the smell all for myself. They taste good too.

If a woman who has eaten a tuberose flower isn't considered someone in touch with the natural world, I don't know who is. While we hear her joyful expressions of the natural though, there's more ambivalence and distaste harbored toward the synthetic, and toward the effects of technology and modern media.

Telephone
(excerpt) The telephone companies do not reduce rates. They make you work and claim they give you "progressive convenience" long distance dialing. With cunning you can actually materialize a living voice responding to your dialing finger....[the "ghostly voice"of the operator's] "just a moment" is the only reminder that you are not talking with a mechanical device.

Television
(excerpt) You can feed your baby peacefully when it's cartoontime. The toddlers will sit transfixed and still--no mischief will be done, no cries of falls will jar your heart. In the "good old days" an aunt would come, read stories so you could do your chores. But aunts now live in other towns, it seems. You know how long your peace will last, the programs are a clock sounding the hours.

Marlene, whose ideals are rooted in a lifestyle that precedes modernity, emerges as a rather sensible creature who's resigned to her contemporary surroundings. She's astoundingly balanced in that way. For all of her opinions that may be at odds with modern life, she seems at peace, and so honorably sure of herself. That poise must also be due to her age at the time of ABC's publication, 1962; she was 61-years-old. You deserve a little deference by then, maybe by virtue of simply making it that far in life. But Marlene lived until she was 91 (she died on May 6, 1992). Who knew she would have a full 30 years ahead of her in 1962? But a woman with as much vigor as Marlene I'd like to think she downright demanded another 30 years from the gods.

Regardless, she never lost sight of her mortality. It's why chapter T strikes me as so nostalgic, especially against the spring blooming outside my window.

Taxi Drivers
They and I reminisce shortly on short rides, long on long rides, but there is no ride without reminiscing. We also sing when a song belongs to the particular kind of reminiscing we are doing. Most taxi drivers I have met were once GI's. The conversation starts like this: "Last time I saw you..."

Marlene has the firmness to define the experience of time itself, with no ounce of irony.

Times
I can truthfully say that times were always bad as long as I can remember.

But, in the end, Marlene's sense of humor pushes on through a glass darkly.

True Love
It's a flower: Trillium erectum. Also called birthroot and bethflower. Medicinal use: astringent.

Trillium erectum, as it happens, is a spring flower, native to the American northeast. It is strong enough to survive sub-zero temperatures and its blossoms smell like rotting meat.

On Cineaste's "Repertory Film Programming: A Critical Symposium"

2010-03-20T20:23:00.001-04:00

All hail the old Thalia Theater!

I wish I were around to see the old haunt in its glory. A dive made mysteriously sparkling and new as film prints resurrected from the past glimmered on its screens. The panelists in this quarter's edition of Cineaste, a group of 14 repertory film programmers discussing the future of film and repertory houses, sure remember it. Between it and the New Yorker and Bleeker Street Theaters, if we trace back the ancestral lineage of informal film education in the United States and Canada, there seems to be few other outlets that have held such intellectual influence over its patrons. If we could bring back the heyday of repertory houses and be so indulgent as to have simultaneous access to websites like Film Studies For Free, why, university film studies programs might vanish. Never mind that that scenario is inherently paradoxical (there would be no website without the devolution of theater culture and greater access to academic film studies programs); it would, in any event, make movies cheaper, and give us considerably more communal experiences.

While I never knew the Thalia, I certainly had my own picture houses. Everyone remembers their favorite local theater. It usually remains a unique regional favorite unto you, especially as the flick-heads of the world have a general tendency to move in the wayward direction of New York City, the host city of amphetamine-enriched cinephilia, where one can look fondly back at the movie houses that encouraged their original thirst for more.

I have a personal reverence for the Denver, Colorado Landmark Mayan theater myself. But it was the Tattered Cover Free Classics screenings in lower downtown Denver with Colorado Public Radio critic, Howie Movshovitz, that stirred in me the most anticipation and happiness about the movies. Those screenings had a grassroots feel: stackable chairs for seating in a quiet carpeted room, a 16mm projector that you heard clicking a few feet away, and of course the people, who in the most simplest sense were just damn happy to be there to see a movie. Howie would introduce the film with a chunk of historical facts on the film's production and its cultural impact, and then we watched. I saw The Philadelphia Story (1940) there for the first time, by no means a rare, just-unearthed picture or print of it, in fact, that film to this day celebrates a good measure of cultural ubiquity, but to see it on film gave it more meaning. It was a 16mm black & white print, rich and silvery.

The Tattered Cover was essentially a traveling picture show set-up and taken down by Howie himself, a total DIY project, an Etsy brick-and-mortar store for screen fanatics. It was personal and intimate, full of character, and an experience that you absolutely could not duplicate in a multiplex, and certainly not one you could repeat home alone on a DVD player. Though I had been studying filmmaking and criticism in school for a couple of years at this point, it was there for the first time that I truly became aware of the importance of the physical medium of movies themselves. Film looked different. There was a grainy texture to a film image. The whites were brighter and had a crystalline aura, and the blacks were deeper. Simply, the picture was gorgeous.

Toward the end of The Philadelphia Story the reel snapped and there was a collective gasp. Howie raised the lights, and as he spliced the film back together I remember purposefully listening to the crowd for complaints, but they never came. Howie put the last touch on the spool, the movie clacked up to full speed and I realized that I had not just witnessed a mere occurrence, a standard snafu usually seen in the projection room, but I had participated in something historic, albeit on a small scale. This wasn't exactly newsworthy, a reel of film breaking at a screening, and it wasn't anything that would be written about in a history book. In the grand scheme of things this was a pretty mundane moment that most people, I imagine, wouldn't care much about.

Still, the Tattered Cover, to me, was historic. A room full of people voluntarily crowding themselves together for an affirmation of what they saw as important in their lives: the chance to not only see a story told on screen, that is, to be entertained, but to be so entertained in an environment that demanded respect for people in your very close proximity, and patience for the apparatus bringing it to you. I don't know if I can pinpoint the roots of my affection for the movies to that very night, but I believe that somewhere in that general time frame I understood why film was important to me, and why it was important to our culture as a whole: to share meaningful time together charting the same experiential course. I know I couldn't have articulated it so clearly at the time, but I loved knowing that the thing I saw on screen was exactly what everyone else in the room saw too, that we collectively understood the film's cues of when to laugh, cry, swoon, or smile, and that we preferred this to the standard habit of at-home watching; we wanted to be together. Maybe it's the change of seasons that triggers such pronounced nostalgia and sentimentality as I describe this scene, but that time together in the screening room became the most perfect public experience I thought you could hope for. There we were, all in it together, living history, even if the rest of the world would never know it.

Which brings me back to Cineaste's conversation about film preservation and programming in their latest issue. Without film, I would never have had that experience at the Tattered Cover. Who's to say I would have ever learned to love the movies as I do now without it? Would strictly digital experiences ever have had the same effect on me? A spool of film can't snap if you're watching a DVD version of it. But the point of speculation is moot. What matters is that film is with us and for the sake of this experience and countless others like it, it must be preserved; we must preserve our history. As I read through the lively thoughts from the film programmers in Cineaste, there were a slew of references to theaters and film screenings from decades ago; already, film is a slowly aging relic of time. Some of the magazine's panelists have been involved in programming since before I was alive (and for the record, I don't consider myself particularly young anymore myself; youthful, yes, but not exactly young), and I hope that 30 years from now this conversation will still be going.

Tom Vick, programmer at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution, hits the nail on the head when he essentially calls for (to use marketing jargon) product differentiation: "Now that we have become just one choice in a sea of moving image options, we need to recognize and emphasize the human expertise that makes repertory programming unique, and the importance we have as entrance points for new and restored films . . . .Our [way of creating a unique movie-going experience] might be to emphasize the human element that makes repertory theaters unique, not just through creative, thoughtful programming and screening good quality prints, but through informative film introductions, hosting visiting filmmakers, live accompaniment for silent films, and other elements that aren't available by download." So let digital run from here until doomsday if it means repertory houses can create a lasting and interactive film-going experience that competes with digital and the mainstream.

I know, that's easier said than done. Though I do think it can be done. Critics can do their part to inspire their readers to appreciate the lesser-known. I'll do mine here by telling you about the last piece of repertory film I saw, Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951), screened last night at Film Forum on 35mm for the first time in 30 years. The past revisited us! Van Heflin, a gawky young cop makes a house call to catch a prowler, but the irresistible lady inside has captured his heart. He pursues her doggedly, like a prowler himself, and from there the woman's picturesque married life devolves into the anti-American dream. Going from a ravishing Hollywood home where she lives a stable life with a prominent radio d.j., to an interstate-side motel with the emotionally impaired Heflin, to, lastly, a weather-beaten stone hut in the middle of the California desert, she gives birth to the pair's illegitimate child. Now that's film noir if there ever was any.

The Prowler is unavailable on DVD or VHS.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: S is for a Sour Oscar Night

2010-03-15T00:48:00.000-04:00

One week ago the Academy Awards aired for four sleepy hours and Scarlett Cinema sat in silence. As perhaps the most underwhelming of Oscar shows in memory, myself and Scarlett's sister blogger, Spinster Aunt, kept a log of happenings to stave off sleep. If the show wouldn't keep us awake, our note-taking would.

Warning: As the primary bond keeping my critic friends and I together is actually a series of jokes at one another's expense, the notes below will surely offend you. I apologize for that in advance, but after such an uneventful Oscar night, it's only fair that Scarlett Cinema and its constituency express itself on the matter truthfully.

In that vein of thought Marlene Dietrich says the Sins of Omission are "the blackest of our daily sins," and that Self-Discipline is "the most useful of all disciplines," so I really am morally obligated to transcribe these words here tonight, if for no other reason than the sake of thoroughness and consistency of self-expression. Forgive the delay.

Spinster Aunt and I took the minutes on March 7, 2010, while friends from Termite Art and other Scarlett Cineastes contributed meaningless banter at our side. Here are the highlights of the collective's thoughts, which can only be described as silliness at best and unpalatable negativity at worst. If you didn't know it before, let this be a lesson that you should never let critics into the Oscar show:

8:33PM: "My God, I hate this show." S. Aunt

8:43PM: (upon seeing Zac Ephron) "Get these itchy clothes off me!" P.L. Kerpius

8:47PM: "Au revoir, Soshanna!" Karen Wang wildly screams after Inglorious Basterds clip

8:58PM: "They should get Ed Asner up there." R. Emmet Sweeney

8:59PM: "I like regular people [onstage, in audience]. They get real affected by this." P.L. Kerpius

9:23PM: "Samuel L. Jackson loves Kangols." R. Emmet Sweeney

9:35PM: Everyone feels bad. Collective cringe.

9:37PM: "This is a disaster." R. Emmet Sweeney; P.L. Kerpius starts dancing; S. Aunt (con) and P.L. Kerpius (pro) bicker angrily over the validity of the shorts categories.

9:47PM: "I gotta beat Alberto [in the Oscar pool] and get this over with." R. Emmet Sweeney

9:52PM: "Let's go to the movies." Alberto Z.; K. Wang begins channel surfing.

10:01PM: Giant Hershey bar opened. Pain going away. Then, lengthy debate as to whether the giant Hershey bar smells like a baby (author's note: it did).

10:12PM: on Charlize Theron's dress: "alien boob dress," (uncredited); C. Theron uses the word "unflinching," very scripted; someone says, "I can see your boobs [in that dress]."

10:15PM: So bored now, we're compiling a list of irritating names: Skylar, Jayden, Taylor, Hayden, Braden, Courtney (male), Loden, Lindsay (male), Tracey (male).

10:16PM: P.L. Kerpius considers eating a pita chip.

10:17PM: Amused by Steve and Alec's Paranormal Activity sketch! (author's note: best part of show)

10:21PM: R. Emmet Sweeney outraged by presence of Sleepy Hollow (1999) in horror montage, "Whoever cut this is a [expletive deleted]."

10:22PM: (after reaction shot of Quentin Tarantino) "I'm Quentin Tarantino and I approve this montage" (uncredited)

10:28PM: "Look at all those nerds." R. Emmet Sweeney, sarcastically, upon seeing the technical awards segment; then, strangely, "YES!", without irony, upon seeing John Travolta.

10:46PM: K. Wang falls asleep; (Oscar dance sequence begins) "Wait, they're dancing? Oh, no." And then, "This is a great idea. I'm glad we're watching this right now." R. Emmet Sweeney

10:57PM: Cutaway to: George Clooney, he doesn't give a [expletive deleted]

10:59PM: "Cloonosaurus Rex" (uncredited)

11:01PM: Universal stupidity sets in; (upon seeing Matt Damon onscreen) "I wish he would marry me. Why won't you marry ME?!" P.L. Kerpius

11:37PM: S. Aunt and P.L. Kerpius reminiscing about Dave Coulier; suggest that his being the subject of Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know" is an urban legend.

11:42PM: (grabbing box of Junior Mints) "Time for some more J-Mints." R. Emmet Sweeney

11:44PM: "This is the worst night of my life. It's horrible but I can't look away." R. Emmet Sweeney

It ended there because the commute home was too long to entertain after the midnight hour on a school night. With all of that said, there is only one thing that can truly be said, and that comes straight from Marlene's mouth:

Stupidity
The only defect with which I lose my patience.

She would not be a fan of this blog.

The Movies Are Fun Again: Shutter Island (2010)

2010-03-03T01:21:00.000-05:00

I waited for you, Shutter Island (2010), and you arrived magnificently, swiftly, from the switch of the first title card to the second in an immediately gratifying fashion.

Yes, all I needed to see was the first credits - before any image flickered across the screen - to know Shutter Island would win me over. At the precise moment that that switch between the two title credits flipped, I turned to my movie companion, clapped my hands together in awesome release, and said to him, "I love it already!" Then I piped down; I don't hate a lot of things, very few things, actually, but movie talkers I despise.

My friend said it best, this is B-film glory from the starting voice-over first-person narration, abundant expositional dialogue, to its clean story wrap-up at the finish line. It took me a few minutes to understand what director Martin Scorsese was doing with this cumbersome opening dialogue; had he quit the subtlety of his classic storytelling at the behest of Spielbergian metaphors, or was this an homage to the dusty reels of his beloved B pictures where time and money are too scarce to allow for anything but the rough-hewn?

I probably can muster a few gripes about Scorsese's string of tight-shots in this movie that make its sets difficult to see, much less comprehend architecturally. At its beginning, when U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) enters the Shutter Island asylum office, dually run by the madhatter-doctors who are played with tremendous screen presence by Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow, the camera is moving in a 360-degree pan, but cuts too damn many times to see where the characters stand.

There was another 360-shot in this same sequence that spared us the cuts, but left behind the blase. I shrugged my shoulders then, knowing that if that camera pulled back a bit we might have seen a glimpse of that ineffable tension put off by two antagonized characters in a closed space.

But for Teddy's bright neck tie (hats off, costume department), pitch-perfect performances (I'm talking to you, Leonardo DiCaprio), and a script that is simple, suspenseful fun, Shutter Island was the cherry on top of February releases. The end credits rolled, I clapped along with the sporadic applause in the room, turned back to my friend and said, "We've done it again, together--movie history!"

Long live fun at the movies.

Dinnertime Retrospectives: About A Boy (2002)

2010-02-28T15:10:00.001-05:00

My DVD collection is small.

I'm sure I don't have more than 30 or 40 titles. Sure, I have guilt about it, film critics are supposed to have hundreds. But after I made the initiative to cut down on DVD purchases - during the Great VHS Purge of the early 2000s when it was clear that that awesome metallic tape format was going to soon be a relic of time, and also, that they became too damn cumbersome to pack up and move every year or two - I made peace with my decision.

Slowly the DVD titles trickled in to replace the tapes, methodically vetted before amazon.com chomped through my credit card number. Back in the summer of 2004, I worked an odd overnight shift at a midtown start-up where my bosses - to keep our staff of five comfortable amidst what had to be a barely-legal labor situation - set up a TV and DVD player for our entertainment. Work was slow during those hours, and it was a hearty distraction when you consider that of our staff of five, three were then film studies students. And along with the DVD player there was a metal framed futon with a scratchy jungle print comforter, a Kmart special no doubt, with lions and palm trees and things in a repeated print laid over it. Smart digs for a few grad students in the red, but it does remind me of The Onion's "Potential Employee Uprising Quelled With Free Pizza" bit, and now that I think of it, there were a lot of free doughnut breakfasts that summer.

In either case, as the days churned on and morale ran low, I shot up and decided it was time to invigorate the staff with new movies. It was something to anticipate that had a double pay off: it gave us a good distraction at what was essentially a drab office slumber party, and it contributed fresh additions to my preemie DVD library.

I purchased two titles, The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and About A Boy (2002). I thought these were quality choices considering their genre differences and varied release periods. You don't want to load your movie collection too heavy in one direction or another; a collection of all horror films, for instance, is cool, but if you're trying to show off carefully acquired tastes you have to curate with diversity and flair. Two movies from the 1940s would have been acceptable, but overkill; and conversely, two picks that are new releases of the past three-to-five years are too bold of a commitment. Recent pictures need time to simmer in your memory. What if you wake up three years later and find you hate Transformer?

I couldn't indulge the risk.

Still, a few days ago, I was looking over the DVD shelf for something to watch casually with dinner; I saw About A Boy, from Nick Hornby's adapted screenplay of his namesake novel, and thought for a second, do I even like this movie?

My memory jogged back to 2004 and I started to question my own taste and motive for purchase: did this movie make such an affecting impact on me that I deemed it worthy to, presumably, watch again and again? All this and I hadn't even put the disc in the player yet, a place where it hadn't actually been for a few years now. My ballet teacher told me recently that I think too much; that she sees my body naturally moving in the progression of step sequences, but looking at my face she can tell I'm questioning those movements as I make them. Whether this is a drive to excellence or mere indecisiveness, I tend towards the latter, and finally deciding any day is a good day to break records and silences, I put About A Boy in the DVD player.

When the movie started I was waiting for a moment when I would roll my eyes at it. It being a modern romantic comedy, after all, it always has the potential to cloyingly manipulate if not kill your spirit. Frankly, there's nothing I can't stand more that a movie that can't outright express its emotion without reeling you into a mythical fantasy of what romance is: a hyperbolic mess of love-at-first-sights, melodramatic tiffs, makeup sessions, and subsequent make-out and extraordinarily edited montages of love-making sessions in flawless ambient light.

The first thing I noticed this time around was how mature Hugh Grant looks. You can see the wrinkles and wear across his face. For all the playboyishly romantic roles he seems to be known for, here, he looks like a real aged man. In fact, I'd venture to say there is a downright average look to his appearance in About A Boy. He is handsome in that non-threatening guy-next-door kind of way, but he doesn't send you on errand for the smelling salts. There's very little to swoon over in this movie, actually, and therein lies its charm.

With ease, About A Boy takes us through the lives of a few average people with problems we can relate to. "About A Boy," a sweet play on words, where the "boy" is not just young Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), friendless and regularly picked-on at school, whose single mother suffers from depression, it's also Will (Hugh Grant), the thirty-something with the emotional maturity of a boy Marcus's age. Will takes him in, becomes a real companion to Marcus, and from the boy's own wisdom in light of his unfortunate home and social life, Will grows up.

The overall cast is great, with Toni Collette as Marcus's distraught mother, and Rachel Weisz as a single mother and Will's love interest. Both are two great performers who in subsequent years we got to know better in other films. They're more ubiquitous now than they were in 2002, another benefit of history on the side of About A Boy - it's always enriching to rewatch a movie and see the roots major celebs sprouted from, and here we see quite a few. Nicholas Hoult might be the most interesting star, all grown up and co-starring in Tom Ford's recent A Single Man (2009).

I had such a pleasant time watching About A Boy that I put it in the DVD player again the next night over dinner. I only watched the first 15-minutes this time, but the point is I just wanted to keep watching.

That 2004 purchase was a good investment after all.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: R

2010-02-21T12:41:00.000-05:00

Greetings, Sunday readers! I come to you as I recover from an evening bounding through the city on foot and in cabs. Taking spotty inventory of the whole evening's events now at midday, I begin with a table for three at the...

Restaurant
You will know the first-class restaurant by the way the food is served, without you and your friends being questioned as to who ordered what.

And it was first-class. We had a casual drop-in at Craftbar where I dined on duck confit with dried cherries, chanterelles and the creamy accompaniment of roasted chestnuts. After dinner, it was off to a strange spot where masses of unknowns merge and crash into one another at the groin level to the beat of bass-buzzing hip-hop. This is also known (I believe, correct me if I am wrong) as a "club." From this experience I have gleaned a number of things--particularly regarding the predatory gaze of men--but mostly I relearned that...

Rhythm
You have to be born with it.

Check back soon for part two of the Nixon series!

Happy President's Day: "Nixon at the Movies," Pt. 1

2010-02-15T19:52:00.003-05:00

For today, President’s Day 2010, I ask, just how does one get to be president? The goal is beyond all ambition. It’s really next to impossible. As one considers the prospect of such an endeavor you have to think, at least for a second, that such a person is acting against his or her own self-interest, for the position requires a total handing-over of oneself to the public so that your individuality as you know it is virtually annihilated. But that seems to be the precise personal characteristic of a candidate, that oblivious self-delusion that says you alone will be elected by the masses to lead them and all of the free world for the next four to eight years; a confidence that says your face is destined to be the face of the nation.

In this case, maybe a better question to ask might be, where do these guys get off? A presidential candidate’s self-assuredness alone is a marvel of questionable nature; anyone who has been in the unfortunate presence of a stranger or acquaintance alike who pontificates on the latest headline with a confidence suggesting they fomented the news themselves (or at least wrote the headline) is enough to make you turn away, or, anyway, tip the bottle back for a good numbing sip. The true wonder of a presidential candidate, and to a far greater extent, the winning character of an elected president himself, is how they manage such soapbox sermons as political platforms palatable to a wide audience.

It’s simply astonishing.

As I move onto the prime topic of this essay today, that of our 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, I can already feel the limits of my persuasion to make you read him, a veritable felon, as sympathetic. As I continue to think about Richard Nixon, I see a wave of compassion cresting and crashing. He’s a hard man to love, and he might be impossible to love for his secretiveness and deep anger; but, on the other hand, Nixon was a supreme intellectual, sharp and ambitious, a born politician who gave himself over to public evaluation and consumption immediately and in a big way. He was a man of controversy as much as he was a man to admire. It’s why as early as 1950, as he rose to fame naming opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas the “Pink Lady,” earning the California senate seat and the infamous epithet “Tricky Dick.”

The Tricky Dick moniker was an incredibly precise nicknaming when we see Nixon’s career arc in retrospect. From an emasculating entrance into executive level politics as Eisenhower’s Vice President, requiring an airing of his personal financial records on national television before Ike would embrace him (aka “The Checkers Speech”); to his bitter whimpers at a 1962 press conference after his defeat for the California governor’s seat:

But as I leave you I want you to know, just think how much you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you.

to, finally, his resignation from the presidency on August 9, 1974, and his ghostly reemergence in 1977 for a series of interviews with David Frost in a last-ditch effort to restore the integrity of his name; from these most visible and pivotal markers in his political career, we see Nixon as severely emotionally wounded, and bitterly resentful at worst.

And after looking at him for so long in the shadows of his persona—which we will see is the only way this man is portrayed in popular film—I want the gray areas of his character more diligently fleshed out. I keep asking myself, Why do I want to like Nixon? Why do I have such a difficult time accepting him as a solidly dark character? Why do I go back to him again and again with hopes of his redemption to always, inevitably, be let down?

In the spirit of today’s national holiday I want to believe this is because there is a matter of deference attached to the office of the presidency. Richard Nixon was the face of our nation for 4 years, 6 months, and 20 days between January 1969 and August 1974, and had a tremendous influence on everything from popular film to international affairs to the course of The Imperial Presidency. So for all of his many faults, which are numerous, I wonder if there is a revised picture we can draw of Richard Nixon. Not just in the name of the ardor President’s Day perhaps instills in us for our national leaders past and present, but also, for simpler reasons.

I would like to look at the presidency with a perspective that weighs the toll of capital “P” Politics with the president’s own habits. He’s human after all. He eats his supper and gets indigestion like the rest of us. He goes to bed and wakes up and it begins again. In the in-between he has diversions. Bill Clinton was an avid reader. FDR collected stamps. Richard Nixon was a movie buff.

No kidding, Nixon watched over 500 movies during his presidency, and his favorite director was John Ford. So while the game of politics commenced—a strange business where all parties and factions are never fully satisfied, where the victory of one bill through Congress means an alienated other half who didn’t support it; while this ebb and flow of victories continues, and when played most successfully, keeps the president’s image glowing and his approval ratings high, the president is doing other things.

The movies were Nixon’s “other things.” In 2005 I came across a wonderfully ambitious and exciting film text by Mark Feeney called Nixon at the Movies. In it, he chronicles Nixon’s movie habits and his influence on the 1970s’ Silver Age of cinema, even including an index of all movies Nixon watched, on what date, and at which venue—usually either at the White House or Camp David*. Feeney’s text was the primary source of a long-ago project wherein I traced the development of Nixon’s political character against the changing western protagonists in John Ford’s westerns. To pick up that thread again briefly, there was a deep conflict between how Nixon imagined himself and how the rest of the world saw him.

Where he considered himself a man of the land, a real western hero (his memoirs begin, “I was born in the house my father built.”), his critics and the media saw him as antagonistic and coolly calculating.

In the second part of this post I’ll outline Nixon’s image—both good and bad—in the media and in popular film that will shed light on our need to see the 37th president more fully. Because although Nixon’s fate as a conspirator is beyond our control now, there are a lot of redundancies in filmed biopics that make old RN seem rather one-dimensional, and almost all dark. Nothing could be further from the case. Richard Nixon has so many shades of gray. It’s just that the most visible are those darker blemishes.

For now, I say, Happy President’s Day.

Nixon may not be our finest president, and many (perhaps including myself) may count him as our worst, but he is both one of our most distinguished and deathly flawed. He defined a tough era in recent American history that gave way to the actions of each president who followed him. His actions are the measure of what not to do when in office, and therefore deserve extended consideration; because a look at Nixon is not just a look back at the past, it’s also an examination of what we are today.

* Fun fact: Camp David was named for David Eisenhower, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s grandson, who later married Richard Nixon’s youngest daughter Julie in 1968.

The Look of Love

2010-02-14T19:18:00.000-05:00

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

"You look beautiful, Red."

C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) looks at Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) without her knowing.

"I promise to be yare!"

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

"I found myself looking at you again and again.
I just couldn't take my eyes off you."

Before Sunrise (1995)

Before Sunset (2004)

"You're going to miss your flight."

Happy Valentine's Day

A Single Man (2009)

2010-02-14T01:38:00.000-05:00

Open any issue of Vogue magazine and you'll see its photo spreads are designed to convey a feeling or an idea, and sometimes even a brief narrative arc. But where Grace Coddington's curated couture shows us still life and portraiture in snapshot, first time director and long-time fashion designer Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009), starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, shows us that same highly decorated world fully animated.

George (Firth) is a middle-aged university English professor whose 16-year boyfriend is killed in a car accident. We first meet his boyfriend and his best friend Charley (Moore) through flashback, which sets a precedent early on that this film is going to be shown in pieces that don't come together as a seamless whole.

Very quickly I decided I was watching a movie of a fashion ad come to life. I say this not just for the impeccable style and crispness of its characters' wardrobe:

Colin Firth can wear a white button-down.

The once pudgy-faced Nicholas Hoult (who you remember as the tender-hearted loner in About A Boy
(2002)) wears a loose-knit angora boat neck sweater with an ease that suggests it's a Levi's jean jacket.

Julianne Moore's eye makeup is a character in its own right.

It's not just the fashion itself, or the natural physical beauty of its characters that make those clothes hang so well. It is the quiet, fragmented field of vision of the film, the artistic mission Ford has to show us the stunning beauty of each set piece in his movie. There is a moment when the camera wanders slowly away to capture George's toes flex against the pressure of the floor. The skin wrinkles with the weight of his step. You see the distinct parts of his ankle and foot moving together to complete the action. This shot doesn't necessarily contribute a lot to the story, but it's a wonder to watch.

That mostly describes my thoughts on A Single Man as a whole. The story feels bare, minimally sure of its destination, which is a result of its fragmentary construction. Yet everything in it individually - Charley's golden bracelet, a table centerpiece of pink flowers, the knot of George's thin black tie, his ultra-mod home, the knobby knees of the young neighbor girl - are all interesting to look at in their own right. Taken together, we have an incredibly stylized and idealized American landscape in the 1960s.

That is to say, the film is detached from reality. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, or here at least it's forgivable. If Ford's film is indeed a fashion ad come to life, we've left the theater with a new visual concept of beauty, just like any staged fashion shoot would have affected. There the story ends, as simply as it began. A Single Man may headline major names (and be up for major awards), but it is played completely in minor keys.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: Q

2010-02-10T08:03:00.000-05:00

Madame Marlene, it has been weeks since I last revisited you, but don't worry, I would never quit you. At least not until this here alphabet ends! In any event, it's a snowy Wednesday morning today and that snow is likely to keep up. It's a fine time to stay in with a book, but since corporate America doesn't adhere to local school district standards of snow days, here's a snippet from chapter Q to satiate you for now.

Quotations
I love them because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizedly wiser than oneself.

Exactly. And like I said, that's exactly why I won't quit you, Marlene.

Quit
Don't, if the goal is at all attainable. You won't like yourself in the morning if you do.

Top Ten Films of 2009

2010-01-24T10:16:00.015-05:00

Being the reprobate that I am, I have finally succumbed to the pressure of our esteemed colleagues over at Termite Art, Tativille, and Tits & Gore, and am only now getting around to posting my top ten films of 2009. For a while, I was fully convinced that this list might never happen because of the deplorable gap in my viewing list. Discriminating cinephiles will probably notice such ignominious omissions as The Beaches of Agnes, The Maid, 35 Shots of Rum, The Last Station, Big Fan, and Up In the Air. Alas, one cannot see every worthwhile film that is released here in the States, no matter how hard one tries. There were at least another dozen films that passed through New York on their limited runs that I regret not having seen: La Danse, Big Fan, A Serious Man, A Single Man, Amreeka, Limits of Control... The list goes on.

That being said, 2009 was not a total wash. I did still manage to catch quite a few other extraordinary films that either premiered at festivals or were released into theaters last year. So, without further ado, here are my "Top Ten" (whatever that means; as my love of film evolves through the years, I grow less and less certain of the merit in "ranking" what is ultimately an art form).*

Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, 2009)
Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, 2009)
Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)
Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani, 2008)
Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, 2008)
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)
Yu yan (Fish Eyes, Zheng Wei, 2009)
Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)
Darbareye Elly (About Elly, Asghar Farhadi, 2009)

*For a list of some other spectacular films that deserve special mention -- and most certainly should be seen -- please see below.

11. Okuribito (Departures, Yôjirô Takita, 2008)

12. (500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009)

13. Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins, 2008)

14. Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)

15. The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray, 2009)

16. Stay Cool (Michael Polish, 2009)

17. Aruitemo aruitemo (Still Walking, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008)

18. White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

19. Garapa (José Padilha, 2009)

20. Up (Peter Docter & Bob Peterson, 2009)

21. Sugar (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2008)

22. Only When I Dance (Beadie Finzi, 2009)

23. Soul Power (Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, 2008)

24. P-Star Rising (Gabriel Noble, 2009)

25. Milh Hadha al-Bahr (Salt of This Sea, Annemarie Jacir, 2008)

26. Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)

27. Sheva dakot be gan eden (Seven Minutes In Heaven, Omri Givon, 2008)

28. La graine et le mulet (Secret of the Grain, Abdel Kechiche, 2007)

Also, for what it's worth, I did see Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009), though it did not make this list. It provoked an incredibly strong reaction from me (as well as the rest of the audience with whom I screened the film). I will need to mull over this rather deliberate omission despite the fact that I am wholly aware of its strong artistic expression and achievement. To be completely honest, it may simply have been too traumatic an experience. A man sitting ten rows behind me did faint mid-way through the film after all...

The Top Ten Films of 2009

2010-01-03T21:24:00.002-05:00

L'heure d'été (Summer Hours, Olivier Assayas, 2008)
Les plages d'Agnès (Beaches of Agnes, Agnès Varda, 2008)
Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)
Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)
World's Greatest Dad (Bobcat Goldthwait, 2009)
Invictus (Clint Eastwood, 2009)
In The Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009)
Where The Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)
Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, 2009)

David Lynch: He'll Steal Your Heart

2009-12-06T18:18:00.000-05:00

"TFBS"
Since things are slow around here, and since I've already showered you in director David Lynch's cleansing stream of clarity regarding movies on the iPhone, here's one more happy nugget from Davey. This time: On Product Placement

This could become a regular series.

Thanks to brickshot for the call out!

Coming back from the abyss to say...

2009-11-20T21:31:00.015-05:00

My hiatus from Scarlett has been embarrassingly, shockingly long. In fact, after a while, I felt almost afraid to venture back here for fear that, well, people might think I had no business returning. I've seen a plethora of films in the last six months that I have both loved and hated, about which I have had both opinions and thoughts. And while I have found it worthwhile to share those opinions and thoughts from time to time in the past, to be perfectly honest, my mind has been preoccupied with other endeavors related to film in more recent months.

So, it took a subject about which I am incredibly passionate to compel me to write this post tonight, which is Tribeca All Access ("TAA"), a tremendously successful advocacy and career development forum for both emerging and established directors and screenwriters who come from traditionally underrepresented communities within the film industry. Having worked with the program for the past five years, I can attest to the amazing results and singularly spectacular experiences that TAA has been able to afford its alumni. Past participants who were able to launch their projects in no small part because of TAA include: Tze Chun (Children of Invention), Paola Mendoza & Gloria LaMorte (Entre nos), and Cherien Dabis (Amreeka), all of whom have gone on to great acclaim on the film festival circuit and are now beginning to enjoy more attention from the mainstream.

During the Tribeca Film Festival, those filmmakers and screenwriters whose projects have been chosen to participate in TAA will be invited to participate in a series of workshops and panels, before pitching their narrative scripts or documentary works-in progress in a series of one-on-one business meetings with industry executives. After the festival, TAA continues to offer year-long support to its alumni as they endeavor to further their careers as well as realize their artistic goals. The early deadline for submissions this year has already passed (October 26), but the regular submission period will stay open through December 14. I cannot praise the program highly enough, as it remains one of the few forums in which mainstream Hollywood meets and actually seems to give a damn about new, exciting, and critically important voices that need to be heard within the dialog of American-produced cinema.

To find out more about this year's open submissions, click here. And if you do decide to submit, best of luck!

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: P

2009-11-16T08:10:00.000-05:00

I'm hard pressed to pick just one or two P words from Marlene's stunning chapter on the letter P. No mention of "pink," one of my personal favorite voiceless bilabial plosives, but she does offer sound advice on P words on sartorial choices, The City of Light, small home electronic devices, and certain desserts. For instance,

Pants
In Texas, when you want to say that a man is beautiful or handsome you simply say: "His pants fit him."

Across the country and across the pond from the Republic of Texas, though, I enjoy everything Marlene has to say about what is perhaps the greatest European city,

Paris
Home which keeps its promise.

Bonjour, merci, au revoir, la vin blanc!--they may be the only French words I know, but I like the sound of the next phrase that I can't quite translate. Something to do with "Say lovely things to me," or "Speak to me, my love." (French speakers, that's your cue to fill me in.)

Parlez-moi d'amour
Yes, please do. The loving heart is a bad mind reader.

Just today, in fact, I happened to note on a list of things I need, a...

Pencil Sharpener (Electric)
Anyone who doesn't have one misses a great delight.

Indeed, sharpening that column of wood and graphite to a fine point is gratifying. When you do it, you are prepared. You are ready to write. A good pencil is the perfect instrument to take your thoughts from your mind to your notebook fluidly. When the lead is the right grade, the pencil fresh, and at a good length resting in your hand, nothing feels more organic against the grain of the page. Long live the pencil (and the electric pencil sharpener)! After all that writing you've built up an appetite, in fact, you're famished. And if you've had a productive enough day, you don't just deserve a meal, you deserve a treat--you deserve a perfect slice of...

Pie
There is no better pie than lemon chiffon pie.

I'll take spiced plum with a butter crust, myself. But it's no use splitting hairs, pie is something we can all agree on. Simply, perfectly, pie!

Slipping Through Space

2009-11-09T23:35:00.000-05:00

Here I am!

Embrace the moment now while I am here, I have a feeling I may disappear again shortly. It goes like this: I moved, I lived out of a suitcase for two weeks, I relocated, then sat--where I still remain now--in a temporary apartment in beautiful Ft. Greene, Brooklyn with a new iMac that has outsmarted me in the password department. I'm locked out!

For the next few sentences or paragraphs I intend to ramble in a tone that is hopefully not too incoherent about the movies I've seen in the past month-and-a-half and the soul draining sadness I feel from the consistent lack of them in that time frame. I am at the point where I'm writing post-it notes to myself, "Watch a movie!" lest I forget. My eyes are lazy. They're atrophied. Do you know this feeling, when you're used to looking and watching, having that clanking bell of emotions reverberate inside yourself from seeing such things? It's some life-validating source of curiosity that is suddenly pulled away from you, leaving your eyes to rest lazily upon the landscape with no newness.

I haven't consistently seen in so long it is like a cataract dulling my line of sight. The eyes dull to cinema when you don't watch. You've got to keep up! It's like practicing a sport. If you live by consistency and dedication, your athletic prowess improves. And so it is with the movies: the more you watch the more you see.

Alas! I have been sleepwalking for weeks.

As my daily life begins to settle a few films have trickled in. For instance, Paranormal Activity at the Brooklyn Pavilion last night. I did a jig inside my head I was so giddy to be back at the theater, but then the movie started and I was unplugged from that amp. How long would this alternating structure of daytime-nighttime documentation continue? The sun rises and the feigned bickering of an impossibly wealthy 20-something couple fills the gritty video space with a weight as light as freshly sifted flour. The night sets in--usually around 3:15 a.m., to be exact--and the creep show starts. I'm a wimp who likes to be scared by spectacles like this, so my heart had a few starts (the footprints through the powder! the door slam!), but in all, what a snooze.

So, after my hiatus, I'll have to work my way up to better pictures.

Tonight I made it to the end of my old stand-by, My Man Godfrey (1936). I keep a handful of DVDs unpacked in a stack of urgent belonging that I need at my ready. There's my William Wordsworth anthology, the third edition of the American Heritage, a thesaurus, Marlene Dietrich's ABC, Singin' in the Rain, The Godfather, Clueless, and My Man. Also, notebooks and pens. In an apartment that's still decorated in brown corrugate, these are happy bits of equipage. I put on My Man every other night or so for 15 or 20 minutes while I sit upright in a blue ladder-back chair eating my dinner from a large serving plate (new dishes have not been purchased yet), so it takes a while to get through a full movie. Besides, I really only need a few minutes of comfortable distraction.

Tonight I finished it though, and decided again that Carole Lombard is my favorite actress of all-time, just behind Barbara Stanwyck. My Man Godfrey is a perfect Hollywood narrative. No surprises. You know where the story is headed. Carole Lombard plays an airhead we can love, and William Powell speaks with a cadence that makes you think the words are just dancing off his lips.

A day or two before I drove my moving van out of Chicago I caught Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are. While I don't think it's a great film, for its jarring tantrum scenes that usually feel unprovoked, its overwhelming melancholy struck a true chord in me. I haven't seen a children's movie that has ever been so eager to explore that emotion, unrelentingly. The critical consensus marks that as a detriment to it, but I remember feeling a melancholy strangely similar to this as a kid that I could never articulate. It was sweet.

Sweet dreams for tonight. I hope to see Good Hair tomorrow! Or maybe Capitalism: A Love Story. Or Antichrist. Or...

Lynch Socks it to the iPhone

2009-10-21T15:37:00.000-04:00

I'm willing to pay a good ticket price to hear David Lynch lecture on the vices of movie-watching on the iPhone. Until then...

...that about sums it up for me.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: Oh, O!

2009-10-07T20:41:00.003-04:00

O is a cute letter. A jubilant, silly one. Not silly in the sense that it connotes frivolity or ignorance; but silly in its infinite, tubby rotundness that when pronounced makes its speaker sound awfully harmless and light. I think if there is a letter that most describes my personality it would definitely be O, even if I prefer the letters P and K (in that order). So I've got allegiance to my initials, who doesn't?

Back to O. Maybe I like it so much because, as a vowel, it is so easily malleable to sound like any of its four other brethren vowels, like for example, the letter A in:

Oxygen (out of a tank)
Why wait till you are under a tent to breath it in?

But mostly, as described in previous notes on Ms. Dietrich's alphabet, O words sound outstandingly like themselves. Like the most important O word of all!

Optimism
Have it. There is always time to cry later.

Jennifer's Body (2009)

2009-10-04T23:50:00.004-04:00

Until I saw Jennifer's Body the only Megan Fox I knew was the scantily clad brunette who basked in the perfect bronze glow of Michael Bay's plasticky summer blockbusters, the Transformer series. To say she "basked" in his artificial light, though, is probably a misnomer; it's more apt to say she was simply on display, like a mannequin with changeable sexy facial expressions. Her character in Transformers is a cliche to say the least, a mass offense to feminism at worst. In either case, it's safe to say we did not get a fair opportunity to judge Ms. Fox as an actress so much as we did as a Forever 21 model.

When I heard of her role in the new teen horror movie, Jennifer's Body I figured this was redemption time. Poof, be gone, Mr. Bay! While she hit the big time in the director's toy robot movies that gave her wider visibility in a business that's dauntingly difficult to break into, it happened at the expense of becoming objectified as a "salty" piece of meat.

That is the screenwriter of Jennifer's Body, Diablo Cody's code for "hot." Fox sat quietly in her savory marinade but rose, ironically, as a hungry maneater. If there was ever a more clever and cunning response to the platitudes given her in Transformers, I can't fathom it: Jennifer (Megan Fox) tears boys limb from limb, savoring their flesh, ruthlessly. So much for that beauteous bronze glow, it's more like a first-degree sunburn now.

More than a response to the silly incoherence of the role Michael Bay provided for Fox, however, Jennifer's Body is foremost a teen picture--a woman's picture even, and of course, a horror. I like the sequence of those classifications, going from teen to woman to horror; swirl them all into one and you've got a dozen Lifetime movies--"We triumph because we're victims!"

But Jennifer is kind of a victim. She's got more than a fair share of daddy issues that leave her to the devices of a rather cruel gang of rockers from the city. Visiting her hometown of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota, the guys lure her effortlessly away from her dedicated best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried), in, of all things, a van. Not an up-to-date, modern mini-van; no, this is a full-on rapemobile, the kind from the kidnapping dramatizations in Unsolved Mysteries (coincidentally, that show ended its run with host Robert Stack in 2002 on the Lifetime network, go figure).

To parse through this line of thought though, as a teen film it works as a gory satire in its depiction of the impossible social pressures, emotional frailty, and physical uncertainty of being a teenager. "Hell is a teenaged girl," says Needy in the film's opening line. Jennifer's Body makes that a literal reality.

Directed by a woman (Karyn Katsuma) and written by a woman (Diablo Cody), this could also be classified as woman's picture. Two females lead the movie as both primary protagonist (Needy) and antagonist (Jennifer). The men are only minor characters, though ones that work as the only fuel for the girls' motivations. While Jennifer seeks revenge by gobbling up the guts of her dates like they were Thanksgiving turkeys, Needy has a more reasoned approach.

After a lifetime of neglect from her bestie Jennifer, Needy is at her pal's side devotedly, sympathizing with her plight of prettiness and cruelty because that's simply the state of the status quo. It's not until she comes to the mature realization that Jennifer keeps her around as a punching bag--she's the nerdy friend used and abused to build up her self-confidence--that their relationship dynamic takes a turn.

For those concerned with spoilers, stop here, but the fact that Needy pushes a stake through the heart of her vampire companion that brings us to the film's final bookend at her new residence at the psych ward, well, that too speaks to the tenuous nature of female friendships. More specificially though, what does it mean that Needy, a perfectly normal teenaged girl with a healthy love life and aptitude for scholastics ends her high school tour at a mental institution? That Jennifer, a pretty but utterly mean and insecure girl, is killed?

On the surface, there doesn't seem to be much hope anticipated or delineated in Jennifer's Body for young women. They can definitely speak up for themselves, but that isn't a much improved-upon statistic from another female director's films, Amy Heckerling's 15-year-old teen pic Clueless from 1995, for example.

Of course, looking at it as a horror solely, Jennifer's Body takes on a alternate meaning. Where young and adolescent women are dressed up in mini-skirts as meat for the killing in recent horrors (e.g. Saw), at least Jennifer's Body keeps the women at the helm, dressed for the most part, and packaged with a brain.

Still, Jennifer's defining characteristic, to me, comes back to its lead, Ms. Fox. She's the star. And she speaks. It may be in the tongue of Cody's clamoring colloquialisms ("Hey, Monistat." "What's up, Vagisil?"), but it's a big step away from Michael Bay's direction. That isn't a bad thing.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: N

2009-09-29T20:44:00.000-04:00

Oh, sleek and snappy dark nail polish that is so the in thing this season in fashion, I adore you. You make my punky fashion spirit socially acceptable at the office, even as you chip away to that gnawed dot of color in the middle of my nail weeks after a painting.

Unfortunately, Ms. Dietrich does not agree. Though, I choose to believe that were she alive today she'd be right on board with this progressive punk vibe. Alas...

Nail Polish
Dark nail polish is vulgar.

Win or Lose: A Summer Camp Story (2009)

2009-09-24T23:19:00.000-04:00

Have you ever heard of Camp Ojibwa? I had not until this summer, when I saw director Louis Lapat’s documentary Win or Lose: A Summer Camp Story (2009) that takes place at this oddly named summer camp for boys. Perusing Ojibwa's website I have learned that the camp has been around for decades, dating back to 1928 when its founding director set up shop in the North Woods of Wisconsin. I suspect it is quietly famous among the generations of boys who have attended its lakeshore locale, who Lapat says consists of mostly the affluent Jewish, a kind of Skull and Bones society for kids revved up for field hockey matches and mess hall banter rather in place of forged political ties and the carrying out of dirty tricks.

Boys ranging in age from seven to 16 leave their home cities for eight weeks to meet there, trading in their parents’ cul-de-sac playground for intense training and bonding sessions that culminate in the camp’s famous “Collegiate Week.” This is the final, defining event of the boys’ interim adventure that Lapat features in his film. The campers are divided into teams and assigned a coach who has named them after his favorite college team, hence “Collegiate Week.” All coaches are Ojibwa alums. When their team is down they specialize in shirtless rages of abdominal flexing, and yelling that sounds more like a baritone bark—that special kind of sports-related incoherence that 20-year-old guys are so good at inflecting. You may have just felt a testosterone rush.

Lapat tempers that testosterone buzz by inserting himself in the narrative—as an animated punk rocker in stick figure form—that lends a touch of sentimentality amidst the Collegiate Week’s fierce competitiveness. He was a four-time Ojibwa camper that shared a common lack of athletic ability with the greater majority of his campmates: Ojibwa is a place for the scrawnier boys at school to live out the athletic dreams that they can never reach in reality. Though, there are still a few fellas peppered into the mix with enough ambition and ability to make you squirm at the far end of the dodgeball court like a scared dog. One of those kids is 10-year-old Jeremy Nachbar who pep talks his teammates with fluent vigor, and if we can bump this kid’s verbal score on the SAT, he will already be ready for professional coaching. He only needs a little more diversity in his vocabulary.

Judging by Jeremy’s coach, Andrew Robinson, the famously competitive ladies’ man and party

animal, who answers to the macho diminutive name “Arob” (think how perfect this name sounds bellowed through the air of a college house party), you can see where Jeremy gets his inspiration. But then there is coach Adam Korn with a soft belly and a kinder heart. An Ojibwa alumni of a different sort, Adam was probably the kid who was picked last for the team and starved for peer approval during his formative years at camp, and if there is any criticism of this well put together first feature from Lapat, served in a neat 58 minutes, it would be the dimmer spotlight that is placed on him. While the film explores a number of different characters in its course, Arob emerges as the movie’s clear star.

So I asked myself as I watched Win or Lose, is the lean cut and fast-talking Arob really the guy I want to be rooting for? Is he my hero, or is it Adam, or even better, is it the disaffected and wonderfully sarcastic 13-year-old Joel Lapin who thinks Collegiate Week is a joke and would prefer to drop competition and watch daytime TV? I can’t help but sympathize with the nerdy and naturally witty; Joel stole my heart, and I suspect he stole Lapat’s too. It is he, after all, who plays himself in a retrospective of animated vignettes that illustrate his own awkward adolescence and gothic fashion sense, but never bitterly. Like him, I was content on the sidelines watching Joel and Jeremy, and Arob and Adam play, because abstractly, those portraits led inevitably to flashes of my own adolescent and young adult memories (all of the humiliations and exhilarations at once), and I felt at peace knowing they were behind me. Tomorrow morning I’ll face a corporate gunslinger shooting down my cubicle. Maybe then I’ll think of Ojibwa. For tomorrow’s distress will soon be a mere flicker in the memories of yore.

Director Louis Lapat’s Win or Lose: A Summer Camp Story has aired in the Midwest on PBS, and will continue to screen nationwide on PBS in the coming months. It has screened at the Wisconsin, Minneapolis, and Sausalito Film Festivals, and will play at the Denver International Film Festival this November. It is also the winner of the Student Academy Awards in New York. Contact your PBS station for airdates.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: M

2009-09-14T01:12:00.003-04:00

It's after midnight as I write this and the Monday morning workday is a scant few hours away. It's fitting, then, that Marlene tell us a little something about...

Melancholy
Having the blues, or Weltschmerz. Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy.

That sentiment speaks to something else I miss on Sunday nights: Mad Men. Having finished the first season and jonesing now for the second, while I long for a cable subscription to watch the third, I thought of Draper and company as I read what Marlene had to say about the...

Martini
I am deeply suspicious of men who carry martinis to the lunch or dinner table.

Such savvy intuition!

Ponyo (2009)

2009-09-07T19:54:00.005-04:00

Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo was one of the two great movies I caught over the holiday weekend. The other is hardly as hug-able as Ponyo--Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad, a miracle of politically incorrect humor (maybe more on it later)--but Ponyo could have kept me bubbling over happily on its own. A little goldfish longing to be a girl sneaks to the surface where her fateful friend Sosuke scoops her up in a pail. They're instant BFFs. And after licking a cut clean on Sosuke's finger, Ponyo the fish turns into the girl you see in the above still, running across waves of water to be with her friend. She's not just weightless on water, either; she's a total free spirit with almost no learned associations of daily human life: a towel, a bowl of soup, a lick of honey from a teaspoon is as wondrous to Ponyo as her skipping across waves is to us.

As usual, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's hand-drawn animation is stellar, lively, and a fine dedication to an art form that is now overshadowed by computer animation. Comparing the virtues of hand-drawn vs. computer animation is a little bit of apples and oranges, but there is something to be said for the signature oozy forms Miyazaki is so great at creating. Visually, his Howl's Moving Castle (2004) is one cloud form melting seamlessly into another, and when I think of his Spirited Away (2001), it's the animated goop that spreads like a molasses trail off spooky characters from the underworld that I see; it's a look I would not immediately associate with animation that's not CGI. After all, with the advent of computer animation cartoons became increasingly aerodynamic. He-Man looks like he was modeled after Zac Efron more than he was a boxy pro wrestler, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have definitely had some work done. Add the bulbous Pixar figures to the mix and cartoons of late look downright bubbly. That's altogether fine by me, but it's not an aesthetic I'd assign to the rawness that hand-drawn images inherit. And yet, there is Miyazaki.

The theater was packed with kids. I haven't seen a movie with that many munchkins in ages and it added another dimension to the experience. So that's my recommendation: don't just see Ponyo in theaters, see it in an afternoon screening with a horde of squirmy, runny-nosed kids. The clouds will lift.