Transporter 3

By Vadim Rizov

[Transporter 3 is now playing in theaters.]

When XXX came out in 2002, a popular theme for entertainment journalism trend pieces was to note that—with the rapidly approaching end of the Schwarzenneger, Stallone and Seagal era—there was a gaping hole where a new generation of action star should be. Vin Diesel was supposed to take up the mantle, but, his career having subsequently gone too far in some direction or other, Jason Statham made for a plausible second contender. Cf. a far-seeing Manohla Dargis reviewing 2002's The Transporter: "the actor certainly seems equipped to develop into a mid-weight alternative to Vin Diesel."

It's a strange movie—a Besson production designed to appeal to every European with a yen for trashy action, directed by Cory Yuen in a hyper-melodramatic style suggesting he thought he was making a real Hong Kong action-drama, rather than just synthesizing everything Besson liked about those movies in a faster package. There's some stellar fights and some HK grace notes (Statham's opening drive to classical music is the kind of shock you'd expect to see in a clean action package from the 90s), but mostly it succeeds by pummeling you with constant, mostly plausible havoc. 2005's Transporter 2 is something else altogether, a gleeful celebration of the possibilities for action set-pieces once you decide to ignore physics. Ditching the first film's rote romance for asexual machismo and inventively absurd choreography, Transporter 2 delivers guilty fun on schedule. Statham came into his taciturn own, embodying macho self-confidence with a touch of the archetypal wounded wanderer without playing any of the elements too heavily. His persona didn't get in the way of the fun.

Unfortunately, someone decided that what audiences really cared about weren't the constant absurdities, but the psychological nuances of Jason Statham, like whether he'd get laid or not. So Transporter 3 is full of a lot of talking—more talking overall than chasing or explosions—and, most ingloriously, a seduction scene that feels about 10 minutes long, wherein a Ukrainian woman (Natalya Rudakova) bullies and coaxes Statham into an ad hoc-striptease/copulation session. I know Statham has his gay fans, but did anyone really want to stop for that long to look at his chest? Statham's pretty good at a low-grade, steely-eyed unflappable macho kind of mode; to bog everything down by tokenly humanizing him (to an even greater extent than the first film did) is roughly as bad an idea as thinking The Good, The Bad And The Ugly would be improved if Clint had some hot sex scenes.

A lot of Transporter 3 is wasted on talk and character bonding between Statham and the Ukrainian. Occasionally something happens to deliver on the ostensible premise: a well-choreographed jacket fight, with Statham making use of his wardrobe to throw people around. There's also a market chase scene which—for mostly logical reasons—requires Statham first to make like Indiana Jones in the marketplace, then jack a bike and use dumpsters as ramps for a ride over sweatshop tables, and finally crash through the car window and throw someone out (the car, of course, being precisely stopped outside the sweatshop window). This is why I come to watch Transporter movies.

The Ukrainian woman comes in handy exactly once, when—as prelude to a surprisingly mundane car chase—she pops some leftover ecstasy from Ibiza, which at least suggests a new strategy for enjoying yourself at these kinds of things. Maybe I just haven't seen a blockbuster in a multiplex in a while, but Transporter 3 is relentlessly loud, a constant roar, and director Olivier Megaton—a self-important former graffiti artist who apparently thinks he has a vision—cuts everything to coherence's breaking point. (Transporter 2 understood that to be completely over-the-top, you also need to be clear on what exactly is happening.) In its dreary "characterization," Transporter 3 forgets what I (and presumably everyone else) came to see: not the time-filling drama of bad network TV, but the limitations of movement in Earth's gravity defied every two minutes.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

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935 (76). Scenes from Under Childhood (1967-1970, Stan Brakhage)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Stan Brakhage’s approximation of what it’s like to see as a child, drawn from years of footage of his own children, is nothing as crude as a literal re-enactment of a child’s point of view, but something much more vivid and disturbing. The film opens with a series of red screens, suggesting light filtered through closed infant eyes, before launching into lightning flashes of white: a nascent gaze opening to the world and hardly able to take in its brilliance. This traumatic sensation is the underlying emotion that runs through the film’s four chapters, and it’s a marvel how Brakhage’s panoply of images—progressing from the abstract to the very literal—can be such an emotionally affecting account of how children come to perceive the world. Mostly shot in handheld with the flickers and jumps one expects of Super 8, the film has been described as the greatest home movie ever made, with Children playing in a yard bathed in impossibly beautiful tree-dappled light or a close-up the upturned carcass of a dead wasp on a bathtub lip strike the heart of a uncanny left behind by adulthood. There’s little nostalgic about this wonder though, as such images will be interspersed by recurring fades to a haunting, ghostlike formation of undulating crystals, suggesting human cells regenerating feverishly. At times the gaze is simply blank, looking at nothing or no one in particular, focusing more on negative spaces than objects, the indeterminate time of childhood with no purpose but to be. A soup of memory, liquid and light, churning with life.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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934 (75). La Kermesse héroïque aka Carnival in Flanders (1935, Jacques Feyder)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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This lavish farce about a 17th century Belgian town whose women openly welcome Spanish invaders when their cowardly male counterparts go into hiding is a classic model of the ebullient pacing and jaunty eroticism that’s long been associated with French comedic cinema. Feyder orchestrates his ensemble and witty dialogue with a lilting, musical efficiency, a quality that’s also reflected in the camerawork, which moves sinuously across lavish sets inspired by Flemish paintings of the period. Feyder’s fanciful farce envisions a marriage of pacifism and sexual equality yielding an idyllic society, which, despite strong critical support, rendered it anathema to contemporary politics. The Belgians saw it as a mockery of their leaders’ ineffectuality during their occupation by the Germans during World War II; the Nazis eventually banned it when links between them and the film’s invading Spaniards became apparent. It’s utopian vision of international peace brokered by the fairer sex, while amounting to a feminist statement ahead of its time, seems downright naive in the immediate context of Petain and Chamberlain’s appeasement policies to the Nazis (much in the way that the “we should have stayed in Iraq” argument underlying David O. Russell’s Three Kings looks very different in the Bush era). But the film managed to place on many top ten lists in a poll conducted by the Belgian Cinematheque only a few years after the end of World War II, possibly attesting to the triumph of laughter and masterful filmmaking over one of the darkest moments of humankind.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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5 for the Day: Mia Farrow

By Dan Callahan

“If I seem to be running, it’s because I’m pursued…”

—Mia Farrow, 1968—

It’s been close to twenty years since Mia Farrow did battle with her one-time boyfriend/boss Woody Allen, in actual law courts and in the even nastier courts of public opinion. She wrote an autobiography in 1997, What Falls Away, in which she described her life up to the point Allen started an affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi, which resulted in accusations on both sides that were so ugly that we’ve all made a kind of pact of forgetfulness so that we can go on seeing Allen’s movies. Farrow has continued to work as an actress, but in fairly obscure films. She turned up this year in Michel Gondry’s loopy Be Kind Rewind; at 63, she looked almost exactly the same as she had in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and it was a reminder that she has spent her whole life pursuing a dream of childhood, both in her compulsive adoption of children, many of whom have special needs, and her determination to keep herself childishly pure in looks and attitude. “She lived all alone in her own world,” said Bette Davis, observing a teenaged Farrow on the set of John Paul Jones (1959), which was directed by her father, John Farrow.

Farrow grew up in Beverly Hills with John Farrow and her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, a minor movie star at MGM and Jane to Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan. At age 9 she was stricken with polio, which seems to have been a seminal experience for her that created both fear and guilt in equal measure. In What Falls Away, Farrow is always describing her feelings of embarrassment and mortification in all sorts of social situations, and it’s easy to feel how her neuroticism and low self-esteem could eventually shade itself into a passive aggressive pride and a kind of ruthless avenging conscience. She was in love with Michael Boyer, the son of movie star Charles, and the most touching scene in the book is when she comes to see Charles and his wife Pat after Michael has killed himself: Farrow is very good at describing the opulent ghostliness of the Beverly Hills of her childhood, where people are always sequestered away in different rooms, either weeping or drinking.

When her father and then her older brother Mike died, Farrow felt the need to go to work to help support her family, and she started making the rounds as an actress, since it was the only world she knew. In New York, she made friends with Salvador Dali, and you can see why the great surrealist was so drawn to Farrow, for she was like a figure from one of his paintings: flat, two-dimensional, a little harsh, more than a little strange. Farrow feigns helplessness at all points in her book, but this starts to feel pretty peculiar as a number of big-deal things happen to her; she becomes a huge star on television in a series of Peyton Place, then marries the much-older Frank Sinatra. She cuts her hair pixie-short to avoid “vanity,” but when she becomes an even bigger star after the release of Rosemary’s Baby, she hightails it to India to meditate, and the Beatles just happen to drop by….

Farrow fell quickly away from these lurid extremes of fame, for she was hard to cast: as a smart modern girl in John and Mary (1969), Farrow is out-of-it and fey, and she looks too stunned to get any of her chit-chatty dialogue out. Worse was The Great Gatsby (1973), a decidedly heat-struck, unsuccessful version of Fitzgerald’s novel, where she gave a bizarrely artificial performance as Daisy Buchanan, like Tarzan’s Jane ready for the nuthouse. In her book, Farrow is especially vague when describing the circumstances of her 70s marriage to the composer Andre Previn, though she does apologize, grudgingly, to his ex-wife Dory, a songwriter who wrote a tune about Farrow’s husband stealing. Previn doesn’t seem to have been around much during their marriage, which is when Farrow started her children collecting in earnest. As she describes her relations with Sinatra, Previn and then Woody, it’s hard not to notice how she gravitates to difficult, famous men as if she likes the idea of their partnership more than the reality, which is what got her into such trouble with Allen, of course. In a recent interview, when Farrow was asked if she was seeing anyone, she girlishly revealed that she was getting close to (wait for it) Philip Roth!

Clearly, this is a woman who is drawn to disaster in her personal life, but there’s a brighter flip side to this strain in Farrow that has come to the fore in her fierce activism against the genocide still going on in Darfur. Religiously, she keeps up a blog about Darfur, www.miafarrow.org, where all sorts of information about the genocide can be found, and she almost single-handedly shamed Steven Spielberg into declining any role in staging the Olympics in China, which she claimed was helping to fund the genocide. Farrow may still look as frail and defenseless as Rosemary, but this is a woman who knows how to play hardball to get what she wants. Her queasy public life is always going to take precedence over her work in films, but let’s not forget her achievements in that area, especially in the movies that Woody Allen built around her in the 80s. In thirteen films, Allen celebrated and sometimes assailed Farrow, and they both emerged victors, artistically, at least.

***
1. Rosemary’s Baby: Farrow eases us into Roman Polanski’s almost self-indulgently disturbing picture of the occult with a plangent, uncertain “la la la” lullaby under the credits, and she keeps up this mood with her dutiful, people-pleasing manner in her early scenes. She looks both sexy and innocent in her pigtails and short skirts, and she’s charming when she keeps reciting her struggling-actor husband’s meager credits. The Catholic schoolgirl guilt sequences in the first half of the film match up neatly with Farrow’s own childhood experience, and her spacey quality is perfect for this role: you can believe that Rosemary wouldn’t be suspicious about her devil baby until it was much too late. Borderline ridiculous pulp material is made seriously upsetting by Polanski, especially when he has Farrow cut her hair, so that she looks like a Holocaust victim (“It’s Vidal Sassoon … it’s very in,” Farrow chirps, obliviously). Toward the end of her nightmare, Farrow’s Rosemary has her small spurts of aggressiveness, but they prove pitifully ineffectual. Throughout the ordeal of this justly famous horror movie, Farrow ideally embodies Polanski’s insight into the overall impotence of basically decent people in the face of total evil.

***
2. Secret Ceremony (1968): Saddled with an absurdly unconvincing long black wig, Farrow leaps right into the center of Joseph Losey’s classic bad movie we love, which stands as a mother lode of unintentional hilarity. It’s a three-way contest between Farrow, Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum to see who can give the most outrageous performance, and though Liz tends to dominate, Farrow wins if we’re using a yardstick of sheer lunacy. Farrow plays her damaged rich girl Cenci as a full-blown village idiot who’s utterly without guile or protection, all wide eyes and smarmy smiles and physical abandon. Underneath all the laughs, though, lies a retroactive trap for Farrow: she’s playing a sly child abused by her stepfather (Mitchum), a child who evidently likes being abused by him, on some level. So, yes, she’s basically playing Soon-Yi many years before the early 90s catastrophe, but any attempt to suss out deeper meanings is wonderfully defeated by the film’s insistently, triumphantly vulgar tone, which Farrow captures perfectly, to her peril and our delight.

***
3. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985): This uncharacteristically specific poisoned valentine to 30s movie escapism is one of the best films Woody Allen has ever made, and at its center is Farrow’s lyrical Cecilia, a Depression waitress who lives exclusively in her own dream world. Allen is not usually a generous director of actors, but he always films Farrow with mistrustful love, and he gives her close-ups in Purple Rose where he seems to marvel at the flood of idealistic feeling that lights up her fine-boned little face. This nearly perfect film is the clearest indicator that Allen and Farrow were completely mismatched temperamentally (pessimist versus optimist) and this mismatch creates the hard-to-place tension in all of the films they made together. At the end of Purple Rose, when Farrow’s Cecilia has been heartlessly jilted, Allen gives her a moment where she slowly raises her head to look up at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing “Cheek to Cheek” in Top Hat (1935). Farrow doesn’t do any tricks with her face to show us what she’s going through; she simply sits there in her movie theater and lets her whole being fill up with apprehensive hope and love. This close-up is deluded and incriminating and very moving, and it says a lot about Farrow, but it’s big enough to make a claim far beyond Farrow and Cecilia and the fantasy of the Purple Rose plot. It’s the feminine answer to Charlie Chaplin’s last close-up in City Lights (1931), all the more heartbreaking because it is so much more reserved.

***
4. Alice (1990): A modest but underrated Allen movie, Alice functions largely as a vehicle for Farrow, who plays a rich, spoiled housewife tickled by the idea of an affair with a jazz musician (Joe Mantegna), but too timid to do anything about it until a Chinatown sage (Keye Luke) gives her a potion that unlocks her inhibitions. When Farrow swallows Luke’s magic herbs, her face opens up like a flower; what follows, in a very long take, is the best single scene Farrow has ever played, a hair-raising seduction of Mantegna that begins when she says, “Your eyes are really … on fire,” and builds wildly from there. Every time she says his name (it’s Joe), it sounds more indecent, more provoking, and she punctuates every intimate “Joe” with subtle little mouth movements and knowing glances. When she dares to put the back of her hand to one side of his face and then another, it really feels shockingly bold, but she manages to top this moment of physical contact when she purrs, “Duke? My favorite, Joe,” then finishes this perilously forward flirtation with talk of how Coltrane “opened up a whole new world of harmonics for me.” The meek Mia mask is dropped, and here we have the woman who bewitched Sinatra, Previn, and Allen himself. Alice is a straightforward gift to Farrow, who Allen seems to see as a small, impregnable fortress, almost as infuriatingly goody-goody as her overly content matriarch Hannah in Hannah and her Sisters (1986).

***
5. Husbands and Wives (1992): In her autobiography, Farrow revealed that she actually shot some scenes of this unforgettably raw Allen drama after she found out about his betrayal with her adopted daughter, but she must have had premonitions, for her Judy Roth is all of a piece, the gamine gone sour: quietly furious, almost feral, encased in bulky sweaters, awkwardly tripping down the street. It could be argued that what’s striking about Farrow here is beyond her control, and that this isn’t really a performance, per se, but her anguish in this film is so punishingly real that it must stand as probably the most affecting thing she has ever done on screen. She looks as if she hasn’t slept in days, and she’s always touching her face self-consciously; her voice has become terminally whiny, and she’s capable of scathing attacks. A negative force field surrounds Farrow here, and her constant state of irritation sometimes boils up into outright hostility (she always seems to be crying, “Bullshit!”). What must be stressed, however, is that though Allen did her unbelievable damage in life, he always remained charitable and sensitive to her on screen, to the last. Instead of leaving her on the discordant note of Husbands and Wives, let’s remember the conclusion of Alice, where Allen imagines an ending for his heroine that has her throwing off materialism and actually working with her idol, Mother Teresa, just as Farrow herself has found meaning in her aggressive and tireless humanitarian work.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 10 (28), "Vadim's New Roomate"

By Odie "Odienator" Henderson, John Lichman, and Keith Uhlich

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

INTRODUCTION

Happy Thanksgiving!

Between personal coffee drinking and attending Apple Store seminars where I was reminded to even be so lucky to be interviewing for a retail job, I forgot to finish the write-up for this podcast! We recorded this the day before Episode 9, a Sunday. And little did we realize, after nearly a year recording at Grassroots (and my having been there for the last few years), that they had live jazz on Sunday nights!

And it's good—but loud. I mean, Grassroots with a sound system is already a bit of a noise maker. But live jazz band with drums, sax and horns? It's like trying to talk over the dull monotone droning that Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz consider acceptable numbers.

So, Keith, myself and Special Guest Odie Henderson packed up and made the cold, harsh trip over to the Holiday Cocktail Lounge for $4 drinks. We were three of seven people in the bar, and our topics ranged from Odie's viewings of Slumdog Millionaire and W. to why Soul Men matters and the fears of the FCC in an Obama cabinet.

All in all, we go through everything—since this is one of our longest episodes yet!

And Vadim isn't here. And Keith kept flashing Odie.

And and and ... here's Episode 10: "Vadim's New Roommate."

So if you see either of us at the bar, buy us a drink! Or if you're AOL, The Onion or the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, please give me one of those many jobs I applied for. I don't have the luxury of going to Grad School, so I need to—you know—"work." (JL)

Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 1 hour 08 minutes 39 seconds)

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PODCAST



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Odie Henderson's varied interests include postcards and sandals.

John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

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"Indie 500": The Broken West, Prodigy, TV On The Radio, Grand Archives

By Vadim Rizov

I know I keep coming up with constant excuses for this column's (to put it politely) somewhat irregular publishing schedule, but this one I need to make. Briefly: The Onion AV Club is in the thick of its year-end process, which meant I just couldn't pass up the chance to make a year-end top 10. I just couldn't; it's an addiction. So maybe my AV Club list and my list here will be markedly different; perhaps not (it's been a weak year and I don't imagine many more surprises cropping up). In any case, I've been cramming like a guilty high-school student on 2008 releases; notes below represent things I was thinking about intensely a month/month-and-a-half ago. Please accept the mental distance; soon enough I'll be catching up on everything that ostensibly matters musically about 2008.

***
Here's the thing about The Broken West: they're one of the most derivative bands working today. They have no ideas of their own. They never met a Big Star track they didn't like, except for maybe "Holocaust." Am I being clear enough in explaining why I like them? Their 2007 debut I Can't Go On, I'll Go On was a huge guilty pleasure for me, ridiculous titular Beckett allusion and all. Back then, I shamefacedly wrote out my qualifications with more conviction than I felt, and they're all still true: "sneering lead singers who assert themselves like American Gallagher brothers ... no breathing room except for ballads ... don't have a whole lot on their mind besides, you know, girls and place-holder lyrics ... consciously anti-intellectual...They're not clever, but they're satisfying." This was an oblique (OK, trying to avoid chastisement for my taste) way of saying that I listened to their album way too many times, and I'm not real sure why. There's a lot of filler there: looking on the track-listing a little over a year later, I can't remember what half of it sounds like, and re-visiting tracks like "You Can Build An Island" or "Brass Ring" isn't really helping.

The reason I'm revisiting them: they were the only great thing I saw at CMJ. Granted, I didn't get out a whole hell of a lot (other bands seen: The Browns, The Muslims, Wye Oke, Portastatic). Still, I was in a really bad mental headspace, which was compounded by the fact that I find most shows to be more trouble than they're worth. The Broken West's performances of "On The Bubble" and "Down In The Valley" gave me six minutes of visceral, head-thrashing, non-thinking joy, and if I'm doing better now, I owe them at least a little debt of thanks. (This despite the fact that The Broken West apparently read the same guide to being an LA band everyone else did and wear the same stupid neck-length hair and pseudo-rock-star button-down shirts as every other goddamn LA buzz band. They can still play.)

All of which is a roundabout way of saying I don't really want to pan their new album Now Or Heaven. The press kit announces that the band felt the need to tear it up and start over from rhythms rather than guitars; this basically means the album is all treble and no bass. For a band wanting to bring the retro-hooks, this is not a particularly satisfying approach. There's a lot of skittery machines and pseudo-electronics that provide tentative rhythms, which isn't particularly satisfying; the songs play better live, with the drums giving enough muscle to melodies that aren't as ridiculously big as before but still get the job done. Lyrics are cursory; the best song is probably "Ambuscade," which announces "these are ruthless people," which probably means this is yet another song about how awful the music industry is, which is about as meaty a topic as The Broken West can touch without lapsing into cliche. The rest is inoffensive and unmemorable. Props to The Broken West for not resting on their laurels, but what a way to go about it: ditching all your assets for experimentation that isn't even that experimental. Next time, guys; still love the show.

***
I don't have a whole lot to say about Prodigy's album H.N.I.C. Part 2. Like last year's Return Of The Mac, it's good for three spins and little more aside from a few stand-out tracks. Last year, the stand-out tracks were mostly courtesy of Alchemist's production, and while he and associate Sid Roams still do a good job running things (Roams gets first single "ABC," which has a bunch of little kids singing the alphabet, leading to an oddly Boards Of Canada-type effect), that's not really the point.

H.N.I.C. Part 2 comes down to three tracks. The record's most anomalous is "Veterans Memorial Part 2," which induced a Pavlovian response in me from its opening chipmunk vocals and soul strings; Prodigy drops the kill-you-for-no-reason bullshit for a second and tells a predictable litany of street reprisals, jail terms and unnecessary deaths with poignancy and original details: there's a killer out there, sure, but at one point a man kills people for no reason (he can give and take it—he gets shot in the head, goes home and takes the bullet out himself), goes to jail, "came home Muslim," and two months later is at it again. That version I hadn't heard before. Prodigy also unsentimentally remembers his dad teaching him how to rob a jewelry store—who knows if it's true, but he's a convincing narrator anyway.

But the really compelling and fucked-up stuff comes on two conspiracy-track numbers. The album kicks off with "Real Power Is People"; it starts with the usual kill-protect-get rich nonsense, in convincingly threatening but slightly dull fashion. Then suddenly Prodigy has some unusual images to drop: "Pedophiles rape little kids for energy / Satanic rituals, WTC (RIP) / They lit the Pentagon on fire / That's lighting the pentagram on fire." The first time I heard this, I sat bolt upright and started paying extra-close attention. "Wow," I wondered, "has Prodigy just found a completely irresponsible but effective persona to grab my attention with? Or does he really believe this, in which case he's gone completely insane?"

Let's be clear: even when Prodigy was deep in Mobb Deep's heyday, he never seemed like our most responsible citizen; when he got arrested for possession of a weapon (for the third time) and sent to jail for three and a half years, it sort of made sense. Prodigy's lawyers may well be on firm ground when they claim he's being shaken down by the NYPD hip-hop squad, but I still only half-believe everything Prodigy says. But this is a whole new level of crazy. On "Illuminati," he merely claims that one of the conspiracy theorists' favorite is out for him: "Illuminati want my mind, soul and body." Up until now, I didn't know that Prodigy and my conspiracy-theory-minded dad had anything in common; I'm sure it would be a nasty shock to them both.

As Prodigy's infamous prison blogs confirm, he's not joking. Check out installment #3, the bluntly titled" RITUALISTIC MURDER". Prodigy begins nice and easy with a few reasoned words about 9/11 ("THERE WERE BOMBS GOING OFF ON JUST ABOUT EVERY FLOOR AND THAT'S THE ONLY THING THAT CAUSED THE TOWERS TO COLLAPSE SO PERFECTLY IN DEMOLITION FORMATION.") Then he gets to the Pentagon: "THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS THE FACT THAT THE PENTAGON WAS SET ON FIRE, THEY'VE ACTUALLY SET A PENTAGRAM ON FIRE. ONLY SATANIC WORSHIPPERS SET PENTAGRAMS ON FIRE, WHEN THEY PRACTICE THEIR RITUALS."

After some more talk of energy lines, the investigative work of Alex Jones (if you don't know, don't ask) and so on, he finally gets around to telling where all the missing children are going: "PEOPLE I'M SORRY TO SAY BUT 95% OF THESE MILLIONS OF MISSING CHILDREN ARE BEING USED AS A PART OF THESE ELITE SOCIETIES DEMONIC AND SATANIC RITUALS. THEY ARE BEING SEXUALLY MOLESTED BECAUSE IN THESE IN THESE SATANIC RITUALS WHEN THEY MOLEST A CHILD THEY'RE CONJURING UP A NEGATIVE ENERGY. ... NOT ONLY ARE THESE MISSING CHILDREN BEING USED AS SEXUAL TOOLS IN SATAN WORSHIP, BUT THEY'RE ALSO BEING EATEN AS A PART OF THESE VERY SAME RITUALS." He also cites Hannibal. You get the idea. Every track has been "researched"; this is no longer just an album.

Where Prodigy is going with this (I won't take you any more of the long way) is a very freaky version of black nationalism where white people invent power structures to oppress the Muslim nation or whatever. And while all this is pretty absurd from where I sit, it's good to hear it. I'm sort of thinking like this: I like to read The New York Times and Dirty Harry's Place back to back, so that I can read what seems like a reasonable perspective on the world, only to have my brain cleansed with a right-wing lunacy so strident I know it represents a perspective I'd never encounter otherwise in a few sharp, short blasts. (I also enjoy the site because, when not waxing political, Dirty Harry wants to do things like pay tribute to Dana Andrews; ain't nothing wrong with that.) Listening to Prodigy as opposed to pretty much any other rapper with mainstream recognition—even the devout Lupe Fiasco—is a quick clue to certain avenues of life I will never be invited into, because I'm probably the enemy. Condoning it is beside the point; I'm just intrigued it exists. Besides, like Prodigy really gives a fuck what I think. I wonder what he thinks of Obama.

***
Like The Walkmen, TV On The Radio are a wildly-acclaimed band every bit as obsessed as what they should sound like as how their songs are constructed. And, like The Walkmen, they've just had their breakthrough moment. Not to get all "I was there," but the brief year that I subscribed to Magnet Magazine, I was briefly insanely dedicated to trying to download sample MP3s of every single band they featured in any capacity, whether in one of their excellent features, the (mostly overwritten) album capsule reviews, and especially the full-page glossy buzz artists who'd get a color photo and a brief write-up. Most fell into the ether, but TV On The Radio had their shot at the moment they were passing through Austin on what I presume was one of their first national touring-laps. At a small in-store at the now sadly defunct 33 Degree Records they were pretty thrilling, running through erratic sound conditions in a way that was improvisatory and engaged, making up plausible songs on the spot. Their trademark empty spaces and drones weren't in place.

I was mostly annoyed by their first album, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes: now they had a sound, but that sound seemed calculated to resist every pop pleasure that didn't involve going a capella. No harmonies or complexities, just reverb and lots of droning; not droning in the sense that some bands embrace full-on, just straight lines that reveled in a sound rather than song. 2006's Return To Cookie Mountain was a step up—producer Dave Sitek came into his own, and the album did more in its first thirty seconds to harmonically stun than the entirety of its predecessor—but the last half degenerated into 8-minute jams going nowhere in particular besides the mixing board.

So, of course, I waited forever to get into this year's Dear Science, because all I was told was that they'd gone pop, which is what everyone said about their last album, which was only relatively true. Within thirty seconds, they've hit clarity: "Halfway Home" opens with one chord being hammered at by the full band, but then suddenly Tunde Adebimpe's vocals go for a perfect ba-ba-ba equidistant from The Beach Boys and The Ramones. This means two things: that TV On The Radio, having gotten their sound down perfectly, feel free to reference other bands now, and also that they're comfortable giving you a pop song without feeling all guilty about it. "Dancing Choose" kind of sounds like Barenaked Ladies, I swear to god, but a lot of the album is accessible relative. Kyp Malone's tracks tend to be a little tricksier, imagining (I know this is a really hackneyed reference point, but I honestly feel it's justifiable) a world in which the Talking Heads didn't drop the polyrhythmic experiments but went even further, instructing pizzicato violins to join in. All of which is admirable and interesting to listen to, but the standout track for me is also, typically, the least overtly ambitious. "Family Tree" is 5 1/2 minutes built upon a few simple elements amplified to infinity: a string quartet, a piano whose simple depressed chords echo over and over, and various production frills that use almost ineffable moments to swell everything up. It's hard to tell exactly what it's all about, but there's a general sense of a pathologically damaged family ("in the shadow of the gallows of your family tree"), something I can always get behind.

TV On The Radio are now meeting me 75% of the way there, in that they've given me one gorgeous (but not overly sentimental) song for late nights and a bunch of intellectually interesting songs that kind of get my blood pumped and kind of are just cerebrally intriguing without collapsing into drones. I'll take it.

***
Grand Archives is as fun a band to listen to as they are boring to write about. Their self-titled debut was respectfully received and promptly forgotten, but this Band of Horses defection deserves at least as much attention as their last album. Seemingly misremembering Howard Hawks, Grand Archives offer up three great songs and no bad ones. Opener "Torn Foam Blue Couch" offers up their vision of unostentious maximalism. Where Band of Horses aim to be an old-school rock band, using only the core instruments at maximum reverbed volume, Grand Archives summon up a slow-building storm from, at first, nothing more than a tambourine, a harp and a boy-girl duo. By the end, the whole band's in, the drums are pounding, horns have shown up somewhere along the way, and—in time-honored rock fashion—someone's hitting the same piano octave over and over again.

None of the songs go anywhere surprising, but they get there with confidence, deliberation and consistent skill. The three knock-outs: "A Setting Sun," a twangy stretch with a surprisingly bouncy chorus. The epic "Sleepdriving" (at 5:20, easily the longest track), the only track that seeks intensity. (NB: there's something wrong with the version in this video.) Beginning with an urgent guitar-picking riff, "Sleepdriving" settles into a grim but pretty verse (it sounds like one of Elliott Smith's angrier moments) before an unexpected string bridge comparable to The Shins' similar one in "Saint Simon," whose arrangement crawls over the rest of the song. "The Crime Window" sounds kinda like a wussier bar band, which is cool too. (Preferable really.) Predictable but very well-crafted, Grand Archives is my guilty pleasure of the year for the sheer margin between actual merit and number of times played (it's one of my ten most played bands for the last three months). Not exactly slept-on, but undervalued all the same.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

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Milk—Take 3

By Keith Uhlich

Like a good many film biographies, Milk reduces the struggles of its subject—gay-rights activist Harvey Milk (Sean Penn)—to a mostly inoffensive checklist. It’s a dispassionate piece of work that I suspect will have the firebrand emotion it so sorely lacks foisted upon it by preached-to choirs and blubbering bleeding hearts stoked by the passage of Proposition 8 and its ilk. Bad art serves no one, but the reach for significance is often enough to proffer a pat-on-the-back and an affirmative nod, as if ‘attempt’ and ‘achievement’ were suddenly synonymous terms of action.

There’s a lot of attempting in Milk, from identifiably hetero actors giving their best gay to director Gus Van Sant going, um, straight after a few years wandering the Bela Tarr-derived arthouse hinterlands. The film is worst when Van Sant falls back on his hand-me-down instincts, shooting an entire conversation in a blood-covered whistle’s reflective surface or Steadicam-tracking Milk’s assassin Dan White (Josh Brolin) in a reprise of the simplistically troubling aesthetics of Elephant. Most problematic are Van Sant’s parallels of Milk to the doomed heroine of Puccini’s Tosca, especially during a howler of a death scene (featuring a rack focus of most unintentional hilarity, however geographically accurate) that forces an unearned sense of martyrdom onto the fictive puppet at the movie’s center.
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To read the rest of the review at UnderGroundOnline, click here.

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Understanding Screenwriting #11

By Tom Stempel

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Changeling, I’ve Loved You So Long, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, ER, 30 Rock, Some Quick Sweeps Updates, and Trailers, but first:

***
FAN MAIL: I can appreciate theoldboy’s disappointment that I did not deal with the opening monologue in Crash. I often have a similar reaction after I send off a column to Keith and suddenly think, hey, why I didn’t I mention that.

I think Max Winter’s take on Sidney in Rachel Getting Married is a very interesting one, and I know there are a lot of people who feel as theoldboy does that the energy of the actors and the music make that film more entertaining than a lot of what is around. So far it has not been all that great a year for films and we have to take our pleasures where we can find them.

***
CHANGELING (2008. Written by J. Michael Straczynski. 141 minutes): The flaw in Eastwood’s iris.

One quality that has kept Clint Eastwood a major star, director and producer for over forty years is that he has a great eye for screenplays, not only to star in, but to produce and direct. And even more important for screenwriters is that he tends not to spend a lot of time in “developing” scripts. The original draft of a script is on white pages, and revisions are on different colored pages. Most “final” scripts look like rainbows on LSD. Frances Fisher, who was in Unforgiven, has said that it was the only film she ever worked on where all the script pages were white. You can see what that can get you with Unforgiven and Mystic River, just to name two of his best.

That’s the upside. The downside is that sometimes the scripts should have been developed more. Both Bird and Flags of Our Fathers could have been better focused. The Bridges of Madison County and Million Dollar Baby both go on much longer after their climaxes than they should. The latter problem affects Changeling, as in the long, long scene of the killer being hanged. Do we really need to see this at this late point in the film?

The screenplay’s author, J. Michael Straczynski, told Jason Davis in the September/October issue of Creative Screenwriting that the script first went to Ron Howard and his company. Straczynski and Howard worked on revisions, but when Eastwood came on board to direct, he wanted to see the writer’s first draft. Eastwood looked at the other drafts, but went with the first one, since he felt “the voice was clearest in the first draft.” That is usually true, and it is often the author’s voice that gets “developed” out of the script. The trick is to keep the author’s voice while improving the script. I have seen this happen with my screenwriting students and have to fight against it. It can be very tricky to improve the script without destroying what made it interesting in the first place. It takes executives and producers with restrained egos to do it right. You see the problem.

The story of Christine Collins is a true story, and Straczynski, a former journalist, compiled three file folder boxes of historical accounts, trial transcripts, and other material. Like many authors of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays, Straczynski tended to put as much of his research as he could into the film. In the second half, as Collins tries to find out what happened to her son, the film bogs down in commission hearings and trials, all of which are true, but get exhausting to watch. Those scenes could have been handled quicker.

The script also gets repetitive, especially with Collins. Her son Walter disappears and she bombards the police, repeatedly asking “Where’s my son?” When they bring her a boy they think is her son, she insists he is not, repeatedly stating, “He’s not my son.” OK, we get it, move on. The odd thing about these repetitive scenes with Collins is that instead of wanting to see the scenes with our star (Angelina Jolie plays Collins), we are relieved when she is not on screen asking about her son.

Straczynski has not focused the character of Collins as sharply as he might. We cannot tell exactly when this ordinary woman moves into being an implacable force. For all the power Jolie brings to the part, and it is considerable, it never quite comes together.

I hope you have not decided from all of the above to give the film a miss because there are things it does very well. The reconstruction of Southern California in the late 20s and early 30s is superb, as is the feel for the corruption of the police department at the time.

Straczynski has written some great scenes, not only for Jolie but the others. He said in the Creative Screenwriting interview that the one area he could not find any documentation on was what happened to Collins in the psychiatric ward. He based his scenes on what he was able to find out about treatments of the time. Since he is not tied down to the “facts” (i.e. transcripts, reports), he can use his artistic license, which he does well. Two of the film’s best scenes are in the ward. First is a nice little scene in which Carol Dexter, a prostitute, explains how the system works. This leads to a great scene in which Collins tries to outwit the shrink, using what Dexter has told her. Straczynski, Jolie, and Denis O’Hare as the doctor bring their A game to that scene, and Eastwood is smart enough as a director to just set back and let them go.

There are two great scenes in which young boys talk about what happened at the “ranch” where a serial killer took young boys. The first one is focused on the police officer interviewing the boy and realizing the horror of what the boy is telling him. The other, near the end of the picture, focuses almost completely on the other boy telling of his escape from the ranch. The scene leads to as much of a happy ending as this grueling film can provide.

***
I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG (2008. Written by Philippe Claudel. 115 minutes): Some movies move forward. Some movies move backward. This one does both.

We do not know much about Juliette when we first meet her, waiting at the airport. Her face has an emotionless expression. Her much more cheerful and open younger sister Lea picks her up. There are obviously things they are not talking about. As often happens, what people are reluctant to talk about it with their family gets discussed outside the family. We learn from other scenes that Juliette has been in prison. For fifteen years. For murdering her son. Don’t worry, that last is not a spoiler. We learn it half an hour into the film, and the revelation at the end if why she killed him. We work backwards, as it were, to that revelation.

We are working forward as Juliette begins her new life, and Lea and her husband adjust to having her around. At first Luc, the husband, is reluctant to have Juliette babysit their children and one can understand why. Eventually he suggests she babysit. Stated that way, it sounds obvious, but it is not. The film is a very subtle look at the changing relationships of Juliette, Lea, Luc, and their friends, most of whom do not know where Juliette has been. In one of the most suspenseful scenes in a film this year, a dinner at a country house turns into a guessing game as to where Juliette has been. The payoff is terrific.

Claudel, a French novelist and screenwriter, has written some great roles for the actors to play, and in his first directorial job, he does not fall into the trap Charlie Kaufman did with Synecdoche, New York (see US#10). The scenes, and the film, move. I knew I was in good hands when the opening shot on the great Kristin Scott Thomas as Juliette was not held too long. Thomas said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times there was “tension on the set,” since she kept telling Claudel she could do the role with less dialogue. He was smart enough to listen to her.

The one downside is the ending. I am not sure I agree with David Denby in the November 10th New Yorker when he says it is a “cheat.” It has been prepared for, but Claudel has gotten us so deeply into the characters both intellectually and emotionally that the ending does not take us a far as the film has. It also leaves open a gaping plot hole. I won’t of course tell you what it is, but let’s just say that if Grissom and his gang of CSIs were on the original case, the outcome would have been different.

***
ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO (2008. Written by Kevin Smith. 101 minutes): Not really.

The idea had potential: two slackers, male and female, who have been friends since grade school decide to make a porn video in order to earn money and pay their bills. They have been platonic friends, but decide to do a sex scene in the film, during which they discover they are in love. So far, OK, but the details of the making of the porno are not particularly well handled, and the characterization of the participants is limited. Miri is set up to be just as foul-mouthed as Zack and most guys in Kevin Smith’s movies. Fine, but she is something of a step down from the similar Becky character in Smith’s Clerks II. And that film suggested the two guys from the first Clerks were at least showing hints of growing up. The romance between Zack and Miri is supposed to serve the same function here, but if anything it seems more adolescent rather than less. What inventiveness the first part of the film has fades away as it becomes more conventional and even sentimental by the ending.

If you do see it, however, you should stay through the credits, because there is a great payoff in the middle of the credits as to what the porno led to. Smith would have had a better movie if he had told the story the payoff suggests rather than the one he did.

A word on language. Part of why we go to a Kevin Smith movie is that the characters are all foul-mouthed, and you never know what they are going to say. I suppose making Becky and Miri just as foul-mouthed is a triumph for feminism, but this is the first Kevin Smith film where I really felt the language was excessive, or at least unneeded. That may sound odd, given that the characters are making a porno, but the language seems more generic gross language than the language that would come out during the making of a porno.

***
ER (1994. Episode “Pilot” written by Michael Crichton. 120 minutes): Michael Crichton died on November 4th. While he will be remembered for his novels and screenplays, one of his more lasting legacies is the television series ER.

Crichton went to medical school before he became a writer, and in 1974 he wrote a screenplay titled EW (for Emergency Ward). Nobody wanted to buy it. As Crichton later told Janine Pourroy for her book Behind the Scenes at ER, “I wanted to write something that was based in reality. Something that would have a fast pace and treat medicine in a realistic way. The screenplay was very unusual. It was very focused on the doctors, not the patients—the patients came and went. People yelled paragraphs of drug dosages at each other. It was very technical, almost a quasi-documentary.” He is right. His script resembles Frederick Wiseman’s 1970 Direct Cinema documentary Hospital, not only in content, but in structure. While there were a number of fiction films of the period that borrowed the Direct Cinema filmmaking style (M*A*S*H, The Candidate), very few borrowed the structure.

Crichton put the script in a drawer, where it stayed for fifteen years. In the late 80s, it came to Steven Spielberg, who expressed an interest in doing a medical drama. As Crichton and Spielberg talked, the director asked Crichton what else he was working on. Crichton said his newest novel was going to be about the cloning of dinosaurs from … well, that was the end of Spielberg’s interest in EW. A few years later Tony Thomopolous of Spielberg’s Amblin’ company found the script and suggested it might make a better television series than a film. Thomopolous put Crichton together with the former showrunner of China Beach, John Wells. By now several series, starting with Hill Street Blues in the 80s, had brought that multi-story, multi-character Direct Cinema structure to television. (For a more detailed look at how that happened, see my 1992 book Storytellers to the Nation: A History of American Television Writing.) There were still concerns about what was now titled ER.

The two-hour pilot of ER establishes the tone and rhythm of the series. In the first act, we start with Dr. Mark Greene asleep. He is awakened by Lydia, an ER nurse, since the incoming patient is Dr. Doug Ross, the playboy pediatrician, coming in to sober up. The quiet of the morning gives way to action as victims of a building collapse are brought in. We see that Ross is a top-flight doctor, even when a patient vomits on him. At the end of the first act, Greene and Ross are asking Carol Hathaway, the head nurse, if there are any more patients. Hathaway, who has wandered through several scenes, tells them no and quietly walks off.

In the second act, we learn that Greene’s wife wants him to interview at a plusher hospital. This is one of few recurring storylines in the pilot. He goes for the interview later and near the end of the pilot decides to stay in the ER. I suspect that in Crichton’s film version we get him telling his wife, but here it is left up in the air. In the ER, John Carter shows up. He is a third year medical student starting a rotation. In a “normal” script, we would have started with him, so he could have “introduced” us to the ER. Here he comes in after we have a sense of the action of the ER. The doctor he is assigned to, Peter Benton, gives him a quick tour, which makes more sense to us since we have already seen some of the places. Later Carter has to try his stitches on Frank, a cop who shot himself in the leg while trying to hit his wife. There was no way anyone, on the show or just viewing it, would know that Frank would return several years later to work the main desk at Admitting.

Shortly before an hour into the show, we have what is so far the longest scene as Dr. Lewis talks to a man who suspects, rightly, that he has cancer. He asks Lewis to level with him, which she does. His reaction is to think of all the things he wants to do with his wife. Since character has never been Crichton’s strong suit (see my book Understanding Screenwriting for a discussion of Crichton’s writing on the three Jurassic Park movies), I suspect this may have been written, or at least rewritten by John Wells. Crichton gets the sole credit on the screenplay, but the scene feels less like him and more like Wells.

Shortly after the hour mark, at the end of Act Four, a new patient is brought into the ER. The doctors and nurses are in shock. The patient is Carol Hathaway, who tried to commit suicide. Ross seems the most stunned. We learned earlier that Hathaway and Ross flirt, although she is now engaged and as she says to Ross, “You had your chance.” Crichton has upped the ante because this is a patient we know, at least slightly, and her suicide attempt has shaken the major characters we have been following. In the original screenplay for the film, Hathaway died, but that was rewritten so at the end of the pilot we do not know whether she lives or dies. She went on in the series to rekindle her affair with Ross and go off with him to live happily ever after.

In Act Five they are treating Hathway and trying to figure out why she did it, and we get additional patients. One element in the pilot episode that does not appear to be continued into the series is that the doctors and nurses are constantly pulling sheets over patients to show they have died. In the series, patients die, but usually with really impressive death scenes.

In Act Six, Benton has a patient he thinks needs surgery. Since all the surgeons are away at a conference (possible, but unlikely) he decides to operate, at least until Dr. Morgenstern, the head of the ER, can get there. This, in spite of the fact that in Act One, a surgeon has told Benton he is not ready for surgery. The operation, which turns out well, was obviously intended to be the climax of the film.

What Crichton laid out, and what Wells and the other writers on the series carried through, was a complex structure that allowed for a variety of characters and stories to be told, either in single episodes or over several seasons. Since it was an ensemble show, cast changes, including the death of Mark Greene, were relatively easily worked into the show.

***
ER (2008. Episode “Heal Thyself” written by David Zabel. 60 minutes): Speaking of Mark Greene…

As I noticed in writing about Dr. Banfield’s arrival in “Another Thursday at County” (US#8), she seemed to have a passing familiarity with County General, especially one of the examination rooms. This week we learn what that was all about.

Banfield and her husband discuss something he brought up at a party last night, and she is not happy about it. We don’t know what. Out running, Banfield comes across the site of an accident, where a little girl has fallen into the lake. We begin to get flashbacks of Banfield, her husband, and their son (so it appears my guess in US#8 that the father was one of the show’s doctors was wrong; but is the son in the photograph the same one in the show?). How do we know they are flashbacks? Yes, Angela Bassett has on a long-haired wig, but she also looks younger and more at ease. How do actors do that? It’s a mystery.

As Banfield in the present accompanies the child and her father in the ambulance, we get more flashbacks of a seizure Banfield’s son had and her reluctance to take him to the hospital. She finally agrees, and at the end of Act Two they arrive at County General. The door of the ambulance is opened by Mark Greene.

Both in the past and the present we are in Trauma One, the room Banfield reacted to. In the past, Banfield gives Greene a hard time, and she eventually realizes her son has leukemia. The son dies, but in the present the girl lives. The past and present are seen in the same scene; at one point Banfield in the present looks at Banfield in the past. The cutting between the past and present has gotten quicker, as have the medical discussions. Crichton’s idea that there would be a lot of technical stuff the audiences would not necessarily understand is still alive and well on ER.

In the last of the flashbacks, Greene sees Banfield out by the river and reassures her that there was nothing she could have done that would have saved her son. Having Greene deliver the message should probably work better than it does. If you are going to bring Greene back from the dead, it had better be to have an impact on Banfield now. We do not really see that in this episode. It is nice to see Anthony Edwards (Greene) again, but he is not doing anything we did not seem him do for eight years before on the show. The same is true with the brief cameos of Dr. Weaver and Dr. Romano.

***
30 ROCK (2008. “The One With the Cast of Night Court” written by Jack Burditt. 30 minutes): November 13th seemed to be a “bringing back the dead, or at least canceled, night” on NBC.

In addition to Greene returning to ER, 30 Rock pulled a twofer. Liz and Jenna’s friend from Chicago, Claire, showed up and was played by former-Friend Jennifer Aniston, hence the episode title in the “The One…” form used by Friends. The show was smart enough not to make Claire a Rachel clone, but rather a total whack-job, determined to seduce Jack in as many different situations as possible. Great choice of character and Aniston, who looked like she was having the time of her life, knocked it out of the park. Brad who? See, I told you they should have been promoting the writing rather than the guest stars.

The other canceled show that was referenced was Night Court. Kenneth, the page, was upset that the show had been canceled before the wedding between Harry and Christine got married, so Tracy arranged for some of the cast to come and enact the scene. Not quite as high flying as the Claire scenes, but meta-enough.

Ah yes, one other small point. Let me extend my personal thanks to all the American voters who made it possible that Tina Fey will not have to be moonlighting as Sarah Palin and can devote her full time and talent to this show.

***
SOME QUICK SWEEPS UPDATES: On Two and a Half Men, Alan had a brief affair with his ex-wife, but sanity prevailed and they broke up again. She got back with Herb, her second husband, and she is now pregnant. Doing the math, it is clear to everybody but Herb that the child is probably Alan’s.

On CSI we finally got an episode in which we see Grissom suffering from Sara’s leaving, “Leave Out All the Rest.” It came while the CSI’s were investigating a murder involving torture, S&M, and other good things. So Grissom naturally went to talk to Lady Heather, his friendly neighborhood dominatrix. She recognized the murder was just a pretext. At least the issue was being actively dealt with by the show, rather than just lingering on close-ups of Grissom looking depressed. On the down side, the new CSI, Riley, was introduced in her first episode as having a sense of humor, which subsequently went missing in the following episodes. A little levity might not be out of the questions, team.

On Boston Legal David E. Kelley and Amanda Jones came up with a new take on an abortion episode, Roe, in spite of Denny’s insistence that audiences would be turning it off. The episode, broadcast on November 10th, does not seem to have caused any outrage.

And CBS, not having the courage of Kevin Smith’s convictions, has canceled The Ex-List.

***
TRAILERS: I have written about movie trailers a couple of times in relation to specific films, but this is more general.

On one of the Mad Men episodes, they ran several trailers for the upcoming remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, presumably because Jon Hamm has a supporting role in the film. I am sure many Mad Men fans loved the quiet subtlety of the original, but the trailers make the new one look like a remake of Independence Day. I doubt if the Mad Men audience is the desired demographic for that.

On the other hand, on another episode of Mad Men, there was a trailer for Revolutionary Road, which may have been too close to Mad Men in setting and tone. But it may well appeal to that demographic.

With most trailers, my general reaction is “no way.” Only occasionally do I see one that immediately makes me want to see the film. One such, in theaters now, is for Last Chance Harvey. It sets up the situation quickly: Harvey has gone to London for his daughter’s wedding, but she wants her stepfather to give her away. Harvey gets a call that he’s been fired. He meets a woman to share his troubles with. I assume from the one review I have seen so far that it is not the whole story. The trailer also suggests the script is providing a couple of great roles for its two stars, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, who appear to have great chemistry. I turned to my wife at the end of the trailer and said, “Shall I go out now and get tickets?”
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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.

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It Does No-Body Good: Milk—Take 2

By Dan Callahan

[Milk opens in theaters on Wednesday, November 26th.]

Slain politician Harvey Milk was a gay pioneer and by all accounts a real mensch and role model, and his story was told in full for the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Now Gus Van Sant is trolling for awards with Milk, a paint-by numbers biopic of the tireless activist that wastes the efforts of some fine actors, most notably Sean Penn, who strives to play Milk as a three-dimensional person with idiosyncrasies and failings even as the “let’s get from A to B” script by Dustin Lance Black boxes him into textbook sainthood. Penn manages to get some energy going in his public speeches, especially when he’s riling up a crowd in the Castro, the gay area of San Francisco where Milk served as unofficial Mayor and then elected official, and he has nice moments of physical schtick that involve subtle, queeny eye flares and dainty hand gestures. Penn even reaches for Brando-esque tragedy in the last scenes, but the straightforward corniness of the script foils all his actorly nuances.

Milk begins with black-and-white footage of gay bars being raided, then moves to the courtship between a forty-year old Milk and Scott Smith, a curly-headed hedonist played as a series of stoned/sexy smiles by James Franco. Penn and Franco work hard at their romantic chemistry (if they smiled any harder at each other their heads would explode), but Van Sant keeps us at a distance from their connection with the smooth assurance of a disconnected voyeur and a half-assed audience pleaser. Franco did some early publicity on the film where he talked about several sex scenes he shot with Penn, but these have all been cut, and it can’t help but seem peculiar that the more Penn’s Milk talks about how every gay needs to come out of the closet, the more Van Sant keeps the politician’s personal life in the literal shadows; there’s some smooching out in the open, yet whenever clothes come off, Van Sant cuts or turns out the lights, all the while asking us to believe that this is supposed to be the freewheeling 70s Castro.

Grainy television footage of sweetly-smiling, viperish gay rights foe Anita Bryant is mixed with grainy new footage in Milk’s apartment and campaign headquarters, but there’s no juice, orange or otherwise, in the bland back-and-forth conversations about grassroots political strategies, even when an avid Emile Hirsch and a fragile Diego Luna are trying their damndest to pump some youthful energy into this hagiography. Luna is especially ill-served by the narrative; we see glimpses of his fraught, sexually charged relationship with Milk, but Van Sant and Black handle his sad exit from the story in a “moving right along!” fashion that is borderline offensive. As Milk’s murderer Dan White, who was given a light sentence after his attorney argued that junk food had impaired his judgment, all Josh Brolin gets to do is sulk and pout, and Black’s theory that White was a closet case is just as ineffectual as the film’s patchwork, uncertain style of directing (again, there were reports that Brolin got to go all-out in a late-night Twinkie binge scene which is nowhere to be found in the final cut).

Van Sant fails most conspicuously in the many scenes of marches and riots; he has no feel whatsoever for a crowd and no way to animate a locale. There’s no life around the edges of these sequences, just a careful period re-creation that comes nowhere near convincing us that we’re really in a certain time and place and that something important is at stake (if you want to see the film Milk could have been, look at the Stanley Kubrick-styled trailer). Two key scenes where Milk talks to a despairing young gay kid in a wheelchair are so poorly played and shot that they reduce what was obviously a heart-rending exchange in life into something almost laughably mawkish on screen. This film might get some tentative acclaim in some quarters for its pro-gay cheerleading. But it cannot be denied that a movie as wishy-washy, trite and simplified as Milk denies and destroys the complexity of life as it is really lived, and Van Sant can’t even fashion the kind of basic Hollywood energy that might give at least the second half of this very dramatic true story the rousing call-to-arms mood needed for the no-less crucial next steps of today’s gay rights movement.

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

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Prop 8: What Would MLK Do?

By Sal Cinquemani

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the white moderates who sided with him on the issue of civil rights but who were reluctant to act, who told him to have patience and wait: "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." It's something that has stayed with me since I first read the text over a decade ago, and in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8 (the California initiative that defines "marriage" in the state constitution as a union between a man and a woman, and which was largely funded by the Mormon Church and disproportionately supported by the African-American community compared to other racial groups), King's words have never felt more prescient.

In the midst of an economic meltdown, and with the moguls of the Big Three automakers arriving in Washington to, as one legislator astutely put it, beg for money like someone showing up for lunch at a soup kitchen in a top hat and tails, the Office of the President-elect has unveiled the details of Barack Obama's agenda for, among other things, civil rights. The plan proposes to expand hate crime statutes, as Obama did as an Illinois State senator, expand federal anti-discrimination employment laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity, repeal the U.S. Military's misguided "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and expand adoption rights (an important stance considering the precedent set by a new ban on adoption for unmarried couples in Arkansas, a state with a shameful foster-care record).

Obama's position on the issue of gay marriage, however, is mixed at best. He opposes a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and even went on record in opposition of Prop 8, but he also opposes using the word "marriage" for gays and lesbians, preferring the much-ballyhooed institution of "civil unions" instead. Some, including myself, have asserted that civil unions should be enough, that progress takes time and change comes in measured steps. But if he were alive today, where would Martin Luther King stand on the issue?
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To read the rest of the article at Slant Magazine, click here.

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Beautiful Dreamer: Milk—Take 1

By Lauren Wissot

[Milk opens in theaters Wednesday, November 26th. Click here to read Lauren's Spout Blog coverage of the film's press conference.]

Milk, Gus Van Sant’s labor of love biopic about civil rights leader Harvey Milk (the first openly gay man elected to higher office in the United States and later gunned down, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, three decades ago this month), is mainstream filmmaking at its finest and a perfect wedding of subject matter to director. For Milk, like Van Sant, was a former “radical” who learned to work within—even to embrace—the system, stealthily turning it to his advantage. What Milk is to extremist activists like Larry Kramer, Van Sant is to fellow filmmaker Todd Haynes—no longer a director of experimental art in the moving picture medium, but a maverick of the mini majors.

Even comparing Van Sant to Haynes is like weighing apples against oranges: Van Sant is as much of a sly showman as his subject, who grasped the power of rallying crowds with catchy lines (“My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you,” a play on Anita Bryant’s scare tactic of gays “recruiting our children”) and staged events (stepping on dog poop to promote a pooper-scooper law)—an insider working covertly within the system. Indeed, Van Sant understands the power of schmaltz above nuance. Whatever you need to do to make your message accessible and heard loud and clear—evidenced in the director’s casting of straight marquee names (like Sean Penn as Milk, in an Oscar-worthy performance) in the lead roles at the expense of actual gay actors—is worth the creative price.

Told in broad strokes with a swift-moving script by Dustin Lance Black that can be prone to cringe-worthy scenes (the small town, suicidal queer kid who can’t run away to the big city because he’s in a wheelchair most definitely should have been cut), Milk as a whole is more than the sum of its cheesy missteps. As with Charles Burnett’s Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation I’m willing to forgive the blunders because the images are so strikingly inventive, because the director has such sheer passion for his story. Van Sant, like Burnett, combines a master’s expertise with a child’s sense of play.

Deftly, he weaves actual archival footage (often seen through the POV of the lead character’s camera lens), archival photos (including snapshots passed around in Milk’s camera shop), and news reports and interviews from the 70s (that Milk and his confidants watch on TV) with the footage from the San Francisco-based shoot where Van Sant and his crew recreated Milk’s store in its original location. The period costume and production design are meticulous—so much so that you can actually feel the Bay Area itself come out as a character. Van Sant and his longtime DP Harris Savides (Zodiac) work as one, most noticeably in an incremental slo-mo towards the end when Milk is about to be shot, the freeze on his profile more spectacular than any blood spilled.

The entire film is one seamless melding of past into present, much like Prop 6 (a battle that makes up a big chunk of Milk and which would have banned gay and lesbian teachers and their allies from California’s public school system had it not been defeated) is paralleled to the current Prop 8. And the straight actors, especially Penn as Milk and James Franco as his lover Scott Smith (Penn and Franco give Brokeback Mountain's Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal a run for their chemistry money), are all astounding. If ever there was a reason for Sean Penn to stop pursuing his career as a mediocre director, this performance is it. Penn is an absolute chameleon; a metamorphosis occurs in which not a trace of the actor can be seen. He captures Milk’s sweet vulnerability, the essence of his charm, to a degree that is nearly shamanistic. Even the miscast Alison Pill as campaign manager Anne Kronenberg and a way-too-old Josh Brolin as assassin Dan White—a role originally meant for Matt Damon who would have been pitch perfect—are thrilling, as is the reclamation of hope that was the crux of Milk’s life.

Screenwriter Black rightly focuses on the “personal is political” love story (“It wasn’t just about rights or electoral politics, it was about the fact that he was in love with Scott or he was in love with Jack Lira—and he wanted that to be okay. He didn’t want to be judged for it. He wanted to have the right to be himself … politics for the sake of love” is how Black puts it in the press notes), of one man who never gave up against all odds. The opposite of an overnight success (Milk was in the closet until age forty, and the many years of losing election after election before reaching the San Francisco Board of Supervisors cost him his relationship with Smith), Milk was a hardworking everyman who only went into government because he believed he could make a positive difference in people’s lives. Politics transformed him, made him mature from an angry hippie reactionary to an open-minded optimist. After ticking off a list of gay community grievances in an early debate, an opponent wisely asks, “What are you for?” It was the last time Milk would be defeated in a campaign.

And yet, sadly, this American hero in the mold of MLK, Jr. is known more for his violent death (shot point blank inside city hall by a colleague who would later claim the “Twinkie defense”) if he’s known at all. Smartly, Black sets out to rectify this by putting Milk’s life and love story at the forefront, virtually ignoring the lurid aspects of the tale. Killer Dan White is merely a footnote, not a raging right wing homophobe (he was too self-involved to be homophobic), but simply an unstable man who took every slight personally. When Milk is the only supervisor to take White up on the invitation to his son’s christening, he’s naively oblivious to the fact that Milk’s friendliness is also a calculated political move. Sappy? No more so than one of the lines Milk speaks into his tape recorder, a last will and testament to be played only “in the event of my assassination.”

“If a bullet should go through my head, let that bullet go through every closet door,” he states. Romantic and melodramatic and heartfelt and beautiful—that’s Milk, and Milk, in a nutshell.

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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.

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Links for the Day (November 25th, 2008)

1. On the eve of Milk, a two-part remembrance by Marshall Fine of how he and one Ms. Anita Bryant memorably crossed paths. Part 1 here; Part 2 here.

["I argued then and would argue now that a critic’s biases are what form his taste and his aesthetic. The professional critic, however, enters every event – be it concert, film, play, whatever – with a clean slate and reacts to what he sees, writing from the standpoint of that aesthetic. But this wasn’t a discussion about the role of the critic. This was a firing fueled by social and economic pressure. I’d poked a finger in the eye of what would come to be known a few years later as the Christian Right. I had to go."]

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2. "A Washington kind of a lie": At The Auteur's Notebook, Fernando F. Croce revisits Advise & Consent.

["Anderson’s anxious visit to a New York City gay dive to see the ex-lover who’s become a pawn in Senator Van Ackerman’s (George Grizzard) blackmailing scheme is in several ways the picture’s most problematic sequence. Stylistically, it breaks from the film’s long-take flow—a two-minute passage is splintered into ten increasingly agitated shots. The fragmentation reflects the sequence’s garishness, with effete barkeeps, swirling lights and distorted romantic music (sung, hilariously, by Frank Sinatra) that make Anderson recoil. Subjective hysteria cracks objective contemplation. Everything is shot through lurid lenses, yet what’s striking about the scene is the way it visualizes the character’s revulsion less toward homosexuality than toward the dishonesty he discovers within himself. In that, he’s closer to troubled Preminger protagonists like Jean Simmons in Angel Face or Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse—characters left to face an inner abyss—than to queer sacrificial lambs like Shirley MacLaine in The Children’s Hour or Sandy Dennis in The Fox."]

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3. Ross Ruediger reviews The Centennial Collection DVD release of Sunset Boulevard.

["Surely everything poignant or insightful there is to say about Billy Wilder’s acid-tongued masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard” has already been said. It’s benchmark cinema - a highpoint of movie history. The film has been deservedly discussed, dissected and devoured by many an intellect more insightful than mine. No amount of words can really express what makes this movie the classic that it is; one must experience it in order to get it. Yet in the spirit of trying to reach anyone who has yet to be initiated into the cult, this review will endeavor (and likely fail) to give it a go."]

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4. Why can't Odie sleep? Run, don't walk, to Big Media Vandalism and find out.

["I have been having some weird ass dreams. Perhaps it's my pressure pills, or job stress, or that I've finally fallen off the precarious cliff of sanity. If Freud and Jung were still alive, they'd want to cut out my subconscious and freeze it for further study. Listen to this:"]

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5. "Milch's End to 'Deadwood': I Don't Believe in Endings": Few days old, but still appropriate.

["Milch does say that he had hoped to introduce a couple of new characters in the never-made fourth season, one of which was based on the sojourning father of John D. Rockefeller who passed himself off as a medicine man who was both a fraud (dispensing mostly alcohol as medicine) and bigamist. He'd be accompanied by a native medicine man whose tactictics were about the same. As it was it could only introduce a bit of their stories in season three. He seems as dismayed by the series' end as the fans. He talks briefly of plans for "Deadwood" films in the same breath of planned "Deadwood" dirigibles and "Deadwood" jockstraps (which were problematic, he said, because some thought it would infer impotence). Still, he adds, "It's a child who believes that such things go on for ever. It's a child also who believes you can't start over. But you can and you have to.""]

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Quote of the Day: Kahlil Gibran

"If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): It does a Kal-El good.



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Clip of the Day: Card Crusher hustler. (Via John Lichman.)

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.

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933 (74). La Région centrale (1971, Michael Snow)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

[La Région centrale will screen Monday November 24 and Tuesday November 25 at the Anthology Film Archives]

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Arguably the first feature filmed by a robot, Michael Snow’s three hour exploration of the possibilities of camera movement over a barren Arctic landscape suggests many things: sci-fi space probe footage more authentic than George Lucas; a rebuff to the romantic frontier landscapes of Hollywood Westerns; an avant-garde equivalent of an amusement park simulator ride. Lensed by a specially designed rotating camera mount pre-programmed to move with stunning variety, the film begins as a slow, soothing meditation on the otherworldly textures of the Canadian wilderness, but gradually morphs into a dizzying, terrifying freakout, a relentlessly spinning gaze that pummels the equilibrium of the human eye. The film pushes the boundaries not only of human sight but of the physical earth, destroying gravity and transforming a lifeless vista into a cosmic force of light and energy. Clinically scientific in its approach yet yielding an organic, even spiritual wonder, La Région centrale does not merely vindicate the oft-neglected genre of experimental film, but thrusts itself into the center of cinema at its most vital.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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David Lynch Folds Space: Because He Is the Kwisatz Haderach!...

By Robert C. Cumbow

[Publication Note: This article is being cross-published with Parallax View.]

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 11/16/2006, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]

"The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its Navigators, whom the spice has mutated over four thousand years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space; that is, to travel to any part of the known universe without moving."

—Princess Irulan, in David Lynch’s Dune

That’s what David Lynch’s Dune does: It gets us from place to place and from beginning to end without ever seeming to move—at least in the way that a more conventional science-fiction action thriller is expected to move. The unkindest viewers and critics have called it boring.

Even the film’s action sequences sit in the memory more as tableaux than as moving images. “My movies are film-paintings,” Lynch said, in a 1984 interview during post-production on Dune. What strikes us even as we watch the film, and comes back most in our recalling of it, is the composition more than the dynamic—posture more than gesture:

• Paul with his hand in the box, his imagination conspiring with the mental powers of the Bene Gesserit to objectify a pain that exists only in the suggestible mind


• Paul’s mentors, Gurney Halleck, Thufir Hawat, and Wellington Yueh, introduced to us as a human triptych


• Feyd Rautha in his futuristic g-string, posing as if for a beefcake photo


• Alia, in a transport of ecstasy, holding aloft her crysknife as the Fremen overrun the imperial forces, a nightmarish composition by Lynch out of Bosch, all darkness, and a fully-formed witch who should be no more than a little girl, lit by fires and explosions, wrapped in Bene Gesserit robe and headpiece, with an expression on her face of triumph in slaughter that no little girl ever wore

This emphasis on the static over the kinetic is not so remarkable in an artist who, after all, began his career in—and remains committed to—the compositional rigors of painting, collage, and sculpture. But to see how it relates to folding space, we must further illuminate this concept of traveling without moving.


The beginning is a very delicate time

"Time does not change us. It just unfolds us."

—Max Frisch

Consider first the much-imagined time machine, a device that doesn’t move, but “transports” its operator to a different time. Time changes constantly, while we exist in it. To “travel” in time would not involve the physical motion of the subject, but rather the acceleration, deceleration, or reversal of the motion of time around the subject. The time-machine fantasy is that a human being can invent a device that could cause this effect. But once disbelief is willingly suspended, and the notion that a human could control the flow of time is accepted, everything else follows easily. And that fantasy is all too eagerly accepted, because the ability to move in time is something we all desire at one time or another; it is one of the basic fantasies, like the desire to be invisible, or to see through matter, or to fly, or to exercise any of a number of other non-human powers that have been vicariously granted us through the superhero, the monster, and other metaphors of science fiction.

The time machine and its operator remain static—in the same place because no movement in space is involved. Time changes around them, and the only risk is that the spatial location of the machine and its operator will, at some point in the flow of time, coincide with another solid object. Accelerated space travel runs the same risk. To travel between planets—let alone solar systems—would take years, decades, lifetimes, without some form of highly accelerated locomotion. But the faster the spacecraft moves, the less reaction time is permitted to the operator to avoid colliding with other objects.


Time folding / space folding

In the worlds of most space-travel fiction, this problem is overcome by the use of computers that can reduce the interval between perception and reaction to nanoseconds. But in the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune, computers have been abolished by the Butlerian Jihad, and the only heightened mental facility remaining is in the form of two mutations: the Spacing Guild Navigators and the Mentat—both creatures with superhuman powers. The Mentat (“human computers” as the Dune screenplay has it) are bred for higher knowledge, perception, reasoning, application of logic, prediction of outcomes. The Guild Navigators are bred for space travel, and their gift is an expanded consciousness, a oneness with space that makes them prescient, sensitive to the locations of objects in space-time, and thus able to navigate unerringly between them.

It’s important to note, however, that in Herbert’s Dune, the Navigators do not “fold space”—there is no such concept in the novel. Folding space—a notion adapted from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and the curved time-space continuum—consists in bringing two spatial points together by collapsing the space between them, thus eliminating the need to move from one to the other. By analogy, imagine that you have a piece of paper on which are two points, A and B. The objective is to get from A to B in the most direct way. One solution is to connect the two points with a straight line—the shortest distance between two points. Another solution is to fold the piece of paper so that point A meets point B.

Just as the time-travel fantasy posits that a man-made device can affect the flow of time around us, so the folding-space fantasy posits that an enhanced human mind can bend the malleable space around it so as to cause any two points in that space to meet and coincide. So early in Lynch’s career, in only his third feature film, we have a pseudo-scientific articulation of the artist’s unique way of seeing the world, and of remaking it. For folding space is a near-perfect metaphor for the way David Lynch makes movies.


The one who can be many places at once

In the throne room scene at the end of Dune, there is a point at which Paul freezes on the very verge of saying something. His lips have even begun to move, before Lynch cuts sharply away to the environmentally impossible rain that brings rebirth to Arrakis, and soars to a climax unanticipated by his audience (or by Frank Herbert). That interrupted moment is actually the beginning of a “deleted scene” (included as an extra in the “Extended Edition” DVD) in which Paul announces that he is sending the Emperor into exile, but is going to wed Princess Irulan, so that the Atreides and the Padisha lines will be intertwined (preventing future strife now that the Harkonnens have been wiped out). He privately tells the Fremen woman Chani that the princess will share his name but not his bed, and that his love will be forever Chani’s. Paul’s mother, herself a consort, tells Chani:

"The princess will have the name, yet she’ll live less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives."

These are the last words of the novel, and for that reason alone it would have been nice to leave them in the film. Besides, the scene would so nicely wrap up both the political and the romantic themes of the film.

But Lynch was young then, an acknowledged Wunderkind, and it was terribly important to him to make it explicit that Paul Muad’dib is the Kwisatz-Haderach, the prophesied messiah of Arrakis—vastly more important than redeeming Chani, Lady Jessica, or Princess Irulan, or restoring order to the troubled politics of the Known Universe. World politics, let alone universe politics, never did become very important for David Lynch—though by Mulholland Dr. he was mature enough to see the tribulations of a Wunderkind director in comic perspective. What has really mattered most to him, from Eraserhead and The Elephant Man straight through to the present, are human relationships, human dignity, not world-saving messianism. But Dune is different. The final rainstorm on Arrakis and Alia’s climactic pronouncement are Lynch’s own invention, relating to nothing in the novel’s actual finale. When Lynch intercuts a familiar shot of the oceans of Caladan with the rain falling on the Fremen of Arrakis, both Paul and Lynch fold space by bringing the moisture of Paul’s native planet Caladan to the desolation of his adopted planet Arrakis.

An entry in Wikipedia for “Kwisatz Haderach” tells us:

"In Hebrew folklore, Kwisatz Haderach is the ability to jump instantaneously from one place to another. The term originally came from Hebrew (…) and means verbatim “jump of the path,” a Hebrew archaic equivalent of the English expression “short cut.”

"In East European Jewish folktales, especially those associated with the Hassidic movement, the term was used to describe the ability to jump instantaneously from one place to another, attributed to various revered holy men. (...)

"The Kwisatz Haderach is a fictional name of a prophesied messiah figure in the Dune universe … The name means “Shortening of the Way,” and is the label applied by the Bene Gesserit to the unknown for which they sought a genetic solution — a unique male Bene Gesserit whose organic mental powers would bridge space and time. The Kwisatz Haderach is also known as 'the one who can be many places at once.'"

A sense of place

There is a sense in which all of David Lynch’s films are a kind of science fiction. But Dune is the only one of his films that is expressly in that genre, and he uses it as a kind of manifesto of his own approach to film making, as well as to set the stage for the space-folding that follows.

To put it another way, Dune’s “explanation” of travel without movement, of the folding of space, is a sly announcement of not only the vision but the technique that David Lynch brings to the screenwriter’s and film director’s art.

One cannot fold the space between two points, causing them to coincide, unless one begins by properly assuring and establishing those two points. It’s no coincidence that Lynch’s films are defined by their sense of place: Eraserhead’s post-industrial wasteland (inspired by Lynch’s memories of Philadelphia, and pointing toward his recurrent use of images of factories), the Industrial Revolution London of The Elephant Man (whose Victoriana folds nicely into the costumes and design of Dune), the Southeastern and Northwestern lumber towns of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, the corrosive, decaying Hollywood of Mulholland Dr. The Dream Dwarf who anomalously counterpoints the otherwise well-defined spatial environment of Twin Peaks is identified in the cast credits as “the man from another place”—not from another time or from a dream, as one would more likely have expected.

The abundant traveling images in Lynch’s films operate as metaphors for and constant reminders of the director’s fascination with space-shifting. The hallmark of many a Lynch film is a subjective shot of a street or highway, usually at night, its centerline being lapped up by the forward vector of the camera (and whatever point of view it represents). Roads, road signs, and traffic signals abound. Wild at Heart and The Straight Story are variations on the great American Road Movie. But beyond this more conventional kind of travel, Lynch’s protagonists have a thirst for spatial adventuring—whether in another place or another body or another life. Dr. Treves intertwines his life with that of the Elephant Man John Merrick by walking around and discovering a London very different from the one he has known, and finding there both horrors and wonders. Special Agent Cooper enters Twin Peaks as an outsider, but takes to the place’s illusory serenity with a naïve enthusiasm unheard of in the protagonists of detective fiction. Duke Leto’s family moves from Caladan, planet of thundering seas, to the bleak and mysterious Arrakis. Alvin Straight undertakes a daunting interstate journey on a lawn tractor, appreciating the newness of everything he encounters en route. Diane’s alter-ego Betty moves from Canada to a strange and wondrous Hollywood that she drinks in with Cooperian innocence.


The peculiar powers of Agent Cooper… and of David Lynch

It’s always struck me as odd that when a film depicts someone with superior physical powers—a gunslinger with an impossibly fast draw and accurate aim, or a martial artist with the ability to turn a leap into sustained flight—no one ever asks why and how he can have such ability; but when a character has superior mental acuity, there is always a need to explain it. Sherlock Homes always had to explain how he deduced (actually induced) factual conclusions based on observed phenomena. The whole purpose of Dr. Watson is to be exasperated by Holmes’s easy-seeming investigations and discoveries, to demand explanations from Holmes, and to be ultimately satisfied by them. Special Agent Dale Cooper has the same sort of powers of observation. Early in Twin Peaks he asks Sheriff Harry Truman about his love affair with Josie Packard. Harry, Watson-like, asks him how he knew. Cooper shrugs it off: “Body language.” This is Lynch’s joke on the Holmes-Watson tradition, as well as on the then-current vogue for interpreting character from posture; it’s really no explanation at all—certainly not the kind of explanation Holmes would have given and Watson would have accepted. As Cooper continues to display his uncanny mental agility, Truman compares himself to Watson, then settles comfortably into the role of taking on faith something he admits he cannot understand. When Harry decides to let Cooper in on the “Bookhouse Boys,” he organizes a meeting at the Double R Café. Norma Jennings serves the coffee, and Cooper immediately asks Ed Hurley, “So, Big Ed, how long have you been in love with Norma?” Big Ed is astonished, but looks to Harry, not Cooper, for an explanation—and all he gets is Harry’s accepting shrug. The message is that Cooper’s powers don’t have an explanation—they just are.

This is a key to the world and vision of David Lynch, in which dreams, visions, imagination, accidents, and coincidences have the same value as observation, interpretation, and reasoning, and are treated with the same degree of reliability. Many writers and artists since the Romantic era have urged the acknowledgment of the irrational as entitled to equal time with the rational; but David Lynch is one of the few artists—certainly one of the very few film makers—whose style and technique exemplify that conviction.

And this was announced at the very beginning of his career: Eraserhead remains without question one of the few truly dreamlike films ever made. Most movie “dream sequences” are too self-consciously surrealistic or too narratively linear, or too Freud-metaphorical to effectively mimic the jarring discontinuity of real dreams. Already in Eraserhead, Lynch recognized dreams as successions of images, prefiguring Dune’s emphasis on the static image rather than the narrative flow. Narrative is not to be trusted; in images, you can believe.


Folding people

Applying science-fiction techniques to conventional topics (as opposed to most film makers, who apply surprisingly conventional techniques even when working in the science-fiction genre), David Lynch regards storylines and characters as parallel universes. Just as space may be folded to cause two distant points to coincide, so two (or more) narratives may merge, collide, change places. Not only an actor but even a character may find himself in a different body, and in a different story. In such films as Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr., narrative lines are treated as if they were characters—they have the freedom to come, go, change, grow, switch places, rewrite themselves as they go along, backtrack to the last fork in the road and take a different direction. In the psychogenic fuguing of Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway, Lynch folds space so that a character, not a point, coincides with (or replaces) another. Fred Madison becomes Pete Dayton, and it’s no accident that both surnames are the names of Midwestern cities as well.

The Mystery Man in Lost Highway compares to Bad Bob in Twin Peaks, and each personifies the evil compulsion in the mind of a character. These familiars appear to others as visions, but actually exist only in the mind of the character whose darker half they represent. In Twin Peaks, both Laura and Mrs. Palmer “see” Bad Bob in hallucinations; only Leland Palmer recognizes Bad Bob’s identity with himself. The Mystery Man of Lost Highway is more complex. Just as the film’s principal male and female characters each inhabit two different people, so does the Mystery Man appear alternately demonic and angelic, assuming the roles of both the brooding nemesis and the saving angel that have become customary in most of Lynch’s films. Indeed, it could be said that this combining of devil with angel has characterized the endings of Lynch’s films all along: The woman in the radiator in Eraserhead is disturbingly strange and opaquely motivated, but seems to hold the secret to Henry’s salvation as well as his doom. Dune’s Alia announces the triumph of Paul and the salvation of his world, but she’s also one spooky little girl. The robins of Blue Velvet bring peace and beauty to the world, but they feast on the morass of worms and bugs just beneath its surface. In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Laura Palmer herself is transformed into the saving angel of the finale, but only after enduring—and frequently personifying—an inferno of corruption.

A cousin to Bad Bob and Mystery Man is the man behind the Winky’s diner in Mulholland Dr. Though Winky’s is punningly close to Wendy’s, it’s also the name of the odd race of people who populate the West in L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels—which makes a chilling and funny kind of sense in light of the way, in Wild at Heart, Lynch folds his customary redeeming angel figure into the Good Witch of the North from The Wizard of Oz.


Folding and phoning

Other writers have used the term “fold” to describe Lynch’s methods. Alanna Thain describes a temporal loop of the transformation of memory and paramnesia involving the stretching of time that is repeated even as it is experienced in David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Thain emphasizes the use of a variety of technologies within Lynch’s diegesis—such as answering machines and surveillance video—that create a temporality within the film continually looping “back on itself in a cycle of composition and decomposition.” For Thain, this folding of time transforms both the viewer of the film and the character in the film into spectator and participant, and vice versa.

In each of his films, Lynch establishes recurrent images that act as the fold-lines to the film’s narrative loops. In Wild at Heart, for example, Sailor and Lula follow their love-making with smoking, and Lynch always depicts the striking of the match in slow close-up, the flaring match merging with the nightmare memory of the fire that killed Lula’s father. The flames that leap from those matches are the fold-lines of the film, causing the fire of love, both its passion and its contentment, to merge with the fire of violence.

An earlier such image, one of the most vivid in all of Lynch’s work, folds both space and time: the phone call in the Twin Peaks pilot. Sarah Palmer has telephoned her husband Leland for news of their daughter Laura, who has not been seen since the previous evening, and while they are talking the sheriff brings Leland the news that Laura has been found dead. Sarah, on the other end of the line, doesn’t hear what the sheriff says; but she hears Leland’s reaction, and she knows. Two points in space become one, without motion, but with agonizing emotion: two parents, helpless in shock and grief, connected by a cord, along which Lynch’s camera tracks with a slowness that suspends time in the same way that a moment of great shock does.

The cord is important. Twin Peaks was made before people had cellular phones. Agent Cooper is constantly “on the line” to the unseen Diane, not by phone but by means of a Dictaphone that, for Cooper, folds both space and time. I wonder what David Lynch makes of the cell phone. Even in today’s world of text messaging, headsets, and constant connectedness, he remains enamored of the classic “land line” telephone. It’s not just that a telephone is a device that makes two different points of space coincide at a specific moment in time. Cell phones do that, too. But the phone calls (both answered and unanswered) that link the characters and events of Mulholland Dr., Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, and Lost Highway are nearly all made from land-line phones, some from now-quaint telephone booths and rotary-dial phones. The telephone is not only a folder of space but an icon of history. Using older phones in, for example, Mulholland Dr., is similar to using Victorian uniforms in the distant future of Dune. The anachronism only serves to give more emphasis to the fold.


Bringing it on home to me

In Dennis Lim’s October 1, 2006 New York Times interview, David Lynch said that before Canal Plus bought into his new film, Inland Empire, he cautioned them: “I don’t know what I’m doing.” His account of the making of the film: “I would get an idea for a scene and shoot it, get another idea and shoot that. I didn’t know how they would relate.”

Based on other interviews with Mr. Lynch and those who have worked with him, both in print publications and on DVD extras, that appears to be the way he has always made his films, dating back even to the early shorts. While it’s hardly a general rule that anyone’s unrelated meanderings can add up to a film, David Lynch is that rare treasure: a truly instinctive artist who doesn’t know what he’s doing but powerfully feels what he’s doing, trusts his own judgment, and by doing so comes up time and again with haunting visions that make chilling sense even (perhaps especially) when their parts don’t “relate” in a conventional sense. And in the Lim interview, the author tells us:

"He brought up wormholes, invoked the theories of the quantum physicist (and fellow meditator) John Hagelin and recounted a moment of déjà vu that overcame him while making The Elephant Man. 'There was a feeling of a past thing and it’s holding, and the next instant I slipped forward'—he made a sound somewhere between a slurp and a whoosh—'and I see this future.'"

Laura Dern described the approach to multi-character acting that Lynch evoked from her for Inland Empire as “unbelievably freeing. You’re not sure where you’re going or where you’ve come from. You can only be in the moment.”

In Lynch on Lynch, edited by Chris Rodley, Lynch described his creative process:

"I don’t want to give the impression that I sit around thinking up horrible things. I get all kinds of different ideas and feelings. If I’m lucky, they start organizing themselves into a story—then maybe some ideas come along that are too eerie, too violent, or too funny, and they don’t fit that story. So you write them down and save them for two or three projects down the road. There’s nowhere you can’t go in a film—if you think of it, you can go there."

In a lecture at Maharishi University of Management—excerpts from which may currently be viewed on YouTube—Lynch said that the only way we know the abstract is through intuition, and that is “a thing that can only really be said in cinema.” It was natural for Stanley Kubrick, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to portray an evolution in which advancements in life forms are made suddenly, in jumps, not ever so gradually over millions of years, because it reflects the way films are made: not the gradual flow we associate with motion in the “real world,” but an illusion of motion created by abruptly replacing one frame with another. And like all of the best film makers, Kubrick made films that evince an acute awareness of the film medium itself. David Lynch is also such a film maker, and it was equally natural for him to embrace the notion of folding space not only as a narrative tool but as a metaphor for the film maker’s art. Think of the “line” between two pieces of film not as a splice but as a fold. The assembly of film is a constant matter of manipulating space and time so that objects, moments, incidents, images, and people coincide, touch, merge.

And who is it who travels from one part of the universe to any other without moving? Who but you and I, the movie viewers? If folding space is an apt metaphor for the art of film, it may be argued that every film maker folds space, and perhaps that’s true. But David Lynch, our quirky but reliable old navigator, is conscious of it; and that consciousness is what his films are ultimately about.
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Robert C. Cumbow has been writing about film for nearly 40 years. His work has appeared in Film Comment, Film Quarterly, the Seattle Film Society journals Movietone News and The Informer, and in numerous newspapers. He is the author of Once upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone and Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter, both available from Scarecrow Press. He is especially proud of his liner notes for the Rhino Records/Turner Classic Movies edition of the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bob is a trademark/copyright lawyer, heads the intellectual property practice at Graham & Dunn, Seattle, and teaches Trademark Law and Advertising Law at Seattle University School of Law.

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Directorama: "Enter Smithee"

A Weekly Webcomic by Peet Gelderblom

[Author's Note: For more information, to browse earlier episodes, or to buy the book in time for Christmas, visit www.directorama.net.]

Click to enlarge:

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Peet Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design in Amsterdam. He founded 24LiesASecond, for which he wrote and edited several essays, and is the twisted cartoonist behind Directorama (the website as well as the book).

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Video essay for 929 (70). U samogo sinyego morya/By the Bluest of Seas (1936, Boris Barnet) featuring commentary by Nicole Brenez

By Kevin B. Lee

Video essay for U samogo sinyego morya/By the Bluest of Seas (1936, Boris Barnet). Featuring commentary by Nicole Brenez, author of Abel Ferrara (University of Illinois Press), professor of cinema studies at Université Paris I and programmer at the Cinémathèque Française. Produced by House contributor Kevin B. Lee, as part of Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?.

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Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for Cinema-Scope, The Chicago Reader, Senses of Cinema and Slant. His website is www.alsolikelife.com.

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Farber/Hawks

By Miriam Bale

[Editor's Note: Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday and Scarface play this weekend as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's tribute to Manny Farber. Click here (and on the film titles in the article) for more details. The lead image below is Farber's painting "Howard Hawks II" (1977).]

The auteurist debate is no longer a matter of dispute; the question critics should be asking is not if a director “writes” the film in cinematic terms, but how. Does he create a film in a way that can be told only through cinema, with many conflicting truths happening simultaneously? Or does he film a script, making a linear collection of words into something visible, connecting the dots with a standardized grammar of cinema that was developed in previous films? In the latter situation, one message is illustrated. However interesting this message may be, this is a waste of cinema. (Print conveys one voice in a linear order much less expensively.)

Manny Farber explained the elevated species of this second scenario more explicitly, under the banner of “masterpiece art” or “white elephant art.” According to Farber:

“The three sins of white elephant art: (1) frame the action with an all over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential for prizeworthy creativity.”

The opposite of this is, of course, termite art. As Farber wrote:

“Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the first half of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact of termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating at its own boundaries, and likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager industrious, unkempt activity.”

Perhaps no director is quite as under-the-radar termitic as Howard Hawks (represented in two separate programs, His Girl Friday & Scarface, both playing this weekend as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's tribute to Manny Farber). Hawks, who Farber described as like a WASPy mother hen, masterfully nurtured the natural energies of all of his collaborators until the film itself seemed carried away by its own natural pace. Hawks utilized improvisation techniques on set, as well as collaging all the best bits of as many good writers as he felt like hiring. He was scornful of the term “improvisation,” though, when it became a fashionable technique. “They talk about ‘improvisation.’ That’s one of the silliest words that’s used in the motion picture industry. What the hell do you think a director does?” he asked sarcastically, according to Todd McCarthy’s Hawks biography. “How do you expect that we can go out with a story that’s written up in a room, go out on location, and do it verbatim? I’ve never found a writer who could imagine a thing so that you could do it like that.”

Stories, once he had one decent enough to not be annoying, were much less important to Hawks—and to Farber—than textures and rhythms. In fact, Hawks thumbed his nose so much at the importance of plot that he would remake the same basic story over and over again to reveal that the value of the film was not plot but the subtle shadings of different renderings. At their best, Hawks films are all crazy rhythms, interplay, and swagger. The same could be said of Farber’s criticism. For instance, from his description of His Girl Friday:

“This Front Page remake with Rosalind Russell playing Pat O’Brien’s role is a tour de force of choreographed action: bravado posturings with body, lucid Cubistic composing with natty lapels and hat brims, as well as a very stylized discourse of short replies based on the idea of topping, outmaneuvering the other person with wit, cynicisms, and verbal bravado.”

Farber may be the most important film critic because he is unique in finding a language that is appropriate for the movies, one that belongs to cinema more than literature. Words are used for their value as sounds, rhythmic patterns, and even visible objects. He said that his famous article “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” was about the way the letters in that title looked on the page as much as about the content of the piece.

Further—also reflected in Hawks’ obsession with films about teams and pairs, about collaborations and conversations—what is unique about the cinema is that when it’s good it’s not just the reflection of one voice, not just a build up of one argument, and this was the strength of Farber’s criticism, whether he was writing alone or in collaboration. Says Kent Jones, who organized the Farber series:

“If you read what he wrote about Taxi Driver, for instance, it’s so balanced between positive and negative that you can’t really say it’s a pan, it’s a dismissal. Maybe it’s a little more weighted towards the negative rather than the positive, but that’s only because of what he’s observing and what he and Patricia [Patterson, his wife] are observing. I want to make that clear, he and Patricia wrote that piece, and they wrote everything together after about 1967, even the pieces that don’t have her listed as a co-writer. They were looking at particular aspects in a possible framework and seeing it in a negative light, but really what they’re doing is describing the movie, and how it moves and all the energies that collide in that movie.”

In any Hawks film, in any good film at all, or in any of Farber’s pieces, especially those he co-wrote with Patterson, it is not only about more than one voice being expressed and not simply about an equal harmony between two voices (as a sing-song call-and-response), but of a weaving in and out of truths, sometimes in harmony and sometimes with great dissonance. It is not only the truths expressed, but the discordance between these truths and the various amounts of space in between that are all important. For instance, in the Chris Petit documentary Negative Space, Farber describes a scene from Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons in which a view of a funeral procession zooms back to a woman, who Farber describes as miscast and overly made-up, who's been looming in the background. The zoom is sudden, a shift in space and perspective, but also a shift in point-of-view, as if two films had been overlaid on the same plane. “That’s GONE in terms of movies,” Farber goes on to say. “Critics don’t write about that kind of material. They write about the wrong things!”
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Miriam Bale is a writer and filmmaker with interests in feminism and ephemera.

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Special

By Keith Uhlich

[Special opens today at Manhattan's Sunshine Cinema. Click here for more information. It is also playing on Time/Warner & Comcast Video-on-Demand. Check local listings.]

Special is good enough in various particulars that its token theatrical release—nearly three years after its Sundance Film Festival debut—is more than slightly bittersweet. Co-writers/co-directors Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore rest their depressive character study on the able shoulders of actor Michael Rapaport, who pushes the film forward even as its jittery, hand-held aesthetic frequently marks time.

As Les Franken, an introverted meterman convinced, after ingesting an experimental depression medication, that he has superpowers, Rapaport grounds Special's numerous flights of fancy within a painfully physical realm. Haberman and Passmore take a page from the cartoonist Bill Watterson, who noted of the tiger protagonist in his great Calvin & Hobbes, "The nature of [the character's] reality doesn't interest me, and each story goes out of its way to avoid resolving the issue. ... I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it." So when Les demonstrates his "ability" to run through walls, we see him do just that. But we also see some telling aftereffects (a bloody nose; a rapidly expanding bruise) or alternate character perspectives (say those of pot-smoking, comic book store-running brothers Joey (Josh Peck) and Everett (Robert Baker)) that throw the veracity of Les' beliefs into harsh relief.

It's to Haberman and Passmore's credit that they don't privilege one point of view over another—there's an empathy and sophistication to their approach (always lovingly low-tech, as in Les' climactic fight with two invisible secret agents) that plays effortless and is sure to go unappreciated in company with the film's abundant rough patches. Prime among these is a meandering middle section where the conspiratorial aspects of Special grind its emotional undercurrents to a halt. Everyone flails around aimlessly for a spell, until Haberman and Passmore drop the colorful-cum-contrived side characters and focus more intently on Les.

The character's loneliness in the film's final section is palpable, and it resonates all the more due to Haberman and Passmore's decision (perhaps inevitable because of budget) to shoot the Los Angeles setting like a desolate ghost town. Les' personal diary entries serve as too-expository narration throughout, but when he's wandering 'round the City of Angels like Monica Vitti in L'Avventura—a bruised and battered shell of a man, silently pondering his existential lot—the film finds its groove.

The "superhero-as-fragile-martyr" theme is nothing new, but Haberman and Passmore go beyond any easy elitist outs. Les isn't above any of the people he aims to save, and though his intentions are noble, they're also irrevocably wrapped up in a complicated, all-too-recognizable psychosis. Even in its imperfections, Special lays enough of a foundation for its final shot, in which the bloom of understanding on one man's face echoes with all the force of an eye-laser (perhaps pre-figured by Superman or Cyclops) to the soul.
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Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

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932 (73). Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where it Rules (1965, Jean-Marie Straub), with video commentary by Richard Brody

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

[Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where it Rules is playing Sunday 11/23 and Wednesday 11/25 as part of the Manny Farber Tribute at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Visit filmlinc.com for more info.]

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Only 50 minutes long but requiring at least two or three viewings to grasp, the debut feature of cinema’s most dynamic husband and wife directing duo is quite possibly the most daunting and demanding work of the 60s New Wave. Adapting a novel by Nobel laureate and post-war German critic Heinrich Boll, Straub and Huillet radically reinvent conventional expository devices such as voiceover narration and scene transitions, transmogrifying D.W. Griffith’s innovations with cinematic time (cf. Intolerance) to reflect a frightening state of national and political shell-shock. Upon initial viewings, half the time one doesn’t know whether a scene is happening in the contemporary West Germany of the 1960s, the 1930s Third Reich, or the First World War. This disorientation reflects the haunted mental state of a family comprised of three generations of political outsiders, perpetually living under traumas suffered by their nation’s history that those around them are eager to repress. What keeps this film from being dismissed as a pretentious high-brow aesthetic exercise is the sinuous mystery to its rhythms, made clean by a near-merciless precision to the film’s Bresson-inspired cutting and framing schemes, and weighted with the emotional accumulation of oblique expressions of rage and cruelty, Teutonic blue notes played with cool ferocity. This is a puzzle film with jigs as sharp as shark’s teeth, now as much as ever.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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Video essay featuring Richard Brody, film editor of The New Yorker and author of Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books)

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An Interview with The Betrayal's Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath

By Lauren Wissot

[The Betrayal opens today at the IFC Center in Manhattan. Click here for screening information, here for the film's official website, and here for Lauren Wissot's review of the film, originally published on The House Next Door on June 14th, 2008 as part of our coverage of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.]

INTRODUCTION

The day I interviewed famed cinematographer Ellen Kuras (who I’d always envisioned as a wishbone with Scorsese and Spike Lee pulling on either leg) and Thavisouk Phrasavath, co-directors of the 23-years-in-the-making labor of love The Betrayal, congratulations were in order. The film, about the fallout from U.S. foreign policy in Laos as told through the personal lens of Thavi and his immigrant family, had just made the doc shortlist for the Academy Awards (along with Man On Wire. Attention Werner Herzog, HND interviews are good luck!) But as we spoke about everything from the American government’s refusal to fully own up to historical atrocities committed in its name (thereby repeating them) to the influence Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (on which Kuras was cinematographer) had on The Betrayal, I got a strong sense that the filmmakers were aiming higher than even Oscar. Sure, a statue would be nice, but influencing an Iraq pullout would be much more on point and gratifying.

Podcast is embedded after the break. It can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file.

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PODCAST


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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 columnist for Spout Blog.

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The Betrayal

By Lauren Wissot

[The Betrayal opens today at the IFC Center in Manhattan. Click here for screening information, here for the film's official website, and here for Lauren Wissot's audio interview with cinematographer/co-writer/co-director Ellen Kuras and co-writer/co-director/subject Thavisouk Phrasavath. This review was originally published on The House Next Door on June 14th, 2008 as part of our coverage of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.]

“I run between what I remember and what I’ve forgotten,” Thavisouk Phrasavath says in his and acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras’ co-directed debut feature The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), which follows Thavisouk (Thavi for short) and his family’s series of betrayals, first at the hands of the U.S. government in Laos and then from within the family itself once he, his mother, and siblings reach American shores. A labor of love over twenty years in the making, the doc combines rich, elegiac images of the Laotians and their land, meditative music, prophetic folk wisdom told in voiceover, footage from the Vietnam era (from utter devastation to empty presidential speeches), Thavi as a teenage long-hair in Brooklyn, wayward youth framed metaphorically against a backdrop of moving trains—all stitched together like a patchwork quilt, like shards of a dream. The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) is slow-paced but not slow moving—thoroughly engrossing. The minutes slip by as Thavi searches for his history, the father soldier who fatefully threw his lot in with America, fighting Communists not in the name of ideology, but for the higher salary and rank—only to be abandoned when the Pathet Lao took over (sound familiar?).

Taken away for “re-education,” the breadwinner leaves behind a wife and ten children to fend for themselves, completely estranged from their fearful friends and neighbors. (Kuras’ camera captures Thavi’s mother, a small exhausted woman, looking physically pained, a lifetime’s worth of hardship in her eyes, as she recounts the tale to a respectful Thavi at her kitchen table in Brooklyn.) Surviving by sheer will and fate, she and eight of her kids (two had to be left behind with their grandmother) made it to America—only to be abandoned again, plunked down in one of two rooms in a Bushwick apartment next door to a crack house, sharing the cramped quarters with a Cambodian family of six. Forced to grow up fast, Thavi fishes in Prospect Park to literally put food on the table, deals with both the cutthroat Vietnamese gangs and the ungrateful siblings who “don’t remember the past.” When Thavi’s father calls from out of the blue, the family gathers round the phone as if at a shrine, a lifeline offered from the presumed dead. But after reuniting, another cruel twist sends his mother into freefall: dad has a new family in Florida to return to. And just when you think things couldn’t get more viciously ironic, Thavi’s half-brother becomes the only sibling to lose his life—the result of a gunshot wound delivered by a member of his own Bloods gang. Now a bigger man than his father, Thavi decides to forgive, goes down south to attend the funeral, recording the police, gang members and monks in attendance, a melting pot gone wrong.

As Thavi explains in voiceover, the Lao have a tradition of freeing an animal into the wild in order to release pain. The connection to nature, to homeland, is crucial to their culture (in this context, “never forget where you come from” becomes quite literal). When Thavi returns to Laos, reuniting with the grandmother and two sisters he left behind, Kuras’ slow pan across the many strong faces (onscreen text announcing that the U.S. still has not officially acknowledged its part in tragic history) makes a strong case as well for the healing power of cinema.

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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.

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HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 9 (27), "The Heeb Film Festival Podcast, or Get Off My Ass, Death!"

By Holly Herrick, Eric Kohn, John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, Michael Tully, and Keith Uhlich

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

INTRODUCTION

Shalom, Wisconsin!

We finally managed to get Eric Kohn on the podcast after food poisoning (mine) and poor planning kept him off. And what great timing as he's curated the third annual Heeb Film Festival this weekend at 92nd St. Y's new location in Tribeca. Best of all, it starts Saturday with a screening of Silver Jew, directed by Michael Tully, who'll attend a Q&A afterwards. But before all that, he's here!

Shocking, I know!

Eric discusses the films playing at Heeb and Michael talks a bit about Silver Jew (which is on DVD, too). We also chat about Revolutionary Road expectations, Gran Torino, and I use my demonic powers to predict the death of a certain director after my success with Paul Newman.

Till then, this is Episode 9, "The Heeb Film Festival Podcast, or Get Off My Ass, Death!" If you're in the NYC area this weekend, go to the Heeb Film Fest! Purchase your tickets here. And if you happen to see Vadim or myself at the bar, buy us a drink!

(Also, Onion, you totally have yet to hire me for Decider. How lame will it be when the guy you picked over me is referencing these podcasts? Super lame. And go to the Heeb Film Fest! And we love Kino International! Forever ever!) (JL)

Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 37 minutes 51 seconds)

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PODCAST



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Holly Herrick programs for the Sarasota and Hamptons Film Festivals.

Eric Kohn contributes film criticism several times a month to New York Press and blogs throughout the week for Cinematical. His writing frequently appears in indieWIRE, The Hollywood Reporter, Moving Pictures Magazine, Heeb Magazine, The Forward, Filmmaker and Moviemaker.

John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

Michael Tully is a filmmaker and proprietor of the site Hammer to Nail.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

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Now and Forever: Early Carole Lombard at Film Forum

By Dan Callahan

[The Carole Lombard retrospective runs at Manhattan's Film Forum from November 21st—December 2nd. Click here for more information.]

In at least seven movies, all of them comedies with serious undertones, the exuberant Carole Lombard became emblematic of the whole screwball comedy genre of the thirties, and she passed into folklore with her marriage to Clark Gable and her early death in a plane crash in 1942, at age 34. It’s her centenary this year, so there have been tributes, including a “star of the month” program on the indispensable Turner Classic Movies. TCM showed her seven wonders, starting with Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century (1934) and ending with Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942). In between those very different peaks, Lombard was the archetypal madcap heiress in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936), a small town girl caught up in the publicity machine in the cutting Ben Hecht satire Nothing Sacred (1937), a manicurist on the make in Mitchell Leisen’s Hands Across the Table (1935), a congenital liar in the overlooked True Confession (1937), and a demanding, hot-to-trot wife for Alfred Hitchcock in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941).

On TCM, these seven testaments to Lombard at her best were garnished with select samplings from her frustrating early sound years, when she was a contract player for Paramount studio. Turner doesn’t own early Paramount movies, but they recently bought a few hundred Columbia films, so they were able to show two early thirties Lombard loan-outs to that studio, No More Orchids (1932) and Brief Moment (1933). By and large, these two films prove that Columbia chief Harry Cohn knew how to display Lombard’s talent far better than her home studio; in the first scenes of No More Orchids, where she’s cannily cast as a flighty, drunken heiress, Lombard’s sense of fun shoots off the screen, as does her frank sexuality (she strips to her underwear with no self-consciousness). And she’s nicely tough/tender in Brief Moment, even if her face sends unintentional signs of her uncertainty with her role, a drawback that marks much of her apprentice work.

The Campus Vamp (1928), a silent short being screened for the Film Forum retrospective, was made when the 20-year old Lombard was a Mack Sennett bathing beauty, and she learned a lot from this training: she seems totally at home in his anarchic nuttiness. The earliest feature being shown is a tantalizing rarity, Miriam Hopkins’ debut, Fast and Loose (1930), which has dialogue by Preston Sturges. Between the fiery Hopkins, a scene-stealing Ilka Chase, a non-dithery Frank Morgan and Charles Starrett, the Guy Madison of the thirties, who plays most of his scenes in a bathing suit, Lombard gets lost in the shuffle, and that’s all to the good. She’s amateurish in Fast and Loose, as if she’s practiced her lines at home and is simply reciting them for us; she looks scared, sometimes, and this fear would turn up again in her next movies in the series, It Pays to Advertise (1931), which is stolen by Louise Brooks in the first reel, and Up Pops the Devil (1931), where Lombard has the lead, but just treads water, stiltedly.

Her first husband, William Powell, loosened Lombard up considerably in two films, Man of the World (1931), where she’s not quite as uptight, and Ladies’ Man (1931), which contains the first sign of Lombard’s special talent for extremes in a long, expertly played drunk scene. Alas, she’s forced and awkward in Sinners in the Sun (1932), which doesn’t contain much sun or sin, unfortunately, though it does have two electric scenes with Cary Grant, in only his second film role. She worked up a palpable chemistry with her future husband, Clark Gable, in No Man of Her Own (1932) a rather gloomy movie that still pulsates with the heat of their mutual attraction for one another, but Paramount still didn’t know what Lombard was good at. They used her as an all-purpose leading lady, which might begin to explain her presence in the hilariously awful White Woman (1933), a rubber plantation melodrama stolen wholesale by a campy/compelling Charles Laughton. As a nightclub singer forced to marry the perfidious Laughton, Lombard looks great, but she seems exasperated and tired throughout the film, as if she’s acting badly to protest the assignment. (Question: what’s become of her second teaming with Laughton, They Knew What They Wanted {1940}? This RKO production has been missing in action for a while.)

Even worse than White Woman is Bolero (1934), where Lombard has to try to act and even dance with the wooden George Raft. It’s a dull movie, but it does boast a defining moment for Lombard: she strips down to her slip again, and Raft dares her to dance something for him. Lombard’s face lights up, as if she’s thinking, “What the hell,” (or “What the fuck,” since she was addicted to longshoreman language). She stomps across the screen in her slip and stockings, while Raft and everyone in the audience thinks, “This woman must be one of the best lays in the world.” Lombard was starting to relax and take chances on screen, which was evident the same year in Hawks’ Twentieth Century, where her lusty, throw-your-whole-body-into-it kind of physical comedy was showcased for the first time in talkies. She was aided by the full-throttle histrionics of her co-star, John Barrymore, and Hawks’ patient coaxing behind the camera; he enabled her to be herself at last, the high-spirited, dishy, flaky girl everyone loved off the set who had rarely come through on screen since the days of her slapstick Mack Sennett shorts.

Even though Twentieth Century signaled that she had arrived as a comedienne, Lombard still had to slog through a few more inappropriate programmers, including an uneasy partnership with Gary Cooper and Shirley Temple called Now and Forever (1934), a nearly unwatchable try-out at MGM, The Gay Bride (1934), and even another “dance” vehicle with Raft, called Rumba (1935). The dominant mode for Lombard in these films is censoriousness: she’s something of a pill, dressing down her male lead and looking fiercely angry and restless in most of her scenes. But it only took a gentle modification of this impatient quality for her star persona to really take shape, as it did under Mitchell Leisen’s direction in Hands Across the Table (1935), the first real Carole Lombard movie, a melancholy/slaphappy romance where all her hard edges were finally smoothed away. There followed a string of classic comedies, some essential, like My Man Godfrey, and some diverting minor work, like The Princess Comes Across (1936).

It’s a shame that Lombard is such a diamond in the rough in her early films, but they are all worth seeing, mainly because of other players like Hopkins and Laughton and Grant (and it’s good to remember that these Paramount features don’t play on television). It took her a while to find her métier, but when she did, there was no stopping her. If you were to screen Up Pops the Devil, and then To Be or Not to Be, you might be forgiven in thinking that the early, unsure Lombard and the Lombard at the summit of her skill for a great director in a great, perilously bold movie were two different people. But her struggle to improve herself and find the right material is what makes Carole Lombard such a quintessentially American, do-it-yourself movie star. In the mid-twenties, Lombard had a movie contract canceled when she got herself into a bad car accident that left a vertical scar on her left cheek. This scar is still visible in a lot of her close-ups, and it’s the reminder for us that she’s living on borrowed time. That retroactive sense of danger informs the giddiness of her comedy, the abandon of her sexual openness and the “what the fuck” daring that lets her be a vision in white satin in To Be or Not to Be, swaying with overwhelmed carnality as she murmurs the ugliest imaginable words, “Heil Hitler…”
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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Links for the Day (November 20th, 2008)

1. "New penguin found, 500 years after extinction": Happy Feet!

["Researchers studying a rare and endangered species of penguin have uncovered a previously unknown species that disappeared about 500 years ago. The research suggests that the first humans in New Zealand hunted the newly found Waitaha penguin to extinction by 1500, about 250 years after their arrival on the islands. But the loss of the Waitaha allowed another kind of penguin to thrive — the yellow-eyed species that now also faces extinction, Philip Seddon of Otago University, a co-author of the study, said Wednesday. The team was testing DNA from the bones of prehistoric modern yellow-eyed penguins for genetic changes associated with human settlement when it found some bones that were older — and had different DNA."]

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2. An aspect ratio piece from a little over a week ago: "Film and Variations: On Multiple Versions."

["For the last few weeks I have been reading through back issues of Mix to get a sense of how the magazine has reported on the development of digital sound technology in Hollywood. One article that stood out from the rest examined the theatrical re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy in 1997. Larry Blake, the author of the piece and a sound practitioner himself, confronted the whole question of whether or not George Lucas was committing heresy by tampering with the “original” films. Essentially, Blake found that even in 1977 there were multiple “originals” in theatrical circulation. This finding also supports my view that, in some sense, we can never really discuss any film as a text without variation. There are, of course, expanded releases, “director’s cuts,” “special editions,” “remastered editions,” and “restored editions” that alter the ways in which we can study a film. There are also more subtle variations that quietly subvert a totalizing view of film as text. We need to consider the aural and visual differences between a film’s theatrical presentation and its home video release. And as Blake’s Star Wars analysis suggests, we also need to consider how multiple versions of the same film can exist in its initial theatrical run."]

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3. Proprietor Bill R. of The Kind of Face You Hate asks, declaratively, "Have I Ever Mentioned that I'm a Brilliant Artist?"

["It is not my intention today to reveal very much about myself, because I have my own life to lead, and I'd rather it not be cluttered up by strangers knocking on my door and asking if they can touch my shirt, or sending me letters, asking if I can send them a piece of my shirt, or whatever it is people like you do. You're like lampreys, every last one of you (no offense). However, I would like to open up one part of my life to you, Dear Readers, that has hitherto gone unreferenced on this "blog", and that part of my life has to do with one of my great creative passions. For I am a monologuist."]

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4. "Big Three auto CEOs flew private jets to ask for taxpayer money": I believe the Internet terminology is pwned!

[""There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses," Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee. "It's almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious." He added, "couldn't you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it." Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California, asked the three CEOs to "raise their hand if they flew here commercial. Let the record show, no hands went up. Second, I'm going to ask you to raise your hand if you are planning to sell your jet in place now and fly back commercial. Let the record show, no hands went up.""]

***
5. "Watching Television, Channeling Unhappiness?": From Science Daily. (Hattip: Josh Nelson)

["Are happy or unhappy people more attracted to television? This question is addressed by a new 30-year analysis1 of US national data of nearly 30,000 adults by John Robinson and Steven Martin from the University of Maryland in the US. Examining the activity patterns of happy and less happy people in the General Social Survey (GSS) between 1975 and 2006, the authors found that happy people were more socially active, attended more religious services, voted more and read more newspapers."]

***
Quote of the Day: G.E. Lessing

"One single grateful thought raised to heaven is the most perfect prayer."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Ambulance + EBay = Al Qaeda



***
Clip of the Day: Words fail me...

_____________________________________________________
"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.

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"Music Video Round-Up": Beyonce, The Sea & Cake, & Glen Campbell

By Brandon Soderberg

"Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)," directed by Jake Nava

“Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” doesn’t really have verses or even a chorus, it’s all-hook, moving from one high-energy Beyonce shout to another, never really letting up. The titular hook’s rushed through in the same double-time as that keyboard line on-speed and Jake Nava’s video similarly starts and doesn’t stop. It's all performance on basically no set at all, Beyonce kinda lip-syncs, instead focusing on her and the other two dancers' Bob Fosse "Mexican Breakfast" walk-it-outs with minimal lighting tricks with minimal cuts.

Usually, cutting’s employed to give the kinda subliminal effect of the action, and that’s generally, necessary because the untouched version of a performance, action, whatever feels inert; manipulation’s apparently necessary. When a director chooses not to cut, to create a single-take, long take, or even, the feigned single-take—a recent music video trope and the best way to describe the editing in “Single Ladies”—the aim’s usually for elegance and cohesion.

Not so much here, where some rarified mix of performer exuberance and directorial subtlety meet up to create the feeling of a single-take while fitting-in all the visceral thrills of quick-cutting. Slow, patient zooms, cuts hidden by lights going to black or flashing to white, and 360-degree dolly shots actually keep-up the energy and immediacy of the routine (a term more apt than, really, calling this a video).

Then, there’s the single odd, surreal element: Beyonce’s robo-claw. This is part of her half-interesting, half-retarded “Sasha Fierce” persona that she’s working for her new album and the millionth example of rap and R & B’s flirtation with retro-futurism, but it also makes sense in some Herzog-ian “ecstatic truth” way. It fits the subliminal brilliance of the video overall, even if it's hard to point you finger on a singular "meaning."

***
"Weekend," directed by Tim Sutton


Tim Suton’s video for The Sea and Cake’s “Weekend” is the kind of off-the-cuff—or seemingly off-the-cuff—video that doesn’t even happen too much anymore, even in the “indie” world. The video recalls Gus Van Sant’s work of the past five years or so, or the sort of thing, say, Kelly Reichardt or a less obsequious David Gordon Green might make if handed a copy of The Sea and Cake’s latest album Car Alarm.

Despite keeping Car Alarm on repeat since it’s release almost a month ago, I’ve yet to decipher more than a few lines of the lyrics and so, what the song's about or how it directly fits the video aren't clear, but the song’s title and the infectious joy those dance-punk drums and Detroit techno synth squelches bring just make sense accompanied by a naturalistic narrative of teens hanging out.

Early on, one of the boys is shown playing a video game with one hand and slapping his annoying brother with the other. A jump-cut removes the annoying brother and brings the boy’s mom—Peanuts or Muppet Babies style—into the room, hands on her hips, the boy motioning that he isn’t sure what’s wrong. It’s adolescent inability to accept blame and it’s the sort of thing that, when you’re fifteen, sends you out of the house and onto your bike to go fuck around with friends. Later, a quick, hand-held shot captures both the shyness and shamelessness of adolescence: One of the other boys sneaks a peek at a girl diving into the water between conversation with friends.

Suton punctuates "Weekend's" hazy realism at just the right time, with a striking shot or editing choice. The sped-up diving of the kids, tangled up in a series of quick cuts, is the perfect visual accompaniment to Sea and Cake’s mix of dance music signifiers. And then it’s followed-up by a ready-for-postcard image of sailboats. It’s the same contrast between controlled chaos and obsessive formalism that the group itself has been mining since the mid-90s.

“Weekend” captures the uneventful rebellion of being fifteen where the stuff you do isn’t really bad and certainly isn’t against the law or anything, but would upset people over thirty: Skateboarding, dicking around in a convenience store, carving your name in a railing, bottle-rockets in the woods, etc.

***
"These Days," from AOL Sessions


This performance by Glen Campbell from AOL Sessions isn’t a typical music video and it’s the kind of live, “exclusive” performance every music website has, but Campbell really sells it and its simple existence sets-up a weird contrast for how music performance has changed since, well, a lot more people gave a shit about Glen Campbell.

Campbell performs a cover of the Jackson Browne-written “These Days”, best known as being performed by Nico—and used expertly in The Royal Tenenbaums—from his album of covers Meet Glen Campbell released in September. Lazy critics immediately compared it to Johnny Cash’s American Recordings and the similarities are obvious but superficial. Meet isn’t stripped down or spare: it’s as obvious and show-boaty as all of Glen Campbell’s work, and filled with the same amount of longing too.


While everything’s changed since Campbell was playing lush, slow-burners like “Wichita Lineman” on The Smothers Brothers in front of incredible, art-directed sets, Campbell, at a cold and ugly AOL Sessions set, sings with sincerity and gives Nashville grins and grimaces all the same.

Those American Cash albums always felt icky because Cash exploited his age way more often than he played off of it and it all seemed aimed entirely at an audience that wouldn’t touch genuine country music outside of Cash. Campbell’s fascinating on the maybe-album-of-the-year Meet because he’s basically making music that sounds like his old music, sounds close enough to the country music that’s selling right now, and never falls back on meta-commentary about old-age and stuff.
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Brandon Soderberg is author of the sites No Trivia, The Biographical Dictionary of Rap, and Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader?.

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Links for the Day (November 19th, 2008)

1. This Saturday sees The King of Comedy, Jerry Lewis, in conversation with Peter Bogdanovich at The Times Center in Manhattan. Information on the event can be found here. In conjunction, the Museum has commissioned an essay by Chris Fujiwara, now up at Moving Image Source.

["Lewis's films are adventures in multiplicity: things happen at the same time, and in the same space, that couldn't or shouldn't so happen (like the multiple Herberts rushing upstairs in panic in The Ladies Man). He loves to work with segmentation, to divide the frame into separate compartments (the line between stage and backstage in the prom scene of The Nutty Professor, the recording studio scene in The Patsy), to divide the narrative into blocks (the episodic structures of The Family Jewels and Hardly Working [1980]). Lewis's great originality as a filmmaker lies in his art of multiplying segmentation or segmenting multiplicity so as to produce a spiraling disorder that leads miraculously to a reassertion of order (as in the endings of The Family Jewels, Which Way to the Front?, and Cracking Up [1983]). His films take place in zones of indeterminacy and combinatorial freedom."]

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2. At Exiled Online, Eileen Jones rants on Quantum of Solace.

["Sadly, the liveliest movie currently in theaters doesn’t move well at all. There are lots and lots of action scenes cut together very badly. You never feel as if you’re getting the impact of the no-doubt exciting things that were staged in front of multiple cameras in locations all over the world. You have to take it on faith that the chase scenes grinding out onscreen involved amazing speed and danger and stunt-work, because it isn’t coming across. In a just world we’d be getting very close to saying R.I.P. Hollywood when directors of top action films can’t direct action. But this isn’t a just world, so we’ll drag on like this indefinitely, watching dull crap and saying, well, it could be worse, at least it’s not High School Musical 3."]

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3. Two featuring House man Ryland Walker Knight: the latest episode of Vinyl is Podcast and "An Amber Kaleidoscope," Ry's piece for The Auteur's Notebook on Lola Montes.

["More a gem than a crystal, Lola Montes begins looking up at twin chandeliers so baroque that their descending shudder makes one think the little globs of glass dangling will break free and fall to the floor at any second. Indeed: at one point our heroine walks a tightrope between literal, if equally metonymic, stages of her life. Martine Carol stars as Lola in Max Ophüls’ final film, acting as buxom locus for this spectacle of refraction, giving us plenty to savor as much as revile as much as pity while the director plays ringmaster (or Ringmaster plays Director) orchestrating her life’s story in swirls and tilts and all forms of excess. It’s a big movie. And, lucky for us, Rialto Pictures has imported a “definitive” 35mm restoration from the Cinémathèque Française to tour America, just like Ophuls’ salacious star subject."]

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4. "Why you probably don't want to get those politics in your sitcom": House man Todd VanDerWerff is back from his Obama campaign sojourn, which means a whole lot more South Dakota Dark. Check his most recent article above, and the site daily for fresh content.

["One of the things you'll occasionally hear TV comedy creators bemoan is the fact that they can't do politically-oriented sitcoms anymore. Some of the best sitcoms of the '70s (often considered to be the golden age of the form) were heavily centered on political issues, particularly Norman Lear's All in the Family, which often seemed to tackle a hot-button issue in every single episode. You'll also occasionally hear this from TV viewers or from their increasingly ineffectual proxies, the critics. "Why can't sitcoms tackle more serious issues?" they ask. "Whatever happened to THAT?" And, indeed, the success of the BLATANTLY political Daily Show and Colbert Report in the comedy field would seem to prove their point -- politics can make for good comedy, and, indeed, SHOULD make for good comedy. But, let's face it, that's not really the way it turns out most of the time. (If I were at all a good blogger, I would link to a few examples of this, but I'm lazy, and you should be glad to have me back, so you're not getting anything except my own personal recollection that American Dad was launched as something Seth MacFarlane insisted would be less like Family Guy and more like, you guessed it, All in the Family. While the show maintains a BIT of political edge, it does so only in the sense where it will make an occasional Family Guy-style cutaway political gag -- and this is coming from someone whose feelings have warmed considerably towards the show and is inclined to be generous.)"]

***
5. Some coverage of David Lynch: The Lime Green Set: Dennis Lim in The L.A. Times and Billy Gil interviews the mysterious Mr. Lynch for Home Media Magazine.

["Lynch: I think there are chapter stops, I’m not positive. You know, I was against them because I wanted the film to be seen in purity. And then I changed because I think most people see it in its purity. But even in the theater, if in the middle of a film, you have to take a leak, during the time you’re leaking, you’re missing that part of the film. Correct? So this is even more assurance that you’re gonna see the whole thing and get back to the point you left. I think it’s not so bad."]

***
Quote of the Day: Harlan Ellison

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): God that's just wrong. With musical accompaniment.



***
Clip of the Day: A belated (by one day) Happy 80th to Mortimer J. Mouse. Below clip, of Kenneth Anger's "Mouse Heaven," via Nathan Lee at WNYC.

_____________________________________________________
"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.

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HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 8 (26), "That's true, but not what Armond means."

By Mike D'Angelo, John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, and Keith Uhlich

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

INTRODUCTION

Hello Greenpoint!

We're back again with our official "Best Introductory Segway Ever" and return guest Mike D'Angelo, who came to discuss a film dear to (one of) our hearts: Afterschool.

Vadim hates the film since he has a gigantic chip on his shoulder about being a part of the "YouTube Generation" (yet I'm fairly confident he watches Hulu more than anything else these days), so he and Mike trade a few hundred verbal blows, during which we learn about Antonio Campos' talk with D'Angelo, namecheck Filmbrain, and contemplate renaming the New York Film Festival as "NYFF" ("knife"). Either way, best modern American film or not? Who knows! Listen and find out!

We (those who attended KNIFE) then try to figure out what The Headless Woman and Bullet in the Head are all about, have our second official "Worst Segway Ever" to A Christmas Tale, the movie with the optional subtitle everyone seems to ignore, and discuss the recurring themes of Arnaud Desplechin.

And though we don't talk about Meet Dave, we DO discuss Armond White's insane essay on Soul Man and how it relates to President-Elect Barack Obama. Also, we coin the following phrase to deal with every Armond White piece ever, giving us our episode title:

"That's true, but not what Armond means."

(Armond, come on. Please. )

Join us next time when we'll have two special episodes! In what order, we'll find out! And if you ever see Vadim or myself at the bar, feel free to buy us a drink! Or pressure The Onion's New York Decider site to hire me. Grassroots is expensive with no fixed income. (JL)

Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 53 minutes 01 second)

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PODCAST



_________________________________________________
Mike D'Angelo looks like this.

John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

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931 (72). C’eravamo tanto amati/We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974, Ettore Scola)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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The premise plays like a joke: a Marxist, a capitalist and a common worker stumble through four decades of post-World War II Italy, each pursuing their ideal of what modern society largely at the expense of the others. The joke is on all of them, as Ettore Scola and fellow writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli plot a bittersweet march from the exuberant hope following the end of Fascism to a 1970s dystopia of class stratification and red tape, where middle class families huddle overnight just to enroll their kids in schools while the rich idle away in comfortable seclusion. Scola and company trade in rough caricatures, betraying mild contempt for both the ineffectual intellectual (Stefana Satta Flores) who leaves his wife and child to pursue a pipe dream of socialism through cinema education, and the selfish industrialist (Vittorio Gassman) who spends a lifetime accumulating wealth and privilege while turning his back on those who love him. Their fellow war buddy, a hapless hospital orderly (Nino Manfredi) who remains steadfast to his principles as well as to their common love interest (Stefania Sandrelli), is left as the de facto hero of the middlebrow.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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Links for the Day (November 18th, 2008)

1. "The Battle for Marriage Equality and the Intersection with Indie Film": Terrific piece by Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE.

["Among the many recent conversations, this weekend I had a private talk with LA Film Fest director Rich Raddon, a Morman member of the film community who was drawn into the spotlight late last week after it was revealed that he donated $1500 to the campaign in support of California Prop 8. Rich is a longtime friend within the film community and I agreed to speak with him off the record, so I can't detail the substance of our conversation. However, I can relate that he is in the midst of a painful and emotional process as his personal and professional worlds collide rather publicly. During our talk, I expressed my own disgust over the tactics of his church and reiterated how offensive the campaign against equality is to so many people, especially within the film community. Rich Raddon is already hearing this first hand from many people around him, so I also listened carefully as he expressed his own hope that the goals of both sides can be achieved peacefully and harmoniously going forward."]

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2. Two-part conversation (#1 & #2) at Reverse Shot between Eric Hynes and Kent Jones. The subject: Manny Farber. As companion to the currently running Film Society of Lincoln Center series "Manny Farber, 1917-2008."

["Talking about The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, which was a Forties film but rooted in the depression, his note on it is, “manic energy but peculiarly manic futility of that time.” That’s a pretty damn good description of Preston Sturges’s films in general and of what makes them so special. He had his own era that he was coming out of, but he was looking at that also. Which other people don’t do. He was acknowledging that as a force in human nature. It allowed him to move on to the Straubs. What excited him in Howard Hawks leads to what excited him in the Straubs, and Fassbinder and Jeanne Dielman. When I wrote a piece about David Thomson where I said it’s too bad that he doesn’t go back and take another look at people, I got an angry letter from a friend of his who said, “You used Manny Farber as an example, and it seems like he’s stuck in the Thirties.” Well if he is, it’s news to me, because he’s always telling me how much he likes Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. He’s seeing the continuity, he’s acknowledging the presence of the Thirties in his own makeup and the fact that movies and cultural artifacts from different eras speak to each other."]

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3. At Gateway Cinephiles, Andrew Wyatt is in the midst of massive St. Louis International Film Festival Coverage. Up to Day Four as of this writing. Keep checking this link for more.

["The 2008 St. Louis International Film Festival is here at long last! This year I’m taking my vacation time to attend as many films as possible in the Festival. How many films? Forty-three feature films in eleven days. You read that right. Every morning throughout the Festival, I’ll be posting my thoughts on the films I saw the previous day. Check back every day for oodles of commentary on a whole mess of international cinema. The Festival features some marquee names in independent film, whose work I don’t intend to neglect, but my itinerary is slanted a bit towards Asian and Eastern European/Balkan films. You’ll find the complete itinerary below the fold."]

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4. "'Weaving Spiders Come Not Here': The Utterly Strange (and True) Tale of the Bohemian Grove": By Tristan Eldritch for 2012 Diaries.

["This has to be one of the most jaw-droppingly surreal things I have ever heard of. I don’t believe in massive conspiracies and All-Powerful Secret Societies, but…….. (more whirring of Theremins) in San Francisco in 1872, a small group of journalists formed a private club at the Astor Hotel on Sacramento Street called the Bohemian Club. The original members were basically learned, monied men who felt a certain disdain for what they perceived as the plebian character of post gold-rush Californian culture. They longed for the gravitas of the Old World, and the daring excitements of the fashionable European capitals, and modeled themselves after a similarly erudite group in New York called the Century Club. They choose the owl as their symbol, and Shakespeare’s line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” as their motto."]

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5. Care to rub bird shyte on your face or bathe in ramen? Then this link is for you.

["At Santa Fe’s Ten Thousand Waves spa, the Nightingale Cleansing Mask includes a powder composed of “sanitized droppings” from the tiny wonder-birds. The high nitrogen content draws out bacteria from the skin and breaks down dead skin cells more gently than acid peels. Used for centuries by geisha in Japan, the facial is “an all-natural way to brighten and smooth the skin.” Is your old-fashioned poop-free exfoliator suddenly looking better than usual? We thought so."]

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Quote of the Day: Maurice Chevalier

"Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Three images from The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces Blog. (Hattip: Lauren Wissot)





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Clip of the Day: This one brings back memories...

_____________________________________________________
"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.

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Directorama: "Summoning of the Muses"

A Weekly Webcomic by Peet Gelderblom

[Author's Note: For more information, to browse earlier episodes, or to buy the book in time for Christmas, visit www.directorama.net.]

Click to enlarge:

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Peet Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design in Amsterdam. He founded 24LiesASecond, for which he wrote and edited several essays, and is the twisted cartoonist behind Directorama (the website as well as the book).

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Angels and Insects: The Cinematic Spawn of Guillermo Del Toro

By David Greven

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 12/02/2005, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]

Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro ranks as one of the most significant and intriguing directors of horror since the genre’s glory days during the 1970s. Yet, in many ways, Del Toro is still working towards the peak of his talents. Examined individually, each of his films seems deeply flawed and even failed. Yet when taken together—arranged and assembled as a vast quilt of images—they achieve a nightmarish splendor that demands recognition. Consider the imagery in Cronos (1993), Mimic (1997), and Blade II (2002). In these films, the images are audacious, ecstatic, ghoulish, and beautiful—they achieve something akin to a connective tissue binding the films together as an oeuvre that achieves intermittent greatness.

Catholic imagery

Del Toro’s images are ecstatic and difficult. Take Cronos as an example. To convey Jesus Gris’ intense obsession with the titular mechanism, Del Toro provides a shot of Jesus in the bathroom, sweating, breathing heavily, the golden scarab affixed to his heart. It’s a shocking image, gorgeous and hideous at once. The beautiful/ugly nature of Del Toro’s images is suffused with a languor and sensuality that makes them even more unsettling.

Del Toro’s use of Catholic images is far from predictable or programmatic. He appropriates religious iconography to distort time and space, to collapse the contours of the present with the obsessions of the past. A perfect example occurs in Mimic, set in a New York City where a new disease borne by cockroaches is killing off the child population. The film begins with Dr. Susan Tyler observing the dying children in a slightly futuristic hospital that is also, oddly, somewhat indistinguishable from a medieval sick chamber. Huge white sheets form canopies over the children’s beds as nuns in white gowns and habits hover over their suffering patients. This collapse of time periods suggests numerous thematic possibilities—that our sci-fi modern medicine bears a far greater connection to ancient forms of medical practice than is commonly perceived, that religious fervor and medical investigation share a common passion, and that the children, the doctors, the nuns, and the hospital all float between time and space, heaven and earth, the past and the present. This imagery prepares us for a narrative that will propose an evolutionary advance of insects approaching human levels of intelligence—which they “mimic”—and that will cause a regression to the most primitive human fears of otherness, the chthonic human terror over difference, here symbolized by the terrifying strangeness of the insect, a recurring trope in Del Toro films.

The insect has, of course, positive and negative associations, and as such functions as an analogy of the ambivalence in much religious imagery. The insect simultaneously signifies birth and regeneration and the promise of immortality—the ugly, slimy caterpillar blooming into the beautiful, wide-winged butterfly. Insects also signify corruption, squalor, evil, menace, death. Del Toro matches the theme of insect regeneration to the Catholic form of the myth of resurrection, the human overcoming death and assuming divine form in Christ’s love. He uses his insect/Christ trope both satirically and poetically.

The Cronos device, for example, a gorgeously designed gold scarab housing an immortal insect that feeds on the blood of the host to whom it reciprocally gives immortal life, is both egg and spider, mother and death, hope and despair. Like a newly made jewel, its beauty draws the appraising hand to hold it. Like a predatory insect, arachnid or bird, its talon-legs spring out and stab into flesh. A golden tick, it fastens itself to flesh and sucks out blood, but like a god, it pumps back new blood into its host, to whom it simultaneously gives immortality and endless death. The host becomes a vampire, the spider, even as it becomes the device’s prey.

Reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction or David Cronenberg’s films, the theme of transformation—in particular the Christian theme of resurrection—informs Del Toro’s work, both satirically and poetically. Always, transformation beckons and bedevils, its allure perfectly matched to its deadliness. In Cronos, the kindly Jesus Gris transforms into a predatory vampire who must constantly wrestle with his vampiric appetite for blood. In Mimic, Susan creates a new hybrid species of insect, the Judas Bug, to combat and kill the disease-carrying cockroach. Yet this savior turns out to be the devil: initially a messiah that rescues humans from death, it then preys upon the saved. In Blade II, the hybrid vampires created to bring the vampire race to a new level of genetic purity transform into cannibalistic predators of other vampires, with the threat that they will then prey on humans. They are, then, a new species alienated from both the vampire and the human.

Though not a Catholic work, Milton’s immortal poem Paradise Lost looms as the great controlling metaphor for all of these themes. With its luridly beautiful imagery and anguished problematization of the Original and the Copy, as well as its interest in religious purity and satirical doubling—Sin as the monstrous mother of Hell, a pack of ravenous dogs forever tearing at her womb, Satan as the dark double of Christ and Adam—Paradise Lost infuses Del Toro’s antic and impassioned oeuvre.

In Blade II, Blade becomes a comic-book Christ, pinned down to a table with his arms stretched out. Metal stakes burst through his flesh, as if he were nailed by a thousand spikes, a collapse of crucifixion and vampire iconographies. The stakes driven through his vampire body just missing his heart, locked in a metal Golgotha, Blade is Christ as aggrieved vampire.

Cronos provides the perfect example of Del Toro’s singular deployment of Catholic imagery. The villain, Dieter La Guardia, a wheelchair-bound, sneering baddie, feverishly collects statutes of archangels, not for any apparent religious reason, but because the Cronos device is buried inside of one. Long rows of archangel statues in prophylactic bags line his high-tech-mausoleum bedroom. This clinical collection of religious icons takes a new dimension that defies mere deconstruction. The rows of bagged angels come to seem like choked ghosts, muffled masses of buried spirits. The bagged angels counterpoint the new insects taking evolutionary flight. (There is an affecting intertext with this imagery in Denys Arcand’s deeply moving 2003 film Les Invasions Barbares [The Barbarian Invasions], when a church official, hoping to alleviate the financial burdens of his institution and examining row after row of wrapped-up icons, despairs to learn that they are all “worthless.”) Like Luis Buñuel and Brian De Palma, Del Toro uses Catholic imagery satirically, but his satire has a spiritual dimension. The ache of the past, the longing for more life, the terrible fusion of the divine and demonic—all lie in Del Toro’s crazy-Catholic horror sensibility.

Ruined heroes

A highly interesting aspect of Del Toro’s films is their interest in the ambiguous, morally muddled hero. Jesus Gris’s love for his strangely silent and fiercely loyal granddaughter is one of his most endearing aspects. Yet by the end of the film, as a blood-famished vampire, he comes excruciatingly close to feeding on her, desecrating her constant purity. Mimic’s Susan, like Seth Brundle in Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), tampers with Nature and produces monstrosities. Blade is a human-vampire hybrid who exterminates vampires, presumably a noble goal. But Blade II comes close to suggesting that within Blade’s exterminatory zeal lies an ancillary evil, a desire to destroy that mirrors the vampires’ own. Blade can’t make sense of his vampiric nature and relentlessly strives to annihilate all vampires so that his own nature can remain unexamined.

Although the morally dubious hero is nothing new in the work of directors sophisticated or otherwise, as a Del Toro trope it is worth study. He refuses any banal sense of Manichean good and evil. He resembles artists like Hitchcock and De Palma in his insistence on the moral ambiguity of the hero. In so doing, Del Toro deconstructs the legitimated supremacy of the patriarchal male hero, in whom the audience presumably trusts implicitly. In this sense, it is intriguing that he makes no gendered distinction among his morally ambiguous heroes. Clearly, Mimic’s Susan bears responsibility for the creatures she helped to spawn. She is neither an idealized maternal Mary-figure nor an Eve-evil temptress. Rather, she is, like all Del Toro heroes, recognizably human, flawed in the face of life and evil.

The set-piece as its own end

Some scenes in Mimic achieve the poetic, oneiric horror of the mother-meat sequence in Bunuel’s Los Olividados, or the Salvador Dali dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. For instance, the spectral, dreamy little boy besieged by two humanlike, looming insects, mixes so many fairy tale and horror movie tones that it’s almost like its own micro-movie universe. In the most unsettling sequence, Susan waits for a train on an increasingly denuded, empty platform. Suddenly realizing she is alone save for a tall, hooded stranger—one of the Mimic insects—she races away from it down the platform. The insect splits open its human garb to reveal itself in all of its blurring, insect glory, swooping through the platform on now extended, nightmarish wings, seizing Susan as its prey, her demon lover taking her on a flight of erotic damnation.

There are other bravura moments in Mimic—think of the battle with the Male Insect at the climax, in which Susan raises a cut hand to lure it towards her and away from the boy, her stigmata a sign of female heroism; or of the alien powwow of insects converging around the doctor before he blows them up and plunges to surprising safety in the water below.

No director more eloquently employs CGI graphics than Del Toro. I have never been so moved by the use of CGI as when I watched the ghostly sorrow of the little boy apparition in The Devil’s Backbone, or so thrilled as when I watch the demon lover insect taking flight in the subway. There is also a glorious moment at the climax of Blade II in which the vampire heroine, afflicted with sunlight, heroically dies limb by limb in the glare of dawn, her martyr’s death a new vampire myth.

The critical value of Del Toro’s oeuvre

Del Toro’s persistent talent rescues him from critical oblivion. If we piece together moments from his films, we have an impressive body of cinematic statements. The little girl rescuing her grandfather from death in Cronos; Susan’s raised, slashed hand of defiance at the climax of Mimic; Blade’s embrace of the dying vampire woman at the end of Blade II—all of these images taken together amount to a profound and beautifully limned statement about moments of profound generosity and courage from embattled heroes in the face of evil. As a message, it’s utterly simple and awesome, like those in most myths and fairy tales. Del Toro’s work forces us to recognize that part may often be more significant than whole.
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David Greven is an Assistant Professor of English at Connecticut College. He specializes in 19th century American literature and film. His book Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) examines the recurrent figure of the isolate, emotionally and sexually unavailable male in Classic American literature. His work on literature has appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, Genders and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Greven has written articles on film and television for such journals as Cineaste, Cineaction, Reel Food, Action Chicks and Reading Sex and the City. Among his passions are Milton, Hawthorne, Poe, Hitchcock, Bette Davis, Classic Star Trek, and De Palma.

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What Would Barry Do?

By Matt Maul

To be perfectly honest, I had turned off last week’s election broadcasts by 9:30pm. My prediction that it would be decided by nine o'clock was only premature by half an hour. Instead of watching John McCain, my choice for president, get defeated by Barack Obama, I decided that the movie 300 would be a more entertaining lost cause to see played out. Based on what little of the coverage I did catch, including that high-tech news anchor hologram on CNN and those inane electronic touch screens that are more suited for weather reports, I think I made the right decision.

The combination of an incumbent GOP president with ever-declining approval ratings, Obama's near perfect campaign, an economic meltdown, and their own mixed messages, made the McCain/Palin ticket seem as over-matched as Greek King Leonidas' thin Spartan army against the Persian onslaught. Unfortunately for him, McCain didn't have his own campaign equivalent of the narrow pass at Thermopylae to funnel the odds in his favor.

While I’m still waiting to have my first “obamasm,” I resented the notion suggested by my unabashedly liberal cousin that the electoral results had left me holed up in a bunker. I pointed out (perhaps a bit too defensively) that most of the blatant displays of emotional outbursts I witnessed after the Obama victory were exhibited by her side. I’ll be fair and refrain from criticizing verklempt supporters who were savoring an historic moment as long as no one castigates me for remaining dry-eyed. In the same way that a lion tamer should never get too relaxed while in the cage, a real conservative probably shouldn’t get choked up over ANY politician. There’s something to be said for the dispassionate objectivity garnered when taking a healthy arms-length posture toward elected officials.

As they enter the political wilderness for an indeterminable period of exile, many in the GOP brain trust are thrashing about seeking to pin the blame for the loss on someone or something other than themselves. The most common conclusion held in Republican circles seems to be that McCain just wasn’t "conservative” enough. Michael Medved takes issue with that stance in his column that asks the question: “Was the Maverick Too Moderate to Win?”

"In fact, the results from Tuesday show that McCain did better than his conservative running mates—and in some cases, much better. In New Mexico, for instance, the Presidential nominee ran three points ahead of the hard-line, anti-immigration candidate Steve Pearce, who ran for an open Senate seat. McCain also drew three points more than incumbent Senator Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, six percentage points more than Senator Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina, five points more than re-elected Senate leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, two points more than Senator Roger Wicker in Mississippi.

"For instance, Senator Susan Collins of Maine beat back a well-financed Democratic challenge and drew an amazing 61% in her state—where McCain got only 40%. Likewise, Gordon Smith in Oregon (who may still retain his seat after the long tabulation process concludes) advertised his willingness to work with Democrats (including Barack Obama) and ran four points ahead of McCain."

On the other hand, the American University’s Center for the study of the American Electorate reported that Republican turnout at the polls was down by 1.3 percent. So, the numbers Medved cites are probably skewed in favor of “moderates” because of the GOP dogs that chose not to bark and instead stayed home on November 4th.

Right now the Republican party finds itself in a large hanger like a team of FAA investigators arranging pieces from the wreckage of an airline disaster trying to determine exactly what went wrong. Certainly, crosstalk between Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld can be heard prominently over the black box. But that probably obscures a more serious rudder problem for the GOP.

I don’t think it’s as simple as suggesting that we’re a more moderate nation now. The passing of Proposition 8, a ban on gay marriage in California, for instance, would seem to belie that notion. This ballot proposal passed in a state that voted for Obama by a twenty-four percent margin. Obama did enunciate “gay rights” as part of his agenda. But, I’m being charitable when I characterize his stance on the gay marriage issue itself as very nuanced.

So, where to begin? I find the suggestion of a battle waging between the moderate and conservative wings of the Republican Party an intriguing, if not flawed, concept. Flawed because I’m not sure I always agree with the current definitions of what a “moderate” or a “conservative” is.

From my bunker the following night, I continued my election recovery therapy by watching Mr. Conservative, HBO’s documentary on Barry Goldwater. In 1964, he was arguably the very first "conservative" candidate for president and author of the ground-breaking The Conscience of a Conservative. Goldwater famously said at his nominating convention that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and (bold added) "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"

There’s that word, “moderate,” again. This time it’s used as a pejorative to chastise those who refuse to take a definitive stance on issues and instead try to split the difference. Love him or hate him, I don’t think Goldwater could ever have been accused of that.

No one’s asked me and I sincerely doubt it will happen, but I can’t help but wonder (or hope) that this downtime could be used to retool the GOP more into the image of Goldwater than the confusing quilt of contradictions it is now. Again, the definitive post-mortem on 2008 hasn’t really been written, but my gut tells me that this would be step in the right direction (no pun intended).

It's important to point out that were he starting his career as a conservative politician today, Goldwater, would probably not pass muster with many of the current crop. For one thing, he was pro-choice. And, when confronted with the question late in his career, Goldwater supported gay rights as well. From a truly CONSERVATIVE viewpoint, he correctly saw these as matters of personal choice that a properly limited government simply had no business injecting itself into. Goldwater wasn’t trying to be provocative or appease the other side. He was just being consistent.

However, one of the reasons for the ultimate success of conservatism as a movement in the late 70s and 80s was its alliance with the “Religious Right” who carried their very vocal stance on social issues into the center of the Republican tent. This has proven to be a two-edged sword as their agenda has often been at odds with the original premise of "conservative" governance.

Here’s the thing. I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian. Which is sort of like being a Roman Catholic without all the laughs. As such, I certainly understand church dogma on the aforementioned social issues and, truth be told, agree with most of it. However, when push comes to shove, I'm most comfortable following what I see as the founder of my religion’s stance against the mixing of church and state inherent in his admonition to “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.”

As described in the New Testament, Jesus made that statement while being duplicitously questioned by a group of men over the apparent conflict between church teachings and Roman tax law (it’s always about taxes, isn’t it?). The questioners were attempting to trick Jesus into committing a seditious act by getting the rabbi to preach against Roman taxation. Cleverly (he was GOD, after all), Jesus assessed their motives and effectively sidestepped the issue. Requesting to see a Roman coin, which one of the men produced, he asked them to describe it for him. The coin had a likeness of Caesar, a divinity in Roman culture, engraved on it. As their religious doctrine did forbid the possession of such a graven image, that alone probably caused Christ’s questioners no small level of embarrassment. So, it was probably with a sort of shrug that Jesus uttered his often quoted answer.

To be sure, because it was a tactical, almost political, answer, many find it too ambiguous to be instructive. However, I agree with the interpretation of the incident as a caution to the faithful that the mixing of theology and politics is, at best, a tricky undertaking and should be avoided. Goldwater was a bit less ambiguous and said straight out that religious groups had NO business in the making of governmental policy. So, while I hold pretty strong negative feelings about abortion personally, I hesitate a bit when confronting how to legislate it. I'd hasten to point out that I find any argument against capital punishment that quotes the Pope is equally problematic for that same reason.

Of course, from the Left’s perspective, it often seems that any conservative who takes a pro-choice stance is magically transformed into a thoughtful and reasonable person. I remember one particular Goldwater appearance on the Tonight Show where he was on a roll lambasting the Religious Right. The segment was intercut with shots of another guest that night, Rosanne Barr, who was shown beaming at the senator admiringly. The frequency of the cuts to the comedienne left me with the impression that the television director in the booth felt that Barr’s approval somehow added epistemological weight to Goldwater's position.

I often wonder if those who now would label Goldwater as a moderate, or even a liberal, truly understand his classically conservative views on other issues such as gun control. Goldwater certainly didn’t interpret the Second Amendment as moot because it strictly applied to state “militias” (whatever those are). Of course, based on a Brian Williams interview of Barack Obama that I recently saw, the President-elect interprets the Second Amendment as an “individual right” too. Or perhaps that was another nuanced position.

As I write this, the top economic story today is the question of what to do with the troubled American auto industry. Specifically, should the Detroit based automakers be bailed out, as the banking and mortgage industries were a number of weeks ago? The sight of Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm as part of Obama’s financial advisory team (which strikes many of us in this state as laughable) would seem to indicate Obama’s inclination toward such an action. Personally, this is a tough one for me. As a Michigander who drives past the GM building every day, it’s my ox that’s now being gored. But my free market inclination is just a bit queasy about using more taxpayer dollars (which haven't been collected yet) to prop up yet another set of corporations.

Indeed, the repercussions of a failed domestic auto industry could affect up to three million other workers nationwide. Or, as Stella (Thelma Ritter) said about nervous car company executives in Rear Window, “When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country's ready to let go.”

I'm pretty sure that Goldwater would be against the proposed bailout. He didn’t hold back from his criticism of management OR labor when he opposed the passage of the government loan for Chrysler in the 1970’s:

"I think this is probably the biggest mistake that the Congress has ever made in its history. I think future historians will register this action as a beginning of the end of the free market system in America. The company was badly run."

This week, Thomas Friedman called for what would amount to a dramatic government takeover of the American auto industry. He correctly assigns blame to management for it's inability to make a profit on smaller, more fuel efficient cars, but mentions the culpability of labor and dealers in the domestic auto cost structure only in passing.

Friedman also fails to give the automakers any credit for their recent accomplishments, which, as pointed out by AP writer Tom Krisner, include “huge progress this decade in cutting costs, raising productivity, and building competitive cars while handling multiple government regulations and a powerful labor union.”

Krisner further writes:

"As Honda and Toyota took over the small and mid-size car markets, Ford, GM and Chrysler put most of their resources into trucks and SUVs, which brought in billions in profits that covered growing health care, pension and labor costs...

"…When times were good, the automakers did not take on the UAW, which the companies say drove up their labor costs to $30 per hour more than Japanese companies paid their workers. The figure includes pension and health care costs for hundreds of thousands of retirees.

"When GM pushed for changes in 1998, the union went on strike at two key Flint, Mich., parts plants, shutting down the company and costing it about $2 billion in profits…

"…when the SUV and truck market started to fade in the mid-2000s, executives realized their business model would no longer work and began globalizing their vehicles, streamlining manufacturing processes and developing new and better cars.

"The UAW, realizing that the companies were in trouble, agreed to a landmark new contract last year that nearly eliminated the labor cost difference between the Detroit Three and the Japanese, shifting retiree health care costs to a union-administered trust fund.

"But just as the cost cuts started to take hold and new products were rolling out, gas prices rose rapidly to around $4 per gallon and Wall Street collapsed, virtually eliminating credit which 60 percent of car buyers need."

So, I’m reluctantly forced to choose between two options: a bailout, complete with all sorts of federally intrusive stings, that might make me feel good short-term, or to Darwinistically let free market forces work in the hopes that a stronger automotive organism will evolve. Taking my cue from Goldwater, I’m forced to choose the latter. I can’t honestly see federal appointees doing a better job at running the Big Three if Friedman’s vision were fully implemented. One needs only to look at the U.S. Postal Service, which currently is in the red, to understand my diffidence.

One of the best alternatives to a bailout I'm aware of is a proposal that would give the same sort of tax credits to people for buying American cars that were offered to those who installed more efficient home energy systems such as solar energy panels or up-to-date windows. At least then the cost of such a rescue could be tied more directly to some measure of success.

It’s going to be a tough call and one of first tests of the new Democrat-controlled Congress and White House. While I've tried to keep the focus here on the Republicans, I certainly have feelings (and misgivings) about what I see happening on the other side of the aisle. However, I’m honestly hoping that they do well. My family's future hinges upon their success (or failure) as much as anyone's.

As for the GOP, it looks like THEIR dream of “less government” has finally been fulfilled. Just not in the way they envisioned it.
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Matt Maul is author of the blog Maul of America.

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Links for the Day (November 16th, 2008)

1. Bookending Synecdoche on Links today. First, Filmbrain with "The Life of the Mind: On Synecdoche, New York (Part 1)." Bring us Part 2 soon, my friend!

["The choices we make in our lives -- from seemingly insignificant matters to life-altering moments -- are at the heart of Kaufman's screenplay, and death is no exception. When Hazel (Samantha Morton) expresses concerns about moving into a house permanently on fire, the realtor nonchalantly says that's it's a big decision how one prefers to die. There are at least half-a-dozen characters in the film who shuffle off this mortal coil, yet Caden, so encumbered by his life's work, can't even die without direction. Obsession with death is nothing new in cinema, but Kaufman's take on it is particularly bleak. For Bergman, death is often tied to man's relationship with god (or lack thereof), whereas Woody Allen uses comedy as a defense mechanism for his fears. In Synecdoche, New York, death is anything but peaceful -- there's decay, disease, infection, and agonizing pain. Bodies literally break down, such that coffins have to be stuffed with cotton balls to keep bones from rattling around. Kaufman legitimizes all of our worst fears about dying."]

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2. "Cult TV Flashback #63: The Time Tunnel (1966-1967)": From John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film/TV.

["Of all Allen's storied sci-fi series, The Time Tunnel was perhaps the least successful on its original sortie. It aired for just a single season of 30 hour-long episodes on ABC. Broadcast from September 9, 1966 to April 7, 1967, the series involved the aforementioned scientists -- Newman (James Darren) and Phillips (Robert Colbert) -- tumbling (literally...) through various historical (and future!) time periods, a circumstance which enabled the series to frequently re-use footage and costumes from such films as Titanic (1953), The Buccaneer (1958) and Khartoum (1966). Despite this crafty, cost-saving measure, the Time Tunnel pilot was still one of the most expensive ever produced at the time, costing a then-whopping $500,000 dollars. You can readily observe where all the considerable expense went in the pilot episode: there are some amazing matte-paintings of the Time Tunnel complex...the whole facility looks like it was outsourced to Krell construction workers. Also, the Time Tunnel control room set is vast and impressive: a testament to 1960s-style futurism. There are banks of giant computers with lots of blinking lights, and that massive, whirly-gig tunnel itself taking center stage. The visual effects are opulent too, particularly views of the lead actors somersaulting through a moving, glittering temporal vortex."]

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3. "Legal grind ends for woman in dirty dance case": Hungry thighs.

["Nobody puts Rebecca Willis in a corner. A small mountain town has agreed to pay $275,000 for banning her from a community hangout after residents complained about her dirty dancing. Willis, then 56, was told to stay away from the Marshall Depot community center eight years ago."]

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4. "A High-Concept Disappointment?: Analyzing the Yes Man Trailer": By Stephen Snart for Fluxing Philosophic.

["The problem with marketing a high-concept formula like this is that the core humor of the film is contained in set pieces and easily extractable dialogue exchanges (e.g. Carrey receives an e-mail asking if he would like to increase the size of his penis and he answers aloud to his co-workers) that work just as well as stand-alone clips as they do in the context of the film. This means that the film itself can only be effective if the threads holding together the set pieces are strong enough to match the comedic high jinks already consumed for free in the advertising. You can’t sit through a 90-minute film exclusively made of Carrey responding yes to crazy/embarrassing questions (it’s hard enough stringing it out in a 2-minute trailer) so by fundamental nature of plot concerns, it needs to contain extra material to stretch out the conceit past sketch-length. But the problem is that the marketing sells it solely on the high-concept scenario and that’s what will compel people to head out to the multiplex. As the advertisements already offer a vast array of these scenarios, the film is setting itself up for failure, at least in terms of quality if not finance – it takes a lot for a Carrey comedy to gross under $100 million."]

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5. Shawn Levy of The Oregonian on Synecdoche, New York. (Hattip: N.P. Thompson)

["Thus far, Kaufman has been American cinema's resident egghead mad genius, unspooling outre ideas and whimsies that have allowed stars and audiences to indulge arty impulses. Now, though, he seems something more: a cross of Lewis Carroll, Woody Allen and Samuel Beckett, a mordant fool singing a black comic dirge about his own mortality and, inevitably, everyone else's. You have a stake in "Synecdoche" simply by virtue of being alive."]

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Quote of the Day: Vachel Lindsay

"Never be a cynic, even a gentle one. Never help out a sneer, even at the devil."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Via Andrew Sullivan, a few images of Proposition-8-and-its-ilk protests across the country: Alaska, Minneapolis, and a post-protest D.C. rainbow.





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Clip of the Day: Edie McClurg knows cooking.

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.

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Video essay for Shooting Down Pictures #928 (69). The Sun Shines Bright (1956, John Ford), featuring Jonathan Rosenbaum

By Kevin B. Lee

Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum compares his favorite John Ford movie, The Sun Shines Bright, with his favorite Carl Dreyer movie, Gertrud, on a video essay produced by House contributor Kevin B. Lee, as part of Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?.

For much more detailed discussions about these films separately, see Jonathan's article on The Sun Shines Bright in Rouge and his essay on Gertrud in his collection Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism.




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Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for Cinema-Scope, The Chicago Reader, Senses of Cinema and Slant. His website is www.alsolikelife.com.

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930 (71). Night Moves (1975, Arthur Penn)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

[Author's Note: Night Moves is playing Sunday 11/16 and Tuesday 11/18 as part of the Arthur Penn retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. Click here for more info.]

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Arthur Penn’s contribution to the mid-70s Hollywood revival of film noir reflects all of the bitter disillusionment and vertiginous, disempowering truth borne by the fallout of Watergate on American society. An unheroic, deeply flawed private eye Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) tries to bring a missing girl to safety, only to be led down a rabbit hole that collapses upon him by the end. Penn strikes a atmosphere of 70s coastal sun-baked laid backness hosting a legion of jive-talkers and hangers-on, and concealing a conspiracy both geometrically simple and shockingly unfathomable. Through this wasteland walks Hackman, in what would be a career performance if he didn’t have so many others worthy of the term. Feeding off a lively, colorful ensemble (including early performances by teenage Melanie Griffith and an unhinged James Woods) and blessed by Alan Sharp’s zinger-laden dialogue, Hackman toils with a latent sense of professionalism that eventually is consumed by pride into a self-destructive, onanistic reckoning with his own ineffectuality in a world that offers no safe harbor to his private anguish and confusion. Sharp’s intricate plotting unravels like a Rube Goldberg, with an ending that ties up loose ends so neatly that it resembles something of an oneiric projection of Moseby’s worst fears come true.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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929 (70). U samogo sinyego morya/By the Bluest of Seas (1936, Boris Barnet)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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The crowning achievement in the mercurial career of Soviet director Boris Barnet, this simple story of a love triangle between two shipwrecked sailors and the beach blonde darling of a fishing village exemplifies a kind of film that could only have been made at the dawn of the talkies, when cinema had to rediscover its vision at the same time that it discovered its voice. Films that most ingeniously mounted this challenge—Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Luis Bunuel’s L’Age d’or, and both Frank Borzage’s and Yuan Muzhi’s versions of Street Angel, to name a few—were able to retain the luminescent purity of the silent era iconography and hitch it to pure simple stories of love and discovery, milked from an infant’s gaze and an adolescent’s emotions. The tremulous and intermittent occurrences of sound add a paradoxical wonder, fearlessly inflicting violence on the silent image by thrusting it into a fragile new dimension. The result is a cinema that remains vital and vigorous, perpetually new. By the Bluest of Seas opens with a capsizing of a ship among relentlessly stormy seas that amounts to an audiovisual ablution for the viewer, eventually casting them on a blank, enchanted seaside full of possibility, where boisterous song, vaudevillian slapstick, romantic wistfulness and nonstop pining rule the day. It is a utopia of emotional freedom and spontaneously generating, momentary magic, a utopia that can only happen in the cinema.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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"... truly the Voice of the Gutter!": Wild Style

By Steven Boone

[Wild Style opens today at Manhattan's Film Forum for a one-week, late shows run. Click here for details.]

“So you want to be an artist, huh?” a woman in evening gown, jewels and 80s power hair says while reclining on the bed in her luxury apartment. Skinny teenage graffiti bandit Raymond (Lee Quinones), aka Zorro, answers the rich, white prospective patron, who seems more interested in sleeping with him than taking him seriously, “I am an artist.” He isn’t particularly thrown by her Mrs. Robinson act. He wants to know if she really respects his work. Still, he can’t help but be the kid he is when taking in the apartment’s stunning city view: “Wow, you know I only see this in comic books.”

Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style has retained its cult classic status for 25 years as a time capsule of early 80s hip hop culture, but seen right now, it stands out most as a satire on urban class collision. It’s all about the way promoters, brokers, journalists, patrons, wannabes and naysayers interact with a rising art star straight from the slums. It playfully mines the silly surrealism of art world ascension, typified by the wealthy art client in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, who gasped in admiration at the titular painter’s work: “… truly the Voice of the Gutter!”

Raymond’s not out to be the Voice of anything other than himself. He just wants to make his graffiti art anonymously, staying steps ahead of the cops. He “bombs” subway cars in the rail yards and returns to his disapproving older brother via fire escape late at night. Any fan of Nas’ 1994 debut album Illmatic remembers the ensuing brotherly exchange as a classic intro sample: “Stop fuckin’ around and be a man. There ain’t nothing out here for you!” “Yes, there is ... this.” In drops a beat that is pure primal NYC hip hop, The Subway Theme by DJ Grand Wizard Theodore. Where the Nas cue, "Genesis," would layer in gritty, smoked out voices of barely legal young thugs talking tough, Ahearn gives us a montage of gloriously defaced subway trains snaking through elevated tracks, sprawling murals, urban blight, sketchpads run riot with color, Zorro on the move, and his graffiti rivals, a crew called The Union. It’s clear that, beyond love and a steady income, Ray wants for little more in this brave young world.

Trouble is, others have different plans for him. An aggressive young promoter (Fred Braithwaite, aka Fab 5 Freddy) pushes him to interview as Zorro with magazine journalist Virginia (downtown culture luminary Patti Astor, playing a Deborah Harry-ish blond bombshell who seems impossibly ditzy for a reporter). He takes Virginia on a tour of New York hip hop, from graffiti wall murals to the rail yards to a raucous party packed with rappers, DJs, and breakers. Zorro reluctantly tags along, worried that appearing in a magazine will make him a prime police target. (The party scene and all other musical numbers in Wild Style fill in the gaps in NYC subculture history left by the post-punk-centric Downtown 81, another film featuring Quinones and Fab 5 Freddy, along with Jean-Michel Basquiat.)

The trio then go to a swank party full of condescending/curious Manhattan elites and art world people—but not before Zorro and the reporter almost get their heads blown off by stick-up kids with a sawed-off shotgun. Freddy intervenes right on time. “Hey, man, nah, they’re cool!” As delicately as if he’d just mispronounced a name at a dinner party, the lead robber lowers his shotty and apologizes: “Yo, man, I’m sorry. I had no idea these were your friends.” Freddy graciously shrugs, “Don’t worry 'bout it, man. You know how that goes.” Afterward on the ride uptown, Virginia squeals, “Wait til I tell all the people at the party I almost got killed! They’ll love it!” This is Ahearn and company, who learned how to make a feature film only by shooting this movie on the fly, also learning how to make social satire from scratch. Adorable.

Even cuter, Zorro pines after Rose (graffiti artist Sandra Fabara, aka Lady Pink), who he first assumes is his new girlfriend on the basis of a sweet kiss at the film’s beginning, but later suspects has been stepping out on him with various members of The Union. Wild Style takes this romantic subplot into a more interesting place than you might expect. Ray ultimately charms Rose through his work, and their relationship is consummated not in the bedroom but through an 11th hour brainstorm when Zorro is stumped for ideas while facing a deadline on a band shell mural he has been commissioned to paint for the movie’s big showstopper. Rose shows her love for him by telling him his big idea sucks and suggesting a better one. Instead of boiling into an argument, this confrontation sends Zorro sky high. She’s kept it real with him and fed his imagination, not his ego or his ambition. It’s a lovely little moment.

Ahearn’s style is as simple and direct as the raps. He apparently didn’t waste a lot of time rehearsing or polishing the film’s dialogue, preferring to just set up situations and let them play out. The result has all the befuddled charm of a middle school talent show where the kids all have talents, just not always the ones they’ve been asked to perform. In this charmingly ragged way, Wild Style celebrates the persistence of street-level ambition, insatiable creativity, and youthful passions in the face of hostile (the cops) and exploitative (media) forces. Zorro wants his work to be appreciated, sure, but he’s not out to conquer the world or become a perpetual moving target . Yet that’s just what hip hop would do/become within four years of Wild Style’s completion. Those who still love and contribute to the culture return to this film as a wellspring of hip hop’s d-i-y, improvisatory spirit. Many point to the impromptu scene of Grandmaster Flash doing turntable sorcery in his kitchen as an emblem of that spirit. But this film overflows with such images. My favorite passes by in a flash: Knobby-kneed little neighborhood kids pitch in to help Zorro finish the band shell, maneuvering paint rollers nearly twice their height, as serious and focused as classical artisans.

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

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It's Clarity: A Christmas Tale

By Vadim Rizov

[A Christmas Tale opens today in New York and L.A.]

Early critical response to A Christmas Tale repeatedly insisted that here's the proverbial Desplechin film for people who don't like Desplechin, in the same way that Kent Jones claimed Regular Lovers was "a Garrel film for people who don't know or don't like other Garrel films." Except Jones didn't mean it as harshly as it sounded (he wrote the liner notes for the DVD, after all), and saying Desplechin's film is more accessible than his past work should in no way imply compromise. A Christmas Tale doesn't synthesize everything Desplechin's been working on since 1991's La Vie Des Morts—how could any one film capture the scope of Desplechin's relentlessly schizophrenic interests?—but it's the most coherent alchemy of Morts, My Sex Life and Kings And Queen we're ever likely to get. It's not dilution; it's clarity.

The plot, such as it is, concerns the seasonal, unsurprisingly acrimonious reunion of the Vuillard clan: cancer-stricken mother Junon (Catherine Deneuve), gravel-voiced paterfamilias Abel (Jean-Paul Roussilon), alcoholic son Henri (Mathieu Amalric), golden child Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), depressive Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), and a host of assorted partners, cousins and hangers-on. It's a family reunion in more ways than one: all the above-named players (minus Poupaud) are veterans of at least one Desplechin film. Nearing 50, Desplechin has found an ensemble cast that, like Ford's favored players, should keep him going for a long time yet. He's daring to reference his own filmography extensively for the first time, moving beyond thematic continuity: the pleasure of seeing Amalric and his long-suffering My Sex Life girlfriend Emmanuelle Devos reunited (this time with the balance of power firmly in her hands) is not to be underestimated. There's also the kick of seeing one Paul Dedalus (Emile Berling) as Henri's nephew: Paul Dedalus, of course, was Amalric's name in My Sex Life, and the transference of neuroticism from one generation to the next is befitting.

Other references have more to offer than the (undeniable but indescribable) pleasure of watching a group of talented people age together on-screen in a world of their making. Consider a brief shot (five seconds long) in which Desplechin crams in three allusions: Devos rounds a corner in a museum, coming across Deneuve sitting in rapt contemplation of a painting. Denueve's bright red jacket and gaze easily conjure up Vertigo; the upper-right corner of the frame shows a part of the painting, a swan. Desplechin's long-standing fascination with mythology reminds us of Leda and the swan; that, in turn, takes us back to Kings And Queen, whose repeated references to the myth fascinated its admirers (and maddened detractors) without anyone agreeing on what it meant.

I'm still not sure what it meant in Kings And Queen, but I think I've finally cracked the mystery of Desplechin's fascination with myth. Consider first the names on display (Juno(n), Devos' Faunia): Desplechin's interests are eclectic, but rarely random provocations designed to frustrate audiences. Early on, Henri announces that he's "part of a myth, but I don't know what myth means." Well, for starters: it means one story that's part of an enveloping fabric of hundreds of others, a story that might appear bizarre, arcane and unrelatable without context. (Such as, e.g., a story about a god-swan raping a woman.) And this is, unfortunately, the way families work as well: they're tight-knit groups of people who long ago failed to understand why they turned out the way they did in relation to each other, relying on shorthand that confuses outsiders as much as themselves. Why does Elizabeth hate Henri as much as she does? Neither one of them knows.

But there's another thing: a myth is something that resonates because it will not go away. Which is what A Christmas Tale (and, ultimately, Desplechin's filmography) seems to be about. The typical home-for-the-holidays family movie has an easy, comfortable arc to deliver catharsis on schedule: first everyone pretends nothing is wrong, then everyone explodes, cries and reconciles, having lanced and salved their long-simmering resentments. A Christmas Tale begins in a state of naked, open animosity and never heals. The point isn't that all will be well after things are brought out into the open; the point is that things will never be OK, and once you acknowledge that, you can begin to live with the trauma for the rest of your life. Late in the film, cousin Simon (Laurent Capelutto), confessing to a long-deferred love, insists that everything he does—dressing, talking, whatever—is for his lost love. "My painting is for myself," he clarifies. Desplechin's familial trauma is constant, but his art is for himself.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

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Links for the Day (November 14th, 2008)

1. "Into the Mystic": J. Hoberman on two Tarkovsky volumes for Bookforum. (Via GreenCine.)

["In the context of a Marxist theocracy, Tarkovsky assumed the illuminating function of obsessing in public over contradictions between the spiritual and the material, the natural and the social, the historical and the individual—variously addressing the Great Patriotic War and the birth of Muscovy, the power of memory and national identity, the nature of art and the impoverishment of modern life. Rublev not only treated the rival religion of Christianity as an axiom of Russia’s historical identity but, even while dealing with state patronage and repression, was the first (and perhaps only) film produced under the Soviets to treat an artist as a world-historical figure."]

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2. House contributor Zachary Wigon reviews A Christmas Tale for The Auteurs' Notebook. See above this entry for Vadim Rizov's take. More Desplechin at Thanks for the Use of the Hall, where Dan Sallitt notes on his beloved Esther Kahn.

["It began to feel a bit like it feels when I sit around with my own relatives, immediate and extended, and we discuss everyone's problems, the wrongs each has done the others, the old stories everyone tells a million times; it began to feel fetishized and masturbatory. A Christmas Tale revels in the dense, layered backstory it has created for its central family, worshipping the legends of the Vuillard history as giant moments imbued with Significance and Meaning. However, as the film goes on, we realize that there is nothing remarkable about these stories; what significance is it to me if, say, Simon (Laurent Capelluto) has always loved Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni), or Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) has always been the peace-broker? Is this not what composes soap opera as well? It's true that the way the film approaches the story is far more important than the story itself, but the film's formal approach can only sustain itself for so long before its magic wears off. This is true for any film. And as Desplechin should know, when the magic wears off is when the movie should end."]

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3. "Gradation of emphasis, starring Glenn Ford": Latest from David Bordwell, on Charles Barr's idea of the "gradation of emphasis."

[" Charles Barr’s 1963 essay “CinemaScope: Before and After” has become a classic of English-language film criticism. (1) It proffers a lot of intriguing ideas about widescreen film, but one idea that Barr floated has more general relevance. I’ve found it a useful critical tool, and maybe you will too. Barr called the idea gradation of emphasis. Here’s what he says:"]

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4. Playing catch-up with Parallax View, courtesy site editor Sean Axmaker: a series of posts about or related to "The Films of Budd Boetticher" DVD box set. In order: "Budd Boetticher: An Introduction" (By Axmaker); "Seven Men from Now - A Cinema Masterpiece" (By Richard T. Jameson); "Budd Boetticher and the Ranown Cycle: “What a director is supposed to do”" (Interview with Boetticher by Axmaker); "Burt Kennedy: Writing Broadway in Arizona" (Interview with Burt Kennedy by Axmaker); "Budd Boetticher: A Career" (Retrospective by Axmaker); "Budd Boetticher: A DVD Wish List" (Axmaker's hopes for future Boetticher home video releases).

["When Oscar “Budd” Boetticher, the last of the old Hollywood two-fisted directors, died on November 27, 2001, his passing was barely noted. This old-fashioned studio pro with an independent streak, a colorful history (including a turn as a bullfighter in Mexico), and a career of some 35 features, had been largely forgotten by all but the most dedicated film scholars and western buffs. His work was poorly represented on VHS at the height of that format and, as of October 2008, only four of his over forty features were on DVD. Has any other celebrated American director ever been so poorly served by home video?"]

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5. "The Serrated Edge of Victory": A beautiful post (and resultant comments) from Michael Guillen, dealing with the confusion inherent to and the oft-deceptive tactics practiced in the political process. A real must-read.

["Another loss for me in this political campaign was that of an endeared aunt who sent me one of the most racist, religiously intolerant emails I've ever received, and who—when questioned about such hateful advocacy—responded by calling me small-minded. I'm too old to obediently grant respect where it is not due and—as I weed my garden for Winter—recognize that there are no small minds, only small actions. I dedicate this entry to her. The work continues."]

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Quote of the Day: Henny Youngman

"When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): One of the first pictures of an extrasolar planet.



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Clip of the Day: Latest of Watchmen (exclusive to Yahoo).

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.

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HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 7 (25), "Oscar (sic) Schindler's Cock Glove"

By John Lichman, Faisal A. Qureshi, Vadim Rizov, and Keith Uhlich

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

INTRODUCTION

Hello Dear Non-Listeners!

We're back like Death Metal Disco and thrice as evil. But this time, we're bringing in the big guns—ok, fine, our imported guns—as we recorded on the Fifth of November with Faisal A. Qureshi (Nerve's Screengrab among other things). As for the annoying buzzing noise during the first ten minutes, that is what happens when your co-host keeps fiddling with his cell phone next to the recording device.

This episode is our minor tribute to the late Michael Crichton. We think back to previous works like Jurassic Park, as well as directorial efforts such as The Great Train Robbery and—shockingly—Runaway. Of course, it all devolves into weird praise for Kirstie Alley, Vadim grumbling about something or other, and me ignoring W. for a second week. At the same time, we learn why Faisal came to a podcast that he wasn't even aware of! (Kidding.)

Lo, this is Episode 7—"Oscar (sic) Schindler's Cock Glove." Thanks again to our guest, who went on with us to our second favorite bar—Holiday Cocktail Lounge—and was pleasantly surprised by the scum-like surroundings we like to inhabit.

Join us next time when Mike D'Angelo comes back to talk Afterschool and if you see either Vadim or me at the bar, please, buy us a drink! And give us jobs if you work for The Onion. (JL)

Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 41 minutes 51 seconds)

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PODCAST



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John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Faisal A. Qureshi's got an Amazon profile.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

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Links for the Day (November 13th, 2008)

1. "Batman launches suit against Christopher Nolan": That'd be the Turkish Batman. (Hattip: Ali Arikan) (Photo Credit: Bryce Edwards) Related: "'Dark Knight' Score Disqualified From Academy Awards Consideration" (from Cinematical).

["Hüseyin Kalkan, mayor of Batman, an ancient oil-producing town in south-eastern Turkey, is planning to sue Christopher Nolan, director of the recent box-office behemoth The Dark Knight, over the use of the name in the film. He claims Nolan and Warner Bros, which owns the film rights to the comic-book character, purloined the name without checking with him first. "There is only one Batman in the world," said Kalkan, a member of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society party. "The American producers used the name of our city without informing us.""]

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2. "More synecdoches, more f-words, more more": The latest episode of Vinyl is Podcast, featuring House contributor Ryland Walker Knight with Mark Haslam and Jennifer Stewart. Subject for discussion: Synecdoche, New York.

["RWK here. On our third podcast, Mark and I discussed his first take on Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (as well as Jean Eustache and, briefly, Jia Zhang-Ke), with Mark saying, "I liked it enough to not have an opinion of it right away." (He then put that reaction into some written words.) What I took and take that exit-poll impulse to mean is that he didn't feel it necessary to simply say, "I liked it," or, "I didn't like it," say to make a declaration of value. Because it's undeniable: this is a grand old meditation on major themes and concerns that continue to sprout up in cinema and, yes, in life. It's bound to shake, rattle and roll some souls. It's equally bound to simply turn off a large percentage of its audience, no matter its wit, right up front with some ugly images of festering decay and disease. Literally: dis-ease. There's little comfort in this film, although there are a lot of jokes. So, what does one do with this little beast? Well, we went straight home and talked on digital tape. We tried to form our opinions live. Of course, like the film, our conversation splintered and, in a way, as is always the case with words, it failed; or, it failed to resolve. And yet—even though an hour is a lot to ask of you, our faithful listeners—I think this is our best podcast yet. The look-see: I'm torn between the two poles."]

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3. The latest issue of the great online film magazine Rouge. Featuring a special tribute section to Manny Farber with a previously unanthologized piece "Seers for the Sleepless." Some resultant discussion at Girish's site.

["The non-stop talker, so popular that night clubs dump their girlie shows for his economical act (it requires only a mike and a telephone), is not necessarily a drug on the entertainment market. He has loosened up the slick gentility of U.S. broadcasting with an informality that radio needs badly if it is ever to get close to the sounds of real life. Some of them – Bill Williams, Barry Gray, Fred Robbins – are among radio’s cleverest word jugglers. Their ‘happiness talk’ actually gives the audience, including myself, a badly needed lift. But, in doing so, it makes them imbibe more sheer trash and nonsense in the name of spoken, sung, or written truth than the citizenry of any other country this side of the Iron Curtain. If they could supply the lift without the tricks, falsehoods and silliness, the disc jockeys would be just about the biggest thing to hit American culture since Walt Whitman."]

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4. According to the Mayan calendar, The X-Files, and Roland Emmerich, the world will end in 2012 (with some familiar musical accompaniment).

["They wouldn't."]

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5. "Dennis Hopper is the same age as John McCain": From Hollywood and Fine.

["“I’ve been a Republican for a long time,” he says, “since Reagan. I thought he was a bad actor but that it was time to change Congress. I voted for this Bush – and his father. But I became very disturbed by the whole process these past eight years. So I announced, just before Colin Powell did, that I was voting for Obama. “Thomas Jefferson once said that it’s your responsibility, every 20 years, to vote in the other party. Twenty years is up. The time is ripe to go back.”"]

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Quote of the Day: Josh Billings

"Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Some concept art for John Boorman's animated adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. (Via Ain't It Cool News)






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Clip of the Day: My sentiments exactly...

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.

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Comics Column #4: Mapmaking and the Hoi Polloi (Dylan Horrocks)

By Michael Peterson

XXIII. "There is only the past."

Jordan Mechner, creator of the long-lived Prince of Persia video game franchise, released a graphic novel inspired by his games earlier this year through First Second books. A publisher swiftly becoming known for high-quality literary works, First Second usually releases imported works from beloved European cartoonists like Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar, as well as prestige projects from already-known talents like Eddie Campbell or Jessica Abel—the idea of a video game adaptation coming from their publishing house, even a particularly well-marketed book like Prince of Persia (celebrating a major new game release), seemed something of an anomaly. However, unlike most adaptations of a video game into any other particular media—cinema having notably had trouble with the product so far—this book turned out to be surprisingly well thought-out and often gentle in its storytelling. While hardcore gamers who came to the book out of curiosity may have been disappointed at the minimal level of swashbuckling—or, really, any of the superficial elements inherent to the "platform game" video game mechanics—the book is a rewarding, if disposable, bit of fairy tale confection.

What makes the book work is not, strictly speaking, Iranian writer A. B. Sina's appropriation of Arabian Nights themes or the elegant simplicity of the linework by married artists LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland (one a noted illustrator of children's books, the other an animator at Dreamworks), but rather their combined understanding of the medium that they're working in. For an adaptation, there is a distinctly notable tailoring of the story to the strengths of the comic narrative. Prince of Persia, the game series, has two primary elements to its story: first, that there is and has been more than one prince, each of whose story repeats throughout history (an element it shares on some level with the best-selling Zelda franchise) and second, that time is an integral element. At first, that time played out as a time limit that the player had to race; later, it took the form of a time-travel mechanic that allowed the player to rewind moves and gaffes mid-play. In the graphic novel, the stories of two heroic Princes of Persia are intertwined through history and told concurrently, and the idea of "time" is played out in a myriad of techniques. From thematic elements concerning the impact of history on the present (at one point, one Prince must battle history itself, in the form of the dead rising), to the mechanics of how the story itself is told, the interplay of moments in time is kept at the forefront.

By telling two stories in tandem, vacillating back and forth, the most obvious method of playing with time and history is the juxtaposition of two moments in subsequent panels. This is a technique that was taken to perhaps its narrative limit in the two Dr. Manhattan chapters in Watchmen, where Manhattan's near-omniscience enables him to see all of time at once. We view moments out of order and simultaneously on the comic page, a taste of how Manhattan looks at all of time. As Dr. Manhattan says:

"Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet."

One of the best comics of last year, Matt Kindt's Super Spy, presented its series of vignettes and short stories out of order, and left it up to the reader to assemble the narrative itself—it worked twofold, because the actual espionage plot was very much secondary to the examination of what the characters had become due to their profession, and also because the act of "decoding" that part of history placed the reader within the story, trying to piece things together along with the characters. In Prince of Persia, one of the Princes, who both enacts moments in history and inhabits them, has been drawing picture scrolls telling the story of the previous Prince—and by reenacting those moments and identifying with them, he's making his artwork tell the story of two times, just as the book itself does. When he's forced to leave his artwork behind, the story barrels forward along the secondary motif of the river—the lifeblood of any desert kingdom, water here is used to represent time—the chosen prince of the prophecies rises from the waters, coming out of history itself, and the site of his reenactments becomes the true kingdom.

The inside covers of the books are marked with a pair of maps, essentially bookending history with cartography. This is appropriate for comics, as, in their ability to display moments in time simultaneously, they resemble nothing so much as maps of time as opposed to place.

XXIV. "...The Big Kids Table..."

One of America's most favored sons in the world of comics, Chris Ware, tends to be lauded more for craft than for story, and it's easy to see why: while an intensely skilled cartoonist, as a storyteller he is almost completely constrained by his style, a combination of emotional desolation and ironic detachment toward his own humor. While there is a certain degree of biting satire in portraying God as a superhero, a blatantly Superman-looking one at that, and then making that man a pathetic failure, the actual humor of it has no air to breathe because every other character in his works are similarly empty and broken. His best-selling Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Boy in the World was based in part on his real life confrontation with his father; his other major works feature the same tropes. If Ware shares one trait in common with Warren Ellis, the subject of this column's previous installment, it's his tendency to approach the same subject again and again, yet each time with a pair of tweezers.

Ware has two techniques that have gained some deserved praise, however, with regards to the portrayal of history. The first is similar to the jumbled histories of Watchmen and Prince of Persia, in which Ware sums up moments in creative history in brief comic strips and then collects them together on the page like a crowded Sunday newspaper, allowing them to play off one another and create history in aggregate—a concept brought even further by David Heatley, whose recent book My Brain is Hanging Upside Down features a pair of stories, one for each of Heatley's parents, in which hundreds of tiny one-note strips are piled atop each other in order to get a larger sense of each of them.

The second technique Ware uses, though, is more unique. Ware's formal diagrams for portraying relationships between his characters and the flow of history are uniquely beautiful. Late in Jimmy Corrigan, Ware has a two-page diagram follow the bloodline of one of the supporting characters back in time, using a series of snapshots, cutaways of a yearbook, the appearance of a pressed flower in a Bible, and a complicated series of arrows and trails in order to tie her to another supporting character who, as in Prince of Persia, exists in a simultaneous narrative taking place earlier in history. That it's even difficult to describe without the image notes it as particularly unique to the comic medium.

Ware and many of his peers—Ivan Brunetti, Adrian Tomine, Seth, and others—have ascended to certain rarefied stratum amongst comic professionals. They are viewed as the forefront of the medium by The New York Times, manage to pick up awards previously available only to prose fiction, and are otherwise held as proof that the comic medium has evolved past the material that wider audiences had for so long considered the only potential of comics at all. The other side of it, however, is that very frequently they find themselves considered the exception that proves the rule. They're sometimes shelved independently of other graphic novels—Spiegelman's Maus, David B.'s Epileptic, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis have been in the "Biography" section for years—and many of them are so insular that their recommendations and commentary stay restricted to the same crowd year in and year out. The Best American Comics was established three years ago as a counterpart to other "Best American" collections of prose writing and has largely maintained the same roster of talent in each annual edition.

It's the inevitable counterpoint to the insularity of superhero comics, which I discussed last time. Many of these cartoonists and their books very much do belong in the list of "best comics," but not all of them, all of the time, to the exclusion of the thousands of other creators who have been innovating or otherwise producing powerful work in relative obscurity. Unfortunately, there are no used bookstores, third-run theaters, or DVD rentals to provide late discoveries of work that slipped past the initial radar.

I was digging through some old notes in preparation for this installment on an especially bitter night in 2005, after attending a gallery opening here in Chicago hosted by cartoonist Ivan Brunetti, editor of a Yale anthology of comics very similar to the "Best American" books. The gallery featured the same few folks; I hurled out some invective that evening, some of which I'm inclined to retract and some of which is still true today:

"Brunetti is part of that society of cartoonists that holds our most public faces—Spiegelman and Ware, Chester Brown and Seth and Joe Matt, Daniel Clowes and Adrian Tomine and the rest of those who hold Schultz and Crumb as the binary star which we should orbit. They're the ones that sit at the Big Kids Table, and at this point, we're resigned to it. They're married to our roots in the daily and Sunday strips, and for many, that form is what informs their every creation, a view that cannot be disentangled. The comic book as a unit is the stuff of old pulps. To stray too far into genre territory, other than as an ironic metaphor, is to obfuscate your message and resign yourself to obscurity. But above all, there can be only one creator, not a union of writer and artist, for only a single creator can achieve their full vision.

"[...] I was surprised to see Jeffrey Brown had been offered a seat. His style is scratchy, they often look like they've been dashed out on a napkin over breadsticks, before the entrée arrives. As a writer, he manages often quite eloquently to capture a moment, a feeling, and to bring these together to show us life that feels very true, and often is quite literally. But should there not be a higher standard of artistic storytelling, to find your work on a wall? Where is David Mack here? Why wasn't he invited to sit at the table? Where is the innovation of JH Williams III? Is the main requirement of comic literary greatness solely the ability to capture malaise and emotional torpor? Is the sole genre the capturing of a wasteland of desperate isolation? And why is it so frequently autobiographical?

"[...] There is a self-loathing that is apparent in comics at every turn, all the more troubling as we reach an acceptable level of pop culture acceptance, but it is perhaps never more alarming than it is here, at what we consider our highest peak. It so often feels like these are men who create comics because they're not good at anything else. Often, their comics read like a protracted suicide note. All the more terrifying when they're so carefully, artfully crafted. Ware, for all his faults, has done more for the language of visual storytelling in his work than many of his peers. The irony being, of course, that it so frequently crosses paths with the work McCloud is disseminating in the online community. It's not hard to make the connection between his elaborate and intricate "mapping" panels and McCloud's nonlinear "trails." Though I think perhaps Ware would be mortified at the connection."

Jeffrey Brown, of course, followed up one of his highest profile moments with the quaint and charming book The Incredible Change-Bots, a "Transformers" parody. It's been clear he doesn't take all of this particularly seriously, and I respect the man for it. My final comment, however, ties directly into Ware's formalist work and how it's worth viewing separately from his other stylistic hang-ups. Many of the other groundbreaking cartoonists working today have been experimenting with similar explorations into how time is handled in comics—how the map is drawn—including those who deserve a higher profile.

XXV. "The proximity of bodies."

The idea of the "map of time" perhaps first made its impressions with McCloud's Understanding Comics, in which he explicates in full detail just how confusing the passage of time can be in comics—that is, what we assume are "static images" usually contain the passage of time, highlighted by dialog and motion. Because the comic sequence provides a visual schema for time's passing, one could consider time the most integral element in the physical construction of comics, both within the panel and then through a sequence of multiple panels.

Really, though, the movement has as its father the work of New Zealand cartoonist Dylan Horrocks, creator of the acclaimed Hicksville. Horrocks was one of the first to come forward and directly challenge McCloud's polemic, particularly with regards to McCloud's attempt to define terms that encompass the entirety of the medium—one whose borders are in constant dispute. Horrocks wrote "Inventing Comics" for The Comics Journal shortly after the McCloud book was released, and he pokes hard at a number of McCloud's assertions (including the link to textual language, which I spoke rather cheekily about in this column's second installment. In "Inventing Comics," Horrocks used the relationship between McCloud's theorizing and a cartographer charting known territory to highlight the limitations in Understanding Comics, and one has to pause at the title of McCloud's sequel text: Reinventing Comics.

The fascination that Horrocks has with cartography is nowhere clearer than in his best-known work. Hicksville is the story of a comics journalist named Leonard Batts who travels to a small town in New Zealand to do a feature on a popular superhero writer's upbringing and finds instead a mythical utopia for comic creators and a number of truths about the star writer and the life he'd left behind. Throughout his travels, Batts is guided by a series of mysteriously-appearing fragments of a comic about Captain Cook and a cartographer, which discuss the nature of maps and what they mean to culture as a whole. For the first half of the narrative, it seems wholly disconnected from the rest of the work, until an interlude exploring a supporting character's backstory brings her to a fictional Eastern-European nation called Cornucopia, where an aging cartoonist named Emil Kopen explains his work:

"Maps are of two kinds. Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kind—the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time—or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time. [...] But these days I have begun to feel that stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies. Time is simply what interferes with that, yes?"

Kopen then claims that he's digressed into talking about magic (more on this in a bit). It becomes clear here, however, that while the story of Captain Cook in the interwoven narrative of Hicksville is partly a love letter to New Zealand as a whole, and in particular this town where comics are the natural lifeblood, and where the lighthouse contains a library of every great comic never written, the story is also about comics itself, maps that can be communication with something beyond oneself.

Horrocks has been working on a sequel to Hicksville titled Atlas, in which this subject is further explored; however, the glacial pace of new Atlas chapters makes the ten year wait for the conclusion of Berlin (the subject of this column's first installment) seem downright punctual. In fascist Cornucopia, maps were outlawed (among other things) in order to keep the populace confused and docile, and only war hero Emil Kopen was able to disseminate maps to the people through his newspaper comic strip.

Horrocks wrote one other significant essay on the nature of comics, comparing McCloud's work to James Kochalka's own theorizing in The Cute Manifesto—he examines storytelling, particularly in comics, as being primarily about the creation of a world in which to play, the play being the narrative itself. This is not so far off from Stuart Moulthrop's idea of the "Interstitial," as previously mentioned, and like Moulthrop, Horrocks makes the connection between comic books and video games, rather than with cinema or prose fiction. In the case of Horrocks, however, the map of that world and its history is inherent to the form in which the story is told.

This idea was also utilized by Nick Bertozzi for his Xeric Grant-winning minicomic Boswash, about a Civil War-era surveyor and cartographer. The comic itself is folded in the manner of a road map, and the story literally "unfolds" as one opens it. By telling Boswash's story within a physical map, the character is physically constrained by the nature of the map and its borders, which fits the character's story: he is forced to go on the run when he insists on showing his superior where the true border lies in disputed territory.

McCloud, for his part, in the writing of Reinventing Comics, made the transition of focus to web-based comics and their potential for experimentation. While he offered many different ideas, and continues to explore in his comics work online, one notable inclusion was the concept of the "infinite canvas." Comics are ever-more frequently exploring their physical space—Chris Ware in particular is notable for seemingly never using the same size and shape for any two comics—but they are by nature restricted by both the printing process and practicality. Online, however, a single comic can theoretically take up a near-infinite amount of "space"—the parameters of the screen through which you view the comic will only concern the window you use to see part of the image at once. This is, in one sense, the natural extrapolation from the "window" concept as explained in the column's first installment—while you might only see part of the map at once, you have access to the entire thing, and all panels can be in juxtaposition with each other in a single space, rather than on opposite sides of a sheet of paper. Online experimental comics pioneer Daniel Merlin Goodbrey has since developed a flash program called the Tarquin Engine, which enables one to zoom in and out of a single "infinite canvas" comic, allowing depth to be introduced to a comic's "physical" construction as well as allow for an entire comic to be viewed at once.

In order to connect panels in an online setting, however, McCloud needed to use something other than the "gutters" that occur between two panels in a print comic, since an infinite amount of space can make the question of direction confusing with regards to how a comic is read. He came up with something that he called "trails." By using a simple (or deliberately ornate!) line connecting panels from one to another, often going in multiple directions, the comics resemble a map more directly—and what's more, the diagrams of Chris Ware. Using "trails" in an online comic allows for additional techniques, including the ability to exaggerate the space between two given panels to suggest a length of time, more literally displaying how time can "interfere with the proximity of bodies."

XVI. "Everything's made from language?"

Perhaps a suitable antidote for Ware's emotionally empty formalism are the comics of Kevin Huizenga. Huizenga is perhaps the great humanist of the "indie cartoonists" (Los Bros Hernandez does a different sort of work, and I tend to count them separately despite their general brilliance)—his work has the clean lines and formal experimentation of Ware with a more full-bodied emotional range. Curses, his one hardcover collection, is focused on wanting children and losing them, and despite the pain inherent in the story is at times very funny, very moving, and even occasionally creepy. When it comes to formalism—and the cartography of time—however, you can draw a line from Ware's history diagrams to Huizenga's short story "Time Travelling."

In "Time Travelling," Huizenga's self-similar character Glenn Ganges is walking to the library on a spring day and realizes that the day is so similar to another that he could very well be living that day again. Rather than feeling trapped by it, Ganges feels the purity of the moment as eternal, and thus recurring—which means other moments are full of potential as well. Huizenga conveys the feeling of stepping out of time by having Ganges step through a series of panels-as-windows (calling back the trope I'd discussed earlier) and then viewing the comic page as a series of moments in history that could be replaced with other moments in a constantly turning wheel of all possible worlds. Later, when Ganges is home and experiencing a comparatively rare dark moment while watching his wife sleep, the wheel image recurs, evoking the previous image (see "recurring visual metaphors, column #2) but now each moment is represented by a person, by a couple—to Huizenga, the people are what matter within and without the moment, and he never loses the gentle humanity of his characters (a number of times, Huizenga has even circled this issue through the logic and visual aesthetic of video games—in the second issue of his "Ganges" series, an abstract portrayal of a video game battle leads into a story in which characters during the dot-com bubble have no external outlet for their anxieties—and camaraderie—save a regular death match tournament).

In the responses to my second installment here at The House, commenter Bruce Reid drew my attention to artist Warren Craghead. Many of his illustrations and comic work follows the pattern of Ware and McCloud in their diagrammatical form. Small collections of image and text form like clumps and are connected by "trail"-like lines that often fork. Some of his work, in fact, quite literally depicts places and the paths between them. They're nonlinear and frequently tend toward the abstract, which lends them the poetic cadence that I'd spoken of in that previous column. Somewhat similarly, Douglas Wolk in Making Comics drew connections between comics as cartography and the use of poetry when discussing the work of Hope Larson.

Perhaps one of the great tragedies of modern comics is the frustratingly high percentage of time that Hope Larson's work is spoken of only in the shadow of her husband's. Make no mistake: you'd have to go far afield to find a bigger fan of Bryan Lee O'Malley's work than myself; the "Scott Pilgrim" series is one of the most enjoyable comic experiences that I could recommend, and despite its hipster reputation it has been incredibly accessible and approachable, in my experience, for newcomers to comics. But since O'Malley's work has been scheduled for adaptation by Edgar Wright (with Michael Cera to star), the increased press coverage of his work has frequently mentioned Larson only as an afterthought, and one of the most promising cartoonists of her generation has been edged out of the spotlight in the last few years, even after the success of her young adult book Chiggers. The truth is, despite having a greater personal fondness (and identification) for and with O'Malley's work, Larson is the better cartoonist—her craft is at this stage much more impressive and she has a greater tendency toward exploration.

Part of the problem may be that her books have, to date, been distinctly all-ages in tone (she is reportedly at work on her first "adult novel"), and a child-appropriate narrative is a very easy way to get the complexity of your storytelling choices ignored. Her second book, Gray Horses, concerns dreams and dream logic, and the rhythms of her work very much speak to the idea of "poetic cadence" in comics. Wolk writes:

"One big theme ... is the flow of the world's images and sensations between the real and imaginary realms: wrinkles in a blanket become a dream image of grass in a field ... Dream logic is the only way to make a map of the processes of joy, and Larson is already becoming a master cartographer of the psyche."

Indeed, her book's endpapers and indicia pages all feature map fragments—relating to the protagonist's literal travels, but also acting as metaphor for plotting the border territory between dream and real. The relationship between photographs and experience in Gray Horses serves not only to blur that boundary further, but also implies, as Prince of Persia attempted to state outright, that history, memory, experience, and dreams are all aspects of time, and in comics can frequently become interchangeable.

Many cartoonists, particularly those in the aforementioned "British Invasion," have dealt at some level or another with the idea of magic, the nature of the comic medium making it the ideal tool to express magical ideas. Alan Moore, more than any other, has used comics to disseminate his particular view on magic, and that magic is frequently tied as much to geography as to comics. In From Hell, his first major "magical" text, and one of the last books he completed before declaring himself a full-fledged wizard, Moore has a lengthy chapter in which Sir William Gull, the author's suspected Jack the Ripper, takes his coachman Netley all about London and shows him how the architecture of the city has ominous magical significance that is specifically informed by its history. Psychogeography has played some part in virtually every work that Moore's written since—the works contained in the book A Disease of Language, which was mentioned in regards to poetics in this column's second installment, are specifically concerned with the magical history of his hometown of Northhampton, England.

No work of Moore's, however, is more specifically involved with magic than his opus Promethea, a title that at first appears to be a pastiche of Wonder Woman and quickly becomes a near-polemic on Moore's Kabbalistic (by way of Crowley) ideas. While a study of comic technique in Promethea could fill a sixteen-week course, the idea of cartography and language plays a specific part—the Kabbalah, after all, is a cosmological map itself. When Moore's characters begin their quest up through the spheres towards the Godhead, the Kabbalah is drawn in the manner of a London Tube map, even as Moore and his artist J.H. Williams III wander around the station.

In a confrontation with Mercury, Moore's heroines are informed that the gods are abstract ideas, dream ideas that could only exist through imagery and stories, and Mercury implies a link between hieroglyphics or vase paintings and modern day comics in the existence of myth, all the while looking directly at the reader. And just moments before, the map of time has been up-ended; Promethea is trapped wandering a road in the shape of a Mobius strip, and she sees herself coming and going along the path just as the reader can see each simultaneous depiction of her on the comic page.

These conceptual tricks reach their apex in the final issue, in which the characters in the story have attained a certain amount of enlightenment, and Promethea speaks directly to the reader in a complicated fold-out poster of an issue that takes the idea that Boswash suggested and cranks it up. On either side of the poster, Promethea travels around the image, and one can follow her and read her dialog in order, or follow a series of "trails" that connect disjointed ideas in a different narrative order—or, one can read it one page at a time as it appears in the book format! In attempting to convey his unique view of magic and the nature of the universe, Moore has completely rewired the natural cartography of reading comics.

XVII. "...an infinitely complex landscape..."

Matt Madden, one of the co-authors of the cartooning textbook Drawing Words and Writing Pictures (and also, now, one of the series editors of the "Best American Comics" line), had earlier worked on an experimental text titled 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, an attempt to do a comics version of the original Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau, one of the co-founders of the Oulipo movement in experimental literature. Madden created ninety-nine variations of the same single-page comic script, attempting to show the variety of possibilities the comics medium had available to it in the telling of a simple tale. In addition to camera angle challenges that would fit in a similar experiment in cinema (all close-shot, all low-shot, etc.), and a series of style imitations (done as Jack Kirby, done as an EC horror comic), there were some very inventive choices. One particular selection had the story told not with a series of panels or dialog balloons, but rather with a full-page map. The physical objects are boundaries and borders, the people geography, and the dialog and thought are roadways to travel—while it's obviously not the most clear of his storytelling options, one can piece together the story being told even from the map.

Madden's use of cartography for storytelling is on the one hand the most "unnecessarily" experimental, but it also serves as a perfect example for how time operates in comics as a unique geography, an oft-overlooked aspect of the medium that informs creators in all the genres and forms. While it is true that much of the best work in comics is getting passed over in favor of a more select group of creators, this element is one of many that shows the various comic camps aren't really that separate (I mean really, on some level, is Ware's pathetic deity superhero that far off from Lethem's wandering neighborhood superhero Omega?).

The "cartography of time" that comics can represent is something that film is less suitable for, but I'm drawn back to the awkward "panel" superstructure of Ang Lee's Hulk, which I mentioned in the first installment of this column. In zooming out to view footage of many clips from the film at once before moving into another, it couldn't quite get across the feeling of reading a comic while watching a film, but there's a definite link there, a map of the story of the film using chosen moments in sequence. And even the lackluster adaptation of From Hell couldn't entirely gloss over the strange beauty in London's urban geography with its magical import.

Horrocks wrote of McCloud's book in "Inventing Comics,"

"Like any map, it presents only one way of reading an infinitely complex landscape, thereby suppressing other possible readings. There are some alternative readings which McCloud is clearly wanting to suppress—those dreaded 'stereotypes' that 'defined what comics could be too narrowly.' But even these maps can be useful at times—they helped guide me on my journey through the history of the industry, for example. They are, after all, the same maps that guided many of the cartoonists, publishers and readers who built that industry."

The divisions aren't going to go away, any more than the divisions that split prose, cinema, video games, and other media into their own various subsections. And while the market forces at work today make those divisions so pronounced that many brilliant creators are going largely unheard, they can also be used as landmarks on a map for exploring comics as a whole, even while finding the similarities from territory to territory.
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Michael Peterson is the publisher of the blog & portfolio site Patchwork Earth.

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928 (69). The Sun Shines Bright (1956, John Ford)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Often cited as John Ford’s favorite film, this turn-of-the century period piece about folksy Judge Priest, the de facto patriarch of a sleepy Kentucky town, at first seems hopelessly dated with its unrepentant nostalgia for a Confederate society whose implicit bigotry enables a cavalcade of dubious stereotypes, not least of which is the embarrassing jigaboo schtick of African American cultural albatross Stepin Fetchit as Priest’s servant. But on formalist terms, this may very well be one of Ford’s most perfect achievements, in which he masterfully orchestrates the rites and rituals that govern a small community into a 90 minute cinematic circus. Each scene brims with Ford’s inimitably attentive playfulness with decorum, decoding and sometimes debunking the social assumptions guiding each character’s interactions, and the sheer beauty of how Ford films bodies moving through space in a civic ballet is a joy to behold. Ford acknowledges and embraces the contradictions of humanism and prejudice governing class, gender and race relations, such as distinguishing one form of vigilantism (shooting a rapist businessman in the back instead of arresting him) as acceptable while another (lynching a helples black man) is strongly condemned). Progress and tradition are locked in a perpetual duel over the life of this town, most vividly in the contrasting protocols of local Confederate and Union army veteran meetings and the scandalous funeral of a prostitute where Judge Priest, at risk of losing his job, takes a principled, proto-feminist stand under the guise of common decency. Tensions finally give way to a prolonged procession—bubbling with music and devoid of words—involving the various factions of the entire town. Filled with collective joy and private sorrow, it strikes a mournal grace note that simultaneously commemorates and laments the man-made forms that maintain and constrict this microcosm of society.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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927 (68). El Verdugo/Not on Your Life (1963, Luis Garcia Berlanga)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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The highest debut placement within last December’s update of the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? list of 1000 greatest films was this corrosively black comedy by Luis Garcia Berlanga, the long-suffering subversive of Spain’s Franco regime. A young undertaker whose job leaves him unloved by the ladies takes interest in the equally forlorn daughter of a government executioner. A series of mild shocks to his humdrum existence nudge him into marriage, parenthood, the real estate rat race, and the eventual assumption of his father-in-law’s socially despised profession, a fate into which he is literally dragged kicking and screaming. Unrelenting in its laughing fixation on death and people’s discomfort with it, Berlanga’s masterpiece is as damning as Bertolucci’s The Conformist (TSPDT #65) in its view of life under fascism, where the complicity and compromise of everday citizens perpetuate a society’s alienation from the horrors it perpetrates. This vision is brought forth not only with a razor sharp script by Berlanga and Rafael Azcona, but by Berlanga’s use of the frame: whether in cavernously deep wide shots or claustrophobic interiors, people frequently bump into each other, distracted in their petty self-interests, the affably hapless protagonist moreso than anyone. The film also tweaks contemporary auteurs Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, linking the bourgeois self-absorption of their milieu to an ignorance of working-class entrapment, a condition that Berlanga, with unsentimental starkness and wit, brings sharply into view.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.