Movie Critics

I meant to get to this earlier...

I was very interested in this post from Jim Emerson about movie critics which deals with some of the same issues that I've brought up on this blog.

I basically agree with Jim, although I think he raises some tricky questions which he then ignores (at least in this post, I'm pretty sure this is stuff that he's aware of and thinks about).

He writes:

[M]ost movies are also crap! Even if they're relatively enjoyable at the time, they're forgettable and disposable, like yesterday's lunch. Imagine if you had to spend more time writing about movies than you actually do seeing them. Because most reviews take longer than 90 minutes to write, which is probably why many critics prefer writing about films that give them something to write about. Something that may be worth thinking about after you pay for your parking.

Now, I know a job is a job, and if I was trying to eke out a career as a movie reviewer, I know that I'd write about whatever movies my editor wanted me to. And it can be fun to write take-downs of stuff like Wild Hogs, but I'm sure, more often, it's just kind of a chore.

But if you're a critic like Jim who knows that a lot of movies that get released are going be stuff like Wild Hogs, then I think it might be a good idea to at least try to approach them in the manner they're intended. I mean, it's not like it should be surprising that Wild Hogs is no Sideways.

Actually, I shouldn't even be talking about Wild Hogs, which I haven't seen and I'm sure is probably pretty awful, but check out the Metacritic scores for Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin, two of the greatest examples of gross-out comedy (here's a terrific essay on Kingpin by Alan Dale, my favorite film critic when it comes to writing about comedy). Most movie critics don't like even the best examples of this kind of movie, so, of course, they're not going to like mediocre ones.

Sean Collins brought up a similar issue in his exchange with Jim Treacher about the critical response to 300: he questioned why Slate had Dana Stevens review the film when she's on record as not liking war movies. Now, I think it can be good to get a kind of dissenting opinion-style piece: to read a review of a movie by someone who just doesn't like that kind of thing in general. Sometimes an outside perspective can provide insight that "insiders" are too close to see. (For instance, I'd note the genre of review where "that kind of thing in general" is experimental/art films and the outside perspective is along the lines of "what obscure, pretentious nonsense".)

In general, though, I get more out of a review or piece of criticism written by someone who is sympathetic to the kind of movie being reviewed, even if not to the actual movie itself. That is, I generally get more out of a negative review of something like 300 written by someone who appreciates Peckinpah movies and wuxia flicks and war movies than one written by someone who just doesn't respond to these kind of things, across the board.

Likewise, I doubt that Alan Dale will write about Wild Hogs (although he might write about Norbit), but I'd be more interested in his take on the movie, simply because I know that he can appreciate and enjoy a good gross-out comedy when he sees it. (On the experimental/art side, even though these movies generally don't float my boat, I tend to get more out of criticism written by folks who do dig this stuff - like Michael Sicinski - then I do from that written by people who's views/tastes are closer to my own).

I don't really have a big summing up point or even a major gripe. I'll just note that this phenomenon - critics writing lots and lots about kinds of movies that they, essentially, aren't that interested in/jazzed by - plays a big part in why professional film criticism is such a wonky, wobbly thing. For instance, as Jim points out, a critic is going to be thankful for a movie that gives him or her something to write about, i.e, a movie that makes their job easier and/or more interesting. This just might mean that certain kinds of movies - those which lend themselves to being written about - are going to tend to have a better reputation among critics than an "equally good" movie that speaks for itself.

Not a big problem, by any means, but one people who write about film and read about film should be aware of.

Movie Chat: 300

300

The teenage goth girl who sold me and my brother tickets for this told us that it was the best movie she had seen since The Matrix. Turns out I agree with her more than I do with the film's critics, who seem to be in two camps: (1) the folks who don't like the movie because it's politically irresponsible and reactionary and (2) the folks who don't like the movie because it feels like a big, stylized video game.

My Take: that's all true enough, but, to me at least, it seemed like everything was in quotes. This is a "Pro-War" movie and there's lots of "Violence". Everything is aestheticized though to such an extent that my reaction was basically to nod along in appreciation of the choreography, the realization of Frank Miller's images, and the physiques on display.

What made me like it rather than just be impressed by it, is that it didn't feel pushy at all. On the one hand, this meant that I never really got caught up in it or had much in the way of an emotional reaction. On the other hand, it meant that I could sit back and enjoy it without feeling worked over.

I want to see Sin City again - I caught it on its opening weekend and was done in by its length, despite liking parts of it quite a bit - but what I like about 300 is that, unlike Sin City, it isn't obsessively concerned with recreating Frank Miller's images on the screen almost exactly as they appear on the page. That seemed to not only have the intended effect of flattening everything out, but also the unintended effect of being kind of redundant. And fetishizing the images seemed to take the life out of them: their pulpy charm was undermined by the millions of dollars spent to "bring them to life". However, 300 treats its source material slightly less reverently: Snyder and his crew conceive of everything in terms of space, movement, and depth. It's still like the space, movement, and depth in a video game, but there are still moments of brainless blockbuster poetry (I'm thinking specifically of the two bits dealing with walls of bodies and the first slo-mo/heavy metal sequence).

My Even Quicker Take: Yes, it is like a video game, but it gets by because it has a sense of assuredness and willingness to slow down and stand back. I think it's a lot like Hero or The Promise, the difference being that wuxia is still kind of a living B-movie genre, while Sword & Sandal is a thing of the past. Still, the formula is the same: all these movies build elaborate, spectacular, action set-pieces out of the standard B-movie tropes that grew out of economic necessity. (Hero probably goes over better with critics because of its foreign art house pedigree).

See also: Sean Collins and Jim Treacher on 300.

Movie Chat: Egged On

"Egged On"

Wow.

Or, even better, "Holy shit!"

Sometimes when I put a movie on, I expect to be wowed. For instance, I really loved A Tale of Floating Weeds, which I watched last week, but liking it or thinking it's a little masterpiece wasn't surprising to me. After all, it's an Ozu movie, Ozu's one of the greats, so, yeah, no duh that it impressed.

But for a movie to be a revelation it has to catch me unaware (which has gotten harder over the years as I've seen more movies and read more about film history).

Which brings me to "Egged Up", a short from Charley Bowers, a silent film comedian and animator whom I had never heard of before reading about him in this primer on the Green Cine site. (Just as a note: Bowers never came up in any of the silent film or general film history classes that I took during the 6 years I spent studying film as an undergrad and a grad student).

Well, I watched it last week and I thought it was pretty terrific. I can't believe I'd been in the dark about this guy for so long, but I'm kind of glad that there are still surprises like this out there for me.

After watching "Egged Up", I looked around on the internet for more info on Bowers. And I noticed that a bunch of articles kept giving the same reason for Bowers's obscurity: he wasn't as strong a performer (both as a physical comedian and as an "actor") as Buster Keaton. That explanation seems kind of bogus to me: while it's true enough - Bowers can't match Keaton when it comes to physical comedy and he doesn't seem to be much of an "actor" - there are so many other possible reasons that quoting this as the primary one seems a little lazy. (And, you know, no one can match Keaton, so it's kind of a weird bar to set, as if, in something that is at least kinda/sorta "art", you have to be the best to be remembered. In reality, lots of "second rate"/"minor" artists have staying power, for lots of different reasons).

It's the way that these judgments get passed down and repeated that bugs me. I mean, reading more about silent comedy, I kept coming across articles that talk about, say, Larry Semon's current obscurity having to do with his "failure to create a comic character" (sort of like this one). I wonder, though, if luck, and, maybe even the tastes and memories of influential critics and film preservationists, have a little more to do with it. The preservation and rediscovery of these films has been something of a chancy matter. For instance, this article suggests that Larry Semon had a better reputation in Europe than in the U.S. because the only films that survived here were from later in his career when he had fallen into formula. I have no idea how accurate this assessment is, but I buy the underlying concept.

This gets into a tricky area:

On the one hand, there are simply too many movies out there not to do some reducing - it can be useful to talk about "the greats" of silent comedy (Chaplin and Keaton) or Japanese film (Ozu and Kurosawa) or Westerns (Ford and Peckinpah) simply because we don't always have the time or the need to deal with subjects in great depth. On the other hand, sometimes we do need to step back and take note of the way focusing on the greats neglects other work that can be just as vital and rewarding.

There's a dilemma that I keep coming up against: now, thanks to Netflix and YouTube and similar sites, we can experience more movies and other pop culture performances more easily than ever before. And my guess is the quantity of content and the ease of accessibility will keep increasing. At the same time, faced with all of this stuff to watch, where are you supposed to begin and how can you know that your not missing things like these Charley Bowers disks? The answer I've come up with, for now, at least: watch whatever seems interesting at the moment, keep poking around the internet for more finds, and realize that I'm not going to get around to seeing everything that I might like to.

I don't know: I try to be generous and charitable when it comes to other people's responses to movie, but, honestly, if you watched "Egged Up" and your reaction is: "Eh, pretty good but Bowers is no Keaton" then I have serious doubts about your love of actual movies (as opposed to, heh, "cinema in general"). I'm not saying that it's a masterpiece or that we need to start teaching it in Cinema Studies programs: I am saying that if you can't enjoy it for what it is - a playful short comedy full of inventive sequences - then you might want to reassess why you were drawn to watch a movie like this in the first place.

Twenty Favorites

Inspired by Dave McDougall, Michael S. Smith, and Darren Hughes (links thanks to, respectively, Michael Blowhard, Andy Horbal, and Andy Horbal):

This is the top twenty I came up with recently when I was compiling an All-Time Top Ten for the annual List Party that I have with my college film buff buddies. This is definitely a personal list, which may seem a little weird since most of the movies on it are pretty standard Best of All-Time Choices, but they're honestly the ones I like most (right now at least). I didn't want to through in some of the more off-the-beaten-path movies that I like slightly less (Shadow of a Doubt, Modern Romance, Videodrome) just to be willfully quirky. I followed Sight & Sound's convention of grouping together the multi-part epics, although, technically, that makes this a Top 23 List. And I didn't restrict myself to one film per director, which is only fair, as this list might as well show off my particular love for Kurosawa, Altman, and Hawks.

1. The Apu Triology


2. The Godfather and The Godfater Part II


3. The Night of the Shooting Stars


4. Play Time


5. Seven Samurai


6. Nashville


7. The Rules of the Game


8. Vertigo


9. Bringing Up Baby


10. Blue Velvet


11. Seven Chances


12. Sans soleil


13. Singin' in the Rain


14. Schindler's List


15. The Leopard


16. Children of Paradise


17. Intolerance


18. Shoot the Piano Player


19. Citizen Kane


20. Rio Bravo


For comparison, here's a list of 20 of my favorite films that probably wouldn't show up on very many film buffs' top 20 lists (i.e., the willfully quirky and off-the-beaten-path list):

1. Aloha Bobby and Rose
2. Modern Romance
3. Die Hard
4. Dumb and Dumber
5. To Live and Die in L.A.
6. The Hollywood Knights
7. Akira
8. Battle Royale
9. Scanners
10. Kingpin
11. Red Dawn
12. A Girl in Every Port
13. The Big Broadcast of 1938
14. Austin Powers
15. The Last American Hero
16. Thunder Road
17. Scrooged
18. Caddyshack
19. The Towering Inferno
20. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

(Someday I'll get around to writing an appreciation of Floyd Mutrux.)

Looking at the two lists, I imagine a Forager Film Series where the double features were made up of one movie off each list: To Live and Die in L.A. and Shoot the Piano Player, Singin' in the Rain and Aloha Bobby and Rose, The Hollywood Knights and Nashville, California Split and Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and The Apu Triology, The Godfather movies and Scrooged, and Intolerance and The Towering Inferno (bring your lunch to this one).

A Very Short Post on Elmore Leonard

In most crime novels (even really good ones), the criminals tend to be dangerous because they are smart or wiley or obsessed or possess some other kind of strength that makes them worthy opponents.This is understandable: writers want to give their heroes a challenge. So, if their protagonists are a cut above, their antagonists need to be, too. (A clear example of this is in the TV show Law & Order: Criminal Intent: Goren is always facing off in a battle of wits against some kind of extra-clever killer.)One of the things I like about Elmore Leonard's criminals is that they are dangerous because they are unpredictable and violent - even though they're usually not that bright. This strikes me as being a somewhat clearer-eyed take on the matter.

Will Movies Last?

Fellow film buffs - especially those of us with an appreciation for old movies - should definitely check out this dialogue at Stuff of Dreams.

The Derelict watched some old movies with a friend of his who is an "old movie novice", and he was a little disturbed by some of her comments, like:

I really just think that movies just aren't really that important. Like, who cares if people forget about Waterloo Bridge or whatever other movie? What's going to happen if they're forgotten? Nothing. Most movies have a short shelf life. I know all of the movies that I like, I'll remember and pass on to future generations, but all of the older movies I've never seen? Who cares?

The Derelict sums it up:

I’m really, I dunno, disturbed by the fact that movies are so disposable. It was something I’d been thinking about for a long time actually, in relation to old movies, to movies in general, to movies as art vs. movies as cheap, quick entertainment... Movies are pop art, for the most part, and I guess it’s to be expected that pop art will have a short shelf life, whether it’s a catchy tune on the radio, a TV show, or a movie. I would like to think that certain movies will last in some form two hundred or three hundred years from now, the way great literature of the past has lasted into our own century, but maybe that’s expecting too much.

My own take on the "will movies last thing?" is a bit less pessimistic. I think that "the Hollywood movie" is one of America's great contributions to world culture from the 20th Century. So, representative movies like Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz will last as part of the popular culture. More obscure movies probably will be remembered only by a (relatively) small number of cognoscenti, but this isn't any different from what has happened with literature. Thanks to high school and college lit classes, there's still a general audience for The Great Gatsby, while a "lesser" but still interesting and enjoyable book like The Magnificent Ambersons is read by many fewer people. And, ironically, even among today's arts and culture buffs, that book is probably best known because Orson Welles turned it into a movie. And I'd love it if more people besides me and the folks in the William Dean Howells society were excited about a book like A Hazard of New Fortunes, but I bet it'd be easier to find someone to gab with about The Maltese Falcon.

But all I can do is guess about the future of "old movies". I can't help but think that the digitization of everything is going to continue.

But I don't necessarily think it's a terrible thing for "old movies" to become something appreciated mainly by film buffs. I'm more concerned with this tendency to reduce arts and culture stuff to nothing more than a choice about how to spend leisure time. (I do this myself, of course, too.) There's something appealing to me about the admittedly hokey and old-fashioned idea of "art appreciation": that is, you should spend time learning about great works of culture because doing so will make your life richer, and not simply because art and literature can be enjoyable or can offer an escape from the day-to-day.

Still, I have mixed feelings about turning to academia and the museums to conserve popular art. On the one hand, keeping these movies around, keeping them - even marginally - part of the cultural consciousness is a truly good thing. On the other hand, I'm not sure a movie like Citizen Kane is best served by thinking of it as a piece of "museum" art. I brought this up on a message board recently, but I think the problem a lot of non-cinephiles have with Citizen Kane is that they approach it with a sense of awe and expect it to deliver some kind of "high art" experience. I think the movie (to i ts credit) works at a lower level than all that: if I was introducing the movie to first time viewers, I'd emphasize its humor and theatricality, its gothic weirdness and visual invention. As much as any Hollywood movie, Citizen Kane is an entertainment.

Anyway, I also sympathize a little bit with the Derelict when it comes to the more selfish reasons for wanting to get people into "old movies": I'd like to be able to have more face-to-face discussions about old movies. (And I didn't find too many fans of old movies at film school, either.)

Tim and Eric, "Not Film", and YouTube

I had originally planned to write more on Tim and Eric here, but I came down with a cold last week, fell behind in my blogging, and decided to post what I had.

Anyway, I commented a little bit about the Tim and Eric show on a message board and I wanted to use one of the responses from there to anchor this post. "The Atlas Boy" wrote:

I like their live performances, but to be honest, I've never been very fond of any of their recorded material -- I see it as kind of like Napoleon Dynamite or that sort of thing without characters, structure, or (for the most part) punchlines. And you know how I am about punchlines. I think they do a good job creating an atmosphere, but either fail to or aren't interested in doing anything with that atmosphere. (They're better in this regard live, obviously.)

And they have a bit of that deliberately-grotesque-and-unpleasant edge that I've never been able to endure.

But as I said, I do like their live work for the most part (though I don't know what they're doing on this tour, or if it has any relation to anything I've seen), and Tim is a really nice guy. (I don't mean Eric isn't. I don't know Eric.)

First, Tim certainly seemed like a nice guy at the show. Towards the end of their act, Tim and Eric come out on stage in bathrobes and show a super secret behind-the-scenes clip from their first Cartoon Network series Tom Goes to the Mayor. I was impressed by how "off" they were: that is, they didn't seem to be performing and it was a weirdly comforting, in a "these are just regular guys" kind of way. That's not a feeling I generally get watching comedians.

Of course, Tim and Eric aren't really comedians. "The Atlas Boy" is right that their bits either don't have or don't emphasize punchlines. There wasn't a memorable one all evening, and, on their Adult Swim shows, any that are there seem like throw-aways or head-scratchers.

And he's also right that there is something like an unpleasant edge to a lot of their stuff. I'm not sure if I would use the word "unpleasant", but there's something willfully off-putting about a sketch like Uncle Muscles, where Tim plays an incompetent singer, sweating buckets under the lights, and the poorly lit video emphasizes the character's bad make-up job. ("Bad make-up" is a recurring Tim and Eric motif.)

What's interesting to me, though (this week at least), is the way Tim and Eric (who met in college and made their first videos for film classes) ransack the realm of performance/video art in order to find material and techniques for their comedy. And I was thinking about Tim and Eric when I read this post about "not films" on Andy Horbal's blog.

There, Andy gives as an example of a "not film" a broadcast of a basketball game that made heavy use of the instant replay in order to figure out a close call. The producers of the broadcast keep replaying - from different angles, at different speeds - a key moment of play. Andy argues that the effect - the way it calls attention to the technique of TV broadcast production - is similar enough to the effect that some avant-garde films aim at - calling attention to what is normally "invisible" in conventional, narrative cinema - so that it would make a useful teaching tool.

There's always going to be a very select audience for long-form, non-narrative films. They ask a lot out of a viewer (in time, attention, etc.) and what they deliver (an abstract, aesthetic experience) is not what most people go to the movies for.

I think the problem facing a lot of long-form avant-garde films is the same problem that Spengler diagnoses for modernist music in this article. That is, modernist painting/sculpture is more accessible (or at least bearable) than its film/video equivalent partly because you aren't trapped in the experience.

(One of my own issues with existing avant-garde films is that they're often in danger of being more interesting to think about/write about/read about than they are to actually watch. It's almost like you have to sit through them in order to earn the right to talk about them afterwards, like some kind of weird, intellectual hazing.)

But, and here I'll go back once again to this recent post from 2Blowhards and connect this seeming digression to what I was talking about at the beginning of this post, I think that the kind of "accidental" avant-garde videos that Michael Blowhard points to on YouTube and the little movies on Tim and Eric's website seem to suggest the emergence of avant-garde-ish video making as a "lively" art, one that not only Andy's hypothetical film students but actual everyday people will find (relatively) accessible.

Movie Chat: The Promise

The Promise

When it comes to wuxia, I'm not even a dabbler. For the most part, my experience with this kind of movie has been through the "prestige" wuxia flicks. Though I've also seen Once Upon a Time in China, Iron Monkey, and a couple others whose names escape me at the moment, I've responded more to relatively "mainstream" (even middlebrow) pleasures of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and The House of Flying Daggers.

I'm laying this out, because I want to put my comments on The Promise in their proper context. I'm not an expert, so I have no real idea how it fits into the genre historically or how it compares with, say, The House of Flying Daggers in terms of fidelity to wuxia's tropes and conventions.

So, my take on Crouching Tiger was that it's wuxia with all the rough edges smoothed away. Hero is wuxia used for large scale, allegorical political pageantry. And The House of Flying Daggers is wuxia as heady, heightened pop opera.

The Promise, on the other hand, strikes me as being closer to a "generic" wuxia - amped up. It's big, the effects are over-the-top, and the plot moves along with a straightforward, unapologetic arbitrariness. There's nothing in the movie that even approaches a mundane, baseline moment to gauge the high-flying fantasy against. And, related to that, there's hardly any attempt to build up these characters or get the audience to care about them in a conventional way. More than any of the other wuxia pictures I've seen, The Promise operates on a mythic level.

In a way it reminds me of Frank Miller's sequel to The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, where he tries to fit in everything that he loves about super-hero comics, even the stuff that most "prestige" super-hero books leave out - the garish circus-like atmosphere, the exaggerated but ungrounded moral struggles, loads of both too meaningful and purposeless action. The Promise has this kind of vibe: as if the filmmakers weren't going to let a proper sense of scale get in their way.

As pretty as The Promise looks, I didn't get the sense that it was trying to impress me with its seriousness. And even its prettiness isn't fussed over. Although this means that the CGI isn't as seamless as it is in Hero, it's also looser - more like a cartoon and less like Ran-lite.

All of which is kind of prelude to say that I enjoyed watching it quite a bit, and I'm a little surprised at how badly it was reviewed by film critics. I mean, I've certainly seen deeper action/adventure movies and more emotionally engaging action/adventure movies, but The Promise looks great, it moves quickly, the performances are all likable, and the set pieces are inventive and exciting. Were people let down because this movie didn't have the intellectual/aesthetic rigor of Hero or the old fashioned movie romance of Crouching Tiger? (I find it inexplicable that The Promise got panned, when Kung Fu Hustle received so many rave reviews.) Was there a secret critics meeting where they decided that they were going to be sourpusses when it came to The Promise?

With that in mind...

I don't have the time or the inclination to write about every movie I see (or book I read) and when I do choose to post about one, it's usually because it provoked what for me at least is an interesting question. I'm not sure how clear this is from the posts themselves, but, for instance, these comments on Little Miss Sunshine were inspired by the idea that sometimes an excess of hype can spoil the experience of watching a "little" movie and when I wrote about The Queen I was really interested in the way our own take on a historical event colors our experience of watching a movie based on that event.

This means that I end up seeing quite a few movies that I like and would definitely recommend, but that I don't feel inspired to blog about. (I'm not a reviewer, after all.) Not that I don't have anything to say about these movies or that I wouldn't be happy to engage in a conversation about them: they just didn't spark the kind of internal conservation that turns into one of these posts.

That's one of the reasons I like doing lists like these: I can name off a bunch of movies I like, but I only need to comment about the ones that move me to comment. With that in mind, here's my Top Ten list for last year's movies. Note that like all these lists, it's a work in progress. I haven't had a chance yet to see, for example, Shortbus or Letters from Iwo Jima or Dreamgirls or Inland Empire, but I did end up seeing about half as many movies as my professional film critic friend. I have two purposes in posting this here: (1) these are all movies I'd recommend (with some qualifications and reservations depending on who I was recommending them to) and (2) these are all movies that I'd be interested in chatting about.

1. Neil Young: Heart of Gold


2. Heading South


3. United 93


4. The Proposition


5. The Descent


6. A Prairie Home Companion


7. The Prestige


8. The Science of Sleep


9. Children of Men


10. Something New


And I also liked: A Scanner Darkly, The Great Yokai War, Inside Man, Venus, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Queen, Slither, For Your Consideration, The Departed, and Idiocracy.

My take: There are a few movies here that I do have more to say about (The Science of Sleep, Heading South, and The Descent), so I'll save my comments on them for later.

I kind of wish I did have something to say about The Prestige beyond that it was the best time I've had watching a big budget, Hollywood entertainment all year.

Children of Men would have been up closer to the top of the list, but I docked it a few places because of its incoherence.

My girlfriend didn't think Heart of Gold should have topped the list, because she said that "it was just a Neil Young concert." Well, I guess so. It's a great Neil Young concert and it's produced, staged, and filmed with lots of thought and skill, but if you don't, you know, like Neil Young it might not do all that much for you. I do like Neil Young and I really like his Prairie Wind album (where all the "new" songs in the movie come from). Regardless, it makes a great double bill with A Prairie Home Companion: I can't recommend watching them back-to-back highly enough.

The Great Yokai War is the only Takashi Miike movie I've ever recommended to my relatives.

I already wrote about Idiocracy, but, since I've seen it, my lukewarm response has heated up a little. When I first saw Office Space, in the theater on opening weekend, I didn't think too highly of it. I thought it had some funny parts, but that a lot of it didn't work. Of course, that was back when I was still in college. Since entering into the "real world" and actually working in an office, my appreciation for the film has grown by leaps and bounds. In the case of Idiocracy, the same thing is happening, but more quickly. Just about every morning there's some story on the Today show that makes me turn to my girlfriend and say in a disaster movie hysteric's voice: "Idiocracy is now!!!!"

Movie Chat: Ikiru

Ikiru

Here's an experience I've had a number of times: I'll feel that I need to read a "classic" 19th Century/early 20th Century novel, I'll pick up a copy, get almost overwhelmed by how daunting I imagine reading it will be, jump in anyway, and end up being surprised at how non-daunting - how engaging, interesting, pleasurable, and, even, yes, fun - the book actually is. (The big example is The Magic Mountain). At this point, I should know better, but I may be suffering from a kind of intellectual hangover from my grad school days, where we all tried to keep concepts like engagement, interest, pleasure, and fun out of any arts and culture discussion.

Anyway, Ikiru was one of the few Kurosawa movies I had never seen and I think I was avoiding it for similar reasons to why I was initially wary of starting something like The Magic Mountain: I knew it was a serious classic, that it dealt - directly - with Big Themes (what does "living" really mean?), and that it was widely-praised by film critics and scholars who tended to write about it using a reverential tone.

I finally watched it this week and it was The Magic Mountain experience all over again. My expectations of a stuffy, fussy masterpiece were dashed within the first minute. This is a Big Theme movie, but Kurosawa's handling is sharp and specific, and the movie has an ironic tone that keeps the sentimentality inherent in the material at bay. It's like a more somber, more cynical, but, because of that, more spiritual version of a Frank Capra movie. Kurosawa isn't selling anything like Capra is in It's a Wonderful Life, although, as I was watching Ikiru, that was the movie I kept thinking of. (They're both, after all, about "little" men, facing death, looking for meaning in their life.)

A couple of other thoughts:

1. I've always felt that, while it's definitely a masterpiece, Rashomon is a little stuffy. (I've always described it to friends as the favorite movie of English Lit. Profs). What's so neat about Ikiru is how Kurosawa takes the overt, in your face device of Rashomon - differing perspectives on the same event - and brings it to bear much more subtly. I.e., the way that different characters - and, at times, the audience - aren't able to get a handle on Watanabe's motivations.


2. Shimura's performance is amazing. He has one of the most intense non-presences I've ever seen in a movie. I love that in the last act, once Watanabe has started taking action and giving meaning to the life he has left, Shimura does absolutely nothing physically to mark this change. Watanabe remains his small, unimpressive, cowering self. His drive, determination, and spiritual rebirth are almost completely conveyed through Kurosawa's use of close-ups.


3. There are so many great sequences in the film, but if I had to choose a favorite: the shot where Watanabe is walking out of the hospital in silence, seemingly all alone. He steps into the street, almost into the path of an oncoming truck, and the sound comes back in as the camera pulls out to reveal the busy city life all around him. It's a showy moment, but also one full of poignancy and real insight into how people deal with awful news.


4. I'm glad I waited to see this movie (even if some of my reasons for waiting were kind of silly). There was a time when I tried to see at least one movie a day (and sometimes managed to get through three or four), and I'd go through the film canon, checking off things that I "needed" to see. Nowadays, I kind of regret the rate at which I consumed Kurosawa, Altman, and Hawks movies, because, now, there are few left that will ever be new to me. Also, I think I have a greater capacity to appreciate a movie like Ikiru than I did seven years ago. (I'm not joking when I talk about saving Bergman for when I'm older.) And I like that I have a whole week to sit and think about this movie before I put the next classic into the DVD player.

"Reverse" Re-makes

In honor of The Departed's Best Picture win, here are my dream "reverse" remakes - Hollywood movies that I would love to see remade by non-Hollywood casts and crews:

Collateral, starring Ching Wan Lau and Andy Lau, written by Felix Chong and Alan Mak, directed by Andrew Lau. I like the heightened, pop-operatics of Infernal Affairs and the set-up of Collateral strikes me as being similarly juicy B-movie material.

Click, starring Naoki Hosaka and "Beat" Takeshi (in the Christopher Walken role, 'natch), written and directed by Takashi Miike. A little more perversity and a little less crudity, no?

The Illusionist, starring Gaspard Ulliel, Roxane Mesquida, and Dominique Pinon, written and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro (as long as we're dreaming, here). As much as I wanted to like The Illusionist, I was under awed by the illusions themselves - their CGI roots were showing. Also, my guess is that these guys might have a more nuanced take on the aristocracy.

Tim and Eric Live!

My girlfriend and I don't do much nightlife-wise here in NYC, so going to see Tim and Eric at the Knitting Factory last Monday was a momentous occasion. In cases like this, there's always the lingering danger of the "I Came All the Way in From Jersey for This, So Of Course It's Good"-effect which can be observed after just about any crappy Broadway matinee: people trying to convince themselves that the show was good because they had already put so much effort (not to mention spent so much money) to see it. Well, I think the show was genuinely good, but if you want to see for yourself, they're doing a live webcast tomorrow night at 9:30.

The show was a mix of live skits and videos from their new Adult Swim series Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job! As good as the live stuff was, I laughed the most (to the point of tears) at a scene from the show featuring John C. Reilly as Dr. Steve Brule, my current favorite sketch comedy character. (You can check out some Dr. Steve Brule clips here).

Most of the Adult Swim series (Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sealab 2021) fit into what I call "stoner/slacker/nostalgia comedy" - slacker versions of Saturday morning cartoon characters engaged in wacky situations. Tim and Eric's work, on the other hand, owes more to sketch comedy like Mr. Show by way of film-school goofing around. Most of the bits on their show revolve in some way around cheesy, amateurish video effects: the visual style is right out of public access TV, locally produced TV commercials, employee training videos, and low-end business seminar presentations.

Here's their website and here's a page featuring lots of their shorts. I recommend "Humpers", which is a truly inspired (IMO) film-school film parody.

Comics Chat: Chewing Gum in Church

Chewing Gum in Church

I've liked everything I've read from Steve Weissman, so I had high expectations for this latest Yikes! book - which looks better than all his previous work. I wish it read a little better than it does, though. I liked it (mostly for its gorgeous cartooning), but this is the first of his collections that I wouldn't immediately and without qualification recommend to a casual comics fan.

Like Peanuts or Calvin & Hobbes, Yikes! has an adult's sensibility, but it tells stories about kids. The kid characters are partly there to give voice to the cartoonist's adult concerns. The twist in Yikes! is that the characters are cute, cartoony, kid versions of Monster Movies monsters - Li'l Bloody (a vampire), Pullapart Boy (a Frankenstein's monster), Dead Boy (a zombie), "Sweet" Chubby Cheeks (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Kid Medusa, etc.

In previous volumes of the series, Weissman has put them in slightly off-kilter situations and used the monster movie twist for color, poetic effect, and an extra layer of (gentle) irony.

I've always though of Weissman along with Richard Sala, as they're the two Fantagraphics-published cartoonists who are working in traditional (i.e., pre-underground) comic book/comic strip genres. And what's compelling about their work is the same thing that's compelling about the best of traditional comics: their sure sense of storytelling, characterization, and pacing, draws you into their very personal style and vision of the world.

Chewing Gum operates a little differently, though. Weissman has set everything up as a series of 4-panel strips. In general, each page has one strip - as if this were a collection of dailies from a newspaper strip - although sometimes Weissman blows things up to one panel per page for four pages.

It's a strange reading experience for a number of reasons. All of the strips point towards a punchline, but the gags are hardly ever fully-realized (I guess on purpose). There's nothing laugh-out-loud funny and there's nothing with the kind of pointed, poignant irony of Peanuts at its more philosophical. It felt to me like a "take" on daily gag strips, rather than an attempt to actually do that kind of cartooning.

A story emerges, but it moves forward herky-jerkily. This is such a big change from his previous work - which at its best has the assured rhythms of something like a Carl Barks Duck story - that I can't help but think that Weissman is purposefully trying to do something unconventional. He doesn't seem to want his audience to engage the same way with this book that they did with his previous ones.

It's a little tricky being a fan of an artist who's changing things up like this. On the one hand, I wouldn't want Weissman to stagnate. It's good that he's trying something new here. Plus, who knows? Maybe when I read his next book, why he's doing what he's doing here will become more clear to me and everything will click into place.

(I've had this experience with Dan Clowes, before: I scratched my head after reading the first chapter of David Boring and thought that it represented a step backwards, but while reading the second chapter I realized my mistake and saw that he had just been laying the groundwork for what he was really up to.)

So, while I still want to see what Weissman does next with these characters, right now, Chewing Gum in Church reads like a bit of a failed experiment - a too-formal for the material exercise that never really gels into a fully-realized book.

(Interestingly enough, this reviewer had almost exactly the opposite response that I did.)

Time Out of Joint Top Ten List: 1992

My favorite movies from 1992:

1. Reservoir Dogs
2. Hard-Boiled
3. The Last of the Mohicans
4. The Player
5. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
6. White Men Can't Jump
7. Batman Returns
8. Red Rock West
9. CrissCross
10. Captain Ron

I also liked: Tresspass, Unforgiven, Unlawful Entry, Death Becomes Her, and Thunderheart.

My take: By 1992 I was getting to be a genuine film buff, so, I saw most of these movies for the first time in the theaters (although I've re-watched them since).

This list is mostly All-American, which is definitely my bad, but, at the time, I didn't spend too much time tracking down foreign films. (This is a good time to mention that these "Time Out of Joint" lists are works-in-progress.) Still, it gives a pretty good cross-section of what I like when it comes to contemporary movies: high style action/adventure pictures (Hard-Boiled, The Last of the Mohicans, and Batman Returns), well-crafted B-movies (Tresspass and Unlawful Entry), unconventional genre flicks (Reservoir Dogs, Red Rock West, and Unforgiven), screwball comedies (White Men Can't Jump, Captain Ron, and Death Becomes Her), and creepy, sexy, scary off-kilter thrillers (Fire Walk with Me).

I've gone back and forth with Reservoir Dogs almost from the moment I walked out of the theater. I had gone with my dad, and neither of us knew what to make of it. All we were sure of was that the torture scene had been very upsetting. (Personally, it's never been the cutting off of the ear that gets to me: it's imagining what the gasoline on the cut must feel like that makes me cringe). There are times when I think that this scene sums up all of the movie's problems, that it's all flashiness and nastiness, just trying to make the audience squirm. Other times, though, like right now, the movie's (black) sense of humor and ballsiness win me over.

I also have mixed feelings about The Player. I really like the movie - it's so well made and it's very, very sharp. But I think it's also kind of shallow, which isn't such a sin, except that, ever since it came out, the critics have made more out of it than is really there (IMO, of course). But that's my problem to get over, not the movie's, which has so many great little moments (Richard E. Grant talking about "reality", Lyle Lovett quoting Freaks, Alan Rudolph pitching a psychic political thriller "with heart", Burt Reynolds's theory on assholes) that, in my heart of hearts, I guess I don't care that when it comes to the bigger issues it strikes me as being superficial (compared to Sunset Boulevard, say).

I have a great deal of affection for Captain Ron, which is one of those movies like Dumb & Dumber where the non-comedian - in this case Kurt Russell - is as funny or funnier than the comedian - in this case Martin Short. There are quite a few movies where Kurt Russell gets to do his jokey, tongue-in-cheek take on traditional action heroes (Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, Sky High), but not enough like this one, where he gets to give an all-out comic performance (Used Cars is the other big one).

Blog Chat: Personally...

Lots of introspection going on in the comments section of this post on Andy Horbal's blog.

I just wanted to comment briefly on something Chris Stangl wrote:

I know I was just arguing for the power of diary form film blogging, but how many blogs would be vastly improved if the writer would just put some intellectual distance between their heart and their keyboard? A: I have no idea, but I can think of a few. Those few are rare because they're writers with interesting ideas lost in a swamp of personal-life mush.

Now, I'm definitely in favor of clarity in writing (even if my own writing doesn't always meet the standard), so, yes, I think it's a bad thing if your best ideas are getting lost...

However (and this is me riffing on Chris's comment, rather than reading into it or arguing with it), if we're doing criticism, "personal-life mush" is going to play a part. To the extent that movies are aesthetic, emotional, and, even erotic experiences, we can't help that our responses are going to be personal. One of the strengths of blogs, IMHO, is that, as opposed to newspaper/magazine film criticism or academic film criticism, writers can deal with how this "personal-life mush" affects their response to and interpretation and appreciation of a given movie in an up-front and straightforward manner.

This 2Blowhards post from last year brings up some related issues.

Weekly Round-up

• I made my first contribution to a Blog-a-Thon. Sam Peckinpah was one of my first "favorite" directors and I was glad to share my appreciation/admiration for one of his lesser known movies. Other things I learned: I like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia a lot less than most other Peckinpah buffs. I like Convoy a lot more than most other Peckinpah buffs. But to each his own... (I'll have to write about both movies one day.)
  
  More seriously, this Blog-a-Thon got me thinking about Peckinpah's self-destructive nature and how it fueled his art, while, at the same time, it got in the way of his moviemaking. Maybe it's because I'm also in the middle of reading a Bob Fosse biography, but I have a much greater respect than I used to for guys like Robert Altman, Luis Bunuel, and Jean-Luc Godard, who were able to maintain artistic integrity while making movies without destroying themselves. (And I'm also saddened that I've known so many would-be artists who got the self-destructiveness down, but didn't have any "results" to show for it.)



• Blake Bell posted this quote from Seth talking about the difference between European and American cartoonists:
  

  I’m not as attracted to European cartooning as I am to North American cartooning. Where a lot of it is really beautiful and interesting, I find that a lot of the European cartoonists, and this could just be in the translations, but they seem to be missing some kind of passionate spark that I find in the best North American cartoonists. There’s some eccentric quality, generally, amongst North American cartoonists that when they tackle some piece of material, it seems to be invested so deeply in their psyche that, if they’re a good artist, it’s very riveting. I don’t find that as much in the European work. I find it a little more dispassionate. It’s well-crafted and interesting but…

  
  Recognizing that he's making sweeping generalizations, here, I kind of agree with his observation, but, for me, that's one of the best things about Eurocartoonists. They aren't all as "in your face" and they often seem a bit more (dare I say it?) sophisticated in their distance from the material. In my mind I'm comparing two favorites: American Peter Bagge's Buddy Bradley stories and Dupuy & Berberbian's Mr. Jean stories. Both are sharply observed takes on young, creative, slackerish types, but Bagge's work is just a wee bit aggressive (as befits stories appearing in a comic titled Hate), while D&B's is somewhat distanced. They seem to give the reader more room: it's a more relaxing, contemplative reading experience. What's weird is that I get the same relaxed feeling from Seth's own work.



• This is complete speculation: My guess is that Paul Muni and Frederic March, who were big, Oscar-winning stars in their day, suffered from backlash from film buffs of the 50s onward, who might have thought these actors - who showed up in lots of prestige pictures - were overrated when compared to performers who worked in less reputable pictures. I wonder if, now, though, they aren't (relatively) underrated.



• Through the Sam Peckinpah Blog-a-Thon I rediscovered the writing of Scott Von Doviak (and some other guys who used to post on a movie message board that I once participated on).
  
  I liked Scott's recent column, where he talks about art house sci-fi movies. At the end, he writes about one of my newest favorites, the time travel brain twister, Primer: "Check out the movie’s Wikipedia page for an obsessive breakdown of the jumbled timeframe and see how far you get before your brain seizes up. So yes, it’s complex and thought provoking, but does this make it a good movie?"
  
  A rhetorical question, maybe, but, as much fun as I have trying to untangle the paradox puzzles, what I really like about the movie is the subtle way it gets at how creative endeavors can end up poisoning friendships when the struggle to have to have the last say in what's best for the company, project, etc. ends up overshadowing any other concerns. In other words, its the human drama that matters to me, (which is really what I'm always looking for in sci-fi stories).
  
  Interesting to think about: I probably would not like Primer as much as I do if I had first seen it in a theater. But, DVR'd off of the Sundance Channel, I was able to pause and rewind so that I could clarify and consolidate my understanding as I went along. And the movie is short enough - just 77 minutes - that it makes it easy enough to watch enough times to get a grasp on what's really going on.

Movie Chat: Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth

It's certainly an impressive movie (although I'm getting less and less impressed with "impressive movies" since wowing an audience seems to be so easily done these days).

I had a few major problems with it, though: not just a negative "gut feeling"-type reaction, but more serious philosophical reservations about what Del Toro does (and fails to do) in the movie.

My big issue: the way the movie portrays the Fascist Captain. Del Toro isn't content to just make him a bad guy - he has to be a Truly Eeeevil Man, and, in virtually every shot that he appears in, Del Toro hits us over the head with his nastiness. And he doesn't do this with any sense of irony, let alone humor, like in The Stepfather, for example. No - the Captain is a Fascist, which seems to mean that he is subhuman, undeserving of even the most fleeting or shallow sympathetic characteristic.

This wouldn't be so bad - just a little bit lazy and cheaply melodramatic - except that Del Toro decides to add realistic, graphic violence to this humorless cartooning (most egregiously in a series of torture scenes).

I'm not a big fan of this kind of triple threat: (1) a completely Evil Bad Guy with no redeeming features, (2) a filmmaker who keeps reiterating this evilness through the least sophisticated means possible, and (3) realistic, graphic violence of the post-Saving Private Ryan variety.

Del Toro wants us to hate this character so much that we're supposed to cheer when he's finally killed and think that it's fitting that his killers refuse to honor his final request.

Some of my friends, who liked the movie a lot, defended Del Toro's handling of the Captain by arguing that the story is being told from the perspective of a little girl, who sees him as a kind of fairytale monster. I get this: Del Toro has made a movie that mixes fantasy and reality where the "real" scenes have a simplified - almost black and white - view of the world, while the fantasy scenes have more nuance and ambiguity.

I still have a big problem with this explanation: it only works if, deep down, you actually agree with the little girl's simplification - i.e. that the fascist Captain is, ultimately, sub humanly evil and the Communist partisans he is fighting are super humanly good. And, honestly, I think this is what Del Toro believes: his own view of the world seems to be as simplistic as that of his heroine's.

Let's politically recast the movie for a second, just to see how well the "from a little girl's point-of-view" reading holds up:

Imagine exactly the same movie, except set it in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The sub humanly evil Captain is a radical, Republican reconstructionist, and the super humanly good guerrillas are D.W. Griffith's romanticized Clansmen. If you would still be willing to give that movie a pass, then I guess I won't begrudge the "fairytale" defense of Del Toro's handling of the Captain.

But things are much more ambiguous. People who hold horrible political beliefs don't always act like monsters - they certainly don't act like monsters all of the time. Amon Goeth, the Nazi villain in Schindler's List, is certainly a monster, but Spielberg, unlike Del Toro, doesn't beat us over the head with how evil this character is. Spielberg's technique is much more nuanced, even if the two characters are both the definitive villains of their movies.

The Night of the Shooting Stars has an example of this kind of thing done just about perfectly: the father and son killers, who spend the movie stalking the refugees, are given one of the most wrenching and emotionally complicated death scenes in the history of movies. As evil as we perceive these characters to be, the Taviani Brothers do not let us celebrate, in any way, their deaths, but rather force us to see it as just another aspect of the obscenity of war.

It's this central failing that makes the rest of Pan's Labyrinth fall apart for me. As beautiful and magical as some of the fantasy sequences are, they don't redeem Del Toro's simplistic and brutal take on reality.

And it's because of this reaction that the movie's smaller flaws - flaws that I'd usually be willing to overlook - stick out at me. Like, why exactly do the guerrillas use a key on the lock, when that will give away the fact that they have a spy in the Captain's house? Or, why does the little girl eat the food in the banquet hall when she's been explicitly instructed (at least twice!) not to? And why does the Fawn tell her that since she ate the food she has completely failed in her quest, only to later tell her, no, wait, she still has another chance, even though she doesn't do anything in the interim to redeem herself?

This is nit-picking, but each of these problems is indicative of the essential arbitrariness of what Del Toro is up to: why do these things happen? Well, they have to happen, so he can get move his plot along and/or get his point across. (By the way, his point seems to be: Fascists are evil).

Reading back on this, I realize I've been a lot more combative here than I really like to be. After all, it's only a movie and I'm not going to lose any sleep over people liking it. (And if you're a fan of the movie, please feel free to post any kind of rebuttal/defense you'd like). But this is one of the few movies I saw this year that really pushed my buttons (in a bad way), and I'm surprised that the response to it has been so overwhelmingly positive.

Really though, my main point here isn't to make an argument against the film, but rather to dig into why it doesn't mesh with my sensibilities. I keep coming back to the feeling that the movie is just too obvious and deliberate - in terms of its relentless one note characterization of the Captain, its black and white reduction of the political situation, its steamrollering over inconsistencies in the service of the plot. I didn't feel like Del Toro made any room for the audience.

I like to think about this in terms of two kinds of surprises. We have surprises in movies themselves. I'm not just talking about "jump-out-from-behind-the-door-and-go-boo" surprises of something like The Grudge and I'm not talking about "where-the-hell-did-that-come-from" surprises like at the end of Don't Look Now. To go back to that scene from The Night of the Shooting Stars: it is surprising to me that I'd end up feeling that badly about the death of the two most despicable characters in the movie. (And it is surprising to me that the Taviani Brothers are able to pull this off!)

There's another kind of surprise, though, or rather feeling of surprise, one that isn't really "in" the movie, but the audience may be able to sense it anyway: it's the surprise of the people making the film. In other words, the sense that the process of making the film was surprising to them in some way or that they ended up in a different place from where they started. I get this sense most strongly from watching movies from Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean-Luc Godard (early on at least), Howard Hawks, and Francois Truffaut: that the people making the movie are working through something in the same way that the audience is.

Maybe this is too metaphysical, but, for me, Pan's Labyrinth has neither of these kinds of surprises: its deliberateness seemed to suck the life out of it.

(Sean Collins seemed to like the movie a lot more than I did, but he goes into more detail about the plot holes than I did.)

The Osterman Weekend

Note: This post is my contribution to the Sam Peckinpah Blog-a-Thon hosted by [This Savage Art].

"What you just saw, in a way, was a live video game." - Tanner (Rutger Hauer), The Osterman Weekend

The auteur theory - the idea that some great directors, through will and skill, can infuse an otherwise mediocre film with their personal vision and give it hidden, inside meaning - has no better proof than the oeuvre of Sam Peckinpah and is nowhere more evident than in The Osterman Weekend.

It's based on a Robert Ludlum potboiler - Ian Masters and Alan Sharp are credited with the adaptation - but Peckinpah fuses the twisty-turny, cross-and-double cross story with his own paranoid feelings about loyalty and betrayal, and his ambivalence about technology and progress in such a way that the resulting movie is as much a reflection of his personal vision as any he ever made - even those movies which he had much more control over.

The story involves a TV show host/Edward R. Murrow-style investigative journalist (played by Rutger Hauer), who is coerced into spying on a group of his friends who, according to a CIA agent (John Hurt), are, themselves, Communist spies.

The movie isn't that well-regarded, and, on first viewing, its easy to see why: the plot is convoluted and certain key plot points are either under emphasized or absent, the acting is (to be charitable) inconsistent (the best performances coming from the solid supporting cast), and the design looks cheap - much more like a made-for-TV movie than a theatrical feature by a major American filmmaker.

The purpose of this post is to push the idea that the movie deserves to be reassessed: I think it's one of the most interesting spy movies of its era and, while not nearly as fully-realized, it's a true companion to Brian De Palma's Blow Out. They'd make a great double feature on the themes of paranoia, surveillance, and the limits of technology to get at "the truth".

I'd like to suggest some things to look for in the movie that show what I think Peckinpah is up to.

Video Images: True and False

Video is everywhere in this movie: the character use it to spy on each other, their houses have TV sets in every room, CIA agents sit at banks of monitors in order to control things from a distance.

Take the opening:

Lalo Schifrin's soft jazz score plays underneath a grainy video image of John Hurt in bed with a woman. The cheesiness of the music and the "videoness" of the picture combine to give us the sense we're watching some kind of cheap porno.

But this turns out to be the reverse of Brian De Palma's trick from Blow Out. There, we start out thinking we're watching an "actual" stalking, but it's "really" just an exploitation slasher movie. Here, our expectations - some soft-core sex - get turned upside down when killers come out of the woodwork and (fatally) drug the woman.

The two openings serve the same purpose: the are warning from the director about how easily we can be manipulated by images and they are letting us know that what we see won't always be the truth.

The movie has another great illustration of the deceptiveness of video:

Rutger Hauer's investigative journalist is all about uncovering "the truth", but Peckinpah gives us a look at how he puts together his show, Face-to-Face.

First off: the title itself is a lie. Hauer doesn't actually face off against his guests: they're talking to each other via video hook-up. And though Hauer is supposed to be eliciting candid responses from the politicians he grills, Peckinpah shows us the behind-the-scenes manipulation that goes on to make sure that Hauer remains in complete control. Peckinpah gives us a news program is as managed as the production of the rigged Twenty-One in Quiz Show.

The deceptiveness of video plays an important part in almost every major twist-and-turn in the movie.

Video Cameras: Public and Private

There's another (related) theme that Peckinpah introduces in the opening scene: the video world has helped to blur the line between public and private.

In this movie the characters not only peep on each other's most intimate moments, but these moments get broadcast on TV.

And CIA agent Hurt runs his operation like a mirror image of the TV production - sitting in front of video monitors, directing the action from behind the scenes - but this production plays out in Hauer's actual house, not a studio, and the "performers" are Hauer's family and friends.

In The Osterman Weekend, privacy is always being violated, and the "authority" figures in the movie are always willing to justify this invasion as necessary for the public good.

This leads to another kind of public/private divide that Peckinpah brings out, namely that the government thinks it needs to keep secrets from the public, for its own good.

Burt Lancaster plays the government heavy who's trying to manage a huge cover-up - his signature quote: "Being wrong isn't nearly as important as not admitting it."

Remote Control

It's through Lancaster's character that Peckinpah bring up a theme from earlier films: that the lowest kind of man is one who has his killings done by proxy. Lancaster sets things in motion, orders hits over the phone, but always tries to keep his image clean. This is railroad man Pat Harrigan from The Wild Bunch, the Mexican gangster who puts the bounty on the head of Alfredo Garcia, the business-suited CIA operatives in The Killer Elite.

Trust, Betrayal, and Loyalty

Hopefully, I've at least shown that you can uncover literary evidence in the movie. But that's really academic. What galvanizes the movie is Peckinpah's sure sense of filmmaking - the deliberateness of the editing and staging and his (nearly) unmatched mastery of action sequences - and his obsession with the ideas of trust, betrayal, and loyalty. Peckinpah projects his own (nearly paranoid) feelings of having been betrayed onto the characters in this movie.

The climax of the movie brings everything together: Hauer uses TV production tricks to turn the tables on Hurt and Lancaster, both. At this point, Hauer becomes something like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs: his world has been violated and now he's going to make everything right. But, in a sense, The Osterman Weekend operates on a more sophisticated moral plane than Straw Dogs, where the "making everything right" really meant "use violence to set everything right".

Here, because the bad guys will always be better at violence, Hauer can't just fight them - he has to expose them and their lies. It's Peckinpah's ironic, somewhat bitter twist, that in order to get at the truth, Hauer must use deception, himself.

The Osterman Weekend isn't a masterpiece. The lead performances are perfunctory and, while some movies made on the cheap look great, this isn't one of them. But it is made with thought and passion. Watching it now, or rather, championing it now, a "problem" that comes up is that it was so prophetic in terms of how it saw televideo culture's invasion of private life that a lot of its insights seem a bit passe now. Still, when it comes to movies about paranoia and surveillance, The Osterman Weekend stands behind only a few - The Conversation and Blow Out - and is as worthy of some critical love and attention as better-received movies like The Parallax View.

Time Out of Joint Top Ten List: 1996

My favorite movies from 1996:

1. Fargo
2. Palookaville
3. Hamlet
4. Flirting with Disaster
5. Kingpin
6. Fly Away Home
7. Tree's Lounge
8. Chungking Express
9. Ransom
10. Supercop 2

I also like: The Whole Wide World, The Frighteners, My Favorite Season, Trainspotting, Mission: Impossible, Multiplicity, MST3K: The Movie, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, Star Trek: First Contact, Super Cop, and Crime Story.

My take: Quentin Tarantino doesn't really make an appearance (although I believe his company released Chungking Express here in the states), but I can see his presence all over this list, which is filled with "quirky" movies about sad-sack criminals and low-lifes and Hong Kong imports. Palookaville, is, IMHO, criminally underrated.

Time Out of Joint Top Ten List: 1981

My favorite movies from 1981:

1. Blow Out
2. Modern Romance
3. Scanners
4. My Dinner with Andre
5. Atlantic City
6. Pennies from Heaven
7. The Evil Dead
8. Excalibur
9. The Aviator's Wife
10. Cutter's Way

I also like: The Road Warrior, Gallipoli, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Dogs of War, Time Bandits, Escape from New York, The Fox and the Hound, and Southern Comfort.

My take: A good year for Louis Malle and for B-movie fans.