The House Next Door

The House Next Door has moved to http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/

The current address, http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com, will also redirect you. See you there!

Read more!

By Ali Arikan

When Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Best Director Award for Three Monkeys at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008, he ended his speech with a simple sentence: “I dedicate this film to my lonely and beautiful country, which I passionately love.” The speech itself had been more elegiac than jubilant, delivered with the director’s dulcet tone, a short melody of gratitude to a festival that had done more than any other for this Young Turk’s career. But it was that final dedication that will echo in the hearts of his fellow countrymen and women for a long time. With one brief line, he captured the very gist of modern Turkey: a solitary land of infectious passions, tragic beauty, and deep melancholy.

Naturally, what’s true of Turkey is even more true of Istanbul. The city’s allure is magical; its sense of isolation at the crossroads of the East and the West palpable; its passions explosive. It’s not at all surprising that this city of contrasts, which seems to defy the fabric of convention itself, has given rise to a particularly unique musical scene.

More on that in just a short while: first, a detour. It’s a shame that the cinema of Turkey is generally synonymous, in the dorm rooms of vexatious frat boys at least, with cheapo knock-offs of Hollywood blockbusters. It's certainly true that those films are funny (even though the real point of the most infamous one of them all, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam aka The Turkish Star Wars, has been lost in all the fanboy hype—it’s not just a spoof of Hollywood, it’s a spoof of spoofs and of knock-offs, too); but they represent the nadir of an industry that found itself unable to adapt to the parallel rise in both the popularity of television and the physical costs of film in the 1970s.

The twenty or so years from the mid-'50s to the mid-'70s are infinitely more interesting, not just to cineastes, but also to more general lovers of film. Turkish cinema—or its metonym Yeşilçam, after the street in the sleazy Beyoğlu district of Istanbul where many of the local film companies had their studios (as in apartments, not back-lots)—lived through its halcyon years in that period, when Turkish output was about 300 films per year on average, the sixth biggest in the world. Remarkable for a country ravaged by wildly fluctuating economic and political instability.

Looking back at many of the films from the era, one’s overall appreciation is divided between a nostalgic longing for the old days, or—and this would be more true to non-Turkish viewers—a purely academic interest. Ironic detachment, that most annoying of qualities when appreciating a work of art, is almost impossible to forfeit for even the least cynical of viewers. The more popular fare of Yeşilçam’s heyday is at times naive to the point of nausea—the comedies, musicals and the tragedies, the three most popular genres of the time are virtually interchangeable—based on one simple storyline with three different endings.

Aside: One could argue the same goes for the more arthouse output of the late '70s with one obvious exception: Şerif Gören and Yılmaz Güney’s Cannes triumph Yol (The Way). You could say the same of the latter director's many other films, which, even though they have more in common with turn-of-the-century Marxist village stories of Russia (understandable, given that particular auteur’s personal politics), are, nonetheless, universal triumphs (Here’s a link to an excellent piece on Güney by Bilge Ebiri).

But what all these films, from the naive to the highbrow, had in common was an impeccable sense of time and place. Snapshots of the tangible as well as the intangible, they were ornate sets of looking glasses into the life of a country.

And it was the obliteration of that sense that was the most terrible result of the decline of homegrown Turkish cinema in the late '70s. As the country got richer, and interest in cinema started to rise again from its ashes (thanks, ironically, to television, and constant repeats of old Turkish films on various networks), a second golden age was heralded in the early nineties. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but the current output has been increasingly more interesting. After almost three decades running from itself, Turkish cinema has started to embrace that lonely, passionate, beautiful country.

Unlike its Romanian or Iranian counterparts, Turkish cinema has yet to make the leap from “curious esoterica” to “universal art.” It’s also still too early to speak of a Turkish New Wave. I would be the happiest little Turk alive (Turkling? Turklet?) if Yeşilçam were able to make that leap into genuine greatness, but it’s simply impossible to substantiate that claim as we near the end of the decade. Ceylan is this country’s only true bona-fide auteur. There are other exciting filmmakers like Zeki Demirkubuz or Yeşim Ustaoğlu (whose recent film Pandora’s Box is delightful), and I feel they have their best work still ahead of them.

But the one figure in Turkish cinema who speaks to me much more personally than any other is Fatih Akin (even though he’s actually German). Born in Hamburg to Turkish immigrant parents, Akın had a fairly successful career with “mid-brow” fare until his break-out neo-Yeşilçam saga Head-On won The Golden Bear in Berlin in 2004. His perspective as an outsider looking in to Turkish life and Turkish cinema, in the aforementioned festival darling or the far-more accomplished—and misunderstood—The Edge of Heaven (tell me that my soul’s forgiven), are closer to my own than any other Turkish filmmaker. Having lived more than half my life outside Turkey, my—fairly recent—return to Turkey was somewhat traumatic, and I find tiny glimpses of that in Akın’s vision. Identity is of key interest to him, and in Crossing The Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005), Akın explores how crucial music is to identity formation, and vice versa.

Unlike Head-On, which is a bona fide classic, and the best homage to Turkish cinematic melodrama, Crossing the Bridge is much less coherent, even wobbly at times, and unsure of itself. Though it crackles with wit and joy and zeal, it also struggles to live up to the director’s previous magnum opus (it’s also far less confident than The Edge of Heaven). The present that is Crossing The Bridge is unable to burst through the past that is Head-On, which is an unintentional meta commentary on Istanbul itself.

A documentary on the Istanbul music scene, the film begins with what sounds like an apocryphal quote from Confucius—that to understand a people, one need only listen to their music. A few seconds later, it is revealed that it comes from the lead singer of the popular (among the kids, at least) street-band Siyasiyabend, with eyes glazed so vividly from Turkish homegrown that they could be mistaken for a pair of Christmas hams. Later in the film, he will make the egregiously inaccurate statement that hard drugs only started to appear in Istanbul in the last few years. So those infamously subfusc Ottoman opium dens used to sell figs, I take it.

The film is chock full of these semi-profound soundbites, but the quote that opens the film is accurate in describing Istanbul: certainly the current music scene is much less a harmonious amalgamation of Eastern and Western forms, and more an amorphous, cacophonic chimera, and if one were inclined to stretch the metaphor, one could easily do so, and use it to describe the city itself, its architecture, its politics, its economy, but, most importantly, its people. The film captures that sense perfectly—what Yesilcam was most adept at doing. Most of the subjects might not be much to listen to (talking, singing, or playing), but the way they are presented is nothing short of beautiful.

Crossing The Bridge documents a musical journey, undertaken, ostensibly, by Alexander Hacke, the bassist for the German avant-garde powerhouse, Einstuerzende Neubauten (which, incidentally, is what I shall call my firstborn), as he tries to get a sense of the city’s musical panorama, having been fascinated by what he had seen of it when he came to the busy metropolis during the making of Head-On (he had worked on the score). Hacke, replete with his Euro-hipster swagger, and facial hair that borrows from, nay plagiarises, Fassbinder, saunters his sweaty stuff, somewhat annoyingly at first, through the hot and humid streets of Istanbul, all the while meeting a wide range of musicians—some of them great, others good, and not a fair few fucking terrible.

Siyasiyabend I’ve already mentioned. A few friends have heard of them, and they come recommended. “Why,” is the only word that comes to mind as the lead singer rolls a fatty and goes off on an acoustic meander overlooking the Golden Horn, the offshoot waterway into the heart of the European part of the city, renowned for its beauty. Gingerly, he croons to a pedestrian three-chord progression emanating from two acoustic guitars—one of which is most definitely out of tune. The scene is shot with such precision and such respect for the band, that one almost, ALMOST, overlooks the fact that the irony of bitching about shallowness while smoking a blunt is lost on this most over-earnest modern-day troubadour.

Sitting here in the middle class confines of an office cubicle, their world is as foreign to me as it must be for those living in NYC. This, though, is the reality of the city: hubs like Beyoğlu, the Mos Eisley of Istanbul, bring people together, and, most of the time, there is nothing in common but the music. A Canadian accompanies a Gypsy band during a traditional Thracian ballad; a Kurdish soprano makes use of the perfect acoustics of an archaic Ottoman bath; a Turkish pop star covers Madonna’s “Music.” Identities mesh, music prevails.

The cardinal sin of reviewing a film must be criticizing it for omissions it never cared about including in the first place. With a documentary such as this, I shall allow myself some leeway. The film does not document the city’s Greek, Armenian or Jewish music, which is a shame since all have had an indelible impression on what is now called the Turkish sound. And it’s also not because some of the inclusions are questionable not just for their musical talents, but also how representative they are of the scene itself. Take, for example, Ceza, the most famous of the recent Hip Hop singers from Istanbul. That his name means punishment in Turkish is apt since his music lacks both the subtle sophistication of latter-day American hip hop, and the poetry of mid-'90s rap, and as such sounds like someone having an episode, or speaking in tongues, or both. His entourage only make Ceza’s scenes all the more risible, as they bounce around Moda, a very affluent neighborhood on the Asian side, looking like the Hobbiton chapter of the Kris Kross Fan Club (Jump, yo!).

The Beyoğlu rock scene is not much to write home about, either. Try as they might, most of them can’t help but sound like 1983. Maybe I am being overly mean about this, but spend at least an hour in a Beyoğlu rock bar with a live band, and you’ll agree with me. Call me traditionalist, but I like my rock like I like my bed: Rocking! (You can also call me Al, but you’ve got to be my bodyguard first.)

Just like Turkish music itself, though, the film finds its niche as Akin and Hacke start to go ethnic. As they stray away from the confines of the city’s petit bourgeois youth toward more authentic sounds, the promise of the earlier scenes draws one back in, and never lets go. Their trip into the gypsy hinterland of Eastern Thrace is so full of joy, one can’t help but dance to the mesmerizing beats (especially if one has had a few bevvies, which, as the film also attests, is the best way to enjoy the music of the Turkish gypsies). It is from that moment on that the film transcends its raison d’etre; the musicians that follow—the sombre Orhan Gencebay, the vivacious Müzeyyen Senar (alas, not anymore since the 90-odd-year-old diva has recently had a stroke), and the legendary Sezen Aksu—form such an amazing trifecta that one forgets about the likes of Ceza, or Siyasiyabend, or any of the other rather bland, yet perfectly representative, acts. Crossing the Bridge is a bizarre film with parts that collapse like a house of cards. Yet when put together, one has a taste not just of the music of Istanbul, but of the city itself.

__________________________________________
Ali Arikan is the author of Cerebral Mastication. Follow his updates on Twitter.

Read more!

There's been a good many tempests directed at Ben Shapiro's Big Hollywood post "Top 10 Most Overrated Directors of All Time." Personal favorite response is from Victor Morton of Rightwing Film Geek—a rebuttal entitled "I blame Sonny."

Amy Taubin's Times article, "One Singular Auteur, Through Another," is all about Steven Soderbergh's upcoming documentary on Spalding Gray, a must-see for those fans (myself included) of the duo's 1996 collaboration, Gray's Anatomy.

And whose is that German cadence (but not really) reading a childhood favorite? (Hattip: Jason Bellamy)

_______________________________
"Links for the Day": A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

Read more!

I understand exactly how this bird feels. (Thanks Michael Grammar.)

Read more!

by Clara Loginov



After watching the beginning of season four of Big Love, I think we can safely give up on ever having a premiere of this show that isn’t a busy and exhausting whirlwind. The show will always set an overwhelming number of balls rolling at the beginning of each season, leaving us only to hope that the threads will be weaved together in a fulfilling manner throughout the season. That said, the season four premiere is somewhat deceptively messy — though it packs in a lot, it also seems to indicate the paths it intends to follow throughout the season.

Bill Henrickson’s (Bill Paxton) business endeavors and his roles as a husband, a religious leader to his family, and now a church that extends only slightly outside his family, have always been inextricably linked. As someone who was never really exposed to religion personally, it was one of the first things that intrigued me about the show even back in season one, when, during the first Henrickson family dinner, Bill said grace and prayed for a successful store opening, establishing a relationship with God that is often best described as self-serving.

In the somewhat ironically titled “Free At Last”, written by Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer and directed by Daniel Attias, so much of the plot revolves around various moneymaking endeavors that it’s clear that this season, the show means business, literally.

But before getting into the business side of things, let’s note that the first scene of the episode picked up on a different kind of endeavor for the Henrickson family: the establishment of their own church, which has been a long time coming. After the events of last season, namely the revelation that the Woodruff letter (proving that the Mormon Church never intended to truly ban polygamy) was a fake, as well as Barb’s (Jeanne Tripplehorn) excommunication from the Mormon church, it is perhaps the moment the family needs this most. The congregation of this unnamed church consists of the Henrickson clan and the remainder of Don Embry’s (Joel McKinnon Miller) sundered family. Though we never learned much about Don’s wives, he’s clearly a broken and humbled man in comparison to the, well, kind of prickish guy we met at the beginning, and the testimony he offers in the newly established church, that he feels it will be “manna to a starving people” is kind of heartbreaking, though, like with the other testimonies, it is clear that he is talking primarily about his own needs.

The testimonies offered by the Henrickson women seem to be the show’s way of picking up from last year, and are perhaps an indication of what we can expect from each of them this season. Though the episode doesn’t revisit the setting beyond this scene, or even reference the church after it, it’s crucial in setting up the episode’s, and presumably the season’s, key arcs and ideas. Barb’s and Nicki’s (Chloe Sevigny) testimonies both indicate a desire to pick up the pieces after shattering events, namely Barb’s aforementioned excommunication and Nicki’s near-extrication from the marriage after exploring her feelings for Ray the DA (Chip Esten, who appears briefly in this episode, and is totally not amused about anything) in the case against her father.

And if Barb and Nicki are lumped together in a way, in this same scene, third wife Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) is clearly distinguished in a way she hasn’t been before, which is to say that here the distinguishing factor is not just her youth and sexuality. Barb’s later statement that Margie is blossoming is demonstrated pretty much right away, being established visually, at first, in the long shot of the congregation singing, with Margie dressed in colors that are much brighter than the whites and pastels and grays of everyone else in the room. This is evidence to hopefully prove what Todd has predicted in the past, that season four will be Margie’s turn in the spotlight. If this episode doesn’t necessarily embark on some big plot for Margie, it does connect her closely to the themes that the show seems to be setting itself up to explore this season.

Because of the way Big Love’s world tangles religion, romance and business, it is often almost as important to find a business partner as it is a romantic partner, and relationships seem to work the best when those involved are on the same page and have a mutually beneficial business arrangement, no matter who they are or where they live. It’s why Barb was happier when she could be the face of HomePlus, Bill’s only enterprise at that time; it’s why Laura is the wife Alby has given the most power to; it’s why, we can perhaps speculate, Don lost his second and third wives. In this episode we see Lois seemingly try to fix her relationship with Frank with, oh, let’s call it love (in a bizarre scene where she forces him, at gunpoint, to take her out for ice cream) and when that fails, she attempts to repair things (granted, which in this case means that her husband doesn’t attempt to kill her, but let’s go with it) with a financial arrangement.

To get back to Margie, what season three established, and what this season looks to expound upon, is her entrepreneurial ambitions and skills, as well as the compatibility of her business relationship with Bill. When it’s her turn to give testimony in the opening scene, she hopes that the casino that Weber Gaming is opening, in partnership with the Blackfoot Indians, will be successful. Her home shopping channel-type jewelry business seems to be thriving, and the naïveté that’s been thus far associated with her character seems to be turning into an odd sort of integrity, as she passes off tasks at home so as to keep her promise to her boss at the television station that the jewelry business will be her sole focus.

Unlike with Barb and Nicki, it seems that if we get a season that offers a deeper exploration of Margie, it may not include as much probing of her past as the other two, and may rather focus on who she is becoming, as this is clearly a formative time in her adult life. Much of the character’s struggles with her past seemed to be put to rest in “Come, Ye Saints,” where she finally dealt with the death of her mother. She has no other family that we know of, unlike her sister wives, who bring a lot of baggage in this regard. Though her ties to the Principle are arguably the most tenuous, for this reason, they have also wavered less than those of Barb and Nicki, especially as their troubled pasts were explored in seasons two and three, respectively. And Margie’s relationship with Bill has remained the most stable over the last three seasons, though it’s mostly her sunny disposition and eagerness-to-please that have kept her obedient, for lack of a better word. It will be interesting to see if Margie’s growing role as a moneymaker will bring her closer to Bill as it largely did in season three, or if she’ll struggle with staying in a patriarchal relationship as she comes to understand her potential in a way she never had before. The fact that she has to keep her business secret from Bill for the time being is already an indication that it may be Margie’s turn to question her marriage, something we’ve yet to see her do.

As it is the most divisive aspect of Big Love, I should probably state my personal opinion and admit that I like the Juniper Creek element of the show more than most, and I do think that the compound continues to play an important role in the show’s universe. I still find many of the Juniper Creek scenes engaging and revealing, and while these scenes sometimes have tonal problems, their sheer bizarreness is itself essential to the show.

The original function of the compound was largely to make the Henricksons appear as a normative version of polygamy in contrast, and while three seasons have been more than enough to establish the central family within this context and Juniper Creek isn’t really needed for that purpose, it still can be seen as representing an aspect of American life, which in my take is that of unassimilated immigrants, or any unassimilated fringe group, really. I have a pretty strange family, immigrants from the USSR, many of whom never made it a goal to fit in cleanly in American society. It may sound crazy, but sometimes the Juniper Creek-ers just make more sense to me, the strange squalor of their homes being more reminiscent of my childhood home than any of the Henricksons' three little boxes. I’ve got to imagine (read: hope) that there are some other people out there who feel this way.

But to get back to the episode at hand, “Free At Last” demonstrated some of more effective ways that the show uses compound characters, in terms of intersections between those characters and the Henricksons. In terms of tone, the scene in which Adaleen (Mary Kay Place) informs Nicki of Roman Grant’s, Nicki’s father, death is a great showcase of what Big Love is so uniquely good at, with much of this owing to Place’s understanding of the show’s dark humor. Adaleen doesn’t know how to break the news to Nicki, so she despairingly sends her to the freezer where she’s stored Roman’s body (“Just get the bacon! Get me bacon please!”), so as to have Nicki discover the body herself. It’s so absurdly abnormal, but with Place’s slyly dark take on the scene, and Sevigny’s dead serious one, the scene is a tiny yet perfect example of Nicky’s disturbed upbringing, and I found it extremely moving and sad.

As a whole, this very hectic and exhausting episode brought everything together using an idea that Big Love established from the beginning, one that has remained a constant theme, which is that greed and the desire for wealth know no barriers across the various groups that we encounter–this is one of the biggest uniting factors for all characters on the show, and the contrast is primarily in the way the characters go about obtaining these things. In the final scene, set at the casino after its successful opening night, the Henrickson’s are brought together when the case of cash they earned is opened for them to look at. Bill started the episode by establishing a new church, and ended it with the opening of a successful business, and as far as Bill is concerned, his riches are bestowed upon him by God, for being righteous and following the Principle.

Take Lois, on the other hand, who has gotten herself involved in any number of dodgy schemes, the latest of which is bird smuggling, and doesn’t care that she’s completely outside of the boundaries of what is legal and, further to the point, normal. I love the idea of Lois living in an apartment in the middle of town, away from the compound, completely unwilling to change her behavior or demeanor despite the change of setting. I don’t know if the show intends to just use this as a darkly comic diversion, or if they plan to go somewhere with it, but I’m actually quite hoping it’s the latter. In any case, I think there is always a place on this show for a group of people who live even more deeply in the outliers of society than the Henricksons.

Little thoughts:

• Sorry for the delay with this piece. I’m in the midst of a grand move to a different country (okay, so it’s from Canada to the United States) and don’t currently have HBO. Or a TV. Or a home, for that matter. By the end of the month, these should be up in a timelier manner (though next week’s may be super late since it’s moving week.) I also want to thank Todd for letting me write up Big Love, and while I don’t expect to fill his shoes, I’ll do…something.



• This episode had some pretty wonderful humorous moments, and Barb’s terrifically bizarre declaration that “Mormons don’t like salmon, we like crab legs” was way up there for me. I did some, admittedly hasty, googling on the topic and didn’t really come up with any interesting sources that reference Mormons and crab legs. Does anyone know if there’s any truth to Barb’s assertion, or are we
  just to take that moment as a sort of desperate grasp for control on her part?



• I hope they give Ben some sort of actual plotline this season, because suddenly being lead singer for a teen Christian rock band doesn’t quite count. I was pleased, though, to see his band validate a theory that a friend of mine has, that all musicians who are fat are bass players. Ok, while this isn’t always true, think about it, it’s true most of the time.



• That phone call from Teenie was kind of ridiculous, I’m just sayin’. And the poor girl has been away at camp for way too long. All she did was show some neighborhood boys dirty pictures. One would expect at least Bill to be proud of her business prowess and keen understanding of supply and demand at a young age.



• How did people feel about the image of Bill taking Roman’s white cowboy hat? I personally found the symbolism to be a bit heavy-handed. It also let us know that Jerry and Tommy (really—Tommy and Jerry, Big Love?) are not letting up on Bill yet, but I honestly hope this isn’t a plotline that is dragged out even further.



• I did mean to include a discussion of the new credits sequence in the main discussion, but it didn’t really fit in. The consensus seems to be that most people are okay with the new sequence, but I haven’t heard anyone who prefers it to the original. If you do, I’d love to hear your take. Personally, I don’t see why this had to be changed: It clearly indicates something of a change in direction, and lets us know that the show, and the paths of these characters, may be getting darker, but these things are well enough explored in the show itself. I liked having that sequence there at the beginning, because it’s a constant reminder of the purpose of the Principle and the characters’ original goal, no matter how far they may stray from it.

______________________________________________
Clara Loginov is a freelance writer currently without home, nation or possessions. (No religion either — imagine!) This bio will be updated when any one of the above is obtained. But she does have a Twitter: http://twitter.com/ClaraLogs.

Read more!

By Dan Callahan

When Eric Rohmer entered a space with his camera, whether it was a Parisian apartment or a beach or a forest, he somehow managed to enlarge that space into an environment that shimmered and tingled with a kind of spiritual, almost supernatural presence (his only antecedent in this spooky regard was Murnau). He must have had his technical tricks and preferences, but I don't think it comes down to what lenses he used, or whatever stratagems he devised to capture natural light, or even the people he picked to be in his films, almost all of whom had a natural grace. Rohmer had an ineffable way of looking at his educated men and women as they talked and talked themselves in circles, making plans and describing their own feelings and sensations after the fact until we forget what action they were planning to take and lose ourselves in a kind of heightened inertia. All the while, Rohmer watched over them like a forgiving but sometimes judgmental God.

_____________________________________
To read the rest of the article at The L Magazine, click here.

Read more!

By Odienator

So, Eric Rohmer is dead, which is not at all surprising given that he was 89. What is surprising, at least for me, is my immediate thought upon hearing of his death. I thought of Father Brogan, the Jesuit who taught my undergraduate political science class at my college. Like Mssr. Rohmer, Father Brogan is also dead, and I took his class in the Spring of '89—coincidentally Rohmer's age—but neither of those is the reason I thought of him.

Father Brogan was an old man, a servant of God with a scholarly grey beard, a penchant for blue dress shirts (he never wore a collar), and a tendency to drone on for the entire class about "The Common Good." I had him in the C pattern of my schedule, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 11-11:50 AM. Despite being fascinated by politics, especially the dirty kind that ran through my home state like shit through a goose, I found Political Science 101 an incredible bore. Occasionally, Father Brogan would shake us from our glazed stupor over the Common Good by saying something filthy and/or off the wall, but he rarely strayed from the topic. Once he said "shit" with the fury of someone who had just fallen ass-first into the fires of Hell, and another time he talked about sucking the Government's Tits, which were at the time represented by Barbara Bush's knockers. But the other 97% of the time, it was All Common Good, All The Time. There was so much ado about The Common Good that my final exam was me repeating the definition of the Common Good thirteen different ways. It was a masterpiece of term-paper bullshit, and the man, bless his heart, gave me an A-minus as my final grade for the class.

Outside of the subject matter, Poli Sci 101 was consistent in one other way: At the beginning of every class, Father Brogan would open his blue notebook and recite a prayer. Not a prayer to praise His Holy Name or to give big-ups to the Virgin Mary. No, Father Brogan was a Republican, and his prayers were always more political than theological. "Heavenly Father," began Father Brogan on the particular day that linked him and Rohmer forever in my memory, "please guide George Bush's hand to continue the work of the great Ronald Reagan." Head bowed, I offered up a canceling-out prayer: "No, sweet Jesus, please strike George Bush and that son of a bitch Reagan with thy lightning! We ask these things in your name…"

After the partisan prayer, Father Brogan called on us to discuss our homework. I sat in front of the the class, as I was wont to do in school because I was a humongous grade whore whose hand was always up. "Mr. Hernandez," he said to the grade whore with the permanently raised hand, "do you know the answer?" "It's Henderson," I said for the 100th time before showing the class I had actually read the boring ass material we'd been assigned. I still think Willie Hernandez got the A I deserved in this class. I honestly don't remember what the question was, but I am sure it had something to do with The Common-You-Know-What. But I do remember what happened next.

Whether inspired by my answer or some random memory popping into his aging brain, Father Brogan started telling us about some French movie. "Blah blah blah blah blah," he said, for it certainly wasn't interesting to me, at least not until he said "and then Claire climbed a ladder and Jérôme came face to face (pause) with Claire's knee."

He paused, and looked heavenward before continuing to speak. "And at once, Jérôme became obsessed with that heavenly, heavenly knee."

As he continued to describe the film, or more specifically, the titular object of Le genou de Claire, horror washed over me in waves. Father Brogan was getting HOT over this. And not just a little hot, either. He was sighing, smacking his lips and practically panting. His face and neck were turning red and he became more animated. "All this over a KNEE?!!" my confused 18-year-old brain asked. "What's so fucking compelling about a knee? Now, Claire's Kootykat—that I can understand!" I figured I'd better pay attention, because there had to be more to it than this. It's a French movie, I reasoned, and PBS had shown me over the years that French movies were perverted as shit. "Maybe her knee has a hidden vagina in it!" I considered. Suddenly I became hooked on the story.

"Jérôme wants to touch (long pause) Claire's knee so much," panted Father Brogan. "And one day, he gets his chance. He…"

Suddenly, Father Brogan stopped talking about the movie. "But back to the Common Good," he said. "WHAT?!!" my inner voice shrieked. "Where's the rest of the story? What the hell happened next? Did he touch her knee and blow up? Did she slap him? Was there or was there not a hidden knee vagina?!" My face must have registered shock, because the professor addressed me directly. "Is there a problem, Mr. Hernandez?"

"Um, no," I said.

Later that day, I called the Great Love of my Life, who was also in college, albeit in Tennessee. An arts history major who spoke fluent French, I was sure she'd know of this French movie. When I described the plot, she said "yeah, I've seen that. Claire's Knee. Eric Rohmer directed it."

"So what happens?" I asked. "Does he touch her knee or not?!"

"Silly boy," she said to me, "that isn't even the point of the movie."

"How can't it be?" I protested. "It's the name of the damn movie!"

"Still," she said in that "you're so unrefined" tone of hers I hated. "It's much deeper than that."

"Well, does he fuck her?" I asked.

"Must you be so crude about art?" she asked, shaming me. After that, I certainly wasn't going to ask about hidden genitalia in knees. I sighed in surrender.

"PBS is going to run some Rohmer during their beg-a-thon this year," she told me. "Why don't you find out for yourself what happens to Claire and her knee?"

Eventually I found out about Claire's knee and Pauline's beach and Chloe's afternoon, a night at Maud's and many other Rohmer stories. More than once, I was bored out of my fucking mind. But also, more than once, I was intrigued, surprised and riveted by what I saw unfolding onscreen. And I have Father Brogan's R-rated reaction to a PG-rated joint to thank for that.

R.I.P. Eric Rohmer. And Father Brogan too.

___________________________________
Odienator has officially retired from blogging, but occasionally pulls a Brett Favre.

Read more!

Thank you for your films, Monsieur Scherer. Perceval will shepherd you. Say hello to Pascale as you pass the full moon.

UPDATE: Dave Kehr says it best.

Read more!

A Rumination by Dan Jardine

There are many reasons that Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset demand, like Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, The Godfather Parts I and II, to be addressed as a single unit, but two are predominant. Firstly, doing so allows us to enjoy the invigorating spectacle of the two films' bold balancing act, as on the one hand there stands the optimism and hopefulness of the (more) conventionally romantic Before Sunrise, while on the other hand we witness the often savage skewering of same in the much bleaker and despairing sequel. Secondly, the two films are more rewarding when consumed as one because we observe the counter-development of these films’ protagonists, as they effectively switch positions and outlooks over the course of the two stories, all the while maintaining the opposites attract magnetism that drives the romantic genre.

Further, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are two films that have a deceptively simple concept masking their depth and grandness of design. What could be more straightforward than placing two attractive, intelligent people together in two gorgeous cultural landmarks, and letting them, to borrow from Hamlet, use their words, words, words to seduce both the audience and each other? And yet, behind this thin façade are two edgy and wise films that I continue to find, a dozen or more viewings down the road, profound in purpose and effect. These two films, which mark director Richard Linklater's crowning achievement as a filmmaker, prove craftily subversive, as the director seduces us with the conventions of a traditional love story, teasing out our expectations, only to undermine them time and again with cynicism and even despair.

Sunrise and Sunset coyly employ, then cleverly attack the romantic delusions that have been passed down through the ages via various popular culture media. Moreover, these films ask us to consider the very nature and purpose of our existence in a fragmentary, superficial and transient universe. Amid some of the most beautiful art and architecture that Europe has to offer, and often accompanied by a soundtrack of history's most enduring composers (Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Strauss), the two leads, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), search for meaning and permanence in a world that emphasizes disposability. The contrast of the past and its constant glories with the confusion and transience of the modern is surely not accidental. In the context of a world where we are only expected to be as happy as our latest acquisition, we share the experiences of the protagonists, who soak up the atmosphere of cultures that have been built over centuries.

Finally, to wrap up this prolonged introduction, I must come clean with a bit of a confessional aside in order to reveal a deeply personal reason that Linklater’s films have, beyond what I hope to show are some impressive aesthetic appeal, held me in their sway. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset have acted as a strange sort of Greek chorus as I have faced down the challenge of enduring the dissolution of my marriage. Having the two leads in these movies echo my thoughts and reveal my feelings in some of the movies' most powerful scenes has been both unsettling in a “how did they know that’s how I felt?” way, and comforting in a “so, I’m not the only one who feels this way!” sort of way.

In Before Sunrise, the young twenty-something couple's conversation is preoccupied with death, transience and the fragility of life. It is both moving and telling that the story that wins Celine over and convinces her to disembark the train and spend the night in Vienna with Jesse revolves around the tale he tells of himself as a child seeing his grandmother's ghost in the spray of a water hose, a fact that we learn in a conversation that also focuses on reincarnation, the fracturing of the individual spirit in the modern world, and Celine's 24/7 obsession with her own mortality. In fact, when the couple first meet, she is reading a George Bataille anthology titled Madame Edwarda, Le Mort (The Dead Man.) Further, the young couple visit the Friedhof der Namenlosen, a graveyard filled with Viennese suicide and plague victims, many of them resting for eternity in the sort of anonymity that had Thomas Gray opining that "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air." And near the film's end, when Jesse quotes from Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening," he focuses upon the passages that emphasize the inevitability of decline and death ("Time will have its Fancy/To-morrow or To-day").

All the while, the couple search for evidence of things that can persist. Staying awake in defiance of that harbinger of mortality—the night—hoping to cheat the death of each day by stealing the time that they shouldn't even be having together, their conversations inevitably swing back to all the proofs that they see around them of the ephemeral, particularly in the realm of human relationships, where nothing sticks, where disintegration and collapse seem to be the norm. It is not merely in conversation, of course, that they hope to cheat death, but also in their burgeoning relationship. It is standard operating procedure in the romance genre to escape mortality through timeless love. In a daring bit of teasery, Linklater takes this expectation and dangles the hope for a happily ever after ending for the duration of both films.

Immersed in centuries-old art and architecture, the young couple in Before Sunrise search for meaning and clarity in their conversations, hoping that the connection they are forging will give them something to cling to in this potential shipwreck of life. Yet it is only when we revisit the couple nine years later in Before Sunset that it is clear these lessons have been internalized. The Celine and Jesse of this film are so young and unseasoned that they don't realize just how special this connection and their time together is, and it is only after nine years of struggle that they are able to put what they had together in Vienna into its proper perspective. The magnitude and rarity of their Viennese Brief Encounter is only evident through the perspective that the years provide. Also, on the most practical level, Sunset must be seen as a completion of the previous film insofar as the latter film picks up where Sunrise left off. Furthermore, the second film provides high relief for the first, as Sunset re-imagines the themes, moods and conversations of Sunrise from a new vantage point nine years hence. Indeed, Sunrise acts much like Sir Walter Raleigh's Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd, a determinedly sceptical poetic response to The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, Christopher Marlowe's self-consciously ironic romantic paean to pastoral idylls. The dialectical tension between the styles and outlooks of these two films serves to enhance our appreciation of their depth and significance. Like The Godfather Parts I and II, these two films are fulfilling when taken as parts of a whole, rather than as separate entities, and viewing the films in a single sitting is a much more rewarding and complete experience of the films.

Before Sunrise appeared on the scene relatively early in the career of director Richard Linklater, and in it he seems content to let his protagonists' words and the beauty of the Viennese cityscape do most of the talking for him. While Robin Wood's seminal essay "Rethinking Romantic Love: Before Sunrise" offers a spirited defense of a deeper reading of the film's cinematic qualities, using one scene in particular (the imaginary phone calls), to point out how sophisticated Linklater's visual instincts are, the reality is that Before Sunrise consists of a largely static camera, with characters delivering the dialogue in a series of standard two shots, while occasionally breaking the camera away long enough to linger lovingly on the gorgeousness that is Vienna.

However, by the time he filmed Before Sunset, Linklater seems to have developed a little more cinematic ambition. The fluid camerawork in Sunset distinguishes the film from its more static predecessor, as Linklater glides through the streets of Paris, rarely resting his shots for more than a second or two on the beauty that surrounds his protagonists, delivering the city sidelong glances instead, as the couple, reflecting the increased speed with which time is passing them by, roam the Parisian streets and waterways. The camera seems to recognize that this couple does not have the same luxury of time that they did nine years previous, as even the film's length (80 minutes vs. the 105 minutes of Sunrise) places the characters in the context of even further temporal urgency. Furthermore, the anxiety and restlessness that informs their attitudes and dominates their conversation is well-matched by the film's incessant movement. It is a classic case of the film's style informing and strengthening its content.

And speaking of time, the years that have passed between the two films have not been kind to our heroes. In Before Sunrise, Celine believes in magic, embraces reincarnation, accepts fortune-telling and is enchanted by the words of the street corner poet. In the second film, the bloom is off the rose, as one life appears to be plenty enough for her now. The intervening years seem to have been particularly hard on her, as Celine has developed a hardened, cynical shell that Jesse finds difficult to crack. What was flippancy in Sunrise—her repeated references to how men are lucky that women don't devour them after sex, the way some insects do—has become bleak pessimism in Sunset. She has seen how the world functions, and even though she appears to be committed through her work to make the world a better place, she is not hopeful of its future. For every optimistic note that Jesse tries to strike, Celine finds a discordant one. Her work for environmental causes appears to have developed not out of humanitarian optimism, but rather a finger-in-the-dike pessimism, the blame for which, it eventually emerges, is a series of failed relationships, the fault for which she finally lays at Jesse's feet. These failures pointedly remind Celine of what a profound and unique experience their night in Vienna was, in much the same way that Before Sunrise reminds us of the creative failure that is the vast majority of mainstream Hollywood romantic comedies. Just as traditional rom-coms encourage an almost delusional level of romantic optimism in their devotees, so too has Celine's Viennese encounter raised her expectations so high, that her feelings of betrayal by her experiences in the years since have been all the greater.

When we first see Jesse in Before Sunrise, he is brash and open, but also freshly wounded by love. Despite winning Celine over with the story of his grandmother's ghost, the younger Jesse is sceptical to the point of cynicism at times, blithely dismissing the inexplicable or the uncertain. However, in Before Sunset Jesse appears, in contrast to Celine, happy enough, married with a child and a modestly successful novel under his belt. There is something more upward-looking in the Jesse of Before Sunset. For example, while he has an irritating habit in Sunrise of contesting nearly all of Celine's thoughts and feelings, in Before Sunset he proves himself far less irritatingly self-involved, and while clearly pessimistic on a personal level, he is much more hopeful in a global sense. It is, one should note, an optimism that grates on Celine. All in all, at first blush, it appears that Jesse has aged well, while Celine has not. But we gradually sense Jesse's deep-seated sorrow as, when Sunset reaches its climax, we learn that he, for all his apparent hopefulness and optimism in the film's first hour, is the victim of a profound dissatisfaction. Perhaps it is his earlier heartbreak that has led him to seek the safety of a comfortable relationship, but the consequences to his happiness appear to be devastating, as the Jesse of Before Sunset appears to be on the verge of a fundamental psychic disintegration.

Just as Celine's romantic bitterness has been provoked by memories of Vienna, Jesse's impending emotional collapse can be found in the stirring up of old ghosts as well. His lament, as the film nears its close, of the complete lack of passion in his current relationship could be dismissed as the sound of yet another generation settling for a little bit less, but there is something a bit deeper and more fundamentally disturbing happening here. Both Jesse and Celine appear to be on the verge of becoming that German couple squabbling in the train at the beginning of Before Sunrise, and all those middle-aged couples they speak of in Sunrise whose untenable relationships have become a seemingly inevitable tedium of soul-sucking routine (their anecdotes are rife with stories of parents, grandparents, and friends who have betrayed their commitment to one another). And Celine is forced to face up to the poverty of her love life, and admit to feeling that the magic, romanticism and optimism that guided her thoughts nine years previous had misguided and even betrayed her, feeding into lofty expectations that could not possibly be met by a disaffected and disinterested world. The years of pain and disappointment have led the two lovers to swap philosophical outlooks.

The struggle in these films is no less epic than that of a Greek tragedy between forces of free will and fate. Are our young lovers doomed to fall into the same patterns of disappointment and dissatisfaction that have befallen every generation as it nears middle age? Or are they going to find a way to overcome the great weight that the natural, historical and cultural forces—Time as the oppressor in Auden's poetry; the dissolution of the individual in Seurat's painting; the resurrection of Notre Dame Cathedral; the endurance of the river Seine; the Prater's Wheel of Fortune-esque ferris wheel—that surround these characters and constantly remind them of the crushing inevitability of the passage of time, and which seem to conspire to keep us all in their sway?

The final 25 minutes of conversation that winds up Before Sunset are the most deeply affecting moments of the two films. Here, both characters face up to their life's failures, and seem on the brink of falling into a desperate cynicism. Life has come up so far short of the vaulted expectations that the night in Vienna bred in them. However, rather than the disappointment dissolving into a series of recriminations or a spiral of mutual regret, the film takes a miraculous healing turn at the end, and the characters rise above their ruefulness, and use it as a springboard into hope, guarded as it must remain given all that continues to separate them, including geography and pre-existing relationships. As a result, the final moments in Celine's apartment are poignant in a way rarely found in more conventional romances.

After spending over three hours watching them connect, and after waiting 9 years to have answered the question on everyone's lips—"will they or won't they?"—we have become so attached to this couple that it is quite impressive that Before Sunset is able to deliver a conclusion that is not only wholly befitting to the couple, who have got so much invested in the lives that they've built apart from one another, yet who clearly need each other to find that faith in life that appears to have left them, but that is among the most eloquent and evocative in filmdom. The carnal union that caps these films is entirely appropriate given the strictures of the romantic genre, but these moments do not come without raising audience concerns. They may be putting off death, both physical and emotional, just a little bit through sex, but is it a temporary reprieve? Ambiguity remains, as we must wonder what reservations and uncertainties lay in store for them the morning after. Indeed, you would have to be entirely bereft of the proverbial feline curiosity not to wonder where they go from here. Jesse has a son for whom he has sacrificed nearly everything, while Celine's work gives her life a center and meaning. Are these impediments too great to be scaled? Or will they navigate these global concerns to fine the happiness we all feel they deserve. Linklater leaves this up to the audience, but perhaps we will revisit these characters in the next decade, and learn if the cynics or the romantics have ruled the day.

Linklater's two films move us towards a new understanding of the genre of romantic films. While conventional romances spend almost all of their energy convincing the audience that, consequences be damned, this particular couple is going to hook up, and it is going to be worth all of our emotional commitment because if they don't hook up, we'll, like, die or something. These films get you thinking about the real nuts and bolts of relationship-building, and more importantly ask us to confront the consequences of attempting to build relationships in the real world of those illusory and harmful myths that we perpetuate in our romantic fictions. In Before Sunset, Celine's bitterness is rooted in the long shadow that the idealistic romantic fantasy of her one night with Jesse cast on the rest of her life. Her failures with men all come back to their inability to hold a candle to the fantasy that she built around this single Viennese night.

Hopefully Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke will give us all a chance to revisit these films in the near future through the kaleidoscopic viewfinder of a third entry in the series. I would love another chance to check in with these characters, to see how their futures have telescoped together (or apart), and more importantly, to weigh whether the films still have as profound a personal effect upon me as they currently do. To wrap things up, I will take one final glimpse of the two films' cinematic suggestiveness. There are many memorable conversations in both features, but as images go, few can top the shot in Before Sunrise of two trains forging their way through the Viennese night. Both move swiftly and in the same direction, but they do not share the same track. They run along on parallel tracks until, just as the camera parts ways with the trains, their trajectories diverge, one moving up, the other down. As symbols go, this representation of the future of our two leads, and the future of most relationships, is fitting. I will take advantage of the train's metaphorical aptness as a keen indicator that it is time to step off of the tracks and take my leave.

_________________________________________
Dan Jardine is a contributor to The House Next Door and the publisher of Cinemania.

Read more!

By Matt Zoller Seitz

[Editor's Note: This is Matt's latest video essay for the L Magazine. The introduction is reprinted below, with the video embedded.]

"The old formula of committed madness feels apropos here," says Nicolas Rapold in the current issue of the L, reviewing Flooding with Love for the Kid, Zachary Oberzan's solo restaging of David Morrell's novel First Blood, the basis for the Rambo films; Flooding with Love plays for a week at Anthology Film Archives beginning Friday, January 8th. In this video essay, Matt Zoller Seitz dissects this D.I.Y. psychodrama. (A transcript of the narration can be found here.)

___________________________________
Matt Zoller Seitz is a filmmaker/writer, and the creator of The House Next Door.

Read more!

By Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard

[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

JASON BELLAMY: In David Cronenberg's Crash we are given a collection of characters with often overlapping but not always similar sexual fetishes. There are characters turned on by automobile crashes—either as foreplay or as self-contained experiences. There are characters turned on by pain. There are characters turned on by scars and disfigurement. There are characters turned on by the turn-ons of others. There are characters turned on by the prospect of being caught having sex in public and there are others turned on just by having sex in cars in public places, seemingly oblivious to whether anyone will notice. The film has sex. The film has nudity. The film has oddity. This is what Crash is. But what is Crash about?

Seeing the film for the first time since its 1997 release, that's the question I asked myself over and over. What is this about? What is the meaning of this? Are these demonstrations of peculiar eroticism an ingenious metaphor or are they self-evident? Is Crash an examination of something or simply an exhibition? I suspect that our discussion of this film will repeatedly come back to these questions, but it seems this is where we must begin. And so I repeat: What is Crash about?

ED HOWARD: That's a good question to start with, though I'm not sure it has a single right answer, or even a right answer at all. The most challenging aspect of Crash, for me, is its utter refusal to express its ideology in unambiguous terms. Sure, there are expressions of ideology, mostly from Elias Koteas' Vaughan, but it's by no means clear what the film's perspective on him is, either. He even contradicts himself, first maintaining that he's interested in remolding the human body through technology and then later saying that mantra was just a ruse, and what he's really after is unleashing the sexuality of the car crash. In a way, the two purposes of Vaughan reveal the film's true roots, in the dialectic between the worldviews of author J.G. Ballard, whose novel is being adapted here, and David Cronenberg, who's adapting it. Reshaping the human body through science and technology is of course a central theme of Cronenberg's oeuvre, from the head-exploding telepathy of Scanners to the televisual mutations of Videodrome to the species shift of The Fly. Cronenberg continually returns to this idea: the ways in which our very minds and physiology have been drastically altered by the tireless advance of modernity. On the other hand, Ballard, though also concerned with the changes wrought by modernity, is more interested in the sexual component of this material: the extremes that people are willing to go to in search of eroticism in a media-saturated, spectacle-numbed age. These two tendencies, not unrelated but not entirely overlapping either, create the film's central tension.

That tension, I submit, is one reason why the film is so hard to figure out. That's not to say that the film isn't also anchored by an elegant metaphor—I'll leave it to you to decide if it's "ingenious"—that makes its sexual excesses more than mere exhibition. That metaphor is the film's most common occurrence (besides sex, maybe): the car crash. For Cronenberg, as for Ballard, the car crash is an emotionally and thematically rich event, a moment fraught with multiple possibilities and meanings. It's the moment, most notably, when the modern technology we rely on the most betrays us in a profound and disturbing way, not only in the most obvious sense, but because it shatters the barriers of isolation that technology places between us. As you point out, the film's characters have different fetishes and obsessions, but one thing they share is the sense that they're alienated from normal sexual, romantic and interpersonal relationships. Even before they become involved in Vaughan's car crash manias, James Ballard (James Spader, playing the novelist's stand-in) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) have an abstracted, stylized sexual relationship based on telling each other stories about their adulterous trysts. These people are at a remove from their sexuality; in the opening scene, Catherine seems as aroused by the cold, sleek surface of a phallic airplane nose as by her lover's caresses.

The car, and the highway, is a perfect metaphor for this disconnection: all those people encased in metal, speeding across the pavement, surrounded by others like them but with no possibility of ever making a connection with any of them. No possibility, that is, but a car crash. That's why the crash between Ballard and Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) is staged as a moment of startling, uncomfortable intimacy, their eyes locked, Remington inadvertently flashing her breast as she struggles to remove her seatbelt. The car crash is so important to these people because it's an escape from their isolation and lack of affect, a way to feel something, even if it's pain and perverse arousal.

JB: Yeah, I've considered that reading, but it doesn't quite work for me. The problem I have with it is that we don't really have any on-screen evidence that these characters are lost or isolated, at least not in any painful or unwilling way. Yes, the characters of this film seem removed from the world around them, to the point that we almost have to remind ourselves that a larger world exists, but that's true of most films. Crash is about its characters; there's nothing unusual there. And so I'm left searching for a moment that shows these characters looking at the world around them and feeling like they don't belong or can't connect, and I can't find it.

Of course, your reading is tempting because it's the best way to rationalize—to whatever degree it's possible—the peculiarity of the characters' fetishes, obsessions and behaviors. "Why would these people go to these extremes?" "It must be because they can't connect otherwise." But as convenient as that answer is, and as logical as it feels, I don't think it's earned. I don't think it's in the "text" of the film. Instead I think it's an understandable knee-jerk attempt to try to place Crash into a somewhat familiar dramatic arc or genre type. Because, again, I don't think Cronenberg actually establishes that these people can't connect. In fact, I'd argue he does the opposite. All we see are these characters connecting, again and again and again. They just happen to connect with each other in what happens to be a niche group. As a result, since Cronenberg doesn't develop this loneliness, longing or isolation, when we suggest that these characters resort to this behavior because they can't connect we are dismissing their urges as the product of some kind of deficiency. And the problem I have with that is that it puts us in the same position as the bigot who assumes that homosexuals couldn't possibly be born with homosexual urges and so must have suffered a childhood trauma or lacked proper parenting. (Ditto bisexuality or sadomasochism or any other sexual orientation or behavior that's outside of the heterosexual-missionary-position "norm.")

A somewhat similar but different way to look at the film is provided in a particularly good review by Roger Ebert, who suggests that Crash is, in effect, "a dissection of the mechanics of pornography." He argues that by presenting characters who are "entranced by a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has," and "by deliberately removing anything that an audience member is likely to find even remotely erotic, Cronenberg has brought a kind of icy, abstract purity to his subject." In other words, rather than getting consumed by our own arousal, we are able to analyze arousal itself.

Now, I have some problems with this, too, because Crash of course does include things that many audience members will find incredibly erotic. For starters, there's nudity—and if we're not supposed to be in any way turned on by what we see, Cronenberg wouldn't cast someone with the body of Deborah Kara Unger. Secondly, there's arousal; seeing people sexually stimulated is often sexually stimulating in itself. Furthermore, deviance, or any behavior outside of the politically correct "norm" (whatever that is), is for many people a significant source of arousal (which is partly what's on display in this film). Sure, the car crash stimulus might be impossible for almost anyone to relate to, but some of the other fetishistic arousals portrayed here aren't that far outside of fairly standard sexual urges. Just as I suspect there are more men who consume pornography showing women being simultaneously penetrated by multiple men than there are men would actually feel comfortable engaging in that kind of activity, I suspect that many people would feel aroused by James Ballard's ogling of the vagina-esque scars of Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), even if they don't share his specific arousal. Nevertheless, Ebert's analogy at least explains the, um, auto(mobile) eroticism in a somewhat more satisfying way. What do you think?

EH: I think that's all very interesting and relevant, all part of a film that can be read and understood in multiple ways that aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. It's possible that in talking about the film in terms of isolation, I'm carrying over my impressions of Ballard's Crash rather than looking solely at the text of Cronenberg's film. Cronenberg adapts a lot of his dialogue from Ballard but of course elides the narrator's interior monologues, which communicate much of the novel's thematic core.

Nevertheless, there is evidence that these characters feel disconnected even in Cronenberg's film. Before James' crash, he and Catherine have a chilly and abstracted relationship where most of the sex occurs outside the marriage. They talk to each other in flat, affectless tones about their indiscretions, and seem more turned on by ideas, by words, than by anything concrete. I'd say that's the definition of disconnection from the world: a preference for the abstract over the tangible. The crash seems to awaken them both to other erotic possibilities, as a continuation of the games they were previously playing to keep themselves at a distance from one another. It's a step towards the world, though not all the way. Instead of getting aroused by abstractions, they're aroused by inanimate objects, but they're still not exactly connecting with other people except in ways mediated by technology, by cold metal and pavement. In saying this, I don't want to judge the characters, and I don't think Cronenberg or Ballard want to either. If there are "deficiencies" in these characters, they're shared by the whole of our media-saturated, stimulation-numbed modern society.

Anyway, I hadn't read Ebert's review previously, but I've also always thought of this film as being closely modeled on pornography. It even follows the structure of porn: a scene, often brief, establishing some hint of character motivation or narrative advancement, followed by a sex scene. Orgasm, then repeat. The film cycles through most of the possible pairings by the time it's through, and there's a degree of mechanism in this exchange of partners: Catherine with a lover, then James with a lover, then James and Catherine, then James and Helen, James and Catherine again, then Vaughan and Gabrielle are added to the mix as well. There are even gay encounters between Vaughan and James, and between Helen and Gabrielle, though these are curiously chaste in comparison to the heterosexual matches. At one point there's a ménage a trois of fondling between Gabrielle, Helen and James. In other scenes, James takes on a voyeuristic role watching Vaughan with a prostitute or Vaughan with Catherine. It's as though Cronenberg is systematically examining the possibilities of the porn form and the sex act, parodying the rote set-up/sex scene structure of the average porn feature.

Porn was of course very much on Ballard's mind in writing the novel, as well. In his 1990 annotations to his pre-Crash collage novel The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard writes,

"[S]exual imagination is unlimited in scope and metaphoric power, and can never be successfully repressed. In many ways pornography is the most literary form of fiction—a verbal text with the smallest attachment to external reality, and with only its own resources to create a complex and exhilarating narrative… Pornography is a powerful catalyst for social change, and its periods of greatest availability have frequently coincided with times of greatest economic and scientific advance."

In some ways, that sounds like a good description of Cronenberg's Crash, especially the part about the disconnect from "external reality." I'm more doubtful about whether Cronenberg would agree with the last sentence: his Crash is many things, but a "catalyst for social change"? So if Cronenberg's film mimics the form of pornography, as I agree it does, what's the purpose of this mimicry?

JB: That's a good question. But before we get into that, I'd like to talk more about the characters and how they connect with one another, or don't. Because while I wholeheartedly agree with you that the relationship between James and Catherine is "chilly and abstracted" at the start of the film, I would disagree with any implication that their relationship ever evolves from that point (or even that they evolve individually). Sure, James and Catherine have a passionate looking sex scene near the middle of the film, but even in that scene they are essentially fucking someone else. Their arousal is just as individual as it was before and is just as tied to one another's other sexual pursuits as it was before. (Catherine spends the whole time getting turned on, and turning on James, by describing him having sex with Vaughan.) One could say that they are having intercourse with one another but having sex with someone else, if you know what I mean. And this isn't unique to James and Catherine. Over the course of the film we see these characters continue to explore their sexual desires, but do we ever see them connecting? In the backseat of a car, James and Helen have sex in which he's little more than an apparatus—both in emotion and in use. James has sex in a car with Gabrielle, but he's attracted to her scars, not to her, and she's turned on by his attraction to her deformities, not by him. The most engaged sex in the film, "curiously chaste" though it is, might be between James and Vaughan, in that they both of them seem to desire one another—rather than using one another as stand-ins for someone or something else. But maybe I only think that because Cronenberg stays at a distance, not allowing me to observe their vacant expressions during intercourse.

All of this indeed means Crash is very much like porn, because there's little evidence that there's any engagement between partners beyond the explicit pursuit of sexual gratification. That is, these individuals aren't looking to connect with one another; they're looking to be aroused by whatever means necessary. This is significant because the scenes that would be used to suggest connection are hard to distinguish from the ones that would suggest disconnection, which leads me to one of my problems with this film: I fail to detect any interesting evolution. The characters don't change. Only the specific focus of their arousal changes, from having sex in public places in the beginning to car crashes by the end, plus some other harder to define stuff in between. There's no real metamorphosis here. Instead it's like watching a drug user switch from heroin to crack. At the root, there's no difference in impulse, desire or behavior.

I don't mean to imply that films need to be about characters growing, learning or evolving. But when I find no deeper significance in Crash's fifth sexual encounter than in its second, it feels all too close to porn to me, but in all the wrong ways—repetitive, empty, untitillating.

EH: Well, I never said any of the film's characters actually succeed in overcoming their disconnection, just that all these car crashes and fetishes are ways of trying to find something more authentic, more satisfying. James' car crash is a triggering event that unleashes some new sexual possibilities, but nothing that happens here necessarily constitutes a deep human bond. I think you're right that throughout the film, none of these people experience a true emotional connection to another person, though the mutual fascination between Vaughan and James comes close. So does the enigmatic last scene, which has more than a hint of nihilistic, apocalyptic finality, but also contains, in James' urgently repeated "maybe the next one," a faintly optimistic suggestion that they'll keep trying: to feel something, to connect to each other, to kill each other? Who knows? The point is they're trying; they haven't given in to the general deadening of sensation and instead keep looking for increasingly outlandish ways to reawaken their numbed sensibilities.

In The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard writes a great deal about this distanced modern condition. After listing a number of body parts and isolated descriptive details about a woman, one of that book's characters says,

"There are one or two other bits and pieces, but together the inventory is an adequate picture of a woman, who could easily be reconstituted from it. In fact, such a list may well be more stimulating than the real thing. Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions… [C]heap photo-pornography is in fact a vital literature, a kindling of the few taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality."

I think this is the spirit of Cronenberg's film and his sex scenes, portraying people who have become numb to conventional emotional and sexual pleasures, and thus turn to inventive extremes for some satisfaction. The film, like Ballard's fiction, documents a world where sex, like every other aspect of human experience, has been obsessively catalogued into lists, charts, data and words rather than feelings and sensations. Ballard compares this situation to the pop art of Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann, the latter of whom is especially relevant, with his paintings of plastic-looking nudes, like desexualized naked Barbie dolls. It sounds, though, like you believe Cronenberg's film is simply a surface presentation of this phenomenon, a reflection of the flat colors and slick surfaces in Wesselmann's work rather than any kind of commentary on or response to the situation.

JB: Yeah, I suppose that's what I'm saying. See, we still disagree about what we're actually looking at here. You say that the characters are "trying to find something more." And that's true, to a point. But I see characters who just want more, and I think there's a difference. The way you describe the movie implies that these characters are reaching for something, as if they're on a quest, as if their search might actually have a destination that will leave them satisfied. The way I see the film, these characters just want roughly the same sensation over and over again, and the only reason their interests or desires might seem to evolve is because their satisfaction requires them to push their limits just to stay in the same place. They're like the drinker who used to be able to get drunk on two beers who now needs five shots just to feel buzzed. That drinker isn't trying to connect. There's no deep significance to the drinking. There's no attempt at growth. The significance is only that they want to get drunk. They want to satisfy an itch.

Now, it's here that I find Ebert's analysis applies well. He writes, "There are no moments of healing sanity because the characters are comatose with lust and fascination. They follow their self-destructive courses because they do not want to stop. If you seek to understand them, ignore their turn-ons and substitute your own." Using this logic, Crash could be seen as metaphor for any destructive activity, particularly drug abuse. "Why would someone risk injury to their family, their job, their reputation, their body, etc, to abuse a drug?" "Because when the compulsion to scratch that itch is so overpowering, everything else is irrelevant." The trouble is, I find Ebert's description of the film more fascinating than the film itself. And just because depth can be implanted into this film, I'm not sure that means the film has much if anything to say on these themes. I think it might be telling that in order to find rewarding complexity in Cronenberg's film we've had to draw upon the written work of Ballard (not to mention Ebert). On screen I don't find much there. So what I am I missing?

EH: Fair enough. I keep returning to the Ballard novel because, frankly, the film is most interesting to me in relation to its source (and to other texts and films), and even Cronenberg seems to know it: it only takes until the film's second scene before somebody asks, "has anybody seen James Ballard?" So, yeah, maybe that's damning. Regardless, I certainly think there's a lot of interest right up there on the screen. Cronenberg removes the novel's intensely internal focus, taking away our ability to see within the mind of James Ballard, who narrates the book. The result is that the film is resolutely concerned with exteriors. How you feel about the film probably depends on how you feel about this refusal to get inside these chilly, distant characters. For me, this decision makes the film more abstract than conventionally narrative. Because in normal terms, you're right, there's not much character development here, there's not much of a dramatic arc.

Instead, Cronenberg presents these bizarre porn scenarios with a deadpan lack of commentary, watching with the same mechanical fascination that we see in James Spader's eyes as he arranges Gabrielle's stiff, metal-encased limbs in the confined space of her car. In that scene especially, Cronenberg's perspective on this material is clear. He's subtly warping it to his own interests, examining the ways in which the technology of the car, and of advanced reconstructive surgeries, have created new hybrid forms for the human body. In the midst of Gabrielle and James' grappling, Cronenberg inserts a shot of the complicated system of metal rods and levers under the steering column, the special tools Gabrielle needs to be able to drive. It visually rhymes, not only with phallic imagery (another current running through the film) and with the metal surrounding the woman's legs, but with the similar system of metal rods that had earlier been digging into and supporting James' own post-crash leg wounds. By highlighting these images, Cronenberg makes these characters look like cyborgs, merging with the metal that's holding their bodies together and which allows them to get around. As a result, they come to identify as much with steel and electronics as with other people.

Later, James caresses a vagina-like wound in the surface of his wife's car in exactly the same way as he had with the scars on Gabrielle's legs: this sign of Vaughan's presence is as sexual for him as anything organic. The film is packed with subtle parallels like this, linkages between the organic and the artificial, like the way, during the car wash scene, Cronenberg draws a connection between the white foamy liquid streaming across the windshield, and Catherine's cum-sticky hand after her violent sexual encounter with Vaughan. Cronenberg's images consistently bring together messy human exigency with mechanical and artificial cleanliness: Rosanna Arquette, delivering the film's best and most playful performance, seeming to have sex with a showroom car, rubbing her ass against its sleek surface and suggestively spreading her stiff legs as she leans against it. Visually, the film is all about these kinds of junction points between human softness and the hard lines of the objects and technology surrounding us.

So what are you missing? In focusing on the film's undeniable lack of affect and pornographic structure, you're maybe missing out on the ways in which Cronenberg's imagery cleverly plays with the themes and ideas at the film's core. There's a streak of perverse playfulness running beneath its icy exterior, like the way James' time spent as an invalid on his balcony, watching cars go by through binoculars with an elegant blonde by his side, mirrors the basic set-up of Rear Window—with the obvious and thematically important difference that Hitchcock's voyeur was watching his fellow humans, while James' voyeurism is directed at cars.

There's also the great scene where Catherine, James and Vaughan are wandering through the dreamlike, fog-shrouded scene of a car crash, curiously unhindered amidst all the chaos. At one point, Catherine sits down next to a female accident victim, smoking, and Cronenberg shoots both women in profile, the accident victim slightly blurry in the foreground, turning to the camera to reveal her scarred visage, offsetting Catherine's blank, perfect features in the background. By framing the two women like this, Cronenberg makes it look like a before-and-after photo, foreshadowing Catherine's future and suggesting the fragility of her flawless, plastic beauty.

Basically, I think the film opens up and becomes far richer when considered on a shot-by-shot basis like this rather than looking at the big picture. Cronenberg's film is precise and very formalist: he carefully frames his images, carrying certain visual motifs through the film in order to express the thematic undercurrents of this material. As much as I love thinking about the film in relation to Ballard and American car culture and other outside reference points, this shouldn't obscure the extent to which Cronenberg explores his ideas, subtly and without exposition, in the visual choices he makes.

JB: What's interesting about your latest comments is that they contrast with what was going to be my next complaint: I don't think the film is visually interesting. If it were, the lack of character (never mind character development, because there's hardly character establishment) and the lack of interesting commentary within the film (in my opinion) wouldn't be such a problem. As before, I found your latest descriptions of what Crash does to be more interesting than Crash itself. That said, I don't want this to come off like a slam of your analysis, but in large part couldn't we narrow down many of your observations to a single sentence? Couldn't we simply say that Cronenberg eroticizes car parts (or the scars of car crashes) in all the places where we'd usually see body parts? So instead of caressing a breast, someone caresses the hood of a car. Instead of semen, we get car-wash foam. Instead of jerking off to porn movies, people get off to car crash videos. Instead of role-playing human sexual encounters, we get reenactments of car crashes. And so on.

Is this clever? Sure. More on that in a bit. But it's also the same technique/gimmick/joke over and over again, which makes Crash like a stationary bicycle. We go round and round but we don't get anywhere. You would disagree, obviously, because you're fascinated by how Crash falls in line with "Cronenberg's own interests," as established by looking at his career as a whole. I get that, and I wouldn't want to suggest that's invalid. Context is significant. Awareness should be rewarded. But there's a difference between saying that the best way to appreciate Crash is to see how it fits within Cronenberg's oeuvre and saying that an understanding of Cronenberg's oeuvre is essential to one's appreciation of this film. Because within Crash itself I don't see much exploration of, or comment on, Cronenberg's interest with "new hybrid forms for the human body." I see where you see it. I realize how Crash overlaps with, say, The Fly, and I assume that's what drew Cronenberg to the project. And so if we were examining Cronenberg's career, I'd say that's an important thread weaving through his filmography. But, within Crash itself, do I think that subject is confronted in any compelling way? No. Within Crash itself it's an irrelevant byproduct of the technology-for-flesh eroticization swap.

In terms of that swap, Crash is indeed quite successful. As I said earlier, there is cleverness in the number of ways that traditional human eroticism can be translated into automobile form, which is why I'd like to propose that Crash is best enjoyed as a comedy. Except I'm hesitant to do so. Though I have no doubt that there is some very intentional humor here, I'm a little unclear about how much. There are times when I wanted to be laughing with Crash but had a guilty feeling that I was laughing at it instead.

EH: Well, if you don't find the film visually interesting, we'll have to agree to disagree on that front. I think of the most prolonged sex scene between James and Catherine—the one where she dispassionately monologues about her husband having anal sex with Vaughan—and I can only marvel at Cronenberg's formal precision. The scene opens with a tracking shot where the copulating couple is first seen through a segmented window that chops up their naked bodies into Cubist fragments and overlays the sex with a lit-up urban skyline, phallic skyscrapers layered over the jumble of limbs, which blend together with the tangled sheets and pillows. We hardly know what we're seeing at first. Then throughout most of the sex the camera remains in closeup on one partner or the other, capturing their unreadable facial expressions, before Cronenberg brings them together into the same shot for the, ahem, climax. The shot sequence implies a coming-together, a connection, but of course the running dialogue throughout the scene only reinforces the couple's isolation from one another, the extent to which their marital sexuality is still defined through stories and fantasies about other people and objects. There's a push-and-pull tension here between connection and disconnection, just as there is in the film as a whole. Scenes like this, with these meaning-charged compositions and the interplay between dialogue and image, belie the idea that Crash is lacking in visual or thematic complexity.

Maybe Cronenberg does return to the same well again and again throughout this film, consistently substituting technological eroticization for more conventional erotic images. Must we fault the film for this single-mindedness? It's a film about sex in the modern, technological era becoming increasingly disconnected from human feeling, so of course it keeps returning to these images where people feel more of a connection with metal constructs than with other people. It's almost like you're dismissing the film's whole central concept—that sex in the age of technology is wound up as much with our surroundings as with the people involved—and then asking what's left. Any film or idea can be reduced to a single reductive sentence, like your accurate summary that "Cronenberg eroticizes car parts… in all the places where we'd usually see body parts." The film is concerned with the examination of this one idea in detail, and personally I find a great deal of interest in Cronenberg's relentless exploration of this theme.

As for Crash's place in Cronenberg's career, as I've suggested, I think this film is best understood as a junction point between Cronenberg and Ballard, which perhaps accounts for some of its more schizophrenic tendencies. There isn't the purity of The Fly and Videodrome, both films where the hero literally transforms under the influence of modern technology, at first unwillingly but eventually with the eagerness and passion of a convert. The ending of Videodrome, in particular, is inflected with a strain of apocalyptic optimism, a cathartic celebration of the way the hero takes what's violent and ugly in our televisual culture and appropriates it into a new sense of identity. In Crash, Cronenberg's enthusiasm for this kind of spectacle is tempered by Ballard's influence, which encourages more of an observational, coldly voyeuristic perspective. Both Ballard's Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition are full of lists, clinical recitations of various possibilities for car crash injuries and sexual experiences. It's this emphasis on pseudo-scientific jargon and structural repetition that gives the film its form, shaping Cronenberg's examinations of sexual perversion and relational disconnect.

All of which would probably be rather dry and formalist if not for, yes, the film's darkly humorous streak. I'm with you there, though for me it's unquestionable that Cronenberg (and Ballard, for that matter) recognizes the humor in this material and intentionally plays to it. The scene where Gabrielle toys with a nerdy car salesman is a perfect case in point: she intentionally flaunts her unconventional sexuality, getting into the car in an awkward way that hikes her skirt up to reveal the black panties beneath, then penetrating the vinyl seat with one of her leg brace's metal hooks. It's played as sexual comedy, no question about it, and Arquette's broad, smirking performance only drives home the humor. The same goes for the sudden insert of the stunt man Seagrave (Peter MacNeill) feeling up his fake, bra-clad breasts, or the sardonic look on the face of a tattoo artist after James asks her where he should put his tattoo ("where the sun don't shine," is the answer implied in her deadpan expression). By the same token, I don't think Cronenberg takes Vaughan's ranting, apocalyptic speeches nearly as seriously as Ballard does; by chopping up Ballard's prose into bite-size fragments and having Vaughan spit out pretentious monologues at every opportunity, Cronenberg makes him a vaguely silly and ludicrous figure, less menacing than absurd. There are signs here that Cronenberg recognizes the absurdity of his premise, that while these people's obsessions might be deadly-serious for them, they are, after all, getting hard from watching car crashes.

JB: Oh, I have no doubt that Cronenberg is having fun with the material. My favorite moment of obvious humor comes just after that sex scene between James and Catherine, when Cronenberg leaps from one of the film's longest and most passionate sexual encounters to one of its shortest and blandest. We see Hunter's Helen, centered in the frame and staring straight at us, writhing up and down as if we're the person she's straddling. "Have you cum?" she asks a then-anonymous partner behind her, clearly lost to her own interests. "I'm alright," an obscured and utterly disinterested James responds from the shadows, as if he's turning down the offer of a sandwich. That's great stuff, and clearly it's comedy by design. But other times I'm not so sure. For example, that sex scene between Catherine and James, when she informs him that "some semen is saltier than others." Is that eroticism or humor or just casual conversation? I can't decide.

While we're here, I want to stick with that Catherine-and-James sex scene for a bit to get back to your praise for Cronenberg's "formal precision." I will agree with you that the initial through-the-window shot of the couple that bathes them in light from the cityscape behind them is absolutely gorgeous. Beyond that, however, the scene you describe isn't the scene I see. According to your description, the couple is apart and then comes together at the moment of climax. But that's only half true. Yes, at the start of the scene both James and Catherine get their own closeups. Yes, at the end they share the same shot. But in between Cronenberg uses several wide shots of the couple fucking that suggest they are connecting, and he goes to the two-shot closeup of them rather quickly. So where you see "visual and thematic complexity," I see a director who goes wide-shot, closeup, wide-shot, closeup, wide-shot, closeup, etc. Pretty standard. The best compliment I can give to that scene's design is that by using only about four shots—Catherine closeup, James closeup, Catherine-and-James wide shot and Catherine-and-James closeup—within a four-minute scene, Cronenberg keeps us at a scientific distance from which we are more likely to study these actions rather than get swept up in their passion. Other scenes have even fewer camera movements, like the one in which James inspects the body of a bruised Catherine after her tumble with Vaughan, which is little more than a zoom.

In your last response you suggested that I am unfairly dismissing the film for single-mindedly focusing on exactly what it's about—dismissing its central concept and asking what's left. Looking back, I admit I'm guilty as charged. I agree that most movies are as single-minded as Crash, but it seems to me that few movies are so flat and vacant, and that's where the problem lies. We agree there is little character development. In fact, as I said, there's hardly any character establishment. Spader and Unger strip out as much emotion as possible, even in the throes of passion. Hunter is almost equally robotic. Koteas provides a demonstration of postures more than a performance. And that leaves Arquette, whose smirk constitutes the majority of her portrayal. This is all by design, I realize. Fair enough. But studying the faces of these characters is like getting lost in the expressions of mannequins, and to this we add Cronenberg's minimalist camera movements. The result is that just about the only thing worth sinking our teeth into is the film's theme. But I didn't find my bites very savory, and by the midpoint I was full.

EH: That's admittedly an understandable reaction. Though I've been defending the film thus far, I realize that it's not without its problems and limitations. As much as I enjoy its rigidly framed imagery, and as stimulated as I am by its thematic depths, I recognize that it's intentionally working within a very narrow range. Cronenberg, there's no doubt, has made richer and better films, films where his own sensibility is undiluted and raw. As in his adaptation of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, seeing Cronenberg confront another equally strong artist head-on is fascinating, but doesn't necessarily lead to a fully satisfying film that can stand up with the director's masterpieces like Videodrome, Dead Ringers or Scanners.

This brings me to one of my problems with the film, essentially the same problem that Iain Sinclair highlights in his deeply ambivalent BFI book. Sinclair shifts, throughout his book, back and forth between the Ballard original and the Cronenberg film, and ultimately concludes that Cronenberg's Crash "depoliticizes Ballard's frenzied satire," making its "pornography safe and elegant." As much as I admire Cronenberg's chilly, abstract take on this material, I think that's a fair criticism. Earlier I brought up Ballard's quote about pornography being "a catalyst for social change," but we kind of got detoured into other subjects. I want to bring it back up because this political context, this sense of revolutionary provocation, is arguably what's missing from Cronenberg's Crash.

For Sinclair, Cronenberg's Crash is a more conservative work than its source novel, and not only because it sanitizes and downplays much of the homoerotic content, shifting the central relationship of the work from James/Vaughan to James/Catherine. (Cronenberg would also remove the homosexual content, with much more questionable results, from Burroughs' Naked Lunch.) More than this process of sanitization, though, the film is somewhat lessened by its lack of context. Some sense of Ballard's radical political screeds would likely go a long way towards making the work's "point" clearer to those, like you, who find it mostly pointless as is. In his annotations for The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard writes,

"A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash?"

These ideas, so vital to Ballard, are at best an undercurrent in Cronenberg's Crash. The interest in celebrities and media still percolates in the background, especially in the hauntingly staged scene where Vaughan re-enacts James Dean's death, or in Seagrave's cross-dressing Jayne Mansfield fantasies, but it's not the driving force of the film the way it is for Ballard in his novel. That's OK, of course, since Cronenberg's interests lie elsewhere. But it still creates a sense of absence at the film's core, which Cronenberg's more formalist engagement with this story can't quite fill.

JB: I think all of that folds into my previous complaints that the film, in and of itself, doesn't have much of anything to say. That passage you cite from The Atrocity Exhibition ponders how the "ceaseless flow" of stimuli might cause the barriers between non-homogenized elements to disintegrate, to alarming results. And that's interesting. But that's not Cronenberg's Crash. Instead of focusing on the "problem," Cronenberg only shows one result. The damage, if you will, has already been done. James and Catherine wander through this netherworld of automobile erotica, but there's no glimpse of what their life might have been otherwise, no sense that a world exists beyond this one. To go back to something I said earlier, James and Catherine are users searching for an erotic high from the very start, and all that changes is their drug of choice. My complaint isn't that Cronenberg eschews a conventional conflict-and-resolution arc—though that might give the film some needed lift. My complaint is that, as you said, this film is without context. It's like watching Planet of the Apes without Charlton Heston. If all we see are apes, the unusual is usual, and so what's the point?

This lack of context or sensationalism, this suggestion that these characters are essentially as normal or abnormal as the rest of us, works quite well along the lines of Ebert's analysis, because by failing to relate to these characters we can better study their behaviors. But it hurts Cronenberg's film at the same time because we have nothing to compare these actions against. Are we supposed to be horrified by what we see here? Why? These characters partake in activities that seem to improve their happiness and that endanger only them. Their actions are so extreme that we can take them seriously but not personally.

If this is a cautionary tale, it's one I don't need. There's very little in Crash that suggests this could be my destiny. (You might as well tell me to beware becoming the best golfer in the world and having multiple affairs with waitresses because my Swedish model wife might someday chase me out of our house with a golf club. It's all so alien to me.) I do find Crash interesting on some level, but it's a lot like watching expressionless fish swim by at an aquarium. I sometimes enjoy the view, but I never worry I'm going to end up in the tank or think that their experiences on the other side of the glass say much about the world I live in.

EH: I don't know. Is Cronenberg's film as thematically rich as Ballard's novel? No, definitely not. And I can understand if you don't see yourself in these characters; if I remember correctly, you had the same reservations about Trouble Every Day, albeit not as strongly in that case. I don't think Cronenberg is presenting a "cautionary tale" here—that's not his style. The more important question is whether it's really so important that we see ourselves in these characters. The film presents the characters' sexual perversions and their icy disconnection without telling us how to feel about them, without providing a definitive interpretation. Maybe that's OK; maybe we don't need to settle on one interpretation or feel like we're seeing our possible future selves on the screen.

Throughout this conversation, we've wrestled with a few possible readings for Cronenberg's film, none of them entirely satisfying and none of them necessarily exclusive. There is another possibility, of course, which is the one you've been advancing. Sometimes a film, or a work of art, doesn't need to engage so directly with the world, or tell us anything about ourselves. Sometimes a work of art is, like Cronenberg's Crash, just its own weird, self-contained object, creating its own rules and its own skewed way of looking at things. Where Ballard's Crash engages with the world, commenting on the omnipresence of media and the warping of sexuality by modern conditions, Cronenberg's Crash seems to exist in its own strange world, cut off from ordinary reality. It seems we agree on that much. We just disagree about whether that's a worthwhile approach.

My question for you, then, is whether you see any value in a piece of art that simply is, that doesn't necessarily relate directly back to reality or tell you anything about yourself. Way back in our conversation about Solaris, we talked about Stanislaw Lem's idea that "we don't want other worlds… we want mirrors." So is that it? Does our art always have to give us mirrors? Or can it—should it—sometimes provide us with a puzzling, enigmatic glimpse of something else altogether, some strange alternate world that exists at right angles to our own?

JB: It's a good topic, and it's neat that we've done enough of these conversations to see them beginning to overlap. (If it hasn't happened already, I feel like we're only a conversation or two away from me totally contradicting myself. But I digress.) Obviously when art acts as a mirror, at least to some degree, it's easier to identify with the material and thus be "moved" by it—cerebrally, emotionally, erotically, whatever. In my case that's what I'm looking for: to be moved. But I don't think I need a mirror to do that. Not at all.

I think Crash is in rare territory, because it offers an unusually low number of opportunities for connectivity or empathy or any other kind of vicarious emotion. I'm not just talking about something as specific as the characters and their interests. I'm talking about the general structure of the film. Crash is ambiguous, but it isn't a mystery. Crash has some confrontational scenes, but it isn't combative. Crash has scenes with life-or-death implications, and yet the film isn't suspenseful. (Perhaps the only suspenseful moment comes in the reenactment of the James Dean car crash when we wait to see if Vaughan and his driver survived the stunt.) And so when I say that the film doesn't move me, affect me, provoke me, my lack of identification with these characters and with the film's themes is only part of the reason.

That said, I believe that Cronenberg intends for Crash to be chilly, distant and even boring. He's certainly trying to avoid giving us mirrors. He doesn't want us to identify with these characters, I don't believe. He wants us to observe them and focus on their behavior. And so it is that Crash feels to me like some kind of cinematic experiment more than it feels like art. I am impressed that Cronenberg manages to make an explicit NC-17-rated film about sex and car crashes that is less stimulating than your average television commercial, but I'm not moved, affected or provoked. Not on the whole, at least. Crash might be inscrutable on some level, but I don't find it puzzling. It doesn't convince me that it contains hidden depths worth discovering.

EH: For me, on the other hand, Crash is an interesting artifact, not so much for what it has to say but for its own sake, and for its interesting resonances with other reference points, among them its own source material. The film, like the novel before it, comments on the romance of the car crash: the modern-day obsession with this most modern of deaths and the celebrity lives it has claimed. More than the novel, however, Cronenberg's Crash also exists as a part of this continuum, as another entry in the media and artistic fascination with the car crash and its implications. Cronenberg thus draws, like Ballard, not only on real-life stories—James Dean, Grace Kelly, Jayne Mansfield, JFK ("a special kind of car accident"), Albert Camus—but on the cinematic and cultural heritage of the car crash's representation.

In particular, Cronenberg and Ballard are heirs to Jean-Luc's Godard's late 60s fascination with the car crash. Brigette Bardot is referenced in both Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, inevitably recalling her appearance in Godard's Contempt, particularly the famed scene when the actress lounges in bed while her lover expresses his affection for her as tributes to her individual body parts, enumerating one by one the individual elements that together add up to his desire and love for her. It's sex as an equation, a concept that reverberates throughout Ballard's work. Cronenberg echoes this scene in the one where James and Catherine have slow, mechanical sex while Catherine enumerates her fantasies about James and Vaughan. Of course, Contempt ends with an ostentatiously phony car crash, a crash where the artifice is so obvious that it's a stylized symbol of a crash rather than the real thing. Similar scenes proliferate in Weekend as well, scenes where the audience's only possible reaction is a distanced, clinical observation of body postures and crushed metal sculptures.

Cronenberg is crafting his own modern take on Godard's 60s studies in alienation and disconnection, and also drawing on other New Wave-era studies in ennui—all those films, like Godard's A Married Woman or Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad or Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura, where blank, disinterested middle class people struggle to find a way of jolting some life into their emotionally flat-lined existence. If Cronenberg's film sometimes seems to be something of a blank slate, a mystery with no solution, maybe that's exactly the troubling feeling the film seeks to engender.
_________________________________________
Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler. Follow his updates on Twitter.

Ed Howard chronicles his film viewing at Only the Cinema.

Read more!

Start your day by checking out the essential blog "Nic Cage as Everyone." Someday, he'll be you. (Thanks to Mr. Seitz and the L Magazine.)

On a more serious, and fascinating, note (per Robert Humanick): The NY Times obituary for Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only official survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts.

Michael Mann + David Milch? Wowza!!!

The Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand call for a Film Preservation Blog-a-thon. The nitty-gritty: "Together with the fabulous Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, from Feb. 14 to 21, 2010, the Siren will host For the Love of Film, a fundraising blogathon, with proceeds to go to the National Film Preservation Foundation." A worthy cause with these fine ladies involved.

_______________________________
"Links for the Day": A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

Read more!

By Tom Stempel

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, Avatar, The Princess and the Frog, Me and Orson Welles, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (book), The Big Trail, Remember the Night, The Big Sleep, Men of a Certain Age, 30 Rock, but first:

***
FAN MAIL: In the last batch, there were only a couple of comments, both discussing a couple of movies I haven’t seen, so let’s get right to the good stuff.

***
PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL “PUSH” BY SAPPHIRE (2009. Screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher, based on the novel by Sapphire. 110 minutes): Not The Blind Side.

I know this has been a critics’ darling since Sundance, yadda, yadda, yadda, and I really wanted to like it, but since I have a reputation to uphold, I have to tell you that I did not think it was as good as The Blind Side, which covers similar territory.

Precious (to use the short form of the title—what an agent Sapphire must have) gets off to a reasonably good start. We see a red scarf in a nicely composed shot that tells us that however gritty the film is going to be, this is still going to be an aestheticized version, with the occasional beautiful imagery as a counterpoint. Given the horrible things I had read happen in the movie, that was a relief. And the director does follow through on that, although his visions of Precious’s dreams seem increasingly conventional. (Granted her dreams probably are, but the script handles this better.) Meanwhile the director shoots a lot of the “real” scenes in the shaky-cam style that is so annoying and which grates against the fantasy style.

The script starts with a voiceover by Precious and if you feel inclined to take one of my compare and contrast essay exams, write a paper comparing the lead character’s first-person voiceover in this film to Ryan Bingham’s in Up in the Air. He is a talker and talks in the voiceover just as he does in real life. He has such a gift of gab we want to hear whatever he has to say. Precious hardly ever speaks up in class, where we first see her. She’s the kind of quiet kid teachers tend to ignore. But her voiceover tells us her mind is working full-tilt and looking at the world in interesting ways. Even before she says anything in dialogue, we like her and want to follow her through the movie. Nice introduction to the character, and it sets up better than the visuals do the difference between her interior and exterior life.

So Precious, a quiet, obese, African-American sixteen year-old goes home to her apartment in Harlem in 1987. We meet Mary, her mother from Hell. Mary spends most of her time watching television and yelling at Precious. A little of this goes a long way. Mary is a one-note character and gets just as tiresome for us to watch as she must be for Precious to deal with. Yes, she does have some reasons to be angry with Precious, since her boyfriend, Precious’s father, has raped Precious and gotten her pregnant. Twice. The first baby has Down’s syndrome and lives with Mary’s mother. But Fletcher has not given Mary any counterpoint to play. Mo’Nique, the comedian and talk show host, plays Mary as well as she can, which is considerable, but the script limits what she can do. How about a moment, before the big scene at the end, where we get some sense that Mary loves Precious in one way or another. That would not only be more interesting for Mo’Nique to act as well as for us to watch, since it would make her even scarier than she already is—we and Precious would never be sure which Mary is showing up.

The white principal at Precious’s school gets her enrolled in an alternative school and Precious’s teacher, Ms. Rain, has her students write every day in their journals. We begin to get Precious’s words coming out and not just in voiceover. The process of education has begun, which is what the film is going to be about. And here it begins to get into conventional territory. The girls in the class are the standard-issue juvenile delinquents we have seen since The Blackboard Jungle (1955) and To Sir, With Love (1967). And Ms. Rain is the same paragon of virtue that Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier were in those two films, respectively. She announces in class the first day her name is Blu Rain, to laughter from the class. Now, what does the screenwriter do with that? Nothing. Would it have killed Fletcher to run in a gag about her parents being sixties hippies? She is played by Paula Paton, who like Mo’Nique does what she can, but the script limits her. If you objected to the white folks helping the overweight black boy in The Blind Side, notice that Ms. Rain is the lightest skinned black person in the film. And just to appeal to the liberal crowd, we and Precious find out she is gay. So of course she is a saint. Would it have killed them to make Ms. Rain a very dark-skinned black lesbian who is more butch than God? And her lover, who seems to walk around her apartment with half her robe off most of the time, is so understanding of Ms. Rain bringing Precious home to stay with them that I wanted to puke. Isn’t she getting tired of all this? The scene in the two women’s apartment lets Precious have a voiceover that, like the rest of the movie, is decidedly anti-male. (A male nurse is a slight exception to that.) If Ms. Rain and her lover were the only lesbians I’d met, I’d think they were all perfect as well. The Blind Side gives Leigh Anne and Miss Sue a lot more texture as characters than any of the supporting roles in this film, and manages to be politically incorrect about it as well. Since The Blind Side has both white and black characters, we get a view of race relations in America today. With Precious’s virtually all-black cast and limited story, we only get another view of the black underclass, and without the nuances that The Blind Side has. The brief scene with Michael’s mother in the latter film gives us a richer character than do all the Mary scenes in the former.

So Precious has her second baby and we get a couple of nice scenes in the hospital when her classmates come to visit. Then she has to go home and Mary goes full-tilt psycho, throwing them out and dropping a television set down the stairwell that nearly kills Precious and the baby. Meanwhile Precious has been telling her life story to Mrs. Weiss in the Welfare office and we are sneaking into Oprah country. The actress playing Mrs. Weiss is someone named Mariah Carey, only one of whose previous movies (The Bachelor [1999]) I have seen, and I don’t remember her from it. Like Mo’Nique and Paton she does what she can and does it very well. If she can resist Hollywood shaving off her moustache and trying to turn her into a glamor girl, Carey may have a future.

The big finish is an extended scene in the Welfare office in which Mary confesses that she let her boyfriend have sex with Precious, starting when she was three. The scene goes on forever, like an episode of Oprah, and not in a good way. There is very little drama to the scene (Mary would like Precious to come home, Precious understandably does not want to), just relentless confessing of how everybody feels. There is a reason why most therapy scenes are so boring to watch on film: they are all talk, and very little happens. That it happens here is part of the Oprah-ization of our culture: if we just talk about how we FEEL, everything will be OK. Because then we will all be self-empowered. Self-empowerment has its limitations, such as often making it difficult if not impossible to get along with other people. The self-help books make it clear you have to take charge of your own life, but they say very little about how you then deal with others. That’s because most self-help books are aimed at women who are trying to get over trying to be all things to all people and need to develop a little independence. Guys, for better and for worse, already have that independence and don’t need to learn how to do it. Imagine the scene in the Welfare office, but with Precious’s father wanting to get back together with her, and you can imagine the howls of protest from Oprah and her fans.

And so Precious does not go home with Mary, but takes off down the street with her two children. And the “take control of your own life” vibe of the last half of the movie suggests this is a good thing. Let’s recap: here is a now seventeen-year-old girl who is homeless, has two babies, one with Down’s Syndrome, no husband or other means of support, and no high school diploma or GED. I really don’t see that as a happy ending.

***
AVATAR (2009. Written by James Cameron. 162 minutes): The emperor’s old clothes.

Well, it’s not as bad as Titanic, which is a relief. We don’t have all that romantic dialogue with Kate and Leo that sounded like a bunch of song cues, and the final song over the credits is not sung in as screechy-voiced a way as “My Heart Will Go On.” And the water CGI effects are a vast improvement. If you want my detailed take on the script problems with Titanic, see the chapter on it in the book version of Understanding Screenwriting.

As more than one commentator on it has mentioned, Avatar borrows from a lot of movies. I am going to avoid even the minimal listmaking of sources I did in US#24 on Monsters and Aliens, but I will point out a few. The picture starts out with us on our way to a planet where a mining crew is at work. When we get there we feel right at home. The crew recalls the team in Cameron’s Aliens (1986). Here is Sigourney Weaver (not playing Ripley here, but always welcome, and she at least tries to give the humorless Cameron’s flat dialogue a little light touch) and there is a macho Latina fighter formerly played by Jenette Goldstein, currently played by the also always-welcome Michelle Rodriguez. So what’s going on? For all the location and crew’s familiarity, Cameron is still facing the bane of all science fiction movies: how do you establish the world we will be living in during the running time of the film. His answer is talk. Cameron immediately starts with voiceover narration by Jake Sully, the paraplegic Marine. Unfortunately, Sam Worthington plays Sully with a typical Marine clenched jaw, which means some of his narration is incomprehensible. There are quicker and better ways to set up the situation. The scientists at the base want to use Sully’s DNA, which is similar to his dead brother’s, to let him become an avatar: part human, part Na’vi, so he can learn about the Na’vi inhabitants of the planet. He agrees to this and lets himself be put in a sleeping pod and wakes up as his Na’vi self. Cameron handles these transitions nicely, but once he is out on the planet, the movie turns into Dances with Wolves (1990). Sully’s Na’vi learns to love the other Na’vi, especially Neytiri, the female who is appointed his minder. She is the most interesting character in the film, much more so than Angelina Jolie’s minder in Wanted. Thanks to Cameron’s writing, Zoe Saldana’s “performance,” and the way that performance has been manipulated by computers, she shows a greater variety of emotion than any other character in the film. It would be a much better picture if Cameron gave the other characters the kind of nuances he gives Neytiri. The other characters are pretty much one-note, although Sully has two notes that seem to contradict each other: in his human form he seems to be a gung-ho Marine. In his Na’vi form, he seems to be a sensitive guy. I suppose you could defend this as the planet making him into a nice guy, but the writing does not do it.

So what we get are other-planet versions of scenes we have seen before. At one point Sully must “break” a flying animal so he can ride it. For all the technological wizardry, it is a “breaking the horse” scene from a hundred westerns. The dialogue Cameron gives to the Na’vi sounds like the dialogue given to the Native Americans in westerns, which along with the computer-generated characters makes them awfully close to Jar Jar Binks. When the Na’vi rise up against the military, we are back in They Died With Their Boots On (1941) or Little Big Man (1970). Except that Cameron gets sloppy about the mechanics. Where did the Na’vi suddenly get the voice communicators in their necklaces? We have not seen any sign of that kind of technology in the film before. And where did the Na’vi get the weapons they now carry? OK, maybe they got some from the military, but that many? And where did the Improvised Explosive Devices Sully uses come from? You could say the final assault on the Na’vi, in addition to conjuring up the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now (1979), is also similar to battle with the Ewoks in Return of The Jedi (1983), except that Lucas is more inventive. He has the Ewoks fight in the way guerilla groups have always fought, rather than as Cameron does, turning them into a full-scale conventional army. And here the film reveals itself to be very much a Bush-era critique of the military. Cameron has given the military and the people dealing with them very Bush-era slogans, including “shock and awe.” The colonel leading the charge is very Rumsfeldian. So we are encouraged to cheer for the Na’vi, standing in for the Iraqis and Afghanis, defeating a very conventionally American-looking army. The father of my granddaughter’s boyfriend is on the politically conservative side, and this bothered him a lot about the film.

As I have mentioned many times in here, if you are writing for film, you are writing for performance. Normally I mean that in relation to the actors, but in a picture like this, you are also writing for the performance of the designers, CGI people, et al. For all the hype about Avatar being a “game changer,” the visuals and the effects are not all that stunning. The planet looks like a botanical garden designed by a lighting designer for a Vegas show: phosphorescent purple and blue plants. The performance capture works with Neytiri, but not as well with the others. And the 3-D does not add a thing to the picture. I ducked once when something was thrown out at the audience, but that was about it.

The audience I saw the picture with, on the Saturday morning after Christmas, seemed more dutiful than impressed. There were no “Awww” sounds and when the credits started, they got up to leave. When I saw the original Star Wars on opening day, the audience stayed through the credits applauding. Now granted, that audience had a little botanical help, but still…

***
THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG (2009. Screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker and Rob Edwards, story by Ron Clements & John Musker and Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, plus several other people who helped on the story and are listed in the film but not on the IMDb or the official website of the film. 97 minutes): The emperor’s old drawings.

I am not sure you will entirely trust my judgment on this one, since I saw it immediately after Avatar and anything, especially if it was an hour shorter, would seem better. But this one had me at hello. We meet two little girls, Charlotte, a spoiled white southern belle, and Tiana, the black daughter of the woman who sews things for the white family. The seamstress is reading the story of the frog and the princess to the kids. Obviously the movie is going to be about the white girl, this being Disney and all. Except it’s not. We follow Tiana home with her mother. Wow, talk about a game changer: a black girl as a Disney princess. So we meet Tiana’s dad and see the happy family. We know the mom is not long for this world, since there is an over-abundance of dead mothers in Disney cartoons.

THE MOTHER DOES NOT DIE. Now that’s a real game changer, more so than anything in Avatar. In the Obama era, that is a bigger whoop than a mere black princess. OK, the father dies, but that’s a small price to pay. Tiana grows up to be voiced by Anika Noni Rose. You know she was wonderful in The No. 1 Lady’s Detective Agency (see US#23), but you may not know she started on Broadway in Caroline, or Change, and the writers have given her a lot to do here. She sings, she has great lines, which she delivers beautifully.

We pretty much know what is coming and the storytelling takes us there with great confidence. When John Lasseter, the head of Pixar, took over as head of all Disney animation, he made two basic decisions. The first was to get back into hand-drawn, or 2-D, animation. Now that’s class, since it would have been very self-protective of Lasseter just to stick to the computer animation that he has taken to such heights. His second decision was to bring back to the studio Clements and Musker, who worked on the last great spurt of Disney 2-D animation in the late eighties and early nineties. They know their medium. (The backstory of the film is from Danny Munso’s article in the November/December 2009 Creative Screenwriting.)

The writers have created a nice gallery of characters. They have provided a great setting by putting it in New Orleans. They have provided places for Randy Newman to write several terrific songs. And they don’t dawdle. After slogging through Avatar, it was nice to see something that not only has a great sense of humor, but does not waste a second of its 97 minutes. If you have to draw (almost) everything, you don’t waste time. The gags come quickly and do not overstay their welcome. The kids in the audience seemed to get the gags even quicker than I did, and I am no slouch in that area. The writers have also provided great opportunities for the performance of the designers. There are shots of the bayou that have a greater sense of three-dimensionality than anything in Avatar, and without those stupid glasses.

The storytelling is inventive, and no more so than at the end. The prince and Tiana are still frogs, and he has passed up the chance to kiss Charlotte, marry her, and use her money to get Tiana the restaurant she has been dreaming about. He and Tiana are in love and decide to live happily ever after as frogs in the bayou. OK, but the writers (and probably Lasseter, who has one of the best story minds in the business) understood that we really want to see Tiana and the prince back in human form (in an animated film? Yes, because we are so caught up in the story) and working her restaurant. So how to do it? You’ll have to see the movie, but the kids and I squealed with delight. And there was applause at the end of the film. Which there had not been for Avatar.

***
ME AND ORSON WELLES (2008. Screenplay by Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo, based on the novel by Robert Kaplow. 114 minutes): Where is Mank when you need him?

The Palmos have worked behind the scenes on movies for years, she as a production manager and he as an assistant director, among other jobs. According to Peter Debruge’s article in the November/December 2009 Creative Screenwriting, they found the novel browsing in a bookstore. They started writing a screenplay from it without getting the rights. When they showed a draft to director Richard Linklater, with whom they had worked, he got the rights and directed the film. This is the Palmos's first produced script, and they make a bunch of rookie mistakes.

The film follows Richard, a teenaged boy who gets picked to appear on stage with Orson Welles in his 1937 production of Julius Caesar. You remember the production, or at least the legends about it, don’t you? Welles had the cast dressed as contemporary fascists, borrowed the lighting scheme from Albert Speer’s “Cathedral of Lights” (see Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will for a demonstration), and had the cast turn machine guns on the audience and fire blanks at them. Aside from the modern costumes, the other two details are left out. We see that the lighting is spectacular, but there is no reference to Speer. Well, why not? Because the script already has a lot of bald-faced exposition, done in the most flat-footed way possible. I was wondering why that was so, and then I read Debruge’s article, and the giveaway is that the book was a “young adult” novel. Obviously the book had to explain to its young adult readers who the hell Orson Welles was and what he did. The Palmos, maybe correctly, assumed they had to do the same thing with a movie audience. I am not sure they did, and if they did, they could have laid the information in a little more subtly. The dialogue in general is very flat. What was called for was a real screenwriter to goose it up. (And if you don’t know that Mank was Herman J. Mankiewicz, maybe you shouldn’t yet be reading this column. Or rather, maybe it will be crucial for your education.)

The writers write some nice characters, especially Richard, the secretary Sonja, and Welles. Linklater’s direction tends to just sit and watch the characters talk and react, and the actors do a nice job. Zac Efron plays Richard and gets a lot more up on the screen that you might expect, given his High School Musical experience. Claire Danes, well, Claire Danes, enough said. Christian McKay is ten years too old for the 22 year-old Welles, but he has the look and the tone. Unfortunately, like the screenplay for Amelia (see US#36), the Palmos have not given him enough of the genius to play. The Speer reference and the machine guns simply would not have fit in with the “young adult” tone of the film.

And if you are going to make a film not just for young adults, why not go all the way, not only with the Wellesian style, but letting Richard sleep with Sonja. He turns down a perfect opportunity to do so. I can see why Kaplow handled it that way, but surely you could sneak it past the ratings board in a movie.

***
SCREENWRITING: HISTORY, THEORY AND PRACTICE (2009. Book by Steven Maras. 227 pages): STOP THE PRESSES! Academics take screenwriting seriously!

One of the problems I faced early in my career of writing about screenwriting was that academia generally did not take the study of screenwriting seriously. In those days (late 60s/70s) the auteur theory held sway. This affected the book publishing business as well. My biography of Nunnally Johnson was turned down by over thirty publishers, most of them twice, because I was determined to deal with his contributions as a screenwriter. When I insisted that was the heart of the book, one editor gave me a look that said, “What planet are you from? I read Andrew Sarris. I know directors make it up as they go along.”

Things have changed, as Maras’s book will show you. He is a Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Media and Communications Department at the University of Sydney (Australia), and his book looks at how academics have been dealing with, as the subtitle says, the history, theory, and practice of screenwriting. In very interesting ways, thank you very much. A lot of the issues that I have dealt with in relatively, OK, very, casual ways in this column are also being discussed among academics. You may get through the book quicker than I did, since I paused almost every page to think over the issues he was discussing. Sometimes I agreed with Maras and/or the people he was quoting, sometimes I didn’t. If you want to think seriously about screenwriting, you ought to pick this one up.

***
THE BIG TRAIL (1930. No credited screenplay. Story by Hal G. Evarts. 125 minutes): The big version.

The old Fox studio had had a considerable success with John Ford’s 1924 The Iron Horse. When sound came in and they had a hit with the first western shot in sound, In Old Arizona (1929), the studio decided to shoot the works and do a big sound western in a new widescreen process called Grandeur. The studio got Evarts, who had written the story for William S. Hart’s last great western Tumbleweeds (1925), to come up with a story of a wagon train. Evarts sort of follows the story of The Iron Horse, with the hero, Breck Coleman, going along on the trek so he can get revenge on two men who killed his friend. That story is better integrated in The Big Trail than it is in The Iron Horse.

For years the only version that was available was the 35mm version shot simultaneously with the widescreen version, but Fox found the original and restored it. It plays better than the 35mm version because we get more of the epic scope of the trek. This would be writing for the performance of the 70mm camera. The problem is that the actors have not yet completely figured out how to say dialogue on film. Tully Marshall, whose film career essentially began playing the High Priest of Bel in Intolerance in 1916, adjusts better to sound than does former stage actor Tyrone Power (senior, the father of the better known one), who keeps pausing as he would on stage. Breck is played by a young guy just out of the prop department. His real name was Marion Morrison, but for this film the studio changed his name to John Wayne. He’s not bad, but he’s not “John Wayne” yet. And since the picture came out in early 1930 and only two theaters were equipped to show it in Grandeur, it bombed and Wayne went into B westerns until 1939. But if you have a big screen TV and you love westerns, you may find the movie entertaining.

***
REMEMBER THE NIGHT (1940. Original Screenplay by Preston Sturges. 94 minutes): Writers versus directors.

Mitchell Leisen, the director of this film, was almost single-handedly responsible for the move of screenwriters to directing in the early forties. Here is Billy Wilder on Leisen: “Leisen spent more time with Edith Head worrying about the pleats on a skirt than he did with us [Wilder and Charles Brackett] on the script. He didn’t argue over scenes. He didn’t know shit about construction. And he didn’t care. All he did was he fucked up the script…” And those are just the opening lines in a quote in Maurice Zolotow’s 1977 book Billy Wilder in Hollywood. Preston Sturges did not think too highly of Leisen either, and Remember the Night is the last script Sturges wrote before he turned to directing.

David Chierichetti, Leisen’s first biographer (Hollywood Director, 1973), is a little more sympathetic toward Leisen, but he did look at the scripts for this film. You can understand why Sturges disliked Leisen. According to Chierichetti, Sturges’s script was 130 pages, way too long for the kind of romantic drama the picture turned out to be. So Leisen cut it down. Mostly his cuts were long speeches Sturges had given to John Sargent, the deputy district attorney handling the case of Lee Leander, accused of shoplifting. As written by Sturges, Sargent is a fast-talking wheeler-dealer. Leisen thought, and he may have been right, that Fred MacMurray, who was cast as John, simply was not up to the demands of Sturges’s speeches. Or he may have simply thought that MacMurray was too much the all-American nice guy he had been playing in the thirties. It took Billy Wilder to see the darker side of MacMurray in Double Indemnity four years later; that MacMurray could have played Sturges’s character. The problem with Leisen’s cuts and his conventional direction of MacMurray is that when the plot requires us to see his manipulative side in the last twenty minutes of the film, we don’t believe it.

Some of Sturges’s comedy elements survive. The defense attorney at the beginning of the film would fit neatly into any other Sturges vehicle. Leisen did not cut his speeches. Lee Leander has the edge we expect of Sturges’s women. She is played by Barbara Stanwyck, whom Sturges used the next year in The Lady Eve. Leisen had a reputation as a woman’s director, and he certainly privileges Stanwyck over MacMurray in both the coverage and the composition and lighting of the shots. She of course delivers, but when did Stanwyck ever not deliver?

The story, which Sturges sets up so it is almost convincing (and Leisen does his part in these scenes with his direction of MacMurray and Stanwyck), has John not wanting Lee to spend Christmas in jail, since he got a continuance on her case. He is driving back home to Indiana for Christmas, and when he learns she grew up near his hometown, he takes her back with him. They meet her mother, who wants nothing to do with her (Sturges’s version was sharper: the mother had a second daughter who was also in trouble with the law). So John takes Lee home with him and his mother and aunt like her. Sturges satirizes small town America, some of which survives in the film, and some of which was shot but dropped. Leisen sets a quieter tone in the Indiana scenes than Sturges would have, and the film becomes more of a romantic drama than a romantic comedy. In other words, more of a Leisen film than a Sturges one. It is a nice movie of its kind, but thank God Preston started directing.

***
THE BIG SLEEP (1946. Screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman, from the novel by Raymond Chandler. 114 minutes): Silence.

This is not a full-scale piece on the writing of this film, but just a minor note. The film was running on Turner Classic Movies, and I had it on while bringing in the groceries, talking on the phone, and some other stuff. I, like nearly everybody else in the known universe, love the dialogue in this film, but what struck me watching it in an off and on way was how silent a lot of the film is. There are a lot of moments in the film where there is no dialogue. We are watching Marlowe watch people and figuring out what possible actions he can take. They didn’t need dialogue, they had screenwriters. OK, except for Faulkner, but he was fun to have around.

***
MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE (2009. Various writers. 60 minute episodes): Why would we spend time with these people?

Several critics have liked this new show, but having seen three episodes, it does not really work for me. The setup is that three guys in their late forties, Joe, Owen and Terry, go for hikes in the hills, sit around in a restaurant and talk about their problems. OK, if their problems were that interesting to hear about. Joe runs a party supply store, which could provide the writers with interesting characters to come for Joe to deal with. No such luck. Joe also has a gambling problem, which introduced us to his bookie, who is not that interesting either. Owen is a car salesman, working at his father’s dealership. How are you going to make a car salesman sympathetic to an audience? They haven’t found a way. His father is always on his case, so Owen seems like a wuss not to stand up to him. Owen is played by Andre Braugher, and the role does not play to his strength, which is a primal power. Terry is an unsuccessful actor who is the epitome of the Peter Pan Syndrome. None of the supporting characters show any signs of breaking out as somebody worth watching as well.

***
30 ROCK (2009. “Secret Santa”episode. Written by Tina Fey. 30 minutes): Tina Fey’s Christmas present to Alec Baldwin.

So just after I got done in my last column complaining that this season of 30 Rock has been uninspired, Tina Fey uncorks not only the best episode of the season, but one of their best episodes ever. As often, there are several plot lines. The first is Liz’s decision to give Jack a Christmas present, although she is warned by Jack’s assistant that Jack is, who would have guessed, the master of giving presents. After several false starts on her part, she and Jack decide to give presents that cost no money. More false starts on Liz’s part. Jack ends up giving her a ticket from a “gender neutral” production of The Crucible in high school in which she played John Proctor. And it’s framed in wood from the school’s stage. And you thought the reference to the production was just a throwaway gag in an earlier scene. Obviously Liz’s present, whatever it will be, is fated to be a big disaster. Yes and no.

Jack, meanwhile, is dealing with NBC/Universal (the show has not caught up yet with the company being bought by Comcast, but that may well bring out the best in the writers) having purchased You.Face, the social networking site. Yes, the name is obvious, but out of it comes a high school friend of Jack’s, Nancy, contacting him. He acted with her in a show in high school. He got to kiss her, but only in the show, and had a mad crush on her. She is coming to New York with her teenage kids and would like to see him. She shows up in Jack’s office and, be still my heart, it’s Julianne Moore. In an earthy mode as a lower-class Boston native, complete with accent. Great idea for a character to pair off with Jack, and even more inspired to get Moore. You would expect something more elegant with her, but if Meryl Streep can have as much fun as she is having these days in a variety of roles, why not Moore? The scenes between Nancy and Jack are terrific, giving us a romantic side to Jack we have not seen, as well as a look at where he started as a person. And the chemistry between Moore and Baldwin is breathtaking. They have dinner, but don’t kiss. She has to go back to Boston on the train the next morning, but the train gets delayed. She comes to his office and they kiss, and she goes back to her husband. How come the train was delayed? Liz called in a bomb threat to Pennsylvania Station as a Christmas present to Jack.

Which in turn reaffirms Kenneth’s belief in God, since the FBI arrives at the office to arrest the three writers whose phone Liz had used to call in the threat. The writers had pretended to be of another, made-up religion to get out of Kenneth’s elaborate Secret Santa system. This got Kenneth questioning God, since He had not punished them. And now they get punished, and his faith is restored. As well as mine in the show. Thanks Tina, that was a great present.
______________________________________
Tom Stempel is the author of several books on film. His most recent is Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So Good, and Bad Screenplays.

Read more!

Two from the Times this morning via Matt Seitz and Steven Boone. First one, recently published, on my beloved Stephen Sondheim. Second—a (year) oldie but goodie—on becoming "screen literate."

Reverse Shot unveils their Top Ten of 2009.

And now why not have a box of Jeremy Irons Cereal?

_______________________________
"Links for the Day": A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

Read more!

By Steven Cooper

At the end of Part One of “The End of Time,” the fact that the Master (John Simm) had transformed every human being on Earth (except two) into a copy of himself turned out to be small potatoes next to the revelation that the Doctor’s people, the Time Lords—thought to have been destroyed at the Doctor’s own hand in the final battle of a great Time War against the Daleks—had seemingly found a way to return to the universe, with the intention of bringing about “the end of time itself.” In this, David Tennant’s final episode as the Doctor, the epic scale increases even further. The Doctor’s past returns to haunt him, and finally, the long-foreshadowed event—“He will knock four times”—comes to pass, signaling his final fall.

Writer Russell T. Davies has said many times that he had no intention of showing the events of the Time War on screen, for the very good reason that any attempted depiction of this universe-shattering cataclysm would be feeble compared to what could be conjured up by the viewer’s imagination. He has been content to provide various tantalizing hints over the years, mostly by unexplained name-dropping (the fall of Arcadia, the Medusa Cascade, etc.)—and there are plenty more to come here. In this episode, he comes as close as anyone should to actually showing the Time War, opening with a CGI vista of the Time Lord citadel burning, with wrecked Dalek ships crashed outside its protective force-field bubble.

We cut inside, to the Narrator from Part One (Timothy Dalton), now revealed to be the President of the Time Lords, holding a council of war. An oracle-like Visionary (Brid Brennan), whose unerring prophecies have guided the council, has decreed that today is the last day of the Time War. One of the council (Julie Legrand) paints a picture of a truly apocalyptic conflict: “This is only the furthest edge of the Time War. But at its heart, millions die every second, lost in bloodlust and insanity. With time itself resurrecting them, to find new ways of dying, over and over again. A travesty of life. Isn’t it better to end it, at last?”

The President is wearing a gauntlet similar to those that have featured in several Torchwood episodes, and uses it to destroy the voice of dissent. Passionately he declares, “I WILL NOT DIE! … A billion years of Time Lord history riding on our backs. I will not let this perish. I. Will. Not.” Another Time Lord mentions a prophecy of two of the “Children of Gallifrey” escaping the Time War—the Doctor and the Master—and a connection to the planet Earth.

Back on Earth, the Master is in control, with Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) tied up and the Doctor strapped into the Hannibal Lecter-like wheelchair contraption that Naismith imprisoned the Master in last episode. There’s a brief diversion to deal with Donna (Catherine Tate); as with Part One, she remains on the periphery of the story. Being chased by multiple Masters awakens her buried memories and threatens to kill her, but the energy is released and knocks out the Masters, before Donna faints. As the Doctor says, “Do you think I’d leave my best friend without a defense mechanism?”

Suddenly the Vinvocci, the two green spiky aliens we met last week, manage to knock out the Master and rescue Wilf and the Doctor. After a bit of comedy with the Doctor still strapped into the wheelchair (“Worst. Rescue. Ever!”) they teleport to the Vinvocci ship over the Doctor’s protests. The Doctor quickly disables the ship to prevent the Master—who has control of every radar and missile system on Earth—from detecting them.

One point that the script doesn’t make sufficiently clear—at least, it confused me on first viewing—is that the initial Time Lord scenes take place before the three pieces of narration in Part One. Apart from that glitch, though, I enjoyed the way that the two plot threads, of the Time Lords and the Master, even though they take place in different time frames, run in parallel with cross-links between them. When the Master is telling of first hearing the drumbeats in his head as a child (a flashback to “The Sound of Drums”), we cut to the President learning from the Visionary about “the rhythm of four—the heartbeat of a Time Lord.” They send that signal back in time so the Master will be infected, forming a link that will allow them to escape the “time lock” which encloses the entire Time War. Knowing the Master’s location, the Time Lords send a special diamond (a “white-point star”) through to Earth, which he can use to amplify the drumbeat signal and create a pathway they can follow.

Wilf, wandering the Vinvocci ship looking for the Doctor, encounters the strange woman in white (Claire Bloom) again, warning him that the Doctor’s final battle is here. When he finds the Doctor, there’s another classic scene between David Tennant and Bernard Cribbins, moving through so many emotions. Earlier, the Master had sneeringly referred to Wilf in front of the Doctor as “your Dad,” and Wilf had said he’d be proud to be. Now, as Wilf takes in the vista of the Earth as seen from space, the Doctor returns the compliment—“I’d be proud if you were my dad.” The Doctor tells Wilf his age, to Wilf’s amazement:

Wilf: “We must look like insects to you.”

The Doctor: “I think you look like giants.”

Wilf tries several times to give the Doctor his gun—if the prophecy says the Master will kill you, then kill him first, says Wilf. The Doctor keeps refusing, each time trying a different way to explain why. “That’s how the Master started.” “It’s not that I’m an innocent; I’ve taken lives. But I got worse—I got clever. Manipulated people into taking their own.” “Sometimes, I think a Time Lord lives too long.” Even after Wilf gets the Doctor to admit that killing the Master would restore humanity, he still refuses to take the gun. His final “I can’t. I just can’t,” sounds so tired, as though this dogged assertion of principle is a thin thread to which he is desperately clinging. But then, when the Master broadcasts a message, telling the Doctor about the diamond from Gallifrey, the Doctor immediately realizes what must be happening and grabs the gun from Wilf. After his earlier pained refusals, this moment has a real impact.

Wilf: “But I’ve heard you talk about your people like they’re wonderful.”

The Doctor: “That’s how I choose to remember them. The Time Lords of old. But then they went to war. An endless war, and it changed them. Right to the core. You’ve seen my enemies, Wilf. The Time Lords are more dangerous than any of them.”

This is the thematic link between the Master and the Time Lords which makes sense of the double plot—they have both been driven by events into an obsession with survival at any cost. The only difference, as we will find out, is one of scale.

On Gallifrey, contact is made with the Master’s transmission. The President addresses the great council chamber and calls for a vote on whether the plan should continue. (The narrated bits from Part One probably belong either just before or just after this.)

The Doctor reactivates the ship and plunges it into the atmosphere. An enjoyable action sequence follows of the ship dodging and destroying missiles—obviously inspired by Star Wars, with Wilf as an unlikely Luke Skywalker in his laser turret.

“The vote is taken. Only two stand against, and will stand as monument to their shame, like the Weeping Angels of old.” There are two Time Lords covering their faces standing behind the President (they were first seen in the final shot of Part One). On Earth, the Gate is replaced by an endless white void, the Time Lords approaching as if from a great distance.

The Doctor jumps from the ship and smashes through the Gate Room roof. It’s the first of a couple of teases in this episode—everyone knows this is Tennant’s last stand, so when the Doctor crashes to the floor in a shower of glass and lies there stunned, we can’t help but wonder—is this it? Is it time for the new Doctor now? But no, it’s not yet.

Amusingly, the Master turns out to be as much out of his league with the Time Lords as Naismith was in trying to handle him in Part One. (Incidentally, I guessed correctly last week that Naismith and his daughter were pure plot devices, rather than real characters. We’re told at the end that they have been arrested for “crimes undisclosed” and that’s all we ever hear of them.) The power of the Time Lords is convincingly established when, after the Master threatens to transfer himself into all of them, the President easily undoes the whole of the “Master race” and restores humanity with one wave of his magic gauntlet. The Master is shocked when the Doctor tells him the true meaning of the prophecy. “Something is returning. Don’t you ever listen? … Not someone, something.” It’s not just the Time Lords that are coming back—the entire planet of Gallifrey appears in the sky, and begins to devastate the world.

As all the extras stampede out of the Gate room, clearing the stage for the final confrontation, Wilf runs in and releases the terrified technician in the power booth, thereby trapping himself. The Doctor notices, but can’t do anything about it. When these twin booths were introduced in Part One, with their idiosyncratic locking system ensuring someone is locked inside one at all times, I’m sure many people worked out that they would have some part to play in the plot resolution. I was reminded of the Torchwood Institute in “Doomsday,” where the rift was controlled by two great big levers simply because Davies was working backwards from the climax where Rose needed to be holding onto one, which she could then lose her grip on and be dragged into the void. In this story the plotting is not so arbitrary, since (a) it’s plausible to require someone to be monitoring the Gate’s power source at all times, and (b) we’ve already seen the booths used to shield Wilf from the Master’s transforming signal.

The Master: “But this is fantastic, isn’t it? The Time Lords restored.”

The Doctor: “You weren’t there, in the final days of the war. You never saw what was born. But if the time lock’s broken then everything’s coming through—not just the Daleks, but the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres… The war turned into hell. And that’s what you’ve opened. Right above the Earth. Hell is descending!”

I love the writing of this final confrontation. That list of terrors sounds exactly right for an unfilmable Time War. Then, even the Master is horrified when the President announces the Time Lords’ plan—to rip open the Time Vortex and end time itself, to ascend to godhood.

The Doctor: “You see now? That’s what they were planning, in the final days of the war. I had to stop them.”

Finally, after five years, the whole story is laid bare. The Doctor destroyed his own people, not as some kind of bitterly regretted sacrifice, a Pyrrhic victory to end the Time War, but to stop them from destroying themselves and taking the whole universe with them. It’s an excellent twist which I don’t think many saw coming.

The Doctor is stood between them, pointing the gun at each in turn. The Master taunts him (“You never would, you coward”—bringing to mind dialogue in “The Doctor’s Daughter” and “The Parting of the Ways”). On some level, the Master wants to die and be released—earlier he said, “This body was born out of death. All it can do is die.”

The President: “The final act of your life is murder. But which one of us?”

One of the two Time Lords who voted against the plan uncovers her face—revealing the mysterious Woman who’s been haunting Wilf. A tear is on her cheek as she looks at the Doctor. Her eyes flick to indicate something which sends the Doctor spinning the gun back toward the Master—“Get out of the way.” The Master smiles as understanding dawns; he dodges, and the Doctor fires at the diamond behind him and destroys the link. “Back into the Time War, Rassilon—back into hell!” (At the name of Rassilon, fifty-seven thousand old Doctor Who fans just punched the air.) The Visionary wails, “Gallifrey falling!”

The President prepares to kill the Doctor in revenge—but in a final twist, the Master saves him, furiously firing his lightning bolts at the President and being drawn back into the void with the Time Lords. The symmetry of the Master saying in turn, “Get out of the way,” was very clever. It’s a wonderfully fitting end to the Master’s conflict with the Doctor, although of course he’ll be back if Steven Moffat decides he wants to use him—as the beginning of this very story showed, the Master has come back from far less ambiguous deaths than this before. The spectre of Gallifrey vanishes; the void is gone; the Earth is saved.

As the triumphant music continues, the Doctor slowly comes to on the floor of the Gate Room. “I’m alive! I’m still alive!” He’s laughing with relief, he can’t believe it. And then he hears four knocks. The music downshifts into painful discords and vanishes, and in a superlative piece of acting by David Tennant, all the vitality drains away from the Doctor’s face as he recognizes the arrival of his unavoidable fate. I haven’t singled out Euros Lyn’s direction much in these recaps, but there is a superb shot as the camera slowly tracks around the Doctor until, inevitably, Wilf is revealed, still in the booth, repeatedly tapping four times on the glass to be let out.

In quiet conversation, the mechanics of the plot work themselves out. The nuclear vault powering the Gate is going critical, and lethal radiation will vent through the booths. Any attempt to interfere with the controls will release it. Of course they both know the Doctor will save Wilf, but first he rails and rages against his fate—as we saw in the cafe scene in Part One, the Tenth Doctor really doesn’t want to die. The emotions fly freely as he berates Wilf for getting himself into this—“You were always this. Waiting for me, all this time.” He yells at Wilf and the universe generally—“It’s not fair!”—before finally coming back to himself, recognizing that he has just illustrated the point he made to Wilf in their earlier conversation: “Lived too long…” With a quick action, he opens the booth, lets Wilf out, and accepts his fate. The staging, with the Doctor slumping down unconscious inside the glass booth, is obviously inspired by The Wrath of Khan, but this is no case of “the needs of the many”—the Tenth Doctor gives up his life to save one man. “Wilfred—it’s my honor.”

The Gate machinery goes dead. The Doctor is still lying in a heap at the bottom of the booth. So, is it time for Matt Smith now? No, still not yet—the Doctor gets back up and steps out of the booth. (“Oh… now it opens, yeah.”) Wilf notices that his scarred face is repairing itself, and he realizes: “It’s started.”

Back in Chiswick, Donna is awakened by the sound of the TARDIS. A moment of humor, as she says, “Did I miss something… again?” As the Doctor drops Wilf back home, he says they will meet one more time.

Wilf: “Where are you going?”

The Doctor: “To get my reward.”

***
And so begins a fifteen-minute Epilogue, as the Tenth Doctor holds off his regeneration to pay a final visit to his friends and companions. I guess some might find this section to be overly indulgent or sentimental, but I absolutely loved it. Given that most of these characters will, in all likelihood, never be seen in Doctor Who again, it also provides closure for us.

The first stop is to meet Martha (Freema Agyeman) and Mickey (Noel Clarke)—now married! Apparently they’re both freelance alien hunters now—the Doctor steps in to save them from a Sontaran they’re chasing. (This might have come as less of a surprise had both actors been able to appear in the last series of Torchwood, as was originally planned.)

A brief sidestep into The Sarah Jane Adventures as the Doctor saves Luke Smith (Thomas Knight) from a traffic accident. Sarah sees the Doctor—and somehow she knows this will be the last time; a lovely moment from Elisabeth Sladen.

Cut to Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) nursing a drink in what’s basically the Star Wars cantina, with the musical number from “Daleks in Manhattan” playing in the background. He’s still recovering from the events of Torchwood: Children of Earth. A note from the Doctor sets him up with Alonso Frame (Russell Tovey), the young midshipman from “Voyage of the Damned.”

The Doctor visits author Verity Newman (Jessica Hynes) at a book signing for her Journal of Impossible Things, based on the diary her great-grandmother was given by John Smith in “Human Nature.” I liked the shout-out to one of David Tennant’s most powerful performances during his time on the show, and also the fact that the author’s name is a salute to Verity Lambert, the original producer, and Sydney Newman, the main creator of Doctor Who back in 1963.

Now we go to the long-awaited wedding of Donna Noble. Sylvia (Jacqueline King) and Wilf notice the TARDIS. The Doctor still can’t approach Donna, but he leaves them a present for her—a lottery ticket bought with a pound given to him by the late Geoff Noble. This scene got me choked up more than any other, with Sylvia’s reaction and Wilf silently mouthing, “Thank you.” And Wilf gets to give one final salute to his friend.

The tour ends, of course, with Rose Tyler (Billie Piper). Wisely, Davies does not mess with the complicated ending of Rose’s story, but takes us back to where we began five years ago. It’s New Year’s Day 2005 on the Powell Estate, and Rose and Jackie (Camille Coduri) are about to go celebrating. Rose encounters a stranger who tells her, “Tell you what, I bet you’re going to have a really great year.” Billie gets to give one last brilliant smile and ends with the same parting words as Donna last year, but so different in connotation—“See ya.”

Finally, the Doctor sees Ood Sigma for the last time, and a gorgeous piece of music supports him as he staggers back to the TARDIS. “This song is ending, but the story never ends.”

In the TARDIS, the Doctor can’t hold off the regeneration any longer—the Tenth Doctor’s final words are a plaintive, “I don’t want to go!” This time, the explosion of pent-up energy is violent enough to take the TARDIS with it—flames shoot out of the windows of the police box, the console room is engulfed in fire, one of the pillars comes crashing down. It’s all change for next year…

***
For me, this was the most successful of the Russell T. Davies finales since the first one, “The Parting of the Ways”—and considering “The End of Time” is on a vastly bigger scale, it was a very impressive feat of storytelling. After some rough patches while the story was getting started, this week’s conclusion seemed to flow smoothly and logically, making good use of the plot elements set up previously. There were just a couple of loose ends from Part One—the church with its stained glass window, and the tale of the Doctor fighting a demon in the 1300s, turned out to be just background detail. And I guessed wrongly that the Ood would be more significant.

About the only thing I had a problem with is the Woman who appears to Wilf. Her various appearances turn out to be not for Wilf’s benefit, but for ours—so that we will instantly recognize her when she uncovers her face in the final confrontation. Apart from prompting Wilf to bring the gun, her scenes were basically just mystification for its own sake. Though I did like the ending scene when Wilf asked, “That woman—who was she?” The Doctor glances toward Sylvia, then Donna in the background. Is the Woman his mother? You decide—Davies isn’t saying.

Trying to sum up David Tennant’s contribution in a paragraph or two is hopeless. The revived series was already a huge success when he joined, but he has taken it to a level no one could have dreamed of. In the UK the series has steadily increased its audience every year, unlike practically every other show on television.

He was given the most incredible variety of stories in which to display his range—comedy, action-adventure, dark sci-fi, historical, romance, and just about any other genre you care to name. In his first year he could sometimes be unconvincing in the shouty moments, but once he settled into the role he was consistently brilliant. It’s been a wonderful ride, and for a lot of people I’m sure David Tennant will be their favorite Doctor for life. He’s certainly in the top group on my list, joining the Doctors I knew growing up, Tom Baker and Peter Davison.

I understand Tennant is currently exploring options in America, having recently shot a pilot for NBC (Rex is Not Your Lawyer). Wherever his future career takes him, I hope he continues to enjoy every possible success. Thanks, David.

***
But with the tears still falling, the mood shifts abruptly as Steven Moffat takes over, arriving with a bang (he’s not credited on screen, but he wrote the script for and oversaw the shooting of everything after the regeneration). We get our first glimpse of the Eleventh Doctor as Matt Smith provides a huge burst of new life, checking out his legs, arms, hands, ears, eyes, nose, mouth (“Chin… blimey!”), and hair (“Still not ginger!”). It’s basically a re-working of the little scene written for the Children in Need charity night in 2005 which introduced David Tennant (and can be found on the Series Two DVD box set), so we end the era as we began, crashing down to Earth in an out-of-control TARDIS. One Doctor is gone, but Doctor Who keeps going—there’s already been a trailer released for the next series, due to premiere in the UK in a few months’ time, showing Matt Smith and Karen Gillan in a whole new set of adventures.

As the Tenth Doctor would say… Allons-y!

Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: “The War Games,” starring Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury. Recently released in North America, this is where the Time Lords first appeared, in the epic conclusion to the Second Doctor’s era.
_________________________________
Steven Cooper is a software developer and long-time Doctor Who fan, living in Melbourne, Australia.

Read more!

Gosh durn, Ms. Mendes.

Read more!

By Matt Maul

Symptomatic of a compulsive streak in my nature, I’ve always been a tad obsessed with seeing the exact moment a digital display on a clock or cell phone clicks off a major milestone. For instance, I often feel a pang of frustration upon glancing down at a car’s odometer to see that it has advanced into a new hundred, thousand, ten thousand, or (heaven forbid) hundred thousand series without my noticing it. If you can recall the extra excitement exhibited ten years ago by New Year’s revelers as 1999 gave way to 2000 even though, technically, the millennium didn’t turn over until the following year, you may be able to empathize.

This probably explains why the cinematic “reboot” phenomenon of the 2000’s decade intrigued me more than it should. More extensive than simply changing lead characters, a reboot involves melting down the component parts of an established film franchise that has run its course and reforging them into a new, yet familiar vision. Successful or not, there’s something about the exercise itself that I gravitate toward. Of course, in addition to being obsessive, I’m also cynical. In my heart of hearts I realize that the decision to breath new life into an otherwise exhausted film series is made on commercial rather than artistic grounds. But that doesn’t mean reboots can’t be done well or aren’t worth the attempt.

***
1) Batman Begins (2005): This was arguably the movie that kicked off the 2000’s reboot craze. Jack Nicholson’s outing as "The Joker" aside, Tim Burton’s original Batman lost my interest after an hour. I don’t think time has been kind to it or its sequels. A guilty pleasure of mine, Batman Forever is the only one of the original series I can still sit all the way through (maybe it’s the irony of Tommy Lee Jones as “Two Face” playing a coin flipping villain before being pitted against one himself years later in No Country for Old Men). In Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan creates a grittier version of Gotham City that I could connect with as opposed to Burton’s more comic incarnation. And while the 1989 film keeps insisting through dialog that Michael Keaton’s Batman is supposed to have a screw loose, I never quite believe it as strongly as I do with Christian Bale.

***
2) Superman Returns (2006): The 1978 Superman bragged in an aggressive ad campaign that “you will believe a man can fly.” That alone would probably have ensured its success. But Christopher Reeve’s characterization of the Kryptonian is never overshadowed by state-of-the-art special effects, Gene Hackman or even Marlon Brando. Unfortunately, in the new version Brandon Routh doesn’t bring much to the table other than the ability to look good in a red cape and blue tights. Furthermore, the reboot doesn’t show Superman doing enough “super” things. The drama of "the man of steel" slowly coming in for a landing accompanied by triumphant music (which happens A LOT) wears thin very quickly. To make matters worse, Superman spends an inordinate amount of time in a coma. Nothing takes the wind out of a film’s sail faster than an elongated hospital sequence where the audience already knows what the outcome will be. Not much tension there. I mean, did anyone actually think Superman might die in the very first entry of the new series?

***
3) Casino Royale (2006): Since Sean Connery created 007’s screen persona in 1962’s Dr. No, the Bond franchise had gone through five changes in the lead role. While making a few tweaks here and there to account for the different actors playing Bond, the formula itself was pretty much left intact for each outing. However, as the 21st-century dawned, the template was badly in need of renovation. Alas, there was no chance that “Team Bond” would take a really dramatic gamble with the property like actually setting a 007 movie in the same time period as Ian Fleming's novels (1950s and 60s). But with the help of Daniel Craig, who had to endure an initial deluge of cries from outraged Bond fans when first cast, Casino Royale pulls off its assigned mission magnificently. Dubbed somewhat incorrectly as “Bond Begins,” the film stays faithful to the 50-year-old novel while incorporating the audience’s collective knowledge about the cinematic Bond and introducing a few new twists of its own.

***
4) The Incredible Hulk (2008): This one is interesting only in that it represents a reboot of a series which never got off the ground in the first place. 2008’s The Incredible Hulk could be classified as more of a mulligan for 2003’s Hulk than an actual reboot. As the title suggests, the new outing seems to deny the existence of the previous attempt. To be fair, I’m not a fan of the Hulk in any format. Unlike Batman or Superman, the exact nature and limits to Hulk’s “power” never seems clear to me. I had at least hoped one of the films would have resolved how the doctor's pants stretch during his metamorphosis. But seriously, I seldom ever connect enough with Banner to feel pulled into his dilemma. And, in the case of both films, the special effects scream CGI which further hinders my suspension of disbelief.

***
5) Star Trek (2009): While not my favorite of the five films on this list (that’s would be Casino Royale), this re-envisioning of Gene Roddenberry’s creation by J.J. Abrams is perhaps the most successful. It manages to thread the needle by using the trappings of the Trek universe to attract new and younger moviegoers without ticking off old “fanboys” like myself. I was especially taken by Zachary Quinto who, as the emotionless Mr. Spock, is responsible for the film's most passionate moments. I dare say that this Trek outing surpasses its predecessors. By jettisoning the baggage from the previous Star Trek television and movie incarnations, the filmmakers gave themselves a blank slate upon which to start fresh and create a totally new, satisfying vehicle. That’s the point of a reboot after all; isn’t it?
__________________________________
Matt Maul is author of the blog Maul of America.

Read more!

Matt's been linking his work for the recently inaugurated Film Salon, and I'd like to start out this Links entry by doing the same for other House contributors. All these are for the "Films of the Decade" feature: Here's Jack Patrick Rodgers on Casino Royale, N.P. Thompson on The Ballad of Jack and Rose, and Vadim Rizov on Yi Yi.

Dave Kehr's "The Ballad of Blu-ray and Scratchy Old Film" is an essential piece of writing on the beauties and the limitations of the new home video format.

Let's look Canada way for the latest issue of Cinemascope (highlights among many: Adam Nayman on Up in the Air; Andrew Tracy wrapping up the Toronto Film Festival; and Michael Sicinski doing a valuable compare of Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are).

One more Canada: Dan Sallitt on Toronto '09 at Senses of Cinema.

And finally: Jim Emerson's annual movie of movies, "Favorites of 2009":

_______________________________
"Links for the Day": A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

Read more!

By Jason Klorfein

[Author's Note: Special thanks to Daniel Kasman for his help with this piece.]

Lee Yoon-ki is a humanist. The refusal by this South Korean director to suggest otherwise can quite understandably be argued as a limitation. Since narrative films often rely on audience identification, a movie that empathizes with a repressed character and stresses a need for self-expression often doesn’t make for very challenging contemporary cinema. The grammar of commercial film (the close-up, the shot/countershot) can so easily be deployed for audience handholding that a small, sincere, affecting drama can seem to be only a modest achievement. Maybe this is why, as Michael Sicinski has noted, after four films in five years, Lee’s sensitive, unassuming work has never gained consistent attention from the U.S. festival circuit (Los Angeles International being the notable exception).

That’s a shame, because Lee’s films deserve closer inspection. The predominantly female protagonists in his movies—office workers, call girls, and massage parlor owners—exist with little protection for their individual rights. Though Lee empathizes with women marginalized by a patriarchal society, he refuses to exploit easy cultural signifiers to arouse audience sympathy. While a melodrama like The Guitar (2008, Amy Redford) might emphasize the soullessness of the workplace to justify its character’s withdrawal from the world, Lee finds value in some of the more superficial social rituals. In his films, boring after-work drinks and radio talk shows provide what little opportunity there is for female bonding and self-expression. The characters also remain rather elusive, in part because Lee’s always-atmospheric images threaten to envelop the actors. Indeed, if his films are refreshingly unsentimental, their imagery is also refreshingly evocative, more romantic than realist. Along with the surprise at seeing his first foray into straight-comedy—My Dear Enemy (2008)—the pleasure in looking at his complete oeuvre comes from recognizing how this modest filmmaker’s visual style continues to evolve and adapt: from the structurally clean compositions of This Charming Girl (2004) to the rich, high-density images of Ad Lib Night (2006); from the spare, awkward scope frames of Love Talk (2005), and, finally, to the sleek, clever widescreen two-shots in Enemy.

The irony of the English title of Lee’s first feature—This Charming Girl—is immediately apparent when we meet the film’s protagonist, the stoic, lonely Jeong-hae (Kim Ji-su), who slowly comes to confront a past trauma. The film keeps one on edge, as Lee offsets the loveliness of the film’s blue summer mornings by creating a permanent aura of menace. The camera hovers around the door hedges of Jeong-hae’s apartment, and temporal mis-directions abound as the film observes her daily routines—what looks to be a POV shot of her new cat turns out to re-establish the character in the same place at a different time. Girl also maintains a sense of perspective that balances Jeong-hae’s insularity. She might be more disturbed, but her female co-workers are just as repressed. When Jeong-hae insists that she leave an after-work get-together with her co-workers to take care of her cat, a hurt friend asks her to stay, pleading that she’s chosen to spend time with her co-workers over her husband. The friend sounds desperate, knowing that these boring happy hours provide some sense of relief. This Charming Girl is emblematic of Lee’s rational compassion as a filmmaker.

In Ad Lib Night, a girl (Han Hyo-ju) is asked by the family of a dying man to impersonate his long-lost daughter, but the film is unburdened by its high-concept. The girl’s task, simply to whisper “I’m sorry” to the man, is accomplished fairly on, providing room for more slice-of-life sequences that are perceptive of both place and class. The family’s house in a rural town outside of Seoul is large, bare, and looks completely out of place. In so many industrialized countries, suburban developments pop-up out of nowhere only to never be finished, leaving rural landscapes littered with sentinel McMansions.

The girl is just as marginalized a figure as Jeong-hae. Referred to by the name of the woman she impersonates, we only learn her own name towards the end of the film. That it’s also revealed that she’s a call girl only reinforces the idea that a young woman’s place within a family is a narrow, subservient role. After her job is done, she’s literally kicked to the side of the room by the anxious family. She is alone, and all but dissolves under Night’s lush DV cinematography. Framing her against blue twilight skies and behind reflective car windows, the images are rich to the point of near opacity.

Three of Lee’s films are adaptations of other material (Ad Lib Night and My Dear Enemy both originate from novels by Japanese author Azuko Taira). His only original screenplay, Love Talk, presents a twist to the history of transmigratory cinema in the U.S.: a South Korean film crew makes a fictional romantic-drama about Korean-Americans in Los Angeles. It’s an intriguing, awkward film that works in fits and starts. Lee’s direction, usually so good (especially with blocking), seems uncertain. The Terry McMillan-esque plot—about a hard-edged massage parlor owner and a Korean-American talk show host—suggests that he works best when other writers provide the coordinates for melodrama. But the movie is also affecting in its clumsiness, particularly in how it constructs an emotional space out of its Los Angeles locations. Shooting for the first time in widescreen, and opening with a long tracking shot that is distinct from the more fragmentary editing of his two earlier films, Lee, who received his MA from USC, creates an eerily empty city. There are never enough extras to populate a Korean town club or massage parlor. In a new country, the Korean ex-pat characters are able to insulate themselves, and the flat delivery by the American actors is both risibly bad and strangely poignant. Their stiffness makes them seem like intruders into the protagonists’ tight-knit community. Love Talk might essentially be a VCD “video movie” for expats that has infiltrated the film festival circuit.

It’s a surprise then, to find that the light My Dear Enemy, departs from Lee’s earlier female-centered narratives. The film essentially agrees with its male lead, Byeong-woon (The Chaser’s Ha Jung-woo), that his former lover Hee-su (2007 Cannes Best Actress winner Jeon Do-yeon) should get over the loan she has asked him to repay. Hee-su is continually humiliated while the debt is collected piecemeal from donations by other female fans of Byeong-woon. Her goal is made to seem more and more petty as the women donating to her become more generous.

But My Dear Enemy, the film that, among Lee’s work, is least concerned with female melodrama, is the one that finally allows an actor to give a standout performance. While the solitary women in Girl and Ad Lib were required to be melancholy, Jeon reveals herself to be a fierce comic actress. Soaked in severe black eyeliner, she ’s the straight woman to Ha, staring down her ex every time he delivers some charming bullshit. But her expressive eyes and dry line readings show an amusement with the situation that becomes all the more palpable through her blocking within the film’s frame. In one sequence, the camera looks from over Hee-su’s shoulder onto a rooftop party crowd of drunk Seoul bohos. The scene’s too much fun for either Hee-su or the film to believe her when she says, “I hate this world.”

My Dear Enemy ends with the “main protagonist slowly gives a grin of profound revelation as she drives alone” bit, the kind of cheaply middlebrow uplift that one worries might find its way into Lee’s films. It makes the argument for the director as a uniquely unsentimental humanist more difficult, and the elements of his earlier work that seemed a bit shaky—like the possibility in This Charming Girl of a romance with an awkward writer—become all the more questionable. But whatever their slips, his films are never uninteresting. Lee has always been a filmmaker greatly sensitive to place, tone, and character. With My Dear Enemy, he finally extends that generosity to his actors. Korean film websites have reported that his next film, And Us, will be another romantic-dramedy. It could be just as commercial as Enemy (which still flopped at the Korean box-office). But these films could prove to be his niche after all, and for a type of movie that is often too static visually and too sticky-sweet emotionally, the rom-dram could use Lee.

___________________________________
Jason Klorfein recently programmed a retrospective on filmmaker Anna Biller for Block Cinema in Evanston, IL. Clips of his video work, programming notes, and other first world fun can be had at jasonklorfein.com.

Read more!

By Veronika Ferdman

A lot has already been written about the changes at this year’s AFI Fest (Oct 30—Nov 7, 2009). So, just to briefly recap; tickets to all the screenings (including Galas and Special Presentations) were free. And as newly appointed Artistic Director Robert Koehler liked to remind everyone during his pre-screening introductions, this was the first time that LA played host to a completely gratis festival. Thus it was a little disconcerting that the first few days saw quite a few half-filled theaters. General consensus suggests that people who would have otherwise paid for guaranteed tickets were not willing to risk standing in the Rush Line (at the start of the festival all tickets were “sold out”). But after the first few days, ticket-based confusion was sorted out and the Sunday post-Halloween screening of Chabrol’s Bellamy was nearly packed (pretty impressive considering it was rather early in the afternoon post a night of merriment and revelry).

However, those that didn’t make it out, nursing hangovers or whatnot, really weren’t missing much. Gerard Depardieu plays Detective Bellamy, who’s taking a brief vacation with his wife at their country house. But an insurance claim murder mystery drops into his lap and he just can’t resist indulging in a little sleuthing. Also, his boozy brother comes to stay with the couple for a while, and familial squabbles and emotional strain ensue. Chabrol, Depardieu, murder, family quarreling—all seemingly wonderful elements that, when put together, should prove engaging and fascinating, but alas, everyone (including Matthieu Chabrol, whose original jazzy score is generic and overly emphatic) seems to be working on auto-pilot. The script is lax and dull; the mystery is solved halfway through the film with little else remaining afterward to keep our attention or interest. And while the film tries to grapple with morality and the relativity of guilt and innocence, at the end, a dark secret is revealed that heavy-handedly attempts to further moralize. Maybe this revelation would be more startling if there was any reason to care about the thoroughly dullard characters, but there’s not.

The Red Riding Trilogy, although dramatically different in tone from Bellamy, also falls into the category of murder mystery-thriller. Comprised of three films, each spearheaded by different directors (Julian Jarrold’s Red Riding: 1974, James Marsh’s Red Riding: 1980, and Anand Tucker’s Red Riding: 1983) the trilogy encapsulates the pursuits of two different serial killers, choosing to follow a different protagonist each time around (1974 features Andrew Garfield’s hot-under-the-collar journalist, 1980 stars Paddy Considine as a near-sainted cop, and 1983 splits its time between David Morrissey’s detective awakening to his conscience, and Mark Addy’s weary lawyer). Maybe it’s because I had the bar set so high, expecting something as wildly engrossing as Memories of Murder or meticulously constructed as Zodiac, but none of the films hold up well, the narrative far too convoluted and muddled. The tapestry of characters and actions is so complex and tortuous that it proves very difficult to keep everything straight in one’s head (to attempt to recount it after just one viewing would be impossible), and watching them all one right after the other is a bit of overload.

Aside from narrative issues, in the first two films the protagonists are not nearly developed or interesting enough to carry the story. With Andrew Garfield you never really understand why it’s so important for him to solve the case of the murders/kidnappings of a few young school girls (aside from the fact that he has a tryst with Rebecca Hall, mother to one of the lost girls). Though to his credit, the actor’s performance is somewhat intriguing. With the exception of forgetting to act wounded (he gets beat up rather badly numerous times, but after each altercation he seems right as rain, with no restrictions in physical movement to speak of), he does manage to pull-off the sarcastic, cocky reporter vibe (quite a departure from his achingly shy and timid character in Boy-A). Point is, Garfield has range as an actor, but his character here is underwritten. And Paddy Considine, while also offering a solid performance, is given a rather stale character. Only in the third film, with a once crooked David Morrissey reconciling himself to an inner morality, and a wonderfully curmudgeonly Mark Addy inhabiting the sore bones of a world-weary lawyer, does the trilogy actually offer compelling, conflicted, interesting characters. Which is not to say that Red Riding: 1983 doesn’t also suffer from various faults of plot overload, resulting in narrative whiplash, before it at least attempts to tie together all the loose threads.

Watching all three films marathon-style with ten minute breaks in-between was a bit grueling. All three are consistently bleak and almost terrifyingly dark in tone. Neither one of them stands as an exemplary entry into the thriller/serial killer fold, yet there are instances within each film of sheer brilliance, where just for a moment all the formal qualities coalesce, creating a sad, haunting beauty. But such moments are few and far between. I can’t say that these are good films, or that I even liked them all that much, but they are worthwhile, if only for those few devastating moments. Just don’t watch them all in one day—that’ll cause a headache. And depression.

On a lighter note, one of my favorite discoveries of the festival was the French-Canadian film I Killed My Mother, written, produced, directed, and starring twenty year-old Xavier Dolan. The film had its world premiere earlier in the year at the Cannes Film Festival, taking home three awards. It’s a semi-autobiographical dramedy, chronicling Hubert’s (Xavier Dolan) alternately comical and highly strained and painful relationship with his mother. The constant fights and misunderstandings that occur between the two are amusing and a bit over-the-top, yet always firmly rooted in an authenticity of familial dynamics. Their relationship is deftly rendered and nuanced, both coming off as believable characters, similarly impatient with one another, each feeling grandly misunderstood, neither one sainted or vilified. Familial relationships are most difficult of all since we have no say in choosing our family, so oftentimes love and hate are inextricably intertwined. Dolan masterfully negotiates the travails of learning to navigate those emotions, reconciling ourselves as best we can to the people we hate and love. Dolan’s film is visually intricate (alternating between warmly-lit tableaux and cinema vérité black-and-white footage) and droll, while being emotionally affecting. Quite frankly, this is one of the best directorial debuts I’ve seen in quite some time, and if this is what Dolan can pull off at twenty, I can’t wait to see what he’ll achieve in ten years time.

Another wonderful revelation was Pedro Costa’s Ne Change Rien, which took a few days remove to really seep into my bloodstream, but now I can’t get it out of my mind. It's a documentary featuring Jeanne Balibar and her band as they try to record an album. Admission: this was my first Costa, so I have no idea how this film fits in with the larger scope of his oeuvre, or if the style is indicative of his usual approach. But in either case, this is one of the most visually striking films I’ve seen, comprised of mostly static long-takes in soft and smoky black-and-white. The narrative is quite simple: there’s no intrigue, no inner-fighting, just process; the endless rehearsals, mild frustration and hushed beauty. It’s not dramatically captivating so much as it is serenely enchanting. And if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that Costa’s in love with Balibar. In each frame she’s quietly, devastatingly beautiful and sultry, the soft light hitting her features in such a way that it lends her an almost ethereal aura. Sigh.

_______________________________________
Veronika Ferdman is a student at USC, earning BA’s in Philosophy and Critical Studies-Film.

Read more!

By Peet Gelderblom

[Editor's Note: This article is cross-published at Directorama.]

People who know me realize I'm not much of a list-maker. My peculiar taste is suspiciously mood-specific and based on private obsessions that are ever-evolving (just like everyone else's, for that matter), so numbering favorites is about as pointless to me as, say, a Stephen Sommers remake of Howard the Duck to mankind. Then again… what is life but a string of silly exercises?

I started making this list just to see if I could. I do not claim to have seen every worthwhile film this decade. I do not claim to have the authority to tell you what you should like. I do not believe in objective valuation and it doesn't think highly of me either. But I might be the guy to convince you to see something you may have dismissed or overlooked. In any case, beware of superlatives.

***
1. Birth (2004 | Jonathan Glazer): An endlessly thought-provoking journey into the mystery of the heart. Kubrick with compassion. Massively underappreciated, so see it with an open mind.

2. Mulholland Dr. (2001 | David Lynch): David Lynch's ultimate celluloid fever dream and about as sensual as the medium gets.

3. There Will Be Blood (2007 | P.T. Anderson): Never has a picture so relatively modest in scope felt so tremendously epic. I was thoroughly immersed in its sense of place and mesmerized by Daniel Day-Lewis' all-consuming personification of capitalist America.

4. Adam’s Apples (2005 | Anders Thomas Jensen): A Danish gem that walks an amazing tightrope between biting satire and heartfelt allegory.

5. Children of Men (2006 | Alfonso Cuarón): Quite possibly the most astonishingly choreographed cinematic experience of the decade.

6. The Incredibles (2004 | Brad Bird): Leave it to Pixar to deliver a gorgeously designed kid-friendly gut-buster that kicks more ass than any Bond movie before it. Beyond the belly laughs, it manages to profoundly touch upon the disillusions of maturity and the strengths of family bonding. How's that for incredible?

7. Zodiac (2007 | David Fincher): The nature of obsession was never studied this, uh, obsessively. Digital cinema finally came of age in Fincher's magnum opus (nevermind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

8. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001 | Steven Spielberg): An achingly beautiful fairy tale for adults with a final section that disappointed me the first time, but has proved curiously rewarding since.

9. In The Mood For Love (2000 | Wong Kar Wai): Lyrical filmmaking at its finest. It is doubtful that adultery will ever have a more glorious excuse.

10. No Country for Old Men (2007 | Joel & Ethan Coen): The Coens rarely disappoint, of course (I loved The Man Who Wasn't There and haven't even seen A Serious Man). This felt like a classic from the first moment I laid eyes on it.

11. Sexy Beast (2000 | Jonathan Glazer): The other movie made by my favorite director this decade, with truly breathtaking performances by Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley. Its title pretty much covers it, even if it does feature Fatty Ray in Speedos.

12. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003 | Peter Jackson): The epitome of world-building. So passionately operatic that it repeatedly had me convinced I was dreaming with eyes wide open.

13. Waking the Dead (2000 | Keith Gordon): This romance between two torn idealists broke my heart. Billy Crudup's breakdown at a family dinner is one of my favorite scenes of the last ten years, for sure.

14. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004 | Michel Gondry): Another complicated love story sans Hollywood glamor told in a deliriously inventive way, capped with the finest bittersweet ending you'll ever see.

15. Elephant (2003 | Gus Van Sant): Deeply moving to some, appallingly empty to others—depending on what you bring to this moving Rorschach test.

16. Memories of Murder (2003 | Bong Joon-ho): A serial killer flick/police procedural as you've never seen before. (Long live South-Korean cinema: I could just as easily have put Old Boy, A Tale of Two Sisters or The Host at this spot. See also number 18.)

17. Femme Fatale (2002 | Brian De Palma): This is just too close to my cinematic erogenous zones to not be part of this list. De Palma's still the most seductive filmmaker on the planet, if he's not too busy pissing people off.

18. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring (2003 | Kim Ki-duk): I had to fit one Kim Ki-duk film on here and this impressionistic Buddhist allegory stayed with me the most.

19. Punch-Drunk Love (2002 | P.T. Anderson): A stunningly original romantic comedy that puts the rest of the genre to shame.

20. Reprise (2006 | Joachim Trier): An evocative portrait of two competitive friends fueled by literary aspirations, cut to the quicksilver rhythm of thought.

21. Inglourious Basterds (2009 | Quintin Tarantino): Quite possibly the most powerful wish-fantasy ever put on film.

22. In Bruges (2008 | Martin McDonagh): Without a doubt the sharpest written feature on this list.

23. Bronson (2008 | Nicolas Winding Refn): A cinematic ode to a horribly violent man who spends a lifetime in jail as some cruel piece of performance art. Oddly fascinating stuff.

24. The Prestige (2006 | Christopher Nolan): An ideal night at the movies. Massively entertaining and refreshingly smart.

25. Hero (2002 | Zhang Yimou): Just for the sheer poetry of its colors, movement, art direction and cinematography. Zhang Yimou tried to top himself later, but I believe he raised the bar a little too high with his wuxia debut.

Among the many films I couldn't get to fit on this list, in no particular order: Fernando Meirelles' City of God, Nanouk Leopold's Guernsey, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later, Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, Sean Penn's Into the Wild, Henry Selick's Coraline, Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, Zack Snyder's 300, Danny Boyle's Sunshine, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Takashi Miike's The Great Yokai War, Paul Verhoeven's Black Book and about a hundred others I'm currently forgetting. (Don't say I didn't warn you this was a silly exercise.)
__________________________________________
Peet Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design in Amsterdam. His short fiction film Out of Sync will go the festival route this year. He founded 24LiesASecond, for which he wrote and edited several essays, and is the twisted cartoonist/blogger behind Directorama.

Read more!

By Lauren Wissot

After viewing Michael Haneke’s masterpiece The White Ribbon, I came to the conclusion that Haneke is my favorite director of the past decade. From 2001’s The Piano Teacher on he’s consistently proven himself not only as a filmmaker merely to watch, but as a director to argue about akin to Lars von Trier and Roman Polanski (before the cinematic debate turned personal). Like von Trier, Haneke trains his cold lens on people desperate to make order out of mayhem. And in a way, Haneke is an anthropological Polanski, forever concerned with the evil we can’t see, with that which lies beyond the frame. He wants us to hear the words left out of the script, to feel the heaviness of absence—to ponder that which is missing.

Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner is set in northern Germany just before WWI changes the lives of the tale’s very Protestant villagers forever. The stock characters include a nerdy narrator schoolteacher, a rich baron, a strict pastor, a sadistic doctor, a suffering midwife, poor tenant farmers and—most importantly—the offspring of these varied human sources who all suffer equally and painfully. Beginning with the doctor’s bad fall from a horse that trips over a wire strung nefariously between two trees, a string of mysterious “accidents” occur that are each more disturbing and bizarre than the last. All the while these possible crimes go halfheartedly investigated since no one ever seems to have seen or heard anything (and no good religious person would dare speak evil anyway). In other words, witnesses are never present because they don’t want to be. These townsfolk are terrified to look in the mirror and maybe see a monster staring back.

In turn, all of the characters from the cruelest to the meekest are caught in a vise of fear because nothing untoward is acknowledged, not even class strife. All feeling is stifled, and this repression breeds repression. An atmosphere of terror, which leads to a panicky desire to control, is passed down from one generation to the next. This brings the audience to see the Fascistic future not as an aberrant outcome, but as the only logical conclusion. Haneke, like von Trier, is interested in delving into the chaos that reigns when the Dionysian spirit itself is forced underground. In The White Ribbon any talk of the irrational—as from the girl who claims to have dreams that come true—will be met with punishment. A cop who questions the crying child after one especially heinous crime practically spits, “I don’t believe in witches and sorcerers.”

Ingeniously, The White Ribbon is not a whodunit but a “Where did the original sin begin?” In Haneke’s world there are no neat and tidy lone gunmen, only a community made up of likeminded individuals constantly reinforcing one another’s behaviors—even when those behaviors are abhorrent. Those growing up in a community of collective abusers can’t help but become abusers themselves. Dysfunction is a “disease” of society, not just of one person or of a single family. Even the absolutely adorable pastor’s son who promises to release a wounded bird he’s rescued (his mere smile elicited a righteous round of “Awwww” at the screening I attended) ends up putting it in a cage—a gift to his domineering dad. He’s so enamored with his controlling father he simply forgets the right thing to do. Indeed, if a child is raised to follow a strict authority figure without question, that child inevitably will grow up to believe that not thinking for oneself is not only normal but necessary.

In addition, Haneke continues to mine his ongoing pet theme that consistent punishment creates an insatiable craving for punishment. (It’s why the sadomasochistic relationship between the doctor and the midwife—who serve as scapegoats at the end for the sole reason that their leaving town makes blaming them convenient—lasts for years.) When the pastor claims that caning his children will hurt him more than it does them he’s also training those kids to embrace punishment as a catharsis that will cleanse both victim and victimizer. Haneke heightens the tension of the caning scene by lingering on a closed door (we hear the sounds of torture but don’t see it) in the same sadistic way the pastor draws out his punishment by telling the kids they will be caned for disobedience—tomorrow evening. In so doing, we come to identify with these characters, with the fright caused by an awareness of inexplicable dread that we are unable to see in tangible form. By manipulating imagery—shots are framed nearly imperceptibly off kilter—Haneke has trapped us in his web. He's crafted an existential thriller in which we the audience are forever losing our balance.

While much has been made of Haneke using The White Ribbon as a literal statement of “This is how Nazism happened” the director is far too smart for that. What Haneke never does—and which tends to drive a lot of critics nuts—is offer concrete answers. The director has no interest in serving as an audience’s strong father figure leading us to simplistic explanations. That is how Nazism happened. What he does do is rather meticulously examine pre-existing conditions, present possibilities like a theoretician. Ultimately it’s up to us to do the hard work of thinking for ourselves. Haneke’s never going to give us the benefit of that other catharsis that occurs when you can name the unknown, define the fear, and thus destroy it. That behavior can get addictive—the compulsion that stirs the heart of every serial killer.

***
Film criticism requires one to be objective about a subjective experience. Corneliu Porumboiu, the director of the Rashomon-like 12:08 East of Bucharest (which took the Cannes Camera d’Or in 2006), mines the often absurd, nuance-averse territories of life in his Un Certain Regard-winning Police, Adjective by focusing on the literal “letter of the law.” Wearing its Pickpocket influence on its sleeve, Porumboiu’s film follows undercover cop Cristi (an understated Dragos Bucur) as, day after monotonous day, he trails fairly harmless, hashish-smoking teens, one of whom stands to do serious jail time for offering the illicit substance to his friends. In a moral quandary probably familiar to many an arresting officer expected to enforce our own controversial Rockefeller Drug Laws, Cristi must choose between his job and his conscience. What should one do when old laws haven’t caught up with new attitudes? Do you partake in that which you believe is wrong?

While Porumboiu’s filmmaking can be overly analytical and self-conscious at times, a bit too calculated in its nods to Neorealism, the director smartly universalizes his rural Romanian tale through deft camerawork, including a long opening sequence that is all images and no dialogue. The patient long shots perfectly place Cristi in the context of this post-Soviet any town in transition, where the only sounds are ambient, cell phone ring tones recognized the globe over. Slowly, the bureaucratic red tape piles up and the excruciating minutes tick by until judgment day arrives in the form of Cristi’s boss played by the diabolically thrilling Vlad Ivanov (who with a name like that was bound to be cast as the evil abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). In a hilarious scene that culminates in a reading and discussion of the dictionary, a very un-liberal revelation occurs. As ludicrous as the law may seem, Cristi’s equally ridiculous, by-the-book superior turns out to be making the most sense. Cops are trained to carry out the law, not debate it. The police force, like the military, is no place for conscientious objectors. In the end, the unsentimental Porumboiu knows that Dirty Harry is for Hollywood. And that, in this highly subjective world, Police, Adjective will not be everyone’s cup of tea.
__________________________________________
Brooklyn-based writer Lauren Wissot is the publisher of the blog Beyond the Green Door, the author of the memoir Under My Master's Wings, and a contributor to The Reeler.

Read more!

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Richard Seitz

PART 1



PART 2



These two videos were commissioned by The L Magazine in conjunction with their series of articles about the decade in film. To read individual essays about 2000-2004 by the magazine's film staff, click here. To read about 2005-2009, click here.

Read more!

By Matt Zoller Seitz


To read the eleventh and final installment in a series of countdown essays written for Salon.com about the most important directors of the decade, click here.

Read more!

By Matt Zoller Seitz



To read the tenth in a series of countdown essays written for Salon.com about the most important directors of the decade, click here.

Read more!

By Miriam Bale

[Editor's Note: This article is being cross-published at The Nibbler.]

“The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible." —Umberto Eco

From a Spiegel magazine interview:

Q: You include a nice list by the French philosopher Roland Barthes in your new book, "The Vertigo of Lists." He lists the things he loves and the things he doesn't love. He loves salad, cinnamon, cheese and spices. He doesn't love bikers, women in long pants, geraniums, strawberries and the harpsichord. What about you?

Eco: I would be a fool to answer that; it would mean pinning myself down. I was fascinated with Stendhal at 13 and with Thomas Mann at 15 and, at 16, I loved Chopin. Then I spent my life getting to know the rest. Right now, Chopin is at the very top once again. If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

Here are the films with images that shifted around most in my mind throughout the aughts. Not the best or worst, but the most enduring:

***
1. The Lady and the Duke (Eric Rohmer, 2001): The theme of the decade—of historic reimaginings thanks to and in conflict with digital imagery—was kicked-off in this 2001 Rohmer, but with self-conscious simplicity. Actors walk in front of painted backdrops for an oddly beautiful and disturbing effect.

***
2. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005): Each shift from one narrative reality to the next is brilliantly acted and directed, but what's truly mindblowing is that it's never clear whether these moments are comedy or tragedy.

***
3. The Story of Marie and Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003): A goofy and deceptively slight film with much to mull on: perspective, pairings, sound, ghost movies, but most of all about how benign thoughts of death get tangled up in intense sex. Maybe that's why it proves the exception to the usually dull screen sex simulacrum.

***
4. Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, 2009): A summation of what the greatest living critic/filmmaker has learned about movies after watching from the second row for over sixty years.

***
5. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000): Shows minstrelsy is a much worse problem now that blackface makeup is out of fashion.

***
6. La France (Serge Bozon, 2007): Film criticism on the war film as filmmaking, from a new generation of French critics/directors.

***
7. Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (John Landis, 2007): Nothing is more All-American than ethnic jokes. Very, very funny with smart transitions and scary photos of Don Rickles as a baby but looking exactly the same.

***
8. The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2004): OK, maybe Robert McNamara is even more All-American than Rickles. No film made me cry more.

***
9. Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel, 2008): So many mysteries—the masterful transitions from one tone, or dimension, to another; the subtle allusions to Jean Seberg and her strange appeal; but most of all the mystery of Louis Garrel's surprising depth. A beautiful film, and heartbreaking.

***
10. Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006): A failure in its attempt to be an auteur statement, as if that meant imposing autobiography on history. But it really was the story of flounce, ribbons, wallpaper, and the history of the way women walked, starring Versailles. In its own way, an annoying cousin of Jeanne Dielman.
_______________________________________
Miriam Bale is a film curator and writer with interests in feminism and ephemera.

Read more!

By Dan Callahan

The Blind Side, which has reportedly made close to 200 million dollars, is based on a true story (the operative word is “based,” of course). If its makers were accused of racism, surely they would be surprised and defensive; maybe they didn’t notice that underneath the inspirational basis of their narrative is a fixation with the idea of sex between the lily-white, condescending caretaker played by Sandra Bullock and Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) her black “gentle giant” charge. It’s a ghastly but revealing movie, not least for one scene with Adriane Lenox, a stage actress who won a Tony as the mother in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. Cast as Michael’s errant, drug-addicted mother, Lenox takes her role, which amounts to only a few lines of dialogue, and fills it out with such delicate, shamed emotion that it’s hard not to resent the director for insistently cutting back to Our Star, the ever-bland Bullock, who listens in such an oblivious, absent way to Lenox’s heartfelt attempts to communicate that I was reminded of Lana Turner inanely marveling at the fact that her long-time maid Annie (Juanita Moore) has friends in Imitation of Life (1959). Fifty years later, we’re still stuck with movie star white supremacy, smiling vacantly for untold millions of dollars, while exciting black actors and black characters continue to lead lives on the outskirts of films when they would be so much more vital at their center.

I don’t know much about Lenox, aside from having seen her in Doubt and now in The Blind Side; her IMDb page says that she also won an Obie Off-Broadway playing Dinah Washington’s mother. I’m almost certain that she’s a major performer, so why haven’t we seen more of her in movies? Put it this way: I can imagine removing Bullock from all of her romantic comedy vehicles and half-baked thrillers and substituting Lenox instead. Instantly, those movies start to seem not only watchable to me but maybe even re-watchable, a body of work to be reckoned with. Yet Bullock is prized by her fans for her very averageness, the fact that she isn’t edgy or faceted or unpredictable or even particularly skilled (confronted with the evidence of her plodding, milkshake-like career, it’s easy to see how someone like Julia Roberts is much bolder in similar material, even if she lacks the introspection and mystery at the heart of the best screen acting). Watching Lenox’s one scene in The Blind Side, it was clear that she imaginatively brought out the part of herself that understood this woman’s weakness and the limitations placed on her from birth (for a hellish example of the grandstanding opposite of Lenox, look no further than Mo’Nique’s near-comic burn-the-house down emoting in Precious, a weirdly jolly cavalcade of black stereotypes).

When Michael Mann was making Public Enemies, didn’t he realize that Billy Crudup’s J. Edgar Hoover was so much more startling and intriguing than the monotonous, brooding standoff of Pretty Boy Cheekbones between Johnny Depp and Christian Bale? Crudup has been a pretty boy himself, and I often had problems with some of his shrill choices in leading man roles, but as Hoover he caught an uncanny kind of straight-laced perversity that made me wonder if he isn’t that old bullshit “character actor in a leading man’s body” paradigm that’s unconvincingly trotted out for your Clooneys and your Pitts in their Oscar-bid parts. In just a few scenes, Crudup not only gives you the uptight, squat strangeness of Hoover but even manages to hint at the human emotions buried somewhere in his by-the-book, chilly manner. Depp’s John Dillinger is the same old glamorous gangster of yesteryear, all surface and surety, and there’s even less of interest in Bale’s imploding policeman Melvin Purvis, yet Mann’s film follows them both in a straight line to the end when it would be so much scarier and enlightening to trace Crudup’s Hoover on his crooked road to power.

Which raises the question: hasn’t a director ever seen the footage they’ve shot and been confronted with the realization that an actor hired for a supporting or even a bit part was much more interesting and would make for a better screen center than the nominal lead? And hasn’t our theoretical director ever had the nerve to say, “Screw this, my movie isn’t what I thought it was. My movie is really about this woman, playing the mother.” Or, “My movie is really about the cross-dressing head of the FBI, not the public enemy and the cop.” This kind of flash happens most frequently when somebody casts a big theater actor in a bit. In Bart Freundlich’s trifling Trust the Man (2005), David Greenspan appeared long enough for me to wonder why no brave indie director hadn’t built a film around him long ago. Elizabeth Marvel has dazzled me in every play I’ve seen her in, but she’s done mostly small parts in films. And I got a serious case of “who is that?” when I saw and heard the actress playing George Clooney’s sister in Up in the Air, only to find out during the end credits that she was Amy Morton. I’m from Chicago, so I grew up with Morton completely dominating plays at the Steppenwolf Theater, yet I’d never seen her in a movie before; going to IMDb, I found that she’s barely been filmed at all. There’s a raft of semi-hidden acting talent out there that could take us to so many new destinations if only directors would look closer and see that the players in the byways of their films are often much more fresh and challenging than the pretty white movie star treadmill we seem to still be stuck on.

____________________________________________
House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

Read more!

Leading off today's links is the latest "Best Picture from the Outside In" entry at The Film Experience. Up for scrutiny this time out: Unforgiven (1992) vs. Casblanca (1943).

The New York Times article "Ready for 2010, Some Films Shot Way Back When" rounds up the crop of movies slated for release in early 2010, many of which were shot several years ago.

Finally, a little Steve & Eydie, SCTV-style:

_______________________________
"Links for the Day": Each day (more or less) the House editors post a link/links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

Read more!

By Matt Zoller Seitz


To read the ninth in a series of countdown essays written for Salon.com about the most important directors of the decade, click here.

Read more!

By Steven Cooper

With “The End of Time,” the Doctor Who careers of two giants of the show—star David Tennant and head writer and executive producer Russell T. Davies—reach their conclusion. With only Part One so far broadcast, we are not even halfway through the story—the second episode is significantly longer—so this can only be a preliminary assessment. But already it looks to be the most ambitious story Doctor Who has ever told.

As ever with a Russell T. Davies season finale (I know there hasn’t been an actual season this year, but the principle’s the same), this isn’t the place to look if you want a small-scale, tight-knit, self-contained story. Davies can do that when he wants to (see “Midnight”), but here he’s looking to pick up threads going all the way back to the beginning of the revived series in 2005 and create an epic. Along the way, there’s a certain amount of expediency evident in the plotting. There’s some bad comedy. There are irrelevant celebrity cameos. But there’s also heartfelt character work, some great performances, and a cliffhanger which turns everything seen so far on its head and left me avid to see what happens next.

The Narrator: “It is said that in the final days of planet Earth, everyone had bad dreams.”

We start unusually, with an unseen Narrator, whose wonderful deep, sonorous voice is provided by Timothy Dalton. Everyone on Earth is having dreams of the laughing face of the Master (John Simm), premonitions of the events to come. But only one person remembers these dreams—our old friend Wilfred Mott (Bernard Cribbins).

Wilf, out doing his Christmas shopping, finds himself drawn to a church where he notices a stained glass window with a small but recognizable blue box in one corner. A strange woman in white (Claire Bloom) tells him a tale of a demon from the sky, striking a convent on this site in the 1300s, which was overcome by a “Sainted Physician” in a blue box. The woman suddenly vanishes when Wilf’s back is turned. As yet, nothing further has come of this, but bear it in mind for next week…

The Doctor arrives on the planet of the Ood in a carefree mood. He’s been in no hurry to obey the summons he received at the end of “The Waters of Mars,” instead taking time off to do some vacationing—including a brief marriage to Queen Elizabeth I which apparently didn’t turn out well (humorously tying up a loose end left dangling at the end of “The Shakespeare Code”). But it turns out he would have done better not to delay. The Ood are also having bad dreams, of something returning “through the darkness” to their world. They show him visions of the Master (“That man is dead!”), Wilf, an unknown man—Joshua Naismith—who we’ll meet later, and finally an imprisoned Lucy Saxon (Alexandra Moen). This leads into clips from “The Sound of Drums” and “Last of the Time Lords,” reminding us how the Master became Prime Minister, unleashed an invasion upon the world, was shot by his wife Lucy, and died, with his body being burned on a funeral pyre.

An explicit recap of these events from two years ago is very necessary, since this part of the story is a direct sequel to them. Lucy Saxon is taken from her prison cell to a secret ceremony being conducted by a hitherto unknown Cult of Saxon, evidently set up by the Master back then as a contingency plan. One of the cult is revealed to be the woman who picked up the Master’s ring from out of his ashes at the end of “Last of the Time Lords.” With that, and various other ingredients (including a “biometrical signature” from Lucy), the Master is resurrected in a very Harry Potter-ish sequence. I wasn’t particularly happy with this use of what is basically a magic spell in Doctor Who; those of us who prefer the show to have at least a veneer of science fiction have to fall back on Clarke’s Third Law here, and assume that this is super-advanced Time Lord know-how which just looks like wizardry to us. (On the other hand, it’s an improvement on the 1980s treatment of the Master, when the series stopped bothering to even attempt explanations for his repeated escapes from certain death.)

Back in Series Three, Alexandra Moen made quite an impression as Lucy Saxon despite having only a handful of lines, and she makes the most of her brief appearance here too. It turns out Lucy has been plotting in secret herself, and she manages to disrupt the resurrection at the cost of her own life. A huge explosion destroys the prison, but the Master escapes just ahead of the Doctor’s arrival.

In an industrial wasteland, the Master reappears as a feral figure with bleached white hair, in scruffy jeans and a hooded top. We find out the botched resurrection has left his body “ripped open,” his life force thrown around with abandon. This unleashed energy gives him the ability to fire lightning from his hands and make Superman-like leaps into the air. But at a cost—he keeps momentarily fading away to just a skeleton, and he is now a creature of unending, voracious hunger able to vampirically drain the life force of others. He scoffs a burger (and later, rips apart a turkey and wolfs it down) in a manner guaranteed to put anyone off their Christmas dinner.

John Simm’s performance in this episode is amazing. In the hands of a less skilled actor, such an over-the-top character would have degenerated into mere scenery chewing, but the sheer visceral intensity Simm brings to every moment he’s on screen means you can’t take your eyes off him. The way a speech will start out normally but turn into long strings of obsessed, gabbled syllables (“Can’t hide anywhere. He can see me. He can smell me. Can’t let him smell me. Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor stop the smell, the stink, the filthy filthy stink”) shows a man barely holding together, liable to fly apart at any moment. For once the Master has no plan, no scheme—he has been stripped down to his core essence, an implacable will to survive at any cost.

The Doctor senses him as he arrives at the wasteland, and the Master responds by beating out the four-drumbeat tattoo that we discovered in “The Sound of Drums” has obsessed him for his entire life and driven him insane. However, the Master gets away when the Doctor’s chase is interrupted as he is found by Wilf and a gang of his pensioner friends, including a cameo from June Whitfield (Absolutely Fabulous) as Minnie “the Menace.” This bit of broad comedy rather outstays its welcome, as Minnie looks the Doctor over approvingly, poses for a photo with him, etc. Still, it’s easy to guess David Tennant will get lots of invitations to re-enact this scene at the next convention he attends, as Minnie gets to live out the dreams of any number of fans by fondling his bum.

Wilf takes the Doctor to a cafe, where all the episode’s sound and fury drops away. No matter how you feel about Russell T. Davies’ propensity to construct overblown epic plots, his talent is obvious in scenes of quiet conversation. Just two characters sitting at a table, talking. But it’s not at all cosy—the Doctor starts by staring fixedly at Wilf, demanding “Who are you?” How is it he can track down the Doctor in a matter of hours when others can’t? There’s some manipulation of events going on here, that keeps pushing them together. But the Doctor has other things on his mind—for the first time, he admits bluntly that he’s going to die. And the Tenth Doctor doesn’t want to die. Even the prospect of regeneration is cold comfort:

The Doctor: “Even if I change it feels like dying. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away. And I’m dead.”

Suddenly, they see Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) outside. Wilf brought the Doctor here to see her, in the hope that he could reverse what he did to her at the end of “Journey’s End,” where the memories of her time with the Doctor had to be locked away in order to save her life. But it can’t be done—the Doctor reiterates that if the sight of him reawakens those memories, Donna’s mind will burn up. For those (like me) who came to love Donna during Series Four, her brief appearance in this episode is a bittersweet gift, but this isn’t her story (at least, not yet), and she drives off with her new fiance—yes, she’s got engaged again.

The Doctor: “She’s got him.”

Wilf: “She’s making do.”

The Doctor: “Aren’t we all.”

The Doctor tells Wilf he’s still traveling alone, and in a near breakdown, confesses his recent errors on Mars (“But I did some things, it went wrong… I need…”). David Tennant yet again shows he can take the Doctor to emotional places he’s never been before. And Bernard Cribbins is absolutely wonderful throughout the episode—there’s not a false note anywhere, from comedy to, as here, the most heartbreaking empathy.

The Doctor leaves to track down the Master. And now, at the exact halfway point of the episode, the voice of the Narrator, backed by Murray Gold’s soaring music, breaks in to remind us that this is all taking place on a much wider canvas. The prologue is over, as unseen forces manipulate events towards a grand convergence.

Narrator: “And so it came to pass that the players took their final places, making ready the events that were to come. … As Earth rolled onwards into night, the people of that world did sleep, and shiver, somehow knowing that dawn would bring only one thing... the final day!”

Cut to the chase. Or rather, cut to after the chase—since we already know the Doctor and the Master can sense each other anywhere on Earth, we go directly to their confrontation in the wasteland. The Doctor steadily advances toward the Master, ignoring bolts of energy being fired to each side, until finally the Master fires directly at him to immobilize him and leave him gasping in the dirt. Ninety seconds have passed without a word of dialogue, just the play of emotions on the two actors’ faces.

The Doctor can’t get the Master interested in the prophecies and the evidence that something is manipulating them; the Master is still obsessed with the unending drum-beats in his head. But then he mentally links with the Doctor, and the Doctor is shocked by what he hears:

The Doctor: “I heard it! But there’s no noise, there never has been, it’s just your insanity... What is it? What’s inside your head?”

The Master is overjoyed to be finally vindicated (“It’s real! It’s real!”) but before he can do anything else, he is abducted by thugs in the pay of Joshua Naismith, and the Doctor is left unconscious.

Christmas at the Nobles’ house. Watching television, Wilf again sees the strange woman in white. She salutes him as an old soldier—who never killed a man in his military service—and warns him that a war is coming, in which he will have to take up arms again. She gives an ominous warning, which will no doubt come into play next week.

The Woman: “Tell the Doctor nothing of this. His life could still be saved, so long as you tell him nothing.”

From under his bed, Wilf takes out his old service revolver. A stone thrown at his window alerts him to the Doctor lurking outside the house. He goes outside to shoo him away, and is followed by Sylvia (Jacqueline King). Despite the danger to Donna, the Doctor has come to find Wilf because he’s the only lead he can think of—he needs more information. The most successful comic interlude of the episode follows as they try to keep the Doctor and Donna apart. Eventually the Doctor takes Wilf with him in the TARDIS, despite Sylvia’s protests (“You can’t come with me!” “Well, you’re not leaving me with her.” “Fair enough”), and they head off to the Naismith estate.

Joshua Naismith (David Harewood) and his daughter Abigail (Tracy Ifeachor) are the least satisfactory part of the episode by far. Nothing about them is interesting; they are a couple of cardboard characters who only exist to join up various bits of the plot. He’s your standard-issue ultra-rich businessman and author, whose book is bought by Donna for Wilf, who shows it to the Doctor, who recognizes him from the visions of the Ood. She’s a spoiled kid whose dilettante investigations into “the legends of Harold Saxon” led her father to the Master. In their house they have the Immortality Gate, a piece of alien technology acquired from the Torchwood Institute (after its fall in “Doomsday”) which can perform cellular regeneration. They intend to put the Master’s abilities to use to get the device working properly.

It’s obvious from the start that Naismith is completely out of his depth with the Master; he might put him on a leash and in a straitjacket, but the Master always has his measure. (“I like you.” “Thank you.” “You’d taste great.”) From the moment the Master sees the Gate, his fierce intelligence starts working again as he begins to turn the situation to his advantage. Naismith’s cluelessness is shown even more when, unexpectedly, two of his technicians turn out to be disguised aliens, known as Vinvocci, who are trying to get the Gate activated for their own purposes. These rather silly-looking green, spiky aliens are mostly used for comedy here, although they’ll probably be more useful next week, given what happens at the end of the episode.

The Doctor and Wilf arrive, sneaking around and into the house just like in any number of old Doctor Who stories (“Pyramids of Mars” comes particularly to mind). After easily exposing the Vinvocci, the Doctor learns that the Gate doesn’t regenerate individuals, but entire populations—it’s like a super-powerful version of the nanogenes in “The Empty Child.” He realizes immediately what the Master’s plan is.

In the completely mad climax, the Master easily brushes aside Naismith’s restraints and activates the Gate. Its signal affects everyone on Earth except Wilf (thanks to a handy shielding booth) and Donna (whose Time Lord memories begin to activate in response). The Master changes every other human on Earth to look like himself. There are some eye-popping shots with dozens of copies of the Master in different costumes, which must have been hellish to do. John Simm milks the ending for all he’s worth (“Breaking news—I’m everyone! And everyone on Earth… is me!”) with a final awesomely dreadful pun about “the Master race” which everyone should have been able to see coming.

***
But now, the real cliffhanger (which the producers kept back from all preview screenings, to preserve the surprise). We finally see the Narrator in full, and he’s not speaking for our benefit.

The Narrator: “And so it came to pass, on Christmas Day, that the human race did cease to exist. But even then, the Master had no concept of his greater role in events. For this was far more than humanity’s end. This day was the day upon which the whole of creation would change forever. This was the day the Time Lords returned.

“For Gallifrey! For victory! For the end of time itself!”

Suddenly the Narrator’s voice is full of menace. The camera zooms out to show a huge amphitheater full of Time Lords in their ceremonial regalia. With the crowd taking up the Narrator’s final shouts, it’s a shot reminiscent of the end of “Bad Wolf” four years ago. The two sides of the Time War—the Daleks and the Time Lords—revealed to us in the same way.

TO! BE! CONTINUED!

***
Obviously, this episode doesn’t stand on its own, so a final assessment will have to wait until after Part Two. It really is basically a hugely extended prologue—the Narrator explicitly says so halfway through, but even at the end the sense is that only now are all the pieces in position so the real story can begin. Rather alienating for the casual viewer (especially at Christmas), but if ever there was a suitable time to take such a risk it’s now, with the lure of David Tennant’s grand finale to bring the viewers back next week.

As with the huge, world-destroying climaxes of previous years, there’s no real tension generated by the “Master race” event, since we all know it will end up being undone with no lasting effects in the next episode. Its power comes from the fact that the Master could hardly have come up with anything more simply offensive to the Doctor than to see the human race’s individuality arrogantly replaced with six billion copies of his nemesis. In that sense, it’s already served its purpose, regardless of what happens next week. The biggest question it left behind is, what’s going to happen to Donna now that her buried memories are awakening?

The Time Lords, though, are another matter entirely. The idea of the Doctor as the last survivor of the Time War, having seen his entire race wiped out, has been a central component of the new series. It has led to some of the series’ most powerful and emotional moments—right up to the Doctor’s bout of megalomania on Mars last episode. Are the Time Lords back for good—or evil? Will the Doctor end up having to destroy his people again? Where does the woman in white fit in? What will Wilf’s ultimate role end up being? And will we be seeing the Ood again? They did say that something was returning to their world. So many questions, so many possibilities…

Some of the plot construction is disappointingly crude. The episode takes a long time to really get going, as numerous unrelated elements have to be set up one after the other—the Ood, Lucy Saxon, the Master’s resurrection, Naismith, Wilf and his friends… The comedy (apart from the scenes involving Donna’s family) tends to fall flat. And I’ve refrained from mentioning the Obama thread until now out of charity—one of those ideas that probably seemed hilarious at three in the morning, but really should have been reconsidered. But when it gets it right, this episode really gets it right—the Doctor/Wilf and Doctor/Master scenes are brilliant, and the performances of David Tennant, John Simm and Bernard Cribbins are pitch-perfect throughout.

I’d like to end by noting that with Part Two of “The End of Time,” the new series of Doctor Who will clock up sixty episodes. Russell T. Davies has written or co-written thirty-one of those, and was involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in all of the others as well. He has successfully taken Doctor Who from a dead-and-gone show remembered mostly as a joke, to a central pillar of popular culture in Britain (and, to a lesser extent, all over the world). I can think of many things he might have done which would have been more to my taste. But I can’t imagine a single thing he could have done to make the show more successful with its most important audience—the general public. For this old Doctor Who fan, it’s been a glorious five years. David Tennant once described Davies as “the least cynical man in a cynical age.” I love Steven Moffat’s work, and I’m really looking forward to next year’s series with Matt Smith—but the sheer joy, exuberance, and unselfconscious absurdity Russell brought to Doctor Who will, I think, be greatly missed.

_________________________________
NEXT WEEK: The arrival of a new year, a new decade, and a new Doctor. It’s Part Two of “The End of Time” – see you on the other side.

Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: “The Deadly Assassin,” starring Tom Baker. This is the only classic series story where the Doctor traveled alone, without a companion. But its main importance is its depiction of the Time Lords. They had made brief appearances before, but this was the first Gallifrey story, where their society was shown in all its baroque intricacy. Radical in its day, this story became the foundation for all succeeding Time Lord lore, right up to “The End of Time.”
_________________________________
Steven Cooper is a software developer and long-time Doctor Who fan, living in Melbourne, Australia.

Read more!

By Matt Zoller Seitz


Links to the seventh and eighth entries in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com. For the entry on Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (and the Naturalists), click here. For the entry on the Coen Brothers (the Fabulists), click here.

Read more!

Steven Santos points us to the Trailer Addict page for an upcoming film called Violent Blue, which is described like this:

"An 18-year old boy is accused of molesting a 12-year old girl. They call each other "soul mates" and claim they never more than kissed. He's put away for 6 years and she waits for him but in the meantime is beaten, gang-raped, impregnated and thrown out onto the streets only to eventually turn to a life of drugs, theft and prostitution. Did society make things better for her by putting this "sex offender" behind bars? And when he's released can they ever go back to how things once were? This is the story of true love."

And which plays like this:



Hrmmm…
_______________________________
"Links for the Day": Each day (more or less) the House editors post a link/links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

Read more!

By Steven Boone

The flicks below are the best things I got out to see in multiplexes and arthouses in 2009. That leaves out Wild Grass, the kooky Alain Resnais comedy I fell in love with at this year's New York Film Festival. Also excluded are the gunfights in Public Enemies; nude, pale Paz de la Huerta straddling brown, blue-suited Isaach De Bankolé in The Limits of Control; the rolling box of Quaker Oats in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done; the local color in 50 Cent's Before I Self-Destruct; the dewy, palpitating bathroom scale and human flesh in the beginning of Antichrist—all perfect fragments of movies that I simply did not dig overall.

It was an exhausted-feeling year. The new movies I came across generally seemed plum tuckered out, slumming through the end of a decade increasingly hostile to simple movie pleasures.

Except for these beauties:

***
10. Serbis

Commercially, this Filipino drama crept into America way back in January, and I barely remember the plot. Something to do with a dilapidated X-rated movie house and the triple-X-rated family strife happening beyond its dingy screen. But I can tell you what the movie smells like on the drop of a dime: perfume, rust, dirty water, hot tea. Just hearing the title and seeing a still of Roxanne Jordan drying her hair in the mirror while admiring her own pouty, sunkissed beauty brings it all back. Director Brillante Mendoza likes his families sweaty and animalistic but never less than luminous.

***
9. Flooding with Love for the Kid

Zachary Oberzan performs every character in the novel First Blood…in his studio apartment. This one is for the filmmakers. If you’ve lost your way, forgotten what’s its all about, see Oberzan’s daredevil stunt to get back to the fundamentals. All you need is a camera and something you can’t go another second without expressing. Everything else will fly into your hands to help tell the story. A toaster, for example, will happily become a police radio. The important thing is the way Oberzan and his household items hold our gaze and move it across the frame to excite meaning.

***
8. Tetro

My personal favorite of Francis Ford Coppola’s films. Here he uses every plane of Vincent Gallo’s crazy face to create some startling turns of poetry. Gallo, the patron saint of feeling sorry for yourself, seems to have made Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny in preparation for Coppola’s woe-is-me family melodrama. Critics—the same mawfaws who would wash Nicholas Ray’s feet if here were here—somehow equated Coppola’s unembarrassed emotionalism with inappropriately callow bombast. Nah, man. I see nothing but masterly wisdom when baby brother Alden Ehrenreich chases behind Gallo, going, “Love, love, love,” across a series of commiserative edits by Coppola’s soulmate, Walter Murch. Ditto Gallo at the café, begging Maribel Verdú with his flood lamp eyes for love, love, love. This movie is a treasury of Coppola’s cinematic comfort foods: wild women, young’uns, wives, opera, The Red Shoes, lens flares and tempestuous families—organic or improvised.

***
7. Broken Embraces

This is another one for the filmmakers. Pedro Almodóvar recognizes the visual cortex as sexual organ, tormentor and deadly weapon. Moving images can destroy people, and people who would destroy moving images should be destroyed. Also: Ah, to be blind and tragic, yet famous enough to have a stranger you picked up off the street describe her perfect breasts to you before letting you feel for yourself! Ah, the way Penelope Cruz, as a secretary-turned-actress twirls to smile for the camera, over and over, in various styles and degrees of adorable! Ooh, the mummified feeling of sex with the one you disgust but for complicated reasons can’t yet leave. Oh, the joy of storytelling: One great, stray scene has the blind ex-movie director and his hipster protégé brainstorming an increasingly ludicrous Twilight-ish vampire romance. It doesn’t matter the material, trash or high art, so long as it gets you going, puts that crazed look in your eyes. Beats me why many critics said this was Almodóvar serving up the same ol' same ol'.

***
6. Alien: The Director’s Cut

At a Film Forum screening this summer, folks laughed when the android’s severed head started talking—a crude use of foam rubber prop and Ian Holm’s head sticking out of a table like Cousin It. But it was nervous laughter. Everything else in this film already had us on the edge of panic. In 2009, Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror masterpiece packs so much weight, texture and tension, I imagine it to be Hunger director Steve McQueen’s prized DVD. In, 2009, sad to say, Alien is an art film.

***
5. Drag Me to Hell

The first great recession-era horror film, and the loudest, happiest audience I’ve sat with in ages. They went bananas for this gross-out morality play at Brooklyn’s Court Street multiplex. Still, the thrills are definitely old school: Afterward, the 25-year-old I was with wrinkled her nose and said, “Was that…supposed to be funny?” Hell yeah, shorty. Sam Raimi is for the children.

***
4. 35 Shots of Rum

Claire Denis and company show you what love is, what music does and what drinking is for. Mourning and celebration can become gross spectacle in the wrong hands; Denis is the kind of emcee/advocate you want delivering your eulogy, your wedding toast, your appeal for clemency. If you evince a soul, she’s in your corner. I will never ever forget that cat in that bag. The hell am I talking about? See the movie. It glides on the nimble watchfulness you’d expect from a rich, slim novel, except in cinema’s language of movement and expression. The male lead is not much of a talker, more of an observer, and so is the ideal viewer of this shy but insistent call for folks to let the right ones in.

***
3. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans

One big, beautiful secret of this movie is that it’s partly a love story between a dirty cop and a dirty whore, without shame or hesitation. Eva Mendes and Nicolas Cage are selfish scumbags here, but Herzog locates the loveliness in their bond: they trust each other no matter how many strangers they fuck or crack capsules they drain. It’s one of many whimsical touches that breeze on by in Werner Herzog’s New Orleans jazz funeral for civilization.

And anybody who thinks the Chicken Dance at the end of Herzog’s Stroszek is the greatest musical sequence ever will love the reprise of that song here, at a crucial moment. Said episode also certifies that Herzog can do anything, including stage a gunfight as balletic as those of his King of New York-directing predecessor, Abel Ferrara. Unlike Ferrara’s Lieutenant, though, there’s not much religion in this one, just Herzog's pained humanism and cosmic daydreaming. Its first and last scenes illustrate the obscenity of Hurricane Katrina in plainer terms than even Spike Lee’s Levees documentary: We’re all stuck together, high and low, acting like we ain’t, until happenstance either reverses the roles or levels the playing field. If that makes this film sound too noble and redemptive, lemme refer you to the scene where Cage squeezes an old lady's oxygen tube and waves his revolver.

***
2. Inglourious Basterds

It has one lousy scene (“Der Fuhrer vill be at ze premiere.”), one forced bit of business (“Gorlami… Gore-lahm-me!”) and one egregious Bugs-Bunny-in-Boston line reading (“…frow vawn hammmersmaaak…”) but is otherwise the war movie Robert Aldrich or Sam Fuller would have made if they’d had access to Quentin Tarantino’s video library, iPod and (not a typo) sensitivity. Tarantino is a lamb. A friend of mine who hates grisly, violent flicks but loved Inglourious Basterds was looking forward to District 9 based on Inglourious-like buzz, so we went to see it. When we both stumbled out of D9 with pounding headaches, she whined, "Why was Basterds just as violent but when I walked out of it I felt giddy, whereas here I feel beaten up?"

I was too wrung out from the roach Apartheid flick to give her my theory that one movie was a graceful, if at times graphic, dance whereas the other is a clumsy, if elaborate, beatdown. In spelling out that difference through mise-en-scène, Tarantino spanks an entire generation of filmmakers who’ve shown so little regard for big screen time and space. (And, given that Star Trek and District 9 are among his favorite films this year, this wasn’t even his agenda, just a wonderful side effect.) As if that weren’t enough, QT employs this sensitivity in defense of every mere civilian who ever lived under actual, daily occupation and terror—not just the specter of it on the teevee. Yes. The violence isn’t nearly as memorable as the odd detail, like Marcel the black projectionist enjoying Nazi champagne in secret, or the great affection that Goebbel’s mistress has for him, all in her brimming, beaming eyes. Tarantino’s war is ultramodern, with homicidal assholes in Facebook proximity to good people, and everyone convinced of his own righteous purpose.

***
1. Bullets Over Brownsville

Everything my astute friends tell me Jean-Luc Godard was up to in his New Wave touchstones, I find writer-directors Damon Diddit and Natural Langdon doing in their camcorder hood docudrama, Bullets Over Brownsville. This is a mischievous, sorrowful, movie-and-music-mad anthem that plays like epic screwball tragedy on the big screen. It is the furthest thing from perfect, this mircobudget tale of four Brooklyn housing project residents caught in an absurd web of violence, but BoB is the best film of 2009 because, like Flooding with Love for the Kid, only bigger, it tears away the last Ho'wood veil (the one made of billion-dollar bank loans and foreign tax shelters). Diddit takes digital effects, editing and cinematography credits, and I salute his desktop-graphic swagger: Under a sick, sad beat by Langdon, the opening credit sequence blends street corner soundbites, video scan lines and the kind of splashy keyframe animation currently in vogue on Smokin’ Aces-through-Slumdog Milllionaire. At the Brooklyn screening I attended, it played as confidently as any of those Ho’wood releases.

Diddit/Langdon‘s fragmentary, cross-cutting, rewinding, film-and-TV-referencing storytelling makes BoB the kind of ghetto art film Spike Lee toyed with in his adaptation of Clockers (whose blown highlights and reversal-stock candy colors are among the many visuals this film expertly quotes). But, like the creator of his source material, Richard Price, Spike was an outsider weighing in. Watching BoB, I have little doubt that at the end of each shooting day, much of the cast and crew went home via the project stairwells. Be warned, arthouse regulars: This film is not apt to fuel coffee shop discussion afterward. It doesn’t speak your snarky, jaunty post-graduate language. Vibrant as it is, it is essentially about people who are drowning, inside a system that favors you, not them. Bullets Over Brownsville isn’t asking you to pity them or save them. This isn’t Mike Tyson or Precious crying into the camera (or to Oprah). This is the hood throwing a party for its own (heavily disputed, usually caricatured) humanity, using Ho’wood’s snatch-and-grab storytelling techniques the way insurgents employ the occupier’s discarded ammo—in retaliation. Bullets Over Brownsville is a sprawling graffiti mural in a movie landscape dominated by sterile billboards.

I liked it.
______________________________________
Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of Big Media Vandalism.

Read more!

By N.P. Thompson

What makes Rob Marshall’s Nine so peculiarly bad is its sheer self-congratulation. We’re incessantly told how important, how fascinating the director Guido Contini must be, and we as viewers are expected to take this on faith, but never once does Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) do or say anything even remotely intriguing. The movie has no real subject; it’s proudly about nothing. Not the arid nothingness of a Van Sant movie, but a boring sort of Condé Nast nothingness. If the real-life Federico Fellini had been as dull and as mopey as his fictional counterpart Contini, no one would have ever staged a Broadway musical [loosely] inspired by the autobiographical 8-1/2 in the first place, which means we could have been spared this present debacle that masquerades as entertainment.

Day-Lewis gamely tries to personify a song-and-dance man, yet his integrity as a performer works against him in a Rob Marshall movie. When Day-Lewis, in his first solo number, climbs the spiraling soundstage staircase that rises into the dark, it ought to be an iconic moment, but there’s magic neither in Marshall’s airless staging nor in his unimaginative camera work.

But back to that nothingness: It’s vitally important to Nine, because that’s all there is. When the end credits rolled, I was aghast to see the screenplay credited to Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella, both of whom have done far superior work, and even their past failures (Tolkin’s The New Age, Minghella’s Cold Mountain) at least had the germs of subject matter spreading about their respective universes. Nine, by sharp contrast, feels like the end result of marketing, or rather of that dreaded term “branding.” It’s nothing but a bunch of “brands” all strung together—the Judi Dench brand, the Penélope Cruz brand, and so forth; I could imagine a gaggle of ad-flack creeps coked out on the sheer nonsense that is “SEO” getting a real hard-on for this empty shell, a spectacle that feels emblematic of what a flash-over-substance nightmare Barack Obama’s presidency has turned out to be.

It’s painful to watch Day-Lewis’s labors tossed away on such idiocy, as he hides behind a potted palm in a hotel lobby, for instance, saddled with lines like, “What, no? Oh, God, no!” Nine coasts on his and the other actors’ reputations; then the movie wants, if not outright demands, to be applauded for its parasitic leech-like behavior of attaching itself to the “right people,” while accomplishing absolutely nothing of its own. It’s so nakedly a paean to shallowness that one wonders why Marshall didn’t splice in footage of the Salahis.

Maury Yeston’s songs are lousy: the lyrics embarrassing, the so-called melodies unmelodic, unmemorable. Even Mamma Mia! had more conviction and authenticity than this.

Ultimately, it’s all extremely conventional: a boring, desiccated little story about a heel who must find redemption. So, then, why all this counterfeit nostalgia grafted onto Fellini? Nine could just as well be about Edward Dmytryk or Robert Siodmak. Or about anyone whose name was yanked at random out of the phone directory.

What about all those “brands” on orgiastic display? Well, most of them are horrible. Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren manage to get by: Kidman seems to know what a fiasco this is (she’s been in so many) and so she hangs back, during her few scenes, without investing much of herself (when she does make an effort, she comes across as shrill); Loren has more power in silence than in her girlish voice—as the ghost of Contini’s mother, she’s pleasant and wistful, which in this movie constitutes something of an achievement. Yet Marshall keeps trying to turn Loren back into a goddess, when she’s long since earned the right not to keep on fostering illusions.

I admit that my knives were sharpened for Marion Cotillard, whom, one or two faithful readers may recall, I detested in the overblown La Vie en Rose. As Contini’s betrayed wife, Cotillard conjures none of Anouk Aimée’s impish charm or devastating, low-key charisma. Nonetheless, this French actress stands out as the only good thing about Nine. She isn’t pretty, she lacks a memorable presence, yet she can suggest pathos without wallowing in it—a valuable trait.

Marshall’s cross-cutting felt germane in Chicago; the fluid editing fit his vision, however skewed, of the material, and the material was so potent it covered the director’s ass. In Nine, without anything to camouflage the void, Marshall cross-cuts relentlessly because it’s his crutch—he doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t trust the songs and dances to build under their own steam or else he doesn’t trust the dumb audience. Marshall thus sabotages Cotillard’s grittiest sequence—her B&W striptease, the one number that has some emotional power, some fearlessness—by slicing it back and forth between a dialogue scene.

Except for the Saraghina episode, which is utterly flavorless, thanks in no small part to Stacy Ferguson’s resemblance to a mule decked out in red seaweed, nothing in Nine stems from memory, the essential DNA of most Fellini films. I suspect that Todd Haynes might have wrung something out of this thin sideshow, yet in a sense he already has: his masterly 2007 musical I’m Not There was a much greater tribute (in spite of being about Bob Dylan) to the spirit that infused some of Fellini’s better work. Haynes the conjurer was able to summon a bit of Fellini’s trademark satiric whimsy while bringing to it a sense and sensibility uniquely his own. Marshall not only can’t provide the illusion that he gives a damn, he’s like a clown wearing a cheap, off-the-rack suit while tearing through the pages of Esquire, Details, GQ, and other shitty magazines in search of more nouveau-riche posturing to plaster across the screen.

Which brings me to the casting of Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, and Kate Hudson.

Hudson, encased in layers of rouge, suggests a demonic cupcake, a fat-cheeked horror, a female impersonator. Clad in white-spangled sequined spaghetti straps with matching go-go boots, she’s supposed to be a journo who just adores Contini movies; her “big” number, “Cinema Italiano,” has the distinction of being the most numbingly illiterate song in the show. The lyrics made me want to stuff popcorn down my ear canals, and Marshall’s choreography, such as it is, consists of Hudson jumping up and down in that hideous costume. Hudson, who can't act, sing, or dance, troops along like a pudgy-faced sorority sister who has wolfed down plate after plate of marshmallow fudge brownies, yet still believes (mistakenly) that she's pulchritudinous. It’s only fair for me to criticize Hudson this way, as the non-performer and her enabler—both of them oblivious to what a flabby, petulant, misshapen tub of lard she’s become—insist on her sexiness.

As for Judi Dench, she's the same in everything. In role after role, she cannibalistically feasts on Glenda Jackson’s mannerisms and vocal phrasing. When near the end, as Contini’s confidante, Dench morosely chirps to Day-Lewis, “Nobody wants to be alone,” her voice rises so high into the squeak range I began to think one of the Chipmunks could do as serviceable a job as she does.

Orgiastically humping and bumping and sliding down a velvet fuchsia pole in white fishnet stockings, Cruz gives a performance so strenuously embarrassing that the Academy ought to demand its Oscar back. Here, she’s Euro-trashy in the worst, most stereotypical manner possible, singing lyrics as limp-wristedly bad as, “I’ll vibrate like a string I’m plucking,” while carrying on as though her desirability were a given. It doesn’t help that she’s chosen to play this role—of Contini’s mistress—as someone with shit for brains. In the 1960s, when comely European actresses appeared in parts like this—sexy and carefree—there was (sometimes) a mitigating fusion of naïvete and voluptuousness. Cruz, very much on the other hand, is inept and amateurish. It is hard to believe that she has ever stepped in front of a movie camera before. But then she has never been exposed/stranded by Rob Marshall, or subject to such stupid ideas as the staging of a seduction scene that takes place in two separate rooms—she fondling herself in one, whilst Day-Lewis writhes in passion listening to her on the phone, from his hotel bed, as a doctor and fat nurse try to examine him.

Cruz fares less terribly in her other new film, Pedro Almodóvar’s tepid, nasty, joyless freak show Broken Embraces, although, alas, that isn’t saying much.

While not as openly repulsive as that great yuppie favorite Volver, Broken Embraces, in its convoluted flashback structure, springs “surprise” after surprise on us—“surprises” that are perfunctory and stale; the macaroons of a filmmaker who’s finished. In one of these, Cruz, as an executive assistant to a wealthy financier, moonlights as a prostitute to raise cash for her father’s medical bills and who should come calling as her first trick, but her boss? It’s enough to slap one’s forehead with an audible “Duh!!!!!” The groan-worthy ironies do not stop there, but by the time Almodóvar has arrived at this point (Cruz hangs up on her employer’s sex calls, then phones him early the next morning to report how distraught her family is over the lack of options in her dad’s cancer care) I’d seen enough of the movie’s parallel narratives to know that neither one holds even the slightest interest—not in plotting, certainly not in the acting, the toneless direction, the music, the cinematography. Almodóvar hires gifted collaborators, among them the composer Alberto Iglesias, the DP Rodrigo Prieto, and as the villainous boss, the distinguished Spanish actor José Luis Gómez, then inspires them to give their most mediocre efforts.

The movie’s English subtitles—it’s worth interjecting—were put together by a complete illiterate who knows zilch about punctuation. Whoever it was consistently places commas and periods outside quotation marks, when any halfway decent proofreader will tell you that they MUST go inside the quote marks. (Did the New York Times critic, swooning in “Almodóvaria,” come up for air long enough to notice?)

Among the featured actors, there’s the 20-something Tamar Novas as Diego, who serves as a seeing-eye man to a blind scriptwriter who calls himself Harry Caine. Together, they devise insipid ideas for screenplays, which they believe to be irresistible. Diego is such a gap-toothed space angel, so generically cute and falsely sympathetic, that he seems marked as a candidate for an early demise, the movie’s sacrificial victim. Here, Almodóvar tweaks this vulgar formula by playing it both ways. When death appears to come for Diego, via an unintentional drug overdose at the sleazy nightclub where he DJs, I felt no sense of shock—only mild indignation at the auteur’s complete lack of taste. What Almodóvar managed to get away with in All About My Mother—the emotional exploitation over the sudden death of a young boy who, up until the moment of his demise, had been a major character—doesn’t work at all in Broken Embraces. We’re meant to be horrified when Diego collapses and is hauled away in an ambulance; and we’re meant to be moved by the plight of the blind Caine attempting to navigate his way around a hospital in search of the lad. I, for one, am so sick of the patented maneuvering by which Almodóvar yanks our collective chain that I could only respond with dulled revulsion. Diego, however, lives.

Cruz, whose character, Lena, morphs from a secretary to an actress in a movie within the movie, looks harshly lit and photographed, even in shots where she’s supposed to evince glamor. Made up to resemble Audrey Hepburn, Cruz is grotesque—it becomes that much more apparent how lacking she is. Later, in a platinum Marilyn Monroe wig, she’s almost palatable, save for the excessively applied mascara that lends Cruz a witch-like countenance.

Watching the on-set proceedings through a video monitor, the financier Martel, who has gone from being Lena’s boss to her john to her lover, loses patience with the perplexing shenanigans of movie-dom and—in the film’s most revealing line of dialogue—pointedly exclaims, “This is shit! It’s incomprehensible!” Of course, that’s how the arty cavorting about would look to a stiff, tired, business executive, yet I heard the line as Almodóvar’s cri de coeur, his hidden-in-plain-sight admission of what a bomb Broken Embraces truly is.

The lone adroit performance stems from Lola Duenas, drolly deadpan as a lip reader who imparts the most outré information in tones utterly unaffected by the words she’s translating. Gómez, for a moment, seems to come alive, seated beside her.

At 128 minutes, there’s lots of dead space in Broken Embraces, so much so that I had plenty of time to wonder, “Is this the worst film that Almodóvar has made to date? Is it really going to steal the crown from Volver, the way Volver stole it from Talk to Her, the way Talk to Her stole it from Law of Desire? Volver, as disastrous as it was, at least managed its badness in a way that felt organic to the writer-director’s level of vulgarity and incompetence. Broken Embraces doesn’t. Almodóvar spends much of the running time indulged in his Hitchcock fixation, and this is partially what slows the damn movie down so much. He’s working in rhythms that aren’t altogether his own, although they aren’t Hitch’s either.

When Lena falls—literally—the camera scrutinizes every bone in her body. There are lingering close-ups of her X-rays and MRI scans. The plight of an abused woman, however, doesn’t engage Almodóvar. He has neither empathy for nor insight into Lena’s physical suffering at Martel’s hands. She shows up at the editing suite of her director/new lover Mateo without money to pay for cab fare—she is bruised and her mouth is bleeding; the beating, though, only serves as a mere plot device, and it was at this moment that I knew with absolute certainty, if I hadn’t realized it before: Almodóvar is a worthless misogynist hack, in drag as a “woman’s director.”

Mateo and Lena take flight to the coast; they settle into a kind of bliss, which we’re already long since primed to know won’t last. Here, as in other Almodóvar films, the smug and the sinister hopelessly entwine, as we wait and wait and WAIT for whatever horrible thing will contrivedly chance along to smash the lovers’ happiness to bits and pieces. Soap operatic ghoulishness passes for a style or worldview. Prurient fascination with sudden loss and with the physical and psycho-emotional affects on the survivor’s psyche are, here but not only here, the director’s signature cards. His worst films have a leering quality, not in a hateful manner a la the overbearing David O. Russell or the rancid Wes Anderson, but in the manner of someone who has lived his entire life inside a plastic bubble and salivates over the suffering of people outside. They feel what he cannot, and so he delights in putting them on display, while, like a flaccid poseur, he enjoys “the show.”

An aerial shot of a photographic jigsaw puzzle being pieced together from spread-out fragments stands out as the single inventive use of the camera.

Finally: The movie has a couple of anti-climactic climaxes glommed on, back-to-back. In one of these, Almodóvar tries to invoke Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom in a sequence of Lena’s death being played back to us on grainy video. In its own hollow way, however, the inclusion of this is more reminiscent of, and more degrading than, a similar sequence in Arthur Penn’s vastly superior Night Moves, in which a private detective repeatedly watches a fatal accident that occurred during the screen test of a young actress. Penn conveyed a sense of horror; the loss meant something to him and to the obsessive, hurt gumshoe as well. There isn’t a recognizable pulse in Almodóvar’s work; if Broken Embraces were the product of a first-time director, it would (justifiably) never have received U.S. distribution. Like Nine, and like Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear, this dud coasts entirely on the reputations of its participants. It is as if no one looked at what is actually going on, either on the page or on the screen.

______________________________________
House contributor N.P. Thompson lives, writes, and photo-blogs in the Pacific Northwest.

Read more!

By Matt Zoller Seitz


“It’s showtime, folks.”

That’s the mantra of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), the boozing, chain-smoking, pill-popping, womanizing, workaholic filmmaker-choreographer hero of the 1979 drama All That Jazz, a hopped-up American variant of Federico Fellini’s navel-gazing fantasia 8 ½ (1963).

Those three words — recited by Gideon into the bathroom mirror each morning after downing a breakfast of Dexedrine and Alka-Seltzer and listening to Antonio Vivaldi’s “Concerto Alla Rustica” — sum up both the character and his real-world counterpart, Bob Fosse, the choreographer, theater director and filmmaker, who died in 1987 at 60. He was a Gideon-level workaholic who ended All That Jazz, a self-written advance obituary, with a shot of his alter ego being zipped into a body bag while the soundtrack plays Ethel Merman’s definitive version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

But Gideon’s mantra also summarizes that movie’s significance within narrative film, a mode of storytelling that rarely dares venture beyond the linear for fear of confusing the viewer. Released 30 years ago this month, All That Jazz set a new standard for speed and complexity, its structure boasting as many temporal pirouettes as the headiest art house fare. Yet the film never feels labored. It’s not homework. It’s showtime.

________________________________________
To read the rest of the New York Times article, click here.

Read more!

By Matt Zoller Seitz


Links to the fourth, fifth and sixth entries in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com. For the entry on Steven Soderbergh, click here. For the entry on Michael Moore, click here. For the entry on Steven Spielberg, click here.

______________________________________

Read more!

By Jaime N. Christley

The phenomenon of the holiday makes it necessary for practically everyone to get into the spirit of things. Spin the globe, drop your finger, pick a holiday from where it lands, and that’s what happens. That’s why it’s a holiday, not a personal day. On the one hand, this can be seen as a social necessity. Part of your acceptance in a social group or subgroup depends on your ability to play a role not only in day-to-day business, but also in rituals. Commemoration, observation, celebration—these are all rituals of a sort. For a little less than a third of the human race, Christmas is the largest and most concentrated matrix of rituals. A few key images tell the story: Decorations appear in advance of the two major holidays that precede Christmas. Theme music besieges the airwaves. Homes and trees are adorned with lights. Government offices, too. These days—at least in my neck of the woods, where Christian and non-Christian faiths share a large and more or less nonviolent space, where pretty much every possible reaction to Christmas is okay—you can celebrate it, piously or non-piously, you can hate it, or you can attempt to ignore it. If, on the other hand, you find yourself in London, in the middle of the nineteenth century, some ways of thinking about the holiday are okay, and some are not.

Which brings us to Ebenezer Scrooge, easily the best known anti-social in Western literature. He’s also a miser, and Charles Dickens was shrewd enough to dovetail his money-hoarding with his misanthropy, instead of stacking the character with unlikable, yet unrelated, characteristics. As Dickens saw it, Christmas was a prominent, cultural fixture, but, politically speaking, it was also an impotent one. Social injustice was defined as the poor treatment of labor, a policy of zero tolerance to debtors, and brutal indifference toward the less fortunate. The character who personified this would not simply hate mankind, he would also hold its purse strings. The character arc of A Christmas Carol traces Ebenezer Scrooge’s evolution from a very bad man to a very good one, the engine of his moral reeducation operated by no one other than the story’s author. (You cannot otherwise explain the employment of spirits and surreal, malleable environments.)

What is unexpectedly inscribed by this fable is that, in order for Scrooge to emerge from his depths as a human being, he must fully embrace Christmas (carols, good cheer, food, social participation) and its attendant social behavior (charity, fair treatment of the worker, leniency towards debtors). This is not an accident. In the Dickens universe, Christmas is not simply an arbitrary metaphor that just happens, for the sake of the story and no further, to be structured around the tenets of good citizenship. Rather, it is how we—Christmas observers, secular and religious, if we align ourselves with the author’s moral compass—see ourselves in our most flattering light, during our most dominant holiday. During the years which saw Scrooge progress from a young boy to a stooped old man, he turned away both from the Christmas spirit as well as the Christmas ritual. Good cheer, good community, a good wife, good posture, etc., these were all chucked out the window. In their place, money, money, money. Over the course of the Christmas Eve of the story, Scrooge is offered a non-negotiable package deal: take Christmas into your heart, don’t ask questions, or you will lose absolutely everything.

Let’s think about this for a moment. While Dickens is known for his readiness to criticize society and organized religion, the medium through which Scrooge's famous conversion is transmitted is a violent manner of inculcation. Scrooge is, of course, a complete fabrication—there are no stories of Dickens forcing a real-life, miserly lender to undergo an omni-sensory nightmare in order to convert the miserable S.O.B. over to a more charitable and, well, merry way of thinking—but it’s certainly interesting that Dickens chose to use, well, torture, the tool of many dominant institutions across history, to isolate one individual and force him to get with the program. And it’s not simple torture; he besets Scrooge on every front: emotional, psychological, spiritual, and physical. One of the canon’s most enduring storytellers, Dickens outlines with equal vividness and creative vigor the problems he sees in the world and the happy new world that emerges as a result of the solutions he proposes. But what does Boz require? A sacrifice. It’s a combination of the horror narrative with another familiar plot: “the dropout must drop back in.”

In filming Dickens’s famous story, Robert Zemeckis (the Back to the Future trilogy, Forrest Gump) exhibits a great deal more in the way of fidelity to the source material than one would expect from an animated movie constructed around a still relatively new performance capture technique and designed to be best experienced in IMAX 3-D. With that pedigree, one can most reasonably expect a feature to be high on gimmickry and low on what they used to call “tradition of quality.” The real experience, however, is a surprise in that it rejects that dichotomy. One of the most complex big-budget directors of the Spielberg age, Zemeckis is not simply struck dull by technology. Instead, he uses new tools to convey, as best he can, the cinematic aspects of Dickens, i.e. the dialogue and the urban spaces of the very early days of Victorian England. (It was Eisenstein who argued, by pointing out the use of parallel montage in Oliver Twist, that Dickens gave more to the cinema than the cinema gave to itself.)

As regards the temptation to trick up the 3-D ride for dumb audiences—in less impressive 3-D features, or less impressive aspects of better ones, the center of the screen is frequently the repository for sticking-out objects such as swords, arrows, fists, guns, skulls, sharks, or a ping-pong ball on an elastic cable—Zemeckis is not precisely a teetotaler in the field of gratuitous visual titillation. But more often than not, he employs 3-D to create layers seemingly within the screen, an effect most classically attributed to Jean Renoir and Orson Welles. None of this is to say that Zemeckis, who receives sole credit for the screenplay, and his fantastically enormous legion of technicians and department heads have crafted the most vivid adaptation of the famous tale. (For this viewer, certain previous films of A Christmas Carol were seen at such a young and impressionable age as to refuse to release their hold on that title.) But it is his own film, and Zemeckis sees fit to use the platform of the Dickens novella to explore what he can do with filmic space, and what it means to be an actor in the movies.

This runs counter to our most favored instinctive response to computer-aided filmmaking: the idea that, now that anything we can imagine can be rendered, with each year bringing us faster and faster processors, more and more memory, and seemingly unlimited access to capital, we won’t be able to make anything worthwhile. However, like many artists, Zemeckis is best served by boundaries, and an adaptation of Dickens is a strict, yet robust, set of boundaries. To take A Christmas Carol and put it on the screen, a few conditions must be met. There’s Scrooge’s introduction, the spirits, the memories, the catharsis, Scrooge’s rebirth, and God bless us, everyone. Zemeckis’s success is derived from his decision to launch a two-pronged attack: one, to be at least 89% faithful to the source material (in terms of setting, tone, and dialogue), and two, to push the digital envelope as far as it will go without breaking.

With the exception of a brief aside allotted to Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, the first reel paints a very thorough and convincing portrait of Scrooge as one of the most miserable, yet among the most well-off, men in London. The “tuppence is tuppence” line is Zemeckis’s creation, and not found in the Dickens. So is the bit with the undertaker silently yet avariciously demanding of Scrooge a gratuity for his firm’s services. Zemeckis peppers his adaptation with little moments like these, some comical, some macabre, some going either way. After we’ve done impossible loop-the-loops around London, we expect a fairly innocuous, virtual reality roller-coaster ride, and it’s the arrival of Marley that ejects us most powerfully from that comfort zone. (During this sequence, which is more potent in its classic “oogedy-boogedy” scare’um effects than almost any horror movie in recent memory, parents who'd taken their under-10 kids expecting harmless PG-rated fun and Jim Carrey face-pulling fled in droves, as if the theater was on fire.)

The three spirit visitations feature some of the most brilliant moments in all of Zemeckis’s body of work. While one may complain of the uncanny valley and some problematic effects (an obese man executing a perfect backflip and landing like Mary Lou Retton is no less cumbersome here than it was in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! eight years ago), the meeting of eyes between young Ebenezer and Belle, his bride-to-be, at the Christmas social, is among Zemeckis’s most beautifully crafted moments, one that can bring tears to one’s eyes not because it is a filmed moment freighted with narrative meaning, but because an artist has charged a visual space with pure, undistilled emotion and let it glide by unadorned. The second of the spirits sees Zemeckis in full effect, The Ghost of Christmas Present sequence centering on a now more captive Scrooge who witnesses the Christmas experience of his contemporaries. Some are joyful and some are miserable, and the vehicle of this spirit’s visual lesson is a banquet hall with a translucent floor that takes impossible flights into the surrounding city. It’s somehow heartening that, with a brigade of visual effects technicians and rivers of flowing cash, Zemeckis would prefer nothing more than to recreate one of the cinema’s most time-honored photographic effects: double exposure, in the spirit of the early McCutcheon/Porter short, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906).

Throughout A Christmas Carol, we are constantly aligned with Scrooge as spectators. He is often seen in close, over-the-shoulder shots as the spirits’ dream-plays unfold before him. Establishing perspective through over-the-shoulder shots in the same frame as the observed object is a technique infrequently used between the offices of Michael Mann and the Dardenne brothers, and, appropriately enough, in Zemeckis’s Carol it has more in common with shoot-‘em-up video games than other movies. Several times during the spirits’ presentations, the Zemeckis digital camera will glide backwards and to the side as Scrooge’s head fills the frame, nose first. We are, given the clarity and magnitude of the visual effects concert, fellow victims of this all-out assault on the senses, but this act of establishing and re-establishing Scrooge's perspective serves to remind us that he is the most privileged member of the audience.

One of the most crucial aspects of Scrooge’s transformation is that it is all too much for him to absorb and remain sane. More than once in the course of the story, he argues that he has seen enough, he’s learned his lesson, can he go home now. But while he’s through with the nightmare—glib and impatient on more than one occasion—it’s not through with him. It is made abundantly clear that Scrooge is meant to undergo a cleansing of the soul, even if it scrambles his brain and breaks his back. This is by far the most interesting layer of the Zemeckis experience, one built around an audio-visual event that straddles the midpoint between “a fun ride” and “a ride that will put you in the emergency room.”

Toward the end of the third visitation, Scrooge’s last layers of security, stature, and significance are stripped away, to the point where even a lowly rat takes on the form of mortal danger. It’s still not enough: he must also undergo the experience of being dead and buried. By the time Scrooge awakes to find he’s been given another chance, it’s clear that he’s not just a lot more cheerful, he’s also a little bit cracked. Getting his life back is something of a consolation prize for losing his marbles, i.e. we’ve broken your skull into a million pieces and put it back together, more or less, so…thanks for playing! It’s also at this point that we really hear Jim Carrey (the cheerful-just-past-sanity’s-breaking-point voice has long been part of his repertoire), and if an elderly moneylender doing a mad jig, alone in his office, isn’t the giveaway, then perhaps the scene where he terrifies his housemaid will do it. In a holiday rife with contradiction, what’s more appropriate than effecting limitless good cheer while remaining timid and terrified inside your own skull?

_____________________________
Jaime N. Christley sells contractual warranties of indemnity in a questionable part of the great city, in the shadow of vile, godless towers and amidst ghastly, nameless fumes and fluids. If he makes it through the day alive, he spends his spare time with flickers and shades, filing his correspondence with Out, damned spot!.

Read more!

By Aaron Cutler

Canons form based on availability. This is notoriously true for literature, where translation helps determine who gets to read what, and when—just think of the fervor with which the American literary establishment has greeted W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño novels over the past 20 years once their work has been translated, well after the authors’ books were celebrated back home in their original languages. But lack of access also haunts cinema studies, often for equally transnational reasons. Many movies don’t cross the pond. Foreign cinema currently accounts for less than five percent of all movies released theatrically in America, so the problem is especially true now. It’s also true for repertory—DVD can only account for so much. Jean-Pierre Melville, the great French crime director whose 1969 French Resistance film Army of Shadows received its stateside theatrical premiere a few years ago and was acclaimed by many critics as the best release of 2006, is a recent discovery for most American cinephiles. The Portuguese Pedro Costa, who may be the world’s greatest filmmaker age 50 or younger, is a discovery-in-progress. Louis Feuillade (pronounced “Foy-yad”), the brilliant French silent film director without whom Surrealism might never have flourished, has barely been discovered at all.

Feuillade directed films from 1906 to 1924, the year before his death. He has one high-profile, universally acclaimed crime thriller, 1915’s Les Vampires, available on DVD in the States, as well as another, less-acclaimed but also brilliant policier (1916’s Judex) and a series of about 10 shorts on an omnibus silent film box set released by the famed French studio Gaumont. This seems like ample representation, until one realizes that Feuillade made more than 600 films in his career (IMDb counts 633). Even though many of his films were 20 minutes or shorter, this is a stunning level of productivity. Feuillade is all the more impressive for working so voluminously even during the First World War. Yet despite so many credits, few American moviegoers know Feuillade. The website Senses of Cinema lists over 200 entries in its Great Directors section, but lacks a Feuillade page; by contrast, the Ken Russell and Craig Baldwin entries seem pretty complete.

Many of Feuillade’s films were lost or destroyed during World War II. I’m not qualified to comment on rights issues, but I can still cite three further reasons why American audiences haven’t seen more of Feullade’s work:

1. Format: Calling Feuillade’s most revered films features is stretching the term some. He was more properly a film serial director, a tradition which sprung out of the 19th-century newspaper tradition of serializing stories over weeks or even months (if the film serial’s precedent was the newspaper serial, its descendant has been the TV miniseries). In contrast to most feature films, in which a self-contained story unfolds over a block of time meant to be experienced in one viewing, Feuillade made multi-part films whose installments came out theatrically in subsequent order, building momentum each week. You can think of Les Vampires and Judex as long films, or as a series of short films—for instance, Les Vampires has 10 parts. Back when cinema was the main popular entertainment, asking a large audience to come out to the movie theater over 10 consecutive weeks was reasonable; nowadays, it would be suicide. This is just as well since, like Béla Tarr’s 1994 film Satántángó, another long-form, multi-piece work, the parts form a cogent whole when shown together. But projecting the entirety of a Feuillade serial creates another problem.

2. Length: With all the parts added together, it’s common for an entire Feuillade serial to run six to eight hours. As Richard Maxwell has noted, the tradition of showing Feuillade’s serials in their entirety in the United States began in the 1970s, around the time when artists like Robert LaPlage, Robert Wilson, and Philip Glass began conducting long-form experiments in music and theater. Yet the problems such works face in finding an audience now seem self-evident.

3. Silence: Because they were made on cheap, easily flammable and/or disintegrating film stock, most silent films are lost to us today (in the United States alone it’s been estimated that 75 percent of silent films are irretrievable). Because they’re so rare, audiences are not used to them, and tend to be apprehensive. I don’t mean that audiences don’t like silent movies—I mean that they’re unwilling even to watch them.

For over 90 years 1913’s Juve vs. Fantômas was the only Feuillade film circulating theatrically in the States. Even the Feuillade work currently known and available is so largely because of more recent remakes and adaptations—the French filmmaker Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face) remade Judex in 1963, and Olivier Assayas made Irma Vep, a Maggie Cheung-starring comedy about a film crew remaking Les Vampires, in 1996. But many of the audiences that have seen Judex and Les Vampires don’t know about Feuillade’s other great work, such as 1914’s Fantômas, 1919’s Barrabas, and perhaps most supremely, 1918’s Tih Minh.

The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum considers Tih Minh one of his 100 favorite movies, thinks it is better than Les Vampires, and, in his book Midnight Movies, calls it the perfect late-night attraction, even with a 357-minute running time. Yet the Internet Movie Database lists no reviews of the film whatsoever, nor anything so much as a plot summary; ditto for Tih Minh’s Wikipedia page.

Tih Minh prints are hard to find. The Cinématheque Francaise owns one, as does Anthology Film Archives, but public screenings rarely happen. I was thus fortunate to catch a screening recently at a Yale conference, spearheaded by History of Art and Film Studies graduate student Richard Suchenski, called “After the Great War: European Film in 1919.” The conference also showed rare treats like Abel Gance’s J’Accuse and Ernst Lubitsch’s The Oyster Princess (The Auteurs’s Daniel Kasman remarked that, had it played in New York, the conference would have been the city’s best repertory series of 2009), but opened with Feuillade. Suchenski’s program notes read that “Although Tih Minh was a great success during its initial release, it was never translated for export and circulated only in incomplete or damaged prints for decades.” After years spent hoping to see Tih Minh, I found it more than worth the wait.

The film begins with explorer Jacques d’Athys (René Cresté) returning home to his family from Indochina. He brings along Tih Minh (Mary Harald), a lovely young girl that he picked up in Laos. He and his loyal servant Placide (Georges Biscot) soon involve themselves in international intrigue that includes jewel thieves-cum-spies who render their victims amnesiacs, a treasure map written in an ancient Asian hand, a literally hypnotic Hindu villain, an insane asylum, and a rock avalanche. A character declares, “Understand that I have to avenge the death of my father.” In the midst of the madness Tih Minh herself becomes a structuring principle, as many of the film’s 12 episodes involve the villains kidnapping her and her subsequent escape or rescue. As the serial’s first third concludes, our heroes flee from the villains, their lovely T.M. in tow; the second third ends with the villains fleeing from them; and the last four episodes build to a final, deadly mountaintop confrontation between the two groups.

The movie doesn’t have a plot so much as a list of incidents. I don’t feel like I’ve given much away, since the one-damn-thing-after-another structure keeps the viewer watching more for what happens moment to moment than for where the story’s going overall. As a consequence of its cliffhangers, and despite its length, Tih Minh zips. In an April 1999 Sight & Sound piece on Feuillade, Vicki Callahan wrote that “the serial form means that the pursuit of criminality or evil is essentially an ongoing saga that can never be completed; the capture of the criminal is not a moment of closure but rather an opportunity to start the narrative anew, since capture is invariably, and sometimes immediately, followed by escape. Rather than a linear, goal-oriented story we have a narrative loop, and one that is further complicated by character movements (whether through misidentification or a particular character's ethical transformation) between the criminal and law-abiding roles.”

As Callahan points out, Tih Minh’s characters frequently tend to shape-shift and role-play, both through external and internal activity (disguise is one example of the first, hypnotism of the second—misidentification is common in the film, though ethical transformation is scarce). In one scene Tih Minh and Placide’s maid fiancée Rosette (Jeanne Rollette) are visited by a pair of nuns at their home, the Villa Luciola. One of the nuns soon throws off the habit, revealing herself to be the villainous male thief, Kistna (Louis Leubel). Brandishing a pistol, Kistna leads Tih Minh out into the garden to find a map for him; he fires his gun, and the bullet ricochets against a statue and wounds him in the hand. At this point Placide (who’s discovered the hidden microphones) bursts into the frame and, chasing Kistna with a powerful hose, drives him over the garden fence. The sequence mimics the film’s overall power struggle—from good, to evil, to a restoration of the good. In the next episode Kistna will send a spying maid and her equally spying dog to infiltrate the Luciola gang, but that too will pass. Like a Shakespearean comedy, Tih Minh moves from chaos to a restoration of order. The film even marches toward a traditional comedic ending—d’Athys and Placide plan a double-wedding for when all the chases are done.

Feuillade is able to depict such wild happenings onscreen because his foundations are so solid. I mean this not just from a storytelling perspective, but from a visual one. The director consistently relies on static medium-to-establishing shots, proscenium-like in their orientation, the camera viewing the characters from a slightly elevated angle, and the lighting's generally unobtrusive. In other words, Feuillade gives us a relatively normal, stable-looking frame so that the odd happenings within it can seem all the more disruptive.

Some of these moments are indomitably striking, especially in the film’s first few episodes. Dreaming of the abducted Tih Minh, d’Athys envisions a ghostly superimposition of her, white dress billowing over waves. Later, upon breaking into the spies’ memorably-named Villa Circé to look for her, d’Athys and Placide stumble across a basement room and swing the door open. Inside they see hundreds of women, their hair wild, eyes wide, and white dresses soiled, crawling over each other, the only ray of light beaming in from a barred window above. The men begin searching for Tih Minh, but cannot find her. Meanwhile, the women crawl out and, arms forward, zombie-like, begin wandering the island.

The film frequently invokes mental health—both good and bad doctors lead people into forgetting and remembering their pasts, or inventing new ones, and at one point a key character is even mistakenly locked up in an insane asylum, the plot unable to advance until his release. Freud’s burgeoning theories of psychoanalysis hover about the film (while the 63 year-old Freud had yet to write major works like Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and Its Discontents at the time of Tih Minh’s release, The Interpretation of Dreams had been in print for almost 20 years). So, too, does World War I: The Armistice was signed November 11th, 1918; Tih Minh’s first episode premiered theatrically on November 30th. The references to the unnamed conflicting governments for whom the characters work recall the convoluted alliances countries formed and broke with each other during the Great War, but the lingering sense of devastation and trauma that the war left across Europe floats through the movie as well.

Feuillade is filming a rousing adventure story, but he’s also questioning the future of the world. It’s a world explicitly without central authority figures, in which the characters fight to assert their own moral order—as one of d’Athys’s companions conveniently says late in the film to justify hunting the thieves, “why inform the police? We are mixed up in the most remarkable adventure in the world, let’s go all the way with it ourselves.” To show how free society hangs in the balance between poles of good and evil, Feuillade doubles many opposing characters. D’Athys’s friend, the good Doctor Davesne, is mirrored by the chief spy Doctor Gilson. Rosette, the good maid, faces an evil maid as her counterpart. Tih Minh breaks out of the spell Gilson and Kistna have put her under, while Gilson’s henchwoman Dolores confesses everything to Davesne under hypnosis. Kistna and his servant Fritz ultimately betray each other, while d’Athys and Placide stay true to one another (all the performers portray effective archetypes, but Biscot’s comic servant is especially wonderful—as he charges gallantly forward to save the women from harm, his flat eyes and smushed face make him seem like a more adult Stan Laurel, though equally, sweetly monstrous). Tih Minh and Kistna show the good and bad possibilities of Europe mixing with Asia.

The film balances its societal poles so that Nature ultimately has to intervene. Toward the end of the film, as the felons flee into the mountains, Feuillade moves his camera several hundred feet back and we see them as specks in the landscape. Unlike Les Vampires, in which the black-clad Irma Vep appears and disappears at her liking, the antagonists here never seem more than human; once the boulders crash, they seem especially so. D’Athys, a bland hero, triumphs over his adversaries not through skill so much as through luck and fate. Rather than a screenplay deficiency, this seems the movie’s point.

I wrote earlier that modern audiences are unused to watching silent films, but other silent cinema isn’t the right point of comparison for Feuillade’s work. Les Vampires came out the same year as The Birth of a Nation, but as Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, Griffith and Feuillade “seem to belong to different centuries. While Griffith’s work reeks of Victorian morality and nostalgia for the mid-19th century, Feuillade looks ahead to the global paranoia, conspiratorial intrigues, and SF technological fantasies of the current century, right up to today.”

The most appropriate comparison for Tih Minh isn’t to another silent film, but to a recent hit like The Dark Knight. Both films are about shape-shifting, disguise-donning villains and the heroes who take the law into their own hands to stop them. Both films structure themselves as a series of setpieces alternating between each party’s capture and escape. Both films are allegories about the wars their countries were then fighting (Tih Minh’s gang is a gaggle of foreigners; several Dark Knight characters call the Joker a terrorist).

Yet Tih Minh trumps The Dark Knight stylistically, tonally, and thematically. Christopher Nolan edits his movie to death, rendering a car chase indecipherable; Feuillade respects the laws of physical space, so that when characters chase each other on ski lifts, a thousand feet off the ground, we still sense where they are in relation to each other and what they have to do to catch up. Nolan pounds his points home with glum, dark seriousness while simultaneously asking us to believe in a clown who can stuff a bomb into a fat man’s chest when no one’s looking; Feuillade knows a poisoned potion in the wine is improbable, and has Placide switch it with sugared water. The Dark Knight insists that wire-tapping, torture, and government cover-ups are necessary in the name of freedom, accepting these precepts fatalistically; Tih Minh, by contrast, shows us a world worth saving. I never want to see Nolan’s movie again, but while Feuillade’s film is almost triple its length, I feel I could watch Tih Minh at least 30 more times. One film exhausts, the other liberates; the comic book film thinks it’s addressing reality, but the human film knows it speaks the language of dreams.

__________________________________
Aaron Cutler has written about film for Slant Magazine and The Believer. He is working on a book about New York’s repertory cinemas.

Read more!

Posting will be light the next couple of days as I unplug from the Internet for Christmas Holiday (the event, but also a terrific Robert Siodmak movie that Glenn Kenny just reviewed in his Foreign Region DVD report at the Auteurs). I've scheduled entries for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day from Aaron Cutler and Jaime N. Christley that will hopefully tide our readers over until I return late on the 27th. It's perfectly probable that Matt will have a gazillion new essays to link-through to over at Film Salon or elsewhere (your productivity, man—envious!). My own deck-the-halls contribution at Time Out New York, "The year in film, A to Z," co-authored with my colleagues David Fear and Joshua Rothkopf, can be found here. To all the writers who have submitted articles to me over the past few weeks that I haven't gotten to yet, my apologies and I will be in touch with you soon (a standard refrain—thanks for putting up with my schedule and my easily distracted self). Upcoming, we've got several end-of-year/decade pieces and there are some exciting new site developments that will be unveiled in 2010: The Year We Make Contact (stole that joke from you Koresky, hope you'll forgive me); can't wait to tell you all about them. Until then, a hearty thank you to all our contributors who give the House its uniquely communal spirit, and to our readers for your continued patronage. All the best to you and yours this holiday season.

_______________________________
"Links for the Day": Each day (more or less) the House editors post a link/links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

Read more!