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By Matt Zoller Seitz and Richard Seitz
By Matt Zoller Seitz
To read the eleventh and final installment in a series of countdown essays written for Salon.com about the most important directors of the decade, click here.
By Matt Zoller Seitz
To read the tenth in a series of countdown essays written for Salon.com about the most important directors of the decade, click here.
By Miriam Bale
[Editor's Note: This article is being cross-published at The Nibbler.]
“The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible." —Umberto Eco
Q: You include a nice list by the French philosopher Roland Barthes in your new book, "The Vertigo of Lists." He lists the things he loves and the things he doesn't love. He loves salad, cinnamon, cheese and spices. He doesn't love bikers, women in long pants, geraniums, strawberries and the harpsichord. What about you?
Eco: I would be a fool to answer that; it would mean pinning myself down. I was fascinated with Stendhal at 13 and with Thomas Mann at 15 and, at 16, I loved Chopin. Then I spent my life getting to know the rest. Right now, Chopin is at the very top once again. If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
1. The Lady and the Duke (Eric Rohmer, 2001): The theme of the decade—of historic reimaginings thanks to and in conflict with digital imagery—was kicked-off in this 2001 Rohmer, but with self-conscious simplicity. Actors walk in front of painted backdrops for an oddly beautiful and disturbing effect.
2. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005): Each shift from one narrative reality to the next is brilliantly acted and directed, but what's truly mindblowing is that it's never clear whether these moments are comedy or tragedy.
3. The Story of Marie and Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003): A goofy and deceptively slight film with much to mull on: perspective, pairings, sound, ghost movies, but most of all about how benign thoughts of death get tangled up in intense sex. Maybe that's why it proves the exception to the usually dull screen sex simulacrum.
4. Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, 2009): A summation of what the greatest living critic/filmmaker has learned about movies after watching from the second row for over sixty years.
5. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000): Shows minstrelsy is a much worse problem now that blackface makeup is out of fashion.
6. La France (Serge Bozon, 2007): Film criticism on the war film as filmmaking, from a new generation of French critics/directors.
7. Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (John Landis, 2007): Nothing is more All-American than ethnic jokes. Very, very funny with smart transitions and scary photos of Don Rickles as a baby but looking exactly the same.
8. The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2004): OK, maybe Robert McNamara is even more All-American than Rickles. No film made me cry more.
9. Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel, 2008): So many mysteries—the masterful transitions from one tone, or dimension, to another; the subtle allusions to Jean Seberg and her strange appeal; but most of all the mystery of Louis Garrel's surprising depth. A beautiful film, and heartbreaking.
10. Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006): A failure in its attempt to be an auteur statement, as if that meant imposing autobiography on history. But it really was the story of flounce, ribbons, wallpaper, and the history of the way women walked, starring Versailles. In its own way, an annoying cousin of Jeanne Dielman.By Dan Callahan
The Blind Side, which has reportedly made close to 200 million dollars, is based on a true story (the operative word is “based,” of course). If its makers were accused of racism, surely they would be surprised and defensive; maybe they didn’t notice that underneath the inspirational basis of their narrative is a fixation with the idea of sex between the lily-white, condescending caretaker played by Sandra Bullock and Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) her black “gentle giant” charge. It’s a ghastly but revealing movie, not least for one scene with Adriane Lenox, a stage actress who won a Tony as the mother in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. Cast as Michael’s errant, drug-addicted mother, Lenox takes her role, which amounts to only a few lines of dialogue, and fills it out with such delicate, shamed emotion that it’s hard not to resent the director for insistently cutting back to Our Star, the ever-bland Bullock, who listens in such an oblivious, absent way to Lenox’s heartfelt attempts to communicate that I was reminded of Lana Turner inanely marveling at the fact that her long-time maid Annie (Juanita Moore) has friends in Imitation of Life (1959). Fifty years later, we’re still stuck with movie star white supremacy, smiling vacantly for untold millions of dollars, while exciting black actors and black characters continue to lead lives on the outskirts of films when they would be so much more vital at their center.
I don’t know much about Lenox, aside from having seen her in Doubt and now in The Blind Side; her IMDb page says that she also won an Obie Off-Broadway playing Dinah Washington’s mother. I’m almost certain that she’s a major performer, so why haven’t we seen more of her in movies? Put it this way: I can imagine removing Bullock from all of her romantic comedy vehicles and half-baked thrillers and substituting Lenox instead. Instantly, those movies start to seem not only watchable to me but maybe even re-watchable, a body of work to be reckoned with. Yet Bullock is prized by her fans for her very averageness, the fact that she isn’t edgy or faceted or unpredictable or even particularly skilled (confronted with the evidence of her plodding, milkshake-like career, it’s easy to see how someone like Julia Roberts is much bolder in similar material, even if she lacks the introspection and mystery at the heart of the best screen acting). Watching Lenox’s one scene in The Blind Side, it was clear that she imaginatively brought out the part of herself that understood this woman’s weakness and the limitations placed on her from birth (for a hellish example of the grandstanding opposite of Lenox, look no further than Mo’Nique’s near-comic burn-the-house down emoting in Precious, a weirdly jolly cavalcade of black stereotypes).
When Michael Mann was making Public Enemies, didn’t he realize that Billy Crudup’s J. Edgar Hoover was so much more startling and intriguing than the monotonous, brooding standoff of Pretty Boy Cheekbones between Johnny Depp and Christian Bale? Crudup has been a pretty boy himself, and I often had problems with some of his shrill choices in leading man roles, but as Hoover he caught an uncanny kind of straight-laced perversity that made me wonder if he isn’t that old bullshit “character actor in a leading man’s body” paradigm that’s unconvincingly trotted out for your Clooneys and your Pitts in their Oscar-bid parts. In just a few scenes, Crudup not only gives you the uptight, squat strangeness of Hoover but even manages to hint at the human emotions buried somewhere in his by-the-book, chilly manner. Depp’s John Dillinger is the same old glamorous gangster of yesteryear, all surface and surety, and there’s even less of interest in Bale’s imploding policeman Melvin Purvis, yet Mann’s film follows them both in a straight line to the end when it would be so much scarier and enlightening to trace Crudup’s Hoover on his crooked road to power.
Which raises the question: hasn’t a director ever seen the footage they’ve shot and been confronted with the realization that an actor hired for a supporting or even a bit part was much more interesting and would make for a better screen center than the nominal lead? And hasn’t our theoretical director ever had the nerve to say, “Screw this, my movie isn’t what I thought it was. My movie is really about this woman, playing the mother.” Or, “My movie is really about the cross-dressing head of the FBI, not the public enemy and the cop.” This kind of flash happens most frequently when somebody casts a big theater actor in a bit. In Bart Freundlich’s trifling Trust the Man (2005), David Greenspan appeared long enough for me to wonder why no brave indie director hadn’t built a film around him long ago. Elizabeth Marvel has dazzled me in every play I’ve seen her in, but she’s done mostly small parts in films. And I got a serious case of “who is that?” when I saw and heard the actress playing George Clooney’s sister in Up in the Air, only to find out during the end credits that she was Amy Morton. I’m from Chicago, so I grew up with Morton completely dominating plays at the Steppenwolf Theater, yet I’d never seen her in a movie before; going to IMDb, I found that she’s barely been filmed at all. There’s a raft of semi-hidden acting talent out there that could take us to so many new destinations if only directors would look closer and see that the players in the byways of their films are often much more fresh and challenging than the pretty white movie star treadmill we seem to still be stuck on.
House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.
Leading off today's links is the latest "Best Picture from the Outside In" entry at The Film Experience. Up for scrutiny this time out: Unforgiven (1992) vs. Casblanca (1943).
The New York Times article "Ready for 2010, Some Films Shot Way Back When" rounds up the crop of movies slated for release in early 2010, many of which were shot several years ago.
Finally, a little Steve & Eydie, SCTV-style:
By Matt Zoller Seitz
To read the ninth in a series of countdown essays written for Salon.com about the most important directors of the decade, click here.
By Steven Cooper
With “The End of Time,” the Doctor Who careers of two giants of the show—star David Tennant and head writer and executive producer Russell T. Davies—reach their conclusion. With only Part One so far broadcast, we are not even halfway through the story—the second episode is significantly longer—so this can only be a preliminary assessment. But already it looks to be the most ambitious story Doctor Who has ever told.
As ever with a Russell T. Davies season finale (I know there hasn’t been an actual season this year, but the principle’s the same), this isn’t the place to look if you want a small-scale, tight-knit, self-contained story. Davies can do that when he wants to (see “Midnight”), but here he’s looking to pick up threads going all the way back to the beginning of the revived series in 2005 and create an epic. Along the way, there’s a certain amount of expediency evident in the plotting. There’s some bad comedy. There are irrelevant celebrity cameos. But there’s also heartfelt character work, some great performances, and a cliffhanger which turns everything seen so far on its head and left me avid to see what happens next.
The Narrator: “It is said that in the final days of planet Earth, everyone had bad dreams.”
We start unusually, with an unseen Narrator, whose wonderful deep, sonorous voice is provided by Timothy Dalton. Everyone on Earth is having dreams of the laughing face of the Master (John Simm), premonitions of the events to come. But only one person remembers these dreams—our old friend Wilfred Mott (Bernard Cribbins).
Wilf, out doing his Christmas shopping, finds himself drawn to a church where he notices a stained glass window with a small but recognizable blue box in one corner. A strange woman in white (Claire Bloom) tells him a tale of a demon from the sky, striking a convent on this site in the 1300s, which was overcome by a “Sainted Physician” in a blue box. The woman suddenly vanishes when Wilf’s back is turned. As yet, nothing further has come of this, but bear it in mind for next week…
The Doctor arrives on the planet of the Ood in a carefree mood. He’s been in no hurry to obey the summons he received at the end of “The Waters of Mars,” instead taking time off to do some vacationing—including a brief marriage to Queen Elizabeth I which apparently didn’t turn out well (humorously tying up a loose end left dangling at the end of “The Shakespeare Code”). But it turns out he would have done better not to delay. The Ood are also having bad dreams, of something returning “through the darkness” to their world. They show him visions of the Master (“That man is dead!”), Wilf, an unknown man—Joshua Naismith—who we’ll meet later, and finally an imprisoned Lucy Saxon (Alexandra Moen). This leads into clips from “The Sound of Drums” and “Last of the Time Lords,” reminding us how the Master became Prime Minister, unleashed an invasion upon the world, was shot by his wife Lucy, and died, with his body being burned on a funeral pyre.
An explicit recap of these events from two years ago is very necessary, since this part of the story is a direct sequel to them. Lucy Saxon is taken from her prison cell to a secret ceremony being conducted by a hitherto unknown Cult of Saxon, evidently set up by the Master back then as a contingency plan. One of the cult is revealed to be the woman who picked up the Master’s ring from out of his ashes at the end of “Last of the Time Lords.” With that, and various other ingredients (including a “biometrical signature” from Lucy), the Master is resurrected in a very Harry Potter-ish sequence. I wasn’t particularly happy with this use of what is basically a magic spell in Doctor Who; those of us who prefer the show to have at least a veneer of science fiction have to fall back on Clarke’s Third Law here, and assume that this is super-advanced Time Lord know-how which just looks like wizardry to us. (On the other hand, it’s an improvement on the 1980s treatment of the Master, when the series stopped bothering to even attempt explanations for his repeated escapes from certain death.)
Back in Series Three, Alexandra Moen made quite an impression as Lucy Saxon despite having only a handful of lines, and she makes the most of her brief appearance here too. It turns out Lucy has been plotting in secret herself, and she manages to disrupt the resurrection at the cost of her own life. A huge explosion destroys the prison, but the Master escapes just ahead of the Doctor’s arrival.
In an industrial wasteland, the Master reappears as a feral figure with bleached white hair, in scruffy jeans and a hooded top. We find out the botched resurrection has left his body “ripped open,” his life force thrown around with abandon. This unleashed energy gives him the ability to fire lightning from his hands and make Superman-like leaps into the air. But at a cost—he keeps momentarily fading away to just a skeleton, and he is now a creature of unending, voracious hunger able to vampirically drain the life force of others. He scoffs a burger (and later, rips apart a turkey and wolfs it down) in a manner guaranteed to put anyone off their Christmas dinner.
John Simm’s performance in this episode is amazing. In the hands of a less skilled actor, such an over-the-top character would have degenerated into mere scenery chewing, but the sheer visceral intensity Simm brings to every moment he’s on screen means you can’t take your eyes off him. The way a speech will start out normally but turn into long strings of obsessed, gabbled syllables (“Can’t hide anywhere. He can see me. He can smell me. Can’t let him smell me. Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor stop the smell, the stink, the filthy filthy stink”) shows a man barely holding together, liable to fly apart at any moment. For once the Master has no plan, no scheme—he has been stripped down to his core essence, an implacable will to survive at any cost.
The Doctor senses him as he arrives at the wasteland, and the Master responds by beating out the four-drumbeat tattoo that we discovered in “The Sound of Drums” has obsessed him for his entire life and driven him insane. However, the Master gets away when the Doctor’s chase is interrupted as he is found by Wilf and a gang of his pensioner friends, including a cameo from June Whitfield (Absolutely Fabulous) as Minnie “the Menace.” This bit of broad comedy rather outstays its welcome, as Minnie looks the Doctor over approvingly, poses for a photo with him, etc. Still, it’s easy to guess David Tennant will get lots of invitations to re-enact this scene at the next convention he attends, as Minnie gets to live out the dreams of any number of fans by fondling his bum.
Wilf takes the Doctor to a cafe, where all the episode’s sound and fury drops away. No matter how you feel about Russell T. Davies’ propensity to construct overblown epic plots, his talent is obvious in scenes of quiet conversation. Just two characters sitting at a table, talking. But it’s not at all cosy—the Doctor starts by staring fixedly at Wilf, demanding “Who are you?” How is it he can track down the Doctor in a matter of hours when others can’t? There’s some manipulation of events going on here, that keeps pushing them together. But the Doctor has other things on his mind—for the first time, he admits bluntly that he’s going to die. And the Tenth Doctor doesn’t want to die. Even the prospect of regeneration is cold comfort:The Doctor: “Even if I change it feels like dying. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away. And I’m dead.”
Suddenly, they see Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) outside. Wilf brought the Doctor here to see her, in the hope that he could reverse what he did to her at the end of “Journey’s End,” where the memories of her time with the Doctor had to be locked away in order to save her life. But it can’t be done—the Doctor reiterates that if the sight of him reawakens those memories, Donna’s mind will burn up. For those (like me) who came to love Donna during Series Four, her brief appearance in this episode is a bittersweet gift, but this isn’t her story (at least, not yet), and she drives off with her new fiance—yes, she’s got engaged again.The Doctor: “She’s got him.”
The Doctor tells Wilf he’s still traveling alone, and in a near breakdown, confesses his recent errors on Mars (“But I did some things, it went wrong… I need…”). David Tennant yet again shows he can take the Doctor to emotional places he’s never been before. And Bernard Cribbins is absolutely wonderful throughout the episode—there’s not a false note anywhere, from comedy to, as here, the most heartbreaking empathy.
Wilf: “She’s making do.”
The Doctor: “Aren’t we all.”
The Doctor leaves to track down the Master. And now, at the exact halfway point of the episode, the voice of the Narrator, backed by Murray Gold’s soaring music, breaks in to remind us that this is all taking place on a much wider canvas. The prologue is over, as unseen forces manipulate events towards a grand convergence.Narrator: “And so it came to pass that the players took their final places, making ready the events that were to come. … As Earth rolled onwards into night, the people of that world did sleep, and shiver, somehow knowing that dawn would bring only one thing... the final day!”
Cut to the chase. Or rather, cut to after the chase—since we already know the Doctor and the Master can sense each other anywhere on Earth, we go directly to their confrontation in the wasteland. The Doctor steadily advances toward the Master, ignoring bolts of energy being fired to each side, until finally the Master fires directly at him to immobilize him and leave him gasping in the dirt. Ninety seconds have passed without a word of dialogue, just the play of emotions on the two actors’ faces.
The Doctor can’t get the Master interested in the prophecies and the evidence that something is manipulating them; the Master is still obsessed with the unending drum-beats in his head. But then he mentally links with the Doctor, and the Doctor is shocked by what he hears:The Doctor: “I heard it! But there’s no noise, there never has been, it’s just your insanity... What is it? What’s inside your head?”
The Master is overjoyed to be finally vindicated (“It’s real! It’s real!”) but before he can do anything else, he is abducted by thugs in the pay of Joshua Naismith, and the Doctor is left unconscious.
Christmas at the Nobles’ house. Watching television, Wilf again sees the strange woman in white. She salutes him as an old soldier—who never killed a man in his military service—and warns him that a war is coming, in which he will have to take up arms again. She gives an ominous warning, which will no doubt come into play next week.The Woman: “Tell the Doctor nothing of this. His life could still be saved, so long as you tell him nothing.”
From under his bed, Wilf takes out his old service revolver. A stone thrown at his window alerts him to the Doctor lurking outside the house. He goes outside to shoo him away, and is followed by Sylvia (Jacqueline King). Despite the danger to Donna, the Doctor has come to find Wilf because he’s the only lead he can think of—he needs more information. The most successful comic interlude of the episode follows as they try to keep the Doctor and Donna apart. Eventually the Doctor takes Wilf with him in the TARDIS, despite Sylvia’s protests (“You can’t come with me!” “Well, you’re not leaving me with her.” “Fair enough”), and they head off to the Naismith estate.
Joshua Naismith (David Harewood) and his daughter Abigail (Tracy Ifeachor) are the least satisfactory part of the episode by far. Nothing about them is interesting; they are a couple of cardboard characters who only exist to join up various bits of the plot. He’s your standard-issue ultra-rich businessman and author, whose book is bought by Donna for Wilf, who shows it to the Doctor, who recognizes him from the visions of the Ood. She’s a spoiled kid whose dilettante investigations into “the legends of Harold Saxon” led her father to the Master. In their house they have the Immortality Gate, a piece of alien technology acquired from the Torchwood Institute (after its fall in “Doomsday”) which can perform cellular regeneration. They intend to put the Master’s abilities to use to get the device working properly.
It’s obvious from the start that Naismith is completely out of his depth with the Master; he might put him on a leash and in a straitjacket, but the Master always has his measure. (“I like you.” “Thank you.” “You’d taste great.”) From the moment the Master sees the Gate, his fierce intelligence starts working again as he begins to turn the situation to his advantage. Naismith’s cluelessness is shown even more when, unexpectedly, two of his technicians turn out to be disguised aliens, known as Vinvocci, who are trying to get the Gate activated for their own purposes. These rather silly-looking green, spiky aliens are mostly used for comedy here, although they’ll probably be more useful next week, given what happens at the end of the episode.
The Doctor and Wilf arrive, sneaking around and into the house just like in any number of old Doctor Who stories (“Pyramids of Mars” comes particularly to mind). After easily exposing the Vinvocci, the Doctor learns that the Gate doesn’t regenerate individuals, but entire populations—it’s like a super-powerful version of the nanogenes in “The Empty Child.” He realizes immediately what the Master’s plan is.
In the completely mad climax, the Master easily brushes aside Naismith’s restraints and activates the Gate. Its signal affects everyone on Earth except Wilf (thanks to a handy shielding booth) and Donna (whose Time Lord memories begin to activate in response). The Master changes every other human on Earth to look like himself. There are some eye-popping shots with dozens of copies of the Master in different costumes, which must have been hellish to do. John Simm milks the ending for all he’s worth (“Breaking news—I’m everyone! And everyone on Earth… is me!”) with a final awesomely dreadful pun about “the Master race” which everyone should have been able to see coming.
But now, the real cliffhanger (which the producers kept back from all preview screenings, to preserve the surprise). We finally see the Narrator in full, and he’s not speaking for our benefit.The Narrator: “And so it came to pass, on Christmas Day, that the human race did cease to exist. But even then, the Master had no concept of his greater role in events. For this was far more than humanity’s end. This day was the day upon which the whole of creation would change forever. This was the day the Time Lords returned.
Suddenly the Narrator’s voice is full of menace. The camera zooms out to show a huge amphitheater full of Time Lords in their ceremonial regalia. With the crowd taking up the Narrator’s final shouts, it’s a shot reminiscent of the end of “Bad Wolf” four years ago. The two sides of the Time War—the Daleks and the Time Lords—revealed to us in the same way.
“For Gallifrey! For victory! For the end of time itself!”
TO! BE! CONTINUED!
Obviously, this episode doesn’t stand on its own, so a final assessment will have to wait until after Part Two. It really is basically a hugely extended prologue—the Narrator explicitly says so halfway through, but even at the end the sense is that only now are all the pieces in position so the real story can begin. Rather alienating for the casual viewer (especially at Christmas), but if ever there was a suitable time to take such a risk it’s now, with the lure of David Tennant’s grand finale to bring the viewers back next week.
As with the huge, world-destroying climaxes of previous years, there’s no real tension generated by the “Master race” event, since we all know it will end up being undone with no lasting effects in the next episode. Its power comes from the fact that the Master could hardly have come up with anything more simply offensive to the Doctor than to see the human race’s individuality arrogantly replaced with six billion copies of his nemesis. In that sense, it’s already served its purpose, regardless of what happens next week. The biggest question it left behind is, what’s going to happen to Donna now that her buried memories are awakening?
The Time Lords, though, are another matter entirely. The idea of the Doctor as the last survivor of the Time War, having seen his entire race wiped out, has been a central component of the new series. It has led to some of the series’ most powerful and emotional moments—right up to the Doctor’s bout of megalomania on Mars last episode. Are the Time Lords back for good—or evil? Will the Doctor end up having to destroy his people again? Where does the woman in white fit in? What will Wilf’s ultimate role end up being? And will we be seeing the Ood again? They did say that something was returning to their world. So many questions, so many possibilities…
Some of the plot construction is disappointingly crude. The episode takes a long time to really get going, as numerous unrelated elements have to be set up one after the other—the Ood, Lucy Saxon, the Master’s resurrection, Naismith, Wilf and his friends… The comedy (apart from the scenes involving Donna’s family) tends to fall flat. And I’ve refrained from mentioning the Obama thread until now out of charity—one of those ideas that probably seemed hilarious at three in the morning, but really should have been reconsidered. But when it gets it right, this episode really gets it right—the Doctor/Wilf and Doctor/Master scenes are brilliant, and the performances of David Tennant, John Simm and Bernard Cribbins are pitch-perfect throughout.
I’d like to end by noting that with Part Two of “The End of Time,” the new series of Doctor Who will clock up sixty episodes. Russell T. Davies has written or co-written thirty-one of those, and was involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in all of the others as well. He has successfully taken Doctor Who from a dead-and-gone show remembered mostly as a joke, to a central pillar of popular culture in Britain (and, to a lesser extent, all over the world). I can think of many things he might have done which would have been more to my taste. But I can’t imagine a single thing he could have done to make the show more successful with its most important audience—the general public. For this old Doctor Who fan, it’s been a glorious five years. David Tennant once described Davies as “the least cynical man in a cynical age.” I love Steven Moffat’s work, and I’m really looking forward to next year’s series with Matt Smith—but the sheer joy, exuberance, and unselfconscious absurdity Russell brought to Doctor Who will, I think, be greatly missed.
NEXT WEEK: The arrival of a new year, a new decade, and a new Doctor. It’s Part Two of “The End of Time” – see you on the other side.
Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: “The Deadly Assassin,” starring Tom Baker. This is the only classic series story where the Doctor traveled alone, without a companion. But its main importance is its depiction of the Time Lords. They had made brief appearances before, but this was the first Gallifrey story, where their society was shown in all its baroque intricacy. Radical in its day, this story became the foundation for all succeeding Time Lord lore, right up to “The End of Time.”
Steven Cooper is a software developer and long-time Doctor Who fan, living in Melbourne, Australia.
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Links to the seventh and eighth entries in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com. For the entry on Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (and the Naturalists), click here. For the entry on the Coen Brothers (the Fabulists), click here.
Steven Santos points us to the Trailer Addict page for an upcoming film called Violent Blue, which is described like this:
"An 18-year old boy is accused of molesting a 12-year old girl. They call each other "soul mates" and claim they never more than kissed. He's put away for 6 years and she waits for him but in the meantime is beaten, gang-raped, impregnated and thrown out onto the streets only to eventually turn to a life of drugs, theft and prostitution. Did society make things better for her by putting this "sex offender" behind bars? And when he's released can they ever go back to how things once were? This is the story of true love."
By Steven Boone
The flicks below are the best things I got out to see in multiplexes and arthouses in 2009. That leaves out Wild Grass, the kooky Alain Resnais comedy I fell in love with at this year's New York Film Festival. Also excluded are the gunfights in Public Enemies; nude, pale Paz de la Huerta straddling brown, blue-suited Isaach De Bankolé in The Limits of Control; the rolling box of Quaker Oats in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done; the local color in 50 Cent's Before I Self-Destruct; the dewy, palpitating bathroom scale and human flesh in the beginning of Antichrist—all perfect fragments of movies that I simply did not dig overall.
It was an exhausted-feeling year. The new movies I came across generally seemed plum tuckered out, slumming through the end of a decade increasingly hostile to simple movie pleasures.
Except for these beauties:
10. Serbis
Commercially, this Filipino drama crept into America way back in January, and I barely remember the plot. Something to do with a dilapidated X-rated movie house and the triple-X-rated family strife happening beyond its dingy screen. But I can tell you what the movie smells like on the drop of a dime: perfume, rust, dirty water, hot tea. Just hearing the title and seeing a still of Roxanne Jordan drying her hair in the mirror while admiring her own pouty, sunkissed beauty brings it all back. Director Brillante Mendoza likes his families sweaty and animalistic but never less than luminous.
9. Flooding with Love for the Kid
Zachary Oberzan performs every character in the novel First Blood…in his studio apartment. This one is for the filmmakers. If you’ve lost your way, forgotten what’s its all about, see Oberzan’s daredevil stunt to get back to the fundamentals. All you need is a camera and something you can’t go another second without expressing. Everything else will fly into your hands to help tell the story. A toaster, for example, will happily become a police radio. The important thing is the way Oberzan and his household items hold our gaze and move it across the frame to excite meaning.
8. Tetro
My personal favorite of Francis Ford Coppola’s films. Here he uses every plane of Vincent Gallo’s crazy face to create some startling turns of poetry. Gallo, the patron saint of feeling sorry for yourself, seems to have made Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny in preparation for Coppola’s woe-is-me family melodrama. Critics—the same mawfaws who would wash Nicholas Ray’s feet if here were here—somehow equated Coppola’s unembarrassed emotionalism with inappropriately callow bombast. Nah, man. I see nothing but masterly wisdom when baby brother Alden Ehrenreich chases behind Gallo, going, “Love, love, love,” across a series of commiserative edits by Coppola’s soulmate, Walter Murch. Ditto Gallo at the café, begging Maribel Verdú with his flood lamp eyes for love, love, love. This movie is a treasury of Coppola’s cinematic comfort foods: wild women, young’uns, wives, opera, The Red Shoes, lens flares and tempestuous families—organic or improvised.
7. Broken Embraces
This is another one for the filmmakers. Pedro Almodóvar recognizes the visual cortex as sexual organ, tormentor and deadly weapon. Moving images can destroy people, and people who would destroy moving images should be destroyed. Also: Ah, to be blind and tragic, yet famous enough to have a stranger you picked up off the street describe her perfect breasts to you before letting you feel for yourself! Ah, the way Penelope Cruz, as a secretary-turned-actress twirls to smile for the camera, over and over, in various styles and degrees of adorable! Ooh, the mummified feeling of sex with the one you disgust but for complicated reasons can’t yet leave. Oh, the joy of storytelling: One great, stray scene has the blind ex-movie director and his hipster protégé brainstorming an increasingly ludicrous Twilight-ish vampire romance. It doesn’t matter the material, trash or high art, so long as it gets you going, puts that crazed look in your eyes. Beats me why many critics said this was Almodóvar serving up the same ol' same ol'.
6. Alien: The Director’s Cut
At a Film Forum screening this summer, folks laughed when the android’s severed head started talking—a crude use of foam rubber prop and Ian Holm’s head sticking out of a table like Cousin It. But it was nervous laughter. Everything else in this film already had us on the edge of panic. In 2009, Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror masterpiece packs so much weight, texture and tension, I imagine it to be Hunger director Steve McQueen’s prized DVD. In, 2009, sad to say, Alien is an art film.
5. Drag Me to Hell
The first great recession-era horror film, and the loudest, happiest audience I’ve sat with in ages. They went bananas for this gross-out morality play at Brooklyn’s Court Street multiplex. Still, the thrills are definitely old school: Afterward, the 25-year-old I was with wrinkled her nose and said, “Was that…supposed to be funny?” Hell yeah, shorty. Sam Raimi is for the children.
4. 35 Shots of Rum
Claire Denis and company show you what love is, what music does and what drinking is for. Mourning and celebration can become gross spectacle in the wrong hands; Denis is the kind of emcee/advocate you want delivering your eulogy, your wedding toast, your appeal for clemency. If you evince a soul, she’s in your corner. I will never ever forget that cat in that bag. The hell am I talking about? See the movie. It glides on the nimble watchfulness you’d expect from a rich, slim novel, except in cinema’s language of movement and expression. The male lead is not much of a talker, more of an observer, and so is the ideal viewer of this shy but insistent call for folks to let the right ones in.
3. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans
One big, beautiful secret of this movie is that it’s partly a love story between a dirty cop and a dirty whore, without shame or hesitation. Eva Mendes and Nicolas Cage are selfish scumbags here, but Herzog locates the loveliness in their bond: they trust each other no matter how many strangers they fuck or crack capsules they drain. It’s one of many whimsical touches that breeze on by in Werner Herzog’s New Orleans jazz funeral for civilization.
And anybody who thinks the Chicken Dance at the end of Herzog’s Stroszek is the greatest musical sequence ever will love the reprise of that song here, at a crucial moment. Said episode also certifies that Herzog can do anything, including stage a gunfight as balletic as those of his King of New York-directing predecessor, Abel Ferrara. Unlike Ferrara’s Lieutenant, though, there’s not much religion in this one, just Herzog's pained humanism and cosmic daydreaming. Its first and last scenes illustrate the obscenity of Hurricane Katrina in plainer terms than even Spike Lee’s Levees documentary: We’re all stuck together, high and low, acting like we ain’t, until happenstance either reverses the roles or levels the playing field. If that makes this film sound too noble and redemptive, lemme refer you to the scene where Cage squeezes an old lady's oxygen tube and waves his revolver.
2. Inglourious Basterds
It has one lousy scene (“Der Fuhrer vill be at ze premiere.”), one forced bit of business (“Gorlami… Gore-lahm-me!”) and one egregious Bugs-Bunny-in-Boston line reading (“…frow vawn hammmersmaaak…”) but is otherwise the war movie Robert Aldrich or Sam Fuller would have made if they’d had access to Quentin Tarantino’s video library, iPod and (not a typo) sensitivity. Tarantino is a lamb. A friend of mine who hates grisly, violent flicks but loved Inglourious Basterds was looking forward to District 9 based on Inglourious-like buzz, so we went to see it. When we both stumbled out of D9 with pounding headaches, she whined, "Why was Basterds just as violent but when I walked out of it I felt giddy, whereas here I feel beaten up?"
I was too wrung out from the roach Apartheid flick to give her my theory that one movie was a graceful, if at times graphic, dance whereas the other is a clumsy, if elaborate, beatdown. In spelling out that difference through mise-en-scène, Tarantino spanks an entire generation of filmmakers who’ve shown so little regard for big screen time and space. (And, given that Star Trek and District 9 are among his favorite films this year, this wasn’t even his agenda, just a wonderful side effect.) As if that weren’t enough, QT employs this sensitivity in defense of every mere civilian who ever lived under actual, daily occupation and terror—not just the specter of it on the teevee. Yes. The violence isn’t nearly as memorable as the odd detail, like Marcel the black projectionist enjoying Nazi champagne in secret, or the great affection that Goebbel’s mistress has for him, all in her brimming, beaming eyes. Tarantino’s war is ultramodern, with homicidal assholes in Facebook proximity to good people, and everyone convinced of his own righteous purpose.
1. Bullets Over Brownsville
Everything my astute friends tell me Jean-Luc Godard was up to in his New Wave touchstones, I find writer-directors Damon Diddit and Natural Langdon doing in their camcorder hood docudrama, Bullets Over Brownsville. This is a mischievous, sorrowful, movie-and-music-mad anthem that plays like epic screwball tragedy on the big screen. It is the furthest thing from perfect, this mircobudget tale of four Brooklyn housing project residents caught in an absurd web of violence, but BoB is the best film of 2009 because, like Flooding with Love for the Kid, only bigger, it tears away the last Ho'wood veil (the one made of billion-dollar bank loans and foreign tax shelters). Diddit takes digital effects, editing and cinematography credits, and I salute his desktop-graphic swagger: Under a sick, sad beat by Langdon, the opening credit sequence blends street corner soundbites, video scan lines and the kind of splashy keyframe animation currently in vogue on Smokin’ Aces-through-Slumdog Milllionaire. At the Brooklyn screening I attended, it played as confidently as any of those Ho’wood releases.
Diddit/Langdon‘s fragmentary, cross-cutting, rewinding, film-and-TV-referencing storytelling makes BoB the kind of ghetto art film Spike Lee toyed with in his adaptation of Clockers (whose blown highlights and reversal-stock candy colors are among the many visuals this film expertly quotes). But, like the creator of his source material, Richard Price, Spike was an outsider weighing in. Watching BoB, I have little doubt that at the end of each shooting day, much of the cast and crew went home via the project stairwells. Be warned, arthouse regulars: This film is not apt to fuel coffee shop discussion afterward. It doesn’t speak your snarky, jaunty post-graduate language. Vibrant as it is, it is essentially about people who are drowning, inside a system that favors you, not them. Bullets Over Brownsville isn’t asking you to pity them or save them. This isn’t Mike Tyson or Precious crying into the camera (or to Oprah). This is the hood throwing a party for its own (heavily disputed, usually caricatured) humanity, using Ho’wood’s snatch-and-grab storytelling techniques the way insurgents employ the occupier’s discarded ammo—in retaliation. Bullets Over Brownsville is a sprawling graffiti mural in a movie landscape dominated by sterile billboards.
I liked it.
Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of Big Media Vandalism.
By N.P. Thompson
What makes Rob Marshall’s Nine so peculiarly bad is its sheer self-congratulation. We’re incessantly told how important, how fascinating the director Guido Contini must be, and we as viewers are expected to take this on faith, but never once does Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) do or say anything even remotely intriguing. The movie has no real subject; it’s proudly about nothing. Not the arid nothingness of a Van Sant movie, but a boring sort of Condé Nast nothingness. If the real-life Federico Fellini had been as dull and as mopey as his fictional counterpart Contini, no one would have ever staged a Broadway musical [loosely] inspired by the autobiographical 8-1/2 in the first place, which means we could have been spared this present debacle that masquerades as entertainment.
Day-Lewis gamely tries to personify a song-and-dance man, yet his integrity as a performer works against him in a Rob Marshall movie. When Day-Lewis, in his first solo number, climbs the spiraling soundstage staircase that rises into the dark, it ought to be an iconic moment, but there’s magic neither in Marshall’s airless staging nor in his unimaginative camera work.
But back to that nothingness: It’s vitally important to Nine, because that’s all there is. When the end credits rolled, I was aghast to see the screenplay credited to Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella, both of whom have done far superior work, and even their past failures (Tolkin’s The New Age, Minghella’s Cold Mountain) at least had the germs of subject matter spreading about their respective universes. Nine, by sharp contrast, feels like the end result of marketing, or rather of that dreaded term “branding.” It’s nothing but a bunch of “brands” all strung together—the Judi Dench brand, the Penélope Cruz brand, and so forth; I could imagine a gaggle of ad-flack creeps coked out on the sheer nonsense that is “SEO” getting a real hard-on for this empty shell, a spectacle that feels emblematic of what a flash-over-substance nightmare Barack Obama’s presidency has turned out to be.
It’s painful to watch Day-Lewis’s labors tossed away on such idiocy, as he hides behind a potted palm in a hotel lobby, for instance, saddled with lines like, “What, no? Oh, God, no!” Nine coasts on his and the other actors’ reputations; then the movie wants, if not outright demands, to be applauded for its parasitic leech-like behavior of attaching itself to the “right people,” while accomplishing absolutely nothing of its own. It’s so nakedly a paean to shallowness that one wonders why Marshall didn’t splice in footage of the Salahis.
Maury Yeston’s songs are lousy: the lyrics embarrassing, the so-called melodies unmelodic, unmemorable. Even Mamma Mia! had more conviction and authenticity than this.
Ultimately, it’s all extremely conventional: a boring, desiccated little story about a heel who must find redemption. So, then, why all this counterfeit nostalgia grafted onto Fellini? Nine could just as well be about Edward Dmytryk or Robert Siodmak. Or about anyone whose name was yanked at random out of the phone directory.
What about all those “brands” on orgiastic display? Well, most of them are horrible. Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren manage to get by: Kidman seems to know what a fiasco this is (she’s been in so many) and so she hangs back, during her few scenes, without investing much of herself (when she does make an effort, she comes across as shrill); Loren has more power in silence than in her girlish voice—as the ghost of Contini’s mother, she’s pleasant and wistful, which in this movie constitutes something of an achievement. Yet Marshall keeps trying to turn Loren back into a goddess, when she’s long since earned the right not to keep on fostering illusions.
I admit that my knives were sharpened for Marion Cotillard, whom, one or two faithful readers may recall, I detested in the overblown La Vie en Rose. As Contini’s betrayed wife, Cotillard conjures none of Anouk Aimée’s impish charm or devastating, low-key charisma. Nonetheless, this French actress stands out as the only good thing about Nine. She isn’t pretty, she lacks a memorable presence, yet she can suggest pathos without wallowing in it—a valuable trait.
Marshall’s cross-cutting felt germane in Chicago; the fluid editing fit his vision, however skewed, of the material, and the material was so potent it covered the director’s ass. In Nine, without anything to camouflage the void, Marshall cross-cuts relentlessly because it’s his crutch—he doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t trust the songs and dances to build under their own steam or else he doesn’t trust the dumb audience. Marshall thus sabotages Cotillard’s grittiest sequence—her B&W striptease, the one number that has some emotional power, some fearlessness—by slicing it back and forth between a dialogue scene.
Except for the Saraghina episode, which is utterly flavorless, thanks in no small part to Stacy Ferguson’s resemblance to a mule decked out in red seaweed, nothing in Nine stems from memory, the essential DNA of most Fellini films. I suspect that Todd Haynes might have wrung something out of this thin sideshow, yet in a sense he already has: his masterly 2007 musical I’m Not There was a much greater tribute (in spite of being about Bob Dylan) to the spirit that infused some of Fellini’s better work. Haynes the conjurer was able to summon a bit of Fellini’s trademark satiric whimsy while bringing to it a sense and sensibility uniquely his own. Marshall not only can’t provide the illusion that he gives a damn, he’s like a clown wearing a cheap, off-the-rack suit while tearing through the pages of Esquire, Details, GQ, and other shitty magazines in search of more nouveau-riche posturing to plaster across the screen.
Which brings me to the casting of Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, and Kate Hudson.
Hudson, encased in layers of rouge, suggests a demonic cupcake, a fat-cheeked horror, a female impersonator. Clad in white-spangled sequined spaghetti straps with matching go-go boots, she’s supposed to be a journo who just adores Contini movies; her “big” number, “Cinema Italiano,” has the distinction of being the most numbingly illiterate song in the show. The lyrics made me want to stuff popcorn down my ear canals, and Marshall’s choreography, such as it is, consists of Hudson jumping up and down in that hideous costume. Hudson, who can't act, sing, or dance, troops along like a pudgy-faced sorority sister who has wolfed down plate after plate of marshmallow fudge brownies, yet still believes (mistakenly) that she's pulchritudinous. It’s only fair for me to criticize Hudson this way, as the non-performer and her enabler—both of them oblivious to what a flabby, petulant, misshapen tub of lard she’s become—insist on her sexiness.
As for Judi Dench, she's the same in everything. In role after role, she cannibalistically feasts on Glenda Jackson’s mannerisms and vocal phrasing. When near the end, as Contini’s confidante, Dench morosely chirps to Day-Lewis, “Nobody wants to be alone,” her voice rises so high into the squeak range I began to think one of the Chipmunks could do as serviceable a job as she does.
Orgiastically humping and bumping and sliding down a velvet fuchsia pole in white fishnet stockings, Cruz gives a performance so strenuously embarrassing that the Academy ought to demand its Oscar back. Here, she’s Euro-trashy in the worst, most stereotypical manner possible, singing lyrics as limp-wristedly bad as, “I’ll vibrate like a string I’m plucking,” while carrying on as though her desirability were a given. It doesn’t help that she’s chosen to play this role—of Contini’s mistress—as someone with shit for brains. In the 1960s, when comely European actresses appeared in parts like this—sexy and carefree—there was (sometimes) a mitigating fusion of naïvete and voluptuousness. Cruz, very much on the other hand, is inept and amateurish. It is hard to believe that she has ever stepped in front of a movie camera before. But then she has never been exposed/stranded by Rob Marshall, or subject to such stupid ideas as the staging of a seduction scene that takes place in two separate rooms—she fondling herself in one, whilst Day-Lewis writhes in passion listening to her on the phone, from his hotel bed, as a doctor and fat nurse try to examine him.
Cruz fares less terribly in her other new film, Pedro Almodóvar’s tepid, nasty, joyless freak show Broken Embraces, although, alas, that isn’t saying much.
While not as openly repulsive as that great yuppie favorite Volver, Broken Embraces, in its convoluted flashback structure, springs “surprise” after surprise on us—“surprises” that are perfunctory and stale; the macaroons of a filmmaker who’s finished. In one of these, Cruz, as an executive assistant to a wealthy financier, moonlights as a prostitute to raise cash for her father’s medical bills and who should come calling as her first trick, but her boss? It’s enough to slap one’s forehead with an audible “Duh!!!!!” The groan-worthy ironies do not stop there, but by the time Almodóvar has arrived at this point (Cruz hangs up on her employer’s sex calls, then phones him early the next morning to report how distraught her family is over the lack of options in her dad’s cancer care) I’d seen enough of the movie’s parallel narratives to know that neither one holds even the slightest interest—not in plotting, certainly not in the acting, the toneless direction, the music, the cinematography. Almodóvar hires gifted collaborators, among them the composer Alberto Iglesias, the DP Rodrigo Prieto, and as the villainous boss, the distinguished Spanish actor José Luis Gómez, then inspires them to give their most mediocre efforts.
The movie’s English subtitles—it’s worth interjecting—were put together by a complete illiterate who knows zilch about punctuation. Whoever it was consistently places commas and periods outside quotation marks, when any halfway decent proofreader will tell you that they MUST go inside the quote marks. (Did the New York Times critic, swooning in “Almodóvaria,” come up for air long enough to notice?)
Among the featured actors, there’s the 20-something Tamar Novas as Diego, who serves as a seeing-eye man to a blind scriptwriter who calls himself Harry Caine. Together, they devise insipid ideas for screenplays, which they believe to be irresistible. Diego is such a gap-toothed space angel, so generically cute and falsely sympathetic, that he seems marked as a candidate for an early demise, the movie’s sacrificial victim. Here, Almodóvar tweaks this vulgar formula by playing it both ways. When death appears to come for Diego, via an unintentional drug overdose at the sleazy nightclub where he DJs, I felt no sense of shock—only mild indignation at the auteur’s complete lack of taste. What Almodóvar managed to get away with in All About My Mother—the emotional exploitation over the sudden death of a young boy who, up until the moment of his demise, had been a major character—doesn’t work at all in Broken Embraces. We’re meant to be horrified when Diego collapses and is hauled away in an ambulance; and we’re meant to be moved by the plight of the blind Caine attempting to navigate his way around a hospital in search of the lad. I, for one, am so sick of the patented maneuvering by which Almodóvar yanks our collective chain that I could only respond with dulled revulsion. Diego, however, lives.
Cruz, whose character, Lena, morphs from a secretary to an actress in a movie within the movie, looks harshly lit and photographed, even in shots where she’s supposed to evince glamor. Made up to resemble Audrey Hepburn, Cruz is grotesque—it becomes that much more apparent how lacking she is. Later, in a platinum Marilyn Monroe wig, she’s almost palatable, save for the excessively applied mascara that lends Cruz a witch-like countenance.
Watching the on-set proceedings through a video monitor, the financier Martel, who has gone from being Lena’s boss to her john to her lover, loses patience with the perplexing shenanigans of movie-dom and—in the film’s most revealing line of dialogue—pointedly exclaims, “This is shit! It’s incomprehensible!” Of course, that’s how the arty cavorting about would look to a stiff, tired, business executive, yet I heard the line as Almodóvar’s cri de coeur, his hidden-in-plain-sight admission of what a bomb Broken Embraces truly is.
The lone adroit performance stems from Lola Duenas, drolly deadpan as a lip reader who imparts the most outré information in tones utterly unaffected by the words she’s translating. Gómez, for a moment, seems to come alive, seated beside her.
At 128 minutes, there’s lots of dead space in Broken Embraces, so much so that I had plenty of time to wonder, “Is this the worst film that Almodóvar has made to date? Is it really going to steal the crown from Volver, the way Volver stole it from Talk to Her, the way Talk to Her stole it from Law of Desire? Volver, as disastrous as it was, at least managed its badness in a way that felt organic to the writer-director’s level of vulgarity and incompetence. Broken Embraces doesn’t. Almodóvar spends much of the running time indulged in his Hitchcock fixation, and this is partially what slows the damn movie down so much. He’s working in rhythms that aren’t altogether his own, although they aren’t Hitch’s either.
When Lena falls—literally—the camera scrutinizes every bone in her body. There are lingering close-ups of her X-rays and MRI scans. The plight of an abused woman, however, doesn’t engage Almodóvar. He has neither empathy for nor insight into Lena’s physical suffering at Martel’s hands. She shows up at the editing suite of her director/new lover Mateo without money to pay for cab fare—she is bruised and her mouth is bleeding; the beating, though, only serves as a mere plot device, and it was at this moment that I knew with absolute certainty, if I hadn’t realized it before: Almodóvar is a worthless misogynist hack, in drag as a “woman’s director.”
Mateo and Lena take flight to the coast; they settle into a kind of bliss, which we’re already long since primed to know won’t last. Here, as in other Almodóvar films, the smug and the sinister hopelessly entwine, as we wait and wait and WAIT for whatever horrible thing will contrivedly chance along to smash the lovers’ happiness to bits and pieces. Soap operatic ghoulishness passes for a style or worldview. Prurient fascination with sudden loss and with the physical and psycho-emotional affects on the survivor’s psyche are, here but not only here, the director’s signature cards. His worst films have a leering quality, not in a hateful manner a la the overbearing David O. Russell or the rancid Wes Anderson, but in the manner of someone who has lived his entire life inside a plastic bubble and salivates over the suffering of people outside. They feel what he cannot, and so he delights in putting them on display, while, like a flaccid poseur, he enjoys “the show.”
An aerial shot of a photographic jigsaw puzzle being pieced together from spread-out fragments stands out as the single inventive use of the camera.
Finally: The movie has a couple of anti-climactic climaxes glommed on, back-to-back. In one of these, Almodóvar tries to invoke Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom in a sequence of Lena’s death being played back to us on grainy video. In its own hollow way, however, the inclusion of this is more reminiscent of, and more degrading than, a similar sequence in Arthur Penn’s vastly superior Night Moves, in which a private detective repeatedly watches a fatal accident that occurred during the screen test of a young actress. Penn conveyed a sense of horror; the loss meant something to him and to the obsessive, hurt gumshoe as well. There isn’t a recognizable pulse in Almodóvar’s work; if Broken Embraces were the product of a first-time director, it would (justifiably) never have received U.S. distribution. Like Nine, and like Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear, this dud coasts entirely on the reputations of its participants. It is as if no one looked at what is actually going on, either on the page or on the screen.
House contributor N.P. Thompson lives, writes, and photo-blogs in the Pacific Northwest.
By Matt Zoller Seitz
“It’s showtime, folks.”
That’s the mantra of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), the boozing, chain-smoking, pill-popping, womanizing, workaholic filmmaker-choreographer hero of the 1979 drama All That Jazz, a hopped-up American variant of Federico Fellini’s navel-gazing fantasia 8 ½ (1963).
Those three words — recited by Gideon into the bathroom mirror each morning after downing a breakfast of Dexedrine and Alka-Seltzer and listening to Antonio Vivaldi’s “Concerto Alla Rustica” — sum up both the character and his real-world counterpart, Bob Fosse, the choreographer, theater director and filmmaker, who died in 1987 at 60. He was a Gideon-level workaholic who ended All That Jazz, a self-written advance obituary, with a shot of his alter ego being zipped into a body bag while the soundtrack plays Ethel Merman’s definitive version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
But Gideon’s mantra also summarizes that movie’s significance within narrative film, a mode of storytelling that rarely dares venture beyond the linear for fear of confusing the viewer. Released 30 years ago this month, All That Jazz set a new standard for speed and complexity, its structure boasting as many temporal pirouettes as the headiest art house fare. Yet the film never feels labored. It’s not homework. It’s showtime.
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Links to the fourth, fifth and sixth entries in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com. For the entry on Steven Soderbergh, click here. For the entry on Michael Moore, click here. For the entry on Steven Spielberg, click here.
By Jaime N. Christley
The phenomenon of the holiday makes it necessary for practically everyone to get into the spirit of things. Spin the globe, drop your finger, pick a holiday from where it lands, and that’s what happens. That’s why it’s a holiday, not a personal day. On the one hand, this can be seen as a social necessity. Part of your acceptance in a social group or subgroup depends on your ability to play a role not only in day-to-day business, but also in rituals. Commemoration, observation, celebration—these are all rituals of a sort. For a little less than a third of the human race, Christmas is the largest and most concentrated matrix of rituals. A few key images tell the story: Decorations appear in advance of the two major holidays that precede Christmas. Theme music besieges the airwaves. Homes and trees are adorned with lights. Government offices, too. These days—at least in my neck of the woods, where Christian and non-Christian faiths share a large and more or less nonviolent space, where pretty much every possible reaction to Christmas is okay—you can celebrate it, piously or non-piously, you can hate it, or you can attempt to ignore it. If, on the other hand, you find yourself in London, in the middle of the nineteenth century, some ways of thinking about the holiday are okay, and some are not.
Which brings us to Ebenezer Scrooge, easily the best known anti-social in Western literature. He’s also a miser, and Charles Dickens was shrewd enough to dovetail his money-hoarding with his misanthropy, instead of stacking the character with unlikable, yet unrelated, characteristics. As Dickens saw it, Christmas was a prominent, cultural fixture, but, politically speaking, it was also an impotent one. Social injustice was defined as the poor treatment of labor, a policy of zero tolerance to debtors, and brutal indifference toward the less fortunate. The character who personified this would not simply hate mankind, he would also hold its purse strings. The character arc of A Christmas Carol traces Ebenezer Scrooge’s evolution from a very bad man to a very good one, the engine of his moral reeducation operated by no one other than the story’s author. (You cannot otherwise explain the employment of spirits and surreal, malleable environments.)
What is unexpectedly inscribed by this fable is that, in order for Scrooge to emerge from his depths as a human being, he must fully embrace Christmas (carols, good cheer, food, social participation) and its attendant social behavior (charity, fair treatment of the worker, leniency towards debtors). This is not an accident. In the Dickens universe, Christmas is not simply an arbitrary metaphor that just happens, for the sake of the story and no further, to be structured around the tenets of good citizenship. Rather, it is how we—Christmas observers, secular and religious, if we align ourselves with the author’s moral compass—see ourselves in our most flattering light, during our most dominant holiday. During the years which saw Scrooge progress from a young boy to a stooped old man, he turned away both from the Christmas spirit as well as the Christmas ritual. Good cheer, good community, a good wife, good posture, etc., these were all chucked out the window. In their place, money, money, money. Over the course of the Christmas Eve of the story, Scrooge is offered a non-negotiable package deal: take Christmas into your heart, don’t ask questions, or you will lose absolutely everything.
Let’s think about this for a moment. While Dickens is known for his readiness to criticize society and organized religion, the medium through which Scrooge's famous conversion is transmitted is a violent manner of inculcation. Scrooge is, of course, a complete fabrication—there are no stories of Dickens forcing a real-life, miserly lender to undergo an omni-sensory nightmare in order to convert the miserable S.O.B. over to a more charitable and, well, merry way of thinking—but it’s certainly interesting that Dickens chose to use, well, torture, the tool of many dominant institutions across history, to isolate one individual and force him to get with the program. And it’s not simple torture; he besets Scrooge on every front: emotional, psychological, spiritual, and physical. One of the canon’s most enduring storytellers, Dickens outlines with equal vividness and creative vigor the problems he sees in the world and the happy new world that emerges as a result of the solutions he proposes. But what does Boz require? A sacrifice. It’s a combination of the horror narrative with another familiar plot: “the dropout must drop back in.”
In filming Dickens’s famous story, Robert Zemeckis (the Back to the Future trilogy, Forrest Gump) exhibits a great deal more in the way of fidelity to the source material than one would expect from an animated movie constructed around a still relatively new performance capture technique and designed to be best experienced in IMAX 3-D. With that pedigree, one can most reasonably expect a feature to be high on gimmickry and low on what they used to call “tradition of quality.” The real experience, however, is a surprise in that it rejects that dichotomy. One of the most complex big-budget directors of the Spielberg age, Zemeckis is not simply struck dull by technology. Instead, he uses new tools to convey, as best he can, the cinematic aspects of Dickens, i.e. the dialogue and the urban spaces of the very early days of Victorian England. (It was Eisenstein who argued, by pointing out the use of parallel montage in Oliver Twist, that Dickens gave more to the cinema than the cinema gave to itself.)
As regards the temptation to trick up the 3-D ride for dumb audiences—in less impressive 3-D features, or less impressive aspects of better ones, the center of the screen is frequently the repository for sticking-out objects such as swords, arrows, fists, guns, skulls, sharks, or a ping-pong ball on an elastic cable—Zemeckis is not precisely a teetotaler in the field of gratuitous visual titillation. But more often than not, he employs 3-D to create layers seemingly within the screen, an effect most classically attributed to Jean Renoir and Orson Welles. None of this is to say that Zemeckis, who receives sole credit for the screenplay, and his fantastically enormous legion of technicians and department heads have crafted the most vivid adaptation of the famous tale. (For this viewer, certain previous films of A Christmas Carol were seen at such a young and impressionable age as to refuse to release their hold on that title.) But it is his own film, and Zemeckis sees fit to use the platform of the Dickens novella to explore what he can do with filmic space, and what it means to be an actor in the movies.
This runs counter to our most favored instinctive response to computer-aided filmmaking: the idea that, now that anything we can imagine can be rendered, with each year bringing us faster and faster processors, more and more memory, and seemingly unlimited access to capital, we won’t be able to make anything worthwhile. However, like many artists, Zemeckis is best served by boundaries, and an adaptation of Dickens is a strict, yet robust, set of boundaries. To take A Christmas Carol and put it on the screen, a few conditions must be met. There’s Scrooge’s introduction, the spirits, the memories, the catharsis, Scrooge’s rebirth, and God bless us, everyone. Zemeckis’s success is derived from his decision to launch a two-pronged attack: one, to be at least 89% faithful to the source material (in terms of setting, tone, and dialogue), and two, to push the digital envelope as far as it will go without breaking.
With the exception of a brief aside allotted to Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, the first reel paints a very thorough and convincing portrait of Scrooge as one of the most miserable, yet among the most well-off, men in London. The “tuppence is tuppence” line is Zemeckis’s creation, and not found in the Dickens. So is the bit with the undertaker silently yet avariciously demanding of Scrooge a gratuity for his firm’s services. Zemeckis peppers his adaptation with little moments like these, some comical, some macabre, some going either way. After we’ve done impossible loop-the-loops around London, we expect a fairly innocuous, virtual reality roller-coaster ride, and it’s the arrival of Marley that ejects us most powerfully from that comfort zone. (During this sequence, which is more potent in its classic “oogedy-boogedy” scare’um effects than almost any horror movie in recent memory, parents who'd taken their under-10 kids expecting harmless PG-rated fun and Jim Carrey face-pulling fled in droves, as if the theater was on fire.)
The three spirit visitations feature some of the most brilliant moments in all of Zemeckis’s body of work. While one may complain of the uncanny valley and some problematic effects (an obese man executing a perfect backflip and landing like Mary Lou Retton is no less cumbersome here than it was in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! eight years ago), the meeting of eyes between young Ebenezer and Belle, his bride-to-be, at the Christmas social, is among Zemeckis’s most beautifully crafted moments, one that can bring tears to one’s eyes not because it is a filmed moment freighted with narrative meaning, but because an artist has charged a visual space with pure, undistilled emotion and let it glide by unadorned. The second of the spirits sees Zemeckis in full effect, The Ghost of Christmas Present sequence centering on a now more captive Scrooge who witnesses the Christmas experience of his contemporaries. Some are joyful and some are miserable, and the vehicle of this spirit’s visual lesson is a banquet hall with a translucent floor that takes impossible flights into the surrounding city. It’s somehow heartening that, with a brigade of visual effects technicians and rivers of flowing cash, Zemeckis would prefer nothing more than to recreate one of the cinema’s most time-honored photographic effects: double exposure, in the spirit of the early McCutcheon/Porter short, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906).
Throughout A Christmas Carol, we are constantly aligned with Scrooge as spectators. He is often seen in close, over-the-shoulder shots as the spirits’ dream-plays unfold before him. Establishing perspective through over-the-shoulder shots in the same frame as the observed object is a technique infrequently used between the offices of Michael Mann and the Dardenne brothers, and, appropriately enough, in Zemeckis’s Carol it has more in common with shoot-‘em-up video games than other movies. Several times during the spirits’ presentations, the Zemeckis digital camera will glide backwards and to the side as Scrooge’s head fills the frame, nose first. We are, given the clarity and magnitude of the visual effects concert, fellow victims of this all-out assault on the senses, but this act of establishing and re-establishing Scrooge's perspective serves to remind us that he is the most privileged member of the audience.
One of the most crucial aspects of Scrooge’s transformation is that it is all too much for him to absorb and remain sane. More than once in the course of the story, he argues that he has seen enough, he’s learned his lesson, can he go home now. But while he’s through with the nightmare—glib and impatient on more than one occasion—it’s not through with him. It is made abundantly clear that Scrooge is meant to undergo a cleansing of the soul, even if it scrambles his brain and breaks his back. This is by far the most interesting layer of the Zemeckis experience, one built around an audio-visual event that straddles the midpoint between “a fun ride” and “a ride that will put you in the emergency room.”
Toward the end of the third visitation, Scrooge’s last layers of security, stature, and significance are stripped away, to the point where even a lowly rat takes on the form of mortal danger. It’s still not enough: he must also undergo the experience of being dead and buried. By the time Scrooge awakes to find he’s been given another chance, it’s clear that he’s not just a lot more cheerful, he’s also a little bit cracked. Getting his life back is something of a consolation prize for losing his marbles, i.e. we’ve broken your skull into a million pieces and put it back together, more or less, so…thanks for playing! It’s also at this point that we really hear Jim Carrey (the cheerful-just-past-sanity’s-breaking-point voice has long been part of his repertoire), and if an elderly moneylender doing a mad jig, alone in his office, isn’t the giveaway, then perhaps the scene where he terrifies his housemaid will do it. In a holiday rife with contradiction, what’s more appropriate than effecting limitless good cheer while remaining timid and terrified inside your own skull?
Jaime N. Christley sells contractual warranties of indemnity in a questionable part of the great city, in the shadow of vile, godless towers and amidst ghastly, nameless fumes and fluids. If he makes it through the day alive, he spends his spare time with flickers and shades, filing his correspondence with Out, damned spot!.
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